Lord Hornblower

Chapter XIX

The forest track which they were following met another at right angles. It was frightfully hot even here in the shade of the pines, thunderstorm weather. Hornblower’s feet were badly blistered, and he was hobbling along with difficulty even on the soft pine-needle mould underfoot. There was no wind to call forth any sound from the trees; everything was silent. Even the hoofs of the horses made no sound—the three pack-horses that carried food and ammunition, the two horses carrying wounded men, and the one horse that carried His Excellency the King’s Lieutenant-General for the Nivernais. Twenty men and two women were shuffling along the trail with Hornblower, the main body of His Most Christian Majesty’s army. There was an advance guard of five under Brown out ahead, a rearguard of five far behind.

Where the tracks crossed a man was waiting for them, a connecting file that Brown, like a prudent officer, had left behind so as to leave the main body in no doubt about which track he was following; as they came up he turned and pointed to something hanging beside the trail—something grey and white. It was the dead body of a man, clothed in peasant’s dress, hanging by his neck from a pine-tree limb; the white colour was a large printed placard fastened to his chest.

“Frenchmen of the Nivernais!” it said. “With my arrival at the head of a large body of troops all foolish attempts to resist the Government of our august Emperor Napoleon must cease forthwith. It is gratifying to me to find that so poor a reception has been given to the Count de Graçay’s insane attempt to oppose the Emperor, recalled to his throne by the supplication and suffrages of forty million of his loyal subjects. Yet some unfortunate people have been deluded into taking up arms.

“Know, therefore, I am instructed by the clemency of His Imperial Majesty to proclaim that any Frenchman, with the exceptions mentioned below, who hands in his arms and makes personal surrender to any troops under my command before fifteen days from the date of this proclamation will receive amnesty and pardon. He will be free to return to his farm, to his shop, to the bosom of his family.

“Anyone remaining in arms will receive sentence of death, to be carried out immediately.

“Any village offering shelter to the rebels will be burned to the ground, and its leading inhabitants shot.

“Any person giving assistance to the rebels, whether by acting as guide or by giving them information, will be shot.

“Exceptions to the amnesty. The above-named Count de Graçay. His daughter-in-law, known as the Vicomtesse de Graçay. With them are included the Englishman, known as Lord Hornblower, who is required to pay for a life of outrage and crime.

“Signed,

emmanuel clausen, Count, General of Division.

June 6th, 1815.

The Count looked up at the blackened face of the corpse.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Paul-Marie of the mill, sir,” said the man who had waited for them.

“Poor Paul-Marie!”

“So they have crossed this track already,” said Hornblower. “We’re round behind them.”

Somebody reached up a hand to the corpse, perhaps to tear off the placard.

“Stop!” said Hornblower, just in time. “They must not know that we have come this way.”

“For the same reason we must leave the poor devil un-buried,” said the Count.

“We must keep marching,” said Hornblower. “Once over the ford and we shall have time to take breath.”

He looked round at his pitiful little army. Some of them, at the moment of halting, had sunk to the ground. Some were leaning on their muskets, and some were spelling out the placard that hung on the breast of the dead Paul-Marie. It was not the first copy of it they had seen.

“Come on, my children,” said the Count.

The old man’s face was white with weariness, and he drooped in his saddle; the wretched horse he rode was hardly in better condition, moving forward reluctantly with hanging head at the prod of the spurs. Shambling, hungry, and ragged, the others followed him, most of them looking up at the dead Paul-Marie as they passed. Hornblower noticed some who lingered, and dropped back to be with them; he had pistols in his belt. Deserters, as well as being a loss of strength, would give information of their intention to cross the ford. Clausen had scored a distinct point with his offer of amnesty, for there were many in the band—Hornblower could list in his mind a number of them—who must already be wondering whether it was worth going on with the struggle. Men with nothing save certain death ahead of them fight far harder in a losing battle than those with a chance to surrender, and his followers must be thinking regretfully of the rapid passing of the fifteen days allowed them in the proclamation. This was June 18th—Sunday, June 18th, 1815. He had to keep his men together for three more days to make sure that they would fight on with their necks at stake.

