“No. I am aware of that, of course. Does his sweetheart correspond with him?”
“Occasionally, sir. I believe he composes three at least of missives for every one he receives in return. I have not seen any of her billets, of course, they being intensely private to him, but I do not know that absence has made her heart grow any fonder. He does not give the impression of a man who is possessed by any certainty of the steadfastness of his true love. I have a vague recollection of being told by one of the beaks at school that a broken heart was good for the poetic muse, something about ‘releasing the springs of true emotion’, so I believe. Daft old bugger!”
“Have you seen or heard any of his poetry?”
“Well, no, sir, but he would hardly be reciting poetry in the mess, now, would he, sir?”
“Not if he wished to keep his breeches about him! I have a strong suspicion that would lead to a debagging!”
“Quite right too, sir! One can tolerate many foibles in one’s companions in the mess. Got to, have you not? Queer bunch you can find in the Army sometimes. Even so, sir, there are limits, and poetry is one of them! Though I did know one captain in the barracks at Hertford who grew roses and sometimes talked about them…”
“I have some roses in the garden at the Lodge, Major Perceval. I never talk about them, you may have noticed, but I do occasionally compliment the gardener.”
Perceval suspected that his colonel might be waxing satirical; he saluted and left the presence.
Captain Collins numbered more than eighty men in his company, having persuaded several of the Portuguese volunteers to ask to join him; he had already made one of the local men corporal, both because he had served in the militia and was slightly older than the others, and because it encouraged them in the belief that they would not be seen as in any way different from the other private soldiers.
“Very efficient men, sir. At least as good as the Irish and for much the same reason – they come from a poverty-stricken land where the existence of a shilling in a man’s pocket makes him something out of the ordinary. They had grown used to eating a hot meal every day over the winter in the Castle, sir, and are happy to continue to do so in our ranks. The heavy shoes, sir, the half boots I should suppose they must really be called, are welcome as well to men who often had to go barefoot for lack of leather in the village. They ain’t much, these new shoes, sir, coming from the new manufacturies as they do rather than from a proper cobbler, but they make life easier on the stony roads.”
“Can they keep pace on the march?”
“Easily, sir. Tough little chaps – fifteen miles with a sixty pound pack is no more than a stroll to them. From what I am told, sir, many of them come from small villages and spend the summers up in the hills with their flocks, on the good grass high up. No roads there, so everything they eat they carry on their backs. That must include sacks of flour, sir, carried up onto the heights.”
A sack of flour weighed ten stones, one hundred and forty pounds.
“Very good. Are you ready to proceed, Captain Collins? Lieutenant Meek in the van, I see.”
“Yes, sir. It is good for him, sir, to be placed where he must remain alert, on his toes, one might say. Set in the rear he may drift into a daydream, but he will not do so where he may be walking into ambush. He values his own skin just sufficiently to repress the Muse of Poetry while he is at the head of the leading platoon. I am not, by the way, imputing shyness to him, sir. He was stood tall and properly at the front at the ford, sir, the men commenting that he knew what was right for a young officer.”
“That is as it should be, Mr Collins. I was told in my first days as an ensign that the proper job of a young officer was to look pretty and stand forwards in time of battle. Other than that he should be silent and do as he was told.”
“Still good advice, sir. Lieutenant Meek is rapidly becoming more the thing, sir. I had wondered whether I might not have to harass him until he chose to send in his papers, sir, but I am now quite happy to keep him. Unfortunately, his family has money, and wish him to stay overseas until he has grown up, and they may well purchase for him at the earliest practical date.”
It could be difficult to prevent the promotion of undesirable officers when overseas. In England it was possible to arrange for a weak lieutenant insistent on purchase to take his captaincy in some other unlucky battalion, but it required contact with the Colonel of the Regiment and the use of his influence at Horse Guards. That was impractical with an unreliable postal service at foreign.
“What route do you propose, Captain Collins?”
Major Perceval had said that the captain was good; that should mean that he had given some thought to the day’s task.
“Difficult in ignorance, sir. I had planned to follow the river bank for the first mile or so, keeping an eye open for paths leading off up the valley side. There will be a reason for any track we come across, sir. A hamlet hidden in the forest, perhaps, or a grove of fruit trees or such, or a path up to meadows in the hills. They may be worth a diversion, particularly if the river winds in its course and they offer the chance of cutting off a bend.”
“Very good. The command is yours, sir.”
They marched, in good time, backs straight and firelocks shouldered until they were out of sight of brigade; half a mile covered and the sergeants muttered the word and they marched easy, muskets cradled in their arms or at trail or crosswise, yoke fashion, if they preferred, and the files spread out across the track. Pipes were lit and the old-fashioned popped chewing quids into their mouths.
“How do they do that, Captain Collins? Chewing tobacco! That coarse, harsh stuff would rip my throat out!”
“Beyond me, sir! I have not the least idea. It has the advantage, one might imagine, that it must wholly destroy their sense of taste, so making army food more easily palatable!”
“Less easy to smell their surroundings as well. For men who see washing water at very rare intervals, that is not a bad thing!”
