Chapter I

 

HONOURED IN THE BREACH
Badajoz, 10 p.m., 6 April 1812

‘Tout va bien!’ The forlorn hope, clambering in pitch darkness over fallen masonry in the dry ditch, could hear the sentries calling to each other on the walls above. Then a shot rang out. ‘Alarme! Alarme! ’ A single shot: the game was up. Some movement had betrayed them, perhaps, or the clank of a scabbard – and an alert sentry. ‘Aux armes!’ The storming party had known it would come, but a few minutes more and they could have gained the top of the rubble. A blazing carcass arched over the ramparts, lighting up the breach as if full moon – seconds only, but enough to give the French their mark. They opened a furious musketry. Artillery soon followed. Lead and grape cut down the struggling infantry before a man could reach the razor-sharp blades of the chevaux defrise, which the defenders had dragged to the rupture when the siege guns ceased firing at last light Cornet Matthew Hervey, standing dismounted with the rest of His Majesty’s 6th Light Dragoons on the high ground half a mile east of the great border fortress of Badajoz, took a firmer hold on Jessye’s reins. It had been four years to the day since he had taken an outside seat on the Red Rover for the Sixth’s depot at Canterbury. Two weeks before that, he had sat in the upper remove of Shrewsbury School, the master still hopeful that Hervey would follow his brother to Oxford and thence take Holy Orders, as their father before them. But the army had claimed him. It had from his earliest days; above all, the cavalry. In large measure it was Daniel Coates’s doing, ‘the shepherd of Salisbury Plain’, sometime trumpeter to General Tarleton and adopted master-at-arms and rough-rider to the younger son of the Horningsham parsonage. Thus armed with a cradle-knowledge of his ‘profession’, the seventeen-year-old Cornet Hervey had sailed with the Sixth to Portugal in the summer of 1808 – only to limp home with them via Corunna six months later.

What a learning that had been. When the Sixth went back to Portugal, but three months after Corunna, he felt himself the complete troop-officer. He feared nothing, not the enemy, nor the Sixth’s own dragoons, nor his own fitness for the rank. And the three years of advance and withdrawal which had followed – offensive and defensive, siege and counter-siege – had confirmed him in his own estimation. He had remained a cornet, however, for although there had been deaths among the lieutenants, the consequent free promotions had not reached down as far as him (and he could not afford to buy his promotion in another regiment even if he had wanted to). They no longer sported in the mess with the old toast, ‘To a short war, and a bloody one!’

There would be bloody war tonight; that was certain. He had seen sieges enough in those three years to know that this one at Badajoz would be a sight harder than the others. He knew how strong were the defences. Badajoz was the guardian of the road to Madrid; when it had been in allied hands it had been a sure guardian of the road to Lisbon. Three summers ago, the Sixth, with the rest of Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army, had marched into Badajoz after the bruising victory at Talavera, and there they had stayed a full three months. And then, forced to abandon the fortress because the Spanish could not, or would not, support them, they had crossed into Portugal. A year of covering had followed, like the wary boxer: Lord Wellington, as by this time Sir Arthur Wellesley had become, could do little more than land the occasional blow – but stinging blows, so that the French began to weaken. However, like the wounded pug fighting on with all the instinct of years at the booth, it was a slow weakening, and never so certain that Wellington dare drop his guard or overreach himself. So that, eventually, every man in the army knew there would be no knockout blow, just a fight until the French at last quit the country, and while the other allies forced the same on France’s eastern borders. But this siege was not their first attempt to dislodge the French from the great guardian of the Madrid high road: twice, the year before, Badajoz had held out against Wellington’s men. And in the depths of a freezing January just past, Ciudad Rodrigo, a fortress almost as strong, had claimed a thousand dead and wounded before the Union flag was hoisted above its castle. No, Badajoz would not fall tonight without a heavy butcher’s bill. The Sixth would not pay, of course. There was no job for the cavalry on a night like this. Tonight it was an affair of the bayonet. Hervey knew what the men with the bayonets were saying, too: if the defenders of Ciudad Rodrigo had been put to the sword, in the old way, the French here at Badajoz would not be resisting, for Wellington’s engineers and gunners had made a practicable breach.

