Seven Men of Gascony Read online

  Selected Historical Fiction Published by McBooks Press

  BY ALEXANDER KENT

  The Complete Midshipman Bolitho

  Stand Into Danger

  In Gallant Company

  Sloop of War

  To Glory We Steer

  Command a King’s Ship

  Passage to Mutiny

  With All Despatch

  Form Line of Battle!

  Enemy in Sight!

  The Flag Captain

  Signal–Close Action!

  The Inshore Squadron

  A Tradition of Victory

  Success to the Brave

  Colours Aloft!

  Honour This Day

  The Only Victor

  Beyond the Reef

  The Darkening Sea

  For My Country’s Freedom

  Cross of St George

  Sword of Honour

  Second to None

  Relentless Pursuit

  Man of War

  Heart of Oak

  In the King’s Name

  BY PHILIP MCCUTCHAN

  Halfhyde at the Bight of Benin

  Halfhyde’s Island

  Halfhyde and the Guns of Arrest

  Halfhyde to the Narrows

  Halfhyde for the Queen

  Halfhyde Ordered South

  Halfhyde on Zanatu

  BY JAN NEEDLE

  A Fine Boy for Killing

  The Wicked Trade

  The Spithead Nymph

  BY BROOS CAMPBELL

  No Quarter

  The War of Knives

  Peter Wicked

  BY C.N. PARKINSON

  The Guernseyman

  Devil to Pay

  The Fireship

  Touch and Go

  So Near So Far

  Dead Reckoning

  BY DUDLEY POPE

  Ramage

  Ramage & The Drumbeat

  Ramage & The Freebooters

  Governor Ramage R.N.

  Ramage’s Prize

  Ramage & The Guillotine

  Ramage’s Diamond

  Ramage’s Mutiny

  Ramage & The Rebels

  The Ramage Touch

  Ramage’s Signal

  Ramage & The Renegades

  Ramage’s Devil

  Ramage’s Trial

  Ramage’s Challenge

  Ramage at Trafalgar

  Ramage & The Saracens

  Ramage & The Dido

  BY V.A. STUART

  Victors and Lords

  The Sepoy Mutiny

  Massacre at Cawnpore

  The Cannons of Lucknow

  The Heroic Garrison

  The Valiant Sailors

  The Brave Captains

  Hazard’s Command

  Hazard of Huntress

  Hazard in Circassia

  Victory at Sebastopol

  Guns to the Far East

  Escape from Hell

  BY JAMES L. NELSON

  The Only Life That Mattered

  BY SETH HUNTER

  The Time of Terror

  The Tide of War

  The Price of Glory

  BY DOUGLAS W. JACOBSON

  Night of Flames

  The Katyn Order

  BY JULIAN STOCKWIN

  Kydd

  Artemis

  Seaflower

  Mutiny

  Quarterdeck

  Tenacious

  Command

  The Admiral’s Daughter

  The Privateer’s Revenge

  Invasion

  Victory

  Conquest

  Betrayal

  BY DEWEY LAMBDIN

  The French Admiral

  The Gun Ketch

  HMS Cockerel

  A King’s Commander

  Jester’s Fortune

  BY JOHN BIGGINS

  A Sailor of Austria

  The Emperor’s Coloured Coat

  The Two-Headed Eagle

  Tomorrow the World

  BY ALEXANDER FULLERTON

  Storm Force to Narvik

  Last Lift from Crete

  All the Drowning Seas

  A Share of Honour

  The Torch Bearers

  The Gatecrashers

  BY DAVID DONACHIE

  The Devil’s Own Luck

  The Dying Trade

  A Hanging Matter

  An Element of Chance

  The Scent of Betrayal

  A Game of Bones

  BY JAMES DUFFY

  Sand of the Arena

  The Fight for Rome

  Published by McBooks Press 2001

  Copyright © 1949, 1976 by May Delderfield

  First published in the United Kingdom by Werner Laurie, 1949

  First published in the United States by Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1949

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, Inc., ID Booth Building, 520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.

  Cover painting: Napoleon by Ernest Crofts © Christie’s Images/CORBIS.

  Maps pp. 78,178, 180: Gardiner’s School Atlas of English History, London, 1891.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Delderfield, R.F. (Ronald Frederick), 1912-1972.

  Seven men of Gascony / by R.F. Delderfield.

  p. cm. — (Military Fiction Classics)

  ISBN 0-935526-97-8 (alk. paper)

  1. Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815—Fiction 2. Soldiers—Fiction. 3. France—History, Military—19th century—Fiction. 4. Gascony (France)—Fiction. I. Title

  PR6061.E36 S48 2001

  823/.912—dc21

  01-030314

  Visit the McBooks Press website at www.mcbooks.com.

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5

  Author’s Note

  Most of the incidents recorded in the following pages are true, episodes written down at the time, or in after years, by officers and men of the Grand Army. The central characters are spun from fact, typical infantrymen of Napoleon in the years of the First Empire’s decline. The greater part of the subsidiary characters, men like Marshal Lannes and Marshal Ney, are now enshrined in French history and their names are prominent on the Arc de Triomphe.

