by Dudley Pope
'Do not talk to me of lodging tickets,' Ramage said with a sudden show of anger. 'You tell that captain in Genoa!'
'What captain in Genoa?' the gendarme said warily, startled by the outburst.
'Captain or colonel, I don't know which,' Ramage said, taking advantage of the effect the rank had on the gendarme. Many promises he made when he gave us the passports and travel documents. "Plenty of work and good pay for carpenters," he said.' Ramage mimicked the precise voice of someone in authority. '"Just take your tools there and turn the wood shavings into soldi!" So we walk and get rides in farm carts - mostly we walk - fifteen hundred kilometres, no less. And when we arrive in Boulogne, what happens? Ah, you see what happens; the first night we get a decent bed to rest our weary bodies, along comes a gendarme. Bang, bang on the door. "Open!" he shouts. "Where are your lodging tickets?" he shouts. A fine welcome that is for honest Italians who come to help fight the English but -'
'But for free lodgings you need lodging tickets,' the gendarme interrupted, trying to quieten Ramage, who had raised his voice to the pitch of a querulous washerwoman. 'You are conscripts - so you must -'
'Conscripts!' Ramage almost shrieked, and lapsed into a stream of Italian to give himself time to think, afraid that his French had become too fluent. 'Conscripts, are we? Ah, I see now, it is all a trick! That colonel - I thought he was a general - was no more than a recruiting sergeant, eh? All his soft talk about skilled carpenters - and we are skilled, I might tell you; you should see the furniture my brother and I have made. Why, when my brother's daughter (she is my niece, you understand) married the son of Giacomo Benetti, you should see the tables and chairs we made for her dot; even my brother's wife, for all her airs - she's no better than us, but she walks with her nose high, like this - well, even she had to admit, they would have looked well in the Pitti Palace -'
He broke off, afraid he would burst out laughing, and hoping the gendarme would recover quickly from the outburst and say something, but the man just rubbed his jaw rhythmically and stared.
'What have you to say to that?' Ramage said, his voice full of indignation.
'You mean you are not conscripts?' the gendarme asked anxiously.
'Read the documents,' Ramage said with a great show of patience. 'Just read them. A man who can make furniture fit for the Pitti Palace taken up as a conscript? Why, even my brother's wife would -'
'Give me time to read,' the gendarme said hastily, obviously alarmed at the idea of hearing more of the niece's dot. He sat down on the edge of the bed, gripping the papers as though fearful they might be snatched away. Finally he let go with one hand and began following the writing with a forefinger, the nail of which was bitten almost to the quick. For more than five minutes he worked his way through every line of all eight documents. When he had finished he carefully folded the papers, stood up and gave them back to Ramage.
'Carpenters, eh? There is plenty of work for you here, helping to build the flotilla.' He looked round at the other three men and, as if anxious to reassert his authority, said sternly: 'See you don't get drunk. The wine of France is very strong; not like that coloured water you get in foreign places.'
'You need not worry,' Ramage assured him. 'I am their foreman; I'm a father to them. An uncle, at least. I bring them all this way. When they are sick I nurse them; when they are weary -'
'Quite so,' the gendarme said, 'and make sure they work hard in the shipyard.' With that he turned on his heel and walked out, slamming the door behind him. Ramage signalled for silence and listened to his footsteps as he went down the stairs.
'As soon as we have had something to eat,' Ramage said heavily, 'we'll have a look at the docks and the shipyards.’
By noon they had the layout of the port firmly fixed in their minds and were due to meet Louis at a cafe near their hotel, a rendezvous they had arranged by walking purposefully past the Marie, their carpenter's tools over their shoulders and, with no strangers within earshot, calling to the Frenchman.
More important than the layout of the port was the size of the Invasion Flotilla. At first Ramage had been appalled by the number of vessels: those he had seen when he sailed in with the Marie only half-filled the outer harbour, but all the inner docks and muddy banks of the river Liane were crowded with a wide variety of craft. The largest were prames, obviously designed as barges to carry troops and cavalry but, as Jackson commented, looking little more than lighters rigged with inadequate masts, and obviously incapable of going to windward. Any progress they made would only be running almost dead before the wind.
