The Spanish Bride (33 page)

Juana passed a Rifleman stretched but beside the path, his face black, and froth on his lips. It was horrible to see him there, left to die, if he were not already dead, alone on the mountain-side. Her own heart was hammering as though it would burst her chest, and her head felt swollen. Terror blurred her vision; she could see only her own body, abandoned on the blistered rocks, with vultures circling and wheeling above it, as she had so often seen them on forced marches. She missed her footing on the loose surface, and stumbled, grazing her knees. The shock made her whimper, but it was fright, not the trifling pain, which dragged the sound out of her. Tiny’s bridle was slippery in her damp clutch; his coat was streaked with sweat, and the sound of his breathing alarmed her. If Tiny were to fail, it seemed to her as though she would have to die. A hand gripping her elbow helped her to her feet again; West’s voice said gruffly: ‘All right, missus?’

She tried to wipe the mist out of her eyes, and smeared the dust across her face. She could not tell West her fears; she whispered: ‘Yes!’ and gave Tiny’s bridle a jerk. The sweat from her body made the skirt of her habit cling round her legs; she began to count her steps, keeping her head bent so that she could see nothing but the stones and rocks at her feet, and not the endless, climbing road ahead. She thought that if she fell out West would probably sit by her till she was dead, to keep off the vultures; only, big, strong men were sinking down every yard or so, and perhaps West would fail before she did. The column came to another jarring halt. West told her, in a hoarse, parched voice, to sit down for a few minutes. It was too much of an effort to answer him, and she said nothing. If she sat down she would never get up again, so she stood still, leaning against poor, patient Tiny, and trying to fill her lungs with the thin, dust-laden air. It made her cough, and when she looked up, sky, rocks, and men spun round in a giddy whirl. There was such a roaring in her ears that she felt confused, and began to fear that she would lose count of her steps. It was important not to do that, she thought, so she said, ‘Four thousand six hundred and eighty-eight,’ to herself, over and over again.

An insistent voice intruded upon her absorption. ‘Open your mouth! Juana, open your mouth, do you hear me?’ it said.

‘Four thousand six hundred and eighty-eight,’ she said huskily. ‘Four thousand—’ ‘Stop that!’ Harry said, in a rough voice. ‘Drink this at once!” She said in a vague, incredulous way: ‘Enrique?’ ‘Yes, I’m here. Drink this up, and you will be better directly!’

He held an enamel mug to her lips, and she obediently swallowed the weak mixture of brandy and water it contained. The world steadied, and stopped whirling round her. She saw Harry’s frowning face, and smiled. ‘Nada me duele!’ she said.

‘We are almost up,’ he said. ‘Can you go on?’

‘Oh yes, only please, Enrique, will you tell West to keep away the vultures? I am sorry to be troublesome, but you mustn’t let the vultures get me, if I fall out. Promise?’ ‘I promise,’ he said, in a strangled tone. ‘But you are talking nonsense. You are not going to fall out.’

‘No, but I thought I would just speak to you about the vultures.’

‘Very well, but you have spoken to me about them, and there is no need to think any more about such things.’

She agreed to it, and indeed, as soon as he was beside her, the phantasmagoria of nightmarish thoughts receded in her mind. The drink he had given her revived her; she said that she felt better, and even dared to look ahead towards the crest of the mountain. He was unable to stay with her; she was not the only cause of his anxieties, though she might be the most acute one. Two hundred men had been obliged to drop out of the column, so exhausted they could only stand leaning upon their firelocks, saying in sullen, bewildered voices that they had never fallen out before, not even on the road to Talavera. Scouts reported the enemy to be marching along the road beside the Bidassoa, and never was a brigade in worse fighting shape. To add to Harry’s worries, Skerrett was fussing and fretting in a useless way which augured ill for his conduct of the brigade in action. The leading brigade reached the crest of Santa Cruz at four in the afternoon, and was allowed to halt there. Several men who had accomplished the last few hundred yards only by dogged determination not to be beaten, no sooner reached the summit than they fell heavily on to the sunbaked rocks, lay wridiing for a few moments of strange agony, and died there, black in the face, like the soldier Juana had seen, with froth on their lips, and their firelocks still grasped in their hands. Others, when the cry of ‘The enemy!’ penetrated to their brains through the drumming in their ears, raised their heads to show faces unrecognizable under the dust and sweat that covered them. Three thousand feet below them, the Bidassoa flowed through a deep gorge between the opposing heights of Santa Cruz and Sumbilla. Beyond the Bidassoa ran the road from Santesteban to Vera, following the river’s course, and, as the weary soldiers looked, they perceived a dense mass of troops moving along the road. Even from where they were halted they could see that the column was in disorder, hurrying northward.

