Book I Chapter 15 The Marquis of Carabas by Rafael Sabatini
THE CHOUANS
In the little time that Puisaye had spent with Boishardi, a three-sided log cabin, a dozen feet square, had sprung as if by magic into existence on the far side of the clearing. A company of the Count's followers, a score of them perhaps, who had gone about the task of construction with the energy of ants, were now, by the light of lanterns, completing its roof of ramage.
Within, when Puisaye had brought Quentin and the Baron to it, they found a table and some stools, of short round timbers, that had been swiftly knocked together. For bedding there were piles of leaves and ferns, over which cloaks might be spread. A couple of lanterns, slung from side poles adequately lighted that interior.
It was a method of construction in which the Chouans were expert, offering an alternative to the trenches built for the shelter or the main bodies in their forest fastnesses. These, dug to a considerable depth and solidly roofed by branches under a dissembling cover of turf and leaves, would defy detection by any soldiers rash enough to carry pursuit into the depths of a forest. They help to explain the mystery of Chouan movements in the guerrilla warfare they conducted, their sudden appearances where least suspected, and their equally sudden and complete disappearances once their work was done. Reports that they vanished as if the earth had swallowed them were often nearer the literal truth than the reporters suspected.
A young man in Chouan dress, of little more than middle height, but of a massive breadth and corpulence suggestive of great power, stood forward with a grin of welcome. It was Georges Cadoudal, a Chouan leader from the Morbihan, already famous and destined to still greater fame.
"Behold your quarters, my General. A wave of my fairy wand, and it springs from the ground. Another wave and the commissariat will arrive, though I doubt if it be equal to our appetites." Light, prominent eyes stared at Quentin out of a round red face. "A new-comer?"
Puisaye named them to each other, describing Quentin as his friend the Marquis de Chavaray, a description that checked further questions, whereafter Cadoudal went off to quicken the sluggards in charge of supper.
Then, at last, Quentin came to the matter of returning thanks. "I owe you my life, Monsieur le Comte."
"Faith, that's the sort of truth one doesn't hear every day," was the answer, delivered with a grim humour that rendered it surprising. "It was fortunate for both of us that I arrived when I did. I begin to believe I have the gift of timeliness."
"I perceive the good fortune to you, sir, as little as I am overwhelmed by the good fortune to myself. It was a nasty situation."
"From which you would not have extricated yourself as readily as from the toils of Boisgelin." He set a hand familiarly upon Quentin's shoulder, and smiled gravely into his face, and the memory of their parting in London rose to shame Quentin perhaps the more bitterly because Puisaye appeared to have forgotten it. "I admire your wit in that affair. And on my soul I believe that you performed better than you suspect. I would wager that Boisgelin--a rascal at heart, who has met his deserts--was aware that in extinguishing you he was serving the interests of his dear cousins. You'll realize before all is done that you have to fight more than the Republic for your patrimony."
"Be that as it may, it does not explain the luck to you in arriving when you did."
It was Cormatin who supplied unexpectedly the answer. "It has enabled the General to form an accurate judgment of the man whom he intended for his deputy in his absence."
"That is your assumption, Baron. It was never more than a passing thought with me to appoint any of these acknowledged leaders to the supreme command whilst I am gone. Their pestilent jealousies make them untrustworthy. To appoint any one of them is to risk the anger and defection of all the others. That's how the Vendée was lost. Fused into one those armies must have prevailed against the Blues and made an end of the Republic. But because Lescure would not be subject to Charette, and Stofflet would not take the orders of either, the Blues had easy work to defeat them piecemeal. It must not happen again, and it shall not, if it lies in my power, as I believe it does, to prevent it. But here comes Georges with supper."
Cadoudal reappeared, boisterously ushering a couple of peasants, one of them bearing on a wooden platter a goose that had been roasted in the forest, the other with a basket on either arm, into which had been packed some loaves of rye bread and a half-dozen bottles of wine.
"A goose as heavy as a swan and juicy as a suckling, and enough wine of Anjou for it to swim in," roared Cadoudal's big voice. "The General is served. To table, sirs."
