Blunted Lance (2 page)

As the patrols moved back, the infantry were checking their rifles and the artillery were busy over their guns, the one thought in every man’s mind ‘Were they going to have to fight their way into Omdurman?’ Dabney’s father had been at the relief of Lucknow and Dabney had often heard him tell of the confusion of battling through the narrow streets.

The army, which had just begun to form up outside the zariba, ready for yet another move forward, were with-drawing again now behind the hedge of thorns. As the patrols rejoined the Lancers, Martin, the colonel, insisted on written reports. There was little to tell him save that the Dervishes were on the move and that if he stayed where he was he’d damn’ soon know they were. But Martin was a fussy man, determined that his newly-raised regiment, which had never been in battle before, should somehow in this campaign collect its first battle honour to decorate its drum cloths. Dabney’s father didn’t trust him too much.

‘A damn’ sight too much tally-ho,’ he had said quietly to his son.

As Dabney dismounted, the sergeant appeared.

‘What about water, sir?’

A veteran charger champed its bit because of a bridle sore, and the farrier, a single horseshoe on his sleeve, moved round it, checking for cuts and bruises. Horses were good and bad. Some were trained, some not. Some were perfect, some were devils. One was a star-gazer, one a slug; another had a cold back, a devil for the first few minutes of every day and able to throw its rider whenever it chose. But a man’s life depended on his mount and they had to be carefully watched.

‘Let ’em drink,’ Dabney said. ‘But see they don’t get too much.’

He glanced towards Kitchener, who was standing just in front, a tall man younger than many of his subordinate commanders. He had succeeded to the command of the Egyptian army to the dismay of rivals who had thought it might be theirs, but had since managed to win most of his enemies over with his competence. Sitting his horse nearby, watching over the heads of the infantryman, was Dabney’s father, General Goff. He was trim, built more like a jockey than a soldier, slim, a perfect light horseman still despite his age and grey hair. Dabney smiled warmly as he watched him. The old man had not played with him much as a child, as the fathers of other boys played with them, and, leaving the business of the family to his wife, had not even seemed to notice him much. But he had managed nevertheless to gain the whole-hearted respect and admiration of his son in the same offhand way with which he had always held the respect of his soldiers – as if he didn’t consider it necessary to try.

As he stared across the burning plain, his face moist under the brassy sun, Dabney could see the shimmering waves of heat, the faint outline of Omdurman and the yellow-brown bulge that was the Mahdi’s tomb. It represented the reason why they were there. There had been a lot of talk of ‘British interests’ and ‘making Egypt safe’ but the real truth, he felt sure, was pure vengeance. His father had been with the force that had arrived just too late to save Gordon, who thirteen years before had been butchered with his garrison at Khartoum just across the river from where he now waited, and he suspected that in Kitchener, who had also been involved, there was an itch to put right that defeat.

The Mahdi was dead now but the troops facing them across the tawny desert were the same men who had followed him, the men who had stormed Khartoum, massacred Hicks’ men at El Obeida and broken the square at Abu Klea, and he wondered if Kitchener’s military skill measured up to his ambition. If it didn’t, the whole lot of them would be lying dead on the sand before the day was out.

Kitchener was watching the plain, dour and arrogant – but obsequious, so Dabney had heard, to anyone who might advance his career. His beefy face was red from the heat of the sun, his pale eyes and opulent moustache making him look somehow more like a sergeant than a general. Churchill’s description of him had already got around. ‘He may be a general,’ he had said, ‘but he’s never a gentleman.’

All the same – Dabney studied his Commander-in-Chief carefully – you had to admit the man’s skill. Under his tuition, the despised Egyptians had become a force to be reckoned with and he had managed to transport his army across four hundred miles of desert to the threshold of the Khalifa’s capital. His military railway and his movement up the Nile of his fleet of gunboats was a remarkable achievement by any standard.

