“Yes.”
“I heard things,” she said. “One could not avoid Trafalgar.”
“The business in Spain,” he said, “it was a great . . . muddle. It is not even clear they wanted us there, the Spanish. Certainly I cannot believe they would want us there again.”
“They can manage on their own?” she asked.
“Their what?”
“They can manage alone?”
“No. Not really. They had some success at first but the French have been fighting for years against armies vastly superior to anything the Spanish can put in the field. In Spain you see generals dressed like emperors and soldiers carrying, I don’t know, billhooks from the time of the Armada. It’s not a lack of spirit. They’ve plenty of that. It’s a lack of everything else. And it was not just the army. The whole country. No real order. Bad kings and bad governments. Centuries of it. And then there’s the nature of the physical country. The only decent roads are the ones the Romans left behind them—”
“John?”
“What?”
“Is this what you want to tell me? About the roads?”
He started again. “I went out to Lisbon in the summer. We sailed in convoy from Falmouth, were nearly wrecked in the Bay of Biscay, arrived at the mouth of the Tagus on the 29th of August. I don’t think you’ve been anywhere like that. Lisbon, I mean. I know I hadn’t. Lovely from the water but to walk through the middle of it . . . Heat, stink. Most of the buildings are whitewashed so you can hardly look at them in the full light of day. A church on every street corner, their steps covered with beggars, the beggars covered in flies. Feral dogs. Ten thousand cats that look too thin to be alive but somehow are. For a week we loathed the place, then began to see something else in it. I’m not sure what to call it. You rest your hand on a stone at midnight and the stone is warm. You see a street lined with orange trees and imagine all your life you have been waiting to see exactly that.
“Anyway, our lives were pleasant enough once we grew used to the heat. And my duties were much the same as those I’d had in England. Exercise the horses, drill the men. We went sightseeing. We went to routs. We invented card games. It was not unpleasant at all, though I suppose we were all chafing a little. Soldiers must at least appear as if they wish to fight, so when November came and we received orders to make ourselves ready to go into Spain I remember three or four of our people giving the hunting cry. There was a lot of talk about tactics, fighting spirit, the superiority of our horses, our swords, our guns. It was also when we had our first taste of the confusion that in the end overwhelmed everything. The rains were due, no reliable maps were to be had and no two Portuguese could agree on the best route to the border. To spread the risks the army was divided. I went on the road through a place called Elvas. We had some of the German legion, some dragoons, six batteries of guns. Highlanders too, the 71st, and it was on the road to Elvas I first heard Gaelic spoken, spoken and sung. The intention, as I understood it, was to defend Madrid, but by the time we had any degree of readiness Madrid had fallen, gone without a fight, the government fleeing south as fast as their mule cars would carry them. As for where the various French armies were, what their numbers might be, their dispositions, I had the impression that no one, from General Moore down, really had the least idea, and as the French were equally ignorant about ourselves we were all of us reduced to moving about the country in the hope of hearing something. Thousands of men in bright coats on beautiful horses looking for each other in the rain! And when the rain stopped the snows began. Spain in winter is a cold country, Emily. A cold country and a hard one.
“At last we did stumble across them, the enemy. A dispatch was intercepted and we learned of a body of their cavalry in a town five leagues or so from where the regiment was quartered. We set off at midnight, travelled through the dark, but as we came close we were challenged by one of their patrols and when we reached the town they were ready for us. Heavy dragoons, Chasseurs. It was first light, misty, not like today, but enough to make the ground uncertain. We wheeled into line. The charge was sounded. I was on the far left of the line and after galloping through a vineyard with my sword stretched out ahead and yelling like the best of them I found nothing in front of me but mist and snow. I gave the order left shoulders forward, the one you said I spoke in my dreams that night, but by the time we joined the others it was almost over. The first shock had been enough. The French were scattering. I fired my pistol at one, his back as he was riding away. I missed him, I probably missed him by yards. I don’t think I was sorry for it. They lost above twenty. We lost six. We took prisoners, including a pair of colonels, captured a good many horses, good horses too, none of them less than fourteen hands. It was our great moment. Everyone telling everyone what everyone had seen for themselves. This was what we had come for! This was war! You should have seen us swagger. Well, there was little enough time to enjoy it.