The mood in the ranks of red was not in favour of quarter; certainly not if the French continued to put up a fight. Those were the ‘rules of war’. But above all Hervey feared for the Spanish, the civil population of the city. He did not suppose the people of Badajoz were any more or less disposed to the French than they were elsewhere. True, they had had the French in their town for a year and more, but that did not make them afrancesado. Yet somehow that was what the men with the bayonets thought. He started. A great fiery flash lit the Trinidad bastion, and a second later came a terrible roar. Jessye squealed. Hervey put his left hand to her muzzle and shortened the reins as he peered at the distant fortress walls. There was smoke now to mix with the mist coming off the Guadiana river. He shivered. Poor infantry: there was no glory in this. Weeks of sodden cold in the trenches, then consigned to oblivion in the dark of the night. Some of them would get through the breach, perhaps, if fortune favoured them and their blood boiled hot enough. And then what? ‘Poor bastards, sir!’ ‘Yes, Serjeant Armstrong. Poor bastards.’ At that range, in the pitch darkness, they did not actually see the limbs and the guts scattered like ash from a volcano for a hundred yards about the breach, but they knew well enough what a mine did. The defenders had lost no time, evidently, counter-tunnelling under the breach. ‘By God, sir, them French is putting up a fight and a half,’ said Armstrong, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I wish I were down there!’ That one mine might mean another was of no consequence to either of them. ‘So do I, Serjeant Armstrong; so do I.’

The whole front was now musketry. Hervey had no idea what were the plans for the assault – how many breaches or escalades, or where – but he had watched the assaulting divisions assembling late that afternoon: four of them, no small affair. If they all succeeded in breaking into the fortress there would be a desperate fight inside unless the French struck their colours at once. He did not see how the defenders could make any sortie now, with so many troops at the walls, yet that was why the Sixth and the other regiments of cavalry were here. Only three weeks ago the French had poured out and driven off the working parties in the parallels below where they stood now. Humiliating it had been. They had filled in the trenches and carried off the picks and shovels (the French commander had offered a bounty for every entrenching tool). But there was no chance of that tonight; not with musketry and cannonading so intense. ‘Hot work for our friends, Hervey.’ The voice was assured, the glow of the cigar familiar and comfortable. ‘Indeed, Sir Edward. I was just thinking that our chances of action seem small.’ Serjeant Armstrong retired a respectful distance. Captain Sir Edward Lankester lowered his voice but a fraction. ‘You imagine the real reason we are posted thus, Hervey?’ ‘I imagine as we are ordered, Sir Edward. I cannot suppose our arms will be needed in the breaches.’ Sir Edward kept silent for a moment. ‘What do you imagine will happen when the army is through the breaches?’ Hervey sighed: cruel necessity. ‘I should not wish to be a Frenchman.’ ‘Ay. You cannot contest a practicable breach and then expect quarter. There’ll be precious little of it. It was not that of which I was minded, though. What of the Spanish?’ Hervey grimaced. When Ciudad Rodrigo had fallen, it had been three hours and more before the officers got their men back in hand. The riot and destruction had been prodigious, just as the looting and despoiling on the retreat to Corunna – and a good many Spaniards abused along the way. They stood silent the while, trying to make out the progress of the storming from the powder flashes, the rattle of small arms and the explosive roar of the field pieces. There seemed a deal too much of all three to suggest the breaches and escalades were being carried – not with the bayonet, at any rate. There should have been a great display of fireworks and then a full-throated roar as the storming parties went to it with cold steel – and a feu de joie, perhaps, as they took the place. But a fire-fight like this spelled trouble. It meant the infantry could not gain a footing on the walls. Andthey couldn’t keep up an assault for ever: some time soon they would be exhausted, all forward momentum lost. Then the defenders would have carried the day, again – or, rather, the night. That was how it had been the last time at Badajoz, and the first time too, by all accounts. Not that he had seen for himself any of it; only heard the course of things, and then what the survivors had told them in the dejected days that followed. A man did not like to have his friends cut down, but if the result was victory he could bear it. To be thrown off the walls of Badajoz and taunted by the French was not to be borne. The men with the bayonets were certain of one thing: the French could not have defied them if the Spaniards had not been helping them. A fortress standing against two assaults by Nosey’s men – what else could be the explanation?

The walls of Jericho – that was what Cornet Hervey was minded of, detached from the bloody business of the breach. How had the walls of Jericho fallen to Joshua’s trumpets? It was allegory, surely, as his brother suggested? In a thousand years they would speak of the walls of Badajoz falling to Lord Wellington’s bugles (he fervently prayed). Had the Israelites undermined the walls of Jericho, as he supposed the engineers had here? And did Lord Wellington do at Badajoz as Joshua had at Jericho? Did he send spies into the city? Joshua’s spies had found the Canaanites terrified of his army after its victories on the other side of the Jordan. A terrified people – perhaps the sound of the trumpets alone induced them to surrender? But Joshua’s spies had nearly been captured; they would not have escaped without the help of Rahab. Was there a Rahab in Badajoz to harbour Lord Wellington’s spies? Hervey smiled. Rahab the prostitute: there would be Rahabs aplenty in Badajoz, and they would take in men right enough after the place had fallen. He shivered again. If there were prayers to be said for any tonight but the poor devils with bayonets, it should be that Badajoz did not meet the fate of Jericho: And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old. Except that Joshua saved Rahab the prostitute alive, and her father’s household, and all that she had. Could he hope that Lord Wellington’s orders would save the Rahabs in Badajoz when blood was running hot among his redcoats? Could he even hope that Wellington’s orders would save the Susannas, for virtue had not always been sufficient protection against the heated blood of the best-regulated men in this campaign. Exactly as at Jericho. Indeed he could hope, for after Badajoz there was Madrid to relieve, and the fortress at Burgos.

