The Misbegotten (62 page)

‘Then . . . tell me, Mr Alleyn. Tell me.’ Jonathan stared at her, and for a while she thought he would not speak.
He must. This is the only way.
She suddenly knew that this was the final step in a long and wearing climb; that by taking this last step, the path would go easier from there on.
Let it be so.
She sat down in the chair at his bedside and leaned forward, reaching for his hand. ‘You must tell me about Badajoz,’ she said.

‘Badajoz.’ The air left Jonathan’s chest, streaming out like surrender. He shut his eyes again, and then he spoke.

He spoke of the three years of war after his return from Bathampton, leaden-hearted because Alice had gone. Three years in which he lived by rote, and fought with silent, grim distraction. After the flight from Corunna the French had flooded back in to retake Portugal, but in April 1809 Sir Arthur Wellesley returned to Lisbon to take command, and the French were driven back towards the Spanish border once more. Jonathan and his fellow officers struggled to keep order in the ranks; the men were restless, and disobedient. After battle they turned thuggish and cruel. Jonathan noticed the empty look in their eyes and knew he had it too; the selfsame brutishness. Wellesley called the men scum, and rabble. He hanged them for plundering, but it did no good. Jonathan was popular with the rank and file of his company; he understood their anger and their fear, the way they were losing themselves. He did not reprimand them for acting like animals, when the war required them to be animals.

And yet the heart of him looked on, and recoiled in horror from the bloodshed and the pain and the wanton destruction. At Talavera, after they’d pursued the French through a burnt and ruined landscape into Spain, he was with the light dragoons as they charged headlong into a hidden ditch. He was catapulted from his horse as it fell, and heard the crunch as the beast’s two forelegs snapped. He had not named the animal – he hadn’t named any of his horses since Suleiman – but still its screams cut through his battle fog like knives. He didn’t blink as he put his pistol to the horse’s head and pulled the trigger. The British and Portuguese were outnumbered by almost two to one at Talavera, but they won what would be proclaimed as a glorious victory on the sides of mail coaches at home. The battlefield was almost four miles long, and two miles deep. Towards the end of it a grass fire started, racing across the parched ground and burning many of the wounded alive. Scores of those that did not burn died of thirst instead, under the merciless Spanish sun. Jonathan searched through fields of crack-mouthed, black-tongued corpses to find Captain Sutton, who’d been knocked insensible by a clod of earth thrown up by artillery fire. Jonathan took him into the shade of a cork tree, and sat with him there until his wits returned. A wounded French rifleman dragged himself over to share the shade; he shared his water and his tobacco tin with Jonathan as well, and made remarks about the heat and the search for food, as they sat with their eyes stinging with the smoke of their burning comrades.

After that great battle, Wellesley was made Lord Wellington. French troops arrived in Spain in ever increasing numbers, but Spanish guerrillas and Portuguese partisans were everywhere, slitting the throats of sentries and harrying smaller troop movements. Back and forth the advantage went; an ebb and flow of men across the Spanish border like the sea around a mid-tide mark. By the end of the year the men were more afraid for their next meal than they were of battle. The looting and pillaging continued, as did the hangings. As the autumn grew old, starvation circled them like carrion crows. Jonathan punched new holes in his belt with the tip of his sabre when it would no longer fasten tight around his shrinking middle. The two warring sides sent out foraging parties to look for food. These men met frequently, and greeted each other courteously, sharing tips and insights into the terrain, into water supplies and edible plants. Jonathan wondered what would happen if they all, on both sides, just declared peace and refused to fight any more. The thought was so bittersweet that Captain Sutton found him crying like a child one day, sitting cross-legged on the muddy ground with autumn rain soaking him.

‘Up, and be doing, Major Alleyn,’ the captain told him kindly. ‘You’re that sodden, the men might think that you weep. It will do them no good to think it.’ He put an arm around Jonathan’s bony ribs and half carried him out of sight of the men, who were carousing – dancing to a fiddle and pipe with a kind of desperate levity. It was the tenth of October, 1810; King George III’s birthday in the fiftieth year of his reign. They’d butchered a donkey that the retreating French had hamstrung and left to die. Jonathan ate the roasted meat alone in his tent, and thought of Alice, and of Suleiman.

