Стрелок Додд

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.

Chapter VIII

'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 ma

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 ca

'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 i