Tuck-of-Drum
BY ALFRED TRESIDDER SHEPPARD(Copyright in Great Britain by A. T. Sheppard.)
AT nine o’clock Josephine beat a vigorous reveille on the drum that had led old troops into action. It was the second of December; the sun of Austerlitz shone on the grass and trees in the little front white garden, and was fast melting the delicate tracery of fern and frond on the oval window of Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum’s bedroom.
A curious name, Tuck-of-Drum; the echo of an ancient story told round camp-fires long burned out; a scrap of wreckage floating, like its owner, when the seas of years held so much that was forgotten. Dominique Laplume was proud of the name; for even the village children, whispering “Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum” behind his back, brought the flicker of a smile to his grizzled face and the ghost of a flash to eyes dim and watery with age.
On Austerlitz day, for many years, the drum had roused him from his slumbers. He had slept heavily, this old warrior; “a thousand thunders!” he said sometimes in self-excuse, “when one has made one’s bed as often on straw or the solid ground——”
His son, growing from childhood tomanhood, plied the drumsticks in his time; he fell at Solferino. His son’s son held them in his turn; the earth still lay bare and trampled over him at Gravelotte. They had given much to France, these Laplumes. Now Josephine, with her black sleeves rolled high on her thin white arms, and her dimpled face set into desperate earnestness, took her dead father’s place, and thundered at the parchment until the old man’s husky voice answered the summons.
Her sabots clattered down the stairs. Coughing and grunting, Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum began to dress. The clothes he had worn the day—and many days—before hung from their pegs in a chintz-covered recess. On a rush-bottomed chair near the bed, carefully brushed and pipeclayed, lay coat, and belts, and breeches, and gaiters that had gathered mud, in their time, from half the kingdoms of Europe. On the dressing-table the cross of the Legion of Honor rested in its little leather case.
At last his shaking fingers opened the door. The drum lay outside; the drum, and, on the drum, the gigantic bearskin, bullet-bitten in old fights, moth-marked during long, idle years. He came downstairs in full regimentals. Madame Laplume was talking to the village postmaster at the open door. She ran to meet him. Her eyes were misty, for she remembered last year’s reveille; but there was a ring of gladness in her greeting.
“Good morning, grandfather!” she cried, kissing him on both cheeks; “a happy Austerlitz day. There is news, too——”
“News?” Dying fires flamed up for a second in his old eyes.
“D’Aurelles de Paladines is driving them back,” she said. “We won everywhere yesterday—everywhere. Chanzy has forced the Bavarians back on Orgères. We have taken Guillonville, Terminiers, Monnerville—and—and—where else, Josephine?”
“Goniers, Villepain, Faverolles,” little Josephine chimed in, repeating the names glibly, like a well-conned lesson.
“And they say the brave General Duerot has broken out of Paris, and is marching to join the Army of the Loire!”
“Good!”
Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum sat down stiffly, the joints in his long limbs cracking; he held the coffee-cup to his lips, but the coffee danced and splashed out. He jerked the cup down quickly, and brushed a drop from his mustache with an impatient hand.
“It is just as I have said,” he cried suddenly and fiercely, springing to his feet. “We have them like trapped rats! Did I not say so, Héloïse? Even the little Josephine has heard me. Listen, Josephine. These Germans, these enemies of our dear France, begin to pay for their folly. They hated us because our great Emperor led us once to all their capitals—to Stuttgart, to Dresden, to Munich, to Berlin—because their kings bowed hats-in-hand before the soldiers of France; because we cut up their country with our swords as I—look you!—cut this bread of mine.” And with nervous hands he sliced white, crust-ringed circles from the roll. “But now—ah, the Emperor, our great Emperor, is dead; and the Marshals and the Grande Armée have marched away. They found us asleep, unready; like rats, like locusts, they swarmed into our cornfields and our vineyards. But we are awake at last! We are ready at last! The revenge begins!”
