That made Dalmas think of his mission. Tomorrow the city should fall. Such things were less certain in Spain, where the normal rules of war did not always apply, but all things being equal it should fall. Then his hunt would begin. He doubted that his man would meekly surrender, but he might slip out among the prisoners and so the infantry company would sweep through the town and ask the obvious questions. Dalmas had a feeling that a British soldier would not be too popular in a city abandoned to its fate by Lord Wellington. More likely the man would try to escape, either immediately or after a lull.
As the cuirassier officer thought about his orders, the sandbags were pulled from the closest embrasure. The Spanish were waiting for the moment and a ball was fired at the gap, but went high. A moment later, the gunner brought down the linstock and the twenty-four pounder leapt back with the force of the discharge.
Part of Dalmas’ mind noted the great lump of masonry tumble down into the ditch, but he was far more focused on a sudden inspiration. He had an idea how the Englishman would make his escape and the audacity of the ploy amused him. It was just what he would do in the same situation. Dalmas laughed out loud because he knew exactly how to catch his spy.
The very ground seemed to rock beneath them. Williams had just been reaching down to adjust the uncomfortable top of his right boot, and the jolt pitched him painfully forward on to the cobblestones. The low, rumbling explosion was unlike anything they had heard before. It was not yet three in the morning and they had just dismissed the company after a long spell of duty carrying ammunition up to the guns on the walls ready for the next day.
Hanley helped his friend up. The rumble had come from the direction of the breach, and before they had gone half the distance the news was spreading.
‘Well, that’s the end,’ Williams said wearily. The French must have dug mines and had now blown in the counter-scarp. It was impossible to see clearly at the moment, but the approaches to the breach were now most likely complete, and the way into the city lay open.
Hanley patted his friend on the shoulder. ‘It’s time to go, Bills’. He said. ‘I know you don’t like it, but you would care even less for being a prisoner.’
‘Don’t like abandoning the lads.’
‘I know, but we cannot take them. Rodriguez will do his best for them.’ Hanley had already gone through the arguments with his friend several times. ‘The governor has given his permission.’ Hanley had managed to see the general privately. Herrasti was in a grim mood, knowing that the end was close and bitter that the British had not come. For a moment, Hanley had wondered whether he would order them held so that at least they would share the garrison’s fate. It would have been hard to blame him. Instead, the old man had looked him straight in the eyes. ‘Tell Lord Wellington that Ciudad Rodrigo fought with all our strength, and that if there is dishonour in these days, then it does not belong to this city. Tell him that! Do you swear it?’
Hanley had given the oath and knew that he would faithfully report the old general’s words, assuming he got the chance. Now he reached out and put his hands on Williams’ shoulders. ‘We have to go now!’
‘Doubt there is time,’ Williams said, but they hurried off to fetch the others.
‘I fear that I shall not care for the answer,’ Hanley began as they walked briskly back to their billet, ‘but do you still feel obliged to the girl?’
‘I promised Pringle,’ Williams said. ‘She may wish to stay in the end, but I must make the offer of taking her.’
‘This is important for the war, Bills,’ Hanley said, knowing it would make no difference.
‘Then go without us.’
Hanley grinned. ‘I’d only get lost again.’ A few minutes later he looked at his watch. ‘We are not going to make it before dawn, are we?’
‘No.’
‘Then we had better follow the other course and hope for better luck tomorrow. We are certainly going to need it. When you say your prayers tonight, young Bills, add a few words for the rest of us!’
‘I always do,’ the Welshman replied in all seriousness. He thought for a moment. ‘Better make sure we have plenty of food and powder as well.’ Williams smiled. ‘Never does any harm to help a miracle along.’
Hanley was surprised when Sergeant Rodriguez came along with the three British NCOs.
‘My war has not finished yet,’ he said simply. Hanley was worried for a moment that this might prompt Williams to return to the company, but the Spaniard assured him that the corporal could cope. ‘His leg isn’t good enough to come with us,’ he added. The corporal had been hit by a small fragment of a mortar shell two days ago and now walked with a pronounced limp.
‘What do we do now, sir?’ Dobson asked. The officers had not shared the details of their plan.
Hanley took a deep breath, and hoped it would sound more feasible than he feared. ‘First we hide,’ he said. ‘And then we wait.’
24
Pringle could sense the general’s impatience, but had to admit that it required no great prescience.
‘Damn your eyes, get moving there!’ bellowed Black Bob Craufurd at the greenjackets as they doubled through the stream, water splashing around them. ‘Go straight through!’ he added angrily when he saw a few of the men trying to pick their way carefully from stone to stone.
‘The general hates to see men go around a trivial obstacle for the sake of dry feet or an easier passage,’ Shaw Kennedy explained quietly. ‘He calculates that a few moments’ delay for an individual rapidly magnifies into minutes for a company, and half an hour for a brigade as each soldier waits for the man ahead of him. And so it is strictly regulated by standing orders.’
Pringle understood the reasoning, even if he wondered a little about the arithmetic. He knew that many of the officers of the Light Division bitterly resented the general’s ‘tyrannical’ regulations.
