CHAPTER 21
The French guns fired all morning. Their sound rattled the windows in the city. It was like a thunder that had no ending.
The smoke grew like a cloud. The women who sat on the tiers of seats above the city wall grumbled because their view was obscured. They could not see the enemy. They could only see the great cloud that grew and spread and drifted southwards with the breeze. Some of them strolled on the ramparts, flirting with the officers of the town guard. Others, their parasols raised against the sun, dozed on the benches.
The gunners fired, aimed and fired again. They dragged the guns forward after each shot, levered the trails round with handspikes, and pushed the ammunition into the hot muzzles that steamed from the sponging out. Men were sent to the small streams of the plain for buckets of water to soak the sponges. The roads from the city were loud with the galloping limbers that brought new ammunition to feed the guns that hammered at the killing ground.
The French infantry sat on the ridges, slicing sausage and bread, drinking the raw, red wine that filled their canteens. The guns were doing their work. Good luck to the guns.
The guns bucked, their wheels jarring from the ground with each shot. As each gun thudded down the gunner ran forward to put his leather-covered thumb over the smoking touch-hole. With the touch-hole covered if was safe to ram the wet sponge down the barrel and kill the last red sparks before the next powder charge was pushed home. Without the touch-hole blocked the rush of air forced by the plunging sponge could flare pockets of unexploded powder that had been known to erupt with enough force to blast the sponge back and impale its handle through the body of a gunner.
The guns had names embossed on the barrels beneath the proudly wreathed ‘N’s. Egalite fired next to Liberte, while Fortune and Defi were being sponged out.
The gunners sweated and heaved and grinned; listened to their officers call the aim and they knew they were filling the western plain with death. They could not see their enemy, the smoke hid all to the west, but each shot lanced a spear of flame into the smoke that would twitch with the canister’s passing and then the gunners would reload, would haul the gun back into a true aim, then stand back as the chief gunner rammed his spike through the touch-hole into the canvas bag of powder, as the second man pushed the quill of fine powder into the hole made by the spike. The quill carried the fire down tp the powder from the linstock held by the chief gunner.
All gunners were deaf, they said. They were the kings of the battlefield and they never heard the applause.
Sometimes, rarely, a battery would pause. The smoke would clear slowly from its front and the officers would peer at their target. The British had been stopped.
The red lines were cowering in the crops, hiding behind stone walls or crouching in ditches filthy with the summer’s rain. The gunners knew the British were beaten. No troops in the world would dare advance into the horror of round-shot and canister that the guns poured into the killing ground.
For the British it was a nightmare of sound. The round-shot rumbled like giant barrels on planks overhead, the canister whistled, the screams of the wounded riding over it all. The musket balls from the broken canister rattled on stone or cracked through corn or thudded into flesh and always there was the rolling thunder from the white cloud ahead. Sometimes, when a gun was short of shot or canister, a shell would be fired instead. The shell would land in the broken crops. It would spin, its fuse smoking wildly, then the casing would crack apart in flame, smoke and iron fragments to add to the noise of death.
The British died in ones and twos. They sheltered where they could, but sheltering men won no battles. Yet these men could not go forward. No man could go into that storm of shot. They crouched, they lay in shallow scoops of land, they cursed their officers, they cursed their General, they cursed the French, they cursed the slow, — crawling time, and they cursed the lack of help on the plain’s edge. They were alone in a storm of death and they could see no help. The Colours were shredded with shot.
The lucky ones were in the small village, the first village of the plain, for there the stone walls were a shield. Even so, some roundshot smashed the houses flat, carving bloody paths in the packed rooms, and always the air outside the hovels was loud with the sound of death.
The attack was stalled.
‘We have him, by God, we have him!’ Marshal Jourdan, who like all the French Marshals had begun to think of Wellington as unbeatable, knew that his enemy had underestimated him. Jourdan guessed that Wellington, secure for the first time by having greater numbers than the French, had committed his army to a frontal attack. The guns, the pride of the French army, were shredding the enemy.
He looked north. A few English cavalrymen were in sight on the river’s far bank and the sight of them had alarmed some of his officers. Jourdan clapped his hands for attention and raised his voice.
‘Gentlemen! The cavalry is a feint! If they planned to attack from there they would have done so already! They want us to weaken our left! We shall not!’
Indeed, he strengthened it. The reserves who guarded the northern river bank were marched south, behind the Arinez Hill, to reclaim the Puebla Heights. Jourdan planned more for them. When the British broke, and when he unleashed his lancers and sabres onto the killing ground, the men from the heights could sweep down to block the defile. The
British, broken and bloodied, would be trapped. But first, Jourdan knew, he must let Wellington send more men onto the plain, more men to be killed and cut off, more corpses and prisoners for the Emperor’s glory. Jourdan knew he‘ must wait. In another two hours, perhaps, the heights would be retaken and the moment would have come when he would destroy Wellington’s reputation for ever. The Marshal called for food, for a little wine. Another two hours, he thought, and he would send the Eagles forward to take Spain back for France. He smiled at King Joseph. ‘I trust, sir, you have invited no one to sit on your right this evening?’
Joseph frowned in puzzlement, not understanding why Jourdan spoke about the victory feast which had been ordered in Vitoria. ‘I hope you will take that place of honour, my dear Marshal.’
Jourdan laughed. ‘I shall be pursuing the enemy, sir, but you may have the Lord Wellington to entertain. I hear he likes mutton.’
Joseph understood and laughed. ‘You’re that hopeful?’
Jourdan was that hopeful. He had won, he knew it, and he could taste the victory already.
The guns made the silver cutlery quiver on the white linen in Vitoria’s grandest hotel. The waiters had laid one hundred and fifty places in the dining room. The bottles of wine, standing in thick groups on all the tables, clinked together and sounded like a thousand small bells.
Flowers had been cut and were now being put on the high table. That was where King Joseph would sit for this feast of victory ordered by the French. A tricolour was hung from the ceiling. The crystal chandeliers vibrated with the sound of the cannon. The whole great room was filled with clinking, ringing, shaking things.
The hotel’s owner looked at the room and knew his men had done well. He wrung his hands. He should have dared ask the French to pay for this feast in advance. They had ordered the best Medoc, burgundy and champagne, and the kitchens were preparing five bullocks, two score sheep, two hundred partridges, and a hundred chickens. He groaned. The patriot in him prayed for a British victory, but the businessman feared that the British might not pay for what their enemy had ordered. He listened to the guns and, his purse more important than his pride, prayed that they would win the day.
The Marquess of Wellington, sitting his horse on the lower slopes of the western hills, watched the French gun line flame and smoke and shatter his men in the killing ground. None of Wellington’s staff officers spoke to him. The whole sky seemed to vibrate with the great blows of the guns.
Staff officers spurred on the slope beneath him. To a casual eye the western hill and the defile seemed like chaos. Wounded men dragged themselves towards surgeons, while other men waited for battle. To someone who had never seen a battle, there seemed no order in the casual disposition of men. They might have hoped for a plan to help them understand.
There was a plan. Jourdan planned to stop the attack with his guns, and Wellington planned to grip those guns in a fist and squeeze.
The English General thought of his plan like a left hand placed palm downwards on the map.
