They found both Lord Wellington and the brig at Lisbon. It was fortunate that they had the twenty horses available after delivering the convalescents. The amount of baggage that Parsons had brought was far more than they had been expecting. The few pack animals they had were also loaded to the gunnels. It seemed that Wellington, as promised, had already started to organise welcome supplies for the partisans.
Parsons was greatly in favour of this arrangement with the Commander-in-Chief and asked Vere to encourage Wellington to use his services as much as possible. Admiral Berkeley was the commanding admiral in charge of all naval forces at Lisbon and had lost no time trying to ‘steal’ Daphne from Admiralty control, while claiming that he should have overall command of any Marine unit operating in the Iberian Peninsular.
Vere was fully aware that Wellington had often been irritated by the ‘advice’ and interference that Berkeley felt it was necessary to proffer. He penned a short note to Admiral Harrison in the hope of curbing this admiral’s ambitions.
They met Wellington just as he was returning to his headquarters in the company of a colonel of Sappers. They all arrived together and MacKay heard his voice before he saw him. “I am glad to see that somebody takes notice of what I recommend, Captain MacKay. Many congratulations. Have you been hanging many Frenchies recently?”
MacKay managed to keep his face straight. “They hae nae been upsetting me sae much of late, My Lord, and someone has told me that it’s the close season for hanging Frogs. My heartiest felicitations on your ain elevation. The Colonel will be delighted when I tell him.”
Wellington stopped laughing and signalled to Vere. “On my desk, Lord George, there is a communication from the useless Junta in Seville, making me Captain-General of the Spanish army. I would like you to copy the section that refers to Welbeloved and give it to MacKay to take back with him. I don’t know if it is legal, but I am sure it will amuse him.”
He thought for a minute. “On second thoughts, MacKay can be on his way and you can return with him when you have brought me up to the present and I have told you of a few thoughts I would like to share with Welbeloved.”
They made good time back to Santiago del Valle, in spite of the heavily laden horses and the need to be extra vigilant because of them. Vere was most impressed with the defended valley and even more so with the impressive ‘fortified’ seat of the Counts of Alba.
Seated round the long polished table in the dining room, Vere presented the extract he had copied from the letter from the Junta in Seville; now the only government left other than the French in Madrid.
Welbeloved read it and roared with laughter, handing it to Mercedes. “Those idiots in Sevilla have made Wellington a Captain-General in the Spanish army without giving him control. They have also given me a title, which I am sure, is not within their gift. They seem to want to make the point that Alfonso is not the Count, but that I am. How ridiculous!”
Mercedes read the extract and looked thoughtful. “Only our poor, simple minded king, acting through the Cortez could make this truly valid. The King is in exile in France and the Cortez no longer exists. This makes the Seville Junta the only legitimate government at the moment and it is making a political statement, which I strongly urge you to accept at face value.
My father had no sons and normally a daughter could not inherit the lands and title. It is only because of my descent from the royal house of Hanover that my son can be the next Count, provided that my marriage is approved by the King. This may be politically opportune, but it could be of enormous significance if you accept it.”
Welbeloved looked at her in exasperation, which slowly changed to resignation after studying the look on her face. “If yew feel it is for the best, my dear, then of course I will accept.” He brightened up. “It will mean of course, that I will be entitled to a great deal more respect from these two gentlemen?”
Vere and MacKay shot to their feet and bowed. “It goes without saying, My Lord,” said Vere. “Lord Joshua of Alba has a most impressive ring tae it, My Lord,” said MacKay.
Mercedes glowered. “I suppose it is too much to expect a mature attitude from children.” Then she giggled. “It is a serious matter, but it’s all very silly isn’t it?”
“Considering the struggle we are engaged in,” Welbeloved mused, “most things lose their significance. It is often a relief when we can laugh at them. Shall we hear what else George has to say?”
Vere put his thoughts in order and began. “Lord Wellington confirms that Austria has sued for peace and has even offered the daughter of the Emperor as a wife for Boney. Hopefully, that will keep him personally from coming to Spain, but he has threatened that he will throw the leopards into the sea.
The Spanish have two armies still in the field, but the Junta is set on big battles and we expect them both to be beat by the new year. Cuesta has burst a blood vessel and is paralysed, but Wellington has no confidence in either of the two new generals in command of the armies.
He anticipates that there will be a massive attack through Spain on Portugal, any time from the Spring onwards, directed through Ciudad Rodrigo and/or Badajoz. He will try and support these towns if the Spanish still hold them by then.
If he is vastly outnumbered he will make a fighting retreat towards Lisbon until he can stand on ground of his own choosing. This is known only to himself and those in this room. He says that if word gets back to the government, they will withdraw the army now and the game will be lost.
He wants to emphasise that this is the worst outcome that he anticipates, but he has to make plans now to cope with it. He has asked me to prepare to raise the peasant militia in Portugal; what they call the Ordenanza or official guerrilleros. He also asks if you would be prepared to loan me a dozen Hornets to help with training these men?”
