Beat the Drums Slowly (26 page)

‘Hush, man! It’s the sergeants that matter. Now quiet yourself, here comes our own ray of sunshine.’ Rawson had noticed General Paget walk his horse forward. Now that Sir John had disappeared, their own commander, a man to whom temper came naturally, would take over and let his men know that they had crimes enough of their own.

‘I have nothing to say about the other divisions of this army. You are the Reserve Division, the corps chosen to occupy the place of honour. When a single one of you gets drunk, it brings shame on your regiment and shame on your country. The French are over there!’ He pointed down the road along which they had come. ‘If any one of you gets drunk, his dishonour threatens disaster to the entire army. We cover the retreat, and you cannot damned well do that if you are lying stretched out in your own puke.

‘I don’t care what you rogues think you have done in the past. Every moment now you must consider yourselves in the place of greatest honour on the field of battle. There can be no excuses, no pardons. As a reminder, the division will camp here, outside the village. You have all damned well lost the right to sleep under roofs and can bloody well make do with the bare earth and the sky for covering. This is your punishment. I shall share it with you, but the worse punishment is to lead men such as you. You shall not disappoint me again!’

As they were dismissed, Murphy let out a long breath. ‘Do you think we have upset him?’ Privately he worried about his wife and baby having to sleep in the cold.

Orders arrived that no soldier would be permitted among the houses unless at all times commanded by an officer or NCO. Work parties went in for food and fuel. The commissaries were able to organise a reasonable amount of both. Food was again mainly meat from slaughtered bullocks.

It stayed dry, but the temperatures dropped and Pringle distinctly saw the frost gathering on Williams’ backpack as it lay beside him. Each company managed to make one decent fire, and in turn the kettles from individual messes were supported over the flames to cook.

Pringle was visiting the sentries when they heard an unearthly sound of mingled moans and slithering. The nervous grenadier crossed himself and then aimed his firelock as they saw a dark shape crawling towards them on the ground. His companion reached a more optimistic conclusion.

‘Wild hog,’ he said, and licked his lips.

Billy Pringle told them to lower their weapons and ran to the shape, for he was sure now that it was a man. Later, as four men carried him in a blanket up to one of the fires, he was no longer so certain, and wondered whether he was looking at a corpse who simply had not actually stopped breathing. Hanley almost vomited at the sight. The man had dragged his shirt up over his head, whether for warmth or against the pain, and when they peeled it back it stuck several times on dried blood. His nose was split by a sabre cut, one of his ears gone altogether and the other a twisted remnant. Both cheeks were slashed open, and even his lips were hanging by slim threads of flesh. There were cuts to his arms and legs, and his jacket was slashed and stained in more places than they could easily count. They put him by the fire, and he thrust his fingers into the embers before he could feel any warmth.

‘Frostbite,’ Pringle whispered to Hanley.

In an uncanny voice which had more of a wounded animal than a human being about it, the man told them that he had been left behind in Bembibre. When he tried to eat, the fragment of meat fell out from his mutilated cheeks. Some wine went down, although as much or more spilt in every direction. They carried him to the village, getting him to one of the carts soon to head for Villafranca.

‘Quite a day,’ said Pringle, sighing as they watched the man carried off.

‘Then make the most of it, tomorrow could be worse,’ replied Hanley.

‘What do you think, Dob?’ asked Pringle, noticing that the old soldier stood near by.

‘Biggest balls-up since Flanders, sir,’ came the reply. It was easier to laugh than to think.

A
nother shot rang out as Williams made his way cautiously up the last stretch of the slope. He held his sword high. It was his only weapon. He had left the loaded pistol with Miss MacAndrews, and told her to flee at the first sign of danger. Whether or not she would follow the order was another matter. There were boulders on the slope, each slippery with ice, and patches where he sank down into several feet of snow.

It took a good five minutes to reach the top. Williams took off his forage cap and laid it down. Gently, he raised his head to peer over a large rock perched on the thin crest, and found himself looking straight into a man’s face.

