Kings and Emperors (49 page)

“The French will have it just as bad,” Phillpot prophesied, “and struggle, as we did, along the same routes, through the snow, ice, and mud, perhaps all three conditions in the same
day
in those mountains, their own supplies far behind and starving, and every hamlet plucked as clean as a chicken. Damn them all, they are
welcome
to it!”

“So, you believe the army can hold for a while?” Captain Chalmers asked him.

“Frankly, sir?” Phillpot posed with a scowl, thinking that over. “For one day, perhaps, after the French catch us up. After that? Well, the Navy will just have to get us off or the entire army's lost, what's left of it.”

Major Phillpot offered them a tour of the defences up on the Monte Mero, though the retreat had cost so many horses that they would have to accompany him on foot while he rode his own worn-out prad; he was seeing a column of hand-carts up with fresh ammunition from the depot. They both decided not to.

“Save a place for me in one of your boats, will you, sirs?” Phillpot asked, and it was not in a parting jest. “Good day.”

“And good luck,” Lewrie bade him. Under his breath to Chalmers, he added, “I think they're going to need all the luck in the world.”

As he and Captain Chalmers made their way back to the quays it began to drizzle an icy rain, quickly turning to sleet, then just as quickly to another bout of snow that began to blanket the ground, which had already been whitened, then churned to a slushy, muddy, muck by the thousands of soldiers. They passed a narrow church, where soldiers were quartered, and paused as they heard a flute and fiddle playing a tune inside.

“What's that?” Lewrie asked.

“I think it's ‘Over the Hills and Far Away,'” Chalmers said as he cocked an ear. “It's from
The Beggar's Opera,
as I recall.” As the tune continued, Chalmers “um-tiddlied”'til he got to a part he recalled. “‘And
I
would love you all the day,
all
the night we'd
laugh
and play,
if
to me you would fondly
say,
over the hills and
far
away.'”

“I wager that's their fondest wish, right now,” Lewrie wryly said, “for them to
be
‘over the hills and far away' from here!”

He recalled that he
had
heard it long before, when he had had the
Proteus
frigate, escorting a convoy of “John Company” ships, and the ship that carried Daniel Wigmore's Circus/Menagerie/Theatrical troupe that had attached itself as far as Cape Town. They had staged a performance of
The Beggar's Opera
when they broke their passage at St. Helena Island, and Eudoxia Durschkeno had sung it as part of the chorus, back when she'd been enamoured of him, and long before she'd discovered that he was married.

The quays were empty when they arrived, and a gaggle of rowing boats were scuttling out into the harbour bearing the last of that surgeon's regimental wounded.

“Mister Hillhouse,” Lewrie said, tapping the finger of his right hand on his hat by way of casual salute. “Last of 'em off, I see?”

“Aye, sir,” Midshipman Hillhouse replied, doffing his hat in reply. “I was told by an army officer that there are more wounded men coming to be got off. The
Prosperity
and the
Blue Bonnet
are now full, so when the boats return, I thought to send the new batch out to the
Boniface,
if you think that right, sir.”

“Quite so, Mister Hillhouse,” Lewrie said with a nod of agreement, then looked about to determine the arrangements that the Army might have made for their soldiers. “Damme, but it's cold. Perhaps we should fetch pots, firewood, and tea leaves ashore after our boats make their first run out to
Boniface.
It's shameful t'let the poor devils lay here and shiver in the open, in this snow.”

“Perhaps ‘portable soup' might be more welcome, sir,” Captain Chalmers suggested. “One would think that the army would see to such. Aha, here comes the next batch.”

Lewrie turned about to see wounded men being brought to the quays, some being trundled in hand-carts, but most, those called the “walking wounded,” astride horses, some clinging to healthy men.

“Cavalry, aha!” Chalmers said. “With all their saddles and such. I suppose we must attempt to salvage all that,” he added with a frown, and a sigh.

“Light Dragoons,” Lewrie noted aloud, taking in the fur-topped leather helmets, short jackets, Paget-model carbines, and sabres the healthy troopers wore. “Aye, I suppose we must get all their gear off, though God knows if we've any horse transports, and they may … Percy? Percy Stangbourne?” he shouted as he recognised the officer leading the column.

