Текст книги "Kings and Emperors"
Автор книги: Dewey Lambdin
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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 26 страниц)
CHAPTER FORTY
All the sick, wounded, and exhausted soldiers were aboard the transports, as much of the depot’s supplies were either removed to the ships, and the rest scandalised. The Spanish artillery in the Citadel, the little island castle of San Antonio off the town’s defences, and along the long sea walls were either spiked, levered over into the harbour waters, or turned about to face landward.
Yet, as Lewrie suspected, General Sir John Moore’s army still stood in their positions along the Monte Mero, on Santa Lucía Hill, and upon the Vigo Road approaches. The transports were waiting, the twelve sail of the line were anchored to provide fire should the French swarm over the defences and gain the town, but … everyone waited, and no one would, or could, tell anyone why.
Moore had brought the remnants of his army to Corunna on the 11th of January, Lewrie’s convoy had come in on the 13th, and defencive positions had been taken up on the 12th, but …
* * *
“Good morning, sir,” Sailing Master Yelland said, tipping his hat as Lewrie left his great-cabins for the quarterdeck on the morning of the 16th. “It looks to be a brighter day.”
“Hmmph,” was Lewrie’s comment. The skies were clearer, and a weak Winter sun now and then peeked through the grey clouds slowly scudding inland. The harbour waters were chopped with short, steep waves, strewn with white-caps and white-horses, and were a tad more green than the steel grey of the day before, a sure sign that out to sea there had been heavy weather. Lewrie went to the bulwarks for a look seaward, then to the Second Rate flagship for any signals that might tell him anything, but finally turned his telescope shoreward to see if he could make out what the army was doing, or if the enemy had arrived in the night.
He finally lowered his telescope and collapsed the tubes so he could stow it in a coat pocket, shaking his head in weariness, and disappointment. He heard a hopeful whine by his right knee, and felt a muzzle touch his leg. Bisquit had come for a snack, and a touch of human comfort.
“Yeovill already cooked you a warm breakfast,” Lewrie said to the dog, “and you’re still hungry? Oh, here, then.” For just such an eventuality, he’d put a spare sausage in his pocket, and held it out for Bisquit to whine and jump at, balanced on his hind legs. “Might be too spicy for ye.”
No, it wasn’t, for Bisquit chewed up the token morsel and went puppy-eyed for more, licking his chops and sweeping the deck clean with a rapidly wagging tail.
“Good morning, sir,” Lieutenant Harcourt greeted him, doffing his hat. Greetings also came from Marine Lieutenants Keane and Roe.
“On deck for the chilly air, sirs?” Lewrie asked them. “Or, to satisfy your curiosity?”
“Curiosity, sir,” Lt. Keane allowed, followed a second later by his subordinate, Lt. Roe, who confessed, “Bored, sir.”
“I know it’s not our proper place,” Lt. Keane went on, “and I know that our meagre Marine contingent would make no difference if a battle is to be fought … sometime … but I do wish that we were ashore with the army.”
“If only to see what’s happening, sir,” the younger Lt. Roe added. “If all the warships present mustered their Marines, we might amount to a battalion.”
“They’d only put you in reserve, sirs,” Lewrie had to tell them, “guardin’ what’s left of the depot, or mannin’ the sea walls. You have just as good a view from here of … whatever.”
“Ah, good morning, sir,” Lt. Westcott said as he, too, came to the quarterdeck from the wardroom below. “Good morning, gentlemen.”
“Good morning, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie said. “Bored, or just curious? There seems to be a lot of both, this morning.”
“Both, sir,” Westcott said with one of his fierce, brief grins. “Though I could use a long nap after cutlass drill. That still on?”
“Aye, if only t’keep the hands awake,” Lewrie said. “Have ’em work up a mild sweat, keep warm…”
“Hark, sir!” Mr. Yelland interrupted, going to the bulwark facing the shore, and cupping a hand to his ear. “I could swear that I hear cannon fire.”
That made them all peer round the vast anchorage to see if one of the ships of the line was holding live-firing practise, or if a storm might be coming, one with thunder and lightning; but there was no sign of either.
