Whose Business Is to Die (26 page)

Colborne noticed him looking at the deployed brigade. ‘It is a shame that we could not find a way of creating some great pieces of ordnance as you suggested.’ That had been part of the
same idea. Medieval walls like this were pretty things, but could not stand up to modern artillery. Yet all they had were the little Spanish pieces and they would not dent the stone. For over an hour the three of them had pondered various schemes to mock up something so that at a distance it looked like a heavy cannon. The only feasible plan required a cart and tree trunk and they had neither. ‘We shall just have to hope the French assume that we come well prepared.’

Williams did not believe it very likely. Last year he had seen a small Polish garrison of an elderly fortification scorn two summons to surrender and then fight off a whole brigade with a few guns and support from the Navy. All that he had seen of Napoleon’s men in the last years made him doubt that Frenchmen would prove any less resolute than their Polish allies.

‘Taking his blasted time, ain’t he?’ Dunbar said, and then a little door creaked open beside the main gate. ‘Good God,’ he added in a low voice.

Two sentries had stepped out, each with a bayonet fitted to his musket, and with brasses polished and blue jacket well brushed. Behind them was a short, immensely fat man in a pale green dressing gown. The first breath of wind wafted round the walls and lifted up the flap of oiled hair combed to cover his bald pate.

The colonel raised his hat. ‘I am General Colborne, of His Majesty King George’s army,’ assuming the rank since he genuinely possessed the responsibility.

‘Major Legros.’

‘A little obvious, don’t you feel,’ Dunbar whispered.

Colborne launched into a carefully prepared speech, telling the major that he was surrounded by a strong force of redcoats, and that two divisions of Spanish under General Blake would arrive by the afternoon. If the Spanish were forced to assault the castle then he could not prevent them from taking vengeance. Blake had sworn to put every man to the sword in punishment for the cruelty inflicted on his country. The Spanish general was senior, but if the gallant major was to surrender to Colborne then the British, and no less a person than Lord Wellington himself, would
ensure that he and his garrison received honourable treatment as prisoners of war.

Williams had heard the colonel rehearsing his plea, but even so was impressed. As far as they knew Blake was fifty or sixty miles away, perhaps more, and moving in the opposite direction, but the mutual hatred of French and Spanish surely carried greater threat than anything else Colborne could say. It was a bluff, he thought, a
ruse de guerre
, and since the French had provided the name they could scarcely complain when such methods were employed against them. Yet the term did rather suggest that they might be naturally wary of such things.

Colborne finished with a flourish, inviting the brave Major Legros to spare them all unnecessary bloodshed.

The Frenchman let him finish, one hand rubbing his unshaven chin.

‘Non,’
he said, and gave a little bow. Then he turned on his heel and went back inside, followed by the two infantrymen.

‘Oh well,’ Dunbar sighed. ‘That would appear to be that.’

Colborne turned his horse and led them away. A musket boomed from the high wall behind them. Then two more fired and Williams saw a ball strike not far in front of them. Each man prodded his horse and raced away as more shots followed.

‘I believe we have offended them,’ he called out to Dunbar.

‘Must have interrupted the major’s breakfast,’ the captain replied. ‘A fellow like that would take such things very seriously.’

They waited for most of the day, watching the castle from a safe distance, but there was no question of attempting an assault, for there were no ladders and even if these had been available it was not their task to fight.

‘No sense in marching through this heat,’ the colonel told them, and ordered small pickets to observe the garrison in the unlikely event that it showed any signs of coming out. The rest of the men had a chance to cook, to repair worn soles of boots and patch up their clothes, or simply to sleep. Just for once the colonel did not insist on a day of drill.

In the early evening they marched, following a road that soon
began to climb and wind through the foothills of the Sierra Morena mountains. The temperature dropped as they went higher, the night closed in and they were happy to keep moving. Williams and some cavalry rode ahead to find a spot for the bivouac, and found one about twelve miles away. By the time the advance guard arrived and Dunbar waved happily in greeting, he had marked out each battalion’s position and drawn a sketch map showing the alarm posts. The ritual was already a habit requiring little thought.

