It's Not Indigestion I'll Eat What I Like Page 3

  The first twenty miles on horseback were not pleasant, but the thick cloaks kept out most of the rain. Cloaks were not really practical for marching and running, although even without them the sweat was soaking through the brown cloth and making the unfortunates as wet as they would have been had it still been pouring.

  This was the afternoon of the third day since leaving Lisbon and each day had been the same. The first twenty miles were on horseback. Quite enough for horses that had spent three weeks penned up on board the transport from England. The next ten miles were on foot with full pack and weapons. They marched for a hundred paces and alternated by trotting for a hundred paces; a method of covering the ground that Welbeloved had first observed in Indian tribes in America.

  Of the ten Hornets with them, two were scouting ahead and looking for a secure resting place for the night. Four were riding as vanguard and four were covering the rear. Two of the Spanish girls, known as MacKay’s harem, were driving the two fully-laden wagons. The rest were participating alongside the new boys, determined to show that they were at least as fit and fully trained as the men.

  It had been a very good idea to bring the girls along even though it meant a temporary separation for the MacKays. The ‘recruits’ had been disparaging at first. By the end of the first day, when the girls had out- performed them in every aspect of their training, their male egos had awakened. The thought of being second best to a bunch of girls in what was essentially a man’s field, was not to be borne.

  The officers and sergeants had accepted their lowly cadet status remarkably well and allowed themselves to be split up into three small squads led by Welbeloved, Atkins and Juanita. The girls took it in turn to drive the wagons or join the squads.

  Most noteworthy of all, at the morning parade on the quay, was the presence of Bailey, properly dressed in a buckskin-brown uniform and expressing determination to accept Welbeloved’s infamous conditions. Welbeloved welcomed him gravely and shook his hand. He placed him in the squad led by Juanita, who made sure that when the men were paired off with their partners; as was the practice in the Hornets and in the ‘Rifles’; he was allocated a member of the ‘harem’ as his partner, to encourage him to greater efforts.

  There were thirty-four recruits altogether, struggling to keep up with the pace that Sergeant-Major Atkins was setting. Two of the original captains and one of the lieutenants had decided that they were too old and set in their ways. They had been replaced by several young officers and sergeants released from Cockburn’s squadron.

  In addition there was Lieutenant Günther Roffhack and Sergeant Otto Grau of the King’s German Legion, in the green uniform of the Rifles. Their platoon had joined the rest of the marines training near Viseu. Lieutenant Fernando Gonçalves and Sergeant Pedro Vidal of the green-clad Caçadores represented the Portuguese. Finally, Lieutenant Algernon (call me Algy) Cholmondeley (Pronounced Chumley), a slight, slim figure was trotting along in his new brown uniform, looking just as smart, if not so vivid as in his red coat.

  Each day, at the end of the twenty mile ride and ten mile trek, there was an hour spent shooting at the targets that the vanguard had prepared. An hour passed in training the horses in the various manoeuvres perfected by the Hornets, then tending and feeding them. A further hour was taken up learning how to crawl unseen across broken country and remain totally invisible in ambush.

  Even after only two full days, it was becoming apparent that some of them were flagging badly. Life on board ship was not an ideal preparation for travelling across country for thirty miles a day, but that was just a matter of physical fitness that the regime was likely to improve. What was surprising to Welbeloved was how poor their marksmanship really was, apart from half a dozen talented exceptions and ‘Algy’ Cholmondeley, who stood fair to equal Evans or Welbeloved himself.

  Unbeknown to Welbeloved, an extra twelve Fergusons had been carried in the cargo brought out by Daphne. Vere told him that they had been commissioned by Wellington as a token of esteem. It was certainly opportune. It meant that there were now enough modified muskets to arm everyone in the party, once the girls had ‘borrowed’ Fergusons for the trip. The four greenjackets kept their Baker rifles and Cholmondeley used the Ferguson that Vere had given him.