They drew up the rude stools, and Cadoudal sat down with them. He had sent Boishardi an invitation to join them. But his messenger returned with word that Monsieur de Boishardi begged to be excused.
Puisaye shrugged. "Let the fool sulk in his tent if he will."
"A whiff of that goose would lift the sulks from a prouder stomach," vowed Cadoudal. "But his loss will be our gain. And, after all, what would be one goose among five?"
A prodigy of a trencherman, he gauged the appetites of his companions by his own.
When of the goose no more than the bones remained, a cheese of goats' milk and some figs were discovered in the bread-basket, and after that, with a second bottle of wine to each of them, Cadoudal and Cormatin loaded their pipes.
Through the open front of their cabin they could see in the clearing the glow of the bivouac fire, which had now been banked, and the shadows of men lying or moving quietly about it.
The talk was mainly political. Cormatin was in correspondence with the secret Royalist agency in Paris, an organization which Puisaye distrusted, denouncing it as in the hands of self-sufficient mischief-makers. The Baron was informed by it of the state of things in the capital, the new Government's total lack of orientation, and the rumours that many of those now in power, Barras amongst them, favoured the return of the monarchy. Hoche, himself, was said to entertain royalist sympathies since his imprisonment by the Convention, and they would find that his mission in the West would prove to be one of pacification rather than repression.
Puisaye poured scorn on it all. "Thus the windy Abbé Brottier, who imagines himself the axis on which monarchism now revolves. Let him chatter his fill, and send his gossipy reports to the Princes. Our task is to work, and the West will be pacified when this task is done and the King is back in the Tuileries."
"Amen and amen," said Cadoudal. "Bring over your English reinforcements, and our lads will sweep the putrid remains of this Republic to Hell."
From what followed Quentin gathered that Puisaye's final mission of preparation in Brittany was now complete, and in the assurance that his army, computed at three hundred thousand men, would rise at a word, he was about to return to England to report to Pitt and claim the powerful aid he had been promised. Within three months he counted upon being ready to strike. His Royal Highness, the Comte d'Artois, as Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, had engaged himself to take the supreme command; and so, with one of the Princes at their head, jealousies would be extinguished and all rival Royalist bands be fused into a single solid army.
From this Puisaye came to matters personally concerned with Quentin, and drew from him an account in detail of how he had fared in France.
"And so," Quentin ended, "lacking the means to satisfy the Republican needs of Monsieur Besné, my marquisate passes into national property, and I remain a Marquis pour rire; or, in the words of Monsieur Constant de Chesnières--since repeated, by the way, by Monsieur de Boisgelin--a Marquis of Carabas."
Cormatin was amused. "Chapeau bas!" he quoted, with a laugh, which earned him a sardonic reproof from Puisaye.
"You are too fat for Puss-in-Boots, Baron."
"I wonder where I shall find me one," said Quentin. "At the moment it seems the only thing I lack so as to complete me."
"We'll find you one, never doubt it," Puisaye assured him. "Your only need is patience. Meanwhile, you should have had enough of France. A little more of it, and--name of a name!--your bones would have remained here permanently. You invite danger from both sides."
"Yet to retreat defeated!" He sighed.
"A strategic retreat is not a defeat, child. You draw back so that you may leap the better. I start for the coast to-morrow night. You'll be well advised to travel with me back to England."
Again Quentin was shamed by this fresh display of a kindly solicitude from a man who would have been justified in the very opposite. Puisaye overbore in his high-handed way the young man's hesitations, and before he slept that night Quentin had penned a letter to Lesdiguières to inform him that failure at Coëtlegon left him no alternative but to return whence he had come, and await events.
Whilst he was doing it, Puisaye was concluding with his two companions the disposition still to be made before he departed; the appointment of a lieutenant to represent him in the West during his absence. He was settled in the determination to appoint none of those gentlemen who headed bands raised in their own districts.
"I perceive the folly of it as clearly as I perceive that had I been a Breton with an immediate following of my own peasantry, not even my appointment by the Princes to the supreme command would have induced these gentlemen to submit to me."
"Jealous as Spaniards, these Bretons," Cormatin agreed with him.
