Vivar eased himself to the crest once more and stared down at the village. “Perhaps those devils will meet the British. Then one pack of barbarians can kill the other.” He shuddered with the cold. “If I had enough men, Diego, I would fill hell with the souls of those Frenchmen. But I do not have the men. So fetch them for me!”
“I will try, Don Bias.” It was as much of a promise as Davila dared offer, for no Spaniard could feel hopeful in these early days of 1809. The Spanish King was a prisoner in France, and the brother of the French Emperor had been enthroned in Madrid. The armies of Spain, that had shown such fine defiance the previous year, had been crushed by Napoleon, and the British army, sent to help them, was being chased ignominiously towards the sea. All that was left to Spain were fragments of its broken armies, the defiance of its proud people, and the strongbox.
The next morning, Vivar’s men carried the strongbox to the west. Lieutenant Davila watched as the French Dragoons saddled their horses and abandoned a village that had been plundered and from which the smoke rose into a cold sky. The Dragoons might not know where Bias Vivar was, but the man in the black coat and white boots knew precisely where the Major was going, and so the French forced their horses to the west. Davila waited a full day; then, in a downpour of rain that turned the snow to slush and the paths to thick mud, he went south.
The hunters and the hunted were moving again, inching their intricate paths across a wintry land, and the hunted were seeking the miracle that might yet save Spain and snatch a glorious victory from defeat.
CHAPTER 1
More than a hundred men were abandoned in the village. There was nothing to be done for them. They were drunk. A score of women stayed with them. They were drunk too.
Not just drunk, but insensible. The men had broken into a tavern’s storeroom and found great barrels of last year’s vintage with which they had diluted their misery. Now, in a bleak dawn, they lay about the village like the victims of a plague.
The drunks were redcoats. They had joined the British army because of crime or desperation, and because the army gave them a third of a pint of rum a day. Last night they had found heaven in a miserable tavern in a miserable Spanish town on a miserable flint road that led to the sea. They had got drunk, so now they would be left to the mercy of the French.
A tall Lieutenant in the green jacket of the 95th Rifles moved among the bodies which lay in the stable yard of the plundered tavern. His interest was not in the stupefied drunks, but in some wooden crates that had been jettisoned from an ox-drawn waggon to make space for wounded and frost-bitten men. The crates, like so much else that the army was now too weak to carry, would have been left for the pursuing French, except that the Lieutenant had discovered that they contained rifle ammunition. He was rescuing it. He had already filled the packs and pouches of his Battalion with as many of the precious cartridges as the Riflemen could carry; now he and one Rifleman crammed yet more into the panniers of the Battalion’s last mule.
Rifleman Cooper finished the job then stared at the remaining crates. “What do we do with them, sir?”
“Burn it all.”
“Bloody hell!” Cooper gave a brief laugh, then gestured at the drunks in the yard. “You’ll bleedin‘ kill ’em!”
“If we don’t, the French will.” The Lieutenant had a slash of a scar on his left cheek that gave him a broodingly savage face. “You want the French to start killing us with our own gunpowder?”
Cooper did not much care what the French did. At this moment he cared about a drunken girl who lay in the yard’s corner. “Pity to kill her, sir. She’s a nice little thing.”
“Leave her for the French.”
Cooper stooped to pull open the girl’s bodice to reveal her breasts. She stirred in the cold air, but did not waken. Her hair was stained with vomit, her dress with wine, yet she was a pretty girl. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, she had married a soldier and followed him to the wars. Now she was drunk and the French would have her. “Wake up!” he said.