Williams flinched by sheer instinct, gasping out a startled yelp and ducking back down. At the same instant, he heard a flurry of robust, and definitely Anglo-Saxon oaths. Williams looked up again. The man wore the distinctive Tarleton helmet, with its high crest running from back to front. As far as he knew, only the British used the headgear, and then only for the light dragoons and some gunners. The man’s dark blue jacket had red facings and three rows of brass buttons trimmed with gold lace. His overall trousers were grey, with a red stripe and more brass buttons. They were also undone, and the man’s purpose in coming to this quiet patch sheltered by a cluster of rocks was immediately obvious. He noticed Williams’ red coat, and looked relieved.

‘Bloody hell, you gave me a turn, you daft sod.’ His accent had the burr of the West Country – perhaps even Bristol itself, where Williams’ family had lived for some years. His face was round, the cheeks ruddy, and the little hair visible beneath his helmet was close to the colour of straw. The impression of a slow-paced yokel was shattered, however, by the quick wit evident in his eyes and expression. He noticed the officer’s epaulettes. ‘Oh, sorry, sir. Didn’t expect to see an officer.’ The man stiffened to attention automatically. His hands were too busy to permit a salute. Steam rose into the air with the sound of a cascade impossible to stop.

‘That’s quite all right.’ Williams smiled and kept his gaze high. ‘You are something of a surprise to me, Driver …?’

‘Parker, sir.’ The uniform was that of the Corps of Royal Artillery Drivers, formed just two years earlier. Such men were attached to each brigade of foot artillery, in charge of the horses, limbers and wagons that towed and supplied the guns. In the old days these tasks had fallen to civilians contracted for each campaign, who had frequently proved unreliable. The corps was under the control of the Board of Ordnance, which also oversaw the artillery, although it remained distinct in uniform. In its brief existence it had also acquired a reputation for indiscipline.

‘Well, Parker, once you have finished, you can take me down to see whoever is in charge.’ Williams turned and waved to Miss MacAndrews, indicating that things were safe and that she should ride round the valley floor to join him. For one short moment he had dared to hope that they had stumbled on the main army, although it seemed unlikely that they should be so far east. A longer glance at the little column was enough to crush that thought. They were not yet safe.

It took them a good five minutes to walk down the steep slope. Looking around, Williams realised that the valley they had been following led into a much wider one. Here the track was well defined and wide. A trail of hoof-prints and ruts led down as far as the halted column of artillery. There were two guns, each of them quite big by the look of things, with their limbers pulled by six horses. Four horses drew a long, four-wheeled wagon. A smaller cart was pushed to the side of the road and its team unharnessed. Two of the horses lay dead alongside it, and Williams guessed that the shots had dispatched the animals. About a dozen men stood around the vehicles.

The man in charge wore the four yellow stripes of a quartermaster sergeant on his sleeves. ‘Groombridge, sir.’ He was short, very broad in the chest and must have been pushing fifty. He wore the uniform of the Royal Artillery itself, with its infantry-styled jacket in blue, and a shako.

‘Pleased to see you, Mr Groombridge. My name is Williams, of the 106th. Although I must say surprised as well.’

‘No more than us to see you.’ Groombridge was precise in his speech, and his face gave nothing away, all the time exuding absolute confidence. He was not about to be impressed by some raw ensign. ‘Didn’t think any of us were out this far.’

‘May I ask where you are going?’

‘Mansilla, sir. We’re taking these guns and equipment to give to the Dons. Beg pardon, sir, I mean the Spanish army.’

‘Mansilla fell to the French days ago. We saw it happen.’

‘We, sir?’ Groombridge’s voice betrayed the faintest trace of relief at this indication that the officer was not alone. At that moment, Jane walked Bobbie around the curve of the valley just over a hundred yards away.

‘I am escorting Miss MacAndrews, the daughter of my commander,’ explained Williams. ‘We became cut off when the army began to retreat.’ The drivers noticed that the rider was a woman. As she came closer it became evident that she was young and attractive.

Groombridge concealed his disappointment well, and if he was surprised at an officer traipsing around the countryside with a young woman then this was equally well hidden in manner of all good NCOs. ‘Yes, sir. Very good, sir.’ His eyes were pale grey, and still conveyed the innocence of childhood – at least until Mr Groombridge was roused. Then the rest of what Williams had said sank in. ‘Retreating, sir?’

