Romantic Spain Volume II Part 10

But I have no intention to describe Irun. Theophile Gautier has done that before me, and I am not sacrilegious. There was another customer in the barber's shop. As I left after the shave he followed, and accosted me on the flagway confidentially.

"How are you, captain?"

"You are in error," I answered. "I am no captain."

"What! Did I not see you take a boat for the _San Margarita_ at Socoa?"

"That may be; but I only boarded her through curiosity."

"Do not be afraid," he whispered. "How is Don Guillermo?"

"What Don Guillermo?"

"Senor Leader. I was with him when he was wounded; I am a Carlist. I am here on the same mission as yourself; to spy what the vermin are doing."

"Ha! good; ramble on, and don't notice me. It is dangerous."

He sauntered along the causeway, hands in pockets and whistling, and presently popped into a tavern, and I re-entered the fonda. Hardly had I set foot over the threshold when I was stupefied by a welcome in a familiar voice, none other than that of Mr. William O'Donovan, who had been my comrade and amanuensis throughout the irksome beleaguerment of Paris.[F] We did not throw our arms round our respective necks, hug and kiss each other--I reserve my kisses for pretty girls, newly-washed babes, and dead male friends, and then kiss only the brow--but we did join hands cordially and long. In answer to my query as to what had brought him to this queer corner at the back of G.o.d-speed, he explained that he was acting as correspondent of a Dublin paper; for, it appeared, the people of Ireland were consumed with anxiety as to the progress of the Carlist rising--details of which, of course, they could not obtain in the mere London papers--and were particularly desirous to have record of the doings of the Foreign Legion, a great majority of whom were sons of the Emerald Isle. His younger brother, a medical student, was likely to come out to join that Legion, and as for Kaspar (a name by which we knew his brother Edmond, afterwards triumvir at Merv), he was sure to turn up. Mother Carey's chicken hovers near when the elements are at strife. He was immensely satisfied with his diggings, he said, liked the natives, and considered this a splendid chance for improving his Spanish. He was reading "Don Quixote" in the vernacular. In a sense, I looked upon his presence as a perfect G.o.dsend to us, as he came in most appropriately as a _Deus ex machina_ to create the character of Barbarossa's invented friend. O'Donovan was in good standing with the Republicans of the town, as he was a staunch Republican himself, and could spin yarns of the Republics of antiquity, and of the greatness of Paris, and the glories of the United States. He was getting on famously with Castilian, and was charmed with the redundancy of its vocabulary of vituperation, which was only to be equalled by the Irish, of which his father had been such a master. I made Barbarossa and my old chum known to one another, and we dined together, pledging the past in a cup of wine tempered with the living waters which bubbled up in the sacristy of the parish church, and were distributed in bronze conduits through Irun.

After the meal and the meditative smoke of custom, O'Donovan sat down to write a letter, which I guaranteed to post for him in France, and Barbarossa and I sallied forth for a walk.

We were lounging about the Calle Mayor gazing at the escutcheons over every hall-door--your bellows-mender and cobbler in this democratic town were invariably of the seed of Noah in right line--when the alarm was raised that fifty horses had been carried off by the Carlists almost at the gates, and that two shots had been heard. The bugler sounded the call "To arms," and forthwith a little company consisting of thirty-two men, the bugler aforesaid, and a captain, set out at a quick step for a high ground beside a signal-tower at one end of the town. We hurried forward with them, and pa.s.sed out through one of the four gates, on the side next the mountains. The soldiers took a position on the slope of a hill a couple of hundred yards from the gate, and Barbarossa and I sheltered ourselves behind an orchard-wall, from which there was an uninterrupted view of the billowy tract of meadow and pasture land beneath, cut into patches by thick hedges. Quick on our heels emerged from the town some half-dozen intrepid "volunteers of liberty," and the inevitable small boy, a red cap stuck jauntily on three hairs of his head and a large cigarette in his mouth. One of the volunteers--he who had demanded our papers on the Plaza--looked viciously at Barbarossa, who a.s.sumed a most artistic pretence of stolidity.

