Flashman's Escape

by Robert Brightwell

  The weather was bitterly cold but Wellington had spent the early part of the winter amassing a large train of siege guns and strengthening the roads to his first target. The siege began on the eighth of January and by the nineteenth the breaches in the city walls were large enough to assault. The plan of attack worked, despite the enemy laying huge mines in the breaches to destroy the brave souls that made up the first storming parties. Most of the officers leading the assault did so from the front and some paid for their bravery. Two major generals were killed in the attack: McKinnon was blown up by a mine and Bob Crauford was shot through the spine. Colborne, my old brigade commander, took a ball through the shoulder.

  But while all this shot and shell was flying about, where was the indomitable Flashy? I hear you ask. Well, all that riding about before the attack in the freezing cold had given me pneumonia. I am proud to say that while the assault was underway I was sitting in a hot mustard bath five miles away and feeling a lot better for it. I had been a coward before Albuera; but afterwards, having seen that being wounded was even worse than I imagined, I was more determined than ever to keep my battered carcass in one piece.

  There was the usual sacking of Ciudad Rodrigo after its capture. Our soldiery raged through the place, shooting, raping and looting until they had drunk themselves insensible. I waited until all that unpleasantness had died down before, wrapped in blankets, I made my way to the Montarco Palace in the city where Wellington had set up his new headquarters. That was where I met Grant again.

  I had been staying in the palace a week by then and, still unwell, had been given a room of my own. One afternoon I returned from a gentle walk around the town to find Grant standing in my room arraying a selection of washcloths and glass bottles around my washstand.

  “Ah, Flashman,” he sneered, taking in my red nose and watering eyes. “I have just had to open the window to get rid of your infected air.”

  “What the devil are you doing in my room? And take all your pots and potions from my washstand. If you think I am sharing a room with you then you can think again.”

  He smiled in triumph. “You are not sharing a room with me. Your belongings have been moved to share with some captains upstairs.”

  “What the devil…” I began, but then I noticed that Grant was pointing to the second epaulet on his coat: the bastard had been promoted to major!

  “Exactly,” declared Grant as he saw the realisation cross my face. “Other majors have been given rooms of their own and I have been given yours. You only had one because you were ill, but now you can share with the other captains. So if you will excuse me, I would like to wash off the dirt from the road.”

  I cast around for some retort before I left. “I am glad not to be sharing with you. I have never seen an officer with some many pots and washcloths. This room will soon smell like the boudoir of some painted trollop.”

  “Cleanliness is next to godliness, Flashman. You cannot expect me to wash my face with the same cloth as I wash other parts of my body. You may spend your time in filth and squalor but I do not.”

  I stormed off at that, not wanting to listen to him prattle on, and at length found myself sharing a freezing-cold attic room with four other captains. But if you think you have got one over on Flashy, you had better watch your back. They say revenge is best served cold, but in this case it was dished with a hot, burning sensation.

  It was as I looked at my own paltry collection of toiletries that I got the idea. A washcloth, a toothpick and the old bottle of liniment with just a dribble left in the bottom was not a lot to show for my cleanliness or godliness. But then I remembered that the liniment when splashed onto a more sensitive area of skin burned like an inferno. I waited until the next day when Grant went out riding with Wellington and then slipped down to my old room. There was a clean, soft cloth that I guessed Grant used for his face, but I emptied the last of the liniment onto the other one and folded it so that the thick green ooze could not be seen. Then, to cover the smell, I removed the stopper of one of his bottles of cheap cologne.

  Half an hour after Grant had returned to his room nothing had happened and I suspected that my trick had been discovered. Then as Campbell and I were sitting in the officers’ mess drinking brandy an animal bellow rent the air from one of the rooms above.

  “What on earth was that?” asked Campbell as I grinned in triumph.

  “I have no idea,” I claimed as innocently as I could manage.

  I knew from personal experience that after even the smallest splash the heat from that liniment builds longer and much more strongly than you would think possible. Grant did well staying in his room for another minute, making just the odd whimpering groan. Several had started up the stairs to investigate and were knocking on his door when it was thrown open. A wild-eyed and half-naked Grant charged, pushing all in the way aside. Campbell and I stayed in the officers’ mess, but we could hear the cries of those in the corridor outside as Grant pressed through.

  “What the devil…”

  “Don’t push me, sir…”

  “You are improperly dressed… are you insane?”

  Grant kept pushing through the throng while emitting a regular panting shriek until he got outside.

  “Come to the window,” I called to Campbell. “This is going to be good.”

  Campbell got there just in time to see Grant emerge from the front of the building. Still screeching, he ran straight to the nearest horse trough and, to the surprise of two mares drinking from it, threw himself into the icy water.

  We joined the throng of officers out in the yard standing around the trough. Grant was only wearing a shirt and was now sitting across the trough with his middle immersed. He was resting there with his eyes shut and ignoring the cacophony of questions that was being directed at him. The water was literally freezing; there were still lumps of ice in it from where the surface had been smashed that morning to allow the horses to drink. Eventually Grant gave a great sigh – the burning sensation must have been extinguished by the icy water – and looked up with still-watering eyes. Someone stepped forward from the group standing around, laughing or exclaiming, and I saw it was Guthrie.

