Rifleman Dodd

“Months and months of drill had been devoted to making him mechanically perfect in loading, so that he would not in a moment of excitement put the bullet in before the powder, or omit to prime, or fire the ramrod out along with the bullet, or make any other of the fifty mistakes to which recruits were prone.” 

As a member of the Rifle Brigade, Dodd is well trained to treat his rifle with respectful precision. A mistake can be fatal, and procedural accuracy increases the odds of success in battle. 

“Somewhere to the south of him was his regiment, which meant to him his home, his family, his honour and his future. To rejoin his regiment was the summit of his desires. But the regiment—so his extensive experience of rearguard actions told him—had been marching hard in retreat for the last two hours, while he had, perforce, been going in the opposite direction. The regiment was ten miles away by now, and between him and it was not merely the enemy’s advance guard but probably a whole mass of other troops […]” 

Dodd will do everything in his power to return to his fellow soldiers. First, though, he must get around enemy lines. He knows the territory by heart, but it will take at least several days to reach the front lines. 

“As Dodd was dropping off to sleep there passed through his mind another fragment of what he had once heard in church—something about birds having nests and beasts holes, while the Son of Man had nowhere to rest his head. Dodd did not realize it, but that quotation passed through his mind every time he composed himself to sleep in a bivouac.” 

The stress of Dodd’s situation fills his mind with an ironic musing. The “Son of Man” refers to Jesus, whose teachings were foreign to the world; similarly, Dodd feels estranged from the enemy-occupied region through which he travels. 

“At intervals during the night Dodd stirred and shifted his attitude. He was still fast asleep, but if at those times there had been the slightest suspicious noise near him he would have been broad awake on the instant. But nothing came to disturb him. The shrieking of owls and the barking of a fox were natural noises which the mechanism of his brain filtered out and did not permit to interfere with his sleep. He was a veteran soldier.” 

By training and experience, Dodd knows how to focus on what’s important and ignore what isn’t. Even while asleep, his mind posts a sentry that wakes him only when necessary. 

“He wanted to reach the other side of the road; if he went back up the road to pass the rear of the column more quickly he would only have to retrace his steps once he was across. So he lay there with the rain beating upon him and the wind shrieking overhead; soon he was soaked to the skin, but still he lay, with the inexhaustible, terrible patience acquired in years of campaigning.” 

Dodd must wait while the enemy army moves slowly past him before he can advance farther; his ability to wait quietly under harsh conditions is part of his survival skill set. 

“Dodd indulged in no highfalutin meditations upon the waste and destruction. He had been a soldier from the age of seventeen. His business was solely concerned with killing Frenchmen (or Russians or Germans as the ebb and flow of high politics might decide) while remaining alive as long as possible himself.” 

His purpose simple and straightforward, Dodd suffers no distractions about the meaning of his life and can move methodically and ruthlessly against the enemy without the uncertainty that plagues many people’s decisions under stress. 

“There was no pity in Dodd’s mind; it was his business to kill Frenchmen, and if the Frenchmen were not in a position to try to kill him in return so much the better.” 

Careful training and long experience in battle enable Dodd to function smoothly and efficiently in a skirmish, his only interest the competent use of bullets to knock down enemy soldiers. Fair play doesn’t enter into it.

“The soldier with years of campaigning behind him has, perforce, acquired a philosophic outlook towards turns of fortune. If one plan goes wrong there is need to make another, that is all.” 

In war, there’s no time for standing around, confused. Grinding one’s teeth over one’s fate wastes energy. There’s only time to adapt when things go wrong. Dodd knows this instinctively. 

“Vigilance was necessary, for Portuguese had been known to creep into the ranks of sleeping men and cut half a dozen throats before crawling away again undetected.”

The French army gets a good look at the extensive and impenetrable fortifications atop the miles of cliffs at Torres Vedras. The regiments must move on, searching for access elsewhere; meanwhile, they must guard constantly against nighttime raids by local guerrillas. Under-provisioned and hungry, their problems have only begun. 

