The three battalions of Stewart’s brigade that had been lying down just behind the crest rose up at once, as if out of the ground, and trotted forward in a line that stretched across the crest. They swept on, past Arthur and Somerset, and drew up a short distance in front of the colour party. Less than a hundred yards beyond, the head of the French column hesitated, and Arthur heard an officer shout an order to deploy into line. But even as the first men began to shuffle to the side, Stewart’s brigade levelled their muskets, aiming straight into the dense ranks of the enemy.
General Hill raised his hat to attract the attention of his officers, paused a moment and then swept it down as he bellowed, ‘Fire!’
At close range, over fifteen hundred muskets poured their bullets into the head of the French column. To Arthur it seemed as if the front rank simply collapsed as men toppled forward or crumpled to the side, leaving a narrow fringe of blue and white uniformed bodies sprawled in the dry grass. A second, and a third, volley cut down scores more of the enemy so that the dead and wounded now lay heaped one upon the other. By now the French were firing back, at will, since there was too much chaos in their leading ranks for the officers to organise a proper firing line. Despite outnumbering the British, they could bring only a limited number of muskets to bear and all the time fresh casualties added to those piled in the grass.
Arthur saw the column begin to give ground, slowly edging back down the slope. To the right and left the other French columns were being given similar punishment and endured little longer before they too were in retreat. Squinting through the powder smoke engulfing his line, General Hill saw that the gap between his men and the enemy had widened and gave the order to cease fire and advance. As the brigade moved on, they left their own dead and injured scattered across the crest, but no more than thirty or forty men, Arthur estimated. An acceptable loss when compared to the hundreds of Frenchmen who had been shot down.
Hill pursued the enemy with his brigade at a measured pace, stopping every so often to pour another volley into their ranks and press them back down towards the thin band of the Portina. As they reached the bottom of the slope Hill gave the order to charge, and with a hearty roar the men lowered their bayonets and ran towards the battered French column. Most of the enemy turned and fled across the stream, splashing through the water to the far bank and then back towards their guns. Before the British soldiers lost their heads a bugle sounded the withdrawal and the men hurriedly re-formed their line, then turned about and climbed back up the slope. General Hill urged his mount ahead of his men and rode back up to Arthur, greeting him with a barely suppressed smile and an amiable nod of the head.
‘The lads have seen ’em off, sir. But hot work indeed! Never seen them fire and move so smoothly.’
‘A fine performance, Hill,’ Arthur agreed. ‘But you can be sure that we have repulsed only the first attack.’ He drew out his pocket watch and glanced at it briefly. ‘Just gone eight. The day is young, gentlemen, and the enemy is still far from beaten.’
As the sun edged higher into a clear blue sky the slight breeze faded and the air began to feel hot and heavy. A lull had settled over the battlefield and Hill gave the order for his dead to be buried at once, so the heat would not corrupt the bodies. Lower down the slope, the British skirmishers had once again gone forward, but they held their fire as small parties of the French waded across the Portina to retrieve their wounded and the bodies of their dead officers. Once again, warily at first, the fraternisation resumed. Those who had little knowledge of each other’s language made signs and mimed to communicate, while others sat and talked, sharing drink and food, amid the dead and wounded of the earlier fighting.
‘Ought we to stop that, sir?’ Somerset gestured towards the Portina.
‘Why?’
‘One wouldn’t want the men to become too fond of their enemy, surely? Otherwise it might predispose them to be merciful when they should be ruthless?’
Arthur briefly removed his hat and scratched at his close-cropped hair. The heat was making him perspire freely and his scalp itched. He regarded Somerset thoughtfully. His aide was still young enough to have rather fixed opinions about the nature of war and experience had not yet tempered his judgement with a wider understanding of military life.
‘Somerset, those men down there know their trade and can be trusted to act as they must when called upon. War is a cruel, brutal business. If we are not to make brutes of those who are obliged to practise it, then we must indulge the better side of their natures whenever we can.’
