Whose Business is to Die, page 19
‘Here, lad, let me have a go,’ Dobson said, and took it from him. He did not bother to spit, and lifted the tool less high, before bringing it down with tremendous violence. The spark leapt high, the noise almost like striking against metal.
‘Bugger, I was afraid of that.’ The veteran looked up at Pringle. ‘It’s more stone than earth, sir. We’ll have to chip it out bit by bloody bit.’
The other teams were making the same discovery, and the noise of rocks being struck and all the attendant grunts and curses rose.
‘Quiet there, quiet as you can!’ The senior engineer’s voice was loud and nervous. ‘Captain, can you not keep your men quiet!’
Pringle was about to reply that they were quieter than some fellow yelling, and then he noticed a figure appear beside the man. It was FitzWilliam, and even in the dark his shape conveyed the poise and calm of the aristocratic former Guards officer. Billy did not catch the words, but could guess their sense. The colonel had a knack for reassuring others.
Dobson launched a powerful assault on the hard ground, the point of the pick driving into the solid earth, clacking against stone with vivid flashes of light.
‘Right, boys. Ten hits with all your might and then pass it on to the next man.’
Jenkins took back the pick and began to work again, his blows wilder than the veteran’s. Then the third man took over.
‘Get shovelling,’ Dobson told Jenkins as the man finished, and the pair of them scooped out the dislodged lumps of earth, but almost every thrust of the spades grated on stone. When the looser earth was cleared away the corner of the pit did not look any deeper to Pringle.
He wandered along the line, and saw that most of the teams were working like Dobson’s group, sharing the brutal work with the picks. A few had not, and men leaned on shovels as they watched the third man work, so he told them to take turns.
Time passed. Billy could not tell whether it was minutes or hours. He felt idle and useless, but when he finally decided to have a word with Dobson and suggest that he take a turn the answer was blunt.
‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but you won’t be much damned use.’
‘Thank you, Sergeant.’
The men laboured on, dim, distorted figures in the faint light of the hooded lanterns. Time after time they savaged the ground with picks and then scraped away the meagre clods of broken earth.
When the French sent up a blue light from the San Cristoval the brightness was dazzling.
‘Down! Down!’ Billy waited for the men to stop and crouch in the trench – if something little more than six or seven inches deep could be dignified with the name. At least the gabions offered some shelter if no protection.
He could hear the faint fizzing of the rocket, the strange flickering light showing him the gaunt faces huddled down as close to the earth as was humanly possible. As it faded, there was another flaring of light, red this time, as a flaming carcase of combustible material was flung from the rampart of the fort. The whole shape of the outwork was almost as clear as day, and Pringle could even see figures moving on top of the wall and hear their shouts. The French must have feared an attempt at escalade, because the burning carcase would make it hard for them to see much further into the dark until it went out.
‘Get going, lads,’ said Lieutenant Colonel FitzWilliam, before any of the engineers stirred.
Dobson was first up, and grunted with sheer effort as he drove the pick into the earth and then prised it back and forth to break up the heavy soil. Pringle watched him, but the glow of the carcase still filled his eyes and it was hard to see properly. He took off his glasses and rubbed them.
The French were silent for a while, and slowly the burning carcase faded until it was no more than a dull glow and the outline of the fort was barely visible in the night. They worked on, and Billy could tell that the pace was slowing. He walked back to where three of the battalion’s drummers waited, each with the dozen canteens of water they had carried piled up beside them.
‘Lads, take three canteens each and offer them to the men,’ he said. One of the musicians was Dobson’s son, a stocky, plump youth more like his poor dead mother than his massive father. ‘Let them have two sips each and no more for the moment.’ Sergeant Dobson had suggested bringing the water to Pringle, who had in turn gone to the colonel and received his enthusiastic blessing.
They worked on, and the drink seemed to give them renewed energy, at least for a while. Yet Pringle could tell that the pace was slackening. Men were groaning more and more loudly with the sheer effort of driving the tools into the iron-hard soil. The picks still set off sparks, but the blows were less frequent and over time became weaker.
