About noon the path leveled off and began to descend into a shallow valley where lay a huddle of buildings, something less than a village, for there was no church and no central plaza, just a single street beside the track. Graham stood waiting for the file to come up and studied the valley for movement. There was none save for a thin cluster of wheeling specks a mile or so beyond the last of the houses.
Lockhart came up, shading his eyes, and stared at the specks for a long time before saying, “There’s carrion yonder. Those will be mountain vultures or ravens, maybe even an eagle or two!” and when Graham asked what they were likely to be feeding on, Lockhart said that it might be anything, a goat, a mule or even human flesh. “They baint very particular, sir,” he said carelessly, “not they ole scavengers.” And the file grounded arms and stood in a silent group, looking down on the rock-strewn valley.
“We can go on down,” the woman said suddenly. “There is no one living there now.”
They approached the score or so of miserable dwellings, to find them deserted save for a starving dog that whined and backed away at their approach. They searched several of the dwellings, but there was nothing worth taking and no scrap of food to be found. Graham’s impression was that the inhabitants had been given plenty of time to evacuate and had possessed enough mule teams or manpower to haul away their goods and drive off the livestock.
Then he saw the stone, a large, oddly placed stone in the exact center of the street, and he walked over to look at it. It was a sizeable boulder, pyramidical in shape, and at first glance it looked like an improvised mounting block, but then it struck him that placed where it was it would impede the passage of carts, so he went closer to inspect. Suddenly he cried out, leaping back so violently that Watson, a few paces in his rear, came running and both men stared down at the stone aghast. Protruding from beneath one face of the boulder were a man’s head and, opposite, his naked feet.
The dead man’s eyes were open and the lips were drawn back in a snarl, revealing broken and discolored teeth through thin wisps of dark beard. It was quite obvious that the boulder had been placed upon him when he was alive and that he had been crushed to death with agonizing slowness. His out-flung hands still held some of the gray dust he had clutched and his elbows were pressed into the ground as though he had exerted a tremendous effort to draw himself from under the crushing weight of stone. As the rest of the file came up Graham turned away, white and retching.
“A convoy passed through not more than three days ago,” the woman said impassively. “They were Ney’s men, most likely, for the Second Corps are a hard-bitten lot and this they did as a warning to other Portuguese. I saw it in the north once, near Astorga.”
“How could men calling themselves soldiers do a foul thing like that?” Graham demanded.
But the woman shrugged and replied, “Clearly you do not know what the partisans do to French stragglers they catch. This man died within an hour. Some of the French conscripts watch the sun around the sky before they are dead.”
Graham’s impulse was to get out of the village as speedily as possible, and for a moment he was inclined to order a retreat to the mountains, but he checked himself, realizing that this was dictated more by personal revulsion than by military instinct. From the higher ground they had seen the track curve back to the south and it was common sense to follow it rather than to take to the woods before darkness fell.
Lockhart stated his conclusions quietly and soberly. “It was a small convoy,” he said, “perhaps half a dozen wagons, with a company as escort. They captured such people as were here and took them along as beasts of burden. They would be short of mules mebbe and making haste to rejoin the main body. Yet there was no fighting hereabouts, tho’ perhaps yonder, where they scavenger birds be screaming!”
Graham listened and his ear caught the far-off squawk of the birds they had seen from above the village. He made a great effort to sound casual and said gruffly, “Two of you march ahead, one on each side of the track, and fire a shot if the plateau is deserted.” He sniffed the air and thought he could detect a faint smell of wood smoke, but he said nothing more, bending his will to master the successive waves of nausea produced by the spectacle of the dead peasant. As Lockhart and Strawbridge marched off down the track he forced himself to look at the man again and as he did so he felt a hand touch his sleeve. The woman was beside him, offering her canteen, and he seized it gratefully, gulping down almost a pint of stream water.
“Come,” she said quietly. “Perhaps we shall be seen by the guerillas. If we are so fortunate we will ask for a guide. There are partisans hereabouts, I am sure of it!”
They moved off slowly and Graham noticed that the Cockney Watson seemed as deeply affected by the sinister atmosphere of the deserted village, for he marched with his head bent and for once his tongue was still. In silence they moved along the track, around which Lockhart and Strawbridge had already disappeared.
The chorus of the scavenger birds grew louder as the road began to ascend, and presently the sound of a single shot caused them to quicken their step until the deserted village was two miles in their rear. Then, unexpectedly, the road leveled off and they came to a flattish stretch where the track ran between two stretches of timber, pine for the most part but here and there a solitary oak or cork. Lockhart was there, leaning on his musket, and as they approached he waved his hand, pointing directly ahead. Here, where the woods closed on the track, was evidence of what must have been a sharp skirmish between ambushing guerillas and the French, and it was clear that the guerillas had had the better of the engagement, for dotted about the fringe of the trees were about a dozen corpses in the ratio of more than three French to one irregular. Graham found that he could look at the bodies without emotion. They were almost all young, some of them hardly older than Curle, and the numerals on their shakos showed that Gwyneth’s guess had been accurate and that they belonged to Ney’s Second Corps, which had lost heavily at Busaco and been brought up to strength with drafts of first-campaign conscripts. There were no arms lying about, only an odd cartridge box and a goatskin knapsack that had been turned inside out and then flung aside by the victors. Two wagons had been pushed off the road and burned, and a third, still smoldering, lay on its side in the center of the track, its near-side wheels clear of the ground.
