Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  They crossed the rhine after the cavalry and marched on, but Adam’s confidence was badly jolted. After all their silence, all this long march, to be betrayed by some fool of an officer! What could he have been doing with a pistol in his hand in the first place? Surely the royal troops must be drunk if they had not heard that!

  The panic began to rise in him, stronger, worse than ever before. He had held it down so far, but now they had been betrayed, and it was not his fault! They were all marching to be shot down like dogs, because of some fool officer, and he, Adam, would go to Hell! Why had he not taken the King’s pardon? What were all those fine words he had spoken then compared to this reality, this Hell? If only they would stop this marching, this endless inescapable marching, with only the dim shadows of other men in front of him.

  Perhaps it was not too late, even now, to run and hide on the moor! No-one would find him - a few steps into the mist and he would be lost. But that thought terrified him too. It would be like Hell already at one step; alone in the darkness, outcast from his friends, unable to see or hear anything but the reproaches of his own conscience. He could not bear to step aside into Hell, but he could not bear to march on towards it either. He stumbled, and felt his arms shaking so that he thought he would drop his musket.

  Trembling, he looked at William Clegg, who had stepped back and was marching beside him now. Two dark eyes looked back at him out of the old, familiar wrinkled face, grey and cold in the misty moonlight. Then William put a hand on his shoulder, and smiled. “Steady, Adam, old friend,” he murmured. “Have faith now.” The hand felt warm and real on Adam’s shoulder, and as his panic died down a little he realised his mouth had been open and his whole body tender with fear.

  He forced the open mouth into a smile, and then closed it firmly, taking a deep, calming breath as he did so. Unable to speak, he nodded at his old friend solemnly, and clasped the hand on his shoulder with his own, remembering the compact they had made at Pedwell. It was absurd how much warmth and comfort he could draw from a hand, but so it was; for nearly five strides he held it, feeling his panic fade. When he let it go he was master of himself again, and had forgotten his fears of Hell in the steady strength of his friends all around him.

  He smiled his thanks at William.

  “Be warm soon enough, I reckon,” he murmured quietly, to show his confidence.

  “I reckon so, “murmured William, patting his musket affectionately. “Not just for us neither. “

  As they spoke they heard a shout ahead of them, repeated again and again as though by a lunatic: “Wake up! Beat your drums! The enemy’s here! Beat your drums! Wake up! For the Lord’s sake, beat your drums!”

  There was a shiver all down the line, and they unconsciously quickened their pace. John Spragg laughed softly behind Adam. “‘Tis too late now, me boys! We’m yer! Us’ll put ‘ee back to sleep again!”

  Adam felt a momentary return of his panic, but then lost it in the urgency of the quickened pace. He checked carefully to see that the pan of his musket was closed, and his powder and bullets in their proper places, though he knew they were, for he had checked them twice before the march.

  Then there was no more shouting but instead the sudden urgent rub-a-dub rattle of drums, no more than a couple of hundred yards away, and he felt, not fear, but a sudden glorious relief that the battle was here at last, and that they still had the surprise, and were going to win!

  Colonel Wade was leading them to the right, across the moor, so that the sound of the drums came from their left rather than ahead of them. As they marched and came closer the mist cleared, and they could see the splutter and spark of slow matches being lit, and the figures of men stumbling hurriedly out of tents and running into lines to their left. They halted, faced left and dressed their line, ready to advance.

  “Come on now, boys, quick about it! Space your lines carefully! Check your muskets now. Don’t fire ‘til you get the order!” The Welsh sergeant’s voice was sharp and clear as it always was, drilling order and purpose into their excitement. This is where it begins, Adam thought, I’ve got here and I’ll not run now. He grasped his musket and rejoiced to feel his hands quite firm, without a trace of shaking. The line facing them was still forming hurriedly. He saw the pikes lowered on either side of him. We’re going to march forward - any second now!

  He looked up and saw cavalry riding across their front from the left. Their own horsemen - he recognised Lord Grey at their head. Why were they doing that? Why weren’t they attacking?

