Hervey 06 - Rumours Of War (35 page)

Sir John Moore was deeply troubled, his expression almost mournful. He leaned back in his chair and shook his head. ‘The matter is, Thomas, Bonaparte is closer than I had ever believed. Perhaps even on the Douro. Certainly he has broached the Guadarramas, which the Spaniards said he would not be able to do at this time of year. They do not seem to have lifted one finger anywhere to stop him.’

Colonel Thomas Graham: fellow Scot and Whig, the man who had raised the Perthshire Volunteers, who had once dressed as a peasant to get through the French lines in Italy, and had managed to be at sieges throughout the Mediterranean, yet with no regular military rank whatever. Sir John Moore valued his advice above all men’s.

‘With how many?’ he asked, calmly.

‘All estimations are within ten thousand of a full sixty.’

Still Graham did not bat an eyelid, though he could calculate that their relative strength was unfavourable in the extreme. ‘And Soult may have half that number in a day or so too, if Delaborde makes a junction.’

‘Just so. By all accounts he is close to Palencia, on the Carrion River, as we speak.’

‘Where shall you make your stand?’

Sir John Moore shook his head. ‘My sole object now must be to save the army, Thomas, for you yourself know that England has not another.’

His old friend held his gaze.

‘We must run for it.’ Sir John Moore jabbed a finger at the map on his table. ‘To the coast.’

Colonel Graham looked saddened. He had given up a life of ease to fight the French, and he knew his old friend to be a true fighter. He lowered his eyes, as if a prize pupil had let down his master.

Sir John Moore saw, but he did not remonstrate. ‘I am sending word to have the Navy take us off at Vigo and Corunna. And to General Romana to save himself.’

Colonel Graham rose to look at the map. It was the best part of two hundred miles to Corunna, as the crow flew. But the road crossed rivers and the Galician mountains; they could not journey as the crow flew.

‘We must steal a march, Thomas,’ said Sir John, anticipating the observation. ‘Two or three marches. And we must get back across the Esla just as soon as may be.’

Colonel Graham stood upright. He knew the import, human and material, of that imperative: the sick would have to be left where they lay, ammunition and all manner of stores destroyed. It was a loathsome prospect for a soldier. He took a deep breath of resolution. ‘Then Paget’s cavalry shall have to buy the army time, since Bonaparte will not let us take it for nothing.’

The fog had lifted to reveal a full moon and a clear sky. Hervey and his new mare could at least see their way. At first Stella had spattered her belly with muddy snow, and then with every step she had broken through a thin layer of ice, until after an hour or so they came to the road by which Sir John Moore’s troops marched on Soult at Carrion, and for another hour after that they trudged never less than fetlock-deep through a freezing mire which the wretched infantry had churned. Hervey pitied them, for the icy mud must be slushing over the tops of their boots, so that they might as well be unshod.

‘Horse!’ he shouted constantly to clear a way. He knew they cursed him as he passed, but he galloped for their safety, and he could only trust they would soon know it.

Then there were bonnets and kilts.

‘Ninety-second?’ he called, pulling up.

‘Who skelpit thro dub and mire?’ came the broad Aberdeen challenge.

Hervey caught the sense, if not the meaning. He took it that here indeed were the Ninety-second. Before he left Sir John Moore’s headquarters he had asked to know the order of march. The highlanders were in General Hope’s brigade, the vanguard of the main column; he knew he had a clear gallop ahead just as soon as he could get by them.

They were halted, too; it would make it easier. He kicked on, past a good deal more Scotch banter.

‘Sic a night he taks the road in, as ne’er poor sinner was abroad in!’

There was laughter and jeering behind him.

‘Wot lest bogles catch ’e, Tam!’

More
laughter and jeering. But soon it was oaths and curses as he kicked into a fast trot, spattering kilts and bonnets with muddy snow.

He thanked Providence he had a good horse under him – not that any who lashed out now with tongue or boot cared that he had mortgaged a year and a half’s pay to buy her. It took a while to overhaul the highlanders, but then the road was empty. He touched Stella’s flanks with his spurs, and they galloped hard for a quarter of an hour.

