02 - Keane's Challenge

by Iain Gale

  ‘Nevertheless, Ross, do so.’

  ‘Hate the English, sir, and worse still any good Scots Presbyterian. Jourdan took some of our lads prisoner after Acre and they fell into O’Callaghan’s hands.’ He paused.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Terrible cruel, sir, he is. General Jourdan had them ready for release back to our lines. Exchange for the same number of Frenchies. O’Callaghan released them all right. Minus their tongues, all of them. Cut them out. Poor buggers.’ He turned to Morris. ‘What’s he look like, sir?’

  ‘He’s tall, though not as tall as the captain, and he has most distinctive hair. Curly. A great mane.’ He smiled. ‘Of course. He has a scar. You remember, James. Did you ever see him? Running across his cheek. Here.’ He pointed to his own right cheek.

  Ross nodded. ‘That’s him, sir. I’d swear it.’

  ‘What else do you know of him, Ross?’

  ‘Only that his family is Irish and loyal to the Stuarts. His grandfather served France in what they call the Wild Geese. The Irish brigade. He had family butchered in the rebellion. Back in ninety-eight.’

  Keane nodded. ‘Well, if that’s the case, I can see how he might be cruel.’ His own suspicions, it seemed, had been confirmed. ‘Thank you, sarn’t. That’s most useful. Now we know our man.’

  Ross left.

  ‘Well done, Tom. You should reconsider staying with the intelligencers.’

  Morris shook his head. ‘I told you, James. I have no future but with the guns.’

  ‘Well, we must inform Grant of O’Connell’s true identity at once, and the duke of course.’

  They left the tent, and as they did so heard a long drum roll. It was close on 6 a.m. Reveille had come and gone and Keane looked about him. The mist had come in thick through the night and lay heavy all around Coimbra and up the road to Bussaco. And in the haze the area of the camp where the guides had made their bivouac, where the ordnance had their park, was in commotion, with orders being shouted from all directions and tents being dropped and stowed. But Keane had the tune now. The drummers were beating ‘to arms’.

  ‘Sarn’t Ross, what’s this? Where is the army?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to say to you these past two days, sir. The army’s gone, sir. Gone up to that ridge to meet the French.’

  ‘This is it.’ Keane turned to Morris. ‘Too late to inform on Pritchard now. Come on.’

  ‘But where to, James? We have no fighting unit to join.’

  ‘Maybe not, but we can still fight, can’t we? I am a soldier. What else can I do when the drums call? We’ll find Craufurd.’

  The Ordenanza had gone, led by Pereira and under orders from General Beresford to join a battalion of Portuguese regulars. Von Krokenburgh too had ridden off with his men, to attach the hussars to the 16th Light Dragoons.

  So it was merely his own company, his bunch of talented ne’er-do-wells, that Keane assembled now, as the camp disintegrated around them. He set off, on horseback, with Morris at his side, through the mist, back the way they had only recently come. To Wellington’s chosen ground at Bussaco.

  *

  It did not take them long to reach the ridge, but by the time they did the mist was clearing. They climbed from the village of Cacemas and soon found themselves on Wellington’s new road running along the reverse slope of the ridge. Keane wondered where Craufurd might be and then, glimpsing a body of green-jacketed troops away to the left flank, he waved the men across behind him.

  Entering the little village of Sula they saw a party of staff officers gathered around windmill and Keane trotted over, followed by the others.

  Craufurd had seen him coming. ‘Ah, Captain Keane, welcome. I had thought that your work was done for the moment. Should you not be off “exploring” with your friend Colonel Sanchez, over to the south?’ There was a chortle from some of the officers, but Craufurd glared at them. His joke, though dry, had not been intended as a mockery.

  Keane shook his head. ‘No, sir. We intend to fight here, sir. Exploring can wait for a day.’

  ‘Where will you go? You have no regiment.’

  ‘I was rather hoping that we might be able to join you, sir.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Keane, I have no place here for scouts. Try the cavalry. Good day to you.’

  Keane nodded and turned away. Where, he wondered, could they find a position on the battlefield? How were they to play a part in what was sure to be a decisive battle? A decisive victory.

  They turned and began to climb their horses steadily to the top of the ridge. The surface was covered with gorse bushes, rocks and boulders. It was perfect defensive terrain.

