Cheering started, no doubt encouraged by the infantry officer in charge of clearing the path. Hanley amused himself by joining in. A good twenty minutes had gone by the time the generals had passed. He had seen no more sign of Langer so he went on his way.
A few hours earlier, Jenny was surprised by someone else from her past. Loud banging on the door interrupted her as she prepared a simple meal for herself. With the cooks gone, she rather enjoyed less sauce and garlic than was the colonel’s taste, and she still felt a simple joy in having plenty of good food to eat. Earlier today she had bought a cut of ham and now began to boil it with some potatoes.
Bertrand was a kind and generous man, but even so she hoped that he was not back early for she was enjoying the days of freedom. Seeing Hanley had helped her to realise that she was free of the drudgery of marching with a regiment and sleeping out in the mud.
The banging redoubled in force. Halfway to the door she froze, thinking of Hanley’s warning about the Spaniard.
‘Who is there?’ she asked in French.
‘A friend,’ came a voice that was too faint to recognise.
Jenny wished that there was a window to open in the door. There was no other way to leave the rooms apart from through one of the windows, and it was a long drop. She realised that she was still holding a kitchen knife, and squeezed the handle tightly. The bolt was always stiff, and she was afraid for a moment that she would have to put down the knife and use both hands to slide it back, until a little jerk to the side shifted it. Only the catch remained, and Jenny lifted that slowly, keeping the knife down low and ready in her right hand.
The door slammed back, knocking her into the room, and a big man barged through. One gloved hand grabbed her wrist so tightly that it hurt, while the other grabbed her throat and lifted so that she had to stand on her toes.
‘What’s this as a welcome, Jenny?’ said Dalmas, twisting her wrist so that she cried out and dropped the knife. He forced her a few more steps into the room, then kicked back with his heel to slam the door shut.
‘Surprised to see me?’ he said, and then let her go so that she staggered for balance.
‘No. Men always come back.’ She spoke as defiantly as she was able.
‘Same old Jenny, ready to defy the world.’ The cuirassier captain smiled. At the start of last year his men had found this English girl, being looked after by an old peasant woman as she barely recovered from fever and recent childbirth. By the time Dalmas saw her she was just well enough to speak, her skin still yellow and waxy, and yet she had hidden her fear, joking with and snapping at him as if she were his equal. He liked her from the beginning.
Dalmas had just been beaten for the first time in his career and he did not like that. It made him angry, and also eager to learn about the British so that he would win next time. One way to do that was to understand them, and that meant first learning the language. He had taken Jenny with him, feeding her, getting her clean clothes. Slowly and with difficulty, she taught him English while he taught her French. When Jenny was well enough recovered, Dalmas also took her into his bed, and had to admit that even then he was not the only one doing the teaching. For over a month he was posted to Madrid and kept her there. Then they had gone their separate ways when he returned to the army and she went to work in one of the city’s better brothels.
‘Bertrand is boasting all the time of his mistress, and something sounded so familiar that I thought it must be you.’
‘He looks happy, does he?’
‘In truth, he looks exhausted.’ Dalmas smiled. He had taken off his helmet, and now unfastened his cloak to show his blue tunic underneath. ‘However, that may not be entirely the result of your skills, my dear. Like all the other engineers, he now has to deal with the mud as well as the Spanish.’
‘Do you think he’d like the thought of you coming visiting?’ Jenny asked.
‘I can be very discreet. But first, tell me what you are going to give me to eat.’ When he heard the answer, Dalmas winced at such Anglo-Saxon savagery. ‘I should have taught you more than simply how to speak a civilised tongue.’
In answer to that Jenny stuck hers out at him.
‘Oh, Jenny, I have missed you a good deal. But now I think you can help me.’
‘Lonely, are we?’
‘Busy actually. I am sent here to aid a Spanish spy in finding an English spy. And I think that you can help me.’ The hardness had returned to his voice. ‘It would be better if you do.’
