But on the 8th April, when his lordship stood at the drumhead with Juana on his gallant arm, his orders had not been obeyed, for no officer, and no six non-commissioned officers, however steady, could hope to control the activities of any regiment at present rioting in the streets, or wenching in the white-washed houses of Badajos.
Yet his lordship seemed quite unperturbed, whispering his nonsense into Juana’s ear. His lordship did not love his men, but without effort he understood them. Presently he would send a strong force into Badajos, and erect a gallows there, but not until his wild, heroic troops had glutted themselves with conquest. Had his lordship cared, after the bloody combat at Ciudad Rodrigo, when he had met the men of the 95th Rifles clad in every imaginable costume, excepting only the dress of a Rifleman? Not a bit! They had had their swords stuck full of hams, tongues, and loaves of bread; they were weighed down by their plunder; but when they had set up a cheer for his lordship, he had acknowledged it in his usual stiff way, and had asked the officer of the leading company, quite casually, what regiment it was? And when he was told that he beheld some of his crack troops, he had given a neigh of laughter, and had ridden on.
No, his lordship was not worrying over the conduct of troops who had cracked the hardest nut of all his Peninsular campaigns. Truth to tell, his lordship had very little sympathy to spare for his Spanish allies. He had suffered too much at their hands.
His lordship was all attention to Juana and her sister, all joviality towards Harry Smith, whom he knew to be one of his promising young officers. He had found time, in the midst of his worries, to arrange for the elder lady to be set on her way through the British lines. You would not have thought, seeing his lordship clapping Harry upon the back, cutting a jest, giving that laugh of his that was like the neighing of a horse, that Soult was on the march, that the Spanish garrison he had left at Ciudad Rodrigo was proving itself utterly incapable, that his own troops were out of hand, and most of them roaring drunk, that he must break camp, and march as soon as possible.
Such preoccupations, shelved for the moment in his lordship’s mind, were yet present in Harry’s brain, when he received Juana’s little hand in his. No moment, surely, could have been more inauspicious for an officer in Lord Wellington’s army to take a wife to himself. The month was April, the summer lay ahead: charming for a civilian, of course; but for a soldier summer meant campaigning. No cosy, happy-go-lucky winter quarters for Harry
’s child-wife, with balls, and amateur theatricals, or trips to Lisbon to break the monotony of a domestic existence. Lord Wellington kept his plans to himself, but everyone knew that in a very short time now he would launch his summer campaign, driving a wedge into Spain, making Marshal Marmont, who had succeeded to Massena’s uneasy command and was reported to be a conceited fellow, look as silly as every other French general who had come against him.
‘Blur-an-ouns, boys, ain’t he the man to stand by? Don’t he take the rough and the smooth with us, and ain’t he afther kicking the French before him, just as we’d kick an old football?’ No one doubted that that was just how his lordship would serve the French. He might have political opponents in England who declared his victories to be exaggerated, too hardly won; but the men who fought under his Generalship had a serene faith in him which only defeat could shake. For his lordship had never lost a battle. Roliça, Vimiero, Talavera, the Coa, Bussaco, Sabugal, Fuentes de Onoro, El Bodon: the long list of his Peninsular victories stretched over three years-difficult, hampered years, when lack of money, the incompetence of some of his Generals, scepticism at home, jealousies in Spain, machinations in Portugal, all combined to build up obstacles that would have driven a lesser man to suicide or insanity. They made his lordship querulous (awful, his temper was, some days), but they never made him lose heart. Harry, as much as his friends, had tried to warn Juana of what lay before her. He spoke Spanish like a native, so she could have no excuse for misunderstanding him. Jack Molloy thought that words conveyed little to a girl whose life had been bounded by convent walls; he thought she listened to Harry, yet, through her inexperience, formed no mental picture of the hardships and the alarms lying in wait for a lady travelling with Wellington’s army. She insisted that she would enjoy the life very much. No qualms shook her; she knew no virginal shrinking; when she and Harry were pronounced man and wife, she looked up at him trustingly, her eyes quite unshadowed. Johnny Kincaid saw that look, and his smile was more twisted than ever, but he was the first to step forward and wish the bride good luck.