9. Tales of Secret Service (26)
A Most Daring Escape Into Enemy Territory
Before April was over Grant was started off from Salamanca to Bayonne, travelling with an escort of 300 time-expired or drafted soldiers, and several officers who had been given short leave from the front. Among these was General Souham, then the senior divisional general in Marmont’s army, who had three months’ leave on urgent private affairs. Grant got on admirably with his travelling companions, but was pondering, all through his journey across Castile, on the fact that his parole expired at Bayonne, and that from there onward matters were likely to be less pleasant.
The convoy, as it chanced, reached Bayonne in the dusk. It halted in the square, and all the unattached officers busied themselves in procuring billets, or going to the post establishment to secure horses or places in the diligence. As to English prisoners, it was customary for them to go to the prefecture and obtain a passport to travel to Verdun, the great place of internment. This Grant did without difficulty, the letter commending him to the Bayonne police having been intercepted by Julian Sanchez many days before. No one was on the lookout to take him into custody.
Now, most men, finding themselves loose and no longer tied by a parole, would have tried to escape toward the neighbouring Pyrenees, and to seek shelter with the bands of Mina or El Pastor, or some other guerrillero chief of the mountains. Not so Colquhoun Grant, who considered that he had a unique opportunity of getting military impressions of France. Having procured his feuille de route for Verdun, he went to look up General Souham, who as he knew was starting for Paris at once, and offered to share his posting expenses as far as Orleans, where the routes for Paris and Verdun diverged. The General, who knew all about Grant, and had found him an amusing companion on the tedious journey from Salamanca, made no difficulty. And it was in the company of a very distinguished French commander that the prisoner-of-war made the first half of his journey.
At Orleans he discovered “by a species of intuition”, says Napier—McGrigor gives no particulars of this incident—an English secret agent, who assisted him to get rid of his uniform, and passed him on to Paris. Here he was accredited to another secret friend, Mr. McPherson, “an eminent jeweller” of old Jacobite descent, who had resided in France all his life, and had been a prisoner in the Conciergerie during the Reign of Terror. Was he by any chance one of the persons to whom Baron Kolli had taken his diamonds two years before? It seems not unlikely.
McPherson procured for him an American passport, and it was as a citizen of the United States that he spent several weeks in a conscientious study of Paris; picking up political and military gossip in cafés, watching assiduously the reviews in the Champs de Mars, visiting the theatres and the Louvre, and generally making observations on the state of French public opinion. McGrigor states that his brother-in-law actually succeeded in sending to Wellington from Paris some useful notes about the distraction of all French troops eastward for the approaching invasion of Russia, which would make it incredible that any further reinforcements would be sent to Spain. There is a note on this in one of Wellington’s June dispatches to Lord Bathurst.
The end of Grant’s stay in Paris came when Mr. McPherson informed him that his constant presence at reviews and ceremonies was beginning to attract the attention of the police toward such an inquisitive and rather mysterious American. He had better move on, and the chance for departure was provided by his taking up the personality of another American, a Mr. Jonathan Buck, who had died suddenly just as his passport, with a visé for return to Boston, had been made out. Accordingly, Grant changed his personality, and incidentally made some alterations in his personal appearance and his clothing, and started for Nantes, as Mr. Buck seeking a passage in some American merchantman returning to New England.
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