As so often on this campaign, I lacked bandages, but I made do with strips torn from the shirts that the men themselves were wearing, in order to bind their own wounds. There was little spare clothing amongst us, for it had been discarded along the march.
We never discovered why we had been attacked by the isolated troop of Spanish soldiers during that particular night. Perhaps word had been carried by one of the peasants, betraying us. Or perhaps they had simply spotted our sprawling, disorganised army tramping along in the direction of Lisbon. They were indeed driven off, but we discovered with the coming of the daylight that – what with the dark and the surprise and our inexperienced soldiers’ lack of skill – a number of our men had been badly wounded and killed. It seemed that a few of the better men amongst the inexperienced recruits had tried to join the regulars, but they had been surrounded by some of the Spaniards and cut down. They lay where they had fallen just beyond the camp and we stumbled upon them in the dawn. Mile by mile, our army, instead of growing by the addition of Dom Antonio’s loyal subjects, was dwindling away.
I did what I could for the wounded, assisted by Dr Nuñez, but many were far gone with existing weakness and the long hours they had lain bleeding before we found them. Four died. The march was halted, except for Essex’s squadron, which set off without us. The dead were buried and Dr Nuñez insisted that the wounded who could not walk should not be abandoned. Unlike so many of their fellows, they had shown courage and initiative. There were five of them. Carrying slings were contrived out of some of the remaining tents. A few of the stronger soldiers would be able to carry these, if they took it in short snatches of an hour or two. Some of the junior officers volunteered to walk part of the way, taking it turn about to ride and using a pair of their horses to carry one of the slings. At last, after some two hours’ delay, we set off in the wake of Essex. Norreys was clearly angry that the Earl had divided the army, exposing us to greater danger, should there be another attack. He sent off a messenger to ride on to Essex and order him to wait for the rest of the army to catch up with his men.
That day was the hottest we had endured. There had been no springs for many miles, and the cheap rough wine bought from the peasants with promises of later payment made the soldiers thirstier than ever. When we came upon a stinking, marshy pond, they rushed towards it in a mindless mob, pushing and elbowing their fellows out of the way.
‘Stop!’
I heard Dr Nuñez shouting and rode ahead to see what was happening. The men were crowding round the greenish stagnant pool, fighting each other to reach it.
‘Stop!’ I echoed the command and elbowed my way in amongst them, trying to pull them away. ‘This is filthy standing water,’ I cried. ‘You must not drink it, however thirsty you are. It isn’t safe. It will carry sickness.’
Even from a distance I caught the rank odour of it, rising out of the pond like the stinking breath of a diseased man. It was surrounded by bog plants, many of them unfamiliar to me, but others I recognised as noxious herbs. The surface was covered with a yellow-green scum, not healthy water-weed but a kind of aquatic mould. Here and there, patches of the surface were clear and it was these, catching the sun with the winking temptation of some witch’s fatal brew, which had drawn the men in, driven by their almost insupportable thirst.
I might as well not have wasted my breath. Maddened with their desperate need for water, they would not listen. They threw themselves on their stomachs, those who had managed to push their way to the front, and began to drink from it, scooping up handfuls of the tainted liquid, even thrusting their heads below the surface and emerging crowned with the olive-tinted slime. I noticed a group of soldiers I recognised – the man who had hustled me away from the fighting the previous night and two of the regular soldiers who had been wounded in the skirmish. They were arguing with some of the unskilled recruits, warning them against the water. One of these was the man who had been bitten by the snake. As I watched, I saw that they were successful in persuading a few of the men, more successful than I was. As experienced soldiers, they would know they must avoid polluted water, however thirsty they were, but most of the men ignored them, as they ignored Dr Nuñez and me. I knew very well what the consequences would be.
It proved as I had expected, that we were right to fear the stagnant water, for by that evening, cholera had seized the army. It is a terrible disease at any time, but on the march under unrelenting sun in a waterless land, it can be as fatal as the plague itself. Its victims raved with fever. A form of violent flux seized them, so they vomited repeatedly and vented profuse watery diarrhoea studded with white matter like grains of rice and stinking of dead fish. There was no mistaking the signs. The loss of the body’s fluid leaves its vital elements desperately unbalanced so that the body craves water, but clean water was the one thing we did not have to give them. The victims’ very skin shrivelled, so that the hands of young men looked like those of aged crones. Those who had friends to help them along staggered onward with us, though they were so weak they must be half carried. Others collapsed in the ditches and did not move. They were simply left behind, for we had no carts to carry them, and even if we had, most would have died within a few hours, for the fever of cholera will burn a man up from inside, consumed by an inner fire. Fortunately the wounded men carried in the slings had been unable to reach the foetid water, for they would have been the first to succumb.
‘It was the honey,’ the whisper went round from mouth to mouth. ‘The honey that peasant gave us, the one who had an ear cut off and watched us with an evil look. The honey was poisoned.’
And any who had eaten the honey (which was pure and good, I had eaten it myself) began to fancy themselves poisoned. They would not listen when we told them that they had caught cholera from the dirty water. They had not been poisoned by someone else, they had poisoned themselves, but it is always easier to blame another man, rather than accept the blame oneself. The whole army, even the men from the Low Countries, took hold of the idea that the Portuguese peasants were trying to poison them. It was perhaps fortunate that the local peasants had taken to hiding from the army, otherwise they might have suffered some undeserved vengeance. As it was, there was whispering amongst the men, and evil glances cast at Dom Antonio and the other senior men amongst the Portuguese.
For some reason, I escaped this mistrust, having become something of a mascot amongst the men, ever since they had seen me suck the snake’s venom out of the soldier’s ankle with my own mouth. Even so, I was aware that the mood was dangerous and could flare up into something more serious at any time.
On the second day after the cholera had begun its attack, our numbers had been reduced again by deaths, but some of those who had been infected, by some fluke of bodily strength, were gradually recovering. By now we knew that we were no more than perhaps a day’s march from Lisbon. It was with some difficulty that Norreys managed to restrain Essex from riding ahead again, in some madcap scheme of arrogant display.
That evening we set up our usual makeshift camp, though by now even the most inadequate of our soldiers understood the need for sentries to keep watch at night. There was, as usual, little to eat. The further we travelled on this seemingly endless journey, the less willing had the peasants become to sell us food in return for scraps of paper bearing the Dom’s scratched signature, so that by now we saw no sign of them. Either the people of this area were more suspicious or word had run ahead of us, so that the villagers had hidden their food supplies. Had we been able to find any of them, they could claim an inability to supply us with provisions.