Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  The sergeant-major spoke again. “Tell Jean to call on my old woman. He’ll get his geese all right and maybe something for his trouble.” Then they heard Soutier drag himself away, and someone whom he disturbed began to babble in delirium.

  Gabriel and Dominique led the pony through the drifts at the rear of the cabins and recrossed the plain towards the trees where Jean was waiting. The Cossacks were drunk and they got away unchallenged.

  The three of them headed due north, taking turns to ride the pony and travelling by the stars. They kept away from the main road and emerged from the forest only at night. What was left of the French army was now far in advance, and Jean supposed that the rearguard had been overrun long ago. No word of it had come through since before the Smolensk halt.

  Twice they saw Cossack detachments pass, and once they almost ran into a column of Russian infantry driving a horde of scarecrow prisoners. Watching from cover, Jean swore savagely.

  “After Austerlitz I saw French staff officers dive into a freezing lake to bring a couple of wounded Russians ashore,” he told them. His face twitched and for a moment Gabriel thought that the sergeant was going to fire, but he controlled himself and lay still, waiting for the column to pass.

  On the fourth day they had a stroke of luck. Crossing a frozen lake, Dominique shot a bear, and they ate the best meal since leaving Moscow. They were too weak to carry much away and had to leave the bulk of the carcass to the wolves.

  When they had leisure to ransack the Cossack’s portmanteau they found a bottle of gin and a variety of cumbersome trinkets, looted from Frenchmen killed or captured along the road. Jean threw most of the spoil away, filling the portmanteau with bear’s meat.

  “It’s still a long way to Prussia,” he muttered.

  On the fifth day Jean became doubtful of the direction they were taking. For forty-eight hours they had seen neither Cossack nor Frenchman, only a monotonous expanse of snowfield and forest. Soon after setting out that day they crossed a shallow stream and Jean cracked the thin ice with the butt of his musket, noting that the water ran south.

  “We must have crossed the main road in the dark,” he said. “From now on we follow this stream, no matter how difficult; it’s bound to flow into the Berezina.”

  They followed it all that day, climbing over fallen trees and slithering down the banks, covering less than a league after each two-hourly halt. They built a bivouac before it grew dark and, because they were ravenously hungry, ate the last of the meat. Jean was particularly sparing with the Cossack’s gin.

  Before it was light Gabriel was awakened by Jean shaking his shoulder. In the wan light he saw the sergeant’s face glowing with excitement.

  “Listen!”

  Gabriel listened. Presently, clear on the east wind, he heard the sound of gunfire and understood the cause of Jean’s excitement. Firing must mean that a French army still existed.

  They packed up and turned the pony’s head into the wind. About midday they emerged from the forest and looked down on a shallow fold between two hills. A small column of men, marching in close order, was toiling up the valley. Gabriel saw that the rear files halted every now and then and fired at a cloud of horsemen hovering just out of musket range. Beyond the horsemen, in the far distance, were black smudges of infantry.

  Old Jean’s eyes shone and he swung himself from the saddle.

  “It’s the rearguard, by heaven!”

  A sudden excitement seized them. They stumbled down the hill, shouting and waving; some of the men at the head of the column waved back. The firing continued, but none of the horsemen rode within normal range and the column was allowed to proceed virtually unmolested. When it reached the outskirts of the forest it halted and the three voltigeurs joined it, sobbing for breath. The pony followed more leisurely.

  A man in a cocked hat and a tattered fur-lined cloak approached. Gabriel saw that he hadn’t shaved for weeks and his lined face was covered with stiff red bristles. His grey uniform was nondescript and only his hat betrayed his high rank. He wore no sword, but carried a musket. There were powder smudges under his eyes, and his right wrist was bandaged. He called over to Jean.

  “Who are you? Where are you from?”

  Jean came to attention. “Voltigeurs of the Second Battalion, Ninth!”

  The officer scratched his stubble. “The hell you are; whose corps?”

  “Viceroy of Italy’s!”

  “When did you last see the main body?”

