The Spanish Bride (19 page)

No, no one had seen as much as an advance-guard. Hill could afford to draw breath again, and even, two days later, to allow his troops a brief respite. Dysentery had broken out amongst the men; and rheumatism was playing havoc with old wounds. The rain fell steadily from a sky like a grey pall; the returns of the sick began to assume alarming proportions; and a messenger from Lord Wellington’s headquarters arrived, plastered in mud, with orders for Hill to march, not to Arevalo, as had been arranged, but to Alba de Tonnes, by way of Peneranda. Lord Wellington, his force ravaged by sickness, was falling back on Salamanca.

‘Failed at Burgos, has he?’ said Young Varmint. ‘That’s what comes of not taking his best troops with him. How do we get to Peneranda?’

They got to Peneranda painfully, by shocking roads. The spring-wagons foundered in troughs of thick slime, and the yokes of half-starved bullocks, straining and slipping under the lashes of their drivers, could scarcely drag them out again; wheels came off, and boxes of ammunition spilled all over the sodden ground; Ross had to make causeways of broken planks and stray flints to get his guns over stretches of the road which looked as though they had been subjected to heavy gun-fire; the long-suffering infantry splashed its way through standing ponds of yellow water, or ploughed through sticky mud which gave up their feet with a sucking sound, and caked their boots till they weighed three times their weight. ‘I wept when I was born, and every day shows why!’ said a Rifleman, hunching his shoulders under the driving rain. He became aware that the man on his left was stumbling, bent almost double, and said roughly: ‘Here, you! Don’t halt before you’re lame! This ain’t nothing yet!’ ‘I’m burnt to the socket!’ gasped his companion. ‘I’d liefer die by the road than go on! I got to fall out!’

‘Call yourself a Sweep! You’d ought to have been with Moore, you had! Blur-an’-ouns, what do you think you know, you bloody Johnny Raw, whining for a drop o’ rain? When we fell out on the road to Corunna it warn’t till the dead lice was dropping from us! Catch hold o’ my arm, and shut your bone-box!’

By the 8th November, the Tormes was reached, and crossed, at Alba. ‘Damme if we ain’t back where we started from!’ said Private Grindle disgustedly. ‘The farther we go, the farther behind, and me with corns like pumpkins on all me ten toes!’

‘Corns!’ ejaculated Tom Plunket. ‘What about my new jacket? Hell and the devil confound it, it’s spoiled entirely, and me well-known to be the smartest man in the rigiment!’ ‘Don’t fret, boys!’ said Sergeant Ballard. ‘We’re off to join the Peer!’

‘Glory be to God!’ sang out Plunket, tossing his shako in the air, ‘Now we’ll see some sport! Ah, if that long-nosed beggar had taken us with him to Burgos there’d have been a different tale to tell!’ ‘Where are we going, Sergeant?

’

‘Salamanca, by what I can make out.’

‘God love us, are you bamming us, Sergeant? Salamanca, by Jiminy! We’ll be feeding like freeholders again!’

But when the British entered Salamanca, they found that the fickle temper of the townspeople had changed. A retreating army seemed to rouse in their breasts a sort of pack-savagery; men who had welcomed the troops with hysterical fervour five months before now seized every opportunity that offered to do individual soldiers all the mischief they could. Reports of murders, of hand-to-hand fighting in the streets, showered upon his lordship’s headquarters; it was said that even the young Prince of Orange had narrowly escaped having a bayonet stuck through his slender person by one of the civil guards. The grumblers in the Light division found the troops from Burgos in such bad shape that they began to think they themselves had not suffered so very much after all. The divisions from the north had had a gruelling time of it in the trenches before Burgos, and had been harassed on their retreat by the French; they were dog-weary, and sullen with a sense of frustration; and a dangerous spirit of discontent had undermined their discipline. The Staff was being cursed for inefficiency; commissariat-carts had been delayed, and sometimes lost; and a trail of rapine in their wake bore witness to the deterioration of the men. The cavalry was in still worse case, horses looking like scarecrows, and some regiments scarcely able to muster half their correct number of sabres. There was neither money in men’s pockets, nor full rations in their bellies, but in this country of vineyards there was always wine to be seized. The army was indulging in its besetting sin, with fatal consequences.

