All in Scarlet Uniform (Napoleonic War 4) (27 page)

The governor issued a proclamation and toured the main defences, praising the gallantry of the Avila Regiment and assuring people that the English would come.

As the company was pulled back to take its turn sleeping in a less exposed post, some citizens still had the energy to cheer the handful of redcoats.

‘Ninth night, that,’ said Dobson, as he marched beside Williams. ‘Ninth since they started digging.’

‘It’s the 23rd June,’ the officer replied. ‘No, I tell a lie, that was yesterday. It’s now the twenty-fourth.’

‘Long way to go still,’ said the veteran.

‘Here’s to Christmas at home!’ Williams had found himself reviving the old joke.

Dobson puffed on his clay pipe. ‘Aye, that’d be good.’

V
elarde was struggling to breathe, lying with his head back against the side of the gully, unable for the moment to speak. Hanley felt as exhausted as the Spaniard looked, but was doing his best not to show it.

‘Halfway there,’ he panted.

His companion still said nothing, but just gave a faint nod. Both men were covered in mud, so that only their eyes reflected the first hints of dawn light.

‘We need to go,’ Hanley said after ten minutes. They needed the cover of darkness to sneak through the siege lines and into the town, and it would be day soon. It was all taking too long. Velarde’s assurance and papers were fine on the road or with wandering patrols, but the Spaniard had no hope that they would convince officers in charge of pickets not to send him to ever more senior commanders. That meant they had to be careful and avoid attention.

They followed the road from Caridad as long as possible, approaching Ciudad Rodrigo from the east, but for the last few miles they cut across country. Between them they knew something of the French dispositions and judged that this was the most open side. A mile out they left Benito and their horses.

‘I don’t think that man likes me,’ Velarde had said once they were away from the one-armed guerrilla.

Hanley ignored him, for he was trying to find his way in the darkness and had no time for wit. They nearly stumbled across the first group of sentries, but fortunately the soldiers seemed just as surprised as they were, and after a vague challenge the Frenchmen made no attempt to search for the retreating figures. More careful, or perhaps simply luckier, they went slowly and were not surprised again, but the cost was in time. At one point the noises of horses, lots of horses, shifting their feet, snorting or relieving themselves noisily, seemed all around them as they moved bent double through a ditch. Hanley’s nostrils told him that there was more than simply wet earth in the clinging mud they squelched through. The sounds of their movements seemed deafening, but there were no shouts or other attention.

When Hanley saw the walls of the town outlined against the night sky he knew that they had gone wrong and had drifted westwards, so that in front of them were the walls and houses of the suburbs. They wandered for half an hour, but the need to avoid the enemy pickets and use every wall, ditch or fold for cover confused them and they were not really much further over by the time they felt that they had worked through the main positions. Ahead would be the outposts closest to the town, men who knew that their own survival depended on stealth, and that would make them very hard to see. From then on they crawled, aware that the darkness contained French skirmishers sitting or lying in holes, not moving, and waiting with loaded muskets for any raiders from the city. The only hope was that all would be looking that way, and not searching for figures slipping through their own lines.

At first they crawled quickly. After ten yards both men were sweating so that their backs were as damp as their mud-smeared fronts, and they soon slowed. By fifty yards they were tired, and yet a glance up revealed that the town walls did not seem to be so much as an inch nearer. At twice that distance the muscles in their arms screamed angrily at the effort required of them. Hanley was in front, and they stopped when over the pounding of his heart he thought he heard something from over to their right. They waited for several minutes, but the pause gave no real rest and as soon as they started again the agony returned. When they tumbled suddenly into the drainage ditch, each man had simply slumped back against the side and stared unseeing up at the sky.

‘We need to go,’ Hanley said, his voice at least returning.

‘Can’t we just let Napoleon have Spain,’ Velarde gasped, and the humour suggested that he was coming back to life. Neither man moved to get up. The light was changing moment by moment.

Then the guns fired.

