Hervey 06 - Rumours Of War (43 page)

‘Left Give Point!’ he shouted, as if the master-at-arms were drilling him. It pierced the green
chasseur
cloth just above the kidneys. The man was dead in the saddle before Hervey could withdraw it.

It was an affair of minutes only. The work of the sword was exhausting as well as bloody, and the point at which men sensed the fight went against them came quickly. The French began breaking off. For them, now, it was flight, and for Stewart’s men pursuit.
Chasseurs
ran for the river as fast as their wearied horses could bear them. The pursuers spared them nothing unless they threw down their arms. Those who chose to dispute it and then at the last minute yield, found no quarter. The Sixth did not kill its captives, ever. But the interval between fighting and yielding could sometimes be too brief for blood to cool sufficiently. Hervey understood it now.

He galloped hard, no longer constrained to the supports, nor even to ride behind the brigadier. In the pursuit it mattered only that the enemy was given no chance to re-form. And
that
needed cold steel to press them. He gave Stella her head, and leaned as far forward in the saddle as the long stirrups allowed. He overtook one Frenchman and then another; the first horse was blown, the second lame. He gave point right then left, not looking back, certain his sabre had done its work. He saw the river, and
chasseurs
plunging in. But the Eighteenth commanded the ford, and just as at Sahagun, Frenchmen were drowning rather than yield. He galloped along the bank, desperate to take a prisoner.

One Frenchman at least had the sense to yield. He dropped his reins and held out his sword with both hands. Only as Hervey advanced to take his prize did he see the epaulettes and sash of a general officer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE FINEST OF INSTRUMENTS

Elvas, 1 November 1826

Hervey picked up a stone and threw it as far as he could from the ramparts; if only it would make a splash, with the satisfying sound of deep water, just as might have been at the Bhurtpore moats had he not captured the sluices before the siege. There was no doubting it: however clever the engineers were with their pontoons and fascines, water stopped men in their tracks. The Esla had been their saving all those years ago, for a time at least.

He smiled. ‘That is how I evaded penury!’

Dom Mateo looked puzzled.

‘My charger, L’Etoile du Soir – Stella; she had taken all I possessed, and more. And I had to sell her at so unfavourable a rate later that I was a thousand pounds in debt to my agents. The general’s sword was mine to keep, and it was a Mameluke he had got in Egypt, studded with emeralds and rubies. I sold it to an officer in the Guards, paid half into the regimental widows’ fund and the rest to the agents. I was in pocket a full five pounds!’

‘Not a very great sum for your troubles.’

‘No indeed. Especially when I lost a pelisse coat and half my tackling at Corunna.’

Dom Mateo raised his eyebrows. ‘I wonder what I myself shall lose.’

Hervey frowned. ‘Dom Mateo, there is no cause for you to lose anything, save a shoe or two.’

Dom Mateo looked doubtful. ‘Reputation or life are what I had in mind, Hervey.’

Hervey frowned the more. ‘Dom Mateo, I will speak freely. You are not at liberty to hazard your life in a vain act of courage. For such it would be were you to lead two hundred sabres against a thousand men and more. It might serve well for a cornet, but never a general.’

‘By your account just now a brigadier led not greatly many more at Benavente. I cannot lock myself up in the fortress here and watch the rebels make free in the very place I am set in charge.’

‘I know, Dom Mateo; I know. I am racking my brain for an answer, I promise you. A ruse, anything!’

Major Coa came struggling to the ramparts. Hervey and Dom Mateo watched the effort with admiration. On level ground he could move as fast as the next man, but the vertical tried him sorely.

‘My dear friend,’ Dom Mateo began, laying a hand to his chief of staff’s shoulder in reply to the salute.

‘Senhor General, you asked to inspect the citadel. Now would be a propitious time. It is lit, and I have double sentries posted throughout.’

Dom Mateo was glad of it. He might at least assure himself that Elvas would not go the way of Almeida, whose magazine had exploded to a single shell, putting to naught all the elaborate and costly devices of Marshal Vauban’s art. ‘But why do you not send me word instead of hobbling up here as if practising an escalade?’

