A Close Run Thing

CHAPTER THREE. THE DIVIDEND OF PEACE

St George’s Day

Since the raising of the regiment, on 23 April 1760 (to consolidate the triumph of the gallant, and late, General Wolfe over the French on the Heights of Abraham), every man of the 6th Light Dragoons had worn a red rose in his head-dress on St George’s Day. Even during the worst of the recent campaigns the Sixth had maintained the tradition, and that morning bud-roses were distributed at muster, as was the custom, by the commanding officer. But at ten o’clock, after watering parade, the major broke with tradition (and thereby instituted a new and cherished custom), for, as the regiment mustered one last time at the Convent of St Mary of Magdala, Edmonds dismounted at the appearance of the elderly abbess and with great gallantry presented her with his rose. And by the time the Sixth had reached the city’s north gate a remarkable number of roses had been plucked from shakos and handed to women of the town — so many, in fact, that Edmonds began to wonder in what state of discipline his regiment had truly been during its ostensible period of interior economy those several past weeks.

Hervey’s rose did not remain in his shako beyond the convent’s courtyard, for as his troop formed threes and wheeled into column he saw Sister Maria at an open window near the arched entrance. Breaking ranks and trotting over, he stood at full stretch in the stirrups and presented her with the deep-red bloom whose petals were no longer primly clasped. And she in turn presented him with a smile equally open, and a sign of benediction.

‘I cannot say that I am sorry to be leaving this place,’ said Laming as Hervey rejoined his file. ‘None of this sisterhood ever looked like praying with their knees upward.’

Hervey sighed. His fellow cornet held the vow of chastity in scant regard after Spain. Laming’s own rose was gone by the time their troop had left the elegant square outside the convent, and in truth he had need of three more before they were clear of the city walls. And as they left this place, whose welcome had been as warm as it had been surprising, their minds turned once more to those who were unable to join that final march. The bones of 150 dragoons, and more, lay in pits, or whitening on bare hillsides between Corunna and Toulouse, for it had been four years since the regiment had left Southampton, and of the 600 or so who had landed in the Peninsula that day in May 1810 almost half had been killed, or wounded, or else evacuated home sick — broken men with scant likelihood of entire recovery. Some of these invalids might by now have acquired a skill with which a cripple could eke out a living. Others might have become in-pensioners at one of the veterans’ establishments. Many more would be reduced to begging in the streets, desperate to avoid the workhouse. Some would, without doubt, have found themselves back in the jails whence they had been all but impressed, or to avoid which they had elected to enlist — ‘paying with the drum’. The horses had fared even worse. There were scarcely four score of the original 600 (and a dozen more of these would fail to finish this march): ‘You would have thought that someone in the Treasury might have been discomposed,’ said Hervey. ‘What economy is it to deny us a new saddle at forty shillings, only to have us replace the wretched animal itself a month later at thirty pounds when its back is done?’

‘My dear Hervey, you and I know that our boast as a nation of horsemasters amounts to little more than that a few stud-grooms know their business,’ Laming replied, taking Hervey aback by the unusual candour of his opinion.

