02 - Keane's Challenge (24 page)

Keane had expressed his fascination, and as he wound his way up to the hilltop windmill that Leech had selected for a demonstration of the art, he was surprised by a feeling of guilt.

After twenty years of soldiering there was not much that made him feel guilty. It went with the job. You were being paid by the king to do everything required of you to defend the nation. Everything and anything. That was it, wasn’t it? There was surely no question of blame. But there it was, for the first time perhaps, he had felt that he might be doing something wrong.

But of course they had done it. It had been a dreadful fortnight, although not unusual for a soldier’s life. Periods of sheer boredom alleviated only by patrols which had yielded no real information. There had been no special intelligence to transmit back to Wellington. No information gleaned from the guerrillas and he could also sense the impatience in Celorico.

He had hardly seen Sanchez. All that he had managed to do was, as his new orders had instructed him, stick close to Craufurd’s division.

Still convinced of his victory, Black Bob had pulled back from the
Côa before the French had had a chance to regroup. But regroup they had, and now the two armies had been sitting apart from each other for the best part of a fortnight.

The camp was restless. All soldiers, given a time of inactivity, will revert to type. Those who had in a previous life been felons will begin to thieve, the gambler will turn a card or roll dice and cheat if he can, and the murderer will make his own plans and await an opportunity. Keane’s camp was no different and he knew it, and he was well aware that Heredia and Silver were still looking for the chance to settle their score.

After recovering from the shock of the battle at the Côa, he had allowed them all two days of indolence. But that was enough. He had to get them moving. The Ordenanza were easy enough to handle and that at least separated Heredia from Silver, whom he took out with the others on patrols that had no real objective.

Finally, though, after two weeks, and with no battlefield encounter with the enemy in prospect, he had agreed to let the two men have it out, under his supervision and according to his rules. They would fight. And since early morning when the word had got out, the camp had been alive with speculation.

He had found Gilpin taking bets.

‘Who’ll take a guinea against Heredia? Come on, lads. Guinea ’gainst the Portuguese.’

Keane stopped him. ‘I’ll take two, if I may.’

Gilpin stopped, surprised. ‘Yes, sir. On who, may I ask?’

‘On you, Gilpin. I’ll wager a guinea that you are flogged within an inch of your life by next week for taking a wager from your comrades.’

Gilpin stared at him. unsure as to whether he might be in earnest. ‘Sir?’

‘Gilpin, I will not lay any bets, and I advise you not to take any. This is a private matter. The men may gamble on it if they will, but do not forget that you are one of their own. Just be discreet.’

The fight was scheduled for that afternoon. It would be refereed fair and square by Garland, the seasoned prizefighter, and the contest would be stopped by a knockout or when a man stayed down for a count of ten. That way, Keane reckoned, he would not lose either of two valuable men. He would just have time, he thought, to view Leech’s demonstration at the mill before heading back to the camp for the bout, which would, he hoped, clear the air once and for all.

He urged his bay mare on up the hill and turned to Archer, who was riding alongside him.

‘I’ve been thinking, Archer, about the general’s code book. You know it is really very simplistic. Anyone who might spend time studying our signals would eventually decode them. It can be done, I’m sure.’

‘Yes, sir. I was trying to calculate the probabilities.’

‘You can do that?’

‘Yes, sir, mathematics was one of the subjects that I studied when a student.’

Keane thought for a few moments. ‘Could a new code be created, do you think? A better one. More secure.’

‘Certainly, sir. In fact I had been considering just such a thing.’

‘Had you now? We should talk more on this matter. I have a feeling that this war will be won and lost on intelligence, and that a great part of that intelligence will be based around codes. The French have long used them and no doubt will do so again here, whenever they can, despite the guerrillas. We would do best to be prepared and to outwit them before we start.’

They had reached the top of the hill now on which stood a
small
pombal
, a flour mill, on top of which was the apparatus, a series of four huge sails, turning slowly in the gentle summer breeze. It was a good vantage point and higher than Keane had thought from his map. But then, as he continued to discover, the maps with which he had been furnished by Scovell sometimes bore little relation to reality and required continual redrawing.

