Chapter X A Prisoner of France
Next morning Jack was awakened early and told that he must march.
“Very happy,” he said, “but where to?”
He had recovered his spirits. No misfortunes, no bufferings, can long depress a healthy boy of sixteen. Consequently when he learned that he was to tramp to Boulogne, more than fifty miles away, he received the information with a smile. His chief thought was: “Perhaps I shall see that Monstair, Boney himself!” The prospect of a fifty-mile walk in keen, bright weather did not daunt him.
He was accompanied by the skipper of the lugger and several of the men. Now that they were on French soil they had lost their reluctance to talk, and before many miles had been covered Jack was chatting as freely as his command of the language permitted, and laughing at the misunderstandings that occurred on both sides. He learned one fact that made him feel sorry. A few days before, Admiral Keith had exploded some vessels among a hundred and fifty of the French praams at their anchorage outside the pier at Boulogne. But this attempt to destroy the flotilla had not succeeded, the vessels having been separated by distances too wide for the explosion to have the destructive effect intended. The French smugglers were much elated at Admiral Keith’s failure, and amused Jack by their confident assertion that before long Bonaparte, or the Emperor Napoleon, as he was beginning to be called, would make himself King of England.
Boulogne was reached at the end of the second day’s march. Jack was taken to a commissary of the forces. He did not learn till some time afterward what story the skipper told. It was to the effect that his lugger, while making for Boulogne from St. Malo, had been becalmed off Barfleur, within sight of an English frigate which lay about two miles astern. A boat had been sent from the frigate to capture the lugger. Attempting to board, the English crew had been driven back with severe loss, and this young officer, who had been foremost of the boarding party, had been left in the Frenchmen’s hands.
Whether the commissary believed the story Jack never knew. Certainly it was acted upon. He was handed over to the keeper of the town prison, and lodged in the cells below the old belfry tower. Next day, however, he was removed and conveyed under a guard a few miles westward toward Etaples. As he left the belfry with other prisoners amid an escort of gendarmes, he saw riding up the hill towards Wimereux a group of horsemen, led by a stout little soldier in brilliant uniform. The gendarmes saluted; the little man gave a curt and careless acknowledgment, and cantered on. It was Bonaparte himself, riding to review the army he was collecting for the invasion of England. Jack recognized him by his likeness to the caricatures he had seen at home.
“’Tis something to have seen the wonderful Boney!” he thought.
Not far from Etaples he was placed with a number of other prisoners, all English seamen, in an old château about a mile from the sea. It had evidently been at one time a pleasant country-house, but from its partly dilapidated condition Jack inferred that it had suffered during the revolutionary riots thirteen or fourteen years before. It was now used as an overflow prison, the regular prisons of the town being filled. The English prisoners in France always outnumbered the French prisoners in England, owing to the greater enterprise of English seamen, which often led them to attempt impossible feats and threw them into the power of the enemy.
The prisoners were kept on the top floor of the château, several rooms having been knocked into one. The windows were barred; there were two stories beneath; outside, the walled park all round the house was regularly patrolled by sentries; and there was a guard constantly at the gate. The wall bordering the grounds was about nine feet high and spiked at the top. These facts were at once noted by Jack, for the instant he was shut up he began to think of escape; but the outlook was not promising.
If he wished to escape at the first, his longing was intensified after a few days of prison regime. There were about seventy prisoners altogether, and twenty jailers. The treatment was not far short of brutal. The prisoners had to sleep on coarse pallets of straw, the stalks cut so short that they were like beds of spikes. The food consisted of nothing but brown bread and more or less dirty water. One and a half sous a day were allowed by the government to each prisoner for the purchase of extra food—a miserably insufficient sum; yet, poor as it was, it more often found its way into the pockets of the jailers than into those of the prisoners. The rooms were never properly cleaned, and the jailers thought nothing of bullying and assaulting brutally any man who had the audacity to grumble.
Jack had the good luck to be spared some of the worst hardships. He was allowed the use of a small room off the larger one—a kind of antechamber, the partition of which was only half demolished where the separate rooms had been knocked into one for the reception of the prisoners. A door opened directly on the staircase; it was kept closed, and it had a grating through which the sentry on duty could watch what was going on.
