Web of Love w-2

by Mary Balogh

  And one looked to the wounded, trying to find a stretcher for those too badly hurt to fend for themselves, encouraging those who were at least on their feet to begin the tramp back behind the lines or even all the way to Brussels if it seemed that they would not be fit for action on the next day. Those who were hurt only slightly, or those who were too tough to admit that their wounds were severe, bound up their cuts as best they could and jested to one another.

  “Yer’d better get some mud on that bandage,” someone called to a brave lad who stayed at the front though he had a nasty slash on the forehead, “or Johnny’ll be usin’ it fer target practice.”

  “It’s the merest scratch,” the same private who knew of no other use for his tongue than to talk with assured the burly sergeant who bound up his arm for him. “Scarcely even needs a bandage.”

  The sergeant, more kindly than some of his peers, looked closely at the youth and did not remark, as well he might, that the boy’s face was almost of a color with the bandage. He ruffled the boy’s hair when he was finished and said gruffly before moving away, “You’ll do, lad.”

  Lord Eden found Captain Norton and Captain Simpson and breathed with something like relief before squatting down beside the latter. “A close thing,” he said.

  “Just a nice little skirmish to warm up with,” Captain Simpson said. “Good practice for the boys.”

  Lord Eden grinned. “You don’t think this is it, then, Charlie?” he asked. “You don’t think Boney will turn tail and run now?”

  The captain chuckled. “Will the sun fall from the sky?” he said. “Scared, Eden?”

  Lord Eden squeezed his friend’s shoulder and rose to his feet again. “Only a Johnny Raw ever answers no to that question,” he said. “You can’t catch me out with it any longer, Charlie. My knees are knocking, if you want the truth. And my teeth clacking. I am trying to get them coordinated so that at least there will be a pleasing rhythm.”

  “Stay close,” his friend said. “I’ll add my stomach rumblings to the music. Excuse me. I have to go over to talk to that young private over there who is pretending not to be sniveling. Poor lad. He wants his mother, I’ll wager my month’s pay. He was doing well until the guns stopped.”

  Lord Eden smiled without a great deal of humor as he turned back to his own company. It did not seem so long before that Charlie had been comforting another lad-though not such a young one-who had wanted his mother after his first taste of action. And without in any way belittling or humiliating him. He wondered if anyone had done as much for Charlie Simpson when he was a raw recruit.

  It was time to snatch some sleep, he thought, looking down at the hard, uninviting ground ruefully and trying not to look at the faces around him or-more to the point-the faces that were not around him. Like Captain Simpson and unlike many other officers, Lord Eden had always made a point of bivouacking with his men under exactly the conditions they experienced, instead of using his rank to commandeer more comfortable accommodation.

  ELLEN WANDERED OUT into the streets the following morning, unable to remain indoors. Any news she heard might be wildly inaccurate, but even rumors and distorted truths seemed preferable to the silence that had haunted her all night after the guns had stopped. And even the night had not been totally silent. There had been noises, frightening noises, that she had resolutely ignored.

  There had been a panic, she learned from one acquaintance, in the very early morning when heavy artillery being moved through Brussels toward the front was thought to be in retreat. And further panic when a troop of Belgian cavalry had galloped through the city shouting that all was lost and the French on their heels. But the French were still not there.

  The Prussians had been defeated at Ligny, she heard later, and General Blucher severely injured. No one seemed to know what was happening at Quatre Bras, except that casualties had been heavy.

  Ellen did not listen too closely. She watched the walking wounded who were beginning to trickle into the city, a sad and tattered remnant of those who had marched out so gallantly less than two days before. She looked closely at each separate one, her heart thumping painfully, and she found herself taking the arm of one soldier around her own shoulders to relieve his companion, who was himself wounded. She sat with him on the stone steps outside a house and wiped the dust from his face with her handkerchief and some eau de cologne. But he would not let her touch his dangling arm. It was broken, he said. He must reach his brother. Fortunately the brother was found just emerging from his home one street away.

  She must go home and fetch bandages, Ellen decided, hurrying along toward the Rue de la Montagne and looking anxiously into the faces of the men about her. But she recognized no one. There was a young soldier wandering alone not far from her own door.

  “A drink of water, lady,” he said as she came up to him, his voice apologetic and not very hopeful.

  “Of course,” she said, touching his one arm and noticing the blood caked on the sleeve of the other. “Oh, you are hurt. Do you have a billet here?”

  “I live in Somerset, lady,” he said. “A drink of water, please.”

  “Come,” she said, setting her arm about his waist and guiding him to the door of the house in which she had rooms. “Come, my dear. I will soon have a soothing bandage on that arm and a warm, comfortable bed for you to sleep in. And you shall have your drink.”

  He was a child, she thought in some horror. She doubted that he was sixteen. And his eyes were already brightening with fever.

  She lowered him carefully to the sofa in the parlor and went for a glass of water before removing his boots or tackling the sleeve that was stuck firmly to his right arm together with a heavy bandage.

  “They removed the ball,” the boy said. “I thought they was going to take my arm off. I reckon they was too busy. Don’t touch me, lady. Let me be. Don’t touch me.”

