Death to the French (aka Rifleman Dodd) (2 page)

'Don't believe old Godinot's got an uncle,' said someone. 'He got us to join his regiment under false pretences.'

'And where would you be if I hadn't seen you at the depot and taken you under my wing?' demanded Godinot. 'Shivering in Poland or somewhere I expect, with no Daddy Godinot to wipe your nose for you. You blues don't know when you are well off.'

A 'blue' in the French army is a recruit-because until he grew used to it, the recruit went blue in the face under the constriction of the uniform stock.

'Why,' went on Godinot, 'perhaps-'

But Godinot's speech was interrupted by a loud challenge from the patrolling sentry, followed immediately by a shot.

All of the detachment scrambled to their feet and grasped their muskets, following Godinot in his rush to where the sentry, his musket smoking in his hand, stood peering through the olives.

'A green Englishman,' said the sentry, pointing. 'That way.'

'After him!' said Godinot. Since the day of Busaco every one in the Eighth Corps knew what a green Englishman was.

The detachment began to struggle through the olive groves, crashing among the branches on the trail of the hurrying rifleman. Five minutes of hot pursuit brought them to the edge of the grove, where a high, bare hill mounted up in front of them. The dark-clad Englishman was toiling up the slope a hundred yards ahead. Godinot dropped on one knee, trying to calm his laboured breathing, and fired hastily, without result. The others as they came up pitched their muskets to their shoulders and pulled the trigger.

'Enough of that!' snapped Godinot. 'Reload. Come on, you others.' He pressed on up the slope with half a dozen men beside him. But the Englishman had the longer legs or the stouter heart. At every stride he increased his distance from them.

'Oh, let him go!' said Godinot at length. 'The dragoons on the left will catch him.'

The men pulled up, panting.

'Come on back,' said Godinot. 'We'll never reach the battalion to-night at this rate.'

They began to plod down the hill again, leaving the Englishman to continue his climb up it. The incident meant little enough to them; every day for a month they had been accustomed to exchanging shots with English outposts. Yet even as they began to dismiss the incident from their memory it was sharply recalled to them. A shot rang out behind them, and Boyel pitched forward on his face, and rolled a little way down the hill, blood pouring from his throat. Everyone shouted with rage. Little Godron dropped on his knees beside Boyel; the others, with one accord, turned to climb the hill once more in pursuit. A puff of smoke hung in the still air to show from whence the Englishman had taken aim. Yet as they set themselves to the climb the Englishman leaped once more to his feet and ran labouring up the hill, and five minutes more of pursuit told them how useless it was. They turned back again, to where Godron, with tears running down his cheeks, was kneeling with Boyel in his arms. An ounce of lead had torn a great hole in his neck and his tunic was already soaked with blood. 'Give my regards to your uncle, Godinot, when you see him,' said Boyel weakly.

'I shall not have the pleasure.' And blood ran from Boyel's mouth and he died.

Godron was sobbing bitterly as Godinot knelt and made certain Boyel was dead.

'He has died for the Emperor,' said Godinot, rising.

'The first of us,' said Dubois bitterly. 'Six of us joined you, sergeant. Now we are five. To-morrow -' 'To-morrow it may be four,' agreed Godinot harshly. He was as moved as were the others, but he was in a position of authority, and had not so much time for sentiment. 'But we must join the battalion to-night, all the same.' He was running his fingers deftly through the dead man's pockets and equipment. 'Money,' he said. 'Observe, eleven francs. You are witnesses. That is for the regimental funds. Cartridges. Here, divide these among you. Socks. Anybody want them? Well, they'll fit me. Nothing else of importance.'

He took the dead man's musket and walked across to a rock, where he smashed the stock and the lock with half a dozen blows.

'Take his bread, some of you,' he said. But the others hung back. 'Take his bread, I say. Dubois, Godron, you others. One biscuit each. Never waste bread on a campaign. Now come along back to the road.'

