Death to the French (aka Rifleman Dodd) by C.S. Forester Read Free Book Online Page B

by ravines, at the bottom of which torrential watercourses boiled over their rocky beds on their way to join the main river. The great high road passed across this plateau as straight as a bullet, leaping each ravine in turn by a high stone bridge; at rare intervals a little village lay beside the road whose inhabitants gained a scanty living by keeping flocks of stunted sheep on the scanty herbage of the hills.
    Dodd had twice marched along this road with his regiment; he remembered its main features, and as each remembered characteristic came into view he grew more fevered in his expectancy,- and pressed forward until Bernardino was really running to keep pace with him. The morning came when Alhandra, the town where the Lines came down to the river, was only thirty miles away-one long march. Inside the Lines was the British army, the regiment, everything that Dodd held dear.
    Then they met a group of Portuguese irregulars beside the road, at a point where the river left it to make a great loop round the end of a mountain spur. They were not quite as irregular as some Portuguese Dodd had seen; some had genuine fragments of uniform, most of them had muskets, and some of them had bayonets and military cross-belts.
    They stopped Dodd and Bernardino, and the leader addressed them with harsh questions. Bernardino answered with the loquacity and self-importance natural to him- a long explanation of the Englishman whose one wish was to see Lisbon again, whose rifle would kill a man at a mile, the orders given them by the Capitao Mor, and much more besides.
    The man addressed laughed harshly at all this, shaking his head. He told Bernardino that the French barred the way to Alhandra and Lisbon, and Bernardino looked blankly at Dodd. But Dodd understood nothing of what was said, and strongly disapproved of all this waste of time over idle gossip. He made to push through the group.
    'Lisboa,' said Dodd. 'Alhandra.'
    They held him back, explaining to him in voluble Portuguese. He caught their drift at last; he heard the word 'Franceses.'
    'Franceses?' he asked.
    'Sim, sim, Franceses,' they answered, pointing down the road.
    And at that moment, as if to accentuate their words, the sentry a quarter of a mile down the road uttered a loud shout, and came running towards them, gesticulating. Everyone looked to see to what he was calling their attention; they climbed on the stone wall bordering the road, and gazed along it. A long column of horsemen was trotting towards them; it only took one glance to recognize French dragoons.
    At once everyone was seized with the confusion of the undisciplined. Some made to run away, some towards the dragoons. Some even pointed their muskets towards the French, who were ten times as far away as a bullet could reach. Dodd alone produced a practicable plan-he had fought in so many skirmishes by now that his reactions were instinctive. He glanced back at the last bridge- but he decided that he could not rely on these feeble soldiers to hold a bridge against a charge of dragoons. To the right the ground sloped away smoothly, and save for a few stone walls offered no protection against horsemen. Only to the left was there safety- the ground rose steeply only one field away, and was rocky and broken.
    'This way!' shouted Dodd. 'Come this way, you fools!'
    The universal language of gesture and example explained what he wanted. Everybody bundled over the stone wall and across the field and up into the rocks. Somebody's musket which had been carried at full cock went off without hurting anyone. Once they had started running they would have gone on until they dropped, doubtless, but Dodd yelled himself hoarse, dropped behind a convenient rock, and the others at length imitated his example. Bernardino, squeaking with excitement, was kneeling beside Dodd and peering over the rock. 'Tirar!' he was saying, or some such word.
    What he meant was obvious from the way he pointed to Dodd's rifle and then at the French. But