Colonel Percy, Viscount Stangbourne, looked up from his dour and weary musings, startled, looked about, then spotted him.

“Alan? Alan Lewrie?” he perked up. “Where the Devil did you spring from? Here to get us off, are you? Thank God!”

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

“Believe it or not, I was just thinking of you, Percy,” Lewrie told him after Stangbourne had sprung from his saddle and had come to not only shake hands warmly, but thump him on the back in a bear-hug.

Well, yer better half, really,
Lewrie thought.

“What? Why?” Percy asked, head cocked over in puzzlement.

“That tune,” Lewrie told him. “I remember Eudoxia singin' it, on the way to Cape Town. How is she?”

“Safe in the country, thank God,” Percy answered. “Oh, she
was
of a mind to take the field with me, same as Lydia, but in her condition … we're due another child, perhaps even now, so far as I know … and her father and I talked her out of it, again thank God!”

“And Lydia?” Lewrie asked of his former lover, thankful that he no longer felt a twinge in doing so, surprised again that mention or thought of her no longer caused a lurch in his innards.

“She's well,” Stangbourne said, half his attention on his restless mount that was butting its head on his back. “Hunting and shooting round the estate, by herself if she can't convince anyone else to join her. Horses and dogs, and her new hobbies … church work, ministering to the wives and children of the regiment who didn't get to come along to Portugal, raising funds and such for the needy.”

Just as I thought,
Lewrie told himself;
it'll be missionary work and soup kitchens in the stews, you just watch!

“That's good, I suppose,” Lewrie opined.

“Yes, well,” Percy agreed, with a roll of his eyes.

“Boats are coming for your wounded men. Have many, do you?” Lewrie asked, peering at the men being lowered from horses, or borne out of the hand-carts.

“We've more sick than wounded,” Stangbourne told him with a bleak expression. “The badly wounded, and the very ill, died along the way, or had to be left behind in the villages we passed through. And, there were some who got so drunk off looted wine stores that we just had to leave them where they lay! Oh, the damned French
loved
that! We could hear them, when we stood as the rear-guard,
butchering
them without an
ounce
of mercy!”

“Good Lord!” Lewrie exclaimed.

“Laughing their evil heads off as they did it, too,” Viscount Percy spat, “my troopers, soldiers, and the women and children with the army, too, all murdered. Now and then, though, we caught them at their games, and made them pay, blood for blood,” Percy vowed, in such heat that made Lewrie re-consider his opinion of Percy. He was not a rich and idle
dilettante
playing at soldiering any longer, but a blooded veteran.

“I hear it was horrid,” Lewrie lamely said.

“You don't know the half of it, Alan,” Stangbourne mournfully said. “I've lost a third of my regiment, and a quarter of my horses! No grain, thank the bloody Spanish very much! No grass for them to eat, no rations for my troopers, damn Spanish promises, again! There were steep places where the ice was so thick that the horses couldn't even stay on all four hooves, fell, broke their legs and had to be put down … fell off the sides of the damned arched bridges into the ravines, horse and trooper together, or grew so weak that they just lay down and died.
Damn,
but half-cooked horse meat is just
foul,
an abomination to every good Englishman.”

“Well, we'll get your sick and wounded out to the
Boniface
and let them heal up,” Lewrie promised. “Warm, dry berths, hot food and drink?”

“We've tried to salvage as much of our saddlery as we could. I hope there's room for that,” Stangbourne demanded, waving at carts filled with sabres, carbines, broad saddle-cloths with the regimental badge embroidered upon them, and heaps of leather goods.

“I'm sure there'll be room in the holds,” Lewrie said to assure him. Now that Percy's regiment was no longer Stangbourne's Horse but officially on Army List, anything lost would be made good by the Government; it wouldn't come out of Percy's purse. He'd lavished thousands to raise, equip, mount, and train his Dragoons in 1804, so many thousands of pounds that Lydia had feared that he would squander his wealth on it … that, or his penchant for gambling deep.

