JК
Sharpes Battle :: Корнуэлл Бернард
Страница: 179 из 244By mid-morning the truce across the stream was official and a company of unarmed French infantry arrived to carry their own casualties back across the bridgethat had been patched with a plank taken from the watermill on the British bank. French ambulances waited at the ford to carry their men to the surgeons. The vehicles had been specially constructed for carrying wounded men and had springs as lavish as any city grandee's coach. The British army preferred to use farm carts that jolted the wounded foully.
A French major sat drinking wine and playing chess with a greenjacket captain in the inn's garden. Outside the inn a work party loaded an ox-drawn wagon with the dead who would be carried up to the ridge and buried in a common grave. The chessplayers frowned when a burst of raucous laughter sounded loud and the British Captain, annoyed that the laughter was not fading away, went to the gate and snapped at a sergeant for an explanation. "It was Mallory, sir," the Sergeant said, pointing to a shamefaced British rifleman who was the butt of French and British amusement. "Bugger fell asleep, sir, and the Frogs was loading him up with the dead 'uns."
The French Major took one of the Englishman's castles and remarked that he had once almost buried a living man. "We were already throwing earth in his grave when he sneezed. That was in Italy. He's a sergeant now."
The rifle Captain might have been losing the game of chess, but he was determined not to be outdone in stories. "I've met two men who survived hangings in England," he remarked. "They were pulled off the scaffold too soon and their bodies sold to the surgeons. The doctors pay five guineas a corpse, I'm told, so they can demonstrate their damned techniques to their apprentices. I'm told the corpses revive far more often than you'd think. There's always an unseemly scramble round the gallows as the man's family tries to cut the body down before the doctors get their wretched hands on it, and there doesn't seem anyone in authority to make sure the villain's properly dead before he's unstrung." He moved a bishop. "I suppose the authorities are being bribed."
"The guillotine makes no such mistakes," the Major said as he advanced a pawn. "Death by science. Very quick and certain. I do believe that is checkmate."
"Damn me," the Englishman said, "so it is."
The French Major stowed away his chess set. His pawns were musket balls, half limewashed and half left plain, the court pieces were carved from wood and the board was a square of painted canvas that he wrapped carefully about the chessmen. "It seems our lives have been spared this day," he said, glancing up at the sun that was already past the meridian.
A French major sat drinking wine and playing chess with a greenjacket captain in the inn's garden. Outside the inn a work party loaded an ox-drawn wagon with the dead who would be carried up to the ridge and buried in a common grave. The chessplayers frowned when a burst of raucous laughter sounded loud and the British Captain, annoyed that the laughter was not fading away, went to the gate and snapped at a sergeant for an explanation. "It was Mallory, sir," the Sergeant said, pointing to a shamefaced British rifleman who was the butt of French and British amusement. "Bugger fell asleep, sir, and the Frogs was loading him up with the dead 'uns."
The French Major took one of the Englishman's castles and remarked that he had once almost buried a living man. "We were already throwing earth in his grave when he sneezed. That was in Italy. He's a sergeant now."
The rifle Captain might have been losing the game of chess, but he was determined not to be outdone in stories. "I've met two men who survived hangings in England," he remarked. "They were pulled off the scaffold too soon and their bodies sold to the surgeons. The doctors pay five guineas a corpse, I'm told, so they can demonstrate their damned techniques to their apprentices. I'm told the corpses revive far more often than you'd think. There's always an unseemly scramble round the gallows as the man's family tries to cut the body down before the doctors get their wretched hands on it, and there doesn't seem anyone in authority to make sure the villain's properly dead before he's unstrung." He moved a bishop. "I suppose the authorities are being bribed."
"The guillotine makes no such mistakes," the Major said as he advanced a pawn. "Death by science. Very quick and certain. I do believe that is checkmate."
"Damn me," the Englishman said, "so it is."
The French Major stowed away his chess set. His pawns were musket balls, half limewashed and half left plain, the court pieces were carved from wood and the board was a square of painted canvas that he wrapped carefully about the chessmen. "It seems our lives have been spared this day," he said, glancing up at the sun that was already past the meridian.