prologue..........................The first Royal Dragons Maguilla, Spain. June 11, 1812
Captain Sullivan James Waring ducked low along his mount's neck just as a rifle ball whistled past his head. The French continued their retreat, but they weren't making the English advance an easy one. Guiding his chestnut gelding, Salty, with his knees, Sullivan reloaded his pistol as he and nearly seven hundred members of the combined First Royal Dragoons and the Third Dragoon Guards pounded across the rolling Spanish plain.
“Sullivan! What the devil is Slade doing?” the rider just to his right shouted.
“Advancing seven miles past any assistance,” Sullivan replied grimly, not certain Captain Phineas Bromley could even hear him over the gunfire and pounding hooves. He sent a glance back over his shoulder at the men and horses under his command. The line was ragged, and the horses tiring. And General Slade continued to gallop along in front of them.
“The six hundred French mounts ahead of him were tiring, as well, but it was hardly a compensation. Seven miles behind them they’d left a hundred or so French captives with a handful of dragoons to watch them—a victory and a damned fine bounty by anyone’s measure. Continuing this pursuit so far beyond any reinforcements was mad. With the village of Maguilla and the broken ground of a riverbed coming into view ahead of them, it was beginning to look suicidal.
“Close ranks!” he bellowed.
Another rider angled toward him. “At this pace,” Major Lord Bramwell Lowry Johns contributed breathlessly, “in three days we’ll reach the coast and then be able to swim home to Dover.”
“We’ll never live that long,” Sullivan returned, blinking dust from his eyes. “That’s Maguilla up ahead. You outrank Phin and me, Bram. If you can catch General Slade, you might remind him that the bulk of the French cavalry is out here somewhere.”
The major began to reply, then flinched sideways as his black watering cap flew back off his head. “They’ve shot my bloody hat off, the bastards!” Bram took aim, fired his pistol, and dropped one of the French cavalrymen ahead of them. “Take that, you brigands!”
The French might be brigands, but the Royal Dragoons had their own troubles. A hundred feet ahead of them General Slade waved his saber in the air, yelling as he had been for the past ten minutes. “Haste, haste! Gallop, damn you!”
The black horse hairs on his hat trailed behind him like a bloody parade streamer.
“That man is the worst officer I’ve ever seen,” Sullivan grunted, beginning to see why they’d had to make it a punishable offense to shoot one’s own commanding officer.
