The battle of Talavera has been causing me a good deal of trouble while revising An Unconventional Officer.
Talavera, 1809
Paul had just rallied his men after their encounter with the left column, keeping a wary eye on the French and trying to assess the extent of the damage. The first company had taken the worst punishing. He had no way of knowing how many were dead and how many lay wounded on the field, but more than half of them were missing including all of the officers. His own light company was battered and bloody and there were faces he searched for and could not find.
“Sergeant, where’s Grogan?”
O’Reilly shook his head exhaustedly. He was sporting a bloody arm where it had been grazed by a musket ball. “Down, sir,” he said quietly.
“Wounded?”
“Dead. No doubt.”
Paul nodded. The green-jacketed rifleman was one of the oldest in his company and had been with him since India. “Poor bastard. Isn’t his wife expecting again?”
I mentioned a few days ago that I am already tired of the battle of Talavera. Home again after spending the Easter weekend with friends I am contemplating another go at it. I’ve been whinging about Talavera but in some ways it illustrates the general problems of writing about battles.
In writing a series of books about the Peninsular War, it’s hard to avoid the odd battle. They occur with increasing regularity, interrupting the daily life of my characters and causing death and mayhem all over the place and they are impossible to ignore.
Researching battles is actually quite fun. There are a lot of first hand published accounts of this war as well as a fair few histories stuffed with maps and diagrams and other useful tools. In addition, some people have written modern guides to the battlefields for people wanting to tour them.
We weren’t able to get to Talavera during our recent trip around battle sites. It was too far off our route and I had read that a motorway recently built makes it difficult to get much sense of how the country would have looked. I found it incredibly helpful to visit the sites of some of the other battles I’m writing about. My fictional regiment, the 110th took part in Talavera, Sobral, Massena’s retreat and Sabugal, and then the fighting along the border the following year leading up to Salamanca and I made it to most of these places, but the two major battles in the first book were left out so I’m doing Talavera from books and maps and photos.
The problem of battles is how to write them. Battles weren’t particularly neat and tidy, they weren’t always well organised and they often took place over ground covering several miles. Things didn’t happen in neat chronological order, so the battle could be going well in one part of the field while disaster struck on the other. And the most crucial problem from an author’s point of view is that for whole sections of the time the men involved had no idea what was going on.
That leaves the choice of whether to write from the point of view of the individuals involved or whether to take a more general view so as to tell the reader what is happening all over the field. There is also, in my case, the action off the field since what is happening in the surgeons tents is of some importance to the plot. With so much going on there is a danger of flitting from one place to another leaving the reader completely bewildered. I suspect my first draft of Talavera was guilty of this since the man I married informed me he had no idea what was going on when he read it.
The other problem is how long to spend describing battles. Book one of the series begins with Paul joining the 110th and describes his early days with the regiment including the battle of Assaye. At this stage he has not met either of the two women in his life and the focus is very much on the action on the field and it’s aftermath.
By the time we reach Talavera there is some conflict. Not only do I have to work out where the 110th is fighting and what happens to the main characters in the regiment as the day unfolds, but I need to keep an eye on my female character who has her own role to play for the first time. It’s a delicate balance between turning the thing into a military history rather than a novel or giving the impression that the battle is a mere backdrop to the personal lives of the characters. I’m working on how to get that right. Time will tell.
Having said all of that, I like a good battle. It enables me to to bring out the best in some of my characters – and on occasion, the worst. It highlights personality traits and gives opportunities to move the plot along very quickly. There are opportunities for some light-hearted moments but far more opportunities for tragedy. At the end of a battle nothing is ever quite the same.
I’m rather looking forward to getting on with Talavera and I’m hoping it will be the last big section of rewriting I need to do on the first book before it’s ready to publish. I wonder if I’ll still be as cheerful about it by the end of next week…..