“It begins,” echoed Madame Laplume. “But come, grandfather, your coffee grows cold, and——”
“The punishment begins!” he continued, his voice shrill as the neigh of an old war-horse. “Look you!” He held up a gnarled hand. “Here is Duerot, with the troops of Paris. Here”—he raised the other, its knotted fingers stretched out—“are De Paladines, Chanzy, De Sonis, Jauréguiberry, with the Army of the Loire. Now see; the Germans are between them.”He snatched a morsel of the bread he had been cutting and brought his palms together. “The Germans—the Germans——”
“You have cut your hand, grandfather,” cried Josephine.
He stopped, and looked dumbly at his palm. A splinter of crust had grazed the skin. The bread rolled to the floor.
“They are crushed,” he mumbled, bringing down his heel. “Miscreants! that they should dare to enter France! But they will pay for their folly; ah, they will pay well! I knew; I said it. ‘Wait,’ I said, when they came to us with their long faces and their stories of defeat. ‘France has slept; but she will shake herself and awake.’Mon Dieu, yes. Why I—I who speak, my little Josephine, put a hundred to flight when I was young, with this little drum alone: that is why they call great-grandfather Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum, my dear. See, it is the sun of Austerlitz that shines on the white trees. Sixty-five long years ago—sixty-five long years ago—the great Emperor pinned this cross on my breast; ‘Ah, this is Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum,’ he said, pinching my ear, ‘who beat the charge in the village, and put a hundred to flight.’ That was nothing; we did those things. And again—today—the sun of Austerlitz——”
He broke off suddenly as the door opened and a fat old man, with a large, hairless, foolish face—the face of a great baby, still eying the world with wonder—entered the room. He, too, wore the uniform of the Emperor’s Guard. The veterans embraced.
“You have heard the news?” cried Laplume. “Ah, it is arranged. Austerlitz day—the day of Austerlitz—sees victory again for France, my dear Hippolyte. Sit down, sit down. Héloïse mixes the salad. Héloïse! Here is Monsieur Bergeret. It has been a struggle, my friend, but we have saved a bottle and a snack for today; we have arranged it, I say.” He sniffed, nudged his comrade and chuckled. A pleasant smell of cooking already pervaded the sitting-room, floating in from the kitchen in the rear.
Madame Laplume, who had vanished while Dominique was telling the child of France and its ancient glories, reappeared, with bare and powdery arms; Sergeant Hippolyte saluted, and passed a wavering hand over his foolish chin. Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum, talking garrulously all the while, patted his old comrade’s accoutrements into shape; fastened a button; untwisted a red shoulder-knot; rearranged an ill-adjusted strap. Age was dulling the Sergeant’s brain a little; “he does not wear as well as I,” thought Tuck-of-Drum, with the pathetic pride of age.
There was a metallic “tap-tap” and a clatter of sabots on the cobbles of the village street. “Jacques Dufour arrives!” cried Dominique Laplume, and flung the door open with a flourish.
It was like the gathering of ghosts from the past. Itwasa gathering of ghosts from the past. These three, with their wrinkled cheeks, their quavering voices, their scanty white hair, their battered uniforms and weapons—these three were all that were left of that band of young recruits who, in the great days of France, had marched down the village street, shouting the songs of the Empire, blowing kisses to fair faces in the windows and the roadsides, exchanging glances with bright eyes that had grown dim at last and closed on earth and all its color and glitter. Like spars, they floated still, scarred and encrusted by the waves of time that had engulfed a generation so heroic, stupendous.
Dufour, wrinkled, wizened, twisted with rheumatism, limped to his place. His grandson carried his musket and placed it in a corner by Bergeret’s; the old man had lost a limb at Quatre Bras and needed a stout stick to aid the wooden leg.
“I will come again at six, grandfather,” the boy piped shrilly in his ear. “I say I will come again to fetch you at six.”
“No, no; Pierre must stay,” interrupted Monsieur Laplume. “Eh? He must stay, too, and hear the stories of the olden days—the days of the glories of France.” The boy’s eyes lit up. “Come, we are ready. He shall sit by the little Josephine.”
By and bye Madame Laplume brought in the meal, steaming from the oven. Bottles of red wine were ranged on the table.
