A Mild Case of Indigestion

by Geoffrey Watson

  While in the riverbed, waiting to deal with the gunners, MacKay had been observing the dragoons. They also were quite complacent about their safety and the only picquets that he could see were four men, more interested in the welfare of their squadron’s mounts than the security of their camp.

  It was this that helped him make his decision. He had envisaged leaving the Spaniards in charge of the artillery camp, but he could now see that it was possible to take El Martillo and his picked band as far as the small olive grove behind the farm, with little chance of detection. After all, this punitive operation was supposed to be in their name.

  He left Thuner in charge of the rest of the Spaniards, with detailed instructions about the cannon and ammunition. He had intended to take him with him in case he needed a translator, but to his well concealed annoyance, he discovered that Juanita had disobeyed his orders for the girls to stay behind and had quietly added herself onto the end of El Martillo’s select band.

  He would have been furious, but for the realisation that she was at least equal to any of the guerrilleros and her french was considerably clearer than Thuner’s. He signalled curtly for her to join the raiding party and they spent the next half-hour crawling carefully around the perimeter of the camp until the whole party was safely hidden in the olive grove and the rows of vines within thirty yards of the farm house and slightly closer to a substantial barn which would normally be used for sheltering animals or storing crops.

  Now it had been taken over by sergeants and corporals, while the officers used the farmhouse itself. Any animals or crops that it had sheltered had probably already disappeared into the kettles and cooking pots by the embers of the various campfires. Whether the farmer and his family were still at home or had been evicted, could not be determined.

  MacKay did a quick calculation. If the dragoons had two squadrons of two troops with thirty men in a troop, they would need two senior sergeants and four sergeants, with a corporal for every ten men. The barn could hold up to twenty men if none of the corporals was bivouacking outside with their comrades.

  By now it was after midnight and most of the dragoons were in their blankets. It seemed reasonable to assume that it would be the same in the barn and it would be foolish not to neutralise the sergeants and corporals before tackling the officers in the house.

  He gave the order and half the party drifted towards the entrance to the barn; a small door let into the wagon doors. Two of the Hornets moved towards the farm to deal with the guards at the front and back doors.

  All movements now became deliberate but casual. It was essential that anyone observing from the camp should see only normal actions, nothing sinister or furtive to arouse suspicion. As soon as six of them had reached the door, MacKay pushed it open and stepped through with a dozen men following through as quickly and quietly as they could manage.

  Inside, there was a single large area with small partitions for animals on either side of the far door. A lone lantern illuminated a dozen sleeping forms and four more still on their feet, but ready to follow their companions into the comfort of their blankets. None of them was carrying a weapon and MacKay’s peremptory “Silence Messieurs! Restez Calme!” achieved complete control, backed up as it was by an array of aimed muskets and Fergusons. The French weren’t to know that none of the weapons was primed. Not that it mattered. Those not in their blankets had been caught literally with their breeches down.

  Within ten minutes all the dragoons were on their faces, bound and gagged. Bound with their own leather harness and reins and gagged with their own torn up shirts.

  Leaving a couple of the Spaniards to guard them, MacKay lost no time in leading his men to the farm. The sentries had been removed and replaced by two Hornets and the single officer they found when they burst through the door was too amazed to do other than submit immediately, his mouth still hanging wide open.

  Anxious as always, that no one should have any chance to raise the alarm, they spread out quickly through the rest of the house and found six dragoon officers and three young Spanish girls. The three lieutenants were asleep in one room. A major and a girl were in the main bedroom and two captains and two more girls were all together in the third room.

  A plentiful supply of the farmer’s best candles left no one in doubt about what was happening. All the girls were quite naked and the men; for some reason still wearing their shirts; were actively engaged in getting the most from the temporary bordello they had created.

  MacKay was the first into the major’s room. The sight of the dead eyed, unresisting girl submitting to what was certainly the latest of many lengthy and repeated assaults, was too much for his normally well-controlled temper. The butt of his Ferguson smashed the man unconscious as well as removing many of his teeth and possibly breaking his jaw.

  This was inconvenient, because when they had all been dragged downstairs, it was one of the captains who had to answer all the questions and Juanita, who should have been translating, was upstairs trying to comfort the girls and get them ready to leave as soon as possible.

  It was fortunate that MacKay had a very retentive memory. He had been fighting the French for twelve years, the last nine with Welbeloved and he had picked up many useful words and phrases. The cowed prisoners certainly understood when he asked them where Colonel Roussillon was. He had been summoned to see Marshal Soult and had escaped justice by no more than two hours by leaving at sunset. But not before ordering the farmer and his wife and son to be shot and raping the youngest and prettiest of the girls as an encouragement to his officers to enjoy all three before he returned.

  The bland assumption that any reasonable man would agree that French soldiers had every right, as superior and invincible conquerors, to take what they wanted and do whatever they wished with subject peoples, was what hardened MacKay’s resolve.

  He had been uneasy about assuming the role of executioner, but now that he had the evidence under his nose, he gave abrupt orders and the men were pinioned and gagged. The short journey to the barn was accomplished without exciting any interest from the camp.

