Bugles at Dawn Page 4

  Now that France was enemy country, with Old Boney’s beaten army retreating back to their own land, he would have to skirt her frontiers. As he saw it, the French would be withdrawing in a south-easterly direction towards Paris. Therefore he must travel north-east to the Rhenish provinces of Germany, now firmly in the possession of the Duke’s allies, the Prussians.

  Once safely there he could use the dead officer’s guineas to purchase a coach ticket round the borders of France and into Italy. There at Bari or Genoa he would take ship for Egypt. With careful management of his money he would be able to reach Madras, present himself to the Governor-General and obtain a commission with the East India Company.

  But first he must concentrate on getting out of the war zone. Bold was quite sure that the British Army was no longer interested in him — the Duke would see to that. But the French were different. He had heard what happened to a French army in defeat. Many of its soldiers broke away from the main body and became armed marauders, looting, raping and living off the land. In the end they turned into highwaymen and downright cut-throats.

  There might be hundreds of such stragglers attempting to live in the woods which stretched for miles in this part of the country. If he were to survive, it would be by his wits and a strong right arm. The average French deserter would not hesitate to slay him for the sake of his horse alone. Unconsciously he touched the two light cavalry pistols, taken from a dead hussar, which now lay concealed in the furled horse blanket. A gentleman might display his sword without being taken for a soldier. But twin pistols would mark him as such. As it grew dark, the feel of their hidden strength gave him a sense of security. Their double barrels presented him with considerable fire power.

  As his mount toiled up the steep height which led to the small township of Bande, Bold saw the dark heights beyond which marked the border between the Prussian Rhineland and the Dutch province of Belgium. On both sides thick pine forests marched up to the tops of the hills like spike-helmeted Prussian grenadiers. No smoke came from the chimneys of the dirty-white stone cottages he glimpsed now and again by the narrow road and it was as if he rode through a land which had gone to sleep.

  He shivered slightly and felt the hairs at the back of his head rise. With a grunt he pulled the Duke’s cloak tightly about his broad shoulders and resisted the temptation to look behind. He told himself he was behaving like a damned coward. Everything was quiet because the locals had already settled down for the night. In this part of the world, just as in Ireland, the peasants probably went to sleep with the chickens — thrifty good country folk who would not waste coin on tapers or candles. He rode on into the night shadows. There was no sound save that of his horse’s hooves and its periodic snorts and head tossings.

  Bold bit his lip with apprehension. His mount was too frisky, and he had to tug at the bit and give its flanks the spurs to keep it under control. Tired as the horse was, it sensed something that he couldn’t. It was not just his imagination!

  Carefully he looked left and right, where the trees were tightly packed right up to the heights. There was no way out there. He was confined, by the fact that he was mounted, to the narrow road.

  Making a decision, he took the reins in his teeth and felt under the horse blanket with both hands for the comforting hardness of the cavalry pistols. Not taking his eyes off the darkening road for one instant, he cocked the pistols. Even muffled by the blanket, they made such a noise that he started.

  ‘Damn fool!’ he cursed himself softly.

  Although he had been expecting something, it came as a shock when the first rider emerged from the trees to the right, perhaps a hundred yards away, and urged his horse up the grass embankment on to the road. There he paused and stared in Bold’s direction.

  A sickle moon had risen, and in its cold spectral light he could see the man, burly, wrapped in a rider’s cloak and wearing what, for a moment at least, looked like a mask hiding his lower face. Then Bold recognized it: a moustache which had been set in hot tar to make a great splay of hair and give the face a frightening martial air. And the startled young man knew who affected to wear their moustachios in this fashion: the dragoons of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. The man waiting silently for him, posted motionless like a black ghost, was a French cavalryman!

  Bold reined his horse to a slow walk. They had been riding since dawn. The beast was very tired. But he hoped it would react to any demand for speed he might make on it.

