The man who killed him lived less than a moment to enjoy his triumph. Before he could swing back into line the camp follower’s musket roared in Graham’s ear and the lancer threw up his hands and toppled backward from his saddle, his horse swinging hard right and dashing past the group with one boot wedged in a stirrup and long reins trailing. Several of the others fired, but no other hits were scored, for the cloud of horsemen tore down the street in a swirl of dust and in a moment the only evidence of the engagement were the two casualties, Morgan with blood running from his mouth and the lancer flat on his back, his absurd lopsided shako crushed under the back of his head and one stockinged foot resting on a highbooted leg.
“Reload and no man fires without my command!” shouted Fox, and, turning, Graham saw the Welsh girl slotting a ramrod into her musket and looking across at the dead lancer with grim satisfaction. Fox addressed Graham, the pitch of his voice returning to normal as his glance darted up and down the street assessing their position and the strength of the enemy. “God curse me,” he muttered, “that I should be caught like that for not having the gumption to picket each end of the town!”
“Morgan reported the town empty,” Graham reminded him, and the sergeant nodded grimly, adding callously, “Then good shuttance to him for a useless fool!” Then, taking command of the situation and making no attempt to defer to Graham, “There’s no more than a troop of them and we can hold out here unless they dismount and come at us through the back of the church! Strawbridge! Croyde! Go inside and barricade any rear entrance. Use that slab from the tomb if you have to, use pews, boxes, anything, but make sure our rear is safe. Lockhart, cover the right. You others face center, there are no more of them to the south, every man of them joined in the charge because they thought we were easy pickings! Watch out, they’re coming again!” And as Graham’s hand groped for the hilt of his sword, “Don’t draw, use the pistol, man!” as though the ensign had been a particularly obtuse private of the line. Graham had been on the point of asking how many lancers had galloped across the square, but the sergeant swung away, forcing Lickspittle and Watson down on one knee and taking his place behind them with musket leveled. Already the girl was crouching behind Lockhart, her musket barrel steadied on his shoulder.
The lancers came trotting back into the square in files of three, perhaps thirty of them in all, with a boyish officer riding a superb light bay out on the flank. They seemed to Graham a very professional-looking detachment in their smart green uniforms and lopsided shakos, small, lean men with faces strangely alike under regulation moustaches and side whiskers. He was relieved to note, however, that there were no carbine buckets on their saddles but in place of them a pair of pistol holsters emblazoned with the gold letter “N.”
He said anxiously to Fox, “Why don’t they dismount and take up positions in the houses opposite?”
But Fox said they were not accustomed to fighting as infantry and would almost certainly attempt another charge before relying on tactics favored by dragoons. He recognized them as Piré’s lancers, Polish veterans who had harried him over the mountains into Coruña nearly two years ago. He did not take his eyes off them as he spoke but watched them wheel into line, the young officer taking up a slightly advanced position on the left flank.
At that moment Strawbridge and Lickspittle came hurrying out of the church and the latter reported breathlessly that the exit from the side chapel had been barricaded.
“Very well,” said Fox quietly, “then look to your front. Lockhart, cover that youngster out on the flank. If you can bring him down we might get a moment to sort ourselves out.”
He had not finished speaking when the officer lifted his saber, and the next instant a double line of horsemen were thundering across the square, the dust rising in swirling clouds, the afternoon sun catching the points of their leveled lances as the wings raced around on the trotting center. Graham glanced at the file wedged together in the open porch, and although not one among them showed anything but resolution he did not understand how Fox thought it possible that a small body of marksmen could withstand the impact of such an avalanche of excellently maneuvered cavalry. Yet it was so, for Fox had been weaned on defensive tactics, and the men under him, poor enough material in most respects, were nevertheless the best-trained marksmen in Europe. The sergeant shouted the command when the lance points were barely twenty yards away. As the volley crashed out the scene was shrouded by the swirl of dust and powder smoke, and when it cleared the lancers were already cavorting across the square in every direction. Through the drifting smoke Graham saw two riderless horses bolt into the funnel of the street at the south end.
