The Spanish Bride

6

It was distressing, marching away from Madrid, and everyone was glad, since there was no help for the retreat when the columns drew out of reach of the capital. They were accompanied for miles by crowds of weeping Madrileños, who saw in the Allied army’s withdrawal the ruin of all their hopes.

‘Yes, yes, all very sad, but it’s their own fault!’ Vandeleur said testily. ‘They’re a lazy, vain, improvident people! What can be done for them?’

It soon became evident that the retreat was going to be arduous. The rainy season had set in, and their long rest in Madrid had not done much to improve the condition of the troops. There was a good deal of sickness; everyone was wearing patched and threadbare clothing; and some of the regiments early showed that they were badly out of hand. The 4th division fell into trouble almost at once, and was obliged to return a list of three hundred missing. After a long, wet march, the Enthusiastics had indulged in an orgy of drinking, at Valdemoro, and no efforts of their officers could round up men quite incapable of marching. They had to be left behind, and the temper of the division was as frayed as its raiment. It poured with rain on the very first day of the march. Shooting-pains attacked General Vandeleur’s old wound; by the time his brigade arrived at Aravaca, to find every cottage in the village occupied by Hill’s headquarters Staff, he was in a real Irish temper. In he stalked, to the first decent dwelling-place he found, startling an officer who was toasting himself before a bright fire. ‘Who are you, sir?’ barked the General, shaking the raindrops from his cocked-hat.

‘Captain Brown, of the Royal Wagon Train, attached to General Hill. And this house,’ added the officer, a little impudently, ’is given me for my quarters.’

The General fixed him with a fulminating eye. ‘I, sir,’ he said, ‘am General Vandeleur, and I am damned glad to see you in my quarters for five minutes!’

They measured one another. ‘Yes, sir,’ said Captain Brown meekly, and began to pack up his traps.

There was no space for anyone but the General in the tiny cottage, but Harry had found a room, no more than six feet square, into which he packed his wife, the Padre, and all his greyhounds, which by now numbered thirteen. The Padre, astonished at such congestion, thought at first that he would prefer to inhabit Juana’s small tent, which had been pitched on the wet ground; but after spending an uncomfortable quarter of an hour in it, he changed his mind.

The division reached the foot of the Guadarrama Pass next day, in fitful sunshine, and there was roast pork for supper, since the troops went pig-sticking, upon being dismissed in bivouac. The weather improved; the sun grew brighter; and when Harry came in from his duties next morning, he found Juana in her tent, as neat, he said, as a new pin, with the soaked garments she had worn on the previous day hung out on a line to dry. She had a very good breakfast waiting for him, and Harry said that the least he could do was to furbish up his person.

‘Shave, perhaps?’ said Juana, teasing him, for he had a boy’s smoothness of cheek and chin.

‘No, not yet,’ grinned Harry. ‘But I’ll wear a clean shirt in your honour, alma mia.’ To find a clean shirt in his portmanteau was easy, to find a dry one very difficult. In his usual haphazard fashion, Harry tossed all his belongings over in the search. ‘Eureka!’ he said at last, shaking out a shirt untouched by the prevalent damp.

Juana gave a scream, for out of the folds tumbled three gold doubloons. ‘Enrique, Enrique, the money!’ she cried, pouncing on the coins as they rolled over the ground. ‘We are rich, we are rich!’

The Padre entered the tent to find his protectors performing a spirited fandango amongst the litter cast out of Harry’s portmanteau. Any fears he might have entertained for their sanity were set at rest by their telling him the wonderful story. He at once took charge of the precious money, promising them an endless supply of bread, and chocolate, and eggs, and sausages.

‘Oh yes, you take it!” Juana said, giving the doubloons into his hand. ‘You understand, Enrique, don’t you, that the poor people will always let a friar buy their eggs, even when they won’t sell to us?’

Yes, Harry understood that; Harry thought they could not do better than to make the Padre their treasurer; and for his part, the Padre said that the money, carefully handled, would last them all until they reached the frontier.

By the end of November, the whole of Hill’s force was over the Guadarrama Pass, with nothing seen of the enemy in their rear. The Light division was at Villa Castin, and Kincaid, riding into the town at dusk, after posting guards and pickets, fell into an adventure which nearly ended his career. He was in a royal rage over it, but a providentially good dinner restored his temper. He had found a mad bull charging round the market-place, tossing any unfortunate who came in his way. Not in the least wishing to become a victim, Kincaid had opened the door of a house immediately behind him, and had retreated into it, driving his horse before him. ‘However, there arose such an uproar within that I began to wish myself once more on the outside on any terms,’ he said, when food and drink had mellowed him. ‘The house happened to be occupied by English, Portuguese, and German bullock-drivers, who had been seated at dinner when my horse upset the table, lights, and everything on it. The only thing I could make out amid their confounded curses was that they had come to the determination of putting the cause of the row to death. But as I begged to differ from them on that point I took the liberty of knocking one or two of them down, and finally succeeded in extricating my horse, and groping my way back to camp. Anyone seen anything of the enemy? I haven’t!’

