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The Gun
by C.S.Forester
Chapter One
A defeated army was falling back through the mountains from Espinosa. Such was its condition that an ignorant observer would find it easier to guess that it had been defeated than that it had been an army. The twenty-thousand men of whom it was composed were strung out along twenty miles of road; its sick and its dead littered the edges of the road for a hundred miles to the rear. At the head came such of the cavalry as were fortunate enough still to have horses to ride; they felt safer there than in their proper place, covering the retreat. Next came the infantry, in groups, in herds, or in ones and twos. Their white Bourbon uniforms were now in strips and tatters, and their skin, blue with disease and cold, showed through the rents. Perhaps half of them still retained their muskets, and of these perhaps a quarter had bayonets as well. Here and there little groups still displayed some soldierly bearing, and marched steadily beneath the cased regimental colors, but these groups were few, for most of the colors had been lost at Espinosa.
The long column of misery tended continually to grow longer, as the more robust struggled forward to get as far as possible from the pursuing French, and as the weaker fell farther and farther behind. There were enough weaklings, in all conscience; even in summer the men had been badly clothed, and even in victory insufficiently fed, and now it was winter, and Espinosa had been fought and lost, and the route of the retreat lay away from the fertile plains and up into the inhospitable mountains. The rain had fallen upon them in deluges for days, and now, as they climbed higher, it was turning into sleet, and a bitter cold wind blew. Ahead of them they could see the snow lying thick on the mountain passes through which they would have to climb, without food or fuel or rest, and with the terror of the French to urge them on. Disease had come, inevitably, to complete the work so well begun by hunger, exposure, and the sword. The typhus -- the Black Death -- was in among them, along with dysentery and rheumatism and pneumonia. Men dropped dying in the very middle of the road, to be trodden and spurned by comrades too sick and weary to step out of the way, and whose shoeless feet left blood at every step.
If such were the state of affairs at the head of the column, the condition of the rear can hardly be imagined. Here were the men whose legs had given way beneath them, and who still tried to struggle along on hands and knees. Here were the women and the children, left ever farther and farther behind, gazing back apprehensively down the road to see when the dreaded helmets of the French dragoons would appear over the rise. Here were the last few relics of the impedimenta of the army, all that had survived the disaster of Espinosa and the hundred miles of the retreat. The horses were all dead, and the few guns and wagons were being dragged along by dying mules, goaded by the drivers who limped along at their sides. It was bad luck on the sick who fell in the highway incapable of moving, for the gun teams were quite incapable of hauling the guns out of the deep central ruts; they could only go straight on, regardless.
If any part of the wretched Spanish Bourbon army could boast esprit de corps and devotion to duty, it was the artillery. The gunners of the few guns which had escaped from Espinosa had no real motive in imperiling their lives in dragging their guns on in this fashion. They knew that if they were to cut the traces and leave their pieces behind no one would ever have the energy to make inquiries into the matter. But either their own natural obstinacy or that ingrained by discipline had caused them to drag the things thus far.
The very last unit in the Spanish column -- if we except the dying -- was a bigger, heavier, and more imposing gun than the iron six-pounders which led the artillery column. Thirteen feet long, it was, and two feet in diameter at the breech, and a foot in diameter at the muzzle. It was an eighteen-pounder bronze gun, of that handsome dark alloy which is still known as "gunmetal". Around the vent and forward along the barrel it was ornamented with blazonry and heraldic traceries, beautifully designed, and cast as part of the gun itself; it was evidently a gun which had had a mold made expressly for itself at the time of casting, and had clearly been intended as an ornament for some wealthy noble's castle. Round the muzzle, in boldly raised lettering, was a Latin inscription, a fragment of the liturgy of Nocturne -- "And our mouths shall show forth Thy praise". The gun must have been one of a pair; its brother must have borne the inscription "Oh, Lord, open Thou our lips", and the two must have stood one each side of the entrance ramp of a castle in the South. When the Spaniards rose against the French invaders, and the nation flew to arms after a French army had been engulfed at Baylen, these two guns must have been taken from their ornamental duties to help eke out the woefully inadequate equipment of the Spanish artillery. The other gun had fallen into French hands at some one or other of the disasters which had befallen Spain when NapoLeon in his wrath led the Grand Army across the Pyrenees -- at Gamonal, perhaps, or Rio Seco, or Tudela, and was probably relegated again by now to ornamental duties at the Tuileries or at Compiegne, to grace Imperial splendor.
It seemed likely enough that the same fate would overtake its fellow, trailing along at the rear of Blake's defeated army. The dozen mules which were dragging its three tons of weight along the rocky road were in the last stages of exhaustion. To force them to take every single step the drivers had to stick their goads into their raw and bleeding sides; the big lumbering gun only surged forward a yard at a time, and every yard with pain and difficulty, crashing and bumping over the rocks which surfaced the road. They reached a point where all the gradients which they had already climbed up into the mountains were inconsiderable, compared with the one which now faced them. It seemed to rise before them like the sides of a house; ahead they could see it at intervals winding on interminably, looping back and forth up the mountain side, as far as the eye could see through the driving sleet. At every hairpin bend the pull of the long string of mules was necessarily at an angle to the length of the gun, with much consequent wastage of power. The drivers shouted, and stuck their goads into the mules' sides until the blood ran in streams; the gunners toiled at the spokes of the wheels with what feeble strength was left them. The wind shrieked round them, dazing them with its force and with the sleet which it hurled along with it. Then the inevitable occurred. One last spasmodic effort carried one wheel up to the top of the rock which had been impeding it; the mules lunged forward under the goads, and the whole thing tottered and fell over on its side in the midst of the road, dragging the limber over with it, and the wheelers in their traces, and they the pair in front, and so on, until half the team was down, while the gun lay, huge and ungainly, on its side with one wheel still slowly rotating.
In this fashion the question was settled for the gunners. It would take hours to put that three tons of bronze on to its wheels again. And the mules were past further effort. Those which had fallen lay quietly on the rocky road, their only movement being the distressed heaving of their flanks. With most of them no amount of goading or kicking or cursing could get them on their feet again. When a dying mule finds himself lying down, he nearly always decides to lie and die quietly, and no stimulus whatever will get him on his feet again to expend his last few breaths in the service of mankind. The wretched animals who were still on their feet huddled together and tried, as well as their traces would allow, to turn their tails to the sleet-laden wind. At any moment the dragoons might appear in pursuit; the gunners had seen them in among the rearguard once or twice already during the retreat, slashing about with their swords like a schoolboy among thistles. The wind and the cold and fatigue and hunger had left the gunners too dazed for intelligent effort with levers and ramps. They had just sense enough to open the limber and allow its small content of ammunition to cascade into the road, and then, detaching the limber from the gun, they were able to right the former and hitch the last few mules to it. With this light load, they were able to struggle forward again up the interminable mountain road, into the fast falling winter night, while the gun still lay grotesquely with one wheel in the air and the dying mules around it, like some fantastic god surrounded by sacrificed animals -- a simile which is not so far from the truth.
The Spanish army went on its way, leaving the gun behind it. Thirtythousand men had fought at Espinosa, and twenty-thousand had escaped from that disaster. The march through the mountains, and a winter among their desolate slopes, left some eight thousand fever-ridden phantoms alive next spring to appear again in another corner of Spain and to be sacrificed in some further foolish battle. For the French left their retreat unharried from the morning of the day when the gun was abandoned. Not even a French army could penetrate farther into that desolate tangle of mountains, with no more motive than the destruction of a beaten enemy; they wheeled aside and marched down into the plains to Madrid.
