Flashman’s Escape
Robert Brightwell
This book is dedicated to my brother John Brightwell, another Flashman fan.
Copyright © Robert Brightwell 2014
Robert Brightwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This ebook may not be reproduced or copied except for the use of the original purchaser.
Flashman’s Escape
Introduction
This is the fourth instalment of the memoirs of the Georgian Englishman Thomas Flashman, which were recently discovered on a well-known auction website. Thomas is the uncle of the notorious Victorian rogue Harry Flashman, whose memoirs have already been published, edited by George MacDonald Fraser. Like his nephew, Thomas has the uncanny knack of involving himself, often reluctantly, with some of the key events and characters of his age.
This packet of memoirs covers the second half of his experiences in the Peninsular War and follows on from Flashman in the Peninsula. While it can be read as a stand-alone novel, if you are planning to read both, it is recommended that you read Flashman in the Peninsula first.
Having lost his role as a staff officer, Flashman finds himself commanding a company in an infantry battalion. In between cuckolding his soldiers and annoying his superiors, he finds himself at the heart of the two bloodiest actions of the war. With drama and disaster in equal measure, he provides a first-hand account of not only the horror of battle but also the bloody aftermath.
Hopes for a quieter life backfire horribly when he is sent behind enemy lines to help recover an important British prisoner, who also happens to be a hated rival. His adventures take him the length of Spain and all the way to Paris on one of the most audacious wartime journeys ever undertaken. With the future of the French empire briefly placed in his quaking hands, Flashman dodges lovers, angry fathers, conspirators and ministers of state in a desperate effort to keep his cowardly carcass in one piece. This extraordinary account brings together various historical events, while also giving a disturbing insight into the creation of a French literary classic!
As editor I have restricted myself to checking the historical accuracy of the scarcely credible facts detailed in the book and adding a series of notes at the end to provide more information on the characters and events featured.
The memoirs of Thomas’s more famous nephew, Harry Flashman, edited by George MacDonald Fraser, are as always strongly recommended.
RDB
Chapter 1
A few miles from Lisbon, March 1811
“So where have you sent my husband this time?” asked Lucy as she pinched out the candle on the trunk that served as a bedside table in my tent.
“Oh, I had to send him to headquarters to see if he could get more boot soles. The men’s boots are already in a sorry state.”
“Yes, but he is getting sent on so many errands lately that he thinks his new captain does not like him.” She giggled and snuggled even closer against me on the narrow cot bed.
“I like Corporal Benton well enough; it is just that I like his wife even more.” I put my arm around her and pulled her tight towards me. Apart from the obvious carnal pleasures of being with Lucy, which we had just enjoyed, the shared body warmth on a cold night like this was useful too.
“Will he back tomorrow?” Lucy asked before yawning loudly.
“Yes, I suppose so,” I replied gloomily.
It was not the done thing for officers to enjoy the soldiers’ wives, but Lucy had been giving me licentious looks since I was first appointed as captain of her husband’s company. Benton was a good corporal, if a little too earnest. While Lucy loved him in her own way, he had evidently not been doing enough to please her under the blankets.
As soon as I had looked over the camp followers of my company, she had caught my eye. There were just six official wives on the strength, drawn in a lottery to accompany the regiment when it left England. But since then most of the remaining men had acquired Spanish or Portuguese women. Lucia da Silva was now Lucy Benton, and if they were not officially married in the eyes of the army, they were in the eyes of the men. This was why the philandering captain of Benton’s company had to be discrete.
“Do you think we will fight the French soon?” murmured Lucy into the crook of my shoulder.
“I don’t know. We have not seen a Frenchman yet and no one knows what state their army will be in when we do catch up with them.”
It was just the sixth day of a new campaign which was expected to turn around our fortunes in Spain and Portugal. While we had spent a winter in good quarters behind the lines of the Torres Vedras forts, starvation and disease had finally forced the French to withdraw. Now the British were advancing again.
Aside from Corporal Benton moaning about his various errands, the rest of the men were in high spirits. As with the start of any campaign there was the usual wild optimism of being in Madrid by the summer. Looking back on that time, I thank God we cannot see into the future. For many of those men who laughed and joked about the coming victories would be dead in a few weeks, and those of us who survived often had cause to wish we hadn’t.
As Lucy snored quietly into my neck I reflected on recent events. The French had initially thought that they had the British army trapped and besieged, when they drove it towards Lisbon the previous autumn. But as a bitterly cruel winter had set in they slowly realised that the positions had been reversed. First they discovered that the British had built an impregnable line of forts along the Torres Vedras hills. Behind these fortifications we had lived in comfort, either in the forts or the houses of Lisbon, and well supplied with food by ship. Our ‘besiegers’ soon found themselves cut off from other French armies when the harsh weather blocked the mountain passes, and then the cold, disease and pitiless partisans had steadily taken their toll. Wellington had expected the French to pull back after six weeks but they had scavenged and searched for food to stay for six months. Deserters who managed to reach the British lines had told tales of whole companies wiped out by a combination of starvation and pneumonia, while their accounts of silently murdered sentries and missing patrols showed that partisans and the local population were exacting a gruesome revenge for the brutal methods used by the French to find hidden food.
