The Colour Of Fear, Chapter Three
Aug. 19th, 2016 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
barefoot_bardTitle: The Colour of Fear
Rating: M (Suitable for ages 16 and above)
Disclaimers: The characters Maugan and Paol Kerjean, and Montreuil belong to outis. Jérémie Blanchard and all others are mine. No profit is being made from this story.
Story summary: Suppressing an armed revolt can be a nasty business. St Domingue, 1802.
Author's Note: Any factual or historical errors that occur within are my own and I duly apologise for them.
The irritatingly light and fickle breeze did nothing but swirl the thick, choking smoke around in lazy waves. It made breathing and seeing difficult. More than once, Jérémie had blundered into one of the others as he tried to help with the work of pulling down buildings on the edges of the village. Though by now, at midday, 'edges' was relative. Parties of men were setting fire to buildings on all corners of the village, creating a ring of defences that would last as long as the fires did. It seemed to Jérémie that the men on this duty were enjoying more than they should. They piled up anything that would burn and happily set it ablaze, occasionally cheering when a house collapsed in on itself. He could understand the military sense in it but found it hard to understand why it should be worth cheering about.
"Should burn the whole bloody place," Gigot grumbled, prising his axe free from the doorjamb he'd accidentally lodged it into. "Reduce it all to ashes and move on."
"Oh aye? Doing that would leave us nowhere to run when we're pushed back. Don't think we'll be staying here for long." All eyes turned to Lussier at this, but he only grinned at them through the haze of smoke. "Word will come soon enough. Let's get this heap of shit down and see about setting some good wood aside for our fire tonight."
"The work'll go faster if Rosy tells us a story from his book."
Immediately, his face began to burn. "I would rather not."
Gigot eyed him with a raised eyebrow. "And? You can give us a story or you can fix my shoe again. Seems you owe me either way."
"I already said I would fix your shoe. That is enough," Jérémie said, surprised at his own defiance. He lifted the heavy blacksmith's hammer he'd found and swung it at the doorjamb Gigot had been hacking at. His eyes were stinging and streaming too badly for him to have a good aim though, so he missed his mark and buried the hammer into the wall above it.
"A story'd be safer!" Gigot laughed, turning away to devote his attention and his axe to a different part of the wall while Jérémie struggled to get the hammer free. It was hard to exert himself and not breathe deeply, even though he tried. Each time he inhaled, he drew in smoke and his throat was beginning to feel decidedly raw and sore from it. Worse, like the others, he was starting to cough more than a little every few minutes. That more than anything else was gradually slowing each of them down.
Lussier alone of them seemed unaffected by it, which was something to be marvelled at. He didn't laugh at Gigot's jest, but shook his head and drew back to use his own mallet to enlarge the hole Jérémie had made.
"We should save our energy for clearing out this block," he said. "The sooner we're done, the sooner we can stop. But," he added with a deliberate glance in Gigot's direction, "Biblical stories won't be shared. A bit too philosophical for present company, you see."
The Bordelais wedged the blade of his axe into a gash in the wall he'd created. "You're a fuckin' bore," he replied cheerfully.
"And you're a human-shaped wine bottle."
"Lussier!" Sergeant Leclerc's voice rang out sharply, stopping Gigot before he could frame up a suitable response to Lussier's jest. Work stopped at Leclerc's approach but the sergeant was looking only at Lussier. "Grab your kit. You're goin' on patrol. No, not any of you. Just him."
Without a word, Lussier passed his mallet off to Gigot and turned away to retrieve his musket from where it was leaning against a rotting water barrel. The others watched him go, none of them sure of the reasons for the sergeant's choosing only one of them for a patrol. Nobody had heard a word of any patrol being sent out, either. Or at least Jérémie hadn't.
"That doesn't bode well," Gigot remarked, once Leclerc and Lussier were out of earshot. "That bastard never lets anythin' go."
A coughing fit came and went before Jérémie was able to ask, "Should we go along too?"
Shaking his head, Gigot applied the mallet to the head of the axe blade, driving the latter down into the undamaged wood of the wall. "I'd like to, but I don't wanna end up on Leclerc's blacklist too. He holds grudges like nobody else I've ever seen. Be glad you wasn't with us at Porto-Vecchio, you three. That was some rough business."
Maugan was frowning as he swung an axe at a stubborn wall stud he and Paol had managed to expose. "He mentioned that place the other night, when we were on picquet."
"Ah! Yes. What an accursed place." Gigot wriggled the handle of the axe until the tool came free, then, casting the mallet aside, swung the axe back into the wall with enough force to make the wall shudder and splinter. He wheezed and spat a rusty wad of phlegm into the dirt, then continued. "You think you seen Leclerc bad here? None of you got a clue."
"I saw him shoot a wounded man without cause," said Jérémie. Just thinking about it made the feeling of sick disgust come creeping back into the pit of his stomach.
"Aye? That's light, for him. We was sent up to Porto-Vecchio to 'administer justice'. Right soon's we got there, it was nothin' but bad. I dunno the word for what we did, but I'll be damned if it was justice."
Maugan made a noise that started out like a grunt but ended with a hacking cough. "And Leclerc was busy dealing it out."
"He was up to his filthy neck with it. The bastard. Capitaine Chéreau wasn't much better. He detailed a bunch of us to go up to this farm not far off, sayin' we were to bring the men there back for trial. Said they were supposed to be workin' with the rebels we were tryin' to beat. Except Sergeant Leclerc was in charge of us and he told us once we got there that everybody we found at the farm was actually already found guilty and our job was to carry out the orders of execution."
"Bullshit," Maugan said, with particular feeling.
"Aye. Sure we all knew it, too. But he said it, and... anyway, we went all through the place, dragging people out from wherever they were hidin'. Some of the lads kept 'em under guard as we brought 'em out. Lussier was up in the barn with Boudet, makin' sure it was empty. They were takin' their time with it too, so Leclerc went up to chivvy 'em along. Next thing the rest of us knows, there's a bunch of shouting, then a shot, and Boudet comes runnin' down to us with some slip of a kid right behind. Maybe a couple minutes later, Leclerc comes strollin' down himself. There wasn't a sight or sound of Lussier, which wasn't half worrisome considerin', so when Leclerc told us to line everybody up and then fall in to two ranks, nobody refused."
Here Gigot paused, as much for breath as to wriggle his axe free of what was left of the wall. It took no imagination to know what happened next in the story. Jérémie felt sick to think about it. He shivered, tried to take a steadying breath but only sucked in smoke, which made him cough and nearly retch. Should such an order ever be given to him, he wasn't sure he could obey it.
"Who was shot behind the barn?" Paol wanted to know, offering the question in a low voice as if he was afraid Leclerc was lurking somewhere nearby.
Gigot kicked solidly at the shredded part of the wall until it began to collapse inward. "A redcoat. An officer, I think. I wasn't supposed to see him. But the job was done and Lussier was still not back. Leclerc wanted us to fire the place before we left. So I went up to the barn and there he was, sitting by this fresh hole in the ground. The redcoat was in it. Decent-sized fellow by the look of him. We covered him up with dirt and some rocks, then left. The barn was already burning, 'cause Leclerc didn't give a shit about waiting around. We marched off and left the whole place blazin'. I didn't get the story outta Lussier till two days later."
The others were silent, resuming work they'd unconsciously stopped, as they considered the meaning behind the tale. For his part, Jérémie thought he might be actively ill. Executing farmers on mere suspicions of guilt and killing an enemy officer on a whim? He'd thought Leclerc was evil before but now it was proven. Cold-blooded murder was not the soldier's lot. It simply wasn't. Leclerc, then, was not a soldier but a beast.
"But the British are the enemy," Paol pointed out with a frown.
"Aye, true. But when they're in their gaudy red coats, they're considered honest combatants. Means we gotta take 'em prisoner. And officers are safer than the likes of us, 'cause they get treated better. That fellow was probably helpin' the rebels but when Boudet and Lussier found him, he was just tryin' to hide. That's no crime, really. And he was in his red coat, so he wasn't a spy, and we shoulda took him prisoner. That's the laws of war."
Instead, Leclerc had taken that law into his own hands and shot the British officer dead on the spot. Jérémie thought of his uncle and realised what he'd felt about Claude was not hate, even though then he'd had nothing stronger to compare it to. His feelings about his uncle were stiff resentment and anger, but not hate. Sergeant Leclerc, on the other hand...
"We're supposed to be better than that."
"Maybe. C'mon, let's get this bastard house knocked down. If we haven't hacked it up too badly, we should get some decent firewood from it." Gigot took half a step back to give himself better leverage when he applied his foot to the heavily-splintered wall. It gave a heartening and audible crack, but did not give very much. "Maugan! Get those studs down, for Christ's sake!"
Obviously that particular conversation was over, even though Jérémie would've liked to continue. Where were the lines to be drawn when it came to prisoners? What about orders like those Gigot mentioned? Shooting anyone simply because they might be the enemy went against everything he believed in.
"C'mon, lads," Gigot urged, hacking energetically at a wall stud until it gave way. "Let's have this bastard down. Put your skinny back into it, Rosy, there's a lad!"
Between the four of them, they were at last able to push the wall in and thence move on to knocking the supporting studs out of the remaining walls. The smoke seemed to become only a nuisance as they concentrated on the work, but once they had succeeded in finally levelling the little house, Jérémie realised his lungs felt on the point of bursting. He was not the only one, either. Both Kerjeans were wheezing and coughing, their eyes red and teary, and even Gigot was unable to suppress his coughs.
"Right, lads, let's get ourselves some firewood. Quickly, before any of these other devious shits get the same idea."
Jérémie swiped a hanging ribbon of snot from his nose and stepped in to employ his hammer to the task. It didn't do much good, not having a sharp edge. The axes wielded by Gigot and the Kerjeans were much more productive. Unneeded for this chore, Jérémie stood back and simply watched, occasionally glancing around to make sure Leclerc or an officer wasn't coming toward them. At a bark from Gigot, he hastily shoved his arms out to receive a splinter-laden pile of roughly hewn wood and was directed to hurry back to the squad's billet.
The remainder of the day passed in this fashion, with the squad eventually amassing a respectable quantity of firewood from the now-demolished house. After taking what they wanted from the ruins, they moved on to the next building along the street, joining with another squad to reduce the structure to a pile of almost-useless wood. Twilight was on the rise when a halt was called to the day's work, releasing the exhausted, smoke-grimed men from their labours. A sizeable ring of clear ground now surrounded the village, providing a buffer between the fields and trees where the enemy lurked, and the intact buildings occupied by the two companies. It wasn't much, according to Gigot, but for now, it suited.
