A Call To Arms (41 page)

Tait surfaced gasping, struggling desperately to bring up his man. Armstrong reached him first and managed to pull up Wainwright’s head. Collins was close enough now to reach out and grab hold of his crossbelt. Tait, exhausted, seized the rope, coughing and trying to catch his breath. ‘Parkin, sir! Just under!’

Armstrong dived once more, then Shepherd Stent. After half a minute Armstrong came up for air, then Stent, and then both went under again. It seemed an age. The raft went over the rope, but the mahouts were already moving the elephants towards it. Up came Armstrong and Stent together, gasping worse than Tait, and with a lifeless Parkin. Hervey grabbed his crossbelt and took the weight from them so they could both make for the rope. And in a minute it was all quiet, the river empty but for two of the elephants, the others having edged the raft to the far side.

The surgeon had been the last out. He had never so much as ridden his horse through a dewpond before, but he had put him straight at the far bank as soon as he had seen cause. And now he worked frantically to revive Parkin, even as the crowding knot of men saw there was no life in him. A full five minutes did Ledley pound at Parkin’s chest to have him cough up the water. Never would Hervey have believed a surgeon had such faith. But it was to no good. At length he rose, and pronounced him dead.

Two hours it took to dig Private Parkin’s grave. The troop carried only a few entrenching tools, and Hervey wanted it deep, so that the scavengers at the jungle’s edge should not disturb Parkin’s resting place. The pals – Wainwright, Spreadbury and Needham – dug alone for the first hour, until finally they relented and let Rudd, the ‘milliner’, join them. Needham cried quietly for a lot of the time. He and Parkin had lived cheek by jowl on Warminster Common since they could remember, longer even than had Jobie Wainwright, for he had come with his mother from the parish
when he was full five years old. Only once did anyone speak, when Spreadbury, exhausted, sat down and said, ‘Danny should have been let off sick.’ But Jobie had simply taken up the pick and quietly explained, ‘No, Billy. We’s all soldiers now.’ And the others had accepted it because Jobie had said it. But even Jobie could not rest, for he had told Parkin’s mother he would look after him, and he hadn’t. What would he say to her? She was as good a mother as any there was on the Common.

When it was done, the pals brought Parkin’s body, wrapped in his cloak, and laid it beside the grave, where the rest of the troop was drawn up, hatless.

‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’ Hervey spoke the words with sad assurance. Though the rubric of the Prayer Book required that the office was not to be used for any that died unbaptized, he had not been minded to enquire of Parkin’s status. He wanted to commend a stout-hearted dragoon to his maker, and to show to the others that the Sixth honoured its dead. ‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’

The words settled on the troop like a chill evening mist. All movement ceased.

Then Hervey read Psalm 90, with its promise of a longer span of life than Parkin had enjoyed, and, probably, than many of those gathered could expect; there were few grey hairs in a regiment, and even fewer in a troop. Afterwards came Saint Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, long and bewildering, and the ranks were not now so statue-like. Hervey sensed it, and hammered out its concluding questions: ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’ And he raised his voice in authority at its final command: ‘Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.’

Hervey nodded to Armstrong, who in turn nodded to the pals, who took the ends of the knotted reins by which Parkin’s body would be lowered into the earth.

‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and
is full of misery,’ began Hervey again, as the pals played out the reins. And then, the body at rest and the reins recovered, Hervey threw a handful of earth into the grave, and the pals did likewise.

‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground …’

Hervey had always liked the appellation ‘brother’ applied to a fellow dragoon, irrespective of rank, and hoped that it would strike the same chord beyond just the pals. For it was the strength of the regiment that a dragoon would fight for his friends – would lay down his life, even – and that those friends, those brothers-in-arms, numbered many more than might ordinarily be the case. Indeed, at its principled best, the regiment was a body of friends, whose connection was no more than the sharing of the Roman ‘VI’ in their headdress.

The rest of the Order for the Burial of the Dead Hervey abbreviated, leading next the Lord’s Prayer – and hearing a respectable rendering of it by many of those present – and then pronouncing the Grace. But ‘Amen’ could not be sufficient to a military occasion, and so he ended with a peremptory ‘Parade dismissed.’ He turned away and closed his prayer book. It had been the first time he had opened it in many months.

Later

The noise of the river crossing, and then the solemnity of the burial service, had masked the peace of a rainforest afternoon. From dawn until late morning there was a procession of sound. Some of it, such as the birdsong, was entirely obvious in its origin, but much of it was far from so. Cicadas were easy to tell, like crickets in some vast echo chamber, but what started quite evidently as a chorus of cicadas would then metamorphose in the strangest way, so that it was not clear whether the cicadas had changed their tune or whether another creature had taken it up in imitation and begun its own development. Sometimes, especially at night, the noise seemed as if it were made by machine – hammering and drilling, and rasping like a saw drawn across wire. And all the time there was whistling, whooping, growling, screeching, snarling – terrible other-world noises that could chill the marrow even as the flesh ran with sweat. But not in the afternoon. Then, as in the early hours of the pre-dawn, the forest became progressively silent, as if every creature had flown or slid away. This was the time that Hervey knew, the time he had ventured a little way into the mysterious
jungle. It had been silent that afternoon in Chintal, five years ago nearly, when the raj kumari had tempted him. And it had been silent that night when he had crept with the rajah’s sowars through the tangled blackness to fall upon the mutineers, so imprudently asleep at their post. Hervey had not heard the rainforest’s fullthroated chorus. He knew of it only from what men had told him, usually men wide-eyed with the telling.