“There were five of us last year,” Dufour muttered. “Buffet and Deyrolles have dismissed.”
“Eight the year before,” said Bergeret, rubbing his hands and smiling vacuously.
“The ranks grow thin, comrades,” said Laplume. “Well, the first toast!”
They rose, and drank in silence to the memory of that great man whom they had fought and bled and suffered for long since—and still remembered and adored. They drank to the old Marshals, to the Grande Armée, to village comrades whose bones lay in the Peninsula, in Germany, in Belgium, in the churchyards of France, but whose faces, dim and mournful, still looked at them through the mists of years, and whose voices still echoed in their memories. They lit cigars and pipes; but the room was full of the smoke of ancient battles. They talked of Desaix, Bessières, Junot, Murat, Lannes, Masséna, Ney—the old, unforgotten names. If they could come again! Ah, ifhecould come again—how the scattered remnants of his lost legions would rally round him, and young France hurry to the eagles, and the glorious days return!
“But we are making an end; we are making an end,” cried Tuck-of-Drum fiercely, bringing down his fist and making plates and bottles jump with the vehemence of the blow. “Chanzy and Duerot have them in the trap at last. I said so—did I not? Even the little Josephine remembers. On the day of Austerlitz——”
An ominous booming, distant, sullen, like an echo of old years of strife, sounded in their ears.
“It is thunder!” cried Pierre. Little Josephine clutched her mother’s arm.
The veterans exchanged glances. “What the devil—” began Laplume. They flung open the door and stepped into the village street. Two or three people, white-faced, had stopped to listen.
The distant guns roared again. What were they doing there—then—in that direction? Tuck-of-Drum looked puzzled, doubtful. This day of all the year, this great day of his life, was bound up with all his thoughts; one hope, one conviction, possessed him, and had shone steadily through all the gloom of the last few months. The day of Austerlitz would see the eagle turn upon its foes; the sun of Austerlitz would look down upon the invading army scattered like chaff before the wind—crushed, rather, like grain between the two millstones, the armies of Paris and the Loire. The previous day’s successes confirmed him. But what were the guns doing there? The fighting should be far beyond Orgères by this time. He beat down a flicker of uncertainty.
“Bah, it goes well,” he muttered. “They make their last stand. Come, comrades, let us drink to Chanzy and the Army of the Loire.”
Poor, foolish Bergeret soon fell asleep, huddled in his chair; but the wine put fire into the veins of his comrades. Pierre and Josephine listened round-eyed as they talked of bivouacs and camp-fires; of ancient comrades and conquered cities; of Austerlitz and the heights of Pratzen, and the Menitz Lake.
“Sixty-five years ago at this very hour”—so the talk went on. “Do you remember? Have you forgotten?” They argued, they shouted, in their old voices that broke from gruffness into shrill quavers, ludicrous under other circumstances, but now pathetic. They moved bottles, glasses, salt-cellars, to illustrate the disposition of troops; in the blue smoke-clouds the children, drinking in their words, could almost catch the glint of the Cuirassiers’ breastplates, the glittering gold-lacingof the Hussars, the rise and fall of green epaulets as the voltigeurs moved into line, the yellow facings of Oudinot’s Grenadiers, the clamorous mêlée of horse and foot. They discussed the present fighting, the mistakes of generals; and here Héloïse, eager as they for the success of the cause which had cost her husband’s life, joined in with the names and dates and figures at her tongue’s tip. In the distance the sullen guns were booming.
“If I were with them!” sighed Tuck-of-Drum. “They had no room for the old soldier; yet I can beat a charge as well as ever! I—I who speak, could fire a musket with the best of them!”
“Grandfather volunteered,” piped Josephine.
“Yes,” said Héloïse, eying the old man proudly; “but they wanted him to take care of us. ‘You must look after the women and children for us, Monsieur Laplume,’ said the officer. ‘You have done your share for France in the field. You know what our great Emperor wrote, “It will be sufficient for you to say, ‘I was at the battle of Austerlitz,’ to authorize the reply, ‘Behold, a brave man.’”’”