Lussier did not return until after nightfall, his face dark with powder and his bearing tired. The squad was attempting to enjoy the thin broth and stale bread that passed for their dinner and on his reappearance a mug and the remnants of the loaf were immediately produced for him. He accepted both without a murmur, even as he sagged wearily down near the fire. Nobody spoke while he ate but once he'd finished, Gigot passed him a mug brimming with wine. It was only after Lussier finally pulled off his shako and crossbelts that any relation of the patrol he'd been on was offered.
"We'll be attacked tomorrow, boys," said Lussier after a long, healthy swallow of wine. "Stirred 'em up good today. Somebody'll swing for Leclerc some day though."
"That sorta day, eh?" Gigot held up Lussier's shako, one finger poking through a hole in the felt, just below the crown. The pompom had also been damaged. Partially shot away in fact. Jérémie shuddered. Such marks meant the patrol had fought at close enough range for accuracy even with a musket. It didn't bode well.
"It was a bloody waste of men, anyway," was the reply. "They got Labelle and Veilleux. But we got a look at a good patch of ground the next plantation over and the capitaine will probably want us to go over tomorrow to hold it."
"Why us?"
In the flickering firelight, Lussier's grin seemed sinister and twisted. "Because we're Leclerc's favourites, René and me, and you lot are lucky enough to be lumped in with us. Now Boudet's gone, the bastard's just got two of us to try getting rid of."
"Told you he never lets anythin' go," said Gigot.
"So they got the story? Christ. Well, sooner they know, the better, I guess." Lussier drained off the last half of his mug and passed it back to Gigot. "Not that it'll make a lot of difference. Most of us will die here, I think."
Jérémie and the Kerjeans exchanged glances, though none of them quite dared to ask what Lussier meant by that. Even though it seemed obvious enough on the face of it. The past days had been bloody enough to convince Jérémie, at least, that this must be what war truly was. The prospect of getting killed terrified him and if a veteran like Lussier thought that was all but a certainty...
"Fear and the pit and the snare are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth..." he muttered, then shivered and drew his knees up a little tighter against his chest, not realising for a moment that Lussier was now studying him with intent. Not only Lussier, at that, but the others as well. His face flushed under their scrutiny and he dipped his gaze to the restless pattern of shadows cast on the ground by the firelight.
"And it shall be that he who flees from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit, and he who comes up from the midst of the pit shall be caught in the snare," Lussier said after a pause and held a hand out for the mug which Gigot had just refilled. "Isaiah, twenty-four eighteen."
Blinking in surprise, Jérémie asked, "How do you - "
"Not every man in this God-forsaken army is without education, tadpole."
"Hey," Gigot interrupted, but Lussier waved him into silence.
"It isn't safe, or smart, to let everyone know your faith. Not these days. You're not very clever to let it be known, Blanchard. Button it up. But," he held out a hand toward Jérémie. "Let's see it."
Given what he'd just said, Jérémie was not sure of the wisdom of that, but he reached for his pack anyway. A moment later he produced the Bible, which he handed to Lussier after a long moment's hesitation. The older soldier looked at the little book for a minute before flipping it open. He skimmed a finger down the page, turned it over, then nodded.
"Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For Himself has said, "I will never leave you nor forsake you. So we may boldly say: 'The Lord is my helper; I will not fear. What can man do to me?' "
"Hebrews, thirteen five and six." Jérémie blinked, as much surprised that Lussier should choose a verse so fitting as because he himself recognised it.
Lussier nodded, closing the book with a dull thump and handing it back. "There is a lot of comfort to be had in this, but there's a lot of danger in it too. You wouldn't know it but it's truth. So keep that in the bottom of your pack and be very careful if ever you take it out again."
"What did that quote mean?" Maugan wanted to know.
"In simple terms? Man may be cruel, and vicious, and devious, but no man may bring harm upon one who puts his trust in the hands of God. Which, in a place like this, is something we must all do." Lussier drank off the contents of the mug in two long swallows. "Now. Make sure your muskets are loaded and your bayonets are fixed. We'll get attacked tomorrow without a doubt. Perhaps even tonight. So we'd better bed down now and keep our pieces to hand. And you," he added, pointing at Jérémie, "could do worse than to pray for every last sorry fucker in this company."
"Aren't you a good one for motivation," Gigot muttered, once again taking his empty mug back and giving it a thorough wiping out with the tail of his shirt.
The others were reaching for their muskets, exchanging meaningful glances as they each drew bayonets from scabbards. It was hard not to feel worried by Lussier's certainty that there'd be an enemy attack and, worse, that divine intervention was needed to help protect them. Jérémie twisted his bayonet into place but took no comfort from the light metallic click. He wrapped himself up in his blanket and lay down with his pack for a pillow, his musket lying almost beneath him it was so close to hand. But, unlike the others who seemed to fall easily to sleep, rest was not within his power. So he lay still while the fire gradually faded and the snores of the others rumbled and rasped in a strange yet soothing chorus. And, despite Lussier's advice, he retrieved his Bible from his pack, finding that just holding it helped, as did letting his memory replay some of the many instances of his mother reading to them from it. Perhaps because of Lussier's brief recitation from Hebrews, the bulk of the passages wafting through his memory were from that book, until his mother's voice eventually faded into the silence brought on by slumber.
~
The thick, low-hanging clouds of smoke seared his nose, mouth, and throat as he ran. Despite the bright midday sun, it almost seemed dark. The plantation house, and the grass all around it, was burning, producing the heavy smoke that blinded his eyes and choked his lungs. Here and there in the dark banks of smoke, the flash of a musket provided a second-long illumination. Something to guide his progress by. Something to run toward. He had no eyes for anything but those. Which was why when Paol flung an arm out squarely into his path, Jérémie had neither the time nor the presence of mind to stop. That solid limb thrust across his path of travel brought him up short, nearly knocking him sprawling.
"If you go that way, you die," the Breton said curtly, going quickly back to reloading his musket.
What? "Aren't the others that way?"
"They've pulled back. We should also."
Oh Christ. Jérémie felt his stomach turn over. He had very nearly run headlong into the arms of the enemy. Following Paol's lead, he ran back the way he'd come, endlessly glad that somebody with more presence of mind than he had been close by. That was a regular occurrence, wasn't it? They all had been looking out for each other and that included Jérémie. He strained his eyes in the smoke and thought he saw somebody run acros their path, moving at right angles to their own direction of flight. Was it a rebel? It had happened too fast for him to be sure but -
"Shit!" Jérémie heard the click of a doghead being drawn back half a heartbeat before the leaping tongue of flame from a musket flashed dangerously close to them. The shot was fired close enough, in fact, for him to feel the heat of the muzzle flash against the back of his head. Without a second thought, both he and Paol slammed to a halt, turned, presented, and fired back. It was a soldier's purest instinct and it wasn't until after the musket was at his hip and his hand was in his cartridge box that Jérémie realised he did not feel afraid so much as angry. Was this natural? Or human? Did it even matter? Not that there was any time for such considerations. The man they'd both just shot was not alone and his comrades were close. Very close. Hell. Shit. Too close! The ramrod was still in the barrel when Jérémie jerked the musket level enough to fire, and the raggedly dressed rebel took both ball and ramrod straight into the stomach.
"We gotta get out of here!"
They certainly did. Jérémie whipped his bayonet from its scabbard and jammed it into place, painfully aware that without his ramrod he could not reload. The thirteen inches of triangular steel was now his only means of defence. "I lost my ramrod!"
Paol swore in Breton. For all Jérémie knew, the words were directed at him for being stupid and careless but he could not care. His mate fired from the hip at another screaming black man and then, in the face of the swift approach of more angry and vengeful rebels, the two of them ran. It was hard to know for sure where the rest of the patrol was but staying put was an unhealthy option. Half-blind, choking on smoke, and both with empty muskets, but for the moment alive so long as they were in motion. That was a much better choice. Jérémie had no idea if it could last but he was ready to run for ever if it meant cheating death.
"Second Company!" The cry rasped its way up from parched throats, squeezing lungs that were already strained by thick woodsmoke and hard exertion. If they could even get a rough idea where the others were, it would be a life line. Something more solid than wild guessing which direction safety lay in. "Second Company!"
"Here! Here! Second Company here!" The answering voice was not one Jérémie recognised but this was utterly irrelevant. That man was in that moment his best friend. A musket flashed ahead of them, but the flare stabbed skyward instead of straight at them. It was a signalling shot. God bless the lad who was clever enough to fire it. Somebody offered a startled oath when Jérémie and Paol came galloping in, nearly bowling over a man who was on his knees and trying to reload his musket. For his part, Jérémie didn't care. All that mattered was they'd reached safety. In a manner of speaking. The patrol had drawn itself in amongst a thin stand of trees which offered scant protection and less cover. Their position was bad and this quickly became apparent even to a novice in war such as he.
"Back from the dead, eh, Rosy?" Gigot called, taking a musket from a wounded man who was loading every firelock that came into his possession with fiendish speed. "We'd given you up!"
"I need a ramrod. I shot mine into somebody. Where can I - "
Lussier, with a face streaked with powder and blood, thrust a ramrod at him. "Reload, fast as you've ever done. Save the stupid chattering for later. Watch your fronts, here they come again!"
Such was his haste to obey that he spilled half a cartridge's worth and got no more than a few grains into the pan. Swearing, Jérémie flung the useless cartridge away and grabbed for another. There was no time to think. There was only time to react, to fly through motions he'd learned in far more gentle surroundings than this. That was if one could call the depot gentle. Prime, load, ram, present - and make sure the ramrod was clear of the barrel before firing. The air was already so heavy and smoky that the billowing plumes of spent powder made no impression. Visibility could hardly get worse. Which meant the enemy could get much too close to them before anyone saw and could shoot them down. With his eyes streaming and his throat afire, Jérémie jammed his hand into his cartridge box for another round. His questing fingers scraped roughly over empty holes in the wooden block before brushing against the round shape of a cartridge.
"Haven't got much left," he announced, surprised at how cool he sounded when his very being felt hot, tingling, and almost numb. His blood raced and he realised as he dumped powder, wadding, and ball down the barrel that his hands were shaking, yet not from any pervading sense of fear. Or at least he did not think it was fear. Somehow, he didn't think he'd been afraid all day but they'd also been fighting all day. Maybe there simply had not been time for that or any other emotion?
"None of us have. Fire till you're empty and stop fuckin' complaining," Sergeant Leclerc snarled, grabbing the musket from the hands of a dead man and checking the priming. "Sir!"
The one-word bellow was more a warning than anything else, but it came too late. Capitaine Chéreau had, only a moment before, been heaving his sword out of a rebel's chest when another with an axe hacked down the corporal nearest Chéreau and then lodged his weapon into the capitaine himself. In an instant, two more enemy fighters swept in through the newly-made gap in the lines. The axe-wielding black soldier struck at his victim thrice more, before a screaming Archambault swung his musket at him like a bat, both hands wrapped around the very end of the barrel. The flat of the solid wooden stock slammed against the rebel's head with an awful meaty smack and the man fell dead on the spot, his skull caved in. A second later, Archambault himself went down beneath a merciless onslaught of knives.
