Four Days in June

by Iain Gale

  The officers stopped together in the centre of the garden, beside an elaborate ornamental fountain. Macdonell saw that the south and east sides were enclosed by a 6-foot-high brick wall and the rear by a stout hedge. Instinct and necessity brought him back to the present.

  ‘Fire steps all along this wall, gentlemen, if you please. And be sure to knock loopholes in it. Every five paces will do nicely. At a height of three feet. And knock down those buttresses. You can use the stones elsewhere. Do not stop until the job is done. I shall return presently.’

  At the far side of the garden they found the orchard, filled with the scarlet-clad troops of Saltoun’s two light companies and what looked like a detachment of Dutch pioneers, clad in green and black. Huge men with white aprons slung over their tunics. Of the young colonel himself there was no sign. As they watched one of the soldiers reached up to pluck a cherry from a laden bough.

  ‘That man.’ Macdonell barked out the command. The cherry-picker dropped his hand. ‘I don’t know who you are, sir, but I would ask you to remember that this is not our property. We are accountable to its owners. His Grace is most specific on the matter and I will personally have any man shot whom is seen taking so much as a single cherry or apple from any of these trees. Is that clear?’

  The men nodded. A sergeant shouted a command and whispered an oath and they returned to their duties. The cherries would wait.

  By the time that he returned to the courtyard, Macdonell’s boots were heavy with mud. He tried in vain to shake it off, stamping them on the cobbles behind the little chapel, and then walked through the driving rain round to the side entrance of the main house. He found Smith leaving the great barn, where with his customary ingenuity he had managed to find a stall and some straw for the colonel’s horse. Macdonell gestured towards the château.

  ‘I intend to see if I can find myself a dry billet in the house. Inform anyone who wants me, Smith, that I shall be in the château. For precisely …’ he took out his pocket watch, ‘one hour.’

  Stamping his boots again, Macdonell pushed at the door to the mansion and slowly it swung open. There was no light save that of the pale moon shining through the ground-floor windows. He was quickly aware, though, of the overpowering smell of damp and stale air. The smell of abandonment which carried with it memories of other times. A lingering odour of wax polish, candle-grease and long-dead cooking fires.

  Feeling his way in the dark, Macdonell found a candle in a brass nightstick on a shelf. He struck the tinder box that lay alongside it and, as the interior sprang up before him in flickering shadow, was for a moment taken back to another darkened house. To Spain three years before and to another pair of civilians who had been even less fortunate than the gardener and his little daughter. To the stripped, mutilated and grotesquely animated bodies of a butchered Spanish peasant and his wife which so often haunted his waking thoughts as they did his dreams and which were here with him again as he walked through the half-light across the marble entrance hall of the empty château.

  He tried in vain to suppress the image. Damn the war. Damn Bonaparte and all the French.

  After a few paces he reached the foot of a sweeping stone staircase and began to climb. Lifting the candle higher he noticed on the walls the imprint of paler areas where paintings had clearly been removed by the chevalier or his tenant for safekeeping. Judging from the number of blanks it had been quite a collection. Close to the top of the staircase a particularly large space marked the absence of a full-length portrait. At last his mind moved to other things. To another country house, where his own portrait occupied precisely the same position. He had a particular fondness for the painting. Recalled the hours of standing in the artist’s studio. A freezing Edinburgh winter and Mr Raeburn’s keen-eyed insistence on his holding the exact same pose. One hand on his belt, the other on his sword, eyes staring just so. How cleverly, though, the man had captured the youthful confidence of the hero of Maida. His younger self. And how well more recently the same artist, now so highly acclaimed, had caught his brother’s likeness in that painting which now hung alongside his own. Macdonell thought too, though, how the difference between the two images reflected the characters of their subjects.