  “The day after we left Smolensk, nearly a week ago,” said Jean.

  “How did you get here?”

  “We returned for a comrade and lost our route.”

  A young officer in a filthy uniform sauntered up, blowing on his hands. “Eugène’s corps! Then they’re over the river now, what’s left of them. We’re better off in the rearguard, Michel!”

  Only then did Old Jean recognize Michel Ney and, beside him, his only subordinate, General Maison. He looked down the column as the men broke ranks to search for firewood. It was the most tatterdemalion body of troops that Jean had seen since they routed the regular Spanish army, back in 1808. There were men of every unit and half a dozen nationalities. Many were wounded and all were in rags. They were about eight hundred strong, and a glance told Jean why Ney and his second in command were carrying muskets. There was no artillery and no transport. The carts carrying the wounded and such baggage as had remained had gone down when the column crossed the Dnieper on thin ice.

  The men had only one thing in common. Everyone, from the marshal downwards, was under arms.

  A few days later the rearguard entered Kovno and recrossed the Niemen. It was composed of Old Jean, Gabriel, Dominique, thirty-eight grenadiers, a few Germans from the Kovno garrison, General Maison and Marshal Ney, whom some called Duke of Elchingen.

  Half-way across the bridge one of the Germans staggered and dropped his musket. Ney bent and picked it up, taking careful aim at a swarm of partisans closing in on the bridgehead. Standing there on the parapet, his cloak bellying in the wind, he fired the final shot of the campaign. It was a characteristic gesture, half genuine defiance, half bravado.

  PART FIVE

  The Efster

  CHAPTER ONE

  Nicholette closed the door of the sickroom very softly and paused on the landing, waiting until the surly Prussian landlord had mounted the stairs and gone to his own room.

  Nicholette had avoided the Prussian ever since she had bribed her way into the house. She distrusted both him and her own powers of self-control. It had cost her nearly a thousand francs to buy her way into the merchant’s house. The little town of Elbing was crammed with troops. Every family had its quota, and the civilians were seething with a rage which they disguised as reawakened nationalism. They went about telling one another that Prussia would soon be free again and secretly contributed to the Tugenbund, Lützow’s and the poet Körner’s underground organization which specialized in assassination and was already improving on the methods of the Spanish and Portuguese guerrillas. But the real reason for their discontent was commercial. The exclusion of British trade was ruining the German towns, and the Grand Army, since its return from Russia, had degenerated into a diseased rabble. The French commissary was temporarily unable to honour the billeting slips, and the conscripts of the line were too poor to spend freely in the shops.

  Nicholette’s landlord was a wealthy silk merchant with political influence. He had been excluded from the billeting list and Nicholette paid him privately. She knew that Nicholas’s chances of recovery would be negligible if he went to the hospital, and had established contact with a Danzig money-lender to draw sums on her Frankfurt banker. The silk merchant’s terms were prohibitive, but she had no alternative except to pay what he asked and take it out in silent hate. Nicholas grew neither worse nor better. He slept restlessly, for days at a time, muttering and staring at her with vacant eyes when she tried to feed him with broth that cost her ten francs a bowl. She wondered whether he was blin
d or incurably insane.

  The guardsman Joicy had long since rejoined what remained of his unit, and gone over to Danzig, where Davout was recruiting. All Europe was simmering, and there would be more hard fighting in the spring. Péliot, the major-general, had been patched up and sent home, an incurable cripple but thankful to escape with his life. He had promised her three thousand francs when he could get to his banker in Paris, and she knew that he would pay. In the meantime she could manage, although the silk merchant charged her a high rate of interest for the Frankfurt drafts, and she writhed under the iniquity of his demands.

  She felt her loneliness acutely. Her body was strong enough now that she could buy sufficient food, but her mind was weighed down by anxiety. She did not know what she could do if the silk merchant turned her and Nicholas into the street. No French officer in the town would dare to enforce hospitality where the landlord was locally powerful. She wished with all her heart that she could get news of Jean and the others.

