‘No, thankfully.’ Williams laughed and then coughed as dust from the road caught in his throat. ‘The Doña Margarita returned from Mexico last year after many years in the country,’ he continued after he had recovered. ‘So we are her American servants. What Frenchman is likely to recognise the differences of speech?’
‘Yes, sir, very good, sir,’ replied Dobson, a master of the old soldier’s art of expressing contemptuous disbelief while avoiding punishment. ‘And do you reckon any Crapaud with eyes in his head won’t spot himself as a soldier?’ The veteran jabbed his thumb towards Ramón, the former hussar who drove the carriage. ‘Or us for that matter?’ Dobson had replaced his shako with a brown felt hat in the broad-brimmed, Spanish style. Their muskets, equipment and Williams’ and Wickham’s swords were hidden in a box under the carriage. A wide-mouthed blunderbuss was clipped to a notched bar on the roof within Dobson’s easy reach and another lay beside the driver. Williams and Dobson each had a heavy horse pistol tucked through their belts, and the officer had another to hand.
‘No law against being an old soldier,’ said Williams blithely, although without much conviction. It was true, there was simply something about the way a soldier stood that got into the blood.
‘No law against getting killed either, sir. That’s if the buggers don’t try to recruit us.’
‘Good promotion prospects in the French Army,’ Williams grinned. ‘No flogging either.’
‘Too much garlic in the food.’
‘Then let us hope that we do not meet them.’ If he had permitted himself to believe in superstition, Williams would have regretted saying that thought aloud as making it inevitable that it would come true.
An hour before sunset half a dozen chasseurs in green jackets and dust-covered shakos stood their horses on the road ahead of them. Two more closed in on the carriage from each side. Such a fine vehicle was a rare sight. Even more unusual were the six well-matched grey horses drawing the coach. Only the very wealthy could afford horses rather than mules.
Ramón halted the team impeccably, looped the reins over a hook and raised his hands. Williams and Dobson did the same. The grey-haired sergeant in charge of the piquet had a scar running from his right ear to his mouth, gold rings in his ears and looked capable of any villainy.
Wickham leaned out of the window, and in French so rapid that Williams struggled to follow introduced himself as Father O’Hara, priest of the daughter-in-law of the Conde de Madrigal de las Altas Torres, and demanded that they be escorted to his superior officer.
‘He’s plausible, I’ll give him that,’ whispered Dobson, who grasped the sense if not the precise meaning of the little speech.
The sergeant was not a man to take unnecessary responsibility if there was an officer close enough to take any blame. Four chasseurs took them down a side track to a walled farm where the main body of the chasseur company was settling for the night. A lieutenant, whose furious desire to grow a bushier moustache continued to be frustrated, at first looked with suspicion at the priest, and at Dobson and Williams with downright hostility.
‘They’re Americans,’ said Wickham, as if that explained everything. ‘Ugly, aren’t they, although of course all God’s children.’
The lieutenant laughed, and began to warm to the charming priest, and was suitably impressed when he saw the pass signed by King Joseph. When the carriage door was opened again and he was presented to the Doña Margarita, he bowed low. She gave him a smile which won his heart. Her mantilla had slipped back a little to show her round, pretty face and the coils of her long black hair fastened up in braids. Although the black dress of mourning was modest, it nevertheless betrayed the line of a full bosom.
Her French was also excellent and completed her overwhelming conquest of the light cavalry officer’s admiration. She spoke lightly of the savages of the new world, and presented him with a little leather pouch, decorated with beadwork.
‘The women of the tribes make them for the bravest warriors to carry their musket balls,’ she explained.
After twenty minutes they left, and were escorted by a dozen chasseurs until they reached the inn two leagues away.
‘That lady’s a cool one,’ said Dobson as the carriage sped along at a good trot. ‘Pretty too.’
‘And you a newly married man!’ joked Williams, who suspected that the veteran was right, although he had yet to enjoy a very clear view of La Doña Margarita. At least her condition ought to prevent any misbehaviour by Wickham.