As the file split up to poke among the wreckage, the woman Gwyneth puckered her brows, looking this way and that as she extracted every scrap of information from the debris.
“Well,” said Graham with a crooked smile, “what happened and when? Where are they now, French and guerillas? Why did they fight here and why would a small body of troops patrol such dangerous country?”
“Because they are hungrier than us,” she said confidently. “Perhaps they did not have the luck to shoot a goat!”
“But why so far off the route of the retreat? They must be ten leagues east of the main body, even supposing the French are in force this side of the river.”
“Masséna will have established a forage depot some distance inland,” she said, “and is collecting every bit of food for the siege.”
“What siege?”
”The siege of Lisbon,” she said simply. “We are not running back to the boats this time, the British will stay in the fortified lines all winter.”
Her announcement made him feel foolish. Under the stress of the last few days Graham had forgotten the fortified lines he had watched in preparation when he disembarked a month or so before—vast, concentric rings of forts and strong points girdling the city, whole valleys blocked with stone walls and fallen trees to make abatis and light-gun emplacements on every commanding hillock, the whole converting Lisbon into an impregnable citadel supplied from the sea and garrisoned by the entire British Army. It was strange, he thought, that he should have forgotten such an important fact, for it had surely governed the entire strategy of the British retreat and had a direct bearing on their own situation. It meant that between themselves and the Bri
tish were a hundred thousand Frenchmen squatting in a huge ring around Wellington’s pickets and starving while the redcoats munched pork and bread ferried from the supply vessels in the harbor. It was a very heartening prospect for men safely within the fortifications, but it seemed to Graham to multiply their own difficulties, for how was it possible for a party of stragglers to thread their way through such a concentration of enemies, and even if they were successful how could they make their presence known when they arrived outside the nearest British strong point?
The woman seemed to have the trick of reading even his transitory thoughts, for she said, “We must forget about the Mondego and head for the Tagus. By this time the entire length of the Mondego will be occupied by the French on both banks, but the southern bank of the Tagus will remain in our hands all winter. If it was not so, then Wellington could not hold on to Lisbon for a day. Besides, there will be regular gunboat patrols on the Tagus, sent there to harass the cantonments. The French have no ships, not even a rowboat if I know Beaky!”
It amused him to hear a camp-follower refer to the long-nosed Commander in Chief as “Beaky,” but his admiration for her as a strategist increased with every word she uttered. She had an instinct about war sharper than that of any man he had met, not excluding Sergeant Fox.
“Why do you suppose the Portuguese did not defend their village against so small a group?” he asked.
“Because they knew the guerillas were in ambush up here,” she said, “and so allowed the French to march them off without a show of resistance—all save that poor fool under the stone, that is, and there is one hothead in every community.”
“Then why did the peasants not return to their homes after the French were defeated and scattered by the partisans?”
“Because they are better off in the mountains. They have their livestock and up there are plenty of caves. There was powder in one of these wagons and they can harass any detachment that passes within range!”
“Poor devils,” Graham said feelingly, but the woman mocked his sympathy with one of her expressive shrugs.
“These people have always starved,” she said. “There was never a living to be scratched from this soil.”
“Then why do they fight for it?” Graham asked, recalling how the newspapers at home had trumpeted Napoleon’s early defeats in the Peninsula and announced that here he was fighting a nation rather than a government.
”Perhaps it is their religion,” she said. “The priests are very active in Spain and Portugal. They are always so in a poor country. At home we are not so dependent upon God, Mr. Graham!”
She used his name ironically, but as always her conclusions made good sense, and he was pondering her words when Straw-bridge came hurrying from below, having descended the slope to a point where the canvas hood of yet another wrecked wagon showed among the pines. He was breathless and wildly excited, blurting out, “There be dree more of ’em down over, sir, and they varmints vinished off the wounded halfway down the slope. Nailed up, they be, the poor toads, and the birds just hoverin’ to veed off ’em!”
Graham looked down the long slope toward the fourth wagon and was able to visualize the long, straggling retreat of the French, fired upon from both sides of the track and seeking the lower ground as the irregulars broke their attempts to rally.
“How many did you say?” he asked, and Strawbridge replied that he had counted seven more Frenchmen shot on the slope and three others lower down, one of them still alive.
The news set them off at a run, plunging down through the stunted trees and undergrowth to a broad shelf of rock where the shattered wagon had come to rest against a large oak, the tallest tree in the valley. Two dead mules lay close by, and on the way down they passed the bodies of the men shot down in flight. It was on the far side of the oak, however, that they were brought up short, for here were three more Frenchmen, two privates of the line each hanging upside down from one of the lower boughs and a middle-aged officer nailed by his hands to the main trunk, his feet not more than a few inches from the ground.