  There was too little rope available to hang them all, as they would have done aboard ship. Instead, they hung seven nooses from the beams of the low barn and forced the men to climb on a farm wagon, which was pulled away when the nooses were fixed around their necks.

  To MacKay, the whole scene seemed more of an anticlimax to all the effort they had put in. he only had to look at the faces of the sergeants and corporals though, to realise that for the 9th Dragoons, everything had changed from this moment. These men knew that it was only the lack of proof of previous atrocities that had saved their own necks from the rope. Possibly it could make them into worse predators, but MacKay doubted that. It might even change Roussillon when he returned and found out what had happened and saw the posters condemning him to death, but MacKay doubted that as well.

  El Martillo would gain enormous credit with the local junta and if Soult was leaving the region, the French would not be able to return without an army of twenty thousand or more. This really was the time to rejoin Welbeloved and take the seeds of rebellion to other fertile areas of Spain.

  Juanita had achieved wonders with the three rape victims, two Cortez sisters of sixteen and seventeen and the widow of their brother, six months married and still only nineteen. They were more traumatised by the brutal murders of their parents and loved ones than their own ordeal. Farmer’s daughters had a very down-to-earth attitude to the sexual act, which they had witnessed one way or another with their animals from childhood. Juanita’s efforts with a great deal of water to cleanse them of any unwanted results of their mistreatment had been very thorough. They were now ready and dressed in salvaged green uniforms from their assailants, while their bodies were still twitching and jerking their life away in the barn.

  The return to the artillery camp took a fraction of the time needed for the outward journey. The dragoons were not looking for people passing by and it would probably be the se
ntries themselves who first entered the barn to find out why they had not been relieved.

  Thuner had loaded as much gunpowder as he could pack onto the gunners’ horses. The rest had been packed tightly into one of the caissons and a long time fuse in the form of a slow match securely attached. The Spaniards had manhandled the six cannon until they were pointing at the dragoon camp. They were each loaded with a double charge of powder and two canisters of grapeshot.

  Forty minutes worth of slow match was lashed across the priming in the touchhole of each gun. As they left, El Martillo was given the honour of lighting all seven fuses.

  They went back the way they had come and were climbing away from any contact with the French army, when the first of the guns fired, followed by the other five over the next two minutes. There was no telling how many dragoons they hit, but the idea was to get the troopers sufficiently roused to investigate such strange behaviour and hopefully be present when the caisson exploded with an enormous roar, some twenty minutes later.

  Even without Welbeloved present, the Goddess of Fortune seemed to be smiling on the Hornets. The whole venture had been an almost complete success, without a single casualty among the Hornets or the guerrilleros.

  El Martillo was established as the unchallenged leader of the Spanish patriots in Galicia and there was a secure supply route established through Ribadeo, capable of servicing the resistance throughout the entire region of northwest Spain.

  Nothing now prevented the Hornets from following Welbeloved south. All the casualties from the almost successful French assault on the camp were healing well. Ramsbottom seemed completely fit again and the two men with the shoulder wounds could do everything except use their Fergusons with quite their old expertise. Their damaged shoulders and arms were the ones they used to load and prime their weapons and the butts nestled into their damaged shoulders when fired. It would be another three months of constant practice before they were back to the accepted standard again.

  In the meantime they were charged with maintaining communications with the Daphne at Ribadeo and acting as trainers and advisers to the guerrilleros.

  Roussillon may have escaped their vengeance, but he had left his written orders with his major. Juanita had translated these and they revealed more about Soult’s intentions than anything they had seen previously. Certainly, he was obeying Joseph’s instructions to evacuate Galicia, but these were not the orders of a commander anxious to hasten to fight Wellesley once more. They were instructions to his army to hasten slowly; to move decorously out of the mountains into the plains of León on the way to join up with other French forces protecting the capital and King Joseph. All this needed to be put in the hands of General Wellesley as quickly as possible.

  The only thing remaining to be decided was what to do about the six girls, now increased to nine with the addition of the Cortez sisters and sister-in-law. The three new recruits had no experience at all, but Juanita was adamant that they should not be left with the guerrilla band and she had made an undertaking to train them up to the standard of the other girls as quickly as possible.

  MacKay had to concede that, except for sheer strength, they were almost equal to the Hornets and he finally agreed, on condition that she formally accepted responsibility for all of them; placed them under his command with herself assuming the honorary rank of sergeant. Her reward for this was to be given the spare Ferguson as a further symbol of her authority.

  He was very careful to stress to himself that this favourable treatment was designed to solve the problem of discipline over the girls and because she thoroughly deserved the honour. In no way could it be due to the way he felt about her or her bold offer of two days ago. There was no way he could even consider agreeing to such a scandalous arrangement. It was quite out of the question. Wasn’t it?

  CHAPTER 17

  Sir Arthur Wellesley may have been confident that the battle would begin on the following morning, but that had been before a couple of thousand of the Spanish peasant soldiers had fled from their lines in panic.