  His brother. Alasdair Macdonell of Glengarry. That fearless fencible who had never fought a battle. Alasdair the great champion of Gaelic who in truth would rather have sheep on his land than those who spoke the native tongue and who even now was probably displacing his tenantry. He did not think that he should have done it that way. But it was not his concern. The estate was Alasdair’s by right and he must manage it as he best thought fit. It was not his business. And wasn’t his brother the very model of a great chief? The template surely for Waverley’s Fergus McIvor? How he delighted his Highland neighbours with the tales of his brother’s battles. What would he make, Macdonell wondered, of the encounter they were to face tomorrow? Whatever the outcome and whatever fate held in store, should he live or die, the battle, whatever it would be known as, would soon be the subject of another of Alasdair’s anecdotes. Perhaps he would even command his piper to write a ballad. Or, as most assuredly he would were the colonel to meet his end here, a lament.

  Reaching the first floor, Macdonell pushed open another door and walked across the dimly lit floor of what appeared to be a formal salon to a window where a simple wooden table was the sole remaining piece of furniture. He looked out into the night. The rain was heavier now, dripping from the roof and forming puddles on the cobbles below where the drenched redcoats splashed about by torchlight, their arms filled with wooden planks and pieces of masonry, busily strengthening the position which tomorrow would be their only protection against the might of Napoleon’s army.

  A sudden clatter on the stairs and a murmur of voices made him spin round. ‘James? Are you there? James?’

  Candlelight filled the stairwell. A square-set figure appeared in the doorway. A familiar shock of curly black hair and, as the light grew in intensity, the coal-black eyes and that disarming, leonine smile.

  ‘Dan?’

  ‘James. You are here. Now we are complete.’

  Behind the red-coated bulk of Colonel Daniel Mackinnon three other officers now came into view.

  ‘Gentlemen. James, you know Ed Sumner, of course. And allow me to present Frederick Griffiths, newly arrived from England. And this,’ with a theatrical gesture, ‘is our doughty Lieutenant Drought of the glorious 13th. I found him outside, in the rain. Looking quite bedraggled.’

  ‘I already have the pleasure, sir.’

  ‘Indeed, Lieutenant.’

  Macdonell nodded at the other two officers. Sumner he had also met before. One of Mackinnon’s protégés. Griffiths was new to him. White-faced and every inch the terrified ensign. Both clearly worshipped Mackinnon and, just as obviously, had donated their precious personal provisions to what he had probably promised would be a convivial party.

  From behind the party two Coldstream privates appeared, hats off, each one carrying a small hamper.

  Mackinnon waved them in. ‘Tonight we dine. For, gentlemen, it may be our last … Perkins.’

  He summoned his soldier-servant, a weasel-faced individual who produced from his haversack a once-white tablecloth and with all the flourish of a footman at White’s (which in fact in his younger days he had been), spread it across the table.

  From one of the hampers the man now brought forth with similar aplomb two silver candlesticks and candles, four napkins and silver knives and forks and spoons and a dozen short glasses. The other yielded a small piece of ham, a single Bologna sausage, a bottle of claret and one of brandy, what looked like a barrel of army-issue gin and a hunk of strong-smelling yellow cheese. It was a worthy last supper.

  This, thought Macdonell (together, of course, with their exceptional fighting ability), was what marked the Guards apart from the common soldiery. What made them his family.

  Mackinnon had been part of that family for the past eleven years. It had been he who had sc
hooled Macdonell on his transfer from the 78th in the brigade’s very particular ways and traditions. They were tied, too, by the bond of combat. Like Macdonell, Dan had seen action from Copenhagen to Salamanca. He was nothing less than a legend, in the regiment and throughout the army. A Highlander, like Macdonell, he was a Skye man and the son of the clan chief. But, for all their closeness, there the similarities ended. For while Macdonnell certainly enjoyed a joke as much as any man, Dan was a prankster without compare.

  Had it not been Mackinnon who once, back in Portugal, had masqueraded as the Duke of York, Commander-in-Chief of the army, and who on another occasion had entered a Spanish convent dressed as a nun, only to find himself inspected by Wellington? He was an expert juggler – with apples, oranges, or the regimental silver. Famously, on mess nights it was his custom to take wagers from fresh-faced new arrivals that he could not climb around the room like a monkey. He never lost. Mackinnon boasted too, not without foundation, of his friendship with Byron. He had brought the great poet and Lothario to the mess when the battalion had been encamped in Lisbon and ever since had prided himself on his ability to recite lengthy passages of Byron’s verse. His Childe Harold in particular was not a performance which suited all tastes. But no one was going to argue with Dan Mackinnon. And so Byron thundered out across mess, billet and camp with improbable regularity.

