‘Hargreaves,’ Dobson said, seeing the direction in which the officer was looking. The veteran pulled back the hammer to full cock and brought his firelock up to his shoulder, searching for a target.
Williams had not realised that MacAndrews’ men had formed part of the charge. Rodriguez said something to Dobson and the two men fired together, the Spaniard grunting in satisfaction. Faintly, Williams caught the sound of drums, which meant that the main columns of French infantry were catching up with their skirmishers. He doubted that the ragged bunch of men on top of the hill could resist a full attack. Then he looked behind and saw that the companies of the 52nd were already crossing the bridge, squeezing past the two tumbrels blocking the middle span.
A big man in the green of the 95th was talking to MacAndrews. The pair shook hands in satisfaction, and Williams recognised Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith and guessed that he had probably led his own charge up the hill at the same time as the major.
‘The Ninety-fifth will form the rearguard!’ MacAndrews shouted, walking his horse towards them. In the distance, Beckwith’s voice boomed out the same instruction. ‘Everyone else will come with me back across the bridge. Keep it slow, lads, there is no need to rush. We’ve shown these blackguards that they need to keep their distance!’
Men obeyed. They all felt the tiredness that so often followed a charge or a hard-fought combat and some swayed as they walked back down the slope. MacAndrews’ horse stumbled for the first time, and he lurched forward and almost lost his balance before the animal recovered. Men slipped on the soft sandy slope more than they had during the charge.
‘Hot work,’ Pringle said as he walked beside Williams, and then the stones gave way under his left boot and he lost his balance, falling and rolling for three or four yards.
‘Bugger,’ he said, sitting up. ‘Can anyone see my glasses?’
Williams, Dobson and Rodriguez stopped to look, but told the surprising number of other willing volunteers to keep going. Pringle was on all fours, but his eyesight was poor and he felt rather than looked for the spectacles. Already most of MacAndrews’ men were filing on to the road. There were shots from up above them, growing in intensity, and Williams guessed that the French were beginning to press forward again. Something crunched underfoot and with terrible certainty he knew that he had found the missing glasses. One lens was cracked, and the brass arms bent, although that could be remedied. Pringle put them on, shutting the eye behind the broken lens so that he could see.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s quite ruined my battle.’
The 95th began to come back down the hill. On the bridge the Royal Horse Artillery lieutenant and his men had almost finished replacing the broken wheel.
‘Hold them back for a few minutes!’ he called. Williams and the others helped his men keep the horse team calm as Beckwith led most of his men across. A captain stayed with his company, the forty or so riflemen using the parapets for cover and firing back up the hill now reoccupied by the enemy. Bullets pecked the stonework and one hit a private in the foot. His comrades grinned as he hopped and angrily cursed the French, but then two of them took him back.
At last the repair was complete. The drivers urged the team onwards, gently at first to test the new wheel, but when it seemed solid they whipped them and hurried across, followed by the second cart. The little group of redcoats and the company of 95th ran after them. As Williams and the others came to the far bank, he saw a wall above them lined by Portuguese soldiers with their oddly shaped shakos. There were greenjackets crouched among the ruins of a house and several formed companies from the redcoats of the light infantry. More men waited as a chain of skirmishers, using all the boulders and folds in the ground for cover.
MacAndrews waited for them, Beckwith beside him again. ‘This way,’ he said. ‘They want us to get up to the top of the hill.’
‘You have more than played your part already,’ the colonel of the 95th added in his deep voice.
As they followed the road, Williams saw guns of the Chestnut Troop already deployed for action and waiting to pound the far side of the valley or sweep the bridge.
Twenty minutes later the French sent three companies of grenadiers across the bridge. Williams watched from high up on the slope and so did not see the details. He saw the smoke blossom all along the hillside beneath him, heard the cracks of rifles, the duller bangs of muskets and the deep-throated roar of six-pounders. The French fired as well, and the shape of the valley made the noise echo back and forth, but it was hard to pick out the British and Portuguese in their places of cover.
The grenadiers were in open view, with only the slight protection of the walls on either side of the bridge. They came on boldly, led by a couple of officers, one of them on horseback, and although a few men fell they were still running when they got halfway across the bridge. Then the attack withered. Williams saw the column shudder as if it were a single being, suddenly hit with great force. The mounted officer was down. The one on foot ran on, but only a handful came with him and soon they were pinned down, crawling for safety among the boulders below the western side of the bridge. Behind them blue-coated bodies piled in mounds on the flagstones.
31
‘I want that bridge.’ Marshal Ney flicked his gloves impatiently against his hip, startling his horse as he looked down into the valley. He calmed her almost as unthinkingly as he had startled her in the first place. ‘Full-strength attack this time, with two battalions of the Sixty-sixth.’ The colonel trotted away to prepare his columns. ‘I want as many guns as possible to support.’
‘Don’t think we will hit much, your grace,’ the battery commander said doubtfully.
‘Doesn’t matter. It may keep their heads down and it will perk up our lads.’
‘Your grace.’ The horse artilleryman rode a mule, and it took him a while to get the stubborn animal moving so that he could give the necessary orders.
