‘The ships failed him, I think,’ Francis suggested.
‘Nevertheless we should have assembled quickly here at Plymouth and taken those easterlies and the long summer days to make our voyage to Spain.’
This was bold talk. Francis found it extreme, for he still did not understand the Duke and counted delays and inefficiency as more the fault of careless underlings and uncertain weather than a bold pursuit of power by one man for its own sake.
But at last the waiting ships were filled; the navy vessels acted as escorts to the merchant fleet and the whole sailed out to sea without serious mishap. The ten thousand recruits, without any real training, without proper equipment, deficient in arms, short of food and water, began to move down the Cornish coast, crossed to the French side from the Lizard, and having cleared the dangerous Isle of Ushant passed out into the Atlantic.
Francis, in common with most of the men of his troop, spent the first two days in the agony of acute seasickness. The common soldiers suffered their misery below decks in an ever-increasing shambles of filth, weakness and lost morale. The ship’s crew were ordered to attend them, but found the task impossible, besides considering it an imposition.
The officers fared better in their quarters in the poop, but Francis had to share a cabin with two other young ensigns, whose condition was worse than his own. This encouraged him to find his sea legs if only to get away from their groans and vomitings. So on the morning of the third day he staggered out into the fresh air, clutched the rail and stared about him.
The sea was everywhere, the horizon a perfect circle about the ship. A mild north-easterly breeze filled the sails, driving the broad vessel over the waves before it in an easy, but perpetual motion. But quietly. None of the tearing, slapping sounds of the last miserable forty-eight hours. No high screaming of the wind in the rigging. No jerking, fearful heaving as they went about at the end of long, unprofitable tacks in the increasingly high waves as they moved out into the great ocean.
Francis turned his head away, while keeping one hand on the rail to steady himself. He saw Lieutenant Felton walking firmly towards him across the deck and envied the man’s easy confident motion.
‘I congratulate you,’ the lieutenant said. ‘You are the first to make the deck. The ship’s master, Captain Trodd, has observed you. He invites you to his table.’
Francis shuddered. Though his inside felt completely hollow the thought of filling it and the certain consequences of such action, were frightful to him.
‘Best thing you could do,’ Felton said, looking with compassion at the white face and trembling limbs of the boy at the rail. ‘Take my arm, lad. A pint of broth inside you will soon put stiffening into those legs of yours.’
‘I thank you, sir,’ Francis said with an attempt at a polite bow that nearly sent him sprawling. ‘But I must learn to keep my footing on this infernal seesaw.’
And he stepped out, sheer will-power keeping him upright, until he reached Captain Trodd’s cabin and almost fell into the chair a sailor held for him.
Lieutenant Felton was right. The bowl of broth was not nauseating, but heavenly nectar. Though he sat waiting for the inevitable reaction while the ship’s master explained their position and showed him a chart of their course and destination, nothing happened. In fact he grew stronger every minute, until he rose to excuse himself, saying he must find his commanding officer to discover his duty and set about performing it.
‘A likely youngster,’ the captain said. ‘Pity he be employed to fight the Spaniards. There’s little help coming to him from the scum in our holds.’
Privately he was determined not to risk his ship, Forager, further than he was obliged. He had visited Cadiz harbour more than once with a cargo of merchandise. It seemed to him the present expedition was both ill-conceived and dangerously ill-planned. He was not alone among the merchant ship sailing-masters to think on these lines.
The voyage continued with a monotony only broken by one day and night of storm, as it seemed to Francis, but of moderate gale, the sailors told him. At any rate he was forbidden the deck and though he did not suffer any return of seasickness he was flung against the corner of his bunk as he tried to crawl into it. When he complained the next morning of his very extensive bruises, he was laughed at as a persistent landlubber, who should be thankful he had not broken any bones.
This sent him to find the senior officers, who wore grave faces.
‘If last night’s gale be moderate,’ one said, ‘then God defend us from any more severe. We have lost two men overboard –’
‘We were confined to cabins!’ Francis exclaimed.
‘They forced their way up, saying they could not breathe,’ went on the officer, with a frown in the boy’s direction. ‘They had not been up five minutes, I am told, when a lurch of the ship sent them rolling into the scuppers and at the next lurch a wave took them over the side. There was no hope of rescue. They were not seen again.’
Lieutenant Felton said, ‘They disobeyed orders because they were both sick men. There are many such with agues and wasting diseases and other ancient maladies that have gone unattended all their miserable lives.’
‘Then we need not lament too strongly for their quick release from their sufferings,’ the chief officer said, testily. ‘But I think you exaggerate, Lieutenant, as usual.’
‘And I think I speak the plain truth, sir,’ Felton answered, his face darkening in anger. ‘Would you that I bring them before you?’
‘Expose us to their contagions? No, sir, not until we can have them up for review on a steady deck in fine sunshine with a breeze blowing from us to them.’
This called forth laughter from all but Felton and young Francis, who followed the lieutenant as the latter left the mess cabin where they had all gathered.
‘Go back!’ Felton ordered. ‘I am on my way to do what I can for the poor devils. Go back lest you catch their ills.’
