by Jo Baker
The company’s progress was easy to mark, and so to follow: the frost-scuffed tracks, lost bootsoles, a broken-axled wagon, dung, patches of yellow piss on the snow. He could not bring himself to walk the road itself, so he followed alongside it, on the far side of the ditch, stumbling over rocks and tearing through scrub. He kept glancing over his shoulder, scanning the horizon behind him, his neck prickling.
In the evening, he came upon a fallen horse; packs of flesh had already been stripped from the haunches. He hacked off a strip of flesh himself and chewed on it as he went; it was dry and crusted with blood and deeply satisfying.
He walked on as the light faded, and it grew dark; he stumbled through the shadows. He was nothing again: animate mud, crawling along the surface of the land. He would slither back to the company. He would be safe there, in the mire. Safe as far as La Coruña, where the Navy would come to dig them out and cart them off, like night-soil from an outhouse.
He met the first stragglers the following day; they formed themselves out of the dust-haze and the distance: a roadside shrine, two men sitting at its foot. The painted wooden Madonna had had her eyes gouged out, and the leaves and berries around her bare toes were frostbitten and stark. A spring bubbled below, forming a basin in the stone; clean water welled there like in a boiling pan and a faint steam rose from it. The soldiers had drunk, and were resting; they looked uncommonly clean; one was still wiping his neck with a dampened kerchief. James stumbled up to them.
“English!” he said, waving.
The men looked at each other. One nodded. They didn’t say a word.
“Thank God I’ve found you!”
He fell to his knees at the little pool, and cupped his hand and drank. He tasted the sulphurous warm water and the sweat and filth of his own hand. Chin dripping, he unknotted his own neckerchief to wipe the wet and dirt away.
“Are we far behind the main body here?”
The two men looked at each other.
“I was lost, I was left behind. I’ve been racing to catch up for—days—” He shook his head, defeated by the stretch of undifferentiated time.
One of them laughed; it had no mirth in it.
“What? What’s happened?”
The soldier shook his head.
“Are the French come? Are we defeated? Is it a rout?”
Then one spoke. He was Welsh, and his accent so strong that for a moment James was not sure of what he was telling him, and it was only after the words were over, and the men were already scrambling to their feet and picking up their knapsacks, and heading away, that James quite realized what had been said.
“We are doing our very best, my friend, to lose ourselves for good.”
He came upon the tail-end of the Army three days later, on the edge of a small market town. The relief was so great it was as though his pack had lifted off his shoulders and he was going to rise up into the sky like a kite. The noise, the voices, the familiar chaos and stink: it disgusted him, and it felt safe.
A hundred yards into the rank mess of the Army, he found an officer, saluted and made himself known. The officer nodded, gestured him along, sending him to a big house on the main square, all fancy stonework and balconies, commandeered for the officers’ accommodation.
He gave his name and rank to the clerk there. In the dim anteroom, the young man scanned through his lists, frowning; he had a boil on his neck. After a moment, he got up from his desk, opened the door and stepped out into the lobby. When he came back, it was with two armed guards.
“There he is. Do your work.”
The guards took hold of James’s arms, and twisted them up behind his back. James tried to shrug them off.
“I don’t— Why?”
“You are a deserter.”
“No—”
“Your sergeant reported you.”
“If I was, why would I come back?”
The clerk shrugged. “Deserters do. They find out what it’s like. They come back.”
James, his hands clamped in manacles, was dragged down into a cellar, which smelt of wine and mice and was lit by a narrow grille high up in the wall. Someone threw a blanket at him; he shuffled it around his shoulders, sank down against the cold stone, and closed his eyes. Fear loosened its teeth and slithered away and coiled up in a corner. They could not keep him locked up for long; with the retreat in full flood they simply could not manage it. They would have to haul him out to explain himself, and all would come clear, and he would not hesitate to point the finger. Those soldiers who had let him sleep on, while the Army moved off, who’d stolen his horses—it was a long shot that they would ever be found; indeed, they might well have deserted themselves, and taken the horses to ride rather than eat. But the thing was—and this was a thing of clear certainty and faith for him—it was all just a mistake: he had not deserted, and he would not be punished for something that he had not done.