Kitchener was talking to General Goff now, pointing towards the Dervish army. Among the men behind them was General Goff’s orderly, Sergeant Ackroyd, dark and lugubrious like his father, Tyas Ackroyd, who had served General Goff as orderly, manservant and general factotum for years and now, at over sixty and limping a little from rheumatism, was running the Goff home as butler. The Ackroyds had gone to war with the Goffs for generations but Tyas Ackroyd had always been more than a mere servant; and his son, Ellis, the sergeant behind General Goff, was a great deal more educated than his father and, with a little help from the General, was making sure
his
sons were more educated even than he was.

Dabney shifted his feet in the hot sand. He’d be sorry to see the Ackroyds sever the connection they’d had with his family for so long. Originally they’d been labourers on the Home Farm at Braxby, and the general and old Tyas had fished and swum together in the Brack long before they’d departed together for the Crimea. Ellis would probably be the last to act as servant to anybody. They were far too independent–minded a family, something that was already showing in Ellis’ son, Tom, who, at the tender age of eleven and itching to be apprenticed to an engineer, was already learning all about the new-fangled petrol engines.

The thought led him to think about home. His sister, Helen, had startled them all by marrying a German and seemed quite happy to be translated to a Continental background. Within months, his other sister, Jane, had married the son of the farmer next door and seemed equally happy to be translated from a military to an agricultural heritage. Robert–? Robert, his elder brother, he decided, was a bit of an ass. He had wangled himself a job on Gatacre’s staff and he was well-suited there because Gatacre was considered to be a bit of an ass, too.

Robert, Dabney decided, would suit his chief well. Robert loved the trappings of the army more than the army itself and Dabney often considered he wore uniform less for the fighting than for the ceremonial.

Perhaps being part of a military family was to blame, because in the last decade or two cavalry officers had tended to drape themselves in a self-conscious arrogance that came less from their skill than from their splendid uniforms, and Dabney had long had the feeling that the mess of the 19th Lancers, the Regiment, –
his
regiment – was far from being a repository of original thinking. Robert
was
an ass. He made his mind up with a young man’s cheerful indifference to the right and wrong of it.

Aware of Churchill staring at him, he realised he’d been smiling to himself. Churchill was a funny customer, he thought, coming down to earth. But, ebullient, brash and far from popular though he was, there was still something about him and, though he criticised everybody, all too often he was right. Perhaps, Dabney thought, it was because he saw Churchill differently. Among the strings Churchill had pulled to get himself attached to the 21st was the one held by General Goff, who had known his father, so that with Dabney he managed to be more relaxed. And nobody could deny his experience because, despite his youth, he had seen action on the North-West Frontier and had got himself into Cuba to watch the rebellion there against the Spanish. In addition, his mother, like Dabney’s, was an American, which had given them a lot in common, and he had been more than once to Braxby to pick the brains of General Goff for his literary efforts.

Dabney glanced at his father again. The contemporary of so many great men, it was odd to think he was still on active service. Evelyn Wood was no longer on the active list. Buller was confined to a War Office role. Even Wolseley – once England’s ‘only general’ – was in eclipse these days and little heard of, Commander-in-Chief of the Army at last after years of intriguing.

The distant noise, the muted buzz that Dabney had heard from the Jebel Surgham – the sound of a swarm of bees in summer – came again, filtering across the plain, mingling with the beating of drums and the mournful wail of horns and changing gradually to a cacophony of human voices. A few officers were standing outside the zariba, looking like a group of racegoers awaiting the appearance of the field round Tattenham Corner. A man laughed. It was high-pitched and nervous, and a sergeant, equally strained, told him to be quiet. Then an officer galloped up to Dabney’s father, saluted and smiled. ‘They’re coming on beautifully, sir! About two miles away now!’

The battle they had all been expecting seemed at last to be on them. Dabney glanced at his father again as he peered across the desert. He’d been roughly Dabney’s age when he’d ridden with the Light Brigade at Balaclava.
That
had been a disaster in the making even before the trumpets had sounded.

As Dabney turned towards the front again, he saw a white speck appear on top of the ridge.

‘There they are!’

What he was looking at took on the shape of a banner, then he saw another and another, until the whole ridge, a moment before stark and bare, seemed furred along its edge as hundreds of men and hundreds of flags began to line it. The whole ridge to the north was covered by teeming black dots. There was a strange unreality about the scene. The enemy host was marching forward, rank on rank, and it was possible to pick out from the roar of thousands of voices the ceaseless chant of the Mohammedan prayer – La illa Lah Muhammad rasul Allah.

