Sharpe's Fury by Bernard Cornwell
“There are marshes, Sir Thomas,” the Spanish liaison officer had pleaded.
“God damn it! Just follow the road!”
But the road had not been followed and the army wandered, then halted, and men sat in fields where some tried to sleep. The ground was damp and the night surprisingly cold, so very few managed any rest. The British lit short clay pipes and the officers’ servants walked their masters’ horses up and down while the guides argued until finally some gypsies, woken from their encampment in a grove of cork oaks, pointed the way to Medina Sedonia. The troops had marched for twelve hours and, by the time they bivouacked at midday, had covered only six miles, though at least the King’s German Legion cavalry, who served under Sir Thomas’s command, had managed to surprise a half battalion of foraging French infantry and had killed a dozen enemy and captured twice as many.
General Lapeña, in a fit of energy, had then proposed marching again that same afternoon, but the men were exhausted from a wasted night and the rations were still being distributed. So he had agreed with Sir Thomas to wait until the men were fed, and then he decided they should sleep before they marched at dawn, yet at dawn Lapeña himself was not ready. It seemed that a French officer, one of those captured by the German cavalry, had revealed that Marshal Victor had reinforced the garrison in Medina Sidonia so that now it numbered more than three thousand men. “We cannot go there,” Lapeña had declared. He was a lugubrious man, slightly stooped, with nervous eyes that were rarely still. “Three thousand men! We can beat them, but at what cost? Delay, Sir Thomas, delay. They will hold us up while Victor maneuvers around us!” His hands had made extravagant gestures describing an encirclement, and finished by crushing together. “We shall go to Vejer. Today!” He made the decision with a fine forcefulness. “From Vejer we can assail Chiclana from the south.”
And that was a viable plan. The captured French officer, a bespectacled captain called Brouard, drank too much of General Lapeña’s wine and cheerfully revealed that there was no garrison in Vejer. Sir Thomas knew that a road went north from the town, which meant the allied army could come at the French siege works from the south, rather than from the east, and though he was not happy with the decision, he recognized the sense in it.
So, by the time the orders had been changed, it was almost midday before they marched and now the army was in chaos. It was infuriating. It was incompetence.
Vejer was visible across the plain, a town of white houses atop a sudden hill on the northwestern horizon, yet the guides had begun by marching the army southeast. Sir Thomas had ridden to Lapeña and, at his most diplomatic, had indicated the town and suggested it would be better to head in that direction. After a long consultation, Lapeña had agreed, and so the army had reversed itself, and that took time because the Spanish vanguard had to march back along a road crowded with stalled troops. But at last they had been going in the right direction and now they had stopped again. Just stopped. No one moved. No messages came back down the column explaining the halt. The Spanish soldiers fell out and lit their paper rolls of damp tobacco.
“Bloody man!” Sir Thomas said again as he rode to find General Lapeña. When the halt occurred he had been at the rear of the column because he liked to ride up and down his troops. He could tell a lot about his men from the way they marched, and he was pleased with his small force. They knew they were being ill led, they knew they were in chaos, but their spirits were high. The Cauliflowers were last in the column, more formally known as the second battalion of the 47th Regiment of the line. Their red coats were faced with the white patches that gave them their nickname, though the Cauliflowers’ officers preferred to call the Lancashire men “Wolfe’s Own” to remember the day they had turned the French out of Canada. The Cauliflowers, a staunch battalion from the Cádiz garrison, were reinforced by two companies of the Sweeps, green-jacketed men from the third battalion of the 95th. Sir Thomas raised his hat to the officers, then again to the men of the two Portuguese battalions who had sailed from Cádiz. They grinned at him, and he doffed his hat again and again. He noted approvingly that the Portuguese cacadores, light infantry, were in fine spirits. One of their chaplains, a man in a mud-stained cassock with a musket and a crucifix slung about his neck, demanded to know when they could start killing Frenchmen. “Soon!” Sir Thomas promised, hoping that was true. “Very soon!”
