Gerald Kersh - The Best of Gerald Kersh

I planned to put a ball in his thick head, take his mount, and ride belly-to-earth north-east to the first French outpost where I would pass the word: The so-called Lacoste, the Emperor’s guide, is an enemy agent – beware the sunken road between Ohain and Braine le Leud, between the French front and the plateau of Mont St Jean!

… So, I rode, only God knows how, for that road was rutted inches deep under a layer of red clay whipped by the rain and mashed by a million wheels and hoofs into a most dangerous mire. And then, that rain! The Deluge was come again. I believe that summer of 1815 was the wettest summer in the history of the world. It was as if Fate, in a sporting mood, seeing two tremendous adversaries coming to hand-grips had said: ‘You shall wrestle in the Indian style, my children – in a pit of slippery mud, just to make the game a little more difficult….’

A storm broke, and at every clap of thunder the whole black sky splintered like a window struck by a bullet – starred and cracked in ten thousand directions letting in flashes of dazzling light, so that I was stunned and bewildered. Dr Mesmer (he, also, dressed all in black) used to daze his subjects with little mirrors revolving before their eyes in order to put them to sleep. So the elements under the black cloak of the night seemed resolved to mesmerise me.

But my brave horse carried me on until, at a bend in the road, he stumbled and shuddered; went down on his knees, and rolled over on his side. I sprang clear just in time … tugged at the reins, shouting encouraging words; then let go his head. He was dead. He had burst his heart.

I stood by my dead horse, sick with hopelessness. But then the lightning flashed again, and I saw, not a hundred paces in front of me, the big grey mare Cocotte, walking very slowly, riderless, in the rain. I made my way to her, and you may rest assured that I had my hands on my pistols under my cloak. When I reached her, I saw in the light of another flash why she was walking slowly: the blacksmith Cornelys had tumbled out of the saddle, his left foot had caught in the stirrup, and she was dragging his enormous bulk in the clinging mud.

Hope flamed high again. I was sure then that Fate was on my side. Cornelys was not dead, only drugged and stunned. In a little while he would recover and continue on his errand as best he could. But first he would have to find another horse; he would be seriously delayed. Before he could be well on the road again to carry his message to Collaert at Braine le Comte I should be half-way to Genappe, where Napoleon was!

I disengaged his boot from the stirrup. His ankle was broken. So much the better! I sprang into the little hunting saddle on the back of the grey mare, turned her head, cried: Hue! – Hue! – Hue, Cocotte! and galloped back down the road over which I had travelled … away, away, past that accursed inn, through Fontaine l’Evêque, and so in the direction of our French outposts … past Drapceau, through St Estelle-sur-Ruth; and, as I rode, I dreamed fine dreams and even – could I have mixed that punch too strong even for my own head? – made up little songs which I sang inside myself to Cocotte’s hoof-beats …

And then, not far from Trois Ruisseaux – you know my luck – the rhythm halted and changed. The mare Cocotte had gone lame, and was limping on her off hindleg.

I assumed that she had picked up a flint, or, perhaps, a bit of a broken spike, from those deplorable roads. So, saying: ‘Patience, Cocotte, my darling; we will put you right in no time at all, and you shall yet help Tessier to save France’ – I dismounted, took out my pocket-knife, and, lifting up the mare’s lame hoof, explored it with my finger-tips, since there was no light to see by. I could feel nothing amiss. Then I remembered how Cocotte had started and kicked while Cornelys the blacksmith, driving home a nail, was making eyes at the inn-keeper’s wife, and my heart sank. He had lamed her through his inattention, the accursed idiot! I realised then that I would have done better to let Cornelys go unpursued to find myself stuck in the mud with a lame mare, while I took my chance in the direction of the French lines…. But I ask you, how was I to have foreseen this?

Full of bitterness, I let go Cocotte’s hoof.

She shook her leg, and kicked me in the face.

I do not know, my friend, how long I lay unconscious in the ditch. I know that when I came to myself I was lying on my back, blinking at a dirty sky from which the rain was no longer falling, and that for the moment I thought that I was again in Spain, when the English stormed the battery and an infantryman knocked me down with the butt of his musket. I was in the most atrocious pain, and my throat was full of blood. It was this very blood, this very pain, that brought me back to consciousness; for the blood made me cough, and the cough shook my head, and my lower jaw was badly broken. Several of my teeth were embedded in my tongue, which was half bitten through.

I have, in my time, been wounded in almost every conceivable way. I have survived grape-shot in my ribs, a musket-ball in the stomach, a pistol-ball in the shoulder and, most miraculous of all, a biscaïen ball in the hip (I say nothing of the bayonet-thrust, or a sabre-cut, here and there) and I have had most of the fluxes, dysenteries and agues that our frail flesh is heir to; together with a rheumatic fever which, I believed, was the ultima Thule of punishment. But the gathered might of all my enemies, my friend, never inflicted upon me one-half of the anguish I suffered under the hoof of that white-eyed devil of a dapple-grey mare! The pain of the broken bones in my face was terrible. The agony of my bitten tongue was worse. But worst of all was the pain of a shattered nerve on the left-hand side of my face. It was as if some fiend had delicately pushed a wire into my left nostril, up through some fine passage at the back of the eyeball, and out at the ear – and then applied a powerful current of electricity. My face twitched and jerked like Galvani’s frog….

However, never mind that. I took off my cravat and tied up my jaws, and then staggered away in search of my horse. Puzzle: find her! She had bolted, God knows where, sore foot and all. Blind with misery and the night, I walked, I cannot tell you how far or for how long, until at last I saw the lights of a wayside inn.

With my muddy, bloody, smashed face, and my sodden black cloak, I must have looked like the Angel of Death himself, for the inn-keeper fell back a pace when he saw me. I tried to speak, but I could not, so I pushed past him, seated myself, put down a gold napoleon and, taking out tablet and pencil, wrote the word: Cognac.

He shook his head: he could not read. Then, as best I could, I drew the outline of a bottle and a glass. I am no draughtsman, but he understood, and brought me eau-de-vie and a glass. Heavens above, but the raw spirit stung like a swarm of bees! Yet it stung me alert. I beckoned the man to my side, and drew the outline of something like a horse, saddled; and put down on the table a handful of Morkens’s gold.

He said: ‘Monsieur wants a horse? Monsieur is in luck, then. I have one only, a beautiful grey mare. She belonged to a Belgian colonel of cavalry. I could not part with her for less than a hundred louis d’or – but, seeing it’s you, I’ll throw in the saddle, a beautiful light saddle, the property of Milord Wellington himself. He brought it over from England when he hunted the fox in a blue coat to pass the time away, at the time of the Spanish blockades. The mare has been eating her head off in my stable for the past six months – God strike me dead if I lie! Well?’