  The three squads were moving independently, with a gap of a hundred yards between them. This made it easy for them to set their own rhythm without having a trotting squad bumping into a marching squad. Atkins was leading the first squad and setting a moderate pace. The double march phase was more of a gentle jog trot than a serious attempt to cover the ground. Maybe he would increase the pace when they were not quite so exhausted after their day’s efforts.

  Nevertheless, even at this speed, one of the lieutenants was in trouble. He had fallen to his knees gasping for breath and holding his sides. It may have been stitch but his partner who had stopped to help was having no success in getting him to his feet again.

  His squad carried on and it was when Juanita’s squad was moving round and past him that the shouting started. Bailey had stopped and was ranting at the poor fellow to get up and move on and not let the Marines down.

  He was really laying into him, but his partner for the day, Maria, took a more pragmatic approach. She and his partner took an arm each and pulled him to his feet, setting off again with him staggering between them.

  Welbeloved came level and saw that he was recovering to some extent. He yelled to Maria in Spanish to encourage him to continue or get him into one of the wagons if he couldn’t. Her reply “De acuerdo Señor El Conde”, echoed behind him as he bellowed at Bailey, “He’s not yor responsibility, Recruit. Leave him be and double back to yor squad!”

  It looked as though he would start to argue, but the look on Welbeloved’s face discouraged that idea. He turned and started at a stumbling run to attempt to catch up with his squad. It said a lot for his determination that he made up the ground lost by the time they reached the site chosen for the night’s rest. He was by far the most unfit of all, carrying the result of years of good living around his waist.

  At the end of the first day he had literally collapsed into his blankets as soon as he was allowed. It was a blessing that the first stage next morning was on horseback. Even then he was using muscles that hadn’t been exercised for a long time, but it did allow most of the agonising stiffness to leave his marching muscles by the time they reached the end of the riding stint. After three days he must have sweated away many excess pounds and would need to be watched to make sure that he still had appetite enough to maintain his strength.

  Target practice that afternoon was in earnest. Four, portable, man-sized targets were brought from the wagons and erected at twenty-five yards. There was a heart-sized circle painted in the appropriate place. As a demonstration, Welbeloved, Atkins, Juanita and Cholmondeley each put a shot through the centre of the heart.

  The four riflemen from the KGL and the Caçadores had already proved their skill with their Bakers and were each loaned one of the spare Fergusons. Five shots each proved that it was justified. All that was needed was loading rhythm and speed and they would be up to Hornet marksmanship standard.

  Of the rest, ten were naturally good enough at that range to be considered promising. All the others ranged from fair to poor to bad and Bailey was the worst. He didn’t hit the target once. Cholmondeley had been standing and watching with Welbeloved. “He’s not naturally adroit, but nobody should be that inept if they can see properly, Sir. I wonder if he uses spectacles for reading?”

  “The answer to that, Chumley is no. I’ve seen him reading without any difficulty. Yew may have the answer though. I’ve known people who could see perfectly well up to a yard and found everything blurred beyond that. I’ll find out later.

  Our immediate problem is that we are likely to meet enemy forces any time from tomorrow onwards. I need to concentrate my marksmen where I can call on them to act together. I must have a word with Atkins.”

  When they set out the next morning, Atkins led the first squad, made up of Cholmondeley, the four riflemen and the six best marksmen with the muskets.

  Juanita and one of the harem drew the short straw by shepherding the dozen poorest shots, including Bailey. Welbeloved brought up the rear with the third squad. They were of a standard which was far better than the average British soldier, but still far below his own exacting standards.

  It was quite an uneventful day, much the same as the previous three, but with a noticeable improvement in levels of fitness. At the beginning of the footslogging period there was a bounce in the step of most of the men. Some of them maintained it until they reached their camping site.

  Target practice that evening was intensified for men in the second and third squads. Four Hornets, including the almost legendary Dai Evans, lay beside each potential marksman, calming them, coaxing them, perfecting their grip on their muskets and showing them exactly how they should align the sights fitted by Roberto the smith during their modification.