  “You shall lie down in bed,” she said gently. “I will not hurt you, my dear. And you will feel so much better afterward. I promise you. I have nursed many boys like you, you know. You must pretend that I am your mother. Do you have a mother?”

  She coaxed him to the bed that had been Jennifer’s and stroked her hand gently over his dusty hair on the pillow until the panic had receded from his brightened eyes. “There, there,” she said, smiling at him, “it will be all right, my dear. No one is going to hurt you anymore.”

  Was some woman murmuring comfort to Charlie somewhere in the city? Was he too badly hurt or too delirious to remember where he lived? Was some woman trying to cleanse and bind Lord Eden’s wound, wincing herself at every hurt she knew herself to be inflicting on him?

  Or were they out there somewhere unhurt, preparing to fight again? Or actually engaged in battle? But there was no sound of guns today.

  Or were they lying dead somewhere?

  Deaden the mind.

  Remove the sleeve and the bandages inch by cautious inch to reveal the red and swollen flesh. Murmur comfort to the boy who had fought like a man the day before and who was trying very hard not to sob like a child. Keep talking to him. Smile kindly into his eyes. Let him know himself loved.

  And deaden the mind.

  Chapter 8

  THE NINETY-FIFTH DID NOT SEE A GREAT DEAL of action the following day. The French forces under Bonaparte’s direct command had won a complete victory at Ligny, with the result that the tattered Prussian army was in full retreat north to Wavre and their commander lying severely wounded in a farmhouse, though he stubbornly refused either to die or to give in to his condition. Marshal Ney had not broken through the British and allied lines at Quatre Bras, but he had battered and bruised them and stood a good chance of shattering them completely on Saturday, June 17.

  But surprisingly, no attack came during the morning, and the Duke of Wellington was able to withdraw all his troops in good order northward to a position he had picked out weeks before, a position on the crossroads south of the village of Waterloo and the Forest of Soignes and north of the inn La
Belle Alliance on the main road to Brussels.

  The men of the Ninety-fifth were the last to retreat, with the cavalry, having been assigned the unwelcome task in the morning of forming burial details to go out between the lines and try to give their own dead some sort of decent burial. The men in Lord Eden’s group dragged a pair of boots from under one bush to find a French cavalry officer at the end of them, still breathing. Those few men who were new to the company were surprised when their lieutenant ordered three of them to lift the Frenchman carefully and carry him to a nearby farmhouse, where some of their own wounded were being tended.

  “I said carefully!” he barked before turning to lead the way.

  One veteran grinned at a new recruit. “If you was to arsk,” he said, “you would be told that the bleeding orfficer ain’t a Frenchie or an Englishman but an ’uman being.” He tapped his temple several times and looked significantly at the recruit.

  “Crazy?” the lad asked.

  The veteran continued to grin. “But you never says it out loud,” he said, “or one of us is likely to flatten your nose level with the rest of your face, see.”

  They had a miserable retreat of it. It started to rain before they were even on their way, and it was like to rain for the rest of the week, the men predicted gloomily, gazing up at the angry clouds and noting that there was a full-blown storm coming up. They forgot that the week was already ending. One tended to lose track of what day or date it was when one was on active duty.

  And as if the marching and the getting soaked were not enough troubles, men with more energy than others grumbled, they were getting thoroughly peppered from behind by those damned French. Indeed, most of them agreed, the only fun they had all day was watching and cheering and jeering the Guards-the Hyde Park soldiers, as they were contemptuously called-driving the advancing French back from the village of Genappe, where the duke had spent the night before. They did all right, those cavalry Guards, despite the rain and the slithering mud. But it was quite hilarious to see the scarlet of their smart uniforms and the shine on their polished boots disappear beneath a liberal coating of mud.

  It was enough to drive them all home bawling to cry on their mammies’ shoulders, one witty rifleman bellowed to an appreciative audience. But there was no other fun at all. Only the interminable trudging and mud, and the blinding flashes of lightning and the crashes of thunder that made their backs twitch, so much like the heavy guns did they sound. And at the end of it all they found a nice muddy bed for the night at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. And no rations. Trust the bloody commissary wagons to have trundled off to Brussels by now, grumbling voices too weary to be mutinous murmured to comrades. Or Ghent. Or Ostend. Or perhaps they were being loaded onto bleeding ships already to feed the bleeding sailors.

  And the rain kept sheeting down.

  LADY ANDREA AND Mrs. Simpson had been right, Madeline thought when she had the luxury of a moment in which to think. The first terrible feeling of panic and nausea and light-headedness when the wounded began to arrive passed almost before it was felt. The urge to go out into the street to find if she would recognize any of the poor men dragging themselves into the city or being half-dragged along by comrades in little better case than they was stronger than the desire to rush up to her room to bury her face in a pillow and clamp her hands over her ears.

  And once out there, though none of them was Dom or any other soldier she knew, there was no going back in again. Someone else had been right too-but she could not remember who had said it; they were all thirsty and begging for water. And while rushing in and out of the house with slopping pails of water and smelling salts and bandages, she quickly forgot everything but the need to quieten pathetic pleading voices, to help someone limp along, to help another sit down in the roadway for a moment, to wave smelling salts beneath the noses of the fainting, to wipe a dusty face with a damp cloth. And always to help the men to a drink.