All four men had estimated separately how many soldiers or cavalry the prames could carry and agreed on two hundred infantry with arms and baggage, or fifty horses and cavalrymen and a platoon of infantry, with all their rations, ammunition and forage.
There were sixteen prames altogether, though many were not rigged, and forty-one sloops, which were smaller and more weatherly, and would be crowded with a hundred men and their supplies and weapons. The most numerous vessels were the gunboats, sixty-one of them, but less than a score had masts and mounted the 24-pounder gun for which each of them was pierced. Like the sloops, they could probably carry a hundred men with stores and ammunition. There were fifteen large river barges, normally towed by horses. Presumably they were to be towed over by frigates.
One dock was filled with a variety of different craft: more than a hundred caiques (which could carry less than fifty men and were more suitable for carrying cattle or horses); thirty or so corvettes carrying about the same; and more than half a dozen different types of fishing-boat, their varied shapes showing they had come from such widely spaced ports as those on the shallow north coast of Holland, with its treacherous sandbanks, to the Breton coast, where fishing was in deep water with rough Atlantic seas. The hatches of the fishing-boats were so small and smelly - Ramage could detect the stench from five hundred yards to leeward of the nearest one - that they could not be used for troops, who would be seasick long before the craft cast off from the dock, let alone reached a mile offshore. The largest of them looked capable of carrying twenty horses with saddles, while the smallest might manage five. But alone in the flotilla, the fishing-boats could go to sea in almost any weather and be sure of reaching their destination.
It was curious how hard it was to relate totals written on paper with what you saw afloat: walking round the quays, it seemed Bonaparte had assembled a large flotilla, with the whole port seemingly full. Then when you wrote down the totals for the various types on a sheet of paper, it reduced in size. But this was only the Boulogne section: there would be many more in Calais, and perhaps as many again in all the small fishing ports. And he had no idea yet how many more were building - not just here in Boulogne, but at the other shipyards up and down the coast.
As they walked to the café, Ramage recalled the phrase Louis had used when he pointed out the first of the vessels - Bonaparte's flotilla de grande espèce, which was certainly a grand enough title. They reached the café and found a few workmen at one table, noisily drinking onion soup and pausing only to break pieces from small loaves of black bread. Ramage sat down at the largest empty table and gestured to the others to leave a chair for Louis. One look at the patron showed why Louis had chosen this particular café: unwashed, unshaven, the man was grossly fat, with the slack face and bloodshot eyes of a perpetual drunkard, and when he lurched over to take Ramage's order of soup for all of them he obviously did not trust his own eyes to focus.
'For how many?' he asked.
'For five,' Ramage said and a moment later Louis joined them, settling back in the chair facing Ramage, who saw that he had shaved and combed his hair since they last met. The Frenchman noticed the glance and grinned. 'I thought I had better tidy myself up, so that I look like a carpenter too! Tell me,' he asked quietly, 'is it an emergency.'
Ramage shook his head. 'Not an emergency, but a change of plan -' He broke off as the owner arrived with plates, spoons and a large jug of soup, all of whic
h he dumped in the middle of the table. He fished around in the large pocket in front of his apron and produced a loaf of black bread, which he put down beside Ramage and lurched back to the bar at the far end of the room.
Rossi poured soup into the plates and passed them round while Jackson produced a large knife and sliced up the bread.
As soon as they were all bent over their plates Ramage described, between spoonsful of soup, the Corporal's description of the lovelorn lieutenant and his weekly ride to Paris with the Admiral's dispatches. At the end of the story Louis was silent for several moments and then, picking up the jug to see if any more soup remained, he gave a prodigious belch. He sat back in his chair looking to his right, away from the group of workmen at the other table, and apparently bored or daydreaming. But Ramage noticed that no lip-reader could watch his mouth.