The warders, drafted from two companies of infantry in the neighboring town, were relieved daily. This was a precaution taken, no doubt, to prevent them from getting tired of their job and relaxing in their watchfulness. At all hours of the night the steady tramp of the sentries round the house could be heard by wakeful prisoners above. And many were wakeful, for their poor fare was ill calculated to encourage sleep, and as the days passed they shivered with the cold. It did not occur to the officer in command, a rough-tongued captain who had apparently risen from the ranks, to provide a fire; and when one of the prisoners ventured to ask for one, he got a snubbing.
Jack was the only officer among the captives. He learned afterward that officers were often liberated on parole, but this was entirely in the discretion of the district commandant, and Jack was unlucky in coming into the hands of a bully. He tried to keep cheerful, but it was hard in such depressing surroundings. The only pleasant part of the day was the short interval allowed for exercise in the park. A space was roped off within which the prisoners might run or walk; it was a considerable distance from the wall, and sentries with loaded muskets stood on guard. There was thus no chance of making a dash for liberty; but the opportunity of stretching their legs in the open for twenty minutes was a boon to men accustomed to the freedom of life on the sea.
Thus four months passed. Every day was like another. A little news came to the prisoners at times through the jailers—how further attempts to destroy the flotilla of praams at Boulogne had been defeated; how the English had attacked in vain Fort Rouge at Calais Harbor; how Napoleon had been at last crowned emperor by the pope in the church of Notre Dame. But the news which Jack eagerly awaited, of a great victory won by Admiral Nelson at sea, never came.
One day in February, when snow was falling, a new batch of prisoners was brought in, to the disgust of the others, for the room was already overcrowded. But Jack was pleased and vexed at once to see that the new arrivals were no other than Babbage, Turley, and a dozen more from the Fury.
“Well! I never did see!” ejaculated the bo’sun, when Jack hailed him. “Bless my eyes, sir, but I thought as you was gone to glory—leastways to Davy Jones, and so did we all. How did you go for to come to this here dirty old hulk of a French prison, sir?”
Jack told the whole story.
“What happened to you and the boat?” he asked.
“Why, sir, we waited for you three hours or more, as we was bid, and when you didn’t come back, I said as how we ought to go up along and find you.”
“No, you didn’t!” interrupted Turley; “that was me. You said our orders was to wait for Mr. Hardy three hours, and the three hours being up, ’twas our dooty to go back and tell Mr. Blake. There, then, old Sparrow-grass!”
Evidently Turley supposed that on French ground the claims of discipline might be ignored. But he was mistaken.
“What do you mean by Sparrow-grass?” demanded Jack as sternly as he could.
“Well, sir, I know that his rightful name is Ben Babbage, but among ourselves, sir, when we thinks of it, we calls him Turnip—”
“That’ll do, Turley. You’ll call Mr. Babbage by his right name, here and anywhere else; remember that. Go on, Babbage.”
“Well, sir, as I was saying, I said as how we ought to go up along and find you. So go we did; but though we spent a couple of hours a-prowling round that there tower, and about the village, and went up to the Grange and all, never a word did we hear of you. So we had to give it up, and we went back and reported you missing to Mr. Blake. He put in at Luscombe himself, and raised a deal of dust, sir, but ’twas no good. So he reported you to the admiral at Portsmouth as missing, and we got another officer in your place, a slack-twisted young—beg pardon, sir, I was a-going to do what Turley done, sir, call names; but I won’t—leastways, not in your hearing, sir.”
“And how did you become prisoners, too?”
“Why, sir, a Mounseer’s sloop set on us t’other day when we was running before a stiff gale. The poor little Fury’s topmast was carried away and the mainmast sprung. The sloop hugged us till the wind dropped; then she came up alongside and boarded. She had three times our number, and they must have bred different Frenchmen in the days when one Englishman was equal to three; we did our best, as you may believe; she lost half her men, but the other half was still double what was left of us, so we had to haul down our colors, in a manner of speaking. Mr. Blake and the new midshipman have been marched off, I did hear, to a place called Verdun; here’s the rest of us, what was left, and if you’ll look out of the window, you’ll see the poor little Fury lying off the quay there. I s’pose they’ll patch her up and call her by a new name, and that’s enough to make any Englishman’s blood boil, it is.”
