Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  Gabriel knew about The Drummer. He had heard Old Jean and Nicholette discuss her round the camp-fire in Spain. She had been a cantinière who followed the Eighty-fifth and specialized in midwifery. They called her “The Drummer” because one of her husbands had been drum-major and when he was killed in the fighting round Landshut she had marched into action beating his bass drum, heading a charge that broke clean through the triple ranks of the Croats. Old Carla had often acted as an acolyte at The Drummer’s confinements.

  Gabriel poured the girl a measure of Danzig gin and sat beside her on Dominique’s spread greatcoat, putting his arm across her thin shoulders. She shivered at his touch, but quietened a little. They sat there for a long time, saying nothing.

  Just before dusk Old Jean limped in from the main road, and they saw by his face that his errand had been unsuccessful.

  “Michel Ney isn’t there,” he told them. “That bastard Joubert had his adjutant kick me out.”

  He fumbled in his tunic pocket, pulling out a canvas bag. “I stole some coffee from the guardroom. That’ll teach them not to leave it lying around.”

  Nicholette said nothing and Jean scratched his nose. His embarrassment made his voice harsh and querulous.

  “Come on, Gabriel, let’s get some water and make a brew.”

  They gathered up their mess tins and went off down to the stream. On the way Jean said: “Nicholas wants us to volunteer for the firing-squad.”

  Gabriel stared at him. “He’s crazy!”

  “He’s not crazy; he’s afraid of being holed in a dozen places by the conscripts.”

  They walked in silence as far as the stream. Finally Gabriel said: “I couldn’t shoot Nicky!”

  “Somebody’s going to. I’ve seen firing-squads formed out of recruits before. It’s worse than killing pigs. Those babies can always take fire better than they can give it. You and Dominique have got to help me out; it’s the last thing we can do for him.”

  “But Nicholette … ?”

  Jean swished the water round in his tin, watching the grit settle.

  “Nicholette needn’t know. They won’t let her into the square.”

  Nicholas was lying on his straw, his hands clasped behind his head, when he heard the music. He recognized it instantly. It was a variation of the tune that Dominique had played on the British transport when they were going to England.

  Nicholas smiled to himself and wondered how the farm boy had located the buttery window. He had probably pitched some yarn or other to the gendarmes and they had sent him round as a joke. The prisoner got up to look out, but it was dark now and he could see nothing more than a pattern of bivouac fires on the hillside opposite. It occurred to him that he would never see that familiar pattern again.

  The tune squeaked on; Nicholas wedged his face between the short bars and called. Somewhere out in the darkness the fiddle stopped and Dominique hailed him. Nicholas could see the outline of a sentry’s shako and shoulders a few feet from the aperture. The man shuffled and grounded his musket stock.

  “It’s an old comrade of mine playing the funeral march,” said Nicholas as Dominique’s dim figure doomed up. Then he called: “It’s at reveille tomorrow, Dominique; better tell Jean!”

  “Are they going to shoot you, Nicky?”

  “You are, Dominique, and see that you aim straight. No gin tonight and get to sleep early!”

  Dominique grinned in the darkness and Nicholas heard the snick of a musket sling. He called sharply: “You go back home, Dominique; you can’t do anything. Go back to Jean, d’you hear me?”

  The sentry shifted his position and Nicholas wondered if the man was aware that he stood in acute danger of losing his life. Apparently not, for he said drowsily, “Play that fiddle again; it sounds good!”

  There was silence for a moment; then Nicholas heard the sling snap back on Dominique’s shoulder. He stayed to play a few bars and then slouched away in the direction of the outbuildings.

  “Plays that fiddle well,” said the sentry, and, turning back to the window, “You wanting tobacco—”

  “I’ve got some,” replied Nicholas, “more than I’ve time to smoke!”