At the battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, in spring the following year, a truce had to be called at the end of the day so that both sides could clear the bodies from the ruined village. There were so many that the narrow streets were near impassable. Jonathan stepped on an outflung hand by mistake, looked down and saw that it was tiny, no bigger than a woman’s or a child’s. The arm it belonged to, and the rest of the body, was buried beneath others, five or six deep, so he never had to see who had owned the hand – the delicate finger bones he’d ground beneath his boot heel.

They moved on to Badajoz, a fortified town in a strategically important location near the Portuguese border. Betrayed by its own governor, Badajoz had fallen into French hands, and been heavily garrisoned. The allies laid siege, digging in as winter approached. There was heavy, relentless rain. Jonathan had seen wounded soldiers burn to death after battle, now he saw them drown in waterlogged mud. The men, hard-bitten and proven, grew idle and restless over that winter of 1811. They occupied themselves with scorpion baiting, cock fighting and horse racing; with picking the fleas out of their clothes and bedding and hair; with whoring and wrestling and hunting for game; with watching friends sicken and die from festering wounds and outbreaks of a plague-like sickness.

Jonathan came down with a bout of fever, and lay listless and sweating in his tent for five days. Captain Sutton visited often, wet his lips with wine, and tried to cheer him with funny stories about the tomfoolery of the men, but Jonathan could not raise a smile for him. In their japes and their games and their contests he saw the lust for violence, coiled inside each one of them like madness; like embers that might burst into flames in a second, and consume the last of the man’s humanity. These were the men who were invested to retake Badajoz on the twelfth of March, 1812. These men made brutal by all the fear and pain, hunger and violence; made brave and savage by their own suffering, and half mad by all they had seen. Jonathan looked over them as they approached the city, and he feared them. Lord Wellington might see a rabble, but he saw a pack of wolves, liable to turn on each other, on their officers, on him. Captain Sutton kept close to him as the siege was set and the barrage began. Jonathan felt his friend’s eyes upon him, measuring. He wondered what madness the captain saw in him; whether he saw the fear and sorrow and the yearning to hide away from it all, or whether he saw the urge to kill and destroy, to vent his rage on all around him. Both were in him, and when he pictured Alice’s face it fed both sides of him equally – the surrender, and the fury.

The artillery barrage succeeded in making three narrow breaches in the town’s crenellated walls. The French waited inside in their thousands; any attempt to storm the breaches would result in a slaughter. Wellington could see it; Jonathan could see it; the lowliest foot soldier could see it. Nevertheless, the command came for the attack to begin at ten in the evening, under cover of darkness and with the French unprepared. But some sound was heard; some inadvertent tip-off betrayed them. The French set fire to the body of a British soldier and hurled it out from the walls to cast light on the advancing men, and as easily as that the element of surprise was lost. The British charged, right into a series of traps the French had set for them. They were blown up by mines, drowned in flooded ditches. They were impaled on iron spikes, and on makeshift barriers of sword blades; the momentum of men behind ensuring the death of the vanguard. Those that reached the breaches were slain in their hundreds, and all the while the French inside hurled out insults and taunts; goading them, laughing.

‘
You must not laugh at us!
’ Jonathan roared as he came close enough to the walls to hear it. He was standing on the bodies of the fallen; he was sprayed with flying blood, drenched in sweat. He knew that the beast in them all was awake, and that the laughter of their enemies ran like fire in their blood; a red frenzy that turned them from men into something both more and less. It kept the attack alive; it stormed the walls, and pressed into the city; it opened the breaches to the onrushing men; and after two hours in which nearly five thousand of the allied besiegers were slaughtered, it sealed the fate of the city of Badajoz.