"Come here, senor, and you will have a better vision of your friends,"

he said with mock suavity.

Barbarossa smiled, thanked him, and walked quietly to the place indicated, an exposed opening beside the wall.

"I can see nothing," he said.

I adjusted my long-distance gla.s.s, and ranged over the wide stretch of landscape, but could see nothing either. As I shut it up and returned it to the case, a sergeant advanced from the party of soldiers on the slope and marched directly towards me. I was puzzled and, I own, a trifle unnerved.

"Senor," he said to me, "I carry the compliments of my captain, and his request that you would lend him your gla.s.s, as he has forgotten his own."

"With pleasure," I answered readily, much relieved. "I will take it to him myself, as it is London-made, and he may not understand how it is sighted."

This may have been a breach of neutrality, but what was I to do? If I refused, the gla.s.s would have been taken from me, and I should have been compromised. I handed it to the officer with my best bow, explained its mechanism to him; he bowed to me, and from that moment I felt that I was under his wing. I may be wrong, but I have a notion that in a skirmish it is much better to be near regulars than volunteers, and I stood in a line with the military a few paces away.

Suddenly there was a spark and a report away down in a field of maize, some six hundred yards below us, and the whizz of a bullet was heard.

"Steady, men!" said the captain; "don't discharge your rifles."

The sight was very pretty as they stood in a group on the green hillside in att.i.tude of suspense, their weapons held at the ready, and all eyes fixed on the front, from which the smoke was rising. It was very like to the celebrated picture by Protais, familiar in every cabaret in France, "_Avant le Combat;_" but even more picturesque than that, for these soldiers were dressed most irregularly--some in tattered capote, others in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, some in shako, others in _bonnet de police_. A few civilians had crept out of the town by this time, and the chief of the Miqueletes roared peremptorily to have that gate shut. This was not an agreeable position for Barbarossa and myself. Our retreat was cut off. We were unarmed. If one of those amateur warriors were killed, we ran the imminent hazard of being ma.s.sacred by his comrades. On the other hand, there was the liability of being ourselves shot by the Carlists.

How were they to distinguish a neutral or a sympathizer from their foes?

I confess I could not help smiling as the thought occurred to me what a piece of irony in action it would be if Barbarossa were to be helped to a morsel of lead by his friends, the enemy. With a cheerful equanimity I contemplated the prospect of his receiving a very slight contusion from a spent bullet on a soft part of his frame.

Ping, ping, came a few reports, but evidently out of range. Each smoke-wreath was in a different direction.

"This may get hot," I said to myself; "the Carlists may not be sharpshooters, but this clump of uniforms in relief on the gra.s.s must present a blur that will be an enticing target for them. I dare not go back to the wall, but it might be discreet to lie down. There is no disgrace in offering them a small elevation of corpus." I stretched myself on the sward, acted nonchalance, and lit a cigar.

The volunteers could no longer be held in control. They opened action on their own account, one fellow distinguis.h.i.+ng himself by the rapidity of his fire, and the intensity with which he aimed at something--or nothing.

"Ah, that's Tomas!" said a portly civilian connoisseur, with his hands in his pockets. "We know him, he is making music; he wants to get himself remarked."

The soldiers did not deliver a shot, but the volunteers kept cracking away, and the invisible Carlists replied. n.o.body was. .h.i.t, though bullets could be heard whizzing overhead for twenty minutes, and one did actually knock a chip off a wall. That was the sole damage done to the Republican position; the damage to the Carlist must have been less.

Two of the Miqueletes ventured stealthily down a road leading towards the point from which the nearest jets of smoke curled, following the ditch by the side, stooping and peering through the bushes. There was a volley from afar. They hesitated and stood, as if undecided whether to advance.

"Sound the retire for those men," said the captain; and as the call rang out they returned.

That volley was the last sign the Carlists gave; and after waiting ten minutes, the captain shut up my gla.s.s, returned it to me, and remarked that the attack was a feint, and had no object beyond worrying his men.