‘Don’t mean you stop looking.’ Dobson’s wife of many years had died at Christmas, crushed underneath the wheels of a wagon during the retreat. For a while the veteran had been shattered. Williams did not see it, but Hanley and Pringle had a haunted look when they told him of what had happened. Yet he recovered, and in the army way had taken a new bride when they were on board ship sailing away from Spain. The new Mrs Dobson was herself the widow of a sergeant, and a very religious and proper woman. It was an unlikely combination, and yet they seemed happy. The veteran had quit drinking on his new wife’s insistence. In the past, he had been repeatedly promoted and broken for drunkenness. Pringle had risked raising him to corporal immediately, and Williams suspected that sergeant’s rank would soon follow. No man was more capable when sober.
‘No, she’s a good lass.’ Williams assumed Dobson still meant the Spanish aristocrat. ‘Wouldn’t trust her an inch,’ he added. ‘Nor our major, of course, or them other two that sent us off.’
‘I see no reason to doubt Colonel D’Urban as anything other than a gallant officer,’ said the shocked Williams.
‘They can be the worst, sir.’ The veteran laughed. ‘But if this cart is carrying only news then I’m a Dutchman. Look how low it hangs on the springs.’
Williams did not know what to say or think, but experience taught him that the old soldier’s suspicions were usually sound.
Dobson looked around at the French cavalrymen riding as escort. He glanced at Williams and then smiled happily. ‘Still, I will say it makes a change from marching!’
5
Hanley had never seen so much death. For as far as he could see in any direction there were bodies. Last May he had fled the massacre in Madrid. In August he fought at Roliça and Vimeiro and had been spattered with the blood, brains and flesh of men ripped to pieces by cannonballs. During the winter’s retreat he had seen the frozen corpses lying in the snow, many with trickles of wine still dribbling from their lips from when they had drunk themselves senseless and let the cold claim them.
He had seen nothing on this scale.
‘There’s Jacques,’ said a lean-faced hussar with pigtails on either side of his forehead and his dirty brown hair tied back with a black ribbon. ‘He’ll not have to worry about finding wine any more.’ Four troopers in the brown and sky blue of the Chamborant Hussars escorted the thirty prisoners back across the plains of Medellín. A man in the same uniform lay stretched on the ground with a great stain of almost black blood on his chest. His eyes stared blankly up at the evening sky.
The vultures were the worst. Scruffy, thin, and more grey than black, they had come from nowhere and now there seemed to be at least one for every corpse. He had never seen so many birds in one place.
A shot rang out as a French infantryman put a ball into the head of a Spaniard whose innards were spilled on the ground by a great slash across his stomach. The man had been moaning softly, and Hanley thought he could see scars on the pinkish intestines where a vulture had pecked and ripped. The Frenchman jabbed at the bird with his bayonet and screamed in rage. The vulture flapped its wings and hopped back a few paces until the man lost interest. The birds were already getting fat. Soon they would be fatter. Half an hour ago a sudden musket shot sent clouds of the carrion fowl into the air. They were no longer so easily frightened.
‘Poor Robert. Well, he won’t have to flog that dog of a horse any more.’ They were passing another man in brown and blue, this one with half his face carried away. His hors
e stood dutifully beside him, cropping the thin grass as if nothing had happened.
‘Take the reins and lead him off,’ ordered the corporal of the hussars.
They passed other Frenchmen. ‘Looks like Philippe has had his last woman.’
There were far, far more Spanish. The dead lay in every posture. Hanley passed men whose faces remained fixed in a rictus of appalling horror, cut down as they fled. Others lay in clusters, shot or hacked down as they stood in a knot and fought to the end. They passed a battery, whose crews had all died around their four guns. There were the shattered corpses of French infantrymen in a swathe of blue ahead of the position to testify to their stubbornness. French gunners were lifting the dead off barrels and carriages, as they prepared to tow the trophies away.