“On Christmas Eve the retreat began. Not back to Portugal as we had hoped but north, into Galicia. We crossed the River Esla on the 28th, reached Bembibre on the 31st, Villafranca on New Year’s Day. The French were never far behind us, Marshal Soult, possibly Bonaparte himself. There were always rumours about him, sightings. The general staff were in a panic and the men were pushed on at a rate they could hardly bear. On one occasion we marched thirty-six hours without pause. Even on horseback that was hard. On foot it must have been torture. We were not equipped for the mountains, not the mountains in winter. Soldiers roamed in gangs hunting for food. We began to view the Spanish as much our enemies as the French. Why did they not help us? Why did they not provide us with what we so desperately needed? The answer of course was that they could not, they had not the means, but that did not stop us from hating them.
“Each morning we left behind those who had not survived the night, and if we buried them at all we buried them in snow. Discipline fell away. People . . . altered. You could see it in their faces, a confusion, as though they were searching for what they might trust in, something to guide them, but everything that could be brought to mind was false, dust, nothing. I cannot say when it started with me. It might have been when I saw the commander of our cavalry led past with his eyes covered much as yours are. He had opthalmia. It was common enough. A trooper was leading his horse by the bridle. They went by in perfect silence. I know I was physically ill by then. I had the flux. I also had violent pains in my head, a neuralgia of some sort, and I had taken to pushing balls of cotton into my ears to stop the wind from piercing them. I have sometimes thought that is the cause of my deafness, that there is still some of the cotton in there. I should have had Rizzo look in with his glass.
“But in the midst of all this we were still giving and receiving orders. I suppose it gave us a sense of things going on as they should, of normality. One evening when my squadron were trying to build shelters at the side of the road, a cornet rode up with a dispatch from Major Leitch to collect stragglers. Collect them and form them into something of a vaguely military character. This was laughable, of course. Completely absurd. The stragglers were the most dispirited, the most afraid, the most desperate. I was to make a fighting body from such men? I think now I could safely have ignored the order. I doubt anyone would ever have known or cared. But a soldier who does not obey orders has ceased to be a soldier at all and it seemed I was not quite ready for that. So I stayed. The army marched away and for a while I was entirely alone, a horseman on a road of churned snow, the last man in Spain. How long I was to wait there had not been specified. An hour? Two? And what if instead of British stragglers it was the French vanguard that came over the rise? I even began to wonder why they had chosen me for such a duty. Was it a recognition of my competence? Or was it that I was considered the most dispensable? The officer they could most easily do without?
“Then the first of them appeared, four men, bowing into the wind, shuffling. They did not see me until they were almost upon me and when they looked
up they looked up like children. Was I there to save them or to kill them? Others came. Men with beards, boys who could not have grown a beard had their lives depended on it. Some of them called up their names, their regiments. No two seemed to be from the same outfit. I am not even sure they were all British, that I didn’t have some of General Romano’s men. You couldn’t tell from the uniforms because there weren’t any, or rather there was a complete muddle of uniforms, anything at all as long as it gave some protection against the cold. One man had on the brass helmet of a French dragoon. God knows where he found it. I thought of telling him to take it off but I didn’t. I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t care.