  *

  Keane looked east over the valley and saw nothing but haze. But as it slowly disappeared objects were beginning to come into view, like ghostly ships sailing out of a sea fog. He gasped. For there, where there had been fields and farms, were thousands upon thousands of men. The dust clouds said it all. Together with the glinting steel of fifty thousand bayonets catching the morning sun. It was clear that, while Keane had been sunk in his dark mood, the allied army had been making its way gradually up to the ridge for some days and the crest was topped in both directions by an irregular line of human figures in red, blue, green and brown.

  He supposed that he might, on Craufurd’s advice, join von Krokenburgh with the 16th, but Keane had no wish to fight alongside Blackwood’s old regiment.

  Better to be among the guerrillas.

  Then, struck by sudden inspiration, he turned to Morris. ‘That’s it. We’ll attach ourselves to Sanchez.’

  ‘Can we do that, d’you suppose, James? I mean, have a proper scrap?’

  ‘Not strictly speaking. It’s not our role. But if you look at the men on this battlefield, it’s not exactly what you might call a regular army, is it?’ He was right. Wellington’s army was a hodgepodge of nations and calibres of men.

  The Guards – 3rd and Coldstream – were there along with some thirty battalions of British redcoats, four from the KGL, sixteen companies of greenjackets, kilted Highlanders and the Portuguese in their thousands. Wellington had cleverly mixed them in with each other so that in one division there would be a brigade of Portuguese and an element of riflemen. It was not a pretty arrangement and the sticklers among the staff had tut-tutted at it, but in the field Keane knew it would be effective, the stronger, battle-hardened troops stiffening the resolve of the greenshanks to stand their ground under cannon fire as their comrades were blown to shreds beside them.

  As Craufurd had told him, Sanchez and his guerrillas had originally been positioned in the south, lest the French should make another attack to flank the army. But, impatient for a proper battle, he had led his cavalry up to the allied right wing, close to the Portuguese, where the duke had been unable to place any horse, and it was here that Keane, having ridden the length of the allied line, finally found them.

  Sanchez looked resplendent. Mounted on Massena’s pale grey mare, badges and buckles polished to a sheen, he was a parody of a French officer and the perfect statement of the Spanish contempt for their oppressors.

  ‘Captain Keane, have you come to join us?’

  ‘If we may, colonel. It’s a good day for a fight. Wouldn’t want to miss out on this one.’

  ‘I am pleased to have you. It has been a pleaseure to command your lancers. And we shall meet the French together, just as we promised we would.’

  Scanning Keane and his men as he always did, he noticed instantly that it was Martin and not Keane who was carrying the much prized gun. ‘Your boy has your gun, captain. How is this?’

  ‘It’s of better use to us in his hands. As you have seen for yourself, colonel.’

  ‘But on the second shot he missed, captain.’

  ‘There’s a first time for everything, colonel.’

  Sanchez laughed and rode across to his men, in their gloriously various uniforms, for the most part stripped from the bodies of dead Frenchmen.

  *

  Drums
and bugle calls filled the valley below them now. The French were preparing to attack and the pop of musketry told him that the enemy skirmishers had engaged their own. They came up the hill out of the last strands of the mist, towards the centre of the allied line.

  The French laboured up the steep hillside, knocking their feet against boulders, dropping muskets, bent double with the effort. And all the time the allied artillery, sixty guns, tore at them with ball, scything down the ranks. But still they came until at last they were at the top. The columns came to a halt and as best they could, across the rocks and gorse, sergeants moved the ranks to form line.

  But most of them never competed the manoeuvre. For as they stopped, as Keane watched with pride, the muskets of two brigades were ordered to the present and opened up on them. Smoke blurred the view and then, within seconds, the blue mass had turned tail and was fleeing pell-mell back down the slope.

  And as they watched, a single red-coated battalion, led by their colonel, and judging by their colours the 88th, charged with bayonets fixed, downhill into the rear of the French column, turning defeat into disaster.

  It was the finest example Keane had ever seen of the use of the tactics taught to the British infantry. The classic method of seeing off an attack by the French. And he had seen enough of them in twenty years. He cheered and the men took it up. And soon the whole field around him rang with cheers as Boney’s bluecoats legged it down the hill and back to their lines.

