Death to the French (aka Rifleman Dodd) (7 page)

The women and old men and children turned out to witness their triumphant entry. Lean chickens scrambled about the stones; four long strips of hand-picked land stretching down towards the green river showed where the villagers wrung their wretched living from the ungrateful soil. There were pigs to be seen, and up the sides of the valley were tethered cows just managing to keep alive among the few blades of grass among the rocks.

The ragged women and the nearly naked children-no child wore more than one garment-stood wondering as they marched in, waving their weapons and their trophies.

The men gathered outside the wine shop, escorting Dodd with ceremony to a seat on the stone benches.

Wine made its appearance at once, in wooden cups. Everyone was drinking, talking, shouting. Everyone eyed Dodd as they pointed him out as the marvellous Englishman who had beaten the French with the necessary assistance of the valiant villagers. As an afterthought Dodd's cup, half empty, was taken from him, and a new one brought him, full of the best wine the posada boasted-vinho valeroso, as he was assured on every side.

When Dodd made the gesture of eating they brought him food, and everyone else, like children, decided they must eat too. The men squatted here and there round the posada while the women brought food, but eating did not interfere in the least with conversation nor-most decidedly not- with drinking. The situation had every appearance of developing into a wild village spree, one of those few marvellous days when the frugal Portuguese peasant could forget the cost of anything, forget the need to work, forget the precariousness of existence. Bernardino, who naturally had the morals of a muleteer, seeing that was his profession, was caressing a girl in a secluded corner. Already someone had produced a guitar, and some were singing and some were dancing, when Dodd heaved himself to his feet. All eyes turned upon him while he picked out three of the young men and beckoned them to follow him. He led them out of the village up the stony lane again. Two of them he stationed within sight of the high road. He handled their muskets; he pointed up and down the road, peering out under his hand; he seemed to catch sight of something on the road, pointed the musket, called out 'bang,' held one of the two still, and pushed the other with the gesture of running back to the village. They grasped his meaning, grinning broadly and nodding. Pointing to the sun, and then to the west, he indicated the length of their watch. The third man he sent up the hillside where the view was more extensive.

Then he went back to the village. There was no position that he could see where twenty peasants could defy the attack of a hundred thousand men, although there was comfort to be found in the sight of the precipitous, rocky heights on each side of the ravine. He walked down to the river bank. The turbulent green water was pouring down over its rocky shelves, the whole surface marked with ripples and eddies. So wide was it that details on the farther bank were hardly to be made out.

Then, far down the river, something appeared round the bend which made him catch his breath with excitement. It was a white boat; as he looked he saw the flash of oars. He picked his way along the stony water's edge towards it. It was fighting its way upstream, taking advantage of the eddies inside the curve. There was something unusual about the deliberation of the strokes of the oars;

Dodd recognized the rhythm at once-he had been landed from so many transports that he could not help but know the Navy stroke.

The boat drew nearer and nearer. Dodd could see the gun mounted in the bow and the flutter of the white ensign at the stern. He could see the officer at the tiller and the men bending over the oars. He rushed along the bank, waving and shouting, but the boat pulled steadily on. In the long pull up from Alhandra so many Portuguese had waved to them from the bank that the crew did not give him a second thought. If only he had been wearing a red coat!

The boat rounded the curve and the officer stood up in the stern sheets to look up the next reach. Satisfied that no French were trying to cross the river he sat down again and pulled the tiller over. The boat swung round and edged into mid-stream to catch the full force of the current; its patrol was over. The current whirled it back round the curve at four times the speed at which it had ascended. Dodd still ran and waved and shouted, to no avail. The officer found time to wave a friendly arm to him, and a few minutes later the boat had vanished round the curve, beneath the beetling cliffs. There was nothing that Dodd could do save to plod back to the village and resume his plans for the discomfiture of the French in this quarter.

'PRECIPICES! My God, nothing but precipices!' said Sergeant Godinot, staring up at the lines of Torres Vedras. 'And there is a fortress as strong as Rodrigo on the top of that hill- look at the guns in the embrasures. We shall have some fighting to do before we reach Lisbon after all, you men. Three miles of precipices so far.'

'You didn't tell us about this at the depot, sergeant,' said Fournier, where he stood beside him.

'The English had not seen fit to inform me of it,' said Godinot, and added, under his breath, 'Nor anyone else either.'

'What in the name of God is that in that ravine?' asked Dubois, pointing. Everyone looked, but no one offered an explanation. All they could see was that a whole valley penetrating the Lines had been stuffed up with something or other. At that distance it was impossible to see, and from their experience it was impossible to realize that a hundred thousand olive trees, roots, branches and all, had been flung into the ravine to make an entanglement that not even a mouse, let alone a man, could penetrate.

'More precipices,' said Godinot, as the march of the company opened up a view of a new sector. Another long strip of a bare hillside had been dug or blasted away, leaving a ten-foot scarp that a man could only mount with a ladder; and redoubts at each end of the scarp, with guns mounted to enfilade it, indicated what would be the fate of anyone who attempted to do so.

'Red-coats up there,' said Godron, pointing. The British army was in position behind the Lines to support the hordes of militia who manned the redoubts. Still the company marched on. The French advance guard was feeling to its left in an endeavour to find if there was any end to this line of fortifications against which it had stumbled.

Sergeant Godinot and his friends were in the extreme flank company, marching continually southwards parallel to the Lines. On their right a bare valley, three-quarters of a mile wide, extended to the foot of the entrenchments, and this valley had been swept clean as if with a broom. Not a tree, not a bush, not a fragment of rock had been allowed to remain. Troops forming up for an assault would do so under heavy fire and without a vestige of cover.

'Somebody's worked damned hard,' growled Fournier.