‘Drop him, sir! Drop him!’
A brown-uniformed Portuguese soldier from the 3rd Caçadores was carrying a diminutive British lieutenant on his back. Pringle guessed that the young officer, a round-faced, snub-nosed young fellow, was reluctant to get his boots wet. The man now looked around, curious to see who had provoked the general’s rage.
‘Drop him, sir!’ the general repeated in a voice that shattered the stillness of the pre-dawn light. The Portuguese light infantryman looked baffled, as did the soldiers around him, who paused, looking in confusion at the mounted officers. Lieutenant Colonel Elder, who commanded the battalion, spurred his horse forward and translated the order. For a moment the caçador looked surprised, before delight spread across his face and he let go of the officer’s legs and jerked backwards. With a great splash the astonished officer dropped down into the cold stream. The caçadores doubled on, most of them cackling with laughter.
‘You, sir!’ shouted the brigadier general to the hapless lieutenant. ‘You have two legs, and in future I suggest you use them. You must set an example and show your men that you can march as far and as fast as any of them. I will say no more to you.’ The general flicked his whip and set off at a brisk trot, Pringle and the rest of his staff trailing behind. He noticed Elder rounding on the lieutenant, and no doubt reproving him for showing the battalion in a poor light to its new commander.
It was one of the few moments of light relief in an otherwise frustrating night. After weeks of tentative observation and probing between the outpost lines, General Craufurd had decided to pounce on one of the French foraging parties that the enemy were in the habit of sending impertinently close to the British. At eleven o’clock the night before they had moved out, marching through the darkness. Pringle went as an additional ADC and because he knew the ground well, for they were only a couple of miles from Fort La Concepción.
Things went wrong from the start. One of the two six-pounder cannon became stuck fast in the mud and took a good twenty minutes to free. Then the limber of the other gun threw a wheel and it had to be repaired. Guides lost their way in the darkness. Pringle was s
ent to find two squadrons of the 14th Light Dragoons who had vanished into the night. That took forty minutes, and he was lucky to have guessed that they had taken the wrong fork in a path and so ended up going much further south than intended. Lieutenant Colonel Talbot of the 14th, clad in a gleamingly bright pair of white nankeen trousers that looked most odd against his heavily braded and snug-fitting jacket, was relieved to see Pringle appear and show them the correct route. The regiment had not long arrived from further south and was still learning the lie of the land.
It was not simply the 14th Light Dragoons who got lost. Marching at night always risked confusion, but Pringle had rarely seen so much go wrong in so short a time. Columns broke up and companies found themselves marching and counter-marching to find their way. It was almost as if the general’s impatience to be at the enemy overwhelmed everyone’s senses, making them so taut that mistakes kept happening. Yet mostly it was bad luck, and Pringle was glad the enemy were not pressing them. After a night of confusion, cursing and shouted orders, before the sun rose they had left the Portuguese in a valley sheltered from gaze where they could act as reserve. The 1/95th, a few companies of light infantry and the detachment of two guns from the Chestnut Troop were concealed in a few buildings and a swathe of scrubby woodland.
The cavalry pressed on, and the general rode with them, looking as fresh and bursting to be at the enemy as if he had had a good night’s sleep. Pringle felt stiff, and would dearly have loved the chance to wash his face and shave, but there was an excitement in riding with so many horsemen. Garland waved cheerily as the staff rode past a squadron of the 14th, Brigadier General Craufurd rapidly edging his way to the front of the entire column. Major Tilney gave no more than a curt nod, and Pringle thought that he looked pale. Then he remembered that this was probably the man’s first action and no doubt he had much on his mind.
Pringle followed the general and his staff up to one of the many little crests in this gently rolling landscape. Before they reached the top they dismounted and walked up to peer over the low stone wall of a sheep pen. Ahead of them the sun rose.
‘Right on time, the saucy fellows,’ Shaw Kennedy said, pointing at the little dust cloud moving along the road towards the village just behind them. Whoever was making it lay hidden in another fold in the ground, but as they watched, a group of horsemen walked their horses over the low ridge. They were little more than a dark smear at this distance, their uniforms impossible to make out. ‘Twenty or thirty?’ In a few minutes the distant Frenchmen vanished into another piece of dead ground.
A great throbbing rumble rolled over the landscape.
‘They’re on time as well,’ Pringle said, and flicked his watch open to see that it was just after four o’clock, and as usual the French gunners had unleashed their first salvo of the day at Ciudad Rodrigo. ‘Reliable fellows, the French.’
‘Then let us spoil their routine.’ The brigadier general had a predatory look in his eye. One squadron of hussars was detached to work around the enemy’s flank in a wide loop. Another squadron of Germans and one from the 16th Light Dragoons were to go forward with the general.
‘You are the support, Talbot,’ the general called as he rode past the men from the 14th. ‘Come on at a steady pace and be ready for my orders.’