The hours crept by; the light from the grille slid across the wall. He dozed, head drooping, and dreamed of the farm. Of meadow grass and cool skies and wild strawberries. Of the gentleman who had ruffled his curls, and said that he was as fine a chap as he had seen, and asked if he was happy.
James, waking now to clarity, felt homesick for a home that he had never really had. If he lived through this, through the retreat and any skirmishes that they might fall into on the way, if he made it as far as La Coruña and the sea, if he took ship for England—if he could just survive this disaster, and all the disasters yet to come in his eleven remaining years of service—he would one day return to Hertfordshire. It was something to promise himself, waiting for him at the end of everything: the paradise to come. If the old man was still alive, James would find him: Mr. Bennet, who had, all those years ago, cared enough to ask whether James was happy. Mr. Bennet was a good man, an important man, the most important in that village near Meryton; and if Mr. Bennet would have him, James would be his man.
He was brought out blinking into cold light; the ground swooped underfoot. Voices lurched out at him. He was yanked along, stumbling, through blurred red and blue. A thin sleet fell, pricking his face.
He had his irons unfastened from one wrist, and then fastened again; his arms were looped around a rough wooden post. It seemed unnecessary. He tried to say, I won’t, I wouldn’t—but his mouth was dry and his words came out thin, and the guard did not listen or did not hear. But James would get his chance to speak, to explain, and then all would be understood.
The gunners assembled there were a stinking jostle of sodden, faded blue. Sergeant Pye swam into focus, feverish and glittery. He read the charge: James watched the mouth moving, and struggled to put the words together; then he began to understand, and felt the terror rise in him like floodwater, creeping up his ankles to his thighs, up his body to his mouth and nose. He heaved against his shackles; he shook his head. His parched lips unstuck:
“No—”
“Dereliction of duty, loss of vital matériel, desertion—”
“No!”
“Desertion in the face of the enemy—”
“I did not desert—”
Sergeant Pye cuffed him round the back of his head. His cheekbone slammed into the post.
James was not to speak.
The facts spoke for themselves.
James spat blood. His tongue touched a broken tooth. His vision blurred.
Pye continued with the charge.
Desertion in the face of the enemy. Amongst crimes a soldier might commit, the very rankest.
James’s vision swelled and shrank. His head pounded. He blinked away blood.
Since it put his companions in danger. Since it left his friends to face without him what he himself would not.
And so the penalty for desertion in a time of war was death.
In the smear of light, through the sting of blood, on the far side of the market square, a skinny child stared out at James, and hitched a smaller child up her hip.
His skin bristled. His hands jerked uselessly
in the manacles, itching to wipe his eyes clear—was it the girl he had shared his bread with at San Tirso? But his vision blurred, he could not see: he pressed his eyes shut, and breathed. Then opened them again, and he stared across the market square. She was not there.
Leniency would be shown, since he had repented and returned.
“Fifty lashes.”
And this, then, as they stripped his coat and shirt away, was at last the full shivering realization of what must come, and that there was nothing to be done, but to go through it, and endure. Fear would have finally claimed him then, poisoned his blood and left him raving, but as the first lash tore into his skin, he closed his eyes, and bit hard into his lip, and pushed his forehead into the rough wood post. He breathed. This is not for ever, he told himself. There will be a time after this.
The pain was astonishing. The first blow was a flare of silver; it darkened to red and just kept burning. And as the lash hissed and licked, and hissed and licked again, peeling away his skin, it also ripped away his fear; it tore the fear up into bloody twitching shreds; as James fell out of consciousness, fear fell away from him stone dead. There was nothing for James to be afraid of, not after this.