His blistered feet were causing him agony, for the short pause beside Paul-Marie’s hanging body had brought back the life into them, and he would have to walk on them for some distance farther before they would be numb again. He had to drive himself to quicken his stride to catch up Marie, walking in the middle of the group with a musket slung across her back and Annette beside her. Marie had cut off her masses of hair—sawed them off with a knife after her first night as a guerrilla soldier—and the ends hung irregularly round her face, which was wet with sweat and streaked with dirt But both she and Annette were in far better physical condition than Hornblower, stepping out with unblistered feet and still with a certain freedom of stride as compared with Hornblower’s leg-weary stagger. They were ten and fifteen years younger than he.

“Why not leave Pierre behind and take his horse, ‘Oratio?” asked Marie.

“No,” said Hornblower.

“He will die anyway,” argued Marie. “That wound will gangrene.”

“Bad for the other men to leave him here to die alone in the forest,” said Hornblower. “Besides, Clausen might find him before he died and find out from him what we intend to do.”

“Kill him and bury him, then,” said Marie.

Women when they go to war are fiercer than men and inclined to carry the logic of war to still greater logical extremes. This was the tender, gentle Marie, the kind and understanding, who had wept for love of him.

“No,” said Hornblower again. “We’ll capture some more horses soon.”

“Providing we do,” said Marie.

It was hard to keep horses alive in these conditions; they died or went lame while men still lived and marched. Only two weeks had passed since Clausen, marching down from Briare, had forced them to evacuate Nevers, and in the fierce manhunts that had followed horses had died in dozens. Clausen must be an active and energetic officer; his columns had marched hotfoot after them in unceasing pursuit. Only night-march after night-march, stratagems and cunning, had kept them out of his clutches. Twice there had been fierce little rearguard actions; once they had ambushed a troop of pursuing Hussars—Hornblower remembered the gaily-uniformed soldiers tumbling from their saddles as the volley blazed from the roadside—and now here they were with half their strength gone already, marching by day, having marched the night before, to cross the rear of one of Clausen’s circling columns. Marie knew of a dangerous and little-known ford across the Loire ahead. Once over that they could rest for a day in the forest of Runes before showing themselves in the valley of the Allier and causing fresh turmoil there. Clausen would be after them at once, but that was far enough to look ahead; the next move would depend on the new circumstances.

Active and energetic Clausen certainly was—he must have learned about fighting guerrillas in Spain. But he had a considerable force to back him up; Hornblower knew of the 14th Leger and the 40th Ligne—the 14th Light Infantry and the 40th of the Line—and there was another regiment with which he had not yet come into contact, and at least one squadron of the 10th Hussars. Nine battalions or more—six or seven thousand men—all chasing his ragged thirty. He was doing his duty, for those seven thousand men could be better employed on the Belgian frontier, where undoubtedly some action was stirring. And if he could only keep up the struggle he could wear down even those seven thousand men, wear out their boots and wear down their spirits. He could! Hornblower gritted his teeth and marched on; his feet were numb again now and had ceased to pain him. Only the terrible weariness in his legs distressed him now. He became aware of a low muttering roar in the distance. “Guns?” he asked, a little puzzled. “Thunder,” said Marie.

They had chattered so light-heartedly once; had walked carefree and gay, hand in hand. It hardly seemed as if it were they two who had walked like that, in that breathing space of peace before Bonaparte returned from Elba. Hornblower was too fatigued to love now. The thunder muttered again; the heat was more oppressive. Inside his clothes Hornblower could feel the prickliness of his sweat. He was thirsty, too, but his thirst was not as severe as his physical weariness. In the forest it was growing dark, not with the approach of evening, which was still far off, but with the massing of storm-clouds overhead. Somebody close behind him groaned, and Hornblower made himself look round and grin.

“Who’s that lowing like a cow?” he asked. “Old Father Fermiac? Five years younger than me, and they call him Father Fermiac and he lows like a cow! Cheer up, Father. Maybe we’ll find a bull for you the other side of the Loire.”

That raised a cackle of laughter—some of it pure hysteria, some of it amusement at his not-quite-perfect French, some of it roused by the incongruity of a great English lord cracking jokes with French peasants. The thunder crashed almost overhead, and they could hear the rain beginning to patter on the trees. A few drops found their way down on their sweating faces.

“Here comes the rain,” said someone.

“I’ve had water underfoot for the past two days,” said Hornblower. “You ought to see my blisters. Even the good Jesus never walked on as much water as I have.”