Ahead of the Portuguese was the Gibraltar Flanker battalion. That was a makeshift unit, formed by the light companies and grenadier companies of three battalions from the Gibraltar garrison. Prime troops, all of them. Two companies from the 28th, a Gloucestershire regiment, two from the 82nd, which was from Lancashire, and the two flank companies of the 9th, Norfolk lads and known as the Holy Boys because their shako plates, decorated with a picture of Britannia, was taken by the Spanish as an image of the Virgin Mary. Wherever the Holy Boys marched in Spain, women would genuflect and make the sign of the cross. Beyond the Gibraltar Flankers were the Faughs, the 87th, and Sir Thomas touched his hat in response to Major Gough’s greeting. “It’s chaos, Hugh, chaos,” Sir Thomas admitted.
“We’ll make sense of it, Sir Thomas.”
“Aye, that we will, that we will.”
Ahead of the 87th was the second battalion of the 67th, men from Hampshire, newly come from England, and unblooded until the night they had assailed the fire rafts. A good regiment, Sir Thomas reckoned, as were the remaining eight companies of the 28th who waited in front of them. The 28th was another solid county regiment from the shires. They had come from the Gibraltar garrison and Sir Thomas was pleased to see them because he remembered the men of Gloucestershire from Corunna. They had fought hard that day and had died hard too, belying their nicknames, the Dandies or the Silver Tails. Their officers insisted on wearing extra long tails to their coats, and the coattails were lavishly embroidered with silver. The 28th preferred to be known as the Slashers in solemn memory of the day they had sliced off the ears of an irritating French lawyer in Canada. The Slasher’s lieutenant colonel was talking with Colonel Wheatley, who commanded all the troops on the road behind and Wheatley, seeing Sir Thomas ride by, called for his horse.
Major Duncan and his two batteries of artillery, five guns in each, waited on the road ahead of the Silver Tails. Duncan, resting against a limber, raised his eyebrows as Sir Thomas passed and was rewarded with a quick shrug. “We’ll untangle the mess!” Sir Thomas called, and again hoped he was right.
In front of the guns was his first brigade, and he knew how fortunate he was to have such a unit under his command. It was only two battalions, but each was strong. The rearmost was another composite battalion, this one made up of two companies of Coldstreamers, two more of riflemen, and three companies of the Third Foot Guards. Scotsmen! The only Scottish infantry under his command and Sir Thomas took his hat off to them. With Scotsmen, he reckoned, he could break down the gates of hell, and he had a lump in his throat as he passed the blue-faced redcoats. Sir Thomas was a sentimental man. He loved soldiers. He had once thought all men who wore the red coat were rogues and thieves, the scourings of the gutter, and since he had joined the army he had discovered he was right, but he had also learned to love them. He loved their patience, their ferocity, their endurance, and their bravery. If he should die prematurely, Sir Thomas often thought, and join his Mary in her Scottish heaven, then he wanted to die among these men as Sir John Moore, another Scotsman, had died at Corunna. Sir Thomas kept Moore’s red sash as a memento of that day, the weave stained dark with his hero’s blood. A soldier’s death, he thought, was a happy one, because a man, even in the throes of awful pain, would die in the best company in the world. He twisted in the saddle to look for his nephew. “When I die, John,” he said, “make sure you take my body back to join your Aunt Mary.”
“You won’t be dying, sir.”
“Bury me at Balgowan,” Sir Thomas said, and touched the wedding ring he still wore. “There’s money to pay for the costs of moving my corpse home. You’ll find there’s
Lapeña looked heavily at Sir Thomas. He sighed as though he had expected the Scotsman’s arrival and thought it a nuisance. He gestured toward distant Vejer, which glowed white on its hill. “Inundación,” Lapeña said slowly and distinctly, then made circling gestures with his hand as if to suggest that all was hopeless. Nothing could be done. Failure had been decreed by fate. It was over.