17
Sergeant Rodriguez patted the man on the shoulder. Their company was providing sentries for the night down in the earthworks forming the glacis and this man had been the first one to hear. Pringle strained to listen. At first there was nothing, and then he caught the rhythmic scraping drifting down from the high ground ahead of them.
‘They’re digging,’ Williams whispered beside him. ‘Up there on the Great Teson.’
Pringle knew he was right. ‘And they would not be doing it in the dark unless it was something we wouldn’t like.’
He went straight to Colonel Camarga of the Avila Regiment, who had charge of the outposts this night. The colonel came and listened, and more reports were coming in so that there could be no doubt. The governor was roused. At 3.30, still almost an hour and a half before dawn on 16th June, every gun that could be brought to bear at the top of the bigger hill opened fire.
Down behind the glacis it was like the rolling thunder and flame of a dreadful storm.
‘Well done, lad,’ Pringle shouted at the sentry who had first spotted the noise and then done his duty and reported it.
The Spanish guns pounded the top of the hill. They could not see their target, but they knew where the hill was and gun captains guessed at the elevation and charge. The Great Teson had always been there and most of them had stood so many hours watching from the walls that they could picture it well in their minds. The crews were still slow at loading, but this was not a job for rapid fire and so that mattered less than in a battle. They fired, and each time the cannon roared and slammed back on its trails, the gunners hauled it back halfway to make it easier to work, sponged, rammed down powder and shot, and then pulled on the ropes again to bring the muzzle fully out of the embrasure.
Each shot produced a great tongue of flame stabbing into the night and sometimes a shower of sparks from burning wadding that fluttered down. There were some stubby, short-barrelled howitzers, and these lobbed their shells up at the hill, their burning fuses leaving a bright trail as they whizzed through the night sky. Herrasti’s men also had mortars, the barrels so massive that they were not fired from a wheeled carriage, but from immensely heavy wooden frames. It took several men using specially shaped carrying staffs to lift one of their shells into the mortar, and their fuses had to be lit separately before the gunner applied his burning linstock to the quill of powder in the touch-hole that set off the main charge and sent the heavy metal sphere hurtling high up to lob down on to the enemy. So much bigger, mortar shells were even noisier and more visible as they arched through the sky, but Pringle wondered whether it would be so easy to see them when they were coming towards you. It must be very hard to guess where they would land and that would make for awful seconds not knowing if you were soon to be smashed to fragments.
The explosions of the mortar shells looked big even from this far away. They lit up the whole top of the ridgeline, and there were smaller objects flying amid the instant splashes of flame, and perhaps these were lumps of earth or the torn remains of people. From here they could not tell, and on the whole he would rather not know. All of the company had come to watch. No one could have slept through the noise, but it was more enthusiasm of the moment. Pringle watched their faces in the flickering and flaring light and sensed the excitement he felt himself. Very slowly he was learning about these men. It was still sometimes hard to know what they were thinking, but tonight it was very simple because he and Williams and Dobson and all the others had just the same thought – we
are hitting back.
‘Really is quite something to behold,’ said Williams.
Pringle chuckled at a memory. ‘I seem to remember you said something like that about Talavera!’
‘Well, that was also quite a thing to see.’
‘I’m sure His Majesty will be relieved to hear that you don’t find the war dull, Bills.’
It was not one-sided. The French had a few guns down on the plain in protected positions and these fired at the Spanish cannon. They too had had time to note the position of the embrasures on the walls, but the flame of each shot was enough to shout out the presence of a field piece and give them an aiming point. The mortars were another matter, for these fired in such a high arc that they could be hidden completely behind an earth bank or stone wall. The French could see the light from their discharge, but none was sited so carelessly that they could be seen and fired at by the enemy. As yet, the French revealed no mortars of their own and so they had to submit without answer to the heavy shells as they thumped into the ground. Ney’s gunners had some howitzers, and so they saw the fire-trails of these smaller shells coming back at the city.