  A voice from the enemy lines called out to the horsemen.

  “Halt! Who are you for?”

  “The King!” a rider shouted back.

  “What King?”

  “King Monmouth, and God with us!”

  “Then take this with you!”

  There was a sudden mighty crash! and sheets of flame split the darkness as the royal musketeers fired into Lord Grey’s horse. The sound was followed by screams of wounded men, the high terrified neighing of the horses and the yells and curses of their riders trying to control them. The field between Adam and the royal soldiers became a dark mass of careering horses and riders, rearing and plunging this way and that, hopelessly out of control.

  A second volley poured into them from the left, splitting the darkness again, and suddenly the horses were bolting madly in every direction away from the noise and flames. Adam saw one horse coming straight towards them and prepared to duck; but then at the last moment it saw them, and swerved violently to the right, hurling its helpless rider out of the saddle at the feet of William Clegg.

  “The bastards! The bloody bastards! ‘Tis just like Bridport! They’ve let us down again! The bastards!”

  Adam felt rather than saw John Spragg’s trembling as he swore furiously to himself, on and on as though he could not stop. Adam remembered what William Clegg had done for him, and put out a hand to calm John; but John stared at him wildly and shook the hand off.

  Then came Wade’s sharp order to march forward, echoed by the sergeant. William Clegg stepped forward over the injured rider at his feet, but as John Spragg reached him he stumbled, and kicked the moaning figure hard, swearing and dropping behind the advancing ranks. Adam looked round and saw John kick the man again, and raise the butt of his musket over the man’s head.

  “John, no! Stop that!” Adam ran back and pushed the musket aside with his own, so that it only glanced off the fallen man’s head. Adam seized it with his free hand and pulled his friend urgently towards him.

  “John! Come on! Leave him! We got to fight now!” He stared into a face shaking with fury and fear, and shoved him away from the body, pointing to the empty places in the dark ranks marching steadily away towards the enemy. “There, John, there! The Devil’s there now!”

  “But that bastard ...!” John raised his musket again but Adam pushed him away, falling over the body to shield it as he did so. “Get up there, you fool! Fight the enemy!”

  John turned to run furiously after his friends. As Adam got up to follow him the fallen rider turned his face upwards in the moonlight, and Adam saw it was John Clapp, breathing heavily with a dark wound on his forehead where the musket had hit him. Adam checked, then stepped over him and ran furiously forward after the others, a sob choking in his chest as he heard the sergeant’s sharp voice barking orders.

  “Hold your fire! Steady now! Rear rank present your muskets! Front rank ready to move forward! Keep your powder out of the water now!”

  As he took his place in the ranks Adam saw that they had stopped a mere dozen yards or so away from the enemy. In front of them, between the two lines, was a wide black ditch of dark, shining water. Another rhine! And a large one too, perhaps four or five yards across and the Lord only knew how deep; maybe only a few inches, or maybe several feet, with a foot of thick mud at the bottom, as one of the earlier ones had been beside the ford where they had crossed it. So this was why Lord Grey’s cavalry had not attacked! They had been riding along the rhine, look
ing for somewhere to cross.

  Colonel Wade was hurrying along the front rank down into the water.

  “Come on, my lads, ‘tis only a little ditch! Hold your fire till you get across now! The rear rank’ll cover you. Front rank, pikemen and musketeers, forward!”

  From the rear rank, as he set his musket in its rest, Adam saw William Clegg step gingerly forward with the others. But somehow there was an awful hesitation all along the line, a dreadful reluctance to leave the ranks of their friends and venture into that unknown, terrible black water under the very muskets of their foes, who were coming forward right to the rhine’s edge to receive them. Wade urged them on furiously, and Roger Satchell splashed into the water in front of his pikemen.

  “Come on, lads, forward! For God and King Monmouth!”

