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whose faces were familiar. Even after less than a day away, it was good to be among the 106th.
    At the rear of the battalion a row of ox-carts carried the heavy baggage piled high. Sitting on top of the mounds were many of the wives and children who followed their men to war. Sally Dobson waved when she saw him and prodded her daughter Jenny, who had been looking the other way. There was a cluster of wives from the grenadiers on the leading cart, since apparently they had insisted on their seniority. In a moment all of them were waving or blowing him kisses.
    ‘Where you been, Mr Williams?’
    ‘Gone all night, eh! What’s her name?’
    ‘Been off riding with the cavalry,’ he replied.
    ‘Bet your arse is sore!’ The laughter doubled.
    ‘No, my dear ladies, it is very sore.’ There was no malice in their mockery, and its coarseness was unthinking and habitual, and so Williams happily joined in. For a few paces he exaggerated the awkwardness of his walk and the winces each step provoked.
    ‘Here, what have you done to all my hard work?’ The heavily pregnant Jenny was looking at his jacket, stained from the fall, smeared in one place with blood from the Frenchman he had killed, and with the right shoulder wing broken and half hanging off. ‘You’re not safe to be out. Bloody men! Send it to me later and I’ll sew it back up for you. Ma will give it a clean.’
    Jenny was barely sixteen, but her condition had done nothing to diminish her good looks or her readiness to speak to anyone as an equal, officers included. She was married to the taciturn Private Hanks, whose feet were badly blistered, so that he was riding on a donkey behind the cart. Williams asked him how he was, and received the expected brief but optimistic reply. ‘Be all right tomorrow, sir.’
    ‘Good.’
    Williams was glad to be home. An argument broke out among the women, all uniting in mutual hostility to Molly Richards. Williams decided it was time to check that the baggage was stored properly on the other carts.

3
     
    T hat evening the newly returned William Hanley sat with Pringle in the small room allocated to the officers of the Grenadier Company. Williams was out checking that the men and their families were settled, had received and consumed their rations, and were neither being mistreated by nor themselves abusing their hosts. Major MacAndrews insisted that his officers visit the men’s quarters twice a day. More often would have given the soldiers no rest. Less would have made it much harder to maintain an acceptable standard of discipline. He knew that other regiments were less strict, but saw that as no reason to change his own regulation. Anyway, standards of internal order appeared to be generally good in the Reserve Division. The grenadiers were in the houses at the far end of the hamlet’s single street. No one seemed to know what it was called, but the entire regiment had somehow been crammed into the forty or so buildings, with the officers allotted space in the only big house in the place, a crumbing villa owned by an obscure member of a very minor aristocratic family.
    Only a single servant remained in the place, and he left the barest pause after knocking before opening the door and peering in, apparently in the expectation of catching the two officers mistreating his master’s property. This would not have been easy. Two low stools and a table with one leg markedly shorter than the other three were the only furnishings left in the badly swept room. The British officers had themselves obtained a meagre supply of straw to spread over the cold flagstones. The candle on the table was also their own.
    Much to the man’s surprise, Hanley greeted him in Spanish, and listened politely to his praise of Don Carlos, and his confidence that the latter would wish him to extend every hospitality to the English while they visited his home. It was clear from his tone that as far as he was concerned his employer was far too generous