“The French will have it just as bad,” Phillpot prophesied, “and struggle, as we did, along the same routes, through the snow, ice, and mud, perhaps all three conditions in the same day in those mountains, their own supplies far behind and starving, and every hamlet plucked as clean as a chicken. Damn them all, they are welcome to it!”
“So, you believe the army can hold for a while?” Captain Chalmers asked him.
“Frankly, sir?” Phillpot posed with a scowl, thinking that over. “For one day, perhaps, after the French catch us up. After that? Well, the Navy will just have to get us off or the entire army’s lost, what’s left of it.”
Major Phillpot offered them a tour of the defences up on the Monte Mero, though the retreat had cost so many horses that they would have to accompany him on foot while he rode his own worn-out prad; he was seeing a column of hand-carts up with fresh ammunition from the depot. They both decided not to.
“Save a place for me in one of your boats, will you, sirs?” Phillpot asked, and it was not in a parting jest. “Good day.”
“And good luck,” Lewrie bade him. Under his breath to Chalmers, he added, “I think they’re going to need all the luck in the world.”
As he and Captain Chalmers made their way back to the quays it began to drizzle an icy rain, quickly turning to sleet, then just as quickly to another bout of snow that began to blanket the ground, which had already been whitened, then churned to a slushy, muddy, muck by the thousands of soldiers. They passed a narrow church, where soldiers were quartered, and paused as they heard a flute and fiddle playing a tune inside.
“What’s that?” Lewrie asked.
“I think it’s ‘Over the Hills and Far Away,’” Chalmers said as he cocked an ear. “It’s from The Beggar’s Opera, as I recall.” As the tune continued, Chalmers “um-tiddlied”’til he got to a part he recalled. “‘And I would love you all the day, all the night we’d laugh and play, if to me you would fondly say, over the hills and far away.’”
“I wager that’s their fondest wish, right now,” Lewrie wryly said, “for them to be ‘over the hills and far away’ from here!”
He recalled that he had heard it long before, when he had had the Proteus frigate, escorting a convoy of “John Company” ships, and the ship that carried Daniel Wigmore’s Circus/Menagerie/Theatrical troupe that had attached itself as far as Cape Town. They had staged a performance of The Beggar’s Opera when they broke their passage at St. Helena Island, and Eudoxia Durschkeno had sung it as part of the chorus, back when she’d been enamoured of him, and long before she’d discovered that he was married.
The quays were empty when they arrived, and a gaggle of rowing boats were scuttling out into the harbour bearing the last of that surgeon’s regimental wounded.
“Mister Hillhouse,” Lewrie said, tapping the finger of his right hand on his hat by way of casual salute. “Last of ’em off, I see?”
“Aye, sir,” Midshipman Hillhouse replied, doffing his hat in reply. “I was told by an army officer that there are more wounded men coming to be got off. The Prosperity and the Blue Bonnet are now full, so when the boats return, I thought to send the new batch out to the Boniface, if you think that right, sir.”
“Quite so, Mister Hillhouse,” Lewrie said with a nod of agreement, then looked about to determine the arrangements that the Army might have made for their soldiers. “Damme, but it’s cold. Perhaps we should fetch pots, firewood, and tea leaves ashore after our boats make their first run out to Boniface. It’s shameful t’let the poor devils lay here and shiver in the open, in this snow.”
“Perhaps ‘portable soup’ might be more welcome, sir,” Captain Chalmers suggested. “One would think that the army would see to such. Aha, here comes the next batch.”
Lewrie turned about to see wounded men being brought to the quays, some being trundled in hand-carts, but most, those called the “walking wounded,” astride horses, some clinging to healthy men.
“Cavalry, aha!” Chalmers said. “With all their saddles and such. I suppose we must attempt to salvage all that,” he added with a frown, and a sigh.
“Light Dragoons,” Lewrie noted aloud, taking in the fur-topped leather helmets, short jackets, Paget-model carbines, and sabres the healthy troopers wore. “Aye, I suppose we must get all their gear off, though God knows if we’ve any horse transports, and they may … Percy? Percy Stangbourne?” he shouted as he recognised the officer leading the column.
Colonel Percy, Viscount Stangbourne, looked up from his dour and weary musings, startled, looked about, then spotted him.
“Alan? Alan Lewrie?” he perked up. “Where the Devil did you spring from? Here to get us off, are you? Thank God!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“Believe it or not, I was just thinking of you, Percy,” Lewrie told him after Stangbourne had sprung from his saddle and had come to not only shake hands warmly, but thump him on the back in a bear-hug.
Well, yer better half, really, Lewrie thought.
“What? Why?” Percy asked, head cocked over in puzzlement.
“That tune,” Lewrie told him. “I remember Eudoxia singin’ it, on the way to Cape Town. How is she?”
“Safe in the country, thank God,” Percy answered. “Oh, she was of a mind to take the field with me, same as Lydia, but in her condition … we’re due another child, perhaps even now, so far as I know … and her father and I talked her out of it, again thank God!”
“And Lydia?” Lewrie asked of his former lover, thankful that he no longer felt a twinge in doing so, surprised again that mention or thought of her no longer caused a lurch in his innards.
“She’s well,” Stangbourne said, half his attention on his restless mount that was butting its head on his back. “Hunting and shooting round the estate, by herself if she can’t convince anyone else to join her. Horses and dogs, and her new hobbies … church work, ministering to the wives and children of the regiment who didn’t get to come along to Portugal, raising funds and such for the needy.”
Just as I thought, Lewrie told himself; it’ll be missionary work and soup kitchens in the stews, you just watch!
“That’s good, I suppose,” Lewrie opined.
“Yes, well,” Percy agreed, with a roll of his eyes.
“Boats are coming for your wounded men. Have many, do you?” Lewrie asked, peering at the men being lowered from horses, or borne out of the hand-carts.
“We’ve more sick than wounded,” Stangbourne told him with a bleak expression. “The badly wounded, and the very ill, died along the way, or had to be left behind in the villages we passed through. And, there were some who got so drunk off looted wine stores that we just had to leave them where they lay! Oh, the damned French loved that! We could hear them, when we stood as the rear-guard, butchering them without an ounce of mercy!”
“Good Lord!” Lewrie exclaimed.
“Laughing their evil heads off as they did it, too,” Viscount Percy spat, “my troopers, soldiers, and the women and children with the army, too, all murdered. Now and then, though, we caught them at their games, and made them pay, blood for blood,” Percy vowed, in such heat that made Lewrie re-consider his opinion of Percy. He was not a rich and idle dilettante playing at soldiering any longer, but a blooded veteran.