Once on the plateau, the cold became intense. There was a brief respite from the incessant rain, but the wind that cut knifelike across the sierra jarred every bone in a man’s body, and brought on attacks of ague that set teeth chattering till the very roots ached. Wellington had taken up his old position behind the Arapiles, but Soult, warier than Marmont, showed little disposition to attack him in force. To the disgruntled British soldiers it seemed as though nothing had been gained. It was not very cheerful on the old battlefield, with a French force hovering, ninety thousand strong, in the vicinity; the bitter wind thinning the blood in one’s veins; and one’s horse setting horribly well-preserved skulls rolling with every step he took on Pakenham’s Hill.

7

The rain began to fall again on the 18th November. All the stores, and the sick men in Salamanca, were being evacuated to Ciudad Rodrigo. Whatever were King Joseph’s wishes in the matter, Marshal Soult, for all his superiority of numbers, was not going to attack Lord Wellington on ground of his lordship’s choosing. At two in the afternoon, orders to march reached the various divisions, and they moved off in two lines to the west, in torrents of rain, the Light division forming the rearguard of the centre column. Juana had bought worsted stockings and mits in Salamanca for herself and Harry. The Padre told Harry that she was the oddest mixture of elderly wisdom and youthful carelessness. You never knew, he said, when you went to look for her, whether you would find a provident housewife, or a little girl escaped from the schoolroom. He was quite astonished at the liberty Harry allowed her. To come upon her, as he often did, visiting the tent of a sick friend, or moving quite freely about the camp, all amongst the troops, shocked his sense of propriety. ‘Don’t worry!’ Harry said. ‘She has more good sense in her little finger than you’ll meet with in anyone. I never interfere with her.’

Harry, indeed, had very little time for interference with his wife’s activities. While the division marched as rearguard, his duties were never-ending. It was an anxious time, for Staff-officers; lack of sleep was beginning to make Harry’s eyes red-rimmed, and more heavy-lidded than ever. The army had an uncomfortable time of it on their first day’s march, for the rain fell in torrents, and quagmires on the roads made progress a heavy labour. The Zurgain river, a trickling stream when last seen, had become a raging cauldron of fast waters, and rose to the men’s shoulders as they waded through its fords. There was no halting until after dusk, when the division bivouacked in a dripping wood. Men began to draw comparisons between this retreat and that of Sir John Moore upon Corunna, but when Harry heard them, he laughed. Nothing they could ever suffer again could compare with that hell of snow and ice through which the troops had struggled, by long forced marches, fighting every yard of the way, with boots worn through and clothing in rags, and ice congealing on their unshaven beards. ‘Corunna!’ Harry exclaimed scornfully. ‘Why, you chicken-hearted crew, we covered thirty-seven miles in one day alone then! The men were starving, too!’ ‘Starving, did you say?’ drawled James Stewart, looming up out of the surrounding gloom. ‘Well, so are we now. We’ve lost the Commissariat.’

‘You fellows on the QM staff ought to be shot!’ Harry said wrathfully. ‘What’s happened to it?”

‘Gone to Rodrigo by the northern route.’ ‘It’s not true!’

‘Oh yes, it is!’ said Stewart. ‘Now, don’t blame me! Go and curse the QMG, if you want to curse anyone. His ears should be burning already.’

Although the army had had plenty of opportunity of judging and condemning Colonel Gordon’s inefficiency, no one could be brought to believe at first that the story was true. But no food was forthcoming for the hungry troops, who groped for acorns on the saturated ground, and chewed them sullenly round camp-fires which fizzled damply, and gave out more smoke than heat No one enjoyed much sleep during the night, for only the side of a man’s body which was turned to the fire was warm, and the sticks, collected to make dry mattresses, sank into the mud under the body’s weight. Firing was heard in the small hours and there was an alarm of an enemy attack, which made the men struggle up, groaning for the cramp in their limbs. Nothing could be seen beyond the light of the fitfully burning fires, and it was discovered later that the firing had been caused by some men of the 3rd division discovering a herd of tame pigs in the patch of forest where they lay. The rest of the army, disturbed from its uneasy slumber, denied any share of the fresh-killed pork, was angry with Picton’s ‘black-hearted scoundrels’; and few men had any sympathy for the hangings that took place in the morning.