Dominique Laplume waved a hand in depreciation, as if to brush aside the praise. “A brave man? Every Frenchman is brave. It is in the blood of France. We need not be proud of what we cannot help. We have been unfortunate, yes; badly led, yes; but the men—the men——”
The door opened suddenly. The village postmaster stood again at the entrance, his eyes starting, his face lemon-colored, his lips livid under the straggling beard. “All is lost!” he cried. “We are betrayed, defeated! Chanzy is driven back! The enemy advances!”
The door rattled in the grasp of his shaking hand. He limped off to spread the news of the disaster, which grew with his terror. Laplume, Dufour, Madame Héloïse, started to their feet and looked at each other blankly. The sudden, awe-struck silence woke Bergeret, who looked round with wide, foolish eyes. Josephine’s mouth twitched and tears gathered. Pierre clenched his brown fists.
“Come,” cried Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum suddenly. He donned the great bearskin, the others followed his example, Bergeret fumbling foolishly with its heavy chain. His baby face expressed wonder rather than the alarm, the bitter disappointment, the wrath, written on the faces of Madame Héloïse and Laplume and Dufour. Tuck-of-Drum girded on his sword and slung the straps of his drum over his old bent shoulders. He thrust Bergeret’s musket into the Sergeant’s hand. Dufour motioned to Pierre, and hobbled out; the boy followed him. Madame Héloïse Laplume ran to the door to intercept them. “Where are you going, grandfather? Where are you going?” she gasped.
“Stand back, Héloïse. We go to call the village. Stay here; stay with the little Josephine.”
She paused irresolute. After all, though they could do no good, what harm could they do—these three old men? They were going to call the village. Yet there was a look on the ancient soldier’s face she had not seen since the day of the first great reverse, when he had gone, with his head erect and old fires flashing in his dim blue eyes, to offer his feeble services to France.
Suddenly, loud and distinct above the distant booming of the guns, his drum sounded—beating an assembly in the quiet village street. She put her hand to her breast and ran out. If the Germans were really coming——
She clutched his arm.
“Are you mad, grandfather?” she gasped. “Come in; come in and finish your wine and pipes together. There are only boys and women and old men in the village. They can do nothing——”
He shook her off.
Well, even the enemy, cruel though they were, could never harm men so old, so feeble and defenseless. They would ride through, laughing in their beards, mouthing their uncouth jokes at the faded uniforms from which theirsires had once fled in terror; but—no, they would never harm them. Josephine was crying softly within. She turned back to the house.
Up the centre of the village street marched Tuck-of-Drum, drumming, drumming with an energy surprising and pathetic, as though he could call from their weed-grown graves the lads who had once jumped so smartly to the rattle of the parchment.
“Rat-a-plan! rat-a-plan!” sounded the summons; his hands had not lost their cunning, though they ached and grew weary with the unwonted strain. Behind him staggered Bergeret, his great bearskin toppling forward over the fat, smooth, foolish face; Dufour hobbled in the rear, his stick and wooden leg tapping the cobbles; little Pierre, beside him, dragged the heavy musket.
Pale faces, working in terror, peered from the café of the Boule d’Or. Tuck-of-Drum burst open the door. On the little tables glasses of bock, tiny glasses of spirits, stood half emptied. The men had all risen; the tawdry, gilded mirrors, cracked and dusty, distorted their faces, showing them more pallid, more unhealthy even than in life. Three or four old men—not so old as the veterans by many years—three or four washed-out-looking lads, rejected even by the army that had dragged men in from the very highways and hedges to resist the invaders—turned startled looks on the newcomers.
“The enemy is coming!” said Tuck-of-Drum. “Comrades, let us march against them, like the men of Dreux, of Châteauneuf! Look—the sun of Austerlitz is going down! Today, all France must help——”
They exchanged glances; they huddled together like sheep.
“What is the use?” one muttered.
“Aye, what is the use?”
A youth sniggered vacuously. “You are sixty years too late, Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum. If the great Emperor could come back now, if France had a man—” The speaker shrugged his shoulders, spread out his hands with a gesture of helplessness and looked round for assent.
