An Untrustworthy Army Read online

  Contents

  An Untrustworthy Army

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Author's Note

  About the Author

  Also by Lynn Bryant

  An Untrustworthy Army

  By

  Lynn Bryant

  Copyright © 2018 Lynn Bryant

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author.

  Front cover artwork

  Copyright © 2018 Richard Dawson

  All rights reserved

  No part of this cover image may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the illustrator.

  To Richard Dawson

  For almost 25 years

  With love

  Acknowledgements

  Getting this book finished has been particularly difficult, due to life very much getting in the way, and I'm grateful for the help and encouragement I've received from so many people.

  Research is a huge part of the writing I do, and I'd like to thank various historians and writers who have helped me with the maddest questions, especially Jacqueline Reiter, Kristine Hughes Patrone, Catherine Curzon, Rob Griffith, Josh Proven, Eamonn O'Keeffe and many others on social media and in person.

  I would like to thank Mel Logue, Jacqueline Reiter and Kristine Hughes Patrone for reading sections of the work and making helpful suggestions.

  Thanks to my proofreader and editor for showing me all the ways in which spell check doesn't help.

  Thanks to Richard Dawson, my husband, for another amazing cover, for technical help and for endless support and patience during the writing of this book.

  Thanks to my son Jon for dog sitting, guitar playing and good humour and to my daughter, Anya, for making me laugh and for never failing to have an opinion.

  Last but not least, thanks to Joey and Oscar, the stars of Writing with Labradors for sharing my study and bringing me joy.

  And in loving memory of Toby, my old black labrador, who was here for the beginning of this book but not for the end. I'll never forget him.

  Chapter One

  It had been hot for weeks, a blistering heat which battered down onto the Anglo-Portuguese army, settled in sprawling cantonments around the city of Salamanca. Colonel Johnny Wheeler of the 112th infantry, baking on horseback, took his place in the triumphal procession into the city wishing that he could be somewhere shady, with a cool drink and his feet up.

  "Why us?" he complained to his second-in-command. "Of all the regiments in this army, why are we here, sweating our arses off, while most of them are probably bathing in the river and drinking wine?"

  Major Gervase Clevedon glanced at him with a grin. "Cheer up, sir, it's supposed to be an honour. We're here because the 112th distinguished itself during recent actions."

  "Well, I wish they bloody hadn't," Johnny said glumly. "Pretty place, this, mind and at least they've the sense to appear welcoming, whatever they might actually think."

  "I'm not sure they've been that welcoming to the sixth division these past ten days."

  "I can't say I blame them. God knows how it took them ten days to reduce three convents."

  Wellington's army had marched north from the Portuguese border earlier in the month and had arrived at the city of Salamanca on the 17th June. He had received excellent intelligence along the way which had correctly informed him that the French had abandoned the city, leaving a garrison of around eight hundred men in three fortified convents within the city. What Wellington's intelligence sources had failed to describe, was how well-built the fortifications were and what the general had imagined would be a simple mopping up operation had dragged on for ten days. Partly this had been due to the difficulties of reducing these particular defences and partly due to Wellington's lack of resources to do so; he had been obliged to send for extra ammunition and had lacked good siege equipment. Johnny, who admitted that he was heavily biased in favour of his own division, also thought that the sixth division had not been the best choice for the job, having little experience of sieges.

  He had mentioned this to his commanding officer and received a basilisk blue eyed stare from Colonel van Daan who commanded the third brigade of the light division.

  "Do not wish that on my lads, Colonel Wheeler, or I will gut you like an Irish herring. I have seen enough siege warfare this year to last me a lifetime. If they call us up for this, I am inventing an epidemic of camp fever."

  Paul van Daan had looked grimly at the orders when they had finally arrived, remembering, Johnny knew, the piled dead in the breaches at Badajoz.

  "He's asking for volunteers," he said. "Two from each company of the light division to form a storming party. Johnny, I do not want to go out there and ask my lads to put themselves forward for another piece of suicidal lunacy which is going to lose men that I care about."

  Johnny stood silently, watching his friend. Eventually, the colonel came out of his reverie and said:

  "All right. Let the company officers know. Two from each company and I'll take nobody with a wife and children. If we don't get enough volunteers, I'll go down there myself, see how he likes that."

  "We'll get plenty of volunteers, sir."

  Johnny had watched the storming party march out with a heavy heart. His commanding officer had ridden down beside them to see them into position and assess their chances and then had ridden back several hours later looking considerably more cheerful

  "They've surrendered," he said. "Out of provisions and ammunition, I think; sometimes my prayers are answered. I've just been with Lord Wellington and he has ordered a victory parade into the city tomorrow, and wishes the 110th and 112th to be part of it. Better smarten your lads up, Johnny."

