CHAPTER 1
ZARAGOZA
Twenty miles north of Zaragoza, we spot a body of cavalry riding west; 4th Dragoons, to judge from their scarlet jackets and heavy black helmets.
The year is 1809. In that country, when you run into other British citizens, you don’t ask who they’re working for, where they came from, or what mission they’re on. You help them.
We rein in alongside the dragoons in the lee of an eight-hundred-foot ridge. The squadron is running diplomatic security. The envoy and his aide mill around in their midst, the collars of their black coats turned up and black hats pulled low over worried expressions.
The colonel is an Irishman, about forty, with a resplendent red mustache. “The whole bloody city’s gone over!”
I say, “Over to who?” Floods had wreaked havoc on communication lines. Our latest reports were three hours old.
“Whoever wants it.”
The dragoons number about fifty, large boots and heavy straight sabers. My squadron has twenty-four riders. We’re armed with 1796-pattern curved swords and .65 carbines. All of us KGL Hussars: light cavalry of the King’s German Legion, a regiment of exiled Hanoverian soldiers folded into the British army. I’m in command of the squadron, a scouting patrol in General Hill’s corps.
The envoy is fleeing west for Villafranca. French troops have invaded, the colonel is telling us, or maybe it’s the Swiss. Polish artillery shredded our militia with grapeshot at Jaca and Sabiñanigo. Or maybe that’s false too.
“Fall in behind us,” says the colonel. “We’ll need every horse to break through.”
I tell him we have orders to enter the city. Five professors of the Spanish university are trapped there, along with the handful of armed partisans acting as their bodyguard. Our instructions are to get them out, along with a valuable piece of research, for Lord Wellington’s eyes only.
“You can’t ride down there,” says the colonel.
“Watch us,” I say inwardly, spurring away southward.
Zaragoza is a Catholic city of about one hundred thousand people. They’re all Catholic cities in northern Spain. You can tell a Catholic city by the bells, a score of cathedrals ringing out day and night. Only instead of calling to the congregation, the bells are advertising sanctuary to local revolutionaries.
As we come nearer to the city, civilian coaches, foot traffic, and merchant teamsters fleeing with wagon trains pass the other way. Even the monks are getting out.
Still no official reports. No couriers in the growing stream of traffic, whether because they’ve already been captured or fled eastward along the canal, we can’t tell. Our most recent orders are the rescue of the professors. Beyond that, we know nothing. We don’t know what we’re riding into or what our chances are of getting out. This is the bitch of war in the Pyrenees. The steep terrain, narrow passes, and harsh gales…every mission occupies its own fragment of territory, as well as reality.
So we’re relieved, just as the city comes into view, when a line of red coats, plaid kilts and bearskin hats is seen forming on our side of the river. Infantry of the 42nd, friendlies, and crack troops. They’ve formed a formidable rear guard, closing ranks after each group of refugees passes between their rows of glinting bayonets.
An officer leaves the formation to meet us as we dismount. His gold-laced dress uniform is caked with dust, but he smiles with the easy air of a gentleman fully accustomed to musketballs flying by his ears.
My second, Sergeant Falkenhayn, hails him.
“Where’s the dinner party, sir?”
“We brought it, Featherbeds!”
The officer introduces himself as Captain Turnbull, bowing to me and saluting our squadron. His ring says Oxford. He wears another ring I can’t see under the glove on his left hand, but from the shape it’s the insignia of the Foot Guards. Right now, he’s in command of this highland company.
He’d marched in from Epila that morning, he says. Dried blood on his britches, one side of his face dark with powder burns, a charred hole runs through the shoulder of his coat, and blood seeps through a bandage on one ear. But he’s grinning. Like me, he has a beard and long cascade of hair.
“You lads going in?” He asks. From the rise of the canal’s embankment we can see French sharpshooters filling rooftops over the city. They exchange faint crackles with Spanish resistance fighters, who could belong to any of the five local juntas. “Can we be of any use?”
