Hervey 06 - Rumours Of War

by Allan Mallinson

  It was more the pity, thought Colonel Reynell now, that none of the officers’ wives had come out. Lady Waldegrave, whose husband was a captain in the Fifteenth, had taken charge of her regiment’s two dozen women at Mayorga; she must by now be half-way to Oporto, he reckoned. And with her had gone some of the Fifteenth’s walking sick as escorts, needing only two able-bodied dragoons to accompany the party. But without an officer’s wife he would have to send a man he could trust; and he could ill afford to send away men he could trust.

  ‘I see nothing for it but to have Cowell go with them,’ he declared, calculating that he might spare an assistant surgeon on a rapid retreat.

  The captains agreed.

  ‘And then, gentlemen, I shall have John Knight look at every horse’s foot with the farrier-major. We may have but a day in which to do any work.’

  Veterinary Surgeon Knight was exalted in both mess and canteen. He had, by degrees, reduced the weight of the troop-horses’ shoes by some two ounces since coming to the Peninsula, and he had had the farriers extend the same weight of iron – fifteen – to provide more cover to the foot, the country being uncommonly stony. The Sixth’s horses had in consequence fared better than the others in Stewart’s brigade. And now, with the snow come, the concave fullered shoes, which Knight ordered narrower than the regulation, were paying handsome dividends for the farriers’ extra efforts. Reynell believed they might well steal a march on a flat-shod French regiment by this means alone.

  ‘Do you have any questions of me?’ He trusted they would not. Questions meant either that he had explained things ill, or that information was too scarce.

  They all had questions, but they knew Reynell had not the answers. There was silence.

  And then Edmonds spoke. ‘Colonel, there’s a deal of French dead lying outside the town since Lord Paget’s affair the other morning, and they have all been stripped bare by the Spanish. I know the ground is too hard to bury them, but are we to leave them thus?’

  They had all witnessed the bodies, naked, the crows pecking at the eyes and the town dogs circling.

  ‘I have heard nothing,’ said Reynell, shaking his head. ‘The Fifteenth, I know, brought in their dead, but they are unburied still. I agree it is unchristian to leave them out so. But the ground . . .’

  ‘I was thinking not merely of that, Colonel,’ replied Edmonds, shaking his head in a cautionary sort of way. ‘Rather of the effect upon the French of seeing their dead lying stripped and unburied. They’re bound to exact revenge somewhere on prisoners or stragglers.’

  Reynell frowned. He did not want to gainsay him, especially not in front of the assembled officers. ‘And yet it might be argued that seeing “Muertos a los Francéses” put into such fine effect might check their ardour.’ He paused. ‘But I believe you are right. I’ll have words with Stewart directly. We might at least pay the Spaniards to lay them in cover somewhere.’

  There were no more questions.

  ‘Very well, gentlemen. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off in solstitio brumali, the very dead of winter. Just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. We write new a page in our history; you may be sure it will be read most attentively.’

  *

  Hervey had exercised the galloper’s privilege of no other duty but the despatch, and had turned in, boots off, immediately after Colonel Reynell’s address. But his sleep did not extend far beyond an hour before he was roused by an orderly and told the major of brigade would see him.

  He rose at once and began dressing. The fur crest of his Tarleton was still wet, and he rued that his cloak would not be dry in a week of Sundays in a warming room. But he thought he looked passing respectable nevertheless to present himself at brigade orderly room. He wondered how far the gallop would be this time. Stella would be tired; it would not do to push her too much.

  ‘General Stewart desires to thank you for your services,’ said the major of brigade, as Hervey entered the almoner’s store, which now served as the hussar brigade orderly room.

  Hervey quickened. Would this mean he was to be personally commended, at this very moment? He sincerely wished he were better accoutred.

  ‘But regrettably those services are to be terminated,’ continued the brigade major. ‘The brigadier is made hors de combat by an attack of ophthalmia.’

  There was nothing more to be said, evidently. Hervey nodded, muttered ‘thank you’, for want of conjuring anything more appropriate, and saluted.