  Slowly the distance narrowed. The only sound was the muted clip-clop of his horse’s hooves on the silver cobbles and the occasional shiver of the other man’s horse as it tossed its mane with apprehension. The blood coursed through his veins hotly. The hands which clutched the pistols were wet. His heart raced. He knew the symptoms, a combination of fear, tension and the urgent desire for violent action, anything which would break the heavy spell.

  Now they were separated by about fifty yards. He was still out of accurate pistol range, and was not going to reveal his weapons until he was sure of hitting the stranger, waiting for him there motionlessly, menacingly.

  There was a rustle of bushes to the other side of the road, followed by the snort of a horse taking the steep rise. Bold cursed under his breath. There was no mistaking the drawn sabre of the second rider, gleaming a cold deadly silver in the moonlight. He tightened his grip on the twin pistols. It wouldn’t be long now. He rode on, his imagination racing as he tried to outthink the two of them.

  ‘Allez vite ... à l’attaque! ... allez, mer gars!’ The sudden command from within the bushes to the right cut into Bold’s consciousness like a savage stab.

  The two dragoons didn’t hesitate. They dug their spurs into their mounts as one. The heavy horses started forward. Waving their sabres they came straight at John Bold, yelling crazily in the French fashion.

  Now he felt icy calm, in total control, just as he had been when the Imperial Guard had attacked at Waterloo in what now seemed another age. All decisions had been made for him. Now he must kill or die. He tugged the first pistol from underneath the blanket, reigning in his mount with a sharp tug from his teeth. Next moment he dug his knees in hard at the shivering horse. Everything now depended upon it remaining still. He dare not miss, for he would have no time to draw his sword.

  Forty yards ... thirty yards ... The dragoons were galloping full out now and he could see them perfectly clear: the frightening moustaches, the gleam on their helmets, the flying dyed plumes — and those lethal sabres swishing the air to left and right, as if they were already lopping off heads.

  Twenty-five yards away! He could wait no longer. He pulled the trigger in his right hand. The pistol bucked violently and he felt the peppery sting of the exploding powder in his face.

  The dragoon on the right was hit right in the chest. He flung up his hands. His sabre clattered to the cobbles. He screamed like a woman in childbirth. Next moment he had been swept from the saddle. His horse fled by Bold at a tremendous rate.

  He fired again. A sheet of angry purple flame and smoke obscured his vision for a moment, then he blinked his eyes free. He had missed! The second dragoon was still coming at him, sabre upraised, ready for the kill. He tensed his body for the killing blow, fumbling hopelessly with the other pistol, knowing that it was too late.

  Nothing happened. In the very last moment, as he jerked his own trembling, terrified mount to one side, the other man thundered by and Bold saw that the whole right side of his face was gone, leaving a scarlet, dripping mass beneath the brass helmet. Within seconds the crazed horse, its dead rider held in the saddle by some weird trick, had disappeared.

  For what seemed an age, though it might have been only a minute, John Bold slumped in his saddle, breathing hard, while his horse pawed the road impatiently. It wanted to be off, despite its weariness; it did not like the smell of the dead man.

  Suddenly Bold remembered the voice which had ordered the attack. He drew his sword and searched the darkness tensely. But there was no one. Sheathing his sword
and keeping one loaded pistol in his hand — just in case — he rode the rest of the way to the township of Bande, his mind full of the strange attack.

  Why should deserters from the French Army be hanging around on a lonely forest road at this time of night? What kind of pickings could they expect there? Peasants did not travel at night, and in these war-torn times, neither did merchants and the like — if they were sensible and wanted to keep their money. Or had that deadly little ambush been arranged specifically for him?

  It was only an hour later when he was safely seated near the great roaring open fire of the Lion d’Or, drinking a welcome tankard of mulled ale and waiting for food, that it struck him. The man who had cried from the dark forest ‘go on, quick — attack!’ had given the orders in French with a cockney accent ...

  FIVE

  Aix-la-Chapelle, or Aachen, as the Germans called it, just over the Dutch border with the Prussian Rhineland, was in a state of complete confusion. For the last twenty years the old city, founded by the Romans, where once German emperors had been crowned, had been under French occupation. Not that most of the locals thought of it as an occupation. For the French had brought with them freedom from the yoke of the Catholic Church and the feudal landowners who had treated their humble, meek peasants little better than serfs.