“The road, Sir Thomas,” the liaison officer translated unnecessarily, “is flooded. The general regrets it, but it is so.” The Spanish general had expressed no such regrets, but the liaison officer thought it prudent to suggest as much. “It is sad, Sir Thomas. Sad.”
General Lapeña stared mournfully at Sir Thomas, something in his expression seeming to suggest it was all the Scotsman’s fault. “Inundación,” he said again, shrugging.
“The road,” Sir Thomas agreed in Spanish, “is indeed flooded.” The drowned stretch was where the road crossed a marsh bordering a lake and, though the road was built on a causeway, the heavy rains had raised the water level so that now the marsh, the causeway, and a quarter mile of the road were underwater. “It is flooded,” Sir Thomas said patiently, “but I dare say, señor, that we shall find it passable.” He did not wait for Lapeña’s response, but spurred his horse onto the causeway. The horse splashed, then waded as the water rose. It grew nervous, tossing its head and rolling its eyes white, but Sir Thomas kept firm control as he followed the line of withies stuck into the causeway’s verges. He curbed the horse halfway through the flood, by which time the water was over his stirrups, and shouted back to the eastern bank in a voice honed by hallooing across windy Scottish hunting fields. “We should keep going! You hear me? Press on!”
“The guns cannot make it,” Lapeña said, “and they cannot go around the flood.” He gestured sadly to the north where marshes stretched beyond the flood’s margin.
This was repeated to Sir Thomas when he trotted back. He nodded in acknowledgment, then shouted for Captain Vetch, the engineer officer who had burned the fire rafts and who had been posted with the advance guard to make just such assessments. “Make a reconnaissance, Captain,” Sir Thomas ordered, “and tell me if the guns can use the road.”
Captain Vetch rode his horse across the flooded stretch and came back with a confident report that the road was eminently passable, but General Lapeña insisted that the causeway might have been damaged by the water and that it must be properly surveyed and, if necessary, repaired before any cannons could be drawn across the lake. “Then at least send the infantry across,” Sir Thomas suggested, and after a while it was tentatively agreed that perhaps the infantry could risk the crossing.
“Bring your boys up,” Sir Thomas said to Brigadier General Dilkes and Colonel Wheatley. “I want both your brigades close to the bank. Don’t want them strung along the road.” There was no danger in having his brigades tailing away into the distance, but Sir Thomas hoped that under the eyes of the British and Portuguese troops the Spaniards would show some alacrity.
The two brigades closed onto the lake bank, leaving the guns on the highway, but the arrival of Sir Thomas’s men had no effect on the Spaniards. Their soldiers insisted on stripping off their boots and stockings before stepping cautiously onto the flooded road. Most of Lapeña’s officers had no horses, for few mounts had been shipped in the feluccas, and those unmounted officers demanded to be carried by their men. They all went painfully slowly, as if they feared the ground would give way beneath them and the waters engulf them. “God in his heaven,” Sir Thomas groused as he watched a small group of mounted Spanish officers who were halfway across and nervously probing the hidden road with long sticks. “John”—he turned to his nephew—“my compliments to Major Duncan. Tell him I want the guns here now and I want them across this damned lake by mid-afternoon.”
Major Hope rode to fetch the guns. Lord William Russell dismounted, took a telescope from his saddlebag, and rested it on his horse’s back as he searched the northern landscape. It was low country, edged on the horizon by bare hills on which white villages reflected the winter sun. The plain was dotted with strange evergreens that looked for all the world like a child’s drawing of what a tree should be. They were lofty trees with a black bare trunk and a dark puff of foliage spreading wide above. “I like those trees,” he said, still staring through his glass.
“Sciadopitys verticillata,” Sir Thomas said casually, then saw Lord William look at him with awe and astonishment. “My dear Mary took a fancy to them on our travels,” Sir Thomas explained, “and we tried planting a stand in Balgowan, but they didn’t take. You’d think pines would grow well in Perthshire, wouldn’t you? But these didn’t. Died the very first winter.” He sounded relaxed, but Lord William could see the general’s fingers drumming impatiently on his saddle pommel. Lord William looked back through the glass, edging the lens past a small village half hidden by the tracery of a winter olive grove, and then the glass stopped. He stared.