They stopped the horses to the left of the mill and Keane trotted forward a little. There before him lay the plain of the river Côa and over to the left the fortress of Almeida. Beyond it he could see the French entrenchments, dug as parallels, and from them there now came red-orange flashes indicating that a bombardment was under way. He watched as the shells exploded in the town, and listened, trying to name the calibre of the ordnance. It seemed to him that these might be larger guns than the French had used before and he wondered whether the siege might be becoming hotter. He was about to pull his sketching book from his valise and make a drawing of the view, when Archer called to him and he remembered his purpose. They made their way further up the hill and through the screen of Spanish lancers. Then, at length, at the top of the hill they saw a wagon containing two barrels of powder and guarded by three men of the Ordenanza. Beside it, ready to welcome them, like a proud father showing off a favourite child, stood Leech.

‘Good morning, sir. We’re ready for the demonstration if you’ve a mind to watch.’

‘Good day, Leech. Please continue.’

Behind Leech stood his party of Ordenanza, some thirty of them, hand-picked by Leech himself for their better intelligence.

He continued. ‘You will observe, sir, that I have set a single barrel of powder with a trail of black powder leading back to a place of safety. Behind the mill is another barrel. When the
small barrel explodes it will trigger the other, larger barrel. The combination of the two and their positions will serve to bring down the mill entirely.’

‘Fascinating, Leech. One thing before you blow it.’ Keane dismounted and walked with Leech and Archer across to the point from which they could see Almeida some eight miles away. ‘Look down there. You’re a gunner, Leech. Tell me what’s happening. Something’s changed, hasn’t it?’

Leech studied the town and the French lines, watching the artillery and counting the seconds it took for the shells to fall and observing the explosion. ‘Howitzers, sir. They’re using howitzers. And pretty big ones by the look of it. That’s what’s changed. They mean business, sir.’

Massena was becoming impatient and he had managed to bring up the heavier French siege guns and the howitzers, guns with truncated barrels, Bonaparte’s favourites, that would throw a case-shot incendiary bomb overhead and into a fortification.

‘We must send word back to the duke. I’m sorry, Leech. We have to do this now. Can you wait?’

The man looked crestfallen. ‘Aye, sir. I can wait. Though it’s dangerous, once the charges are set, you see. Anything could disturb them.’

‘Well, do as you think. You may have to blow them without me. I’m truly sorry, but this must be done now.’

They left the gunner and rode fast down the hill and north towards the telegraph station located on the hill close to Castello Mendo, five miles away. This had been Archer’s home twice a day, every day for the past two weeks, either with or without Keane, and as usual now they found it attended by its permanent crew of three Portuguese telegraphists. Here it was that they had transmitted news from Almeida back to Celorico. But
aside from those daily reports, there had been little else to report, as surprisingly, aside from their assault on Almeida, the French had been completely inactive. It was almost as if their previous exertions might have exhausted them.

They reached it quickly and, racing up to the summit, found the Portuguese already receiving a message from Almeida.

As it came in, Archer made a note of the numbers and in turn Keane looked them up in the code book.

‘Under very heavy fire. Many casualties. Enemy using howitzers. Explosive shells starting fires.’

He showed it to Archer. ‘It is as we thought. They have increased the bombardment. I wonder how long Cox can now hold out. Make a signal to Celorico. “News from Almeida. Enemy using howitzers. Many casualties. Fires started. Have observed from above. Situation grave.” Sign it from me.’

Archer began to create the code numbers and was writing them down to hand to the Portuguese signallers when there was a huge explosion and the very earth seemed to rumble and shake beneath them.

Keane looked aghast at Archer. ‘Did you feel that? That was the devil of a bang. Good God. Leech.’

‘Christ, sir. Those charges must have gone off. I wondered if he’d set too much explosive. You know that he tried to destroy that mill three days ago? It hadn’t fallen and he was determined to make it do so.’

Keane’s stomach felt suddenly hollow. He imagined that Leech would have set another, larger charge and that it might have gone off prematurely.

