The Sultan's Daughter (11 page)

Almost overcome with horror at the idea of digging his own grave, Roger gave a gulp; but he took the spade. The six soldiers closed round him, the Sergeant gave an order and the firing party set off.

As they marched through the cantonment, men lounging in the doorways of the huts and others cleaning arms or harness stared at Roger with curiosity. Apparently the fact that he was a civilian carrying a spade and obviously under arrest was enough to tell them that he was going to his death. Evidently, too, a rumour had already run round the camp that he was an English spy, for several of them shook their fists at him, with shouts of
‘A la mort, cochon!'
and
‘Sale Anglais'
. He was well aware of the hatred with which the French regarded Britain; so their abuse meant nothing to him, and his whole mind was occupied in an attempt to think of an eleventh-hour ruse by which he might save himself, or at least postpone his execution.

His hot meal and three hours' sleep had restored him physically, but the shock of finding that none of the men from the Army of Italy had even heard of him, and the abrupt way in which General Desmarets had dealt with his case, had robbed him temporarily of his wits. It was half past three on a chilly but sunny afternoon, and all he could think of was how pleasant it would be to have a good horse between his knees and be cantering across the downs. At the same time he was terribly conscious, as they marched towards the sea, that with every step he took the moments of his life were running out. Yet, try as he would, he could not bring himself to concentrate.

After twenty minutes they came to within half a mile of
the shore at a place where, between a break in the cliffs, there was a wide area of sand-dunes in which steep mounds alternated with depressions and shallow valleys. Some of the mounds had coarse grass growing in patches on them; but there was no other vegetation, except at some distance inland, for as far as the eye could see.

When they had laboriously made their way for some two hundred yards across this desolate waste they slithered down into a broader dip than any they had so far crossed. The Sergeant called a halt and grunted, ‘This'll do'.

The men surrounding Roger fell out and moved a little way away from him. For a moment he was tempted to make a dash for it. But with slopes of loose sand rising to twelve feet or more on every side he realised that it would be hopeless to do so. He would have been riddled with bullets before he could have reached even the top of the nearest crest. Such is the instinct in a healthy man to cling to life until the very last moment that, although he felt certain that within another quarter of an hour his body would in any case have six lumps of lead in it, he could not bring himself to make the bid against the virtual certainty that he would be killed before he took another dozen breaths.

The Sergeant picked one man to stand by Roger with his musket at the ready; the other five piled theirs in a pyramid, with the long, thin bayonets pointing to the sky. They then sat down in a group on a nearby slope to take their ease and began a game of cards. Pointing to the flattish bottom of the hollow, the Sergeant said to Roger:

‘Get to it. And don't waste time diggin' a trench more'n what's big enough to take yer body. Should be a metre deep, though; else the sand'll blow off and leave bits of yer stickin' out. We don't want ter tumble over any nasty stinkin' English corpses when we're next out 'ere doin' our trainin'.'

The mental picture that the old ghoul's words conjured up in Roger's mind, of his own body rotting and creeping with maggots, filled him with nausea. Yet there was nothing for it but to begin digging. Although he had found it impossible to concentrate while being marched to the dunes, he had kept looking about him in the wild hope that an officer carrying a reprieve would come galloping up from the cantonment, or
that some unforeseen diversion would occur that might give him a chance to escape. But on all sides the landscape had remained empty. By the time they arrived at this hollow where he was about to dig his grave he knew that there could be no living creature within miles, except for the seagulls that wheeled overhead and the men who had been ordered to execute him.

The sand was soft and as soon as he began to dig the trench he found that a good part of each spadeful trickled back into it. That brought him the sudden thought that if he could prolong his gruesome task until darkness fell he would stand a worth-while chance of attempting a breakaway. But it was not yet four o'clock, so there was a long time to go before it became even twilight. Moreover, in this wildly optimistic idea for delaying matters till sundown, he had counted without the Sergeant.