‘Halt! Parole?’

He threw all his weight back and pulled sharp on the curb.

‘Blenheim! Sir John Moore’s galloper!’

‘Pass, sir,’ replied the serjeant of the Forty-third’s rearguard.

The road was now a little wider; he put Stella into a fast trot.

In a couple of minutes they came on the rear ranks of the Rifles. ‘Where is General Craufurd?’ he called, checking the pace to not quite a walk.

‘Up at the front,’ growled the serjeant. ‘Where he always is.’

Hervey pushed by at a trot, urgent now, not caring about the protests and the curses. In five more minutes he was cantering clear ahead of them.

In a few more he saw the little bunch of riders that was Major-General ‘Black Bob’ Craufurd and his staff.

‘Galloper!’ he shouted. ‘Galloper for General Craufurd!’

An ADC turned to meet him.

‘Orders for General Craufurd from Sir John Moore!’ He took them from his cross-belt pouch and thrust his hand out.

The ADC took the envelope, reined back round and rode up to the general’s side.

The moon was bright, and with the aid of a small torch Craufurd began to read. In a few seconds more he turned in the saddle and threw up his hand.

‘Halt!’ he thundered.

Hervey would never forget the terrible shock of that order, and Craufurd’s utter repugnance in the words of command ‘About turn!’ They were relayed to the most junior officer at the rear of the brigade, each repetition with the greatest sense of abhorrence, of anger even.

It was daylight when the light brigade tramped back into Sahagun. It had been freezing even harder since they had turned about, and marching in the rutted wake of the rest of the infantry and the artillery had been a trial beyond reason for many of them, so that as they slid and stumbled on the icy cobbles their dismay was complete. The men who had swaggered out of the town the evening before, sure they would deal such a blow to the French that Bonaparte would be confounded, now skulked back like lashed dogs – but dogs that would snarl, and bite, should any even look at them.

Except the wives, wedded or not, and the children, who now ran to meet their men and pushed into the ranks to kiss and hug them. They did not care that they were sullen and in retreat, only happy that husbands and fathers were still alive.

Lieutenant-Colonel Lyndon Reynell, commanding the 6th Light Dragoons, learned the news of the withdrawal –
retreat,
as Stewart had it – from his brigadier shortly before three o’clock, woken from the first full night’s sleep he had expected to enjoy since the regiment had left Salamanca. General Stewart had been able to give him precious little intelligence of the enemy; he explained that Lord Paget had been unable to tell him much, and that he thought Sir John Moore withheld the worst. Nevertheless, Reynell grasped the import of the orders at once, for he knew the topography of north-east Spain from close study of the maps he had bought in London with considerable prescience and a good number of sovereigns. He assembled his officers at once.

Hervey, stood-down from his duties as galloper for the time being, relished the opportunity of hearing his colonel, for Reynell, the senior subalterns said, was a light dragoon to his fingertips; he understood instinctively the possibilities that time and space, the inflexible factors in a given situation, afforded. Hervey had not heard him speak more than half a dozen times. His orders came through the captains, and the regiment had been as much an association of troops and squadrons as a unity these past two months.

Lieutenant-Colonel Lyndon Reynell knew men, and he knew
his
men; he certainly knew his officers. They would carp, complain, protest, disparage. And in doing that they would undermine each other’s confidence in both Sir John Moore and in what they were about. He had been with the Duke of York when they had had to run for it in the depths of a German winter; he knew just what a regiment could become if ever the officers lost the will to do their duty. He would have none of that in the trial before them, and he had no doubt what the march would be. His own reputation was inextricably the regiment’s: no one would be able to say that the 6th Light Dragoons had conducted themselves in any manner but the best. But as he watched his officers now, crowding into what remained of a once cherished chapel, he knew he faced unhappy men. It was the early morning of Christmas Eve. He decided he would intrigue them.

‘A cold coming we shall have of it, at this time of year,’ he began, with a wry smile that said they might even take a perverse pleasure in their shared hardships.

And since Colonel Reynell was a son of the bishop’s palace, as well as veteran of half a dozen hard campaigns, he was allowed his whimsy. Some of the faces before him began to share the smile and the allusion.

