An Act Of Courage

so many troops at the walls, yet that was why the Sixth and the other regiments of cavalry were here. Only three weeks ago the French had poured out and driven off the working parties in the parallels below where they stood now. Humiliating it had been. They had filled in the trenches and carried off the picks and shovels (the French commander had offered a bounty for every entrenching tool). But there was no chance of that tonight; not with musketry and cannonading so intense.

‘Hot work for our friends, Hervey.’ The voice was assured, the glow of the cigar familiar and comfortable.

‘Indeed, Sir Edward. I was just thinking that our chances of action seem small.’

Serjeant Armstrong retired a respectful distance.

Captain Sir Edward Lankester lowered his voice but a fraction. ‘You imagine the real reason we are posted thus, Hervey?’

‘I imagine as we are ordered, Sir Edward. I cannot suppose our arms will be needed in the breaches.’

Sir Edward kept silent for a moment. ‘What do you imagine will happen when the army is through the breaches?’

Hervey sighed: cruel necessity. ‘I should not wish to be a Frenchman.’

‘Ay. You cannot contest a practicable breach and then expect quarter. There’ll be precious little of it. It was not that of which I was minded, though. What of the Spanish?’

Hervey grimaced. When Ciudad Rodrigo had fallen, it had been three hours and more before the officers got their men back in hand. The riot and destruction had been prodigious, just as the looting and despoiling on the retreat to Corunna – and a good many Spaniards abused along the way.

They stood silent the while, trying to make out the progress of the storming from the powder flashes, the rattle of small arms and the explosive roar of the field pieces. There seemed a deal too much of all three to suggest the breaches and escalades were being carried – not with the bayonet, at any rate. There should have been a great display of fireworks and then a full-throated roar as the storming parties went to it with cold steel – and a feu de joie, perhaps, as they took the place. But a fire-fight like this spelled trouble. It meant the infantry could not gain a footing on the walls. And they couldn’t keep up an assault for ever: some time soon they would be exhausted, all forward momentum lost. Then the defenders would have carried the day, again – or, rather, the night.

That was how it had been the last time at Badajoz, and the first time too, by all accounts. Not that he had seen for himself any of it; only heard the course of things, and then what the survivors had told them in the dejected days that followed. A man did not like to have his friends cut down, but if the result was victory he could bear it. To be thrown off the walls of Badajoz and taunted by the French was not to be borne. The men with the bayonets were certain of one thing: the French could not have defied them if the Spaniards had not been helping them. A fortress standing against two assaults by Nosey’s men – what else could be the explanation?

The walls of Jericho – that was what Cornet Hervey was minded of, detached from the bloody business of the breach. How had the walls of Jericho fallen to Joshua’s trumpets? It was allegory, surely, as his brother suggested? In a thousand years they would speak of the walls of Badajoz falling to Lord Wellington’s bugles (he fervently prayed). Had the Israelites undermined the walls of Jericho, as he supposed the engineers had here? And did Lord Wellington do at Badajoz as Joshua had at Jericho? Did he send spies into the city? Joshua’s spies had found the Canaanites terrified of his army after its victories on the other side of the Jordan. A terrified people – perhaps the sound of the trumpets alone induced them to surrender? But Joshua’s spies had nearly been captured; they would not have escaped without the help of Rahab. Was there a Rahab in Badajoz to harbour Lord Wellington’s spies? Hervey smiled. Rahab the prostitute: there would be Rahabs aplenty in Badajoz, and they would take in men right enough after the place had fallen.

He shivered again. If there were prayers to be said for any tonight but the poor devils with bayonets, it should be that Badajoz did not meet the fate of Jericho: And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old. Except that Joshua saved Rahab the prostitute alive, and her father’s household, and all that she had. Could he hope that Lord Wellington’s orders would save the Rahabs in Badajoz when blood was running hot among his redcoats? Could he even hope that Wellington’s orders would save the Susannas, for virtue had not always been sufficient protection against the heated blood of the best-regulated men in this campaign. Exactly as at Jericho.

Indeed he could hope, for after Badajoz there was Madrid to relieve, and the fortress at Burgos. Lord Wellington would brook no check to progress, unlike the Israelites after Jericho: the Lord God of Israel, angered with the looting of the city, had punished Joshua at the siege of Ai. Lord Wellington would not want such a punishment; Lord Wellington was an upright man, and he would waste not a day in his zeal to eject the French from Spain (word was that he had not spent a day but at his duty since coming to the Peninsula). He would not contemplate a defeat at Ai; there must be no riot in Badajoz, no regiments incapable through drink of continuing the advance. He had given strict orders to that effect. Who would dare defy them?

‘By God, sir, they’ll be hotted up after this!’ said Serjeant Armstrong, a furious musketry now the length of the walls.

Hervey woke to the grim truth before them. ‘Let’s hope their blood’s boiling this minute, Serjeant Armstrong, for those walls will not be theirs without it.’

Armstrong knew it better than most. He had been in the trenches that afternoon, volunteering for the working parties taking grenades forward. ‘Never saw men writing their wills like that, sir,’ he had told him afterwards. ‘They were giving me letters and all sort o’ things to send for ’em. But by hell they’ll go to it tonight! Never seen men as hotted up. And them without a drop inside ’em yet!’

Hervey hoped for their sakes they had rum inside them now. It fired the belly and dulled the pain. ‘It is the very devil to stand and watch. I don’t think I ever had more feeling for a red coat.’ But too many of Serjeant Armstrong’s letters would be read by widows, or mothers bereft of a son, he reckoned. It was beginning to look as if the third attempt on Badajoz would go the same as the other two, for all the infantry’s ardour.

Another mine exploded, a galleried one, big and deep, so that the earth trembled even where the Sixth stood.

‘Jesus!’ gasped a dragoon.

‘As you were!’ growled the serjeant-major.

He disapproved of profanities, especially in the face of the enemy. But in truth, he only silenced the cursing; he did not stop it. In the next hour there were a dozen more earth-shaking explosions, so that there could not have been a man in the Sixth who did not curse with his teeth clenched, thankful, deep down at least, to be standing-to his horse rather than in the breaches below them.

At eleven o’clock a galloper came, almost taking the videttes by surprise. ‘Sixth Light Dragoons?’

‘Ay, sir.’

‘Lord George Irvine, please.’

Hervey heard the exchange well enough: the videttes were but fifty yards in front, and the galloper shouted (no doubt he was deafened if he came from the trenches).

‘This way, sir.’

They peered to see who he was, for they might then have some idea what he brought.

‘Here!’ called the adjutant, as galloper and guide approached the line.

‘Lord George?’ called the galloper again as he slid from the saddle. If he was deafened by the explosions, he was equally blinded by the flashes.

‘Yes, Pontefract, before you!’ Lieutenant-Colonel Lord George Irvine had the advantage of an orderly with a torch.

Lieutenant the Earl of Pontefract threw his cloak back over his shoulders and saluted as another orderly took his reins. ‘Good evening, Colonel. Sir Stapleton Cotton’s compliments, and would you have one squadron dismount and come up to the trenches in support of General Picton’s division at once.’

Hervey’s ears pricked, as did everyone’s that heard. The orders were precise, yet their purpose unclear. What kind of support did ‘the Fighting Third’ Division have want of ?

‘Sir Stapleton suggests you may stand down the remainder until dawn.’

That settled one thing at least, thought Hervey: Wellington must be sure there could be no sortie.