All in Scarlet Uniform (Napoleonic War 4)

by Adrian Goldsworthy

  Pringle had heard several, but could see that young Garland was bursting to repeat his tale and so pleaded ignorance. ‘Don’t believe so.’ The commissaries were civilians tasked with arranging supplies for the army, buying where possible, and having them brought as needed and wanted by the troops. The job was difficult, its incumbents a mixture of rogues, fools and the genuinely capable, and they were rarely popular as a breed.

  ‘Well, this commissary goes to Lord Wellington to complain. “My lord, General Craufurd threatens to shoot me unless I deliver his division full supplies by sunset tonight!” “Does he, by God,” says Lord Wellington, “well, if I were you I should get him everything he wants in time, for if General Craufurd says he plans to shoot you then he is sure to do it!” ’

  Pringle laughed along with Garland, even though he had heard the story several times before. Indeed, he had more often heard it told of Picton than Craufurd and doubted that there was any truth in it.

  MacAndrews edged his horse through the cluster of riders and gestured to Pringle.

  ‘Time to go,’ he said.

  Billy nodded to Garland and followed the Scotsman back towards the almost empty Fort La Concepción. Behind them, the guns rumbled on at Ciudad Rodrigo.

  22

  Sometimes the French howitzers kept firing through the night. Shells exploded, the wickedly sharp fragments of the casing ripping through the air. Sometimes it was the blast alone that killed, and that could leave no trace at all or scorch and burn terribly.

  On the second night Williams returned to their room paler than Hanley had ever seen him before. He was staring unfocused into the far distance, and when he sat down he began to shake, beginning with his hands, until the tremors spread to his entire body. He sputtered and coughed when Hanley gave him some brandy, spitting most of it out, but whether it was the ardent spirit or his revulsion it calmed him a little.

  ‘I was looking at one of the pumps they use to fight the fires,’ he said in a quiet, hollow voice. Hanley suspected ‘looking’ meant that he and Murphy had helped drive the handle of the machine to pump water through the hose, but did not interrupt. He could tell the man needed to talk, and it was better to let him build up to it in his own time. Although he was no longer shaking, there was no colour in the Welshman’s face.

  ‘They come from Lisbon, did you know that?’

  Hanley nodded. ‘They were sent from Lisbon at the governor’s request some months ago,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh, I did not know. Gave me a shock.’ Williams held the empty glass tightly and stared at the bare wall. ‘You know my sister is expecting a child?’

  Again Hanley nodded. ‘It must be hard to be cut off from news.’

  Williams stared at the wall for five minutes, and then suddenly looked at his friend. ‘Do you remember Josephus? The Bellum Judaicum?’

  ‘Yes, been a while since I read it, though.’

  ‘One passage always haunted me. He fought against the Romans, you will remember, before joining them.’

  Williams lapsed into silence again, struggling to speak. Hanley tried to remember as much as he could of the story of a first-century war.

  ‘He spoke of catapults, firing great stones whizzing through the air. There was one story so dreadful I wished afterwards that I had never read it so that I could blot the horror from my mind.’ He dropped the glass and pressed his hands against his eyes and forehead. ‘Dear God, now I have seen it.’

  The memory snapped into place with stark horror. ‘A woman with child?’ Hanley asked, hoping to be wrong. Josephus spoke of standing beside a pregnant woman when she was struck in the belly by a stone from a catapult. The mother died instantly, her whole stomach ripped open, and her unborn child was flung a hundred yards away. Hanley closed his own eyes, as if that could somehow shut off his imagination.

  Williams was shaking again. ‘I wish I could weep,’ he said softly.

  Hanley gave his friend water this time, and then helped him to bed and covered him with blankets so that he was warm. The cot shook for a long time before Williams drifted at last into sleep.