Jack was angry as Babbage at the success of the sloop in capturing the cutter. But he felt somewhat cheered at the sight of the faces of his messmates; and their presence, strangely enough, set him again thinking of escape. Babbage was a seasoned and knowing old salt, and Jack resolved to have a long and private talk with him at the first opportunity.
But though in the course of a week they had many such talks—in the park while exercising, in the little antechamber at dead of night—they almost despaired of hitting upon any likely plan of regaining their liberty. There was no chance of silencing the sentries at the head of the staircase; any attempt to break open the door would at once be heard outside, and the whole force of warders, all soldiers, would be on the alert. The bars across the windows might indeed be loosened or forcibly wrenched out, and the bedclothes—if the material of which they were made was not too poor—might be torn up and knotted to form a rope; but a small light was kept burning in the room all night, and any work at the windows would certainly be seen by the sentries at the door and by the men patrolling outside.
“Ah now! if only brother Sol was here!” sighed Babbage one evening, when Jack and he had been talking over every plan that suggested itself, possible and impossible.
“What could he do?” asked Jack.
“’Twas a saying of his, sir, ‘Nary a way in but a way out,’ though I said to him, ‘What about a mouse-trap?’ Ah, brother Sol ’ud see the way out of this here trap if any man could.”
“Well, I wish this brother Sol of yours would get himself captured and come here. Where is he?”
“I don’t know, sir; I haven’t seed him for four and twenty year. But well I mind the last thing he said to me when he went away. ‘Ben,’ says he, ‘God bless you!’ I never forgot them feeling words, sir.”
“I suppose not. As he isn’t here we must do without him. We must get out somehow, Babbage. I, for one, am not going to rot in France for half a dozen years. Is there anything we haven’t thought of?”
Babbage pursed his lips and pondered.
“We’ve thought of everything from window to ground,” he said presently. “The only thing we haven’t thought of is the roof, and we want to go down, not up—leastways, not yet.”
“I don’t know. What about the chimney?”
“No good, sir. Haven’t I seed the sergeant of the guard poke his nose up every day to see if the bars are safe? They’re just fixed so that no nat’ral man’s head could pass between. Must ha’ bin done a purpose.”
“Does the sergeant examine them carefully?”
“No, sir; he just stoops down, and cocks his head around, and gives a squint up, and many’s the time I’d ha’ liked to take advantage of the sitivation to kick him, only I thought I’d better not. ‘Kicks is poor tricks,’ too, as brother Sol used to say.”
“Well, I’ll come into your room to-night, and have a look at them. Luckily the chimney is on the same side as the door; the sentry won’t see me. We might be able to loosen those bars and clear the chimney.”
“And what then, sir?”
“I’d climb the roof and take a look round. Can’t say more at present.”
“Very good, sir.”
In the small hours Jack crept quietly into the larger room and got into the chimney unobserved. The bars were just above his head, and he very soon decided that with a sufficiently hard implement he could loosen the mortar about their ends. That was the doubtful matter. The knives supplied to a few of the prisoners who were given meat for their dinner were removed by the jailers after the meal, and all weapons had of course been taken from the men before they were brought into the room. But next morning Jack managed to force a long rusty nail out of one of the planks of the floor of his room; it seemed to him stout and strong enough for his purpose.
It was necessary to take the rest of the prisoners into his confidence. He got Babbage to tell them what he had in view, and as they were all Englishmen, with just as keen a longing for liberty as himself, there was no fear of their betraying him. As soon as the jailers had distributed the morning rations he slipped into the chimney. Half a dozen of the men, gathered as if casually near the fireplace, screened him from any one who might suddenly enter the room. He began to scrape away the mortar at one end of each of the bars, working as quickly as he could. Turley swept up with his hand the flakes of mortar that fell to the floor. By the evening Jack had worked so well that one bar was loosened sufficiently to be bent down when the time came. Then he got some of the men to tear off scraps of their woolen shirts, and with these he filled up the holes, so that even if the bar was tested by the sergeant there was a good chance that it would hold well enough to prevent discovery.
The scraping occupied him for two more days—one bar a day. By the time he had finished he found that the nail which had served him so well was worn to within half an inch of the head.