‘How long have you been away from the army?’

‘Three weeks now. We landed at Corunna and then waited there for these nags to arrive. It meant we left in dribs and drabs. Lieutenant Simmons was in charge, but he fell ill ten days back, and told me to push on.’

Williams tried to explain what had happened in the campaign, realising that much could have happened since they were cut off. He doubted the British Army had halted yet, and the massacre at Mansilla made it even more unlikely that Romana’s forces were in any fit state to resist the enemy.

‘I think it would be best if you came along with me, Mr Groombridge,’ said Williams, doing his best to adopt a tone that suggested no real alternative.

‘Yes, sir.’ The sergeant rather suspected that the lone officer would be coming along with him. ‘We can’t push too hard, though, because of the horses. There never was much strength to them, and we have been short of fodder.

‘It breaks my heart, but we have to abandon the forge here.’ He gestured at the two-wheeled cart whose team had been removed, and the two dead horses beside it. ‘Poor things were lame.’ Williams noted that the sergeant’s tone made it absolutely clear that he was not about to abandon the guns or wagon to travel more quickly. In fact, he had dismissed that thought himself, at least for the moment, but it would be worth remembering that Groombridge’s respect for rank extended only so far, at least for the moment.

‘It’s a pity.’ The sergeant’s accent had a trace of Kent. ‘Because it’s the only decent bit of work among the whole lot. Those carriages are twenty years old if they are a day.’ He was pointing at the guns. Something had seemed odd about them from the beginning, and Williams at last realised what it was. They had twin trails, rather than the single, solid block trail now in use. ‘Reckon we’ve been giving the Dons all the stuff we don’t have a use for ourselves. And of course nobody much uses twelve-pounders any more, so the limbers and the ammunition cases are full of rusty old shot and charges of grape from the navy. God knows what they expect the dagoes to do with that. On a brass gun of all things. Won’t half knacker the barrels.’

‘Any other weapons?’ asked the ensign.

Groombridge, who had joined the Royal Artillery as a boy, struggled for a moment with the idea that anyone who had two twelve-pounder cannons might require additional armament.

‘Oh, I see. Four muskets, sir. The Wee Gees don’t normally carry them, but as we were off on our own I reckoned it were worth having a few. There’s two hundred cartridges.’ Williams guessed the odd nickname must refer to the drivers.

‘Provisions?’

‘Biscuit and salt beef for another week. Rum for a fortnight. That’s for myself, the two artificers and the ten drivers. Two sacks of oats left. We had some rye from a village a few days back, but I won’t use that unless we get desperate.’ Seeing the puzzled expression, the sergeant explained. ‘It makes them crap. Sorry, sir, I mean it purges the horses something powerful.’

‘Well, hopefully we can find some better fodder before long. Thank you, Mr Groombridge, that all sounds excellent.’

‘Sir.’ Groombridge saluted, and silently wondered just what the young officer felt he had added to the strength of their little band. Then he noticed that the pretty young woman on the horse was feeding a baby. Well, isn’t that bloody marvellous, he thought to himself.

They pressed on. Miss MacAndrews took the baby and rode in the wagon. The driver was a cheerful Irishman, and one of the two artificers who also sat among the baggage and stores showed a great fondness for little Jacob. ‘Raised four of my own,’ he explained, and assured the young miss that the lad was not at all fevered and seemed in the bloom of health.

Groombridge rode a mule. He was still uncertain of what to make of the ensign, but had to admit that the arrival of a baby and a good-looking young woman had taken the men’s minds off their sense of isolation.

Williams led Bobbie for a while, as the pace of the draught horses was slow. Later he rode for the first time in days. There was something reassuring about being among British faces and hearing English voices once again. Part of him regretted the inevitable loss of intimacy with Miss MacAndrews. There seemed now little chance that the all too brief and swiftly interrupted moment of lovemaking would be repeated. Nothing in the girl’s demeanour had given him cause to hope for this. That had not prevented him dreaming of it, even when he told himself that he should not.