  There was an earsplitting boom! from the left, as Colonel Matthew’s regiment fired across the ditch without trying to cross it, and then an answering crash! from in front of them as the enemy fired back. Adam felt the blast of the bullets zipping past him, and several men slumped groaning to the ground around him. He saw Roger Satchell stagger and nearly fall as a wounded man stumbled against him, before collapsing threshing into the shallow water at the edge of the rhine.

  The front rank drew back nervously from the ditch, and somehow, Adam did not know how it happened, men were firing all around him, from the front rank and his own, blasting away bitterly without orders. He fired himself, and the great jarring boom! and sheet of flame in the darkness filled him, not with satisfaction, but a sense of guilty horror that he had disobeyed orders, and a great engulfing fear of disaster that could only be allayed by reloading the musket and firing again as fast as he could. All around him men were doing the same; biting open their charges, ramming them down with the scourer, spitting the bullets into their hands - all the old drill that they had been taught, but not together. This time of all times they were not firing together! He heard Sergeant Evans’ voice yelling out the stages, but he was too far ahead, so that the order to fire came when Adam was not ready, and he felt he had to fire when he was ready to try to catch up, whilst others were ahead and could not wait.

  Then again the shock of the enemy’s volley lashed through them like a blast of wind through corn, and more men collapsed around him. Adam knew that they had to fire together like that themselves to win, and they were not doing it. He rammed the bullet down hard again with his scourer, lifted the musket into its rest, and fired blindly across the rhine into the smoke and darkness.

  43

  “IF ONLY the dawn would come! Can’t we go now? ‘Twill be light when we get there!”

  “It would not! ‘Tis hardly three yet; and what use would we be if we got lost in the dark, or stumbled into the royal camp? ‘Tis much better to stay here, watch and pray. Oh my great Lord, show forth your strength now!”

  The crackle of the distant musket fire was followed by the flat thunderclap of cannon, and Nicolas Thompson’s voice shook with a sudden rush of earnest emotion. “Those be our guns, Ann, I’m sure of it. And they’ve a good gunner, too, to serve them. May the blessed Lord guide his eye tonight!”

  The group peering over the battlements of St Mary’s church tower had grown to a small crowd. At times Ann felt herself hemmed in and pressed against the wall as though she might fall, but she did not think about that. All her attention was concentrated on that area to the south-east, beneath the tall silhouette of Weston Zoyland church, where for over an hour now the darkness had been split by the crackle of musket fire and the bigger white flashes that they saw a second before they heard the flat bang of the field-guns.

  In the darkness between the flashes, Ann prayed too, as they all did. At first she earnestly reminded the Lord of her father’s goodness and courage, and that of all the men of Monmouth’s army, who had so selflessly resisted temptation to serve Him. Later, as the battle went on and she saw there would be no easy victory, she remembered her father’s decision to spurn the King’s pardon at Pedwell, and the brutal words of Colonel Weston began to haunt her mind.

  It was then that she made her final, most solemn and desperate promise: “Give them victory now, Lord, spare my father and give them victory now, and I will do what I know you want and what is truly right, and renounce Robert for ever. And if one must be killed, let it be Robert, not my father!” Her lips trembled as she said the words, though no-one else could hear them; for it was a real promise, made without any hidden tricks or reserves in the secret corners and drawers of her mind; and she knew she would keep it.

  When she opened her eyes and looked again into the darkness below the distant church, there was a change indeed, so that she thought her prayer had been answered. Her heart pounded afresh and she grew first hot with triumph and then cold as she saw what it meant.

  More guns were firing now; not just the four from the north, on Monmouth’s side, but two and then three and four from the south-east, firing the opposite way. At first someone said it must be Monmouth’s troops who had captured the enemy’s guns and turned them around; but as the barrage increased there could be no doubt. The two groups of guns were firing directly towards each other. Between them, Ann realised, the two lines of musketeers and pikemen must be standing, their ranks ripped again and again by the thunder of the shot that fired louder and louder as the night went on.

  Ann stopped praying. She thought perhaps she would never pray again. She only stood and gripped the parapet, staring at the eastern sky for the first sign of the dawn that would show her the final truth. As the gunfire from the King’s side increased, her heart froze slowly into a certainty as cold as the grey stone beneath her hands.