‘Look at ’em, boys, look at ’em!’ called out Tom Plunket, in a cracked voice. “They’re rompéd, by Gob! Now it’s out with our muzzle-stoppers, and off with our lock-caps!’ 4

The sight of the retreating column whipped up the division’s spirits; men who, a moment before, had thought themselves unable to move, struggled to their feet again; and when Alten decided to force the march on for seven miles more in an attempt to intercept the retreat, almost the whole of the 1st brigade began to struggle down the steep track on the northern side of the mountain. As many of Skerrett’s men as could still put one foot in front of the other followed, but thirty miles of marching in the rear of the column over heart-breaking ground had taken too big a toll of the brigade’s strength. ‘The men can’t do it, General,’ Harry told Skerrett bluntly.

‘I believe you are right,’ Skerrett said, in an undecided tone.

Harry, who knew he was right, bit his lip to keep back a hot retort. After a few moments, Skerrett seemed to make up his mind, and sent Fane off with a message for Alten. Fane came back presently with orders for the brigade to fall out at the foot of the hill, near a village where they had halted on their march to Lecumberri. For himself and Juana, and Tom Fane, Harry took possession of the same cottage which they had occupied a few days before. It was a neat little building, and when they had last seen it it had stood in well-cultivated fields, with a garden full of vegetables behind it, and a yard teeming with poultry and goats. The passing of the French army had, changed all that. The Indian corn had been seized for forage, the pea-rows stripped in the garden, all the fields trampled down, and the ducks and the hens commandeered. The owner seemed resigned, however. He told Harry that some of his corn had been taken by English Commissaries; but the English gave receipts for what they took, and paid for it, if one had patience; and even if they never paid, he would riot care, since they had driven the villainous French out of the country. He still had a little bacon hidden away: enough eked out with their own rations, to provide a supper for the Smiths, he said.

It was late when Harry joined Juana and Tom Fane in their billet. He found Juana asleep on the floor, with her cloak spread under her, and Tom Fane sitting on a stool, watching her. She looked small, and defenceless, so exhausted that neither the opening of the door, nor Harry’s unhushed voice so much as stirred her eyelids.

When the farmer brought their supper in, Harry woke her. He made her sit up to the table; she still seemed half-asleep, but the smell of the food roused her, and she ate a very good supper. As soon as she had swallowed the last mouthful, she went to sleep again, and never moved until morning. She sat up, then, yawning, and stretching her limbs. ‘Oh, how I have slept!’ she said.

‘Better, querida?’ Harry asked.

‘Oh, I am perfectly well, and so very hungry!’

‘If only we had some more of that bacon we ate for supper!’ said Fane. ‘We ought to have saved some!’

‘You ate bacon for supper?’ exclaimed Juana. ‘Oh, malvado, hombre brutale! Why did you not wake me?”

‘But, Juana, Harry did wake you!’ ‘No! Never! It is not true!’

‘Yes, it is,’ Harry said, laughing at her. ‘You ate a capital supper, too!’ ‘Enrique, it is a lie! I ate nothing, I tell you! Estupido, how could I have eaten supper when I remember nothing of the sort? I was all the time asleep.’

‘My dearest heart, you may have been asleep, but upon my word of honour you sat on that stool, and you ate bacon, and eggs, and drank two cups of coffee!’

‘Yes, you did really,’ Fane assured her.

‘Well, if it is true, I think it is worse than anything!’ she said. ‘Because it does not seem to me that I have had anything to eat since yesterday morning, and it would be very comforting just to remember eating bacon and eggs last night.’

