A Mild Case of Indigestion

by Geoffrey Watson

  “Meek as lambs, Sir. Mind, I always ken when her Ladyship is nae best pleased, but I reckon she’ll be talking tae me again in a couple o’ days.”

  Don’t yew believe it, Hamish. Well before that! She thinks the world of yew. Almost like a big brother, but thank yew for putting them both out of harm’s way. We’d better join the men now, before the Frogs get here. Yew put them all where we agreed?”

  “Aye, Sir. Ten o’ them here to discourage any escape. The rest scattered all aroond like the audience at one o’ those old Greek theatres we saw when I first knew you. Lopez is up wi’ the ladies. He’s almost guid enough tae be a Hornet, but that uniform does tend tae stand oot and that bondook o’ his is useless at over twenty-five yards.”

  MacKay joined the ten men making up his bottleneck stopper and Welbeloved walked over and settled himself at the bottom of the path up to the camp. He gazed around, delighted that even he could see no sign of his hidden men. He raised his voice. “Is Evans anywhere close?” Immediately came a reply. “Lyin’ yere, only five paces be’ind you, I am, Sir. How did you know?”

  He grinned to himself. Evans was the best shot of all the Hornets, better even than Welbeloved, although he would never admit it publicly. The place where he was lying commanded the best field of fire on the plateau. Welbeloved would have bet money on him being close.

  “Just keep it in yor mind, Dai Evans, there is very little yew do that I don’t know about.” He could imagine the grins on the faces of all the men within earshot. “What I want yew to do now is cover me if I step out to talk to one of the horse soldiers that should be here any minute.

  There are only thirty of the poor souls and I would prefer not to have to kill them. It would be better if we captured them and sent them back to Marshal Ney without their trousers, as we have done before.

  If they attack me when I step out, shoot them. If they stop to listen, hold yor fire unless they point a carbine at me. I can’t reason with people like that and yew are free to shoot them.

  If they all run, Mr. MacKay will likely stop them, but anyone fleeing is fair game.”

  He had been over all this with them before they took cover, but wanted the men close to him to have no doubt of his intentions. They all settled back to wait.

  The French were still in no hurry. They stopped where the path opened onto the plateau and studied the area closely. Ten minutes later, orders were heard and five men detached and walked their horses along the crude defenses that the Hornets had made, keeping as far away from the tumbled high ground and the hidden riflemen as they could.

  They made a cursory check on the shacks at the far end, then trotted back within yards of the hidden men, offering a moving target and peering at the slope for any sign of danger.

  If experts like MacKay and Welbeloved couldn’t see the ambush, then the French, trotting quickly past, had no chance. They rejoined their friends and the whole troop moved out and formed a single line, following the same route as the first five, around the rim of the plateau. As soon as they were spread evenly around the rim, they stopped, turned their mounts towards the high ground and waited.

  If they had listened to Capitaine Vaux, they would know that the voltigeurs had been fired on from the higher ground. Welbeloved applauded their caution in remaining outside the effective range of the standard musket. Equally obviously they had discounted stories of the devastating accuracy against Vaux’s men. Things like that sometimes happened in battle and anyway, this place looked and probably was deserted.

  A young officer in the center of the line shouted an order and they all began to walk their horses forward in a very relaxed manner. No doubt their carbines were loaded, but they were still held in their holsters, close by the riders’ knees.

  This seemed as good a time as any. Welbeloved rose to his feet and walked down to level ground. Using his loudest voice, he roared. “Arrêtez-vous la!” and watched as the startled officer raised his hand and yelled “Halte!” then stare in amazement at the strangely dressed, authoritative figure, standing defiantly alone, apparently defending a narrow path to the very top of the valley.

  Welbeloved gave him little time to think. He pointed at him. “Avancez-vous seul!”

  The Frenchman looked around. There was no sign of anyone other than this lone figure. He growled at his sergeant and they both advanced together, ignoring Welbeloved’s instruction to come forward alone

  They stopped ten yards away and surveyed each other. The sergeant continued to search the slope before him, now holding his carbine but not yet actually pointing it.

