An Act Of Courage

And Hervey is nothing if not a thinking man – a thinking soldier. But he is also a son of the country parsonage, and alumnus of the old, if provincial, public school. His is a Tory view of history, and an instinctive Tory perspective of the future. Life does not leave him untouched, however; quite the opposite. Mine are tales of regimental soldiering, but the exposure of this moral, principled, if somewhat naive, son of the minor English gentry to the reality of war, life and the march of time is the theme of this series.

All my arrangements preparatory to the attack on Badajoz are in train, and I believe are getting on well; some of the troops have marched for the Alentejo, and others will follow soon; and I intend to go myself the last, as I know that my removal from one part of the country to the other will be the signal for the enemy that the part to which I am going is to be the scene of active operations . . . Pray let us have plenty of horses for cavalry and artillery, and the reinforcements for our infantry, as early as you can. If we should succeed at Badajoz, I propose to push our success early in the year as far as I can.

Viscount Wellington of Talavera to the Prime Minister,

19 February 1812

CHAPTER ONE

HONOURED IN THE BREACH

Badajoz, 10 p.m., 6 April 1812

‘Tout va bien!’

The forlorn hope, clambering in pitch darkness over fallen masonry in the dry ditch, could hear the sentries calling to each other on the walls above.

Then a shot rang out.

‘Alarme! Alarme!’

A single shot: the game was up. Some movement had betrayed them, perhaps, or the clank of a scabbard – and an alert sentry.

‘Aux armes!’

The storming party had known it would come, but a few minutes more and they could have gained the top of the rubble.

A blazing carcass arched over the ramparts, lighting up the breach as if full moon – seconds only, but enough to give the French their mark. They opened a furious musketry. Artillery soon followed. Lead and grape cut down the struggling infantry before a man could reach the razor-sharp blades of the chevaux de frise, which the defenders had dragged to the rupture when the siege guns ceased firing at last light.

Cornet Matthew Hervey, standing dismounted with the rest of His Majesty’s 6th Light Dragoons on the high ground half a mile east of the great border fortress of Badajoz, took a firmer hold on Jessye’s reins. It had been four years to the day since he had taken an outside seat on the Red Rover for the Sixth’s depot at Canterbury. Two weeks before that, he had sat in the upper remove of Shrewsbury School, the master still hopeful that Hervey would follow his brother to Oxford and thence take Holy Orders, as their father before them. But the army had claimed him. It had from his earliest days; above all, the cavalry. In large measure it was Daniel Coates’s doing, ‘the shepherd of Salisbury Plain’, sometime trumpeter to General Tarleton and adopted master-at- arms and rough-rider to the younger son of the Horningsham parsonage. Thus armed with a cradle-knowledge of his ‘profession’, the seventeen-year-old Cornet Hervey had sailed with the Sixth to Portugal in the summer of 1808 – only to limp home with them via Corunna six months later.

What a learning that had been. When the Sixth went back to Portugal, but three months after Corunna, he felt himself the complete troop-officer. He feared nothing, not the enemy, nor the Sixth’s own dragoons, nor his own fitness for the rank. And the three years of advance and withdrawal which had followed – offensive and defensive, siege and counter-siege – had confirmed him in his own estimation. He had remained a cornet, however, for although there had been deaths among the lieutenants, the consequent free promotions had not reached down as far as him (and he could not afford to buy his promotion in another regiment even if he had wanted to). They no longer sported in the mess with the old toast, ‘To a short war, and a bloody one!’

There would be bloody war tonight; that was certain. He had seen sieges enough in those three years to know that this one at Badajoz would be a sight harder than the others. He knew how strong were the defences. Badajoz was the guardian of the road to Madrid; when it had been in allied hands it had been a sure guardian of the road to Lisbon. Three summers ago, the Sixth, with the rest of Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army, had marched into Badajoz after the bruising victory at Talavera, and there they had stayed a full three months. And then, forced to abandon the fortress because the Spanish could not, or would not, support them, they had crossed into Portugal. A year of covering had followed, like the wary boxer: Lord Wellington, as by this time Sir Arthur Wellesley had become, could do little more than land the occasional blow – but stinging blows, so that the French began to weaken. However, like the wounded pug fighting on with all the instinct of years at the booth, it was a slow weakening, and never so certain that Wellington dare drop his guard or overreach himself. So that, eventually, every man in the army knew there would be no knockout blow, just a fight until the French at last quit the country, and while the other allies forced the same on France’s eastern borders.

But this siege was not their first attempt to dislodge the French from the great guardian of the Madrid high road: twice, the year before, Badajoz had held out against Wellington’s men. And in the depths of a freezing January just past, Ciudad Rodrigo, a fortress almost as strong, had claimed a thousand dead and wounded before the Union flag was hoisted above its castle. No, Badajoz would not fall tonight without a heavy butcher’s bill. The Sixth would not pay, of course. There was no job for the cavalry on a night like this. Tonight it was an affair of the bayonet.

Hervey knew what the men with the bayonets were saying, too: if the defenders of Ciudad Rodrigo had been put to the sword, in the old way, the French here at Badajoz would not be resisting, for Wellington’s engineers and gunners had made a practicable breach. The mood in the ranks of red was not in favour of quarter; certainly not if the French continued to put up a fight. Those were the ‘rules of war’.

But above all Hervey feared for the Spanish, the civil population of the city. He did not suppose the people of Badajoz were any more or less disposed to the French than they were elsewhere. True, they had had the French in their town for a year and more, but that did not make them afrancesado. Yet somehow that was what the men with the bayonets thought.

He started. A great fiery flash lit the Trinidad bastion, and a second later came a terrible roar. Jessye squealed. Hervey put his left hand to her muzzle and shortened the reins as he peered at the distant fortress walls. There was smoke now to mix with the mist coming off the Guadiana river. He shivered. Poor infantry: there was no glory in this. Weeks of sodden cold in the trenches, then consigned to oblivion in the dark of the night. Some of them would get through the breach, perhaps, if fortune favoured them and their blood boiled hot enough. And then what?

‘Poor bastards, sir!’

‘Yes, Serjeant Armstrong. Poor bastards.’

At that range, in the pitch darkness, they did not actually see the limbs and the guts scattered like ash from a volcano for a hundred yards about the breach, but they knew well enough what a mine did. The defenders had lost no time, evidently, counter-tunnelling under the breach.

‘By God, sir, them French is putting up a fight and a half,’ said Armstrong, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I wish I were down there!’

That one mine might mean another was of no consequence to either of them.

‘So do I, Serjeant Armstrong; so do I.’

The whole front was now musketry. Hervey had no idea what were the plans for the assault – how many breaches or escalades, or where – but he had watched the assaulting divisions assembling late that afternoon: four of them, no small affair. If they all succeeded in breaking into the fortress there would be a desperate fight inside unless the French struck their colours at once. He did not see how the defenders could make any sortie now, with