Whose Business Is to Die (25 page)

Pringle was crouching, still following the flare of the shell’s fuse. He noticed that the colonel remained upright.

‘Best to take cover, sir,’ he said with some urgency.

‘I do not believe we are in danger,’ FitzWilliam replied, ‘but if I am wrong there will be time enough.’

The arc of the shell was now plainly to their left, and so Pringle half stood as he watched the sparking fuse trail through the air. It landed a good thirty yards away and a little behind them, spun crazily on the ground for a couple of seconds and then burst in a gout of flame, sending jagged pieces of its casing scything through the air. Lieutenant Colonel FitzWilliam sprang back a pace and peered down at something on the ground in front of him.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘at night it is quite easy to misjudge such things!’

Pringle heard men laugh at the antics of their commander. No more French guns fired, until several minutes later the howitzer went off with another dull thump.

‘Get down!’ Once again the workers dived for the little cover available.

The gun captain must have cut the fuse shorter because this time the shell burst in the air and some way short. A gabion was
pitched over by a piece of whirling iron and another shook with the impact, but that was all the harm done.

‘I do not believe they can see us too clearly,’ Truscott suggested, as they stood up again, and the men went back to work. Once again FitzWilliam had not moved.

‘Yes, they are trusting to luck, and trying to annoy us.’ Pringle began counting under his breath, and had reached five hundred before the next shot was lobbed up high by the howitzer. This one was closer, and as he watched the line of the shell, the colonel took two paces forward and dived down into the trench. The shell landed only a few feet from where he had been standing and lay there, neither spinning nor with any trace of a burning fuse. Murphy bounded out, struck the metal sphere with the butt-end of his spade, so that the fuse flew out, flared for an instant and then went dim.

‘Well, at least we know our enemy has a sense of humour,’ FitzWilliam said, standing up and flicking dust from his jacket and breeches. ‘My poor tailor’s heart will be broken,’ he added, and the men near by laughed. ‘Sergeant Murphy, you are a brave fellow, but you should not take such risks.’

‘It’s fine, sir,’ the sergeant told him in a loud voice meant to carry along the line. ‘Everyone knows that you cannot kill an Irishman – you just make him mad!’

‘Thought you were all ruddy mad in the first place,’ Dobson called from the far end of the trench.

‘Ah, well, a man digging a trench in hard ground while someone throws shells at him is sure to be the best judge of sanity!’ Murphy yelled back. With the French firing at them, there was little point in keeping silent.

Pringle had started to count again, but it was almost twice as long before the French fired, this time dropping too short. The interval was never the same, and that made it worse because the shot could come at any time and no one knew where it would land. The seventh shell landed close enough to the trench for a piece of casing to strike a man in the shoulder and knock him flat. It did not seem to be too serious a wound, but he could
not work and so was bandaged by one of the drummers and led away. The next shell plopped to the ground behind the gabions and burst, flinging the nervous engineer officer back several yards. He had wounds to the face and chest, but the worst was a gaping tear in his left thigh. They managed to stop the bleeding, and he was carried off, sobbing in pain at every step.

The men worked on, fighting against fatigue as well as the stubborn resistance of the stony ground. Some of the picks bent so badly that nothing could straighten them out, and the men using them took turns with the other tools. No more shells did any damage, and there were a few more jokes, even if no one had the energy to laugh as much as they had earlier on. Pringle realised that the shape of San Cristoval and the fortress on the far side of the Guadiana were both growing clearer. Dawn could not be far away.

There was a longer pause between shots from the howitzer, and this time its single thump was followed by the roar of half a dozen cannon. Two of the gabions were struck, and one was still too light to resist and so was flung down. An eight-pounder ball went through a gap between them and skimmed the low trench, striking the crouching figures, smashing through flesh and bone. When Pringle dared to look up, one man lay unmoving, with his head hanging to one side at an unnatural angle, and another was screaming.

The colonel took cover with everyone else, but the trench was barely eighteen inches deep. The line of gabions was spread thinly, with only half filled well enough to weight them down and offer protection from the enemy shot.

‘Sandbags!’ Truscott yelled. ‘Fill the bags and stack them in front.’