  Welbeloved started the dialogue. “I am Colonel Welbeloved, commanding a company of British soldiers that you probably know as the Frelons Bruns. I would have thought that Capitaine Vaux would have warned you not to send such a pitifully small force to provide targets for my men.”

  His attempt at speaking French was certainly understood, as was his use of frelon for hornet. The name struck a chord with the officer, indicated by a narrowing of his eyes, but only increased his hostility. “My name is Lieutenant Duval and I should tell you that Vaux is under arrest for cowardice and on his way back to France, probably to face a firing squad.”

  “That is a pity. He was certainly no coward. He defied us to kill him even after all his men had fled. It also means that you have a problem. If you surrender you will probably be shot when you return. If you don’t surrender we will have to shoot you. The choice is difficult, is it not so?”

  Duval snarled. “No, it is not difficult. Shoot him Sergeant!”

  The sergeant did manage to point his carbine before Evans fired. The ball went through the center of his wide shoulder belt and swept him from the saddle, one foot caught in the stirrups and the horse bolting towards the line of chasseurs.

  The Lieutenant did not move because Welbeloved’s rifle was now pointing at him and the click as it was cocked seemed unnaturally loud. “Order your men to remain still and we can continue to negotiate.”

  Duval turned and shouted. All movement stopped except for a couple of men intercepting the sergeant’s horse. “Now, I see you need educating,” Welbeloved continued as if nothing had happened. “There is a rifle pointing at every one of your men. At this distance, all would be hit, most of them fatally.”

  He paused and examined Duval’s tall shako. “I see you need convincing.” He turned, “Evans! Put a ball through his hat without touching his head!”

  Turning back, he was just in time to see the badge on the front of the shako blown backwards, breaking the chinstrap and wrenching the helmet off to lie several yards away.

  Duval was in shock, feeling his head to make sure it was still there. Welbeloved made his voice as menacing as he could. “They can all shoot as well as that! Order your men to dismount and drop their weapons on the ground.”

  Most of them complied unwillingly but the five nearest to the track round the spur set their spurs and raced for safety, bent low over their horses necks. Even crouched like this and travelling quickly, MacKay’s ten rifles laid them dead on the ground before they had travelled a dozen yards.

  There was no more thought of resistance. The horses were herded towards the meadow beyond the huts. The remaining chasseurs were made to line up after putting all their weapons in a pile. Half were marched off to scrape a pit in the shallow soil of the meadow. The rest collected the bodies and laid them in the pit, covering them with stones before heaping the soil back. Come next spring, it would just be one more mound of grass for the animals to feed on.

  They almost had a mutiny when the prisoners were lined up again and told to strip off tunics, overalls, britches and boots. When told that the alternative was to be handed over to the Spaniards, there were no more audible complaints. Each man was allowed to retain all of his personal possessions. Duval set the example himself even though he had been offered the same terms as Vaux. As he explained, he might get away with his life if he was seen to suffer equally with his men. He did insist that he retained his
mutilated shako as evidence of his near acquaintance with death.

  Welbeloved went out of his way to impress on him that the Hornets would never ordinarily shoot an unarmed man. For obvious reasons they couldn’t keep prisoners, so that sending them back without their uniforms seemed the best compromise. He hoped that word would get around among the French; that surrender and live, resist and die meant exactly that. It could make life so much simpler in the future.

  The woebegone procession started off in good order with Duval leading. They would not get back to their billets before the early hours of the morning and their feet would be lacerated and bloody, but they would be alive and carrying Welbeloved’s message of contempt. Marshal Ney would doubtless have conniptions and his unfortunate anti-partisan commander would be forced to mount a massive; hopefully ill-considered; operation to eradicate this hornet’s nest.

