As he waited in the dark for the lancers to attack, there came into his head a conviction that this idiotic succession of victory and flight must cease, that he was done with turning his back on inferior troops, that this would be one time when he would stand his ground and see the backs of the Frenchmen for a change. It was a very stupid notion and deep in his heart his professionalism told him as much, but in a curious way he was also tired of acting in a professional manner. For once, and with every fiber of his being, he wanted to think of himself as a fighting man answerable to no one but himself. So he told Lockhart to take the four muskets, because he remembered that the helpless young ensign had nothing better than a pistol and that in any case a musket was very little use for hand-to-hand fighting in the dark. He had his long, needle-sharp bayonet, the weapon he had carried about with him for a dozen years, and with that grasped tightly in his right hand he remained in the porch waiting, feeling as he did so a wonderful sense of elation and irresponsibility, as though, by shedding comrades and firearms, he had cut all the ties binding him to the old familiar life of foraging, trudging, skirmishing, chivvying, encouraging, sustaining and finally slinking down to the beach to waiting longboats and derisive Jack Tars.
He had not long to wait. By now it was pitch dark and the wide street seemed deserted. Listening intently, Fox could hear nothing more than a faint scuffling sound, as though rats were scampering about in the single-story houses opposite, and once or twice his ear caught the jingle of metal, perhaps a spur scraping on a loose stone, although he would have imagined that cavalrymen committed to a dismounted action would have had sufficient sense to remove their spurs before setting out. He sidled back into the depth of the porch, pressing himself flat against the stones and extending his bayonet at full length, its point toward the square. He stood like this for what seemed to him a long time and then, very close at hand, he heard labored breathing and sensed a solidity in the darkness. A moment later a man moved in from the right and Fox realized that whoever it was was only half persuaded that the porch had been evacuated by the British, for the sound suggested a certain amount of irresolution. He remained where he was, keeping absolutely still, and on each side of the porch the Frenchmen probed the darkness. Then, as though a series of tiny bonfires had been lit far down the street, a soft, uncertain light penetrated the pressing darkness, traveling across the plaza and searching out angles where the shadows lay. In the fitful glare of torches Fox saw his man, standing with his back toward him less than a yard away and lifting up his head to call out to comrades who were already clattering down the street from each side, every mounted man bearing a flaming pine torch which he tossed into the porch as he galloped past.
It was, thought Fox in the moment of understanding, a lurid and unlikely scene, men riding with flaming torches, other men shouting as they leaped out of the shadows, the light of the torches catching the steel of their sabers and metal buttons. As the first torch fell at his feet and the Frenchmen whipped around to face the interior of the church, the sergeant lunged, driving his bayonet through the lancer’s throat and feeling the sharp tug on the blade as the man fell away. He sensed rather than saw the second man leap in from the right, withdrawing his saber for a short-arm thrust, and he flung himself sideways so that the man overshot by a foot and the bayonet entered his side under his upraised arm, catching for a second on some piece of equipment and then sliding off into the ribs.
The sharp jar of point against bone was the last conscious sensation in the sergeant’s life. He did not feel the blow that crashed down through his shako into his skull or the pistol ball that tore into his breast at point-blank range, only a rush of feet and a chorus of yells against an improbable background of winking lights and blundering horses. Then they were over and past him, rushing into the church with torches flaming and sabers flashing, running here and there among the pews, calling to one another for more light and more speed.
It was not until a group of them gathered in the porch looking down on the dead man that they realized the rest of the file had gone, how and where they could not imagine until more torches were brought and they found the stone trap in the chapel and followed it as far as the old monastery. Then the French troop sergeant decided that the stragglers were beyond pursuit and called off his troopers, telling them to light fires in the open street and set about making horse litters for the wounded. He paused for a moment to look down at the dead lieutenant, whose insistence upon a second charge in daylight had cost the squadron an extra five casualties, and then he walked over to look at Fox, who they said had held the porch alone with nothing but a bayonet and had sent two more troopers into the shades before he went down under the final rush. Swiftly, when no one was looking, the Frenchman raised his saber in salute. It was a compliment that he had not paid his own dead.
Graham had never considered following any career but that of a soldier. As a second son he had resigned himself to seeing estate and fortune pass to his elder brother, and when he was a child lead soldiers and toy swords had been his playthings, military glory his dreams. His idealized conception of war had survived the officers’ training course at Hythe and the experience of the voyage in a cramped transport, but during the long march north from Lisbon his notions of a soldier’s life had undergone some radical changes. Until then he had seen himself as an inspirer of wavering men standing fast against a resolute foe, or advancing in faultless formation across a background of meadows and standing corn. In this stirring setting there had indeed been a few reminders that sometimes soldiers got killed. One or two corpses had lain about at his feet in composed and graceful attitudes, and in more introspective moods he had himself received a clean flesh wound which did not, however, prevent him from continuing in action. The nagging responsibility of the long march over the previous two days had tarnished this idyllic picture somewhat, but it was the encounter with the lancers that had obliterated the picture. The corpse of the Welshman Morgan lying in front of the porch had looked not graceful but obscene, with blood flowing from the mouth and the eyes glazed in terror, whereas the body of the lancer shot down by the camp follower had looked grotesquely comic, with one stockinged leg flung over the high boot and the shako crushed under the head.
