In the Name of the King

by A L Berridge

  We were seven, that’s all. But if you’ve got the right seven that’s as good as an army and when we set off into the mist I knew that’s just what we were.

  Stefan Ravel

  Well, if you want to look at it like an amateur. The truth is we were seven innocents riding into a battle zone without the slightest idea what was waiting for us at the other end.

  There were clues if we’d looked for them. We headed for Albert where the Picardie had been last time we looked, but it seemed d’Enghien had started the whole lot for Vervins to relieve a rumoured siege at Rocroi. I still wasn’t worried. The dons would be out in the open, we ought to be able to pass round the lines and find the man we were after unguarded while his comrades were fighting a battle.

  We followed in the army’s wake. It was very different from La Marfée, but then it always is when the battle’s ahead of you with all the hope in the world. There were no straggling wounded, no crying women and abandoned baggage, only a lot of flattened crops and pissed-off civilians who’d been eaten out of their last winter stores. The only thing the same were the rumours. A one-armed veteran at Moislains said he’d heard the Spanish were thirty thousand strong, and a lot of people were listening.

  We spent the night at Éspehy, but there was no mistaking the smell of fear the next day. Sunday and the church bells ringing, the righteous flooding in to pray for deliverance and the rest quietly packing their bags. We passed handcarts rattling along with household possessions piled on top, a mattress, a kettle, a brass dinner bell, and the men pushing them with that old, old look that said ‘Why don’t you kill each other someplace else and leave us the fuck alone?’ Civilians. They wouldn’t have had the food in their bellies let alone their sodding dinner bells if it weren’t for the army and people like us.

  We camped outside Vervins, then ploughed on towards Maubert-Fontaine. There was a lot of traffic round Aubenton and Rumigny, and when we saw heavily guarded wagons in the fields it wasn’t hard to guess why. D’Enghien had left the baggage train behind and was pushing on through the woods. We were getting close.

  If you’re ever looking for a pleasant ride through Champagne, Abbé, you can forget the Forêt de Pothées. Ditches, bogs, up-and-down fucking chasms, it was a nightmare with flies. We were still in the middle of it by late afternoon when we got our first hint of what we were really riding into. A low, distant rumble, and birds flapping out of the trees in alarm. Another, like a thunderstorm getting closer, and that warhorse of Jacques’ lifted its head and neighed.

  ‘Guns,’ said André.

  ‘Guns,’ said Grimauld, and spat. ‘That’s artillery, laddie, heavy ordnance. That’ll be the dons.’

  We told ourselves it was only what we’d expected, and went on. We rode maybe another hour and dusk starting to fall, then the sounds ahead of us changed. We were hearing more cannon, but the salvos seemed lighter than before.

  ‘They’ll be ours, won’t they?’ said André, batting the branches out of his face as he rode. ‘Our army’s got there, they’ll turn it round.’

  ‘Not with that kind of firepower they won’t,’ said Grimauld, who was clearly first cousin to the comforters of Job. ‘Hear it? That’s not a patch on the first.’

  A deep answering boom made the point with depressing emphasis. There are a few things one likes at the start of a battle, and being outgunned isn’t one of them.

  ‘That won’t stop them,’ said André, sweeping aside generations of military experience as if they were more branches. ‘That’s the army of Picardie ahead of us, you’ll see what they can do.’

  That was just it, Abbé. I was rather afraid we would.

  Carlos Corvacho

  I’ll stop you right there if I may, Señor, and we’ll have a few things straight. I know what the French say about Rocroi, but if it’s truth you’re after let’s keep it fair. It wasn’t just the Picardie we were up against, we’d half the army of Champagne as well, and us with four thousand of our own men stuck up in Chateau-Regnault with Beck. Now I’m not saying we didn’t have a wee bit of an advantage with the artillery, but that’s good generalship, Señor, that’s planning a campaign in the proper style.