Even yesterday, that scene would have horrified him into immobility but today the need to protect his life trumped all else. He could entertain thoughts and emotions in detail later. If there was a later. Jérémie swept the butt of his own musket into the head of another rebel, knocking him aside in time to clear the way for Maugan to fire almost in his face at a bony black man about to wrap his club around Lussier's head. This was insane. Chaos. Hell on earth. The patrol's lines were broken. The enemy was everywhere. Those men who still had cartridges kept firing. Somehow. Those who didn't used musket butt, bayonet, and bare fist against the flood tide of rebels swirling around them.
With the capitaine dead, command fell on Sergeant Leclerc and, to his credit, the sergeant leapt immediately to the responsibility. "Run! Run! Fall back, follow me!"
It was not the most comforting or inspiring orders but survival was more important than any notion of glory. Somebody's hand was on his pack, apparently with the intent of dragging him along, but for once Jérémie needed no prompting. He was already in motion, following close behind Gigot, whose large frame was easiest to keep in sight. The patrol's survivors fled as though the very hounds of Hell were baying and nipping at their heels. That this was more true than not occurred briefly to Jérémie as he stretched his legs to their limit, striving only to keep up with the deer-like bounds of Gigot. As the scattered patrol raced away from the wreck of the plantation, the dense banks of smoke thinned and, abruptly, it seemed, vanished. It was possible to breathe in clean air and in the unfiltered sunshine, the eyes felt suddenly dazzled. Blinded and gasping, Jérémie somehow held his stride, until his eyes adjusted to the brightness. There was no hope of easing the tightness of his chest until they were safe though.
Waist-high seas of uncut grass and burnt stumps of trees flashed past unseen. Dips, rises, and rabbit holes in the ground were passed over without thought. The crying, gurgling form of a wounded man was glimpsed only for an instant before that luckless fellow was left behind, ignored by his comrades but not by their bloodthirsty pursuers. His screams lent the others speed. Half a mile had gone before any of them knew it but there was still a full mile to go before they were within sight of the village they'd left that morning. Run. Escape. The only thing to care about. His lungs screamed and his heart beat impossibly fast. His legs were burning but he could not slow. Must not. To fall behind was to die. Not today. No. Every stride was one long leaping step closer to safety. Survival. Life. He had never run so hard or so long, for such a dear prize.
Ahead of him, Gigot was pointing, uttering a high laugh to which his racing pace lent a breathless, staccato beat. A column was approaching them across the field. Even as Jérémie stared at it in disbelief, the column was shifting, flinging itself out into line and thence into opened ranks. The swiftest-footed men of the patrol were nearly up to that line and within a minute those men were flying through the opened ranks. The line came on in this formation, marching at the quick. Jérémie rallied his flagging strength and stretched his legs out, his feet barely feeling as though they touched the ground as they propelled him toward and then, suddenly, past the thin line of grave-faced soldiers. He made it several more yards on sheer momentum before stumbling then collapsing into the grass. It felt impossible to get enough air into his lungs and he was sure his heart would hammer its way out of his chest. Every part of him burned and ran with sweat. His eyes stung and swam. He coughed, shuddered, and then felt a heavy blackness settle over him.
His eyes opened suddenly only a moment later, he thought, and he realised he was being carried by his arms and legs between the Kerjeans. They were on the march. Halfway back to the village, in fact. The first task undertaken by his befuddled mind was to get his feet moving, which drew a grinning, "About time, mate!" from Maugan.
Speech felt beyond his ability but, ahead of them, he caught sight of four men bearing a stretcher. A heavy stretcher. Gigot. A grin came onto his face. For once, he was not the only one coming up short. He thus felt less guilty about letting the Bretons help support him for another hundred yards, until his legs seemed sound enough to bear his weight again. Paol was carrying his pack and shako, and Maugan his musket, he realised, but neither seemed inclined to give up those items. Probably just as well. He wasn't sure if he really wanted that weight back. Not when his legs still felt more than a little wobbly and weak.
"Straight to the surgeon with you when we're back," Maugan told him, nodding toward the semi-distant village. "One of the boys said he's come up with Fourth Company from Fort Liberté. We'll need him after today."
They would indeed. The survivors of the patrol were formed in a pathetic little column not far ahead, with its less fit members straggling behind as best they could. Less fit was a relative term. Most of them had run their legs off and those who seemed to have handled that fairly well were still hard up to march as soldiers should. If none of them needed the attention of a surgeon in some way, it'd be a miracle. Or something very near it. Jérémie glanced back and was comforted to see the men who'd come out to support them were spread out in skirmish line, trading speed for protection. He didn't know who they were or who'd sent them, but those details didn't matter. Those lads had saved the patrol.
His strength began to gradually return as they plodded along, such that by the time the exhausted group reached the picquet lines, he felt almost like himself again. His voice had even returned, though it was hoarse and scratchy. The surgeon, Montreuil, was at work looking over each of the men from the patrol with a curt, unfriendly thoroughness. He'd already seen to Gigot, who now had a place in the surgeon's wagon. Lussier was just departing, the spotless white bandage on his arm standing starkly at odds with his filthy smallclothes. He nodded at them as he passed but didn't speak. Perhaps he too found it painful to swallow, never mind talk. Jérémie and the Kerjeans joined the short queue of men waiting for treatment, Jérémie at least never more glad to stand still in his life.
"Let me guess. You're an unfortunate sufferer of acute exhaustion too." The surgeon stood before him, reaching brusquely for Jérémie's wrist. "Can you swallow? Yes? Never mind that it hurts, it will for a while. I expect it hurts to talk also. It will, for a while. Open your mouth - yes, good. No lasting harm has been done. Go back to your billet and drink some wine. Next man."
Wine. Was that it? Jérémie supposed he was relieved to know he'd recover but he'd thought a surgeon would have more interest in loading his patients up with medicines. Then again, he had never needed a surgeon's services before, so what did he know? He moved aside and waited for the Kerjeans to receive their own perfunctory looking-over. Part of him wanted to look in on Gigot, but the prospect of sitting down near a fire and not having to move again was too strong.
"We'll have to find our own wine since Gigot's not gonna be with us tonight," Maugan observed, moving away from the wagon once Montreuil had dismissed him. "But I know somebody, so we'll - "
"Second Company, on your feet! Get your packs and muskets! Marching order! Form for parade right here, you got five minutes!" Sergeant Leclerc was moving briskly along the road, glaring around at the men of the company as he went. He'd managed to wash his face, which stood out oddly against his filthy uniform. Ominously, his expression bordered on the thunderous and when he spotted Jérémie and the Kerjeans, he altered his course to approach them.
"You three," the sergeant snapped, "get your lazy backsides over there with the rest of the company. No slackin' off for any of you. If you been listenin' to Lussier about that, you're all fuckin' stupid. Now, get movin' - "
"Sergeant Leclerc! When the company is mustered, I want - you lads, what are you doing?" It was Lieutenant Gironde, laden with a pack and two pistols. He was clearly ready to get on the march toward trouble. "You're not going anywhere except back to your billet. Get some dinner, clean your muskets, and have a rest."
This direction clearly did not go down well with Leclerc, but Jérémie's first inclination was not to pay the sergeant's feelings any mind. He was tired and hungry, and was happy to have the lieutenant's permission to knock off for the day. His companions, however, apparently had other ideas.
Maugan looked deliberately past Leclerc and to Gironde said, "We're good for goin' along, sir. We just need to clean our muskets and repack our cartridge boxes."
"You sure, lads? I saw the patrol's run. It looked exhausting."
"We'll come anyway, sir. We're good for it."
It crossed Jérémie's mind to object to that, but in the presence of an officer, he didn't quite dare. In the event, it was plain Gironde didn't believe the assurances, though he didn't bother to call Maugan's bluff. Instead, he nodded. "All right. There's a pot of water on the boil over there. You can clear out your barrels with it, then fill up your boxes. Ten minutes and no more. If you're not paraded with the others, you're staying behind."
"Yes sir."
No one moved until both Leclerc and Gironde had departed, then Paol hefted up Jérémie's pack. "Best get this back on," he said.
Grimacing, Jérémie struggled back into the pack's straps, then accepted first his shako then his musket. The weight felt unusually heavy and he felt decidedly put upon to have to carry it again, but there was no other option. Most of the other lads from the ill-fated patrol looked to be mustering themselves as well, queueing up to have boiling water ladled into their powder-clogged musket barrels. More telling than all of that was Lussier's reappearance, tightening the last screw on his musket's lock plate even as he approached.
"If you've got fresh flints, better fit 'em in now," he told them. "Best not to chance these old ones failing. Oh, and René was kind enough to let us have this." He held up a canteen with a grin.
"Nice of him," Maugan said, taking a swig then passing the canteen to his brother. "How's the arm?"
"Just a scratch. Drink up, tadpole," Lussier told Jérémie when the canteen came to him. "You didn't do too badly today but the job's not done yet."
That was what he'd guessed and what he'd been afraid of. Jérémie took a long swallow and managed not to cough or sputter at the sweet bite of the wine. He wasn't much of a drinker. Or at least he wasn't on the same level as the others. Certainly not as bad as Gigot. He passed the canteen back to Lussier, who stoppered it and slung it over his head.
"You know," the older soldier went on as the group joined the swiftly-shortening queue for the boiling water pot, "if we all get back after this, you're gonna have more business fixing up shoes than you'll know what to do with! I think I'm losing the sole on my right one and I'll bet you a lot of the other lads are in a similar state."
"When we get back, you mean?"
He shook his head. "No. If. Remember how I said revolts were a bad business? You're gonna see that laid out plain real soon. So grab as many cartridges as your boxes will hold and then take a handful more. I don't know about Gironde but Leclerc is out for blood. We'll be busy for a couple days yet. And if we're lucky, we'll get out safe again."
The pallor in Jérémie's face and the grim expressions from the Kerjeans brought a brief, twisted smirk to Lussier's face. He held his musket out so a ladle of steaming water could be poured down it, but said nothing more. In reality, what he'd already said was more than enough. Feeling a sick sense of dread start to settle over him, Jérémie stepped up to receive his own ration of boiling water, taking care to keep his thumb over the touch hole so no water could escape. If the flint got wet, it was useless. He swirled the water around the musket barrel for a couple seconds before tipping the firelock upside down. The stream of filthy water that came out was as sure a sign as any that he'd overcome his apparent inability to act under fire. Not that this was any comfort when they were about to march straight back into the teeth of an angry and stirred up enemy.