‘Good work, boys,’ he said, pacing along the shallow trench. He was about to suggest that the men with the gabions take a turn, but before he could the engineer set them to taking earth from the low spoil heap and starting to fill up the great baskets.
Truscott appeared. ‘Slow work. No one realised that the ground was so hard.’
Pringle bit back the suggestion that perhaps someone ought to have checked. His friend had a tidy mind, resentful of mistakes and inefficiency, and was unlikely to welcome such an obvious comment.
‘This is to be the main attack,’ the acting engineer explained. Billy sensed that Truscott was as frustrated with watching and waiting as he was, and needed to talk simply to fill the time. ‘The others are diversions. This will be the main battery. We knock a hole in the San Cristoval, storm that, and then put a battery there to breach the castle walls of Badajoz itself.’
‘Might take a while,’ Billy ventured. ‘If the pace here is anything to go by.’
‘It’s worse than you think. I have seen the guns brought from the stores on Elvas.’ Truscott sounded offended. ‘You can see the dates when they were cast moulded on the barrels – half are from the seventeenth century.’
‘Dear God.’
‘We will need His help for certain if we are to have any chance at all. They are dreadful brass things, the bores distorted by age. The gunners have been sitting for days measuring shot with great care in the hope of finding enough to fit.’
Pringle tried to cheer his friend. ‘It’s all a waste. As I told you, what you clever engineers should really be doing is building a great wooden …’ He stopped, for out of the corner of his eye he caught a flash from the San Cristoval, followed by the dull thump. A gun had fired, and the thought that it must be a short-barrelled howitzer was confirmed when he caught a tiny spot of light high in the air and coming towards them.
‘Down!’ he shouted. ‘Everyone down!’ Pringle pushed his friend into the trench.
The men dropped tools and flung themselves into the pitiful scrape of a trench. The ones working on the gabions knelt behind them even though none had more than a few inches of soil in them.
Pringle was crouching, still following the flare of the shell’s fuse. He noticed that the colonel remained upright.
‘Best to take cover, sir,’ he said with some urgency.
‘I do not believe we are in danger,’ FitzWilliam replied, ‘but if I am wrong there will be time enough.’
The arc of the shell was now plainly to their left, and so Pringle half stood as he watched the sparking fuse trail through the air. It landed a good thirty yards away and a little behind them, spun crazily on the ground for a couple of seconds and then burst in a gout of flame, sending jagged pieces of its casing scything through the air. Lieutenant Colonel FitzWilliam sprang back a pace and peered down at something on the ground in front of him.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘at night it is quite easy to misjudge such things!’
Pringle heard men laugh at the antics of their commander. No more French guns fired, until several minutes later the howitzer went off with another dull thump.
‘Get down!’ Once again the workers dived for the little cover available.
The gun captain must have cut the fuse shorter because this time the shell burst in the air and some way short. A gabion was pitched over by a piece of whirling iron and another shook with the impact, but that was all the harm done.
‘I do not believe they can see us too clearly,’ Truscott suggested, as they stood up again, and the men went back to work. Once again FitzWilliam had not moved.
‘Yes, they are trusting to luck, and trying to annoy us.’ Pringle began counting under his breath, and had reached five hundred before the next shot was lobbed up high by the howitzer. This one was closer, and as he watched the line of the shell, the colonel took two paces forward and dived down into the trench. The shell landed only a few feet from where he had been standing and lay there, neither spinning nor with any trace of a burning fuse. Murphy bounded out, struck the metal sphere with the butt-end of his spade, so that the fuse flew out, flared for an instant and then went dim.
‘Well, at least we know our enemy has a sense of humour,’ FitzWilliam said, standing up and flicking dust from his jacket and breeches. ‘My poor tailor’s heart will be broken,’ he added, and the men near by laughed. ‘Sergeant Murphy, you are a brave fellow, but you should not take such risks.’