The next day Colborne drove the brigade hard. After just three hours’ sleep the bugles and drums roused them. They set out at four o’clock and marched until noon before resting.

‘Make sure they eat and do not simply fall asleep,’ he ordered, sending Dunbar and Williams to prompt the unit commanders. The instruction was not a welcome one, and the Welshman could remember times when he had felt so exhausted that all he wanted to do was slump by the road, prop his head on his pack and sleep. As he rode past the companies he heard officers give orders, and the sergeants shouting to stir the men.

Colborne gave them two and a half hours and then ordered them up. They marched on under dull skies and steady drizzle through the afternoon and evening, and then kept going as night fell. The clouds had gone, and a bright field of stars made finding the way straightforward. Dunbar took a troop of Portuguese cavalry on ahead and so for a change Williams led the advance guard, leading his horse to show them that he was sharing the burden of this long march.

‘Thirty-five miles in a day,’ Dunbar told him when they arrived at the small town where they would stop. ‘I have rarely heard of the like.’

‘I am not surprised,’ Williams told him. ‘The men are quite done up.’ It seemed the colonel was of the same opinion, for the next day they did not move, although he ordered an hour of company drill followed by another hour by each battalion.

The following day they did not go more than ten miles, although it was still hard because the road was bad and rose and
fell through hilly country. The forty-three prisoners they had taken grew sullen, so Colborne posted half a dozen Portuguese cavalry to escort them. Fear of reprisals kept them moving.

‘Did you hear what happened up north?’ Dunbar asked Williams when the column halted for the five-minute break given regularly each hour. ‘As Lord Wellington was chasing Masséna, they reached a village with the houses burned and people massacred. Some redcoats were leading a column of prisoners back past a Portuguese brigade. One of their light bobs suddenly runs out, shoots a Frenchman through the head, and then fixes his bayonet and runs amok. Killed three before they stopped him. But it turned out that it was his village and he had just seen the bodies of his parents lying dead in the street, the mother shamefully mistreated. Lord Wellington had the man released after a couple of days under arrest.’

Williams had heard the story several times, albeit with a steady increase in the number of prisoners cut down. It was a grim tale, and he tried to imagine seeing his own family lying slaughtered by the ruin of their burning house. The thought of Anne or one of the other girls violated brought on a horror and a rage that made him suspect that he might well act as the Portuguese soldier had done.

‘I pray to God that the people of England never see just how horrible this war can be,’ he said.

‘Amen to that. Though it might make them take the business seriously and give us what we need to finish the job. By the way, have you found out any more from those rogues?’

They had taken seven prisoners wearing pale green jackets with yellow facings. None was French and they tended to stay together as a group, conversing in a strange mixture of half a dozen languages. The men confessed to be soldiers in the Irish Legion, and admitted that they were under the command of a Major Sinclair, but did not know where he was. They had caught them in a village, waiting at an inn. Three had fled and managed to escape by hiding in a nearby marsh.

‘No,’ Williams replied. ‘I doubt that they know much more.’
He had told the colonel and Dunbar of the men’s importance, and so a cavalryman had ridden back to the main army with a report for Baynes.

‘Nasty-looking bunch,’ Dunbar said. ‘Don’t think the other prisoners care for them too much.’

The pace quickened again the next day, but now they were heading back to join the rest of the army. The news once again refreshed spirits and the men stepped out with a will. For the first time in days they started to sing, the Buffs beginning with a spirited rendition of ‘Confound our officers’.

Dunbar grinned at Williams when he heard the chorus. ‘Nice to be appreciated.’

They kept moving, into flatter plains once again, and so the going become easier.

‘Badajoz is under siege,’ Colborne told them after speaking with a priest who had ridden to bring them news. ‘And Marshal Soult has mustered an army and left Seville overnight in the small hours of the tenth of May.’ That was two days ago, and no doubt the French would be moving quickly to relieve the beleaguered city.

It was Williams’ turn to find a place for the night’s camp, and when he rode on ahead he was pleased to run into an outpost of the 13th Light Dragoons. They were almost back with the army.