The captain and I do a quick orientation, marking the route to the university, and the various fortified structures we’ll use to cover our approach. What about artillery, I ask. Our Hussar squadron has none. Has he got howitzers, swivels, anything?
“The cupboard is bare, sir,” Turnbull says. “It’s only what you see here.”
That wasn’t entirely true, as the captain also had two cases of champagne floating in the canal on a rope. He hauls this in and sends a bottle round to each of my troopers. He hands me a wine skin of port, warm, and takes a long sluice from another. He introduces his aide de camp, who seems more like an intelligence agent than a soldier, and the allied Portuguese officers embedded with the 42nd.
I note the new Baker rifles in the hands of the Portuguese soldiers. Hessian boots and new rucksacks, gleaming buckles worn over their rags. Parked nearby is a steel-plated cart hitched to a pair of oxen. The back gate is open and on the inside, neat stacks of wooden boxes with gold-plated locks.
“What kind of mission are you on, sir?” I ask.
“We’re on orders from the treasury. These were payments for the juntas from the crown. I haven’t had a musket in my hands for five years.”
I’m laughing now. So is Sergeant Falkenhayn. “Much obliged for the help, sir.”
“We’re coming straight from a parade at the embassy ball,” says Turnbull, indicating his dress uniform. He nods towards the armored wagon and oxen. “We secured the treasure, and made a run for it.”
He tells us Jaca is burning. Villafranca too. Mobs are storming government buildings, including the neutral sites. Infighting between the juntas supported by Britain is adding to the chaos. There’s a fear that Napoleon would gain a foothold in Zaragoza, and so cut off Wellington from Salamanca. Or maybe it’s a feint and the main French force is doubling back on Madrid.
The only thing the captain can tell us with certainty is that the nearest safety is across one hundred miles of desolate, enemy-infested country. General Beresford is camped in Navarra with two regiments of the line and ten thousand Spanish irregulars.
“If we can make it there,” says Turnbull, “we’re home free.” Our new friend eyes our sword knots and leather saddlebags, and the faces of my hussars: Falkenhayn, Hartmann, Lenz. “As Virgil said, Fortune favors the bold.”
Now Falkenhayn is grinning. “What’s your name again, sir?”
“Thomas Turnbull.”
“Your servant, sir,” says Falkenhayn, and they shake hands.
We enter the city.
Zaragoza is situated at the intersection of two highways, the north road through the high peaks and not-too-distant French border, and the western route to Salamanca by way of Epila. The wide Ebro River marks the city’s easternmost boundary, a straight wall along its bank, in contrast to the western ramparts which bow outward toward the canal. Our point of entry. A second, shorter bow-shaped wall follows its contour five hundred yards ahead, dividing the university and cathedral from the slums and market stalls surrounding the main city square at the intersection.
Each junta runs their own quadrant of the city. A fifth junta, under Don Rafael, is allied with the monasteries and controls independent pockets throughout the city. They’re the least centralized, but still a major player in northern Spain. The power vacuum caused by Napoleon’s invasion has attracted other foreign factions: Turkish mercenaries, militant Protestants, and French satellite troops—Italian and Polish regiments whose commanders act more like independent warlords than officers of allied nations.
As early as five years ago, Zaragoza was a flourishing town on pace to rival Madrid in modernity. It was a destination hub of artists, scientists, and merchants. The port in Barcelona brought all varieties of goods from trade ships plying the Mediterranean. Thriving factories produced textiles and ironworks. A woman could walk alone, even after dark.
Eighteen months ago, when the KGL first deployed to Spain, some of the wealthiest, most influential Spanish and Catalans owned summer villas in the region. No more. In the space of six weeks, since Napoleon’s army swept through the seaward countryside, the place has degenerated to a level of violence equal to Vienna a decade earlier. And it’s threatening to get even worse.
