A Mild Case of Indigestion

by Geoffrey Watson

  Because the association of the Condesa and Isabella had worked so satisfactorily as auxiliaries to the Hornets, MacKay made a concession to the inevitable and offered the six girls recognition as his group of auxiliaries, subject to the same discipline as the rest of his men.

  They were all so desperate to accept that they even agreed that while they were with the Hornets, they would rigidly hold to the rule that enemy soldiers would be allowed to surrender in safety once they had ceased to resist.

  His intention was that Isabella and one of the girls should go with Hickson and his group, while Juanita and another girl should accompany his small platoon. The Hornets were not cavalrymen and when they went into action, the Condesa and Isabella had perfected the art of herding the horses away to a convenient place of safety. If he was going to have to play guardian to a group of militant females, MacKay was determined that they should be a disciplined unit, fully capable of protecting themselves.

  There were now one or two Fergusons available and he made them practice marksmanship and loading under the watchful eye of Isabella. He also got Ryan to select suitable knives for each girl from the collection of personal weapons harvested from the French. Ryan was the Hornet’s acknowledged expert with all types of stabbing and throwing knives and he put the girls through hours of combat practice with wooden substitutes. If it ever came to a one-on-one situation, any French soldier would get the surprise of his life and very likely the last surprise of his life.

  With the ready agreement and co-operation of El Martillo, a group of six of the guerrilleros would accompany each of his platoons on all of their forays. While they were away, MacKay’s walking wounded would train the rest to become fighters. He stressed the word fighters to El Martillo, as soldiers seemed entirely inappropriate for the sort of warfare they were talking about. Individually, each would be much deadlier than any conventionally trained and drilled soldier.

  ***

  Two days later, MacKay, Ryan and their disparate band of fighting men and women were south of the mountains, looking down into the broad valley carrying the road from Orense. This road went eastwards, north of the frontier with Portugal, until it reached the gentler countryside of León and turned south towards Zamora and Salamanca, or southeast to Valladolid and Madrid.

  It was the southern of the two supply arteries that supplied the French army, now concentrated in southern Galicia. The northern artery had already received MacKay’s attention and Hickson had been sent back to the same bridge, carrying an abundance of captured gunpowder. Destroying the bridge would temporarily limit that road to riding and foot traffic only, until the French could repair the damage or throw a temporary structure across.

  For the moment, MacKay’s interest was focussed on finding out the future intentions of the French. They had been in the region for a long time now and the country was not fertile enough to support tens of thousands of extra mouths.

  Sooner or later, like a swarm of locusts, they would have to find fresh sources of food and sustenance and Welbeloved would need to be informed if twenty thousand Frenchmen were following him south.

  His whole group was relaxed, taking the opportunity of getting to know each other better, cleaning and checking their weapons or even snatching the chance of a short nap after travelling for most of the night.

  MacKay and Ryan were taking turns with MacKay’s telescope, studying and trying to evaluate the traffic. This was flowing in both directions, passing through a small town that certainly had a French garrison, the size of which they could only try to guess by patiently recording the coming and going of military traffic.

  The flow of traffic was predominantly westwards towards Orense and was not overtly military in appearance. Convoys of wagons with their contents covered by tarpaulins, suggested that they were carrying provisions rather than arms or other lethal supplies. If so, Soult’s army would not be going hungry, even if the Spanish were short of food.

  There had obviously been very little trouble on this southern route. The wagon trains had minimal protection. A convoy of ten wagons would typically have half-a-dozen cavalrymen back and front and a single armed driver for each wagon, wearing the iron-grey jacket faced with brown, of the Train des Equipages.

  Until five years ago, all the drivers had been civilians hired for the duration of the campaign and were intended only to supplement the supplies obtained by foraging. Since then, the Wagon Train battalions had been formed to keep the armies fed in areas where foraging was inadequate. It looked as though the system was paying dividends in Spain.

  Towards dusk, the amount of traffic leaving the town came to a halt and by the time it was dark the road into the town was clear as well. The last party to claim its shelter for the night came from the direction of Orense. MacKay gave a snort of amusement as he scanned the troop of chasseurs with his glass. Riding in their midst was his old friend Commandant Rabuteau, standing out like a peacock in his harem of dull coloured hens. Perhaps at last he was returning to his master King Joseph Bonaparte with Marshal Soult’s answer to his demands.

  He glanced across at his new corporal. “Did ye nae recognise yon rainbow popinjay, Ryan lad?” The Ulsterman’s thin face twisted into an expression of disgust. “That I did, Sor. We should niver have let him go. Perhaps it’s feyut that’s put him back within oor reach agin. D’ye reckon we’d be welcome an’ we went visiting?”

  MacKay mentally translated. Ryan’s thick Belfast dialect was never easy to follow. He always seemed to swallow half of his words before he spoke them. But then, it wasn’t easy to understand the lowland Scots around Glasgow either and Ryan’s forebears had probably settled in Ulster from there a couple of hundred years ago.