Soon the wind tore gaps in the cloud of smoke and Graham saw that in the open space before them, where Morgan and the first lancer lay, was a horse with its legs threshing and its body contorting, while dotted here and there, on either side of the dying animal, lay five men, three clearly dead and two others on their hands and knees, one of them badly wounded in the chest but the other no more than dazed by the fall, for before the fastest of the infantrymen could reload he scrambled up and crossed the square at a stumbling run, diving into one of the houses opposite. At the same moment the wounded man collapsed on his face and lay still.
Lockhart had got his man. The young officer lay nearest the porch, his saber advanced and still attached to his wrist by the sword knot. Lockhart, glancing at him dispassionately, said he had shot him through the body and seen him fall.
”Five with nine balls! That’s promising if no more,” said Fox cheerfully, and Graham noticed that under the stress of combat the man’s nature had undergone an abrupt change. All his dourness had disappeared and in its place was the ebullience of a schoolboy engaged in some kind of prank at the expense of authority. He went around banging the men on their shoulders, his eyes sparkling with excitement, and Graham saw the boy Curle looking up at him with adoration in his eyes. For himself he felt curiously deflated and cut off from the group, almost a spectator to the encounter, and he looked with contempt at the clumsy pistol he was holding. He could not even remember discharging it when the sergeant had screamed the command.
The woman said as she reloaded, “They won’t come again until dark and then on foot!”
The sergeant nodded, posting Lockhart and Lickspittle as lookouts and motioning the others to withdraw into the church. As they moved off, a random pistol shot struck the molding of the arch over their heads and a thin shower of chips rained down.
“We were lucky they weren’t dragoons,” Fox said. “A dragoon troop commander would never have charged in the first place but shot it out from the houses.”
“They’ll try that now, I imagine,” Graham said, but Fox shook his head and said that the woman was right, they would stay under cover until darkness and then close in on the church in ones and twos, relying on saber and pistol.
The prophecy seemed to dismay Strawbridge, who said, in his thick yokel’s accent, “Worn ’em ’ave ’ad their rations an’ ride off now, Sergeant?”—a thought that had occurred to Graham.
Fox made no reply, and Graham saw his brows draw together as though pondering the wisdom of admitting the full extent of his anxieties, but finally he sucked in his cheeks and touched Graham on the arm, drawing him deeper into the gloom of the big building and leaving the others nearer the entrance. As they moved away the woman detached herself and joined them uninvited and the three of them stood in a group near the raised tomb in which the Highlander had been laid.
“We can get out of here without them knowing,” she said calmly. When Fox stared at her unbelievingly she added, “There is a crypt below with a passage leading up on the hill! My man went down there, searching for rings.”
The sergeant looked at her with interest. “You are sure of that?”
The woman shrugged and Graham got the impression that she despised them all, even Fox. “Over there,” she said, pointing, and because the light was bad Fox took out his tinderbox and, stooping, plucked a han
dful of rushes from the floor, twisting them into a torch.
They moved across the chancel and into a side chapel where there was an iron ring bolt on the floor. The woman raised a small square slab and pointed to a flight of steps.
“There are no more dead down there,” she said glumly. “We went down and searched before the others moved on. Sometimes these fools bury their dead with rings and trinkets. My man had a gold one out of a tomb in a town back yonder but sold it for a shoulder of mutton. The meat lasted us all the way down here.”
She spoke as if she thoroughly approved her late husband’s common sense, and it crossed Graham’s mind that the ragtag and bobtail of the British Army were an odd incongruous rabble in some respects, for here was a woman who had risked her life to bury her husband’s corpse in sacred ground but found no shame at all in confessing to grave robbery. She seemed, in fact, far more interested in the possibility of rings stripped from the fingers of the dead than in the prospect of escape offered by the crypt.
“Wait here,” Fox said, and holding his rushlight high, he ran down the steps and disappeared. He was gone only a few moments, emerging like a demon from the pit. “She’s right,” he told Graham, “the passage leads away uphill and there’s light at the far end of it.” He replaced the small slab and stood thinking a moment, his hand rasping on the stiff stubble of his chin. “You must lead the file out through here the moment it is dark,” he said. “I and one of the others will stay on and hold them off. That way you can get clear and can wait for me back in the hills. That’s no kind of country for cavalry and they won’t follow armed men up there. We can be deep in the woods by the time they discover we’ve gone!”
