CHAPTER TWO
The Church
Graham forgot many of the experiences that came his way during the next thirty days, but he never forgot the four hours’ march that followed the squad’s ascent of the cliff face above the river.
They could not remain where they were, crammed into a small crater and denied sufficient room to move without risking a miniature landslide that would spill them into the water. On their right was the thundering waterfall, and on their left, not more than three miles away, the town that was now almost certainly occupied by the French advance guard. Behind them was the river and above them a dense mass of scrub leading, presumably, to the edge of the escarpment and the valley down which Masséna’s army was advancing. They had no choice but to climb upward through close-set timber and a wilderness of uprooted trees and loose stones, their advance progressing at the rate of about a mile an hour. Graham led, fighting his way through the tangled undergrowth and calling back warnings of lightly poised boulders, any of which would have carried them away like a row of skittles. Up they toiled through the long afternoon, Sergeant Fox chivvying the rear and Strawbridge half carrying and half dragging the boy Curle, who twisted his ankle in the first stage and could barely put foot to the ground. Graham heard Lickspittle and Croyde muttering and cursing and Watson wheezing for breath, but still, by some miracle of buoyancy, the Cockney found it possible to crack a wry joke about the toughness of the briers or the plodding progress of his companions.
About an hour before dark they reached level ground where the woods thinned a little and Fox, with his ear to the ground, detected the rumble of artillery caissons in the valley, where the timber gave way to a wild stretch of moorland studded with giant rocks. Looking across the slope toward the next peak, Graham was reminded of a picture he had seen in one of his father’s books representing an astronomer’s conception of the craters of the moon. Presently, when they had pushed to the very edge of the undergrowth, they could see that Fox’s surmise had been correct and that the road below was black with French transport wagons moving at a crawl toward the fold in the hills where the town crouched below the horizon.
Graham said, “We must bear left and go on down until we can find the smaller river again. If we can get across that we can work our way to the main stream and find the ford that the cavalry used during the advance!” He made it sound very definite, as though he personally had knowledge of the crossing and was not relying upon the sergeant’s guess.
They moved off again, finding the descent somewhat easier, and when it was almost dark they struck the tributary again, a narrow, twisting stream boiling along between slab-sided masses of rock and not more than fifty feet across, but too deep and swift-flowing to ford. Then, in the last moment of half-light, they saw the tiny beach and cave, and less than twenty yards downstream the fallen tree, a giant pine almost bridging the river.
They went over gingerly, Strawbridge carrying the boy on his back and Fox, roped to a jagged branch, steadying the file in the center. The cave was a godsend. It offered shelter and the chance of a fire, for down here, in the depth of the woods, it seemed unlikely that a French patrol would stumble on them. Fox set the exhausted men gathering firewood, but the boy was too spent to climb the rocks at the cave mouth and was hoisted inside by Strawbridge and Lockhart. Watson had kept his tinderbox in a sealskin bag with his stub of pipe and few shreds of tobacco, so that they soon had a fire going at the back of the shallow excavation. The wood was damp and the cave soon filled with smoke, but they were able to make some attempt to dry their clothes, and presently Lockhart and Watson busied themselves with the preparation of soup made of onions and the moldy bread they had brought from the town.
“We could do better than this by morning,” Graham heard Lockhart tell the Cockney. “We could set some traps, for there’ll be a thousand coneys hereabouts unless I’m much mistaken!”
“Set some traps, then,” Graham told him, and Lockhart, followed by Strawbridge, took flaming billets and went down to the river again just as Fox returned from a reconnaissance along the unexplored bank.
“There is a cattle path yonder,” Fox told Graham, “and this beach is probably a drinking place for the beasts grazing on the plateau above. It leads in the right direction, due south by my reckoning.”
”We can try it in daylight,” Graham told him shortly. “Call the men together for their meal and I’ll see what I can do with the boy’s ankle.”
