Rifleman Dodd

Six companies, including Godinot and his men, receive orders to march east, upstream on a paved road alongside the Tejo River, which the French call the Tagus. The soldiers speculate on their destination—Retreat? Leave Portugal? Rejoin the Army of the South on the other side of the river?—but no one informs them. The road turns inland, toward some hills. Shots ring out near the front, briefly halting the march, but these are a common occurrence, and Godinot’s men in the rear don’t concern themselves. Some French soldiers move in a long line over a hill in routine pursuit of the guerrillas.

One of Godinot’s men sees an English soldier in a green jacket leading the guerrillas. The French give chase, but the Englishman is too quick. One Portuguese slips and falls down the hill to their feet, and Godinot and his men have their bayonets in him before he can get up. On the hillsides, the skirmish line quickly breaks up into groups. Rain begins to pour down on the battle, breaking it up further. A few soldiers on each side get shot, including one member of Godinot’s squad, hit in the stomach by the Englishman. At sunset, the French fall back and march to an abandoned village, where they can tend to the wounded and put roofs over their heads.

The men find potatoes scattered in a field not yet destroyed by the retreating forces, along with a few goats, a chicken, and wooden fences for fuel. The soldiers eat a decent meal by a warm fire. They find a wine cellar, its caskets destroyed, but there’s enough wine in the bottoms and on the floor to drink: “It was a perfectly splendid, riotous evening” (77). One of Godinot’s men, Fournier, insists that the Englishman who shot at them today is the same one who killed one of their own several days earlier.

The next morning, two companies guard the village while the other four stretch out across the nearby hills in a methodical day-long search in the rain for the guerrillas. Aside from yesterday’s bodies, they find nothing.

Dodd, on the other hand, wins the day: “In exasperating three hundred men like this, and wearing out three hundred men’s shoe leather, Rifleman Matthew Dodd had done his duty” (80). It was he who convinced the villagers to destroy most of their food supply and evacuate the rest and themselves into the hills; it was he who stove in the wine casks. Anticipating that the French would search the hills, Dodd had his irregulars move to another hilly area. His hope is that the French will run out of food and retreat, permitting him to continue on toward Lisbon.

He doesn’t yet know that the determined French commander will keep the troops positioned on the Tagus for another three months, and one third of those troops will die of starvation and disease. The English forces at Lisbon, meanwhile, will rest up and dine on good food brought in by sea. Dodd spies a cavalry group across the river, but the distance is too far to determine nationality. Bernardino, whose eyesight is superb, decides they’re “Portugezes,” which means the far side is controlled by friendly forces. Dodd would cross if he could, but there are no boats or bridges, and Dodd can’t swim.

The French companies at the village make up the Fourth Battalion of the 46th Infantry Regiment, a hastily formed mass of conscripts, barely more than boys—poorly trained, understaffed, and under-supplied—sent directly to the Spanish peninsula, where their main enemy is hunger. Though they’ve seen little action, the original 800 soldiers of the Battalion are now whittled down to 500.

The men eat all they can find in and around the village. In the hills they find 20 sheep and some bags of corn, which extends their supplies by two days. Godinot and his men are part of an expedition that crosses the high road to search for more food, but they run into another group of French troops, part of the veteran Second Corps, that insists the area belongs to them, not Fourth Battalion, and forces the foragers to leave. They return to the village empty-handed but discover later that headquarters did, indeed, designate those hills as Fourth Battalion territory.

The men search the mountain near the river, trudging along goat paths, joking grimly about the type of meat they hope to find. Godinot’s squad hears gunfire and shortly comes across a dead French soldier, shot through the head. They investigate, climbing up and down the rugged terrain, and hear more shots fired nearby. At one point, they capture an elderly Portuguese straggler, Miguel, and question him about nearby food. The man is unresponsive despite being prodded angrily with a bayonet. They tie his hands and take him with them.

Back at the village, Adjutant Sergeant Doguereau and a second sergeant, both experienced in interrogation, take the prisoner into a building. Soon, screams can be heard. The sergeants emerge; the old man has told them of a hidden silo pit filled with corn and olive oil. Delighted, the French soldiers uncover the supplies; they return the old man to his prison room for later questioning, but that night he hangs himself.

