A Mild Case of Indigestion

by Geoffrey Watson

  MacKay’s face was scarlet, but his dour Scottish humour hadn’t deserted him. “That’s doubtless so, Condesa. Any Frenchman he did that tae, would soon ken how ruthless he was.”

  Welbeloved was not the slightest bit discomfited. He placed Mercedes gently back on her feet. “Absolutely true Hamish, but remember the saying ‘out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.’ Madame is telling me that I am not beastly enough to the Frogs and is about to explain to us what we can do to enrage them still further.”

  Mercedes pushed her hair out of her eyes and tucked it into her cap. She smiled winningly at both of them. “Ever since I became a camp follower of the Hornets, I have watched you taking the greatest possible care each night to find a camp site that can be defended easily and from which one can escape if necessary. Is this not so?”

  Both men agreed with alacrity and she went on. “I have never seen a place such as this, which fulfils your requirements so completely. You have already shown that you can defend it against several times your own numbers and in your recent soliloquy, you were musing about routing the next attack and then leaving by the back door. Why leave? You say the French cannot tolerate a stronghold in their midst and would have to keep attacking. We could hold this place against an army and we don’t have to go anywhere to find them. They will always come to us.”

  Welbeloved had already come this far in his thinking before deciding against the idea. He knew enough about his wife by now though, to realise that her reasoning hadn’t stopped there. While he was trying to work out what he had missed, he glanced at MacKay, encouraging him to answer.

  MacKay had enough respect for the Condesa to guess that she had thought this thing through thoroughly, but bravely went ahead and offered the conventional reply. “If the French send two hundred against us, my Lady, we can repel them. If they then come with five hundred, we can damage them badly but not stop them. Where we are standing now is too wide and we have no means of putting a suitable barricade across the pa….” He came to a stop and gazed at the cliff face and the overhang at this point.

  Welbeloved was only slightly ahead of him. It was his turn to kiss Mercedes thoroughly, murmuring, “and where would yew place yor mines my clever little strategist?”

  She led them to where the track clung to a rock face that rose a hundred feet almost straight up. The spur around which the path wound was massive and rounded where one would have expected a more pointed wedge shape. About fifty yards back from there, the rock face had fallen away in years past, leaving an overhang and a thin fissure extending downwards from the edge of it and disappearing into the trackway.

  Pointing to this she allowed herself to speculate. “It looks as if one could insert a vast lever into that split and bring down a slice of the cliff together with the overhang. If the fault line continues under our feet, it might even sweep the track away completely instead of just blocking it. The only ways in to our little plateau would then be the back door we used and the difficult climb up by the waterfall where the stream goes down to the valley.

  It would create a large natural fortress that could be held by half-a-dozen Fergusons, or by the guerrilleros, until the French discovered the back way in. That is unlikely to be soon as they would have to come from the other side of the mountain.”

  The two men studied the rock face and poked at the crack where it disappeared into the track. Both of them stood back and inspected the whole of the face of the spur, assessing the difficulty of placing the powder up towards the top of the fissure and the possibility of cutting the track away at the same time.

  Welbeloved grinned without humour. “It’s a lesson that we should both learn, young Hamish. I know that we’ve both destroyed bridges and blown things up from time to time, when it hurt the enemy directly. I’ll wager that we’ve never used explosives to build a castle, or even thought about such a possibility.”

  “Aye sir, that’s verra true.” He looked very serious. “It just goes to show sir, we men are too ruthless and single minded. It needs the truly compassionate nature of the gentler sex tae contemplate destruction on such a scale.”

  Mercedes rose to the bait. “I thought you were my friend, Hamish, but never mind. I will show you how compassionate I am when I set off the powder and entrap a hundred or so Frenchmen who, according to my husband, ought to be running around on our plateau very shortly.”

  That got both their attentions. “I hope I am your friend, my Lady, but I canna see how you expect to light a fuse over yonder wi’ several hundred Frenchmen looking on.”

  Welbeloved held his tongue and the Condesa merely smiled infuriatingly at him. “Perhaps we should start placing the charges then. I’d like to use Masters to help me prepare them and our Swiss mountain man, Johan Thuner to climb up and place some of them at the top of the fault. I’m likely to need about half the kegs of powder that we brought with us, if that is agreeable. It’s a pity we haven’t managed to capture any from the French yet. Theirs is good enough for this sort of work and I would be able to save our better quality British powder for the Fergusons.”

  Johan Thuner was a Swiss who had fought against the French from the very first. Admittedly, his country had merely moved from control by Austria to that of France and the French had brought their revolutionary ideals of Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood. Unfortunately, these ideals did not seem to extend to all Frenchmen and certainly not to many of their ‘liberated’ neighbours. They definitely had not stopped Swiss wealth and treasures being pillaged and taken back to France.

  He spoke English with a thick German accent and a version of French which might have been understood in Geneva, but not very easily by those Frenchmen who had survived his encounters with them. He had no difficulty in understanding the Condesa when she spoke to him in High German, but his own Swiss version of that same language was almost incomprehensible to her and so he spoke English to her and she spoke German whenever they had a conversation. He seemed delighted with the arrangement.