‘Come on. You have your physician’s equipment?’

‘Carry it always, sir. Though I wonder if there will be anything I can do.’

They rode as fast as they could back towards the mill. The road snaked its way down the hillside and up again, back the way they had so recently come. Nearing the top of the hill, Keane fully expected to find debris from the mill scattered in all directions and whatever might be left of Leech and the Ordenanza. But there was none to be seen. Nor was there any smell of explosive or burning.

The wagon stood where it had been, but the lancers and the picket of the Ordenanza had gone. Keane thought it strange and was hugely relieved to see Leech, carefully picking up a barrel of gunpowder that seemed to have slipped over inside the tailboard.

‘Leech? Thank God you’re all right.’

Leech turned. ‘Sir?

‘Christ man, we thought you must be dead. That explosion.’ It was only then that he noticed that the mill was still standing. ‘If it wasn’t the mill, what the devil was it?’

Leech looked at him and shook his head. ‘Don’t you know, sir? Look.’

He pointed to the vantage point on the hill from which they had so recently observed Almeida. Keane dismounted and, with Archer, hurried over. The lancers and the Ordenanza were standing there already, silent, spellbound, aghast.

For, on looking down on Almeida now, Keane saw a huge column of smoke rising from the centre of the town. Fires were burning everywhere, it seemed, but principally on the left and on that part closest to them.

Leech was standing at his side now. ‘It’s the town, sir. Bloody great blast. Whole magazine must have gone up. Poor bastards.’

Keane just stared at the shattered fortress. ‘It’s incredible. How the devil did it happen?’

‘I would suppose that a shell must have landed in the powder magazine when it was standing open. Like while they were moving the barrels. That’s all I can think must have happened. Damned bad luck, sir, ain’t it?’

The smoke was starting to clear now and, looking down, Keane could see that huge blocks of masonry had been hurled far outside the ramparts, together with cannon and parts of equipment. He sought out the huge medieval castle with its four massive towers, which had stood in the centre, and the cathedral which had been nearby and, with its huge crypt, had acted as powder magazine for the town. Both had simply disappeared.

‘I’m going to take a closer look. Archer, with me.’

They made their way cautiously down the hillside closest to the enemy lines. Here was a similar path leading down, but they were careful to stick to cover. For even though Keane knew that the French would have been stunned by the explosion, he could not be sure where their pickets and reconnaissance patrols might be. They came out of the trees and then rode on to a plateau and looked towards the city.

From the centre of Almeida a thick plume of grey smoke was curling into the sky. Below it, all seemed to be a sea of flame.

‘Christ, the whole place is destroyed.’

Archer pointed. ‘No, look, sir. It’s only on one side that it’s gone. See to the right there, the east side seems fine.’

He was right. But anyone could see that the place was now indefensible. The shock wave must, he thought, have hit the French trenches with some force. Even from where they stood he could see some damage to the siege works. There would have been men thrown off their feet, concussed, wounded and perhaps even killed. An image of utter confusion entered his mind.

As they rode back up to the hill Leech waved at them. ‘Go, sir. Get on your way now. I’m going to blow the mill.’

Keane nodded. They would not wait to watch this time either. The man could not be diverted from his task. And Keane was mulling over other things in his mind.

So, carefully, Leech set his fuses and within a half-hour the mill was blown.

The noise and the vibration made their horses jittery and once again he thought of the French and the huge impact of the blast in Almeida. And he realized at once that here was an opportunity that would not come again.

He turned to Archer. ‘That’s it. We must use the moment. We need to act now. Find the others. There’s no time to waste. No time.’

He increased his pace and together they rode back towards the camp and in through the lines.

*

It was late in the day that they arrived. As they passed the 43rd, Napier approached him. ‘Keane, what on earth was that bang? Sounded as if half the world had gone up.’

‘You might say it has for some poor people. That was Almeida. Powder magazine must have taken a hit. The whole place is blown to pieces. Well, the castle and the church. Part of the walls has gone too. Once the French recover their wits, they’ll take the place in hours.’