Napoleonic Literature
Kincaid: Adventures in the Rifle Brigade
Chapter II
Rejoin the Regiment. Embark for the Peninsula. Arrival in the Tagus.
The City of Lisbon, with its Contents. Sail for Figuera. Landing extraordinary.
Billet ditto. The City of Coimbra. A hard Case. A cold Case, in which a
favourite Scotch Dance is introduced. Climate. The Duke of Wellington.
I REJOINED the battalion at Hythe in the spring
of 1810, and, finding that the company to which I belonged had embarked
to join the first battalion in the Peninsula, and that they were waiting
at Spithead for a fair wind, I immediately applied, and obtained permission,
to join them.
We were about the usual time at sea, and indulged
in the usual amusements, beginning with keeping journals, in which I succeeded
in inserting two remarks on the state of the weather, when I found my inclination
for book-making superseded by the more disagreeable study of appearing
eminently happy under an irresistible inclination towards sea-sickness.
We anchored in the Tagus in September; — no thanks to the ship, for she
was a leaky one, and wishing foul winds to the skipper, for he was a bad
one.
To look at Lisbon from the Tagus, there are few
cities in the universe that can promise so much, and none, I hope, that
can keep it so badly.
I only got on shore one day, for a few hours, and,
as I never again had an opportunity of correcting the impression, I have
no objection to its being considered an uncharitable one; but I wandered
for a time amid the abominations of its streets and squares in the vain
hope that I had got involved among a congregation of stables and outhouses;
but when I was, at length, compelled to admit it as the miserable apology
for the fair city that I had seen from the harbour, I began to contemplate,
with astonishment and no little amusement, the very appropriate appearance
of its inhabitants.
The church, I concluded, had on that occasion indulged
her numerous offspring with a holiday, for they occupied a much larger
portion of the streets than all the world besides. Some of them were languidly
strolling about and looking the sworn foes of time, while others crowded
the doors of the different coffee-houses; the fat jolly-looking friars
cooling themselves with lemonade and the lean mustard-pot-faced ones sipping
coffee out of thimble-sized cups, with as much caution as if it had been
physic.
The next class that attracted my attention was the
numerous collection of well-starved dogs, who were indulging in all the
luxury of extreme poverty on the endless dung-heaps.
There, too, sat the industrious citizen, basking
in the sunshine of his shop-door and gathering in the flock which is so
bountifully reared on his withered tribe of children. There strutted the
spruce cavalier, with his upper-man furnished at the expense of his lower,
and looking ridiculously imposing: and there — but sacred be their daughters,
for the sake of one, who shed a lustre over her squalid sisterhood sufficiently
brilliant to redeem their whole nation from the odious sin of ugliness.
I was looking for an official person, living somewhere near the Convent
D'Estrella, and was endeavouring to express my wishes to a boy when I heard
a female voice in broken English, from a balcony above, giving the information
I desired. I looked up and saw a young girl dressed in white, who was loveliness
itself! In the few words which passed between us, of lively unconstrained
civility on her part, and pure confounded gratitude on mine, she seemed
so perfectly after my own heart that she lit a torch in it which burnt
for two years and a half.
It must not detract from her merits that she was
almost the only one that I saw during that period in which it was my fate
to tread war's roughest, rudest path, — daily staring his grim majesty
out of countenance, and nightly slumbering on the cold earth, or in the
tenantless mansion, for I felt as if she would have been the chosen companion
of my waking dreams in rosier walks, as I never recalled the fair vision
to my aid, even in the worst of times, that it did not act upon my drooping
spirits like a glass of brandy.
It pleased the great disposer of naval events to
remove us to another and a better ship, and to send us off for Figuera
next day with a foul wind.
Sailing at the rate of one mile in two hours, we
reached Figuera's Bay at the end of eight days and were welcomed by about
a hundred hideous looking Portuguese women, whose joy was so excessive
that they waded up to their arm-pits through a heavy surf, and insisted
on carrying us on shore on their backs! I never clearly ascertained whether
they had been actuated by the purity of love or gold.
Our men were lodged for the night in a large barn,
and the officers billetted in town. Mine chanced to be on the house of
a mad woman, whose extraordinary appearance I never shall forget. Her petticoats
scarcely reached to the knee, and all above the lower part of the bosom
was bare; and though she looked not more than middle aged, her skin seemed
as if it had been regularly prepared to receive the impression of her last
will and testament; her head was defended by a chevaux-de-frise of black
wiry hair which pointed fiercely in every direction, while her eyes looked
like two burnt holes in a blanket. I had no sooner opened the door than
she stuck her arms a kimbo and, opening a mouth, which stretched from ear
to ear, she began vociferating "bravo, bravissimo!"
