The Spanish Bride

2

The Smiths had rejoined the division in time to share its first sight of the spires of Madrid, which were seen from the top of the Guadarrama Pass, rising out of the heat-haze far below.

There was a good deal of excitement at this first view of what had come to figure in most men’s minds as the Promised City. The soldiers broke from the ranks to run forward when the cry of: ‘Madrid! Madrid!’ was heard; and if there were those who thought that the plain of New Castile, which seemed to be such a long way below them, looked flat and singularly unattractive, there were many more who, though extremely footsore, felt themselves filled with renewed energy at the dim view of the capital’s spires.

The Light division camped that night in the park of the Escurial, and while the more serious-minded persons went off to look at the palace, others engaged in an impromptu boar-hunt. In the end, they had the best of it, for the palace was discovered to be an unbeautiful edifice, wholly stripped of the pictures and statues which had once adorned it. When the weary columns, plodding across the interminable plain, came within five miles of Madrid, they encountered the vanguard of a host of Madrileños, who were streaming out of the city to welcome them. From then onward, the march became a triumphal procession, and the thirst the soldiers were suffering from was quenched with wine, grapes, lemonade, all of which were pressed upon them by an excited populace, who hailed them as deliverers, and even flung down palms on the causeway for them to tread on. The road was choked with civilians, women as well as men, and no one seemed to have come empty-handed. The grinning soldiers had sweetmeats popped into their mouths by pretty girls, or sprigs of laurel stuck in their shakos; and several persons of consequence had actually hired porters to carry wine-jars out for the refreshment of ‘the troops.

‘Oh, by God!’ laughed Harry, catching a rose tossed to him. ‘We shall take the whole division into Madrid as drunk as wheelbarrows!’

‘It’s all very well, you fellows, but it’s very embarrassing, upon my word it is!’ said George Simmons, mopping his heated face. ’Two of those girls pretty nearly pulled me out of the saddle just now!’

“They wanted to kiss you!’ Harry told him.

‘Well, I know that, but it’s not seemly. Besides, one doesn’t want to be kissed by such forward hussies!’

‘Who doesn’t?’ demanded Beckwith. ‘Where are they? Why doesn’t someone pull me out of my saddle?’

‘Charlie, now do be serious! Really, I am astonished! I thought Spanish ladies were so strictly reared, but just look at them! For they are ladies, quite a number of them. You can tell by their mantillas.’

The scene outside the mud walls of the city was as nothing, however, to the welcome which was being prepared for the troops within them. Lord Wellington rode in at the head of the army, and several of the regimental bands, catching the spirit of the populace, struck up See the Conquering Hero Comes. Compared with the wild enthusiasm of the Madrileños, the entry into Salamanca two months before was a colourless affair. Not Talavera, not Bussaco, had been victories in any way approaching the magnitude of Salamanca. Never before had the French had to evacuate the capital, but this time not only had Marmont’s force suffered a crushing defeat, but King Joseph had had to withdraw from Madrid in a belated attempt to bring reinforcements to his lieutenant, leaving only a garrison in the fort of the Retiro. The Madrileños, therefore, greeted Lord Wellington as their liberator, and a very awkward time he had of it, forcing his slow way through the decorated streets to his headquarters. Shawls, veils, and flowers were strewn on the cobbles for his horse to tread on; rose-petals showered down on him from every balcony; women clung to his stirrups, and actually kissed his knees; and on more than one occasion he was nearly unseated. Behind him his devoted troops marched in, dusty, shabby some of them, and all of them footsore, but every one on the broad grin, and a great many of them with laughing beauties already attached to them. ‘As good as ever went endways!’ That was the opinion the British soldiers held of Spanish women.

The army was quartered in and around Madrid, the Light division being placed at Getafe, a small town situated a few miles south of the city, on a rather dreary plateau. The Smiths found a comfortable billet there, but they, like everyone else, spent all their leisure hours in Madrid. Harry had managed to get some of the pay which was owing to him, and nothing would do for him but to deck Juana in the finest raiment his purse could afford. Strolling with her on his arm along the Prado, in the cool of the evening, he declared that not one of the fair Castilians Madrid had to show could compare with his little Estremenha. As for Juana, she was so much enchanted by Madrid that it remained for ever in her mind the touchstone by which she judged all other cities.