The daring blasphemy raised another cackle, got the men along for another hundred yards. The heavens were opening overhead, and the rain was falling in cataracts. Hornblower dropped back to the pack-horses, to make sure that the leather covers were securely over the panniers. He had two thousand rounds of musket ammunition there which he did not want spoiled—it would be harder to replace than food or even shoe-leather. They plodded on, in the semi-darkness, their clothes growing heavier with the rain soaking into them. The earth beneath their feet grew spongy and soggy, while the storm showed no sign of diminishing. The thunder still roared and the lightning flashed, lighting up the dark spaces under the trees.

“How much farther?” asked Hornblower of Marie.

“Two leagues and a half, perhaps.”

Three hours more of marching; it would be almost dark, if not quite, by the time they arrived.

“This rain will deepen the ford,” said Marie, sounding the first note of a new anxiety.

“My God!” said Hornblower before he could check himself.

There were eighteen half-battalion columns scattered in pursuit of them, and he was threading his way through the midst of them. He was risking almost everything on being able to cross the river at this unexpected point, which would throw off pursuit for a time at least. Their danger would be extreme if they were unable to pass. This was a rocky country in general, with a shallow topsoil, among the headwaters of the great river, and rain would affect the level of the water after only a short interval. He turned on his weary legs to urge the men to lengthen their stride. That was something he had to do every few minutes during the rest of that dreadful march, as darkness closed in prematurely about them, as the rain roared down upon them incessantly, as the led horses stumbled and plunged and the two wounded men groaned in agony. The Count rode without a word, bowed forward in the saddle with the water streaming from him. He was in the last stages of exhaustion, Hornblower knew. Someone ahead challenged through the rain and dark; it was a man sent back from Brown’s advanced guard. Brown had reached the edge of the forest, and the river lay a short distance ahead across the rocky flood plain. They all halted together under the last of the trees while scouts moved cautiously forward to discover if this lonely stretch of river bank were patrolled—there could not be too many precautions taken, even though any self-respecting sentry would sneak away to find shelter on a night like this.

“The river sounds loud,” said Marie. They could hear it even through the noise of the rain where they lay in the wet mud, and Hornblower dared not think what that implied.

Brown’s messenger came back; he had explored the river bank and found no sign of the enemy, as was to be expected. Clausen’s division would be sufficiently dispersed guarding likely places, let alone the unlikely ones. They got to their feet, Hornblower feeling new agony as his weight came again on his blisters. He could hardly step at first, and his legs were stiff and weary as well and hardly obeyed his wishes. The Count was able to mount his horse, but the poor brute seemed as leg weary as Hornblower himself. It was a sorry party that limped and hobbled and stumbled forward in the gathering darkness. The thunder had long ceased, but the rain continued to fall steadily, with every promise of going on through the night.

The turbulent surface of the river gleamed in the half-light ahead of them.

“The ford begins down by those trees,” said Marie. “It is a ledge under the surface that runs diagonally upstream from there to the middle of the river. That is how you cross the deep part.”

“Come on, then,” said Hornblower. In his pain and weariness he felt as if he would like to cover that last half-mile on his hands and knees.

They came to the water’s edge; the rushing river boiled at their feet among the rocks.

“It is too deep already,” said Marie. She was only voicing the suspicion that had formed in every mind. There was no expression in her tone at all; her voice was flat and dead.

“I’ll take a horse and try it,” she went on, “Here, help Pierre down.”

“Let me try, madame,” said Brown, but Marie paid him no attention.

She climbed astride into the saddle, hitching up the skirts of her habit to permit her to do so. Then she urged the horse forward into the water. The animal balked, nearly lost his footing among unseen rocks, and went forward with the utmost reluctance under the urging of Marie’s heels. The water was almost up to its belly before—as Hornblower guessed—it had reached the end of the ledge of rock that Marie had spoken about. There was another battle of wills between Marie and the horse, and it plunged forward again. Three strides and it was out of its depth, struggling madly over the irregular bottom, almost vanishing from sight, and whirling downstream at frightening speed before it regained its footing. Marie, flung from the saddle, somehow hung on to the pommel, avoiding the lashing hoofs as the horse headed for the shore, and found her footing as it came out from the shallows snorting in fear. Marie struggled onto the bank weighed down by her dripping clothing. No one had uttered a sound while the trial was being made, not even in the moment of Marie’s greatest peril. It was plain now to everybody that the ford was impassable.