No, no one had seen as much as an advance-guard. Hill could afford to draw breath again, and even, two days later, to allow his troops a brief respite. Dysentery had broken out amongst the men; and rheumatism was playing havoc with old wounds. The rain fell steadily from a sky like a grey pall; the returns of the sick began to assume alarming proportions; and a messenger from Lord Wellington’s headquarters arrived, plastered in mud, with orders for Hill to march, not to Arevalo, as had been arranged, but to Alba de Tonnes, by way of Peneranda. Lord Wellington, his force ravaged by sickness, was falling back on Salamanca.

‘Failed at Burgos, has he?’ said Young Varmint. ‘That’s what comes of not taking his best troops with him. How do we get to Peneranda?’

They got to Peneranda painfully, by shocking roads. The spring-wagons foundered in troughs of thick slime, and the yokes of half-starved bullocks, straining and slipping under the lashes of their drivers, could scarcely drag them out again; wheels came off, and boxes of ammunition spilled all over the sodden ground; Ross had to make causeways of broken planks and stray flints to get his guns over stretches of the road which looked as though they had been subjected to heavy gun-fire; the long-suffering infantry splashed its way through standing ponds of yellow water, or ploughed through sticky mud which gave up their feet with a sucking sound, and caked their boots till they weighed three times their weight. ‘I wept when I was born, and every day shows why!’ said a Rifleman, hunching his shoulders under the driving rain. He became aware that the man on his left was stumbling, bent almost double, and said roughly: ‘Here, you! Don’t halt before you’re lame! This ain’t nothing yet!’ ‘I’m burnt to the socket!’ gasped his companion. ‘I’d liefer die by the road than go on! I got to fall out!’

‘Call yourself a Sweep! You’d ought to have been with Moore, you had! Blur-an’-ouns, what do you think you know, you bloody Johnny Raw, whining for a drop o’ rain? When we fell out on the road to Corunna it warn’t till the dead lice was dropping from us! Catch hold o’ my arm, and shut your bone-box!’

By the 8th November, the Tormes was reached, and crossed, at Alba. ‘Damme if we ain’t back where we started from!’ said Private Grindle disgustedly. ‘The farther we go, the farther behind, and me with corns like pumpkins on all me ten toes!’

‘Corns!’ ejaculated Tom Plunket. ‘What about my new jacket? Hell and the devil confound it, it’s spoiled entirely, and me well-known to be the smartest man in the rigiment!’ ‘Don’t fret, boys!’ said Sergeant Ballard. ‘We’re off to join the Peer!’

‘Glory be to God!’ sang out Plunket, tossing his shako in the air, ‘Now we’ll see some sport! Ah, if that long-nosed beggar had taken us with him to Burgos there’d have been a different tale to tell!’ ‘Where are we going, Sergeant?’

‘Salamanca, by what I can make out.’

‘God love us, are you bamming us, Sergeant? Salamanca, by Jiminy! We’ll be feeding like freeholders again!’

But when the British entered Salamanca, they found that the fickle temper of the townspeople had changed. A retreating army seemed to rouse in their breasts a sort of pack-savagery; men who had welcomed the troops with hysterical fervour five months before now seized every opportunity that offered to do individual soldiers all the mischief they could. Reports of murders, of hand-to-hand fighting in the streets, showered upon his lordship’s headquarters; it was said that even the young Prince of Orange had narrowly escaped having a bayonet stuck through his slender person by one of the civil guards. The grumblers in the Light division found the troops from Burgos in such bad shape that they began to think they themselves had not suffered so very much after all. The divisions from the north had had a gruelling time of it in the trenches before Burgos, and had been harassed on their retreat by the French; they were dog-weary, and sullen with a sense of frustration; and a dangerous spirit of discontent had undermined their discipline. The Staff was being cursed for inefficiency; commissariat-carts had been delayed, and sometimes lost; and a trail of rapine in their wake bore witness to the deterioration of the men. The cavalry was in still worse case, horses looking like scarecrows, and some regiments scarcely able to muster half their correct number of sabres. There was neither money in men’s pockets, nor full rations in their bellies, but in this country of vineyards there was always wine to be seized. The army was indulging in its besetting sin, with fatal consequences.

Once on the plateau, the cold became intense. There was a brief respite from the incessant rain, but the wind that cut knifelike across the sierra jarred every bone in a man’s body, and brought on attacks of ague that set teeth chattering till the very roots ached. Wellington had taken up his old position behind the Arapiles, but Soult, warier than Marmont, showed little disposition to attack him in force. To the disgruntled British soldiers it seemed as though nothing had been gained. It was not very cheerful on the old battlefield, with a French force hovering, ninety thousand strong, in the vicinity; the bitter wind thinning the blood in one’s veins; and one’s horse setting horribly well-preserved skulls rolling with every step he took on Pakenham’s Hill.