Hanley and Velarde had both seen and heard the French grand battery at Talavera when something like sixty field guns had hammered at the redcoats. That had been louder and more terrible than anything either man had ever known, the fury of the guns smashing men into ruin. There were fewer pieces emplaced and firing at Ciudad Rodrigo today, but even so the noise and menace were far greater. The biggest guns at Talavera were twelve-pounders, and there were only a handful of those. This morning these biggest of field pieces were the smallest to take part in the barrage. Today there were substantially larger sixteen-pounder cannon, and some of the even more massive twenty-four pounders, and with them were big howitzers and mortars. They were not in a single long line as at Talavera, but entrenched to protect them, and cunningly sited in groups of half a dozen or less, aiming at vulnerable spots in the defences. This was not a barrage to smash men, but to smash the town itself. The bigger, deeper roar of gun after gun was followed by the dull sound of blows as shot pummelled the medieval stone or buried itself deep in earthen banks. Howitzer and mortar shells exploded, raining debris in great fountains.

Later, Hanley would realise that none of the guns was firing over them, and yet still they felt ripples of shock. The two men instinctively shrank, pulling in their limbs protectively as they lay in the ditch. After the first great, rolling onslaught the silence was so oppressive that he wondered whether he had lost his hearing for ever.

‘They’re early!’ Velarde half shouted the words, sounding more puzzled than involved.

‘What?’

‘Not supposed to start for two days!’

Hanley shrugged. ‘Most inconvenient.’

Siege guns were big, and it took a large team to reload and drag them back into position, and that meant the process was slower. Gun captains took great care aiming, to ensure each shot was worth the effort, and so it was a couple of minutes before the guns began to fire again.

Hanley pushed himself up, looking over the lip of the ditch. He grabbed Velarde.

‘Run!’ He shouted to be heard over the noise, and without bothering to say more he scrambled over the bank and lumbered into a run. He was stiff, and the movement awkward for a few paces, and then he began to get his stride and the weariness of all that crawling seemed like a distant memory. Velarde followed, although the man looked to be fading. The sun was an immense red ball over to Hanley’s left and he squinted as he veered a little in that direction.

The rumbling of the second salvo came to its end and now he could hear shouts. Ahead, two white faces appeared from a pit scraped in the ground and both had muskets, although they were not yet aiming them. Still there was no reply from the town.

Hanley ran on, and now his legs were aching with every step. He swung away from the French skirmishers, ignoring their challenge, and kept going.

‘Come on!’ he called without looking back, and trusted Velarde to follow him.

A musket banged, the noise close, but almost puny after the great guns. Hanley did not see where the shot went and felt nothing come close to him, so perhaps it was a warning. He did not bother to waste breath on any more encouragement. They were near the suburbs now. He could see the earthworks in front of the nearest houses and saw movement at them.

Another shot, and this time he felt the ball pluck the air close by him, and then there was a thump. Velarde shrieked.

Hanley turned and saw that the Spaniard had been hit in the calf and pitched on to the ground. He turned, ran back and was surprised at how close the man was behind him, for he had not heard his footfalls in the soft earth.

‘Come on!’ he said, lifting him. ‘You have to walk.’

Velarde cursed him and the French, and everyone else, but he let himself be lifted and then they went on, the Spaniard wincing with pain at every step. The soldiers manning the earthwork were firing now, not at them, but at the French, and it was enough to keep the voltigeurs in their holes. Shots snapped the air or flicked the grass near them, but somehow they staggered on, Velarde cursing or complaining.

‘Trinidad!’ Hanley shouted, and hoped they had not changed the password for a friend. ‘Trinidad!’

Hands reached out to pull them up over the chest-high emplacement. At that moment the first guns on the town walls began to reply to the French barrage.

‘I am Lieutenant Hanley of the English army,’ he announced. ‘And this is Colonel Velarde. We must see the governor urgently.’

‘You’d have to speak to the major,’ said a sergeant dubiously.

‘Then get him, man,’ Hanley snapped.

They waited, gratefully accepting water and using it as much to clean the mud off their faces as to drink.

‘Thank you for saving my life,’ Velarde said.

‘Well, you saved mine.’

‘When did you start to trust me?’