  If the reader would like to know more concerning the careers of these remarkable men, the public libraries teem with current memoir and biography recording their deeds between the outbreak of the Revolution and the final debacle at Waterloo. They are worth contemplating, for men of their calibre are lamentably rare in the Europe of today.

  Lannes was a dyer’s apprentice whose gallantry earned him the title “Bayard of the French Army;” he was universally mourned when he received his mortal wound at Aspern, in 1809. Ney was the son of a cooper, called “Bravest of the Brave,” who died facing a Bourbon firing-squad after Waterloo. The flamboyant Murat, son of an innkeeper, became a king before he also died in front of a firing-squad. Marshal Massena, once a smuggler, earned a military reputation second only to his chief, Napoleon. Marshal Bessières, darling of the Old Guard, died in action like Lannes, and was affectionately remembered by all the veterans. Marshal Marmont, another friend of Napoleon’s youth, betrayed him and lived to regret it; Marshal Poniatowski, a Polish prince, was drowned escaping from Leipzig; Marshal Mortier, as popular as any, lived to hold high office under the Bourbons and was blown up by a bomb thrown during a Paris procession years after his master had died in exile. The others, Victor, Oudinot, Macdonald and the steadfast Eugène de Beauharnais, were equally colourful in their lives and in their deaths.
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  There were many high-ranking Imperialists who never received the coveted marshal’s baton. Some of them are mentioned in these pages, men like Lasalle and Sainte-Croix, both dashing cavalrymen, and hard-fighting corps commanders like Reynier, Reille, Vandamme, Foy and Gérard; leaders of heavy cavalry like Montbrun and Milhaud, all men of mettle who enjoyed living and did not regret dying at the head of their battalions and squadrons.

  Napoleon himself thought of them constantly during the six years’ exile on St. Helena, and when he died his last words paid tribute to their gay courage. “I shall meet all my faithful companions in Valhalla,” he said, but there were many faithful companions whose names he did not know but who nevertheless died for him, some willingly, some indifferently.

  This book is only a fragment of the First Empire legend, and in writing it I intended to commemorate the gallantry and the hardihood of a million unknown men who marched, fought and died during the years when France challenged a continent.

  —R. F. D.

  Prologue

  When Father Pavart climbed the uncarpeted stairs to the veteran’s room overlooking the river he found the old man sitting in the window-seat, looking down on the crowd surrounding Peltier, the postillion. Peltier had just galloped across the bridge with the news.

  Father Pavart was the one person in the village who was acquainted with the old fellow. The others had been discouraged by the veteran’s incivility. He seldom gave any sign that he heard when he was addressed, and the woman who attended to his few wants and lived on the ground floor below seldom wasted time in endeavours to open a conversation when she came up with his meals or to mend the fire he kept going both summer and winter.

  He was thought to have money, but none knew this for certain. Nobody was sure of his name, not even Father Pavart, who visited him occasionally. He had come to the village from a small town in the south, where he was supposed to have buried his wife a year or two ago. He was a commonplace-looking man, who might have been any age between fifty and seventy. He had an air of brooding and large, sad eyes. At times he appeared to be crippled with rheumatism and rarely left his room. His right hand had been maimed in some sort of accident. Two fingers were missing and the remainder were bent over a scarred palm, reddish and unsightly. The hand looked like a claw and did nothing to increase his popularity among the children.

  He was supposed to have fought in the wars of the Empire, but he never told stories, like some of the other veterans in the district. He lived the life of a bad-tempered recluse, and Madame Friant, his landlady, often told neighbours that she would have turned him out long ago if he had not paid his dues in advance and in gold, on the first of every month.

  Father Pavart was known to be on good terms with the old man, but he showed no disposition to enlighten the curious. After a few months Madame Friant’s taciturn lodger was accepted as a newcomer who would never play any part in village life and consequently came to be ignored. Far from resenting this, he did all he could to encourage the villagers in their neglect. He spoke to no one but the priest and his landlady.

  It was early in December, 1840, when Peltier, the postillion, flogged his lathered team across the bridge and pulled them up in the yard of the inn. All the way across the bridge Peltier had been shouting down to pedestrians. The first snow had fallen and the post horses were badly blown. They had been driven much too hard along the main road from Rennes.

  The veteran had seen the chaise when it first entered the byroad approaching the bridge on the far side of the river. He had watched its progress right up to the inn-yard and had seen François, the little inn’s sole ostler, unlatch the boot and take out the mails and one or two packages. He must have wondered why Peltier’s arrival caused such a stir. Everyone within earshot was running to talk to the postillion, who jumped down from his box and stamped about the yard, beating his hands together and turning to answer questions on every side.

  It was then that Father Pavart entered the room; but the figure on the window-seat did not turn to greet him. The priest sat down in the one arm-chair and spread his gloved hands to the flames.

  “He’s come home,” he said.

  The veteran seemed to shiver slightly but continued to look down on the lively scene in the yard.