  He settled back on the straw and lit up his short pipe. Deliberately he went back over the years—boyhood, university days in Berne and Zurich, lean days in Toulouse, the idyll at Cicero’s, Camilla swimming in her lake, the night sky over Poland, sultry afternoons by the Danube, Nicholette’s canteen wedding, the thirsty road down into Portugal, fragrant Devon hedgerows beside the Otter, the steady slop of the Channel wavelets against the smuggler’s prow, the smell of despair in Moscow, east wind humming through the canvas as he bent over Nicholette on the road to Orsha.

  He envied no one, regretted nothing. His review of the years was like a walk through a wood, with no one tree distinguishable from the others. He did not resent his sentence that afternoon; it was no more and no less than he had expected. He knew that Nicholette loved him as much as she could love any man, and was grateful for it, but he was unable to feel anxiety about her future. It had been a mistake to try for Switzerland. He knew before he had gone a league that Jean had been right; she could never settle to domestic life. He wondered if it would have been any different with himself, whether he could have gone back to teaching after shooting and bayonetting his way across Europe for so many years. He felt no sense of disgrace at the manner of death they had chosen for him. It was much the same as that he had courted ever since he walked into the Toulouse depot on the night he left Cicero’s, and it was sure to be more certain and painless than the ends awaiting most of the men squatting round those pinpoints of light on the hillside. The majority would either be cut down in the cavalry charges of the future or receive a shower of grapeshot that knocked them aside and left them to gasp out their lives in the mud or on the operating tables of improvised clearing stations. He was no more ashamed of dying for deserting the Empire than he would have been of dying to sustain it a few more months. He saw clearly now that its collapse was a matter of time, possibly only of weeks, and he felt that the men who had condemned him were equally aware of this irony, all save the few diehards like Jean who would stamp about shouting “Vive l’Empereur!” until somebody told them that the Bourbons were back in the Tuileries. Then they would have to make their peace with the new régime or else sit playing at conspirators on half-pay in faubourg cafés.

  Lying there in the foul straw, Nicholas had an odd sense of oneness with the dark sky, the stars and the night breeze blowing in from Bohemia. He wished for only one thing: he wished that Jean and Gabriel and young Dominique were coming with him. He had no real hope of finding Manny and Claude and Louis.

  The sky was red behind the city roofs as the regimental square formed up in front of the crude hutments. The troops shivered in the early-morning ground mist, for the camp was pitched on marshy ground and until the sun rose men walked about shrouded to the knees in vapour.

  Somewhere a drum was beating, the tattoo sounding soggy and indistinct as the drummer hammered a damp skin. Over by the town, cavalry trumpets brayed and thin smoke spiralled from fires built of damp wood.

  The firing-squad, Jean, Gabriel, Dominique and two others, white-faced boys of barely eighteen, had assembled outside the barn used as headquarters and now stood about restlessly, awaiting the adjutant-major, who was inside drinking coffee—the officers were all new to the regiment and they did not think Jean’s request to be included in the firing-squad a strange one. The sooner the tiresome business was over the better. The troops were restless during this period of inaction; the officers wished the campaign would either end or begin again.

  The provost and his gendarmes conducted Nicholas to a broken-down wall that had once bordered a pigsty. The sergeant-major, who knew Nicholas only slightly, offered him a bandage for his eyes.

  “Take the damned thing away,” Nicholas told him. “I’ve brought my own bandage; it’s in my pocket.”

  The sergeant-major felt in his prisoner’s
pocket and pulled out a dirty white handkerchief, puckered by needle and thread into a clumsy rosette.

  “Pin it above the heart,” said Nicholas. “There’s a mist about and I can’t swear to the marksmanship of all the firing-squad!”

  “Veterans are doing it,” the sergeant-major told him as he fumbled with the rosette.

  “I know,” said Nicholas. “They’re comrades of mine.”

  The man looked surprised but said nothing. He made a tail out of a loose end of the handkerchief and tucked it firmly into the breast pocket of the prisoner’s tunic. Nicholas glanced down.

  “They ought to hit that at ten paces,” he said.

  The companies started to fall in round the pigsty, sullen at being ordered to parade before they could get their bivouac fires bright enough to cook breakfast. Nicholas saw them dimly, massed in close ranks on three sides of the crumbling wall.

