Corporal Sam and Other Stories. Arthur Quiller-Couch
a third of his men followed him, Captain Archimbeau led the supporters up the breach; but by this time the enemy had packed the ramparts on either side. No soldiery could stand the hail of musketry, grape, and hand-grenades that rained upon the head of the column. It hesitated, pushed forward again, and broke some fifteen feet from the summit, like a spent wave. Then, as the Royals came pouring back, Lieutenant Campbell of the 9th, with all that could be collected of his picked detachment, forced his way up through the sheer weight of them, won clear, and made a fling for the crest. In vain! His first rush carried him abreast of the masonry under which Sergeant Wilkes and the corporal clung for cover. They rushed out to join him; but they had scarcely gained his side before the whole detachment began to give ground. It was not that the men fell back; rather, the apex of the column withered down as man after man dropped beside its leader. He himself had taken a wound. Yet he waved his sword and carried them forward on a second charge, only to reach where he had reached before, and be laid there by a second bullet.
Meanwhile the Royals, driven to the foot of the slope, were flung as a fresh obstacle in the path of the 38th still striving to press on for the lesser breach. From his perch half-way up the ruins, Sergeant Wilkes descried Captain Archimbeau endeavouring to rally them, and climbed down to help him. The corporal followed, nursing his wounded hand. As they reached him a bugle sounded the recall.
The assault had failed. At the foot of the breach a soldier of the 4th Regiment, mad with rage, foamed out a curse upon the Royals. Corporal Sam lifted his bleeding fist and struck him across the mouth. The sergeant dragged the two apart, slipped an arm under his comrade's, and led him away as one leads a child. A moment later the surge of the retreating crowd had almost carried them off their feet. But the sergeant kept a tight hold, and steered his friend back every yard of the way along the bullet-swept foreshore. They were less than half-way across when the dawn broke; and looking in his face he saw that the lad was crying silently—the powder-grime on his cheeks streaked and channelled with tears.
CHAPTER III.
'I don't understand ye, lad,' said Sergeant Wilkes.
'Fast enough you'd understand, if you'd but look me in the face,' answered Corporal Sam, digging his heel into the sand.
The two men lay supine on a cushion of coarse grass; the sergeant smoking and staring up at the sky, the corporal, with his sound hand clasping his wounded one behind his head, his gaze fixed gloomily between his knees and across the dunes, on the still unrepaired breach in San Sebastian.
A whole fortnight had dragged by since the assault: a fortnight of idleness for the troops, embittered almost intolerably by a sense that the Fifth Division had disgraced itself. One regiment blamed another, and all conspired to curse the artillery—whose practice, by the way, had been brilliant throughout the siege. Nor did the gunners fail to retort; but they were in luckier case, being kept busy all the while, first in shifting their batteries and removing their worst guns to the ships, next in hauling and placing the new train that arrived piecemeal from England; and not only busy, but alert, on the watch against sorties. Also, and although the error of cannonading the columns of assault had never been cleared up, the brunt of Wellington's displeasure had fallen on the stormers. The Marquis ever laid stress on his infantry, whether to use them or blame them; and when he found occasion to blame, he had words—and methods—that scarified equally the general of division and the private soldier.
'Fast enough you understand,' repeated Corporal Sam savagely.
'I do, then, and I don't,' admitted Sergeant Wilkes, after a pause. The lad puzzled him; gave him few confidences, asked for none at all, and certainly was no cheerful companion; and yet during these days of humiliation the two had become friends, almost inseparable. 'I've read it,' the sergeant pursued, 'in Scripture or somewhere, that a man what keeps a hold on himself does better than if he took a city. I don't say as I understand that altogether; but it sounds right.'
'Plucky lot of cities we take, in the Royals,' growled Corporal Sam.
He nodded, as well as his posture allowed, towards San Sebastian.
'And you call that a third-class fortress!'
'Accidents will happen.' Sergeant Wilkes, puffing at his pipe, fell back philosophically on his old catchword. 'It takes you hard, because you're young; and it takes you harder because you had fed yourself up on dreams o' glory, and such-like.'
'Well?'
'Well, and you have to get over it, that's all. A man can't properly call himself a soldier till he's learnt to get over it.'
'If that's all, the battalion is qualifyin' fast!' Corporal Sam retorted bitterly, and sat up, blinking in the strong sunlight. Then, as Sergeant Wilkes made no reply, or perhaps because he guessed something in Sergeant Wilkes's averted face, a sudden compunction seized him. 'You feel it too?'
'I got to, after all my trouble,' answered Sergeant Wilkes brusquely.
'I'm sorry. Look here—I wish you'd turn your face about—it's worse for you and yet you get over it, as you say. How the devil do you manage?'
Still for a while Sergeant Wilkes leaned back without making reply. But of a sudden he, too, sat upright, drew down the peak of his shako to shade his eyes, and drawing his pipe from his mouth, jerked the stem of it to indicate a figure slowly crossing a rise of the sandhills between them and the estuary.
'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 assault—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 pass 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.