Hanley threw more water over his now moderately clean face simply for the joy of feeling the cold liquid against his hot skin.

‘What?’ Hanley frowned. ‘Oh well, it seemed too big a risk not to trust you. Or perhaps I always have.’

The major appeared, an eager young man who had no doubt found that the war made for rapid promotion and short lives.

‘We need to see General Herrasti immediately,’ Hanley said convincingly. ‘I can assure you that he will want to see us. Now where can we find him?’

Cannon fired again from the high medieval walls.

‘The governor will be on the walls,’ said the young major proudly.

They were escorted by a sergeant and four men, and Hanley’s impression of the major’s good sense was reinforced by this sign of still qualified belief. It also helped them to find their way through the suburb and be admitted through the gate into the city itself. Two of the men supported Velarde and that gave the officer someone else to curse. The sergeant said little, but whistled tunelessly just under his breath.

Inside the town, they climbed up to the walls, just as one of the Spanish guns fired, leaping back on its trails, and jetting a cloud of dirty smoke through the embrasure. To the right a French howitzer shell sailed down to land neatly on the wide walkway. Men dived to the floor because there was no cover. The shell spun, fuse sparking, and then erupted in flame and dust and jagged fragments. A boy of twelve carrying buckets of water to the gun crews was left as a bloodstained pile of old clothes. Another lad, who looked even younger, knelt down and wept.

‘Dear God,’ said Hanley.

Beside them a tall house was burning. The French fire no longer came in great salvoes, but as each crew made ready and found a target. There was a crack as a heavy shot struck the wall itself. Others sailed high, smashing lumps off the parapet or the buildings behind the wall. As they went towards it, acting on reports that the governor had gone that way, Hanley saw that the tower of the cathedral seemed to attract particular attention. Already there were a few scars in the stonework.

They pressed on, waiting whenever a gun was about to fire rather than risk being crushed by the recoil. When they found General Herrasti the old man looked as if he was having the time of his life. He urged on the gun crews and the civilians carrying for them, telling them they were punishing the French and that Napoleon would soon shudder when he heard the name of Ciudad Rodrigo. Orders flowed from him in rapid succession, sending officers scurrying away to shift the positions of some guns, or more often to concentrate their aim on particular French pieces.

‘We count forty-six guns and howitzers in their batteries,’ the old man said to Hanley when at last they were ushered forward and given a moment of his time. ‘I have more than a hundred, but sadly not many can see the French works. Still, we have enough to surprise them. It is good to see you, Hanley, and nice to be giving you information for a change!’ He laughed. Hanley thought the general looked years younger. ‘Now what can I do for you? You realise I am quite busy!’

‘There is a conspiracy to betray the city.’ Hanley’s words were lost in the thunder of a Spanish twelve-pounder slamming back on its trails as it flung a shot at the embrasure in one of the French batteries up on the Great Teson. Further along the wall and clear of the smoke, an officer with a glass trained on the spot whooped in delight and shouted out that he saw pieces of sandbag and gabion flying into the air. Between shots, the French gunners covered the vulnerable gaps in their earthworks. Men cheered.

‘Well done, boys!’ Herrasti yelled, patting the sergeant in charge of the gun on the back. ‘That’s how it’s done.’

Inside the city there was a thunderous explosion when a French shell landed in the open door of a magazine with ammunition ready for immediate use on the walls.

The governor winced. ‘Don’t worry, boys! Plenty more powder where that came from! You were saying, my dear Hanley?’

‘There is a conspiracy to betray Ciudad Rodrigo to the French. Joseph Napoleon has agents working to bribe men to seize power.’

The governor looked grave and dropped his voice. ‘You know this? Who?’

‘This is Colonel Velarde.’ Hanley gestured and Velarde straightened, letting go of the two soldiers, but then he hissed in pain and let one of them support him on the side of his wounded leg.

‘Your servant, General.’ Velarde managed a feeble bow.

Hanley cut in before he could say any more. ‘Colonel Velarde has full information about the plot, sir, because he is a traitor and has come to Ciudad Rodrigo to make it happen.’