“In all I collected close to thirty. Some still had weapons. Most could have done nothing but throw snowballs at the French. It had been common practice for some time to use musket stocks for firewood. Well, I formed them into a column and we set off in search of the army. It was not that far ahead of us, couldn’t be, and the sooner I caught up with it the sooner I could be rid of my charges. It was necessary however to keep stopping. Had I not done so I would soon have had to commence the whole business over again. So we stopped every hour then every half-hour, all the while widening the gap between us and the army. The snow came horizontally. I remember leaning on my horse’s neck trying to see the road. I had no sense of progress, no notion of our coming closer to anything other than our own extinction. For three days we went on like this. Three days does not sound like a long time but to us it began to seem we had never known any other and never would. Some gave up, walked into the forest or lay in the snow to sleep. Others joined us, fell in with the column. I followed the road and they followed me, their officer. Not out of any respect or fear. There was nothing of either. Very likely they followed because I was on a horse and had I toppled off the horse, as I often thought I might, they would have taken my boots, my cloak, left me where I was, dead or dying. I would not have blamed them. I would have understood . . . ”
He let himself falter, let his gaze settle again on the moon, which had slid perceptibly westwards since he started to speak. Behind him in the room he could hear nothing. Was she asleep? Was he confessing to a sleeping woman? A sleeping woman and a cat? He could look round but he chose not to. To start all this again, later, tomorrow, the day after—an intolerable thought.
“At dusk on the fourth day we came to the village. I had sent off some of the stronger people as scouts, more for form’s sake than out of much hope they would find anything useful. But they came back with news of the village and we turned off the road towards it. It is a place called Morales. Hard to believe you’ll find it on any maps. A church, a square with an old twisted tree in the centre, perhaps thirty houses. They did not welcome us. It may be they thought we were the French, though most had not stayed to find out. By then the snow had stopped and I could see a score of them disappearing into the treeline above the village, men and women, running away. Well, it turned out, of course, they were very wise. There was a moment then, I believe there was, when I might have called the men to me, drawn them up in the square, spoken to them, reminded them we were there on sufferance, that these people were our allies, that property was sacred. I did nothing of the sort, of course. I rode to what seemed one of the better houses, rode up to the front door, knocked with my boot, received no answer, dismounted, went around the back of the house, tried the door there, pushed at the shuttered windows and finally discovered one I could force. It was dark in there, silent. I don’t know what sort of room I’d climbed into, I couldn’t see enough of it, but I felt my way to a door and through it into another room where there were the embers of a fire. Immediately I looked for something to burn on it. There was probably a wood store under the eaves but I wasn’t going outside again. I broke up a stool by swinging it against the floor. Furniture usually burns well, that was one of the lessons of the retreat. I laid the pieces on, they caught. Soon there were flames, beautiful flames, and the room took shape around me. There was a table where the family must have been eating when news of our arrival reached them. Three plates on the table, meals abandoned before they had been quite finished. Beans, bread, oil. I tugged off my gloves with my teeth, picked up the first plate and stood there scraping the food into my mouth with my fingers. It was a reprieve, a marvel. I was, quite suddenly, intensely happy. An hour earlier the world appeared determined to be rid of me. Now it had reached out to save me.
“I was still eating when I heard the first shots. I listened of course. I may even have stopped chewing for a few seconds. But the shots were irregular and seemed only to come from one place. I did not think it was contact with the enemy. Apart from anything else neither we nor the French were much inclined to fight in the dark. So I went on with my supper then got on my knees to search the floor for what might have been dropped. I hope you can picture that. The captain of hussars snuffling like a dog under the table. But soon there was a new disturbance and harder to ignore. The main door of the house opened into the room I was in, or would have done had it not been barred on the inside. A fist hammered at the wood, a voice called out for me. Sir! Sir! Sir! I kept silent but he kept knocking, kept calling. In the end I realised the only way to get rid of him was to ask who he was and what he wanted. He said he was Thompson. I recalled him, just about. A boy soldier and among the first who came to me along the road. He said that the others had gone berserk. Or they had gone mad. I forget the exact word he used. He had seen them shoot a man, a villager. He had seen them taking women away. He feared they intended to set the church alight. None of this amazed me. None of it, I think, meant anything to me at all. I called back that he should stay out of their way, that I would come and see for myself. He begged me to come soon and I assured him I would.