  44

  ADAM ONLY noticed it was dawn when he stopped firing, obeying the sergeant’s orders to save the last of the powder for the cavalry. One by one the others stopped also, making a little pocket of eerie silence in the midst of the firestorm. The steady volleys still swept into them from across the ditch, and a sparse intermittent musket-fire still crackled from far away on their left, where Colonel Holmes stood encouraging his men, waving his sword in his one good arm.

  But the real horror was the flat, ear-numbing boom! of the field-guns on both sides, which swept whole files of men into bloody, unrecognisable pulp with their cruel chain-shot every four or five minutes. There was only one gun firing directly against their regiment; Adam felt each man around him tense as he unconsciously counted the last few seconds before each shot, and then relax as the force of the blast hit him, and he found himself still alive. Life had become reduced to these short, five-minute intervals, with a horrible devil’s lottery at the end of each.

  Now that he was not firing Adam was able to look about him. At first he wondered that the pale dawn light should give colour to the trampled grass and blood, and yet leave the faces of the men around him grey and black as they had been in the night; and then he saw that the black was the black of burnt powder and the grey the grey of exhaustion. John Spragg smiled at him grimly, too tired any more for panic.

  “‘Tis not a pretty sight, Adam, is it?”

  He nodded to their left, where the ranks of royal horsemen stood, just out of musket-shot, waiting the moment to charge. They must have crossed the rhine further up, Adam though - our horsemen should have done it, if these could. Now they are going to do to us what we should have done to them.

  There was jostling and movement as the Colyton men formed a square to give the musketeers the best protection from the pikemen, and then another awful pause, broken suddenly by the flat boom! of the field gun and the horrible screams of a man who staggered out of the ranks with a great hole pumping blood out of his shoulder where his arm had been blown off, while a headless corpse slumped to the ground where a man had been standing.

  Adam watched numbly as the man who had lost his arm ran until his strength gave out, and then collapsed twitching by a patch of tall yellow buttercups which had somehow escaped the mowers. I cannot stand here any longer, he thought. I can fight, but
I cannot stand here to be shot at. Oh Lord let them come soon, please, if they are coming! But still the cavalry did not attack, and Adam felt the sweat breaking out on his face and in the palms of his hands as the minutes passed to the next cannon-shot.

  Then there was one of those lonely quiet moments that come in the midst of battle, and they all heard quite clearly William Clegg’s voice as he muttered softly to himself: “Oh Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken us?” He had spoken quite softly, for himself, and yet he had spoken for all of them, and Adam never knew whether there had been an order to retreat, or whether they had all just turned at once and started walking quietly away from the rhine.

  It was then that the cavalry charged. Adam did not hear it at first. In the boom of the guns, he only felt a jostling around him, half the men standing still and the others pushing past to run, and he looked left and saw the long line of horsemen in blue coats sweeping inexorably down on them. One moment it was pretty, a line of tiny abstract figures, and the next it was a great mass of waving swords and yelling helmeted faces above the horses’ wild staring eyes, great flaring nostrils, and the huge steelshod hooves that reared over his head as he fired, and then smashed down towards him as inescapably as his own death.

  45

  THE NIGHT was the best and the worst of it. The best, because sometimes - very rarely but sometimes nonetheless - he could fall into a calm, dreamless sleep for three or four hours. That was the best that could ever happen. More often - perhaps six or seven times in the last month - he managed to lie quite quietly when he could not sleep, and watch the stars slowly cross from one bar to another of the high cell window. At these times a sort of tranquillity seeped into his mind from the starlight and grey moonlit stone, like a promise that one day he would have suffered enough, and be given the words to pray again.

  One night he even felt that he had prayed, if one could pray without words. That feeling was so good that it stayed with him all through the clamour and hunger and stench of the next two days, when seven more men were found and herded into Dorchester jail, and two men died, and Ann came to visit him.