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Much of the corn, as has been already mentioned, had to be hidden on the hillside-some even was only poured into a silo near the barn and the mouth of the pit covered with rubbish. The forty-eight hours which opened with the battle with the dragoons and concluded with the battle with the infantry had been busy enough.
Since the last skirmish there had been peace. Dodd, with Bernardino chuckling delightedly at his side, had lain out on the hill and seen the elaborate attack launched on the other hill- the one they had evacuated. He had counted the force left in the village, and had decided that it was ten times at least too large for him to risk an attack upon it in the absence of the main body. He had seen two graves dug and two men buried in them- one had been little Godron, whom he himself had wounded the night before, although he did not know that. He could easily have lobbed a shot or two at long range among the groups moving among the cottages, but he refrained. There were valuable sheep and cows on the hill behind him, and he did not want to offer any temptation to the French to come up this way and find them.
As they made their way back to the river something on the distant bank caught Dodd's attention-it looked like a long row of glittering beads on an invisible thread. He looked again-the distance was well over half a mile and details were obscure. But his first guess had been correct. The glittering beads were the helmets of a long line of horsemen trotting along the road along the farther bank. It was a long distance to ascertain their nationality. Dodd gazed and gazed, and was still not sure.
'Portugezes,' said Bernardino briefly, looking at them under his hand. Bernardino's eyesight was perfectly marvellous-even better than Dodd's-and Dodd was content to take his word for it. He thought he could see high crests to the helmets, and was inclined to agree with him.
So the farther bank was occupied and would be defended against the French should the latter by some miracle find means of crossing the roaring half-mile flood. Dodd nodded his head in solid approval of my Lord of Wellington's arrangements. Could he himself cross over he would find himself among friends who would pass him back to Lisbon and the regiment. But there was no way in which he could cross. There seemed to be no boats at all- that was one matter in which Wellington's order had been obeyed- and Dodd could not swim a stroke. He could only look longingly at the Portuguese dragoons trotting along the opposite bank and turn once more to his present duty of keeping himself out of the hands of the French.
Chapter XI
THE fourth battalion of the Forty Sixth Infanterie de Ligne had time now to look about itself-for the first time, be it said, since it was formed. Until recently a French infantry regiment had consisted of three battalions, but when the war with Austria was over and the war in Spain was rising to a climax the masses of eighteen-year-old recruits- harvest of two successive anticipated conscriptions- which cluttered the depots had been swept together into battalions which had arbitrarily been labelled as belonging to regiments already serving in Spain and packed off as reinforcements for the great offensive to be launched against Wellington.
Unmilitary bodies they were: some hundreds of untrained boys, a dozen officers scraped up from here and from there, a few sergeants from the depot. What little they knew about soldiering had been acquired in the long, long march from France to Portugal, during skirmishes with Spanish guerillas and Portuguese irregulars and British outposts. At the one pitched battle, Busaco, this unhappy Eighth Corps had been kept discreetly in the background while Ney had led the veterans of the other Corps to red ruin against the British line.
They had never known as yet the kindly sensation of being included in a regiment, a properly constituted regiment with staff and transport and efficient officers. The half-dozen pack-mules they had been allotted had broken down months ago on the heartbreaking mountain roads of Spain. Even the battalion papers and accounts-those masses of notes so dear to the French official mind- had vanished. Even the cantiniere which every self-respecting French unit could boast had deserted them. She had gone off to some other unit which was more experienced and could be relied upon to steal a mule for her when necessary and protect it- and her dubious virtue- from the assaults of hostile irregulars. The fourth battalion of the Forty Sixth owned nothing, literally nothing, which had not been carried into Portugal on the backs of its aged officers or its eighteen- year-old privates. Since leaving France it had depended for its food on what it could glean from a harried countryside, and it had cooked it by the light of nature supplemented by the instruction of its half-dozen overworked sergeants. Small wonder, therefore, that of eight hundred men who had entered Spain only six hundred had entered Portugal and only five hundred had lived to assemble in the little village.
The colonel roused himself from his contemplative languor long enough to issue orders for the village and the fields to be swept clear of food which was to constitute a regimental reserve- even his lack-lustre eyes had brightened at the words 'regimental reserve,' because the battalion had never owned a reserve of food apart from the bundles of 'cash' which dangled from the men's belts. And yet when it was all brought in and the men had lived on it for a couple of days little enough remained. Five hundred starving men can eat all that is to be found in a little village when the villagers have had time to make their escape. There was a little heap of potatoes, and a sack or two of corn scraped from the corners of the barn, and that was all. In a couple of days' time the battalion would be back again in its normal state of semi-starvation, unless, miraculously, the headquarters which seemed to care so little should do something about it.
The colonel roused himself again. Twice he sent out a company across the high road, and each time by good luck they came back with food. Once they caught a little girl herding sheep, and took all her flock and left her weeping. An older regiment would have given her, young as she was, something more to weep over. Once they found a solitary farm, deserted, and found much corn and maize there, so that the whole foraging party was not merely able to load itself but also filled a cart with the food which they dragged back by hand to the village. But all this only managed to stave off starvation for a day or two. Five hundred men eat an enormous bulk of food every day. Even twenty sheep do not go very far among five hundred men. And they loathed the corn ration. The mill beyond the road had been burnt, and the men could only pound their corn between two rocks and then boil the product into a sort of porridge which revolted the stomach after the fifth meal.
And when it came round to the turn of Sergeant Godinot's company to go out foraging beyond the high road there was an unpleasant surprise awaiting them. They encountered a column of troops before they had marched five miles- French troops, hard-bitten veterans of Reynier's Second Corps. The officer in command of the newcomers halted his men and rode up to the company. The men heard every word of the dialogue between him and the captain.
'What are you doing here? Foraging?'
'Yes,' said the captain.
'You have no right here. The general order gave us this area for foraging.'