The Spanish Bride by Georgette Heyer Read Free Book Online

kicking or dowsing them into comparative sobriety, and forcing them to carry away the wounded from the breaches and the bastions.
    A brilliant day had succeeded the clouded night; the sun beat down upon the old walls, and the plaster-coated houses; and from the ditch where the dead lay in heap upon heap, a faint, growing stench of putrefaction began to rise like an unhealthy miasma. Quartermaster Surtees had got a party of decent men together, and had been at work dragging the wounded out from under the dead ever since dawn. Harry was there too, of course, with his brother Brigade-Major, Charles Beckwith; old Dr Burke, whom every man in the Light division loved, was there, heartening the worst cases by his loud, cheerful bullying, all the time the tears were pouring down his cheeks. Stretcher-parties, some sober, some too drunk to carry their burdens without stumbling over inequalities in the ground, were employed in carrying the wounded men to the rear. Some of these died before they reached the camp; some, their hurts roughly bound up in the ditch, were tipped off the stretchers by the clumsiness of the bearers, and started bleeding copiously again. Now that the sunlight disclosed the results of the night’s struggle at the breaches, men who had borne their part in it looked on the scene with horrified eyes. The carnage was more frightful even than they had known, the dead so numerous that they looked like wooden soldiers spilled out of a child’s toy-chest—those of them who had not been stripped naked, and left in strange, sprawling attitudes to fester in the ditch.
    George Simmons found Major O’Hare thus, upon the breach, shot through the chest by musket-balls that had torn great gashes in his flesh. He had volunteered to lead the storming-party, and had been almost the first to fall. He lay beside Sergeant Fleming, who had always been with him. They were both dead, and George, composing their twisted limbs, and drawing down the lids over their dreadfully glaring eyes could not help shedding a few tears. ‘A Lieutenant-Colonel or cold meat in a few hours!’ O’Hare had said last night, shaking George’s hand before he went off to lead the advance.
    Well, he was cold meat, like Stokes, and Crampton, and Balvaird, and McDermid, like the hundreds of rank-and-file who lay piled up at the foot of the breach, in a fantastic, incredible mound. George brushed away the tear-drops, rejecting with the detachment of those who had fought in many engagements and had learned to look upon the loss in battle of friends as passing griefs, sharp yet soon over, that it was a bad soldier who mourned the dead over long, as bad a soldier as the man who dwelt on the chances of his own death. A friend was killed, and one wept over him; but soon, one would find another friend, not dead but miraculously alive, and a spring of gladness would make one forget the first sorrow. Such a spring George felt when he saw Harry presently. His honest face grew lighter, its dejection vanished in a beaming smile. He grasped Harry’s hand, ejaculating: “Thank God! You’re safe! Well done, old fellow!’
    ‘If only we had carried it!’ Harry said, casting a fierce, hungry look upwards at the breach. ‘Never mind, they’re all saying it was our attacks that made it possible for Leith’s and Picton’s fellows to break in. And Johnny’s safe too, and dear old Charlie Beckwith! Oh, but Harry, though there’s no denying we are The Division, it makes one’s heart swell, indeed it does, to think of those noble fellows of Picton’s scaling the Castle-hill as they did! And the Pioneers, too, winning the river-bastion, with everyone ready to swear they must fail!’ ‘Yes!’ Harry said, kindling with ready enthusiasm. ‘Noble fellows, all of them, and the bloodiest, most glorious action, George! By God, I would fight every one of our battles again, but not this one!’
    ‘Oh, no, not this one again!’ George agreed, with a shudder.
    ‘I hate