He determined to make an expedition up the chimney on that third evening, if circumstances proved favorable. After the evening meal of bread and water he got Ben to use his strength in bending down the bars. Then he crawled through and began to ascend. It was a tight fit. The chimney was narrow; but Jack, never stout, had grown thin on the prison fare, and he wormed his way up by the aid of projecting bricks left for the chimney-sweep; those were the days of chimney climbing. The flue was not very dirty; evidently no fires had been lighted below for a long time.
He reached the top without mishap. There was no chimney-pot. Looking cautiously out, showing as little of his head as possible, he saw the sea rippling far below in the distance, shining ruddy in the glow of the setting sun. A strong easterly breeze was blowing. To the right lay the harbor and town. To the left were two sloops and three or four praams; alongside the nearest sloop a coasting brig; then two fishing smacks. A cable’s length from these lay the Fury, now apparently refitted with new main- and topmasts, and eastward of her, a little farther out, a lugger and another smack. Jack guessed that, besides the Fury, only the sloops and the praams were likely to be armed with cannon, though the lugger might carry a small gun.
The immediate surroundings of the château were out of sight, except to his left, being screened by the parapet of the flat roof some feet away from the chimney. Except at one point, where the roof of an outbuilding rose nearly to the same elevation as the part where he was perched, there was a sheer drop of fifteen feet from the top of the chimney-stack.
It was a sloping roof, and Jack made up his mind to crawl down it until he came to a chimney of the outbuilding, from which a thin spiral of smoke was rising. But he waited until the dusk had deepened before he thought it safe to emerge. Then he crept carefully down till he reached the smoking chimney. The roof there was not quite as high as the other; the drop was about five feet; and he guessed from the position that below the chimney were the servants’ quarters. Two other chimneys beyond were smoking; these, he thought, must belong to the rooms occupied by the guard. The other chimneys, from which no smoke was rising, could only be reached by dropping some twelve feet and climbing an equal distance; and to do that would involve the risk of being seen or heard.
Jack placed his hand on the side of the chimney from which a thin smoke was coming. There was so little heat in the bricks that he guessed the fire below had been allowed to die down. His guess was confirmed when he put his hand in the air over the mouth of the chimney: it was scarcely warm. He resolved to climb down and find out whither the chimney led. Thin as it was, the smoke in the narrow space was rather suffocating, and he felt a certain dread lest he should cough and betray his presence. There seemed no end to the chimney, as step by step he let himself down, moving with extreme caution to avoid making any sound that could be heard below. As he approached the bottom he was relieved to find that the heat did not perceptibly increase. The fire must be almost dead. He was dislodging soot from the walls; would it be seen by the persons in the room? Perhaps if they saw it they would think it due to the strong wind. Perhaps there was nobody in the room. He heard no voices, no sound of movement, though he saw there was a light. The chimney was a good deal wider at the point he had reached, and he wondered if it led to the kitchen.
Waiting a little to make sure that the room was unoccupied, he at length ventured to slip down to the grate and peep into the room. It was empty of people. A large table stood in the middle; kitchen utensils hung from pegs on the walls; the door was ajar, and he now heard voices, proceeding evidently from an adjoining room.
On the hearth was a long iron poker. “That may prove useful,” he thought; and leaping lightly down he seized it. A large chopper hung to a nail at the side of the chimney. This also he secured. Then creeping to the door, he peeped round from the level of the floor. Three men were seated at a table enjoying their supper. This was apparently the cook’s room. The men were very much at their ease. A large fire of logs threw a glow upon their faces; a bottle of wine had been emptied; the smell of fried onions teased Jack’s appetite. He listened to the men’s conversation.
“Monsieur le capitaine will bring two guests to supper,” said one.
“Peste!” growled a second, the fattest of all, by whom, as Jack now saw, a cook’s white cap lay, “he will keep us up late. Monsieur le capitaine is so particular. A supper fit for Bonaparte is not good enough for him. The kitchen fire will have to be made up. Go and see to it, Jules.”
The man addressed scraped his plate and drank his wine before lazily rising to do the cook’s bidding. Jack flew back with the speed of a hare, and before the man had pushed back his chair the adventurer was several feet up the chimney, grasping his precious spoil, the poker and the chopper.