“Aye, I thought so!” Yelland said, pointing ashore. “There’s gun-smoke rising along yon line of hills.”
That prompted everyone to fetch out their telescopes, or grab a spare from the compass binnacle racks, and crowd the bulwarks for a good look. Slowly, the sound of cannon rose in volume, and spent powder smoke spread along the whole length of the Monte Mero, sickly yellow-white and lingering, merging together into a long pall that hardly seemed to move despite the breeze off the sea, with taller thunderheads of smoke rising to mark the positions of enemy batteries and British batteries as they duelled with each other for supremacy.
“Well, the French have come at last,” Lewrie summed up. “We can only hope they arrived in as poor condition as our army when it got here. Hah! Maybe they’re so hungry they’re fightin’ to seize what’s left of the food in the depot!”
“I simply don’t understand this, sir,” said Midshipman Leverett, who was standing nearby without even a pocket telescope to watch events unfold. “The army’s had bags of time to evacuate, long before the French showed up. Why are we still here, why’s the army still here?”
“Well, the depot had to be emptied to supply, feed, and re-equip the troops, first,” Marine Lieutenant Keane said, “and there were the sick and wounded to be seen to. That took time. General Moore had to set out defences should the French arrive in the middle of that. If he had begun the evacuation, yesterday say, his defence line would now be a lot closer to the town and the docks, and the French would capture half the army … just roll over the few regiments still on shore.”
“And, perhaps it’s because the French are starving, frozen solid, their own cavalry and artillery lost in those mountains in pursuit,” Marine Lieutenant Roe, Keane’s second-in-command, added, “and Moore now has the upper hand. If he holds, and bloodies them, the French can’t interfere when he does begin to evacuate.”
“Or, maybe General Moore is tired of being chased all round Spain, and wants to get in a hard lick at them to show the French, and Napoleon, who’s the better soldier,” Lt. Westcott commented with one brow up. “What? Just saying,” he had to add, after almost all officers on the quarterdeck turned to look at him, amazed by such a suggestion. “In his shoes, wouldn’t you want to get in the last blow?”
We do insane things for our pride, Lewrie thought, peering intently shoreward; for God, King, and Country … and ourselves.
The sound of the bombardment, and counter-bombardment was louder, now, the concussions spreading out from the Monte Mero ridges to make the bare limbs of trees ashore tremble, to create wee ripples of harbour water that spread outward from the docks at Santa Lucía. He cocked an ear and imagined that he could almost hear the twigs-in-a-fire crackling of musketry, but he shook his head, thinking that it was much too soon for the French to advance their infantry columns and come down from the further ridges of the Peñasquedo to attempt to march up the slopes of the Monte Mero. He hoped that Moore was husbanding his soldiers on the reverse slopes, as Wellesley had done at Vimeiro, even as Sir Brent Spencer had planned at Ayamonte.
They’ll keep bangin’ away with artillery for a time yet, he told himself; unless they really are starvin’! If the French do get atop the ridge … hmm.
“Mister Yelland,” he called out over his shoulder, his view intent upon the near shores, “those transports East of the quays at Santa Lucía … they’re anchored rather close to shore. How deep are the waters there, d’ye think? Do your charts show?”
“Close to shore, sir?” Yelland asked, rubbing his chin.
Always was slow on the up-take, Lewrie thought.
“Should it be necessary to close the shore and fire our guns to support the army should it be driven back, how close could we get, I’m asking,” Lewrie patiently told him.
“I’ll go look, sir,” the Sailing Master said, taking off his hat and scratching his scalp for a second; “Close” and “Shore” together in one sentence put the wind up every officer responsible for the safe navigation of a King’s Ship.
“I will join you,” Lewrie said, closing the tubes of his telescope and steeling his nostrils for an assault as he went to the improvised chart space.