The wolves were unleashed, and nothing could rein them in. They were the sum total of all they had seen and suffered, all they had been required to do and to bear. They were a vision of mankind stripped of all decency and pity, and they were hell-bent on revenge. Women were raped, and raped again. Children, even crawling infants, were kicked around for sport, stuck with bayonets. Men were tortured, killed, torn to pieces, be they French invader or Spanish resident. Men looted, men desecrated, men ravaged and pillaged; men turned on one another and fought to the death over spoils as trifling as a piece of food or a bottle of wine. Over the right to rape a woman before she died, or afterwards. Their officers could not hope to control them. Their officers dared not try, for fear of being torn apart themselves; the men were blind drunk on brandy and wine and blood.

Jonathan wandered through it all without seeing it, for the first twelve hours or so. He found a dark cellar, entirely empty; lay down on the dirt floor and slept a while. He did not feel as though he possessed his own body; he felt like a ghost, drifting unseen amongst it all. Only when he awoke and rose did he notice the pain in his leg, and the way it would not take his weight. He looked down and found a chunk of wood thrust straight through his calf. The exit wound was a chaos of black clotted blood and shards of grey bone. The sight caused no emotion in him at all. He stumbled out into the violated streets. A cloudy day had dawned, but the light brought no respite to the degradation of Badajoz. The men went about in packs, under no command. Jonathan did not speak to any, nor interfere with the things he saw. He did not dare, since to interfere was to see it, to take it in; and to see it was to run the risk of losing himself for ever.

But Captain Sutton found him, and brought him to a group of five men, the sparse remnants of his company, who had banded together for safety from the pillage.

‘Thank God you’re alive, Major! I had feared the worst. If anyone can restore some order here, it’s you, sir.’ Captain Sutton splinted up Jonathan’s shattered leg, tearing strips from his own uniform to bind it. ‘But I should get you to the surgeons first. Come,’ he said.

‘No!’ Jonathan cried. He remembered the surgeons: the stink of rum and bile and open bowels; the mound of severed limbs that piled up outside the window of a Talavera convent where they’d set up their tables. Huge black moths, circling the field lamps. The pain in his leg was coming in waves now, a rising beat of agony, but he would not submit to the surgeons. ‘No! I can stand. I can walk. Let us bring a halt to this madness.’

‘Are you sure, sir?’ Sutton wasn’t convinced, but Jonathan stood, using an abandoned musket as a crutch.

Talking had returned Jonathan to himself, however reluctantly. Nausea bubbled in his gut as they moved cautiously through the ruins of the town; smoke skirled around them from a hundred different fires. They broke up fights and issued orders that were sometimes heeded; more often ignored. They hastened the passing of soldiers and citizens who had been left in dreadful agony, deliberately, and with no hope of survival. They pulled a man from a barrel of brandy only to find that he had drowned himself in it, and was beyond reprimand. They fired their guns to scatter a group of men squabbling like magpies over the gilded treasure from a plundered church. And as the hours passed, Jonathan’s heart grew sicker and sicker with it all. He knew, with complete certainty, that not one man of them would ever feel himself possessed of his whole soul again. They must lose a part of it, or risk the corruption spreading to every corner. All too often, it was clear that this had already happened.

It was the woman’s screams that drew them. Many women wept noisily, or prayed, or were mute or unconscious as they were violated. This woman screamed with such anger and outrage that Jonathan flinched away from the sound. He did not want to witness what would cause her to make such sounds. Grim-faced, his small band of men rushed towards the church from which her voice came echoing. She was at the far end of the aisle, near the dais where the altar sat. It was a small church with a pretty rose window high in the wall, its glass miraculously intact, lighting the scene of torment playing out below in shades of blue and gold. A group of ten or so British soldiers surrounded her, and had been with her for some time by the looks of it. She had been stripped naked, and struggled to rise even though her lower body was awash in blood. Each time she got to her knees she was kicked back down, and as Jonathan approached a man climbed on top of her, and began his work again. She screeched with that wild rage, and the hair stood up on Jonathan’s arms.

‘
Enough
!’ he bellowed. He levelled his pistol at the man with his breeches down. ‘You will desist, there. That is an order!’

For a startled moment the men all turned to look at him and were silent; and Jonathan’s heart, which was speeding so fast that he couldn’t feel its separate beats, filled with the hope that they would obey him. But then the one who appeared to be their leader, a big man with close-cropped hair and a pocked face, snarled.