“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?