  “Come along, old fellow,” he cried soothingly. “Let’s get you back upstairs in the warm. You are clearly not well.”

  Grant was pulled out of the trough and an old horse blanket was wrapped around his shoulders. He staggered back towards the headquarters building as though in a daze but as he got near me I could not resist goading him.

  “So, Grant,” I murmured quietly, “are you still sure that cleanliness is next to godliness?”

  He looked up at that and I watched as realisation of what I had done slowly crossed his face. “You bastard!” he yelled as he lunged towards me. “I will kill you for this.”

  Several officers helped Guthrie pull him back.

  “What on earth is he talking about?” asked Guthrie.

  “He seems to be raving. I don’t think he is right in the head,” I replied as Grant thrashed about and yelled to be released. “I was enjoying a drink with Campbell here when I heard him come down the stairs. I just came outside like everyone else.”

  Guthrie was no fool and he gave me a hard look, but then he shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I will need to give him something to calm him down.”

  With that Grant was dragged away, still kicking and screaming, and that was the last I saw of him for two months. I don’t know whether it was the icy immersion or sharing my room, but after the opiates Guthrie gave him wore off, Grant came down with pneumonia.

  It seemed sensible to not to be in Ciudad Rodrigo when the hapless major recovered. The war was moving on, but the place to which it was moving was the last place I wanted to go. Having captured the fortress guarding the northern road into Spain, Wellington now turned his attention to the one guarding the southern route: Badajoz.

  Chapter 14

  March 1812

  We had lost enough men capturing Ciudad Rodrigo, but Badajo
z was going to be a far tougher nut to crack. The river Guadiana ran along its northern ramparts and along that stretch it was nowhere less than three hundred yards wide. The town was surrounded by a wall some thirty feet high with a castle and seven smaller bastions built into the walls. Spies had told us that it had rations for two months and plenty of ammunition, while the five thousand men in the garrison had seen off British and Spanish assaults in the previous year. They had spent the intervening months strengthening every aspect of the fortress and laying mines in anticipation of our trench work that would cause carnage in the weeks ahead.

  We didn’t know about the mines then, but a child could work out that thousands of men would die trying to take the place. By the time I arrived, work was already underway digging out gun batteries and assault trenches. I realised then that I had been fortunate to have been stationed in Albuera during the preparations for the siege the previous year. It was back-breaking and brutal work, not helped by more torrential rain. There was a foot of liquid mud in most of the trenches, which made moving heavy things like siege guns almost impossible. They were often up to their axles in the ooze and had to be hauled slowly over thick planks, which then had to be dug out of the mud to use again.

  But you would be a fool to get out of the trenches, for the enemy artillery had plenty of ammunition and knew its business. Countless men lost their lives to a well-aimed cannon ball at Badajoz. I remember the first time I was given a tour of the siege works. The French must have noticed that a group of officers was moving forward and found us a tempting target. Four of their guns fired simultaneously. I had been nervously watching their gun embrasures and saw the first plume of gun smoke before I heard the discharges. I was diving behind some sandbags when the balls impacted. At first we thought no one had been hit as there had been no screams or shouts of pain. But as I pulled myself up from the muddy trench floor I saw Major Thompson’s legs lying still over the edge of the parapet. When we pulled him back into the trench we found he no longer had a head.

  Eventually the British batteries were established and work began on breaching the walls. But even then the French fought back with vigour. They seemed to have guessed in advance where we would make our assault and had dug tunnels that reached under our trenches. Twice huge mines were blown up under our earthworks, killing many and burying others alive under tons of wet mud. By the end of my first week outside Badajoz, everything I owned was covered in mud and I was plastered in it. As I was not an engineer there was little I could do to help proceedings. I volunteered to take some despatches just to get away and see a green landscape again.

  So it was that on my way back a few days later I found myself on the road through Albuera. I had not meant to visit the battlefield, but once I was in sight of that ridge on which I had so nearly died, I felt myself drawn to it. The village was deserted as I rode through but I sensed I was being watched. Certainly some of the villagers had come back as there were signs of repairs to the buildings and some fields had been dug. I did not stop but pointed my horse up the ridge. There a scene of decayed devastation met my eyes. The ground was littered with grey bones, some lying loose on the ground, others protruding from mass graves. In one ditch there had been an effort to cremate some bodies but there had not been enough fuel. The head is the hardest part of a body to burn and a pile of blackened skulls lay in the bottom of an ash-covered pit. I saw the area where the men of my company had been buried, but I could not bring myself to go close to it. I preferred to remember them at peace being buried. I did not want to see that the grave had been disturbed by wild animals like most of the others.

  I was in a macabre mood when I returned to the siege works, which was not improved by what I found there. Word had come through that the French were gathering their armies to lift the siege and Wellington had decided to launch the attack without further delay. The assault was set for ten o’clock that night and I cursed myself for coming back a day too soon.

