Massйna saw his blue coats gain the far skyline and he felt a great burden drop from his soul. Sometimes, he thought, the hardest part of being a general lay in the necessity of disguising worry. All day he had pretended a confidence he had not altogether felt, for the wretched Major Ducos had been right when he said that Wellington loved nothing better than defending a hill, and Massйna had watched Fuentes de Onoro's hill and worried that his brave men would never spill over its lip to the rich harvest of victory beyond. Now they were over, the battle was won, and Massйna had no further need to hide his anxiety. He laughed aloud, smiled on his entourage and accepted a flask of brandy with which to toast his victory. And victory was sweet, so sweet. "Send Loup forward," Massйna now commanded. "Tell him to clear the road through the village. We can't deliver supplies through streets choked with dead. Tell him the battle's won so he can take his whore with him if he can't bear to untie her apron strings from round his neck." He laughed again for life was suddenly so very very good.
There were two battalions standing ready near the church; one famous and the other infamous. The famous battalion was the 74th, Highlanders all, and known for their hard steadiness in battle. The Scotsmen were eager to take revenge for the losses suffered by their sister regiment in Fuentes de Onoro's bloody streets and to help them was the 88th, the infamous battalion, reckoned to be as near ungovernable as any regiment in the army, though no one had ever complained about their ability in battle. The 88th was a hard brawling regiment, its men as proud of their fighting record as of their homeland, and that homeland was the wild, bleak and beautiful west of Ireland. The 88th were the Connaught Rangers and now, with the 74th from the Scottish mountains, they would be sent to save Wellington's army.
The French hold on the ridge's crest was tightening as more men reached the road's summit. There was no time to deploy the Scots or Irish into line, only to throw them forward in column of sections at the very centre of the enemy's line. "Bayonets, boys!" an officer shouted, then the two battalions were running forward. Pipes played the Scotsmen on and wild cheers marked the Connaught advance. Both regiments went fast, eager to get the moment over. The thin mingled line of allied infantry split to let the columns through, then fell in behind as the front ranks of the Irish and Scots slammed into the advancing French. There was no time for musketry and no chance for men to hold back from hand-to-hand fighting. The French knew that victory was theirs if they could just defeat this last enemy effort, while the Scots and Irish knew that their only chance of victory depended on them throwing the French off-the ridge's crest.
And so they struck home. Most infantry would have checked their charge a few paces short of an enemy line to pour in a volley of musketry in the hope that the enemy would retreat rather than accept the challenge and horror of hand-to-hand fighting, but the Highlanders and the men of Connaught offered the French no such chance. The front ranks charged bodily into the French attackers and used their bayonets. They screamed war cries in Gaelic and Erse, they clawed and spat and clubbed and kicked and stabbed and all the time more men piled in behind as the rear ranks of the columns collapsed onto the fight. Highland officers slashed with their heavy claymores, while the Irish officers stabbed with the lighter infantry sword. Sergeants drove spontoons hard into the mass of Frenchmen, skewering them with the pikehead, twisting it free and driving it forward again. Inch by inch the counterattack advanced. This was fighting as the Highlanders had always known it, hand to hand and smelling your enemy's blood as you killed him, and it was the kind of fighting for which the Irish were as feared in their own army as among the enemy. They thrust forward, at times so close packed with the enemy that it was the sheer weight of men rather than the edge of their weapons that forced progress. Men slipped and sprawled on the bodies that lay on the saddle's lip, but the press of men behind thrust the men in front onwards and suddenly the French were going back down the steep hill and their grudging retreat became a spilling flight for the safety of the houses.
Riflemen retook the knoll of rocks as Portuguese soldiers hunted down and killed the voltigeurs inside the church. Irishmen and Scotsmen led the wild, screaming, bloody countercharge down through the graveyard and for a moment it seemed as though the ridge, the battle and the army were saved.
Then the French struck again.
Brigadier Loup understood that Massйna would not offer him a chance to make a name in the battle, but that did not mean he would accept the Marshal's animosity. Loup understood Massйna's distrust and did not particularly object, for he believed that a soldier made his own chances. The art of advancement was to wait patiently until an opportunity offered itself and then to move as fast as a striking snake, and now that his brigade had been ordered to its menial task of clearing the main road through and beyond the village of Fuentes de Onoro the Brigadier would watch for any opportunity that would allow him to release his superbly trained and hard-fighting men to a task more suited to their skills.
His journey across the plain was placid. The fighting boiled at the top of the pass above the village, but the British guns seemed not to notice the advance of a single small brigade. A couple of roundshot struck his infantrymen, and one case shot exploded wide of his grey dragoons, but otherwise the Loup Brigade's advance was untroubled by the enemy. The brigade's two infantry battalions marched in column either side of the road, the dragoons flanked them in two large squadrons while Loup himself, beneath his savage wolf-tailed banner, rode in the centre of the formation. Juanita de Elia rode with him. She had insisted on witnessing the battle's closing stages and Marshal Massйna's confident assurance that the battle was won had persuaded Loup it was safe enough for Juanita to ride at least as far as the Dos Casas's eastern bank. The paucity of British artillery fire seemed to vindicate Massйna's confidence.
Loup dismounted his dragoons outside the village gardens. The horses were picketed in a battered orchard where they would remain while the dragoons cleared the road east of the stream. There were not many obstructions here to slow the progress of the heavy baggage wagons carrying Almeida's relief supplies, merely one collapsed wall and a few blackening corpses left from the British gunfire, so once the dragoons had cleared the passage they were ordered to cross the ford and start on the larger job inside the village proper. Loup ordered Juanita to stay with the horses while he marched his two battalions of infantry around the village's northern flank so that they could begin clearing the main street from the top of the hill, working their way down to meet the dragoons coming up from the stream. "You don't have to be careful with the wounded," he told his men, "we're not a damned rescue mission. Our job is to clear the street, not nurse injured men, so just throw the casualties aside until the doctors arrive. Just clear the way, that's all, because the sooner the road's clear the sooner we can put some guns on the ridge to finish off the Goddams. To work!"
He led his men up around the village. A few scattered skirmishers' bullets came from the heights above to remind the grey-clad infantry that this was still not a battle won and Loup, striding eagerly ahead of his men, noted that the fighting was still very close to the plateau's lip, and then a great cheer from the ridge announced that the battle could yet be lost.
For the cheer marked the moment when a phalanx of red-coated infantry drove in the French attack and thrust it back across the crest. Now, beneath their bright flags, the British counterattack was storming down the slope towards the village. French voltigeurs were abandoning the high rocks and fleeing down the slope to find safety behind the village's stone walls. A sudden panic had gripped the leading French grenadiers who were giving ground to the vengeful redcoats, but Loup felt nothing but elation. God, it seemed, was working to a different plan than Marshal Andrй Massйna. The street clearance could wait, for suddenly Loup's opportunity had come.