Death to the French (aka Rifleman Dodd) (22 page)

Up the bank the roll of the drum roused the sleeping soldiers. Soon they were all pouring down to the river. Men ran with buckets, with cooking cauldrons. A bucket chain- a double bucket chain- was formed from the river's brink to the rope sheds. But it was not with mere bucketfuls of water that that blaze could be extinguished. Men dragged out masses of burning rope and tried to beat out the flames with bits of wood. But there was so much to do. There were flames roaring up the sides of stacks of pontoons. The timber for the road-bed- dry brittle stuff was burning in its huge piles, each the size of a cottage. Gusts of wind were carrying sparks everywhere. Men with crowbars tried to tear the great heaps to pieces and roll the burning stuff down the bank, but that was stopped after two great masses of timber had been swept away to be lost in the wide waters of the Tagus. Timber adrift in the Tagus would be as much lost to the French as if it had been burned.

The officers had come running up from their billets in Punhete in all stages of undress and helped to direct the efforts of the men, with Colonel Gille in chief command.

The heat and smoke were terrible- at one time and another there were as many as a score of men stretched out on the bank recovering from their effects. No one in the mad struggle noticed the coming of the dawn. No one paid any attention to the despatch rider, who turned up in the middle of the confusion calling for Colonel Gille. The colonel merely snatched the note and crammed it into his pocket before plunging into the battle with the flames again.

They got the fire under at last, but it was a hopeless sight on which their eyes rested in the bleak light of the early morning. Quite three-quarters of the cable were burned, and half the pontoons; the other half were burned in patches where flames had licked up the sides of the stacks of pontoons. Pontoons with one side burned off lay about here and there above the water's edge. A little tangle of rope represented all that remained of the heaps of neat coils which had lain in the sheds. A good deal of the road-bed timber remained, but that was the most easily replaced of all.

Taking it all in all, the bridge was utterly ruined. To rebuild it would call for much time-and all available materials had already been used. The men and the officers, utterly worn out, lay about exhausted on the bank, looking gloomily at the charred remains. No one said anything, no one did anything. Gloom and depression had settled upon them all. No one even stirred when white-haired old General Eble came trotting up the slope on his emaciated horse. They looked dully at him as he cast his eyes hither and thither over the scene of destruction. Sergeant Godinot was too tired and sick at heart even to feel the apprehension which as sergeant of the guard he ought to have felt. With Dubois dead he had no heart for anything. Colonel Gille and the other officers rose to their feet as General Eble rode up, and stood shakily at attention. Everyone heard what the general said.

'There is still a lot of timber, boats, rope, all over the place. Why have you left them like this?'

Colonel Gille's teeth showed white in his smoke-blackened face as his lips writhed at this bitter irony.

'Yes, my general,' was all he was able to say.

'Do you call this complete destruction, Colonel Gille? It is as well I came here to see that my orders were obeyed.'

Colonel Gille could only stand to attention and try to take this chastisement unmoved.

'Come on, speak up, man. The men ought to have been on the move an hour ago. Why did you not finish your work?'

By this time doubt had begun to display itself in the expressions of the sapper officers. In this nightmare campaign anything might happen. The general might be mad, or they themselves might be mad.

'Oh, for God's sake, colonel,' snapped General Eble, showing anger at last. 'Pull yourself together, man, and your men too. Why have you not obeyed my orders?'

'Orders?' repeated Colonel Gille stupidly.

'I sent you orders three hours back that the bridge was to be burnt down to the last stick and the bridging detachment returned to their units. The army retreats to-morrow.'

A lightning change came over the officers' faces. Even Colonel Gille smiled. With a flash of recollection he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the despatch which had been handed him in the middle of the rush to extinguish the flames.

'Get these pontoons stacked together again,' he ordered briefly. 'Bring that rope and pile the whole lot together and burn it. And set fire to the roadway timber again. You see, it was like this, my general-' But there is no need to follow Colonel Gille into the ramifications of his explanation to General Eble on how the bridge came to be set on fire prematurely and extinguished again. When an army is about to set out on a dangerous retreat in face of an active enemy there is little time for explanation.

Once more the crackle and roar of the flames made themselves heard above the gurgle of the river, and the wind blew a long streamer of smoke across the countryside. Soon all that was left of the bridge on which hundreds of men had laboured for three months was a long row of piles of white ashes, still smoking a little.

Down on the high road there was already a long string of artillery marching down towards the concentration point at Santarem. They were the guns which had been brought up to be set in batteries at the confluence of the rivers to cover that hypothetical crossing.

After the guns went the two battalions of infantry who had been waiting here for the same purpose. It was easy to see that they were intended to be battalions, for each was divided into six companies, and of each six one company wore the bearskins of grenadiers and one company the green plumes of the voltigeurs. Had it not been for that it might have been guessed that the column represented a single battalion, so short was it. That was the effect of a winter without food. General Eble pointed down to the moving column and spoke to Colonel Gille. 'Hurry up and give these men their orders, colonel,' he said. 'They ought to have left before those. Now half of them will never reach their regiments.' It took some time to issue feuilles de route to every non- commissioned officer in charge of a detachment. Nearly every regiment in the French army was represented in the bridge-building column. However, there were no rations to be issued as well; the army staff could not be expected to have sent up from their almost non-existent store rations for men who were to march in towards them that very day.

It was long past noon now, and none of the men had eaten since the day before, and now they were faced with marches of twenty miles or more. No wonder there was gloom upon the faces of the men as they marched off.