They stood around in an awestruck group. As they watched, the officer’s eyelids flickered and the body twitched so that Graham shouted hoarsely, “Take him down, damn you, take him down from there!”
Lockhart at once began to prize at the blunt nail driven through the man’s right hand while Croyde, white-faced, hacked at the rope securing the officer’s ankles.
“Shoot him,” the woman said calmly. “There is no life left in him!” But Graham snarled around on her and tried ineffectually to wedge the hilt of his sword under the head of the nail pinioning the officer’s left hand.
“You let me attend to that, sir,” Lockhart said gently. “I’ll have him down in a trice.”
He managed at last to draw out the nail on which he was working so that the man’s hand dropped suddenly and Watson shied away in alarm. The others stood back, huddled in a group, but Graham moved to take the weight of the man’s body as the rope fell away and Lockhart chipped away at the bark to expose an inch or so of metal and get a purchase on the second nail-head. When the left hand was freed they lifted the body clear and Graham, tearing open the tunic, laid his ear to the Frenchman’s breast, but could come to no conclusion as to whether the man was alive or dead. The wounds in each palm welled a trickle of blood and Graham took the woman’s canteen, holding it to the officer’s lips and watching the water trickle down the dark beard.
Then, unexpectedly, the man gave a long shudder and Gwyneth said, “He’s dead, Mr. Graham, as dead as the others! Leave him now, he feels nothing.”
Graham stood up, but as he did so he was assailed by a wave of giddiness that caused him to stagger and clutch wildly at Curle, who was nearest to him. As through a red mist he saw Lockhart run to catch him and then, as though watching a distant explosion, the whole slope of the mountain seemed to heave up and topple and the scream of the birds overhead rang in his ears as the blinding red screen changed to blackness and he collapsed into Lockhart’s arms.
When he opened his eyes he saw the ripped canopy of one of the wagons immediately above, and the woman was rooting in one of the lockers with her back to him.
“What happened?” he asked presently when she continued rummaging. “Were we attacked from above?”
She turned then and closed the locker lid, holding a small keg that appeared to have been dusted with thick white powder.
“No, Mr. Graham,” she said evenly, “there is no one here but us. I told Lockhart to bivouac. The French will not return unless they come with a large body and cavalry, and if they do that we can see them miles away. I told the men to light their fire in the open. Perhaps the irregulars will see the smoke and come down from the pass.”
“Might they mistake us for French?”
“No,” she said. “They will see the sentry’s scarlet coat and will recognize us as British before they get within range.” She blew some of the powder from the keg and applied her strong white teeth to the cork, pulling it free with a loud plop and sniffing the contents.
“Ah so,” she said with a smile, “men always do the same things in the same way. We found a ditched wagon a day’s march from Coruña and as now the brandy keg was buried in the flour locker. It is curious a man should hide it there, for after spirits a soldier will always look for flour and then he will find both! Here, have some, it is what you need, I think.”
She poured a measure of brandy into a tin cup standing ready on the wheel casing and he sat up, gulping down the spirit so quickly that it made him splutter. It was excellent brandy and seemed to flow into every part of his body.
“They carried me in here?” he asked, noting that the wagon was one of those just off the track and not, as he had at first supposed, the vehicle beside the tall tree. “I fainted in front of the men?” And then, when she made no reply, “It was heat and fatigue!” He tugged at the fastening of his tunic and loosened his stock an inch or so.
“There is no shame in weakness,” she
said slowly, “not weakness of the stomach and bowels. Weakness of the spirit in the face of the enemy, ah, that is different, I think, but you have not turned your back on the French as yet. When you do I will leave you and find my own way back to the lines!” She recorked the brandy and placed the keg in the back of the wagon. “You had better take charge of it,” she said, “whilst I bake some bread. There is enough flour here to last us for two days if we are careful. It is strange that the Portuguese overlooked it when they searched the wagon!”
He watched her scoop a few handfuls of flour into a canteen and lay back, luxuriating in the haze induced by the brandy. He thought, She’s an extraordinary woman, even for a camp follower. Nothing surprises her and nothing frightens her! She has the physical strength of two men and the courage and ingenuity of a battalion! She can neither read nor write and she is not even sure of her age, but she is more fit to lead troops across this wilderness than veterans like Crauford or Picton.
Lulled by the train of speculation sparked off by these thoughts and the brandy, he slept, waking when the light in the narrow clearing was almost gone and Gwyneth climbed into the wagon with a canteen of stew made from the remains of the goat and seasoned with salt she carried in a block in her knapsack. The hot soup increased his sense of peace and well-being, so that he handed her the brandy keg and gave instructions that each man was to have half a cupful. Then he rose stiffly and moved out into the open, noting that dispositions had already been made by Gwyneth or Lockhart, with Croyde standing sentinel at one end of the track and the drummer Curle at the other. The others were crouched over a small pile of stone, squatting on their haunches like a trio of savages watching the stewpot.
Too Few for Drums Page 9