By this time the two leading squadrons, each of over one hundred men, had formed into lines two deep. The fields of high maize were open, without walls or other boundaries, and the lines encountered little difficulty as they walked forward. A nod from the general and the captains in charge took their men into a trot, and then a canter. The lines became ragged, but the eager horses ate up the ground, running easily over the smooth earth as they emerged from the grain fields into open country.
Pringle felt a thrill from the power of so many horses running together, hoofs drumming on the ground. There was a rattle of bouncing equipment, scabbards tapping against slung carbines and the bag called a sabretache each horseman carried on his belts. The general and his officers were in the middle, on the track that passed for a road. To Pringle’s left were the 1st KGL Hussars, all of them moustached veterans with grey overalls, deep blue jackets with rows of gold braid down the front and a second fur-trimmed jacket or pelisse, slung over their left shoulder and billowing in the breeze. They wore tall brown fur caps with short white-over-red plumes. It was an ornate uniform, and yet these men were very obviously practical and capable soldiers. Even after a night march and months of patrols and picket duty, their horses looked sleek and fit.
On his right the 16th Light Dragoons had high-crested black Tarleton helmets, and red collars and cuffs on their dark blue jackets. These were tight-waisted and the rows of white lace on the front widened at the top, giving the impression of broader shoulders. They were an experienced regiment, and yet it was not simply the uniform or the clean-shaven upper lips that made them look different from the hussars. There was still an air of young soldiers about them.
Both squadrons spread out as the horses ran, and the two neat lines were now vaguer. Pringle thought cavalry charges were supposed to accelerate slowly, giving men and horses their head only at the last minute, so that they hurtled towards the enemy like a great wave. It was over a mile to the next rise and the French were still somewhere beyond it. Looking back, he saw great clouds of dust rising behind the two squadrons and thought that the enemy must see this sign betraying their presence. Perhaps that was why the general hurried on. Two hundred horsemen against thirty should not be a contest – with more squadrons to come on if necessary – and so haste was all that mattered, rushing on to fall upon the enemy before they had a chance to retreat.
The horses surged up the little rise and without an order being given they slipped to a halt. A Frenchman shouted in alarm, and Pringle could imagine the shock of looking up and seeing two hundred enemies suddenly crowning the crest. The French were in green jackets with pink fronts, and had baggy brown trousers and helmets covered with brown cloth to hide the reflections. To Pringle’s astonishment they seemed not to have noticed the approaching dust cloud and were no more than three hundred yards away, meandering along the little track without an apparent care in the world. Ugly great sacks of forage were hung from the rear of each saddle.
‘Charge them!’ General Craufurd snapped immediately.
‘Mein herr!’ the German captain was pointing to the high grain in a field beyond and to the left of the horsemen. ‘Infantry!’
Pringle scanned the gently wafting tops of the maize and saw nothing. Then he caught a flash of something metal, and a moment later more gleams betraying the bayonets of infantry.
‘No matter,’ snapped the brigadier general. ‘They cannot be formed. Sweep them aside. Now go!’
‘Draw sabres!’ The squadron commanders called out in clear – and in one case heavily accented – voices.
Steel hissed and grated on the metal tops of scabbards as the hussars and light dragoons drew their heavy curved sabres. Pringle’s own hand went to the hilt of his sword, but then he realised that the general did not intend leading the charge. That was sensible, for it was not his job, but Billy sensed the excitement and part of him wanted to ride with the squadrons. He had never been in a cavalry charge. A different part of him, instinctively sympathetic to the plight of foot soldiers like himself, felt sorry for the French infantrymen in the cornfield.
‘Walk march!’ The German order sounded slightly different as the two squadrons went forward, lines still loose.
‘Trot!’ Horsemen accelerated, the men bouncing in the saddles. Sabres still rested comfortably on their shoulders. Pringle coughed as clouds of dust wafted around them, and prompted the general to ride to the side so that he could see better.
The French dragoons shook themselves into a rough line as the blue-coated British and German horsemen went into a canter and almost immediately a gallop. Sabres were now held out and high, points reaching for the enemy. Pringle looked through the thinning dust, but could no longer see the infantry
men in the corn. On the track the dragoons turned their mounts and fled, running back through the field and trampling the high maize.
‘Damn me!’ Shaw Kennedy gasped in surprise as there was a ripple of movement in the corn and suddenly there was a neatly formed square of French infantry, three ranks deep, with the second and third ranks standing behind the kneeling men in front. Dawn light flickered along the bright points of levelled bayonets.
‘Charge on!’ the general shouted, although there was little chance that his voice would carry, but the two squadron captains needed no urging. Men drove spurs into the sides of their mounts and the horses seemed to leap towards the square of soldiers wearing the long drab overcoats beloved of the French line infantry. Pringle had stood in a square little bigger than this one and could imagine the earth trembling under the pounding hoofs, and the infantrymen watching nervously as the line of high horsemen rushed up, sabres bright and horses open mouthed and wide eyed.
It looked as if the French commander had left it too late. There were at least as many horsemen as there were infantrymen in the square, but cavalrymen always filled so much space that they looked more numerous. From the hill, it was if a wave was about to wash away a castle in the sand.
All in Scarlet Uniform (Napoleonic War 4) Page 25