Held Fast For England Part 27

"And the talking," said another.

"Now, drop it, boys, and be serious. What is the news, really?"

"There is a council of war going on, at the governor's, O'Halloran.

Boyd, of course, and De la Motte, Colonel Green, the admiral, Mr.

Logie, and two or three others. They say the governor has been gradually getting extra stores across from Tangier, ever since there was first a talk about this business; and of course that is the most important question, at present. I hear that Green and the Engineers have been marking out places for new batteries, for the last month; and I suppose fatigue work is going to be the order of the day. It is too bad of them choosing this time of the year to begin, for it will be awfully hot work.

"Everyone is wondering what will become of the officers who are living out with their families, at San Roque and the other villages across the Spanish lines; and besides, there are a lot of officers away on leave, in the interior. Of course they won't take them prisoners. That would be a dirty trick. But it is likely enough they may s.h.i.+p them straight back to England, instead of letting them return here.

"Well, it is lucky that we have got a pretty strong garrison. We have just been adding up the last field state. These are the figures--officers, noncommissioned officers, and men--artillery, 485; 12th Regiment, 599; 39th, 586; 56th, 587; 58th, 605; 72nd, 1046; the Hanoverian Brigade--of Hardenberg's, Reden's, and De la Motte's regiments--1352; and 122 Engineers under Colonel Green: which makes up, altogether, 5382 officers and men.

"That is strong enough for anything, but it would have been better if there had been five hundred more artillerymen; but I suppose they will be able to lend us some sailors, to help work the heavy guns.

"They will turn you into a powder monkey, Repton."

"I don't care what they turn me into," Bob said, "so long as I can do something."

"I think it is likely," Captain O'Halloran said gravely, "that all women and children will be turned out of the place, before fighting begins; except, of course, wives and children of officers."

There was a general laugh, at Bob.

"Well," he said quietly, "it will lessen the ranks of the subalterns, for there must be a considerable number who are not many months older than I am. I am just sixteen, and I know there are some not older than that."

This was a fact, for commissions were--in those days--given in the army to mere lads, and the ensigns were often no older than mids.h.i.+pmen.

Late in the afternoon, a procession of carts was seen crossing the neutral ground, from the Spanish lines; and it was soon seen that these were the English officers and merchants from San Roque, and the other villages. They had, that morning, received peremptory orders to leave before sunset. Some were fortunate enough to be able to hire carts, to bring in their effects; but several were compelled, from want of carriage, to leave everything behind them.

The guards had all been reinforced, at the northern batteries; pickets had been stationed across the neutral ground; the guard, at the work known as the Devil's Tower, were warned to be specially on the alert; and the artillery in the battery, on the rock above it, were to hold themselves in readiness to open fire upon the enemy, should they be perceived advancing towards it.

It was considered improbable, in the extreme, that the enemy would attack until a great force had been collected; but it was possible that a body of troops might have been collected secretly, somewhere in the neighbourhood, and that an attempt would be made to capture the place by surprise, before the garrison might be supposed to be taking precautions against attack.

The next morning orders were issued, and large working parties were told off to go on with the work of strengthening the fortifications; and notice was issued that all empty hogsheads and casks in the town would be bought, by the military authorities. These were to be filled with earth, and to take the places of fascines, for which there were no materials available on the Rock. Parties of men rolled or carried these up to the heights. Other parties collected earth, and piled it to be carried up in sacks on the back of mules--there being no earth, on the rocks where the batteries would be established--a fact which added very largely to the difficulties of the Engineers.

On the 24th the Childers, sloop of war, brought in two prizes from the west; one of which, an American, she had captured in the midst of the Spanish fleet. Some of the Spanish men-of-war had made threatening demonstrations, as if to prevent the sloop from interfering with her; but they had not fired a gun, and it was supposed that they had not received orders to commence hostilities.

Two English frigates had been watching the fleet; and it was supposed to be on its way to join the French fleet, off Cape Finisterre.

The Spaniards were seen, now, to be at work dragging down guns from San Roque to arm their two forts--Saint Philip and Saint Barbara--which stood at the extremities of their lines: Saint Philip on the bay, and Saint Barbara upon the seash.o.r.e, on the eastern side of the neutral side. In time of peace, only a few guns were mounted in these batteries.