Many of the British officers had been pressing Wellington to advance against the weakened French for weeks but he had been content to wait. “Let ‘General Winter’ do his work, gentleman,” he had repeatedly intoned, and it had been one of the harshest winters that anyone could remember. His reluctance may also have had something to do with the fact that he was being entertained by one of the finest courtesans in Lisbon. I know because I introduced him and had spent much of that winter with her sister. You would be a fool to leave either of their beds prematurely. But now that the French had pulled back, the British commander had no choice but to pursue them, taking his army with him.
That meant exchanging a warm house for a freezing tent, although as Lucy shifted against me I had to admit that there were compensations. Life was even tougher for the rest of the company as there were only tents for the officers; the rest had to sleep in the open or under whatever cover they could find. For a British regiment this did not just mean the men. There were a similar number of their women and children, and even a menagerie of animals, mostly goats for milk. There was also a handful of dogs including Boney, my Irish wolfhound, who was curled up just beyond the tent door.
I had been with my new regiment, known as the Buffs, for nearly a week. We had spent all that time marching through the barren Portuguese countryside and for the most part it was a pretty miserable existence. People imagine that when a British army is on the march it is all neat rows of men in red marching in time, with ca
mp followers coming on behind, if at all. Well, it might be if Wellington or some other general is expected, but when the company is marching alone things are rather different.
The next afternoon I scanned my new command, from the dozen men who were marching at our head to the fecund Private Carter bringing up the rear with his wife, babe in arms and two small children. The column must have stretched out a quarter of a mile and that was just our company. Several were limping as there was a serious need for boot repairs; Benton’s latest mission was not just to get him out of the way.
My boots were fine, but then I had not been walking. Lieutenant Hervey and I were mounted on decent horses, while a scrawny mule pulled a cart in the middle of the throng loaded with regimental supplies and a handful of tired children. Riding might sound better than walking, but there were disadvantages; especially when it was biting cold and your muscles had got out of the habit of spending a long time in the saddle. After just six days of living out in the open, I was feeling every sympathy for the French. How they could have survived a winter in this freezing wilderness was beyond me. I had lost feeling in most of my body, either through cold or the hard leather of the saddle. The sensation from my nether regions left me wondering if I would ever be able to perform in the bedroom again. I shifted myself in the saddle and felt a searing burst of pins and needles through my bollocks, while my manhood felt completely numb. With Benton back I knew I would have to forgo the arousing massage that Lucy had given me the night before.
The sergeant, noticing my discomfort, called out, “The men could do with stopping for a rest soon, sir. That stone church in the next village could provide some hospitalisation.”
I grimaced in pain as I replied, “I think you mean hospitality, but I doubt there will be any of that as we have not seen a living soul since we set out.” Every village we had passed so far had been torn down and burnt by the retreating British last autumn to deny shelter to the French. This was the first one we had seen with buildings still standing.
“We should continue until the major calls the regiment to a halt,” Lieutenant Hervey said down his nose at the sergeant. “He will want all of the companies to camp together.”
“Damn your uncle,” I gasped as the pins and needles got worse. “We will stop when we get to that church. It is getting late and I am not walking past stone walls and a roof to camp in the open when it is this cold.”
I glanced around me. The army was not marching in a column but spread out across the country. The French had retreated on a broad front, and while scouts monitored their withdrawal, the British army was advancing on an equally broad front. If the French had abandoned cannon and other equipment, Wellington wanted the British to have it. Two more companies of the Buffs were in view on either side of us, but I thought we should be the first to that church.
“Now hold this wretched horse,” I called to the sergeant. “I need to get down and walk for a bit.”
He held the bridle and for a moment I thought my legs were so stiff that they would not allow me to dismount. But with a grunt of effort I managed to swing my right foot over the horse’s rump and drop to stand, slightly bow-legged, on the ground.
“Do you want me to ride your horse up to the church, sir?”
Ensign Price-Thomas was the third officer of the company. Despite being a lad of only fifteen, he had more experience of the regiment than his captain and his lieutenant put together. He had been orphaned as a young boy and raised by his aunt who was married to one of the regimental surgeons. I had planned to let the mare have a rest going up the hill, but the ensign weighed next to nothing and so I nodded my assent.
“Yes, ride up there and make sure our men claim that church before any of those other companies.”
Not being able to afford a horse of his own, Price-Thomas always took the opportunity to ride someone else’s. He was up in the saddle in a flash and was soon galloping the horse up the slope.
“You might have been able to do what you wanted when you were a staff officer, but now you are with the regiment there is a chain of command.” Lieutenant Hervey looked down at me from his saddle. “The major will want to know why this company is not with the rest of the regiment when it bivouacs tonight.”