  But, as any general will admit, though a victory might be yours on one part of a battlefield, the battle itself is often very far from won.

  The allied guns on the far left wing had opened up now, and looking across the valley Keane saw another mass of men advancing from the French lines towards the ridge. He turned to Morris. ‘Christ, they’re trying another attack. That was only a diversion. Come on, let’s take a look.’

  They began to move to the north with the rest of the men and Sanchez’s cavalry behind him. And as they did so, a figure in blue on a dark bay horse galloped past them all fast along the ridge towards the new attack, pursued by a horde of mounted red-coated officers.

  Silver spoke up. ‘That’s Nosey, sir. Look. He’s off to direct them hisself. You can bet old Massena won’t do that.’

  Sanchez rode up to them. ‘Come on. What are you waiting for? That’s your General Wellington, isn’t it? Don’t you want to join the action?’

  He pulled away, hot in pursuit of the duke, his men pouring after him, and Keane spurred on and followed as if he was out on a field day in the old country, his horse leaping the bushes as she would any hedge or fence.

  *

  Galloping along the ridge behind the line of infantry, they skirted what remained of the action in the centre and dropped down to the new road before pushing up so that they were now level with the convent at Barca. The tall bell tower, with its gaping arches, towered above them against the morning sky. Riding along the side of the huge plantation which had once been the convent garden, they emerged to find themselves among scores of greenjackets moving steadily backwards up the forward slope, stopping to let off a round at a cloud of French skirmishers. Keane had been right; this was the main assault, for behind the skirmishers came six huge columns of blue-coated infantry. For a moment he thought that all must be lost. Martin summed up their fears. ‘Where are our lads? Who’s going to stop them?’

  But Keane had spotted something. A single, solitary figure of a British officer was sitting on his horse up at the edge of the convent wood. Black Bob seemed to be alone, but looking more carefully they all began to see what Keane had caught sight of, for there, to Crawford’s left, hundreds of men were lying down as if asleep.

  Keane called to Morris, ‘They’re Craufurd’s Light Bobs – the 52nd and the 43rd.’

  The riflemen continued to retreat up the hill followed by the French, and then, just as the blue-coated columns reached the crest and threatened to swamp the allied line, Keane saw Craufurd remove his bicorne hat and wave it three times in the air. In an instant the recumbent redcoats were up and, their muskets already loaded and primed, within seconds had formed their line. The command was given and, with a precision that was nothing less than beautiful, they emptied their barrels into the face of the French.

  Eighteen hundred muskets fired at close range and to Keane’s eyes the French column actually seemed to shake, as if some great Titan had moved the earth and smitten it with an unseen force. He had never seen the like. Then, with their officers shouting huzzahs, the two British battalions pushed forward into the French with their bayonets and for the second time that morning, with the seventeen-inch steel shafts jabbing and stabbing death into their backs, the enemy gave way and scattered down the hill.

  Keane turned to Morris. ‘It is a complete victory, Tom. He’s done it. Wellington’s done it. He’s beaten the best of them.’

  He had hardly finished when Archer trotted up. ‘Sir, have you seen? Down there.’

  He pointed off to their right, not far from where the French were streaming down the hill. Across the valley floor, out of the village of Moura, Keane could see another column advancing towards them. Then another and another. Looking towards the ridge he saw immediately the troops waiting to receive this new attack. And they were wearing blue coats.

  ‘Portuguese. They’re bloody Portuguese.’

  By some miracle the French had directed their masse de décision, the critical, powerful column that might decide the entire battle, against Wellington’s blind spot, the only brigade on the field made up entirely of raw Portuguese levies and now outnumbered by more than two to one.

  ‘They’ll be slaughtered.’

  Keane watched the horror unfold before him, slowly, almost dreamlike. He looked around for the familiar blue-coated figure. The bay mare. Surely Wellington’s commanding presence was needed here now, if anywhere. As he looked, cannon fire from the Portuguese and British guns began to open up on the advancing French column.

  Keane shouted over the cacophony. ‘We need to get word to Wellington. The Portos need him. Before the French reach them.’