Somebody offered him a damp rag to clean off his bayonet, which he realised was still fixed. The sight of the dried blood gave him an instant's pause. Not that there was any time for reflections. Grimacing, Jérémie gave the triangular blade a quick wipe then twisted it free and shoved it back into its scabbard. He couldn't dwell on it but the fact remained he had used the blade to lethal effect today, without any trace of regret or mercy. And that scared him.
~
The sunlight was a blessing. It was a relief from the depths of what had been an endless, agonising night. To say the night had been dark was stretching the point. The glow of the burning plantation and grass fields had given the darkness an ominous sort of illumination and had also made the air smoky and hard to breathe. That last was hardly different to what conditions had been earlier in the day, really. Jérémie hooked his arm more securely around the trunk of the tree he was perched in and squinted against the sunshine. From this vantage point, he could see how wide was the swath of burned earth which stretched away around them. He could also see the corpses that still dotted the scorched landscape. They were the only traces left of their enemy. Nothing else was in sight. Thank God.
Fighting had begun afresh almost as soon as the company had got within of the plantation. It had gone on all night. The company had initially stood in the open, formed in line and giving volley fire, until their wily opponents had got around them and turned the left flank. Squares were hardly a defence against infantry yet for an hour, the company had fought off successive attacks in this way. After that, they'd withdrawn to the dubious safety of a couple plantation outbuildings that had defied the fires by virtue of having been built from stone. They had been hotly engaged for the rest of the night from these positions. After a while, Jérémie's senses had become numb to the rattle of musketry, the shouts and screams, the clash of steel on steel when a particularly determined attack was repulsed at bayonet point.
Then dawn had come and as if by magic, it had all ceased. Lieutenant Gironde had kept them in place for the better part of an hour before sending out patrols to find out where the enemy had gone. Reports came back that the enemy had apparently cleared off, leaving their dead behind. It was a sudden and baffling turn of events. Picquets were set, one of the trees which somehow survived the fires was felled for use in camp fires, and fatigue parties were detailed. The men they'd lost here yesterday had to be found and last night's dead had to be buried. Jérémie and the others were in one of the former parties and after a couple of hours they found what was left of two men. The unlucky pair had been hung from the same tree, which stood in the path of the fires. It was impossible to know what had killed them but as the bodies were cut down, he hoped they'd already been dead when they'd been strung up.
In all, the search parties had only found four of the men who'd fallen during yesterday's combat. Capitaine Chéreau was one of them. What was left of him. The rebels had literally hacked the capitaine to pieces. The sight had made Lieutenant Gironde throw up on the spot. The remains were buried quickly and without ceremony. Nobody wanted to linger too long over the task. Of the others who were known to have fallen there was absolutely no sign. Perhaps that was for the best. For his part, Jérémie had no interest at all in finding them and thereby learning what had happened to them. It was more than bad enough to have seen Chéreau, who hadn't been dead when the rebels went to work on him, according to a stony-faced Lussier. That statement nearly made Jérémie vomit just to think about it.
To escape being part of any further details, Jérémie had volunteered to go up the tallest surviving tree and keep a lookout. Way up here, it was possible to see for some distance, but he was also above the drifting haze of woodsmoke. Staying awake was surprisingly easy at such a height, since he knew that if he dozed off it was very likely he'd fall. Even as tired and drained as he felt, keeping his eyes open while up here was not hard. Being up so high meant he was, for once, away from the others and thus alone with his thoughts. Or at least he had been until somebody remembered he'd been perched up in the tree for the better part of two hours.
"Blanchard!" It was a corporal calling up to him. "Get yourself down here!"
Despite himself, Jérémie felt resentful of that order. It was actually almost pleasant to be up in the tree, above everything on the ground. Far removed from death, anger, and war. For a while he had nearly been able to pretend it wasn't happening. The tree bark scraped at his hands and tugged at his coat as he scrambled down from branch to branch, his movements surprisingly nimble in the face of his half-blind descent. It was half a miracle that he made back to solid ground without anything more than a few scratches to boast of.
Waiting at the bottom was Paol, a mug of warm wine in hand. "We've got lucky. Lieutenant Gironde wants us to get our heads down for a few hours. It's been a long day. C'mon. We got some stew and bread, and René's stash of wine."
"He hardly needs it, does he?" Jérémie accepted the mug with a tired grin. "A rest will be perfect."
Not least because the company hadn't had a second's respite since they'd marched out from the village the evening before. A rest. Even only a few hours of it was a blessing. He took a long swig from the mug then passed it back to Paol. Without further conversation, he followed the Breton toward the squad's billet. Such as it turned out to be. A makeshift hut knocked up from unburnt timbers and scattered masonry. It was anything but comfortable but Jérémie was too tired to care. Somebody had gotten a fire going, ironically enough, and there was a small pot steaming merrily over it.
"What's this, then?" Lussier wanted to know as the two came up. "You ain't happy bein' a frog, so you wanna be a monkey instead?"
"It was just what I was told - "
"Never mind him," said Maugan, offering a tin plate filled with stew. "Tuck in while it's still hot."
Only too happy to overlook Lussier's jibe, Jérémie dropped carelessly onto the crunchy, burnt grass. The plate of stew smelled heavenly. It reminded him that he hadn't had a bite to eat since the previous morning and he was briefly puzzled by the fact that he hadn't felt hungry in the long hours in between. Being busy fighting for your life could perhaps have had something to do with it. Equally puzzling was the how and where of the ingredients used for the stew had been gotten, but he decided such things were irrelevant. All that mattered was getting the aromatic food down. It didn't even need to taste good, really. What mattered was that it was hot and fresh.
"We'll be wanted for sentry tonight, I heard," Paol said, tucking into his own plate with a little less enthusiasm.
"Probably. So get your fill and catch some sleep. There's no telling when we might get another bit of luxury like this."
Jérémie licked his fingers, not having bothered to dig out a spoon, and frowned. The stew had scalded his mouth, which made it a little painful to speak, but his weariness had worn his patience a little thin and Lussier's apparently gloomy outlook annoyed him. "You're not long on optimism, are you?"
"Optimism is a fairly useless thing in our present circumstances, tadpole," was the reply. "We're here on a dirty piece of business. So far, it's been a little unpleasant but we've hardly just begun. It'll get worse, I can promise you that. It always does."
"Maybe, but worse can hardly be borne if you have not got any faith."
At that, Lussier chuckled. "Ah, faith. What a useless thing. You're still young, lad. You'll grow out of it." On seeing Jérémie's face redden, he shook his head. "My father was a faithful man. He was a priest, so he believed. Hell. He lived by God. And God let him go to a terrible death. You're too young to have heard about the September Massacres, though, I expect. Point is, blind faith is naïve, tadpole. God doesn't give a shit about any of us mortals. Look where we are now. What we're doin'. I've done this devil's work before and I can tell you it's the same basic thing no matter where you face it. Here, Corsica, the fuckin' Vendée... but if you think it helps to be hopeful and optimistic, you go for it. Whatever you reckon you need to get you through. I'll just say that it ain't worth the effort."
The Kerjeans were looking at each other with unreadable frowns, while Jérémie tried to understand how Lussier's line of thinking made any sense. How could he talk so disparagingly about God, when only the day before he had told the squad they should put their trust in Him? Had that only been a lie? It seemed likely. Which meant that he couldn't be sure what was truth and what wasn't - but to be fair, he supposed that Lussier was simply holding true to his advice to hide one's faith. It was a strange way to go about it, though. Jérémie was not fond of hypocrites and it bothered him that Lussier might be one.
"You're drunk," Paol said flatly into the uneasy silence.
"Maybe I am," Lussier replied. "But that hardly changes facts."
Maugan's frown was deepening. "You were in the Vendée?"
"That miserable place? Aye. I was there. Funny how I was fighting for the very republic that murdered my family, eh? Ideals are funny things, I'll tell you. But faith? Faith is the first thing to fail when the only thing around you is death and suffering."
"Ideals and faith are what keeps us human," Jérémie pointed out.
Lussier answered that with another chuckle. "They're also what makes you open to manipulation, tadpole. You just have to look at the progression of our great and glorious revolution to see that played out in spades. The folks up in the Vendée saw through it all and we slaughtered 'em for refusing to go quietly along."
"There was the Chouans too."
"Aye, they made trouble too, and they were dealt with the same. Makes you think, doesn't it, that those brave fools were happy to die for their faith when they could have spared a whole fuckin' lot of lives by being just a little less bullheaded. I can tell you, God didn't give two shits what happened to those poor believers. Neither did we. Nothin' is any different here. Only thing missing here is General Turreau and his columns, but I'll tell you lads to be happy for that!"
Jérémie felt sick and set his half-eaten stew aside. He knew nothing of what Lussier was talking about but the older soldier's stance was objectionable all the same. "Better to die a brave fool than to live as a sensible coward," he said. That was one thing immediately apparent from Lussier's story. The man's own father should have proved that to him. "I do not know anything of the Vendée or anywhere else but here. Here... God has kept us safe and alive so far. We'd be foolish and shortsighted to spit on His protection now for so stupid a reason as bitterness."
"Bitterness! You silly boy. You don't know the first thing about it."
There was a grunt from Paol. "Good thing he don't. He's talkin' more sense than you right now."
"If you think that, you're as naïve as he is. I'd expected better from you." Lussier reached for Gigot's canteen, but Maugan beat him to it. The Breton upended the canteen into the fire, which sputtered and hissed as the wine poured across the flames. "You bastard!"
"No more than you're being this evening," Maugan said, tossing the empty canteen aside. "We lost good people in the Chouannarie."
"So did the republic," Lussier countered. "And for what? A useless king and a meaningless religion? Freedom, even? That's what these poor bastards here are fighting for. What they're butchering good men for. They're no different than those savages in the Vendée or Corsica. God," he added, pointing suddenly at Jérémie, "is the last thing you should expect any protection from when these black devils come howling for your blood. Your only protection comes from this company and I'll tell you now if you don't have the spine to match like with like out here, I've got no use for you."
"I ain't listenin' to this," said Maugan as he got up. "C'mon, boys. Let's find another billet."
Disgusted, Jérémie stood up. This was clearly the true Lussier. What he saw and heard made him sorry to have met the man. Wine was no excuse at all. "Then you will remember your evil ways and your deeds that were not good; and you will loathe yourselves in your own sight, for your iniquities and abominations." He shouldered his pack and musket, then grabbed up his shako by its chinstrap. Let the bastard chew on that. Before Lussier could come up with a sharp response, the trio moved off, not giving him a backward glance.
"Sorry about that, Rosy. We've never seen him like that before."
Jérémie shrugged. "It's fine. I have heard worse." It was a weak attempt to brush off the effect of Lussier's remarks but thankfully neither Kerjean called his bluff.
Instead, Maugan clapped him once on the shoulder and said, "Good man. Now c'mon. I think Saint-Laurent's got a decent shelter over there. Probably got some good food on also. Let's take it from him."
