Johannes Meyer proved skilful in catching them. During the action at Óbidos he caught seven different varieties. The following day, at Roliça, he found five more while marching through the dry, flinty gullies in the hills over-looking the village. He pinned them all inside his shako and looked forward to drawing them in his notebook that night. But then the battle began mid-morning and went on for hours and he had to forgo that happiness until the fighting was over.

The Battle of Roliça was a slaughter and the outnumbered French were defeated. They suffered seven hundred casualties, the English and Portuguese four hundred and eighty-five. The last Johannes had seen of Wolfie was during the assault by the 29th Regiment of Foot (the brazen English charge up the hill), an attack the French had initially repulsed and almost turned to victory, but there was a second full-frontal assault immediately after the first and then it was all over. Johannes had drummed the men down into the fray and he’d seen Wolfie charge at the English with his bayoneted musket, but then he’d lost him in the cannon smoke.

In the morning, the Portuguese peasants came with their donkeys and rough boarded carts, dead soldiers stacked in the trays. It took a number of trips to collect and deliver them all, it was miserable work, but the villagers of Roliça didn’t want the bodies strewn over their hills and in the gullies, and nor did they think it was their duty to bury so many dead into the dry, hard-packed earth. They delivered them and said, ‘Here are your soldiers,’ and waited for coins, standing beside the carts. They were poor and some of them had looted the bodies, but not all, and they hoped for payment because bringing the bodies up was respectful and dignified them.

Général Delaborde sent a man around with a shako and the small collection was handed to the peasants. They took their empty carts back down to the village.

The sun was already blazing and there were many flies. The soldiers drew lots for who’d wield the shovels and picks first, then tied handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths like bandits. Johannes found Wolfie in one of the lines of bodies on the ground. Wolfie’s arm had been blown off at the elbow and his belly was bloody, chewed up with shrapnel.

Later that night, under a cold scattered belt of stars, Johannes took his notebook and his collection of beetles, some water, a bayonet and a loaf of bread, and took off into the silvered darkness, and nobody caught him this time as he set off alone through the pine stands in the hills behind the camp. He’d never play a drum again.

TO KILL A MAN IS NOTHING

Through pure luck and the adrenaline of fear, they managed to eventually drag themselves to the small town of Borken. Exhausted.