'But aren't we going to bury him, sergeant?' protested Dubois. Godinot looked up at the sun to judge the time of day. 'There is no time to spare,' he said. 'We must join the battalion to-night. Come along, all of you.' The obeyed reluctantly, trooping down the hill and through the olive groves to the road. They formed up and resumed their march, but of the six friends who had joined under Godinot's charge at the depot nine months before there were now only five, five men with heavy hearts and hanging heads. The sixth lay out on the bare hillside, where he would continue to lie all through the approaching winter, a noisome, festering mass until the carrion crows picked his bones clean to bleach in the sun and the rain.

RIFLEMAN MATTHEW DODD went on up the hill. As soon as he was safe from immediate pursuit he sat down in the cover of a whin-bush to reload his rifle-reloading took so long that it was always advisable to do it in the first available moment of leisure, lest one should encounter danger calling for instant use of the rifle. He took a cartridge from his pouch and bit the bullet-a half-inch sphere of lead-out of the paper container. He poured the powder into the barrel, all save a pinch which went into the priming pan, whose cover he carefully replaced. He folded the empty cartridge into a wad, which he pushed down the barrel on top of the charge with the ramrod which he took from its socket along the barrel. Then he spat the bullet into the muzzle; it only fell down an inch or so, for it happened to be one of the more tightly-fitting bullets-extreme precision of manufacture was not demanded or considered necessary by those in authority. Since he could not coax the bullet down the rifling, he reached behind him to where a little mallet hung from his belt by a string through a hole in the handle. The fact that Dodd carried one of these tools proved that he was one of the careful ones of his regiment-it was not a service issue. Standing the rifle up on its butt he rested the ramrod on the bullet and tapped sharply with the mallet; musket and ramrod were so long that only a tall man could do this easily. The blows of the mallet drove the bullet down the rifling until at last it rested safely on top of the wadding; then Dodd hung the mallet on his belt again and replaced the ramrod in its groove. After that he had only to make sure that the flint was in good condition, and then his rifle was ready to fire again. Dodd went through all these operations mechanically. Months and months of drill had been devoted to making him mechanically perfect in loading, so that he would not in a moment of excitement put the bullet in before the powder, or omit to prime, or fire the ramrod out along with the bullet, or make any other of the fifty mistakes to which recruits were prone.

It was only then that he had time to consider his position and think what he had to do. He settled himself down in the shelter of the whin-bush, easing his pack on his shoulders; three years' campaigning had taught him the importance of making the most of every moment of rest. Somewhere to the south of him was his regiment, which meant to him his home, his family, his honour and his future. To rejoin his regiment was the summit of his desires. But the regiment- so his extensive experience of rearguard actions told him -had been marching hard in retreat for tthe last two hours, while he had, perforce, been going in the opposite direction. The regiment was ten miles away by now, and between him and it was not merely the enemy's advance guard but probably a whole mass of other troops; the detachment which chased him would not have been moving isolated in the way he had found it if it had not been well behind the front line. Merely to follow his regiment would simply carry him into the arms of the enemy. Military instinct called upon him to find a way round- that was the earliest tactical lesson the regiment had taught him, five years ago on the high Downs at Shorncliffe, with Sir John Moore on his white horse riding up and down to see that every recruit learned his part. South-east from him ran the Tagus, and along the Tagus bank he knew he would find a road which would take him to Lisbon and the Lines- he had tramped that road a dozen times already. To reach it he would have to get across the pursuing French army and pass forward round its flank. Dodd had never seen a map of Portugal in his life, and could not have read it if he had: he had learned his geography by experience. With his face upturned to the sky he visualized from memory what he knew of a thousand square miles of country. He knew the two main roads by which the French were advancing. There was a chance-a faint chance-that he could reach the third road and find it unguarded. It would be one, two, three, four days' march with luck to the Tagus, and two-three, perhaps-to the Lines at Alhandra from the point where he would meet the river.

