Corporal Sam and Other Stories Part 2

'You see that man?'

'To be sure I do. An officer, and in the R.A.--curse them!--though I can't call to mind the cut of his jib.'

'You wouldn't. His name's Ramsay, and he's just out of arrest.'

'What has he done?'

'A many things, first and last. At Fuentes d'Onoro the whole French cavalry cut him off--him and his battery--and he charged back clean through them; ay, lad, through 'em like a swathe, with his horses belly-down and the guns behind 'em bounding like skipjacks; not a gun taken, and scarce a gunner hurt. That's the sort of man.'

'Why has he been under arrest?'

'Because the Marquis gave him an order and forgot it. And because coming up later, expecting to find him where he wasn't and had no right to be, the Marquis lost his temper. And likewise, because, when a great man loses his temper, right or wrong don't matter much.

So there goes Captain Ramsay broken; a gentleman and a born fighter; and a captain he'll die. That's how the mills grind in this here all-conquering army. And the likes of us sit here and complain.'

'If a man did that wrong to me--' Corporal Sam jumped to his feet and stared after the slight figure moving alone across the sandhills.

Had his curiosity led him but a few paces farther, he had seen a strange sight indeed.

Captain Norman Ramsay, wandering alone and with a burning heart, halted suddenly on the edge of a sand-pit. Below him four men stood, gathered in a knot--two of them artillery officers, the others officers of the line. His first impulse was to turn and escape, for he shunned all companionship just now. But a second glance told him what was happening; and, prompt on the understanding, he plunged straight down the sandy bank, walked up to a young artillery officer and took the pistol out of his hand. That was all, and it all happened in less than three minutes. The would-be duellist--and challenges had been common since the late a.s.sault--knew the man and his story. For that matter, every one in the army knew his story.

As a ghost he awed them. For a moment he stood looking from one to the other, and so, drawing the charge, tossed the pistol back at its owner's feet and resumed his way.

Corporal Sam, who had merely seen the slight figure pa.s.s beyond the edge of the dunes, went back and flung himself again on the warm bank.

'If a man did that wrong to me--' he repeated.

CHAPTER IV.

Certainly, just or unjust, the Marquis could make himself infernally unpleasant. Having ridden over from head-quarters and settled the plans for the new a.s.sault, he returned to his main army and there demanded fifty volunteers from each of the fifteen regiments composing the First, Fourth, and Light Divisions--men (as he put it) _who could show other troops how to mount a breach_. It may be guessed with what stomach the Fifth Division digested this; and among them not a man was angrier than their old general, Leith, who now, after a luckless absence, resumed command. The Fifth Division, he swore, could hold their own with any soldiers in the Peninsula.

He was furious with the seven hundred and fifty volunteers, and, evading the Marquis's order, which was implicit rather than direct, he added an oath that these interlopers should never lead his men to the breaches.

Rage begets rage. During the misty morning hours of August 31st, the day fixed for the a.s.sault, these volunteers, held back and chafing with the reserves, could scarcely be restrained from breaking out of the trenches. 'Why,' they demanded, 'had they been fetched here if not to show the way?'--a question for which their officers were in no mood to provide a soft answer.

Yet their turn came. Sergeant Wilkes, that amateur in siege-operations, had rightly prophesied from the first that the waste of life at the breaches would be wicked and useless until the hornwork had been silenced and some lodgment made there. So as the morning wore on, and the sea-mists gave place to burning sunshine, and this again to heavy thunder-clouds collected by the unceasing cannonade, still more and more of the reserves of the Fifth Division were pushed up, until none but the volunteers and a handful of the 9th Regiment remained in the trenches. Them, too, at length Leith was forced to unleash, and they swept forward on the breaches yelling like a pack of hounds; but on the crest-line they fared at first no better than the regiments they had taunted. Thrice and four times they reached it only to topple back. The general, watching the fight from the batteries across the Urumea, now directed the gunners to fire over the stormers' heads; and again a cry went up that our men were being slaughtered by their own artillery. Undismayed by this, with no recollections of the first a.s.sault to daunt them, a company of the Light Division took advantage of the fire to force their way over the rampart on the right of the great breach and seize a lodgment in some ruined houses actually within the town. There for an hour or so these brave men were cut off, for the a.s.sault in general made no headway.

It must have failed, even after five hours' fighting, but for an accident. A line of powder-barrels collected behind the traverses by the great breach took fire and blew up, driving back all the French grenadiers but the nearest, whom it scattered in mangled heaps.

As explosion followed explosion, the bright flame spread and ran along the high curtain. The British leapt after it, breaking through the traverse and swarming up to the curtain's summit. Almost at the same moment the Thirteenth and Twenty-fourth Portuguese, who had crossed the river by a lower ford, hurled themselves over the lesser breach to the right; and as the swollen heavens burst in a storm of rain and thunder, from this point and that the besiegers, as over the lip of a dam, swept down into the streets.

'Treat men like dogs, and they'll behave like dogs,' grumbled Sergeant Wilkes, as he followed to prevent what mischief he might.

But this, he well knew, would be little enough.

CHAPTER V.

Corporal Sam Vicary, coming up to the edge of the camp-fire's light, stood there for a moment with a white face. The cause of it--though it would have been a sufficient one--was not the story to which the men around the fire had been listening; for the teller, at sight of the corporal, had broken off abruptly, knowing him to be a religious fellow after a fashion, with a capacity for disapproval and a pair of fists to back it up. So, while his comrades guffawed, he rather cleverly changed the subject.