Sergeant Fox could have told him that even the least sensitive soldier carries to his grave the sense of horror that accompanies the spectacle of the first men killed in action, but Fox himself was now lying among the debris of battle in the plaza and Graham was alone with his six survivors and the problem finding a way through the mountains to the British lines. As yet it was this problem that obsessed him, but beyond it, tucked away almost out of sight, was the repellent specter of fear, fear of wounds and pain, of disgrace and ignominy, but above all fear of death at the hands of the savage little men who had speared Morgan and flung him in a bundle at Graham’s feet. Until that moment he had been able to think of the French as opponents in some kind of sportive contest, but now he saw them as murderous savages who howled, slew and trampled men under their horses’ feet. The knowledge that somewhere out in this endless tract of granite and forest were a hundred thousand such men, any one of whom would destroy him with the utmost unconcern, was chastening. It brought his picture of war into a sharp and painful focus, so sharp and so painful that he was glad to seek refuge in pondering the broader issue of finding a way over the lower ridges of the Sierra and across the seemingly unfordable river to Lisbon.
He realized that what he needed most desperately was a map and he thought with rage of the folded map he had seen in the possession of Captain Sowden, cursing the precipitancy of the engineer who had deprived him of this treasure by heaping Sowden’s corpse with rubble. He knew that in the absence of maps he must rely upon memory and instinct, but his recollection of the topography of southwestern Portugal was nil, and instincts that he had once thought of as highly developed were in fact as untrained as those of a puppy lost in a fairground. Resentment prowled about inside him, finding some kind of outlet in t
he helplessness of oafs like Strawbridge and guttersnipes like Watson, whose capacity for finding a way out of the mountains was even less than his own. In a kind of savage desperation he remembered the Highlander’s widow, now trudging along behind him and chattering away in her singsong voice to the irrepressible Watson, and he thought, Surely she must have some kind of geographical knowledge inside her head. He made a mental note to consult her at the earliest opportunity.
When the moon rose, the march continued with stumbling uncertainty. They found a track of sorts that seemed to lead across the shoulder of the mountain in a general southwesterly direction, but at every stage it lost itself among masses of giant boulders, and after three hours’ tortuous progress he called a halt at a point where the path led them to a comparatively level stretch marked by a couple of shepherds’ huts built of flat stones and roofed with reed.
The moon was high now and the mountainside was flooded with silver light, revealing on one side the towering slopes of the peak and on the other a steep, rock-strewn valley, filled with blue-black shadows where timber flourished. Far away, no more than an indeterminate gleam, was what might have been the river, but whether it was a tributary or the main stream Graham had no notion whatever.
He said gruffly to Lockhart, “Tell them to bivouac here and no fires! Post a sentry and ask the woman to come with me!”
He moved along the ridge toward the smaller hut, feeling that for the moment at least he must isolate himself from the men until he could form some kind of plan that would conceal from them his utter helplessness. He paused in the entrance to strike his flint, and the tiny flame revealed a circular interior bare of everything except two or three trusses of damp straw. His calves and thighs ached horribly as he sat, unbuckling his sword-belt and laying aside Fox’s heavy pistol and ammunition pouch. He felt so dizzy that for a moment he thought he was going to faint, but he pulled himself together as the woman’s figure moved across the entrance, cutting off the light, and he heard the swift rustle of her ridiculous green dress as she sat down beside him, drawing up her knees and hugging them in what seemed to him a curiously relaxed movement, as though she had entered a civilized home and taken a seat by the fire.
She said flatly, “You are lost?”
His first impulse was to snarl a denial, but almost instantly the realities of the situation reasserted themselves and he said in a tone of resignation, “I have no map and I have been in Portugal less than a month. Do you know what direction we should take to find the left bank of the Mondego and cross it after the rearguard?”
“There will be no crossing down here,” she said thoughtfully. “Higher up there are many bridges and a few fords, but none this far south. The river is wide when it nears the sea. On the way north in the summer we did not cross it until we reached Coimbra. The cavalry did, I believe, but only a few leagues south of the town. We must be a long way south of the place where they crossed, and anyway”—he could sense her shrug—”cavalry will cross where infantry drown!”
