The Spanish Bride (2 page)

His companions shouted with joy at this story, but Stewart said: ‘Harry, you liar!’ ‘No, upon my word! It’s true as death! One of the Sergeants told me—Brotherton.’ Eeles remarked that Brotherton was a good fellow, but Stewart only laughed. Harry was still defending the story when they reached the vicinity of the rabbit-warren, for his energy led him into vehement argument as easily as it led him into impetuous action. A hare, getting up suddenly, put an end to the discussion; sport drove sieges and assaults temporarily out of mind. An unusually strong hare was presently found; Harry, always agog to demonstrate the speed of his dogs, gave her twenty yards law before hallooing the hounds out of the slips. She twice gave them the go-by, and although the dogs fetched round a dozen times, she kept on working her way towards the warren.

‘By God, I’ll have to head her off!’ exclaimed Harry, seeing tomorrow’s dinner escaping from his clutches.

‘No, don’t!’ said Eeles, intent only upon the sport. ‘Damn it, you can’t do that!’ ‘Oh, can’t I, by thunder!’ Harry flung over his shoulder.

‘You fool, ’ware rabbit-holes!’ shouted Stewart, seeing Harry clap spurs to his horse’s flanks, and career away at a gallop in the direction of the warren.

Harry, however, was off in his headlong way, trusting to his horse, his whole attention concentrated on the hare. Irish Paddy put a hoof in a rabbit-hole, and came down heavily, and rolled over Harry.

Stewart was up with him in a flash, and had leapt out of the saddle, all thought of the hare forgotten. ‘Oh you fool, you damned fool!’ he said, on his knees beside Harry’s inanimate body.

‘Is he dead?’ Eeles asked anxiously.

‘No—yes—I don’t know!’ replied Stewart, ripping open Harry’s tight green jacket. ‘No, I can feel his heart beating! Harry! Come on, old fellow, wake up! Open your eyes, now!’ It was soon seen that such adjurations were of no avail. When they raised him, Harry’s head lolled alarmingly, and although Eeles, who boasted a rough knowledge of surgery, pronounced that no bones were broken, no amount of coaxing, of chafing of hands, of slapping of cheeks, produced any sign of returning consciousness. ‘It’s no use: we shall have to bleed him,’ said Stewart. ‘Try some brandy!’ urged Eeles, pulling a flask out of his pocket. The brandy ran out of the corners of Harry’s mouth. ‘Oh, Harry, why will you be such a careless devil?’ Eeles said distractedly. ‘It all comes of trying to head the hare! Damned unsportsmanlike! I told him not to!’

‘Never mind talking! You hold him, while I bleed him!’ said Stewart. Eeles made a knee for Harry’s slight, wiry frame, while Stewart pulled his jacket off. A whip-thong made a serviceable tourniquet about one limp arm, and Stewart had just opened a blunt-looking pocket-knife, and had made a slight incision with it in the flesh, when Harry’s head, which was resting on Eele’s shoulder, moved, and Eeles, eyeing Stewart’s preparations with some misgiving, cried: ‘Stop! Wait a minute, he’s coming round!’ A drop or two of blood welled up from the scratch on Harry’s arm; his eyes opened, blurred and dazed for a few instants, but regaining brightness and clarity in surprisingly little time. They blinked up into Stewart’s anxious face, travelled to the knife in his hand, and widened. The next instant, Harry had leapt to his feet, rather shaky still, but in full possession of his faculties. ‘Keep off, you villain!’ he exclaimed, swaying on his feet. ‘What the devil—?’ He became aware of the thong bound round his upper arm, and plucked at it, weakly laughing, ‘God save me from my friends! Why, you old murderer! Oh, look! If I’m not bleeding to death! Where’s Moro?’

In the agitation of the moment, his friends had forgotten both hare and hounds, but at this inquiry they looked round involuntarily, to find that the sagacious hound, Moro, had killed the hare without any assistance from his master. Relief made them scold, but Harry, dabbing at the scratch on his arm with his handkerchief, was quite unrepentant, and merely abused the clumsiness of his horse.

Paddy, having picked himself up, was quietly grazing a few yards away. While agreeing that he was the clumsiest brute alive, Stewart told Harry that he deserved to be dead. But Harry was making much of Moro, and paid no attention to him. It was evident that he had sustained no serious injury, for though dizzy at first, he soon declared himself to be well enough to mount, and ride back to camp.

‘What made you buy a stupid brute like this?’ demanded Stewart, leading Paddy up to him. ‘What’s wrong with Tiny? He’d not let you down like that!’

