It happened on a broiling afternoon in July 1812, and midway in a
fortnight of exquisite weather, during which Wellington and Marmont
faced each other across the Douro before opening the beautiful series of
evolutions--or, rather, of circumvolutions--which ended suddenly on the
22nd, and locked the two armies in the prettiest pitched battle I have
lived to see.
For the moment neither General desired a battle. Marmont, thrust back
from Salamanca, had found a strong position where he could safely wait
for reinforcements, and had indeed already collected near upon forty
thousand of all arms, when, on the 8th, Bonnet marched into camp from
Asturias with another six thousand infantry. He had sent, too, to
borrow some divisions from Caffarelli's Army of the North. But these he
expected in vain: for Bonnet's withdrawal from Asturias had laid bare
the whole line of French communication, and so frightened Caffarelli for
the safety of his own districts that he at once recalled the twelve
thousand men he was moving down to the Douro, and in the end sent but a
handful of cavalry, and that grudgingly.
All this I had the honour to predict to Lord Wellington just twelve
hours before Bonnet's arrival on the scene. I staked my reputation that
Caffarelli (on whom I had been watching and waiting for a month past)
would not move. And Lord Wellington on the spot granted me the few
days' rest I deserved--not so much in joy of the news (which,
nevertheless, was gratifying) as because for the moment he had no work
for me. The knot was tied. He could not attack except at great
disadvantage, for the fords were deep, and Marmont held the one bridge
at Tordesillas. His business was to hold on, covering Salamanca and the
road back to Portugal, and await Marmont's first move.
The French front stretched as a chord across an arc of the river, which
here takes a long sweep to the south; and the British faced it around
this arc, with their left, centre, and right, upon three tributary
streams--the Guarena, Trabancos, and Zapardiel--over which last, and
just before it joins the Douro, towers the rock of Rueda, crowned with a
ruinated castle.
Upon this rock--for my quarters lay in face of it, on the opposite bank
of the stream--I had been gazing for the best part of an idle afternoon.
I was comfortable; my _cigarritos_ lay within reach; my tent gave shade
enough; and through the flapway I found myself watching a mighty pretty
comedy, with the rock of Rueda for its back-scene.
A more satisfactory one I could not have wished, and I have something of
a connoisseur's eye. To be sure, the triangular flapway narrowed the
picture, and although the upstanding rock and castle fell admirably
within the frame, it cut off an animated scene on the left, where their
distant shouts and laughter told me that French and British were bathing
together in the river below and rallying each other on the battles yet
to be fought. For during these weeks, and indeed through the
operations which followed up to the moment of fighting, the armies
behaved less like foes than like two teams before a cricket-match, or
two wrestlers who shake hands and afterwards grin amicably as they move
in circles seeking for a hitch. As I lay, however, the bathing-place
could only be brought into view by craning my neck beyond the tent-door:
and my posture was too well chosen to be shifted. Moreover, I had a
more singular example of these amenities in face of me, on the rock of
Rueda itself.
The cliff, standing out against the sun's glare like ivory beneath the
blue, and quivering with heat, was flecked here and there with small
lilac shadows; and these shadows marked the entrances of the caves with
which Rueda was honeycombed. I had once or twice resolved to visit
these caves; for I had heard much of their renown, and even (although
this I disbelieved) that they contained wine enough to intoxicate all
the troops in the Peninsula. Wine in abundance they certainly
contained, and all the afternoon men singly and in clusters had been
swarming in and out of these entrances like flies about a honeypot.
For whatever might be happening on the Trabancos under Lord Wellington's
eye, here at Rueda, on the extreme right, discipline for the while had
disappeared: and presumably the like was true of Marmont's extreme left
holding the bridge of Tordesillas. For from the bridge a short roadway
leads to Rueda; and among the figures moving about the rock, diminished
by distance though they were, I counted quite a respectable proportion
of Frenchmen. No one who loves his calling ever quite forgets it: and
though no one could well have appeared (or indeed felt) lazier, I was
really giving my eye practice in discriminating, on this ant-hill, the
drunk from the sober, and even the moderately drunk from the incapable.
There could be no doubt, at any rate, concerning one little Frenchman
whom two tall British grenadiers were guiding down the cliff towards the
road. And against my will I had to drop my cigarette and laugh aloud:
for the two guides were themselves unsteady, yet as desperately intent
upon the job as though they handled a chest of treasure. Now they would
prop him up and run him over a few yards of easy ground: anon, at a
sharp descent, one would clamber down ahead and catch the burden his
comrade lowered by the collar, with a subsidiary grip upon belt or
pantaloons. But to the Frenchman all smooth and rugged came alike: his
legs sprawled impartially: and once, having floundered on top of the
leading Samaritan with a shock which rolled the pair to the very verge
of a precipice, he recovered himself, and sat up in an attitude which,
at half a mile's distance, was eloquent of tipsy reproach. In short,
when the procession had filed past the edge of my tent-flap, I crawled
out to watch: and then it occurred to me as worth a lazy man's while to
cross the Zapardiel by the pontoon bridge below and head these comedians
off upon the highroad. They promised to repay a closer view.
So I did; gained the road, and, seating myself beside it, hailed them as
they came.