  They did, however, shake hands.

  ‘The general is well pleased, Mr Hervey. Lord Paget sent his best expressions of contentment at your recall of General Craufurd’s brigade last night. I dare say it will be noted favourably.’

  Hervey did not know where these things were noted, but he trusted they were if the major of the hussar brigade said so. ‘Thank you again, sir,’ he said quietly, saluting once more and taking his leave.

  And he left the brigadier’s headquarters pondering regretfully on the cost – two hundred guineas – of that favourable note.

  *

  Lord Paget, as well as Colonel Reynell, presumed that as soon as Soult realized he was not to face an attack he would go on to the offence. And as soon as he realized that Sir John Moore’s army was beginning a general withdrawal, he would conduct the most vigorous pursuit, not waiting for a junction with Bonaparte’s sixty thousand, who could then throw their irresistible weight into the fight a few days later. It was Paget’s intention to convince Soult, therefore, that Moore’s cavalry was twice its actual strength. That way the French might be the more circumspect, and thus slow, in pressing their attacks. If Sir John Moore’s army was obliged to fight Soult’s and Bonaparte’s forces combined, it would be annihilated. And in Paget’s ears, as well as Moore’s, rang the words of Mr Canning: ‘The army is not merely a considerable part of the dispensable force of this country. It is in fact the British army. Another army it has not to send.’ There was nothing he, Paget or any of them could do to prevent the junction of Soult and Bonaparte, but he could prevent Soult from fixing Moore in place. And for as long as Moore could keep a march between himself and Soult he ought to be able to get his army to Corunna; the junction of Soult and Bonaparte would ultimately therefore be to no purpose.

  He could not yet know it for certain, but in this deception Paget was already favoured by the affair at Sahagun, for Debelle had told Soult that a great number of cavalry had fallen upon him. It would therefore be, he trusted, more a matter of maintaining the illusion than creating it. Accordingly, he gave instructions for his regiments to mask the retirement of the rest of the army. He intended that not a yard of country should go unwatched, and that the videttes and patrols should act with the utmost belligerence: every prod was to be parried, every exploratory attack was to be met by a counter-charge. It was a risky stratagem. The commander of a force would not hazard his cavalry in such a way unless he had ample of them; it was a settled precept. Soult would likely as not calculate that Paget’s force was twice its actual size. Therein lay the simple ploy. But in any case, Paget wanted his commanders to take the offence; he did not intend that British cavalry slink out of Castile like a pack of whipped hounds.

  Within the hour, Sir Edward Lankester had the officers and serjeants of A Troop gathered in the lean-to that served as his orderly room.

  ‘In other words, gentlemen, we pay a second time for the privilege of wearing fine uniforms,’ he concluded, after speculating on what might lie ahead. ‘It should be our object that not a single French sabre touch one of our friends in red before they are safely over the Esla. Thereafter they shall best be able to see to themselves.’

  A better turn of phrase Lankester could scarcely have fashioned, appealing to every fine instinct, and to one or two lesser ones as well. Hervey himself was thoroughly fired with the spirit of the arme blanche, relishing the notion of protecting the redcoats, as a lion might protect its cubs. And he was determined to have
early sport of it.

  Once outside, he and Cornet Laming tossed a silver dollar to see who would take the first watch until midnight.

  ‘We are fortunate, are we not, Laming, that we shall take the southern road,’ he said, as he repocketed the coin. ‘We’re bound to have a go with some French dragoons.’

  ‘And see Boney,’ said Laming, smiling.

  Hervey raised his sword arm. ‘Death to the French!’

  Laming raised his. ‘And we shall keep our feet dry that way too, says Lankester, for there are bridges all the way, not fords.’

  It was a pleasing notion. Their feet had been wet with rain or snowmelt for a week or more.

  ‘Nor did I ever learn to swim, Hervey.’