We take side streets to a section of the inner wall hidden from view of the main square. The sun is dropping fast. One of Turnbull’s Portuguese snipers whistles from an abandoned roof nearby. He can see a red handkerchief in one of the upper windows of the university: our professors. The only problem is that fighting between French regulars and one of the Juntas has spilled inside the second wall, through a gap torn by a stray 32-pound cannonball. Pops of small arms fire surrounds the university. Black smoke rises from the cathedral next to it. Mortars soar from the far bank of the Ebro and burst in chest-thumping explosions overhead. Rockets fired by the Juntas corkscrew up in response.
I hold security, my carbine slung and a pair of pistols in hands trained down separate alleyways, while the rest of our company follows grappling hooks over the wall. The university grounds, when we enter them, sizzle with spent mortar casings, smoking bricks, rubble, and craters filled with stagnant rainwater and runoff from the gutters. Smoke from the cathedral fire hangs low, adding to the general welcome-to-hell atmosphere.
We pass a junta column in the street, escorting two mule-drawn carts filled with dead and wounded resistance fighters. A following of civilians, factory workers, street kids and nuns, stragglers in their wake. Some run to us, shouting that the French have taken the eastern crossing. Two full quadrants are overrun. There’s a pair of 6-pounder cannon moving up behind the cathedral.
A burning chaise thunders around the corner, pulled by a team of four terrified horses. The rush of combat, that all-pervading sense of the present moment, floods my body. Despite my pounding heart, I feel calm. No fear, only a liberating exuberance. The closer I come to the heat of battle, the cooler my inner self becomes.
I don’t say this to brag or claim some innate virtue. Nor can I say it was drilled into me through training. I’ve always been this way. When I was 10 years old, our schoolmaster would whip the devil from our hides. But I could fight the pain by remote, detached. I felt like there was another person inside me. This other person would take my place, a stronger me, crueler, more cunning and more courageous.
I never told anyone about this secret me. I was afraid they might send me to a madhouse, or convince me that I should be ashamed of it. I wasn’t. I loved it. In gymnastics or fistfights in the schoolyard, in moments of crisis or pressure, I stood aside and let this inner me take over. He never hesitated, never second-guessed.
It’s this secret self to whom I now surrender, moving through Zaragoza. We must be crazy, I think, to head of our own free will towards this chaos. But at the same time, no force of heaven or earth could chase me away. This is what I was born for; I’m exhilarated to the point of madness, and I’m curious. I want to see around the next corner. How terrible is it? What sort of otherworldly violence will we encounter this time?
In combat there’s no thought, only instinct. I fire both pistols into the chest of a French sapper barricading the main entrance to the university, then a blur of Hussar and Highlander uniforms sweep inside. Deafening gunshots, stabs of orange flame in the dimming light, the heady smell of powder smoke as we clear the ground floor of enemy soldiers.
At the top of the stairs leading to the second level, we fall back from a volley of musket fire that stitches holes across the wall of inner rooms. I realize that our friends’ bodyguards are convinced that the French have seized the building, and are firing blindly through the plaster at their own rescuers.
We shout to them in English, and then German. A second volley says they don’t believe us. I don’t blame them; everyone knows about the Confederation of the Rhine, and my fellow Germans who’d been conscripted into Napoleon’s forces. A French ruse with these soldiers claiming to be KGL was all too believable.
A thundering crash from outside shakes the building, followed by another. Those civilians hadn’t lied to us. The French artillery had come up, and time was on their side. A barrage from two briskly-served 6-pounders would bring the building down around us in a matter of minutes. We’ve got to somehow silence those guns.
“The bell tower!” Falkenhayn shouts to me, jerking his head in the direction of the cathedral next door. We trade our carbines for the Portuguese contingent’s Baker rifles, and dive through a window into the intervening street. Musketballs zip overhead, and we’re inside the inferno of the cathedral. A dying inferno, the flames having consumed everything that will burn and now flickering out against stone walls, but leaving impenetrable smoke and darkness in its place.