“[…] for three whole months the French were to stay here on the Tagus, starving, while disease and hunger brought down victim after victim, until one man in three had died without setting eyes on an enemy while the English rested and waxed fat in the shelter of the Lines. The ships streaming into Lisbon harbour would bring them English beef and English pork and English bread so that they might rest in comfort until their grim, unseen allies had done their work, until the French army might be sufficiently reduced in numbers to make it possible for them to sally out and engage them on an equality.” 

The French army expected to live off the land as it conquered Portugal, but the land has been scorched clean by retreating British and Portuguese. Whittled down from hunger and guerrilla raids, the invading soldiers find themselves trapped in a foreign country with little prospect of food or victory. Wellington’s strategy will damage the French while his forces look on from a distance.

“The wretched peasants, of course, saw utter ruin ahead of them. Their fields were being left untilled, their buildings were being ruined, and now they were being compelled to eat their livestock without leaving any nucleus at all which might multiply in the years to come. The score or so of diseased and starving sheep which were carried twice daily across the secret ford represented now their sole wealth; when that was gone they would have nothing, literally nothing. They would starve whether the French retreated or whether the French stayed.” 

The devastation of this war affects both sides, causing starvation among the Portuguese even as the French army runs out of food. The army can return to France, but the Portuguese have lost the foundations of their food supply—seed for planting, cows for milking, sheep for shearing. The disaster will linger long after the war is over.

“Clearly it would be a dangerous enterprise to try to make his way through that country. Bernardino voiced his disgust at the prospect; he was for turning back again, and a man less obstinate than Dodd might have yielded, or one with a lower ideal of military duty. But the British army had not won the distinction it now possessed by turning back at the first sign of difficulty: nor would Dodd turn back now.” 

Dodd is a determined, toughened veteran who knows how to find his way through obstacles to reach his destination. He’s also a product of British instruction, among the best in the world, a system that trains the people who help build the British empire. 

“He was engaged in war, and war without death was a quite unthinkable thing. And seeing that England had been engaged in one continuous war since he was a child in petticoats a world without war was equally unthinkable. And Dodd had far too much practical common sense ever to begin to think about such a fantastic notion as a world without the possibility of war.”

The dead of war—including the old Portuguese man, killed by starvation, that he helps bury—have no effect on Dodd, who’s aloof from sentiments that bring others to tears. Instead of wishing for a world at peace, or wishing that beloved kin weren’t gone, Dodd takes stock of the violent world around him, accepts its conditions, and forges ahead on his own mission of death.

“No comfort of mind or body could compare in Dodd’s opinion with the negative comfort of remaining alive as long as duty permitted—this opinion of Dodd’s goes far to explain why he had been able to survive five campaigns.” 

Dodd will first do what he can to stay alive and then consider satisfying other desires. Dodd does not believe in the risk of sticking his head up out of cover in the daytime simply to satisfy his curiosity about the enemy’s location, as young and inexperienced Bernardino wants to do. 

“It was a lively day for the convoy escort as well as for the drivers. The escort spent their time running up and down a couple of miles of road in hopeless dashes after an enemy which fled at their earliest approach and yet was always ready to reappear elsewhere and resume their harassing attacks. If the three hundred men of the escort had been strung along the road trying to guard every point they would have been just as useless—one man to every ten yards.” 

Dodd, Bernardino, and the stunted man practice an early form of guerrilla warfare, in which a few irregular troops or locals harass a much larger force. Guerrillas find weaknesses in the enemy’s defenses and pour their limited resources into those gaps; in this case, Dodd’s team takes advantage of forest cover to fire on a long supply train weakly guarded, bringing down its horses and causing a massive traffic jam. 

“Thirteen hundred men, attacking concentrically from all round, had swept the place bare, and left no living thing upon it. […] The men they had captured had been taken with arms in their hands and without uniforms, and so deserved to die. The women were as bad as the men, and anyway soldiers needed relaxation during three years’ campaigning. And if the poor fools had only sense enough to submit to the all powerful emperor the women would not be interfered with quite so violently.” 

