Love Under Fire Read online

  “If we could find a fire, I would cook the eggs,” Elvina said tentatively, still feeling hungry and knowing that Lord Wye’s need must be greater than hers.

  “Let’s walk around for a little,” he suggested. “No one will notice us in the crowd. I want to learn when the troops will be leaving.”

  It was dark when they came from the Church and went back to the Grande Place.

  It seemed to be even more crowded than when they left it and from what was being said around them Elvina learnt that new troops had just arrived from the North. Many of them were only boys of sixteen, the Emperor’s last batch of conscripts.

  They looked worn out from a long march and many of them were obviously in ill health. At this moment they were all concerned with just one thing, getting something to eat.

  Some were foraging about, trying to extort food from the people in the town, others were already cooking a meal over the fires they had lit in the streets and all along the quayside.

  There were some women with them, some of them the ordinary hangers-on of the Army, blousy, cheap women who were prepared to sell their affections to whoever could pay for them. Others were wives and even mothers who had accompanied their menfolk into danger rather than to be left behind.

  Choosing a motherly-looking woman who was cooking something that smelt delicious over a wood fire, Elvina approached her timidly.

  “I have a few eggs, madame,” she said. “Might we share your fire?”

  The woman looked up, a refusal already on her lips and then she saw the bandage round Lord Wye’s head.

  “Le pauvre brave! He is wounded.” she exclaimed.

  Elvina nodded.

  “Badly, madame. He cannot speak very well, but he can understand and he wishes to go back to fight again and this time to win.”

  “Quel courage!” the woman cried. “Sit down, ma petite. What have you with you? You can share some of our food as well, but we cannot give you much.”

  “I have only six eggs, madame. It was all I could buy.”

  “It’s enough,” the woman answered.

  She cooked the eggs, making a rough omelette with goats’ butter and herbs. Elvina shared some of it with her and her son and in return they gave both her and Lord Wye a piece of heavy dark bread such as the peasants bake.

  Elvina felt that she had never eaten a more delicious meal and she knew, although he said nothing, that Lord Wye was enjoying it too.

  “And now, madame, we must find somewhere to sleep,” Elvina said. “Does your son know at what time the Army leaves tomorrow morning?”

  The boy soldier, who had said little because he was too tired, roused himself to reply.

  “Our orders are to stand by at dawn.”

  “You won’t be well enough to go,” his mother protested fiercely.

  “As long as I can stand on two feet, they will make me,” he answered sullenly.

  “Nom de Dieu! When will this fiendish War end?” the woman asked despairingly. “First my husband and then my two elder sons have been taken from me. All I have left is Pierre and he has only just passed his sixteenth birthday.”

  “Oh, I am sorry,” Elvina sympathised.

  “What do we gain by war?” the woman asked. “A quoi bon? Our lands are laid waste, our fields are unploughed and our men are dead. What glory is there in that?”

  “Silence Mère, that is traitorous talk,” the boy urged.

  “I know, I know,” his mother went on. “But sometimes my heart feels that it will burst with keepin’ back all one is afraid to say.”

  “We shall drive the English out,” the boy said quickly. “That is why the Emperor has sent Marshal Soult to the front. He is a fine General.”

  “I only pray that you will be alive to see it,” his mother moaned.

  Elvina touched Lord Wye on the arm.

  “Allons-y,” she said.

  She thanked the woman for her hospitality and then they started to find their way back towards the Church. A crowd of soldiers who had found their way into a wine cellar came reeling down the street and they were shouting,

  “Ou sont les femmes? Bring out your women or we will come and get them!”

  With a swift movement that Elvina had not expected, Lord Wye pushed her into a doorway of a house and stood in front of her.

  “Keep quiet,” he ordered. “These men are more dangerous than anything we have encountered so far.”

  Some of them burst into a shop that was still open and seized a girl from behind the counter. They dragged her into the street. Her shrieks echoed across the Grande Place, but no one made the slightest attempt to go to her rescue.

  Drunken soldiers fought amongst themselves for her and then while she was still screaming one of them carried her away towards the beach.

  “Les femmes, les femmes! Nous desirous les femmes!” the others yelled.

  They reeled past the doorway where Lord Wye, looking suddenly somewhat aggressive, faced them.

  Elvina felt the terror and horror of what was happening turn her knees to water. It was ghastly to wait behind Lord Wye and not run in search of safety.

  It would have been a mad thing to do, but the waiting was almost too frightening to be endured.

  Now the soldiers were level with them. She felt Lord Wye stiffen and knew that he would fight for her, but, strong and brave though he might be, he would have no chance against twenty or more men crazed with wine and lust.

  She held onto his tunic in desperation and was almost flattened as Lord Wye’s body pushed her back against the door until the carving on the wood bit into her skin.

  “Are you wounded, soldier?” one of the men shouted. “Come and join us. A woman is better medicine than anything the doctor can give you.”

  There was a roar of laughter at this sally and they passed on, staggering and shouting, and before the noise had died away, the shrieks of another woman told Elvina that they had found a victim.

  “Let’s hurry,” Lord Wye said grimly. “This is no place for you.”