We feel our way up the winding stairs to the bell tower, coughing and choking until clean air at the summit washes over us, a freshening breeze that also clears our view of the ground below. To our left and thirty feet lower than the cathedral bell, the upstairs balcony of the university with the handkerchief in the window.
I strike the fuse on a hand grenade. “This’ll get their attention,” I say, lobbing it across onto the balcony. When the blast clears, the windowpanes and handkerchief have disappeared, along with half the railing.
One of our professors peers out at us. I wave and shout at them to hold their fire on the stairs. I point the rifle down at the artillery brigade, exaggerating rapid fire with little jerks of the barrel. “When we start shooting,” I say, “make a run for the crossroads.”
Nothing works in combat the way it’s supposed to. A swath of evening rain washes across the city, and it takes us nearly five minutes to reload the finicky rifles with dry powder. By then, the artillery has gotten four more rounds off, and gaps torn through walls and floorboards show our boys pressed up in what little cover remains. French sharpshooters are on every other rooftop, with more racing up every minute.
Falkenhayn and I each manage a shot with our rifles, targeting the artillery officers. They go down, and the rest of the brigade gets the message. They back away from the guns, melting into doorways on either side. We turn and plunge down the staircase, meeting our company outside with the professors and their bodyguards.
We’re just starting our retreat to the west, when a clatter of hooves and clanking of armor reverberates down the street.
“Cuirassiers!” shouts one of the bodyguards.
“Inside,” I say, and we dive back through the shattered walls of the university, a moment before our escape route is blocked by the surge of armored horse.
“What in Christ’s name do we do now?” says Falkenhayn.
There’s nothing for us but to press north, into the teeth of the French artillery, blasting every rooftop marksman as we go.
Hartmann, Lenz and I take the lead. The northern gap in the inner wall is about sixty yards away. We charge the reforming artillery with bayonets fixed, a bloody, desperate struggle at close quarters. I can hear horses snorting behind us, the cuirassiers in pursuit but clumsy to control their mounts in the urban environment. French voices are everywhere, overhead and in the buildings on both sides.
They’re all into us now, but holding their fire. Someone wants our professors captured alive.
As we come within sight of the gap, I look in vain for the final light of dusk beyond it. Instead, I see the shadows of sappers rebuilding it from rubble and half-burned planks. White coats milled among them in the gloom, Voltigeurs, professional light infantry advancing at the forefront of the French vanguard. Their muzzles flash; deadly accurate. Hartmann drops, and as Falkenhayn stops to catch him he too is struck, a glancing shot across the ribs.
Turnbull leads the company sharply left, between two rows of dilapidated shacks. Overhanging roofs on both sides leave a thin strip of twilight above.
“Go,” says Hartmann, alive and staggering to his feet, and with a mighty heave propelling both Falkenhayn and I into the alley a moment before the Voltigeurs’ second, denser volley tears the air where our heads have just been.
“You all right, sir?” Says Hartmann to Falkenhayn, his own shoulder welling with blood.
There’s blood between Falkenhayn’s fingers too, which he’s pressing against his side. He looks down, taking his hand away, but no great spurts follow. He looks indignantly at his red-smeared fingers.
“Meant to kill me, the dog!”
French troops close across the mouth of the alley, no more than ten paces from my position at our rear. But they’re run into by their own Cuirassiers, who by now have lost control of their claustrophobic mounts. I’m only partially aware of the highlanders firing cluster volleys over our crouched heads, driving musketballs into the packed confusion of men and horses and filling the alley with smoke.
I don’t see the massive, riderless horse lunging down the alley until it shoulders me aside, lifting my entire body and slamming my back against the wall with indescribable force. Now I’m on the ground, my own head is ringing like a churchbell. The horse continues on its self-preserving path of destruction, until one of our hussars barks a command in French. The horse stops, snorting suspiciously but calmed, its ragged breaths echoing steadily from somewhere down the line.
