"I am at least honest, colonel, as he must be who defends the absent or the dead."
"We have had enough of this—to your companies—fall in, gentlemen!" said the colonel, sternly and impatiently, as he spurred his horse, unsheathed his sword, and the formula of the parade began, after which he revenged himself by drilling the corps, under a drizzling rain, for nearly two hours, forcing Askerne's grenadiers to skirmish in a swamp, and making old Major Middleton put the battalion twice through the eighteen manoeuvres.
About this time a patrol of Portuguese cavalry found near the high road that led through a desert towards the Spanish frontier, the remains of a man, almost reduced to a skeleton, picked, gnawed, and torn asunder, to all appearance recently, by those devouring wolves and wild dogs which infest the mountains of the district.
Terrible surmises of Quentin's fate were now whispered among the Borderers; the officer in command of the patrol was closely questioned by Middleton, Warriston, and others; but he constantly stated that the victim had probably been stripped by robbers before being devoured, as nothing had been found near the remains that might lead to their identification, or in any way connect them with the missing Quentin Kennedy. Thus, in default of other proof, as time wore on, the members of the regiment made up their minds to consider the poor bones as his, and concluded that he had perished miserably in the wilderness.
To do Cosmo Crawford justice, there were times when he was not without secret emotions of shame, and even of compunction, for the part he had acted to Quentin. His own conscience, the small still voice that would speak, could not acquit him; but those gleams of the better spirit came only briefly and at intervals, and such unwelcome thoughts were always eventually stifled by the constitutional malignity of his nature, and he would mutter to himself—
"Pshaw! he is well away; what the devil was he to me, or I to him?"
It was while the troops were lingering at Portalegre and elsewhere along the Spanish frontier, that Lord Castlereagh's despatch, containing the first organized plan of the future campaign, arrived in Lisbon.
In the northern provinces of Spain, thirty-five thousand horse and foot were to be employed; ten thousand of these were to be embarked from British ports, and the rest to be drafted from our army of occupation in Portugal; and these were supposed to be equal to cope with the vast hosts pouring through the many passes of the Pyrenees from France and Germany, and those which already blackened all the plains of Castile and Arragon.
We have elsewhere mentioned the vast strength of the French army, whose head-quarters were at Vittoria.
The brave but ill-fated Sir John Moore was ordered to take the field without delay with the troops that were under his own command. Some fortress or city (unnamed) in Galicia, or on the borders of the kingdom of Leon, was to be the place for concentrating the whole allied armies of Britain, Spain, and Portugal; and his specific plan of operations was afterwards to be concerted with the stupid, jealous, and uncompromising local juntas, and the obstinate and impracticable Spanish generals.