‘They are my men too, sir, since I serve under you,’ Francis said steadily. ‘But what can we do for them?’
‘Nothing, I fear. But we must discover it for ourselves, since our leader will not lead.’
Francis did nearly turn away, for he suspected that this bitterness from Felton stemmed more from his usual attitude of dissent and criticism than from any true concern for the wretched creatures pent up below.
But as he thought of them and remembered his own early sufferings on the voyage he changed his mind and continued to follow the lieutenant. The sailors needed some persuading to allow them access to the bowels of the ship and at once fastened down the hatch they had reluctantly lifted to admit them.
The conditions below were appalling. There had been filth and squalor before the gale, only partially cleared up in the few days of peaceful sailing. The gale had brought to light fresh hidden areas of ordure, decayed abandoned food, torn rags of soaked clothing, the remains of straw mattresses caked with old vomit, dried urine and faeces. Worst of all, adding to the general stench, was the recognisable scent of death, three corpses laid together in a row, three skeleton faces, skin shrunk to the bone, lips drawn back in their dying agony.
‘When?’ demanded Lieutenant Felton in a voice of grief and fury.
All the heads turned to him in apathy, only one spoke.
‘We have no reckoning of time, but when they bring us food,’ he said. A small man, lean but wiry, nearly old, very experienced. ‘Three times, I think, but I may have slept.’
‘Why did you not say there had been deaths?’
‘Death is a familiar visitor where I come from, master. We are not overly surprised to see Him.’
He turned back to his companions, to throw the dice with which they were playing to pass the time. Francis understood, with horror, that these appalling conditions were something familiar, unremarkable, causing neither sorrow nor revulsion. While he had been filled with disgust at his own weakness, these others, whom he was about to lead, so he thought, in battle, were quite prepared to sit on a d
ung heap with decaying corpses beside them and neither think nor feel anything.
Later that day, when the wind had died to a whisper and the sun came out, the confined wretches were ordered up on deck, as the commanding officer had planned. Francis was chagrined when he saw the fellow’s complacency, but compelled to admire the way he had his commands instantly obeyed.
Decent burial was given to the three dead men. A close inspection of the troops drawn up in wavering lines produced two men who fell down in their places and were taken – up dying, and a score who were set aside for treatment or for care alone, if their condition was beyond aid.
‘We have now reached that corner of Spain called Finisterre,’ the officer roared. ‘We go south and if conditions hold as they usually do in these parts we should have beam winds all the way to our objective and increasing warmth to cheer our bones. You will see no land, for our approach must not be noticed by the enemy. But we may look before many days to join the rest of our convoy, for we must get together at the southern tip of Portugal to exchange news and plans for the attack. So get you below and clean your foul quarters and your fouler persons. Any laggard will be brought to me and prescribed ten strokes of the cat to wake him from his dream of idleness. Disperse!’
Francis, set aside to attend the chronic sick, made places for them on deck sheltered from the sun by a canvas awning. Some were too ill to care, but others did improve, a few rapidly, for their particular ailment was less a disease of the organs than a despairing attitude of mind. In Francis’s cheerful, sturdy presence they lost some of their fear. His hidden sorrows and uncertainties matched their open ones, bringing them together silently without the embarrassment of any declared defails.
Those who in time decided they were quite restored formed themselves under Francis to attend the others and were later allowed, when he pleaded for them, to go for military training to Lieutenant Felton, while still considering themselves Francis ‘s men.
Captain Trodd, watchful of all that went on in Forager, noted the worth of this particular band. He also made plans for the disposal of the remaining invalids. Some, as all saw, were marked for imminent death, others were unlikely to survive any ordinary martial exercise, far less a campaign. He was determined to have no weaklings from his ship for the return. He had never considered the possibility of Forager, not returning at all, nor did he now.
But the campaign was doomed from the start. The merchant ships, engaged to carry soldiers and put them ashore in Cadiz harbour, performed their duty faithfully for the most part, but in such a way that the troops were in great disorder when they found themselves ashore. They never truly recovered from it.
At the beginning the English fleet had a chance to secure a major victory, for they found a number of Spanish warships in the bay and could well have sunk or captured them. But though word went round from the English admiral how the auxiliaries should act to these ends, their cowardice became apparent, for the merchant ships at once went about and hurried in an opposite direction to St Mary Port, to hang about in the vicinity there until the intended prey, having learned what was brewing, made dash for the narrow opening by Fort Puntal into Cadiz harbour, reaching complete safety without a single shot being fired on either side.
This was followed by an attempt on the part of the English Navy to attack Fort Puntal at the base of the narrow spit of land that ended in the garrisoned town of Cadiz itself. But the merchant ships, which had summoned up enough courage to cross the bay, again quailed before the promise of violent action. They sheltered behind the warships and when ordered to bombard the fort did so in such a wild, haphazard manner that most of their shots were totally wide of the mark and their only hits were made upon the navy in the van.
The officers whom Francis served were furious, but the ship’s master, who had indeed not fled the action, but was determined he would in no circumstances hazard his ship, said with a reasonable air, ‘Look you, sirs, I was engaged to carry you and your men to this port of Cadiz, which I have done faithfully and in good time, seeing I have shorter sail and heavier bulk than the King’s Navy. I will put ye all on shore when the order comes and I will stand to for any rescue and evacuation that follows the venture. But I was not engaged to fight my vessel, nor will I. And that’s the end and sum of it.’