The army marched at dawn, cold, and hungry, and brittle-tempered. ‘Come on, my lads!’ Harry said. ‘We’ll show “em what The Division can do!’ ‘Bellies ain’t filled with fair words,’ somebody growled.

‘Fair words! God damn your eyes, you’ll get no fair words from me, you gin-swizzling, cribbage-faced, cow-hearted Belemranger!’ Harry retorted.

He raised a laugh. The grumbler was elbowed into the background, and informed that he had chosen the wrong officer to try that game on. ‘You silly gudgeon, what do you want to sauce ’im for? ’E’d swear the devil out of ’ell, ’e would! ’E’s a bruising lad, our Brigade-Major. Damned if we hadn’t ought to give ’im a cheer!’

The idea took well; a ragged cheer was raised, which Harry acknowledged by a grin, and a recommendation to the unshaven scarecrows confronting him to save their breath for the march.

Except that the men were hungrier, there was nothing to distinguish the day’s march from the previous one. Along the route, the Light division met stragglers from the main body of the army, slinking off in search of plunder, or dead from exhaustion at the side of the road. It was all very depressing, and although the sight of bleached skeletons of horses was too ordinary to attract any attention, no one much liked to see the stiffening carcases of horses which had failed on the march, and had been dispatched by a merciful musket-shot; or to hear the faint lowing of oxen driving off the road to die miserably in the sodden fields. A little very bad beef, cut from the still-warm bodies of some of the draught-animals, was served out during the usual noon halt. It was rather nasty, and there was no time to cook it properly. A few of the men, kindling fires, toasted slices on the ends of their ramrods, but most of them stuffed the raw chunks into their canteens, where the meat soon turned the little bread they carried with them into a kind of bloody paste. One of Arentschildt’s troopers was seen making his portion into a sandwich, and sharing it with his mount. That made the Englishmen laugh, but there was no denying that the soldiers of the King’s German Legion took much more care of their horses than any British trooper. They would none of them think of eating a morsel before their horses had been fed, and they most of them trained the animals to eat the same food as they ate themselves.

The rumour that the supply-train had gone off by the Ledesma road was confirmed during the halt. That meant there would be no more rations issued until the army reached Rodrigo. The Staff was bitterly cursed, as much by the officers as by the men; quarrels began to break out over trivialities; and even the sunniest-tempered soldiers marched in sulky silence.

The bivouac that night was quite comfortless. It was almost impossible to kindle fires with the green wood, which was all that could be found; and the iron kettles hung over the damply smoking sticks took so long to boil that the men fell uneasily asleep as they waited for them. The French were hovering close in the rear, but they did not show themselves until the following day, when they began to press the rear-guard rather sharply. Through another of the Quartermaster-General’s errors, the cavalry that should have covered the Light division had marched off at dawn, ahead of the infantry, with the inevitable result that the column was a good deal harassed by skirmishing parties of French horsemen. Some of these troops actually penetrated the interval between the Light division and the 7th, and plundered the greatest part of the 7th’s baggage; while a party of three light dragoons had the incredible good fortune to snap up General Paget, just arrived from England as second-in-command of the army. He had been riding, with only his Spanish servant, to hasten the progress of the 7th division, and, being short-sighted as well as one-armed, he had been taken prisoner with almost ridiculous ease. The news raised perhaps the only laugh indulged in by the disgruntled troops that day.

8

The centre column, of which the Light division formed the rear-guard, had orders to encamp on the farther side of the Huebra, but when the rest of the column, jumping down the steep bank into the swollen river, had struggled safely across, a considerable body of French infantry appeared behind the squadrons of dragoons who had been Dickering with the Light division all day. This changed the complexion of things rather seriously, and Harry lost no time in sending Juana forward, with strict orders to stay with the 52nd regiment, who were to move into bivouac while the Riflemen held the bed of the river.

Knowing that Harry would remain with the Riflemen, Juana showed him a white face, pathetically small under the big, dripping hat-brim. Words seemed to be strangled in her throat; she wanted to cling to him, to hold him fast; but of course she knew she must not do that. She managed to say: ‘Take care of yourself!’