It occurred to Graham that he should remain behind himself and order the sergeant to lead the file through the exit, but on the heels of this notion came the certainty that Fox would refuse to obey him and would defend his action by reminding Graham that as the only officer among them he was under an obligation to command the main body. He said doubtfully, “How long will you wait?”
Fox replied tartly, “That depends on Johnny Frenchman! Perhaps half an hour, perhaps not so long. I shall fire two shots in quick succession when I’m withdrawing and you can give covering fire from the hill. Maybe they will think there are more of us up there.”
”If the enemy are firing how shall we recognize your signal?” Graham asked, and flushed as the woman exchanged a glance with Fox.
“One must not confuse musket shots with pistol shots, sir,” he said quietly, and Graham’s cheeks burned as they returned to the porch.
It was almost dusk and a faint orange light silhouetted the mountains behind the town buildings. The lancers seemed very quiet, too quiet for comfort, Watson said, displaying a string of oatmeal biscuits taken from the saddlebag of the dead horse.
The sergeant bit into one of the biscuits and spat the flakes on the ground with an exclamation of disgust. “The light cavalry have no commissariat,” he told Graham, “so they carry these wherever they go, poor devils!” Graham detected a genuine sympathy for the French in the voice of a man whose general had last week threatened to hang a quartermaster’s sergeant for failing to deliver his quota of beer and beef at the end of the day’s march. Then, addressing Watson half jokingly, the sergeant said, “If you risked your life for French hardtack you deserve to get a bullet through your thick skull!”
“It warn’t me as did it,” said Watson, still grinning, “it was the young ’un.” He pointed to Curle, who had taken not only the saddlebag but a white sheepskin cloak strapped behind the saddle and one of the lancer’s pistols and shot pouch.
“They banged off half a dozen times, sir,” the boy told Graham, “but they couldn’t hit me on account o’ the carcass!”
Graham ordered an issue of one biscuit apiece and among them they finished the last of Croyde’s brandy, passing the flask from hand to hand. In the first moment of darkness Fox made his dispositions, selecting Lockhart to remain behind with him and retaining four of the muskets, the loading and priming of which he superintended personally. Then, feeling half a deserter, Graham led the way through the church and down into the crypt, having provided himself with a rushlight flare that revealed a narrow passage sloping gently uphill.
The atmosphere was cold and damp as they moved along in single file. The passage was a good deal longer than Graham had imagined, all of two hundred meters he would have guessed, emerging under the wall of the half-ruined building they had noted on the hill when they entered the town. Leaving the file near the exit, he crept into the open, moving carefully over a mass of fallen masonry and looking across the roofs of the houses to the plaza. All seemed very quiet down there and after a moment’s pause he told Watson, as leading file, to bring the others outside, then move around the angle of the half-demolished wall to the bare hillside that sloped steeply upward behind the buildings.
They were almost clear of the stones, with heather under their feet, when the firing broke out, first one or two isolated shots, then a long, ragged volley. Looking over his shoulder, Graham could see a series of tiny flashes, followed by a flowering of small, winking lights as a confused uproar came from below.
The men seemed inclined to hang back, but he prodded them into moving higher up the hill, where the heather was buried under loose shale and Graham knew they would be safe from pursuit by mounted men. At the top of the slope the ground leveled out among a group of boulders and here he ordered a halt, listening intently for the two-shot signal that would signify Fox’s withdrawal.
They waited more than half an hour, growing more and more anxious every minute, and finally Strawbridge plucked his sleeve and whispered, “They’m commin, sir, I can yer ’em! List now!” and held up his hand. But although Graham strained his eyes in the darkness he could see nothing and hear nothing until the swift rustle of the woman’s dress on his right told him the camp follower was standing directly in front of him on the very crest of the hill.
“Someone is climbing the slope now,” she said, and almost at once a dim figure, bent almost double under a cluster of firearms, flung himself over the crest into their midst. It was Lockhart with all four muskets and he was desperately short of breath.