They laughed comfortably – they had soldier servants who provided them with hot water and laundry whenever it was humanly possible. When they had to rough it with the ranks then they could afford lavender water or even the expensive Eau de Cologne, although that latter had an alcohol content that meant it often was lost on the march. The connoisseurs among the more desperate alcoholics found that any form of scent made their diluted methylated spirits more palatable and would go to some lengths to steal it.
The river narrowed, became more of a mountain stream in the space of a mile, running fast over a rocky bed, the banks high; it would have been very hard to cross. The ford was effectively the last place where wagons could be moved from one side to the other, made a bottleneck which a defence could use to great advantage.
“If we are pushed back then we must do as the Frogs did, Captain Collins. Too valuable a point to ignore on a retreat.”
They came to a first turn off, a path leading up the valley side where the slope was less.
“Mackeson, take a look at the ground for me!”
A soldier trotted out of the ranks and bent over to inspect the track.
“His father is a gamekeeper, sir. He grew up keeping an eye out for poachers and watching over the deer, in some lord’s park over in Sussex. Joined us a couple of years before we went out to India, having to leave home for some reason.”
Septimus did not ask what that reason was; Captain Collins would not have enquired, for no officer really wanted to know just what a man might have done that was so outrageous to his own community.
Mackeson straightened up and walked across to them, saluting as he spoke, being a good soldier.
“Ain’t been used this year, sir. Grass is just starting to grow, so there was feet on it last year what kept the soil bare. Can’t tell what it might ‘ave been, sir, not for sure, but a guess says goats being taken up to the ‘ills, because they would ‘ave snatched mouthfuls as they walked and they bites right down to the roots.”
“
No people and no goats left where the French have been, sir, so no traffic this year.”
“Ignore it, Captain Collins. We can send a patrol up later in the week, perhaps, but for today it’s the hills to the front.”
The track narrowed and grew steeper, slowing their pace.
Septimus surveyed the hillsides right and left, grass covered and rising another three or four hundred feet and with rocky outcroppings that could have hidden men. The path rose to a col perhaps half a mile away, which would give a view of the next valley and perhaps offer a route uphill to the tops where they could see more.
“Ambush country, Captain Collins, but insufficient cover for any large and organised force. Withdrawal would not be easy even for a platoon, except they were trained men like our Rifles. We would lose half the day if we spread the men out in a skirmish line on either side of the track. Risk it, I think. Press on into the pass, halting at the highest point; just before in fact, so as to look over the other side first.”
Twenty minutes took them to the top, seeing nothing on the way.
The leading platoon edged carefully to the highest point of the track and then rapidly fell back, waving them down to the ground.
“Form line, sir?”
Septimus agreed, running to see what was there.
Lieutenant Meek joined him, red coat discarded and bareheaded; Septimus copied him, becoming far less visible at any distance.
“Another valley, sir, with a river. I expect every valley has a river at this time of year, even if they dry up in summer, sir.”
A sensible comment, though not what Septimus needed just at that moment.
“Down on the flatter land, sir, where the trees thin out, a little bit this side of the water…”
A French soldier in blue coat appeared with a bucket in his hand, ambling idly to the stream.
“Camped up, sir. I can see tents, sir, and that, from all I read, says the surgeons, because the men do not use canvas as a rule. They will be in turf and branches bothies in the woodland, but the medical men have marquees issued to act as wards for the sick and wounded.”
“Well observed, Lieutenant Meek. The surgeons will not be at the front, of course, so there should be men between them and us. Can you spot them?”
Try as they might, they could see no front line.
“Then this must be the rear of some force, whether division or greater we do not know. It might be their whole army, for all we are aware. Had the unit that ambushed the ford withdrawn here, then they would know that we are close, and would not have left themselves so open. So, where did they go to?”
Septimus repeated his conclusions to Captain Collins and informed him that they were to push a march back to their own camp. Brigadier Dudley must send a message as quickly as possible to headquarters, giving the location of the French rear; for their own well-being they must then discover where the ambushers from the ford had gone to.
The patrols fanned out over the hillsides beyond the forested valley. The second day of searching found a body in a blue coat, a corporal who had died of his wounds and had been left, quickly hidden behind low rocks. The body was not pretty after days of exposure to the vermin but it served as an indicator of the passage of the French.
The patrol from the Light Company fanned out and found a track less than fifty yards away across the hillside. Lieutenant Melksham looked and listened wisely as the men told him that the track had been heavily used, but not for a week or so, that the Frogs had been up and down several times.
“It sounds from what you say, Sergeant, that the French set up their ambush and then relieved the men more than once.”
“Maybe a lot more than once, sir. I wouldn’t mind betting they was here over most of the winter, sir. Made their camp somewhere over the ‘ill, sir, and just kept a rearguard out at the river, sir. Sort of to make it cost us to get this far and give them plenty of warning we was on our way, sir.”
