Whose Business Is to Die
Read Whose Business Is to Die Online
Authors: Adrian Goldsworthy
Tags: #Napoleonic Wars, #Historical
WHOSE BUSINESS IS TO DIE
WHOSE BUSINESS
IS TO DIE
Adrian Goldsworthy
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
LONDON
For Thomas Atkins Esq., past, present and future
How stands the glass around?
For shame, ye take no care, my boys
,
How stands the glass around?
Let mirth and wine abound
,
The trumpets sound!
The colours they are flying boys
,
To fight, kill or wound
,
May we still be found
,
Contented with hard fare, my boys
,
On the cold, cold ground
Why, soldiers, why
,
Should we be melancholy boys?
Why, soldiers, why?
Whose business ’tis to die!
What, sighing? Fye!
Damn fear, drink on, be jolly boys!
’Tis he, you or I
,
Cold, hot, wet or dry
,
We’re always bound to follow, boys
,
And scorn to fly
.
’Tis but in vain;
(I mean not to upbraid you boys)
,
’Tis but in vain
,
For soldiers to complain
.
Should next campaign
,
Send us to Him that made us, boys
,
We’re free from pain
.
But should we remain
,
A bottle and kind landlady
Cures all again
.
• • •
‘Why, soldiers, why?’ was featured in the 1729 play The Patron, and was very popular during the Peninsular War. It was often called ‘Wolfe’s Song’ and may well have been sung by the army in the Quebec campaign of 1759. There was also a story that General Wolfe sang the song the day before he was killed at the moment of victory, but this is almost certainly apocryphal.
CONTENTS
A
s soon as he saw the tree the officer knew that he had come the right way. The twisted shape was distinctive, its trunk shattered by some winter storm, and while once again he wondered why the farmer had let this one grow outside the walled orchard, that did not matter because he had not led the column astray. The colonel had found this route during the night, riding ahead of the army, and then sent him back to bring on the brigade so that they approached the open country through this stretch of shallow valleys and hills dotted with vineyards and gardens. Everything looked so different in daylight, and the slower pace of a marching column compared to three staff officers and a couple of dragoons on their own had made the trip seem far longer and fed his worry that he had made a mistake. That had set him thinking, trying to remember each change of direction and work out whether he had gone wrong. Yet there was the tree, and that meant that he was right and there was barely a quarter of a mile to go.
‘Well done, girl.’
Lieutenant Hamish Williams patted his grey mare on the neck and then arched his stiff back. An inch or more over six foot, he was a big man and powerfully built, and this impression was reinforced because the horse was a short-necked, clumsy-looking beast of barely fifteen hands. Yet for all her ill-favoured looks, Francesca had proved a good purchase, for she had plenty of stamina and was showing herself to be uncommonly sure footed. His other horse, a chestnut gelding with the graceful lines of an
Andalusian, was proving less good, and had already gone lame in its offside front leg.
Williams reached inside his heavy boat-cloak and pulled out his watch. It was almost ten minutes past twelve on the morning of – and this took a few moments of calculation in his weary state – the twenty-fifth of March in the year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. The watch, like the horses and the new uniform he wore under his cloak, was one of his Lisbon purchases, part of those wild two days when he had spent more money than ever before in his life. The only thing he had failed to find was a good glass, to replace the one the French had taken last year. Intended to be mounted on a stand, it had been a clumsy, heavy weight to carry strapped to his pack, but the magnification was so wonderful that it had seemed worth it. More than that, it was a present – and one she could not really afford – from his mother when, much against her wishes, her only son had gone for a soldier. He still had not had the heart to write and say that it was lost.
Williams looked back over his shoulder, but there was no sign of the leading company. If they did not appear in five minutes then he would have to ride back to find them, but he had not long left them and they should not have gone astray. He really ought not to have to wait long. Looping the reins over his left hand, Williams plucked off his oilskin-covered bicorne hat and ran his other hand through his fair hair, blinking as the fatigue washed over him. His chin felt as rough as sandpaper, although in truth only the closest observer would have seen that he had not shaved. Three years of campaigning in all weathers had given just the slightest dark tinge to his fair, freckled skin, although there were a few black flecks of powder encrusting his right cheek from where he had fired a musket more times than he could remember. Even so, with his bright blue eyes and fresh face, the lieutenant still resembled an overgrown schoolboy more than a veteran soldier.
The infantry did not appear, and to stop himself from hurrying back to search for them and risking appearing nervous, he
unclasped his cloak and rolled it up to fasten behind his saddle. He would have to remember to shake it out and dry it later on – or ask his soldier servant to do it. Having a servant was as much a new experience as possessing a watch and two horses, so such thoughts did not come naturally to him.
‘Ah, better late than never,’ he said out loud as a rank of soldiers marched over the rise a couple of hundred yards behind him. ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair,’ he added, and then tried to remember where he had read the line. Not Shakespeare, of course, but someone modern. It was probably something a gentleman should know, although literary knowledge – indeed knowledge of any sort – was scarcely the boast of many good fellows, let alone the thrusters, in the army. Williams felt his want of education keenly, and wished one of his particular friends from his own regiment were here to ask. Pringle, Hanley or Truscott would no doubt have known – and would not mock him for his ignorance.
There was an officer walking to the right of the front rank, and when his cloak parted for a moment it gave the briefest glimpse of his scarlet coat, but that was almost the only dash of colour. The men were a drab sight in their grey greatcoats, shoulders hunched and heads bowed as they walked. They had been marching for seven hours, with only the usual short rests every hour, and most of the time they had faced driving rain and a road churned to mud by the cavalry who had preceded them. Their trousers, which were almost any shade of brown, blue, grey or black rather than the regulation white, were uniformly red-brown from mud, and more mud was spattered on the long tails of their coats. Muskets were carried down low at the slope, an affectation of the light bobs that he had always found less comfortable than slinging the firelock from his shoulder.
Williams doubted anyone back home would see the little column as fair in any way, the dark figures marching across muddy fields on a grey day. Many Britons rarely thought about their soldiers, save perhaps to puff themselves up when news came of a victory, and there had been few of those for some
time. If they saw them at all it was in the shining splendour of a parade or field day, or in coloured prints where neat lines of men directed by officers on prancing horses fired or charged through the smoke. The soldiers in those pictures were as immaculate as their formations, and fought their battles in picturesque landscapes with mountains rearing in the background. Williams had seen prints of Vimeiro and Talavera and had seen nothing that reminded him in any way of those grim fights.