‘Senhor, a major does not summon a general!’

Dom Mateo smiled. ‘My friend, forgive me; I was never major!’ Hervey struggled but thought he gained the sense of things. He liked the major’s propriety in coming in person to the ramparts: a very soldierly impulse animated him, for all that he was
pé do castelo.
He resolved to talk with him privately, as soon as he found opportunity without risk of offence to Dom Mateo. Perhaps he might have some moderating influence, were they not able to come up with a ruse.

‘Major Coa invites me to a tour of inspection, Hervey. Shall you accompany me? I can at least take satisfaction in showing you a well-found garrison.’

Hervey had seen the citadel by night, and its outside by day, but he had not seen the great powder magazine in the depths of the circular fort. Since the explosion of the Almeida magazine, the engineers had dug deeper and built stronger at Elvas, so that powder now lay forty feet below the ground, beneath concrete as thick as nature would permit. Steel doors and shutters closed off the tunnels and shafts by which powder was brought to the surface on rails and lifts, and thence to the bastions by narrow canal, the way lit by reflecting-lamps in parallel tunnels to eliminate the danger of flame with powder. And every ten yards there was a lath braced high between the tunnel walls, heaped with gypsum to suppress fire after an explosion. Hervey expressed his regard for the magazine’s discipline and method as they emerged from one of the two lifts that raised the kegs and shell.

‘I do not imagine there is a safer place to be in a siege, Hervey,’ said Dom Mateo, and with evident pride. ‘It is unquestionably bomb-proof.’

‘I can well imagine.’ Hervey turned to Major Coa. ‘My compliments to you, sir.’

Dom Mateo’s chief of staff bowed. ‘Musket cartridges are stored in smaller magazines within the bastions. Perhaps we should visit, General?’

‘Yes, yes; anything that might be found wanting. There can be no excess of inspections!’ agreed Dom Mateo, only too happy to be diverted by things that he understood. ‘Shall you come, Hervey?’

Hervey glanced left and right. ‘What is the rest of the citadel?’

‘Guard quarters and armouries,’ said Major Coa. ‘And stores.’ Then he remembered, smiling. ‘And a very good number, I believe, bearing the letters BO.’

‘BO?’ Dom Mateo wondered why he should not know such a thing when it came to his own garrison.

Hervey smiled. ‘Board of Ordnance. Yes, General d’Olivenza told me. The Duke of Wellington established something of a depot here.’

‘Douro? In my fortress?’

‘Did he not sleep here when the army laid siege to Badajoz? I think so.’

‘Douro slept in my quarters? My honours multiply!’

Hervey smiled again. ‘May I see what remains, General? I imagine things to be very antique, and not a little decayed.’

‘No, indeed not, Major Hervey,’ said Major Coa before Dom Mateo could reply, stung by the suggestion of poor storekeeping. ‘To my knowledge only biscuit has been ruined.’

Hervey shook his head. ‘It is hard to imagine how biscuit could ever change its property!’ He turned to Dom Mateo again.

‘Of course you may see it, Hervey. I myself should wish to. I have ever been a student of history!’

Who was the more surprised by the extent of the Board of Ordnance’s expropriate stores, Hervey or Dom Mateo, it would have been difficult to say. Shelf after shelf, room after room, was packed with issue – canteens, water bottles, cartridge bags, digging tools, blankets, boots, helmets, waterdecks, socks, cloaks; the inventory was remarkable. Indeed, the inventory was present, and in the charge of a veteran storekeeper who, Major Coa explained, had signed the ledgers with one of the duke’s commissary officers when the war ended, and had kept the stores ever since. ‘He receives a pension from your government, he is proud to say.’

Hervey shook his head in disbelief. But then, if the Board of Admiralty could have victualling stations the far side of the world, why should not the Ordnance have its stores in Portugal still? Except that, in all probability, no one at the Ordnance remembered they had.

They stepped into the last of the rooms. The smell of camphor was even stronger than before. The shelves were piled high with red coats, neatly bundled.

‘How many have you, senhor?’ asked Hervey, astonished.

Major Coa repeated the question in Portuguese.