‘Just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey, in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off
in solstitio brumali,
the very dead of winter.’

All were smiling now, though not many could have known the words’ provenance. It was a grim pride in their misfortune.
In solstitio brumali:
they should by rights be in winter quarters.

Reynell, perceiving his officers to be now willing accomplices in the misfortune, would tell them the worst. ‘Well then, gentlemen, here is how I perceive our nativity and its twelve days. I hope no
longer
than twelve. But there is a French force now opposed to us large enough to destroy us. Certain, indeed, to destroy us. That much you may be assured of, else Sir John Moore would give battle at once. Therefore the army is to march to the sea by two routes, the principal to Corunna’ – he pointed on the map before them – ‘and the subsidiary to Vigo, which also General Romana’s Spaniards will take.’

He paused to let them take a good look at the map.

‘The first and major obstacle to both our troops and the French is the Esla. The cavalry will hold off the enemy there while the infantry cross and put as many miles as may be between themselves and their pursuers, and while the engineers demolish the bridges.’

All faces were at once lit by this prospect of action, even if in retreat.

‘Thereafter we shall serve the rearguards, ourselves on the northern route, to Corunna, that is, until embarkation, when it may be necessary for Sir John Moore to fight a general action in order that the army might break clean away. I need not add that there will be several smaller-scale affairs when our brigadiers judge it to be opportune to inflict a delay for a modest effort.’

The nodding of heads told Reynell that he had explained things well. Now was the time to make his principal point.

‘Gentlemen, the discipline and conduct of the regiment is in your hands. It will want the very surest of attention. I cannot give emphasis enough to this matter, for herein lies the reputation of the regiment and the safety of the army. I cannot think that our army has ever been given greater occasion to display its worth.’

Reynell paused for a moment to let his words sink deep, to take a firm root so that he would not have to repeat them in the days to come. He looked at each of the captains in turn: Edmonds, the army son with as much service as he himself; Lankester, the patrician, who took campaigning in his stride, as if it were the chase; Worsley, the quiet, bookish man with a fortune in sugar; Leonard, the red-haired Irish squire who went at all his fences flat out, as brave, or foolish, as they came; and Arthur, Viscount Dereham, whose mother wrote regularly to the Duke of York to have her son recalled to safety at the Horse Guards, but who refused all offers of preferment. A colonel ought not to have many fears on their account. But it did no harm to spell it all out.

‘Now, gentlemen, in the absence of specific orders, I want first to have all camp-followers sent to Corunna. I absolutely forbid that any of them should remain. This will be no place for them, and it would be a distraction to all our men, wed or not, to have a mind for their safety.’

According to the regulations, only six wives were allowed to accompany a troop on service, and these were chosen by lot on the night before embarkation. The Sixth had had so many wives tramp to Northfleet, however, that the captains had decided they would increase the number by half at their own expense, and so a total of forty-five ‘To Go’ tickets had been placed in the hats along with nearly a hundred ‘Not To Go’. However, with the fortunate forty-five, too, there were a dozen children. The wives had been tolerably useful as far as Escorial, but some of the more prudent ones had taken the colonel’s liberal allowance to pay their way back to Lisbon. But then some, like Private Flyn’s wife, had spent theirs before going too far back down the road, rejoining the baggage train and turning necessity into virtue by their protests. ‘If Dan falls, who’s to bury him? God save us!’ Biddy Flyn had preached all over camp. ‘Divil a vulture will ever dig a claw into him while there’s life in Biddy, his laful wife.’

It was more the pity, thought Colonel Reynell now, that none of the officers’ wives had come out. Lady Waldegrave, whose husband was a captain in the Fifteenth, had taken charge of her regiment’s two dozen women at Mayorga; she must by now be half-way to Oporto, he reckoned. And with her had gone some of the Fifteenth’s walking sick as escorts, needing only two able-bodied dragoons to accompany the party. But without an officer’s wife he would have to send a man he could trust; and he could ill afford to send away men he could trust.

‘I see nothing for it but to have Cowell go with them,’ he declared, calculating that he might spare an assistant surgeon on a rapid retreat.