  Ahead of him, in the low mist, somebody shouted an order and the firing-squad tramped into view, marching in step with Old Jean in front. They formed up quite close to the sty and grounded arms. Then the adjutant-major and his drummer took their places at either end of the file.

  Nicholas exchanged a single glance with Jean, but Gabriel and Dominique looked away, over the prisoner’s shoulder towards the hills. The sun struggled to break through the mist, but soon abandoned the attempt and crept blindly along the eastern horizon, flickering for a moment on the spires of the town.

  Sentence was read, a jumble of words indistinguishable to all but the principal actors. Nicholas shivered slightly and thought of accounts of executions that he had read in Cicero’s library, where brave victims donned two sets of underclothing on the morning they were to suffer lest the witnesses might think they shivered from fear.

  At last the adjutant-major stopped mumbling; the provost took over, barking the order to aim. The five men in the squad glanced at their priming, and their barrels went up reluctantly, their eyes squinting along them towards the rosette.

  Nicholas wondered if he had acted wisely in wearing his tunic. He had cut off the brass buttons in case they deflected the balls, but most men were shot in their shirts. Involuntarily his mind went back to the executions in the square of a Spanish village, when he had stood where Jean was standing now, centre man in a file of five.

  At that moment the sun triumphed unexpectedly over the mist, breaking through in thin rays and catching points of light on the levelled musket barrels. Five distinct jewels sparkled like a necklace girdling the squad.

  Suddenly Nicholas felt winded, as though he had run full-tilt into a solid obstacle level with his stomach. The five jewels multiplied until they seemed to cover the distant city in a mantle of brilliant lights….

  Before the smoke had cleared away, before even the echo of the volley was lost among the hills, the right-hand side of the square bulged and a one-horse wagon forced its way through into the enclosure.

  Jean’s dull eyes left the man on the ground and swung round on the vehicle. The provost sheathed his sabre and ran towards the wall. The adjutant and his drummer crossed over to the woman driving the wagon.

  Jean saw the officer exchanging words with her. Gabriel and Dominique had already moved away towards the bivouac. Out of the corner of his eye Jean saw that Gabriel walked unsteadily, leaning on Dominique’s forearm, dragging his musket by the barrel.

  The adjutant came back to the provost, who was certifying the death of the man stretched on his side at the foot of the wall.

  “She’s his wife and she has an order for the body. Do you know anything about it?”

  The provost nodded. “It’s all in order,” he said. “She saw the Old Man last night. Here, you!” he called to a group of conscripts who were slouching away from the fringe of the square. “Nobody’s told you to dismiss; get the body into that wagon. Move to it!”

  The conscripts obeyed clumsily, the man nearest the head turning away his face as he took hold of the shoulders. They lifted the body and carried it across to the vehicle. The woman had already let down the tailboard and spread a brown regulation blanket on the plank floor.

  Jean slung his musket and touched Nicholette on the arm just as the conscripts jumped down and began to lift the tailboard back into position.

  “Better come back to the bivouac, Nico.”

  She turned and looked straight at him. Before he could drop his gaze she spat, firmly and accurately, hitting him just above the mouth. Then she turned away, went round to the front of the wagon and called shrilly to the horse. Jean stood there dully, watching the vehicle pick its way through the dispersing groups of men, and his fingers brushed the sparse hairs of his grey moustache.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Grand Army was at bay on the outskirts of Leipzig. Earlier in the campaign General Moreau, chatting at Allied Headquarters with another distinguished renegade, Crown Prince Bernadotte, had likened the French army to a maimed bear striking blindly at a pack of lithe wolves; but Moreau, because he was French, did not underestimate the bear’s powers of recovery once it broke from the ring.

  Moreau and Bernadotte sought one another’s company a good deal at Allied conferences, neither taking much part in the discussions. Moreau was already regretting his decision to join the Coalition against his countrymen. Looking across at the French lines, he sometimes wondered whether any of the men he had led to victory twenty years ago were still in the bivouacs. Bernadotte’s memories were much more green. Less than four years ago he had been leading a corps against his present allies at Wagram.

