52 pages • 1 hour read
C. S. ForesterRifleman Dodd
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1932A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Relentless Determination
Trapped behind enemy lines, Dodd has one overriding purpose: to return to his regiment. He’s willing to suffer any torment to achieve his single-minded goal. Dodd repeatedly faces difficulties that, without fail, he resolves by choosing the option most likely to advance him toward the British lines and a reunion with his company section. Dodd’s training teaches him to focus on the job at hand. In this case, his principal task is to evade the enemy: “Military instinct called upon him to find a way round—that was the earliest tactical lesson the regiment had taught him” (17). Exposure to the elements, gnawing hunger, constant tension, and exhaustion plague Dodd during his months on his own. Not once, though, does he consider any option beyond finding his way back to his countrymen: “[I]t was his duty to push on” (24). Dodd’s deep sense of purpose gives him a tremendous capacity to endure.
Also grimly determined, despite hunger and lack of equipment, are the soldiers of the French army. Like Dodd, they have a purpose and a sense of loyalty and duty to the goal of conquest in the name of Emperor Napoleon. Unlike the rifleman, however, most soldiers aren’t as sure of themselves. The daunting defenses of the British forces, combined with relentless hunger, cause most French troops merely to hope for reinforcement or retreat. Dodd, facing equally difficult obstacles on his path of return, simply does whatever he can to inch forward in pursuit of the goal. The prospect of death doesn’t phase him, as long as he goes down fighting while trying to return to his men.
Sergeant Godinot, Dodd’s nemesis among the French, also shows some determination and ingenuity, but his resolve is less sturdy, and he displays cowardice during an ambush and nervous uncertainty among his own troops when they become surly: “[H]e could only plead and joke, and pretend to ignore the sotto voce insolences which reached his ears” (210). Godinot’s soldiers mutiny, break his leg, and desert. Alone on the road, the sergeant is captured by Portuguese irregulars and executed.
Dodd, on the other hand, makes it back to the British. His success represents the rewards of duty and determination in wartime; Godinot’s death symbolizes the penalty for soldiers whose spirit wavers under stress. The retreat of the starving French army in the face of the well-fed, energetic British forces speaks to the author’s view of the rightness of the allied cause and the moral bankruptcy of France’s attempt to conquer the peninsula. Throughout the story, fortunes of war mistreat both sides with equal venom. Out of the haze of battle, though, emerges an underlying theme that determination and virtue, and not mere might, will win out in the end.
Hunger as a Weapon
Hunger and starvation hang over Rifleman Dodd like threatening clouds. The combatants hoard or destroy foodstuffs in the hope that the other side will starve and retire from battle. The result is that both sides suffer. As with all invading armies, Napoleon’s French troops in Spain and Portugal live off the land. They commandeer food supplies from the locals. One hundred thousand invaders can leave little in their wake.
One strategy available to the defenders is to remove all foodstuffs before the enemy can obtain them. At the behest of their British allies, Portuguese civilians evacuate ahead of the invasion, taking with them what little supplies they can; as they depart, they burn their own fields and silage and destroy their livestock. The French arrive to find little or nothing to eat. France at the time is fighting on multiple fronts throughout Europe; it doesn’t have the resources to feed its armies fighting on the other side of the alpine Pyrenees in Spain. The conquest of the Spanish Peninsula relies on the French obtaining supplies locally, but Lord Wellington’s scorched-earth policy forces them to cut rations.
The men in the field, who do the heavy lifting of warfare, receive less food than they need to fight effectively. When soldiers try to forage for food, often they are met with deadly attacks from partisans. Despite these problems, the general staff decides to continue the occupation, with the result that the French battalions get ground down more by hunger than battle, and one-third starve to death or die from famine-induced illness. Hunger eats into an army’s resolve, and administrative folly makes matters worse. Often supplies are held back: “When food is short the men who have the obtaining of it will see that they have enough before passing on any surplus to those who have none” (172).
The Portuguese who remain behind enemy lines also suffer from effects of the scorched-earth policy and must dole out carefully what little they have. One of Dodd’s team members risks his life to steal food from the French, and Dodd helps remove or destroy foodstuffs from a village ahead of its occupation by the invaders. In the end, the French forces cannot hold out forever against famine, and they pick up stakes and retreat. Wellington’s British and Portuguese troops, well fed and healthy from months bivouacked on the protected Lisbon Peninsula, march onto the field, chase the fleeing French, and drive them from Portugal. The scorched-earth strategy is a success but at great cost, not just to the French but to the Portuguese as well, who pay that price to rid their land of invaders.
The Devastation of War
In Rifleman Dodd, devastation haunts the story and impinges itself on the characters’ decisions. Trapped behind enemy lines, Dodd travels cross-country, searching for the front lines and his comrades. Everywhere he goes, the land has been ransacked, burned, and emptied. What food and supplies the invading French haven’t already stolen, the British and Portuguese have purposely destroyed. This strategic game gives the advantage alternately to one side or the other, but it devastates the region in the process.
Thousands of Portuguese flee their homes and retreat behind the Torres Vedras barricade. One hundred thousand olive trees are torn from the ground and used as a giant barrier to help protect the refugees. Other such trees are burned to prevent their use by the French. French troops push aside any civilians they encounter, occupy hamlets, damage them carelessly, and sometimes burn the buildings when they leave. Siege guns batter forts and large buildings, causing further destruction. The French also kill without mercy any civilians caught out of bounds, and they kidnap and rape the women, “who avoided men’s eyes and slunk along by the walls, women who wept and women who sometimes killed themselves, women whom Ney’s godless veterans of the Sixth Corps had caught in their foraging expeditions inland” (155).
As they advance, the French encounter guerrilla warriors; when they can, they torture and slaughter these opponents. The Portuguese try to give as much as they get, venting their rage against the French by slitting their throats as they sleep or by capturing, torturing, and burning them. Dodd takes ruthless advantage of this anger, and he and the irregulars he works with harass and kill enemy troops whenever they can.
The French capture a town, Santarem, and dismantle it to provide wood and other materials for a pontoon bridge that they plan to float over the Tagus river. For months they work on this project, then transport the pontoons to the place where it will cross, only to find that the general staff has changed its mind and decided to burn the bridge and pull the army from the region. That Dodd initiates the bridge’s immolation makes little difference; either way, men and materials are wasted in mass amounts.
Starvation takes its toll on both sides; in the end, the French soldiers cannot withstand relentless hunger. That, combined with their inability to capture the well-protected capital, Lisbon, forces the French army to retreat from Portugal. Liberation of the country comes at an awful cost in lives, property, farmlands, and trauma. Though they inflict great harm on the invaders, the Portuguese people also pay a heavy price.