“And I am sure you will tell him,” I retorted.
For all his talk of chain of command, Hervey did not hesitate to pull family strings with his uncle, the major, when it suited him. Lieutenant Hervey had been acting as company captain over the winter, when he had commanded it almost entirely from the officers’ mess. He resented having me dropped in as the new captain above him; but he did not resent it half as much as I did.
I had been sitting comfortably on Wellington’s staff, basking in my largely unearned credit. As far as my brother officers knew I had saved the army from ambush at Talavera and then brought detailed intelligence of the French army, all while disguised in enemy uniform. While my work had met general acclaim, a fastidious bastard called Grant had poured scorn on my achievements. He had claimed that to use a disguise was dishonourable. Now that same bumptious little swine had usurped my place in Wellington’s favour. He had taken my place on the staff and as a result I was posted to be a line officer in the Buffs.
“The major says that this is the most poorly turned out company in the regiment,” continued Hervey. “If Loquacious spent more time inspecting and less time reading, things would be a lot better. The man is an embarrassment. He has no idea what he is saying half of the time.”
He was referring to the sergeant who was notorious for trying to improve his vocabulary, not always successfully. Whoever had taught him to read had given him a dictionary, which the man studied with the same enthusiasm that a cleric might use on the Bible. His real name was Sergeant Evans, but when Hervey introduced him the lieutenant gave me a wink and said, “We call him Loquacious after the great Roman emperor.” If there had been a Roman emperor of that name I had been asleep in class when they had taught it; but I did know that the word meant verbose and wordy. Judging from the stony, blank look on the sergeant’s face as his lieutenant grinned at him, I guessed that the sergeant had also looked up the word himself. I had learnt in India, when I was first reluctantly recruited into the army, what happens when you annoy a good sergeant and I was not making that mistake again.
“He keeps the bayonets sharp and runs a good musket drill,” I told Hervey as we walked alone. “The men respect him and that is what counts.”
“Well, I think the man is a fool.” With that Hervey viciously stabbed his spurs into his tired horse and galloped up the hill towards the church.
I was glad to be left alone with my thoughts. I gave a grunt as I stretched my back to loosen stiff muscles while Boney trotted up alongside and nuzzled my hand. Pulling up my greatcoat collar against the biting cold wind, I reflected on how my circumstances had changed over recent weeks. While my cheeks froze, my innards burned with anger against the man whose success had relegated me to regimental duties.
The worst of it was that I had encouraged Grant to go on the mission that had brought him renown throughout the army. Hell, I had even wagered fifty guineas to tempt him. It was a ridiculous plan and I had been sure that he would end up with a French musket ball between his shoulder blades or captured. Either way he would have been out of my hair.
As the French had started to starve in their encampments, Grant had been whining about the lack of fresh meat and being forced to eat salt beef brought in by the navy. “There are plenty of cattle in the hills to the north of the French positions, guarded by the partisans,” I told him. “You can always ride through the French army and up into the hills, to bring some back down past the French again. If you think you can do all that, I would pay to see it.”
We had all laughed at his expense that night. No one thought it could be done – well, almost no one. Imagine my surprise next morning when we heard that Grant had seen Wellington to propose the scheme; and that this normally sensible man had offered him a bag of gold
to pay for the cattle if he got through.
He left late the following afternoon, wearing his British uniform and on fast horse, hoping to get through the French lines in the dark. Having attempted the same feat less than six months previously, I knew this was no easy thing even in a French uniform. Surely, I thought, the French would not let a British officer ride clean through their lines twice, especially when on the way back he would be bringing livestock past the now hungry men in blue. Several of us rode to see him off and, in my case, make sure he did not back out on the wager. He really did not have a clue what he was doing; he had not even brought a proper map, just some notes on a scrap of paper. I could not help but chuckle at the thought of him riding through the middle of a French encampment as the sun rose the next day.
I wasn’t laughing three weeks later when we received reports, sent down the semaphore signalling stations from the forward sentries, that a herd of cattle was approaching. I could not believe it. My friend Campbell and I joined some of the other staff to ride out and see for ourselves. There coming through the first line of fortifications we found an exceedingly smug Captain Colquhoun Grant, with a watchful partisan riding by his side. Behind them were sixty head of cattle with a couple of drovers moving them along. Beyond those a long mule train could be seen lumbering up the slope under a burden of grain sacks, and behind those the start of a flock of sheep, again with more mounted drovers. It was an astonishing sight, especially given that all of it must have been driven through the hungry French army.
As the other officers rode forward to congratulate Grant, Campbell turned to me. “There is something not quite canny about this.”
“Not canny!” I exploded. “This smells fishier than Billingsgate fish market. For Christ’s sake, the cattle are still wearing their bells. My aged, deaf Aunt Agatha could have heard them coming, so why couldn’t the French?” I wasn’t exaggerating either: while a few of the bells were made of thin metal, the rest were of the wooden clacker variety, but they still made a lot of noise as the herd moved towards us.
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