'So you wish to sample the food at the Hotel de la Poste at Amiens . . .' It was a statement, not a question, and Ramage waited as Louis mulled over the problems involved. '. . . Carpenters won't do - Amiens is the centre for velvet, and that sort of thing. And priests, too,' he added maliciously, 'with the largest cathedral in Europe. Priests are great travellers now, since the First Consul and the Pope signed the Concordat - always going to see the bishop. Not so long ago they were being hunted down by the enfants de terreur and their churches and cathedrals robbed and pillaged. Fashions change,' he commented. 'Passports will be needed, and different clothes. I shall want some money to pay for all this.'
'Of course,' Ramage said. 'And I need to be in Amiens by Friday night, so that I can spend Saturday arranging things at the hotel. The others could arrive on Saturday, if that would make it any easier.'
'It might be better to split into two parties of two,' Louis said, obviously thinking aloud. 'Two priests, two weavers, two masons . . . people travel in pairs. Four creates suspicion. Let me think about it. I'll see you in your room at ten o'clock tonight.' He called to the patron for wine and asked quietly: 'You had an interesting walk round the port?'
'Very interesting,' Ramage said, 'and a little frightening. Even the vessels completed so far could carry an army across the Channel . . .’
'They could' the Frenchman said evenly, 'though whether they will is another matter. Would you bet on a week or more of easterly winds?'
'Not if I was a Bonaparte, but the odds seem shorter when you look at it from the British point of view.'
Louis shrugged his shoulders. 'Appear to shorten my friend, but an east wind is still an east wind, and this flotilla of sheep needs moonlight also or they'll all get lost. You have seen those prames?They need a gale of wind under them to make any progress..."
'If only half of them arrive on the Kentish beaches,' Ramage said, 'they might not take the country, but the devastation ...'
Louis reached up and took the carafe of wine from the patron and reminded him they needed glasses.
'Yes, there would be much devastation. Indeed,' he grinned broadly, 'it would upset the contraband trade for a long time, too, which is one of the reasons why we are helping you. To tell you the truth, I'm beginning to enjoy it; running contraband three or four nights a week becomes boring.'
Ramage raised his eyebrows. 'I should have thought boredom was the last thing that troubled you.'
'Don't misunderstand me; a boring voyage means a safe one, and I have no wish to return home with wild stories of narrow escapes. We make a profit because we sail as regularly as the packetboat did before the war. But it is still boring!'
The patron arrived with the glasses, which Ramage saw were even dirtier than the windows at the Corporal's inn. He reached for the bottle and poured wine for them all and lifted his glass to Louis. 'War sees some strange alliances - here is to this one.'
The Frenchman drank to it and then put his glass down carefully. 'Not so strange, when you think about it carefully. I don't want to rule the world; I just want to be left in peace to follow my trade. You don't want to rule the world either, nor do these men; you just want to be left in peace, knowing your family and friends are safe from invaders. That is why we are allies against this Corsican . . .' He stood up. ‘I’ll see you in your room after supper,' he said.
That night while Ramage and his three men were sitting on the two beds in their room, talking in whispers as they waited with the flickering candle flame glittering occasionally on the shiny blades of the carpenters' tools stacked on the floor beneath the window, there was a faint double tap at the door, and before anyone could move Louis slipped into the room, closing the door silently behind him.
Stafford looked at him and said admiringly, 'Cor – didn’t hear the coming of you! If you want a job when the war’s over, just look me up in London: we could make a good living, s'long as you don't mind working at night.'
The Frenchman grinned and said to Ramage in his hesitant English: ‘I think the heavy feet might alarm you, no?'
'It most certainly would,' Ramage said in French. 'We were woken this morning by a gendarme banging on the door. He wanted to inspect our papers - mistook us for conscripts.'
'I warned you: they check all inns and lodging houses for deserters two or three times a week. A matter of routine, but alarming if you have a guilty conscience!'
He sat down on the bed beside Ramage and took some papers from his pocket. After putting them down, he brought out a bottle of ink, and then carefully removed a quill pen which he had slid down inside his boot. He held it up to the candle flame to make sure the point had not split.