If it had been left to Edmonds, then further loss might at least have been avoided, but the decision to march to the Channel ports had, in his view, been the final testimony that no-one cared in the least measure for man or beast now that Bonaparte had been brought down, and his anger had been profound and brooding as a consequence. Had it not been for Barrow, so rumour in the squadrons held, Edmonds would have knocked down the staff captain in Wellington’s headquarters (which he had visited in spite of Heroys’s advice to the contrary) when that officer loftily dismissed him with the explanation that they were marching to Boulogne to spare the horses the distress of the passage through the Bay of Biscay. But why they should now be taking so indirect a route, avoiding the towns and adding more than fifty leagues to the journey, was wholly beyond him, and not even the most languorous staff officer could advance a plausible reason. The sullenness of the country people was in marked contrast to what they had become accustomed to in Spain, and indeed Toulouse, but they hardly constituted a threat. Rests and bivouacs — and these were few enough — were solitary affairs indeed. Only in the Vendee was there any respite. The wretched condition of the towns and villages in the other departements had brought the regiment hateful glowers. Or that at least was the interpretation placed upon them: apprehensiveness might equally have been the reason, for if the Grande Armee had so fearful a reputation for rapaciousness in its own country, then why should the British be expected to be any better? Once or twice the Sixth had the opportunity to demonstrate their good faith when, outpacing the commissary waggons, they had to find their own forage, and in doing so astounded the corn merchants by exchanging properly receipted promissory notes rather than merely making off with the feed. But as to how the population truly regarded them the Sixth were at a loss. The wretched condition of the people was in part the result of the Royal Navy’s complete and utter blockade of the Continent, but Bonaparte’s war taxes had made greater ravages. It was not the British who had ordered the levee en masse, putting every man, woman and child, sick or healthy, to war-work intermittently for the past twenty years. The people might have complained about the infamous gabelle and the sundry other extortions of the ancien regime, but what had revolution profited the peasantry if the evidence now were anything to judge by?

In the Vendee, at least, it appeared that this was understood. There, things looked even more wretched at times, but royalist colours flew from the public buildings and from a good many private houses, and the regiment was made welcome. The brigade was permitted a four-day billet, and the Sixth quartered themselves in the little town of Clisson, near Nantes. And in Clisson they were presented with evidence for the first time that they might indeed be liberators rather than conquerors, for while there was much work for the troopers, and even more for the farriers, the officers found the hospitality of the noblesse most generous.

Nor was it a hospitality born of plenitude, for there had been an intermittent reign of terror since the uprising. The chateau to which the officers had been invited on the second evening had little remaining of the fine paintings and furnishings that had once filled it. Its master and his chatelaine, the former of whose three brothers, and their two sons, had died by the guillotine or the firing squad during the past two decades, had dug up their plate that very morning, the first time it had seen daylight during that same period. But the red wine of the Loire valley had filled the elegant silver decanters of the unearthed service, and these in turn had kept the officers’ glasses full throughout the night until the adjutant, at Edmonds’s bidding, had called the party away to its unsteady attendance at morning stables.

Hervey had missed this entertainment, however. He had ridden some thirty miles eastward, to the Chateau de Chantonnay, in a fruitless attempt to deliver Sister Maria’s letter and ring into her father’s hand, learning as he arrived that the family had left for Paris the day before. He was glad at least that he would not have occasion to describe to her what he found, for the house was a veritable ruin. From the one man who did not run away on seeing him, a crabbed old gardener from the former estate, he learned that the family had been living in what had been the stables after the house had been requisitioned and turned into a button-making factory. Sister Maria de Chantonnay’s injunction had been uncompromising, however: the ring was to be given to no-one but her father in person, so all that Hervey was able to do was hand her letter to the vieillard, whom he hoped was a faithful enough remnant of the household. The ring would go with him to England after all.

That four-day billet was indeed a labour: ‘I’ve fair pissed me tallow dawn to dusk since we stopped ’ere, Mr ’Ervey,’ complained Johnson on the last morning. The farriers had re-shod every horse, and the dandy brushes had been hard at work removing the vestiges of winter coats. There had been green fodder to cut — there was no commissary provision on the march — and saddlery and harness had been stripped down, cleaned and mended. But there had been opportunities, too, for diversion; and when the regiment left on the fifth day it was amidst more emotion, even, than at Toulouse. Indeed, the final muster bore so little resemblance to a military parade, so numerous and pressing were the onlookers, with buttons, rings, notes and promises being tearfully exchanged, that the exasperation of the adjutant and Mr Lincoln was plain to behold. Edmonds himself was so alarmed at the suspension of good order and military discipline that once under way he trotted the regiment hard for four hours on and off to put bite back into them.

The country through which they passed subsequently was never as pretty, and in no degree as friendly, as