“If—if—if!” cried Dominique Laplume. “Wewill lead you—we, of the Grand Army! Today all France must rise. All must help. It is the great effort. Today France conquers—or is conquered. ‘If’ never won a battle. Come, I say! Jules Brienne, your grandfather carried an eagle at Marengo. Monsieur Grenier, your uncle fell by our side, fighting bravely, on the field of Austerlitz.”
He argued, ordered, entreated; in vain.
“Bah! Poltroons!” he muttered, and turned on his heel.
Again the drum sounded.
“Yes, go out and play with your toy, Papa Tuck-of-Drum,” cried young Brienne after him. Laplume did not hear. They marched next to the Café de l’Ecu. The village postmaster, shaking still and casting nervous looks round him like a frightened horse, was telling his story to a similar assembly.
“Pah!” muttered old Dufour, twirling his thin mustache, “these villages are the rubbish heaps of France. The men are all away.” Again the appeal was made. A fat man, with fishy eyes and yellow, pendulous cheeks, shrugged his shoulders and raised protesting hands. “What can we do? What can we do?”
“They would finish us all with a volley. We should be killed,” whined another man.
“Killed? And what then?” Laplume snorted with fierce contempt.
“Let us be killed then!” broke in Dufour, crashing his stick down on the sanded floor. “It would be worth it. A thousand times worth it! Let each village in France raise a wall of dead against the invaders!”
Bergeret nodded his foolish head again and again with emphasis. The fat man began to talk fast, volubly, excitedly, pouring torrents of abuse on the Emperor, generals, government, the enemy, waving his fat hands, shrugging his fat shoulders. The curtained door of the café opened. He stopped suddenly and lamely. A countryman burst in.
“They are coming—they are coming!”he shrieked. “I have seen them in the road. I ran through the woods. Hundreds of them! I have seen their lances—the sun on their lances!”
“Come!” cried Dominique Laplume in a voice of thunder. “In the name of France!”
No one stirred. He looked round, scorn in his old eyes. “We will go, then—Bergeret, Dufour—my old comrades.” His voice choked with bewilderment, disappointment, anger.
They went out. The air was sharp with frost. It was very still in the village. The sun, a red ball of fire, still glowed on the frosted trees; on the white and yellow walls of the cottages; on the white fields and white-cowled windmills; on the powdered cobbles of the street. A segment of moon, strangely like a pierrot head, thrust through curtains of cloud, its mouth whimsically awry, peered down sideways at the earth—at the white earth, where legions of tiny men, like ants, hurried to kill or be killed in their bewildering quarrels. The distances were blue—the shimmering steel-blue of winter distances. Here and there a column of black smoke, shot through again and again with tongues of fire, went up to heaven; the smoke of burning villages; little sacrifices France offered for her folly to gods not yet appeased.
“To the bridge,” said Tuck-of-Drum. They marched in silence. The drum was silent. At the end of the long, straggling street a tiny bridge spanned a frozen stream which the enemy must cross. By the side of it was a clump of bushes, so thick that, even leafless, they formed a screen behind which the veterans and the boy crouched down.
“They might have broken down the bridge at least,” grumbled Dufour. “Menitz was frozen, and the Emperor——”
“They are coming!” whispered Pierre.
His sharp ears, close to the ground, had caught theclip-clopof approaching hoofs.
Tuck-of-Drum drew his sword and rested its hilt on the rough wooden parapet of the bridge. “Fix bayonets!” he growled.
Sergeant Bergeret should have given the word, but he carried out the order placidly, drawing the sword from its scabbard and fixing it with his fumbling fingers. “Put it in for me,” muttered Dufour, handing his bayonet to Pierre. “Now give me the musket—so—and run home, good lad. Embrace me and then run home.”
He sat on the ground, his wooden leg stiff and straight in front of him, and clutched the bayonet. Pierre’s lips tightened; he did not move. “Go home, I say!”
“Hush, they come!” whispered Tuck-of-Drum.