  We made gruel of the French lines that night. Two and a half hours we were banging away and my Capitán guesses there’s a thousand down at the least. We should have followed it up with steel in my opinion, my Capitán said we should have attacked them while they were still coming down the defile, but de Melo didn’t want them driven off, he wanted another Honnecourt. He saw more value in destroying a French army than seizing a little fortress in the middle of nowhere, and with morale what it was going to be in a day or two’s time I won’t say he wasn’t right. Oh, yes, Señor, we knew what had happened in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. We knew before most of the French did, your Duc d’Enghien having decided to keep that touchy little titbit to himself.

  So we do nothing till they’re all formed up and the guns fall quiet. Some French cavalry try a charge down the far end, but someone orders it back, we shift our infantry along a wee bit, and there we all are, standing with nothing but a strip of valley between us and never a move on either side. The light gets dimmer, the French stand down for the night, and us, we do the selfsame thing. The fires are lit, then the men settle down to eat and sleep right in the lines as if there’s no such thing as a French army no more than a few feet away.

  We’re on the left wing, Señor, back with the Flanders cavalry where we belong. Not that we hadn’t still got Bouchard to look after, him and his exiled friends, so we have them set comfortably inside a screen of gabions as if they’re precious as cannon. It’s no more than a gesture really, seeing as they’re cavalry-trained and happy to take their chance alongside us in the morning, but to lose them in a battle’s one thing, to have them picked off under our noses while we sleep is quite another. My Capitán doesn’t trust the French troops one bit, especially when they’re quiet.

  ‘Not too many of them though, are there?’ says Bouchard. ‘We shouldn’t have much difficulty seeing them off.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ says d’Arsy. ‘L’Hôpital knows what he’s doing, and we’ve already had a taste of Gassion. Is General Beck joining us, or do we go it alone?’

  It’s a fair question, Señor, and our own men asking it already. My Capitán reassures them that de Melo’s already sent a message and Beck is expected to join us in the morning, then has me give them wine to keep them quiet and goes back to prowling about the lines his own self.

  He’s uneasy, Señor, and not the only one that night. De Melo’s wandering up and down encouraging the men and leaving them jumpier than he found them. The young Duque of Albuquerque in charge of our own wing, even he’s twitching, saying our deployment’s more like a parade than a battle order. There’s no denying the ground’s tricky either, that’s an enemy fort at our backs and no lines of circumvallation dug, de Melo being confident we can take the fort without. There was plenty not to like, Señor, and no call for the French moaning we had the advantage from the start.

  My Capitán leaves off at last and joins me at the fire for a bite of supper. I’d kept some cold fowl back for him special and it did me good to see him eat it.

  I said ‘That’s right, Señor, you relax now, you’ve done everything you can.’

  He stopped mid-bite. ‘Never say that, Carlos. What you mean is I’ve done everything I can think of.’

  It was the selfsame thing in my opinion, but I gave him his wine and said never a word.

  Neither did he. He sat sipping his wine, looking round at the men and the horses and the little campfires, seeing it all safe and secure in his head. We were nicely sheltered where we were, Señor, a little wood in front of us like a screen so we couldn’t even see the waiting French in front. It was quiet all about us, the rustle and murmur of men sleeping, some of the horses maybe snorting a little, and the wind blowing soft through the trees.

  My Capitán turns towards the sounds and his eyes glisten black in the firelight.
Then he lets out a little sigh and stands up. ‘You think I’ve thought of everything?’

  ‘Yes, Señor,’ I say. ‘You always do.’

  ‘Not always,’ he says. ‘But perhaps I have now.’

  Stefan Ravel

  What you have to understand is that we weren’t looking for a battle. Bouchard was important, so we naturally expected to find him tucked safely behind the Spanish lines a long way from the fighting. It didn’t occur to us he might simply have got stuck in it.

  We didn’t fancy that ourselves, Abbé, so we left the army’s tracks and slithered down into the marshes to find a way round the whole lot. It didn’t help much. We had to follow the Ruisseau right to its source before we could cross it, and when we emerged from the last straggling trees above Sévigny-la-Forêt and saw what was in front of us I was tempted to turn straight round and go back.