As it turned out, only half of that statement proved true, but none of them minded doing without a second chance at dinner.
Rating: M (Suitable for ages 16 and above)
Disclaimers: The characters Maugan and Paol Kerjean, and Montreuil belong to outis. Jérémie Blanchard and all others are mine. No profit is being made from this story.
Story summary: Suppressing an armed revolt can be a nasty business. St Domingue, 1802.
Author's Note: Any factual or historical errors that occur within are my own and I duly apologise for them.
The irritatingly light and fickle breeze did nothing but swirl the thick, choking smoke around in lazy waves. It made breathing and seeing difficult. More than once, Jérémie had blundered into one of the others as he tried to help with the work of pulling down buildings on the edges of the village. Though by now, at midday, 'edges' was relative. Parties of men were setting fire to buildings on all corners of the village, creating a ring of defences that would last as long as the fires did. It seemed to Jérémie that the men on this duty were enjoying more than they should. They piled up anything that would burn and happily set it ablaze, occasionally cheering when a house collapsed in on itself. He could understand the military sense in it but found it hard to understand why it should be worth cheering about.
"Should burn the whole bloody place," Gigot grumbled, prising his axe free from the doorjamb he'd accidentally lodged it into. "Reduce it all to ashes and move on."
"Oh aye? Doing that would leave us nowhere to run when we're pushed back. Don't think we'll be staying here for long." All eyes turned to Lussier at this, but he only grinned at them through the haze of smoke. "Word will come soon enough. Let's get this heap of shit down and see about setting some good wood aside for our fire tonight."
"The work'll go faster if Rosy tells us a story from his book."
Immediately, his face began to burn. "I would rather not."
Gigot eyed him with a raised eyebrow. "And? You can give us a story or you can fix my shoe again. Seems you owe me either way."
"I already said I would fix your shoe. That is enough," Jérémie said, surprised at his own defiance. He lifted the heavy blacksmith's hammer he'd found and swung it at the doorjamb Gigot had been hacking at. His eyes were stinging and streaming too badly for him to have a good aim though, so he missed his mark and buried the hammer into the wall above it.
"A story'd be safer!" Gigot laughed, turning away to devote his attention and his axe to a different part of the wall while Jérémie struggled to get the hammer free. It was hard to exert himself and not breathe deeply, even though he tried. Each time he inhaled, he drew in smoke and his throat was beginning to feel decidedly raw and sore from it. Worse, like the others, he was starting to cough more than a little every few minutes. That more than anything else was gradually slowing each of them down.
Lussier alone of them seemed unaffected by it, which was something to be marvelled at. He didn't laugh at Gigot's jest, but shook his head and drew back to use his own mallet to enlarge the hole Jérémie had made.
"We should save our energy for clearing out this block," he said. "The sooner we're done, the sooner we can stop. But," he added with a deliberate glance in Gigot's direction, "Biblical stories won't be shared. A bit too philosophical for present company, you see."
The Bordelais wedged the blade of his axe into a gash in the wall he'd created. "You're a fuckin' bore," he replied cheerfully.
"And you're a human-shaped wine bottle."
"Lussier!" Sergeant Leclerc's voice rang out sharply, stopping Gigot before he could frame up a suitable response to Lussier's jest. Work stopped at Leclerc's approach but the sergeant was looking only at Lussier. "Grab your kit. You're goin' on patrol. No, not any of you. Just him."
Without a word, Lussier passed his mallet off to Gigot and turned away to retrieve his musket from where it was leaning against a rotting water barrel. The others watched him go, none of them sure of the reasons for the sergeant's choosing only one of them for a patrol. Nobody had heard a word of any patrol being sent out, either. Or at least Jérémie hadn't.
"That doesn't bode well," Gigot remarked, once Leclerc and Lussier were out of earshot. "That bastard never lets anythin' go."
A coughing fit came and went before Jérémie was able to ask, "Should we go along too?"
Shaking his head, Gigot applied the mallet to the head of the axe blade, driving the latter down into the undamaged wood of the wall. "I'd like to, but I don't wanna end up on Leclerc's blacklist too. He holds grudges like nobody else I've ever seen. Be glad you wasn't with us at Porto-Vecchio, you three. That was some rough business."
Maugan was frowning as he swung an axe at a stubborn wall stud he and Paol had managed to expose. "He mentioned that place the other night, when we were on picquet."
"Ah! Yes. What an accursed place." Gigot wriggled the handle of the axe until the tool came free, then, casting the mallet aside, swung the axe back into the wall with enough force to make the wall shudder and splinter. He wheezed and spat a rusty wad of phlegm into the dirt, then continued. "You think you seen Leclerc bad here? None of you got a clue."
"I saw him shoot a wounded man without cause," said Jérémie. Just thinking about it made the feeling of sick disgust come creeping back into the pit of his stomach.
"Aye? That's light, for him. We was sent up to Porto-Vecchio to 'administer justice'. Right soon's we got there, it was nothin' but bad. I dunno the word for what we did, but I'll be damned if it was justice."
Maugan made a noise that started out like a grunt but ended with a hacking cough. "And Leclerc was busy dealing it out."
"He was up to his filthy neck with it. The bastard. Capitaine Chéreau wasn't much better. He detailed a bunch of us to go up to this farm not far off, sayin' we were to bring the men there back for trial. Said they were supposed to be workin' with the rebels we were tryin' to beat. Except Sergeant Leclerc was in charge of us and he told us once we got there that everybody we found at the farm was actually already found guilty and our job was to carry out the orders of execution."
"Bullshit," Maugan said, with particular feeling.
"Aye. Sure we all knew it, too. But he said it, and... anyway, we went all through the place, dragging people out from wherever they were hidin'. Some of the lads kept 'em under guard as we brought 'em out. Lussier was up in the barn with Boudet, makin' sure it was empty. They were takin' their time with it too, so Leclerc went up to chivvy 'em along. Next thing the rest of us knows, there's a bunch of shouting, then a shot, and Boudet comes runnin' down to us with some slip of a kid right behind. Maybe a couple minutes later, Leclerc comes strollin' down himself. There wasn't a sight or sound of Lussier, which wasn't half worrisome considerin', so when Leclerc told us to line everybody up and then fall in to two ranks, nobody refused."
Here Gigot paused, as much for breath as to wriggle his axe free of what was left of the wall. It took no imagination to know what happened next in the story. Jérémie felt sick to think about it. He shivered, tried to take a steadying breath but only sucked in smoke, which made him cough and nearly retch. Should such an order ever be given to him, he wasn't sure he could obey it.
"Who was shot behind the barn?" Paol wanted to know, offering the question in a low voice as if he was afraid Leclerc was lurking somewhere nearby.
Gigot kicked solidly at the shredded part of the wall until it began to collapse inward. "A redcoat. An officer, I think. I wasn't supposed to see him. But the job was done and Lussier was still not back. Leclerc wanted us to fire the place before we left. So I went up to the barn and there he was, sitting by this fresh hole in the ground. The redcoat was in it. Decent-sized fellow by the look of him. We covered him up with dirt and some rocks, then left. The barn was already burning, 'cause Leclerc didn't give a shit about waiting around. We marched off and left the whole place blazin'. I didn't get the story outta Lussier till two days later."
The others were silent, resuming work they'd unconsciously stopped, as they considered the meaning behind the tale. For his part, Jérémie thought he might be actively ill. Executing farmers on mere suspicions of guilt and killing an enemy officer on a whim? He'd thought Leclerc was evil before but now it was proven. Cold-blooded murder was not the soldier's lot. It simply wasn't. Leclerc, then, was not a soldier but a beast.
"But the British are the enemy," Paol pointed out with a frown.
"Aye, true. But when they're in their gaudy red coats, they're considered honest combatants. Means we gotta take 'em prisoner. And officers are safer than the likes of us, 'cause they get treated better. That fellow was probably helpin' the rebels but when Boudet and Lussier found him, he was just tryin' to hide. That's no crime, really. And he was in his red coat, so he wasn't a spy, and we shoulda took him prisoner. That's the laws of war."
Instead, Leclerc had taken that law into his own hands and shot the British officer dead on the spot. Jérémie thought of his uncle and realised what he'd felt about Claude was not hate, even though then he'd had nothing stronger to compare it to. His feelings about his uncle were stiff resentment and anger, but not hate. Sergeant Leclerc, on the other hand...
"We're supposed to be better than that."
"Maybe. C'mon, let's get this bastard house knocked down. If we haven't hacked it up too badly, we should get some decent firewood from it." Gigot took half a step back to give himself better leverage when he applied his foot to the heavily-splintered wall. It gave a heartening and audible crack, but did not give very much. "Maugan! Get those studs down, for Christ's sake!"
Obviously that particular conversation was over, even though Jérémie would've liked to continue. Where were the lines to be drawn when it came to prisoners? What about orders like those Gigot mentioned? Shooting anyone simply because they might be the enemy went against everything he believed in.
"C'mon, lads," Gigot urged, hacking energetically at a wall stud until it gave way. "Let's have this bastard down. Put your skinny back into it, Rosy, there's a lad!"
Between the four of them, they were at last able to push the wall in and thence move on to knocking the supporting studs out of the remaining walls. The smoke seemed to become only a nuisance as they concentrated on the work, but once they had succeeded in finally levelling the little house, Jérémie realised his lungs felt on the point of bursting. He was not the only one, either. Both Kerjeans were wheezing and coughing, their eyes red and teary, and even Gigot was unable to suppress his coughs.
"Right, lads, let's get ourselves some firewood. Quickly, before any of these other devious shits get the same idea."
Jérémie swiped a hanging ribbon of snot from his nose and stepped in to employ his hammer to the task. It didn't do much good, not having a sharp edge. The axes wielded by Gigot and the Kerjeans were much more productive. Unneeded for this chore, Jérémie stood back and simply watched, occasionally glancing around to make sure Leclerc or an officer wasn't coming toward them. At a bark from Gigot, he hastily shoved his arms out to receive a splinter-laden pile of roughly hewn wood and was directed to hurry back to the squad's billet.
The remainder of the day passed in this fashion, with the squad eventually amassing a respectable quantity of firewood from the now-demolished house. After taking what they wanted from the ruins, they moved on to the next building along the street, joining with another squad to reduce the structure to a pile of almost-useless wood. Twilight was on the rise when a halt was called to the day's work, releasing the exhausted, smoke-grimed men from their labours. A sizeable ring of clear ground now surrounded the village, providing a buffer between the fields and trees where the enemy lurked, and the intact buildings occupied by the two companies. It wasn't much, according to Gigot, but for now, it suited.
Lussier did not return until after nightfall, his face dark with powder and his bearing tired. The squad was attempting to enjoy the thin broth and stale bread that passed for their dinner and on his reappearance a mug and the remnants of the loaf were immediately produced for him. He accepted both without a murmur, even as he sagged wearily down near the fire. Nobody spoke while he ate but once he'd finished, Gigot passed him a mug brimming with wine. It was only after Lussier finally pulled off his shako and crossbelts that any relation of the patrol he'd been on was offered.
