Death to the French (aka Rifleman Dodd) (21 page)

That disposed of one sentry. Dodd stooped and with fierce effort tore the bayonet from the corpse, and thrust it back, dripping as it was, into the scabbard. Then he picked up the Frenchman's heavy musket with its fixed bayonet, and started back with sloped arms down the sentry's beat.

He stopped in the darkness behind the shed; the other sentry, as he approached, could see only a dark, erect figure and the glimmer of a bayonet as Dodd stood at ease. Nothing could have been farther from his thoughts than that it was an Englishman who stood there and not his acquaintance Dubois, whom he had last seen only two minutes ago.

He said something as he came up. Presumably his last thought must have been that Dubois had suddenly gone mad, as the dark figure stepped forward and brought the musket butt crashing down on his head.

There was less need for silence to kill only a single sentry, and the butt is more certain than the bayonet to ensure instant inability to give warning. Such was the strength with which Dodd struck that the musket stock broke at the small of the butt; the heavy base, attached now by only a few fibres, waggled heavily as Dodd brought the weapon back ready if another blow were needed. None was. The man had fallen instantly. Dodd's expression hardened in the darkness as he stooped over him. Soldiers do not kill wounded men, but in this case, with the fate of a campaign dependent on a man's silence, Dodd would not have hesitated at the cutting of a throat. But it was not necessary; the man's brains were running out of his shattered skull like porridge.

Dodd was free now to go on with his plan. The visiting rounds had been made; sentries would not be changed for nearly two hours. An hour ought to be sufficient for the completion of his work. He listened intently for an instant to see if the dull sounds had caught the attention of the soldiers up the bank. He heard nothing, and he burst into rapid action. He hurried round to the river front of the works. In the cable sheds he found masses of loosely twisted, hairy rope, and with his sword bayonet he cut an armful of two-feet lengths of this. Then he groped his way to where he had seen put down the cauldrons of liquid for daubing the bottoms of the pontoons. There was still plenty in them. By touch Dodd ascertained that their contents was a semi- liquid grease that ought to burn furiously. He soaked his lengths of rope in the stuff, and put them among the stacked pontoons.

Cutting himself a fresh supply he soaked these too. There was still place for some more among the pontoons. The others he took along to the piled road-bed timber. He pushed his oily wicks among the planks. For a second he debated the risks of delay against the advantages of more inflammables, and decided that delay was justifiable, so he cut yet more lengths of rope, soaked them, and thrust them among the timber. Then he poured what was left in one cauldron over a pile of pontoons, and what was left in the other over some of the mass of rope in the shed. Then he went up the bank to where he had seen the fires. Digging with his foot among the ashes disclosed a mass of red embers. They would save him a good deal of trouble with all the paraphernalia of flint and steel and tinder and slow-match.

He tore off his battered old shako, shovelled embers into it with his foot, and ran, clumsily yet fast, down to the sheds. He poured the embers out on to the oil-soaked cables. That ought to make a fine blaze. The cables were the easiest stuff to burn, and if they were destroyed Dodd guessed that they would be difficult to replace, so that their destruction might be equivalent to the destruction of the whole bridge. The oil spluttered and sizzled; there rose to his nostrils a smell like the frying he had often noticed in Portuguese kitchens. Then a wisp of cable took fire; the little flame sprang up, sank, sprang up again, and spread to the whole thickness of the cable, which burnt like a torch. Dodd watched it for a moment, watched the flame spread to the other ropes and then, catching up a burning length, he raced along the works with it. He stopped wherever he remembered having inserted a piece of oily rope, which he lit. They burnt nobly. Soon all along the heaped masses of timber, and among the stacked pontoons there were little roaring flames. From the time of the first bringing of the fire until now not more than five minutes had elapsed. It was at this moment that there came a shout and a bustle from the bank where the French were, and Dodd knew that he had no more time for destruction. He flung his torch in among the pontoons, and ran away in the darkness upstream. If he had had his rifle with him he might have stayed longer, firing a shot or two to keep the French back so that the flames might gain a better hold, but his rifle was up in his hiding-place. And a glance at the piled cables just before he fled showed him that it was not necessary: the sheds were a roaring furnace already. The sight of that mass of flames cheered Dodd immensely as he ran for his life up the river bank. The men who were now rushing down at top speed to the works would find that blaze hard to extinguish. From the French huts came the long roll of a drum.

IT WAs after the bridge builders had been established for two days on the banks of the Zezere that the faint sound of a distant bombardment came to their ears. It was a very distant droning noise, coming from far away to the south, and everyone could guess from the quality of the sound that it implied a siege. Exactly which town was being besieged, and who was besieging and who besieged, no one in the ranks could really guess. Not even the men of the Second and Sixth Corps in their marchings to and fro across Spain had ever been led south of the Tagus, and a knowledge of Spanish geography beyond the river was not very usual among them. It was Colonel Gille, in command of the bridging party under the general command of General Eble, who supplied an explanation. 'That sounds like your uncle, sergeant,' he said to Sergeant Godinot, in an interval of inspecting the work on the pontoons.

'Oh, yes, colonel?' said Godinot.

'That must be the Army of Andalusia besieging Badajoz,' said Colonel Gille. 'They are on the move at last. But-' Colonel Gille bit his sentence off sharply, and swallowed the end. Not even the loose discipline of the French army, which permitted of quite free conversation between a colonel and a sergeant, quite allowed the sergeant to ask questions of the colonel. Godinot could not press Colonel Gille to continue his sentence, but that 'but' had told him a great deal. He could only wait for the colonel to resume his conversation. 'Your uncle is a fine officer,' went on Colonel Gille. 'I knew him well when I was on the Prince of Eckmuhl's staff in Poland. I would give something to see his brigade come marching up to the other side of the river. If only the Duke of Dalmatia ' Colonel Gille left another sentence unfinished.