Somerset was still for a moment and then nodded. Arthur sensed that his aide had not fully accepted the point. Perhaps he would one day, if he lived long enough. Arthur replaced his hat and resumed his consideration of the enemy’s intentions. The first attack had been repelled. The question was, would they repeat the attempt? If not, where would they press next? For the moment, the enemy’s formations stood their ground under the baking sun and waited for orders. Arthur pulled out his telescope from his saddlebag and began to scan the enemy’s positions until he located their senior officers.
He found them easily enough, a gathering of figures in neat blue jackets heavy with gold lace and bullion epaulettes, with feathered bicornes. Some of them were examining the British line through their telescopes and Arthur was briefly amused by the thought that they might well be trying to divine his intentions in turn. A cluster of senior officers seemed to be engaged in a heated debate, with much gesturing towards the British line. Arthur watched them a moment longer, then lowered his telescope and sent Somerset to tell Hill that he could stand his men down for a while and encourage them to find what shade they could for the present.
The lull in the fighting continued for the rest of the morning, and both sides took the chance to send small parties of men, loaded with canteens, down to the Portina to refill them. Elsewhere men, stripped down to their shirts, continued to dig graves and remove as many bodies from the field as possible. Arthur moved to the shade of a small grove of olive trees close to the crest of the ridge and sat and rested in the shade, leaving strict orders that he was to be disturbed if necessary. Overhead, the sun climbed to its zenith and the battlefield became a stifling cauldron of hot air and painfully bright light, infused with the irritating drone of flies as they swarmed over the corpses still awaiting the burial parties.
Arthur stirred as he became aware of a presence close by, and he blinked his eyes open to see Somerset standing over him. ‘What is it?’
‘Sir, the French are on the move.’
Arthur was on his feet at once, quickly rolling his head to ease the stiffness in his neck. He looked down the slope. Sure enough the French army was spreading out across a wider front as more cannon were brought forward from the reserve and manoeuvred into position a short distance beyond the Portina, ready to bombard the British line.
‘They mean to attack along the entire front,’ Somerset commented.
‘I have eyes and a brain of my own,’ Arthur replied tersely. As his embarrassed aide kept his silence Arthur quickly thought through the coming phase of the battle. The French were doing the right thing, he realised. Their earlier attempt to seize the ridge had allowed Arthur to redeploy men to meet the threat, but an attack along the entire line of his army would mean that there would be little chance to shift his outnumbered forces about to bolster weakened points. As before, the defences manned by the Spanish were being avoided as the enemy was determined to shatter the British army first. The hour of gravest danger was swiftly approaching.
Shortly after noon the massed artillery of the French army opened fire. Over eighty guns were answered by Arthur’s thirty in a one-sided duel. Once again, bloody gaps were torn in the thin red lines waiting to receive the enemy attack. The French generals were clearly impatient, since the bombardment was mercifully short. As the guns fell silent the drums of the French infantry rolled out, signalling the advance. The skirmishers waded across the Portina and fell in with their British counterparts in a brief exchange of crackling musket fire. Beyond the Portina Arthur saw that the main enemy formations were advancing with broader fronts, as he had expected. There was to be no repeat of a narrow frontal attack this time. The survival of his men would depend on their rigorous training. They would have to fire and reload faster than the French in a bludgeoning exchange of massed volleys.
Campbell’s Guards brigade, on the extreme right of the line, was the first in action, waiting until the French had closed to within eighty yards before unleashing their first volley. A moment later the enemy halted and returned fire. After the first few exchanges, the space between the opposing sides was filled with smoke and the combatants were obliged to fire blindly at each other. Watching through his telescope Arthur could see that the enemy were having the worst of it, firing no more than two volleys to the redcoats’ three.
Closer to the ridge, the French line closed up on Cameron’s brigade and the men of the King’s German Legion. Seemingly not to be outdone by the Guards, Cameron allowed the French to close to within fifty yards before unleashing his first volley. With a clear view of the target, and at such close range, nearly every bullet struck home and the French line stopped dead in its tracks as the front ranks were annihilated by the withering fire. Without waiting to let off another volley, Cameron’s men fixed bayonets and briskly advanced through the thin screen of smoke and charged at the disorganised French line.
