In the violence of the struggle neither had heard them in the distance, but now they were loud and coming on at a canter. Evidently the horsemen had been alerted to trouble ahead by the firing of the musket that had shattered the dog's head.
Wiping the blood from his face with the back of his hand, the peasant gave a frightened glance down the road; then, abandoning his musket, turned to make off into the woods. With a lightening glow of elation Roger knew that he was saved, but he was not content to let his would-be murderer go.
When in Spain he had learnt how to throw a knife. Drawing back his hand, he sent the sharp blade with all the strength he had left whizzing after his enemy. He aimed to strike the man between the shoulder blades, but by then he had become so weak that the force behind the throw was insufficient, even at that short distance, to carry the knife high enough. Yet it scored a hit, slicing into and cutting a tendon at the back of the peasant's left knee.
He let out a scream, staggered and fell. Scrambling to his knees, he attempted to run on, but his left leg had been rendered useless. The moment he put his weight on it he fell again. By then a small party of Chasseurs had rounded the corner and were approaching at the gallop. Clawing at the muddy road, the man made frantic efforts to drag himself up a low bank into the thick undergrowth.
Roger, still gasping for breath, was sprawled across the body of bis dead horse. Although he was covered from head to foot in blood and muck, his uniform was still recognisable as that of a French officer. The leader of the Chasseurs, a young Lieutenant, had grasped the situation in a glance. Drawing his sabre, he rode at the peasant, intending to sever his head from his body at a stroke. But Roger raised a hand and cried in a croaking voice:
'Don't kill him! I want that man alive.'
A moment later the Lieutenant and his four companions pulled up and dismounted. Two of them seized the man and dragged him to his feet, while their officer hurried over to Roger. In a few words he confirmed the fact that he had been ambushed, then added jerkily:
'A sabre slash or a bullet is too swift a death for that... that swine. I want him hanged ... but not with a running noose. Just have a loop of rope put over his head and ... and string him up to the nearest tree. When his friends find him, he'll be an example to them. They'll see from his face that we left him to dance on air till . . . till he slowly strangled, instead of our pulling on his feet to give him a quick end.'
The Lieutenant had already seen from Roger's rank badges that he was a Colonel, so did not demur. One of his men produced a lanyard, tied one end of it to the stout branch of a tree that protruded about seven feet above the road. The struggling peasant was pushed up the bank and the other end knotted round his neck. His legs were then kicked from under him, and he swung out above the road.
His shouts ended abruptly, his little eyes bulged, and his limbs began to jerk like those of a puppet on a string. His neck had not been broken by a drop of several feet and, as the noose was loose, it would not immediately choke him. It could be anything up to a quarter of an hour before the strain of the weight of his body on his neck caused his torture to end in oblivion. Roger was not by nature cruel, but he had suffered such agony, both physical and mental, inflicted on him in this terrible encounter, that he felt fully justified in exacting vengeance.
By tins time the head of a column of wagons had appeared round the bend of the road, and Roger learned that it consisted of supplies being sent up to the Emperor's army. On hearing that the Emperor was on his way back to Dresden, the Lieutenant agreed that it was pointless to proceed further, and ordered his column to turn about. He also called up a sergeant to whom Roger gave the despatch he had been taking to St. Cyr, and ordered him to ride off ahead at full speed with it.
Meanwhile, two of the soldiers had cut Roger's riding boot away and pried his injured leg from it. As the bullet had gone right through his calf, he was spared the probing needed for extraction, but the muscles had been torn to pieces and, although he was nearly fainting with pain as they bound up the pulpy mess with a field dressing, his vanity was piqued by the gloomy thought that never again would fair ladies comment on the perfection of his legs when wearing silk stockings. He had, as he had feared, lost a lot of blood, so was very weak and now unable to stand unless supported. As several of the wagons were-loaded with hay, they were able to make him fairly comfortable in one of them and he was conveyed to a nobleman's palace in Dresden that had been turned into a hospital for officers.
There they gave him opium to dull the pain of his wounds, then stripped him of his filthy clothes and bathed him thoroughly. The thickness of his tunic had prevented the hound's teeth from biting deeply into his left forearm but, after his leg had been properly dressed, he had to submit to the further ordeal of having the bites cauterised.
Next morning he gradually roused from a heavily-drugged sleep to contemplate the extremely worrying situation in which he had landed himself by his hasty decision to set off without an orderly. Failing to take that precaution had led to his coming within an ace of losing his life; but he endeavoured to console himself with the thought that although, had he been accompanied by an armed companion, the peasant would never have dared attempt to finish him off, that could not have prevented the man from shooting him through the leg in the first place.
When the surgeon made his rounds, Roger asked anxiously how soon he would be able to ride again. The reply was not for a month or, at the least, three weeks, and then only for a mile or two at a time at walking pace. That was what he had feared, and his heart sank. If Georgina's visions had been true foresight, young Charles was due to die with the fall of the leaves, and it was already September 13th.
Fate, Roger thought bitterly, had been against him all the time in this nebulous mission, about the success of which he had, from the beginning, considered the odds greatly against him. Georgina had seen Charles in her crystal actually about to be hanged, and for his would-be rescuer to take steps in time to prevent that now seemed most improbable.
Yet for Georgina's sake he had felt it imperative to do his utmost to render her vision false by finding the boy and getting him back to England before the autumn. To do that there should have been ample time; but again and again he had been thwarted, first by Charles having left Spain, next by learning that he was not held prisoner in France, but was somewhere in Davout's command based
on Hamburg, thus necessitating the long ride up to Dresden. And Hamburg lay to the north-east, over two hundred and fifty miles away. How, now that he was crippled, could he possibly hope to cover that distance before every tree in north Germany was bare of leaves?
17
The Battle of the Nations
That afternoon the Emperor sent to enquire after Roger. From time to time, his friends on the Staff came to visit him and he learned something from them of the progress of the war, although it had again become a most complicated picture.
The three armies opposed to the French now greatly outnumbered them, but the weakness of the Allies was that their forces, which roughly formed a semi-circle east of the Elbe, were widely separated. One army covered Berlin, while the others were in Silesia and Bohemia. Napoleon, in accordance with his habitual strategy, aimed to concentrate his army and defeat each in turn before they could join forces against him; but his plans were seriously bedevilled by the fact that since he was operating in hostile country he could secure no reliable information about the whereabouts of his enemies.