  We were looking at a battlefield. It was night, of course, but the two lines were clearly marked by the dots of little fires spread out over the plain. The town of Rocroi was ahead all right, a neat mass of grey stone bastioned walls, but there was something in front of it I didn’t care for at all. We’d passed most of the French lines by going through the marshes, but before us was the biggest single enemy force I’d ever seen.

  ‘Spain,’ said André, his tone quite expressionless. ‘They’re back.’

  I’m afraid they were. Oh, there’d been Spanish troops at La Marfée, but they were mixed in with Imperials and a bunch of Sedanaise, they’d just been ‘the enemy’, nothing more. Here was the real enemy, right here. The firelight flickered on the planted standards, blue, red, fucking pink, any colour you can think of, but across them all that jagged slash of the Burgundy cross of Spain. We’d been fighting them in the dark for three years now, but here they were, finally out in the open, doing exactly what André said they’d do all along. They were back and invading France.

  I whispered ‘If you want Bouchard in that lot, little general, you’re on your own.’

  He dragged his head round as if he’d forgotten I existed. ‘What does one man matter in the face of all this?’

  I was tempted to agree. When you come to the lines of a great battle, Abbé, you’re on the edge of the world.

  ‘Let’s at least look,’ said Jacques, a man with the imagination of a coal bucket. ‘There’s a wood ahead, we can spy out the land, see if there’s a way behind the lines.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said André, but his eyes never left the campfires. He was a soldier, that boy, he should have been with his own kind, not skulking in the night like an assassin. But that was something else Bouchard was responsible for, and I for one wasn’t inclined to forgive it.

  I said ‘We’ve come this far, let’s see if we can get the bastard. On foot, mind, and only three, we don’t want anyone getting the wind up and blowing our heads off.’

  That was quite a possibility, as it happened, since when two armies sleep this close they tend to be a little careful in the matter of sentries. Charlot led the rest back into cover, then André, Jacques and I proceeded at an undignified crawl past the French right wing. Cavalry, Abbé, I could hear the horses. D’Enghien had gone for a standard formation, with infantry in the middle and wings of cavalry to either side.

  It wasn’t long before the night thickened, there were dry leaves under my hands, and I knew we were safe in the thicket. It looked dense and dark in the middle, so we kept to the edge and inched our way cautiously up towards the dons. I was hearing more rustling than I had in the open, and a murmur of voices suggested the Spanish lines were closer than we’d thought, so we only went halfway before sticking our heads out for a look.

  And there were the dons, illuminated by their campfires like a panorama in flame. I couldn’t see more than the left wing immediately in front of us, but that was cavalry too, the same formation as d’Enghien’s. There were more tents on this side, dark shapes of baggage wagons and distant siege cannon, but otherwise it might have been the French lines we were looking at all over again. There was just one thing out of place, an enclosure of gabions where you’d expect to find cannon, but with nothing inside but a tent and four men round a little fire. They were chatting in a desultory kind of way, then one lifted his head and laughed.

  ‘André,’ whispered Jacques next to me. ‘André.’

  Oh, he’d seen him, his face had already changed. It was sharper, hungrier, burning eyes beneath dark brows. If Bouchard had been powder he’d have gone up like a battery.

  I drew my pistol, but André’s hand clamped down on mine. ‘I’ll kill you if you do.’

  Well, it’s always nice to know where one stands. I said ‘You want us to go and kidnap him so you can fight a fucking duel?’

  He looked away. ‘I don’t want to murder him.’

  I did, I’d have done it and taken Mass on the same day. ‘Then what?’

  He didn’t know, poor kid, he’d the will but nothing like the conscience. ‘I could go down alone. If d’Estrada’s there he’ll …’

  His voice was rising. I got a hand up to warn him, but something was already rustling behind us in the thicket and then a sleepy voice said ‘¿Qué pasa?’

  We weren’t alone. I turned my head warily, and dear Christ, the wood was full of them. We’d crept in round the edges, but the centre was one great pile of sleeping soldiers, curled up on the ground like so many twisted roots. Some even sat upright against tree trunks, and in the distance ahead of us were a couple standing sentry.