“We must all walk on water now besides milord,” said a voice. It might have been a joke, but anyone who heard it knew that it was not.

Hornblower made himself come out of his daze. He had to think and plan and lead.

“No,” he said. “I’m the only one who can do that. And none of us care to swim. Do we? Then let us keep along the river bank until we find a boat. I’ll exchange ten miracles for one boat.”

The suggestion was received in depressed silence. Hornblower wondered if the men were one-half as tired as he was. He forced himself to his feet, by a fierce effort of will ignoring the pain of the blisters.

“Come on,” he said. “At least we cannot stay here.”

No guerrilla leader in his senses would camp for the night beside an unfordable river against which he could be hemmed in, and with the rain continuing it would be at least twenty-four hours before it would be passable again.

“Come on,” he repeated. “Come on, Frenchmen.”

Then he knew he had failed. A few stirred reluctantly; more looked to see how their comrades acted, and then deliberately lay down again, some on their backs, some with their faces pillowed on their forearms, with the rain still dropping on them.

“An hour’s rest,” pleaded one voice.

Someone—Hornblower guessed it was young Jean, not yet seventeen—was sobbing unashamedly and loudly. The men had reached breaking point. Someone else, someone with greater powers of inspiration, might have got them to move again, Hornblower told himself, but it was beyond him. Had the ford been practicable they would have crossed it, and staggered on a mile or two the other side, but in the face of this disappointment they were capable of nothing further tonight. And they knew, the same as he did, that there was nothing to go on for. The rebellion was at an end, whether they marched till they died or gave up now. The thunderstorm, the flooding of the ford, had balked it. The men were realists after this experience of guerrilla warfare, and knew that anything further they did would be only a gesture. They all knew of Clausen’s proclamation offering amnesty, too. Brown was at his side, eloquent in his silence, a hand on the butt of a pistol in his belt. Brown, himself, Marie; the Count and Annette, for what they were worth. One or two more—old Fermiac for one—were all he could count on. It would be enough for the moment. He could shoot a couple of the most obstinate of the objectors, and the rest would get to their feet and march, sulkily. But he could hardly keep unwilling men together in a march in darkness. They could slip away too easily; nor would it be difficult for someone more discontented or desperate than the others to slip a knife into his back on the march or put the muzzle of his musket to his ribs and pull the trigger. He was prepared to face that risk, he was prepared to kill a couple of malcontents, but he could see no real benefit from such action. There was one thing left for him to do, the last resource of the hunted guerrilla leader, to disperse his band and hope for better days to come. It was a bitter pill to swallow, especially in view of the desperate danger to Marie and the Count, but it was not a matter of choosing the best of possible alternatives. He had to choose the least bad. But failure was a horrible thing.

“Very well,” he said. “It is here that we say goodbye.”

Some of the men stirred at those words.

“’Oratio!” said Marie, and then ceased abruptly. She had learned the lessons of discipline.

“Your lives are safe,” went on Hornblower. “You have all read Clausen’s proclamation. Tomorrow—tonight if you will—you can make your way to the troops and surrender. You can go to your homes. Madame and the Count and I go on, for go on we must. And we would even if we need not.”

The men were stunned into silence by his words. No one stirred, no one spoke in the darkness. The two weeks of toil and danger and hardship through which they had just passed seemed like a lifetime to most of them, and it was hard to realise that a lifetime had come to an end.

“We shall return,” continued Hornblower. “Remember us when you are in your homes. Think of us. We shall return with a fresh call to arms. Then we shall all of us gather again in our strength to thrust down the tyrant. Remember that. And now one last cheer for the King! Vive le Roi!”

They cheered, feebly enough, but Hornblower had achieved what he set out to do. He had sowed the seeds of a later rebellion; when Clausen’s division should move away it would be possible to set the Nivernais in a turmoil once more should a leader arise—should he and the Count ever succeed in making their way back into the province. It was a desperate, slight hope, but it was all that remained.

“In the name of God!” said Fermiac. “I come with you now.”

“I also,” said another voice in the darkness.