  By God, thought Macdonell, as he watched Dan with scrupulous attention to detail supervising the laying of their meagre table, but this was soldiering. Mackinnon was the sort of man who could transform even the most godforsaken of billets into a life-enhancing evocation of the very soul of St James’s. With his arrival they were no longer sitting in the damp and draughty salon of some deserted Belgian farm, but were almost transported back to the great rooms of White’s, Almack’s or Brooks’.

  Macdonell smiled at his friend. Nodded his approval. He was confident that the defensive preparations were in hand. Wellington, he was certain, would send more pioneers, and his own men were well advanced in their work. He would not begrudge himself a half-hour for a last supper with dear Dan.

  Mackinnon sank back against the rail of his chair and, balancing a glass of claret between thumb and forefinger, gazed into its red depths before speaking.

  ‘Well, James? What price this? Here we are. It would seem that once again it has fallen to us to save the day. The Peer in his all-seeing wisdom has placed us in the weakest part of his line and has given us the chance to show the rest of the army, yet again, how His Majesty’s Foot Guards make war.’ He turned to the others. ‘And I tell you, gentlemen, we shall have our work cut out for us. Where, you may ask, is the army of Spain? Eh? Gone, I tell you. Disbanded. Sailed away for “England, home and beauty”. The Peer knows it. And we know it. Eh, James? What say you? D’you think we could win Salamanca again with this army? Vitoria? Bussaco? No. I think not. Belgians. Militia. Conscripted farmers. Men who only a year ago were fighting for Boney. And what of our own boys? Green as the corn and ripe for the cutter, I say.’ He glanced at Griffiths, who had gone even paler. ‘Oh, I do beg pardon, my dear chap. Present company excepted, naturally.’

  He continued. ‘The army’s gone, I tell you, James, and in its place we’ve no more than ploughboys and thieves commanded by commissaries and quill-pushers. Why, only this morning I rode past an entire company of our own infantry drawn up at the roadside taking inventory of their equipment. En route of march, I tell you. I worry, gentlemen, for our fate tomorrow. Oh, there are men here, certainly. Men who can really fight. Certain troops. Certain regiments. Certain squadrons. The Inniskillings. The Highlanders. Others too. The dragoons, my dear Drought. But as for the rest. All we can do, James m’dear, is to fight our corner and hope that Boney throws his full might directly at us alone. At the Guards. For if he does not, then I am very much afraid, gentlemen, of … of I know not what. So, it lies with us alone, gentlemen. And, thank God, we are no ledger clerks. We are precisely what the army calls us, “gentlemen’s sons”. We fight in defence of freedom … ’

  As if on cue, immediately below their window a soldier, perhaps a fellow Scot, began to play a mournful, slow air on a fife. A lament: the ‘Flowers of the Forest’.

  Mackinnon, raising his voice slightly, rose to his feet. ‘We fight for the freedom of our countrymen, gentlemen. And indeed, no less for our own freedom to live as gentlemen. We owe it to our country to preserve our birthright. For without us, surely, there would be no country. We, gentlemen, are England, and England us. And of course,’ he added, with a smile to Macdonell, ‘do not let us forget that we are also the north part of Britain.’

  He looked at Drought.

  ‘And God bless Ireland, Mr Drought, eh?’

  He continued: ‘But gentlemen, think on’t. We are Britons. It is not only our privilege to defend Britannia’s honour. But also our duty. It is the very mark of our rank.’

  At length he paused. Griffiths, Sumner and Drought, hoping they might now begin to eat, raised a half-hearted ‘Hear hear’ and fell into an awkward silence. Mackinnon smiled and his eyes darted towards the window as outside the tempo of the music changed and the whistle-player struck up a jig. Macdonell knew what would follow. Sure enough, Mackinnon drained his glass, placed one foot on a chair and broke into rhyme:

  ‘A lady of rank of Nankeen, Who was wife to a great Mandarine, Could not walk at all, Her feet were so small, So she rode on her arse, like a queen.’