‘Strained a tendon,’ replied Harry, hoisting himself into the saddle. Stewart cast his eyes up to heaven. ‘Ridden him to death, I suppose!’ ‘Will you stop scolding?’ retaliated Harry. ‘There’s no harm done, I tell you! What’s the time? Oh, by God, I shall be late! Come on, Charlie!’

‘The luckiest devil in the whole army!’ said Stewart. 3

His fall seemed to have no ill-effect upon Harry; he was, in fact, not a penny the worse for it; and the hare which Moro had caught made an excellent soup. Stewart prophesied an aching head and bruised bones next day, but he was wrong. A little thing like a tumble from his horse could not hurt an old campaigner, boasted Harry, looking absurdly young as he said it.

The remark did not even make Stewart smile. Harry was a very old campaigner. At the age of nineteen, he had been at Monte Video; six months later he was with General Whitelocke on his ill-fated expedition to Buenos Ayres. He had been to Sweden with Sir John Moore; he had been at Corunna; at the Combat of the Coa, where he had got a ball lodged in his ankle-joint, and had had to be sent to Lisbon to recover from it. Not that he did recover from it at Lisbon. Oh dear, no! None of your Belemites was young Mr Smith, malingering in hospital while there was fighting going on somewhere in the interior. As soon as he could put his foot to the ground, nothing would do for him but to rejoin his regiment. He found it at Arruda.

‘You are a mad fool of a boy, coming here with a ball in your leg! Can you dance?’ demanded his Colonel.

‘No, I can hardly walk but with my toe turned out,’ had responded Harry coolly. ‘Well! Can you be my ADC?’

‘Yes, I can ride and eat,’ had said Harry, grinning to conceal the excruciating pain in his ankle.

And ridden he had, until he had gone back to Lisbon with his Colonel, and had had the ball cut out of his tendon.

As soon as he could walk, he had rejoined his regiment, in time to take part in the skirmish at Redinha. (‘Ah, now you can walk a little, you leave me!’ said Colonel Beckwith. ‘Go and be dammed to you; but I love you for it!’).

Since Redinha, he had been in upwards of half-a-dozen sharp skirmishes, and three major actions: Sabugal, Fuentes de Onoro, and the assault of Ciudad Rodrigo. He had emerged from all these affairs without a scratch. When half the army was down with the deadly Alemtejo fever, Brigade-Major Smith was enjoying some capital hunting on the Spanish border. Aguish? Devil a bit! He had never felt better in his life.

When his duties took him up to the trenches outside Badajos, he was often covered with mud from the bursting of shells in the soft ground, but no splinter, no charge of grape, lodged itself in his spare frame. Shot-proof and fever-proof, that was Harry Smith: a roaring boy, the broth of a boy! said Private O’Brien, admiring his Brigade-Major

’s flow of bad language when the explosion of a shell knocked him off his feet. A damned good duty-officer, said Colonel Barnard; crazy as a coot! complained Harry’s exasperated friends.

Nothing was going to keep Harry from making one of the storming party that would presently assail the breaches in the walls of Badajos. By 6th April there were three of these: one in the bastion of Santa Maria; one in the bastion of La Trinidad, farther to the west; and the last in the curtain-wall between the two. The main attack was to be launched at these points, and the troops chosen to carry it out were the Light and 4th divisions. That was just as it should be, but there were some gloomy spirits who thought old Hookey was wasting his time with all this bombardment of the walls. George Simmons, rather a serious young man, said that the way General Phillipon’s men were repairing the breaches was going to make them more formidable than any unbroken bastion. The French evidently meant to defend the town pretty desperately, for the British Engineers reported on the morning of the 6th that every sort of obstacle was being piled behind the breaches. The guns would batter away at them while the daylight lasted, and that would prevent much work being done to repair the gaps; but when the hour for the assault was changed from half-past seven in the evening to ten o’clock, the Engineers looked a little grave. With the inevitable slackening of gun-fire, as darkness fell, the French would get to work again, and they could work to some purpose, those grenadiers. It looked like being a bloody business, however well planned it might be. It was not only well, but very extensively planned. Though the Light and the 4th divisions were expected to carry the town by storming the breaches, no less than five secondary attacks were to be made. The trench-guards were to try to rush the San Roque lunette; old Picton was to make an attempt to take the Castle by escalade (a very forlorn hope, this: not at all likely to succeed); Power’s brigade of Portuguese was going to threaten the bridge-head beyond the Guadiana, on the opposite side of the town to the damaged bastions; the Portuguese troops belonging to Leith’s 5th division were to make a false attack on the strong Pardeleras fort; and—a last-minute decision, this—the rest of Leith’s division was to brave the mines which had been laid outside the eastern walls of the town, and try to force the river-bastion of San Vincente.

