Jonathan came down with a bout of fever, and lay listless and sweating in his tent for five days. Captain Sutton visited often, wet his lips with wine, and tried to cheer him with funny stories about the tomfoolery of the men, but Jonathan could not raise a smile for him. In their japes and their games and their contests he saw the lust for violence, coiled inside each one of them like madness; like embers that might burst into flames in a second, and consume the last of the man’s humanity. These were the men who were invested to retake Badajoz on the twelfth of March, 1812. These men made brutal by all the fear and pain, hunger and violence; made brave and savage by their own suffering, and half mad by all they had seen. Jonathan looked over them as they approached the city, and he feared them. Lord Wellington might see a rabble, but he saw a pack of wolves, liable to turn on each other, on their officers, on him. Captain Sutton kept close to him as the siege was set and the barrage began. Jonathan felt his friend’s eyes upon him, measuring. He wondered what madness the captain saw in him; whether he saw the fear and sorrow and the yearning to hide away from it all, or whether he saw the urge to kill and destroy, to vent his rage on all around him. Both were in him, and when he pictured Alice’s face it fed both sides of him equally – the surrender, and the fury.
The artillery barrage succeeded in making three narrow breaches in the town’s crenellated walls. The French waited inside in their thousands; any attempt to storm the breaches would result in a slaughter. Wellington could see it; Jonathan could see it; the lowliest foot soldier could see it. Nevertheless, the command came for the attack to begin at ten in the evening, under cover of darkness and with the French unprepared. But some sound was heard; some inadvertent tip-off betrayed them. The French set fire to the body of a British soldier and hurled it out from the walls to cast light on the advancing men, and as easily as that the element of surprise was lost. The British charged, right into a series of traps the French had set for them. They were blown up by mines, drowned in flooded ditches. They were impaled on iron spikes, and on makeshift barriers of sword blades; the momentum of men behind ensuring the death of the vanguard. Those that reached the breaches were slain in their hundreds, and all the while the French inside hurled out insults and taunts; goading them, laughing.
‘You must not laugh at us!’ Jonathan roared as he came close enough to the walls to hear it. He was standing on the bodies of the fallen; he was sprayed with flying blood, drenched in sweat. He knew that the beast in them all was awake, and that the laughter of their enemies ran like fire in their blood; a red frenzy that turned them from men into something both more and less. It kept the attack alive; it stormed the walls, and pressed into the city; it opened the breaches to the onrushing men; and after two hours in which nearly five thousand of the allied besiegers were slaughtered, it sealed the fate of the city of Badajoz.
The wolves were unleashed, and nothing could rein them in. They were the sum total of all they had seen and suffered, all they had been required to do and to bear. They were a vision of mankind stripped of all decency and pity, and they were hell-bent on revenge. Women were raped, and raped again. Children, even crawling infants, were kicked around for sport, stuck with bayonets. Men were tortured, killed, torn to pieces, be they French invader or Spanish resident. Men looted, men desecrated, men ravaged and pillaged; men turned on one another and fought to the death over spoils as trifling as a piece of food or a bottle of wine. Over the right to rape a woman before she died, or afterwards. Their officers could not hope to control them. Their officers dared not try, for fear of being torn apart themselves; the men were blind drunk on brandy and wine and blood.
Jonathan wandered through it all without seeing it, for the first twelve hours or so. He found a dark cellar, entirely empty; lay down on the dirt floor and slept a while. He did not feel as though he possessed his own body; he felt like a ghost, drifting unseen amongst it all. Only when he awoke and rose did he notice the pain in his leg, and the way it would not take his weight. He looked down and found a chunk of wood thrust straight through his calf. The exit wound was a chaos of black clotted blood and shards of grey bone. The sight caused no emotion in him at all. He stumbled out into the violated streets. A cloudy day had dawned, but the light brought no respite to the degradation of Badajoz. The men went about in packs, under no command. Jonathan did not speak to any, nor interfere with the things he saw. He did not dare, since to interfere was to see it, to take it in; and to see it was to run the risk of losing himself for ever.
But Captain Sutton found him, and brought him to a group of five men, the sparse remnants of his company, who had banded together for safety from the pillage.
‘Thank God you’re alive, Major! I had feared the worst. If anyone can restore some order here, it’s you, sir.’ Captain Sutton splinted up Jonathan’s shattered leg, tearing strips from his own uniform to bind it. ‘But I should get you to the surgeons first. Come,’ he said.
‘No!’ Jonathan cried. He remembered the surgeons: the stink of rum and bile and open bowels; the mound of severed limbs that piled up outside the window of a Talavera convent where they’d set up their tables. Huge black moths, circling the field lamps. The pain in his leg was coming in waves now, a rising beat of agony, but he would not submit to the surgeons. ‘No! I can stand. I can walk. Let us bring a halt to this madness.’
‘Are you sure, sir?’ Sutton wasn’t convinced, but Jonathan stood, using an abandoned musket as a crutch.
Talking had returned Jonathan to himself, however reluctantly. Nausea bubbled in his gut as they moved cautiously through the ruins of the town; smoke skirled around them from a hundred different fires. They broke up fights and issued orders that were sometimes heeded; more often ignored. They hastened the passing of soldiers and citizens who had been left in dreadful agony, deliberately, and with no hope of survival. They pulled a man from a barrel of brandy only to find that he had drowned himself in it, and was beyond reprimand. They fired their guns to scatter a group of men squabbling like magpies over the gilded treasure from a plundered church. And as the hours passed, Jonathan’s heart grew sicker and sicker with it all. He knew, with complete certainty, that not one man of them would ever feel himself possessed of his whole soul again. They must lose a part of it, or risk the corruption spreading to every corner. All too often, it was clear that this had already happened.
It was the woman’s screams that drew them. Many women wept noisily, or prayed, or were mute or unconscious as they were violated. This woman screamed with such anger and outrage that Jonathan flinched away from the sound. He did not want to witness what would cause her to make such sounds. Grim-faced, his small band of men rushed towards the church from which her voice came echoing. She was at the far end of the aisle, near the dais where the altar sat. It was a small church with a pretty rose window high in the wall, its glass miraculously intact, lighting the scene of torment playing out below in shades of blue and gold. A group of ten or so British soldiers surrounded her, and had been with her for some time by the looks of it. She had been stripped naked, and struggled to rise even though her lower body was awash in blood. Each time she got to her knees she was kicked back down, and as Jonathan approached a man climbed on top of her, and began his work again. She screeched with that wild rage, and the hair stood up on Jonathan’s arms.