  At first light the next morning the French guns opened up to join the howitzers, so that the noise redoubled. Two batteries on top of the Great Teson focused all their hate on a short section of the medieval wall in front of the cathedral. Sixteen- and twenty-four-pound shot struck again and again at the centuries-old stone and mortar. The aim was good, and chips became ever widening scars beneath the thick clouds of dust. Then whole stones and larger pieces tumbled down from the wall and into the ditch. The outer face broken, rubble from the inside crumbled quickly.

  The next day the French guns returned to their work, the heavy shot slamming again and again into the same stretch of wall. It was quickly clear that the wounds were mortal, as more and more of the wall collapsed into the ditch. By 2 p.m. on the second day of precise fire at this spot some forty yards of wall were down, and the rubble had slumped into the ditch so that it would be no hard thing for a man to walk up from the bottom of the ditch and into the town. He still had to reach the ditch and survive the fire of the defenders, though.

  The French artillery kept pounding the town, and all the while the saps zigzagged ever closer to the walls. Each day Williams and Hanley went to study their progress, just as the former had once done with Pringle. After a night’s sleep the Welshman seemed his usual self again, but his friend wondered what the cost of such things was in the longer run. He had always felt himself to be a cynical man, and one never swept away by rhetoric of glory and even beauty in sacrifice and warfare. Yet nothing he had imagined had come close to some of the horrors he had seen since the war began. Nor had he dreamed of the closeness he now felt to men like Williams and Pringle. There was an incongruous, almost guilty joy in such friendship, and he had to admit that he had been happier in these last years than ever before. Sometimes Hanley wondered what price his own mind and soul would pay for the things he had seen and done.

  That same day he and Williams stood at the back of a meeting of the governor’s staff and the city’s Junta, listening as a new summons from the French was read out, delivered by an officer under a flag of truce. That man waited under guard near the walls while it was decided what answer to make. The letter began with the usual pleasantries, praising the garrison’s resistance.

  ‘… but these efforts, always recognised by the French army, will destroy you if you continue your defence much longer. Although with regret, the Prince of Essling will be forced to treat you with all the rigour that the laws of war authorise. If you hoped to be aided by the English’ – more than a few heads glanced back at the two redcoats when this was read – ‘you are deceived. How could you fail to realise that if this had been their intention, under no condition would they have permitted Ciudad Rodrigo to be reduced to such a deplorable condition? Your situation can only grow worse. You have to choose between honourable capitulation and the terrible vengeance of a victorious army.’

  Some of the Junta, and a few of the officers, wanted to give in. Hanley could see it in their eyes, as much as what they said. Several were bitter at the failure of Lord Wellington to appear and drive away the French. Yet most were grimly determined to persist. The bishop gave a speech fuming against the crimes committed by the French in Spain.

  ‘His Excellency is right,’ said General Herrasti after listening to all the opinions. ‘These people have come to our land as invaders. They kill and they plunder at will.

  ‘Much of what the French prince says is true. They are breaking our defences and when they do assault it will be terrible. Soldiers who fight their way through a breach are little more than animals by the time they get into the city. I will hide none of these things from you.’ He looked around the table, staring at each face in turn, holding their gaze.

  ‘Yet we are not beaten. They have made a breach, but will not find it easy to attack. The glacis, ditch and earthworks are almost untouched. After forty-nine years in the service I know the laws of
war and my military duty. The fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo is not in a state to capitulate and no breach is formed and sufficiently complete that makes it necessary. There may come a time when surrender will be necessary to save the people of this city. It is not yet. The English may still come, and I will send a new message to Lord Wellington today. If they do not come, it will not be our fault, and I will have no man say that the garrison and citizens of Ciudad Rodrigo did not do all that honour and love of their country demanded.

  ‘If you follow my advice then we shall reject this summons.’

  They did not cheer. Instead the mood was one of cold determination, but all voted to support the general. Hanley wondered whether this was the moment when Velarde’s conspirators would have struck if he had been there to confirm their resolution. He tried to study the faces, but in truth was not even sure that the cautious men were disloyal. Perhaps the French would now realise that their agent was dead, or at least unable to fulfil his promises. Hanley had spent hours with the coded sheet and remained utterly baffled.

