The Spanish Bride

3

His lordship wrote in his dispatch that the attack led by the 52nd regiment had given the Allies the victory.

‘He could not help saying that,’ Colborne remarked, with rather a wry smile. Indeed, his lordship’s unenthusiastic dispatches, with their coldly favourable mention of senior officers (whether they had acquitted themselves well, or had behaved in a fashion which led his lordship to give it as his private opinion that they were mad) were a source of much discontent in the army. The fact was that his lordship, whose censure was masterly, had never learnt how to praise.

But the army forgave him his grudging approval on this occasion, for his lordship had actually been hit during the battle. As he always exposed himself in the most reckless fashion, it was surprising that he had never been hit before; but he had not, so that his men had come to think him invulnerable. But at Orthez, just as he was laughing at General Alava for being unseated by a hit from a spent shot, he himself was badly grazed on one hip. General Alava said that it served him right, and that he deserved to be wounded, for mocking at the misfortunes of others.

‘Wounded? Pooh! Nothing of the sort!’ said his lordship.

However, the abrasion made him very lame for several days, and it was evident that it hurt him a good deal to mount his horse. He would not admit it, of course; and so far from lying up for a time, he undertook a long ride, which he need not have done, to visit Lord March, desperately wounded, and carried off to the rear in the middle of the battle. The 52nd were mourning March as dead already, and were heartily sorry for it. They had not much acquaintance with him, since he had always been employed on Lord Wellington’s personal Staff; but in the New Year he had made up his mind that it was time he learned his duties as an officer of the line; and had given up his Staff appointment to join the regiment. He was a charming young man, and when he fell, Major George Napier was so distressed that, leaving his brother William to hold March’s head on his knee, he dashed off to tell Colborne, who said unemotionally: ‘Well, I can’t help it. Have him carried to the rear.’ Harry, meanwhile, had raced off to bring up a surgeon. He thought March pretty far gone, and was horrified to see the surgeon poking his finger into the wound to trace the course of the ball. Fitzroy Somerset had ridden up with March’s brother, Lord George Lennox, and was very much upset, but March, digging his nails into the palms of his hands, said faintly, but with great firmness: ‘Maling, tell me if I am mortally wounded, because I have something I wish to impart to George.’

‘If you will be very quiet, you will do very well,’ replied the surgeon gruffly. But he told Harry that he did not see how March could recover, a piece of intelligence which eventually reached Lord Wellington’s ears, and sent him off on that imprudent ride. ‘People who say the Peer has no heart know nothing of the matter!’ Harry told Juana. ‘Only fancy his riding all that way to visit poor March! Dr Hare, who has March in charge, told me that the Peer came in in the middle of the night, limping awfully, and upon hearing that March was asleep, just kissed his brow, and went away again, taking care not to waken him!’ ‘Well, that was very kind of him, certainly,’ said Juana in a practical voice, ‘but tell me, Enrique, have you found the Caçadores yet?’

‘Oh, my God, no!’ groaned Harry.

He did not find them for two days, so inextricably mixed with the 6th division had they become. Barnard (the best of Brigadiers, Harry swore) only laughed; and when Harry came in wet, and cold, and triumphant one evening, and said: ‘Eureka!’ he replied in the most unceremonious way: ‘What, have you found those damned Portuguese at last? By God, we must crack a bottle on it!’

He, and Bob Digby, his ADC, and the Smiths, crammed themselves into a tiny inn that night, which was owned by an old soldier who had lost a limb in one of Napoleon’s Italian campaigns. He knew just what an officer wanted for dinner, and dished up a splendid meal. He was a wag, too, and he told Barnard that war was no longer what it was when he first served. ‘I see that now the cavalry give way first, then come the artillery, and then follow the infantry in disorder,’ he said.

This unflattering picture of Soult’s retreat from Orthez at once endeared him to his British guests. They won his heart next day when Barnard called for the bill. ‘The bill?’ he repeated.

‘Yes, for our lodging, and food, and wine.’

The old soldier gaped at him. ‘Mon colonel, you mean to pay for what you have had?’ ‘Of course I do! Come now, what’s the figure?’

‘Eh, bien, monsieur! comme vous voulez! But I see that war is not at all what it used to be!’ The baggage came up with the division that morning, and in the afternoon they forded the Adour. News had reached the army of Sir John Hope’s crossing at the mouth of the river, and everyone was in splendid fettle.

‘By Jesus, if we don’t kick the Frogs all the way to Paris!’ swore a Rifleman, just returned to the brigade in all the glory of a new uniform.

