“Leave her!” All the same the Lieutenant could not resist crossing the yard to look down at the girl’s nakedness. “Stupid bitch,” he said sourly.
A Major appeared in the yard’s entrance. “Quartermaster?”
The Lieutenant turned. “Sir?”
The Major had a small wipy moustache and a malevolent expression. “When you’ve finished undressing women, Quartermaster, perhaps you’d be good enough to join the rest of us?”
“I was going to burn these crates first, sir.”
“Bugger the crates, Quartermaster. Just hurry up!”
“Yes, sir;‘
“Unless you’d prefer to stay here? I doubt the army would miss you?”
The Lieutenant did not reply. Six months ago, when he had joined this Battalion, no officer would have spoken thus in front of the men, but the retreat had jaded tempers and brought hidden antagonisms to the surface. Men who would normally have treated each other with wary respect or even a forced cordiality, now snapped like rabid dogs. And Major Warren Dunnett hated the Quartermaster. It was a livid, irrational and consuming hatred, and the Quartermaster’s annoying response was to ignore it. That, and his air of competence, could provoke Major Dunnett into a livid anger. “Who in Christ’s holy name does he think he is?” he exploded to Captain Murray outside the tavern. “Does he think the whole bloody army will wait for him?”
“He’s just doing his job, isn’t he?” John Murray was a mild and fair man.
“He’s not doing his job. He’s gaping at some whore’s tits.” Dunnett spat. “I didn’t bloody want him in this Battalion, and I still don’t bloody want him in the Battalion. The Colonel only took him as a favour to Willie Lawford. What the hell is this bloody army coming to? He’s a jumped-up sergeant, Johnny! He isn’t even a real officer! And in the Rifles, too!”
Murray suspected that Dunnett was jealous of the Quartermaster. It was a rare thing for a man to join Britain’s army as a private soldier and to rise into the officers’ mess. The Quartermaster had done that. He had carried a musket in the red-coated ranks, become a Sergeant, then, as a reward for an act of suicidal bravery on a battlefield, he had been made into an officer. The other officers were wary of the new Lieutenant’s past, fearing that his competence in battle would show up their own inexperience. They need not have worried, for the Colonel had kept the new Lieutenant from the battle-line by making him into the Battalion’s Quartermaster; an appointment based on the principle that any man who had served in the ranks and as a Sergeant would know every trick of the Quartermaster’s criminal trade.
Abandoning both the drunks and the remaining ammunition to the French, the Quartermaster emerged from the tavern yard. It began to rain; a sleet-cold rain that spat from the east onto the three hundred Riflemen who waited in the village street. These Riflemen were the army’s rearguard; a rearguard dressed in rags like a mockery of soldiers, or like some monstrous army of beggars. Men and officers alike were draped and bundled in whatever scraps of cloth they had begged or stolen on the march, the soles of their boots held in place by knotted twine. Their unshaven faces were wrapped with filthy scarves against the bitter wind. Their eyes were red-rimmed and vacant, their cheeks were sunken, and their eyebrows whitened by frost. Some men had lost their shakos and wore peasant hats with floppy brims. They looked a beaten, ragtag unit, but they were still Riflemen and every Baker rifle had an oiled lock and, gripped in its doghead, a sharp-edged flint.
Major Dunnett, who commanded this half Battalion, marched them westwards. They had been marching since Christmas Eve, and now it was a week into January. Always west away from the victorious French whose overwhelming numbers were swamping Spain, and every day of the march was a torture of cold and hunger and pain. In some Battalions all discipline had disappeared and the paths of such units were littered with the bodies of men who had given up hope. Some of the dead were women; the wives who had been permitted to travel with the army to Spain. Others were children. The survivors were now so hardened to horror that they could trudge past the frozen body of a child and feel nothing.
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