Each French gun fired as soon as it was loaded, and so there were no more salvoes, and simply a sporadic fire pounding the position intended to form the battery.

‘We need to have enough shelter for the covering party to stay!’ Truscott called to him, and then he grabbed one of the sacks, dragging it along the ground. ‘Follow me!’ Murphy was beside him, hefting a tied-up sack over his shoulder, and so was
Dobson. Pringle was about to join them when a shot ripped through the air above him and he found himself cowering.

‘That’s right, build it up!’ The remaining engineer officer was standing up, showing the men where to reinforce the gabions and form something like a parapet.

Pringle pushed himself up, went to grab a bag as men with shovels finished filling it, then saw gloved hands reaching for the same thing.

‘My dear Pringle, after you,’ Lieutenant Colonel FitzWilliam said, pulling his arms back. ‘I shall have the next one.’

Pringle grasped the sandbag, was surprised at its weight, and staggered forward. The engineer officer was still shouting encouragement, and then a roundshot skimmed the top of the gabions and the man’s head vanished in a spray of blood. Pringle felt something hot and wet slap into his cheek and one of the lenses on his glasses was covered in blood.

‘I think you are in charge,’ he told Truscott, hefting the bag and laying it down on the wall growing between the nearest gabions.

‘We need this at least four foot high for a good twenty yards.’ A strong picket of men from one of the brigade’s Light Companies was to hold the position all day in case the French sallied out, hoping to fill in the small excavation that was all they had managed in a night’s work. ‘Oh, thank you, sir,’ Truscott added, his tone full of surprise at seeing FitzWilliam laying a sandbag.

‘Keep up the good work,’ the colonel told him, and then ducked as a shot tore through the air over their heads. ‘There is some advantage in not being too tall,’ he added, but the laughter was thin.

A shell landed among the redcoats filling sandbags, the blast throwing men back. Murphy landed face down in the spoil heap. Jenkins helped him up, Murphy spitting out earth as he came.

‘You cannot kill an Irishman,’ he said, and then stopped because another grenadier was stretched out with the side of his face missing.

‘That is the best we can manage,’ Truscott said after five minutes more. The gabions were tall, but the wall of sandbags linking
them was not much more than three feet high, and there were no more bags to fill. ‘It ought be enough if they keep down.’

The covering party that had watched them through the night moved in behind the wall.

‘Best if we go as fast as we can, sir,’ Truscott said to the colonel.

‘You give the order, Mr Truscott, since as acting engineer you have command. Mr Pringle, you will lead them off and I shall bring up the rear.’

‘Pick up the tools as we need every one,’ Truscott shouted. ‘When I say go we run for the top of the hill. Stop when you are over the crest and we will form up there. Well done, lads, it was a fine night’s work.’

The howitzer fired, and then two of the guns and a moment later another. The balls slammed into the makeshift rampart, which shuddered, but did not collapse.

‘Go!’ Truscott called, and Pringle bounded away, waving with his arm for the men to follow. He was tired, stiff from taking shelter, and his limbs did not want to move until a ball flicked through the grass ahead of him.

‘Come on, boys!’ The 106th swayed and sometimes staggered for they were all exhausted, but no one wanted to linger and they went up the slope as fast as they could. To his amazement, they lost no one. The colonel and Truscott were the last over the crest, and a ball rolling down the slope almost took the captain’s foot.

‘Look out!’ Pringle yelled at them, and FitzWilliam realised the danger and shoved his companion aside.

‘My apologies, my dear fellow,’ he said, and perhaps it was the relief of getting into shelter, but the men were laughing again.

‘Lead us back, Mr Truscott,’ the colonel ordered. ‘Smartly now, boys, do not let those fusiliers see us save at our best.’

The column formed up, picks and shovels shouldered like muskets. As they marched away, Truscott fell into step beside Pringle.

‘You may be right, Billy, perhaps we should have just built a horse.’

19

‘I
make it at least one hundred and thirty English miles,’ Dunbar said, his finger running down the list and doing the calculation again. ‘Yes, at the very least.’