As Lewrie expected, the shore was steep-to, sloping off sharply, and littered with large boulders, but the old Spanish charts did show at least five fathoms of depth within a quarter-mile of the coast. East of the commercial piers of Santa Lucía there was a deep notch, a cove or inlet that resembled a large, circular bite out of a sandwich, just beneath the heights of Santa Lucía Hill, which was the end of the Monte Mero ridge. With the use of a long brass ruler, Lewrie could determine that if they entered that cove, they would have a direct line-of-sight to the Monte Mero, and could take any French mass of troops, advancing triumphantly on Corunna, in enfilade, and if they came on in their massed columns, Sapphire’s guns could rake their flanks with all her weight of metal.
“There’s this little stream that runs down from the hills, from Elvina to spill out into the bay below Santa Lucía,” Lewrie pointed out with a pencil stub. “If Moore is dis-lodged from the ridge, that’d be a good line t’try and hold, and we could smash the French columns right on their right flank. It’s what … hmm, five fathoms, or the Spanish equivalent … a quarter-mile from the rocky shore…”
“At mean low tide,” Yelland dubiously agreed, “though there’re these two rocky outcrops, wee islands, and the depths between…”
“We get between ’em, right here,” Lewrie said, making an X to mark the place on the chart. “If we have to, Mister Yelland.”
“If we can thread our way through the transports crammed about the quays, sir,” Yelland cautioned. “They are anchored close to ease the rowing distance from shore to ship. Corunna’s as crowded as the Pool of London, or worse, even with the loaded ships moved seawards.”
“It’d take some crafty ship-handlin’, aye,” Lewrie said, standing erect from leaning over the inclined chart table, and tossing the pencil into a low shelf on the back edge. “But, if the army runs into trouble, I’ll not have it said that the Navy let ’em down. That’s what they pay us for … crafty ship-handlin’, right?”
“Right, sir,” Mr. Yelland said, looking as if he had been ordered to thread ’twixt Scylla and Charybdis, hunt up the fabled Northwest Passage through Midwinter icebergs, or sell his first-born son; that glint in his eyes, and the way he licked his lips, told Lewrie that Mr. Yelland was badly in need of a stiff “Norwester” glass of grog.
Lewrie stepped back out onto the quarterdeck, took a deep and refreshing breath of clean air, then trotted up the ladderway to the poop deck for a better vantage point. The cannonading was continuing, with no sign of a French breakthrough … yet. When he swivelled to look to the West, where Percy Stangbourne’s cavalry guarded the road from Vigo, he could not spot any sign of a French attack. Whoever was in command of the French troops looked as if he was throwing all he had at the Monte Mero, so far.
Can’t be Napoleon himself, then, Lewrie thought; that bastard would be sneaky enough t’feint an attack where Moore’s strongest, and hit him where he’s weakest.
* * *
Lewrie returned to the quarterdeck after a break to warm up in his great-cabins, and have Yeovill fetch a pot of hot tea from the galley, and, admittedly, to visit his quarter-gallery toilet. He saw his crew gathered all down the bulwarks facing the shore, half-way up the shrouds, in the fighting tops to watch what was happening ashore. Some men of the off-watch division had eschewed four hours of sleep below, and were on deck in their warmest clothing, with their blankets wrapped round them.
“Any change?” Lewrie asked the First Officer, who was sipping a cup of tea himself, with his own boat cloak wrapped round him for warmth.
“It gets louder, now and then, sir, then fades out a bit,” Lt. Westcott said with a bored expression on his face. “Every now and then I think I can hear musketry, but, who knows?” he said with a shrug. “We seem to be holding them in check.”
Lewrie pulled out his pocket watch to note that it was a little past 10 in the morning of the 16th of January, and the fighting had begun just round 9 A.M. He looked shoreward with his telescope for a long minute, then lowered it and looked round his own decks. Hands were looking aft at the quarterdeck, now that he was back.
Lewrie made up his mind with a firm nod, then went to the edge of the quarterdeck to lean on the cross-deck hammock stanchions.
“Lads!” he called out loudly, drawing everyone’s attention to him. “The Army’s holding the damned Frogs, so far! I’ll tell you what I know from when I was ashore at Vimeiro!”