“When I was certain he had gone I climbed out from under the table. I stood, drew my sword, and started poking the thatch above the rafters. We knew this was one of the places they liked to hide things, the Spanish. It was always good to search there. And sure enough, after walking up and down the room a few times stabbing the straw I had a success. I punctured a wineskin. It startled me. I thought I had run through something living. Then I could smell what it was and stood beneath the stream and opened my mouth. I washed my face in wine, it ran into my eyes, but most of it I managed to get down my throat. I could still hear shots, and there was some shouting, but it wasn’t directly outside, it wasn’t close. When I had drunk all I could I lay by the fire, as near to it as I dared. I can hardly tell you the pleasure I felt. The warmth of the fire, the warmth of the wine. I slept. I have no idea for how long. It might only have been ten or fifteen minutes but had I not been woken by more beating at the door I would, I suppose, have slept on until the French arrived or the householder came back to wake me with the edge of his axe.
“It was the boy again, Thompson. He was more urgent now, his voice shrill. I hated him. I wished him dead. But at last I got to my feet, went to the door and unbarred it, my one honourable act of the entire campaign. The instant the door was open I could see the fires. The houses had thatched roofs and even with snow on them they burned well. The light must have been visible for miles. Well, I was sober enough then, sober and awake. The boy ran, I followed. He led me along the edge of the village to a large house beside the track we had come in by. The door was open and we went inside. It was a room much like the one I’d been sleeping in, though this, I remember, had a large crucifix on one of the walls. The men were in there, about half our company. A few of them carried burning sticks, though most of the light came from the flames on the roof of the house opposite. They were gathered in a circle and in the centre of the circle were two chairs. On one of these a girl was standing. She had on a petticoat but above her waist she had nothing and had crossed her arms to cover herself. On the other chair, a little behind her, was a soldier with a pair of shears, sheep shears, I think, though they might have been for cloth. He was cutting off the girl’s hair, cropping it close to her scalp, one hand working the
shears, the other holding her head still. Most of her hair had already gone, black hair in a pile on the floor, enough to stuff a bolster with. Her eyes were shut. She did not weep or call for help. She had withdrawn herself, had sent her spirit away somewhere.
“The men, when I first went in, were rapt. They had foolish grins on their faces and yet they looked horrified. As they became aware of me, my presence, so their expressions changed. They started to be uneasy and looked about themselves like people waking from a dream. But not the soldier on the chair, not him. He was one who had joined us the previous day, met us on the road, alone. He had been wearing a greatcoat then. Now he had taken it off and I could see his tunic and his corporal’s stripes. When at last he did look at me it was because he was ready, because he chose to. Looked, looked away, went on with his cutting.
“It was Thompson who shouted that he should stop. The girl on the chair was probably his own age. I’d say she was. And it was that, the boy’s protest, that finally woke in me some sense of duty, of decency. I made to draw my sword only to realise I had left it in the house where I had slept. My pistol, thank God, I did still have and I would have been entirely within my rights to have used it on him. He was only a few feet away, I could hardly have missed. He looked at me again. I think he was surprised though he was careful not to show it. He brushed some hair from the girl’s shoulders, dusted it away. Here, he said, is one who will remember the British army. Only then did he come down.
“I ordered them out, all of them, told them the French would be on us at first light. Thompson hung on my sleeve asking about the girl. She was still on her chair. He wanted me to do something for her. I made some promise or another, shook him off, went back for my horse. I didn’t go into the house for my sword and so lost it, itself a shameful thing to confess. But there was more, there was more. When I rode into the square I saw, by the light of the burning church, the use they had put the tree to. Firelight on bare feet, bare feet floating a half-yard off the ground. I did not stop to count them. I did not want to risk seeing their faces. I did not even look round to see if the others were following me. For the villagers watching from the hill I must have looked like Death himself riding out of the village.
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Page 33