He gave the order "March," the gate was opened, Barbarossa rejoined me, and we returned to Irun, taking care to keep as near the regulars as we could. "Nada--nothing," cried the captain to an inquiring lady on a balcony, and the town-gates were closed after the volunteers had returned and tramped to the Plaza with the proud bearing of citizens who had done their duty.

How that heroic Tomas did strut! A fighter he of the choicest brand, one not to stop at trifles; there was martial ire in his flaming glance; defiance breathed from his nostrils; triumph sat on his lips; he swung his arms like destructive flails; and as he entered a tavern one could only fancy him calling in a voice of Stentor for a jug of rum and blood plentifully besprinkled with gunpowder and cayenne pepper to a.s.suage the thirst of combat.

O'Donovan gave me his letter. Barbarossa hinted that it was our best course to slope, and slope we did, as soon as the horse was harnessed.

As we pa.s.sed down the street a grinning face saluted me from a doorway.

It was that of my acquaintance from the barber's shop. He gave me a meaning wink. The artful Carlists had evidently succeeded in their object, whatever it might have been. On the river-bank our fair and faithful ferry-maid awaited us. We were conveyed over in safety, and at the hotel of Hendaye soon forgot the perils we had encountered.

Barbarossa was dead-beat, and threw himself on a sofa, where he sank back heavy-eyed and exhausted; and I, almost feared that he would drop into a coma, as the penalty of overstraining nature, until the sight of a pack of cards restored him as if by a spell to his normal wakefulness.

Even in a disturbed region it is needful to have a change of linen, so we got back next morning to St. Jean de Luz, where I had left my baggage. There I met M. Thieblin, a colleague, whom I had seen last at Metz, previous to the siege of that fortress in the Franco-German war.

He was now representing the _New York Herald_, and had just returned from Estella, at the taking of which place, the most important the Carlists had yet seized, he had the luck to be present. He a.s.sured me that it was utter fatuity to dream of following the Carlists, except I had at least one horse--but that it would be sensible to take two if I could manage to procure them. It was more than an ordinary man was qualified to cope with, to make his observations, write his letters, and look after their transmission, without having to attend to his nag, and do an odd turn of cooking at a pinch. The riddle was how to get the horse--a sound hardy animal that would not call for elaborate grooming, or refuse a feed of barley. Horse-flesh was at a premium, but he thought I might be able to have what I wanted at Bayonne, on payment of an extravagant price. A requisition for forage and corn could be had through the Junta; and I should have no trouble in getting an orderly on applying with my credentials to the chief of staff of any of the Carlist columns to which I might attach myself. We had a long conversation, and Thieblin frankly informed me that in his opinion the Carlists had not the ghost of a chance outside their own territory. There they were c.o.c.ks of the walk. What the end might be he could not pretend to vaticinate, but "El Pretendiente" would never reign in Madrid. The conflict might last for months--might last for years; but the Carlists owed the vitality they had as much to the divisions and inefficiency of their adversaries as to their own strength. There would be no important engagements--to dignify them by the epithet--until the organization of the insurrectionary forces was regularized, and they had a stronger artillery and an adequate cavalry. M. Thieblin did not stray far from the bull's-eye in his prophecy.

I went to bed in the mood of Crookback on Bosworth Field, and felt that my dream-talk would shape itself into the cry, "A horse! a horse!"

Until that coveted steed had been la.s.soed, stolen, or bought, I must only endeavour to justify my existence--that is to say, render value for the money expended on me by picking up "copy" anywhere and everywhere.