  Johnny had regarded him blankly, thinking about the tattered and patched uniforms of the entire light division. "How?" he asked.

  "Tell them to clean their weapons and stand up straight. They're soldiers, not actors, it's the best he's going to get."

  Despite his reservations, Johnny welcomed the chance to spend more time in the city, although like many of the officers in cantonments outside Salamanca, he had visited several times to look around. There had been little to do during the investment of the forts apart from a sudden flurry of activity on 20th June when it had looked for a while as though Marshal Marmont might launch an attack on the Allied forces gathered on the heights of San Cristobal. Otherwise, Wellington's officers had spent their time playing cards, visiting the city and speculating on their commander's next move.

  "I suspect one or two wine shops might lose half their stock tonight," Gervase Clevedon said. "But if they've any sense at all, the taverns will do a good trade. The brothels certainly will, I'm not expecting many of my lads to go back out to camp tonight, they've bloody earned this. They'll spend what's left of their pay and be broke for months, but it'll be worth it to them."

  Johnny grinned, knowing it was true. "Gervase, what happened to us? We used to be such correct young officers, I swear to God I once had a man flogged for drinking on duty."

  "They still don't drink
on duty, sir, he'd kick them into the river. And I for one wouldn't go back. We were a regiment of outsiders, the 110th, new-fangled and pretty much laughed at by half the army back in India. Some good lads, mind, but no identity to speak of. As for the 112th it was in so much disgrace when it came back from the Indies, most people thought it was going to be disbanded."

  Johnny ran his eyes over the neat ranks of the 112th and felt a lift of pride. He had taken over command of the regiment just over a year ago and after many years in the army when promotion had seemed an impossible dream, well beyond his purse, he had not learned to take it for granted. "I know. Look at them now, up here with the light division's finest. Jesus, it's hot. I wish they'd get going."

  Clevedon was peering back along to column. "I think you might find," he said cautiously, "that the victory parade is being held up, while Colonel van Daan's wife's maid locates her missing hat."

  Wheeler broke into laughter as a pretty brown haired woman in a sprigged muslin gown sped past them carrying a fetching straw hat trimmed with silk flowers. "Get a move on, Teresa, we're dying of heat stroke out here," he called.

  Teresa Carter looked back over her shoulder. "I do not know why he bothers, she will have lost it before they get into the Cathedral," she said.

  At the head of the 110th, Colonel Paul van Daan took the hat from Teresa with a smile of thanks and turned to his wife.

  "Put it on," he said in tones of considerable patience. "Keep it on, I am not having you with sunstroke. Or I will spoil Lord Wellington's lovely parade by tipping you off that horse into the river."

  "I'm not sure I'd mind that just at the moment, it might be cooler," his wife said, tying on the hat at a particularly fetching angle. "Jenson, would you ride up and present our apologies to Lord Wellington for the delay? The Colonel has a mania about my hats, I cannot tell you what a bore it is."

  Paul's orderly grinned and spurred his horse forward. The victory parade would lead to a Te Deum in the Cathedral and the Plaza Mayor would be illuminated during the evening while Lord Wellington and his officers were entertained by the Spanish grandees of the city to a civic banquet and fireworks. Paul had given the men of the 110th and 112th leave to spend the night in the town, providing they behaved themselves, and were back in camp by noon the following day. By now, his veterans had learned to trust his promise that he would go through the town in search of them personally the following day if they failed to turn up and he was not expecting any trouble.

  "You would think," his wife commented, drawing up beside him, "that the Spanish would have had enough of fireworks, given that the French seem to have blown up entire sections of their city to build fortifications. Since being with the army I have found that things exploding in the sky have taken on a whole new meaning for me."

  Paul laughed and turned his head to survey his wife. They had marched north from the border after several weeks of awaiting reinforcements and provisioning their army. Lord Wellington's previous sortie into Spain in 1809, which had culminated in the bloody field of Talavera, had been cut brutally short by the inability or possible unwillingness of his Spanish allies to provide the supplies for men and horses that had been promised, and Wellington had been determined not to risk the same thing happening again. Improvements had been made since then, to the commissariat and the quartermasters departments and there were no problems in supplies coming in to Portugal or being sourced locally. The difficulty was in transporting them to where they were needed, when they were needed. Troops marched quickly, considerably faster than the ox-wagons which were often used to bring up supplies, and it was not unheard of, for Wellington's army to arrive at their destination and find no provisions or baggage.

  It was relatively unusual for the third brigade of the light division, which Paul commanded, to find itself without food. He was known as a perfectionist in the management of his regiment and had extended this attitude to running a brigade. It was more of a challenge given that he now had eighteen hundred men under his command, but he had been remarkably successful so far, although he suspected it had made him no friends in the commissariat and his young wife, who assisted him with the administrative aspects of running his brigade, was probably even less popular than he was.