  All the talk at the headquarters was centred around whether the breaches were yet large enough for an attack to be successful. Several of the more experienced hands, including an artillery colonel, were insisting that they needed at least another three days to guarantee a safe assault on the city. But with rumours of Marshal Soult approaching from the east and possibly Marshal Marmont from the north, Wellington could not afford to give them that long.

  The gunners were still pounding away when Campbell and I rode down to look, from a safe distance. As I levelled my telescope at the city walls I could see that there were already three breaches but only two were big enough to consider. All of our guns were now concentrating on those two breaches, giving the enemy the clearest signal which ones we were planning to use. In front of the wall was a stone-faced ramp called a glacis; this was intended to deflect shot from the bottom of the wall. Normally an assault would not be started until the glacis had also been destroyed in front of the breach. Once a glacis was flattened the gunners could get at the bottom of the fortifications and fill in with rubble any ditch between the glacis and the wall. While it was pock marked with shot holes, the glacis in front of all the breaches was intact, which meant that the lower part of the wall behind it was as well.

  “I would not want to be part of the forlorn hope that goes first into those,” I declared with feeling. The men first into a breach were volunteers, who were known as a forlorn hope. If they survived then they could expect honours and promotion.

  “No, it promises to be a bloody affair,” agreed Campbell. “But we took Ciudad Rodrigo with the glacis still intact and so we should be able to do the same here.”

  “Where will you be tonight?” I asked.

  “Wellington has asked me to watch the first assault and then report back to him on how it is going.” The brave oaf actually sounded disappointed to be missing out on more of the action. Then he brightened and turned to me. “Why don’t you join me? Then one of us can go back with a first report, while the other watches a bit longer.”

  My first reaction was that I wanted to be nowhere near that assault party tonight. But then I thought that if I did not join Campbell, I could be given a far more dangerous duty instead. Wellington was under the impression that I liked nothing more than risking life and limb on a daring mission. If he knew I was back and available for orders, he might give me command of the forlorn hope as some kind of treat! In comparison to that, acting as an observer sounded relatively safe. We would be standing to the rear and I would volunteer to be the bearer of the first message, which would get me safely away from the action. So I agreed, and if the next few hours turned out to be a living nightmare, well at least I am still alive to talk about them, which is more than can be said for many.

  The French would have had to have been deaf and blind not to have known that an assault was coming that night or where it was directed. All day we had poured shot towards the largest breaches. While they had got a little bigger, there was still a very steep pile of rubble leading up to the gaps in the wall that were halfway up its height. Most of the gun fire ceased at dusk when it was hard to see where the shots landed, but one or two continued to deter the French from interfering with these breaks in their defences. Lanterns could be seen moving about on the piles of rubble in front of the breaches as the garrison prepared for the anticipated assault.

  If the French were showing lights, they were not the only ones. Our attack force had started to assemble at dusk, when there was still some light, to avoid the deepest puddles in the trenches. But it took ages for the men to work their way forward, slipping and sliding in the mud. Soon countless lanterns and torches could be seen making their way across the muddy terrain. Like a swarm of fireflies in the darkness, they gradually congregated in the trenches dug for the assault. They made an irresistible target for the French gunners, and while they could not see where their balls landed, they kept up a steady fire in the direction of the lights.

  I left it as late as I could before we made our way down to the trenches. By then it
was pitch dark and the mud in the earthworks was so churned up by the men who had gone before that it was easier and probably safer to walk on the ground above. We had a shaded lantern to show the way and we managed to get to within a few hundred yards of where the men were gathered before we found a trench blocking our route. As I held the lantern over it to see how deep it was a sea of nervous faces stared back up at me.

  “Good luck, you fellows,” called Campbell cheerily. “Is there a way down?”

  The men reached up and helped us into the trench. The sides were slick with wet mud, and once we were in it we could not easily climb back out. We had no choice but to walk along its length. Campbell led the way and was positively jolly with everyone he met, slapping men on the back or shaking their hand and wishing them well. I was sure that he genuinely envied them their chance for glory. We could not see their faces clearly, but most we met were quiet in nervous anticipation. They knew that a good number of them were likely to be dead in the next few hours.

  We made slow progress through the crowded trenches, but then I became aware of a movement in the men behind us. There were shouts of “Make way!” and I could see people squeezing themselves to the sides of the earthwork to make room for someone important. At first I thought it was Wellington come to take a final look at the preparations for the attack. But then the last few men parted and standing in front of me was the scowling face of Picton. At least this time he was properly dressed in his general’s uniform; the last time Campbell and I had seen him face the enemy, at Busaco, he had been wearing a nightshirt and cap.

  “You two again, eh,” he growled while he surveyed us with his steely blue eyes. He was a frightening figure and even then he made me feel like we were doing something wrong. “What the devil are you doing back here?” he barked in an accusatory tone.

  Even Campbell gulped slightly before replying. “We are observers, sir. We are to report to General Wellington on the progress of the attack.”