It was a strange place, abominably placed in the dullest kind of country, quite bleak and treeless, menaced by the grand chain of the Guadarrama mountains, which in winter rained down storms from their snowy summits, and in summer cut off from the plain the cooling north-west winds. In all Spain, no greater heat was to be found than that shimmering day-long over the capital. A mean little river watered Madrid; mud walls surrounded it, with, beyond them, fields of tilth stretching away in unbroken monotony to the foot of the sierra. Inside the walls, wealth and poverty lived side by side in startling contrast. Nowhere could be found such broad, clean streets of fine houses, but behind them lurked twisted alleys lined with filthy hovels. Beggars were scarcely ever seen, but in the poorer parts of the town people died like flies of starvation, and night after night emaciated corpses were thrown out of the houses, to be collected and carted away in the morning on hand-barrows. It did not take the army long to discover this shocking state of affairs. The 3rd division started soup-kitchens, and the other divisions quickly followed the example. Pay was months in arrear; no new clothing could be got to replace worn, patched uniforms; officers sold their watches, their silver spoons, and sometimes even their horses; the men lived on their rations; but everyone somehow or other managed to contribute towards alleviating the distress of the city.

But although famine reigned in the background, the festivities planned for the entertainment of the British were on the most lavish scale. No one heard the moaning in the mean streets when the guitars and the mandolines played waltzes and fandangos for British soldiers and their Castilian partners to dance to. The hovels showed blank, dark windows at night, because their inmates had no money to buy as much as a tallow-dip; but on the Puerta del Sol, and the Prado, all down the Galle Mayor, huge wax candles were set out in scores on every balcony, their little tongues of flame burning straight upward in the hot, still air, so brilliantly lighting the town that it seemed like noon at midnight.

The shops displayed the most attractive wares; the cafes set out their little tables on either side of the Prado; guitar-players sang to any party of officers who looked as though they might be good for a peseta or two; the ladies of the town paraded in their best silk petticoats, and smartest satin bodices, flirting their fans, setting the long fringes in their skirts swinging with the provocative play of their hips; lemonade-sellers, in sleeveless waistcoats and white kilts, went up and down, doing a roaring trade under the avenues of trees; the gayest mats were hung out as sunblinds, creating a strange medley of bright hues in streets where the houses were already stained every colour of the rainbow. Two days after his entry into the town, a grand ball was given in Lord Wellington’s honour. Everyone who could beg or steal a ticket attended it. Harry took Juana, dressed in the height of the Spanish fashion, and looking enchantingly pretty, with a high comb in her hair, and a black mantilla draped over it. Kincaid was there, too, in great spirits, because he had sold his baggage-horse, which (he said) ate as much and more than it could carry on its back, and was consequently so thin that he could hang his hat on its hindquarters. But it was a fine, big animal, and he had got a mule and five dollars in exchange for it, so that he was now able, according to Charlie Beckwith, to support a mistress in the first style of affluence. Lord Wellington, always a splendid man for a party, was very affable, not to say jovial. His hawk-eye picked Juana out surprisingly quickly, and he carried her off on his arm to introduce her to several of the most notable people present. ‘My little guerrtire,’ he called her; and nothing would do but he must see her perform a Spanish dance. So one of her countrymen led her on to the floor, while Harry stood by, as proud as a peacock, said his friends. His lordship told Harry, with his loud whoop of a laugh, that he was a lucky young dog. Nothing, in fact, in his lordship’s demeanour would have led even the keenest-eyed observer to suspect that he was preoccupied with matters far removed from balls, and congratulatory addresses. The truth was that his brilliant victory over the Army of Portugal at Salamanca, though it might win for him the thanks of Parliament, the long-postponed appointment as Generalissimo of the Spanish armies, an English marquisate, a Portuguese marquisate, a grant from Parliament, and as much flattery as any man could desire, had waved no magical wand over his most pressing difficulties. His army was so much reduced by sickness that the field hospitals at Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo were filled to overflowing, and some of his battalions could muster no more than three hundred bayonets in line; the war-chest was so diminished that he could neither pay the hale troops, nor support the sick men in the rear; two of his most competent generals, Graham and Picton, had been invalided; Beresford, Cotton, Leith, and Cole, all wounded at Salamanca, were in hospital; the Spanish officials with whom he was obliged to deal seemed to have been chosen for their inefficiency (‘an impediment to all business,’ he called one of them); he had had to leave Clinton’s division to contain what remained of Marmont’s army on the Douro; and he was quite uncertain of what Soult’s movements in Andalusia would be. But no trace of these cares was allowed to appear in his lordship’s public manner; indeed, very few people knew that such cares existed. To most of the light-hearted gentry making merry at the ball, the Allied army’s prospects seemed to be rosier than ever before. They had shattered Marmont’s force (‘Forty thousand men beaten in forty minutes,’ someone said); Marmont himself, at first reported slain, was badly wounded; two of his Generals had been killed; the French losses were anything from ten to fifteen thousand men, two Eagles, and twenty guns; and here was the Allied army, actually quartered in King Joseph’s capital! Never had there been more excuse for dancing!