  There remained much to do before dusk. Thirty additional horses had to be unsaddled and checked before putting them out to graze. The French cavalry did have a reputation for neglecting their mounts and although these thirty had quite a few ribs showing, through a scarcity of fodder, there were only a few saddle sores that needed attention. Some cavalry units could be smelt quite a distance down wind due to untreated sores and the stench such corruption caused.

  These were well shod. A few days on the fresh grass here and in the upper meadow would put flesh back on their bones. The partisans seemed to have a goodly number of mounts of their own but would no doubt welcome some remounts.

  The carbines were lighter and shorter versions of the 1777 standard French musket. Shorter and lighter so that they could be loaded more easily and used while in the saddle. Accuracy was questionable. The short barrel tended to make them little more effective than a pistol, but there were twenty-five or more cartridges in every pouch and Welbeloved had a lot of experience teaching novices both how to modify the weapons and how to aim and fire them to get the best results.

  Shortly before dark, Masters and Thuner walked down to set the trip cord again. It was most unlikely that the French would come again during the night but Welbeloved reasoned that he couldn’t afford to make a single mistake. Napoleon could lose a thousand men and hardly notice. The Hornets only had thirty to begin with and so everything they did had to be thought out in great detail. If they were ever caught napping; once would be enough.

  It was almost dark when Thuner and Masters returned to the camp. They went straight to the Condesa and had a long talk with her, gesticulating towards the other side of the little meadow, where the track ran alongside a steep rocky slope that rose quickly to merge with the mountainside.

  After a while, they all rose and walked over to where Welbeloved and MacKay were in deep discussion. Mercedes opened the conversation while her co-conspirators shuffled their feet in a certain embarrassment.

  “My two friends here have just set the lower mine trip cord and while they were there they walked farther down the track, examining the spur almost to the point where the track swings across the valley.” She turned to Masters. “Explain to the Captain, exactly what you just told me.”

  Masters stopped fidgeting and took a deep breath. “Aye aye, My Lady.” He paused, obviously arranging his thoughts in the right order. “The side of the spur is not quite straight up, Sir, both above and under the path. Though even Thuner here would be hard put to climb up or down. Even when the track turns away from the spur, it is still impossible for anyone normal to climb there.

  At that point there seems to be a kind of crevice or gash, right at the top, with a lot of loose rocks showing. Now Johnnie Thuner here reckons we ought to be able to get on top of the spur by climbing over near to the path yonder,” pointing to the broken rock face across the meadow. “We thought a small charge could start a rock fall where we saw the crevice. It would block the path and seal off the whole of the spur when Her Ladyship’s mine goes off as well.”

  Welbeloved looked over at the rocky climb they were talking about and made an instant decision. “First thing in the morning, go and have a look. Take some powder with yew and get a mine placed if it looks as if it will fall as yew reckon.” He grinned at MacKay. “Whether they are right or wrong, it is good thinking and they both deserve an extra tot tonight, eh Hamish?” Aye, Sir, that they dae. I’ll see tae it.”

  Generally speaking; anything he asked his men to do, Welbeloved could do it as well or better. The one exception was rock climbing. His acrophobia was no problem when climbing a tree or up in the rigging of a ship of war, where there were abundant hand holds. On any sort of rock face, he was quite simply a liability and acknowledged the fact with as good a grace as possible.

  The following morning, as he watched three figures already half way up the climb opposite, he felt a deal of apprehension. His precious wife had deviously outsmarted him again in order to get her own way. He should have realised that she would have wanted to oversee the placing of the charges, but he hadn’t. She hadn’t disobeyed him. It was he who had neglected to forbid her to risk her life clambering up a height only suitable for mountain goats and mad Swiss.

  Now he could only watch with his heart in his mouth as they disappeared from sight onto the top of the spur. The fact that Isabella was keeping well out of his way this morning was another indication that both the women were only too aware that his approval would not have been given.

  A further hint, just the faintest aroma of conspiracy came to him when he noticed that MacKay had found many things to occupy him at a suspiciously diplomatic distance away. He remembered that it had been just the same before they got married, but that was before she had promised to obey him.