  The next day, General Herrasti ordered every gun that could bear to concentrate on the French saps. Williams and Hanley watched through their glasses. Experience is a ready tutor, and the Spanish gunners were now more skilled in serving their pieces. They were more accurate, if not yet able to fire with the precise aim that came only from years of training and practice. The areas around the heads of the saps were deluged with shot, and enough struck squarely, flinging down the gabions and sandbags protecting them. Williams could only imagine the carnage at the head of those trenches.

  Yet still the enemy edged closer, with trenches and batteries near the abandoned Convent of Santa Cruz, and a long sap crossing the Lesser Teson and creeping towards the ditch and glacis of the city. Their artillery switched its attention more to the suburb of San Francisco. Soon houses were burning, and the earth ramparts protecting the area were thrown down in many places. The biggest guns fired less often.

  ‘Perhaps they are running out of shot?’ suggested Hanley when Williams drew his attention to it. It surprised him that the Welshman could tell so much from the noise.

  ‘Or saving it for particular targets?’

  That night the sound of digging was closer. The French slaved each night because darkness protected them from accurate shooting by the garrison. The next morning they could see the line of the Second Parallel, almost touching the slope of the glacis.

  ‘That’s the last obstacle!’ Williams said, pointing. ‘Damn it!’ he yelled, and jerked back from the edge of the embrasure as a voltigeur’s bullet smacked into the stonework inches from his head. More carefully he moved so that they could look down from the walls into the ditch. ‘Do you see the counter-scarp?’

  ‘Possibly, if I knew what it was.’

  Williams chuckled. ‘You really will have to learn more about your profession one of these days. It is the outside face of the ditch. Here it is faced in stone and a steep, sheer drop. At the moment it would be difficult to jump down without risking broken legs and ankles. It would slow them down, if nothing else, and an attack that slows can readily falter. The French will want to tumble that wall into the ditch so that they can run down and be ready to climb the breach.’

  That night the company was on duty, providing pickets and a reserve in the covered way behind the suburb. As senior officer Hanley was naturally in charge, and went forward at nine o’clock to report to the commander of the garrison in the San Francisco convent. The French howitzers and mortars fired for two hours after darkness fell, but then the bombardment slackened. It was not wholly silent, but the break from the explosions and flashes was almost more oppressive than the noise.

  Hanley got lost in the maze of walled gardens between the suburb and the town, and now realised that he should have listened to Williams’ advice and taken a look in daylight. He walked for five minutes and then almost stumbled into a picket, prompting a flurry of raised weapons and surprised cries. Fortunately the sergeant and his five men were not nervous or over-vigilant and no one fired. Several bayonets were levelled at his chest, but the password and a ready explanation quickly confirmed that he was a friend.

  ‘Dark night, Lieutenant,’ said the sergeant, a short, cheerful fellow, whose tone hinted that officers were not safe let out on their own. ‘You have come too far to the left. Much further and it might have turned nasty. Listen for a moment.’

  Hanley let his breathing steady, did as he was told, and then gasped nervously. The French sounded as if they were just a few yards away. He could hear the spades thunking into the earth, the pickaxes striking stone, the tipping of spoil, and over it all the murmur of voices and softly spoken orders.

  ‘If you’d gone much further you would have changed armies,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘How close are they?’ Hanley found himself whispering.

  The sergeant grinned, teeth white in the soft light of the waxing moon. ‘Sounds closer than it is at night. It’s at least a long musket shot, and perhaps a bit more. They’re up on the Lesser Teson.’

  He gave Hanley directions, and almost to his own surprise the officer made no more mistakes and reached the convent, where he spoke to the commander and listened to the reports from the sentries and patrols. The French were close, but had been for days. There seemed to be nothing untoward.