Juana, on her way to join Harry, had been obliged to ride over the battlefield, and had found it covered with dead and dying men. She said that nearly everyone had been wounded in the head, a circumstance attributable to the high banks which had afforded cover for the men’s bodies; but she was particularly distressed by the plight of an artilleryman, who had had both arms shot off while he was ramming down the cartridge into his own gun. He would accept neither food nor drink from Juana: he told her quite roughly to go away; and when she had begged him at least to sip a little brandy and water, he had spat a very impolite name at her, and had said with all the failing strength he could muster: ‘You’d like me to drag out me life with both me arms gone, wouldn’t you? Ah, leave me be, you bloody little fool!’ ‘He was right,’ Harry said decidedly, when the sad little tale was told him. ‘Better dead than crippled like that!’

The incident, however, clouded Juana’s day. It was clouded for the army by the bitter cold, and the necessity of undertaking an arduous march to Mont de Marsan, north of St Sever. The men had been so tired after the battle that whole regiments had slept in the open rather than give themselves the extra exertion of pitching tents. The result was cramped and rheumaticky limbs. A tot of rum, served out at dawn, improved matters a little; and after some hours of hard marching all but the worst sufferers had tramped off their rheumatism. The Light division reached Mont de Marsan after dark, and were ordered to take up quarters for the night. It was a large, busy town, but was already so full of Marshal Beresford’s Staff, and a brigade of cavalry, that Harry had the greatest difficulty in finding a billet even for his Brigadier. Frost was hardening the ground, and sleet had begun to drift before he got his wife under cover. He had found a little house owned by a widow, who no sooner saw Juana’s white face, and shivering limbs, than she set about lighting a fire. Juana was tired, and so cold that she had to clench her teeth to prevent their chattering. The widow stripped her wet clothes off, and rubbed her body with a warm towel, until Juana begged for mercy. Jenny Bates had unpacked Juana’s portmanteau, but the widow, forming the poorest opinion of such an uncouth handmaiden, told her to be off and leave her mistress to those who knew how to wait on ladies.

Jenny, who wanted to find her man, readily went away; and the Frenchwoman, dressing Juana in dry clothes, put a pot of bouillon on the fire, and sat down to look her guest over. ‘But you are a child!’ she exclaimed.

‘No, I am sixteen,’ said Juana, spreading her hands to the blaze in the hearth. ‘My poor little one, you are a baby! And Spanish? One would not have credited it! But your man, he is English?’ ‘My husband. I have been married since two years.’

‘Is it possible? Mon Dieu, what you must have seen!’ ‘Only battles,” said Juana sleepily.

‘Only! Ma pauvre, have you no mother, no father?’

‘No. I have no one but my husband. It is quite enough,’ she added seeing the pity in the widow’s eyes.

‘But an Englishman!’

‘Do you dislike the English? I forgot that perhaps you might hate us,’ said Juana, a little nervously.

‘No, no, my cabbage! The English are freeing my country from the usurper; how should I hate them? I am a Royalist! I am proud to have our deliverers in my poor house. Sit still, and rest yourself; presently you shall have your bouillon.’

She bustled away, and when she came back it was with a pretty Sevres bowl, into which she ladled the broth. The bowl, she told Juana, had been one of her wedding gifts, and had never been used since her husband’s dead!.

Juana admired it very much, and by the time Harry came in, shaking the wet off his cocked-hat, she could have given him a minute account of their hostess’s life, with the details of every illness she had suffered over a period of forty years. They spent the night lost in the billows of a feather bed, and parted from the widow next morning with every expression of gratitude and regret. The division was ordered back to St Sever, a town on the high road to Toulouse; and as the weather was showery and cold, they had a miserable march of it, over one of the worst roads they had ever encountered. When darkness fell, the best accommodation Harry could find for Barnard was a tiny cottage by the wayside, into which Barnard, and Digby, and the Smiths all managed to squeeze themselves. The baggage having been left to follow the division, wet and muddied garments could not be changed, and although Juana got a tiny bedchamber under the eaves for her exclusive use, the three men were obliged to sleep on the floor downstairs, wrapped in their cloaks, and using their sabretaches as pillows. An order to march at daybreak was expected, but it did not come, so the party sat down to breakfast. Barnard and little Digby loudly envying Harry his boyish lack of beard. Barnard, passing a hand over his bristly chin, said that he wondered Juana would consent to sit down with such a ruffianly-looking fellow, but Juana assured him that she did not mind at all.

‘You know, my dear, you ought by rights to be in bed with an inflammation of the lungs,” said Barnard severely.