Seeing that he was allowing most of the sand he dug up to slide from his spade before he threw the remainder aside, the N.C.O. said with an oath, ‘Think we want ter stay 'ere all night? Put some guts into it, you English bastard. Shovel quick and toss it as far as you can. That's the way to make a trench in this soft stuff.'

Roger responded by digging faster, but still at no great speed; so the Sergeant suddenly struck him smartly across the shoulders with a swagger cane he was carrying and cried, ‘Lively, I said! Lively! If yer not sweating within two minutes I'll cut yer face ter ribbons wiv this cane o' mine.'

Again Roger had no option but to obey, and within a few minutes he was sweating profusely. But some of the sand continued to trickle back into the trench and before he had dug out more than a third of the amount that had to be shifted he was puffing like a grampus. Thrusting his spade upright in the sand for a moment, he took off his heavy coat and threw it down behind him.

As he resumed his digging, the Sergeant remarked, ‘That's a real aristo's coat yer got there. Should sell for a tidy sum, so I'll take it as my share of yer kit. Be a sin ter bury good clothes like yours. The others can cast lots for the rest of yer duds.'

After a minute he added, ‘I bet yer got a bit o' money on
yer too. I'll give you a spell from diggin' if yer'll hand it over.'

Roger's heart bounded. A ‘spell' might mean anything from a few minutes to an indefinite period. The Sergeant's offer sounded like an overture to him to buy his life. On reaching Paris he had meant to draw his back pay and, should he need more, there were means by which he could draw on British Secret Service funds; so he had not brought a large sum with him. He had only fifty
louis d'or
to cover immediate expenses and they were in a money-belt round his waist. Yet those fifty louis, which would have done no more than see him to Paris and buy him a new uniform when he got there, would be regarded by the Sergeant as a magnificent windfall. Even if he had to give five louis apiece to his men to keep their mouths shut that would still leave twenty for him, and that was more than the pay he would receive in a whole year.

The Sergeant spoke again. ‘Come on. Yer can't take it wiv yer. If yer 'and it over I can split it wiv the boys now. That'll save us a lot o' time arguing, about shares when ye're a gonner, an' we'll get back to camp the sooner.'

His words instantly dashed Roger's hopes. He felt that he must be out of his mind not to have realised that they would search his body for cash and valuables before they filled in his grave. As they would come by the money anyhow, why should they risk condign punishment by letting him buy his life with it?

Yet even in his extremity it went against the grain to make the Sergeant a gratuitous present; and he thought it possible that it might not occur to them that he was wearing a money-belt. If so, they might strip him only to his underclothes and so fail to find his gold. In the hope of depriving them of it he said tersely to the N.C.O.:

‘If you've been counting on lining your pockets, Sergeant, you are unlucky. The Coastguards searched me last night and took from me every sou I had.'

‘Then that's bad luck for yer, too,' the Sergeant snarled. ‘I'll give yer no spell, an' if yer drop while yer work I'll have the boys jab their bayonets in yer an' finish yer off that way.'

Once more, under the N.C.O.'s threats and his baleful
glare, Roger set about digging. After another ten minutes the sweat was pouring off him and he had managed to scoop out a trench, the middle of which was over two feet deep. But the sides sloped and it still required a lot more work before his body could have been laid in it and well covered.

It was now nearly half an hour since he had started on the job and the hard work had made him uncomfortably hot; but that was far from being the case with the firing party. The sun had gone in and the chill of a February afternoon had descended on the dunes. Of the group of five sitting on the slope nearby playing cards, one or more was now standing up every few minutes to stamp his feet and flail his arms to keep his circulation going.

To ease his aching arms, Roger risked a blow from the cane to pause for a breather. As he did so, the Sergeant snapped, ‘Keep at it, damn yer, or we'll all freeze to death afore yer done.' Then he added as an afterthought, ‘What wouldn't I give for a good tot of schnapps to warm me up!'