He described the French column formations, and how they marched shoulder to shoulder like a massive blue carpet, how the British Army kept their men safe behind the ridges yonder ’til it was time to come up and shoot those columns to a bloody standstill; how the exploding Shrapnel shells would burst over them and scatter bodies about; how a reef of dead and wounded would pile up knee or thigh high, when the French would stall, unable to step over those reefs, even though the drums and the officers would still urge them forward; and he told them how the French had broken and run, at last, and how vain those shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!” would be.
“Long live the Emperor,” he said in a comically shaky voice, “and let me live t’get outa this place! Mon Dieu, Mort de ma vie! I am running now, toot sweet!”
That had them roaring with laughter.
“I was told that those ridges yonder, the Monte Mero, are steep, and so full of boulders, it might as well be a stone fort,” he went on. “The Frogs’ll be out of breath by the time they’re halfway up, and dyin’ by the dozens at every step. All the gun-smoke is over on the other side, so far, so…’til we see red coats fallin’ back, and blue carpets on this side of the ridges, all’s well. If we do see that, then we’ll sail over to that inlet, yonder,” he said with one arm pointing towards the foot of Santa Lucía Hill, “and use our cannon t’slaughter ’em by the hundreds!
“Our first year in the Med,” he exhorted, “you shot the Devil out of forts and batteries … this Summer, we took on that column of Frogs marchin’ along the coast road from Málaga, you shot the guts out of two Spanish frigates. You’re the best set of gunners ever I did see in the King’s Navy. If called to do it, can ye shoot Hell out of a French army?”
Eager cries of agreement and cheering greeted his exortations, and he waited ’til it died down before continuing. “For now, we will wait t’see what happens. You off-watch men, you really should go below and get some sleep, but I can’t order ye to. So…’til the rum issue and dinner, let’s have a Make and Mend, and stand easy.”
They cheered that, too. The keenly curious could stay by the bulwarks and up the masts, while others could read, write letters, or mend their clothing, fiddle with their craftwork and carvings, whilst a fair number would indeed nap on deck wrapped in their blankets, or go below to turn into their hammocks.
* * *
The rum issue at Seven Bells of the Forenoon came and went, as did the hands’ mid-day meal, the change of watch from Noon to four, the change of watch at the start of the First Dog, and even the approach of the Second Dog at 6 P.M. The army was holding, it seemed, as the sun sank low and dusk began to dull the view of the shore. Lewrie had been aft in his cabins, catching up on the never-ending paperwork associated with a ship in active commission, when he took note that Pettus and Jessop were lighting more lanthorns.
And the sudden silence.
“What the Devil?” he asked himself as he rose from his desk, cocking his head to listen more closely.
“Think it stopped, sir,” Jessop commented. “Quiet-like.”
Wonder if that’s good, or bad, Lewrie asked himself as he went for his hat and boat cloak, and hastened out to the quarterdeck, where he found his officers gathered in puzzlement, up from the wardroom in curiosity, instead of preparing for their own suppers.
“There are boats coming off from the quays, sir,” Lt. Westcott pointed out. “More wounded men, it looks like.”
“Any summons from the flag for us to send in boats?” Lewrie demanded.
“Not yet, sir, no,” Westcott answered, totally mystified.
“I can’t see any French infantry on the ridges, sir,” Harcourt, the Second Officer, reported. “Ours, mostly, some hand lanthorns, and litter parties, I think. The light’s going.”
Boom-Boom! There were two guns fired aboard Admiral Hood’s flagship, the General Signal to all naval ships present to watch for a hoist of signal flags, which would be hard to make out in the gloom of dusk.
“I can make out … Send Boats,” Midshipman Hillhouse slowly read off with a telescope, “and Wounded, spelled out, sir.”
“Let’s be at it, then, gentlemen,” Lewrie snapped, “man all boats and get them on their way. See which transport shows a night signal that she’s to receive wounded. Bosun Terrell? Muster all boat crews!”
“What of the hands’ supper, sir?” Westcott asked. “What should Mister Tanner do, hold off serving out, or—?”
“Damn,” Lewrie spat. “He’s to serve those men still aboard, and let the meat simmer awhile longer for the rest.”
