A Close Run Thing Read Online Free Page A

commander. ‘What? Slade – adultery?’
    ‘No, Uxbridge!’
    Edmonds shook his head with disbelief at his own slowness. ‘Well, perhaps it was hardly the breaking of the seventh commandment but the manner.’
    ‘Another commandment, you mean,’ smiled Lankester. ‘Thou shalt not elope with the Marquess of Wellington’s sister-in-law?’
    Edmonds could not but reflect the smile, the first he had been tempted to that day. ‘Well, certainly not in a post-chaise from under the very nose of his younger brother!’
    Lankester thought he perceived the storm cones to be lowering. ‘It occurs to me that, if Nelson had been deprived of his command because of Lady Hamilton, the French fleet might still be at sea instead of under it at Cape Trafalgar – and we might yet be patrolling the Sussex coast.’
    Edmonds nodded and frowned: Lankester had judged the storm’s passing over-hastily. The major’s bile rose again at this reference to the Royal Navy, whose utilitarian principles he had long held in admiration. ‘I do not see why we must be foisted with knaves and imbeciles when the Admiralty are perfectly able to order their affairs in so eminently businesslike a fashion,’ he snorted.
    ‘Or does the Navy have its patronage, too,’ countered Lankester, ‘less manifestly connected with birth perhaps, but patronage none the less?’
    ‘All I know is that if Nelson had been an officer under Slade’s command he would not have risen beyond a troop!’ rasped Edmonds, deciding that it was time he took up his position in front of the regiment, and pressing his charger forward with sudden urgency.
    * * *
    Major Joseph Edmonds, his left eye almost closed by the pain in his jaw, peered into the distance as the infantry pressed their assault across the Languedoc Canal towards the outer defences of Toulouse, the first city they had reached since coming down from their winter quarters in the Pyrenees. He might rant against the likes of Slade, but the object of his profoundest disapproval – the conduct of the campaign itself – he kept privy. With a concealed passion he utterly disputed the need to fight Soult here, especially since rumours had been circulating for days that Bonaparte was finished, dead even. The French had been deserting in droves: many had given themselves up to the Sixth’s own patrols. And, so far as he was able to make out, Bonaparte’s more general situation was no more felicitous. In the east the Continental allies – Austria, Prussia, Russia and Sweden – were making ever better progress towards Paris. A month ago Wellington had occupied Bordeaux, but to what end? Surely now there was no more need than to invest, with the merest token force, any garrison which stood in their path. Paris was the cornerstone of Bonaparte’s edifice; there was little purpose, therefore, in trifling with outworks. Edmonds began to wonder whether anyone had any notion of strategy other than fighting the enemy wherever and whenever he stood, as if every last French musketeer must be slaughtered, or put into a prison hulk, before victory might be claimed. Was there no campaigning art? Were they to continue breaking windows with guineas? Edmonds knew his history and despaired that the commander-in-chief seemed not to share his perception of the wars of antiquity, of Caesar and Hannibal. Why was Wellington so Fabian a general? Quintus Fabius Maximus –
Cunctator
(‘the Delayer’) – reviled in life for his caution and then lauded for it in his later years: Rome would never have been defeated at Cannae with such a general, the Senate had mourned. But why so many officers, Wellington included, took Fabius Maximus as their paradigm rather than Hannibal was quite beyond him. No wound in the dozen or more during his service had cut him so deeply as the rebuff he had received two winters before when he had submitted a stratagem worthy, he felt sure, of the grace of Baal himself, to manoeuvre the French out of Spain. It had