"Another fortnight and it'll be frozen, " said Picard.

"As bad as Russia, " consented Major Santon, his chief of staff.

"Nothing was as bad as Russia, " Picard said, though in truth he had rather enjoyed the Russian campaign. He was among the few men who had done well, but he was accustomed to success. Not like Colonel Gudin, whose garrison he now marched to rescue. "Gudin's a useless piece of gristle, " Picard said.

"I never met him."

'Let's hope you meet him tomorrow, but knowing Gudin he'll mess things up."

Picard leaned to his fire and lit a pipe. "I knew him way back. He promised well then, but ever since India." Picard shrugged. "He's unlucky, that's what Gudin is, unlucky, and you knew what the Emperor says about luck, it's the only thing a soldier needs."

"Luck can turn, " Santon observed.

"Not for Gudin, " Picard said. "The man's doomed. If the 75th hadn't taken refuge with him, we'd have left him to rot in Spain."

Santon looked up the dark northern slope. "Let's hope the British aren't waiting for him up there."

Picard sneered. "Let them. What will they send? One battalion? You think we can't blast our way through a battalion? We'll put our grenadiers up front and let them shoot some rosbifs for breakfast. Then, we'll occupy Irati. What's there?"

«Nothing,» Santon said. "A few shepherds."

"So it's mutton and shepherd girls for Christmas, " Picard said. "A last taste of Spain, eh?"

The general smiled in anticipation. Irati might be a miserable hovel on the frontier, but it was an enemy hovel and that meant plunder. And Picard rather hoped there would be rosbifs guarding the small village, for he reckoned his conscripts needed a fight. Most were city boys too young to shave and they needed a taste of blood before Wellington's army spilled across the Pyrenees into the fields of France. Give a young soldier the taste of victory, Picard reckoned, and it gave him a hunger for more.