“They're holding the cavalry ashore, for now,” Percy went on. “If the French get here before enough transports arrive…”

Lewrie assured him that over an hundred ships were coming, and that the Navy would do its best to get everyone off before the French arrived in force.

“Horse transports?” Stangbourne pointedly asked.

“Ah … that I don't know, Percy,” Lewrie had to admit. “We don't have any among the ships we brought from Gibraltar. But surely, that'll have been thought of, by Admiral de Courcy, Admiral Hood, and London.”

“Well, just Merry bloody Christmas, and Happy Fucking New Year!” Percy exclaimed, quite out of character from the proper fellow that Lewrie had known before. “Haven't we left enough behind, already? Guns, carriages, waggons, even the pay chests that got tossed into the steep ravines! Come Spring, some damned Spaniards might find them and make themselves rich!
Then
maybe the bastards will offer us even the
slightest
bit of aid!”

“Ready, sir,” one of Stangbourne's officers interrupted.

“Right, coming. Excuse me for a bit, Alan,” he said, stomping off, and leaving the reins of his horse to a trooper.

“No help from the Spanish, I take it, sir?” Lewrie asked the junior officer.

“Those pusillanimous bastards, sir?” that worthy spat, brows up in surprise at the question. “Not a morsel. There was only one Spanish general willing to come join us,
if
we could feed, arm, and clothe
his
soldiers for a Winter campaign! All that talk of proud, armed civilian bands defending their own blasted country is just so much moonshine. Every village or town we came to, the Spanish had packed up and carted everything away, leaving us scraps, offering us nothing! Well, they left the wines. Benavente, Astorga … Bembibre was the worst. Rum stores, wine vats, got staved in and it ran in the filthy streets like floodwater, and our poor fellows scooped it up, dirt, mud, animal waste and all, and drunk themselves simply hoggish. Even flogging couldn't control them. It was abominable. You ask me, sir, Spain and its idle people aren't worth the effort to save, for they won't save themselves.”

Percy came back to rejoin them as the last of his wounded and sick men were laid out on the stone quays. At least the depot that General Sir David Baird had established could provide them blankets, replacement greatcoats, and capes.

“I thought to send out for kettles, to brew up tea or soup,” Lewrie said as Percy took back his horse's reins, and stroked its nose and muzzle.

“Ah, thankee, Alan, but I've already seen to that,” Percy told him, gesturing to some troopers removing kettles from the hand-carts and passing among the sick and wounded with tin mugs. “The depot has lashings of rum that will most-like be burned up or dumped into the harbour, so they'll all get a portion in their tea, orders and regulations be-damned. They've more than earned the wee comfort, the poor devils. Like my horse, do you, Alan?”

“Aye, he looks a go-er,” Lewrie agreed, appraising the grey gelding.

“Thunder, here, is a stout and brave beast,” Percy said, stroking his horse's neck. “He's the last of mine that still has shoes. Another of our torments, that … the farrier waggons lost, no nails or horseshoes, along with no grain and no grass to graze. We simply had to shoot the lame ones.

“I started with a string of five in Portugal,” Percy went on, fondling his mount's forehead and muzzle, “and now I've two left, and my mare is lame, and without shoes, so I suppose it's be kindest to shoot her, too, but…” He broke off and buried his face against his horse's neck.

“The depot, surely…,” Lewrie tried to encourage.

“They've no grain,” Percy told him, leaning back. “We were told the Spanish would provide, and I doubt they could shoe no more than a single squadron before running out, and most of the farriers marched with the army, anyway … dead back in those damned mountains,” he said as he waved towards the far, forbidding heights.

“The big convoy's due any hour,” Lewrie promised, hoping that there were horse transports; he was an Englishman, a horse-lover from birth, and despised the thought of Percy's magnificent horse being shot to keep it from the French, or to keep it from starving.

“I must get back to my post,” Percy announced, after a grim look-over the so-far-empty harbour. “We're brigaded with Fraser's Division, to defend the open country and the road from Vigo. That's about the only place where French cavalry could attack. I'd offer you a supper in our regimental mess, but I doubt you'd care for oat meal and hard bisquit.”