I was advised to go to Bilbao by sea, but the advice came too late. The last steamer from Bayonne had ventured there four-and-twenty hours before I sought my pa.s.sage, and even on that last steamer the few voyagers were unable to insure their lives with the Accidental Company, although they consented to promise that they would descend into the hold the instant they heard a shot. It was almost as full of jeopardy to travel to Bilbao by sea as to sail down the Mississippi with a racing captain and a lading of rye-whisky on board. One Monsieur Gueno, master of the barque _Numa_, of Vannes, made moan that he was seriously knocked about while he lay in the Nervion, off the Luchana bridge, during a skirmish between the Carlists and the troops. They both fought vigorously, but they gave him most of the blows. One of his crew, in a punt behind, was killed, and twenty-five bullets were embedded in a single mast. He had the tricolour flying all the time. A fellow-countryman of his, Monsieur Jarmet, of the s.h.i.+p _Pierre-Alcide_, of Nantes, sent in a claim for an indemnity of 160 for damages sustained by his vessel much in the like manner. A Spanish war-craft, moored behind him, began pelting the Carlists with shot; the Carlists replied, and the _Pierre-Alcide_ came in for the bulk of the favours distributed. Three bullets penetrated the captain's cabin, and four rent holes in the French flag. Neither pilots nor tugs were for hire at Bilbao, and captains of sailing vessels had only to whistle for a favouring wind and rely on their own good fortune and skill. Bilbao had to be dismissed on the merits.

Taking it for granted that I had that evasive horse, I reasoned, as I tossed on my bed, to the restless whimper of the Bay of Biscay, over which a storm was brewing, that "el Cuartel Real," the headquarters of the King, was the natural goal. There first information was to be had, and it was felt that it was about the safest place to be; but the King seldom stopped under the same roof two nights successively, and no one could tell where he would be two days beforehand. If he was at Estella when one started, he might be at Vera or Durango, or goodness knows where, when one got to Estella. So far his progress had been a success; he was present at the taking of Estella, and exercised his Royal clemency by releasing the captured prisoners. It would have been more politic to have demanded an exchange, for there were partisans of his own in Republican dungeons (Englishmen amongst them); but then prisoners have to be fed and guarded, so on the whole it was as well they were set free. It was very much the case of the man who won the elephant at a raffle. If the stories, spread a.s.siduously by the Republicans, of the ma.s.sacre and maltreatment of captives by the Carlists were correct, here was the opportunity for the exercise of wholesale cruelty; but there was not a particle of truth in such charges, which, by the way, one hears in every civil war. Where Don Carlos might advance next, or where severe fighting--not such brushes as that I witnessed at Irun--might take place, was a mystery. The movements of the Republican leaders were inexplicable, and conducted in contravention of all known principles of the art of war. They hara.s.sed their men by long and objectless marches. They ordered towns to be put in a state of defence at first, and then withdrew the garrisons. They engaged whole columns in defiles, where a company of invisible guerrilleros could tease them.

They acted, in most instances, as if they had no information or wrong information. The latter, I believe, was nearer the truth. Their system of espionage was inefficient, as the information they got was untrustworthy, and always would be, in the northern provinces, for the feeling of the ma.s.ses of the people was against them. Instead of making headway they were losing ground every day, and would so continue until they received reinforcements with fibre, and were commanded by officers who really meant to win, and had the knowledge or the instinct to conceive a proper plan of campaign. The generals could hardly be censured, for their hands were tied; they were forbidden to be severe; they dared not squelch insubordination. Capital punishment, even in the army, and at such a crisis as this, was abolished. There had been, I heard, something suspiciously resembling a mutiny in the column of Sanchez Bregua. A certain Colonel Castanon was put under arrest on a charge of Alfonsist proclivities; but the Cazadores and Engineers threatened to rebel unless he was liberated; and Sanchez Bregua, instead of decimating the Cazadores and Engineers, as Lord Strathnairn would have done, liberated the Colonel.

But to that question of my route. Peradventure the presence to my dozing vision of the General commanding the Republican troops of the north that had been might help me towards a solution.

"That had been" is written advisedly, for Sanchez Bregua had been recalled to Madrid, not a day too soon. He was one of those generals whose spine had been curved by lengthened bending over a desk. Loma, who was active and das.h.i.+ng, and had the rare gift of confidence in himself, had taken his stand at Tolosa, and was awaiting the advent of Lizarraga.

