Run Them Ashore (24 page)

18

T
here were skirmishers dotted along the slope ahead of the Poles, but when the chasseurs finally saw the oncoming infantry they ran. There were too few of them to fight, their rifles were slow to load, and it would take more than a few shots to stop the mass of infantry surging down the slope, so their officers and sergeants yelled at them to retreat. One man’s foot caught in a loop of long grass and he fell forward. Before he could rise, a Polish infantryman jabbed down with his bayonet and the man screamed, arching his back away from the pain, until the soldier kicked him to free the blade and ran on. Two more chasseurs dropped their weapons and surrendered, to be pushed roughly to the rear by Poles who were not inclined to stop.

Williams saw the rifle company of the Chasseurs running back up the far side of the valley to the shelter of the rest of their battalion. Hatch was among them, as was the capable Mueller. The formed companies numbered some four hundred men, in line two ranks deep, running along the crest of the hill beside the battery position. At the moment they were at ease, muskets grounded, and he waited for their commander to take charge.

The skirmishers were coming up the hill, not retreating but running as fast as they could with no thought of glancing behind or stopping to fire and slow the enemy. They had outstripped the Poles by a good hundred yards, but the loose column of infantry with their blue coats and yellow fronts was already at the bottom of the valley. He guessed there were about a hundred of them. A smaller group was now following behind in support.

Someone bellowed an order and the line of chasseurs came
to attention. The first of the riflemen reached them, but instead of running to the flank the man barrelled straight into the line, pushing his way through. His face was blank, his mouth open, and he had dropped his rifle and his pack to run as fast as he could.

Hanley appeared beside Williams.

‘What is happening?’ he began, and then stared in shock at the little body of enemy surging up the hill towards them.

The fleeing skirmisher pushed his way through the formation, the nearest files spreading out like startled sheep. A sergeant standing in his place behind the company tried to grab the man by the collar, but he pulled free. More skirmishers ran up to the battalion, and the whole line shook as if it was in the wind.

‘Canister,’ Williams yelled at the Royal Artillery lieutenant. ‘Load with canister!’

‘We’re already loaded,’ the man replied.

‘Then fire what you have got.’ He turned to Hanley. ‘Bring the Toledo Regiment. Tell them to come quickly or the battery is lost.’ A lieutenant had given a captain an order, but Hanley cared little for military discipline and trusted his friend’s instincts when it came to battle.

The crews of the twelve-pounders hauled on ropes to shift the aim of the guns, but these were naval carriages not designed for such big adjustments. Then the gun captains adjusted the turnscrews to point the muzzles down.

‘Can’t see ’em, sir,’ a sergeant in charge of one of the crews shouted to his officer. The Poles were on the hillside beneath them, and no gun could shoot down at such a steep angle.

The chasseurs broke. They had not been formed long and did not know their officers well. If they had had time to prepare themselves, time to shoot at the enemy or to march forward steadily against them, then they may well have stood, but this was too sudden. The Poles should not have attacked, there were too few of them and no one expected such folly, and too many of the chasseurs and their officers could not accept that it was happening. Something must be wrong, and with their own
riflemen pelting up the hill towards them they simply became more nervous. Another skirmisher forced his way into the ranks, and then two more. Sergeant Mueller was screaming at them to halt and to rally, but then the Poles cheered again, a great deep-throated cheer so different from the normal French chants. Men turned all along the line and began to run. It was like a pail filling with rainwater and suddenly pouring over the brim. The battalion collapsed, officers and sergeants resisting for only a moment before they too joined the flight. No one wanted to be last and to be caught by the dreadful enemy and so nearly all of them ran, and those who stayed raised the butts of their muskets in the air to surrender.

A Polish officer was leading the charge, swinging his sword around his head, and he found the energy to run even faster up the hill as the blue-coated defenders fled and his own men cheered again. The sergeant in charge of the left-hand twelve-pounder nervously jerked the lanyard too soon and the heavy cannonball slammed through the air several yards over the lieutenant’s head and he roared in fear and relief, amazed to be still alive.

