Death to the French (aka Rifleman Dodd) (11 page)

'Where are the others?' asked Godinot. He knew the answer to the question, but he asked it merely for something to say.

'Dead,' said Fournier. 'They shot Bernhard through the heart. Guimblot ' 'I saw Guimblot,' said Godinot.

They looked at each other. Godinot was ashamed of his panic. 'They're coming! They're coming again!' said Dubois, seizing Godinot's arm. A twig snapped somewhere in the undergrowth, and the noise started the panic in their minds again-perhaps it was Dubois' fault, for he was shaken by his wound and panic is infectious. They fled over the hill again, running madly along the paths, until Dubois fainted with loss of blood. They tied up his wound and dragged him down to the village. There was an unpleasant interview with his captain awaiting Sergeant Godinot when he had to explain the loss of more than half his party. There is no excuse for defeat in the military code, just as success excuses everything. But other parties had sustained loss and defeat, too, it appeared, when they came back in driblets from the mountain; there were several wounded to bear Dubois company in the hospital; there were several dead left among the rocks. And several men had seen the Englishman in green uniform, and several shots had been fired at him, all unavailingly.

In the evening Fournier came to Sergeant Godinot.

'I want some money, sergeant,' he said. 'Give me some.'

Sergeant Godinot could see no use for money here in these uninhabited billets, and he said so.

'Never mind that,' said Fournier. 'I want some money.'

Godinot bowed to his whim and pulled out two or three copper coins-enough to buy a drink had there been drinks to be bought. Fournier thrust them aside. 'I want money,' he said.

What he was really asking for, as Godinot came to realize, was silver-in French the same word. Godinot found him a Spanish pillar dollar, one of four which Godinot kept sewn in his shirt in case of need. Fournier weighed it in his hand. 'Give me another one, sergeant. Please give me another one,' he pleaded. Godinot did so with some reluctance, looking at him oddly. It was only later in the evening, when he saw Fournier sitting by the fire with an iron spoon and a bullet-mould that he realized part of what was in Fournier's mind. He was casting silver bullets to make sure of hitting the green Englishman at the next opportunity. The others round the fire were not given the chance by Fournier of seeing exactly what he was doing. They made jokes about shortage of ammunition and Fournier's diligence in replacing it, but they did not know it was silver he was using, and in consequence paid no special attention to his actions. After all, bullet-moulding was a pleasantly distracting hobby, and men who were really fussy about their marksmanship were often known to mould their own bullets in an endeavour to obtain more perfect spheres than the official issue. Yet Sergeant Godinot felt much more ill at ease when at next morning's parade Private Fournier was found to be missing. Everyone realized that it could not be a case of desertion- no one could desert to the Portuguese, and to have deserted to the English would have called for a journey through the cantonments of half the French army. Sergeant Godinot could only tell his captain what he knew of Fournier's motives, and express the opinion that he was out on the hill somewhere trying to shoot the green Englishman. And the captain could only shrug his shoulders and hope that Fournier would return alive.

He never did. Godinot awaited him anxiously for several days, but he never came back. Godinot never found out what happened to him. He was the fifth of that little group of friends to die- Boyel had been the first, and little Godron the second, and Lebrun and Bernhard had been killed in the ambush a day or two before, and now Fournier was gone and only Dubois was left, with a hole in his arm.

So one day after an announcement by the colonel, Sergeant Godinot came to visit Dubois in the battalion hospital.

'We are going to Santarem to-morrow,' said Godinot.

'Who is?'

'We are. You and I. We are going carpentering or rope- making or boat-building- they want men for all those.'

'Who does?'

'Headquarters. The colonel announced this morning that all men with a knowledge of carpentry or boat-building or rope-making or smith's work were to report to the adjutant. So I reported for you and me. I didn't have to tell him more than the truth. When I said that my father owned one-third of the Chantier Naval, and that you and I had spent half our lives in small boats in Nantes harbour, he put our names down at once. We are to report at Santarem to-morrow.' 'Santarem?' asked Dubois vaguely.

'Santarem is twenty kilometres down the river,' said Godinot. 'Heaven bless us, man, don't you remember marching up through it?'

But since the conscription had taken him from his home a year ago, at the age of seventeen and a half, Dubois had marched through too many places to remember half of them.

'So that arm of yours must be better by to-morrow,' said Godinot. 'Half a bullet ought not to keep you sick longer than that.'

The missile which had been extracted from Dubois' arm had been half a musket ball-apparently the Portuguese sawed their bullets in two in order to double their chances of hitting something.

'It is better,' said Dubois. 'I was to report for light duty the day after to-morrow. Do you think they'll issue rations to us at Santarem?' 'They'll have to if we're doing other work,' said Godinot, and the two of them looked at each other. Food was already short again in the battalion-that day's ration had only consisted of a litre of maize porridge. 'It's headquarters at Santarem,' he continued. 'Those brutes in the Second Corps will have to send in some of the beef they get beyond the road.'

Everyone in the battalion was firmly convinced that the Second Corps in its foraging area beyond the road was revelling in beef every day-an extraordinarily inaccurate estimate. Dubois smacked his lips.

'Beef!' he said. 'With thick gravy!'

He said the words with the same respectful awe he had once employed in speaking about the Emperor Napoleon.

Adjutant Doguereau had weeded out a great many of the applicants for work at Santarem. Quite half the battalion had hurried to report to him after the regimental announcement, full of stories about their knowledge of carpentry or rope-making. Everyone was anxious to escape from the battalion, from the dreariness of life in cramped billets, the shortage of food, the endless, ineffectual skirmishing with the outcasts on the hill.