'Oh, and by the way, talkin' of the convent'--he meant the Convent of Santa Teresa, a high building under the very slope of the citadel, protected by its guns and still held by the enemy, after three days'

fighting--'do any of you know a small house to the left of it, with only a strip of garden between? Sort of a mud-nest it is, like a swallow's, stuck under overhang o' the cliff. No? Well, that's a pity, for I hear tell the general has promised five pounds to the first man who breaks into that house.'

'But why, at all?' inquired a man close on his right.

'I know the place,' put in another; 'a mean kind of building, with one window lookin' down the street, and that on the second floor, as you might say. It don't look to me the sort of house to hold five pounds' worth, all told--let be that, to force it, a man must cross half the fire from the convent, and in full view. Five pounds be _d.a.m.ned!_ Five pounds isn't so scarce in these times that a man need go there to fetch it for his widow.'

The corporal was turning away. For three days San Sebastian had been a h.e.l.l, between the flames of which he had seen things that sickened his soul. They sickened it yet, only in remembrance. Yes, and the sickness had more than once come nigh to be physical. His throat worked at the talk of loot, now that he knew what men did for it.

'The general ain't after the furnitcher,' answered the first speaker.

'It consarns a child.'

'A child ain't no such rarity in San Sebastian that anybody need offer five pounds for one.'

'What's this talk about a child?' asked Sergeant Wilkes, coming in from his rounds, and dropping to a seat by the blaze. He caught sight of Corporal Sam standing a little way back, and nodded.

'Well, it seems that, barring this child, every soul in the house has been killed. The place is pretty certain death to approach, and the crittur, for all that's known, has been left without food for two days and more. 'Tis a boy, I'm told--a small thing, not above four at the most. Between whiles it runs to the window and looks out.

The sentries have seen it more'n a dozen times; and one told me he'd a sight sooner look on a ghost.'

'Then why don't the Frenchies help?' some one demanded. 'There's a plenty of 'em close by, in the convent.'

'The convent don't count. There's a garden between it and the house, and on the convent side a blank wall--no windows at all, only loopholes. Besides which, there's a whole block of buildings in full blaze t'other side of the house, and the smoke of it drives across so that 'tis only between whiles you can see the child at all. The odds are, he'll be burnt alive or smothered before he starves outright; and, I reckon, put one against the other, 'twill be the mercifuller end.'

'Poor little beggar,' said the sergeant. 'But why don't the general send in a white flag, and take him off?'

'A lot the governor would believe--and after what you and me have seen these two days! A nice tenderhearted crew to tell him, "If you please, we've come for a poor little three-year-old."

Why, he'd as lief as not believe we meant to _eat_ him.'

Sergeant Wilkes glanced up across the camp-fire to the spot where Corporal Sam had been standing. But Corporal Sam had disappeared.

CHAPTER VI.

Although the hour was close upon midnight, and no moon showed, Corporal Sam needed no lantern to light him through San Sebastian; for a great part of the upper town still burned fiercely, and from time to time a sh.e.l.l, soaring aloft from the mortar batteries across the river, burst over the citadel or against the rocks where the French yet clung, and each explosion flung a glare across the heavens.

He had pa.s.sed into the town unchallenged. The fatigue parties, hunting by twos and threes among the ruins of the river-front for corpses to burn or bury, doubtless supposed him to be about the same business. At any rate, they paid him no attention.

Just within the walls, where the conflagration had burnt itself out, there were patches of black shadow to be crossed carefully.

The fighting had been obstinate here, and more than one blazing house had collapsed into the thick of it. The corporal picked his way gingerly, shivering a little at the thought of some things buried, or half-buried, among the loose stones. Indeed, at the head of the first street his foot entangled itself in something soft. It turned out to be nothing more than a man's cloak, or _poncho_, and he slipped it on, to hide his uniform and avoid explanations should he fall in with one of the patrols; but the feel of it gave him a scare for a moment.

The lad, in fact, was sick of fighting and slaughter--physically ill at the remembrance and thought of them. The rage of the a.s.sault had burnt its way through him like a fever and left him weak, giddy, queasy of stomach. He had always hated the sight of suffering, even the suffering of dumb animals: and as a sportsman, home in England, he had learnt to kill his game clean, were it beast or bird.

In thought, he had always loathed the trade of a butcher, and had certainly never guessed that soldiering could be--as here in San Sebastian he had seen it--more b.e.s.t.i.a.l than the shambles.

For some reason, as he picked his road, his mind wandered away from the reek and stink of San Sebastian and back to England, back to Somerset, to the slopes of Mendip. His home there had overlooked an ancient battle-field, and as a boy, tending the sheep on the uplands, he had conned it often and curiously, having heard the old men tell tales of it. The battle had been fought on a wide plain intersected by many water-d.y.k.es. Twice or thrice he had taken a holiday to explore it, half expecting that a close view would tell him something of its history; but, having no books to help him, he had brought back very little beyond a sense of awe that so tremendous a thing had happened just there, and (unconsciously) a stored remembrance of the scents blown across the level from the flowers that lined the d.y.k.es-- scents of mint and meadow-sweet at home there, as the hawthorn was at home on the hills above.