Frederickson’s calm words made the task sound oddly easy. Sharpe, turning to the window, saw how the darkness was shrouding the city. There was a slender moon, sharp-edged and low above a tangle of dark masts and rigging which showed over the black rooftops. Candles showed in some windows and torches flickered where link-boys escorted pedestrians about the streets. “Why Arcachon, though?” Sharpe turned back from the window. “You think Lassan lives there?”
“I doubt we shall be so fortunate as that,” Frederickson said, “but because he’s an educated man, and a devout one, it’s likely that he and the local priest would have been on friendly terms. It’s hard to find civilized conversation in a small garrison, let alone someone to play chess with, and I recall that we kindled a fire with a very fine chess-set from Lassan’s quarters. So, my suggestion is that we find the priest of Arcachon and hope he can tell us where to find Lassan. Do you agree?”
“I think it’s a brilliant notion,” Sharpe said admiringly.
“I’m just a humble Rifle Captain,” Frederickson said, “and therefore flattered by the praise of a staff officer.”
“But,” Sharpe said, “if Lassan’s an honourable man, why would Ducos falsify a statement of his? He must know that Lassan could deny it.”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Frederickson admitted, “but we’ll never know unless we find Lassan.”
“Or get out of here,” Harper said grimly. “Can I have permission to hit a provost?”
“No killing,” Frederickson warned. “If we kill one of the bastards then they’ll have real cause to court-martial us.” He crept close to the door. “I wonder if our brandy is working.”
The three men went silent as they tried to decipher the small sounds from beyond the door. They heard voices, and then, quite distinctly, the sound of liquid being poured. “Another half hour,” Sharpe decided.
The half hour crept by, but at last the first of the town’s clocks rang ten. Sharpe grimaced, seized the door handle, and nodded at Harper. “You first, Sergeant.”
He snatched the door open, and their escape had begun.
Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram was the guest of honour at the dinner which the Transport Board was giving in the prefecture. The officials and their guests had dined well on roast mutton, roast chicken, and baked pears. Now, as the bottles of brandy thickened among the remaining bottles of claret, Wigram was invited to make a speech.
He spoke well. The vast majority of the men about the long table were civilians from London who had come to supervise the onerous task of removing an army from France. Their days were spent in settling accounts with the masters of ships, allocating hull space, and securing supplies for the army’s journey home. Now, in the candlelit splendour of the prefecture’s large hall, they could hear a little of what that army had achieved.
“In the darkest days of the struggle,” Wigram said, “when every man’s voice at home was raised against our endeavours, and when any prudent man might have deemed our cause lost, there would never have been a dinner as splendid as this one you have so generously provided. Then, gentlemen, we lived on very short commons indeed. Many is the night when I have given my horse the last food from my saddlebags, then slept hungry myself. The French were never far away on those cold nights, yet we survived, gentlemen, we survived.” There were murmurs of admiration, and a few guests, overcome both by Wigram’s heroism and the plenitude of the wine, tapped their glasses with their spoons to make a pleasant ringing applause.
“And even later,” Wigram’s glasses reflected the candlelight as he looked up to make sure his voice reached the far end of the table where the more junior guests sat, “when fortune smiled more compassionately upon us, hardship was still our constant companion.” In fact Wigram had slept between sheets every night of his war, and had been known to have a cook flogged because his nightly joint of beef was underdone, but this was no time to quibble. This was a time for every man to garner what credit he could from the war, and Wigram could garner with the best. He bowed to Captain Harcourt, another guest at the dinner, and paid a fulsome tribute to the contribution made by the Royal Navy. Again there was applause.
Finally Wigram turned to a question he had frequently pondered. “I am often asked,” he said, “what qualities arc most desirable in a soldier, and I confess to cause astonishment when I reply that it is not a sturdy arm, nor an adventurous spirit which gains an army its victories. Such qualities are necessary, of course, but without leadership they will inevitably fail. No, gentlemen, it is the man who keeps his mental faculties alert who contributes most to the glorious cause. A soldier must be a thinker. He must be a master of detail. He must be a man whose precision of thinking will render him staunch and steady amidst danger and uncertainty.” It was at that point that Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram paused, his mouth dropped open, and one by one the guests turned to stare with amazement at the apparitions which had appeared in the doorway.
It was commonly said that most men only joined the British Army for drink. The French scornfully accused the British of fighting drunk, indeed of not being able to fight unless they were drunk, though if the charge was true then it was astonishing that the French did not make their own men drunk because, sober, they could never beat the British. There was, nevertheless, a great deal of truth in the charges. The British Army was notorious for drunkenness, and more than one French unit had escaped capture by leaving tempting bottles and casks to waylay their pursuers.
So it was hardly astonishing that the three provosts were drunk. Each had consumed close to a pint and a half of brandy, and they were not merely drunk, but gloriously, happily and carelessly oblivious of being drunk. They were, in truth, in a temporary nirvana so pleasant that none of the three had even noticed when a big Irishman rapped them hard on the skull to introduce a temporary unconsciousness. It was during that blank moment that each of the provosts had been stripped stark naked. Then, to make certain they stayed incapable, Sharpe and Frederickson had poured yet more brandy down their spluttering throats.
Thus it was that Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram’s speech was interrupted by three deliriously drunken men who were as naked as the day on which they were born.
The Provost Sergeant stared about him in blinking astonishment as he found himself in the brilliantly lit banqueting hall. He hiccupped, bowed to the company, and tried to speak. “Fire,” he at last managed to say, then he slid down a wall to fall asleep.
Behind him smoke seeped through the open door.
Wigram stared, aghast.
“Fire!” This time the voice came from outside, and was a huge roar of warning. Wigram panicked, but so did almost every man in the room. Glasses and plates smashed as men fought to escape the tables and cram themselves through one of the room’s two doors. The naked provosts were trampled underfoot. Smoke was thickening in the corridor and billowing up the stairwell. Wigram fought to escape with the rest. He lost his glasses in his panic, but somehow managed to scramble through the door, across the vestibule, and down into the town square where the dinner guests assembled to watch the promised inferno.
There was none. A guard sergeant filled a bucket of water and doused the pile of brandy-soaked uniforms which, heavily sprinkled with gunpowder and then piled with loosely stacked, brandy soaked ledgers, had caused the pungent smoke. There was a nasty scorch-mark on the carpet, which hardly mattered for, being embroidered with the imperial initial ‘N’, it was due for destruction anyway. Most of the ledgers were scorched, and a few had burned to ash, but the fire had not spread and so no real harm had been done. The Sergeant ordered the three drunken provosts to be carried to the yard and dumped in a horse-trough, then, pausing only to steal half a dozen bottles of brandy from the table in the banqueting hall, he went to the front door and reported to the officers that all was well.