  But now the Prussians had taken over. Although they spoke the same language as the citizens of the border city the victorious Prussians from the north were as foreign as the French; and now they were behaving like an occupation army. Everywhere, as John reined his horse to a walk, there were burly Prussian grenadiers in the narrow alleys and streets around the cathedral, using their long bayonets to rip down French street signs, pulling down the hated tricolour and trampling it underfoot, and plundering any of the little shops still foolish enough to display signs in French.

  The locals watched in fearful silence. The citizens in their shabby coats and worn beaver hats and the country folk in white smocks and gaiters knew that the Prussians suspected them of having worked hand in glove with the French and having served in Napoleon’s armies, which in truth a lot of the younger ones had. Now they realized the Prussians were going to make them pay for their real or suspected treachery. It would be 1792 once more when the ragged drunken revolutionary army of the new Republic of France had come swarming across the border like locusts. For a while they were going to have to suffer.

  But it was no concern of his. He must find food and lodging for the night. Then on the morrow he would sell his horse and discover how the coach ran to far-off Bavaria in the south, where he would cross the border into Italy.

  He penetrated deeper into the streets huddled against the great Romanesque cathedral, their houses leaning against its massive walls as if in need of protection. Barefoot urchins ran errands. Men hawked stone pots from carts pulled by dogs. A knife-grinder was busy at his wheel, watched by a crowd of gawping yokels. Housewives gossiped as they carried buckets of water from the street wells on yokes. A few raddled whores leaned from upper windows, their hair unkempt under dirty lace caps, breasts bulging from filthy fichus. It could have been any big city, yet to John there was an underlying tension about the scene.

  Suddenly the succulent odour of roasting meat assailed his nostrils. He stopped and felt his lips begin to water. For the last three months since the campaign in the Low Countries against Napoleon had commenced he had been living off ‘choke-dog’ hardtack, and the usual British soldier’s rations of oatmeal and peas. Even in Bande the fare had been poor, a thick porridge garnished with slabs of salt bacon. Now the thought of a real roast and what went with it made his stomach rumble in anticipation.

  He paused in front of the establishment from which the smell was coming. It was not an ordinary alehouse but a real coaching inn, with the bugle-horn of the post engraved on its facade above the sign which announced this was the Gasthaus zur Alten Post — the Old Post Tavern. He nodded his approval. Such places, in contrast to the rough and ready alehouses where one slept in the barn or on the rough benches after the other customers had departed, would be expensive. But he felt he deserved the luxury. Besides, here he might not only dine and sleep, but also find out about the coaches.

  Half an hour later, his horse stabled and fed, his few bits of baggage stowed away by the ostler’s assistant in a low-ceilinged room dominated by a double bed with a stuffed goose-feather coverlet, he sat expectantly in the dining room. At his side was the huge green-tiled Kachelofen which reached to the ceiling, adding its heat to the open fire at the other end of the room, where a cook in a dirty apron tended the roast on his spit and constantly stirred various copper pots and kettles.

  ‘Guten Abend, junger Herr.’ With a curtsey the serving wench, a pretty young thing with flaxen hair in a braid around her head, said, ‘And what are the young gentleman’s wishes?’

  John grinned roguishly. She was a ripe young pigeon and he knew what some of his fellow officers back in the Fifty-second Foot would have answered. Speaking slowly in the Lorraine patois he had learned at his mother’s knee, he said, ‘Some of that roast, Jungfrau, and what goes with it ... and, yes, some bread and ale.’ Again she bobbed a curtsey, giving him a flash of her pretty blue eyes, and he told himself that title of ‘Jungfrau’ — maiden — was merely a courtesy. With her figure and the kind of look she had just given him, he doubted if she would have preserved her virginity long in a place like this.

  Five minutes later she was back with a wooden platter, piled high with slices of the sour roast — beef marinated in herbs and vinegar — plus sauerkraut and the steaming small dumplings of the area, filled with chopped liver.

