An Infamous Army (Alastair-Audley Tetralogy 4)

Judith could not speak. She had seen the Highlanders march out of Brussels in the first sunlight, striding to war to the music of their own fifes, and the memory of that proud march brought a lump into her throat. She pressed Georgiana’s hand again, and released it, turning away to hide the sudden rush of tears to her own eyes.

She and Barbara returned home a little after noon, to find that Worth had just come back from visiting Sir Charles Stuart. He was able to tell them that an aide-de-camp had ridden in during the morning, having left the field at 4 am. He reported that after a very sanguinary battle the Allied Army had remained in possession of the ground. Towards the close of the action the cavalry had come up, having been delayed by mistaken orders. It had not been engaged on the 16th, but would certainly be in the thick of it today, if the French attack were renewed, as the Duke was confident it would be.

The ladies had hardly taken off their hats when the sound of cheering reached the house; they ran out to the end of the street, where a crowd had collected, and were in time to see a number of French prisoners being marched under guard towards the barracks of Petit Château.

But the heartening effect of this sight was not of long duration. The next news that reached Brussels was that the Prussians had been defeated at Ligny, and were in full retreat. The intelligence brought a fresh feeling of dismay, which was made the more p

rofound by the arrival, a little later, of the first wagon-loads of wounded. In a short time the streets were full of the most pitiable sights. Men who were able to walk had dragged themselves to Brussels on foot all through the night, some managing to reach the town, many collapsing on the way, and dying by the roadside from the effects of their wounds.

Except among those whom panic had rendered incapable of any rational action, the arrival of the wounded made people forget their own alarms in the more pressing need to do what they could to alleviate the sufferings of the soldiers. Ladies who had never encountered more unnerving sights than a pricked finger or the graze on a child’s knee, went out into the streets with flasks of brandy and water, and the shreds of petticoats torn up to provide bandages; and stayed until they dropped from fatigue, stanching the blood that oozed from ghastly wounds; providing men who were dying on the pavements with water to bring relief to their last moments; rolling blankets to form pillows for heads that lolled on the cobbles; collecting straw to make beds for those who, unable to reach their own billets, had sunk down on the road; and accepting sad, last tokens from dying men who thought of wives, and mothers, and sweethearts at home, and handed to them a ring, a crumpled diary, or a laboriously scrawled letter.

Judith and Barbara were among the first to engage on this work. Neither had ever come into anything but the most remote contact with the results of war; Judith was turned sick by the sight of blood congealed over ugly contusions, of the scraps of gold lace embedded in gaping wounds, of dusty rags twisted round shattered joints, and of grey, pain-racked faces lying upturned upon the pavement at her feet. There was so little that could be accomplished by inexpert hands; the patient gratitude for a few sips of water of men whose injuries were beyond her power to alleviate brought the tears to her eyes. She brushed them away, spoke soothing words to a boy crumpled on the steps of a house, and sobbing dryly, with his head against the railings; bound fresh linen round a case-shot wound; spent all the Hungary Water she owned in reviving men who had covered the weary miles from Quatre-Bras only to fall exhausted in the gutters of Brussels.

Occasionally she caught sight of Barbara, her flowered muslin dusty round the hem with brushing the cobbles, and a red stain on her skirt where an injured head had lain in her lap. Once they met but neither spoke of the horrors around them. Barbara said briefly: ‘I’m going for more water. The chemists have opened their shops and will supply whatever is needed.’

‘For God’s sake, take my purse and get more lint—as much of it as you can procure!’ Judith said, on her knees beside a lanky Highlander, who was sitting against the wall with his head dropped on his shoulder.

‘No need; they are charging nothing,’ Barbara replied. ‘I’ll get it.’

She passed on, making her way swiftly down the street. A figure in a scarlet coat lay across the pavement; she bent over it, saying gently: ‘Where are you hurt? Will you let me help you?’ Then she saw that the man was dead, and straightened herself, feeling her knees shaking, and nausea rising in her throat. She choked it down, and walked on. A Highlander, limping along the road, with a bandage round his head and one arm pinned up by the sleeve across his breast, grinned weakly at her. She stopped, and offered him the little water that remained in her flask. He shook his head: ‘Na, na, I’m awa’ to my billet. I shall do verra weel, ma’am.’

‘Are you badly hurt? Will you lean on my shoulder?’

‘Och, I got a wee skelp wi’ a bit of a shell, that’s all. Gi’e your watter to the puir red-coat yonder: we are aye well respected in this toon! We ha’ but to show our petticoat, as they ca’ it, and the Belgians will ay gi’e us what we need!’

She smiled at the twinkle of humour in his eye, but said: ‘You’ve hurt your leg. Take my arm, and don’t be afraid to lean on me.’

He thanked her, and accepted the help. She asked him how the day had gone, and he replied, gasping a little from the pain of walking: ‘It’s a bluidy business, and there’s no saying what may be the end on’t. Oor regiment was nigh clean swept off, and oor Colonel kilt as I cam’ awa.’ But I doot all’s weel.’