"We'll be attacked tomorrow, boys," said Lussier after a long, healthy swallow of wine. "Stirred 'em up good today. Somebody'll swing for Leclerc some day though."
"That sorta day, eh?" Gigot held up Lussier's shako, one finger poking through a hole in the felt, just below the crown. The pompom had also been damaged. Partially shot away in fact. Jérémie shuddered. Such marks meant the patrol had fought at close enough range for accuracy even with a musket. It didn't bode well.
"It was a bloody waste of men, anyway," was the reply. "They got Labelle and Veilleux. But we got a look at a good patch of ground the next plantation over and the capitaine will probably want us to go over tomorrow to hold it."
"Why us?"
In the flickering firelight, Lussier's grin seemed sinister and twisted. "Because we're Leclerc's favourites, René and me, and you lot are lucky enough to be lumped in with us. Now Boudet's gone, the bastard's just got two of us to try getting rid of."
"Told you he never lets anythin' go," said Gigot.
"So they got the story? Christ. Well, sooner they know, the better, I guess." Lussier drained off the last half of his mug and passed it back to Gigot. "Not that it'll make a lot of difference. Most of us will die here, I think."
Jérémie and the Kerjeans exchanged glances, though none of them quite dared to ask what Lussier meant by that. Even though it seemed obvious enough on the face of it. The past days had been bloody enough to convince Jérémie, at least, that this must be what war truly was. The prospect of getting killed terrified him and if a veteran like Lussier thought that was all but a certainty...
"Fear and the pit and the snare are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth..." he muttered, then shivered and drew his knees up a little tighter against his chest, not realising for a moment that Lussier was now studying him with intent. Not only Lussier, at that, but the others as well. His face flushed under their scrutiny and he dipped his gaze to the restless pattern of shadows cast on the ground by the firelight.
"And it shall be that he who flees from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit, and he who comes up from the midst of the pit shall be caught in the snare," Lussier said after a pause and held a hand out for the mug which Gigot had just refilled. "Isaiah, twenty-four eighteen."
Blinking in surprise, Jérémie asked, "How do you - "
"Not every man in this God-forsaken army is without education, tadpole."
"Hey," Gigot interrupted, but Lussier waved him into silence.
"It isn't safe, or smart, to let everyone know your faith. Not these days. You're not very clever to let it be known, Blanchard. Button it up. But," he held out a hand toward Jérémie. "Let's see it."
Given what he'd just said, Jérémie was not sure of the wisdom of that, but he reached for his pack anyway. A moment later he produced the Bible, which he handed to Lussier after a long moment's hesitation. The older soldier looked at the little book for a minute before flipping it open. He skimmed a finger down the page, turned it over, then nodded.
"Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For Himself has said, "I will never leave you nor forsake you. So we may boldly say: 'The Lord is my helper; I will not fear. What can man do to me?' "
"Hebrews, thirteen five and six." Jérémie blinked, as much surprised that Lussier should choose a verse so fitting as because he himself recognised it.
Lussier nodded, closing the book with a dull thump and handing it back. "There is a lot of comfort to be had in this, but there's a lot of danger in it too. You wouldn't know it but it's truth. So keep that in the bottom of your pack and be very careful if ever you take it out again."
"What did that quote mean?" Maugan wanted to know.
"In simple terms? Man may be cruel, and vicious, and devious, but no man may bring harm upon one who puts his trust in the hands of God. Which, in a place like this, is something we must all do." Lussier drank off the contents of the mug in two long swallows. "Now. Make sure your muskets are loaded and your bayonets are fixed. We'll get attacked tomorrow without a doubt. Perhaps even tonight. So we'd better bed down now and keep our pieces to hand. And you," he added, pointing at Jérémie, "could do worse than to pray for every last sorry fucker in this company."
"Aren't you a good one for motivation," Gigot muttered, once again taking his empty mug back and giving it a thorough wiping out with the tail of his shirt.
The others were reaching for their muskets, exchanging meaningful glances as they each drew bayonets from scabbards. It was hard not to feel worried by Lussier's certainty that there'd be an enemy attack and, worse, that divine intervention was needed to help protect them. Jérémie twisted his bayonet into place but took no comfort from the light metallic click. He wrapped himself up in his blanket and lay down with his pack for a pillow, his musket lying almost beneath him it was so close to hand. But, unlike the others who seemed to fall easily to sleep, rest was not within his power. So he lay still while the fire gradually faded and the snores of the others rumbled and rasped in a strange yet soothing chorus. And, despite Lussier's advice, he retrieved his Bible from his pack, finding that just holding it helped, as did letting his memory replay some of the many instances of his mother reading to them from it. Perhaps because of Lussier's brief recitation from Hebrews, the bulk of the passages wafting through his memory were from that book, until his mother's voice eventually faded into the silence brought on by slumber.
~
The thick, low-hanging clouds of smoke seared his nose, mouth, and throat as he ran. Despite the bright midday sun, it almost seemed dark. The plantation house, and the grass all around it, was burning, producing the heavy smoke that blinded his eyes and choked his lungs. Here and there in the dark banks of smoke, the flash of a musket provided a second-long illumination. Something to guide his progress by. Something to run toward. He had no eyes for anything but those. Which was why when Paol flung an arm out squarely into his path, Jérémie had neither the time nor the presence of mind to stop. That solid limb thrust across his path of travel brought him up short, nearly knocking him sprawling.
"If you go that way, you die," the Breton said curtly, going quickly back to reloading his musket.
What? "Aren't the others that way?"
"They've pulled back. We should also."
Oh Christ. Jérémie felt his stomach turn over. He had very nearly run headlong into the arms of the enemy. Following Paol's lead, he ran back the way he'd come, endlessly glad that somebody with more presence of mind than he had been close by. That was a regular occurrence, wasn't it? They all had been looking out for each other and that included Jérémie. He strained his eyes in the smoke and thought he saw somebody run acros their path, moving at right angles to their own direction of flight. Was it a rebel? It had happened too fast for him to be sure but -
"Shit!" Jérémie heard the click of a doghead being drawn back half a heartbeat before the leaping tongue of flame from a musket flashed dangerously close to them. The shot was fired close enough, in fact, for him to feel the heat of the muzzle flash against the back of his head. Without a second thought, both he and Paol slammed to a halt, turned, presented, and fired back. It was a soldier's purest instinct and it wasn't until after the musket was at his hip and his hand was in his cartridge box that Jérémie realised he did not feel afraid so much as angry. Was this natural? Or human? Did it even matter? Not that there was any time for such considerations. The man they'd both just shot was not alone and his comrades were close. Very close. Hell. Shit. Too close! The ramrod was still in the barrel when Jérémie jerked the musket level enough to fire, and the raggedly dressed rebel took both ball and ramrod straight into the stomach.
"We gotta get out of here!"
They certainly did. Jérémie whipped his bayonet from its scabbard and jammed it into place, painfully aware that without his ramrod he could not reload. The thirteen inches of triangular steel was now his only means of defence. "I lost my ramrod!"
Paol swore in Breton. For all Jérémie knew, the words were directed at him for being stupid and careless but he could not care. His mate fired from the hip at another screaming black man and then, in the face of the swift approach of more angry and vengeful rebels, the two of them ran. It was hard to know for sure where the rest of the patrol was but staying put was an unhealthy option. Half-blind, choking on smoke, and both with empty muskets, but for the moment alive so long as they were in motion. That was a much better choice. Jérémie had no idea if it could last but he was ready to run for ever if it meant cheating death.
"Second Company!" The cry rasped its way up from parched throats, squeezing lungs that were already strained by thick woodsmoke and hard exertion. If they could even get a rough idea where the others were, it would be a life line. Something more solid than wild guessing which direction safety lay in. "Second Company!"
"Here! Here! Second Company here!" The answering voice was not one Jérémie recognised but this was utterly irrelevant. That man was in that moment his best friend. A musket flashed ahead of them, but the flare stabbed skyward instead of straight at them. It was a signalling shot. God bless the lad who was clever enough to fire it. Somebody offered a startled oath when Jérémie and Paol came galloping in, nearly bowling over a man who was on his knees and trying to reload his musket. For his part, Jérémie didn't care. All that mattered was they'd reached safety. In a manner of speaking. The patrol had drawn itself in amongst a thin stand of trees which offered scant protection and less cover. Their position was bad and this quickly became apparent even to a novice in war such as he.
"Back from the dead, eh, Rosy?" Gigot called, taking a musket from a wounded man who was loading every firelock that came into his possession with fiendish speed. "We'd given you up!"
"I need a ramrod. I shot mine into somebody. Where can I - "
Lussier, with a face streaked with powder and blood, thrust a ramrod at him. "Reload, fast as you've ever done. Save the stupid chattering for later. Watch your fronts, here they come again!"
Such was his haste to obey that he spilled half a cartridge's worth and got no more than a few grains into the pan. Swearing, Jérémie flung the useless cartridge away and grabbed for another. There was no time to think. There was only time to react, to fly through motions he'd learned in far more gentle surroundings than this. That was if one could call the depot gentle. Prime, load, ram, present - and make sure the ramrod was clear of the barrel before firing. The air was already so heavy and smoky that the billowing plumes of spent powder made no impression. Visibility could hardly get worse. Which meant the enemy could get much too close to them before anyone saw and could shoot them down. With his eyes streaming and his throat afire, Jérémie jammed his hand into his cartridge box for another round. His questing fingers scraped roughly over empty holes in the wooden block before brushing against the round shape of a cartridge.
"Haven't got much left," he announced, surprised at how cool he sounded when his very being felt hot, tingling, and almost numb. His blood raced and he realised as he dumped powder, wadding, and ball down the barrel that his hands were shaking, yet not from any pervading sense of fear. Or at least he did not think it was fear. Somehow, he didn't think he'd been afraid all day but they'd also been fighting all day. Maybe there simply had not been time for that or any other emotion?
"None of us have. Fire till you're empty and stop fuckin' complaining," Sergeant Leclerc snarled, grabbing the musket from the hands of a dead man and checking the priming. "Sir!"
The one-word bellow was more a warning than anything else, but it came too late. Capitaine Chéreau had, only a moment before, been heaving his sword out of a rebel's chest when another with an axe hacked down the corporal nearest Chéreau and then lodged his weapon into the capitaine himself. In an instant, two more enemy fighters swept in through the newly-made gap in the lines. The axe-wielding black soldier struck at his victim thrice more, before a screaming Archambault swung his musket at him like a bat, both hands wrapped around the very end of the barrel. The flat of the solid wooden stock slammed against the rebel's head with an awful meaty smack and the man fell dead on the spot, his skull caved in. A second later, Archambault himself went down beneath a merciless onslaught of knives.
