The Spanish Bride

4

The baggage arrived during the morning, and with it Juana, still so much upset by the shock of mistaking Algeo’s horse for Old Chap that she was quite unlike herself, subdued enough to make Harry anxious, and starting at every unexpected sound. Several days passed before her spirits recovered their usual buoyancy, but, happily, having won the Grande Rhune, Lord Wellington condemned his army to another month, of inactivity, so that no further alarms occurred to set her back again.

The division now took possession of the great ridge of hills. It was a wonderful position, if you had a fancy for long views and morning fogs. On a clear day, even Bayonne could be seen in the distance, while St Jean de Luz seemed to be like a toy town below the division. The waters of the Bay of Biscay sparkled to the west, with little ships dotted everywhere along the coast. They were British cruisers, and great was the excitement when one was seen chasing a French brig-of-war. Thousands of soldiers, straining their eyes from the top of the Grande Rhune, burst into wild cheering when the brig blew up.

‘How delighted the tars would be if they knew that so many of their countrymen were observing and applauding them from the tops of the Pyrenees!’ remarked George Simmons, beaming with pleasure.

‘Oh, George, George!’ chuckled Tom Smith. ‘How are your horn-players?’ George’s company had captured a couple of French horn-players at the Pass of Vera. He shook his head. ‘Oh, no good at all! We tried to get ’em to play us the latest French songs, but the poor fellows were so scared they made wretched work of it.’

George’s horn-players were a great joke, of course, but Juana could not quite understand how George was able to laugh so light-heartedly, for he had just come back from San Sebastian where he had been visiting a close friend, who had been desperately wounded in the storming of the citadel. So many friends had fallen there, and at the Grossing of the Bidassoa, that she herself felt such an oppression of the spirits that laughter, for many days, seemed impossible.

However, a diversion soon occurred which made her forget such gloomy thoughts. In the redisposition of the forces on the ridge, the extreme right of the division became the left, and the Smiths had to pack up and move their ground. When the brigade reached the new position, they found the first battalion of the Rifles just evacuating it Major Gilmour, in command of the battalion during the temporary absence of Barnard, had built a mud hut for himself, and as soon as Juana came riding up, he hailed her, and pointed to this grand erection with a flourish of his hat. ‘Jump off, my dear, and come into your own castle, which I in perpetuity bequeath to you!’ he declaimed.

Juana slid off Tiny’s back at once. She was delighted with the hut, and clapped her hands at its elegant appointments. ‘Oh, a chimney, and a fireplace! Oh, how did you contrive to make a door? It is the dearest house!’

‘Quite a gentleman’s residence, I flatter myself,’ said Gilmour. ‘Ten foot square, you observe: door of the best wattles and bullock-hide: situation commanding unrivalled views! Bless you, my child: may you find it watertight! Where’s Harry?’

‘Oh, he has gone to post the pickets! He will be so astonished when he sees our lovely house! Dear Gilmour, I am so grateful! It is horrid in our tent now!’

By the time Harry and Fane came in, a fire was burning brightly in the hut, supper was ready, and the servants had set up the tent for their own use.

‘By Jove, nothing was ever so snug!’ Fane exclaimed, warming his chilled hands at the fire. ‘What a good fellow Gilmour is! Only to think of sleeping in the warm!’ After the rigours of damp autumn nights under canvas, the hut did indeed seem the height of luxury. As soon as supper was cleared away, they stoked the fire, spread a couple of mattresses on the floor, and lay down under their blankets in quite a glow of content. Snuggled in the crook of Harry’s arm, Juana said drowsily: ‘Listen to the wind! It will rain soon. How sorry I am for West and Kitchen in my horrid tent!’

She was right about the rain. She had barely dropped into her first sleep when a sudden storm rose. Harry, still awake, heard the rain pelting down, and was just congratulating himself on his dry quarters when a clod of earth fell on to his face. Before he had time to do more than look up at the roof of black sods, the rain was pouring between the cracks, crumbling away the sods, and smothering everything in the hut with mud. Fane started up with a shout of dismay, but Juana, rudely awakened by a shower of rain and slime, broke into peals of laughter. In a few seconds the hut seemed to be full of water. The fire, extinguished by the rain, belched clouds of smoke, and the hut’s unfortunate owners tumbled out of it, quite drenched, and as black as mudlarks. ‘Oh, wasn’t it nice of Gilmour?’ said Harry. ‘Just wait till I see him! My poor darling, are you very wet?’

‘Oh, I am soaked, but wasn’t it funny, Enrique? Oh, look at Tom’s face! He is just like a blackamoor!”

They spent the rest of the night in the despised tent, dispossessing the servants without ceremony, and never again braved the dangers of Gilmour’s mud hut. The weather was becoming very cold, and as the convoys were late in arriving from Portugal, the soldiers began to be sorry they had been parted from their overcoats. A disagreeable feature of the district started to manifest itself in the sudden springs which broke through the ground in all the most unexpected places, and transformed reasonably dry bivouacs into swamps. Kincaid, who had made a most ingenious fire-place in his tent by digging a hole, and carrying vie smoke out under the canvas wall to a turf chimney,-returned from dining in a friend’s tent to find a fountain springing out of his fireplace, and playing over his bed and all his baggage.

‘It couldn’t have happened to anyone else!’ said Charlie Eeles, trying, as well as he could for laughing, to help Kincaid to remove his belongings to a drier spot.

‘No, because no one else had the sense to think of such a fine invention,’ retorted Kincaid. The morning fogs grew thicker. It was a beautiful sight, George said, to watch the peaks emerge, like islands, from the clouds, while the dense vapour, iridescent with the rays of the sun, hung heavily over all the valleys.