These five secondary attacks, timed to begin simultaneously with the main attack, were not expected to succeed, but to distract the defenders’ attention from the breaches. The approach to these, from the camping grounds of the Light and 4th divisions, lay between the Rivillas river, with its spreading inundation, on the right, and a quarry cut in rising ground to the left. It was preconcerted that the 4th division was to keep nearest to the water, and, upon reaching the ditch dug round Badajos, to swerve to the right, and to assail the breaches in the curtain-wall, and in La Trinidad. The Light division was to strike westwards to attack the breach in the flank of the Santa Maria bastion. Each division was to provide an advance of five hundred men, accompanied by several parties carrying haybags and ladders. These were to facilitate not only the storming of the breaches, but the descent into the ditch, which was reported to be as much as fourteen feet deep. There was no lack of volunteers for the forlorn hope: the only difficulty lay in selecting from the eager crowd of warriors clamouring each one to be the first to assail the walls, the fittest persons for the task. The British army, hating the trench-work it had been forced to do, irked by the fire from Badajos, and depressed by the soggy condition of the ground, desired nothing better than to come to grips with the enemy. Nor had the army any objection to coming to grips with the Spanish residents, held within the walls. Since Talavera, when the Spanish General Cuesta had abandoned the British wounded left in his charge to the French (who, if the truth were but known, had treated them with far more consideration than their Spanish allies had done), Lord Wellington’s soldiers had added loathing to the contempt they already felt for the Spanish. If Badajos fell at the end of this third siege, the inhabitants need not look for mercy at the hands of its conquerors. Not only had Lord Wellington’s men a grudge against the Spaniards, but they were further incensed by the knowledge that the inhabitants of Badajos had yielded very tamely to the French. If a besieged city surrendered at discretion, it might look for clemency; God help it if it resisted to the end! for then, by all the rules of war, it belonged to the victors to sack and pillage as they chose.

The officers knew what kind of temper the men were in. “They’ll regret it, if they hold out,’ said Cadoux, in his soft finicking way, admiring a ring on his finger, anxiously smoothing a crease from his smart green pelisse. He flickered a glance, a whimsical, mocking glance, under his long lashes at Brigade-Major Smith. ‘I’m afraid it will be a very bloody business,” he sighed: ‘Do you think I should wear my new coat, Smith? It would be dreadful if it got spoiled. Isn’t it a damned bore, this horrid assault?’

Harry could not bear Daniel Cadoux. There was just the suggestion of a lisp in Cadoux’s speech. Harry said that he assumed it. He said that Cadoux, with his dandified dress, and his pretty jewellery, made him feel sick. He could not imagine why Cadoux had ever joined the army, much less the Rifles; or how it was that he could induce his men to follow him. ‘One of the Go-ons,’ said Harry contemptuously.

‘What’s that?’ inquired a very young subaltern, quite a Johnny Raw.

‘That, my boy,’ said Harry, ‘you’ll very soon discover for yourself.’ Relenting, he added: “The men say there are only two kinds of officers: the Go-ons, and the Come-ons!’ ‘Oh!’ said the very young subaltern, digesting it, and reflecting that there was no need to ask to which category the energetic, fiery young man before him belonged. No need at all: Harry Smith, dining with some of his friends a few hours before the attack on the night of 6th April, was in tearing spirits, his eyes keen and sparkling as they always were when there was dangerous work to be done. ‘Come on!’ would shout Brigade-Major Smith presently. ‘Come on, you devils!’

4

A double ration of grog was served out to the men before the attack, but it would not have appeared, to a casual observer, necessary to hearten the troops with rum. All was bustle and high spirits in the camp, old warriors giving a last look to their rifles, and Josh Hetherington enlivening the occasion with a ventriloquial display as popular as it was scandalous. ‘Mankiller’ Palmer was adjuring Tom Crawley, sober for once, to kill a Frenchman for himself: a Peninsular catchword that would never grow stale; while Burke, who had volunteered for more forlorn hopes than anyone else, was alternately boasting of his past exploits, and exchanging good-natured abuse with a friend from the 52nd regiment. The army was not in Lord Wellington’s confidence, nor had his extensive plans for the capture of Badajos been communicated to the men, but in their usual inexplicable fashion they knew all about those plans, just as they had known a full day before most of their officers the date of the attack.