  Hervey smiled. He could swim well enough. He had learned in the mill pool in Horningsham, and he had swum the Severn at Shrewsbury; but all the same he did not fancy he would manage more than a few strokes in an Esla in spate, boots and all. ‘We must hope our horses have the skill,’ he replied, looking a shade rueful.

  Laming and he shook hands. They would have a long journey, ‘at the worst time of the year’, Colonel Reynell had said: ‘the ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short; the very dead of winter’.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE REVERSE

  Elvas, 30 October 1826

  Sir John Moore had at least been sure, those seventeen winters past, of who and where his enemy was. Unspeakable though retreat might be, he had reached the conclusion that there was no other course. Having made that decision he could direct everything thereafter with singular purpose and resolve. Hervey, on the other hand, knew little of the factors by which to determine his course. He could suggest only general dispositions, as indicated in the scheme he had submitted to Colonel Norris, and then trust to the depth of the defensive works at the frontier, and to the reserves. Except that Dom Mateo could scarcely muster a reserve. In this regard Hervey knew they must rely on the telegraph to Lisbon for their early relief. He thought it the very devil of a thing that while Lord Paget had been able to humbug so great a number of French (as he covered the retreat of Moore’s infantry from Sahagun) at Elvas now there was not the means to humbug a fraction of that number of rebels.

  And then later that morning, the day after Hervey had arrived, even as Major Coa was putting into effect the measures they had decided on the night before, came particularly unwelcome news. The captain of the Corpo Telegráfico reported that his company were not mobilized, as Dom Mateo had presumed them to be. His command was depleted and unpractised, said the captain; there were neither the men, the means nor the skill to establish a signal line between Elvas and Torres Vedras. He had even heard that there were not the resources at Torres Vedras, either, to repeat a signal to Lisbon.

  ‘And we may suppose that it is the same on the other lines,’ said Dom Mateo, kicking the leg of his writing table. ‘We have all the appearance of an army, but evidently parts of it are an illusion.’

  For all that their plans depended on it, Hervey could hardly express himself very surprised. The economies in both their countries after Waterloo had been considerable. And the captain of the Corpo Telegráfico said only what Hervey’s old friend Commodore Peto had about paying off the lieutenants and warrant officers on the old semaphore lines to Portsmouth and across Kent. In England as well as Portugal, when the threat of invasion receded, parliament was of a mind that they could return to the velocity of the horse in conveying intelligence and instructions.

  ‘However,’ continued Dom Mateo. ‘I am assured that the Conselho da Guerra is to remedy the defect at once.’

  ‘I am glad of it, Dom Mateo,’ said Hervey. The immediate danger they faced was one thing, but the design he had pressed on the chargé and the Horse Guards was conditional on the operation of all the old lines. ‘But how long might that remedy be?’

  ‘I have already asked. The captain says that cadets from the academy at Peynas are being seconded to the corpo as we speak, and men from the Batalhão de Artifices too. It should take but a few weeks to have them ready. They are intelligent men, all.’

  Hervey did not doubt it. He had a high regard for engineers and artificers, as long as they were directed to ends that served a good design (otherwise they had an obstinate capacity for blowing things up, as well he knew from Bhurtpore). ‘A few weeks, you say, General?’

  ‘Just so. With artificers and good cadets we shall have a telegraph into the Conselho da Guerra itself. So now we may turn our minds, I believe, to the employment of the cavalry.’

  At this Dom Mateo looked more at ease, and Hervey imagined there to be encouraging news. ‘Last night we asked Major Coa to determine the number at your disposal.’

  ‘And he has done so. The Eighth Cavalry is mobilized.’

  ‘Excellent! And its strength?’

  ‘Two squadrons – two hundred and twenty sabres.’

  Hervey marvelled at the matter-of-fact way in which Dom Mateo exposed their weakness. He had expected twice that number of regular sabres, at least, and perhaps as many from the militia. That was the trouble, he sighed: Portugal was not Spain; it did not breed enough remounts.

  ‘And who is to command them?’

  ‘I am.’