  “Now that you mention it, I thought we might gae doon tonight and disturb their sleep, though I doubt we’d meet Rabuteau again among sae many Frogs. It would nevertheless reinforce the opinion I’m sure he already has, that the French in Spain have worn oot any welcome they might once hae enjoyed. We’ll keep the party small, I think. Just you and Riordan, with one o’ the new men and one o’ the Spaniards. Find oot, which o’ them is good in the dark and get Juanita tae, ask the same question o’ the partisans. She can come tae hold the horses, when we get close enough tae leave them.”

  Ryan hurried away to arrange things. He was happy that Riordan would be coming. A fellow Ulsterman was welcome even if he was Catholic like O’Malley. Ryan’s family was staunch Presbyterians and had fought for King Billy at the Boyne. He himself had never bothered to understand what all the fuss was about and rigidly avoided all religious discussions. As far as he was concerned, Riordan was a good Hornet and a good man to have at your back when looking for trouble. If he had any strong views as a Catholic, he certainly never talked about them. That also was fine with Ryan.

  He chose Mason, the tallest and quietest of the new Hornets, to come with them. He had been weighing him up since he arrived and thought him competent and placid enough to complement the more quick-tempered and mercurial Riordan.

  Juanita chose Antonio Gomez from the partisans. She didn’t know a lot about them, but Gomez had been a soldier and could speak about as much English as MacKay could speak Spanish. She thought, rightly, that the more they could understand one another the better. She herself was learning as many English words as she could, the better to understand and talk to the tall Scot. She was developing a quiet form of hero worship for MacKay, in spite of the fact that he was a man. Since the mass rape, she loathed all men, particularly French men, but MacKay seemed so reserved with women and so much removed from the disgusting creatures that had used her, that she could almost think of him as a different species.

  Not that his reserved nature extended to anyone under his command. She was quick to remark on how promptly all his orders were obeyed. There was certainly no trace of reserve when he was training the girls as Hornets and they were even quicker than the men to jump to carry out his wishes, even when they didn’t quite understand his terrible Spanish


  The six riders left at sundown, leaving the new Hornets to instruct the partisans in their method of selecting and setting up a defensive camp for the night. It was not difficult to ride to within half a mile of the town before MacKay found a good place to leave Juanita with the horses. The five men went forward on foot to probe the defences.

  Long ago, when the Muslim Moors had reached this far into Iberia, the Spanish had built a small castle and put a wall around the town. Both were still there, but when gunpowder and bombards became a normal part of warfare and the Moors had all been expelled, the castle was still maintained by the local lords and the wall was left to decay. Where it was inconvenient, holes had been knocked through and where it was opportune, houses had been built, only needing three other walls to make stout and acceptable dwellings. The masonry taken from the gaps had been cheap and readily available to make the houses even stouter.

  The town had prospered and grown. More dwellings now clustered together around the outside of the walls than had originally huddled within and the river that had once lapped against the defences now trickled along with houses built on both banks.

  MacKay’s glass had shown him that the main road crossed the river over an ancient bridge and continued up the valley on the other bank. This bridge was outside the walls but dominated by the rocky mound on which the castle had been sited. The road from the castle led directly down to the town plaza, with the church along one whole side and both of them taking up fully one third of all the space within the original walls.

  The men walked in single file with Ryan leading, Riordan in the middle and MacKay at the rear. Mason followed Ryan and Gomez was in front of MacKay, who could evaluate their fieldcraft while having them neatly sandwiched between experienced men. Gomez had the most to learn and had been put where he could watch what the others did and do his best to emulate their skills. He had also been thoroughly inspected before they moved off and anything that could rattle, jingle or gleam on himself or his horse had been ruthlessly silenced, removed or covered. With the rest of his friends looking on, it had been a vital and object lesson to them all.

  From the French point of view, the town was ideal as a staging post for supplies coming from the east. Possession of the castle ensured that they could garrison it adequately with a company of troops at the most. At night they had two gates on the main road and four or five openings in the old walls needing two or three sentries only. They had never had any trouble with the partisans; or so El Martillo had claimed; and only a few isolated and largely ineffectual attacks on convoys along the road.

  The plaza was big enough for parking the wagons and providing a paddock for the horses, while the buildings around the plaza were ideal billets for wagon drivers, escorts and travellers in general.

  They were approaching one of the gaps knocked in the wall and Ryan had signalled back for them to stop. MacKay quietly drifted forward until he found him pressed up against the corner of a house looking at a gap wide enough to take two horses side by side, but no more.

  Ryan raised a hand in acknowledgement of MacKay’s presence and leaned closer to whisper. “There’s a couple of Frog sentries on the other side of the wall, through yonder gap. I could tayuk them wi’ no difficulty, but not wi’out them mayukin’ enough noise to wayuk the whole town.”

  MacKay took a look himself. There was very little light but he could make out two dim figures through the gap and he caught a whiff of tobacco smoke. It seemed unlikely that the French sanctioned pipe smoking while on sentry duty; an indication perhaps, that discipline was quite relaxed in this outpost with no prospects of immediate action.

  Ryan was right nevertheless. There was no chance of getting through the gap in the thick wall and putting them out of action without rousing the town. He told him to settle down and observe until they changed the sentries and he took the rest of the men back to explore the collection of buildings outside the walls.