Ill.u.s.tration: The Rock and Bay of Gibraltar.

Admiral Duff moved the men-of-war under his command, consisting of the Panther--of sixty guns--three frigates, and a sloop, from their usual anchorage off the Water Port--where they were exposed to the fire of the enemy's forts--to the New Mole, more to the southward.

Bob would have liked to be out all day, watching the busy preparations, and listening to the talk of the natives; who were greatly alarmed at the prospect of the siege, knowing that the guns from the Spanish forts, and especially from Fort Saint Philip, could throw their shot and sh.e.l.l into the town. But Captain O'Halloran agreed with his wife that it was much better he should continue his lessons with Don Diaz, of a morning; for that it would be absurd for him to be standing about in the sun, the whole day.

The evening lessons were, however, discontinued from the first; as Dr. Burke had his hands full in superintending the preparations making, at the hospitals, for the reception of large numbers of wounded.

Bob did not so much mind this, for he had ceased to regard the time spent with the professor as lessons. After he had once mastered the conjugation of the verbs, and had learned an extensive vocabulary by heart, books had been laid aside, altogether; and the three hours with the professor had, for the last two months, been spent simply in conversation. They were no longer indoors, but sat in the garden on the shady side of the house; or, when the sky happened to be clouded and the morning was cool, walked together out to Europa Point; and would sit down there, looking over the sea, but always talking.

Sometimes it was history--Roman, English, or Spanish--sometimes Bob's schooldays and life in London, sometimes general subjects. It mattered little what they talked about, so that the conversation was kept up.

Sometimes, when it was found that topics failed them, the professor would give Bob a Spanish book to glance through, and its subject would serve as a theme for talk on, the following day; and as it was five months since the lad had landed, he was now able to speak in Spanish almost as fluently as in English. As he had learnt almost entirely by ear, and any word misp.r.o.nounced had had to be gone over, again and again, until Don Diaz was perfectly satisfied, his accent was excellent; and the professor had told him, a few days before the breaking out of the war, that in another month or two he should discontinue his lessons.

"It would be well for you to have one or two mornings a week, to keep up your accent. You can find plenty of practice talking to the people. I see you are good at making friends, and are ready to talk to labourers at work, to boys, to the market women, and to anyone you come across; but their accent is bad, and it would be well for you to keep on with me. But you speak, at present, much better Spanish than the people here and, if you were dressed up as a young Spaniard, you might go about Spain without anyone suspecting you to be English."

Indeed, by the professor's method of teaching--a.s.sisted by a natural apt.i.tude, and three hours' daily conversation, for five months--Bob had made surprising progress, especially as he had supplemented his lesson by continually talking Spanish with Manola, with the Spanish woman and children living below them, and with everyone he could get to talk to.

He had seen little of Jim, since the trouble began; as leave was, for the most part, stopped--the s.h.i.+ps of war being in readiness to proceed to sea, at a moment's notice, to engage an enemy, or to protect merchantmen coming in from the attacks of the Spanish s.h.i.+ps and gunboats, across at Algeciras.

Bob generally got up at five o'clock, now, and went out for two or three hours before breakfast; for the heat had become too great for exercise, during the day. He greatly missed the market, for it had given him much amus.e.m.e.nt to watch the groups of peasant women--with their baskets of eggs, fowls, vegetables, oranges, and fruit of various kinds--bargaining with the townspeople, and joking and laughing with the soldiers. The streets were now almost deserted, and many of the little traders in vegetables and fruit had closed their shops. The fishermen, however, still carried on their work, and obtained a ready sale for their catch. There had, indeed, been a much greater demand than usual for fish, owing to the falling off in the fruit and vegetable supplies.

The cessation of trade was already beginning to tell upon the poorer part of the population; but employment was found for all willing to labour either at collecting earth for the batteries, or out on the neutral ground--where three hundred of them were employed by the Engineers in levelling sand hummocks, and other inequalities in the ground, that might afford any shelter to an enemy creeping up to a.s.sault the gates by the waterside.

Dr. Burke came in with Captain O'Halloran to dinner, ten days after the gates had been closed.