  Hanley decided to retrace his steps, rather than risk getting lost again. When he came towards the picket, he called out the password and waited for the response. Nothing happened. He walked forward slowly, and again gave the watchword. Then his foot struck something. It was one of the recruits, and the whole front of the white waistcoat he wore as uniform was dark with blood. Hanley dropped to a crouch, staring around him. The smell of fresh blood was strong and rank in his nostrils.

  The sergeant and his men were all dead, the NCO still with a Frenchman’s short sword thrust upwards into his stomach and under his ribcage. Several of the others had their throats cut like the first man he had found. From up on the Lesser Teson, the noise of digging and quiet talk still wafted down.

  Hanley’s heart was pounding again. This was so sudden. After days inside a besieged town, he had become used to the sight of the French near by, but the same complacent spirit had killed the sergeant and his men. The officer looked around him, trying to pierce the darkness. Reaching down, he pulled his pistol from where it was tucked into his sash. Apart from that he had his sword.

  There was no sign of the French. Hanley thought back to the hill at Talavera when he had become caught up in a night attack. He wished that Dobson was at his side this time as well, for the veteran always seemed to know what to do.

  A Spanish howitzer fired from an emplacement set into the earthworks by the ditch. The noise and flame were startling, but at least they gave his reeling mind a better sense of his bearings. Keeping at a crouch, he half walked, half jogged back towards where he guessed the company were. The Spanish shell prompted the French to return the compliment. A mortar gave its dull boom and a great shell arched high, trailing sparks to land three or four hundred yards away near the cathedral. Even at that distance the explosion of the big shell made him flinch.

  He stopped, and as he looked around again he just made out a darker shade to the night over on his left. Hanley dropped to one knee, knowing it was easier to see anything against the sky, and wondered whether all he had seen was one of the garden walls. Then it moved, and there was the sound of shuffling feet. There were men, certainly dozens and perhaps over a hundred. No Spanish should be moving in the dark.

  Hanley eased the hammer back on his pistol, and the click as he cocked it like a brass tray dropping on an empty stage. The French – he was sure they must be French – kept going away from him. He did not worry about aiming, but simply levelled it generally in their direction. He needed to make noise and hope to surprise the French into firing and revealing themselves.

  Lieutenant Hanley pulled the trigger, snatching at it a little so that the muzzle jerked up as the
hammer slammed down and sparked. Nothing happened, and the main charge did not ignite. Hanley cursed silently, and ruefully remembered Pringle’s expression after his second pistol misfired during the duel.

  The French seemed to be going away from him, heading for the convent, and he guessed that must be the target of the attack. He was about to shout when half a dozen muskets banged.

  ‘Vive l’empereur!’ the French cheered. More muskets flamed into the night and in the flashes he could see distinct silhouettes as the French soldiers surged away from him towards the looming shape of the convent.

  Hanley ran back towards the glacis and ditch. He could hear shouts, and he bawled out the password. A deep voice called the order to hold their fire, and he recognised it as Sergeant Rodriguez’s. Without really knowing what he was doing, he had found his way back to the company.

  ‘Get down, sir!’ Dobson bellowed, and Hanley found himself responding to the NCO’s tone before the words really registered. He dropped into the cold grass.

  ‘Fire!’ Williams shouted, and the company sent a volley towards the French, the balls snapping in the air as they passed over Hanley’s head. ‘Come on, William,’ his friend called.

  Hanley pushed himself up and sprinted towards them as the recruits reloaded. Beside them another company fired, the muskets squibbing off in dribs and drabs rather than as one roaring discharge.

  No shots came back.

  ‘Must be relying on the bayonet,’ Williams said with more than a trace of admiration. He turned as a Spanish major ran up behind him. ‘Are we going forward, sir?’

  ‘No. Stay in your position. There are too many of them out there.’

  Shots came from the convent and the nearby hospice, the sound sometimes echoing from the courtyards and the little walled gardens. There were shouts and screams.