Glancing behind him, Dabney could see the boats carrying supplies and ammunition deployed along the banks of the Nile with the barges that were to carry the wounded. Kitchener was staring across the sand, his head forward, his pale eyes and squint faintly menacing behind the bull’s horns of his moustache.

By this time, among the mass of Dervishes, Dabney could see the emblems of the more famous Emirs – the bright green flag of Ali-Wad-Helu; the dark green of Osman-ed-Din; the sacred black banner of the Khalifa himself, heir to the great Mahdi, on its right a vast square of men under an array of white flags. Using his field glasses, he could even pick out the individual leaders themselves, in front of their troops. There were plum-skinned Arabs and yellow men with square bony faces and tightly-ringleted black hair, bent men, straight men, old men, young men, boys even, all advancing together in a cheering excited mob which nevertheless marched quickly and steadily and kept its formation, every single one of them with hatred in his heart and a desire to kill. The sight made his heart thump. These were the men who had killed Gordon and they were inspired by their old victories and embittered by their more recent defeats.

The Dervish left was beginning now to stretch out towards the Kerreri Hills, the centre moving directly towards Dabney, the right edging to the south. This southern wing, under its hundreds of white flags, decorated by texts from the Koran, was perfect in its formation.

There was a surprising clarity about the battlefield, every stone and grain of sand sharp in the light, each one with its sun-touched side and its little curve of shadow. But it was silent. No one seemed to speak. Not a gun fired. In the stillness a horse whinnied and a man cleared his throat noisily, nervously, as men did before a race.

‘If we don’t win this one,’ someone said – and in the silence his voice was clear and frightening in the implication of his words – ‘then God help us. It’ll be Isandhlwana all over again.’

The battlefield remained silent. The guns had still not spoken. But the excitement was growing almost too much to bear as they watched the horde of black figures approaching, and there was a murmur and an excited surge forward.

‘Stand still,’ an officer snapped. ‘Your turn’ll come!’

As he spoke, about fifty yards short of the zariba two puffs of red sand lifted into the air as the Dervish artillery opened fire. Immediately, one of the field batteries began to bang away, followed at once by more explosions and a roar as the gun-boats anchored in the river behind joined in the barrage. The smell of cordite filled the air and great clouds of smoke appeared along the front of the British and Sudanese brigades as battery after battery opened on the Dervishes between the Jebel Surgham and the Kerreris, the sound of the cannonade echoing and re-echoing among the clefts and spires of the hills.

Though the aim of the British guns was excellent, the exploding shells seemed to send no more than a ripple through the vast horde in front. Then the whole Dervish army seemed to discharge their weapons in a vast feu-de-joie, and a huge section began to peel off from the main line of advance and head for the zariba. The British soldiers waited, front rank kneeling, rear rank standing – just as the Highlanders had received the Russian cavalry at Balaclava, General Goff remembered.

The Dervishes were still moving in good order, the whole division crossing the crest into the plain. The shells were striking them at a rate of twenty to the minute now, bursting in their faces so that the white banners began to topple in all directions and the mass began to crumble into groups under individual leaders. The tumult increased, the Maxims stuttering away, a field battery in action on a small rise, the gunners busy about their pieces, the officers standing on boxes of army biscuits to stare through their glasses at the effect their shells were having. The ragged line of men was still pushing forward, struggling ahead in the face of the pitiless fire, the banners swaying and tossing like waves in a stormy sea, the white-robed figures collapsing in dozens among the spurts of smoke from their own rifles and the larger puffs from the bursting shrapnel.

The infantry were firing steadily and stolidly, mercilessly, without hurry, taking pains to be accurate, empty cartridge cases forming heaps alongside each man. As the Dervishes drew nearer, they became fewer, but the rifles were growing hot now and were being exchanged hurriedly for those of the reserve companies, while the Highlanders were beginning to empty their water bottles into the jackets of the Maxims.