They had told the most fantastic lies about their experience with boats and their ability to do smith's work. But Adjutant Doguereau had seen through all the lies of these lads fresh from the plough and the cart's tail. There were only thirty men paraded under Sergeant Godinot and sent off to march down the road to Santarem.

Santarem was a long, narrow town of tall, white houses squeezed in between the road and the river. When they marched into it there was no sign of civilian life-every inhabitant had fled weeks ago-but the long, high street was all a-bustle with groups of men working here and there.

The red woollen shoulder-knots of the engineers were much in evidence. They saw white-haired old General Eble, whom everyone knew and liked, striding stiffly along the road followed by his staff. A sergeant of sappers took them in charge and led them to their billet-a big warehouse on the water's edge. 'Here, you blues,' said the sergeant of sappers, 'is where you will live for the next month or two. And where you will work. My God, how you will work!' 'But what is the work, sergeant?' asked Godinot.

'We are going to build a bridge to cross the river. A pontoon bridge. And after that we are going to build another bridge. That makes two.'

Godinot looked out of the open warehouse door, across the quay, to where the river rolled in its green immensity. Two pontoon bridges to cross that width of rushing water-bridges capable of bearing artillery-would be an immense task. 'Yes, you can look,' said the sergeant of sappers. 'The calculation is that we shall need two hundred pontoons. And some pontoons will need four anchors, some only two. And we shall need about ten kilometres of cable for the anchors and the roadway. And the roadway, as you see, will be about a kilometre and a half long for the two bridges. That will have to be made of timber.'

'Have you got the timber and anchors and things?' asked Godinot, a little bewildered.

'No,' said the sergeant. 'But we have a good many houses in the town. We are to pull the houses down and use the joists. And we shall have to save the nails when we pull the houses down because we have no nails. And before we start pulling the houses down we shall have to make the tools to do it with, because we have no tools except a few hammers we have got from the farriers. But there is plenty of iron in the balconies. We have got to make hammers and saws and axes and adzes out of that. And of course we have no hemp for the cables. We have got to make cables. There are three warehouses full of bales of wool. We have got to try if woollen ropes will suit, and if not-well, we have got to try ropes made of linen, or hay, or straw, or we shall have to tie together every odd bit of rope the army can find in its billets. And there is no tar, of course, for the bottoms of the pontoons. I don't thank General Eble has thought of a way round the difficulty of the tar. There is olive oil, however. Is there anyone here who knows how to make a durable paint out of olive oil? I thought not. But they have begun experiments already down the road. If you sniff attentively you may be able to smell them.'

This long speech by the sergeant of sappers was received with a chilly silence by his audience. The French recruit takes none of the delight in extemporization which his counterpart across the Channel displays. This talk of building bridges to cross a half-mile river out of floor joists appeared to their minds to take far too much for granted.

The sergeant of sappers knew it, but he could do nothing in the matter except change the subject.

'Five o'clock,' he said. 'Too late to start work to-day. Report with your party at five o'clock to-morrow morning, sergeant.'

Godinot instantly broached the subject which lay nearest to their hearts.

'What about rations, sergeant?' he asked.

'Rations? Rations? Do you blues mean to say you want rations? I don't know why you have come to Santarem, then. You must hurry to the quartermaster's stores and see what there is. They served out the day's rations an hour ago.' 'What was it, sergeant?' asked Dubois.

'Maize,' said the sergeant of sappers. 'Unground maize. One pound per man. That is what they were issuing an hour ago. There may be some left, but I doubt it.' As it happened, the doubts of the sergeant of sappers were ill-founded. Every man in Sergeant Godinot's party received his pound of maize. It only remained for them to pound it as well as they could, and then boil it into porridge over a fire made of what wood they could steal. It constituted a poor day's food for men engaged in hard physical work.

LIFE among the outcasts in the rocky mountain by the river settled down extraordinarily quickly into routine. The Portuguese peasants had been accustomed all their lives to unremitting hard work, and gladly took up what labour there was to be done-it irked them to be idle. So that it was quite willingly that they did sentry-go along the brow of the hill, and slaved to enlarge the cave by the river so that there might be shelter in it for all. It was the women's task to look after the cattle on the hill and move them from point to point so that they might find herbage here and there-scanty herbage, but enough to keep them just alive. The constant fear of attack by the French kept everyone from quarrelling.

It was all very matter-of-fact and obvious. When shots from the brow of the hill told that an attack was developing there, everyone knew what he had to do. The little flock of sheep was driven down to the river's brink and carried one by one on the backs of men and women over the secret ford to the little beach outside the cave. The women drove the large cattle into hidden gullies and left them there, perforce, while they came down for shelter to the cave as well. The men took their muskets and went out on the hillside to skirmish with the enemy. There was ample time for everything to be done, because on the precipitous goat tracks through the rocks and the undergrowth the French soldiers moved so slowly that an interval hours long occurred between the firing of the first warning shots and the arrival of the French anywhere where they might be dangerous. The very first attack, made only a few days after the arrival of the French, was perhaps the most successful. It was only a short while after daybreak that a musket shot told of the danger, and Dodd had seized his rifle, and, with Bernardino at his side, had hurried to the broad flat rock on the summit which the peasants called 'the table' to see what was developing.

It was the usual sort of attack-four columns of men pushing up the hill by perilous goat tracks through the bush.

Dodd could catch glimpses of each in turn making the slow ascent whenever the conformation of the ground brought them into view. Each column consisted of a company; even at that distance he could see in the clear air that one column wore the bearskins of the grenadiers of the battalion and another the plumes of the voltigeurs-'light bobs' Dodd called them mentally; the remaining two companies of the battalion had been left behind, of course, to act as headquarters guard.