Fox seemed to hesitate and then, in a low voice, he said, “Them jaibirds are hoarding, sir! They’ve got brandy and maybe something else. Will you hold a pistol to them while I make a search?”
Graham glanced around the cave. Lockhart and Strawbridge were outside setting traps, Watson was tending the soup and the Welshman Morgan was carefully cleaning his musket. It was the first time he had realized that neither Lickspittle nor Croyde was present.
“Where are they?”
Fox jerked his head and Graham followed him out into the open and down the bank to a spot where the two felons were sitting side by side on a fallen trunk.
“Open your knapsacks!” Graham said, leveling the weapon at Lickspittle.
The men looked surprised, then resentful as Fox kicked their knapsacks aside and began to strew their belongings on the shingle. There was just enough light to examine the contents and Fox grunted with satisfaction when he found four hardtack biscuits and a hambone with about a pound of meat adhering to it.
“The ensign could order me to shoot you for this,” Fox said. “What else have you got?”
Croyde looked murderous for a moment and then, jerking up the flask, threw back his head and applied it to his lips. Graham tore it from his hand, placed his thumb on the neck and shook it. It seemed to be about half full of spirit. He said slowly, “You can go your own way, both of you. If you get back to our lines I’ll have you both shot, but I don’t think you would get back alone, the French would take you sooner or later. What is it you want, to act with us or travel alone? This is your last chance and I’ll give you a minute to decide!”
He sensed the sergeant’s approval of this ultimatum. They stood with their backs to the rushing stream, watching the two men exchange glances. Lickspittle seemed inclined to brazen it out, but Croyde was confused and almost tearful. Sensing this, Graham ignored the smaller man and concentrated on Croyde.
“Well?”
Croyde scratched the side of his head.
“I’ll stay with the file, sir. Matt will, too, for we’d never find our way out o’ this place alone and we’d be strung up by they dragoons.” He turned desperately to his companion. “We would, Matt, I’m telling you!” When Lickspittle declined to answer he plunged his hand into his greatcoat pocket and pulled out a quid of tobacco, thrusting it toward the impassive sergeant. “Take it, Sergeant, it’s good Navy issue. I got nothing else, I swear to God I ’aven’t!” And he suddenly swung round and tramped back toward the cave.
Lickspittle stood up slowly. He did not seem in the least cowed by the desertion of his crony and when he spoke there was a grinding contempt in his voice.
“We might as well have been topped or transported,” he said, “and I told him that many times. It would have been finished with, wouldn’t it? A man can only die the once!” And then he too turned on his heel and went back to the cave.
Fox hurled the quid of tobacco to the ground and crushed it under his boot. “Damned scum!” he said. “Is it right they should make good soldiers bed down with the likes o’ them? I’ve said so once and I’ll say it a thousand times.”
“I don’t suppose they would,” said Graham, “if they could get enough honest fellows to take the shilling!”
“That’s true,” replied Fox thoughtfully, “but there’s reasons for men steering wide of the color sergeant when he comes drumming for recruits. When a man joins the colors he turns his back on most things as make life worth living! Start young enough, like me and yon drummerboy, an’ it’s bearable, maybe. We’v
e never known nothing better, neither one of us, but a man with a trade, a man who wants his own hearth and his woman in bed beside him o’ nights, ah, that’s mighty different, sir! What would a man like that gain by following the drum into a Godforsaken land like this?”
“You could have got your discharge long since,” Graham said, struck by the bitterness in the man’s voice and the savage line of his mouth. “They sign a man seven years at a time, don’t they?”
“What else would I do now?” said Fox, and suddenly he sounded less bitter than pathetic, like a cripple comparing his prospects with those of the able-bodied.
“Have a swig from the flask, Sergeant,” Graham said, smiling, but the sergeant shook his head.
“I never touch spirits, sir, I seen too much madness come of it!” And, seeming anxious to break off the conversation, Fox followed the path to where the faint glow reflected on the rocks outside the cave.