Perhaps with these Frenchmen it might be possible now to make an hysterical appeal to them, carry them away on a wave of emotion, set them marching once more. Hornblower felt the temptation, and he had to balance the pros and cons coldly. That sort of hysteria would hardly survive the shock of the men’s feeling their leg weariness. Some of the men simply could not march farther. It would not do; by dawn next day he would not have six men with him, and time would have been irretrievably lost.

“Thank you,” said Hornblower. “I shall remember that in time to come, Fermiac, my friend. But we must ride, and ride hard. Four of us and six horses gives us the best chance. Go back to your wife, Fermiac, and try not to beat her on Saturday nights.”

He even got a laugh by that, at this moment of all moments. It helped to keep the parting on a sane level, the level he was aiming at with an eye to the future. Yet he knew there was no future; he knew it in his soul, in his bones, even while he gave the order for the pack-horses to be stripped of their loads, even while he forced Brown in a bitter argument to leave Annette behind and make her life safe. He was going to die; probably Brown was going to die. And Marie, dear Marie—while his spirit tossed on wave after wave of emotion, of remorse and self-condemnation, of fear and regret, uncertainty and despair, his love for her endured and increased, so that her name was in his mind as a constant accompaniment to his thoughts, so that her image was in his mind’s eye whatever else he was picturing. Dear Marie, sweet, beloved Marie.

She was leading a spare horse, and Brown was leading the other; the four of them were mounted on the best of the six. The animals slipped and plunged over the rough surface at the water’s edge until they reached the path above the river. They walked dispiritedly through the darkness. Hornblower could hardly sit in his saddle with his weariness; he felt giddy and sick, so that he had to hold on to the pommel of the saddle in front of him. He closed his eyes for a moment and instantly seemed to be swept over some vast smooth declivity, like the boat going over the cataract of the Loire four years before; he was almost out of his saddle before he recovered himself, jerking himself upright and clinging to the pommel like a drowning man. Yet at the foot of the declivity he had known that Marie was waiting for him with the brooding love in her eyes.

He shook off delirium. He had to make plans, to think how they could escape. He called up before his mind’s eye the map of the country, and marked on it what he knew of the situation of Clausen’s flying columns. They constituted a semicircular cordon, whose diameter was the river, and at whose centre he found himself at present. So far he had buoyed himself up in this danger with the hope of passing the river by Marie’s ford. Hard on their heels, he knew, was marching a half-battalion of the 14th Leger, which had apparently been given the duty of direct pursuit while the other columns headed him off. At nightfall that half-battalion was presumably six or seven miles behind, unless—as might easily be the case—its commanding officer forced his men to march on in the darkness. Should he try to pierce the cordon or try to pass the river?

The Count’s horse in front of him fell with a crash and a clatter, and his own nearly threw him as it plunged to avoid treading on it.

“Are you hurt, sir?” came Brown’s voice in the darkness; he must have slipped down instantly from the saddle despite the handicap of a led horse.

“No,” said the Count quietly. “But I’m afraid the horse is.”

There was a chink of bridles as Brown and the Count felt about in the dark.

“Yes. He’s slipped his shoulder, sir,” reported Brown at length. “I’ll change saddles to the other horse.”

“Are you sure you are not hurt, Father?” asked Marie, using the intimate form of address which was by no means the rule between them.

“Not in the least, dear,” answered the Count, in just the same tone as he would use in a drawing-room.

“If we turn this horse loose they’ll find it when they come along, my lord,” said Brown.

’They’ meant the pursuing troops, of course.

“Yes,” said Hornblower.

“I’ll take him away from the path and shoot him, my lord.”

“You won’t be able to lead him far,” said the Count.

“A few yards may be enough,” said Brown, “if you’ll be kind enough to hold these two horses, sir.”

They sat and stood while Brown persuaded the suffering creature to hobble away to his doom. Through the gentle noise of the rain they heard the click as the pistol misfired, waited while Brown reprimed, and then heard the crack of the weapon.

“Thank you, sir,” Hornblower heard Brown say, presumably as he took over the horse the Count had been holding, and then he added. “Can I take over your led horse, madame?”

Hornblower made up his mind at that moment.

“We will keep along the river bank a little longer,” he said. “Then we can rest until dawn, and try to make a crossing.”