When they were done, and he was bloody slumping meat, hanging from his manacled hands, they slung him face down on a limber, and shackled him to it by the right wrist. As if he would run. As if he could run. As if there was anywhere to run to, other than La Coruña and the sea.
He swung and jolted, raw, all the way to the coast.
He was released for the defence of the town.
Every last man, even the criminals and cowards were needed. He was still weak and feverish and his back burnt with scabs, and the scabs cracked, and wept.
Before the attack, the sappers blew up the powder stores, to deny them to the French invaders. The town walls shook; sparks flew up into the sky like fireworks.
They lugged the nine-pounder out along the ridge. Only he and Sergeant Pye now were left of the five members of the detachment who had started out. A red-headed boy had joined them, and a big bald silent fellow; a lithe man of middle years was the new ventsman. The boy, who was a loader, was missing two fingers on his left hand, but it didn’t matter, he said, laughing, showing his empty mouth, ’cos he used the other hand to wank. New horses, too: a ragged Spanish bay, calm and stoical, who blew through her nose at James; he rested his forehead on her cheek. He said, “Mi querida, mi querida, mi querida.”
Scrubland fell away below them; the plain stretched beyond, rocky and bitter. The French were a line of blue coats, gunmetal, glinting steel. His dirty old shirt stuck to his scabs. He followed Pye’s orders silently.
Behind them, ships rode in the bay, all beautiful and clean, and it was January the 16th, someone had said, and it was a whole new year, and he had not noticed that, no more than he had noticed Christmas.
He was not afraid. He was weak and faltering, his hands trembled, and a careless movement sent ripples of flame up his back again; his body shied away from this instinctively, but he was not afraid. He reckoned: I am sore, I am clumsy, I am weak, and so chances are I will get my hands blown off, and bleed out into the Spanish dirt. He reckoned: I would hardly feel it—the pain, the horror—before I was empty and gone. It did not seem a particularly terrible thing, not any more.
He nodded to the ventsman, whose face was lined and lean. His hands looked shaky.
James proffered his own hand to shake. “James Smith.”
“Bill Hastings,” said the ventsman, his Adam’s apple rolling down then back up his narrow throat. He pumped James’s hand, nodding, too nervous for further talk.
The artillery wagon pulled up behind them with their ammunition; the lads there looked grey. The infantry were ranked to left and right, a handful of guns gathered on the other escarpment; behind their lines, in the harbour, the bumboats were already ferrying soldiers out to the waiting ships.
Us lot, James thought, the ones left holding the fort: we are here to die.
Roundshot screamed overhead, flew long, landing near where the horses were tethered, making them buck and whinny and pull. A shot crumped into the dirt in front of them; the men scattered and flung themselves to the ground. Pye was yelling all the time; James wiped the grit from his face, got back to his feet, back to his work.
Below, the infantry slogged it out; muskets and bayonets and scuffling and skidding and screaming in the rocky patchwork countryside.
“Frogs can’t get to us.” Pye grinned. “Their cavalry can’t charge us here. Position is too strong.”
And it was true. The fighting continued, but no progress was made on either side. Stalemate. At dusk, the French retreated back behind their lines. This battle was unwinnable, but the result of the campaign was clear. However they might describe it to themselves, the English were already defeated; they might not have been massacred, but they were humiliated.
James watched as Pye spiked the gun. The clanging of the iron was muted, jarring; James’s ears still hummed and buzzed from battle. He had dragged that gun halfway across Spain and back again, and now Pye was hammering an iron spike into its innards, and they would leave it behind here amongst the rocks.
Beside him, the ventsman glugged water, wiped the bottleneck with a filthy palm, all black powder and dust, and proffered it to James. His hand trembled violently now, making the water slosh; the ventsman laughed.
“Fuck!” He shook his head, and didn’t say anything more.
James took the bottle. His hand was still. “Where you from, then?”
“Kent.”
“You miss it?”