‘That’s the spirit!’ Arthur clenched his fist.
The mêlée was brief, and then the French gave ground and began to retreat across the Portina. Cameron’s men, overcome by the excitement of breaking the attack, streamed after them, thrusting their bayonets into the fleeing enemy, or clubbing them down with the heavy butts of their muskets. Some cooler heads paused to reload and fire on the enemy, thereby inadvertently contributing to the loss of cohesion of the brigade.
Somerset sniffed with derision. ‘What do those bloody fools think they’re doing? They can’t take on the whole French army by themselves.’
Arthur’s jubilation of a moment earlier turned to dread as he watched the tiny figures in red dissolve into a formless swarm as they crossed the brook and pursued the French into their own lines. Already another enemy line was moving forward to counter the British charge, and their beaten comrades flowed round them to the rear, where their surviving officers began to steady them, and re-form their units. As the screen of fleeing Frenchmen thinned out, the soldiers of Cameron’s brigade suddenly found themselves confronted by a new enemy force. While Arthur watched with a sinking heart, the French halted, made ready and unleashed a lethal volley. The redcoats were cut down in swathes, and while a few men returned fire it was clear that most were momentarily stunned by the sharp reversal of fortune. Another volley sealed their fate, and leaving their stricken comrades on the far bank of the Portina the survivors hurried back over the brook, losing more men as the French skirmishers rushed forward to pursue the broken British formation.
It was clear that there was no question of Cameron’s rallying his men, and their foolhardiness had left a gaping hole in the centre of the British line. Arthur turned to Somerset.
‘We must fill the gap at once! Get you to Mackenzie and order him to move his men across and stop the French. Go!’
While his aide spurred his horse down the slope towards the brigade waiting in reserve, Arthur galloped across the crest and reined in at General Hill’s side. The sudden spray of dirt startled Hill’s mount.
‘What the devil?’The general looked round irritably until he saw his commander.
‘Hill, Cameron’s brigade has broken. I need your men.’ Arthur gestured to the Forty-eighth Foot, on the right of Hill’s command. ‘Whatever happens you must hold your ground here.’
‘I will, sir. Have no fear of that.’
‘Thank you.’Arthur touched the brim of his hat and turned his horse to the south, thundering along the rear of Hill’s brigade until he reached the colonel in command of the Forty-eighth, where he gave his orders breathlessly.‘Double your men to the right. I want them in a line to take the French in the flank.’ He pointed out the French pushing Cameron’s chaotic brigade across the Portina. ‘If they are not stopped and sent back, then the battle is lost.’
‘I understand, sir.’ The colonel saluted and turned to shout the necessary orders. Arthur stayed with him and led the regiment down the side of the ridge at a steady trot, the men’s knapsacks and bayonet scabbards slapping and jingling as their nailed boots trampled down the dry grass. As he watched the French attack press forward, into the British line, Arthur willed his men on. The enemy had to be stopped swiftly before they managed to cut his army in two. To the right he saw the two thousand men of Mackenzie’s brigade trotting across the plain to head off the French column.
‘Not enough,’ he muttered softly to himself.
Mackenzie’s men faced at least a division of the enemy, ten thousand of them, as the French, scenting victory, marched more men into the breach. Mackenzie’s brigade halted, and turned from column to line as they prepared to face the onslaught. Cameron’s survivors flowed through the gaps between the companies ahead of them and paused a safe distance beyond, breathless and shaken as their officers rallied them. The British line fell silent as the French came on, drums beating while the men in the rear ranks sang lustily. Those at the front held their muskets ready as they paced towards the waiting redcoats, who were standing still, muskets grounded, as if they were on parade. As the enemy closed, the order to make ready echoed down the line and with well-drilled precision the muskets came up, the weapons were cocked and the men took aim. As the first volley was fired, Arthur halted the Forty-eighth and wheeled the formation into line, perpendicular to the head of the attacking French column.