Being a stranger alike to the appearance and the
manners of the natives, I thought it possible that the former might have
been nothing out of the common run, and concluding that she was overjoyed
at seeing her country reinforced at that perilous moment by a fellow upwards
of six feet high, and thinking it necessary to sympathize in some degree
in her patriotic feelings, I began to "bravo" too; but as her second
shout ascended ten degrees, and kept increasing in that ratio, until it
amounted to absolute frenzy, I faced to the right-about and, before our
tête-à-tête
had lasted the brief space of three-quarters of a minute, I disappeared
with all possible haste, her terrific yells vibrating in my astonished
ears long after I had turned the corner of the street; nor did I feel perfectly
at ease until I found myself stretched on a bundle of straw in a corner
of the barn occupied by the men.
We proceeded next morning to join the army; and,
as our route lay through the city of Coimbra, we came to the magnanimous
resolution of providing ourselves with all manner of comforts and equipments
for the campaign on our arrival there; but when we entered it at the end
of the second day our disappointment was quite eclipsed by astonishment
at finding ourselves the only living things in a city which ought to have
been furnished with twenty thousand souls.
Lord Wellington was then in the course of his retreat
from the frontiers of Spain to the lines of Torres Vedras, and had compelled
the inhabitants on the line of march to abandon their homes and to destroy
or carry away everything that could be of service to the enemy. It was
a measure that ultimately saved their country, though ruinous and distressing
to those concerned, and on no class of individuals did it bear harder,
for the moment, than our own little detachment, a company of rosy-cheeked,
chubbed youths, who, after three months feeding on ship's dumplings, were
thus thrust, at a moment of extreme activity, in the face of an advancing
foe, supported by a pound of raw beef drawn every day fresh from the bullock,
and a mouldy biscuit.
The difficulties we encountered were nothing out
of the usual course of old campaigners; but, untrained and unprovided as
I was, I still looked back upon the twelve or fourteen days following the
battle of Busaco as the most trying I have ever experienced, for we were
on our legs from daylight until dark, in daily contact with the enemy;
and, to satisfy the stomach of an ostrich, I had, as already stated, only
a pound of beef, a pound of biscuit, and one glass of rum. A brother-officer
was kind enough to strap my boat-cloak and portmanteau on the mule carrying
his heavy baggage, which, on account of the proximity of the foe, was never
permitted to be within a day's march of us, so that, in addition to my
simple uniform, my only covering every night was the canopy of heaven,
from whence the dews descended so refreshingly that I generally awoke at
the end of an hour chilled and wet to the skin; and I could only purchase
an equal length of additional repose by jumping up and running about until
I acquired a sleeping quantity of warmth. Nothing in life can be more ridiculous
than seeing a lean, lank fellow start from a profound sleep at midnight
and begin lashing away at the highland fling as if St. Andrew himself had
been playing the bagpipes; but it was a measure that I very often had recourse
to, as the cleverest method of producing heat. In short, though the prudent
general may preach the propriety of light baggage in the enemy's presence,
I will ever maintain that there is marvellous small personal comfort in
travelling so fast and so lightly as I did.
The Portuguese farmers will tell you that the beauty
of their climate consists in their crops receiving from the nightly dews
the refreshing influence of a summer's shower, and that they ripen in the
daily sun. But they are a sordid set of rascals! Whereas I speak
with the enlightened views of a man of war and say that it is poor consolation
to me, after having been deprived of my needful repose and kept all night
in a fever, dancing wet and cold, to be told that I shall be warm enough
in the morning. It is like frying a person after he has been boiled; and
I insisted upon it, that if their sun had been milder and their dews lighter
that I should have found it much more pleasant.
THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON
From the moment that I joined the army, so intense was my desire to
get a look at this illustrious chief that I never should have forgiven
the Frenchman that had killed me before I effected it. My curiosity did
not remain long ungratified; for as our post was next the enemy, I found,
when any thing was to be done, that it was his also. He was just such a
man as I had figured in my mind's eye, and I thought that the stranger
would betray a grievous want of penetration who could not select the Duke
of Wellington from amid five hundred in the same uniform.
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