Along with four cows found in a ravine, the battalion now has food for a week; “for that it was well worth having a man killed and two wounded in the ambushes on the hill” (97).

No more food is found for several days; the mountain trails are empty. The soldiers grow sick of nothing but corn mush. Doguereau details squads to climb up the mountain, Godinot’s among them, and hunker down to wait for a Portuguese to appear and capture him. Instead, Godinot’s squad is ambushed by guerrillas led by the Englishman: Shots and bayonets lash out; panicked, Godinot runs away. Fournier and wounded squad member Dubois also escape, but three more lie dead.

Back at the village, Godinot is being questioned angrily by the sergeants when more squads trickle in, some who report troops killed or wounded at the hands of the Englishman and his irregulars. That night, Fournier asks Godinot for some silver coins; the sergeant gives him two Spanish dollars. Fournier uses a campfire to heat and mold them into silver bullets. The next morning Fournier is gone, and Godinot explains to the captain that the private must have hiked into the hills to hunt the Englishman. Fournier never returns. Godinot has lost six of his seven recruits at the hands of the rifleman.

A call goes out for boat makers, carpenters, and rope makers; half the battalion applies for the jobs, hoping to escape their pointless duty and meager rations. Godinot and his last recruit, Dubois, make the cut. Godinot leads 30 men back down the river road to the occupied town of Santarem. No civilians remain there, but the place is abuzz with French soldiers. Godinot’s group learns it will help build two pontoon bridges across the mile-wide river. The task will be immense. The men must first disassemble much of the town and extract its wooden beams and nails, then make rope from warehouses full of wool. Lacking tar, the group somehow must find a way to waterproof the pilings with olive oil. Worse, the hungry men learn that food rations consist entirely of corn.

(Chapter 13 reviews the action in Chapters 11 and 12, this time from Dodd’s viewpoint.)

On the mountain near the village, the Portuguese work hard to enlarge a hidden cave near the beach, hide their few cattle in places of meager forage, and share sentry duty. When the French soldiers advance in long columns up the hills, the Portuguese slip past them on side ridges and take pot shots at the enemy.

In a small village, everyone is related, and they mourn as a family the death of old Miguel. His passing overwhelms the other bad news about the loss of the hidden corn-and-oil silo. The French soldiers who next climb the hills in a silent crawl are easily detected, and Dodd and his irregulars made short work of the first squad and then harry the other squads as they retreat, wounding or killing a few. Several Portuguese fighters are injured, but they retrieve weapons and ammunition from the dead French, and the day is celebrated as a victory.

The next day, a shot just misses Dodd, and he and Bernardino duck down. Bernardino crawls away to flank the opponent. Dodd peers through the brush, locates the spot where smoke appeared, observes movement in the bushes there—the assailant is reloading—gauges the likely center of the shooter, and fires. Quickly rolling away, Dodd reloads and crawls with infinite patience toward the assailant’s position, observes legs lying still, and fires at them, but the legs remain unmoving. He reloads and resumes his crawl; finally, he reaches the enemy’s position and finds a young man dead of a bullet to the groin that burst an artery. There is also a small injury to the dead man’s knee from Dodd’s second bullet.

Bernardino arrives and is “intensely amused that they had expended so much time and energy on stalking a dead man” (118). He’s also impressed that both Dodd’s shots reached their target from 50 yards away. They inspect the body and find an oddly shiny bullet; Dodd assumes the French are making ammunition from scrap metal and tosses the souvenir into the bushes: “He had never heard of the superstition that to kill a very important person, or one with diabolical powers, a silver bullet is desirable” (119).

Many days of torrential rain ensue; no skirmishes take place among the winds. Dodd’s Portuguese allies hoard their food carefully, but soon they must eat the cows and sheep. Still, they would rather starve in the hills than surrender and be executed. Though illiterate, Dodd begins to learn the Portuguese language. His attempts to speak are pathetic, but the villagers don’t care because he’s so good at killing Frenchmen.