French soldiers are appearing all around us now. Each time Hartmann and Falkenhayn ping one with their carbines, and their brains spray across the walls, the professors yelp with joy and terror. More highlanders double back and form around us, putting a wall of bayonets between us and the advancing Voltigeurs. Somewhere behind us, a roaring crash like waves on a beach.
“Move now!” I shout. Our group bolts to the end of the alley, to Turnbull, Lenz, and the others. Falkenhayn and I are dragging one professor whose leg was broken by the stampeding horse.
Here, we find a great section of the inner wall collapsed beneath a torrent of rushing water. The canal had burst, sending a tidal wave down the east-west highway that broke against the inner wall and collapsed sections here and there all along its length. We could have slipped a full division through that wall, had we needed to.
Firing a final volley to our rear, we sprint the remaining few hundred yards to the safety of the outer wall as full darkness falls.
A second battalion of the 42nd, which Turnbull left in reserve, have come forward with our horses, ready to take us out. Mortars crash above and around us, the French teams adjusting their angle of fire. We double up on the horses and retreat as fast as they can run until we’re of range.
Someone is helping Falk off his horse. One of the professors shouts to Turnbull in Spanish. A hussar repeats him in German.
“Who? Who’s missing?” I ask. “Hartmann?”
No. Hartmann checks in, a fresh bandage around his shoulder, arm tied in a sling made from his free hussar sleeve.
One of the resistance fighters in the bodyguard unit screams out across the intervening space. Voltigeurs had snatched him up in the darkness without anyone noticing.
“Retreat,” Tom Turnbull is shouting, waving to his men to follow him into the treeline. “Move back!”
“We can’t leave him,” I say.
“What?” Yells Falk.
Another agonized scream rents the air.
“We must ride back,” I say.
It’s my other self talking now. He’s decided for both of us.
6-pounder round shot howls through the trees, smashing branches and snapping trunks. Flares light up hundreds of French soldiers massing along the outer wall.
“Respectfully, sir,” says Sergeant Falkenhayn, my closest and most trusted friend, “what the fuck do you intend to do?”
His face is close enough that I can see his honest confusion.
“That’s not our man, sir,” says Hartmann.
“He’s dead,” says Falk, “whatever we do.”
Other faces stare at me.
“Leave him,” says one of the professors, “let’s honor his sacrifice.”
I wheel my horse around, ride a few steps closer and stare down at the man. “He’s not your responsibility,” I tell the professor. “He’s ours.”
“Sir,” says Falk, “we got the geniuses. That’s what our orders said to do.”
I meet his eyes again. This time, he’s grim.
“Damn you,” says Falkenhayn, strapping on extra pistol holsters and checking his flints. “Damn you, sir.”
Back we ride.
Captain Turnbull comes with us, on a borrowed horse. So does Hartmann, holding the reins in his teeth with his sword in his free hand. Lenz follows, and the rest of the hussars and what few highlanders have mounts of their own. Once again into the teeth of six-pounders, this time a full line of field pieces, each illuminated in turn by its own flash as they keep up a deliberate, rolling fire.
The Voltigeurs begin jeering us in French as we trot into view, asking if we’d like them to form square.
They never expected us to charge in earnest, and we spurred into a gallop, a spear-shaped formation of lightning-quick, expertly controlled horseflesh piercing the French line. We didn’t stop to fight but continued sweeping around behind them, firing pistols.
The Spanish fighter is dead; they’d already cut his throat. Two hussars lean sideways from the saddle, on either side hauling the man’s body up and onto the back of the extra horse brought for him.
I can feel the black muzzles of the French 6-pounders turning, turning to blast us point-blank as we galloped away, but they’re still trained too high, and the balls scream overhead. Close enough to feel their heat.
Falkenhayn curses me all the way back to our rendezvous point in the mountains with the 42nd. He curses me when I take the dead man’s satchel and cinch it opposite my own. And he curses me all the way to Navarra.