  The veterans found it hard to forgive either man.

  Moreau’s doubts as to his wisdom in joining the Coalition were soon to be set at rest. A stray cannon ball ricochetted into a group of staff officers outside Dresden one morning and laid the ex-Republican general mortally wounded at the feet of the Czar. Moreau died like Turenne and Lannes and Bessières; but, unlike these men, he was not wearing a French uniform when the cannon ball cut away his legs. Bernadotte rode away thoughtfully. After that he was even more silent in the Allied council chamber.

  By mid-October the French army had withdrawn to the villages ringing Leipzig.

  Jean, Gabriel and Dominique lay in Mockern with the second company of the Eighty-seventh. They were strongly entrenched and did not doubt but that they could hold out against a dozen assaults of the Swedes and Blücher’s Prussians camped in the plain beyond. For this was to be a defensive battle, at least until the edge had been worn off Allied enthusiasm. The voltigeurs were a mixed company now, half veterans, half conscripts, a unit differing from that of the early summer, when there were ten recruits to every experienced sharpshooter in the ranks. Most of the conscripts had disappeared during the summer fighting. Some, who had survived Lützen and Bantzen, had simply gone home, travelling by night with the instinct of homing pigeons, unchallenged for the most part by military police and gendarmes, whose units had now been swept into the firing-line. Many of the deserters reached their farms and cottages before the New Year, keeping out of sight until the First Restoration coaxed them into the open. The conscripts had stood the initial cannonades well enough, but they learned more quickly than the preceding generation, and those that had been eager for glory soon decided that one cannonade is very much like another.

  Thirty days’ marching and fighting in drenching rain had accounted for others, whose graves were dotted about the German fields. Phlegmatic ploughmen turned them up from time to time after the armies had trailed off to the west and spring crops were being sown. They were buried naked, for there was a serious shortage of draught horses in the Grand Army and thousands of new uniforms were still stacked in the Rhine depots awaiting distribution to the corps in the fields.

  Gaps in the ranks were filled by veterans from the German garrisons. Ever since the end of the September armistice little columns had been trickling in from Bohemia, Württemberg and Bavaria, consisting of men who had fought well in the early campaigns and had earned their luck to settle in fortress towns
. Many of them openly cursed the obstinacy of the Emperor, and as they sat round the fires at night there was talk that Jean would have considered blasphemous a year or two ago. Now even he said nothing, but spent most of his time foraging in the vegetable patches behind abandoned farms. He and his file lived extremely well by the standards of the Imperial infantry in the autumn of 1813.

  Gabriel began sketching again during the lull, and several pictures from this period survived. There is one of a team of horses tugging a field-piece and its caisson up the slopes of a shallow ravine. The horses are thin and the gun is of small calibre. Artillerymen of the Coalition armies would have thought it hardly worth while bringing into action. Gabriel also sketched a memory impression of Nicholas facing the firing-squad, but this odd piece of work is obviously unfinished. The artist has shown the five musket barrels radiating like the spokes of a wheel, while the man in the hub of the picture has no features to identify him as Nicholas. The only clear part of the sketch is the background, showing the spires and battlements of Dresden. It is difficult to understand why Gabriel left it in the book. The sketch has a laconic title—“Dresden Parade.”

  The night before the first day of the final battle they talked about Nicholette. They had not mentioned her since she had driven off with Nicholas’s body. Gabriel suddenly demanded to know where she had buried her husband, and Jean, without looking up from his soup, replied: “She bought a plot in the little churchyard near the Gross Garten. I went there, soon after she’d moved off.”

  Gabriel had heard from some of the men about the incident at the tailboard when Nicholette had spat in the sergeant’s face. He said nothing, but he wondered how Jean felt about it, whether he was enraged or philosophically indifferent. The girl had as completely disappeared as if she had been shot and buried with Nicholas. Gabriel wondered, as he had wondered in England, whether they would ever see her again, or if she had driven off to find peace in Switzerland by herself.