Blades had done most of the work. Half the prisoners marching with him had wounds to the head and shoulders from the French sabres. So had most of the dead. Severed hands and arms were dotted over the ground. So were heads. They passed half a dozen neatly decapitated men whose necks had been sliced evenly through above the collar.
‘That’ll be Sergeant Blanchard of the Tenth Chasseurs,’ said the lean-faced hussar in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Saw him do the same to the Russians at Friedland. He’s a wicked bastard.’
Another trooper looked down approvingly. ‘Knows how to use a sabre, though.’
‘Use the point, lads, not the edge,’ said the corporal out of habit. ‘Always the point.’
They moved on, and still there were more corpses in white, brown, grey and blue coats. In Portugal the peasants and the camp followers had stripped the dead within hours. This did not seem to be happening here, and Hanley wondered whether there were simply too many dead or whether the nearest villagers were too terrified to scavenge. Most of the corpses had their pockets turned out. Papers wafted on the air as the breeze scattered precious letters from mothers, and from wives who were now widows, but did not know it.
Hanley felt alone. There were no officers with the group and the Spanish soldiers treated the foreigner with suspicion. They said little to each other, and nothing to him. It made it worse that as an officer he was permitted to keep his sword according to the usual conventions of war. The Spanish soldiers were unsure which side this tall man was on, with his ragged and unfamiliar uniform.
The hussars took them to a much larger group of two hundred or so prisoners, and left them for the infantry to escort. They waited while other parties were brought in. Hanley tried to talk to the dozen or so officers in charge of the captives, but none of the Spaniards had seen him before.
‘Long live Napoleon and his invincible troops!’ More than half of the prisoners raised the shout when a French colonel trotted past with his escort of a few dragoons. None of the officers joined in the cry, and several looked bitter. The captives were afraid, standing within sight of thousands of dead or dying men dressed in uniforms like their own. They did not know what fate lay in store and were pathetically eager to please their captors.
There were far more dead than prisoners, for in the first hour the French had not been inclined to accept surrenders. Their doctors did their best to help the wounded, but their own men came first and there were not enough surgeons to cope. Sporadic shots continued to echo across the fields as the suffering were killed quickly. Better that than wait for the vultures.
‘I am an English officer. My name is Lieutenant Hanley.’ A new party of prisoners straggled in to join the main group and Hanley tried to talk to a man in a light blue coat with a yellow front and the gold epaulettes of an officer.
‘My name is O’Donnell and I’m the Pope,’ was all the reply he got before the man barged past him. The man had spoken in Spanish and showed no trace of being Irish.
Hanley needed to talk. He was not a man who thrived on solitude, unlike Williams, who seemed to be quite content in a private world of silence when none of his close friends was near. Hanley wished the ensign were here, and then told himself that such a desire was selfish since that would mean that his friend would be a prisoner as well. Pringle would have cheered him up. Billy was always lively company, apart from those occasions when he was paying the price of a night’s drinking that was heavy even by his standards.
The English officer stood on the edge of the great huddle of prisoners, and wondered whether he should try to speak to one of the French guards. The folly of confirming the Spaniards’ suspicion of him was all that stopped him, and then the guards were shouting at them to move, clubbing with the butts of their muskets at anyone who did not go quickly enough.
‘Long live Napoleon and his invincible troops!’ Another mounted officer rode past and almost all of the Spanish rank and file took up the cry.
Hanley tried to work out how he had got here, but the memories of the rout were confused. He remembered the lancers and other cavalry fleeing, and the infantry battalions collapsing as the French hussars came from their front and at the same time swept round their flank. Men panicked and fled, and some shouted out ‘Treason!’ The duke also was shouting, trying to stem the flow, but then all the horses were running back in a wild stampede.
He could remember that Wickham was there beside him, and in the press of horsemen the man’s big hunter could not speed away. Velarde disappeared. There were screams and shots all around them, the thunder of so many hoofs pounding across the fields, and the dull, wet thuds of steel sinking into flesh.
