By My Sword Alone by David Black (best e books to read .TXT) 📗

For ever after it, he only had to look at his left hand to be reminded; the stumpy gaps where the third finger and pinkie used to be, now gone at their first joints. He had to drop his breeches however, if he wanted to see the gouge the onward passage of the bullet had made across his leg. Still, they were his first honourable wounds, won in battle, and on the day, they had painted a heroic picture in blood.

Events then passed in a blur. James was aware of faces looking down on him, and then figures bundling him away, down the ravine and then up again on a soldier’s back to where the army’s meagre detachment of cavalry stood idle. The wounds were already hurting, but that pain was as nothing compared to the searing, sudden agony when the cavalry’s farrier cleansed and cauterised his finger stumps with an iron from his brazier. His hand was then tightly bound, as another bustling figure whipped the torn breeches off him and laid bare the slash on his leg. The sight of it rendered poor James momentarily faint, but he roused himself to watch as the farrier packed it with a foul-looking poultice that appeared concocted from warm mud and nettles and stank of vinegar.

Poor, poor James; he’d never felt so far from glory.

They propped him up against saddles, and gave him a flask of spirits, urging him to drink hearty. When he could unscrew his eyes from the first hit the fiery liquid delivered to his chest, he was suddenly aware that from his perch, halfway up the side of the glen, he had an almost perfect view of the battlefield, and the fight that was to come.

He had to admit to himself, the British soldiers did look magnificent – he also had to admit they were British, not just English. For the detachments of Mackays and Munroes, loyal to King George, were all too evident.

The first shots came from the British side, directed against Murray’s troops below him, and they provided an explanation for the four queer-looking stretchers that he’d watched being carried from a couple of tumbrils rolled up just behind the enemy’s front line of infantry. The devices looked like plump brass toads, and once individually arrayed, became the centre of much activity. Then, the first puff of white smoke made all too plain what they were; belching, first from one, then from the others, and the bangs that belatedly echoed across the glen. Some crude form of artillery.

But wasn’t the bangs that stunned James, it was that he was suddenly aware he could see the balls fired from these devices as they climbed lazily into the air, describing parabolas agonizingly slowly until over the top, at which point they began plunging rapidly earthwards to land among Murray’s infantry lines, where they bounced, fizzing, and then exploded, one by one, in brief flashes and smoke. It was only after a scream wafted up from within the meagre clouds, that James realised their potential lethality.

He would learn later the devices were coehorn mortars; stumpy, angled barrels designed to lob shells as plunging fire, and the fizzing he’d seen was each ball’s fuse, lit before firing and designed to detonate them once they’d fallen amongst an enemy. Against the Highlanders’ piled stone defences, they were ideal weapons, better than ordinary artillery which could only fire ball on a level trajectory. You might say James’ slack-jawed gaze of wonderment, right then, was the beginning of his tactical education.

The bombardment proceeded unabated for a while, and to James, looking down from his perch on his own lines, it did not seem as if the enemy were wreaking much actual physical havoc among them. Yet he could see the men shuffling, restless under the fire. Despite the distance, it was as if he could feel them flinch at every bang.

Musketry could be heard from the centre now, and when he looked to the white-uniformed ranks of Spaniards, he could see they were exchanging volleys, at extreme range, with ranks of red coats. The officers on both sides however, appeared to show no inclination to bring their fight to bayonet point and were concentrating instead on keeping their lines regular, and in seeing the odd gap re-filled when any soldier fell, wounded. However, in the still of the evening – it was now almost 7 o’ clock, according to James’ timepiece – the powder smoke began to thicken into fog and its intensely evocative reek to fill the air.

James Lindsay, third son of the Earl of Branter, had celebrated his thirteenth birthday barely two months before, which made him the youngest fellow in the Marquess of Tullibardine’s army that day. One might have reasonably assumed that no mother would have allowed a son so young to march off to war, but James’ mother had died of smallpox when he was but three years old, and given that the Lindsays were a family fiercely loyal to the cause of the king over the water, James Francis Edward Stuart – King James III, as by divine right – no-one had thought to stand in the boy’s way when he announced that he too would rally to the Royal Stuart standard.

Loyal as the family might be, however, James Lindsay’s father, the earl, was not on the field this day, to see his son wounded in the cause. Instead, he was still in hiding after the previous rising, four years before, having been stripped of his title and most of his lands by a Westminster bill of attainder in the reprisals that followed. Nor was the family’s oldest son, Archibald, present. In the wake of that previous rising, by family agreement, instead of going on the run with his father the earl Archibald had stepped forward to petition King George for his own pardon, renouncing all loyalty to the Stuart cause, with