Even yesterday, that scene would have horrified him into immobility but today the need to protect his life trumped all else. He could entertain thoughts and emotions in detail later. If there was a later. Jérémie swept the butt of his own musket into the head of another rebel, knocking him aside in time to clear the way for Maugan to fire almost in his face at a bony black man about to wrap his club around Lussier's head. This was insane. Chaos. Hell on earth. The patrol's lines were broken. The enemy was everywhere. Those men who still had cartridges kept firing. Somehow. Those who didn't used musket butt, bayonet, and bare fist against the flood tide of rebels swirling around them.
With the capitaine dead, command fell on Sergeant Leclerc and, to his credit, the sergeant leapt immediately to the responsibility. "Run! Run! Fall back, follow me!"
It was not the most comforting or inspiring orders but survival was more important than any notion of glory. Somebody's hand was on his pack, apparently with the intent of dragging him along, but for once Jérémie needed no prompting. He was already in motion, following close behind Gigot, whose large frame was easiest to keep in sight. The patrol's survivors fled as though the very hounds of Hell were baying and nipping at their heels. That this was more true than not occurred briefly to Jérémie as he stretched his legs to their limit, striving only to keep up with the deer-like bounds of Gigot. As the scattered patrol raced away from the wreck of the plantation, the dense banks of smoke thinned and, abruptly, it seemed, vanished. It was possible to breathe in clean air and in the unfiltered sunshine, the eyes felt suddenly dazzled. Blinded and gasping, Jérémie somehow held his stride, until his eyes adjusted to the brightness. There was no hope of easing the tightness of his chest until they were safe though.
Waist-high seas of uncut grass and burnt stumps of trees flashed past unseen. Dips, rises, and rabbit holes in the ground were passed over without thought. The crying, gurgling form of a wounded man was glimpsed only for an instant before that luckless fellow was left behind, ignored by his comrades but not by their bloodthirsty pursuers. His screams lent the others speed. Half a mile had gone before any of them knew it but there was still a full mile to go before they were within sight of the village they'd left that morning. Run. Escape. The only thing to care about. His lungs screamed and his heart beat impossibly fast. His legs were burning but he could not slow. Must not. To fall behind was to die. Not today. No. Every stride was one long leaping step closer to safety. Survival. Life. He had never run so hard or so long, for such a dear prize.
Ahead of him, Gigot was pointing, uttering a high laugh to which his racing pace lent a breathless, staccato beat. A column was approaching them across the field. Even as Jérémie stared at it in disbelief, the column was shifting, flinging itself out into line and thence into opened ranks. The swiftest-footed men of the patrol were nearly up to that line and within a minute those men were flying through the opened ranks. The line came on in this formation, marching at the quick. Jérémie rallied his flagging strength and stretched his legs out, his feet barely feeling as though they touched the ground as they propelled him toward and then, suddenly, past the thin line of grave-faced soldiers. He made it several more yards on sheer momentum before stumbling then collapsing into the grass. It felt impossible to get enough air into his lungs and he was sure his heart would hammer its way out of his chest. Every part of him burned and ran with sweat. His eyes stung and swam. He coughed, shuddered, and then felt a heavy blackness settle over him.
His eyes opened suddenly only a moment later, he thought, and he realised he was being carried by his arms and legs between the Kerjeans. They were on the march. Halfway back to the village, in fact. The first task undertaken by his befuddled mind was to get his feet moving, which drew a grinning, "About time, mate!" from Maugan.
Speech felt beyond his ability but, ahead of them, he caught sight of four men bearing a stretcher. A heavy stretcher. Gigot. A grin came onto his face. For once, he was not the only one coming up short. He thus felt less guilty about letting the Bretons help support him for another hundred yards, until his legs seemed sound enough to bear his weight again. Paol was carrying his pack and shako, and Maugan his musket, he realised, but neither seemed inclined to give up those items. Probably just as well. He wasn't sure if he really wanted that weight back. Not when his legs still felt more than a little wobbly and weak.
"Straight to the surgeon with you when we're back," Maugan told him, nodding toward the semi-distant village. "One of the boys said he's come up with Fourth Company from Fort Liberté. We'll need him after today."
They would indeed. The survivors of the patrol were formed in a pathetic little column not far ahead, with its less fit members straggling behind as best they could. Less fit was a relative term. Most of them had run their legs off and those who seemed to have handled that fairly well were still hard up to march as soldiers should. If none of them needed the attention of a surgeon in some way, it'd be a miracle. Or something very near it. Jérémie glanced back and was comforted to see the men who'd come out to support them were spread out in skirmish line, trading speed for protection. He didn't know who they were or who'd sent them, but those details didn't matter. Those lads had saved the patrol.
His strength began to gradually return as they plodded along, such that by the time the exhausted group reached the picquet lines, he felt almost like himself again. His voice had even returned, though it was hoarse and scratchy. The surgeon, Montreuil, was at work looking over each of the men from the patrol with a curt, unfriendly thoroughness. He'd already seen to Gigot, who now had a place in the surgeon's wagon. Lussier was just departing, the spotless white bandage on his arm standing starkly at odds with his filthy smallclothes. He nodded at them as he passed but didn't speak. Perhaps he too found it painful to swallow, never mind talk. Jérémie and the Kerjeans joined the short queue of men waiting for treatment, Jérémie at least never more glad to stand still in his life.
"Let me guess. You're an unfortunate sufferer of acute exhaustion too." The surgeon stood before him, reaching brusquely for Jérémie's wrist. "Can you swallow? Yes? Never mind that it hurts, it will for a while. I expect it hurts to talk also. It will, for a while. Open your mouth - yes, good. No lasting harm has been done. Go back to your billet and drink some wine. Next man."
Wine. Was that it? Jérémie supposed he was relieved to know he'd recover but he'd thought a surgeon would have more interest in loading his patients up with medicines. Then again, he had never needed a surgeon's services before, so what did he know? He moved aside and waited for the Kerjeans to receive their own perfunctory looking-over. Part of him wanted to look in on Gigot, but the prospect of sitting down near a fire and not having to move again was too strong.
"We'll have to find our own wine since Gigot's not gonna be with us tonight," Maugan observed, moving away from the wagon once Montreuil had dismissed him. "But I know somebody, so we'll - "
"Second Company, on your feet! Get your packs and muskets! Marching order! Form for parade right here, you got five minutes!" Sergeant Leclerc was moving briskly along the road, glaring around at the men of the company as he went. He'd managed to wash his face, which stood out oddly against his filthy uniform. Ominously, his expression bordered on the thunderous and when he spotted Jérémie and the Kerjeans, he altered his course to approach them.
"You three," the sergeant snapped, "get your lazy backsides over there with the rest of the company. No slackin' off for any of you. If you been listenin' to Lussier about that, you're all fuckin' stupid. Now, get movin' - "
"Sergeant Leclerc! When the company is mustered, I want - you lads, what are you doing?" It was Lieutenant Gironde, laden with a pack and two pistols. He was clearly ready to get on the march toward trouble. "You're not going anywhere except back to your billet. Get some dinner, clean your muskets, and have a rest."
This direction clearly did not go down well with Leclerc, but Jérémie's first inclination was not to pay the sergeant's feelings any mind. He was tired and hungry, and was happy to have the lieutenant's permission to knock off for the day. His companions, however, apparently had other ideas.
Maugan looked deliberately past Leclerc and to Gironde said, "We're good for goin' along, sir. We just need to clean our muskets and repack our cartridge boxes."
"You sure, lads? I saw the patrol's run. It looked exhausting."
"We'll come anyway, sir. We're good for it."
It crossed Jérémie's mind to object to that, but in the presence of an officer, he didn't quite dare. In the event, it was plain Gironde didn't believe the assurances, though he didn't bother to call Maugan's bluff. Instead, he nodded. "All right. There's a pot of water on the boil over there. You can clear out your barrels with it, then fill up your boxes. Ten minutes and no more. If you're not paraded with the others, you're staying behind."
"Yes sir."
No one moved until both Leclerc and Gironde had departed, then Paol hefted up Jérémie's pack. "Best get this back on," he said.
Grimacing, Jérémie struggled back into the pack's straps, then accepted first his shako then his musket. The weight felt unusually heavy and he felt decidedly put upon to have to carry it again, but there was no other option. Most of the other lads from the ill-fated patrol looked to be mustering themselves as well, queueing up to have boiling water ladled into their powder-clogged musket barrels. More telling than all of that was Lussier's reappearance, tightening the last screw on his musket's lock plate even as he approached.
"If you've got fresh flints, better fit 'em in now," he told them. "Best not to chance these old ones failing. Oh, and René was kind enough to let us have this." He held up a canteen with a grin.
"Nice of him," Maugan said, taking a swig then passing the canteen to his brother. "How's the arm?"
"Just a scratch. Drink up, tadpole," Lussier told Jérémie when the canteen came to him. "You didn't do too badly today but the job's not done yet."
That was what he'd guessed and what he'd been afraid of. Jérémie took a long swallow and managed not to cough or sputter at the sweet bite of the wine. He wasn't much of a drinker. Or at least he wasn't on the same level as the others. Certainly not as bad as Gigot. He passed the canteen back to Lussier, who stoppered it and slung it over his head.
"You know," the older soldier went on as the group joined the swiftly-shortening queue for the boiling water pot, "if we all get back after this, you're gonna have more business fixing up shoes than you'll know what to do with! I think I'm losing the sole on my right one and I'll bet you a lot of the other lads are in a similar state."
"When we get back, you mean?"
He shook his head. "No. If. Remember how I said revolts were a bad business? You're gonna see that laid out plain real soon. So grab as many cartridges as your boxes will hold and then take a handful more. I don't know about Gironde but Leclerc is out for blood. We'll be busy for a couple days yet. And if we're lucky, we'll get out safe again."
The pallor in Jérémie's face and the grim expressions from the Kerjeans brought a brief, twisted smirk to Lussier's face. He held his musket out so a ladle of steaming water could be poured down it, but said nothing more. In reality, what he'd already said was more than enough. Feeling a sick sense of dread start to settle over him, Jérémie stepped up to receive his own ration of boiling water, taking care to keep his thumb over the touch hole so no water could escape. If the flint got wet, it was useless. He swirled the water around the musket barrel for a couple seconds before tipping the firelock upside down. The stream of filthy water that came out was as sure a sign as any that he'd overcome his apparent inability to act under fire. Not that this was any comfort when they were about to march straight back into the teeth of an angry and stirred up enemy.
Somebody offered him a damp rag to clean off his bayonet, which he realised was still fixed. The sight of the dried blood gave him an instant's pause. Not that there was any time for reflections. Grimacing, Jérémie gave the triangular blade a quick wipe then twisted it free and shoved it back into its scabbard. He couldn't dwell on it but the fact remained he had used the blade to lethal effect today, without any trace of regret or mercy. And that scared him.