Marshal Ney grinned with all the friendliness of a wolf. ‘Dalmas.’
The cuirassier officer clicked his heels as he stood to attention.
‘Lost another one, have you?’
‘Yes, your grace. Broke its legs coming down the slope.’
‘Better it than you.’
‘Yes, your grace.’ Dalmas had shot the beast. He had done this more than a few times before, because horses wore out, but even after all these years a part of him was always sad. The Emperor’s armies used up horses at a prodigious rate, and sometimes he wondered whether one day there would be no more remounts to replace them.
‘You’ve done well today. Nearly cut them off.’ Dalmas felt there was an emphasis on the ‘nearly’ and guessed what was going to happen. He did not offer any explanation or excuse. Winning was what counted, and although he had won a succession of little victories earlier on, the final failure was all that would matter.
Marshal Ney pointed across the valley. ‘I want to break them, Dalmas. Take their confidence now and they will not stand up to us again. Sixth Corps are the finest regiments at the Emperor’s command and with lads like these you can do anything.
‘You didn’t get their spy.’ Dalmas remembered that just a few hours ago the marshal had said he did not give a damn about spies. It did not surprise him. He would have done the same if he were a marshal of France. ‘So you need a victory Dalmas.’
The cuirassier felt that he might as well play the game. ‘Your grace, I ask permission to lead the attack on the bridge.’
Marshal Ney tried and failed to feign surprise. ‘That is good. I need my best man to do this.’ After almost two years Dalmas was still a temporary ADC, without the full pay and privileges of the permanent staff. ‘Lead the Sixty-sixth. You won’t need a horse for that! Take them over the bridge and drive the rosbifs off at the point of the bayonet.
‘It is simple, Dalmas.’ The marshal reached down to pat him on the shoulder. ‘Storm the bridge and you will be a major by the end of the day, and have your own regiment within two years. Who knows
?’ Ney smiled again, taking his hand away and waving it in the air. ‘One day a general or even a marshal!’
Dalmas brought his bloodstained sword up in salute.
‘I can see I have chosen the right man. Take that bridge at any price and do it quickly.’
It took half an hour to form the regiment up on the approach road, where they were at least sheltered from the sporadic shots coming from the far bank. The companies were formed six abreast, for no more than that could fit on the bridge.
‘The cross of the legion to the first men over!’ General Ferey promised the men as he inspected them.
Dalmas hoped that luck was real and that he still had plenty of it. He had dispensed with his cuirass, but kept the helmet and had no choice but to wear his high cavalry boots. They were not designed for running, but there were too many corpses on the bridge to try to ride across. It did not matter. If he could keep his men going, then speed itself was not so important. An attack like this would succeed if the enemy believed that it was unstoppable. The British must crack, or this column would be mown down like grass before the scythe, just as in the first assault. They needed luck, and they needed the British to be so unnerved by being chased from one position to another and hustled over the river that they would break. Dalmas had seen it often enough in cavalry charges, had seen enemy lines slow, and then seem almost to shiver as horses began to turn. Press on then, and the enemy would flee and those who did not go fast enough would easily be chopped from their saddles.
He turned to look beside him. The grenadier companies were too badly mauled to head this fresh attack and so the men behind him were the fusiliers, who formed the bulk of any regiment. Almost all had the moustaches of veterans. They looked tough, confident men, and Dalmas suspected that if anyone could win this fight then it was these soldiers.
Jean-Baptiste Dalmas raised his sword high.
‘Vive l’empereur!’ he shouted. The men took up the cry and the drummers began to beat. Above them on the valley sides, voltigeurs fired at the far bank and a moment later the battery of horse artillery vomited smoke and noise.
Dalmas walked forward, not looking back now and trusting the infantrymen to follow. He went down the curving road, and then turned sharply. Now he could see the bridge ahead of him, its three big arches curving over the steep and rocky ravine. The road turned to the right as it joined the bridge, and there were dozens of corpses stretched out on the stones.
‘En avant!’ he called, and began to jog forward in his clumsy boots. Behind him the drummers hammered their drums and the sound of steady marching turned into a pounding of feet as the men followed him. The cuirassier ran on, jumping one corpse, but then landing on another man’s hand, and the grenadier yelled out in pain even as he clutched at the wound in his stomach.
‘Vive l’empereur!’ The noise of the battalion raising the shout bounced up off the valley sides.
Then the enemy opened fire and for a moment the great roar of cannon, volleys of musketry and individual shots drowned out everything else. Pieces of canister and bullets smacked into the walls and surface of the bridge. Men fell in the column, and sometimes they tripped the men behind. Other infantrymen toppled when they slipped on the blood and entrails of those killed in the first attack.
The column kept going. With a reverberating clang, Dalmas’ head was jerked back as a ball punched through the brass of his helmet’s crest holder. He staggered, reached out to steady himself on the top of the wall, and was narrowly missed by a bullet which flicked the stonework. Some of the infantrymen were passing him, and that was no good, so he made himself run on again, his skin cut where the brass chin-scales had driven into it with the force of the strike. The black horsehair crest was badly torn, and flapped against the back of his helmet as he went.
