‘It will soon be time to give the enemy a taste of our mettle, men – and our steel!’ he bellowed to his company, and they gave him a resounding cheer as they marched. The words were bitter in his mouth, and sounded hollow in his ears. Behind the saddle, Suleiman’s ribs arched out, plainly visible beneath his too-thin coat. When the wind blew the horse shivered, but did not baulk. Jonathan felt the shudder pass up through his own body, as though he and his horse were one being. Lend me your courage, brave friend.
Jonathan wrote to Alice constantly, and managed to resist telling her of the fear he felt, and his disgust at the bloodlust of his compatriots. He managed not to describe the way they all seemed to be growing less and less human as the weeks wore on. They grew more bestial, more brutish and cruel – even in their most basic characteristics: they were hairier, ragged, and they stank. The war was shaping them to its own ends. He wrote none of that, and instead wrote of the longing to return to her which occupied his every waking moment, and haunted his dreams as well. Then their surreptitious march was cut short – they encountered a company of around seven hundred French cavalry, and engaged them in a short and brutal fight which finished when the French were all slain. Thus Soult was alerted to their march on Saldana, and their whereabouts.
Word was sent south; the main French force halted, turned, came back for them. When Jonathan was passed the dispatch with this news, he felt his guts turn watery and his legs soften with panic. He bit it down and awaited orders, but they had no other choice than to flee. Within days they might be surrounded by so many thousands of French that any battle would be a massacre. There was no choice but to retreat, back to the coast in the west. On Christmas Eve 1808, the British turned towards the mountains. The officers had to herd their reluctant men – the troops wanted to stay and fight the Duke of Damnation, or Napoleon himself – to fight anybody, rather than climb a mountain range in wintertime, with no supplies. They knew that the mountains would be every bit as deadly as any such battle might be.
Jonathan was sure he could feel the French behind them. He sensed them like a huge black cloud, or like a wave about to break over their heads. He had the constant unnerving feeling of being watched, crept up on. He gave short shrift to his disobedient men, although he stopped short of having them flogged. Men under other officers were not as fortunate. Some took a hundred lashes for a muttered complaint; two hundred for straying away from the columns; three hundred for cozening mutiny. They were left with their backs in tatters, unlikely to live, and loving their commanders no more than before. Run! Jonathan wanted to scream at them. What is the matter with you? Run, while you can! The words stayed trapped in his mouth, straining to get out, as the rain turned to snow and the wind grew teeth and claws. His men took the obvious conflict within him as a sign that he hated the order to retreat as much as they did. It made them love him more, and if he’d had any laughter left he would have laughed at this irony.
It was cold enough to freeze the blood in their veins. Each night the snow set with frost, turning hard and razor sharp. Men who had lost their boots in the sucking mud of the plains now walked barefoot, on feet gone black with frostbite, shapeless with swollen bruises. One man had worn his right through to the bone. He was kneeling in snow, looking down a rocky slope at the milling French not far below them, when Jonathan came up behind him. The smooth, grey knobs of his heel bones protruded through the lacerated soles of his feet. The sight gave Jonathan a dizzy feeling, as if he teetered on the lip of a precipice, and was about to fall. When the man saw him looking, he grinned at Jonathan.
‘A fair sight to frighten the Frenchies, eh, sir?’ he croaked, in a voice as broken as his body. ‘Don’t fret for me, sir; they pain me not at all.’ There was a dull, feverish light in his eyes, and Jonathan moved away without talking to the man, afraid of him because he was clearly dead but still marching; dead but not yet aware of it.
To begin with, the rearguard of the British force was harried constantly. Again and again they had to turn, draw up lines, and repel the French pursuit. Make ready! Present! Fire! Shouted out, over and over again. Jonathan heard the four words in his sleep, and woke with his hand curled around the hilt of a sabre he wasn’t holding, his arm aloft, ready to fall to the accompanying roar of musket fire. He led one short, vicious fight to hold a river crossing, after which the little stream was left crammed with corpses, both French and British. Jonathan surveyed the scene with his ears ringing from the guns; the burbling water sounded like music, like silver bells. There was smoke in his eyes and mouth; his throat was so dry he couldn’t swallow, and there was nothing in his canteen. He went to the water’s edge and knelt in the freezing mud, and scooped up water that was colder than ice, and red with blood. He drank it down nonetheless. It soothed his throat, and tasted of iron. On the far bank lay a young French soldier, still just a boy. He fed the red waters from a wound to his face – half of which was missing. But the boy lived for a little while longer; Jonathan met his eyes and found he couldn’t look away. He sat down in the filth and stayed with this dying lad, whose blood he had drunk with the water. There was no rancour in either of them; no anger or spite; no blame. Only a shared acceptance of what had been done, and could not be undone. When Captain Sutton hauled him to his feet Jonathan blinked, and saw that the boy was dead.
In the coming weeks death was always with them. There were injuries, old and new; there was starvation; there was illness and disease; there were skirmishes, and there was the all-consuming cold. Then death, as if bored, began to find new and creative ways to take them. There was a strange reaction to some supplies of salt fish and rum that finally reached them – when consumed in quantity it blasted through the men’s starving systems with devastating results. There was a swirling fog one day, so thick and white that the eye could not pick out what was ground and what was not. It hid the precipitous drop into a canyon, and more than one man stepped off the edge, all unawares. A pair of mules stumbled off as well, taking a cartload of wounded men with them. All were too weak to cry out as they fell – including the mules. Childbirth claimed one young girl, who remained seated in the snow in a crimson swathe of her own blood, cradling her baby as she waited to die. The child was born too soon; it moved weakly for only a minute or two before it died. Jonathan stopped beside the girl for a while. She sat mute and immobile, not struggling to rise; she looked very beautiful against the snowy ground, with her dark, dark hair and her silvery eyes. Jonathan stayed and waited with her, but he could think of nothing to say or do for her, and death seemed in no hurry to claim her. So he walked on, burrowing his face into his greatcoat.
The next time their path led them alongside a yawning nothingness, an empty drop in which the wind moaned and snow skirled, Jonathan saw a man step off the edge, quite deliberately. Horses collapsed underneath the men they carried and were butchered and eaten, if time on the march allowed. Dogs suffered the same fate. Otherwise, the men chewed the leather straps from their kit and uniforms for sustenance. By the middle of January 1809, as their path began to descend towards the fertile plains that would lead them to the sea, the retreat through the mountains had killed five thousand of them. Jonathan walked beside Suleiman with his arms around the horse’s neck. He was too weak to walk unaided, but Suleiman was lame in both his front legs, and winced at every step, and Jonathan could not bear to mount him, however much Captain Sutton urged him to. So he half walked and was half dragged by his horse, and when he tried to check Suleiman’s front feet to find out the problem, they were so hard-packed with ice he had no way of telling. The horse’s coat was matted and bedraggled; it clung to his stark bones, hard with mud and frost. Jonathan tried to murmur encouragement as they went, but after a while his words became nonsense, and his lips cracked and bled when he moved them, so he only thought what he wanted to say. Keep going, my brave friend, for I will perish here without you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I brought you here, brave creature.