Then the press began to thin, but all was confusion, French mixed in with the Spanish and every rider galloping as fast as he could in flight or pursuit. A French hussar was ahead and to his left and he watched helplessly as the man drove the point of his curved sabre into the back of a Spanish officer in a heavily laced blue coat.
Wickham gave the chestnut its head and was streaming away, flicking up clods of earth as he went. Hanley had lost his hat and his horse stumbled, sinking down at the shoulder, but somehow he kept his balance and the beast recovered and was running again. A Spanish dragoon was galloping ahead of him, and the man turned back, aiming a pistol straight at him. There was noise and the creak of leather close behind him, and the dragoon fired, a small cloud of smoke following the flash of flint which flared the powder. The Englishman felt the wind of the ball and heard a cry behind him and glanced back to see a French trooper clutching at his arm.
His horse tightened its muscles and then sprang to clear a fallen animal, and he noticed that it was Wickham’s chestnut and that the red-coated officer was sprawled in the grass, pushing himself up on all fours.
Hanley wrenched hard on the reins. His horse protested, snapping at its bit, but turned and came to a halt.
‘Come on, old fellow!’ he called, and was amazed that his voice sounded so calm and that his choice of words was so banal. He reached out his hand to pull the major up behind him.
Wickham saw him and sprang up, running fast to grasp the offered hand.
Something hit Hanley hard from behind and he was pitched down from the saddle, the wind knocked out of him as he landed badly on his face. There was movement all round him, boots on the ground, and horses rushing. He felt rather than saw his own mount spurred away.
Hanley pushed himself up. His left arm hurt where he had fallen, and he reached with the right to feel his shoulder. There was no wound, no sign of blood, but he was sure a bruise was swelling. Turning, he saw Wickham riding hard to the rear on his horse, and beside him was Velarde in his round hat.
The Englishman winced as he turned back and it was almost too late because a French hussar was bearing down, his arm raised across his body preparing to cut.
‘I am an English officer!’ he bellowed in fluent French, and just at the last instant the man checked his blow, and the sabre merely flicked across an inch or two above Hanley’s dark hair. An officer was following, his wounded horse making it hard for him to keep up the pace. The battle flowed on past them and Hanley was a prisoner.
Hours later he was still a prisoner and feeling lonely and isolated. He gu
essed that it was his own fault. If he had not stopped for Wickham then no doubt he would have escaped. Williams would be sure to tell him that the major was a scoundrel and not worth such a sacrifice. The thought made him smile, for he knew with absolute certainty that Williams himself would have gone back, for the man was as devout a worshipper of honour as he was of God.
‘Long live Napoleon and his invincible troops!’ The cry went up again.
This time the officer was less pleased. ‘No, no,’ he cried. ‘Long live King Joseph!’ The rider was dressed in a deep blue jacket smothered in gold decoration at the cuffs, collar and down the front. Beside him was a man dressed in a brown uniform, only a little less ornate, and Hanley suspected this man was Spanish.
‘Long live Napoleon and his invincible troops!’ The cry was taken up by more of the prisoners, including a few of the officers. This time it was a challenge.
‘No, I tell you, long live His Most Catholic Majesty King Joseph!’
‘Long live hunchbacks!’ came a muffled cry from somewhere in the column.
‘You, my man.’ The rider in brown pointed to one of the nearest prisoners, a boy of scarcely sixteen who wore a military waistcoat as his only uniform. ‘I’ll give you a silver dollar if you praise your king.’ Listening to his speech, Hanley was now sure that the rider was Spanish.
‘And I’ll have you shot if you don’t!’ said the other officer, angrily twisting his brown moustache.
‘Long live King Joseph,’ said the soldier without any enthusiasm or real understanding. Until two weeks ago he had never strayed more than a few miles from a tiny village where no king ever visited.
‘Good fellow,’ said the man in brown. ‘Here is your dollar.’ He tossed the coin down.
Send Me Safely Back Again Page 6