“Not all of them,” Gudin said. “Some are French.”
“But French or Spanish, they will slow us down,” Caillou insisted. “The essence of success, Gudin, is to march fast. Audacity! Speed! There lies safety. We cannot take women and children.”
“If they stay,” Gudin said, “they will be killed.”
‘That’s war, Gudin, that’s war!” Caillou declared. “In war, the weak die.”
“We are soldiers of France,” Gudin said stiffly, “and we do not leave women and children to die. They march with us.”
Gudin knew that all of them, soldiers, women and children alike, might die because of that decision, but he could abandon these Spanish women who had found themselves French husbands and given birth to half-French babies. If they were left, the partisans would find them, they would be called traitors, they would be tortured and they would die. No, Gudin thought, he could not just leave them.
“And Maria is pregnant,” he added, nodding towards an ammunition cart on which a woman lay swathed in grey army blankets.
“I don’t care if she’s the Virgin Mary!” Caillou exploded. “We cannot afford to take women and children!” Caillou saw that his words were having no effect on the grey-haired Colonel Gudin, and the older man’s stubbornness inflamed Caillou. “My God, Gudin, no wonder they call you a failure!”
“You go too far,” Gudin said. He outranked Caillou, but only by virtue of having been a colonel longer than the infantryman.
“I go too far?” Caillou spat in derision. “But at least I care more for France than for a pack of sniveling women. If you lose my Eagle, Gudin,” he pointed to the tricolor beneath its statuette of the Eagle, “I’ll see you face a firing squad.”
Gudin did not bother to reply, but just walked his horse towards the gate. He felt an immense sadness. Caillou was right, he thought, he was a failure.
It had all begun in India, 13 years before, when Seringapatam had fallen, and since then, nothing had gone right. He had not received one promotion in all those years, but had gone from one misfortune to the next until now he was the commander of a useless fort in a bleak landscape. And if he could escape? That would be a victory, especially if he could take Caillou’s precious Eagle safe across the Pyrenees, but was even an Eagle worth the life of so many women and children?
He smiled down at his Sergeant. “You can open the gate. And once we’ve left, sergeant, light the fuses.”
“The women, sir?” the sergeant asked anxiously. “They are coming?”
“They’re coming, Pierre.”
The Dragoons left first. It was dusk. Gudin planned to march all night in the hope that by dawn he would have left any partisans far behind. Until then, he had hardly been worried by the fearsome Spanish guerilleros, but those savage men had few French enemies left in Spain and were closing on the remaining enemy fortresses like vultures scenting death.
Gudin had spread a rumor that he intended to march his garrison to join the beleaguered French troops in Pamplona, and he hoped that might keep the partisans away from the road that led northwards, but he doubted the rumor would work.
His best hope lay in marching at night, and God help any of his men or women who could not keep up, for they would face a terrible, slow death. Some would be burned alive, some flayed, some, but no, it did not bear thinking about.
It was not war as Gudin understood it, it was butchery, and what galled Gudin most was that the guerilleros were only doing to the French what the French had done to the Spaniards.
The infantry marched through the gate behind their Eagle. The women followed.
Gudin stayed to watch the sergeant light the fuses, then he spurred away from his doomed fort. He paused a half-mile up the road and turned to watch as the fire in the fuses reached the charges set in the fort’s magazines.
The night blossomed red and a moment later the sound of the explosions punched through the damp darkness. Flames and smoke boiled above the fort’s remains as the heavy guns were tumbled from their emplacements. Another failure, Gudin thought, watching the great fire rage.