‘I make it more than two hundred and fifty miles,’ Dunbar concluded when the next afternoon they met up with the remainder of the Second Division, which was part of the force stationed to the south to screen the besiegers. ‘It does seem rather a long way to end up pretty much where we started!’

‘Well, that is the army for you,’ Williams said.

‘Gentlemen, if you do not have duties to perform then I will find something to fill your time,’ Colborne told them, but his heart was not in the reproof, and instead he watched his men with a proud eye as they halted and were dismissed.

20

B
attery Number One was ready, after a frantic night of dragging three twenty-four-pounder cannon and a couple of eight-inch howitzers into place. Truscott had supervised, aided by Major Dickson of the Royal Artillery, but currently attached to the Portuguese. The guns were all on old-fashioned solid and clumsy carriages, the metalwork rusty and some of the wood rotten. Two spokes on the wheel of one of the howitzers had snapped as they were hauling it up the slope behind the battery, and it had taken nearly an hour for the little Portuguese gunners to replace it. There were plenty of the stockier redcoats to help haul the pieces up, but Dickson had no experienced artillery artificers to speed the repair.

At first light Dickson’s crews prepared to open fire on the San Cristoval. Three nights of hard slog had fashioned a reasonably solid position, with a rampart built mainly around the gabions and cut to make embrasures for the guns. Truscott watched the major polishing his spectacles as he waited to give the order to pull the sandbags out of the embrasures and allow the bombardment to commence.

‘I must say I did not believe that we would be ready,’ Dickson had said. A short man, his rotund shape belied a remarkable energy and talent for organisation. It was the major who had selected the guns and brought them from Elvas. Now he ran his fingers round the muzzle of the nearest and his expression was not one of fondness. ‘You ought to have seen the ones I rejected,’ he told Truscott. ‘We must do our best. The angle is not ideal – too oblique to inflict the most damage – but at least
we can see the base of the fort’s wall. Yes, I believe we may do very well in spite of everything.’

The French had not made the work easy. The previous day they had done their best to slow the besiegers down, sending out a strong battalion and some cavalry to raid the trenches. They came from Badajoz itself, crossing the great bridge and streaming up the side of the valley. No one had been looking in that direction and the alarm was not given for some time. The enemy even brought a couple of light field pieces to support their attack.

Truscott had heard the shouting and then the discharge of muskets and cannon as he was making the long walk back to camp, and had immediately run back. With the weight of French fire, the main covering party lay back on the far side of the ridge, so the sortie had reached the battery position before anyone could stop them. A couple of men were wounded or captured, but they had not lost more than one or two spades.

‘Dear heaven, I am beginning to think like an engineer,’ Truscott muttered as the thought sunk in.

The French were soon evicted as the 40th Foot and some Portuguese companies came up in support of the covering party. They were driven out, but then the redcoats and their allies became excited and chased as far as the ditch outside the San Cristoval fort and stayed there for hours, engaged in a futile exchange of musketry. It had taken a while to drive the cavalry and guns back into the fortress, but in the end they were forced to retreat under the protection of the outwork covering the bridge. Throughout the day the guns in Badajoz pounded the battery position and trenches as the men toiled to repair the damage and extend them.

Truscott was told to assist one of the RE officers in laying out a new battery, which was designed to cover the bridge and threaten any fresh attack. They used flags to measure it out and mark the position, working in the open because it was set back a little, on a hummock near the top of the valley, and it was hoped that the distance was too great for accurate shooting. They had
almost finished when a six-inch shell landed beside one of the redcoats working under their command. The man reached down to pinch out the fuse, but before he could the bomb went off, fragments ripping through his body and flinging him back. A tiny piece grazed Truscott on the cheek, but the engineer officer was struck in both legs.

They had begun the siege with nine Royal Engineers. By now two were dead and four wounded, which meant that there was even less rest for assistants like Truscott. He spent the remainder of the day supervising the men cutting a trench out from Battery Number One towards the site where Number Two would be constructed. The French fire never slackened, and throughout the day there was a steady trickle of casualties.