  Fatalistically, he realised he would never win this battle until she fell and broke her insubordinate neck and that was a victory he did not wish even to contemplate.

  CHAPTER 6

  Welbeloved was; if he would admit it; looking for a measure of sympathy from MacKay and finding him strangely unfeeling. The Scot, after all, was not married to the problem. Although he was coming, more and more, to view the Condesa as a younger and very lively sister, he could not, for the life of him, see why a climb to the top of the spur to play with her beloved fireworks, should cause such emotion in his commander. But then, he did not suffer from acrophobia.

  Then the alarm was raised as the French were sighted, remarkably early in the morning and Welbeloved was entirely professional once more. From the edge of the plateau near to the track, he and MacKay looked down on a column of infantry six abreast, crawling like a giant blue centipede with white legs all moving together.

  One centipede of about company strength was already drawing clear, but a second one was snapping at its heels. There were two hundred heavy infantry in sight with more following every minute.

  Looking down over the rim of the plateau they could also see the green uniforms of the voltigeurs flooding into place at the base of the climb.

  MacKay looked quietly satisfied. “It would be verra easy tae get the idea that we’ve managed tae offend them in some way, Sir. Or dae ye think it’s their way o’ paying us a compliment?” MacKay’s Scottish accent always seemed to return in full force at moments like this.

  Welbeloved grinned. “They are certainly taking us seriously at long last. There must be at least four hundred over yonder and another hundred trying to get up by the stream. I would suggest yew get a few of the men along the rim, ready to heave those piles of rocks down onto any Frog that comes too near the top.”

  Thuner came trotting up, hardly out of breath after his dash from the top of the spur. “Compliments of ze Gräfin, Zir. She has zeen all ze Vrogs und vill zend an avalanche on zem after I go boom mit her minen.”

  Welbeloved beamed. “Good lad! I thought we would have to set it off at ground level. Go and climb up to yor eyrie and pull the trigger when the first company is halfway past the mine. I want it to explode before the second company reaches it. Understand?”

  “Ja, Zir. I unterstant. Pull ze cord zo minen g
o boom after first hundert men, ist nicht zo?”

  “Exactly so, Thuner. The Condesa and Masters will remain on the spur, yes?”

  “Ja, Zir. I zend Isabella und Lopez to help. Is goot?”

  “Is excellent, Thuner. Away yew go now.”

  Thuner trotted off, quickly checked that the trigger cord was clear of any obstruction and made his way up to his perch with an ease which Welbeloved found oddly comforting, considering his previous unease when watching Mercedes on a much easier climb.

  He looked over the rim and studied the voltigeurs, some three or four hundred feet below him. At the bottom there was a choice of ways to climb and he could see six lines of green clad soldiers crawling upwards. Halfway to the top from that point, the choice narrowed to three possible routes, plus a difficult clamber up by the stream, which would certainly soak the climber to the skin and ensure that his carbine would be useless until thoroughly dried out.

  Six of the men were detailed as rock droppers, two to each climb. Each route was a two-handed climb and they were told to wait until there were five or more men, one after the other, on each ascent. They could then amuse themselves by trying to brain the leading climber with a cannonball-sized rock in the hope of bringing down the whole file.

  It was time to pay attention to the mass of line infantrymen slowly crawling up towards them. He walked with MacKay around the point of the spur and they both watched the five separate centipedes approaching the point where they would swing across the valley to the root of the spur, where Mercedes would have them within range of her avalanche.

  His glass showed a minimum of a hundred men in each company. He was thoughtful as he walked back to the plateau. Five or six hundred men bursting onto the plateau and spreading out into a charge, would overwhelm the Hornets, no matter how quickly they fired.

  In theory, he could afford to let two hundred men erupt onto his selected killing ground. Then the Hornets could slaughter over half of them in little over a minute, with only four aimed shots from every rifleman. After ten rapid shots it was always advisable to let the Fergusons cool down to avoid jamming the thread on the breech with unburnt powder deposits and overheating.