Instead of going on with his digging, Roger stared at him for a moment. He had just remembered that after taking a few gulps from his brandy flask while in the sea he had managed to get it back into his pocket. To the N.C.O. he said, ‘The Coastguards didn't rob me of my flask and it's still three-quarters full of cognac. You'll find it in the left-hand skirt pocket of my travelling coat.'

The Sergeant's eyes widened eagerly and he exclaimed,
‘Mort de Dieu
! Yer may be a pig of an Englishman, but I'll see to it yer gets a quick, clean death for that.' Then he turned about and began swiftly to rummage in the coat that Roger had thrown behind him.

The guard holding his musket at the ready was standing a yard away on Roger's other side. He, too, was feeling the cold and as time had gone on he had ceased to give his whole attention to the prisoner.

Suddenly Roger lifted the spade and slashed sideways at him with it. The edge of the spade caught the man on his right hand, severing two of his fingers. With a scream of agony he dropped his musket. The Sergeant had just found the pocket in Roger's coat and, bent right over, was pulling the flask out of it. The guard's scream had hardly rent the
air before Roger had turned on his heel, swung the spade high and brought its blade down with all his force on the back of the Sergeant's neck. The blow almost severed it. From the terrible wound his blood spurted out in a jet over the sand, and he collapsed without uttering a sound.

Without losing an instant, Roger threw aside the spade that had served him so well as a weapon and made a dash for the slope furthest from the other five men. With the sand slithering beneath his boots he scrambled up it. Jumping to their feet, the men ran to their stacked muskets, shouting imprecations and calling on him to halt. In their haste two of them collided, fell and rolled into the trench. The other three grabbed up their firearms and levelled them.

From the moment Roger had thought of his brandy flask and realised that it could be used as a snare by which he might possibly save his life, his wits had come back to him. It had been the apparent hopelessness of his situation that had so clouded his mind from the moment General Desmarets had ordered his execution. The germ of a plan had scarcely formed before he had a clear-cut picture of exactly how he must act. His perfect sense of timing had done the rest and it did not now desert him.

At a glance he had measured the slope and judged that by the time he reached the crest the men would have their weapons in their hands and be ready to fire at him. Up there, against the skyline, and only some twelve yards distant, he would provide a perfect target that they could not fail to hit. Without pausing to look behind him to see if he had judged aright, he flung himself flat.

Three muskets banged in quick succession. Bullets whistled through the air a good three feet above him. He knew that there should be two more, but dared not wait where he lay for more than another few seconds. Picking himself up, he ran on, the hair now prickling on his scalp from the horrid expectation that at any moment one of those other two bullets would smack into his back.

He plunged into a dip, then breasted another slope. A furious shouting broke out behind him, but no bullets either hit him or whined past. From that he could only conclude that the muskets of the two men who had not yet fired could
not have been loaded. On reaching the second crest he risked a glance over his shoulder. Three of the soldiers were leaping down the slope twenty yards behind him, the other two were ten yards in the rear, had reached the top of the first mound and were taking aim at him.

Again he flung himself flat. Again the bullets hummed through the air above him. Again he scrambled to his feet and dashed headlong down the slope ahead. But throwing himself down, although for only thirty seconds, had cost him a good part of his lead. The three nearest men had come up to within fifteen feet of him.

Yet as he pounded on he was far from giving up hope. None of the five could reload his musket as he ran. If they halted to do so, by the time they had rammed home the charges and the bullets and primed their weapons they would have to be good marksmen to hit him. As they must know that themselves, he thought it certain that they would put their trust in running him down. But unless there were trained runners among them he felt confident that he could out-distance them; because he had shed his topcoat, whereas they were wearing theirs, and, in addition, they were weighed down by their heavy equipment.

In that he proved right. By the time he had covered a quarter of a mile he had gained a fifty-yard lead on his pursuers. But he had had no choice in the direction he should take and saw that he was heading almost directly for the sea. To continue on his course was to risk that when he reached the beach they would spread out and hem him in against the water. With his previous night's experience still fresh in mind, he would have thought twice before seeking refuge in the sea even had it been fully dark. As it was still daylight, it would have been completely futile to do so.