  January passed, with snow turning to sleet. She went down to the barracks every day and enquired for stragglers of the Ninth. She had heard that the light infantry were concentrating in Elbing before marching back over the Elbe for a refit. New drafts of conscripts trickled in from the west, rosy-faced boys of sixteen and seventeen, most of them still in farm smocks and leggings made of sackcloth. They were housed on the stone floors of the barracks with less than one blanket apiece. They could not even begin their drill, for Elbing had no muskets in its arsenal. The Grand Army had emptied it on the way to Moscow.

  February went by and Nicholette drew another thousand francs at fifty per cent. Nicholas still lay and stared at the ceiling, and the Prussian landlord ceased to answer her greeting when she came downstairs for her daily visit to the barracks.

  On the first day of March a short column came in from the north. Nicholette saw them approaching and immediately recognized them as veterans. They marched loosely, their arms slung anyhow, and they did not sing like the boy recruits.

  She watched the lean men swing by, but there was not a face she recognized until the rear file drew level, two men and a sergeant, the latter in the centre, limping badly on the right foot and helped along by his comrades. The sergeant looked straight ahead; the others, bowed under his shared pack, had their eyes on the ground.

  “Jean! Jean Ticquet!”

  She ran, leaping, across the rutted road, and the three men stopped, staring at her, amazed and slightly embarrassed.

  “Thank God you’ve come … it’s Nico … he doesn’t get well!”

  They fell out by the roadside, and the sergeant hugged her delightedly. Gabriel stood by, fidgeting with his pack, while Dominique’s mouth hung open in his habitual grin.

  They did not know what to say. Neither of them had ever seen Nicholette weep before.

  The first thing Nicholas saw when he opened his eyes was a thin veil of snow on the large latticed windows. He watched the flakes settle on the diamond panes and saw them melt a moment after and slide, like water snakes, to the sill.

  The high ceiling was full of dancing shadows, writhing about the heavy crystal chandelier; it was some time before he realized that the shadows were kept dancing by the spluttering log fire on the other side of the room, farthest from the window.

  He lay there a long time, his eyes moving slowly about the room as his brain made feeble attempts to account for his presence in the high canopied bed.

  He was like a man suddenly awakened whilst sleep-walking, who finds himself confronted with doors and walls that he fails to recognize. Time and again his consciousness returned to the attack only to recoil in miserable bewilderment from the wall of alien factors confronting it. Soon the effort exhausted him and he abandoned the attempt, shutting his eyes tightly and fixing his mind on his identity as the one mooring post in an ocean of unaccountable cross-currents.

  At last he was able to remember the wagon and the birth of the dead child on the road to Orsha. The recollection comforted him; he determined to begin from this point and push forward, gingerly, like a skirmisher leaving cover and advancing, belly down, over the plain towards enemy piquets.

  He remembered going out in the blizzard and burying the child in the soft snow. After that there was a gap until the guardsman Joicy had brought him some stew and he had found himself under the sheepskin beside Nicholette.

  He became excited by his ability to remember so much, and his mind advanced with more confidence into the shadowy past. They had been marooned beside the road for two days, and by that time the wagon had been snowed in up to the floorboards, making it impossible for their one horse to drag it back to the packed snow of the highway. The gendarmes in the hooped tent had moved on; the colonel, one of the two surviving passengers, had died in the tent, raving of a wife in Picardy and whimpering like a frightened child when they had tried to force the brandy bottle between his clenched teeth. Major-General Péliot survived, crawling back into the wagon and making himself a nest in the cavity beneath Nicholette’s palliasse.

  The guardsman Joicy had solved their immediate problem by tearing off the tailboards, fashioning a rough sledge and fitting it with a canopy made from the rotting canvas of the tent. Nicholas had stood by, marvelling at the man’s ingenuity and iron resolution, watching him straighten nails with frostbitten fingers. Joicy had been apprenticed to a carpenter in Condé when he was a boy. He had never forgotten his trade and there remained in him, after fifteen campaigns as a guardsman, the old pride of craftsmanship. He apologized for the ungainly object when the sledge was finished.