"You are quite a stranger, Teddy," Mrs. O'Halloran said.

"I am that," he replied; "but you are going to be bothered with me again, now; we have got everything in apple pie order, and are ready to take half the garrison under our charge. There has been lots to do. All the medical stores have been overhauled, and lists made out and sent home of everything that can be required--medicines and comforts, and lint and bandages, and splints and wooden legs; and goodness knows what, besides. We hope they will be out in the first convoy.

"There is a privateer going to sail, tomorrow; so if you want to send letters home, or to order anything to be sent out to you, you had better take the opportunity. Have you got everything you want, for the next two or three years?"

"Two or three years!" Carrie repeated, in tones of alarm. "You mean two or three months."

"Indeed, and I don't. If the French and the Dons have made up their mind to take this place, and once set to fairly to do it, they are bound to stick to it for a bit. I should say you ought to provide for three years."

"But that is downright nonsense, Teddy. Why, in three months there ought to be a fleet here that would drive all the French and Spaniards away."

"Well, if you say there ought to be, there ought," the doctor said, "but where is it to come from? I was talking to some of the naval men, yesterday; and they all say it will be a long business, if the French and Spanish are in earnest. The French navy is as strong as ours, and the Spaniards have got nearly as many s.h.i.+ps as the French. We have got to protect our coasts and our trade, to convoy the East Indian fleets, and to be doing something all over the world; and they doubt whether it would be possible to get together a fleet that could hope to defeat the French and Spanish navies, combined.

"Well, have you been laying in stores, Mrs. O'Halloran?"

"Yes, we have bought two sacks of flour, and fifty pounds of sugar; ten pounds of tea, and a good many other things."

"If you will take my advice," the doctor said earnestly, "you will lay in five times as much. Say ten sacks of flour, two hundred-weight of sugar, and everything else in proportion. Those sort of things haven't got up in price, yet; but you will see, everything will rise as soon as the blockade begins in earnest."

"No, the prices of those things have not gone up much; but fruit is three times the price it was, a fortnight ago, and chickens and eggs are double, and vegetables are hardly to be bought."

"That is the worst of it," the doctor said. "It's the vegetables that I am thinking of."

"Well, we can do without vegetables," Mrs. O'Halloran laughed, "as long as we have plenty of bread."

"It is just that you can't do. You see, we shall be cut off from Tangier--maybe tomorrow, maybe a fortnight hence--but we shall be cut off. A s.h.i.+p may run in sometimes, at night, but you can't count upon that; and it is salt meat that we are going to live upon and, if you live on salt meat, you have got to have vegetables or fruit to keep you in health.

"Now, I tell you what I should do, Gerald, and I am not joking with you. In the first place, I would make an arrangement with the people downstairs, and I would hire their garden from them. I don't suppose they would want much for it, for they make no use of it, except to grow a few flowers. Then I would go down the town, and I would buy up all the chickens I could get. There are plenty of them to be picked up, if you look about for them, for most of the people who have got a bit of ground keep a few fowls. Get a hundred of them, if you can, and turn them into the garden. Buy up twenty sacks, if you like, of damaged biscuits. You can get them for an old song. The commissariat have been clearing out their stores, and there are a lot of damaged biscuits to be sold, by auction, tomorrow. You would get twenty sacks for a few s.h.i.+llings.

"That way you will get a good supply of eggs, if the siege lasts ever so long; and you can fence off a bit of the garden, and raise fowls there. That will give you a supply of fresh meat, and any eggs and poultry you can't eat yourselves you can sell for big prices. You could get a chicken, three weeks ago, at threepence.

Never mind if you have to pay a s.h.i.+lling for them, now; they will be worth five s.h.i.+llings, before long.

"If you can rent another bit of garden, anywhere near, I would take it. If not, I would hire three or four men to collect earth, and bring it up here. This is a good, big place; I suppose it is thirty feet by sixty. Well, I would just leave a path from the door, there, up to this end; and a spare place, here, for your chairs; and I would cover the rest of it with earth, nine inches or a foot deep; and I would plant vegetables."

"Do you mane we are to grow cabbages here, Teddy?" Captain O'Halloran asked, with a burst of laughter.