  Welbeloved watched as the gap that was left was filled, with laudable promptness, by Cuesta from the ample reserves he was holding close to the town. His glass also showed the dark blue mass of French soldiers swarming around the Cascajal hill and the plain to the south of it. He made a quick estimate of the numbers facing him and hadn’t counted half of them when he got to twenty thousand. Already, this was the size of the complete British force waiting on the two mile stretch to the west of the Portina Stream, between the redoubt and the Segurilla mountains in the north.

  If Napoleon had been present, he felt confident that there would have been an immediate assault on the Spanish lines. The Emperor was noted for his ability to take advantage of the slightest mistake made by his opponents. Very obviously though, in this case, Napoleon was not present. It was only his brother, now King of Spain, together with Marshals Victor and Jourdain. Though undoubtedly amused at the confusion in the enemy ranks, even the impetuous Victor had probably looked at the sun and decided that there was only an hour before dark. Too little time to achieve anything significant.

  The whole British army was on short rations. The Spanish had promised much but had delivered little or nothing. Quite cynically, they knew that there was insufficient to feed their own army, since the French had swept the country bare. The promises were made, not to be kept, but to keep the British in the field for as long as possible.

  The Hornets had brought their own supplies, but with no chance of any fire, it was a cold supper as the daylight faded and they settled down to wait for dawn and whatever orders General Wellesley might decide to send them.

  It was a very brief rest. Nobody got any sleep at all. At ten o’clock the French attacked the Medellin hill from the east across the Portina stream.

  The first the Hornets knew about it was the noise of drums beating out the pace and yells of ‘Vive l’Empereur’ as an assault was made on the eastern slope of the Medellin. An assault moreover that sounded as if it might be succeeding. There was hardly any musket fire as the targets couldn’t be seen in the dark, but the drums and the yells from the French were sounding from above them as the enemy climbed towards the summit.

  The Hornets stood-to and faced in the direction of the disturbance, but all the action seemed to be taking place to the north on the upper slopes. That was where hand to hand fighting was now taking place with screams and yells mixed with a scattering of shots, the clash of steel, the insistent beat of the French drums, and the inevitable continuous battle cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur’. These reached a crescendo and then started to change direction and die away when someone organised a counter attack. The sound of fighting moved away down the hill once more.

  An hour after it had started, the attackers had been repulsed or had withdrawn and the Hornets relaxed once more. Welbeloved had to admit to being frustrated and feeling quite helpless. He had trained his men to attack in the dark and they were very good at it, but only when they knew where their enemy was and what sort of target they were attacking.

  For any two armies, night fighting was a risky and chaotic business. Once battle was joined, soldiers on neither side could tell whether they were killing the enemy or their own comrades.

  The only way the French could justify this attack was to try and panic their foes into running away. If they had attacked the Spanish line where it had only just been reinforced it could well have been a battle-winning move.

  As it was, once they had climbed deeper into the British lines and the fighting had become a chaotic mêlée, nobody could tell friend from foe and the only sensible option had been for the French to retire, which is what apparently they had done. Welbeloved was just grateful that the Hornets hadn’t found themselves in the middle of two groups of frightened men, anxious to kill anything that moved in the dark.

  The one thing that the enemy had achieved was thoroughly to unsettle their opponents. It is doubtful whether many in the British lines got much rest
for the remainder of the night. Sporadic musket fire went on until dawn with nervous sentries firing at shadows.

  Dawn came early. The sky behind the French became brighter and brighter and at about five o’clock the guns across on the Cascajal hill opened fire, heralding an attack by three enormous columns over the Portina stream and up the Medellin hill, following the track of the assault on the previous night.

  The Condesa had already gone to join Wellesley and Dolores was left to keep watch over the hobbled horses. Welbeloved’s men were all lying down in cover, watching the first column of more than fifteen hundred men as it advanced in parade order, drums beating out the pace until they were close enough to quicken the tempo into a charge.

  The column looked like nothing so much as a big, fat caterpillar as it crossed the stream and the road to Segurilla and started to climb towards the ridge on the apparently deserted hill. Perhaps the way the legs were moving; white clad under blue tunics; was more like an enormous blue millipede, but the pace hardly slackened as they set off up the hill.

  Welbeloved had seen smaller French columns in action many times in the past. He could appreciate how such formations had been able to punch holes in large assemblies of men drawn up to receive them.

  This first column was advancing with about twenty-five men in the first file, closely followed by another sixty files. It was a huge mass of men that looked quite unstoppable. Against the conscript soldiers of most European armies it very probably was.

  The basic problem with this favourite tactic of the French was that only the men in the first file could use their muskets and then only when they were moving. Unless the head of the column deployed outwards once it was within range, very few muskets could be brought to bear. By then their opponents would be firing at them and the moving column couldn’t stop for just the front file to take aim.

  These French soldiers were also climbing a seemingly deserted hill against a supposed enemy that they couldn’t see. It must have been disconcerting for them when they had mentally wound themselves up for a fight and struggled up a long, steep hill, to find that there was no one to fight.