‘It’s fine, sir,’ the sergeant told him in a loud voice meant to carry along the line. ‘Everyone knows that you cannot kill an Irishman – you just make him mad!’
‘Thought you were all ruddy mad in the first place,’ Dobson called from the far end of the trench.
‘Ah, well, a man digging a trench in hard ground while someone throws shells at him is sure to be the best judge of sanity!’ Murphy yelled back. With the French firing at them, there was little point in keeping silent.
Pringle had started to count again, but it was almost twice as long before the French fired, this time dropping too short. The interval was never the same, and that made it worse because the shot could come at any time and no one knew where it would land. The seventh shell landed close enough to the trench for a piece of casing to strike a man in the shoulder and knock him flat. It did not seem to be too serious a wound, but he could not work and so was bandaged by one of the drummers and led away. The next shell plopped to the ground behind the gabions and burst, flinging the nervous engineer officer back several yards. He had wounds to the face and chest, but the worst was a gaping tear in his left thigh. They managed to stop the bleeding, and he was carried off, sobbing in pain at every step.
The men worked on, fighting against fatigue as well as the stubborn resistance of the stony ground. Some of the picks bent so badly that nothing could straighten them out, and the men using them took turns with the other tools. No more shells did any damage, and there were a few more jokes, even if no one had the energy to laugh as much as they had earlier on. Pringle realised that the shape of San Cristoval and the fortress on the far side of the Guadiana were both growing clearer. Dawn could not be far away.
There was a longer pause between shots from the howitzer, and this time its single thump was followed by the roar of half a dozen cannon. Two of the gabions were struck, and one was still too light to resist and so was flung down. An eight-pounder ball went through a gap between them and skimmed the low trench, striking the crouching figures, smashing through flesh and bone. When Pringle dared to look up, one man lay unmoving, with his head hanging to one side at an unnatural angle, and another was screaming.
The colonel took cover with everyone else, but the trench was barely eighteen inches deep. The line of gabions was spread thinly, with only half filled well enough to weight them down and offer protection from the enemy shot.
‘Sandbags!’ Truscott yelled. ‘Fill the bags and stack them in front.’
Each French gun fired as soon as it was loaded, and so there were no more salvoes, and simply a sporadic fire pounding the position intended to form the battery.
‘We need to have enough shelter for the covering party to stay!’ Truscott called to him, and then he grabbed one of the sacks, dragging it along the ground. ‘Follow me!’ Murphy was beside him, hefting a tied-up sack over his shoulder, and so was Dobson. Pringle was about to join them when a shot ripped through the air above him and he found himself cowering.
‘That’s right, build it up!’ The remaining engineer officer was standing up, showing the men where to reinforce the gabions and form something like a parapet.
Pringle pushed himself up, went to grab a bag as men with shovels finished filling it, then saw gloved hands reaching for the same thing.
‘My dear Pringle, after you,’ Lieutenant Colonel FitzWilliam said, pulling his arms back. ‘I shall have the next one.’
Pringle grasped the sandbag, was surprised at its weight, and staggered forward. The engineer officer was still shouting encouragement, and then a roundshot skimmed the top of the gabions and the man’s head vanished in a spray of blood. Pringle felt something hot and wet slap into his cheek and one of the lenses on his glasses was covered in blood.
‘I think you are in charge,’ he told Truscott, hefting the bag and laying it down on the wall growing between the nearest gabions.
‘We need this at least four foot high for a good twenty yards.’ A strong picket of men from one of the brigade’s Light Companies was to hold the position all day in case the French sallied out, hoping to fill in the small excavation that was all they had managed in a night’s work. ‘Oh, thank you, sir,’ Truscott added, his tone full of surprise at seeing FitzWilliam laying a sandbag.
‘Keep up the good work,’ the colonel told him, and then ducked as a shot tore through the air over their heads. ‘There is some advantage in not being too tall,’ he added, but the laughter was thin.
