Page 48 of Who Cries for the Lost

For a long moment Hendon simply stared at him, his face tight in a way that made him look older than his years. Then he drew a long breath and let it out slowly. “I suppose there are ugly episodes in every nation’s past that ought by rights to stain their honor for eternity.”

“You’re saying Cabrera is one of ours?”

“Yes. But I suspect that in the end it will all simply be forgotten. The French don’t want to remember the embarrassment of their defeat at Bailén, and the Spanish are, after all, the Spanish, while we like to pretend we had nothing to do with it.”

“But we did?”

Hendon reached for his cognac and took a long, slow swallow. “Oh, yes. Spain was going to honor the terms of the surrender agreement until we stepped in.”

“So it’s true? We stopped them from repatriating their prisoners?”

Hendon nodded. “They’d marched them to Cádiz in preparation for loading them on transports and sending them to France. There were something like twenty-five thousand of them in all.”

“That many?”

Hendon nodded. “Seventeen thousand from Dupont de l’Etang’s army at Bailén, plus another five thousand of his troops that surrendered later and three thousand more from I forget where. Spain was going to send them all back to France. But then we stepped in. The regional commander of the Royal Navy at the time was Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, who’d basically been given the authority of a viceroy. He told the Spaniards that if they tried to honor their promise and repatriate the French prisoners, we’d blow their transports out of the water.”

“So what happened?”

“At first, nothing. The Spaniards didn’t know what to do. They couldn’t send the prisoners to France the way they’d planned, so for a time they simply kept them in Cádiz. A few were being held in the castle there, but most were crowded onto hulks in the harbor, where conditions were appalling. Hundreds were dying every day, to the point the people of Cádiz were complaining because they couldn’t deal with all the dead bodies.”

Hendon drained his cognac and set the empty glass aside. “By that time, Napoléon himself had come to take charge of the French Army in Spain, and London was afraid he was going to march on Cádiz and free his captured soldiers. Just think: twenty-five thousand men—or, I suppose, more like twenty thousand by then—added to the French ranks. We told the Spaniards they had to get their prisoners out of there.”

“But not send them back to France.”

“Obviously not. The Spanish government—or what there was of it at the time with the King in exile—decided that if we wouldn’t let them send the prisoners to France, and if they couldn’t keep them on the mainland, then the only thing they could do would be to ship them to the Mediterranean, to Majorca or Minorca. Except the citizens of the main islands didn’t want them, and Collingwood didn’t want them there either because he liked to use the two islands for his fleet.”

“So whose idea was it to send them to Cabrera?”

“I don’t know. It’s a tiny, wretched place about twenty miles from Palma, totally uninhabited and essentially uninhabitable. Basically it’s just a small stretch of rocky cliffs and scrub-covered hills with only one freshwater spring that disappears in the heat of summer. I’m told there’s a small medieval castle by the bay—more like a fortified tower, really—that could provide shelter for maybe twenty or thirty men. Not fifteen to twenty thousand.”

“And we simply dumped them there?”

Hendon nodded. “With no food, no water, no shelter, and no means of building any. At least Robinson Crusoe had a wrecked ship from which he could salvage all sorts of tools and materials. Those poor bastards on Cabrera had nothing. Nothing.”

Hendon drew a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and reached for his pipe. Sebastian waited while he tamped a load of tobacco in the bowl and kindled a taper. After a moment, the Earl continued.

“Eventually the local government in Majorca hired someone to take over a small shipment of food from Palma every four days. But the rations were starvation level—a few ounces of bread and a handful of beans per man per day. And sometimes the ship simply didn’t come, either because of the weather or because the officials in Majorca couldn’t pay the bill. Then the men marooned on the island would starve. At first, when there were more of them, they were dying at the rate of four or five hundred a day.”

“My God,” whispered Sebastian.

Hendon was silent for a moment, his hand cupping the bowl of his pipe, his expression that of a man whose thoughts were far, far away. Then he sighed and said, “No one knows exactly how many died there. Some of the men eventually volunteered to join the Spanish Army simply to have a chance of surviving. At one point we took off a few dozen officers and brought them here to England. And the prisoners themselves tried to hide the real number of deaths because an artificially inflated number of survivors meant more food for the living. But it wasn’t only the lack of food that killed them. Many died of thirst in the summer or of exposure in the winter. After a few years, they were basically naked, and they could never really build much in the way of proper shelters. More than a few of them despaired of ever leaving the island and threw themselves off the cliffs into the sea.”

“I’m surprised any of them survived.”

“I suppose it’s a testament to the human spirit.”

Sebastian lifted his cognac to his lips and took a deep drink that burned all the way down. “You say ‘London’ decided not to allow Spain to repatriate the French prisoners. Who in London?”

Hendon drew on his pipe, then let the smoke ease out slowly before answering. “Castlereagh was foreign minister at first and must bear a large measure of responsibility, along with Admiral Collingwood. But it would be wrong to put it all on those two alone. Wellington’s voice was loud, as were those of his brothers. Richard Wellesley was our ambassador to Spain, then took over as foreign secretary, at which point their brother Henry was sent to Spain as ambassador.”

“And Jarvis? What was his position in all this?”

Hendon met Sebastian’s hard gaze. “What do you think?”

And yours? Where was your voice? Sebastian wanted to ask. Instead he said, “Who else?”

Hendon thought about it, then shook his head. “I honestly can’t recall.”

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