  Forgetting all caution they ran down the side street that led to the Church. But here there was disappointment.

  While they were gone, the Church had been closed and the door locked.

  Elvina suggested that they should find a place to sleep in the graveyard.

  “Even the drunken soldiers will seldom – go there,” she muttered. “They are afraid of – ghosts.”

  “And are you not afraid of them?” Lord Wye asked.

  “Not if you are with me,” she answered simply.

  They found a spot by a family vault. There was grass to sit on and the stone edifice to lean against.

  It was quiet and the stars above them were gently reassuring.

  Elvina gave a little sigh. It was one of relief, but Lord Wye misinterpreted it.

  “Come and sit close to me, child. I will protect you somehow. And I swear to you I will kill the first man who puts his hands on you.”

  Elvina felt him draw her close and she let her head fall back against his chest.

  “I am not afraid – with you,” she whispered and knew that it was the truth.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The long winding column of men and mules climbed slowly up the rough mountain track towards the frontier.

  Behind the file of soldiers in their stained and dusty uniforms, the sun glinting on their muskets, were the guns, pulled joltingly over the uneven going by bullock teams and followed by hundreds of peasants carrying shot and shell.

  The bells on the mules mingled with the shouts of the muleteers and the screeching of wagons.

  In contrast to the Commissionaires with their epaulettes and medals and the muleteers with their colourful rags and guitars, were the women who brought up the rear of the army.

  The Officers’ ladies, befeathered and bejewelled as no respectable wives would have been, were in carriages, while the women of the ordinary rank and file, looking tired and often heavy with child, trudged through the dust, but still had a read
y tongue and a coarse joke for every man who spared them a glance.

  Amongst these women marched the stragglers of the Army, the men who fell out from their columns during the march or who, incapacitated in some way or another, were determined not to be left behind.

  Elvina noticed that there were several dozen in the same condition as Lord Wye, their heads bandaged or their arms in slings, but who still kept going.

  They were often helped by some kindly women who would carry their muskets and even occasionally offered them a ride on a donkey, which were the possession of the more affluent.

  “Dites-moi, ma petite, what’s wrong with him?” a woman, whose painted face proclaimed her trade, asked Elvina, jerking her thumb in the direction of Lord Wye. “He hasn’t said a word since we left the town.”

  “He is dazed and a little stupid from his wound,” Elvina answered.

  “Curses on the English who make us suffer in this way,” the woman replied. “Voilà, mon enfant, you hang on to my donkey’s tail. He won’t kick you and it will give you a bit of help up the road.”

  Elvina thanked her and did as she suggested. Although Lord Wye was finding no difficulty in moving at the slow pace of the baggage column, she found that the rough stones hurt her feet and already one was cut and bleeding.

  They had had quite an argument about shoes before they left.

  “You must have shoes. You cannot walk with bare feet,” Lord Wye had said. “We will knock up a shoemaker and buy a pair.”

  “And pay him with English gold, I suppose?” Elvina enquired. “Are you – crazy? It will make him suspicious. Besides a new pair of shoes will look ostentatious amongst the women I have seen behind the Armies – that is the respectable ones. They nearly all go bare-footed. It’s only the Officers’ women who can afford shoes.”

  “Dammit all!” Lord Wye expostulated.

  “Don’t worry,” Elvina said quickly before he could argue any further. “I shall manage. My feet will get hardened – as do other women’s.”

  “Other children’s you mean,” he said with a laugh. “I expect, if the truth were known, you like feeling free and untrammelled. I remember when I was a boy, walking through the fields in the early morning. I can still feel the cold of the dew on my bare feet. It is something I shall never forget.”

  Now Elvina rather regretted her impulse to be hard.

  It was true that most of the other women who were, as she said, respectable, walked barefooted, but that was because the soldiers’ pay was long overdue and when they did receive any money they spent it on clothes to cover their nakedness.

  Their feet were as hard as leather and almost as dark as the army boots.

  Lord Wye had been fortunate with his boots. When the muskets were distributed to the soldiers who had lost theirs, before they moved off in the morning, a contemptuous quartermaster who had doled out a musket and a pack had also chucked a pair of boots and gaiters at his feet.

  “You’re a disgrace to the Emperor!” he said sourly.

  The boots were not new, but at least they were less worn and of a larger size than he was wearing already. The gaiters had lost several buttons, but they certainly smartened up his appearance.

  “It is obvious,” Lord Wye whispered to Elvina, “that Soult is having to scratch around to get an Army together. If they were not short of men they would not waste a musket on me.”

  The conversations that Elvina overheard confirmed this. Some of the Regiments that had straggled back from Vitoria and other battles in Spain were mere fragments mustering no more than two or three hundred men with the colours.

  “He is certainly taking them young enough,” Lord Wye exclaimed as he saw the thin emaciated boys, who had come from Northern France, marching past.

  They were followed by veterans so tired and so worn by the exertions of war that they looked as if they might drop on their tracks even before they started.

  But Marshal Soult himself was a legend and there was no doubt at all that the spirit of the new Army he had assembled to face Wellington with was inspired by their faith in him.