With little more than an hour to darkness, there were many things for officers, NCOs and dragoons alike to attend to; but Hervey was determined to speak to them about the march ahead, and indeed of the ultimate purpose of that march. He therefore ordered the campfires to be built high so that he could address the troop in full view of them, even if they for the most part would be in the shadows.

It was a joy to watch Armstrong at field duty. This time of the day was his, and he knew precisely how to fill it. His eye missed nothing, nor his ear. His whip swished, jabbed and pointed this way and that, without ever making contact with a man, and certainly never a horse. An NCO considered himself well worthy of his rank if he escaped wholly without censure. Hervey could think himself in Spain once more, when death was an almost daily affair, and as he sat alone beneath a magnolia tree he found it easier than he had expected to lay aside thoughts of Private Parkin, and to apply himself instead to his maps. Such was the worth of a serjeant-major of Armstrong’s line and service.

‘Five minutes, sir,’ said Armstrong.

Hervey looked up. The light was failing and he could no longer make out the detail on his maps, such as it was. ‘Very good. All’s well?’

‘As you’d expect, sir. They’re just getting on with things. Surgeon’s got his work cut out trying to stop ’em pulling them leeches straight off, though.’

Hervey nodded. ‘A very noble effort of his with Parkin.’

Armstrong sighed. ‘It was scabby luck: Parkin of all people to be in its way.’

And that was the only way to look at it, Hervey considered. But he knew he had yet to bring the occurrence to a close in the minds of many of the troop, the greenheads especially.

When they were assembled, standing easy with carbines piled,
Hervey began at once on the task of putting the spirit back in them. He knew how a Frenchman, or perhaps an Italian, would go about it, with soul-stirring rhetoric and appeals to patriotic sentiment. But the English soldier, in his experience, responded best to something simpler. ‘Private Parkin died today because he was too good a man to go sick when his companions were embarked on something hazardous. I have to tell you now that many of you – all of you, perhaps – will be put to the same test as Parkin in the days ahead.’

The silence was now absolute.

‘We shall strike camp tomorrow morning, two hours before dawn, and shall be taken by the native guides north to the Burman border through thick forest, a march of perhaps two or three days. We shall rendezvous with tribesmen from the hills who know that border well, and we shall cross it and enter Burman territory, and we shall seek out the force which is at this very moment assembling with the intention of bearing down upon the place we have just left.’

He paused to judge the effect. The silence held as acutely as before.

‘Having discovered their location, we shall attack them with the greatest ferocity and destroy their capacity to do this vile thing.’

The promise of action was too much – just as he had hoped – and there was a murmur of approval. He must now encourage it.

‘Do not ask me what is the plan of action, for until we know where is the enemy and what his dispositions, such plans are futile. Only remember this: surprise is our shield and our spear, but without our horses we can have no advantage once surprise is lost. We shall struggle therefore to take them through the forest in the expectation that their appearance alone will shock the enemy.’ He had toyed with the idea of reference to Hannibal, but the allusion would have been absurdly high-flown, and much worse understood. ‘And we should be grateful they are good little tats, all of them.’

He saw the nodding of heads. Now was the time to promise and to challenge. ‘Very well, you new men are to become soldiers full and good. See to it that you do not dishonour Private Parkin! Parade is dismissed.’ He delivered this last as fact rather than an
order, which allowed the challenge to carry over into the conversation that at once arose. And he would stand aloof from it, but ready to respond if approached. It was not yet the time to go among them.

Armstrong knew it from old, and busied himself with the roster of sentries. Seton Canning sensed it and sought out the quartermaster to discuss some matter of provisions. Even Johnson found other things to be about. Eventually some NCO would come and share his enthusiasm for what Hervey had promised, but for the moment he would watch the little knots of men alone. And he could think of what he might be able to say to the Skinner’s men who had stood loyally but uncomprehendingly throughout.

It was cold that night. Even near a fire, and wrapped in his cloak, Hervey felt the earth giving up its warmth to the sky and taking with it his own, for they were bivouacked in a clearing. He had turned in at once after rounds at last light, the night noises just beginning – the men would have to bear them for themselves – and he had slept fitfully. He had not risen at all, leaving to his lieutenant instead the job of picket-officer, for he knew it was no advantage his having a man like Seton Canning if he didn’t use him. When he did wake, the silence surprised him, with only here and there a whicker from the horse lines or a grunt from a sleeping dragoon. Nothing sounded the passing of the early hours in the forest. In Spain there had always been something – the cockcrow, a tocsin, or a watchman’s call. He imagined that he had not slept this far from habitation in three years. He could look at his hunter if he wished, by the light of the dying fire, or the luminescent one which Daniel Coates had given him, but he had seen no point, instead lying still, keeping what warmth remained to himself.