She supported him to the end of the street, but was relieved of her charge there by a burgher in a sad-coloured suit of broadcloth, who darted up with exclamations of solicitude, and cries to his wife to come at once to the assistance of ‘notre brave Écossais.’ He turned out to be the owner of the Highlander’s billet, and it was plain that Barbara could relinquish the wounded man to his care without misgiving. He was borne off between the burgher and his comfortable wife, throwing a nod and a wink over his shoulder to Barbara; and she hurried on to fight her way into the crowded chemist’s shop.

Nothing could have exceeded the humanity of the citizens. There was hardly a house in the town whose doors were not thrown open to the wounded, whether Dutch, or Belgian, German, Scotch or English. The Belgian doctors were working in their shirt-sleeves with the sweat dripping off their bodies; children, who stared with uncomprehending, vaguely shocked eyes, were bidden by their brisk, shrill mothers to hold umbrellas over men huddled groaning on the pavement under the scorching sun; stout burgomasters and grim gendarmes were busy clearing the wounded off the streets, carrying those who could not walk into neighbouring houses, and directing others with more superficial injuries to places of shelter. Sisters of Mercy were moving about, their black robes and great starched white head-dresses in odd contrast to the frivolous chip hats and delicate muslin dresses of ladies of fashion who had forgotten their complexions and their nerves, and in all the heat of the noonday sun, and the stench of blood, and dirt, and human sweat, toiled as their scullery-maids had never done.

In one short hour Judith felt her senses to have become numb; the nausea that she had first felt had left her; in the urgent need to give help there was no time for personal shrinking. A Belgian doctor, kneeling beside an infantryman on a truss of straw in the road, had called to her to aid him; he had told her to hold a man’s leg while he dug out a musket-ball from his knee, and roughly bound up the wound. He spoke to her brusquely, and she obeyed him without flinching. A few minutes later she was herself slitting up a coat-sleeve, and binding lint round a flesh-wound that ordinarily would have turned her sick.

At about half past two, when the news came from the Namur and Louvain Gates that the promised tents were at last ready for the wounded, the sky became suddenly overcast. The relief from the sun’s glare was felt by everyone, but in a few minutes the fear of a storm was making it necessary to get all who could be moved under shelter. The blackness overhead was presently shot through with a fork of lightning; almost simultaneously the thunder crashed across the sky, rolling and reverberating in an ominous rumble that died away only an instant before a second flash, and a second clap broke out. By three o’clock the lightning seemed continuous, and the thunder so deafening that the fear of the elements overcame in nearly every breast the lesser fear of a French advance. The lurid light, the flickering flashes in a cloud like a huge pall, the clatter in the sky as of a giant’s crockery being smashed, made even the boldest quail, and sent many flying to their homes. Rain began to fall in torrents; in a few minutes the gutters were rushing rivers, and those still out in the streets were soaked to the skin. Rain bounced on the cobbles, and poured off the steep gabled roofs; it took the starch out of the nuns’ stiff caps, made the pale muslins cling to their owner’s bodies, and turned modish straw hats into sodden wrecks.

Barbara, helping a man with a shattered ankle to hop up the steps into a house already containing two wounded Belgians, felt her shoulder touched, and looked round to find Worth behind her. He was drenched, and dishevelled; he said curtly: ‘I’ll take him. Go home now.’

‘Your wife?’ she said, her voice husky with fatigue.

‘I’ve sent her home. You have done enough. Go back now.’

She nodded, for she was indeed so exhausted that her head felt light, and it was an effort to move her limbs. Worth slipped his arm round the young Scot she had been supporting, and she clung to the railings for a moment to get her breath.

When she reached home she found that Judith had arrived a few moments before her, and had already gone up to strip off her wet and soiled garments. She came out of her bedroom in a wrapper as Barbara reached the top of the stairs. ‘Barbara!’ she said. ‘Thank God you have come in! Oh, how wet you are! I’ll send my woman to you immediately! Yours is in hysterics.’

A weary smile touched Barbara’s lips. ‘The confounded wench hasn’t ceased having hysterics since the guns were first heard. Is there any news?’

‘I don’t think so. I’ve had no time to ask. But don’t stand there in those wet clothes!’

‘Indecent, aren’t they?’ said Barbara, with the ghost of a chuckle.

‘Shocking, but I’m thinking of the cold you will take. I’ve ordered coffee to be sent up to the salon. Do hurry!’

Twenty minutes later they confronted one another across a table laid out with cakes and coffee. Judith lifted the silver pot, and found that her hand, which had been so steady, was shaking. She managed to pour out the coffee, and handed the cup to Barbara, saying: ‘I’m sorry. I’ve spilled a little in the saucer. You must be very hungry; eat one of those cakes.’

Barbara took one, raised it to her mouth, and then put it down. ‘I don’t think I can,’ she said in rather a strained voice. ‘I beg your pardon, but I feel damnably sick. Or faint—I’m not sure which.’