All in Scarlet Uniform (Napoleonic War 4) (29 page)

‘Got a letter of complaint from her father yesterday,’ the colonel explained.

‘She’s inside Ciudad Rodrigo.’

‘Good,’ MacAndrews said. ‘Probably better to keep it that way. I’ll reply that you have cut your connection with the girl. It would be wise,’ he added. ‘Instead dream of Lizzie Loring, who was a pretty little vixen. She was married to a Tory officer, but he didn’t seem to mind and contented himself with fiddling the books so that the prisoners under his charge starved and he got rich. Hell of a way to fight a war.’ The colonel sighed, and then grinned. ‘If ever you want to learn how not to do something, then read about how we lost the colonies!’

‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

They rode the next half-mile in silence. ‘The battalion is posted abroad,’ MacAndrews said suddenly. ‘The last batch of letters confirmed it. Gibraltar first, and then perhaps Cadiz or even back here, if Lord Wellington can cling on in Portugal.’

‘Do you think we can, sir?’ Pringle asked.

MacAndrews was a true Highlander, and never answered any question quickly. ‘Maybe,’ he said with similar Caledonian reluctance to commit. ‘The French are obviously so convinced they are going to win that they are dragging their feet. Maybe something can be pulled out of the hat to surprise them.’

‘Are we to rejoin the battalion?’

‘Nothing certain as yet, although the colonel writes to say that he earnestly hopes to arrange this.’

Pringle thought back to Williams telling him of Dobson’s comments all those months ago, and that led him to the fears for his comrades, and the guilt that he was no longer inside the besieged fortress. He had carried the letter from the governor to Celorico, even seen the general read it immediately. Billy Pringle had never for a moment thought that the British commander would march to the town’s relief, and all that El Charro had said had only added to that conviction. It seemed a wasted journey, but now it meant that he was safe and his friends were not.

MacAndrews grunted when they saw a cluster of horsemen on the ridge ahead of them and the two men urged their mounts up the slope to join them. Earlier that morning the companies from the 1/45th had also marched away from Fort La Concepción, going back to the irascible General Picton’s Third Division. Burgoyne was still there, tinkering with his ‘infernal devices’, as MacAndrews called them, and there was usually a corporal’s picket of the KGL Hussars, but otherwise there was simply the Scotsman and his small party of officers and NCOs.

‘Ah, Colonel MacAndrews,’ said Brigadier General Craufurd as they arrived. ‘I understand that you are to be placed under my command for the moment. What is your establishment?’

‘Six officers present, with thirty-six sergeants, corporals and other ranks. One officer and three NCOs are in Ciudad Rodrigo.’ They could see the town clearly from the ridge, and watch the flashes of guns, even though the noise of the shots came only later as an indistinct rumble.

‘Aye, well, I dare say they’re playing their part most gallantly. I have no doubt that we can make use of those of you present.’ The general’s tone was gruff, but practical. His brigade had now become the Light Division, but as yet its regiments were not divided into two or more brigades, and so Black Bob had no subordinate generals and their staffs to help him run things. Pringle suspected that he and the rest of MacAndrews’ little force would soon find themselves running errands and performing all the other little tasks than no one else cared to do. He edged his horse to the fringes of the group of staff officers.

‘Well, Pringle, my dear fellow, what a joy to see you!’ Billy turned, the voice vaguely familiar, but was still surprised to see Lieutenant Garland beaming delightedly and holding out his hand. It was odd to receive such an enthusiastic greeting from a man whom he had shot at their last meeting.

Pringle smiled broadly, took the hand, and made the appropriate noises. ‘I did not know the Fourteenth were up?’

‘Oh, can’t keep the Hawks out of the thick of things,’ said the light dragoon officer with the bounding enthusiasm of a puppy. The 14th Light Dragoons wore the Prussian eagle on the side of their crested Tarleton helmets, an honour bestowed by the Prussian wife of the Duke of York, and had picked up the nickname as a result. ‘I’ve ridden on in advance. Tilney is coming, of course. You really must dine with us when you have a mind.’

The priorities of cavalry officers always baffled Pringle, but after several years in the army he was used to the way they spoke of campaigning as little more than an excursion with friends, and a brief diversion from the serious business of hunting and gaming.

‘Is Mr Williams well, may I ask?’

‘When last I saw him, but he and a small party are inside Ciudad Rodrigo.’

Garland looked shocked for the briefest moment. ‘Ah, can’t keep him out of the thick of things! Doesn’t surprise me.’ He looked more serious, although obviously bursting to speak. ‘I wonder whether he has heard from home lately?’

Pringle smiled. ‘Sadly, the letters had not arrived before he left, but may I take this opportunity of offering you the heartiest congratulations on the birth of your daughter.’ Anne Williams now wrote regularly to him, but the vagaries of the army’s postal deliveries meant that he had recently received three in one batch, the second telling of the birth. ‘Mrs Garland is doing very well, I hear.’

‘Oh, she’s strong stock,’ the lieutenant said, almost as warmly as he would speak of a pure-bred hunter. ‘And women dearly love having babies,’ he added, confiding all the wisdom of his nineteen years. ‘We have named her Esmerelda Harriet. After my mother and my grandmother respectively.’

‘Very pretty,’ Pringle lied. ‘You must be eager to see her?’

‘Well, duty first. Would not want to miss all this excitement.’

Pringle fought the urge to pat the puppy-like Garland on the head or rub his stomach. The guns rumbled and suddenly there was a great flash. Pringle had not been looking in the right direction, and by the time he turned there was simply a big plume of black smoke coming up from the side of what he guessed was the Great Teson. The general looked amused and his staff were whooping like schoolboys.

‘Must have hit a French magazine,’ he said.

‘Damned good shooting,’ Garland said.

‘Probably luck, but none the worse for that.’

‘I wonder if General Craufurd will attack soon?’ Garland mused. ‘He seems quite a firebrand, although they say he knows his business.’ The outpost line had held for months and not suffered a serious surprise or reverse, so Pringle would not challenge the statement. ‘Did you hear the story about General Craufurd and the commissary, my dear fellow?’

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.

S
ometimes 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.