  The result was a considerable improvement. Frequent fatal hits were registered by the whole of squad three and apart from Bailey and an older sergeant, even squad two got more hits than misses on the target area.

  ***

  In Portugal, Vere, MacKay, Tonks and Thuner had divided their recruits into three units of one hundred men each. The KGL men and all the Caçadores were separate and were handed over to Thuner to train alongside them. Some of the Germans claimed that they could understand Thuner’s Swiss German and fortunately most of the Hornets who were helping had learned enough Spanish to make themselves understood by the Caçadores. The fact that both groups were trained riflemen and carried their Baker rifles made the latest training more a matter of fieldcraft and fitness than marksmanship.

  Hickso
n and Lopez were off on a visit to their comrades and Guerrilla leaders, El Marquisito in the Asturias and El Martillo in Galicia. The French now only had a token presence in northwest Spain. The two Hornets were therefore determined to recruit up to twenty of the men who had been former Spanish soldiers and then members of the ‘Green Wolves’ that had been founded by Welbeloved during the Corruna campaign, three years ago.

  Their plan was to combine these with a dozen fighters that they knew they could get from Tio Pepe. This would make a complete Spanish platoon within the Brigade.

  Activity was frantic in the hills north of Viseu; Wellington’s headquarters and the capital of the region. All the men had made the first part of their journey in flat-bottomed barges for twenty miles up the river. From there they had marched to their training area in the hills and their ordeal had begun.

  The greatest problem was lack of acceptable arms. The KGL and the Caçadores had their Bakers, but the Marines were issued with only the standard British musket, often referred to as the Brown Bess. There were three hundred potential sharpshooters effectively weaponless and also horseless.

  Two squads of twenty Hornets left immediately. Twenty under the command of Sergeant Ryan set off to find El Charro. He was the energetic leader of a large band of mounted guerrilleros operating throughout León. Ryan’s instructions were to co-operate with El Charro and keep the main French base at Salamanca under observation, but mainly to steal as many horses as possible from any cavalry units that they could combine to ambush.

  The other twenty men with two wagons were to dash back to Santiago del Valle and collect as many converted muskets as they could and as many horses with equipment, still available from those captured in their last raid on Talavera.

  If fortune favoured them there could be as many as a hundred of each and Roberto would be working even harder to increase his production of breechloaders.

  The hundred Wasps, now fully recovered from their wounds at Talavera and trained almost up to Hornets standards, were what made full training possible. They were armed and mounted and split into four platoons with a sergeant over each. They joined the four divisions of trainees and continued their own training by taking part in their exercises, lending their own breechloaders for target practice and their horses for riding lessons.

  Then the tough and relentless regime of marching, running, stalking and concealment began. Vere and MacKay couldn’t afford to be as ruthless as they had been with the Hornets, but they didn’t have the time or the patience to make the allowances that had enabled them to retain some of the Wasps, when they were borderline competent, but would be unlikely to reach the highest standards expected of the Hornets.

  The first two weeks were hell for the recruits. Physically they were pushed to their limits and beyond in a conscious effort to weed out the weaklings, both in body and spirit. Forty men changed back into their red coats at the end of that time and set off on the march back to Lisbon. Admiral Berkeley had promised Welbeloved that he would hold all the rejects either for transfer to line regiments or for second line duties as garrison or support personnel. Their brown uniforms were passed on to the KGL or the Caçadores as soon as they became available and the number of horses and breechloaders required was also reduced.

  After three weeks, the Hornets came back from Santiago del Valle. They had reached there just in time to commandeer breechloaders and horses, earmarked for guerrilleros. A hundred breechloaders and horses eased the training problems enormously and Roberto had promised he would deliver at least twenty- five more muskets each week.

  A dozen trained guerrilleros from Tio Pepe helped to bring the horses in. Hickson and Lopez returned with eighteen men from the north and the Spanish platoon was complete with thirty men both armed and mounted. Uniforms would be provided from the quantities of cloth that Cockburn had acquired. They would join the KGL and the Caçadores for the remainder of their training.