‘Look out! Heads down!’ shouted Dobson in that wonderful sergeant’s voice able to carry over the worst chaos. The veteran had spotted a sputtering trail of sparks looping towards them.
Pringle saw that his men pressed themselves down, shoulders hunched against the stone reinforcement that kept the inside of the glacis steep. He saw that Williams was still standing and had simply drawn his head down as if seeking shelter from the rain, and so did the same.
Both were hit by a pattering spray of earth when the six-inch shell smacked into the front of the earth bank and exploded instantly. Pringle took off his glasses, and brushed away the dirt.
‘Everyone all right?’ he asked. No one was injured, and the men’s eyes were shining with excitement, for the near-miss had made them all feel involved in the artillery duel. Pringle was willing to bet that if he gave the order they would happily fire their muskets again and again up at the ridiculously distant hill just to make noise and be involved.
‘Mr Pringle, sir, and Mr Williams.’ Dobson was just beside them, speaking as softly as he could and yet still be heard over the thundering barrage. ‘This is not the open field, sirs, and there is no need to show off.’
‘I don’t follow, Dob,’ Williams said, and a sudden brief pause in the noise caused several of the recruits to turn and stare in puzzlement.
‘Next time, when there is a ditch to hide in, you bloody well take cover in it!’ Dobson stiffened to attention. ‘With every respect, sirs.’
‘Thank you, Sergeant Dobson,’ Pringle said.
Williams appeared unconvinced. ‘What about setting an example?’
‘What about having your giblets spread over the side of the wall?’ Dobson was respectfully belligerent, but had to wait for a particularly intense concentration of shot and shell to batter their ears and eyes. ‘This is going to go on for days. You can be lucky once or twice, but if you don’t hide you will die.’ Three big mortar shells went off in an almost perfect line on the top of the Greater Teson. ‘Think about them poor sods up there. They’ve been at it for hours, digging harder than they ever have in their lives because they know that if they don’t they’ll die once they’re spotted. It’s not about showing pluck or good discipline, it’s just you and your fellows with spade and pick trying to hack the deepest ditch you can to save you from the enemy guns.’
‘It’s called a parallel,’ Williams said a few moments later. ‘The trench they are digging is called a parallel.’ As the name suggested, a parallel was built opposite the enemy fortress and ran parallel to it. Once they had the trench, the besiegers would add battery positions and protected magazines for ammunition. Then they would start forward, digging saps out of the parallel, taking them closer to the enemy walls. These could not go straight, otherwise a single shot would run down them and slaughter everyone inside, and so the diggers or sappers went at an angle to the way they wanted, zigzagging slowly and laboriously nearer. In time there might be more parallels closer and closer to the walls, with more batteries to pound the defences at shorter and shorter distances.
‘Thank you, sir.’ Dobson kept a straight face. ‘Be glad to know that the next time I have to shovel away to make the ruddy thing.’
Williams grinned, half shouting over the noise. ‘I remember you showing me how to use a spade.’
‘God help us, you needed to be shown, sir!’
The sky was beginning to hint at dawn and for a change it looked as if it would be a dry clear day. The guns kept pounding, and when the sun rose they could see the churned soil on top of the Great Teson. The line of the French parallel was clear, spoil piled into a rampart strengthened with sacks filled with earth and tied shut and big wicker gabions filled with more spoil. Sometimes these were hit and shattered, debris flying high. As yet the trench could not have been more than a few feet deep, and the French must have crouched as they worked, yet some were still maimed and died. Later in the morning Pringle borrowed Williams’ telescope and watched for a while from the wall near the cathedral. Once he saw a man clearly, raising a pick over his shoulders as he worked in the ditch, and then a shot puffed up earth a little short of the parallel, skimming up and shattering the French soldier’s head.