  “I could do something better, if only I had sound hands.”

  All this time Nicholette had lain on her pallet and nursed her returning strength. It was incredible how quickly she rallied from the shock of Nicholas’s unspeakably clumsy delivery. Nicholas himself seemed the weaker of the two when at length they started out. It was the woman who did most of the reassuring.

  “We’ll get back all right and winter in German billets. If Annette holds out we’ll be in Danzig for the New Year,” she kept telling him.

  Annette was the surviving mare, and in spite of her miserably inadequate fodder she plodded along, dragging Nicholette and Péliot on the sledge, with Nicholas and the guardsman taking turns to ride on the runners. Nicholette said that Annette was the best draught horse she had ever seen. Old Carla would have been mad about her.

  They followed the wreck of the army to the banks of the Berezina, where Victor’s corps held off the Russian attacks until the greater part of the fugitive mob had crossed to the west bank. Nicholas saw the engineers building the two bridges, standing waist deep in icy water and driving the piles down into the slime. Almost every engineer engaged in the work died on the job, but countless stragglers had crossed before one bridge collapsed under the weight of the transport and the other became little more than a flimsy jumping-off place into the black current that swirled the débris downstream.

  Thousands died on this bridge, fighting for handholds on the planks, screaming for help where no help could be given, not even by one’s own brother or oldest comrade. Whole groups of men and women spilled over the parapet, clutching at one another in despair, clinging to the uprights and stray ends of binding rope, hanging on sometimes for an hour before another avalanche tore their fingers from the hold and whirled them downstream. And all the time the Russians closed in on both banks, while Victor and Oudinot fought them off, savagely and sullenly, as though from habit.

  The sledge passed over during the night, when the eastern bank was studded with the bivouacs of hungry wretches too engrossed in cooking horsemeat to make the precarious crossing. They passed through Smorgonie, where the Emperor boarded a fast sleigh and headed away for Paris, leaving the rabble to the reluctant Murat. The indignant King of Naples, looking faintly ridiculous in the shreds of his tattered finery, stamped about in the snow bewailing the loss of his splendid cavalry. The troops heard of the Emperor’s desertion with indifference. They were far t
oo immersed in their personal problems to question the wisdom of Napoleon’s decision. To the survivors of the Grand Army the Emperor Napoleon had ceased to act as a rallying point. They were more interested in plundering the pay wagons of the Imperial Guard, which they passed, overturned, on a slippery hill outside Vilna. Some of the men, who had long since abandoned their arms, stopped to fill sacks with forty-franc pieces.

  Several times the fugitives beat off Cossack attacks, but after Smorgonie Nicholas was hardly conscious of incident. He fired mechanically when Joicy fired, and reloaded behind the sledge canopy when he saw the old guardsman drop a ramrod into the barrel of his musket. He no longer talked to Nicholette, and sometimes the four of them travelled the whole morning without exchanging a word. When they got into Kovno, on the Niemen, Nicholas realized that he was partially blind. The discovery came as a violent shock. He found he had difficulty in focussing his eyes on the buildings, while the streets seemed to merge with the snow-covered plain beside the broad river. He remembered looking with interest at the round bald patch on the crown of Major-General Péliot’s head when the officer took off his fur cap for a moment to adjust a muffler. He recollected noticing that the pinkness of the bald patch was of the same shade as the clouds behind the setting sun over the river. Then the clouds and the water, the town and the plain and Péliot’s bald patch dissolved into one broad sheet of blinding white and he stopped suddenly in the tracks of the sledge and began to scream.

  He lay still under the stiff linen sheet and watched the shadows dancing on the ceiling. The door opened and a woman came in, carrying a tray and a steaming bowl. She went over to the fireplace and he was able to study her back. She was short and sturdy, moving with a certain tautness that was not without grace. She busied herself at the hob for a moment and then turned towards the bed. He recognized Nicholette and tried to smile.