Peering through the brushwood, they could see, on the road ahead, the pennoned lances of German Uhlans, rising and falling with the jolting of the horses. The hoofs clicked louder and louder on the frozen road.
Suddenly Tuck-of-Drum sprang up.
“The Guard will advance,” he growled, with a little hoarse laugh, the faint echo of one that men now dead had heard and talked of, long since. Joy, fierce, savage joy of fighting, dormant so long but not extinct, flared up and flashed in his faded eyes. And yet, with the joy, a rage terrible and righteous shook him as he saw the glitter of the steel, the fluttering pennons, the casques and foreign uniforms—the foes of France, violating the sacred soil of which the dust of his race had made.
His trembling hands clutching the drumsticks, he advanced to the centre of the bridge. Bergeret stood on his right, his bayonet extended. Dufour grasped the parapet, dragged himself up, groaning in spite of clenched teeth, planted his wooden leg firmly, and, leaning against the woodwork of the bridge, rested the butt of his weapon on the ground, the tremulous steel pointed toward the enemy. Pierre came to help him. “Go back! go back!” he growled, pushing the boy aside with all his feeble strength. Pierre slipped on the frozen earth andfell, clutching at the bushes. Suddenly Dominique Laplume sounded thepas de charge.
A strange, pitiful defiance this, echoing back through the deserted village street, floating mournfully out to the white, empty fields, sending its arrogant, useless challenge to the ribbon of white road ahead. “Rat-a-plan! rat-a-plan!” The old drum, that had sent a hundred men flocking like sheep before it—the old drum that Jules, who fell at Solferino, that Dominique, who fell at Gravelotte, had beaten on winter mornings of their boyhood—answered nobly to this last great effort, and seemed a living, sentient thing, entering into the brave spirit of the challenge.
There was a startled shout, a clatter of stones, as the Uhlans reined in their horses.
“They fly!” shrieked Tuck-of-Drum; “they—ah!”
Half a dozen carbines shot up and flashed fire. There was a hoarse cry in German; an officer struck aside the stock of a man’s weapon.
Dufour’s bayonet clattered down; he slid into the thicket, his wooden leg scoring a long, jagged line in the frosty road. Bergeret was on his knees, a light of strange intelligence dawning in his smooth, foolish face; quite suddenly he fell sideways on to his fallen bearskin, matted already with his blood.
Tuck-of-Drum still stood in the centre of the bridge. The drumsticks descended on a drum pierced and soundless—then dropped, one after the other, slowly, from his nerveless grasp. The world swung around him. The poplars down the roadway on which his glazing eyes were fixed marched, doubled, moved into echelon and square. “La Grande Armée! La Grande Armée!”
Was it the cry of the Germans, in wonder, in derision, in pity? Or did his quivering lips frame the words? Ghosts formed round him; the ghosts of the old battalions who had marched, long back, into silence. They swayed, they heaved, in countless numbers; file after file, rank after rank, regiment after regiment, formed up, doubled into place, and passed him by. He saw the flash of breastplates, the crimson fronts of the Polish lancers, the red plumes of the line, the bearskins of the Guards, the glittering eagles of France.
“My comrades—O my comrades!” He staggered forward, with stretched-out hands. A confused murmur buzzed in his ears; it swelled into a tumult—“and the shout of a king was among them.”
One hand sought the bearskin. Suddenly he fell face forward.
Under the wide sky, in the uniform of their dead Emperor, the three veterans lay together; a young boy crouched near them, bleeding from an unnoticed wound, and sobbing.
A night wind crept over the frozen fields; a little wind, like a sigh from France for her ruined homes, her smoking villages, her slain children, her lost cause and faded glories.
The sun of Austerlitz sank down behind the poplars.
The Royal Road to LearningFREDDIE—What’s an honorary degree, dad?Johnson—That’s a title a college confers on a man who would never be able to get it if he had to pass an examination.The hardest kind of work is looking for it.
The Royal Road to Learning
FREDDIE—What’s an honorary degree, dad?
Johnson—That’s a title a college confers on a man who would never be able to get it if he had to pass an examination.
The hardest kind of work is looking for it.