In his haversack there were two pounds of what the army termed 'bread'-unleavened biscuits only a shade better in quality than the French-and a beef-bone with some stringy meat still adherent. Dodd was a careful soldier; he had saved that meat from his last night's ration, knowing well that when on rear-guard duty it was no unusual thing for camp to be pitched long after midnight, much too late for the wretched ration bullocks to be slaughtered and cut up and cooked. In the twin pouches on his belt there were fifty- five cartridges and a packet of flints-he felt to make sure. His rifle was loaded and his sword bayonet hung on his hip. He was as well equipped as a private soldier could hope to be. He wasted no time repining over the shortcomings of his outfit; he heaved himself to his feet, looked cautiously round him for signs of the enemy and, finding none, began to plod stubbornly south-eastwards through the heather. The hillside was bare and open, and there was no possible chance of concealing his movements for a mile or so.

But the rifle-green colour of his uniform was some slight protection, all the same; a scarlet infantryman-and nine- tenths of Wellington's army was scarlet infantry-would have been absurdly conspicuous. And his buttons and badges were black, with nothing to catch the sun and reveal his presence. The brave old Duke of York at the Horse Guards might not be very receptive of new ideas, but once he could be induced to accept an innovation he could be relied upon to see that it was carried out to its logical end. In the same way the long bayonet which tapped on Dodd's hip was really a short sword, because skirmishers and sharp-shooters might find their marksmanship impaired if they had to aim with a fixed bayonet, although at any moment they might be called upon to fight hand to hand. So to this day the Rifle Brigade flaunts its black buttons and badges, and 'fixes swords' when its fellow regiments 'fix bayonets,' and carries its rifles at the 'trail' instead of at the 'slope.'

The dark green dot moved slowly along the hillside. At its end the hill sank in an abrupt shoulder, dropping down into a tortuous valley winding its way through a tangle of other hills, in which Dodd guessed he might find a rushing stream, and probably some sort of track, or possibly a real road- but that was not very likely, for roads were few in Portugal. He approached the sky-line cautiously, and when he reached it he sank down upon his face in the heather, hitching himself forward with his elbows to see what lay before him.

There was the little stream he had expected, much contracted now at the end of summer and making its way tortuously among masses of boulders. But beside the stream there was a little house, walls and roof of grey stone, standing in the midst of a tiny field which generations of patient work had cleared of rocks and made fit for cultivation.

Houses spelt danger to an isolated straggler. Dodd lay long and patiently staring down at it. He could see no sign of life. There was no smoke, no movement. That was not specially surprising, because he knew that the country had been swept clean of inhabitants at Wellington's order. Food was to be all destroyed, women and old men and children were to be swept back into the Lines-Dodd had seen much of the pitiful processions during the retreat-while everyone who could handle pike or musket was to go up into the hills and feed as best he might while hoping for the chance of catching an isolated Frenchman. So that the house should be empty of its owners was only to be expected; what was to be feared was that there might be Frenchmen there. Down in the courtyard, close by the grey stone wall which divided it from the field, was some whitish bundle-even Dodd's keen countryman's sight could not make out what it was. Probably an abandoned household bundle. At last Dodd decided that although he could see no sign of a Frenchman he had better not approach the house. He scanned the valley of the stream, noting the twisting path which followed it. By keeping to the hillside, above the skyline, he could work his way safely to the next valley. There he could see a coppice, and he could go through that down to the little stream and reach the path unobtrusively. He hitched himself back above the ridge, peered round, and walked over the hill down towards the coppice.

Among the trees he moved with caution. He had the slope of the ground to indicate his direction to him, but that was a treacherous guide, as he well knew. And there might be enemies within ten yards of him. He peered round each beech trunk in turn as he came to it, looking for Frenchmen and planning his next advance. It was ironical that with all this elaborate caution he should have been taken by surprise. Something hit him on the shoulder. It was only a beech nut, but it made him leap as though it had been a bullet. Someone was peering at him through the yellowing leaves high up in a tree-he had forgotten to look upwards.