He dearly wished that he could hop into the pinnace or the launch and go ashore to discover what had happened, but, for once he held himself to a tighter rein. He would have to be patient!
“Mister Hillhouse, still here?” he called out.
“Aye, sir?” the Midshipman replied.
“Take charge of one of the cutters, get ashore, ferry wounded men out to the transports ready to receive them, but … report back to me as soon as you can as to what’s happened ashore,” Lewrie ordered.
“Aye aye, sir!” Hillhouse said, doffing his hat before dashing off, eager to shine, happy to be singled out, and just as curious as his Captain in that regard.
Who the Hell am I dinin’ in t’night? he had to remind himself; Sailin’ Master, Marine officers, Purser, and Mister Elmes, and two of the Mids? Well, the Mids are out, they’ll all be busy.
He thought better of that.
“Gentlemen, I will be dinin’ later than normal,” he announced. “We’ll put it off ’til the Mids invited are back aboard. I will be aft.”
As soon as he was in the privacy of his cabins, he tossed off his hat and boat cloak and cried for whisky, listening to the clack of his chronometer as it measured the un-ending minutes that he had to bide.
* * *
“Midshipman Hillhouse t’see the Cap’m, SAH!” the Marine at his door shouted.
“Enter!” Lewrie barked back, much too loud and eagerly.
Mister Yelland the Sailing Master, Marine Lieutenants Keane and Roe, Mister Cadrick the Purser, and Lieutenant Elmes were already in the great-cabins, sitting or standing round the starboard side settee with wineglasses in their hands. Their already-muted conversations were hushed as Hillhouse entered, hat under his arm.
“Well, Mister Hillhouse?” Lewrie demanded.
“Beg to report, sir, all wounded are now aboard the transports, and our boats are returning,” Hillhouse began, very aware that all eyes were upon him. “The army beat off every French attack, and hold the same positions that they did this morning. I was told it was touch and go round some village called Elvina, the French would take it and we would shove them back out, several times. I was told that they’re fought out … the French, I mean, sir. Shot their bolt, was the way an officer described it. We’ve won, sir!”
Sapphire’s officers began to cheer at that news, but Hillhouse was holding up a hand to indicate that there was more to be imparted.
“It was dearly won, sir,” he said at last when the din had subsided. “General Sir David Baird is among the wounded, had his right arm shattered, and General Sir John Moore, sir … he was hit by a cannonball, and he passed over, just after the French retired from the field. General Hope is now in command of the army, and he wishes the army evacuated, now the French are so badly mauled. I am told that we should begin just after first light, tomorrow, sir.”
“Baird, good God!” Lewrie gasped. “I knew him, from Cape Town. Poor fellow! I hope he survives his wounds.”
“And, we all met Sir John last year, sir,” Lt. Elmes lamented. “A Devil of a fine fellow, a gentleman, and a soldier.”
“Amen t’that,” Lewrie agreed, taking a sip of his wine that had suddenly lost its sprightly lustre. “Hope is sure that the French are done, they’ve shot their bolt, and can’t interfere with the evacuation?”
“I gathered that they were in very poor shape when they arrived, and fought out of sheer desperation for our rations, sir,” Hillhouse told him, “much as you speculated this morning, that they were fighting for a spoonful of food!”
“Well, then, sirs, let ’em starve some more round their cheerless campfires tonight,” Lewrie said with a grin, “and let us make a point to dine exceeding well! You’ll join us, of course, Mister Hillhouse?” And the Midshipman nodded his thanks, Lewrie raised his glass and proposed a toast; “To Victory, gentlemen!”
“Victory!” his officers shouted back.
“And Confusion, and Famine, to the French!” Marine Lieutenant Roe added on, crowing with glee.
“Ah, supper is laid and ready, sir,” Pettus reported.
“Good! Let’s dine, then, sirs,” Lewrie bade them, waving them to the dining-coach and their places at the table.
Some victory, though, he thought as he took his seat at the head of the table; too dearly won, and we’re still slinkin’ off like thieves in the night. And, there’s still tomorrow. The army ain’t away Scot free, yet!