Godinot’s battalion sweeps the hills where locals harassed the French; the sweep kills all the Portuguese men and captures their women, who are raped by the French soldiers. Wars generate cruelty, which causes counter-reprisals, until otherwise decent men become vicious brutes. 

“And even if he were assured of good treatment the prospect of surrendering was very nearly as hateful to him as death. He wanted to live. He wanted to rejoin his regiment. He wanted to find out what was the destination of the bridging train, and to do something towards destroying it.” 

His sense of meaning and purpose centers around his work for the regiment, and Dodd will do anything rather than give that up. Though aching from hunger, the rifleman searches constantly for a way to hamper the enemy. 

“[…] though he was a light infantryman and accustomed to some extent to acting by himself, he had been thoroughly imbued with the army tradition of looking for orders and doing nothing more than those orders dictated. That was all a private soldier was expected to do; indeed, to go beyond that usually meant trouble. Even in those days the usual retort of a non-commissioned officer was ‘You thought? You’re not paid to think. You’re paid to obey orders,’—a speech which has endured word for word even down to our day.” 

If soldiers on the battlefield make their own plans instead of carrying out their commanders’ orders, their army’s strategy begins to fray and weaken. Dodd’s training gives him some leeway in the field but not much; trapped deep inside enemy territory for months, however, his attitude shifts toward innovative acts of sabotage. 

“Dodd had never known what good food was, not once in all his life, nor had Bernardino. It was mere irony that the money and effort wasted in the war in which they were fighting was sufficient to keep every single man engaged in it in Lucullan luxury for all their days.”

Lucullus led the forces of ancient Rome in the conquest of much of the Middle East and brought back immense riches. His treasures helped improve Rome, but the spending on the Peninsular War—a holding action against Napoleon’s conquest of Europe—gives no boon to anyone. A bitter and recurrent truth is that good and loyal men often must fight wasteful wars that arise from the ambitions of rulers.

“Loneliness and fatigue and strain and bad food made a strange dark labyrinth of his mind, but they did not prevent him from creeping steadily along on his self-set task.” 

His only companions now dead, Dodd continues, sometimes mumbling to himself, trudging along as if in a nightmare, his pursuit of the bridge builders always uppermost in his mind.

“Sergeant Godinot’s party was the worst of all. Its twenty men (there had been thirty at one time; the other ten lay in the graves where sickness had overtaken them) were at once weak in body and mutinous in soul. The unfortunate sum of their military experiences—they were only one-year conscripts, after all—had left them without any more desire to serve their country at all.” 

Godinot has lost all his recruits, and the others in his company, for their year of service to the French Empire, have little battle experience beyond hunger, misery, and death. They all would have been better off if they’d remained at home. Many speak darkly of desertion, and some issue catcalls at General Eble when he rides past.

“The French had burned the villages and hamlets in which they had found shelter through the winter, just as the Germans were to do in France one hundred and six years later. They burnt everything, destroyed everything; the smoke of their burnings rose to the sky wherever one looked. In truth, the area which the French had occupied was horrible with its burnt villages and its desolate fields, ruined and overgrown, where not a living creature was to be seen. There were dead ones enough to compensate—dead men and dead animals, some already skeletons, some bloated corpses, with a fair sprinkling of dead men—and women—swinging from trees and gallows here and there.”

Like most invading armies, past and future, the French treat their conquered territories with murderous contempt. Napoleon’s invasions are supposed to improve Europe, bringing liberty and law to countries ruled by tyrants; in Portugal, all it brings is ruin. 

“As for the wake of death which Dodd had left behind him—the Frenchmen whose deaths he had caused or planned, the Portuguese who had died in his sight or to his knowledge, from the idiot boy of his first encounter to Bernardino and the stunted man a week ago, all that made no impression at all upon Dodd. Five campaigns had left him indifferent regarding the lives of Portuguese or Frenchmen.” 

Years of fighting have hardened Dodd’s heart to the miseries of war. Though he would never stoop to behave in the cruel manner of other soldiers, he no longer thinks about the carnage and brutality. His single-minded purpose is to return to his regiment.