  Paul watched Anne who was looking around at the glorious soaring buildings of Salamanca with obvious appreciation. She was attracting considerable attention from the crowd, being the only woman in the parade at the specific invitation of Lord Wellington who was her constant admirer. She was twenty-two and they had been married for two years, although he had known her for two years before that, but he was not sure he would ever become complacent about having her beside him. He had been deeply attached to his pretty, gentle first wife who had died bearing his daughter but he adored Anne in a way that he could never have imagined feeling about any woman and it had very little to do with her startling beauty.

  It had been an appalling year for them so far. After the heady first year of their marriage, Anne had given birth to a son, his fourth child and her first, and Paul could remember thinking in those days after William's birth that he had never felt so happy and so secure as he did with this unconventional young woman with the black eyes of a gypsy and the courage of a lioness. She travelled with his regiment without apparent concern for her own comfort or safety but she was less sanguine about her small son in an army camp, where sickness and fever killed many of the children born to the army wives and camp followers. They had agreed reluctantly that he should be sent home to be raised by Paul's family along with his other children. In Lisbon Anne had met his older children for the first time, and Paul had been surprised and delighted by how quickly she seemed to have developed a bond with them. He would never have thought of Anne as particularly maternal, but she had taken Grace, Francis and Rowena to her heart as if they were her own. And then travelling back to join him at Badajoz where the English were besieging the city, she had been taken by the French, and for two long weeks Paul had thought that he might never see her alive again.

  Anne turned her head to look over at the crowd where a group of Spanish girls had made garlands of brightly coloured flowers. They were running forward to decorate the officers and men of the army and in some cases their horses. As Anne and Paul watched, a pretty girl of around sixteen threaded her way through the ranks to Sergeant Jamie Hammond who was young and dark and good-looking, marching easily at the head of the 110th light company and draped a garland of white flowers about his neck, reaching up to kiss him. Hammond smiled and scooped her to him, kissing her with obvious enjoyment and then waving to her as she ran back to her giggling friends.

  "I suspect that Michael is wishing he was still on foot just now," Anne said. Paul grinned. Captain Michael O'Reilly who commanded the light company of the 112th, had formerly been his sergeant and had developed something of a reputation with the local girls although since he had taken up a commission, he had been a little more circumspect.

  "It's a shame we won't be here longer, it won't be long enough for him to find himself a girl," Paul said.

  "I'm not so sure, he's an extraordinarily quick worker," Anne said and Paul gave a choke of laughter.

  "A completely unsuitable conversation for the colonel's lady, girl of my heart."

  Anne turned her head and smiled impishly at him and Paul felt his heart turn over. Her resilience was astonishing given her ordeal at the hands of a French colonel only three months earlier. She glowed with health and vitality and enjoyment of the day and Paul thought ruefully that she seemed to have recovered faster than he had. The image of his battered, abused wife standing in her shift when he had fought his way through to find her was burned into his brain and Paul was not sure he would ever completely forget the expression in her eyes when she had told him that she had been raped. Paul was trying hard not to be over-protective with her, since he knew it would drive his independent-spirited wife crazy if he fussed over her or tried to restrict her movements, but her ordeal was too recent for him to forget h
ow it had felt to know that another man had hurt her so badly and he had not been there to protect her.

  Around them the people of Salamanca thronged the ancient streets. The buildings were graceful, in a variety of ochre and pink stone, soaring arches and towers giving way sometimes to a crumbled heap of stone where Napoleon's troops had destroyed some historic foundation to use as building stone for the makeshift fortresses which had held the town.

  "It's lovely. Such a shame about the destruction," Anne said, fanning herself. Paul surveyed the fan with some amusement. His wife, who had little interest in fashion, regarded fans as purely functional objects and he was sure he had never seen the elaborately painted article before.

  "It is. A lot of these buildings were part of the university, but it's mostly been closed down by the French. They've destroyed some of the buildings and used others as barracks which will mean they're wrecked inside. The place we're billeted in tonight was one of the old colleges, I've got some of the lads clearing it out now. It's big and very elegant but they'd left it like a pigsty."

  "They probably left in a hurry," Anne said, looking around her. "I wonder what happened to the students?"

  "Probably most of them ended up either in the French army or the guerrillas," Paul said.

  "Or dead," his wife said quietly.

  "Yes, poor bastards. It's funny, this place reminds me of my student days in Oxford. Hard to imagine Magdalen and Balliol ripped apart by French infantrymen. It puts it in perspective, somehow."

  Anne glanced at him. "Which college were you?"

  "Balliol. Have you visited Oxford?"

  "No, love, I'm a Yorkshire lass, I'd never been anywhere until I married Robert, apart from York, Harrogate and a trip to London when I was fifteen."