“The sergeant’s done for,” he gasped. “I seed ’em come at ’im when I got through the passage. They was waving torches all round him!” And then, somberly, “He was a rare one for a fight, was Sergeant Fox! We downed two of ’em before he tells me to run and I don’t doubt but he got another with his bayonet come to the last, sir.”
Nobody commented on his news and there was a heavy silence broken only by Lockhart’s heavy breathing. They waited another few minutes, but no more sounds of fighting came from below, only a snatch or two of song and once a gust of laughter. Then, with misery in his heart, Graham gave the order to move along the escarpment toward the woods that he remembered as clothing the southern slopes beyond the town’s end.
CHAPTER THREE
The Camp Follower
They were unable to march far. The ground was too broken and the temptation to take the down slopes too strong for dispirited men stumbling along in the dark. Yet Graham realized their only chance of safety lay in sticking to ground where cavalry could not follow, so presently he called a halt, determined to move no farther until the moon rose.
They gathered in a hollow between two enormous slabs of rock and Lockhart described what had occurred at the church after the main body had moved out.
Fox’s surmise had been accurate. There was no attempt to rush the position; instead the lancers tried to close in from both sides, keeping close to the walls of the buildings left and right of the church and crossing the square on their bellies, using the carcass of the horse and the six dead men as cover. He had winged two on his side of the porch and was confident that Fox had scored a hit on another coming up on his left. “I heard him yelp!” he said in his broad Sussex brogue, “so I knowd Sergeant vound a mark.” Then, after the first attack had petered out, the
sergeant ordered him to leave and take the four muskets with him. Lockhart admitted that he was dumbfounded by the command and went so far as to protest, but Fox had ordered him into the church, promising to follow within minutes.
“I waited t’other end o’ that tunnel ’till I was sure ’ee was vinished,” he said, without the least inclination to dramatize the situation. “I had a notion he wouldn’t come lest he drawed those green varmints after us! He put that stone trap back, d’ye see, and mebbe they’d fool away an hour or so puzzling where us was tu.”
Put like that, there was only one interpretation of the sergeant’s act and Graham decided that Lockhart was probably right, that Fox had in fact deliberately sacrificed himself in order to give the file a better chance of winning clear and in so doing had deprived himself of firearms, knowing that muskets were essential in the file’s chance of rejoining the rearguard. He went on thinking this for the rest of his life, and so did every other man in the file, for to each one of them Sergeant Fox had died a hero, a man who had voluntarily laid down his life for his friends, but although there was an element of truth in this it was by no means the whole truth of the matter. The real reason why Fox had elected to face twenty-five men with nothing but a bayonet was far more complex. Certainly it had to do with his sense of duty, but it derived more from a streak of obstinacy that had made him such an ideal noncommissioned officer in an army commanded by a man whose recipe for victory in war was one-tenth offensive and nine-tenths defensive.
Sergeant Fox, thirty-three years of age when he died with fourteen wounds in his body, had been fighting the French for seventeeen years. He had fought them in Egypt, in Sicily, in the Lowlands, on their own soil at Quiberon and Toulon and in four campaigns up and down the western seaboard of the Peninsula. He recognized no other foreigner as an enemy worthy to engage his professional skill, and although he had probably accounted for more than a score of Frenchmen, some of whom he had killed in cold blood, he felt no grudge against them but rather the respect one purse contender feels for his opponent in the prize ring. Fox’s life had been an exceptionally unrewarding one, but there was no element of fatalism in the decision. His choice was dictated by frustration fermenting within a naturally aggressive nature. For seventeen years he had fought the French and for seventeen years considered himself their superior in the field. Yet each victory had ended in withdrawal and more often than not in the shame of precipitate retreat. Fox did not understand how this came to be, but it was so and the memory irritated him. He had beaten the French at Coruña and then taken refuge in the ships of the British Navy. He had beaten them soundly at Vimeiro and seen them ferried away in the ships of the British Navy. Quite recently he had helped to throw them back in disorder at Busaco, yet here he was on the run again, plodding across the mountains to the sea and toward the inevitable British Navy.
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