Somehow he was able to extract a crumb of comfort from her cheerless statement, for at least it proved that she had some knowledge of the terrain, and for the first time since Lockhart had gasped out the information that Fox was dead he felt that he was not alone. He said quietly, “What do the men believe? Do they think we shall find a way out of here?”
“They still have you to lead them,” she said, with a note of surprise, “and you are an ensign!”
The naïveté of her remark made him want to laugh, yet in a sense it disappointed him, for he would have expected her to have satisfied herself regarding his unfitness for the task of leading men out of this wilderness.
“The sham battles we fought on the Downs in England were not this kind of battle,” he said. “If I had a map or compass I could make a shift at getting these ruffians back to the regiment. All I can do at the moment is guess. Can you help me to guess?”
At that moment the moon sailed out from behind a bank of cloud, its light flooding through the aperture and striking her face slantwise so that she looked for a moment exactly like one of the stone goddesses beside the lily pond in his father’s Italian garden in Kent. He was astonished at the classical regularity of her features, but even more by her expression of serenity. He knew, in that instant, that his life and the lives of those other men would depend upon this woman whose instincts were so much more developed than theirs, and he wanted instant assurance of this. He said urgently, “Forget that I am an officer! This is no time for the courtesies of rank. It is different for the men. To them I must remain the leader and if they have no trust they will break away and try to make their way back individually. The sergeant was very insistent about us keeping together, and he was a good soldier. They must believe that I know the way home and that I have a plan, but you know that I have no plan. If you think you can find the way back it is you who must lead through me, it is you who must make up for the map and the compass, do you understand?”
She got up and without answering walked into the open, holding the folds of her dress with both hands like a woman crossing a muddy street. Wonderingly he followed as she moved across the heather to the edge of the escarpment and stood there, her head raised like that of an alerted animal, scenting the keen, rain-laden breeze from the valley.
“Well?” he said expectantly, “what can you tell me?”
“The west is there,” she said, pointing, “and the big river runs through that valley to the south,” and she pointed once again, swinging her body around in a slow, graceful movement.
“How can you be so sure?”
“I can smell the rain,” she told him, “and the rain comes from the west. Besides, I can see the river in the moonlight. If it were not the big river, then it would not gleam, for the small rivers run through deep ravines with trees growing close to the banks!”
“Suppose we followed the slopes of the mountains until we could go down into the valley, would the French have occupied all the crossings?”
“I told you, there are no crossings below here,” she said patiently, “therefore there will be very few French, only an odd foraging party. Masséna and the main body are already on the far side of the river. He would have rebuilt the bridge your people destroyed and crossed over by now. The French are very good at bridge building. They are a clever people, yes indeed!”
He was impressed by her confidence and the certainty with which she seemed able to draw credible conclusions from her experience.
“How long have you been in this devil’s country?” he asked suddenly.
“Since the beginning,” she said. “Donald was my third husband. Bryn, my first man, was killed after we landed to fight General Junot. Then I took Briggs, his file companion, but Briggs died on the road to Corunna. He was a sickly man and could not forage enough to keep himself alive when the snow came. I waited with him two days until the dragoons were at our heels. Then I went on to the boats and took Donald after we were put ashore and refitted at Portsmouth.”
He noticed she used the verb “took” in the sense that a woman at home might say “married” and that she did so without self-consciousness. It was clear that she regarded these liaisons as binding but terminated by the death of a partner, recalled only as one of the file might remember a piece of jewelry or a pair of boots looted during a march. She gave no sign of mourning the man killed in 1808, or the wretch who starved to death during the terrible retreat to Corunna, or even the Highlander Donald, laid in an alien tomb a few hours ago. From the way she spoke of these associations it was obvious that she regarded them as a by-product of war and no more momentous than her present situation.
“How old are you?” he was moved to ask, and for the first time since he had encountered her in the church he saw an element of surprise register on her placid face.
“How old? Perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, I am not sure. It is something I have never thought about. How old are you, Mr. Graham?”
“Nineteen. I celebrated my
nineteenth birthday on the transport.”
“Ah so,” she said, in her Continental manner, “you are old for an ensign. All the ensigns in the Forty-third are younger than that. They do not shave, although they pretend it is necessary when they are in garrison and have soap and time to spare!”
He would have liked to remain there a long time talking to her in this way, for her voice and placidity relaxed him, coaxing the ache from his calves and the confusion from his brain. She was like a sister to whom a small boy could run for solace and reassurance, and he wanted to confide in her unreservedly, not merely as a guide but as a comrade. He said, with an effort, “It is as I said, you will have to help me in every way. Suppose we find the riverbank unpatrolled and are able to dodge the forage parties, how can we get across?”
Too Few for Drums Page 6