Welbeloved was talking almost before Vere was finished. “Absolutely no question, George. We will support yew in every way. Thanks to Mercedes’s mentor and Isabella’s father, Tio Pepe, the Gredos range will soon be teeming with guerrilla activity and we will be sending some of our team to help his friend Juan-Martin Diaz in the Guadarramas around Madrid.
I can spare twenty men for yew, on condition that yew take some more of my wounded with yew and in particular Lieutenant Percival Tonks of the 95th. He is still recovering from two broken legs, but I want to steal him from the Rifles and I want him back, as good as yew were a year ago.”
Vere stuck out his hand in vast relief. “Agreed, Sir. With no reservation.”
CHAPTER 22
Welbeloved and Tio Pepe stood by the forge of the blacksmith’s workshop in the village, grateful for the heat of the fire against the icy conditions outside. The first snow of the winter had already fallen and melted and now they were in the middle of a minor blizzard that was piling up drifts in the passes and defiles leading into the valley.
In a normal year, the peasants would set to work clearing the roads as soon as the snow stopped falling, but this year it was probably a good time to leave the hidden valley undisturbed for as long as possible. By the end of the year, in three weeks time, the wounded men would not only have recovered completely from their injuries, but would probably be fitter than ever before in their lives.
When Vere had gone back to Badajoz, he had taken Dodds and twenty-five Hornets, escorting another thirty convalescents back to their regiments. Five of the Hornets returned with the horses and the rest of Daphne’s cargo that had been stored in Lisbon. It had taken them ten days to bring the convoy back safely, because of the French troops swarming over the countryside.
If the Hornets and their pack horses had such difficulty moving about, it would be the height of folly to try moving any more of the convalescents until they were better able to defend themselves, probably in the spring, after the winter snows.
Then came news, which had been expected yet dreaded. The French had routed the two remaining Spanish armies. One battle was south of Madrid, not far from Toledo and the other southeast of Sal
amanca. It seemed that the only Spanish resistance left was in Seville and Cadiz, with only garrisons still holding the walled frontier towns of Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo.
The twenty remaining Hornets were then effectively sealed into the valley in the Gredos with a hundred or more convalescents. MacKay and half the men had moved east into the Guadarrama Mountains to help Tio Pepe’s friend and guerrilla leader, Juan Martin Diaz, who was known as El Empecinado or the dweller by the stream.
The first snow of the winter had also given notice that Welbeloved would have a hundred restless soldiers to control over the winter months. In order to keep them out of mischief, he started them on a gentler form of the training that the Hornets had had to undergo when they were first recruited. Of the sergeants who had been wounded, four still remained at Santiago del Valle and they were each put in charge of squads of twenty-five men.
After four weeks, everyone was basically combat fit again. At that point Sergeant-Major Atkins took control and started the tougher schedule enjoyed by the Hornets.
Thousands of the French 1777 pattern muskets had been harvested after the battle and stored by Tio Pepe’s partisans. One was issued to each of the convalescents so that they could accustom themselves to the weight and feel of them. No ammunition was issued however. Welbeloved had other ideas.
Some years ago, Tio Pepe had sent the promising son of the local smith to Toledo as an apprentice to the famous steel making and swordsmithing workshops for which the city was celebrated. He had returned when his father died and thenceforth, metal working in the valley had improved out of all recognition. He was also blessed with an enquiring and inventive mind, which had led him to strip and examine Isabella’s Ferguson. Having satisfied himself on the efficacy of the system, he had taken one of the harvested muskets and opened up the left side of the breech to make a chamber that would accept a prepared ball and cartridge, with a steel block that would then snap shut to give a gas-tight seal.
It was still only a smooth bore musket, but could be loaded from a prone position and fired as quickly as the Ferguson. Tests showed that this particular modified gun had a bore of 0.70 inches, which was fractionally more than the supposed standard 0.69. Roberto the Smith resolved that by reproducing a Ferguson scissor mould to make a ball that fitted accurately.
Welbeloved himself test-fired the prototype at a hundred yards, putting ten balls through the chest of a man-sized target. Two of the convalescents then gave it the same test. Rifleman Williams hit the target every time. Private Jackson scored six hits, but he had probably only ever fired his musket kneeling or standing upright. Welbeloved set Roberto to work fabricating fifty sets of breechblocks and selecting fifty of the better muskets for conversion.
Roberto also had a business brain. He agreed a price for converting the muskets and took on three young lads as apprentices. They were now busy forging thick steel bars from which the blocks for another hundred breeches could be cut. His forge had expanded into a large workshop, which, together with the section he had also started for moulding precision bullets, could even earn a designation as a small manufactory.
The production of cartridges expanded rapidly. After the first batch of converted muskets was delivered, every man in the new company took turns improving his marksmanship from the standing, kneeling and prone positions. They were using fifteen hundred cartridges every day. Even though Daphne had delivered twenty thousand and many thousands had been harvested from the battlefield, it was a relief when the standard became good enough, that even Atkins was satisfied. After that, practice on the range they had constructed could be held down to once a week.
By Christmas, Welbeloved had a company of light infantry that was trained almost up to Hornet standards. They even had their own uniform, lovingly cut and stitched by the women of the valley, from hard-wearing, brown-green cloth that Tio Pepe had managed to bring in unbeknown to the French.