'Oh, well, we shall see, we shall see,' he concluded lamely before going off to another part of the works. 'This is good work you have been doing here, sergeant.'

Sergeant Godinot, even if he could not divine the details of Colonel Gille's thoughts, could at least guess that the sound of the bombardment of Badajoz was not as comforting to the staff as might be supposed. It proved that the Army of Soult (the Duke of Dalmatia, as Colonel Gille punctiliously called him) was on the move, but it proved also that the move would be an ineffective one. Instead of marching with all his army to their aid, Soult had merely thrust a detachment of his army into the nest of fortresses guarding Southern Portugal. He was besieging Badajoz now. If he was successful in his attack there, he would next have to take Elvas, which was a larger and a better designed and a better garrisoned fortress. And after that there were half a dozen smaller fortresses-Albuquerque, Olivenza, and so on. It would be months before he could appear on the Tagus by this route. Months? And the French army there was dying of sheer starvation, at the rate of hundreds a day. No wonder that the sound of the distant bombardment was the knell of the hopes of the French staff. Sergeant Godinot could not guess these details, of course, but he could guess that there was despair at headquarters, and so could his fellow-soldiers; if confirmation was needed it was supplied by the fact that the miserable daily rations were being reduced even below their previous unhealthy standard. On their first arrival on the Zezere the men used to take their muskets and go out into the neighbouring country and shoot little birds, using bags of tiny stones in place of small shot, but the practice was discontinued almost at once by general order. The army, with no reserves of ammunition, could not waste powder on sparrows, nor even on thrushes. Ragged, barefooted, hungry and diseased, the French army in Portugal was in imminent danger of going to pieces. Still, despite the rumours of retreat which sped through the ranks, the bridge building still went on. The carpenters still laboured over their unpromising materials, and the rope-makers still twisted cables, and the boat-builders still built boats. The work was very nearly complete now, and everyone knew that even when it was finished they would still have to stand by to lay the bridge when the time came.

The men dragged on their uncomfortable existence in the huts above the river, the officers their hardly less uncomfortable existence in houses in the village, save for the officer of the day, for whose use the men built a wooden shed at the end of their row of huts, next door to that devoted to the guard. Naturally, guard duty was not heavy. In daytime two sentries out on the hill, and at night two additional ones to guard the bridging material from the pilferings to be expected of men chronically short of fuel, were all that were necessary. Fifteen men and a sergeant and a drummer supplied these guards-it was only once in three weeks that a man's turn came round.

The day when Sergeant Godinot was sergeant of the guard had begun no differently from any other. True, a messenger had come from Santarem to summon General Eble to headquarters-the orderly had told them his message, and they had seen the general ride off but that might not mean anything of importance. The duties of the sergeant of the guard at this point were not in the least onerous. There were no drunkards to be dealt with, for not one of the men had drunk anything except water for six weeks. Equipment inspections brought no defaulters, for every man's equipment had been reduced by wear and tear to a nullity.

Desertion was impossible on this wing of the army; no man would willingly leave the frying pan of life in the ranks for the fire of capture by the irregulars- the English were far away. All that Sergeant Godinot had to do was to post his sentries and relieve them at the proper time. The rest of the time he could sit and doze in the doorway of the guard hut while his men snored away their four hours' off duty inside.

Night came with a gusty wind and showers of rain and an intermittent moon.

Everything was very quiet in the camp.

From where Godinot was sitting he could just hear the gurgle and splash of the turbulent Zezere. He had ample time to sit and meditate on his hunger, and to try to work out what would be the future course of the campaign, and to look back on the golden days when he had been a schoolboy in Nantes, sailing boats on Sundays, and with always enough to eat and with never a tear in his clothes lasting for more than a day. His shako was on his knees, and he smoothed his scalp thoughtfully- before he had been promoted and transferred to the new fourth battalion he had served in the grenadier company, and the bearskin of the grenadiers tended to make a man's hair thin on top. The last change of sentries had left young Dubois on guard down by the river. Godinot hoped that Dubois would come safely through the campaign. All the others- Boyel and little Godron and Fournier and the rest- were dead. And he knew all their mothers in Nantes- women who would weep and would say he was to blame. The poor women did not know yet that their sons were dead, although it was as much as three months since Boyel was killed. They never would know as long as the army remained isolated here in Portugal. But that could not last much longer. Soon they must move- and Godinot found his thoughts beginning the circle again. He shook them off and rose to his feet, glancing at the guard-house watch- the one watch which remained in working order in the whole detachment- hanging on the wall. There was still an hour before sentries had to be changed again. He stepped out into the night, stopped, rubbed his eyes, and looked again.

Down on the river's brink there was a dull red glow like a fire. On each side of it were a row of twinkling points of light, like candles. As he watched, one of these points of light expanded and brightened and reddened. There was another point of light moving about down there. Someone was setting fire to the bridge- the bridge was on fire already!

'Guard, turn out!' roared Godinot. 'Turn out, you bastards. Quick!'

He kicked the men awake as they turned over sleepily.

He grabbed the drummer by the collar and stood him, still half-asleep, on his feet.

'Beat to arms! Do you hear me? Beat to arms! Come on, you others.' He dashed down the slope with the sleepy guard trailing behind. As he ran, he saw tall flames shoot up from the cable sheds. As a gust of wind blew, the sound of the burning rose to a roar. Then he tripped and fell with a crash over a dead body. He paid it no attention, but plunged on to try to save the precious bridge.

The cables were the most precious, and were burning the strongest. He plunged into the mass of flames, and tried to drag the stuff out, but the heat drove him back. He turned to the men who came up behind him.

'Buckets! Water!' he said. 'Use your hats-anything.'