‘Ugh!’ said Molloy, shivering. ‘We shall have the whole division down with ague, that’s all I know.’ Oddly enough (for frequent hail-storms alternated with the fogs) the health of the men was good. They grumbled a great deal, for it was not only cold and wet on the Rhune, but the sight of the rich plains of France below them was tantalizing, and they all longed for the order to dislodge the French from the opposite height of La Petite Rhune. Moreover, while the Allied army remained inactive, every French soldier seemed to be busy casting up fortifications, so it looked as though they meant to defend their front pretty desperately. When the weather was at its worst, pickets at the foot of La Petite Rhune used to call hopefully to the British outposts: ‘You can’t remain in these bleak mountains much longer. We suppose you will soon retire into Spain for the whiter?’

‘Very likely we may, if we are ordered to,’ was all the answer they got. ‘Spain or France, it’s all the same to me,’ said fat Johnny Castles, crawling out from under the wet folds of a collapsed tent. ‘Hail brings snow in its tail, and it’s time we came down from the clouds.’

‘Ah!’ remarked a Scot. ‘I was hearing that Hill’s fellys are under a gude twa feet of snow the noo, so set that doon on the backside o’ your count-book!’

“The way our Colonel’s spying out the land looks to me like we’ll soon be knocking Johnny Petit off his perch there,* said a private from the 52nd, with a jerk of his thumb towards the Lesser Rhune.

It was quite true: Colonel Colborne, imparting his wisdom to Harry, was reconnoitring every yard of ground in his front, for with the surrender of Pampeluna, at the end of October, orders for a general advance were daily expected. From the commanding heights of the Grande Rhune, all the French lines could be seen. Colborne and Harry used to watch the progress made on the enemy’s fortifications, and often Wellington would join them, walking about on one of the northern ridges of the hill, and staring in his high-nosed way over the rich terrain below him. He used to talk to Colborne, sometimes with a good deal of animation, more often in staccato sentences. He said he “would be obliged to send the greater part of the Spanish troops home before venturing into France, and even Colborne, who, from having served with the Spaniards in the past was always inclined to defend them, could not deny that it would be hazardous to march them into France. As for the British, discipline must be strengthened, said his lordship; and indeed, between them, he and the Judge Advocate were imposing the stiffest punishments for plundering.

One day, when his lordship rode to Colborne’s outpost, he stayed for longer than was usual, and after walking about for some time, lay down on the ground, supporting himself on his folded arms, and looking meditatively towards the Petite Rhune. His

Quartermaster-General, Sir George Murray, was with him, Fitzroy Somerset, and one of his ADCs; and an orderly was walking their horses about a little way behind them. Besides Colborne and Harry, Alten and Kempt had joined the party.

Wellington was silent for some time, but presently he turned his head towards Colborne, and said abruptly: “Those fellows think themselves invulnerable, but I shall beat them out, and with great ease.’

‘That we shall beat them, when your lordship attacks, I have no doubt,’ replied Colborne. ‘But for the ease-!’ ‘Ah, Colborne, with your local knowledge only you’re perfectly right!’ interrupted Wellington. ‘It appears difficult, but the fact is the enemy have not men to man the works and lines they occupy. They dare not concentrate a sufficient body to resist the attacks I shall make upon them. I can pour a greater force on certain points than they can concentrate to resist me.’ He turned towards Murray, seated beside him, and, dropping his voice to an earnest undertone, began to talk to him.

Alten, collecting the eyes of his Brigadiers, got up, as though to move away, but his lordship broke off his conversation to say: ‘Oh, lie still!’

He went on speaking to Murray, in his quick incisive way, outlining his plan for an attack of the whole army. Murray listened attentively, once or twice interpolating a question. When his lordship had finished speaking, he pulled writing materials out of his sabretache, and began methodically to set down the plans on paper. The chill wind rustled the sheets, and whipped the plume in his cocked-hat. It must have been very uncomfortable, Harry thought, sitting on damp ground, and trying at once to write with cold fingers, and to hold down the corner of the paper, but Sir George seemed to be quite unperturbed. When he had transcribed his chief’s plans, he read them aloud, while Wellington, with his telescope to his eye, scanned the French lines.

Harry had heard it said that, after Wellington’s, Murray’s was the best brain in the army, and by the time the Quartermaster-General had finished reading his notes aloud, he believed it. It was wonderful, he thought, that Murray had not missed one point, but had got it all down, almost precisely as Wellington had spoken it.

‘Is that your desire, my lord?’

Wellington had listened in silence to his orders being read, his cheeks a little sucked in, and his lips pursed. He put his telescope down, and smiled, ‘Murray, this will put us in possession of the fellows’ lines. Shall we be ready tomorrow?’ ‘I fear not, my lord, but next day.’

Wellington nodded, and sat up. ‘Now, Alten,’ he said, ‘if, during the night previous to the attack, the Light division could be formed on this very ground, so as to rush at La Petite Rhune just as day dawned, it would be of vast importance, and save great loss. And by thus throwing yourselves on the right of the works of La Petite Rhune, you would certainly carry them.’

Alten looked meditatively across the ravine at the jagged ridge of the Lesser Rhune, with its scarped front, and redoubts overhanging the steep slopes. His lordship’s tone was confident, but anyone with the smallest knowledge of the ground must have known how desperate a task he was asking of his crack troops. Alten’s lean, dark countenance gave nothing away; after a few moments’ consideration, he said calmly: ‘I dink I can, my lord.’ ‘My brigade has a road,’ said Kempt. ‘There can be no difficulty.’

‘For me, there’s no road,’ said Colborne, ‘but Smith and I know every bush and every stone. We’ve studied what we’ve daily expected, and I think we can engage to lead the brigade to this very spot on the darkest night.’

‘Well then, Alten,’ said his lordship briskly, ‘when you receive your orders for the attack, let it be so.’