  Hervey knew he should not have been surprised at this either. It took him a moment or two to marshal his words nevertheless. ‘Dom Mateo, two hundred sabres: it is not a worthy command for you.’

  Dom Mateo was not dismayed. ‘But you yourself told me that Lord Paget had not many more at Sahagun.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘And I have read how, on the march to Corunna, he deceived the French into believing there were many more sabres against him than was so.’

  ‘True.’ Hervey thought it best to let Dom Mateo run his course.

  ‘And he did that by placing himself at the head of his division. I do not have a division, else I should place myself as Lord Paget did. But if all I have is two squadrons, then so be it. They will have greater need of me than perhaps even your regiments had of Lord Paget.’

  There was logic, and certainly honour, in what Dom Mateo said. Hervey decided to concede, if only for the moment. ‘We were lucky at Sahagun. The French were not sure who we were, or how many. Perhaps it could be the way here.’

  Lucky – by God they’d been lucky! And every inch of the way to Corunna too, if truth be known. Colonel Reynell had said they were writing a new annal of war, but it had not felt like it at the time; not at any rate one that would be held up as worthy. There had been nothing heroic in the scene that Christmas Day as they left Sahagun. Hervey even shivered at the remembrance of it. Save, perhaps, that while the divisions of red were marching away from the town, Lord Paget and his cavalry were marching in the other direction, towards the French. But whether away or towards, the icy rain lashed them, the winds and snow froze them, and the roads were so churned they exhausted man and horse alike. It was the same every step of the way to Corunna, worse by far than anything he had seen since – worse than the downpour and the mud before Waterloo, worse than the freezing wastes of Canada, worse than the jungles of Burma. The memory appalled him still. And, yes, they had been lucky.

  Soult would still be expecting an attack, Paget had reckoned. It was why Debelle had been bolted from Sahagun, was it not? Especially since Soult must imagine Sir John Moore to be in ignorance of the calamity about to befall him at the hands of L’Empereur marching north. Yes, Paget reckoned that Soult was undoubtedly of a mind that Moore was moving against him; in which case, Soult would surely be trying to secure the emperor’s design by drawing Moore on to him at Carrion, all unknowing? So now he, Lord Paget, marched towards Soult, obliging him it seemed, while the bulk of Moore’s army marched away. It would only take a few cavalry pressing the outposts vigorously to convince the marshal in his expectations. But without doubt he thereby put his own head, at least, into the lion’s cage! He must have a care to remove it quickly, and make tracks, when once the beast realized it had been duped.


  Mud – and freezing mud at that. Two men in A Troop were so frostbitten after picket the morning Sir John Moore’s redcoats marched away from Sahagun that the surgeon feared he could not save their toes. A good many bags were thrown off the regimental cart to make space for them that Christmas morning. Trumpeter Lee’s wife died from the cold in the early hours, or so the surgeon pronounced, for she had been too sick to leave with the others. Lee sounded ‘last post’ by the cairn that he and the other trumpeters built for her.

  But then the rain stopped, the clouds parted, and the midday sun, even in solstitio brumali, gave a little balm to the face, all else being swaddled or leather-clad.

  Christmas Day: any regiment worth its salt would make some effort at a festive air, if only tongue-in-cheek. When A Troop had ridden past the Fifteenth’s outlying pickets on their way to probe Soult’s, they found a lemon tree decorated with lights and oranges, and a great iron pot over a fire from which steaming punch was dispensed to any who passed. The casks of wine and carboys of rum piled close by, presents of a fleeing commissary, suggested that none of Paget’s men need go without.

  But that night Hervey and the rest of A Troop thought they would freeze to the marrow as they picketed the road east of Sahagun. Lord Paget had turned his little force about just outside Carrion, and retraced his steps in the early hours. And just as expected, Soult’s outposts had taken flight at the first appearance of the cavalry, so that A Troop did at least have the satisfaction, along with the rest of Paget’s men, of knowing that the French would be stood-to-arms waiting for Sir John Moore to attack at first light.