Williams had not made so precise a count, but his guess had been similar. The brigade had marched all that way in just eight days, and from the start the weather had been dry and the sun beat down on them. Colborne was no great stickler for the details of uniform, and he let the men replace their stiff stocks with any convenient piece of cloth. Even so they sweated in their thick woollen jackets, while dust from the road turned faces and uniforms alike as dusty brown as the Buffs’ facings.

Three or four times they had seen small parties of French, patrols or foraging expeditions. Only twice had they come close enough to expend any powder, and even then the enemy soon retired. The French left in Estremadura were spread thinly, and so Colborne marched at them, changing his route time and again, but always advancing, so that the enemy could not guess how many men he had and where they were going. Unbalanced and confused, the French retreated, and so far they had not concentrated or mounted any serious resistance. All they left behind were little garrisons like the one outside this town. The plan was working well, and Colborne meant to keep on pressing them.

‘Still a long way to go,’ the colonel told them, ‘even if much of it will be back the way we came. But for the moment, everyone can rest – well, everyone apart from us!’

The three men sat on their horses and waited in the shade of
a tall house, for although it was barely an hour after dawn it was already getting warm. They were in the little town of Belalcazar, and the arrival of the redcoats had not caused the sleepy place to stir much from its slumbers.

A bleary-eyed man appeared on a balcony across the street and stared at them in silence. Dunbar raised his hat cheerily, but the man said nothing.

‘I doubt it is a terribly wise thing for folk to stare too closely at the French,’ Colborne commented. ‘But we have not demanded food or the virtue of his daughter, so one would hope that counts for something.’

The man yawned, stretching his arms high and closing his eyes and then resumed his scrutiny. ‘Inglés?’ he ventured after a while.

‘Sí,’ Dunbar replied. ‘English.’

‘Viva los ingleses!’
the man said, yawned again, and went back into his room.

‘Not quite a Roman triumph,’ Captain Dunbar said, and laughed. Colborne looked with some irritation down the street behind them, but saw no one and did not appear inclined to say anything.

‘Remember when we marched through Campo Major,’ Williams said after a while. ‘Everyone was hanging from windows and calling out
“viva los franceses!
” until they realised who we were!’

Dunbar chuckled and the colonel gave a faint smile. ‘Cannot blame ’em. They have been occupied so many times by the enemy that they have learned caution. It is surely for the best that they do not give us too warm a welcome here for we shall not stay long. Ah, at last.’

Two horsemen came up the street. One was a captain in the Portuguese cavalry and the other a trooper with a white handkerchief knotted on the tip of his sword as a rudimentary flag of truce. The officer reported that everyone was in place.

‘Good,’ Colborne said, enthusiasm returning, ‘then let us be about our business.’ He led them up the main street, keeping a
tight rein on his horse as it tried to run up the slope. Williams was riding Musket and the horse continued to please.

They passed the last pair of houses and there was a hundred and fifty yards of open country rising up to the shelf on which the castle perched. It had high walls, reinforced by turrets elegantly decorated in the Moorish fashion, and a big tower twice as high in one corner. Its top was eight-sided and from this distance looked almost circular, carved with crests of long-forgotten nobles. There was a flagpole on its top, and as they rode towards the castle a tricolour flag rose up it, hanging down because there was no wind.

‘At least there is somebody in,’ Dunbar murmured.

‘Two companies at least, if that priest was right,’ Williams said. They had tried and failed to find the town’s mayor, and then spotted a little boy who led them to the priest’s house.

The challenge came as they walked the horses up the steep path on to the shelf around the castle. It must have sat on rock, for there was no sign of a moat. Up close it looked even more picturesque. Williams thought how much Hanley would have loved to sketch or paint the scene.

They halted, and Colborne called out that he wished to speak to the commander of the garrison. His French was good and clear, even if the accent immediately betrayed his true nationality. Williams glanced around as they waited. One of the battalions was formed up on each side of the little castle, standing in line about half a mile away. Half the Portuguese raced up and down behind them to throw up dust and give the impression of greater forces waiting to advance. That had been his idea, remembering a trick used by Sir Robert Wilson when he harried the French along the border with his Loyal Lusitanian Legion. Williams had seen the cavalier Sir Robert bluff a French garrison into surrender by pretending that a couple of companies were a whole battalion.