Lord Wellington would brook no check to progress, unlike the Israelites after Jericho: the Lord God of Israel, angered with the looting of the city, had punished Joshua at the siege of Ai. Lord Wellington would not want such a punishment; Lord Wellington was an upright man, and he would waste not a day in his zeal to eject the French from Spain (word was that he had not spent a day but at his duty since coming to the Peninsula). He would not contemplate a defeat at Ai; there must be no riot in Badajoz, no regiments incapable through drink of continuing the advance. He had given strict orders to that effect. Who would dare defy them? ‘By God, sir, they’ll be hotted up after this!’ said Serjeant Armstrong, a furious musketry now the length of the walls. Hervey woke to the grim truth before them. ‘Let’s hope their blood’s boiling this minute, Serjeant Armstrong, for those walls will not be theirs without it.’ Armstrong knew it better than most. He had been in the trenches that afternoon, volunteering for the working parties taking grenades forward. ‘Never saw men writing their wills like that, sir,’ he had told him afterwards. ‘They were giving me letters and all sort o’ things to send for ’em. But by hell they’ll go to it tonight! Never seen men as hotted up. And them without a drop inside ’em yet!’ Hervey hoped for their sakes they had rum inside them now. It fired the belly and dulled the pain. ‘It is the very devil to stand and watch. I don’t think I ever had more feeling for a red coat.’ But too many of Serjeant Armstrong’s letters would be read by widows, or mothers bereft of a son, he reckoned. It was beginning to look as if the third attempt on Badajoz would go the same as the other two, for all the infantry’s ardour. Another mine exploded, a galleried one, big and deep, so that the earth trembled even where the Sixth stood. ‘Jesus!’ gasped a dragoon. ‘As you were!’ growled the serjeant-major. He disapproved of profanities, especially in the face of the enemy. But in truth, he only silenced the cursing; he did not stop it. In the next hour there were a dozen more earth-shaking explosions, so that there could not have been a man in the Sixth who did not curse with his teeth clenched, thankful, deep down at least, to be standing-to his horse rather than in the breaches below them.

At eleven o’clock a galloper came, almost taking the videttes by surprise. ‘Sixth Light Dragoons?’ ‘Ay, sir.’ ‘Lord George Irvine, please.’ Hervey heard the exchange well enough: the videttes were but fifty yards in front, and the galloper shouted (no doubt he was deafened if he came from the trenches). ‘This way, sir.’ They peered to see who he was, for they might then have some idea what he brought. ‘Here!’ called the adjutant, as galloper and guide approached the line. ‘Lord George?’ called the galloper again as he slid from the saddle. If he was deafened by the explosions, he was equally blinded by the flashes. ‘Yes, Pontefract, before you!’ Lieutenant-Colonel Lord George Irvine had the advantage of an orderly with a torch.

Lieutenant the Earl of Pontefract threw his cloak back over his shoulders and saluted as another orderly took his reins. ‘Good evening, Colonel. Sir Stapleton Cotton’s compliments, and would you have one squadron dismount and come up to the trenches in support of General Picton’s division at once.’ Hervey’s ears pricked, as did everyone’s that heard. The orders were precise, yet their purpose unclear. What kind of support did ‘the Fighting Third’ Division have want of ? ‘Sir Stapleton suggests you may stand down the remainder until dawn.’ That settled one thing at least, thought Hervey: Wellington must be sure there could be no sortie. ‘Very well, Pontefract,’ replied Lord George Irvine resolutely. ‘Is there a guide?’ ‘I will take them to the rendezvous myself, Colonel.’ Lord George Irvine did not hesitate: unless there were good reason otherwise, First Squadron would do duty, its captain being the senior. ‘Sir Edward?’ ‘Colonel!’ ‘One to three, then.’ ‘Very good, Colonel. Sar’nt-major?’ ‘Sir!’ ‘Squadron will dismount, every third man horseholder.’ It was not a very practised drill. However, the ranks numbered off in threes at stand-to morning and evening, so there should be no untoward confusion now, even in the dark. Private Jewitt, Hervey’s groom, took Jessye’s reins from him. ‘Will you take my carbine, sir?’ ‘No, just my pistols I think, Jewitt.’ Hervey had no more idea than the next man what their duties would be, but if they were going to scramble into a breach or attempt an escalade, he would be better unencumbered. It was the first time they had been called forward in a siege. He had to be ready for anything.