Alice Lorraine: A Tale of the South Downs

by R. D. Blackmore

Now, thoroughly as these British men were resolved to get within the wall, with equal thoroughness very brave Frenchmen were resolved to keep them out. And these had the weather in their favour; for it is an ill wind that blows no one any good; and the rain that rains on the just and unjust seems to have a preference for the latter. Though it must be acknowledged in the present case, that having a view to justice, a man of equal mind might say there was not too much on either side. At any rate, the rain kept raining, for fear of any mistake among them.

Moreover, the moon, between the showers, came out at night, or the sun by day—according to the habits of each of them—exactly when they were wanted by the Frenchmen, and not at all by the Englishmen. If an Englishman wanted to work in the dark the moon would get up just behind his back; and muskets, rifles, and cannon itself were trained on him, as at a target; and his only chance was to fall flat on his stomach, and shrink back like a toad in a bed of strawberries. And this made us eager to advance, per contra.

And after being shot at for a length of time, almost every man one can meet with desires to have his turn of shooting. Not for the sake of revenge, or anything low at all in that way; but simply from that love of fairness which lies hidden—too deep sometimes—somewhere or other in all of us. We are anxious to do, one to another, as the others desire to do to us; and till we come to a different condition, men must shoot and be shot at.

All these peaceable distinctions, and regards of right and wrong, were utterly useless and out of place in front of the walls of Badajos. Right or wrong, the place must be taken; and this was the third time of trying it. Fury, frenzy, rushing slaughter, and death (that lies still when the heat is over), who can take and tell them truly; and if he could, who would like to do it, or who would thank him to hear of it?

All the British army knew that the assault was to be made that night; and the Frenchmen, as appeared by-and-by, knew right well what was coming. For when the April sun went down in the brightest azure of all blue skies, a hush of wonder and of waiting fell and lay upon all the scene.

The English now were grown to be what they always grow to be with much fighting—solid in their ways, and (according to the nature of things) hot or cool with discipline, square in their manner of coming up, and hard to be sent back again, certain sure of their strength to conquer, and ready to charge the devil himself if he had the courage to wait for them. They were under a man who knew how to lead them, and trusted them to follow him; their blood was stirred without grand harangues or melo-dramatic eloquence.

Every man in that solid army knew his own work, and meant to do it, shoulder to shoulder, with rival hardihood and contagious scorn of death.

The walls were higher and the approach much harder than at Ciudad Rodrigo; the garrison stronger, and the captain a strenuous and ingenious warrior. Therefore on the 6th of April, 1812, as the storming parties watched the sunset fading along the Guadiana, and the sudden fall of night, which scarcely gives a bird time to twitter on his roost, they wanted no prophet to tell them how different their number would be to-morrow. But still, as the proper and comforting law of human nature ordains it, every man thought, or at any rate hoped, that his messmate rather than himself was the one to leave a widow and orphans by midnight.

Hilary Lorraine was now beginning to get used to fighting. At first, in spite of all his talk about his sword and so on, blows and bloodshed went against the grain of his kind and gay nature. He even thought, in his fresh aversion at so many corpses, that war was a worse institution than law. That error, however, he was beginning to abjure, through the power of custom, aided by two sapient reflections. The first of these was that without much slaughter there can be no real glory—an article which the young man had now made up his mind to attain; and his other wise recollection was that a Frenchman is the natural enemy of the human race, and must, at all hazards and at any sacrifice of pious lives, be extirpated. Moreover, he may have begun to share, by virtue of his amiability, the views of his brother-officers, which of course were duly professional. So that this young fellow, upon the whole, was as full of fight as the best of them.