Mueller was level with the battery, three men still with him, and they turned, dropped to one knee and then fired. A Polish infantryman was flung back, tripping another man as he rolled down the slope. The sergeant in charge of the second twelve-pounder jerked the lanyard on his gun, but the flint failed to spark.

‘Get back!’ Williams yelled at the artillerymen. ‘Get back!’ Their own officer was staring blankly at the onrushing men and so the Welshman grabbed him and pulled him away. The crews dropped rammers, sponges and all the other heavy equipment and most started to run. One sergeant cut with a short sword at the Polish lieutenant as he sprang up on to the rampart. The officer parried the blow, but before he could cut down one of his soldiers was beside him and fired his musket, not bothering to bring it up to his shoulder. With a gasp the sergeant reeled backwards, dropping the sword and staring down at the blood spreading out over his
stomach. Another Pole followed the lieutenant over the rampart and dodged the clumsy blow of a gunner wielding a trail-spike. The infantryman swung the butt of his musket into the man’s jaw, knocking him to his knees, and then reversed the weapon, driving his long slim bayonet into the gunner’s chest.

The Poles surged over the breastwork and into the battery and the remaining artillerymen fled. Williams went with them, but tried to break away in the direction in which Hanley had gone to fetch the Toledo Regiment. Behind him the Poles were cheering wildly at a triumph which had seemed so impossible and yet proved so easy. Williams went down into a little gully, using his hands to pull himself up the other side, and bounded over the little crest.

Ahead of him, the Toledo Regiment streamed down towards the beach, mingling with the fugitives from the foreign regiment. A small party of officers and NCOs had not fled and were clustered around the colours, but there were no more than a dozen of them.

‘The chasseurs ran into them and they panicked!’ Hanley shouted, as if he could not quite believe what he was saying. In just a few minutes the entire Allied defence had collapsed under the attack of a force a tenth of its size.

‘Back to the beach,’ Williams said, and the two men ran over the sandy slopes. The 89th were there, and if they were steady they still outnumbered the Poles by a large margin and should be able to take the battery back. Out to sea, boats were clustering around
El Vencedor
and before long their own 106th would begin landing, but that would take time and for the moment the four companies of the 2/89th were the only troops left.

The two hundred and eighty remaining men of the 2/89th were forming line on the mound of shingle at the top of the beach. Most of them had dark stains on their hands and faces, and Williams realised that the black dye of the facings must have run when their wool jackets were soaked in last night’s storm. Sergeants shouted and pushed men into place with their half-pikes. The movements were slow and clumsy, and some of
that was because these companies had spent little time drilling together, but more was the same sense of shock he had seen up on the hill. This should not be happening, and officers and men alike still struggled to accept that it was.

Then Lord Turney ran up from the beach. His horse was waiting for him, and he put a boot in the stirrup and almost bounded into the saddle, setting the animal in motion, and riding to the front of the 89th.

‘Right, lads, those bloody foreigners have run like rabbits and it’s up to you to save the day. You’re the Eighty-ninth, you’re Irish and English, and you’re the stoutest fellows in the world, so we are going to go up that hill and we’ll drive those rogues off with the bayonet.’ He drew his curved sword from its heavily decorated scabbard and waved it high. The blade, heavy with gold inlay, flashed in the bright afternoon sunlight.

‘Fix bayonets!’ The senior captain bellowed the order. The long blades scraped out and then clicked into place as they slotted and locked around the muzzle of each firelock.

Up the hill one of the twelve-pounders blossomed smoke and a cannonball tore through the air over the line to land on the beach.

Lord Turney stood high in his stirrups. ‘Eighty-ninth, follow me!’ he shouted, and walked his horse up the hill.

‘Forward march!’ The senior captain of the 89th gave the order and stepped off behind the general. The drummers beat the rhythm and the line marched off, the dressing still a little ragged, but on ground like this that would soon have happened even if they had begun in immaculate order. Soldiers marched with the butt of their musket in their left hand, the weapon resting against their shoulder, the tips of the bayonets a line of steel higher than the plumes on their tall shakos. There were one hundred and twenty men in each of the two ranks, and behind them a thinner line of subalterns, sergeants and drummers.