  André’s eyes showed white in the dark. ‘No es nada,’ he said, then something my don-speak isn’t up to repeating but that sounded like an attempt at humour. Under other circumstances I’d have found the contrast between his face and voice rather comical, but not right then, Abbé. Not just then.

  There was a grunt where the voice had come from, some muttering nearby, then quiet returned. It wasn’t total, of course, and I’ll admit I did a little cursing of myself for not realizing the rustling wasn’t all made by ourselves and the voices weren’t all coming from the lines. Now my eyes had adjusted I estimated we’d got several hundred of them around us, making the wood look double the trees.

  André whispered ‘It’s an ambush. We have to warn d’Enghien.’

  I was rather more worried about ourselves just then, but either way the priority was to get the fuck out. That didn’t look too easy either, since we could hardly crawl back to the French lines right under the noses of several hundred puzzled dons. We’d have to go round the outside in full view of the Spanish lines.

  We were on the edge of the wood anyway, so we just slid gradually round the trees till we were facing the field, then dropped to our bellies and crawled. I expected a shout, maybe a shot, but nothing came. I suppose we were in the dark with a thick background of trees behind us, and anything beyond the sentries’ own fires was probably just black.

  But we weren’t the only ones taking advantage of the dark, and we’d only been moving a minute when André stopped so suddenly I nearly crushed my face on his boot. Something was moving down near the Spanish lines, a low black hump steadily working its way across the field. Someone was doing as we had, and crawling furtively towards the little wood.

  I murmured ‘He’s in for a shock when he gets there.’

  The figure crawled on. It lifted its head a moment, a pale blur in the dark, then bent again for another determined haul forward.

  ‘We have to warn him,’ whispered André.

  I sighed. ‘He’s a deserter. Fuck him.’

  ‘We can’t,’ said Jacques. ‘He’ll start an alarm, and we’ll be caught in the open.’

  That at least was rational. André was already slithering back to intercept the stranger, so I contented myself with crouching against the trees to block the way in. I also drew my knife.

  The figure made it safely into the shadows of the trees, then jolted to a sudden stop as André raised his head. André whispered quickly ‘Tranquilo, Señor, soy un amigo …’

  The man sp
rang forward, pinning André to the ground and crushing in to throttle him. We leapt out and on him, Jacques forced his wrists apart while I jammed my blade under his throat and hissed at him to stay still. André started to slide groggily out from underneath, but suddenly froze to a stop and stared stupidly up at the stranger’s face. I got it myself then in the sensation under my fingers on his neck. There was a thick, ridged line in raised bumps, one hell of a scar if you saw it in the light, and I knew quite suddenly I’d done just that.

  ‘D’Arsy,’ whispered André.

  ‘De Roland,’ said the man. ‘What …?’

  ‘All right,’ I said, and eased off the blade. ‘But can we save the explanations for somewhere a little less public?’

  We were maybe safe enough. I guess from a distance we looked so close to the trees the dons imagined any movement was from their own musketeers, but it wasn’t a theory I wanted to test. I urged them all back on their bellies and led the crawl at my best pace until we could round the wood and get out of sight of the enemy.

  We stopped in a wretched clump of rye that had somehow survived the winter harvest, and I got out my flask. We were out of range of the wood, out of sight of the Spaniards, and at least out of whispering earshot of the French. Ahead of us I could see the safety of the forest where the others waited with the horses.

  I had a slug of brandy and passed the flask to André. ‘What now, little general? Crawl in to warn d’Enghien? We can deliver a traitor to prove our good will.’

  D’Arsy gave me a look, but he couldn’t hold it, Abbé, he knew what he fucking was. He stared at the ground instead.

  André studied him, and I’d guess he’d rather mixed feelings. He took a gulp of brandy, winced as it hit his bruised throat, and said ‘I got your message.’

  D’Arsy grunted.

  ‘You’re trying to leave the Spaniards?’