“Oh, by God, Kent is lovely. And I got a lovely wife, Mary. Got a coupla boys.”
James nodded. He drank, and the water was sweet. He understood fear now; he knew its birth, its breeding.
What was left of the infantry, under cover of darkness, crept down towards the shore; the men were ferried out in little boats to the waiting ships. The gunners were to follow. The rest of the detachment were already scuffing and scrabbling down the slope; he found himself suddenly alone with Pye on the top of the escarpment. Pye waved him over to where the horses were hitched.
“Sort them ones out.”
James slipped in between their ridged ribcages as the horses stepped and swished. He talked to them, running his hands along their flanks, to let them know where he was, and keep them calm. He set about unbuckling the mare’s gun-carriage tack. They’d forage for themselves, and roam a while unburdened, until someone claimed them.
“Don’t waste your time.”
“Sir?” James looked to Pye. Blood on his neck-cloth, soot on his face. There was a sore on the wing of his nose; he scratched at it.
“Use your bayonet, gunner. Don’t waste your shot, either.”
James just looked at him.
Pye jerked a blackened hand, impatient, at the horses. “Get a fucking move on.”
James could not move at all; he swallowed.
“Do I have to do everything round here?”
Sergeant Pye drew his own bayonet, and strode over, and stuck the mare in the throat, the Spanish bay. The other horses pulled away, shying, whinnying. The bay mare sank to her knees, her jaw still jutting upwards, held there by her halter; blood gushed from her wound and wet the dirt. The leather creaked, a strap snapped; she keeled over sideways; her head cracked to the ground. She lay, her big eyes blind, blood bubbling from her nostrils.
“Right. Get on with it.”
James felt his hands curl into fists, then flex.
“Are you squeamish?” Pye said. “I thought you might be squeamish.”
“Sir.”
James drew his bayonet. Pye turned away, heading over towards a bony skewbald gelding.
When it came to it, it was as easy as falling. It was easier, since his body put up no fight against it, as it would have with a fall. He stepped over the bay mare’s head.
“Sir.”
Pye turned towards him, lips twisted, rea
dy to speak, but James just took him by the shoulder, and pushed his blade into him. There was resistance first, of layered wool and linen, skin, muscle. And then there was softness inside. The man’s mouth opened. James felt the steel grate against the deep-buried spine. He saw black-pitted molars, the red flesh at the back of Pye’s mouth. He jerked the bayonet upwards, twisted it. Pye’s eyes widened, the whites yellow and veined, the pupils flaring huge.
James had killed before, he must have, he knew he had; but he had never killed a man so close to, not like this, not with blood warm on his hands, and the stink of breath in his face. The sergeant sank to his knees, the bayonet slicking out of him. James stepped back; Pye slumped forward and hit the ground, his eyes and mouth open in the dust.
James walked away. He did not follow the others straight down to the strand, but took a sloping angle, oblique, across the shambling drop. He let go of the bayonet; it clattered and pinged, bouncing down from rock to rock. When he reached the sand, he ripped away what was left of his shoes and let his gaiters uncurl themselves and fall away. He walked barefoot, away from La Coruña, away from the Army, away from blood and any thought of home. How could he go home now? How could he take all of this back there? He kept the lapping waves to his left, and the dark land to his right, till the ships’ lights were out of sight, and he could no longer hear voices. Night sounds of birds, the shush of the waves: he peeled off his clothes—the faded stained coat, the filthy britches, the shirt that stank and stuck to him and shivered with lice. He walked out into the glimmering water.
He did not expect to live. He did not even think about it. He was not afraid. He wished only to be clean.
1809
A glimpse of a woman in black. Something trickling between his lips; thin goaty milk; he swallowed.
Then later, there was a narrow cot that smelt of canvas, the thin sunlight sheering through closed shutters. The sound of voices carrying up through the floorboards, the old woman’s, and a younger woman’s, and a child’s.