  It had the desired effect. Roaring with laughter, Drought, followed by the two junior Guards officers, thumped the table and begged him for another. Here then, thought Macdonell, was their promised evening. Here a last chance to lose troublesome thoughts of what tomorrow might bring. A chance to lose the ghost of that Spanish charnel-house. To lose, too, thoughts of home. A chance to lose yourself in friends and comrades. To become now, on the eve of battle, what you knew without doubt you must be tomorrow. Indivisible. Thinking and fighting as one. A foe without equal.

  Macdonell stood at the window staring at the rain, half listening to the well-rehearsed Peninsular anecdote with which Mackinnon was now entertaining the small company. He flipped open his watch. It was half an hour after nine. Closing the lid, he replaced it in his pocket and turned back to the room. In the course of the last hour the party had increased as, hearing of Mackinnon’s expedition to the château, five further Guards officers including George Bowles, attired at last in his own grey overall trousers, had braved the weather to wander down from the ridge. A dense fug of smoke from the small cigarillos which marked out the Peninsular officers from more recent recruits pervaded the room, whose walls were now hung with coats and cloaks, draped on hooks which had once held fine paintings and gilded sconces. In one corner stood two umbrellas.

  Macdonell knew that it was now well past his time to leave these convivial surroundings. Time to return to reality. As he moved towards the door, other, junior officers began to follow his example. Two took their coats and slipped by him to the stairs. He turned to the room.

  ‘Gentlemen, stay, I beg you. Finish your supper. I must make a tour of inspection. But stay. I’ll say adieu to you, Dan. Until we meet tomorrow.’

  Macdonell left and descended the staircase, passing on the way two slumbering soldiers who snapped to attention at the door. They had placed candles at intervals on the steps to light the way and he was able now to gather a clear impression of the house. It had evidently been until quite recently a place of moderate splendour. Coloured and carved panelling clad the walls, and where a chandelier would have hung only the gilded hook remained in the ceiling.

  He collected his still sodden blue boat-cloak from the nail on which he had hung it earlier and walked out into the night. The rain was as heavy as ever. Around the yard groups of soldiers sat huddled over small fires, while others took their turn at the walls, hammering the defences into place. A huge bearded redcoat passed directly in front of Macdonell, almost knocking him down, dropped his burden of planks of wood, and swore to himself in German. A
Hanoverian, thought Macdonell. So his request for further pioneers had reached High Command.

  Huddled at the foot of the chapel wall he noticed Gooch. The boy was covered with mud and had contrived without much effect to wrap himself in a blanket. Leaving him to sleep for a few minutes more, Macdonell looked up at the château. A light still twinkled in the window of their improvised dining room and he could see Mackinnon again standing on the table. Was it another limerick? Or daring tales from Spain? Macdonell fancied that he could hear a favourite passage of Byron:

  Each volley tells that thousands cease to breathe;

  Death rides upon the sulphury Siroc,

  Red Battle stamps his foot, and nations feel the shock.

  In the dark of the courtyard, he shivered. He was not a superstitious man, but death, he knew, had a liking for the company of soldiers. Particularly in the dark watch before a battle. He had walked these twenty years in the shadow of his grim presence. But this place felt somehow different. It was as if he could actually smell something on the air. Death, he sensed, had marked this place for his own, and tomorrow he would claim his due. Was he himself to perish? And what of the others? What of Henry Gooch there in the shadows? And what of the Grahams, Dashwood, Wyndham, Henderson, Miller, Biddle? What of the unfortunate Monsieur van Cutzem and his little Marie? Could death claim them all?

  Standing close by the south gate now, Macdonell heard voices drifting in on the rain from far into the wood. No distinct words. Merely murmured mutterings in a foreign tongue. It made him stop. And, as if to answer, fresh words began to ring in his head. Words he had heard spoken so often by Dan Mackinnon. Familiar words, which uttered by his friend could stir the feeblest heart to thoughts of glorious deeds. Yet here in the darkness he could derive no comfort from them. And not once through that long, wet, troubled night, either as he walked among the still-labouring men, or still later as he chased sleep in the château’s echoing, empty salon, was he able, try as he might, to drive their ghastly truth from his mind: