Run Them Ashore (26 page)

He was near the back of the flood now, and the closest Poles were a line of skirmishers working in pairs and moving carefully down the hill some one hundred and fifty yards away. One pair stopped behind a low pile of boulders and a man fired down the hill, tumbling a fleeing redcoat into the dust. Down nearer the beach he saw some formed troops, and guessed they were the first of the 106th.

Then the breath was knocked from him and he staggered as something appallingly hot drove deep into his side. A hammer blow slammed against the side of his head and he fell, rolling off the grass and down the steep side of the gully.

19

T
he howitzer fired first, but the infantrymen turned gunners had not quite understood the shrapnel shell, so that its fuse was too short and it exploded high in the air barely a hundred yards from the barrel. On the beach Major MacAndrews heard the crump of the explosion and looked up to see the little cloud of dirty smoke in the air. Then he saw one of the long guns fire from the battery and watched as it cut a bloody swathe through some of the fugitives. The entire brigade looked to be in rout, the enemy pressing hard, and he had no more than the two flank companies of his own battalion and a detachment of Royal Marines to save them from utter disaster.

‘Captain Hall,’ he said to the naval officer who had accompanied him ashore, ‘I should be most obliged if you will signal for all ships to send every boat they have to take men off the beach.’

‘Of course. And I shall realign the gunboats so that they can best sweep the approaches to the beach.’ Both men kept their voices calm.

‘Major Wickham, Captain Pringle. Place your companies on either side of the carronade battery. The Light Company on the left and the Grenadier Company on the right. Ensure the men are loaded and wait for my order.’ MacAndrews did not care for Wickham, but the man was making a rare appearance back with the regiment and was senior to Pringle. That was one more reason why he had wanted to get ashore with the first party, so that the fellow would not be in charge. The other was to consult with Lord Turney and find out what the regiment was required
to do, but there was no sign of the general, and the only thing left was to bring off as many men as possible.

As the Grenadier Company marched past he noticed Sergeant Dobson in his proper station at the rear, as usual carrying a musket in place of the regulation half-pike. Ever since he had sobered up he was one of the finest NCOs in the battalion. Now the veteran winked as he passed, and spoke in a low voice.

‘Biggest balls-up since Flanders, sir.’

MacAndrews smiled. His wife often accused him of enjoying chaos, and he suspected it was true. Perhaps it was a Scottish thing, a satisfaction that other people’s mistakes led to confusion and ruin, but that he could prove his own worth by dealing with it.

‘Lieutenant Jones, leave a sergeant and a dozen men to stop fugitives from swamping the boats, and take the rest of your marines and occupy the rocks at the edge of the beach looking towards the castle. I do not think they will come that way, but it is sensible to take the precaution.’

The first fugitives were arriving on the beach. One group scattered when a twelve-pounder ball hit the sand and flung up a great cloud of pebbles and dust, but then they were up again, all apparently unscathed. MacAndrews looked for officers and sergeants among the fleeing soldiers to start rallying their men. So far it was mainly the blue-uniformed chasseurs who were arriving, and he doubted that the men in the lead were likely to be the most reliable, but had to work with what he had got. He saw a captain among them looking calm, and went to the man.

‘Stop them,’ he commanded. ‘There is nowhere much for them to go unless they want to swim, so it should be easy. I want the Chasseurs formed over there.’ He pointed to the right of the beach. ‘Send the Eighty-ninth to the centre and the Spanish beyond them.’

The captain stared at him, and MacAndrews wondered whether the fellow did not speak English, but suspected it was simply panic. He was covered in dried blood, evidently from someone else for there was no other trace of injury. He grabbed
the man’s collar, shook him, but still the eyes were vacant. Then a sergeant stamped to attention beside him.

‘Mueller, sir!’ he said.

‘Good man,’ MacAndrews replied, letting go of the captain. ‘Start collecting as many chasseurs as you can and form your regiment over there.’

Two more cannon shot skimmed the rise above the beach, throwing up plumes of sand. One ran through the crowds of men without causing any damage, but the other struck the knee of a soldier from the Light Company, flinging him aside, with just a ragged stump left of his leg. Muskets popped from the castle, and one of the swivel guns opened fire. The range was long, but not so long that bad luck could not allow a few shots to strike home. One of the marines was dead, a tiny hole in the centre of his forehead.

Slowly, some of the fleeing men began to rally. More officers and NCOs emerged willing to shout over the chaos and call their soldiers to them. MacAndrews saw the scarred face of Hatch on the beach, looking excited, almost happy, and with a rifle slung over his shoulder, but the man was pushing and yelling at the chasseurs to form them up.

‘The general is taken,’ Hanley said, appearing from nowhere.

‘Aye,’ MacAndrews said. He felt no particular emotion and after so many disasters it probably did not matter any more. He listened as Hanley told him a little of what had happened. Biggest balls-up since Flanders, he thought to himself, and knew that he was smiling.

Up at the top of the beach the carronade belched a spray of heavy grapeshot at the first few Polish skirmishers to creep over the top of the lowest hills. The gunboats added their fire a few minutes later, two angling to send balls bouncing across the approach to the beach and the others sending shots at the castle in the hope of disturbing the men shooting from there.

All of the fleeing men who were going to escape were on the beach by now, and MacAndrews left their officers to deal with them. A naval lieutenant backed by his own sailors and the
marine detachment was sent to supervise the loading of men into the boats. Now and then shot from the battery landed on the beach and men were mangled and killed. A shell from the howitzer exploded above the re-forming 89th and the carbine balls scythed round in a wide arc to cut down half a dozen of the redcoats.

The major walked back up to the flank companies of the 106th.

‘They’re getting a bit lively,’ Billy Pringle said. As usual Wickham looked detached, no more than an observer who was not really involved.

‘Deploy a skirmish line only if they start to be a real nuisance.’ As long as the enemy were willing to stay back then MacAndrews did not wish to provoke them. There was a danger that dispersed men would get cut off and left behind, or even worse hit by some of the fire coming from the boats. At the moment the Poles seemed content to keep their distance and snipe only at long range, but that might change when they realised that the enemy was re-embarking.

A long peal of thunder rolled and drummed in from the sea, as the air above them was ripped and dozens of very heavy shot flew over to slam into the slopes of the hill. The
Rodney
had anchored and unleashed a broadside of its great guns. A few minutes later they fired again, and this time there was grape as well as shot, and MacAndrews heard the whining of the smaller iron balls as they passed high over his head. The earth around the hilltop battery was lashed and pummelled, and for a while the guns there went silent. A few skirmishers still squibbed with muskets at the 106th and the sailors manning the carronade.

‘Lie the men down,’ MacAndrews told Pringle and Wickham. The sailors had some protection from the bank topped with sandbags, but the redcoats were in the open and there was no sense in exposing them unnecessarily, and so the men could lie down until they were needed. MacAndrews and the other officers could not hide in the same way, for their job was to
betray no sign of fear, and so they walked along behind the lines, chatting in a falsely relaxed and exaggerated way.

In an hour the boats took some eight hundred men back on board the warships. That was all that was left of the 89th, the Chasseurs, the Toledo Regiment and the gunners, and as far as MacAndrews could judge the rest of Lord Turney’s expedition was either dead, wounded or captured. From what Hanley told him and what he could see, all this loss had been inflicted by a much smaller force – half a battalion of Polish infantry and a few French cavalry. There was still no sign of the vanguard of General Sebastiani’s column coming from Malaga, and the major began to hope that they could evacuate before they arrived. Several thousand enemy would be much harder to keep back, even with the protective fire of the warships, which in truth was more intimidating than deadly.

Quite a few of the men who embarked no longer carried muskets, and some were injured. Hanley was worried because he could not find Williams, and MacAndrews could only hope that the lieutenant had been carried back on board one of the boats with the wounded, for the captain was sure he had seen him fall.

All the while the gunboats, the great ship of the line and the frigate pounded the shore. The battery replied sporadically, and then the two big cannon on the castle’s eastern wall opened up again, and the
Rodney
changed its aim to slam shot against the ancient stonework. Heavy thirty-two-pound balls gouged deep holes in the sandy-coloured wall, and MacAndrews was puzzled as to why the general had not waited until he was ready to bring such firepower against the little castle.

It took another half-hour to carry off the remaining troops. MacAndrews had the sailors spike the carronade, tip their reserves of powder into the sea and then sent them and the Light Company into the boats. He pulled Jones and his marines back and took them and the Grenadier Company on to the sand of the beach itself. The gunboats edged in closer to fire canister at the low rise around the abandoned carronade battery, for the sight of the retreat had emboldened the Polish infantry and they were
pressing closer. Pairs of skirmishers came warily over the mound of shingle at the edge of the beach, fired at the lines of redcoats and then fled back out of sight when bursts of canister flicked through the long grass. Three times they came on at a low crouch and three times the gunboats flayed the shingle with canister and the skirmishers vanished. One of the grenadiers was shot through the heart and died within moments, before the Poles were driven back, and another had his left arm broken by a ball. At last the boats approached to carry them off.

‘Mr Jones, would you be kind enough to take your marines and board.’

For once the lieutenant closed a mouth which seemed perpetually open. ‘Sir, it is the peculiar skill of my corps to operate from boats. I suggest it would be more fitting for your soldiers to go first.’

MacAndrews gave a slight bow. ‘As you wish. Captain Pringle, take the Grenadier Company to the boats.’ It reminded him of a story he had heard about the evacuation of one of the forts in Cadiz harbour. It had been held for weeks under terrible enemy fire, and when the time came to leave there was an argument between the commander of the garrison and the senior engineer. Each wanted to be the last to leave, and as they debated the issue a French shot killed the engineer and badly wounded the other officer. MacAndrews was not sure he felt much pride when he heard the story, and genuinely could not make up his mind whether a man should weep or howl with laughter at such antics.

None of the Royal Marines died because of their officer’s insistence that they form the ultimate rearguard, but Jones got a ball through his hat as the Poles risked the fire of the gunboats to send a last defiant message to the retreating enemy. For another hour and three-quarters the warships bombarded the coast, concentrating mainly on the castle. The gunboats were out of ammunition and withdrew, but the larger ships sent shot after shot into the east wall, leaving half the parapet knocked down and the wall itself pockmarked.

Major MacAndrews felt the hull of the
Rodney
shudder under
his feet as another broadside raced along from gun to gun on the two main decks. He was not sure whether all this spite was achieving very much, but understood that it was hard to pull away and admit failure.

‘Well, gentlemen, there is the question of what we should do,’ Captain Burlton said to the others. As captain of the
Rodney
he was now the senior naval officer, taking over from Captain Hope, just as MacAndrews was the senior soldier – the Navy apparently assuming that the colonel of a Spanish regiment must rank lower than a British major. ‘
Circe
is in sight, and so we are stronger than ever before, at least at sea.’ The additional thirty-two-gun frigate, which was supposed to have joined the squadron before it sailed, had at last arrived.

Captain Hope lived up to his name with one last attempt at optimism. ‘The main French force is here.’ Lookouts had reported the approach of several hundred cavalry, followed by a strong body of infantry. ‘If Sebastiani is here, then even in these light airs we could reach Malaga and take the place half a day before he could return.’

The sailors looked at MacAndrews. He did not think that either of the captains felt real conviction in favour of the proposal. Perhaps they wanted a soldier to confirm the ruined condition of all of the brigade apart from the 106th, or perhaps they simply wanted someone else to state the impossibility of continuing with the plan and to take the blame if there were need. Either way it did not really matter.

‘Perhaps we could take it, but I doubt very much that we could hold it,’ he said, and only a fool would have given another opinion. ‘I can only rely on my own battalion – and of course on the marines and sailors,’ he added, both because it was true and because few compliments were ever wasted. ‘The other soldiers are spent, at least for the moment, and in no condition to fight. As importantly, the commander of the expedition is lost.’ MacAndrews did not add that it would be presumptuous for a mere major to assume a general officer’s command and initiate a new landing, for surely that was obvious – though he would
not have hesitated to do so if there was value in the operation and a decent prospect of success. In this case there was neither.

The sailors raised no more objections. Both their ships were crammed with soldiers, and it would take time to ferry them to the transports, but for the moment the crews were busy working the guns. Burlton had already ordered food to be served to them before they left.