"My friend," said I to the leading grenadier, "you are taking a deal of
trouble with your prisoner."
The grenadier stared at his comrade, and his comrade at him. As if by
signal they mopped their brows with their coat-sleeves. The Frenchman
sat down on the road without more ado.
"Prisoner?" mumbled the first grenadier.
"Ay," said I. "Who is he? He doesn't look like a general of brigade."
"Devil take me if _I_ know. Who will he be, Bill?"
Bill stared at the Frenchman blankly, and rooted him out of the dust
with his toe. "I wonder, now! 'Picked him up, somewheres--Get up, you
little pig, and carry your liquor like a gentleman. It was Mike
intojuced him."
"I did not," said Mike.
"Very well, then, ye did not. I must have come by him some other way."
"It was yourself tripped over him in the cellar, up yandhar." He broke
off and eyed me, meditating a sudden thought. "It seems mighty queer,
that--speaking of a cellar as 'up yandhar.' Now a cellar, by rights,
should be in the ground, under your fut."
"And so it is," argued Bill; "slap in the bowels of it."
"Ah, be quiet wid your bowels! As I was saying, sor, Bill tripped
over the little fellow: and the next I knew he was crying to be tuk home
to camp, and Bill swearing to do it if it cost him his stripes.
And that is where I come into this fatigue job: for the man's no friend
of mine, and will not be looking it, I hope."
"Did I so?" Bill exclaimed, regarding himself suddenly from outside, as
it were, and not without admiration. "Did I promise that?
Well, then"--he fixed a sternly disapproving stare on the Frenchman--
"the Lord knows what possessed me; but to the bridgehead you go, if I
fight the whole of Clausel's division single-handed. Take his feet,
Mike; I'm a man of my word. Hep!--ready is it? For'ard!"
For a minute or so, as they staggered down the road, I stared after
them; and then upon an impulse mounted the track by which they had
descended.
It was easy enough, or they had never come down alive; but the sun's
rays smote hotly off the face of the rock, and at one point I narrowly
missed being brained by a stone dislodged by some drunkard above me.
Already, however, the stream of tipplers had begun to set back towards
the camp, and my main difficulty was to steer against it, avoiding
disputes as to the rule of the road. I had no intention of climbing to
the castle: my whim was--and herein again I set my training a test--to
walk straight to the particular opening from which, across the
Zapardiel, I had seen my comedians emerge.
I found it, not without difficulty--a broad archway of rock, so low that
a man of ordinary stature must stoop to pass beneath it; with, for
threshold, a sill of dry fine earth which sloped up to a ridge
immediately beneath the archway, and on the inner side dipped down into
darkness so abruptly that as I mounted on the outer side I found myself
staring, at a distance of two yards or less, into the face of an old man
seated within the cave, out of which his head and shoulders arose into
view as if by magic.
"Ah!" said he calmly. "Good evening, senor. You will find good
entertainment within." He pointed past him into absolute night, or so
it seemed to my dazzled eyes.
He spoke in Spanish, which is my native tongue--although not my
ancestral one. And as I crouched to pass the archway I found time to
speculate on his business in this cavern. For clearly he had not come
hither to drink, and as clearly he had nothing to do with either army.
At first glance I took him for a priest; but his bands, if he wore them,
were hidden beneath a dark poncho fitting tightly about his throat, and
his bald head baffled any search for a tonsure. Although a small book
lay open on his lap, I had interrupted no reading; for when I came upon
him his spectacles were perched high over his brows and gleamed upon me
like a duplicate pair of eyes. He was patently sober, too, which
perhaps came as the greatest shock of all to me, after meeting so many
on my path who were patently the reverse.
I answered his salutation. "But you will pardon me, excellent sir, for
saying that you perhaps mistake the entertainment I seek. We gentlemen
of Spain are temperate livers, and I will confess that curiosity alone
has brought me--or say, rather, the fame of your wonderful cellars of
Rueda."
I put it thus, thinking he might perhaps be some official of the caves
or of the castle above. But he let the shot pass. His lean hands from
the first had been fumbling with his poncho, to throw back the folds of
it in courtesy to a stranger; but this seemed no easy matter, and at a
sign from me he desisted.
"I can promise you," he answered, "nothing more amusing than the group
with which you paused to converse just now by the road."
"Eh? You saw me?"
"I was watching from the path outside; for I too can enjoy a timely
laugh."
No one, I am bound to say, would have guessed it. With his long scrag
neck and great moons of spectacles, which he had now drawn down, the
better to study me, he suggested an absurd combination of the vulture
and the owl.
"_Dios!_ You have good eyes, then."
"For long distances. But they cannot see Salamanca." His gaze wandered
for a moment to the entrance beyond which, far below and away, a sunny
landscape twinkled, and he sighed. But before I could read any meaning
in the words or the sigh, his spectacles were turned upon me again.
"You are Spanish?" he asked abruptly.
"Of Castile, for that matter; though not, I may own to you, of pure
descent. I come from Aranjuez, where a Scottish ancestor, whose name I
bear, settled and married soon after the War of Succession."
"A Scot?" He leaned forward, and his hands, which had been resting on
his lap, clutched the book nervously. "Of the Highlands?"