  Being in these Spanish mountains was like being at home for him. Not only was he in his own element, but he was also a talented climber, able to go where few normal men could even see a fingerhold. His method of descent in broken country was by a series of hair-raising leaps from boulder to boulder with the same surefootedness as his native ibex.

  He and Masters brought some of the kegs of powder, several yards of slow and quick match and whatever tools they needed for opening chambers for the charges along the length of the fault line. Thuner’s expertise was essential. He made his way up the face of the rock until he was clinging to the edges of the crack right up under the overhang. Once there, he was able to gouge out a hole within the crevice, fill it tight with powder and plant a short length of slow fuse in it before pushing in a wooden plug to contain the initial force of the ignition.

  He moved down a few feet and repeated the operation using a fractionally larger piece of slow match. All the way down, wherever he could find a place where the fault was wider and deeper, he repeated the process until he had charges every three or four feet all the way to the bottom, each with a slightly larger length of slow match.

  Once the whole length of the fissure had been mined, he climbed up to the top again carrying forty feet of quickmatch and a satchelful of small broken rocks to help him jam it into the crevice. A small, split wooden peg joined the quick to the slowmatch all the way down to the base, where they had managed to evacuate a chamber big enough to accommodate a whole keg of powder.

  Mercedes had taken the trouble to determine the rate at which the matches burned. It wasn’t entirely accurate as they were composed basically of cord impregnated with saltpetre, but she determined a rate of about one foot a minute for the slowmatch and just over two seconds a foot for the quickmatch.

  It would take about one minute and twenty seconds for the quickmatch to burn all the way to the top and then five seconds for the slowmatch to reach the charge. On the next charge down, the quickmatch would reach it eight seconds e
arlier and the slowmatch was just long enough to burn for thirteen seconds. The basic idea was to make all the charges explode at the same time, to achieve the maximum force throughout the fissure. The slowmatch into the keg at the bottom was cut to just under eighteen inches.

  The whole calculation was very rule of thumb, even without allowing for variations in the rate of burn, but Mercedes was hopeful of containing all the explosions within a ten-second period. She had sealed off the lower chamber and placed a large slab of rock over the space holding the end of the fuse. All the Hornets had gathered round to inspect and her expression was triumphant as she explained the steps she had taken.

  Of course, they couldn’t really inspect anything. All the powder and fuses were out of sight, concealed within the fissure. They had to take her explanation at face value, but even so it was most ingeniously constructed and like a lot of children they could hardly conceal their impatience to see how it would work.

  Welbeloved himself was curious. Not nearly so much about how the mines would work, as he was entirely confident in his wife’s expertise. He surveyed the chamber where the end of the fuse was barely visible inside and then looked at her infuriatingly smug expression. “I am more than willing, my love, to tell yew again how extraordinarily clever yew are. It will nonetheless be necessary to convince me that yew are not going to place yorself recklessly in danger when firing this device. If the French arrive in force, yew will not be able to get within two hundred yards of yor fuse.”

  She took his arm again. “My dearest husband, I delight in the protective solicitude you always show towards me, but I have no intention of being anywhere close when the fuse is lit. Let us walk back to the camp and conduct a few small experiments before we determine exactly the method by which we shall succeed. Bye the bye,” she added innocently, “didn’t I see a brace of pistols among the weapons taken from our prisoner? Do you think I could have one of them?”

  MacKay set the men to work finding as many large rocks and small boulders as they could and placing them along the edge of the plateau in case the French thought of coming that way again. If the Condesa’s mine was successful, the partisans could build something more permanent and really create an impregnable position for themselves.

  Mercedes was back at the upper camp and had found the pistols taken from Vaux. They were standard French issue and she checked the trigger action, making sure that the flints were in good condition and sparking well. Masters dug a small pit and she laid one of the weapons in it, on its side with the lock uppermost. Four pegs driven into the ground, held it in position.

  Thuner took a large ball of twine, tied a loop in the end which he handed to the Condesa and started walking away, paying out the line as he went. He reached a protruding rock, thirty or so yards away and carefully fed the line around so that he could change direction and move up the slope for another twenty yards, where he stopped and waved.

  Mercedes waved back and pulled the twine tight, feeling the movement when Thuner pulled and released it a couple of times. A prearranged signal slackened it sufficiently for her to slip the loop over the trigger of the cocked pistol and a further signal brought a tug and a satisfactory flash of sparks as the flint was released.

  With a triumphant grin and applause from Welbeloved and MacKay, she explained that the pistol would be loaded with a quarter charge of powder leading directly to the frayed end of the quickmatch. Her complicated mine ought to explode one minute and twenty-five seconds later. It was possible that the burst of powder smoke would be noticed by anyone passing at the time, but by then it would be far too late to do anything about it.

  Having proved to everyone’s satisfaction that her device worked, it only remained to put it in position. Thuner had found a ledge about forty feet above the track. It was quite a difficult climb but once there he could lie hidden and still observe the pathway adjacent to the hidden mine. The fifty yards of twine between him and the explosion should be enough to keep him safe from the blast and any flying debris.