'We have to write in the details on the documents,' he explained. 'Who you are, why you are travelling . . . But first I must tell you some differences you will find on the road to Amiens - on any road, in fact. If you use a postchaise (the wagon is too slow), the posts are still the same: thirty-four between here and Paris, and usually ten kilometres (about six English miles) apart. They are well supplied with horses, although the postmasters no longer follow the old rule of one horse per person; you're lucky to get three horses for four people these days. The postillions can legally charge only fifteen sous per post, but if you do not pay them double they can make the journey unpleasant in many little ways.
'Now, listen carefully; there is now a new system by which the traveller has to pay a toll. The money is supposed to be for the upkeep of the roads, but no one has spent a sou on a road in France since the Revolution, let alone a livre: there are deep potholes every few yards. You pay the tolls at barrières which have been set up along the main roads. But watch out, they are not at regular intervals, and the toll varies between three and eighteen sous.
'All of this makes travelling expensive: before the Revolution you could take a postchaise to Paris for 213 livres; now you have to pay double. Still, there is a brighter side: before the Revolution you would be lucky to arrive in Paris without meeting a highwayman or a footpad. Now they are a rarity.
"They are a rarity,' he said, tapping Ramage's shoulder for emphasis, 'because - from your point of view - there is another pest on the roads: mounted gendarmes. They halt all carts and carriages and demand to see every traveller's papers. Anyone arousing suspicion is taken to the nearest jail. Oh yes, their favourite trick is to make you sign your name, which they compare with the signature in your passport, so remember that and practise it!'
After making Ramage repeat the details, Louis said: 'Now, the journey to Amiens. The route from here is through Montreuil (four posts, or about twenty-three miles), Nampont, and Nouvion to Abbeville -'
Ramage noticed the Frenchman tensed slightly as he paused and then continued.
'It is a wretched town now; half the people have left and the Revolution has ruined the damask industry. Reichord's Hotel is comfortable - by today's standards, anyway. Then you go on to Ailly-le-Haut-Clocher. There's a Red Cap of Liberty on top of the church steeple. It is stuck on the weathercock, so it swivels round with every change of wind.' He shrugged his, shoulders. 'Perhaps others have noted the irony - to comment aloud in public would be to risk your neck. At t
he next village, Flixecourt, you will get your first sight of a Tree of Liberty; they are proud of the one set up in the square. You will change horses for the last time at Picquigny, and Amiens is only a league and a half beyond.'
'Abbeville,' Ramage said quietly, 'has some unpleasant associations for you.'
Louis looked down and was silent for a full minute, seeming almost to shrink, leaving his body behind while he went to some private place full of dreadful memories. Embarrassed at this unexpected reaction to his curiosity and regretting the question, Ramage was trying to think of a way of changing the subject when the Frenchman looked up.
'I will tell you about it - no, don't worry,' he said as Ramage went to speak, ‘I want to tell you so you can understand better why I help you. At the moment I must seem to be a smuggler with no allegiances; a man whose loyalty can be bought - no, do not bother to protest, M. Ramage, you have all the doubts about me that I would expect in an honest man. In a minute or two you will understand and we shall be better friends.
'The name Joseph Le Bon means nothing to you. To me he is a former priest from Arras who almost made me believe in God. "Ah" you might say, "a saintly man, and wise, as befits someone who once taught rhetoric at the College of Beaune, in Burgundy, and a man of great ability if he nearly succeeded in making an atheist like Louis believe in God and an after-life."
'You would be partly right: Le Bon made me hope there is an after-life because I want the comfort of knowing there is a Hell in whose flames Joseph Le Bon burns in agony for all eternity, for he is now dead. My only regret is that the Committee of Public Safety finally ordered his execution and cheated me of my revenge. But those who watched him on the scaffold - they saw him screaming with fear, groaning, wailing and begging for mercy before the blade dropped. I had planned that he would be begging me for mercy, but -' he shrugged his shoulders '- the Committee that set him on a path of mass murder eventually executed its own servant.