There was no moving him to any other course, but he did fulfil the terms of that forced agreement made in England. When Fort Puntal fell to the troops on board the warships, a picked lot of regulars trained in the Dutch wars, Francis found himself upon dry land again, assembling to march on the town of Cadiz at the southern tip of the bay.
Again there was really no hope of success, for sufficient warning had been given of the foreign fleet in the bay and a number of the garrison of Fort Puntal had escaped to carry the news of the invasion to Cadiz, some fifteen miles away, where instant preparations were made to man fortifications and repel the attack.
Freed at last from the dread holds of the ships the ruffian army was drunk with joy in the fresh air and sun. And soon drunk with a more direct and potent joy. For though the surrounding countryside was bare of crops, fruits or any other edible provision, there was wine enough in the homesteads and villages to addle the wits of any who searched for food and was not kept under too strict a discipline to break away from the ranks.
Francis, given charge of a company of twenty men, struggled to preserve order among them, which lasted for less than an hour when the order came to advance. By that time the men had begun to complain, at first bitterly but with respect, then loud and insistent.
‘We are all in like case,’ Francis told them, but uneasily for he had a small pack on his back which Felton had told him to keep there or he would starve.
‘We’ve had no food since yesterday at noon!’ one man shouted boldly. ‘Nor sleep either with the comings and goings, the firing and yelling and burning all night!’
‘We cannot march, naked as we are!’ cried another, whose bare feet were already streaked with blood where they had been torn by the sharp stones on the track.
It was all true, Francis thought, desperately trying to think of some way to help these useless recruits. They must be kept alive at least, so he ordered a halt under a couple of widebranched trees, took off his pack, which in any case was a burden sapping his own strength in that burning sun, and after doling out fragments of food in fair shares to his men, went forward to find help of any kind that might be available. He had noticed from a small dry hill they had climbed a short while before a white, balconied house standing not far off from where he had halted his men.
The people of the house were all inside, the women cowering in terror, praying aloud, the men with muskets guarding the balcony and upper windows, which were shuttered. There were no windows at ground-floor level, an empty yard, but an unlocked gate.
Francis, sword in hand, raised it in salute and bowed. He could not speak the language but he made it plain by gestures that he had a troop of men with him who could burn the house and all within it. He asked for food, for clothing, for footgear.
Frightened head-shaking was all he got for his elaborate mimes. But when he persisted, and when the men on the balcony saw the wild appearance of the troop who crept slowly forward from the shade of the trees, they began speaking together all at once, at the same time retreating into the house.
Francis held his men with promises, though the boldest wanted to climb up the balcony and force an entrance. He made them take up proper positions behind him. He put up his sword and drawing the pistol at his waist, primed it in readiness.
‘If they open only to fire on us then drop down, return the fire and spring up to charge,’ he ordered, knowing that among the twenty only five had been issued firearms and the rest sabres.
But the door of the house was opened slowly by unseen hands and a great vat of unbottled wine was pushed out. The doors closed on the silent house and the silent, thirsty, sun-scorched men waited. Francis, unnerved by such a surprising answer to
his requests stood rooted, without an idea how to proceed.
Thirst won; against discipline, almost negligible, against threat of danger, now apparently removed. With cries of greedy pleasure the men broke ranks and dashed forward. They surrounded the vat. Those that had bowls filled them. Those that had caps scooped up enough to pour down their throats. Others used their hands or even put down their faces and sucked wine like a horse at a water trough. They pushed and pulled to find a place at the rim, they snarled, swore, kicked and struck to find a place to drink.
‘Have done!’ Francis yelled, over and over again. ‘Do you not see their plan? To get you all drunk and cut your throats when you be incapable! Have done, have done, villains, brutes, beasts, senseless oafs!’
He fought his own way to the vat, pistol in one hand, naked sword in the other, beating at the bent-over backs with the flat of it. He drove off the drinkers and then with a mighty heave, weapons still in hand, he pushed the vat over, so that the wine ran out to disappear between the stones of the courtyard.
A heavy groan met this action, followed by a menacing roar of anger. Francis knew what he had already expected, that his life was now in immediate danger.
‘Forward, my men, to Cadiz!’ he shouted. ‘Form your ranks! March! I cover your rear. Forward, I say!’
He did not think he would be obeyed. But the few who had drunk first and now felt refreshed, with their spirits rising, the very few who had had the sense to understand his earlier warning, forgave him for the destruction of that dangerous liquor and turned to obey. The rest fell into line and Francis, dazed by the success of his action, put up his sword, but keeping his pistol in hand, brought up the rear, determined to stay there until he joined the main stream of the army, from which he had become separated, as had many other units. Together they would go forward to the attack on Cadiz.
But no attack was made. The rabble army was too slow, too ill-equipped, too feeble in body and mind and spirit. The generals and captains judged an attack impossible. Cadiz could not be taken.
To Serve a Queen Page 8