  When small numbers of additional horses began to come in from Ryan’s fishing expedition, they realised that they already had over half their requirements. Ten of the Hornets back from Santiago went immediately to join Ryan in the quest for more horses. The other ten returned to Santiago to help Welbeloved and collect more supplies of muskets.

  At the end of the fourth week, they rejected another twenty marines. Vere, MacKay, Tonks, together with Dodds, Hickson and Thuner, conferred together that evening and agreed that everyone remaining had now reached the minimum standard to qualify as Wasps. Moreover, they were all fit enough for the physical aspects of their training to be relaxed in favour of the specialist skills they would need.

  As the fieldcraft and woodcraft expertise would require them to move across all types of country quickly and without being detected, the state of fitness they had achieved would certainly not be allowed to diminish.

  Nobody knew how long they had left to them. Reports kept coming in of the build-up of the French army around Salamanca, where Marshal Masséna and Marshal Ney would soon have enough men to swamp the English and Portuguese. Vere and MacKay, in their different ways, both solicited the goodwill of Welbeloved’s Dame Fortune. They felt it was time he brought back the officers who would weld their trainees into a fighting unit.

  CHAPTER 3

  Welbeloved was feeling somewhat reassured with the results of the fourth marksmanship session. The patient coaching given by the Hornets had produced a vastly improved result and he only now realised that the recruits, particularly the officers, in his squads had most probably never before fired a musket in anger. Doubtless some of them had used sporting guns and certainly they must have practised with their pistols, but their vast ignorance about the use of the basic weapon available to their soldiers, left him bewildered.

  Then he remembered that Nelson himself had forbidden the marines on his ships to use their muskets, except on deck. He reasoned that the risk of fire from the burning powder, catching the sails and tarred rigging was greater than any advantage it might give when firing from the tops.

  Whatever the reason, he now had an accurate picture regarding the marksmanship of the fifty-one members of his squads. The Hornets, the girls and Cholmondeley with Fergusons and the riflemen with their Bakers, twenty-two all told, were deadly against all targets up to two hundred yards. Two thirds of the rest were now accurate against stationary or marching targets at fifty yards.

  The remainder still relied heavily on the favour of the Goddess of chance for any success over twenty-five yards, but everyone could now load and give aimed shots from the prone position at least three times a minute. That sort of speed took normal recruits weeks of repetitive training with their muzzleloaders.

  He realised that the four riflemen and their Baker rifles might not quite attain the three shots in a minute but their accuracy largely made up for that.

  This was the moment when Willie Peterkin chose to disturb his thoughts. Peterkin was the Hornet with the keenest eyes and was always chosen as one of the advance scouts. As he cantered up, Welbeloved ordered a halt to hear what had brought him personally hurrying back.

  He listened patiently to news he had been hoping he would not have to hear until his recruits were better prepared. “The river that gaes into the Tagus frae the north aboot eight miles frae here. The one we hae tae follow tae reach Santiago.” Welbeloved nodded. He knew exactly where he meant. “There’s fifty Frog hoosars just crossed it, heading this way. Foot soldiers followin’, I reckon four or five hundred, wi’ more cavalry at the rear. The hoosars could be here in an hoor and the foot soldiers twa or three hoors later. They’re movin’ steadily. Nae in any hurry.”

  Welbeloved cursed under his breath. “Thankyew Peterkin. Go back to yor partner. Wait until yew can be sure of the numbers. Satisfy yorself that they are set on coming this way, then come and report.”

  Atkins and Juanita had come close enough to hear what was said. He nodded to them and started thinking out loud. “We need to go north, but the last obvious road through those hills was about ten miles back and it ain’t my favourite option.

  Fifty hussars is not an insurmountable problem but this is not good ambush country. We shall have to be devious, but we can certainly make use of any horses they care to donate. I don’t fancy arguing with five hundred foot soldiers, so whatever we do has to be over in the two hours before they get here. We need a defensive position and an escape route.”