‘Dois mil novecentos e treze, senhor.’

Hervey was even more astonished at the precision of the counting.

‘He says that there were more than four thousand,’ added the major, ‘but that ten years ago he was instructed to send two thousand coats to Gibraltar.’

Hervey shook the storekeeper’s hand and thanked him. ‘Please tell him, Major Coa, that I shall be sure to inform the Board of Ordnance of his devotion to duty at the first opportunity.’

He did not add that there was a senior officer from the Board in Lisbon at that very moment. Indeed, he preferred to forget that he was in Elvas without that officer’s leave, express or otherwise.

As they walked the curtain wall towards the first bastion, Dom Mateo expounded on the faithfulness of good Portuguese servants and the co-operation that subsisted between their two countries even after war with France was long over.

Hervey, deep in thought, said nothing but an occasional ‘just so’. Suddenly he stopped and seized Dom Mateo’s arm. ‘I have it, Dom Mateo! I have it! Or if it does not serve, then I believe nothing will.’

‘Have what, Hervey?’

‘I have your means: a
ruse de guerre
!’

Dom Mateo’s eyes lit up. ‘Tell me!’

‘What would the rebels do – the Spanish, even – if they were to be confronted by British troops?’

Dom Mateo looked at him quizzically. ‘That is the question to which we all await an answer, is it not?’

‘Yes, indeed. But what would be the effect?’

Dom Mateo frowned. Had he a ruse or not? ‘We suppose they would not dare risk an adventure against the might of the King of England. But, Hervey, the King of England has not yet sent these troops. Neither is it certain that if he does they will come to Elvas. The rebels may be deterred by the
presence
of the King’s troops, but they assuredly will not be by the mere threat.’

‘Just so. But what if they
believed
that English troops were already here?’

‘And how might they be induced to believe that?’

‘There are two thousand red coats in your stores!’

There were none in the world save those on the backs of His Majesty’s men, whether white or black or brown. There was no mistaking the British redcoat – ‘Thomas Lobster’. ‘The finest of all instruments,’ the duke had said of his infantry. Time and again in the Peninsula, Hervey had seen what a line of redcoats could do. With five hundred of them barring the road to Lisbon, no Miguelista, or Spanish regular for that matter, would even dare to challenge!

Dom Mateo stood stock still. ‘Hervey, you cannot be suggesting that my men pretend to be Englishmen?’

Hervey smiled wryly. ‘Perhaps not just Englishmen. There is the tartan cloth there too!’

‘It would be a dishonour! By the articles of war, any man captured would be hanged.’

‘He would be hanged for wearing the uniform of his
enemy;
I know of no such injunction against wearing that of an ally.’

‘Nevertheless it would be insupportable.’

Hervey looked at Major Coa.

The major bowed. ‘Senhor General, may I speak?’

Dom Mateo nodded.

‘Senhor General, there is a long and honoured tradition in our country of wearing English cloth. When we were delivered from the French by our allies, it was English serge with which our new army was clothed.’

‘Yes, yes, Major Coa, I know that full well. But it was blue cloth not red!’

The major stood properly to attention and drew himself up to his full height, a gesture to say that he spoke with all his dignity and judgement. ‘Senhor General, this leg is not my own.’ He rapped it twice with his knuckles. ‘But it serves me well.’

Dom Mateo smiled. The simple patriotism was affecting. And then he began to grin at the notion of humbugging his enemies. ‘Very well, gentlemen. What serves best my country shall serve. I shall command
British
troops. The King of England shall make me a marquess!’

He began rattling off instructions to Major Coa in Portuguese.

Hervey walked on along the ramparts, peering at the distant hills towards Spain.
The finest of all instruments, British infantry:
there was no doubting it, even had the duke not said so. No infantry could stand as they did. They volleyed in two ranks, not three, because they could load faster, and thereby could cover a wider front. No infantry could go with the bayonet like they did. None could take a breech so well. None could march as fast. But it was the lash that saw to it all in the end. He wondered if Sir John Moore would have called them the finest? Not on that march to Corunna he wouldn’t. Not until the very end, at least.