  With the pistol in place, they checked that everything worked satisfactorily, then removed it, fitted a flint and primed the pan and the barrel before cocking the lock and replacing it with the loop of the twine around the trigger.

  While they were disguising the position of the fuse chamber, Welbeloved was talking quietly to MacKay, who called together Masters and a couple of the other men and set off around the spur and down the track for four or five hundred yards. There, they shamelessly copied the Condesa’s idea and concealed a two-thirds empty keg of powder under a slab of rock at the side of the track. Inside the keg was the second pistol, charged and primed in the same way and packed around with gravel and small stones. Twine was stretched nine inches high across the track, attached to pegs and to the trigger of the pistol. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains by the time they had finished and had set completely when they got back to the camp.

  Welbeloved had always realised the limitations of the Ferguson. The one obvious drawback, once night had fallen, was that it became little better than a musket. In the dark you could point it and fire it, but with little hope of accuracy. If he had been of a nervous disposition he could have had nightmares about hundreds of French attackers storming through his camp at night with fixed bayonets. It was the reason why he was always so fanatical about the sort of position they picked for a bivouac.

  Fortunately, tonight was going to be cloudless and there would be a half-moon clear of the mountains before midnight. However, if any unwary foot tripped MacKay’s mine before daylight, he would make sure Mercedes’s cliff face was tumbled before any attackers could get past it.

  CHAPTER 5

  Much to the surprise of everyone, it was a quiet night. Apart from the rotating sentries, they all got a good night’s sleep in the new two-man brown canvas tents that Welbeloved had introduced, following the campaign in the depths of the last winter.

  Although they were now approaching summer temperatures during the day, the altitude conspired to make them grateful for the protection of the canvas roof against the chill of the hours before dawn.

  Thuner went down early and removed the trip line from the lower mine and Lopez returned to report that the guerrilla camp was set up again only three hours ride away and that the Hornets would be welcomed whenever they chose to join them.

  Mercedes and Masters took him on a guided tour to show how they proposed to fortify the plateau while the rest of the men were set to improving the defenses over the steep climb up by the stream.

  It wasn’t until almost noon, at a time when any self-respecting Spaniard would be thinking of whatever food was available, followed by two or three hours siesta out of the burning sun, that the first aggressive moves were detected.

  A column of horsemen came into view, riding two abreast along the narrow track rising around the edge of the far valley. They were walking their horses and showing no great sense of urgency or caution. Even at this distance Welbeloved’s glass showed the dark green overalls and tunics with the familiar broad white leather shoulder belt and black shakos of the Chasseurs à Cheval, Napoleon’s light cavalry.

  Theirs was a role, normally on the fringes of a battle, as hunters and harriers of opposing light troops, whether infantry or cavalry. It had been a squadron of chasseurs that had captured the Condesa and her maid last autumn and held them briefly until Welbeloved had rescued them.

  The column approaching on the other side of the valley was only a troop at the most. Thirty riders making fifteen pairs, riding side by side. Of more immediate interest was the absence of any supporting troops. The chasseurs were half a mile up the track by now. Any supporting infantry would surely be in sight.

  They waited until the horsemen were turning across the neck of the valley and moving towards the track on the other side of the spur. There was still no sign of any following troops. Welbeloved signaled to Thuner not to climb to his perch, but to join the rest of the men concealing themselves around the plateau.

/>   It occurred to him that Vaux had seen all the partisans leaving and would have reported the fact to his superiors. They probably assumed that the whole site was now abandoned and were doing what he had originally speculated; only sending a small force to check and then destroy anything of value remaining.

  He trotted back to where the path opened onto the plateau and saw what he expected. The plateau was quite deserted except for MacKay standing alone and staring intently at the rising, rock-strewn ground framing the natural arena.

  He nodded to Welbeloved. “Oor lads are getting better, Sir. Though I say it reluctantly, they’re unco guid. I know where I put them and I canna see hide nor hair. I hope the new lads will be half as guid when they get here.”

  “So do I, Hamish. So do I. I also hope that most of them survive the ministrations of George Vere and Dodds. I didn’t have much time to evaluate them before we left, but George will weed out any that can’t come up to our standard. If he finally gets here with thirty I’ll be delighted.”

  “Aye, Sir. You should be. I ken that mony o’ them were the troublemakers in their last regiments. I did nae think the Colonels o’ the regiments who were told tae release them would send us their model soldiers. If those lads were the ones that could think for themselves and didna take tae blind, unthinking obedience, then we can gie them enough trouble oorselves tae make them intae passable Hornets.”

  Welbeloved once more thanked the Goddess for bringing him Hamish MacKay, many years ago as a gangling, rather rebellious marine and one-time highland gillie-gamekeeper-poacher? He never really knew.

  A sudden thought struck him. “Where are the ladies, Hamish?” MacKay smiled. “I wondered when you would be asking, Sir. I took the liberty o’ sending them tae guard the top o’ the path by the camp.”

  “Yew’re a braver man than I am, Hamish. Did they go without fuss?”