"Oh, as to that, Baron, don't imagine that Bretons are the only Frenchmen cursed with that disease." He was bitter on the subject of the obstacles jealousy had insensately raised for him in England, seeking in reckless malice to destroy his credit with the British Government, without which nothing would be accomplished.
"The only possible nobleman here," Puisaye continued, "is one whose influence, gallantry and repute inspire an almost superstitious dread in the Republicans. I mean Boishardi."
"A mistake, Monsieur le Comte," Cadoudal condemned it. "I know his worth, and I'ld willingly serve under him with my lads. But the others . . . Parbleu, not one of them would recognize Monsieur de Boishardi as better than himself."
"That is why I have brought Monsieur de Cormatin."
The Baron looked up, his prominent eyes widening in his florid face.
"You are not proposing . . ."
"I am. It must be settled to-night. And there is no other way but by bringing in a man from outside, since no Breton will be served by these Bretons. Just as they accepted my nomination by the Princes because I am not a Breton, so they will accept my nomination of you as my major-general, paying attention only to your military qualifications, which my proclamation will not fail to stress. Parbleu, you may laugh if you please. It deserves that you should."
Cormatin, shrinking visibly from the responsibility, was all protests. But Puisaye masterfully swept them aside. "Men's deference goes more readily to the unknown than to the known," was his crowning, sardonic argument. "What do you say to it, Georges?"
"It's the solution," said Cadoudal.
"That, Baron, is the voice of the rank and file of the army you'll control."
"But the duties!" cried Cormatin. "What do I know of them?"
"They are soon summed up: to preserve the cohesion of this great secret army that awaits the call; to avoid any dissipation of its strength in minor encounters and inconclusive skirmishes; and to maintain its monarchical spirit, its high resolve, and readiness to strike for Throne and Altar when the moment arrives. There are your duties. They are simple, and in the discharge of them you will have the support of the chiefs, with whom you will work in consultation. In honour you cannot refuse the charge."
"Monsieur le Baron can depend upon me," added Cadoudal, "and I count for something hereabouts."
"Both with the men and with the chiefs," Puisaye added. "With Georges beside you, you may make your mind easy. And so, I'll draw up my proclamation before I sleep."
At once reassured and overborne, Cormatin dismissed what reluctance lingered in him, and went to dispose himself on one of the rude beds the forest yielded.
They were astir again at peep of day, and after a crust and a draught of wine they were following an army that moved forward scarcely visible and with little more than a rustle through the forest twilight. Every man, and there were fully a thousand moving to that ambuscade, bore the white cockade in his hat, the emblem of the Sacred Heart on his breast, and his gun slung from his shoulders. Boishardi was not visible; but he marched at the head of his own contingent, and when the sally into the open came it was he who led it.
That sally followed upon a massacring fusillade poured from the forest's edge upon the convoy as it moved, unsuspecting, along the road to Rennes.
The Blues were some four hundred strong, and in two detachments, one ahead of the long line of wagons, the other following it. The attack was made simultaneously upon front and rear, and when the rolling volleys had accounted for more than a quarter of each detachment, the Chouans poured forth from their cover in two parties, one led by Boishardi, the other by Cadoudal, and fell upon the remainder before they could recover from the confusion into which they had been flung.
Vainly did the surviving officers seek to rally them, vainly did a mounted major seek to curse them into standing firm. They were youngsters, mostly newly conscripted, until this moment unbaptized by fire, and appalled by the wild aspect of the fierce men who now assailed them. Once broken it was beyond their power to form their ranks anew, and as the major was brought to earth by a shot that killed his horse, the lads, flinging away their muskets so that they might travel lighter, fled the field of battle, some sweeping along the road towards Rennes, others taking to the woods opposite to those from which the attack had come.
All happened at such speed that within a half-hour of the attack, no evidence remained of it but the plundered and shattered forage wagons. The wounded and the dead had been borne into the woods, and the Chouan horde, having struck its blow, had vanished again completely. Only the tale of it remained to be borne by the fugitives to the garrison at Rennes, which, recognizing its impotence to seek out so elusive an enemy, would merely rage and curse and indite a report, for the exasperation of the Convention in Paris, of the rich haul of arms, ammunition, accoutrements and provender by which the Chouans were supplied towards a continuance of their brigand warfare.