The Spanish Bride

3

Not until late in the afternoon on the following day did any orders reach the division from Lord Wellington. Such news as Alten’s scouts brought in was vague, culled from the lips of peasants, and imperfectly understood. There seemed to have been heavy fighting somewhere north of Pampeluna, and there could be no doubt that Soult had made a big thrust through the mountains. Alten’s hatchet-face was as calm as ever, but his Staff found him unusually curt, and when his messengers came back reporting failure to get into touch either with Wellington, or with Hill, a muscle twitched in his cheek, and he folded his lips as though to keep back a hasty word of censure. The troops, although they badly needed their enforced rest, could not enjoy it while rumours of an engagement were in the air, but fretted a little, wanting to know what they were doing, lying up in a wood while the rest of the army was fighting the Johnny Crapauds.

But at dusk, a cocked-hat, white with dust, was seen, and the word ran through the lines that one of the Squire’s ADCs had ridden into the bivouac, more dead than alive, and had fairly tumbled out of his saddle into Quartermaster Surtees’s arms. He brought an order, dated the previous day, from Wellington, and had been hunting for the division until his horse almost foundered, and he himself reeled in the saddle from sheer fatigue. Soult had been defeated at Sorauren, after a very sharp engagement, lasting for two days, and the Light division was to retrace its steps at once to Zubieta.

Some hard swearing was indulged in, from the General down to the newest-joined private, for nothing was hated more than counter-marching. The Staff was blamed, of course, but it was, in fact, nobody’s fault. With the Light division once set in motion through a maze of mountains and twisted valleys, it had been a difficult task to find it, and to halt it; and a running-fight, culminating in a two-day battle on the right wing, had not made matters any easier.

Alten issued his marching-orders immediately, and the division broke camp in the failing daylight. No more than nine miles was covered, for Alten, with the lesson of one night march along mountain roads behind him, halted the division at Leyza, as soon as darkness fell. Fresh orders from headquarters arrived during the small hours. Soult had retired by the Pass of Arraiz, and was making for Vera, and the neighbouring village of Echalar. His lordship desired Alten to head him off, if possible, at Santesteban; failing that, seven miles farther north, at Sumbilla; or at least to cut in upon his column of march somewhere. But his lordship had hoped to find the Light division at Zubieta, within five miles of Santesteban, not ten miles distant, on the other side of a difficult pass.

The division was under arms at dawn, and by noon had reached a point a few miles from Santesteban, after a hard march. ‘George has the best of it after all,’ said Molloy, mopping his brow.

George had had to stay at Leyza, in charge of a court martial. Harry had been half-inclined, foreseeing a gruelling day, to leave Juana with him, but the bare suggestion had made her so cross that he had given the notion up. Juana would suffer fatigue and hardships uncomplainingly, but the least hint of being left behind turned her from a gallant comrade into a disagreeable child with the sulks. A hunched shoulder, and glowering scowls were Harry’s portion for three stormy hours.

‘You will never see me again if you leave me behind, because I shall go back to Spain,

’ Juana announced.

‘Don’t talk nonsense!’

‘I am not talking nonsense! You are unkind, and tired of me, and I expect you have seen some horrible woman whom you would like much better than me!’ ‘A Basque peasant, I suppose, all plaits and petticoats.’

‘I don’t care who it is, and I wish very much I had never married you, for you are brutal, and a tyrant, and I remember now a great many things you have done which I said nothing about at the time, but which wounded me very much for all that, and I can tell you this, that I would rather be taken by the French than stay with you another day!’

‘Why I haven’t wrung your neck all these months, I can’t imagine!’ said Harry. ‘I should be very happy to have my neck wrung, for nothing could be worse than being obliged to live with you!’

‘Oh, very well!’ said Harry. ‘Come, then: only you’ll get no sympathy from me if you have to fall out on the march, mind!’

‘Mi queridissimo esposo!’ Juana breathed, casting herself into his arms, and passionately embracing him. ‘Of course I won’t fall out!’

After that, it became naturally a point of honour not to betray the least sign of fatigue, and when, after a full day’s march, news reached Alten that the French had left Sante-steban early, and he ordered the division to move on by the mountain path to Yanzi, Juana said nothing could please her more.

The day had begun by being misty, but for some hours past the sun had been beating down on the dusty troops. The supply column had been outstripped two days before, and the rations stowed in the soldiers’ packs were running short. Everyone was tired, for the going was at all times difficult, and the labour of crawling up mountain-sides was nearly equalled by the strain of the inevitable descent, which some thought more wearing than the climb. The long ascent of the Santa Cruz height cast into insignificance even the discomforts of the division’s night-march. The sun was blazing overhead, and the path, little better than a sheep-track, grew ever more precipitous, until the officers had to dismount, to lead their horses, and the men struggled on, bent nearly double under the weight of their knapsacks. To make matters worse, large boulders were embedded in the track, and the loose shale slipped from under the men’s feet. The altitude made the blood sing in their ears; one or two were actually sick; and all had to tear open their stiff jacket-collars to ease the throbbing of swollen throat-veins.

Kempt’s brigade had the luck to form the leading column, but Skerrett’s, choked by the dust raised by the troops ahead, suffering all the inevitable checks that fall to the lot of men marching in the rear, fared very badly. Man after man dropped out, literally unable to put one foot in front of the other. No one’s pack weighed less than forty pounds, and some weighed much more; shakos seemed to tighten and tighten round sweating foreheads, and when a soldier tumbled down exhausted, and his shako fell off, it was seen that it had left a bright red line across his brow. Crawling up the abominable track, their heads almost on a level with their knees, the choking dust got into their lungs, and blinded their eyes, while the sun’s rays scorched their backs.

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!’