  Father Pavart chuckled. He was a short, slight man, with a mahogany complexion and startlingly blue eyes. For a provincial priest who seldom moved out of a remote parish, he might be considered a highly intelligent man, and he usually got his own way with the most obstinate of his flock. He was notoriously garrulous. He never went to Paris, but he read all the papers and always knew everything that was going on in the capital and beyond. He was very friendly with the editor of the Rennes newspaper, who was a distant relative; the two occasionally visited one another and were known to correspond a good deal.

  When the veteran made no reply Pavart went on: “Peltier’s been telling them all about the funeral procession. The catafalque came down the Seine on a barge. There were torches and music. I should like to have been present myself.”

  As he said this Pavart squinted in the veteran’s direction. He paused a moment, his eyes fixed on the old man’s bent shoulders. He seemed to be pondering how best to broach the purpose of his visit.

  Presently he said: “My cousin in Rennes wants you to write about him.”

  The old man spun round and stared into the priest’s eyes.

  “Me!”

  Pavart affected not to notice the old man’s agitation. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Why not? You could do it as well as anyone I know. You were there, were you not?”

  “There are dozens of veterans in Rennes. There are one or two here, so I’ve heard.”

  “The men here are conscripts, Leipzig and Waterloo men. My cousin wants something better than that. I told him about you when we met during the summer. He is an unrepentant Bonapartist and often asks after you.”

  The man in the window-seat got up and moved towards the fire. His height sometimes surprised strangers. When sitting down he appeared quite short. He carried himself loosely, as though to brace himself would have made his bones ache. His hair was thin and grey and he looked miserably under-nourished, although Pavart knew that Madame Friant fed him well enough. He came and stood on the worn hearthrug, looking down on the priest.

  “I don’t know why I ever told you anything,” he said. “It wasn’t because you were a priest. Priests were never of much account in the old days. We didn’t see one from one campaign to another. I’m not in the habit of talking about the past. My wife and I made a pact the night of Waterloo.”

  “What sort of pact?”

  “A pact to forget the past. It was our only chance.”

  The veteran pushed forward his maimed hand and with his left hand pulled out the grotesquely curled fingers and let them clench again. Pavart had seen him do this before. The habit fascinated him.

  The priest let his imagination wander to Paris for a moment. He saw the silent throng lining the snow-covered streets to watch the funeral procession move towards the fantastic tomb they had prepared at the Invalides. He heard the slow, mournful strains of the bands, the shuffle of the plumed horses that pulled the funeral carriage, the creak of the carriage wheels along the precise lines of the procession. He had never seen Napoleon and he wished, with all his heart, to be in Paris at this moment. He looked at the veteran with a new interest. It gave him a pleasant shock to realize that the gaunt, nondescript man standing on the hearthrug had marched with the Emperor across the Danube plains and through the icy pine forests from Moscow to the Niemen. Great names, already part of a great legend, were as familiar to this man as the names of Peltier, the postillion, and François, the ostler, were to the priest. It had all happened more than a quarter-century ago when the half-crippled man before him was in the prime of his life. A greedy curiosity took possession of Pavart. He had mounted the stairs to make a request on behalf of his editor cousin, whom he greatly admired; he determined now
that the request should be made a demand.

  “I should like you to listen to me carefully for a few moments,” he said.

  The veteran grunted and sat down on the rush-covered chair opposite, reaching for his pipe, a long, old-fashioned clay with a discoloured bowl. Pavart knew him for a heavy smoker.

  The priest leaned forward, speaking earnestly.

  “The First Empire is already a legend,” he began. “It does not matter whether your memories are painful or pleasurable. Nothing can alter the attitude of the average Frenchman today or that of succeeding generations tomorrow, to the man who made that Empire and sustained it for nearly twenty years. People who were in exile like me, or those that were born after he went away, cannot be expected to measure the good or the evil of his influence on our country or on Europe. History a century hence may decide upon that, or again it may never arrive at a conclusion. What is important is that we Frenchmen build up truthful records from the testimony of men such as you. Whether you regard Napoleon as a living force or as a fiend now in his master’s keeping is incidental. The fact remains that he and his generation belong to us, to France. New dynasties, new invasions, new theories, cannot influence that fact, much less alter it. It is for men like you to tell us what you yourselves know of those years. History is only important if, by surveying it, we are able to account for the past and shape the future. If you have suffered in the past, as I presume you have, then it is your duty as a Frenchman—”

  Father Pavart broke off and coughed, feeling suddenly embarrassed. The man opposite was still looking towards him, but his melancholy eyes were quite vacant. Pavart knew that he was no longer listening to a word of the lecture. His unlighted pipe was still clutched in his sound hand.

  The priest stood up and shook out the folds of his cloak. He felt slightly piqued.

  “I’ll call in again tomorrow,” he said, and quietly left the room.

  The veteran sat motionless in the uncomfortable chair until the fire had burned down to a dull glow, almost smothered in grey ash. Outside it began to snow again and large flakes cushioned themselves against the window-panes. He got up and stirred the fire, tossing on some more billets and ramming them down with his foot. Then he crossed over to his bed and, stooping, dragged a hair trunk from beneath it; throwing back the battered lid, he groped in the interior for some large cloth-bound manuscript books that lay submerged among the jumble of creased clothes and papers.