Sergeant Godinot's party was the worst of all. Its twenty men (there had been thirty at one time; the other ten lay in the graves where sickness had overtaken them) were at once weak in body and mutinous in soul. The unfortunate sum of their military experiences- they were only one-year conscripts, after all-had left them without any more desire to serve their country at all. Already Godinot had caught bits of conversation among them which proved that their one ambition was to desert to the English- they would have deserted to the Portuguese if there was the least chance of doing so and surviving. And the very last thing they wanted to do was to march back with the French army through the awful mountains they already knew too well, with the English pressing on their rear and the hated irregulars all round them. Yet as they were all of them still only boys who had not yet attained their full growth the months of underfeeding and exposure had left them very weak, and such was their present hunger that they could hardly stagger along.

Some of them, however, retained just enough spirit to burst into hoots and catcalls when General Eble and the other officers rode past them, overtaking them on the road towards Santarem. Sergeant Godinot could not check them. Sergeant Godinot reflected ruefully that he had to march these men twenty-five miles before dawn next morning, with the prospect of another march, and perhaps even a battle, immediately on arrival. With Dubois dead, there was no one in the detachment he could trust. It was going to be a difficult time for him. He would be glad when he got into Nossa Senhora do Rocamonde-that, he learned for the first time from his feuille de route, was the surprising name of the village where the Forty Sixth had lain so long billeted.

The march was far worse than he anticipated. The whisperings that went on in the ranks behind him boded no good, he knew. He guessed that the men were realizing that twenty men, banded together, might be safe from the irregulars and be able to find their way to the English outposts.

He might at any moment be faced with mutiny. Certainly he was faced all the time with disobedience to orders and with mutinous arguments. The men kept calling out that they were tired, they kept asking for rests, and when a rest was granted they were sulky about starting again. Godinot had to plead and urge and beg. He did not dare use violent methods. Even although military law justified him in threatening to shoot those who disobeyed, the situation did not. At the first sign of a physical threat he would have found a bayonet through him or a bullet in his brain. If there had been even one man among them whom he could trust, one man to guard his back, he might have cowed and overawed those mutinous dogs. As it was he could only plead and joke, and pretend to ignore the sotto voce insolences which reached his ears.

After dark the trouble became much worse, naturally.

Sergeant Godinot marched at the tail of the little column, slipping and stumbling over the stones. He urged them along, keeping an eye open lest any should take advantage of the darkness to leave the ranks. He tried to cheer them up by drawing vivid pictures of the rations which would be issued to them when they reached the battalion- but that was not successful. The men remembered what sort of rations had been issued before they were detailed to the bridging train, and they could form a shrewd guess as to what they would be like now, after two months' further starvation.

The moment came when the whole section flung themselves down on the roadside and swore they could not move another step-not for all the sergeants in Christendom. Godinot did his best. He reached into the darkness and seized what he thought to be the ringleader by the collar and hauled him to his feet, and then the man next to him, and then the next. If he had been an unpopular man they might have killed him then, but, as it was, they spared his life in the scuffle which flared up there at the side of the road. Somebody kicked Godinot; somebody pushed him back.

Somebody else, more vicious, took his musket by the muzzle and swung the butt end round in the darkness close to the ground, like a scythe. It was a blow delivered with all the lout's strength; it hit Godinot on the leg and he fell with a cry. Then they all ran off in a body, like a pack of schoolboys (they were hardly more than that) detected in a piece of mischief, leaving Godinot on his knees on the road, trying to get to his feet.

Godinot found that even when he managed to get on his feet he could not long retain the position. The small bone of his right leg was broken; it was agony to walk or even to stand. He could only make the slowest possible progress along the road, and the others never came back to help him.

What happened to them, whether they eventually rejoined their battalion, or achieved their ambition of deserting to the English, or died of starvation, or fell into the hands of the Portuguese, will never be known.

After two days the Portuguese irregulars found Godinot. Terrible creatures these Portuguese were- half naked, reduced to skeletons by starvation, as mad with rage at their sufferings and those of their country as was Godinot with pain and hunger and thirst when they found him. They had come creeping across the Zezere, closing in remorselessly on the French army when it gathered itself together to make its retreat. Godinot was the first of the stragglers they picked up, and he was not to be the last by any manner of means. Although he was crazy when they found him, they did not spare his life.

RIFLEMAN DODD was not disturbed in the hiding-place to which he fled after setting fire to the bridge. Even if anyone had seen him as he ran away when the alarm was given they were all too busy fighting the fire to trouble about a single fugitive. Dodd reached the shelter of the rocks, and assured himself that his rifle and the rest of his gear were there. In his hand he found, rather to his astonishment, that he still held the battered remnants of his shako. It had been so soaked with rain that the glowing embers had only burned one or two small holes in it. He pulled it on again over his mop of hair and passed the chin strap over the tangle of his beard. Down the stream he could see the flames of the burning bridge, with the figures of the fire-fighting party rushing about round them like old-fashioned pictures of devils in hell.

He watched their exertions with as much excitement as his exhausted condition would allow, and the longer the fire burned the more assured he could become that his efforts had been successful. He felt some elation, but not nearly as much as he would have done had he been fresh and strong and fit. Indeed, now that his efforts had been crowned with success, he was mainly conscious only of weariness, and of something which oppressed him like despair. It was home- sickness- not the desire for the green Sussex Downs, but the desire to be once more with his regiment, marching along with the green-clad files, exchanging jagged jests with his fellows, squatting round the camp fires, leading a life fatalistically free from anxiety and responsibility.