All his men, and every able-bodied male in the town, were diligently excavating ditches and making entrenchments. Until Tolosa was captured by the Carlists, no serious attack on Pampeluna was probable; and that attack was likely to a.s.sume the form of an investment. Estella was to the south of Pampeluna, and all the country round, from which provisions could be drawn, was in the occupation of the Carlists. Tolosa was the objective point of the moment, and to Tolosa I determined to go. An attempt on San Sebastian could not enter into the calculations of the Carlist leaders at this stage of their revolt. The stronghold was almost inaccessible on the land side, and men, munitions, and provisions could be easily thrown into it by water. Irun, Fontarabia, and even Renteria (were artillery available) could be seized whenever the comparatively small sacrifice of lives involved would be advisable. But the game was not worth the candle yet. Were Irun or Fontarabia in the hands of the Carlists, there was the always-present danger of sh.e.l.ls being pitched into them from a gunboat in the Bida.s.soa; and Renteria, outside of which the Republican troops only stirred on sufferance, was to all intents as serviceable to the Carlists as if it were tenanted by a Carlist garrison, which would thereby be condemned to idleness.

That whirlwind ride from Renteria to Irun would come before me as the storm battalions mustered outside, and the waves began las.h.i.+ng themselves into violence of temper. What if I had to go to Madrid while such weather as this was brooding? To get to the capital one is obliged to embark at Bayonne for Santander, and proceed thence by rail--so long as no Carlist partidas meddle with the track. Romantic Spain!

But are not those Republicans who affect that they know how to govern a country primarily and princ.i.p.ally to blame? Only consider the continued interruption of that short piece of road between San Sebastian and Irun. Is it not disgraceful to them? One of our old Indian officers, I dare venture to believe, with eighteen hors.e.m.e.n and a couple of companies of foot, could hold it open in spite of the Carlists. But such a simple idea as the establishment of cavalry patrols of three, keeping vigil backwards and forwards along the line of eighteen miles, with stout infantry posts always on the alert in blockhouses at intervals, seems never to have entered into the obtuse heads of those officers lately promoted from the ranks. Seeing that the intercourse of different towns with each other and with the coast and abroad has been so long broken up, I cannot fathom the secret of how the population lives. The troops arrive in a village one day and levy contributions, the guerrilleros arrive the next and do the same; the fields must be neglected, trade must droop, yet n.o.body apparently wants food. True, the land is wonderfully fat; but some day the cry of famine will be heard.

No land could bear this perpetual drain on its resources. And then I thought of Carlists whom I met in France, who had given of their goods to support the cause. With them I talked on this very subject. They were respectable and respected men; they prayed for success to Don Carlos with sincere heart; but they had left Spain, and they complained that this condition of disturbance was lasting too long.

"You ask me why I did not remain," said one to me; "wait, and you shall see."

He opened a door and pointed to three lovely little girls at play, and continued, "These are my reasons; I have made more sacrifices than I was able for the Royal cause, and they asked me at last for another contribution, which would have ruined me. I love my King; but for no King, senor, could I afford to make those darlings paupers."

Had these Carlists any glimmer of the suns.h.i.+ne of a victorious issue to their uprising? (egad, that was a strong blast, and the waves do swish as if they were enraged at last!). Thieblin thinks not. And yet they are active, and, like the storm outside, they are gaining strength. Those of them under arms are four times as numerous as the Republicans in the northern provinces. Leader swears to me that everyone who can shoulder a musket is a Carlist. There are no more Chicos to be had, unless the volunteers of liberty come over, rifles, accoutrements and all, to Prince Charlie--a liberty they are volunteering to take somewhat freely.

I was rash in saying there were no more Chicos. Did not a company of "bhoys" trudge over to Lesaca to offer their services recently? But they were very ancient boys. The youngest of them was sixty-five. They were veterans of the Seven Years' War, and mostly colonels. Their fidelity was thankfully acknowledged, but their services were not gratefully accepted. The aged and ferocious fire-eaters were sent back to their arrowroot and easy-chairs. At all events, they had more of the timber of heroism in them than those diplomatic Carlists of the _gandin_ order, who are Carlists because it makes them interesting in the sight of the ladies, but whose campaigning is confined to an occasional three days'