5

They marched that morning, the brigade miraculously revived, and rejoined Alten at Yanzi. Kempt’s brigade, reaching the banks of the Bidassoa on the previous evening under cover of thick woods, had taken the disorderly French column, on the other side of the river, by surprise, and had riddled the ranks with their fire. The prospect of ‘knocking the dust out of the Frenchmen’s hairy knapsacks’ had spurred the brigade on, but after that first volley they had not attempted much more. Hemmed in the defile by the mountain behind them, horribly at the mercy of the Riflemen’s accurate fire, the French had made signs asking for quarter, pointing to their wounded, whom they were taking with them. There was appalling confusion amongst them, and the bodies of dead men swirled away in the Bidassoa, while the cavalry, trampling over wounded infantrymen, tried to charge up the pass of Echalar. On the march the next day, the weary Light division was cheered as much by the arrival of Lord Wellington in their midst as by the litter of abandoned French baggage all along the road. His lordship looked to be in excellent spirits. He touched his hat to the Light troops, and smiled, so presumably he was not dissatisfied with the results of their forced march. His lordship was, in fact, in a mood to be pleased with his men. He said in moments of exasperation that they were good for nothing but fighting. He admitted that they were very good at that, and it was reported that he had said of the action at Sorauren that he had never seen the army behave better. The men, as he knew they would, had got his lordship out of a scrape. General Cole had failed to send proper intelligence to him, and there had been, one way and another, a good deal of uncertainty amongst the various divisional commanders, so that Soult had been allowed to penetrate much farther than he ought’ to have done. The Pass of Maya had been lost rather unnecessarily, and by the time the army had retreated as far as to Sorauren the soldiers were grumbling and fretting, mistrustful of their Generals. But all that was changed the instant his lordship joined the army. He rode up quite alone, having sent Lord Fitzroy Somerset galloping off with dispatches for the Quartermaster-General. He appeared amongst the skirmishers of some Portuguese Caçadores, and no sooner did the Caçadores clap eyes on that low-cocked hat, and familiar frock-coat, than they set up a shout of ‘Douro! Douro!’ by which title they were in the habit of hailing his lordship. The British troops pricked up their ears at the sound of it; a little later his lordship was amongst them, and such a roar of cheering greeted him that it reached Soult’s lines, and even brought a tinge of colour into his lordship’s cheeks. He saluted his troops in his stiff way, but although all he said was: ‘No cheering, my lads, but send the French to the rightabout,’ it could be seen that he was not unmoved by the demonstration. There was no more grumbling, there were no more pessimistic prophecies. When his lordship came himself, his men knew that the end was certain. You could not look at his calm profile without acquiring a feeling of boundless confidence, and he had a knack of appearing without warning amongst hardly-pressed troops which always turned the tide in favour of the Allied army. Nothing ever ruffled his calm in battle. You would not have known him for the same man who, in his office, displayed such alarming irritability whenever anything went awry. He could rally demoralized troops by merely putting himself in their midst; and if, in the stress of circumstances, their fire grew ragged, he could steady it just by saying in his loud, cheerful way: ‘That’s right, my lads: take your time! No hurrying, now!’ as though they were at target-practice. The knowledge that Hill’s force had done so well at Sorauren was naturally a little galling to the Light Bobs, remembering their abortive march to Lecumberri, but they were able to demonstrate what stuff they were made of when they reoccupied their original fine of pickets above Vera, and found that the French were holding the heights of Echalar on their right. The men were so weakened by excessive marching and lack of food that some of them could scarcely stand. Some biscuit served out by the Commissary was eaten while they primed and loaded their pieces, and, weak or not, the division went into action on the French flank, while the 4th and 7th divisions launched an attack on the front. A brigade of the 7th carried off most of the honours of that day’s fighting, but the Rifles and the 43rd regiment, under Colonel Barnard, won the peak of Ivantelly in dense fog, sweeping aside the French skirmishing-line, losing touch with their own main body, and fighting like devils in smothering cloud-wreaths. When the fog cleared, there was Barnard, established on the crest, so the army re-christened the peak Barnard’s Hill, and the division was able to forget that it had not struck a blow at Sorauren.

Soult, with his centre smashed in, and his flanks routed in the bewildering mist, was now quite rompéd, the army thought. Men were said to be deserting from the French ranks by hundreds; and everyone knew how much valuable baggage had been lost on that disastrous retreat