  These were mostly small cottages used by artisans, small traders and peasants who had drifted into the town to find any sort of work away from the grinding labour in the fields. All were closed and shuttered tightly in spite of the heat of an early summer night.

  Soon they came out onto another of the tracks leading out of town and found an open smithy with the embers still warm and a very frightened boy apprentice who had been sleeping on a rough pallet laid on a wide shelf built onto the back wall. Under urging from Gomez he went to rouse a resentful and protesting blacksmith, loudly swearing he would shoe no more French horses until the morning, even if it were King Joseph himself.

  He found no horses, but he did find MacKay and Gomez, heavily armed and asking why he was shoeing French horses at all. His profanity was quieter but no less forceful. “Madre de Dios! Don’t be stupid! What other horses are there to shoe? Even our French-loving afrancesados have had to hand over their beasts to the French. Would you rather I let my family starve and have the French take over my forge? Idiot!”

  It was only when MacKay asked a question that his belligerence moderated. “You are not Spanish. Who are you?” Even here, they had heard stories about the Avispónes Morenos and he was immediately co-operative. Even more so when Gomez admitted that he belonged to the partisans of El Martillo, a fellow blacksmith.

  They talked for most of the night. Quite early on, MacKay abandoned any plans to enter the town at this time. To be sure, there were many desirable targets and wagon loads of food to deny to the French, but there was no big target like an ammunition train that he could destroy quickly and violently with just a few men. He would reassess his ambitions and retire to the hills while awaiting reinforcements.

  CHAPTER 12

  While avoiding the larger towns and cities, Welbeloved found that his road to the south was largely free of French forces, once he had left the mountains of Galicia behind him.

  The main cities and strongpoints would have garrisons of course and any supply routes, such as the ones feeding Soult and Ney, had to be protected. It all depended on where the French armies were concentrated. He knew that Soult and Ney had up to thirty thousand men in Galicia, an occupation that had existed since Sir John Moore had fought Soult to a standstill before evacuating his battered army from La Coruña.

  All the information that he was picking up from local Spaniards and guerrilla bands as he travelled, seemed to indicate that the next nearest concentration of forces was in the area within one hundred and fifty miles of Madrid, where King Joseph had two or three marshals and their armies close at hand to protect him.

  Once they had turned south from the mountains of the Culebra on the northeast corner of the Portuguese frontier, they had nearly a hundred miles across the river plains of the Duero and the Tormes before the next mountains of the Peña de Francia, southwest of Salamanca. In reality, this was more of a plateau than a plain, very rarely falling to less than half the height of Snowdon, but the travelling was easier than in the mountains.

  The walled frontier town of Ciudad Rodrigo was approached with caution. There was a fair amount of traffic passing through, much of it military. If Wellesley had brought his army out of Portugal, this was one of the two possible routes he would be obliged to use to reach the heart of Spain. Many red-coated soldiers could be seen but Welbeloved waited until Vere has studied them and made a positive identification before letting him lead the Hornets into the town. He had heard the story of how Soult was said to have mistaken the British at Oporto for Swiss Grenadiers who also wore red jackets.

  There were some curious glances in their direction from British troops in the town, but none of them were confident enough to challenge the dull coloured but dangerous appearing riders. None, that is, until the town provost, a red-faced and very officious major, barred the way and accosted Captain Vere in a very loud voice, demanding that he dismount and account for himself and the small advance party he was leading.

  Vere had been soldiering long enough to know that, detested though the provosts were, they had an unpleasant but essentia
l job to do in an army where discipline was largely maintained by frequent use of the lash and where grave misdemeanours were often punished by summary hangings.

  He looked down at the choleric face below him and touched his cap politely before swinging his leg over and dismounting. At the same time, in accordance with the Hornet’s standard practice, he withdrew his Ferguson from its holster and cradled it in his left arm.

  This seemed to disconcert the major who opened his mouth in amazement and stepped back a pace. “Is something troubling you, Major?” Vere’s smile was innocence itself. “You appear to be unwell, Sir. Should I get two of my men to attend you?”

  The provost was indeed spluttering and had turned an unhealthy shade of purple. “Y-you presume to draw your musket on me, Sir? I can have you hanged for that.”

  Vere’s smile was fading rapidly. “You are becoming tedious, Major. Neither I, nor any one of my men would dream of drawing our weapons on you, as you so quaintly put it. We only do that to the enemies of King George before we kill them.” He paused thoughtfully, introducing a yearning tone into his voice. “You wouldn’t, by any chance, be an enemy of our Sovereign King?”

  The Major refused to be cowed, although his face did pale into a shade of puce, before a new, powerful voice announced that the rest of the Hornets had caught up. “Do stop teasing the poor fellow, George. I’m sure that if yew speak to him in a civilised manner he will tell yew where we can sleep for the night and, even better, where we can find Sir Arthur.”

  Vere was sure that Welbeloved had dropped Sir Arthur Wellesley’s name entirely intentionally, as there was no point antagonising the provost if he could be persuaded to co-operate.

  He was, indeed, fractionally less belligerent, although his language was still aggressive. “Who the devil are you, Sir, and what is this crowd of scalawags doing here?”