A shell landed among the redcoats filling sandbags, the blast throwing men back. Murphy landed face down in the spoil heap. Jenkins helped him up, Murphy spitting out earth as he came.
‘You cannot kill an Irishman,’ he said, and then stopped because another grenadier was stretched out with the side of his face missing.
‘That is the best we can manage,’ Truscott said after five minutes more. The gabions were tall, but the wall of sandbags linking them was not much more than three feet high, and there were no more bags to fill. ‘It ought be enough if they keep down.’
The covering party that had watched them through the night moved in behind the wall.
‘Best if we go as fast as we can, sir,’ Truscott said to the colonel.
‘You give the order, Mr Truscott, since as acting engineer you have command. Mr Pringle, you will lead them off and I shall bring up the rear.’
‘Pick up the tools as we need every one,’ Truscott shouted. ‘When I say go we run for the top of the hill. Stop when you are over the crest and we will form up there. Well done, lads, it was a fine night’s work.’
The howitzer fired, and then two of the guns and a moment later another. The balls slammed into the makeshift rampart, which shuddered, but did not collapse.
‘Go!’ Truscott called, and Pringle bounded away, waving with his arm for the men to follow. He was tired, stiff from taking shelter, and his limbs did not want to move until a ball flicked through the grass ahead of him.
‘Come on, boys!’ The 106th swayed and sometimes staggered for they were all exhausted, but no one wanted to linger and they went up the slope as fast as they could. To his amazement, they lost no one. The colonel and Truscott were the last over the crest, and a ball rolling down the slope almost took the captain’s foot.
‘Look out!’ Pringle yelled at them, and FitzWilliam realised the danger and shoved his companion aside.
‘My apologies, my dear fellow,’ he said, and perhaps it was the relief of getting into shelter, but the men were laughing again.
‘Lead us back, Mr Truscott,’ the colonel ordered. ‘Smartly now, boys, do not let those fusiliers see us save at our best.’
The column formed up, picks and shovels shouldered like muskets. As they marched away, Truscott fell into step beside Pringle.
‘You may be right, Billy, perhaps we should have just built a horse.’
19
‘I make it at least one hundred and thirty English miles,’ Dunbar said, his finger running down the list and doing the calculation again. ‘Yes, at the very least.’
Williams had not made so precise a count, but his guess had been similar. The brigade had marched all that way in just eight days, and from the start the weather had been dry and the sun beat down on them. Colborne was no great stickler for the details of uniform, and he let the men replace their stiff stocks with any convenient piece of cloth. Even so they sweated in their thick woollen jackets, while dust from the road turned faces and uniforms alike as dusty brown as the Buffs’ facings.
Three or four times they had seen small parties of French, patrols or foraging expeditions. Only twice had they come close enough to expend any powder, and even then the enemy soon retired. The French left in Estremadura were spread thinly, and so Colborne marched at them, changing his route time and again, but always advancing, so that the enemy could not guess how many men he had and where they were going. Unbalanced and confused, the French retreated, and so far they had not concentrated or mounted any serious resistance. All they left behind were little garrisons like the one outside this town. The plan was working well, and Colborne meant to keep on pressing them.
‘Still a long way to go,’ the colonel told them, ‘even if much of it will be back the way we came. But for the moment, everyone can rest – well, everyone apart from us!’
The three men sat on their horses and waited in the shade of a tall house, for although it was barely an hour after dawn it was already getting warm. They were in the little town of Belalcazar, and the arrival of the redcoats had not caused the sleepy place to stir much from its slumbers.
A bleary-eyed man appeared on a balcony across the street and stared at them in silence. Dunbar raised his hat cheerily, but the man said nothing.
‘I doubt it is a terribly wise thing for folk to stare too closely at the French,’ Colborne commented. ‘But we have not demanded food or the virtue of his daughter, so one would hope that counts for something.’