Williams went to join the other staff officers marching on the right flank of the line nearest to the castle, although thankfully out of range of musket or the swivel guns on the wall. Another
gun fired from the battery, aimed better this time, and the ball bounced a few feet in front of the line and then rose to rip off a man’s leg beneath the knee and shatter the hip of the rear rank man behind him.

‘Close up!’ shouted a young sergeant who had felt the wind of the ball as it passed and gone pale. ‘Quiet, my boy, remember you’re Irish,’ he said to the soldier who was screaming because he had lost his foot.

‘It’s not your bloody leg,’ the man shouted angrily, but the rage seemed to drive away the pain, because he stopped screaming.

The line marched on, the men closing to the centre to fill the gap left by the wounded men. It was a gentle slope on this side of the hill, less sheltered than the one the Poles had assaulted, and the infantrymen turned gunners managed to fire each gun once more before they were masked. A discharge of canister mostly went high, making a weird rattling, ringing sound as the balls struck the row of bayonets. Three men had their shakos knocked off by balls going low, but the one in the middle was also hit by a bullet which punched through his forehead. He dropped like a sack of old clothes and his rear rank man stepped faster to take his place. The other gun fired a ball on almost the same line as before. One moment the two men of the next file to the right were marching forward with the rest. Then the front rank man was cut in two, his legs standing for a few seconds after his mangled torso was ripped off and flung against the soldier behind, whose ribs were splayed open and right arm torn off as the same shot gouged a bloody path through his side. The young sergeant was drenched in their blood and stared at the ruin of the two men, stopping as the line marched on.

‘Cat got your tongue, Sergeant?’ shouted the man who had lost his leg. The NCO recovered from his horror.

‘Close up, lads, close up,’ he managed to croak through a mouth which seemed drier than he could ever remember.

The 2/89th pressed on, keeping in step as well as men could on the sandy slope. Muskets began to fire as enemy skirmishers sniped at the line. Williams could see blue-coated voltigeurs
bobbing up to fire from among the hummocks and waving long grass on either side of the battery.

Lord Turney’s horse whinnied in pain and turned to the side, arching its long neck. Williams could see blood on its chest. Something was odd, but he could not place it. One of the staff officers beside him grunted as a musket ball struck his thigh.

‘Go on, I am fine,’ he said, pulling his sash loose to bind the wound.

The battery was less than a hundred yards away, and Williams began to wonder when the general would order the charge. It was still too far, for over that distance men would straggle and it would be so easy to stop and begin firing, but it was hard to walk in silence as the enemy fired into the line. Not far from him one of the redcoats was flung back, blood jetting in a great fountain from his neck.

The 89th marched on, faster now as they closed the distance, and none of their officers tried to keep them in check. Drummers pounded the skins on their drums, but no one was listening to the rhythm any more, and it was more a question of fighting back by making noise.

A second bullet struck the general’s horse in the head, and Williams knew what had bothered him, for he was sure the sound was the sharper one of a rifle rather than the dull boom of a musket. The animal fell, but Lord Turney was already free of the stirrups and sprang off, landing on his feet. He staggered, then regained his balance, and walked on, sword resting against his shoulder as if nothing had happened and he did not have a care in the world. Another ball flicked the long grass beside his feet, but he did not acknowledge it and simply walked on.

Williams glanced back over his shoulder. Some two hundred of the chasseurs had re-formed and were advancing to the right and some way behind the 89th. There was a red-coated officer at their head and he realised that it was Mullins. Over on the left, but much further back, the Spanish officers and NCOs were restoring order to their own regiment. Down on the shore redcoats were splashing into the surf from two big longboats with
more rowing behind them. It was too far to see any detail, but he could not help wondering who from among his battalion was here. It would not surprise him if Pringle, Dobson and the rest of the Grenadier Company were in the lead.