When supper was done and every man but Fox had had a gulp of Croyde’s brandy, the sergeant posted Lockhart as sentry and the rest of them lay down to sleep. Graham gave Lockhart his watch and orders to wake the men in rotation, but despite his own aching tiredness he did not feel sleepy. His lacerated cheek was throbbing, but it was not the smart that kept him awake but the strangeness of his situation, cooped up in a cave beside a tumbling Portuguese river with a group of men who at sunrise that morning had been no more than a file of blank, stupid faces but were now, by some extraordinary chance, linked to him and his future more closely than were his brothers at home or the junior officers with whom he drank and gambled and boasted in the depot at Hythe. Propped on his elbow watching the dull glow of the dying fire, he felt an intense curiosity about each of them as an individual, how they came to be there, where they had been reared as children, whether they had wives or children and, above all, what they thought about him, a young coxcomb unweaned in war and clearly uncertain of his responsibilities. They would, he thought, have been much happier with the sergeant, who spoke their own language. If, in the end, they were rounded up by the French and cut down, or marched off to starve in some prison fortress, they would not blame the lucky shot of the dragoon but the green ensign who had led them astray and deprived them of the one source of security that they had ever known, the regiment.
He studied them as they slept, marveling at their ability to relax in the pungent atmosphere of the cave with nothing but a canteen of onion soup in their bellies. Watson was lying on his back snoring, the spluttering flames playing goblin tricks among the begrimed crevices of his face. Where, Graham wondered, had the man acquired such a fearsome complexion, a face seamed with the filth of years and one seemingly that had never known soap and water—yet surely he must shave sometimes? Did he scrape his ugly little face with a dry razor? Was the skin so tough and bedaubed that it had lost all sensitivity? His gaze wandered to Strawbridge, whose face by contrast was round and pink. How did Strawbridge acquire those massive limbs and strength that enabled him to plod over uneven ground with a fourteen-year-old boy on his back? Not on army pork and hardtack surely, more likely from generations of countrymen who had lived all their lives in the open air, developing giant physiques by the exercise of monotonous daily labor?
Beyond Strawbridge lay Fox, the sergeant, as soundly asleep as any of them, which was odd seeing that Fox, when awake, never ceased to look tense and calculating. Perhaps this was a rhythm acquired by a professional who had survived half a dozen campaigns, an ability to slough off the tensions of the hunted animal the moment it found the security of the burrow? Yet the man could be gentle as well as brusque and resourceful. He had been polite and helpful with Graham from the outset, hiding his contempt and irritation under a mask of deference accorded not so much to Graham but to the epaulettes he wore. It was Fox, of course, upon whom each of them depended, but Fox, a mere sergeant, would never admit this, not even to himself. Always he would hint at decisions and then pretend that Graham had made them, for this was how the Army was organized, orders filtering down through graded channels until they reached the culde-sacs of brains such as Croyde’s and Lickspittle’s. Graham pondered the imponderables of the file. Was the smaller, less tractable of the two felons a fool or a yokel? Not in the sense that Strawbridge or Watson was, for at least Lickspittle had possessed brains enough to challenge the established order of things and risk his neck in order to make a guinea or two by evading the law! And he had done more. He had evaded the penalty of getting caught with arms in his hands, for he was still alive and in good health when, by all the rules of the game, he should have been hanging in chains on some seacoast gibbet alongside his friend Croyde.
The boy Curle groaned in his sleep as he turned and scraped his injured ankle on the rock floor. The sprain, Fox had assured them, would be cured in a day or so if Curle was made to walk. Fox had cut up his own spare shirt to make a cold-water bandage and had applied it with a skill not often seen among the supposedly trained ambulance orderlies. Graham had commented on this and Fox had shrugged, explaining that sprained ankles were as common as lice and that no man was permitted to leave the line of march on account of one. He was helped over the next few miles and then he recovered. Provosts followed the rear of the column to ensure that he did.