More importantly, by February they would all be armed with a weapon that could be fired twice as rapidly as a muzzleloader. One that could be relied on, with Roberto’s precision ball casting, to be lethal at a hundred yards. All they lacked was the mobility of the Hornets and Welbeloved had every intention of ambushing one or more of the well-escorted French couriers, until there were enough horses for every man.
Quite a few of them had already shown qualities that could make them into good recruits for the Hornets. The more Welbeloved watched them training, the more ways he thought of for them to be used effectively. The locals in the valley had long ago decided what they should be called. They were not quite as deadly as the Hornets, but there were more of them and they were more green than brown. In Spanish, the two names were very similar and it was perhaps inevitable that the new company, instead of Avispónes Morenos, should become known as the Avispas Verdes, the Green Wasps to the locals. The dry humour that had developed among the Hornets preferred the Wicked Wasps, but generally just plain Wasps.
By the end of February, there were other developments. News came in that King Joseph and Marshal Soult had entered Seville and that the Spanish Junta had resigned in favour of a three-man council leading to an elected Cortez. Cadiz was preparing to withstand a siege and the Royal Navy was getting ready to keep the defenders supplied.
Mercedes had been out of uniform and back into dresses since December. At the end of February she gave birth to a fine, healthy boy and the whole valley gave itself over to a week of celebration. The child was named Carlos after Welbeloved’s great friend, Charles Cockburn.
Welbeloved had been at sea for most of his daughter’s short life and his memories went back more to the times during his brief visits when she was a laughing, chattering, delightful toddler. His son was also delightful when asleep. At other times he was a noisy, wrinkled, red-faced, smelly bundle of trouble, interested in nothing but suckling, yelling and sleeping.
Mercedes, naturally, loved him devotedly and constantly pointed out appendages that were the image of those his father sported. His father bore all this dutifully and stoically, making what he thought of as encouraging and appropriate noises and praying for the time when he could get something like an intelligent response from the infant.
Tio Pepe, on the other hand and to Welbeloved’s amazement, turned from a rough, tough, uncompromising leader of ruthless guerrilleros, to a doting, grandmotherly figure, only too pleased to be allowed to hold and rock the infant, when his mother, his nursemaid and various other female attendants could bear to relinquish him. Welbeloved wondered whether he was perhaps practising for the day, in another month or two, when Isabella would make him a grandfather.
Perhaps it would be well to consider building a nursery and kindergarten, if the rest of his command was determined to take part in this new baby making enterprise. The three Cortez girls had never been as enthusiastic as the others to avenge their mistreatment. They had quickly used their proximity and feminine gifts to steal three of his best men. To be fair, they had all been willing to become soldiers’ ‘wives’, but Mercedes wouldn’t hear of it. She had insisted that the village priest should marry the Catholic O’Malley to the Widow Cortez and bless the unions of Ryan to the older sister-in-law and Evans to the younger.
Then there came the biggest surprise and one that gave him a great deal of pleasure. MacKay had returned with his men from the mountains around Madrid. He had finally succumbed to the determined advances of Doña Juanita. All the arrangements were made for the priest to bless their union as soon as Mercedes was recovered from childbirth.
***
It did seem, at this time, that the majority of the requests made by Wellington were now accomplished. Tio Pepe and El Empecinado, between them, had bands of guerrilla fighters stretching over the northern and southern slopes of the chain of mountains that ran from east to west for two hundred miles, from Madrid to the Portuguese frontier.
Over the whole of that area, no Frenchman who travelled the roads could consider himself entirely safe without a large armed escort. The num
ber of couriers that they stopped around the Gredos chain had fallen off, but in the Guadarramas around Madrid, El Empecinado was still reaping a valuable supply of intelligence from poorly protected and less wary couriers.
The French would, naturally, tighten their security arrangements, but Roberto El Hierro and his apprentices were working flat out to get the modified muskets into the hands of the guerrilleros, now that every man in the Avispas had his own weapon.
Only half of them had horses however, and that problem needed to be addressed before the warmer days of Spring in the plains brought the enemy out of his winter hibernation, to a greater degree of alertness.
Tio Pepe’s man in the south had reported that a squadron of chasseurs was wintering at Talavera, together with a couple of regiments of infantry and some batteries of artillery. In itself, this was of little interest, as Welbeloved already knew that a small garrison had been left in the walled town. What did catch his attention however, was that the chasseurs exercised their mounts every day and had based themselves in the farm buildings that the British had used as their hospital.
As all these buildings and barns were outside the fortified and guarded walls of the town, there was every chance that something could be attempted, which would increase the mobility of the Avispas.
The guerrilleros were not very good with numbers. Few of them had had any military training and looking down from the hills at the small figures of the horsemen manoeuvring over the recent battlefield had not produced a reliable figure for the troops of cavalry, scattered across the plain.
Welbeloved, Hickson and half-a-dozen Hornets had left Santiago a day before the rest of the party and had established themselves on the slope of the Medellin at their old camp, from where they had a good view of the town and the countryside around it.
A Mild Case of Indigestion Page 25