Melksham scanned to hillside, saw it was all open, lightly scrub covered at this time of year, waist high on his men. It was moorland, he thought, unlike anything he had ever seen at home in Bombay – not that India was ‘home’ any longer. His father had written him that the family was taking ship to England, would be well on the high seas by now, and that his agent had the option to purchase a manor house a few miles south of London.
He brought his mind back to business, castigating himself for day-dreaming. The hillside was devoid of practical cover, but the French knew they had crossed the river, so they ought to be watching. If they were not on the slopes then they had to be hidden behind the crest.
The line of the hilltop was almost even, flat from south west across to the north, just a nick in the skyline half a mile or so ahead, where the track crossed onto the tops, probably. He had seen the Downs behind Winchester, a rolling plateau, more or less at a height but not flat; the country might be like that here. It might as well be that the hills formed a ridge and that there was a wide valley hidden out of his sight. Whichever it might be, it could be assumed that the French were tucked away with telescopes examining him now.
“If they have been here for months, Sergeant Exton, then it stands to reason that they will have made themselves a redoubt of sorts to cover the track, probably up on the top there, out of sight and easy to get out of when the need arises.”
“There’s rock close to the surface around ‘ere, sir. Going to be more at the top, if it’s like our moors, sir. A few days at rolling the bigger stones into place and they could be set up nice and comfortable, sir, just waiting. Be bloody daft, beggin’ your pardon, sir, if they only ‘ad the one. Was I them, I’d put three or four platoons out at a time, forty or fifty yards apart along the top. They knows we ain’t going to make good time through the scrub, so they can kill a few of us until we bring up all the battalion, like, and then bugger off and leave us to catch ‘em again at the next place they choose. While we’re goin’ at ‘em, slow-like, they can bring their brigade or division or whatever they’ve got to the ready and either push us back or run away, whatever’s convenient to them.”
“Perhaps that is why they left the body, sergeant, so as to point us in the direction convenient to them.”
It seemed a logical suggestion, just the sort of thing the Frogs might do.
“Two men forward, Sergeant Exton. Cautiously, try to get an idea of the lay of the land, see if they can spot where the Frogs might be. They ain’t going to show their ambush for just two men who stay at a distance. Send a platoon out to either side of the track, get an idea of whether it’s possible to make an advance through the scrub. Hold the remainder here. All to return in two hours. The Frogs will be able to see us poking about and they will know what we are doing. They can’t send cavalry out on the track, not in single file, and the scrub is too thick for horses. They’d be foolish to send infantry down the track for us to pick off from the rough on either side. Only sensible thing is for them to use guns, if they’ve got any up here. And if they have, that tells us there’s no steep valley on the other side.”
“Tea, sir?”
“They know we are here, that is if they are here, so we do not need to hide away. If they aren’t there then they still won’t see our fires, if you see what I mean, Sergeant.”
“Brew up, lads!”
The sergeant found it simpler not to explain that he saw exactly what his young officer meant, and had thought it all through himself before asking permission for fires.
Melksham never failed to be amazed by the men’s ability to make tea in the most unlikely places. They scavenged dry twigs and branches from under the scrub and set stones into a hearth in seconds it seemed and had a filled bucket or kettle, depending on their tastes in tea, on the boil while the man whose turn it was produced a handful of leaf from a dry inside pocket of his coat.
“Easier in the good battalions, sir,” the sergeant suddenly commented. “The men sew oilskin into the skirts of the coat and keep the tea safe there. It ain’t allowed in reg
ulations, sir, so some battalions won’t ‘ave it at any price, but mostly the officers don’t see it, sir. Keeps the lads so much ‘appier, sir, if they can brew up. Makes sense, too, it do, sir. If they can’t ‘ave tea then some of ‘em puts rum in their water bottles, sir. No good that ain’t, sir, men on the piss on the march and not able to see straight by half way through the day. Better they ‘as their tea.”
Melksham could see reason in the sergeant’s argument, wondered why he was being told now.
“Difficult to lay your ‘ands on, sir, tea leaves when you’re out on campaign.”
Light dawned.
“I shall have a word with the QM, Sergeant Exton. Something can be worked out, I am sure.”
It would cost, but the men knew that Melksham was a nabob’s son. They would not have mentioned the problem to a poorer officer, but they expected him to dig his hand into his pocket occasionally. Also, and importantly, they liked and trusted him, he was a good officer.
“From the looks of it, sir, and from what we saw close to the camp, sir, I reckons the Frogs just kept a platoon down there permanent over winter, sir. The ashes from their fires, sir: they weren’t enough for a battalion what been there all winter, and they didn’t ‘ave no bothies there – they wouldn’t ‘ave camped out in trees without buildin’ their little huts. They sent the battalion down as soon as they got word that their brigade was coming back. But the brigade what was in our place next to the Castle never came up this track, sir. They went someplace else.”
“We know they did not go up the river into the high hills that the Colonel examined…”
“Better get back, sir, and tell ‘em that we’re likely facing the wrong way, sir.”
“Go back, with a platoon, quickly to Major Perceval, with the message that we think the Frogs went down the river, not up the valley sides.”
Blood and Famine (Man of Conflict Series, Book 4) Page 20