Herrasti kept the guns firing all day, for this was the time when the workers were most vulnerable. Some balls and shells killed or maimed, and others smashed the rampart and so delayed the time when the parallel would be completed and offer them good protection. The governor sent out a sally, and if it was quickly driven off then it added to the sense of striking back. A proclamation was made announcing that the English would soon be coming to drive the French away. Pringle and the other redcoats were cheered more than usual when they went through the streets.
On the following days the guns thundered on in a slower, steadier pounding of the French siege works. Each morning, as early as their duties permitted, Pringle and Williams went up to the walls on their own, and from one of the little turrets too small to mount a gun they stared at the enemy works and tried to spot the changes. The pace was slow.
‘I remember my father talking about battles at sea,’ said Pringle once, as he watched a tiny lizard standing stock still on the top of the battlement, obviously convinced that this made it invisible. He lost his train of thought, wondering how all this seemed to animals and why they did not all have the sense to go somewhere less dangerous. The French skirmishers still sniped at the walls, although periodic sallies were keeping them back, and the governor had mounted more guns down in the earthworks protecting the ditch to contest that area. Frequent raids from the gardens and Convent of Santa Cruz had also prompted the enemy to start digging another ditch facing this threat.
‘We are quite a long way from the sea.’ Williams broke the news as gently as possible.
‘Damned good thing too! My apologies, my dear fellow, I wandered off for a moment. No, it was simply that the thing that most puzzled me as a boy was the time everything took. Father would speak of sighting the French, and so they would beat to quarters and do all sorts of other splendidly nautical things, but then the captain would order a hot breakfast served to everyone while they waited.’
‘Very civilised, the Navy.’
‘Weevils in the food give the place a certain distinction, I suppose. But it all seemed to happen so slowly. They’d spend hours watching each other, working for wind, and sometimes it was even days before they closed and fought. Didn’t ever think I’d be part of something even slower.’
‘They’ve started saps,’ said Williams after a few minutes staring through his glass. ‘Two of them.’
‘May I see?’
‘Look for where most of the shot is striking.’ The Spanish gunners must have already seen the same thing and were aiming at the heads of the trenches as they were dug. The French would have put gabions there as the men struggled to deepen and improve th
e ditch behind, but a clear strike would knock these down and plunge into the knot of workmen as they toiled.
The next day, Pringle was unable to join Williams on the walls until after he had attended a meeting summoned by the governor. As they climbed up into the little turret, Billy had still not worked out how to tell his friend the sickening news, and so for a while he delayed and they just scanned the siege works.
‘Saps are closer,’ Williams noted quickly.
A musket ball chipped the stonework where the lizard had posed the day before and Pringle was relieved that the little chap was not in evidence today. He hoped he was all right.
‘They’re closer too,’ the Welshman added, referring to the French skirmishers.
‘The governor found out from a prisoner that they are a special battalion, the chasseurs de siège, formed from the pick of the voltigeur companies.’ Pringle passed on the information flatly.
‘That’s good. Be a shame to be shot by someone who isn’t a good soldier.’
Pringle sometimes forgot how much time Williams had spent around Dobson. He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve got some bad news, Bills,’ he said.
Williams took his eye from the glass and looked at his friend.
‘Who?’ he asked, and clearly expected to hear that one of their men had fallen.
‘Not that. It’s just that I’m leaving.’
‘That sounds like good news,’ Williams said, and obviously meant it.
‘Only me,’ Billy spoke bitterly. ‘Not you, not Dobson, Murphy and Rose, or our boys. Just me.’
‘Still good news. I was not intending to say anything, but your snoring lately …’ Williams was grinning. They had shared a room since they arrived in Ciudad Rodrigo, apart from the nights when Pringle had gone to visit his ‘friend’, but that had only happened once in the last week.
‘The governor has written to Lord Wellington and wants to send a British officer to report on the seriousness of the situation. I said that he should send you, but he insisted that a captain would carry more weight.’
All in Scarlet Uniform (Napoleonic War 4) Page 18