The subaltern

by G. R. Gleig

But I must not presume to intrude upon the province of the historian: let me therefore return to myself and my own little party.

The house of which we now took possession exhibited very unequivocal symptoms of having been the arena of sundry desperate conflicts. The walls were everywhere perforated with cannon-shot; the doors and windows were torn to pieces; a shell or two had fallen through the roof, and, bursting in the rooms on the ground-floor, had not only brought the whole of the ceiling down, but had set fire to the woodwork. The fire had indeed been extinguished, but it left its usual traces of blackened timbers and charred boarding. Several dead bodies lay in the various apartments, and the little garden was strewed with them. These we of course proceeded to bury; but there were numbers concealed by the bushes on the hillside beyond, on which no sepulture could be bestowed, and which, as afterwards appeared, were left to furnish food for the wolves and vultures. Then the smell, which hung not only about the interior, but the exterior of the cottage, was shocking. Not that the dead had as yet begun to putrefy; for though some of them had lain a couple of days exposed to the influence of the atmosphere, the weather was far too cold to permit the process of decomposition to commence; but the odour even of an ordinary field of battle is extremely disagreeable. I can compare it to nothing more aptly than the interior of a butcher's slaughter-house, soon after he may have killed his sheep or oxen for the market. Here that species of perfume was peculiarly powerful; and it was not the less unpleasant that the smell of burning was mixed with it.

Having remained at this post till sunset, my party was relieved, and we fell back to join the regiment. We found it huddled into a single cottage, which stood at one extremity of the green field where we had halted yesterday, hoping to bring the enemy to the bayonet. Of course our accommodations were none of the best: officers and men, indeed, laid themselves down indiscriminately upon the earthen floor, and heartily glad was he who obtained room enough to stretch himself at length without being pushed or railed at by his neighbours. The night, however, passed over in quiet; and sound was the sleep which followed so many dangers and hardships, especially on the part of us, who had spent the whole of the preceding night in watchfulness.

Long before dawn on the morning of the 14th, we were, as a matter of course, under arms. In this situation we remained till the sun arose, when, marching to the right, we halted at a rising ground in front of the village of Bedarre, and immediately in rear of the church of Arcanques. When we set out the sky was cloudy and the air cold, but no rain had fallen. We had hardly got to our station, however, when a heavy shower descended, which, but for the opportune arrival of our tents, would have speedily placed it out of our power to experience any degree of bodily comfort for the next twenty-four hours. Under these circumstances, the tents, which a few weeks ago we had regarded with horror, were now esteemed dwellings fit for princes to inhabit; whilst the opportunity which their shelter afforded of disencumbering ourselves of our apparel, was hailed as a real blessing. No man who has not worn his garments for five or six days on end can conceive the luxury of undressing; and, above all, the feeling of absolute enjoyment which follows the pulling off of his boots.

As the rain continued during the whole of the day, little inducement was held out to wander abroad. On the contrary, I perfectly recollect that, for the first time in our lives, we succeeded in lighting a fire in our tent, and escaped the inconvenience of smoke by lying flat upon the ground, and that the entire day was consumed in eating, drinking, smoking, conversing, and sleeping. No doubt, my unwarlike readers will exclaim that the hours thus spent were spent unprofitably; but I cannot, even now, think so, inasmuch as they were hours of great enjoyment.

We were not without serious apprehension that circumstances had occurred which would compel Lord Wellington to keep us during the remainder of the winter under canvas, when the better half of the day following had passed over, and no order arrived for our return into quarters. Nor were these feelings of alarm diminished by witnessing the march of the whole of the fifth division through our encampment, confessedly on their way to comfortable cantonments. As the event proved, however, our apprehensions were groundless, for about an hour and a half after noon we too received orders; and two o'clock saw our tents struck, our baggage packed upon the mules, and ourselves in motion towards the highroad. Of course we flattered ourselves that we were destined to return to those rural billets which, by dint of mechanical skill and manual labour, we had made so snug; but there we were disappointed.

We traversed almost step by step the same ground over which we had travelled in the course of the late military operations, till we reached the identical green field in which it had been our lot to bivouac, with so little comfort, on the 10th of the preceding November. I believe I have already mentioned—if not, I may state here—that adjoining to these fields were several farmhouses; one of them, indeed, of very respectable size and appearance, though the rest hardly rose above the rank of cottages. In a mansion of the latter description—in that same mansion, indeed, where I and a host of more active animals had formerly contended for the possession of a bed—were Grey, myself, and our men stationed; nor can I say, though the place was certainly in better plight than when last I saw it, that we were particularly delighted with our abode.

The room allotted to us was an apartment on the ground-floor. It was furnished with a fireplace, which had been built by the corps that preceded us, and among the members of which it was very evident that there existed no one possessing an equal degree of skill in masonry with ourselves. It smoked abominably. In the construction of their window, our predecessors had, however, been more fortunate; their oiled paper held out against the wind and rain with much obstinacy. But the quarters were, on the whole, exceedingly comfortless, especially when contrasted, as it was impossible not to contrast them, with those which we had so lately fitted up. Nevertheless we were too happy in finding ourselves once more under shelter of a roof to waste many repining thoughts upon unavoidable evils; and we had the satisfaction to know that our abode here would be of no longer continuance than the duration of the winter, if, indeed, it continued so long.

It is an old and just observation, that the term comfort is one of relative rather than of direct significance. To the truth of this saying we were compelled to bear testimony, when, about two o'clock in the afternoon of the 18th, we found ourselves once more in line of march, and advancing to the front, for the purpose of relieving another brigade in the outpost duty. Everybody who is old enough recollects, I daresay, the severity of the winter of 1813-14. Even in the south of France, the frost was at times so intense as to cast a complete coat of ice over ponds and lakes of very considerable depth; whilst storms of cold wind and rain occurred at every interval when the frost departed. The 18th of December chanced to be one of these wet and windy days, and hence we could not help acknowledging, when we found ourselves once more exposed to the "pelting of the pitiless storm," that our chamber, on the disagreeables of which we had dilated with characteristic minuteness, was, after all, an abode by no means to be despised.

The corps employed in guarding the front of the left column consisted of a brigade of three battalions—in other words, of about eighteen hundred men. Of these, six hundred were appointed to furnish the pickets; whilst the remaining twelve hundred acted as a support in case of need, and busied themselves till the hour of need should arrive in fortifying their post. The ground on which our tents stood was the identical green field where, during the late action, we had bivouacked for two successive nights; and our working parties were employed in felling the wood round the mayor's house, in throwing up breastworks contiguous to it, and in constructing a square redoubt capable of holding an entire battalion. The redoubt was named after a daughter of the worthy magistrate, who resided for the present in the little town of Biaritz, and had already declared himself a partisan of the Bourbons. It was called Fort Charlotte, and gave rise to as many puns as are usually produced by the appearance of a tongue or a dish of brains at a Cockney's table; nor was any one more parturient of such puns than the father of the young lady himself. Between this gentleman and the officer commanding the outposts, a constant intercourse was kept up. The town of Biaritz, where he dwelt, lying upon the sea-shore, and out of the direct line of operations, was not occupied either by the French or Allied troops. It constituted, on the contrary, a sort of neutral territory, which was visited occasionally by patrols from both armies; but so far retained its independence that its inhabitants were in the constant practice of carrying their commodities for sale, not only to our camp, but to the camp of the enemy. Though the mayor professed to keep up no such species of traffic, the state of his property, overrun by the invading force, furnished him also with a legitimate excuse for occasionally looking after its preservation; and hence he contrived from time to time to make his appearance amongst us, without becoming, as far as I could learn, an object of suspicion to his countrymen.