“On Christmas Eve the retreat began. Not back to Portugal as we had hoped but north, into Galicia. We crossed the River Esla on the 28th, reached Bembibre on the 31st, Villafranca on New Year’s Day. The French were never far behind us, Marshal Soult, possibly Bonaparte himself. There were always rumours about him, sightings. The general staff were in a panic and the men were pushed on at a rate they could hardly bear. On one occasion we marched thirty-six hours without pause. Even on horseback that was hard. On foot it must have been torture. We were not equipped for the mountains, not the mountains in winter. Soldiers roamed in gangs hunting for food. We began to view the Spanish as much our enemies as the French. Why did they not help us? Why did they not provide us with what we so desperately needed? The answer of course was that they could not, they had not the means, but that did not stop us from hating them.

“Each morning we left behind those who had not survived the night, and if we buried them at all we buried them in snow. Discipline fell away. People . . . altered. You could see it in their faces, a confusion, as though they were searching for what they might trust in, something to guide them, but everything that could be brought to mind was false, dust, nothing. I cannot say when it started with me. It might have been when I saw the commander of our cavalry led past with his eyes covered much as yours are. He had opthalmia. It was common enough. A trooper was leading his horse by the bridle. They went by in perfect silence. I know I was physically ill by then. I had the flux. I also had violent pains in my head, a neuralgia of some sort, and I had taken to pushing balls of cotton into my ears to stop the wind from piercing them. I have sometimes thought that is the cause of my deafness, that there is still some of the cotton in there. I should have had Rizzo look in with his glass.

“But in the midst of all this we were still giving and receiving orders. I suppose it gave us a sense of things going on as they should, of normality. One evening when my squadron were trying to build shelters at the side of the road, a cornet rode up with a dispatch from Major Leitch to collect stragglers. Collect them and form them into something of a vaguely military character. This was laughable, of course. Completely absurd. The stragglers were the most dispirited, the most afraid, the most desperate. I was to make a fighting body from such men? I think now I could safely have ignored the order. I doubt anyone would ever have known or cared. But a soldier who does not obey orders has ceased to be a soldier at all and it seemed I was not quite ready for that. So I stayed. The army marched away and for a while I was entirely alone, a horseman on a road of churned snow, the last man in Spain. How long I was to wait there had not been specified. An hour? Two? And what if instead of British stragglers it was the French vanguard that came over the rise? I even began to wonder why they had chosen me for such a duty. Was it a recognition of my competence? Or was it that I was considered the most dispensable? The officer they could most easily do without?