'Not as hard as you'll have to work soon, old boy, when we break through,' laughed Godinot, expressing an opinion he did not feel in the least. 'Break through? Do you think we're going to break through that? Never in your life,' said Fournier. He had only been a soldier for a year, but he knew the militarily impossible when he saw it.

'Well, we'll find a way round,' said Godinot optimistically. A puff of smoke shot from a redoubt, and a cannon-ball screamed over their heads and plumped into the hillside above them.

'We are trespassing on Their Excellencies' territory,' said Godinot. The captain at the head of the company took the hint, and led the little column diagonally up the hill a trifle before marching on.

There were frequent stumbles and oaths in the ranks, for there was only the rough countryside to march upon. There was no road, no track even, here outside the Lines. Before long every man in the ranks was cursing and complaining as he staggered along over the uneven ground, bowed under his pack, until at last there was no breath left even for curses, and the only sounds to be heard were the clash of nailed boots on rock and the creaking of accoutrements. Once or twice there was a welcome halt, but each time the colonel rode up and the company had to move on again. As much information as was possible must be gained in the shortest possible time regarding this amazing phenomenon, and these stony hills were no place for cavalry. Up hills they went, so steep that progress had to be made on hands and knees, and down valleys. The intervals between companies was growing longer and longer, as Sergeant Godinot saw when he looked back; the advance guard was growing desperately thin. Still they marched, until at the last crest they saw ahead of them what must be a river valley-the Tagus at last. 'Did you say we were going to find a way round, sergeant?' asked Fournier with a sneer, pointing to their right front. In that direction there was a gleam of water, a hint of marsh and of flooded fields, stretching clear down to where two more huge redoubts towered above the Tagus bank. A tributary of the Tagus had been dammed at its mouth to make a morass four miles long to fill the gap between the fortifications in the hills and the Tagus. Even Godinot, conscientiously anxious to keep his section cheerful, had no reply to make to that. He could only look wordlessly, and he continued to look when the order to halt was given and the exhausted men sank to the ground. Three staff officers who had accompanied them on foot, their bridles over their arms, gazed down at the river with their telescopes. Then they turned back, wordlessly. Godinot guessed what sort of message they would have to take back to headquarters-they displayed their disappointment and dismay in every gesture-still he did his best to be cheerful.

'They'll have found something better than this out on the right,' he said. But his tentative optimism was received with a chilling silence. Even men stupid with fatigue and hunger had more sense than to imagine that an enemy who had so carefully fortified this end would leave the other end unguarded. That, of course, was an eminently correct deduction. This outer line (there were inner ones too) extended for twenty- two miles across the base of the triangle enclosed between the sea and the Tagus, so that in the top of the triangle, in Lisbon and the surrounding country, the British army and the Portuguese population could find secure shelter while the enemy starved outside. British ingenuity and Portuguese hard work could make a position impregnable even in the days before barbed wire and machine guns.

The captain summoned his four sergeants and issued his orders. 'Sergeant Bossin's section will do picket duty to-night. I will attend to the posting of the sentries myself. The other sections may bivouac and cook.' The captain tried to meet the eyes of his sergeants when he said this, but his gaze wavered. It was hard to say those words and face the reproach in the faces of the others. There was a chill wind blowing, and a thin rain was beginning to fall.

'Do we bivouac where we are, sir?' asked Godron.

'Yes. Those are the orders.'

The captain knew that it was a bad disciplinary move to blame the hardship the men had to suffer upon higher authority, but he had to excuse himself. Back went the sergeants to where the exhausted men lay upon the bleak hillside. So weary were they that the news that there was to be no issue of rations was received without a complaint. The men had ceased, in fact, to expect a ration issue, and, marching as they had been in contact with the enemy, they had had no chance to plunder food.

Wearily they made their preparations for the night. Half a dozen volunteers-the ones whose feet were least damaged -began to crawl about the hill cutting bbushes for fuel.

Fournier and Lebrun, who boasted the possession of a blanket which they carried turn and turn about, began to erect it like a tiny tent. Soon half a dozen wretched little fires were alight, giving much smoke and very little heat. Only round one fire was there any bustle of expectation. Here a pot was actually being hung over the flames, and one man was preparing the meat for the evening meal for himself and his intimate friends. It was a little white dog he had seen at the beginning of that day's march, and had instantly shot. For the rest of the day he had carried it slung by the paws from his belt and now, in quite a matter-of-fact way, he proceeded to skin it and disembowel it and joint it, throwing the meat piece by piece into the pot. Other men looked on hungrily, but it was only a little dog, and they could not expect a share.

Someone carried a platter of the stew to the captain in his solitary bivouac, but although he looked at it with longing, and sniffed at its heavenly savour, he refused it sadly, and turned again to gnawing at his flinty bread. He could not eat meat unless all his men had at least a taste of it.

Darkness fell, and the fires began to die away. The wretched men huddled their cloaks closer about their ragged bodies, and tried to burrow into the earth in an effort to shelter themselves from the penetrating cold. They were only boys, these men of the Eighth Corps, new recruits bundled together into hastily formed battalions and sent out on the long and dreary road to Portugal, untrained, unseasoned, ill-equipped. The man who sent them was at that time progressing about his provinces displaying to a dazzled people the marvellous new wife he had won by right of conquest-a real Hapsburg princess, daughter of fifty emperors.

The wind blew colder with the falling of the night. The men muttered and groaned as they turned backwards and forwards seeking some sort of warmth or comfort. Yet their rest was not broken when the sentries challenged, for that was a cry to which they were accustomed. For the captain went the rounds three times that night, to see that the sentries were alert and at their posts. Vigilance was necessary, for Portuguese had been known to creep into the ranks of sleeping men and cut half a dozen throats before crawling away again undetected.