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They found no sentry at the summit of the path, even though Dodd had purposely chosen a path which led towards a point where a sentry ought to have been found.
Dodd clicked his tongue with a
And then both he and Bernardino caught sight of something which made them halt abruptly where they stood, and look, and look again, not understanding what they saw.
There was a little level stretch of ground here, where the rocks were more naked than usual, and the bushes lower, but at the farther side of it a thorn tree maintained a precarious existence. The branches of the thorn tree grew downwards a little, so as partly to screen whatever was underneath them. Through this screen they could faintly see two men leaning against the trunk in attitudes of strange abandon. One was bent oddly forward with his arms hanging queerly limp, the other was lolling back in a ma
It was all very mysterious and eerie. Dodd cocked his rifle as he picked his way over the rocks towards the tree.
It was not until he was close to it that he could see the details. The two men had been nailed to the tree with bayonets - their own, presumably, as their scabbaards were empty- although it was apparent that whoever was responsible had been merciful enough to shoot them afterwards. Dodd looked at the dead faces. He knew them, despite the distortion of the features. They were two Portuguese, two of the men who had helped him defend the hill. One of them was Pedro who had cut the wounded Frenchman's throat after the ambushing. Bernardino at Dodd's elbow was pouring forth prayers and oaths intermingled. The stunted man, as ever, said nothing. To him this was only two more corpses in a land where death took his hundreds daily. Dodd, in the end, forced himself to take the same view of it, although the sight had strangely u
He turned away and resumed his journey over the hill. Bit by bit the whole tragedy revealed itself. The hill had been stormed during their absence. Another dead man, one of the garrison, lay in the path down to the river. Old Maria lay dead at the mouth of the cave beyond the secret ford. It was possible to guess a little of what had happened to her before she died.
But it was not possible for Dodd to guess all the details. He could not guess, , and he never would know, that the colonel of the battalion in the village had at last brought himself to confess his own weakness and had borrowed the services of two battalions of Ney's Sixth Corps to aid him clear the mountain of the brigands who plagued him there.
Dodd never knew of the onslaught of these terrible men who had marched by night to launch a surprise at dawn. He never knew, fortunately perhaps, of the torture which was applied to one of the captives to make him reveal the secret of the ford, nor of what the brutes did to Agostina and the little girls. But it became clear enough in the course of the day that the mountain was deserted and empty. The men and the boys were dead. The women- save old Maria- and the girls were missing. Thirteen hundred men, attacking concentrically from all round, had swept the place bare, and left no living thing upon it. Nor could Ney's men be really blamed for what they had done to their prisoners. They had carried on a nightmare war in Spain and Portugal for three endless years now. Often had they seen what the enemy did to their friends. The men they had captured had been taken with arms in their hands and without uniforms, and so deserved to die. The women were as bad as the men, and anyway soldiers needed relaxation during three years' campaigning. And if the poor fools had only sense enough to submit to the all powerful emperor the women would not be interfered with quite so violently.
All food, of course, had been taken away. Dodd found consolation in the thought that what would make thirty days' food for twenty people would only make one day's food for five hundred, and actually, although he did not know it, thirteen hundred men had shared it- barely more than a mouthful apiece. To Dodd and Bernardino the hill seemed accursed. They remembered the jolly people with whom they had lived there so long, people who had faced death at their sides over and over again. Dodd was too serious-minded a man to be able to smile- as many soldiers would- over the fact the mere coincidence that he should have decided at that moment to go and see why the guns were firing at Santarem should have preserved his life when the others died.
Dodd would allow nothing to be done, all the same, to alter the things on the hill. The two dead men remained nailed to their tree to rot, Maria still lay in her dreadful attitude at the mouth of the cave. There was too much chance that anything he might do in the matter would disclose to any fresh exploring party from the village that there were still some survivors on the hill.
Chapter XVII
SERGEANT GODINOT came to find that, despite the desperately hard work demanded of him and his men, life in Santarem was far more to his liking than life with the battalion in the village. The very work was a blessing; they were at least doing something instead of rotting in their billets while the eternal rain drummed on the roofs, and the hard-bitten veterans of the Second and Sixth Corps were far better working partners than the helpless disease-ridden recruits of his own battalion- except for Dubois, of course, who was his boyhood's friend. They got the town mill working soon, and the town ovens, so that the men could have bread to eat instead of the pestilent corn porridge. With the lightheartedness of the best type of French soldier they soon organized among themselves a town band which gave concerts whenever work permitted. The officers walked about the streets with women on their arms, which made the place very homely, even though some of the women wore men's uniforms and none of them as they flaunted through the town could possibly be mistaken for other than what they were.
There were other women in the town, too, women who avoided men's eyes and slunk along by the walls, women who wept and women who sometimes killed themselves, women whom Ney's godless veterans of the Sixth Corps had caught in their foraging expeditions inland.
The bridge made rapid progress towards completion, thanks to old General Eble. He was everywhere at once, urging and commanding and inspecting. There was always a flurry and a speeding up whenever he appeared, whether it was in the forges where men laboured to make steel saws and adzes out of wrought-iron balcony rails, or in the nail recovery workshop where men laboriously straightened and repointed nails, or in the row of houses which men were feverishly pulling down for the sake of their timber, or in the paint works, or in the boat-building shed where Godinot spent most of his time, or in the rope works where men were trying to perform miracles.
Perhaps the most popular employment was the house- breaking- literally housebreaking- because the old houses which were being pulled down were infested with rats which could often be caught in the course of the work. A roasted rat made a splendid addition to one's daily ration during the frequent weeks when no meat was issued. Men who had been lucky in the matter of loot earlier in the campaign were known to pay as much as a silver dollar for a fat rat, although it was hard to find sellers here where there was nothing for money to buy and no apparent prospect of ever reaching home.