A six-pound round shot skimmed over the parapet and took the heads off two of his men, smashing them to pieces like overripe pumpkins. He could hear the screams of other men being hit behind him. There was red-hot pain in his side as a bullet grazed him, breaking a rib so that his breathing became painful.
Dalmas ran on. The bridge seemed far longer than it had looked from up above, but he was nearing the end now, where it turned sharply on to the bank. A sergeant running beside him dropped face forward, one moment a vigorous, charging soldier, and the next falling with all the life of a sack of turnips.
There were no more cheers, and he could not hear the drums, but the cuirassier officer staggered on. At the end of the bridge he looked behind him and saw that his men were almost all corpses or had fallen back to the west bank. Only four were still with him, and then it was three as one soldier’s head was flung back, his forehead bright with blood. Someone called to him, and he led them down off the road and into the big rocks beside it. The survivors of the first attack were there, not daring even to fire up the slopes.
Dalmas flung himself down and leaned his back against a rock, each breath painful. His right wrist hurt and when he looked at his sword he could see that the blade was bent from the strike of a bullet that must have wrenched the hilt in his hand, but he could not remember it.
‘Bridges,’ he said softly as balls pinged off the rock behind him. He did not have good luck with bridges.
Williams and the others trudged up the hill. They passed a group of four greenjackets carrying young Simmons. The boy was obviously in great pain, and the soldiers carried him in a blanket, moving as gently as possible to spare him.
Brigadier General Craufurd and his staff rode past, going back down towards the fighting. A third French attack had been repulsed, but the two sides still fired at each other across the valley.
‘Leave him!’ Black Bob called to the 95th. ‘Let him lie here until later. You are needed in the fight.’
One of the greenjackets was a corporal and he looked up. ‘This is an officer of ours,’ he said, ‘and we must see him in safety before we leave him.’ The group walked on, ignoring the divisional commander.
Williams expected a burst of outrage, and was surprised when the general simply nudged with his heels and went on his way down the hill with his staff. He nodded to MacAndrews, but said no more.
‘I would never have believed it,’ Williams said once the senior officers were out of earshot.
Hanley had stayed behind. ‘It is a strange day. Ten minutes ago I watched the general ask General Picton to march his Third Division up to support us here. He refused, and the two of them glared at each other for a few minutes, and then bade farewell as if nothing had happened.’
‘Nothing he could do,’ Pringle said, all but winking at them as he screwed the eye closed behind his broken lens. ‘The French won’t get across the river.’
Hanley pursed his lips. ‘The general seems less certain.’
‘The bridge is piled high with their dead,’ Williams said, fighting the urge to wink back at his short-sighted friend. ‘No point turning his men out and marching them here for the sake of it. The river will hold the enemy back until the level drops. Almeida is cut off, though.’
‘Well, another siege for the French. That should hold them for a while.’
‘I don’t know what else will,’ Pringle said gloomily.
The sky had grown darker and darker as they climbed up out of the valley, MacAndrews’ little command united again. As they came to the top, lightning flashed its harsh white light to crack on a hilltop to the north. The rain came in heavy drops before the thunder rolled towards them. In moments it slammed into the ground, as heavy as the storm the night before, drenching them quickly. MacAndrews kept patting his horse to calm the frightened animal.
In the valley behind them, the power of nature quickly blotted out the violence of man, and the guns, muskets and rifles fell silent.
EPILOGUE
‘Colonel Murray tells me that Wellington cannot bring himself to blame Craufurd,’ Baynes said, his face a mask that made it unclear whether or not he agreed. ‘He believes he meant well, and that the error was one of judgeme
nt, not intention.’
Hanley said nothing. Instead he looked at the people walking beside the road. They were from the villages all around, and they trudged south towards Lisbon, their heads down and great bundles of possessions on their backs.
‘As it turns out it rather looks as if Marshal Ney was not supposed to have attacked either. The French high command do not appear to be the happiest of families.’ The merchant looked at the long lines of refugees, all of them weary and dirty from travel.
‘This is an ancient defence in this country.’ Baynes smiled at a young woman carrying a bird in a cage and wearing a silk dress that was probably her finest and so the one she would save. The hem was several inches above the ankle in the local style, but was still spattered with mud. She must have removed shoes and stockings for her feet were bare and dirty. ‘They are to leave nothing for the invader to use. No food, no stores, and not even firewood to burn.
‘It is humbling, don’t you think? They abandon their homes, and sacrifice everything to save their country.’
‘But will they?’ Hanley asked.
‘Lord Wellington believes they will.’ Once again the merchant’s tone was hard to read. ‘And so he invokes the old laws. Those who do not wish to go are made to leave.’
‘Not so willing a sacrifice, then.’ Hanley tried to ignore the plaintive looks of the people they passed. The two Englishmen were on horseback, not tramping on with what was left of their lives and homes on their backs. The corpulent Baynes scarcely looked as if he ever did without his comforts.
‘A sacrifice none the less. Marshal Masséna is about to learn what it is to see a whole army starve.’
All in Scarlet Uniform (Napoleonic War 4) Page 33