  Her senses were allowed to accustom themselves gradually to the gruesome sights. Those who arrived first were those who could still somehow drag themselves along, the somewhat lesser wounded. It was later in the day before the worse cases began to arrive, those too weak to move themselves. They came by the cartload, right into the city and onto the streets, many of them, though by the afternoon, tents for the wounded had been set up at both the Namur and the Louvain gates.

  And then it began to rain. Men who must have welcomed the cooling drops at first were soon soaked through to the skin, muddy, and shivering. And women tended them with sodden skirts and hair that plastered itself to their heads and faces and dripped streams of water down their necks.

  Lady Andrea and Madeline began to move inside as many of the men from the street in front of the house as could move of their own volition or with a little help. A few, those with unhurt legs, were put to bed upstairs, with no thought to the mud that quickly transferred itself to the delicate silk sheets. Others stretched themselves out on the carpets downstairs and counted themselves blessed.

  Madeline hauled off mud-caked boots, cut uniforms from congealed or still-flowing wounds, bathed and bandaged cuts and gaping holes, soothed fevered brows, held reaching hands, spoke quiet words that she could never afterward recall, once closed eyes that would never close themselves again-with a hand that scarcely trembled. And always, constantly, held weakened hands and heads so that the cup of water might reach thirsting mouths.

  She scarcely thought of her twin all day. There was no time to think. And it was not desirable to think. Mrs. Simpson had been right about that too. But she saw him in every face around her, in every lifted arm. She heard him in every muffled moan and plea for water, in every gasp of thanks.

  She did not know when night came. She did not even know that the rain still lashed down outside. There was no leisure in which to wonder if her brother was still alive to feel all the discomfort of a night spent outdoors during the final hours of a lengthy thunderstorm.

  LORD EDEN WAS very definitely alive. And uncomfortable. And hungry. He had a chance to share a scrawny fowl and a bottle of wine with Colonel Barnard of his regiment in the small cottage the latter had commandeered for the night. But with one last regretful look Lord Eden waved a dismissive hand, said that the bird was not nearly plump enough for his delicate palate, grinned at the other two officers gathered there, and returned to his hungry, sodden men.

  “A strange fellow, Eden,” the colonel said before turning his attention to the pathetic feast spread before him.

  Lord Eden and Captain Simpson spent a tolerably comfortable night huddled beneath two blankets, a thick layer of clay spread over the top one for warmth and waterproofing, their heads resting on saddlebags. Those poor devils who had never been on a campaign before! Charlie remarked before yawning loudly and falling asleep just as if he were lying on a feather bed. They must be suffering. If one just ignored an empty, protesting belly and the muddy ground, and pretended that one was not wet through to the bone, one could not ask for greater comfort, Lord Eden agreed, sliding into oblivion only moments after his friend.

  But the morning was a different matter. Although the rain had stopped, everyone and everything was wet and muddy. And shivering. Guns were unfit to be fired. Stomachs were so empty that they felt and sounded like echoes in a hollow cave. And when might the French be expected to attack? They had bivouacked alarmingly close to the allied lines and would surely want to make an early push for victory.

  But the attack did not come all morning. Somehow, despite the prevailing wetness, fires were built and stiff hands warmed and sodden clothes steamed. Guns were carefully cleaned and polished by thawing hands. And finally the commissary wagons appeared from somewhere and the men had breakfast.

  But one did not feel quite as one would like to feel before a major battle, Lord Eden thought, walking among his men to see that the proper preparations were being made. But then, one never did. And the consolation was that the enemy would feel no better. And he did not doubt that this would b
e a major battle, perhaps the biggest of his experience. They certainly could not retreat any farther without losing Brussels.

  The morning was a long one. Let them get started, he thought constantly, and heard as constantly on the lips of the men about him. Even though we aren’t as ready as we would like to be, let them get started.

  But when the attack did begin, all the activity was directed far to the right of their position at the crossroads. The French were trying to take the villa of Hougoumont, and the British and German defenders were just as determined that they would do no such thing.

  “Poor devils!” one rifleman commented.

  “Wisht they’d come this way,” another said, staring off to the right with narrowed eyes, though the lie of the land blocked the view of the villa from his sight.

  It was half-past one in the afternoon before the heavy French guns, amassed on the slope to the south of the allied lines, all opened fire at once in the most deadly bombardment that even the oldest veteran had ever experienced. Men died and men cursed in impotent rage. There was nothing that could be done to defend oneself against such attack. The bombardment was a sure prelude to an infantry attack, to be followed doubtless by a cavalry attack. Let them come on, then. Enough of this!

  The men of the Ninety-fifth were ordered back from the road behind a rise of land, where they could lie down in relative safety from the relentless pounding of the guns. But still men died.

  The survivors felt enormous relief and a deep, knee-weakening dread when the guns stopped suddenly and the French drums could be heard heralding the approach of infantry. And their position, which had sheltered them from the cannon, made matters more nerve-racking now, for they were crouched down behind the rise and could not see who-or what-was approaching.