  From the zinc-covered bar, already awash with beer suds, she watched him enjoying his food. What an attractive young man he was, she told herself, despite the fact he was a foreigner ...

  It was when she brought the Kompott, a mixture of currants and dried apricots covered with a thick layer of cream, that he discovered the reason for the stifling heat. Although Aachen lay high above sea level and was usually subjected to cold northern breezes, it was June and what landlord would waste money on heat at this time of year?

  ‘It’s yon blackamoors,’ the girl whispered as she answered his question. ‘There in the separée.’ She nodded to the almost closed-off wooden alcove in the corner. ‘They say in Africa they run around naked.’ She giggled suddenly and covered her mouth, as if she had said something shameful. ‘They need the heat. That is why the landlord has fired the oven so. I ’spect they pay him well.’

  Replete with good food, he looked casually at the separée. Her ‘Blackamoors’ were undoubtedly Indians of some sort, for above the partition he could see the silken domes of turbans and the gleam of what he took to be pearls, holding them in place; while beneath there were curved sandals of expensive leather, worked in intricate designs. He grinned to himself. The serving wench probably had never heard of India.

  Idly as he picked at his Kompott, knowing that he had eaten too much already, he wondered what these rich Indians were doing in this remote German city. Once as a boy he had gone to London with his father and had seen a group of them with some rich nabobs, just returned from making their fortune with the East India Company, all of them wrapped in silks and expensive furs. How alien they had looked: all dark flashing eyes, hooked noses and sensual, rapacious mouths. They seemed to him to belong to a civilization, if that was the word for it, which was totally remote and foreign.

  The trouble in the inn started some half an hour later jut as he was about to finish his ale. The place had filled up, mostly with civilians, drinking the potent local apple wine, but there was a handful of Prussian light infantrymen in green uniforms with dark facings, who were soon flushed with beer and schnapps. There were five of them, lean tall young fellows with short blond hair and extravagant moustaches, waxed and turned upwards in the French fashion. Five insecure young men, wishing to attract attention to themselves and doing it in the only way they knew how. By being loud and unpleasant. />
  It began with the serving wenches. It was the usual business. The hands grabbing and pinching, the arms encircling their waists, trying to force the sweating, red-faced girls on to their laps, the lips sucking the backs of their hands with a loud smacking noise like an obscene kiss. John had seen it all before: British soldiers were no different.

  But he felt sorry for the wench who had served him. The older ones were used to that sort of thing and were quick to escape, shrugging off the infantrymen’s crude advances with a bold look and a contemptuous comment. But she was obviously new, and her plump cheeks grew progressively redder every time she was subjected to their crude advances.

  One of the Prussians, the tallest of them, a surly-looking fellow with hard eyes, roused Bold’s ire, though he told himself the plight of an anonymous girl meant nothing to him. He teased the flushed girl with importunings and finally when she bent low to place a tray heavy with beer steins on the table, he thrust a big paw into her fichu and grasped one of her breasts, forced upwards by the tight embroidered waister, and seizing the nipple between his lips pressed his teeth cruelly into the red-tipped flesh.

  The civilians gasped. The cook dropped his ladle into the big pot. At the bar, the landlord clenched his fists with impotent rage. The girl dragged herself free, her face suddenly white with shock. Abruptly a heavy silence fell upon the crowded room as she started to sob softly, and cover her blue-veined breast.

  The Prussian with the dangerous blue eyes looked around the room calmly, seeming to savour the sudden stillness. Slowly he drew his bayonet from the scabbard at his side and challengingly placed the naked blade on the table in front of him.

  Bold knew he was a fool to interfere. He was a foreigner in a strange country and Marshal Bluecher’s Prussians were hard ruthless men. Why make it his cause? But he felt that black Irish temper which had impelled him to strike the cowardly Guards captain on the field of Waterloo, rising once more. As he pushed back his chair it made a loud scraping sound and all eyes turned on him. The shamed wench raised her tearstained face in some kind of warning. But John had no eyes for her. His gaze was fixed on the Prussian.