  As the Officers passed them, a glittering cavalcade of good horseflesh, flying plumes and jingling decorations, Lord Wye nudged Elvina.

  “That is Soult,” he muttered.

  She looked at the Marshal and felt a little shudder of fear. Aged forty-four, the same age as the Duke of Wellington, he was a big, rough coarse man.

  There was a brutal look about him and she heard one of the women say later that he could be very vindictive if he did not get his own way or his troops did not do what he expected of them.

  But it was not fear but admiration and the hope that he would lead them to victory that made the troops cheer as he rode amongst them, his shrewd hard eyes taking in every detail of the men he had to command.

  “Now we will drive the devils into the sea!” a soldier shouted.

  The Marshal heard him and replied,

  “They must not be allowed to run. Kill them where they stand!”

  There was a roar at this and Elvina felt herself shiver again.

  She wondered what would happen if the crowds expressing their hatred of England knew that there were two English citizens in their midst.

  Lord Wye must have had the same thought for he stopped whispering to her and, when they moved off, merely slouched along, dragging his feet a little as a man would do who was not quite certain what he was doing or where he was going.

  They marched from dawn till nearly midday.

  By that time many men from the forward columns had collapsed by the roadside, sitting down to rest and ease their aching feet or lying stretched out in utter exhaustion as the others moved slowly past them, making a jest or merely expressing their contempt of such weakness by a downturned thumb.

  The ladies in the carriages drank wine, ate fruit and threw their empty bottles and their grape pips out of the windows. The mules bucked and the patient bullocks plodded on with their heavy wooden-wheeled carts creaking behind them.

  At about noon the command came to halt.

  The peasants flung themselves down at the side of the cart track, drew food of some sort or another from their pockets or scrounged behind the food carts, managing in some clever way of their own to filch a ration under the very noses of the Commissionaires.

  The women were helped last, but they forced the Sergeants in charge to give them as much as they could spare and more, making every sort of excuse of sick or lame men, so that many of the soldiers obtained double rations and some even treble while others went short.

  “Here, you share with us, ma petite,” a bedraggled woman with a face like a gypsy and a baby strapped to her back said to Elvina. “Your man’s in no fit state to fight for what he is entitled. You can pay me back when he gets his share tonight.”

  “Thank you,” Elvina smiled.

  The woman cooked some sort of concoction over a hastily lit fire. It looked disgusting, but it was at least eatable. Because Elvina and Lord Wye were hungry, they ate every scrap that was offered and wished for more.

  Fires were forbidden on the march, but no one paid the least attention and only after an hour’s cooking and eating did the Army resume its way up the hill.

  The mules and bullocks were whipped to start them going, the muleteers yelling at them and at the men on the road to get out of their way. The gun carriages had to be pushed by a dozen men before the wretched animals dragging them could get them under way.

  They were by now high up above the town.

  They could see the little Harbour of St. Jean de Luz lying below them. In the blue sea beyond there were many ships and Elvina was sure that they all flew the English flag.

  She felt Lord Wye press her arm.

  “Was there ever such accursed luck as to be cast away on that particular sandbank?” he asked. “A little further down the coast and we would have been rescued by the Royal Navy.”

  “As it is we shall be rescued by the Army,” she answered him.
r />   He took her hand, squeezed it, and then continued to hold it in his, helping her up the hill for all that he seemed to be walking in so slipshod a fashion that anyone watching would have believed that she was assisting him.

  They walked for another four hours until so many men seemed to be straggling behind that even the Marshal must have noticed the discrepancy in his ranks. But somehow they reached the top of the hill and had gone a little way down on the other side before the order was given to camp. _

  From here they could look down into the rough undulating valley that rose into a tangle of mountains.

  The woman who had cooked for them at midday suggested that they should place themselves near to her, but Lord Wye and Elvina moved away into the shelter of a rock.

  There were people all round them and yet, at the same time, they had a little privacy, for the rock was on a ledge and it was impossible for anyone to approach them unseen.

  Now they could talk so long as they did so in whispers and when possible in French.

  “Your accent is bad,” Elvina whispered, “but even so, an English word would sound strange coming from a French soldier. It is wiser to speak French just in case we are overheard.”

  Lord Wye nodded.

  “I am worried about you,” he said in French. “You must be very tired.”

  “There are many who are more tired still,” she replied. “Think of those who have fallen out.”

  “The poor devils have very likely walked from Paris behind the Marshal,” Lord Wye reflected. “Napoleon cannot have many men left if this is the best he can send against Wellington.”

  There was a note of elation in his voice that made Elvina say quickly,

  “Hush! You sound too bright and gay – to be a man suffering from the effects of a head wound.”

  “By the way that gash in my forehead is throbbing abominably.”

  She took the bandage off and looked at it. It was slightly inflamed, but there was nothing she could do but bathe it and bandage it up again.

  Lord Wye rose to go and collect his ration.

  “Don’t speak,” Elvina begged of him. “Just stand round the cart until someone serves you.”

  He was away a long time and she grew anxious. She wondered if she should go in search of him, but was afraid of drawing the authorities’ attention to Lord Wye.