~
The sunlight was a blessing. It was a relief from the depths of what had been an endless, agonising night. To say the night had been dark was stretching the point. The glow of the burning plantation and grass fields had given the darkness an ominous sort of illumination and had also made the air smoky and hard to breathe. That last was hardly different to what conditions had been earlier in the day, really. Jérémie hooked his arm more securely around the trunk of the tree he was perched in and squinted against the sunshine. From this vantage point, he could see how wide was the swath of burned earth which stretched away around them. He could also see the corpses that still dotted the scorched landscape. They were the only traces left of their enemy. Nothing else was in sight. Thank God.
Fighting had begun afresh almost as soon as the company had got within of the plantation. It had gone on all night. The company had initially stood in the open, formed in line and giving volley fire, until their wily opponents had got around them and turned the left flank. Squares were hardly a defence against infantry yet for an hour, the company had fought off successive attacks in this way. After that, they'd withdrawn to the dubious safety of a couple plantation outbuildings that had defied the fires by virtue of having been built from stone. They had been hotly engaged for the rest of the night from these positions. After a while, Jérémie's senses had become numb to the rattle of musketry, the shouts and screams, the clash of steel on steel when a particularly determined attack was repulsed at bayonet point.
Then dawn had come and as if by magic, it had all ceased. Lieutenant Gironde had kept them in place for the better part of an hour before sending out patrols to find out where the enemy had gone. Reports came back that the enemy had apparently cleared off, leaving their dead behind. It was a sudden and baffling turn of events. Picquets were set, one of the trees which somehow survived the fires was felled for use in camp fires, and fatigue parties were detailed. The men they'd lost here yesterday had to be found and last night's dead had to be buried. Jérémie and the others were in one of the former parties and after a couple of hours they found what was left of two men. The unlucky pair had been hung from the same tree, which stood in the path of the fires. It was impossible to know what had killed them but as the bodies were cut down, he hoped they'd already been dead when they'd been strung up.
In all, the search parties had only found four of the men who'd fallen during yesterday's combat. Capitaine Chéreau was one of them. What was left of him. The rebels had literally hacked the capitaine to pieces. The sight had made Lieutenant Gironde throw up on the spot. The remains were buried quickly and without ceremony. Nobody wanted to linger too long over the task. Of the others who were known to have fallen there was absolutely no sign. Perhaps that was for the best. For his part, Jérémie had no interest at all in finding them and thereby learning what had happened to them. It was more than bad enough to have seen Chéreau, who hadn't been dead when the rebels went to work on him, according to a stony-faced Lussier. That statement nearly made Jérémie vomit just to think about it.
To escape being part of any further details, Jérémie had volunteered to go up the tallest surviving tree and keep a lookout. Way up here, it was possible to see for some distance, but he was also above the drifting haze of woodsmoke. Staying awake was surprisingly easy at such a height, since he knew that if he dozed off it was very likely he'd fall. Even as tired and drained as he felt, keeping his eyes open while up here was not hard. Being up so high meant he was, for once, away from the others and thus alone with his thoughts. Or at least he had been until somebody remembered he'd been perched up in the tree for the better part of two hours.
"Blanchard!" It was a corporal calling up to him. "Get yourself down here!"
Despite himself, Jérémie felt resentful of that order. It was actually almost pleasant to be up in the tree, above everything on the ground. Far removed from death, anger, and war. For a while he had nearly been able to pretend it wasn't happening. The tree bark scraped at his hands and tugged at his coat as he scrambled down from branch to branch, his movements surprisingly nimble in the face of his half-blind descent. It was half a miracle that he made back to solid ground without anything more than a few scratches to boast of.
Waiting at the bottom was Paol, a mug of warm wine in hand. "We've got lucky. Lieutenant Gironde wants us to get our heads down for a few hours. It's been a long day. C'mon. We got some stew and bread, and René's stash of wine."
"He hardly needs it, does he?" Jérémie accepted the mug with a tired grin. "A rest will be perfect."
Not least because the company hadn't had a second's respite since they'd marched out from the village the evening before. A rest. Even only a few hours of it was a blessing. He took a long swig from the mug then passed it back to Paol. Without further conversation, he followed the Breton toward the squad's billet. Such as it turned out to be. A makeshift hut knocked up from unburnt timbers and scattered masonry. It was anything but comfortable but Jérémie was too tired to care. Somebody had gotten a fire going, ironically enough, and there was a small pot steaming merrily over it.
"What's this, then?" Lussier wanted to know as the two came up. "You ain't happy bein' a frog, so you wanna be a monkey instead?"
"It was just what I was told - "
"Never mind him," said Maugan, offering a tin plate filled with stew. "Tuck in while it's still hot."
Only too happy to overlook Lussier's jibe, Jérémie dropped carelessly onto the crunchy, burnt grass. The plate of stew smelled heavenly. It reminded him that he hadn't had a bite to eat since the previous morning and he was briefly puzzled by the fact that he hadn't felt hungry in the long hours in between. Being busy fighting for your life could perhaps have had something to do with it. Equally puzzling was the how and where of the ingredients used for the stew had been gotten, but he decided such things were irrelevant. All that mattered was getting the aromatic food down. It didn't even need to taste good, really. What mattered was that it was hot and fresh.
"We'll be wanted for sentry tonight, I heard," Paol said, tucking into his own plate with a little less enthusiasm.
"Probably. So get your fill and catch some sleep. There's no telling when we might get another bit of luxury like this."
Jérémie licked his fingers, not having bothered to dig out a spoon, and frowned. The stew had scalded his mouth, which made it a little painful to speak, but his weariness had worn his patience a little thin and Lussier's apparently gloomy outlook annoyed him. "You're not long on optimism, are you?"
"Optimism is a fairly useless thing in our present circumstances, tadpole," was the reply. "We're here on a dirty piece of business. So far, it's been a little unpleasant but we've hardly just begun. It'll get worse, I can promise you that. It always does."
"Maybe, but worse can hardly be borne if you have not got any faith."
At that, Lussier chuckled. "Ah, faith. What a useless thing. You're still young, lad. You'll grow out of it." On seeing Jérémie's face redden, he shook his head. "My father was a faithful man. He was a priest, so he believed. Hell. He lived by God. And God let him go to a terrible death. You're too young to have heard about the September Massacres, though, I expect. Point is, blind faith is naïve, tadpole. God doesn't give a shit about any of us mortals. Look where we are now. What we're doin'. I've done this devil's work before and I can tell you it's the same basic thing no matter where you face it. Here, Corsica, the fuckin' Vendée... but if you think it helps to be hopeful and optimistic, you go for it. Whatever you reckon you need to get you through. I'll just say that it ain't worth the effort."
The Kerjeans were looking at each other with unreadable frowns, while Jérémie tried to understand how Lussier's line of thinking made any sense. How could he talk so disparagingly about God, when only the day before he had told the squad they should put their trust in Him? Had that only been a lie? It seemed likely. Which meant that he couldn't be sure what was truth and what wasn't - but to be fair, he supposed that Lussier was simply holding true to his advice to hide one's faith. It was a strange way to go about it, though. Jérémie was not fond of hypocrites and it bothered him that Lussier might be one.
"You're drunk," Paol said flatly into the uneasy silence.
"Maybe I am," Lussier replied. "But that hardly changes facts."
Maugan's frown was deepening. "You were in the Vendée?"
"That miserable place? Aye. I was there. Funny how I was fighting for the very republic that murdered my family, eh? Ideals are funny things, I'll tell you. But faith? Faith is the first thing to fail when the only thing around you is death and suffering."
"Ideals and faith are what keeps us human," Jérémie pointed out.
Lussier answered that with another chuckle. "They're also what makes you open to manipulation, tadpole. You just have to look at the progression of our great and glorious revolution to see that played out in spades. The folks up in the Vendée saw through it all and we slaughtered 'em for refusing to go quietly along."
"There was the Chouans too."
"Aye, they made trouble too, and they were dealt with the same. Makes you think, doesn't it, that those brave fools were happy to die for their faith when they could have spared a whole fuckin' lot of lives by being just a little less bullheaded. I can tell you, God didn't give two shits what happened to those poor believers. Neither did we. Nothin' is any different here. Only thing missing here is General Turreau and his columns, but I'll tell you lads to be happy for that!"
Jérémie felt sick and set his half-eaten stew aside. He knew nothing of what Lussier was talking about but the older soldier's stance was objectionable all the same. "Better to die a brave fool than to live as a sensible coward," he said. That was one thing immediately apparent from Lussier's story. The man's own father should have proved that to him. "I do not know anything of the Vendée or anywhere else but here. Here... God has kept us safe and alive so far. We'd be foolish and shortsighted to spit on His protection now for so stupid a reason as bitterness."
"Bitterness! You silly boy. You don't know the first thing about it."
There was a grunt from Paol. "Good thing he don't. He's talkin' more sense than you right now."
"If you think that, you're as naïve as he is. I'd expected better from you." Lussier reached for Gigot's canteen, but Maugan beat him to it. The Breton upended the canteen into the fire, which sputtered and hissed as the wine poured across the flames. "You bastard!"
"No more than you're being this evening," Maugan said, tossing the empty canteen aside. "We lost good people in the Chouannarie."
"So did the republic," Lussier countered. "And for what? A useless king and a meaningless religion? Freedom, even? That's what these poor bastards here are fighting for. What they're butchering good men for. They're no different than those savages in the Vendée or Corsica. God," he added, pointing suddenly at Jérémie, "is the last thing you should expect any protection from when these black devils come howling for your blood. Your only protection comes from this company and I'll tell you now if you don't have the spine to match like with like out here, I've got no use for you."
"I ain't listenin' to this," said Maugan as he got up. "C'mon, boys. Let's find another billet."
Disgusted, Jérémie stood up. This was clearly the true Lussier. What he saw and heard made him sorry to have met the man. Wine was no excuse at all. "Then you will remember your evil ways and your deeds that were not good; and you will loathe yourselves in your own sight, for your iniquities and abominations." He shouldered his pack and musket, then grabbed up his shako by its chinstrap. Let the bastard chew on that. Before Lussier could come up with a sharp response, the trio moved off, not giving him a backward glance.
"Sorry about that, Rosy. We've never seen him like that before."
Jérémie shrugged. "It's fine. I have heard worse." It was a weak attempt to brush off the effect of Lussier's remarks but thankfully neither Kerjean called his bluff.
Instead, Maugan clapped him once on the shoulder and said, "Good man. Now c'mon. I think Saint-Laurent's got a decent shelter over there. Probably got some good food on also. Let's take it from him."
As it turned out, only half of that statement proved true, but none of them minded doing without a second chance at dinner.