“We’re being watched, Sir Thomas,” he said.
“Aye, I should imagine so. Marshal Victor’s no fool. Dragoons, are they?”
“A troop of them.” Lord William twitched the long barrel to bring the lens into finer focus. “There’s not a lot of them. Maybe twenty.” He could see the horsemen’s green uniforms against the white walls of the houses. “They’re dragoons, sir, yes, and they’re in a village between two low hills. Three miles off.” A flash of light showed from a roof and Lord William guessed that a Frenchman was staring back through another telescope. “They’re just watching us, it seems.”
“Watching and reporting back,” Sir Thomas said gloomily. “They’ll have no orders to trouble us, Willie, just to keep a sharp eye on us, and I’ll wager your father’s dukedom to one of my gamekeeper’s cottages that Marshal Victor’s already marching.”
Lord William searched the hills on either side of the village, but no enemy showed on those low heights. “Should we tell Doña Manolito?” he asked.
Sir Thomas, for once, did not object to the mocking nickname. “Leave him in peace,” he said softly, glancing at the Spanish general. “If he knows there are green men stalking him he’ll like as not turn and run. You’ll not repeat that, Willie.”
“Soul of discretion, sir,” Lord William said, then collapsed the glass and put it back into his saddlebag. “But if Victor’s marching, sir—” he added, thinking about the implications, but leaving the question unfinished.
“He’ll bar our road!” Sir Thomas said, at last sounding cheerful, “and that means we have to fight. And we need to fight. If we just run away then those bastard lawyers in Cádiz will say the French can’t be beaten. They’ll sue for peace, then they’ll throw us out of Cádiz and invite the French in. We have to fight, Willie, and we have to show the Spaniards we can win. Look at those troops.” He pointed to where his redcoats and greenjackets waited. “Finest men in the world, Willie, finest in the world! So let’s force a battle, eh? Let’s do what we came to do!”
The Spanish infantry waiting to cross the causeway had to hurry off the road to let the two batteries of British guns pass. Those guns came in a rattling jangle of trace chains and a clatter of hooves. General Lapeña, seeing his men scatter, spurred to Sir Thomas and indignantly demanded to know why the ten cannons, with their limbers and caissons, had broken the order of march.
“You need them on the far bank,” Sir Thomas said encouragingly, “in case the French come while your brave men are crossing.
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said as he grinned.
A company of riflemen were sent to escort the guns. They stripped off their cartridge boxes and waded onto the causeway where they lined the verges, their presence intended to calm the horse teams. The first battery, under Captain Shenley, made fine time. The water came above the guns’ axles, but four nine-pounder cannons and a five-and-a-half-inch howitzer, each weapon pulled by eight horses, made the crossing without mishap. The limbers had to be emptied so that the water would not ruin the twenty-powder charges they each carried. The charges were placed on one of the battery’s wagons that stood high enough to keep the charges dry and carried another hundred rounds of spare ammunition besides. “Now the second battery!” Sir Thomas ordered. He was in a fine mood now because Shenley’s battery, chains jingling and wheels throwing up cockscombs of spray, had harried the laggard Spaniards to the far bank. There was suddenly a sense of urgency.
Then the leading gun of the second battery slewed off the causeway. Sir Thomas did not see what happened. Later he learned that one of the horses had stumbled, the team veered left, the drivers had hauled them back, and the gun, swinging behind its limber, had skidded off the road, bounced across the verge, then slammed down into the flood, spilling the gunners off the limber and bringing the horses to a sudden, sodden halt.
General Lapeña turned his head very slowly to give Sir Thomas an accusing look.
The gunners whipped the horses, the horses pulled, and the gun would not move.