Remembering Curle’s uncomplaining submission to Fox, Graham glanced at the child’s face as he slept. He did not look fourteen or anything like fourteen, but younger and infinitely more vulnerable than Graham’s youngest brother, Geoffrey, who was nine and was still treated as an infant by the estate workers. How was it possible that a child as frail as Curle could survive an active campaign, march twenty miles a day on the barest minimum of food and most likely a few hours’ sleep in the open? Yet there were many such children in Wellington’s army and Graham could only suppose that the weaklings died in infancy and those who survived grew as tough and indestructible as men like Fox.
He looked at the composed face of Morgan, the camp preacher, and the thought occurred to him that these ranting, Bible-quoting Dissenters had always proved themselves in the field, ever since Cromwell had recruited his solemn-faced troopers who regarded Almighty God as their personal patron. Graham wondered how Morgan, the Methodist, viewed the men with whom his King had now been at war, more or less continuously, for nearly twenty years. Did he bayonet them as unbelievers and atheists or simply because he was paid to do so and was encouraged by his religious beliefs to give value for money?
He heard a boot grate on the stones outside and remembered Lockhart, the sentinel. Of all the men in the file Graham felt closest to Lockhart, because he moved and spoke like the gamekeepers on the estate at home. He was clearly a countryman, just as Watson was a gamin of the cities, but he was not the type of countryman represented by the bovine Strawbridge. His ingrained respect for the officer class was a legacy of training in civilian life, yet he possessed, within this circle of deference, a measure of independence revealed in his dourness and the way he carried himself along with big, swinging strides.
Despairing of sleep, Graham got up and went to the mouth of the cave. Lockhart was there, leaning on his firelock and staring into the blackness across the stream. Graham could see nothing, but he was aware that the gamekeeper knew by instinct exactly what was going on out there under the scrub crowding down to the water’s edge.
”Have you heard anything?” he asked and the man shook his head.
“Nothing to be feared of, sir, just the coneys. I’ve a notion the traps I set will yield us something. A man could live offen this kind of country, depending he had fire and seasoning, that is!”
Graham strained his ears and heard a vague scuffling sound issue from a clump of briers upstream of the beach.
“We’ve got one be the forelegs,” Lockhart said with quiet satisfaction. “I’ll get it soon as I’m relieved, before a vixen happens by and skins it!”
“Go now and I’ll keep watch,” Graham told him, for suddenly the prospect of cooked meat made his mouth water. He took Lockhart’s musket
and bayonet, and the man went silently into the bush, emerging a moment later carrying a small hare warm to the touch.
“Skin and joint it now,” Graham said. “I’ll stand sentry until Watson relieves you.”
But the man shook his head vigorously. “Officers mayn’t stand sentry while the likes of us are on hand, sir,” he said severely, and, dropping the rabbit, he took his musket and went inside the cave to wake Watson.
The little sweep came out rubbing his eyes and looked rather startled when he saw Graham standing there. Graham reassured him, smiling in the darkness.
“Lockhart has just caught a hare, so we shall be sure of breakfast in the morning!” And he was rewarded by the little man’s engaging grin as Lockhart reappeared with a canteen, collected his hare and took it across to the fire. When they were alone again the Cockney coughed and Graham, sensing his embarrassment, said, “How long have you been with the Fifty-first? Were you with them at Busaco?”
Thus directly addressed, the Cockney’s natural amiability mastered his embarrassment and he began to talk to Graham as though for the moment they were almost equals. “I done two years, sir. Come out with the first lot, I did! I had a crack at ’em that first time at Vimmyro, that time we packed ’em back ’ome with the Navy, but I dodged the last lot, told orf fer ’ospittle guard at that convent, I was. Died like flies in there they did, but we was looked after orlright. All the rum we could drink and bushels o’ good straw to lie on. Wisht they left me there, that I do, if you get me meaning, sir!”
Too Few for Drums Page 3