‘Que absurdidad! I aim never ill. You are like General Vandeleur, and that nice woman at our billet last night, thinking that I must be very weak and delicate. It is not true.’ ‘By the way, did you find a good billet?’ Barnard asked. ‘Harry put me in a hole of a place with a smoking chimney.’

‘Oh, we were so comfortable! Our hostess was a Royalist, and a widow, and, do you know, she gave me some bouillon to drink out of the prettiest Sevres bowl, which she had not used since her husband died! Muy patatico! And she told me about her baby that died, and about-’ She broke off, as Joe Kitchen came in. ‘Oh!’ she cried, tears springing to her eyes. ‘Oh, Enrique!’

Harry turned, and saw that Joe, considerably taken aback by his mistress’s sudden agitation, was standing in the threshold, agape, and with the identical Sevres bowl, full of milk, in his hands.

‘Where did you get that?’ demanded Harry angrily. ‘Why, from the widow’s house, sir!’ faltered Joe.

‘You mean you stole it! How dare you, sir, do anything of the sort?’

Barnard, made uncomfortable by Juana’s tears, delivered himself of a tirade against the plundering habits of the army, which made poor Joe shiver in his shoes. Upon being ordered to explain what the devil he meant by his conduct, he plucked up enough courage to say: ‘Lord, sir, why, the French soldiers would have carried off the widow, if she’d been young, and I thought it would be so nice for the goat’s milk in the morning! She was angry, though, because I took it,’ he added honestly.

Barnard, who had a very ready sense of humour, could not help letting his lips twitch at this. Joe saw it, and thought that if he made himself scarce he would escape a flogging, so he put the bowl down, and, with a pleading look cast in Juana’s direction, effaced himself. Barnard went off to headquarters as soon as he had swallowed his breakfast, but came back at ten o’clock with the news that the division would not move that day. Juana, who had been unwontedly silent since the discovery of the Sevres bowl, slipped out, and went in search of West. West was a little startled at being told to saddle his own horse and Tiny, and to put up a feed of corn in his haversack, but Juana said grandly, if untruthfully, that Master knew all about it.

Harry was on the point of setting out for his brigade when Juana came up to him, dressed for riding, and said in a careless tone that she was going to visit one of the wounded officers.

He never interfered with such excursions, and merely nodded now, and told her to take West with her.

‘Oh yes, of course! But do not be alarmed if I am not back till late.’ ‘No, very well,’ Harry said absently, frowning over his order-book.

Digby, coming round the corner of the cottage, overheard this interchange, and not being preoccupied, like Harry, wondered why Juana, going to visit a sick man at ten in the morning, should expect to be back late. He was still puzzling over it when West brought the horses round to the door. He heard Juana ask West if he had remembered the feed of corn, and jumped up, exclaiming: ‘By Jove, the little monkey is up to some mischief!’ It did not take him long to get his own horse saddled, and he was soon riding after Juana, in a northerly direction. He overtook her about a mile from the cottage, and ranged alongside, demanding: ‘Where in the name of heaven are you off to, Juanita? This is no way to take to visit any wounded of ours!’

Juana looked very much put-out, and said crossly: ‘Fuera! I don’t want you!’ ‘No, but only listen! You are going in the wrong direction, really you are!’ ‘I am not! I am going to Mont de Marsan, and I know the way very well.’ ‘Mont de Marsan!’ he ejaculated.-‘My dear girl, you can’t!’ ‘I must. Un caso de necesidad,’ said Juana mysteriously.

‘What need can you possibly-Don’t tell me it is because of that wretched bowl!’ ‘It’s not a wretched bowl! It is the prettiest bowl in the world, and that poor woman’s husband used to drink out of it, and I do not care what you say: I am going to take it back to her!’ ‘Dearest Juana, I do feel for you, indeed I do, but you mustn’t-I’ll tell you what! Give it to me, and I’ll take it for you!’

‘De ningun modo! I must myself take it to her, and beg her pardon.’ ‘It’s fifteen miles there, and there are enemy patrols about!’

‘I am not in the least afraid of enemy patrols,’ said Juana scornfully. ‘No French dragoon could ever catch me on my Spanish horse Tiny. Besides, I have told West to keep a sharp look-out.’

‘Oh dear, what an obstinate little wretch you are!’ said Digby. ‘Very well, if you will go, I must come with you.’

‘A voluntad! But will not Barnard need you?’

‘He’ll have to do without me,’ said Digby. ‘But what Harry will say when he hears of this-!’ ‘Oh, never mind that!’ said Juana cheerfully. ‘Adelante.’