The cannons were bronze and rested on two-wheeled carriages that were timber reinforced with iron. Spain’s climate was not damp, but iron rusted there as it did everywhere. Kit and Roger supervised the men as they cleaned and oiled and tested the wheeled artillery ready for a march. British guns weighed three-fifths of a ton: moving them from place to place on unpaved roads was never less than achallenge and often a nightmare. Each gun was attached to a two-wheeled limber, and the ensemble required six horses to pull it.
Most days Kit had been so busy that he forgot to worry about fighting.
The army moved with hundreds of vehicles, mostly supply wagons, and they, too, had to be serviced, checked, and often mended at the end of the winter. The oxen and horses that pulled them were, fortunately, someone else’s responsibility. Kit had never had a horse of his own and had hated them ever since Will Riddick’s wild-eyed stallion had cracked his skull when he was six years old.
New recruits were drilled, taught to shoot, and sent on long marches in full gear to harden their feet and teach them resilience. Shiploads of supplies arrived from England: new boots, fresh uniforms, muskets and ammunition, and tents. This was how the government spent the money raised by all the new taxes back home.
Promotion was fast. Last year’s battles had deprived Wellington’s army of many officers. Kit and Roger were quickly elevated, to give them authority as they supervised the work. Roger was made a lieutenant. Kit, because of his years of service in the militia, became a captain.
In Rodrigo City they had often recognized the men of the 107th Foot. Joe Hornbeam and Sandy Drummond had both been made ensigns, the lowest rank of officer.
Kit had been surprised to see hundreds of English women in the city. He had not realized how many wives travelled with their soldier husbands. The army tolerated this, he learned, because the women were useful. On the battlefield they brought their men food, drink, and sometimes ammunition. Away from the fighting they did all the things wives always did: laundry, cooking, and love in the night. Officers believed that the presence of wives made the men less likely to drink to excess, quarrel and brawl, and catch nasty diseases from prostitutes.
They had met Kenelm Mackintosh in his role as chaplain to the 107th, and found him changed, his clerical robes covered with dust, his face unshaven, his hands grubby. His attitude was different, too. He had always been arrogantly remote, talking down to uneducated mill hands, but now he had lost that haughty air. He asked whether they were getting enough to eat and had decent blankets for the cold nights. He had in fact turned into a more or less likeable fellow.
Halfway through May, Wellington’s army had left Rodrigo City heading north. Some of the men were eager, having been bored all winter. Kit just thought it was better to be bored than dead.
The allied army was approximately 120,000 strong, Roger learned by chatting to the headquarters staff. The 50,000 British formed the largest contingent, reinforced by 40,000 Spanish and 30,000 Portuguese troops. The guerrilla fighters of the Spanish resistance were an unknown quantity.
The French army in the north of Spain was thought to be about 130,000 men. They would get no reinforcements. It was said that more than half the entire French national army had been lost in Bonaparte’s catastrophic march on Moscow. So, far from augmenting his army in Spain, Bonaparte had withdrawn the best men for his ongoing battles in north-east Europe – whereas Wellington’s force had received a stream of men and supplies over the winter.
Bonaparte always surprised his enemy – but Bonaparte was not in Spain. His brother Joseph was in command here.
The march had been hard. Kit’s neck was scorched by the sun and his feet got blisters. Although small in stature, he was not a weakling, but every day he found himself dead tired by the time the sun went down and he could rest. It came as a relief when an axle snapped or a wagon wheel buckled, and they could stop for an hour and mend it. Even better was a patch of soft or sandy ground where wheels sank too deep to roll, and an afternoon had to be spent making a temporary road of planks across the obstacle.
Kit consoled himself with the thought that no matter how hard the march, it was better than fighting.
Roger kept in touch with friends in the headquarters staff and learned of the intelligence coming in, much of it from the Spanish guerrillas. King Joseph of Spain – Bonaparte’s brother – had moved his capital from Madrid north to Valladolid, a city with a commanding position in the centre of northern Spain. Wellington’s army was marching north-east, towards Valladolid, but he had also sent a flanking force on a northerly curve to approach the French from an unexpected angle.
Rather than resist this manoeuvre, the French unexpectedly retreated. British headquarters staff wondered why. Intelligence estimated that the enemy were fewer than expected: only about 60,000 men. Perhaps many of them were up in the mountains fighting the guerrillas. Their retreat north-east took them nearer to the French border. Was it possible they would flee across the mountains to their home country? The thought crossed Kit’s mind that the British might win without fighting. Then he told himself that that was wishful thinking.
It was. King Joseph made a stand in the Zadorra river valley west of the Basque city of Vitoria, and now, at last, Kit would have to fight.
They were on a broad plain with mountains north and south, narrow canyons east and west, and the river snaking across from north-east to south-west. The French were camped on the far side of that diagonal river. Wellington’s army would have to cross the water to attack.
Kit was terrified. ‘How will it start?’ he asked Roger anxiously.
‘They will form a line across our route, to stop our onward march.’
‘And then what?’
‘We’ll attack in columns, probably, trying to make holes in their line.’
That made sense to Kit.
Roger said: ‘The river is our problem. An army crossing a river,by bridge or ford, is packed close and slow-moving – an easy target. If King Joseph has any sense he will place strong forces at every crossing point and hope to mow us down just when we’re most vulnerable.’
‘We can build makeshift bridges.’
‘That’s what the Royal Engineers are for. But if the enemy are nimble they will attack while we’re trying to do that.’
Kit began to think there was no way for a soldier to stay alive. Men did survive, he told himself. He just could not imagine how.
He slept fitfully that night and got up with the sun to oversee putting the oxen in harness.
Each gun carriage came with two auxiliary vehicles, called caissons, carrying ammunition. For speed of loading, a round came as a preformed charge: a canvas bag containing the cannonball and the correct amount of gunpowder. The British army used mostly six-pound iron balls measuring three and a half inches across. The caissons were heavy, drawn by a team of six horses.
The British, Spanish and Portuguese armies moved forward at eight o’clock. Walking to our graves, Kit thought.