  He began to turn, getting ready to ride himself to wherever the duke might be, but Morris had beaten him to it. Always the better horseman, he wheeled round and dug his spurs into his horse’s flanks.

  He smiled at Keane. ‘Too slow, James. As ever. I’ll do it. It is my turn, I think.’

  Keane watched as Morris increased his pace and cantered along the ridge. He had spotted the general now, in conversation with Craufurd, and Keane noticed Wellington turn, drawn to the sound of the guns. Morris was nearing him when from the opposite side of the valley the French cannon began to reply. A ball came across and scudded past to their left, sucking in the air. Others fell among the infantry to their front and more began to land among the Portuguese as the French continued their approach march.

  A rain of black roundshot fell to Keane’s left, close to where the duke’s party were standing, and he prayed that none would hit the general. Of course the odds were against it, but as he watched one of the cannonballs smashed into a figure on a horse who had been careering along the ridge, and with an obscene spray of blood sliced his torso in two, like a knife cutting through butter. Keane felt suddenly as if his own breath had been knocked from him and sat unsteady in the saddle. For the horseman had been Tom Morris.

  He was conscious of Archer beside him. ‘Sir, that was Captain Morris, wasn’t it?’

  Keane said nothing.

  Ross was speaking. ‘Captain Keane, sir, Captain Morris is dead, sir. He’s dead. Shall I ride to the duke, sir. Shall I tell him, sir? The Portuguese.’

  Keane collected his wits. Tried to obliterate the horror he had just witnessed. ‘No, sarn’t. I’ll go.’ He urged his horse into action and moved fast towards Wellington, coursing the ridge and in doing so riding over the bloody mess that had been Tom Morris.

  ‘Sir. Your Grace.’

  Wellington turned and saw him. ‘Keane?’

  �
��The Portuguese, sir. Over there.’ Keane pulled up and, turning, pointed back the way he had come, towards where the four French columns were about to reach the top of the ridge. Wellington, instantly aware of the situation, tipped his hat to Keane and took off, followed by the cloud of staff.

  Keane joined them, taking care not to look down at Morris’s ruined corpse as he passed, and was almost back with his men when, looking towards the Portuguese brigade, his attention was taken by one of their officers. The man was sitting astride his horse at the rear of the second battalion, giving orders to a subordinate. But what most struck Keane about him was that the man wore a pair of round-rimmed spectacles and his face was topped by a shock of wavy orange hair.

  Keane froze for a moment, then moved quickly, urging his horse past the staff officers and his own men towards the Portuguese. He could hear Wellington’s voice as he passed. A loud voice, short and precise. ‘Stand firm. Steady there. Stand and you will beat them. Make ready.’ The commander-in-chief of the allied armies, giving the command as if he were a subaltern again.

  Keane did not take his eyes from the red-haired man. Pritchard-Macnab-O’Callaghan, was talking now to another officer, and Keane recognized that man too, at precisely the same moment that Captain Aeneas Foote saw him. Keane turned back to his men. ‘Silver, Garland, Heredia, sarn’t Ross. To me.’

  The three men came fast and Keane turned to move again, but Foote had left Pritchard and ridden to meet him.

  ‘Keane, you’re not looking for me?’

  ‘No, it’s him I want to talk to.’ He indicated O’Callaghan, who nodded politely.

  Ross spoke. ‘Sir? Your orders?’

  Keane pointed to the man who had been Pritchard. ‘Get him. He’s a French spy.’

  Foote laughed. ‘You’re mad, Keane. Stark raving mad. That’s Colonel Sir John Macnab. He’s a British officer.’

  Keane ignored him and spoke again to Ross. ‘Get on, sarn’t, get him.’

  Ross turned and led the others off, towards O’Callaghan, at the rear of the Portuguese, but O’Callaghan had seen them too and before they reached him had pushed his horse through the two ranks of Portuguese and out beyond them towards the advancing French. The four men began to follow, but the infantry were closing ranks again and they had to struggle to get through, striking with the flats of their swords. O’Callaghan knew he had only one chance and he intended to make use of it. He stooped and then, with a quick movement, unbuttoned his tunic and pulled it off, throwing it to the ground to reveal the dark blue and gold waistcoat of a colonel of the Grenadiers of the French Imperial Guard.