Blunted Lance (22 page)

‘Gawd knows—’ the reply came slowly ‘—I reckon I was born in this bloody ditch.’

Dabney smiled. It wasn’t the chatter of downhearted men.

‘Have the ammunition collected from the dead and wounded,’ he told Leduc. ‘Together with field rations and dressings. We shall probably need every one before we’ve finished. And let’s have patrols pushed forward in case they come again.’

As the wounded were moved back to the shelter of a cow byre where the medical officer and his orderlies were working, the supply column came up, bringing ammunition and food.

Desperate for men and remembering the extenuated flank barely in touch with the Kents, Dabney considered for a moment impressing the supply column into the trench but he realised they were probably needed to carry supplies elsewhere. The food they brought was cold bully beef and biscuits, but it was snatched up without question by the starving men.

During the evening, Brigadier Farrar arrived with the wounded staff officer, who looked by this time as though he were ready to faint, the bandage on his hand saturated with blood. The brigadier wasted no time sympathising about Fullerton, and Dabney attacked straight away. His father had always told him that if he had anything unpleasant to say it was best to say it as soon as possible and as unpleasantly as possible, so there was no mistake about how he felt.

‘We need spades,’ he said.

‘We haven’t got spades,’ Farrar snapped.

‘Then you might as well accept that we shall have to give this place up, sir,’ Dabney retorted. ‘It’s not our fault the cavalry don’t carry entrenching tools and, with respect, sir, nobody can hold this place unless we make it deeper.’

‘And then?’

‘Given spades, I’ll hold it as long as you like, sir.’

Farrar stared at him for a moment then he nodded. ‘I’ll get you some spades up as soon as it’s dark,’ he said. ‘Can you hang on that long?’

‘Yes, sir, we can. I’d like wire, too, if there’s any available. Then I can get it out in front tonight.’

‘I’ll do what I can.’ Farrar searched his face. ‘You’re a Goff, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The general’s severe face relaxed momentarily. ‘Knew your father. Served under him in India. You’ve got a reputation to keep up. See that you do. I’ll try to get hot food up tomorrow. In the meantime, it’s up to you to do what you can. You’ll have to hold on here at least for another day. I’ve got the Gloucesters coming up but they can’t possibly be here until tomorrow night. I can scrape up a few base wallahs like cooks, clerks and so on to help. How about your horseholders?’

‘I’d like them up here, sir. They belong to the Regiment and they’ll do a lot better than clerks and cooks. Have you some grooms who can look after our horses?’

‘I can see to that. I’ll send your men up as soon as I get back. Everybody’s holding, but the Hussars seem to have been hard hit. They had no shelter and God alone knows who’s running the show at the moment. A wounded man brought the news back. I’m going up there to try to stiffen them. I’m also getting my clerks and cooks to prepare a strong point in the village just in case. There’s a railway that runs through it and we can man the embankment. Just hold on and we shall be all right. You’re doing all right so far. But you have no choice. Your orders are unequivocal. There’s nothing between you and the Channel ports.’

When the 19th were relieved six days later they were mere shadows of the soldiers who had gone into the line. They moved like phantoms, a ghostly trickle of men in which the will to move struggled with the wish to sleep.

An infantry battalion whose identity Dabney didn’t even bother to enquire took over from them, fresh soldiers, clean and unstained with mud or blood, their packs neat, their rifles clean.

‘Well played, the Clutchers,’ one of them said. ‘Are we downhearted?’

The yell went up immediately from the men round him. ‘NO!’

One of the exhausted Lancers lifted his head and stared at them with red-rimmed eyes from a haggard black face. ‘You bloody soon will be,’ he observed.

Dabney’s face was foul with dirt and his clothes were torn and covered with blood. He was dazed, a hundred years older and grimmer, but unhurt. Leduc stumbled alongside him, also untouched. He was licking his lips and his tongue seemed curiously pinker and cleaner because of the filth on his face. He looked taut and distressed and he carried a pack that was full of the identity discs and pay books of the dead.

The whole place reeked of the acid fumes of high explosive, the smell of death and the stink of human excreta, because they had never been able to dig latrines. Here and there on the grass were flecks of dried blood where they had dragged a wounded man to die, and behind the line was a group of neat mounds in which they had buried the grey-faced dead. It had been a dismal job in the slow-falling rain.

‘Poor devils,’ Leduc had muttered as the padre intoned a prayer. ‘Their graves are full of bloody water.’

As they stumbled back to Mortigny, men wearing bandages startlingly white against the grime of their faces were supported by their friends. A man with his arm in a sling had his other arm round the shoulders of a weeping boy far less badly wounded. ‘There, there, mate,’ he was saying. ‘You’ll be all right.’

Mortigny was full of relieved regiments, infantry and cavalry all mixed up together, wandering about in aimless fashion, all too tired to care. Most of them were bowed and limping, muddy ghosts who looked in their stained uniforms as if they’d been buried and dug up again. Scores had gone to sleep on the pavement, their backs against the walls, indifferent to the appeals of NCOs and officers. Food had been brought up and those who were awake munched thick sandwiches of bread and bully beef, their faces brooding and enigmatic, their mouths pursed round the stumps of Woodbines.

The wounded were being gathered in a field behind the Mairie. The anaesthesia of shock was wearing off now and pain and thirst were setting in among the torn bodies. A doctor, wearing a bloodstained apron, moved among them giving injections of morphia and anti-tetanus, and the whole area under the Red Cross flag stank of carbolic, ether and chloroform.

Gathering the regiment together, they began to call the roll. Leduc was swaying with fatigue as he stood near Ellis Ackroyd exclaiming the names in front of Sergeant-Major Waterford. They seemed not to have eaten a proper meal or slept for days and Dabney was light-headed with exhaustion. Somewhere, he knew, he would sleep and that was the only thing in his mind. For the moment, all he knew was that the cavalry corps had virtually ceased to exist.

Brigadier Farrar was moving through the crowding men. He looked worn-out and the wounded staff officer who had been with him had disappeared.

‘Leave them,’ he was saying to a subaltern trying to rouse a group of infantrymen. ‘Let them sleep. I’ve arranged transport. There are buses coming to take them away.’

Ackroyd had finished calling the roll by this time. It hadn’t taken long, and Sergeant-Major Waterford was now addressing the survivors.

‘That lot can go in buses if they like,’ he said. ‘
We
shall march out. I know they call us the Manure Shifters but we’re more than that. We’re Goff’s Greens. Goff’s Gamecocks. The Clutchers. The Widowmakers. And, by God, we’ve made a few widows these last few days.’

It raised a smile. It was the old magic working. They weren’t fighting to defend Belgium or save France. Not even to protect Britain or the King. They were fighting for the Regiment. A soldier’s loyalty was always to his regiment. He knew everything about it. It was his family and it was to the regiment that he directed his energy. The British soldier’s feet, like his head, were not his strong point, but they all knew what the Sergeant-Major meant. Marching out was a gesture and, while gestures could sometimes be pointless, this one was being made to indicate that they were the best regiment in the British Army, something every other single regiment in their simple faith also believed.

Recovered now, the horses were waiting two miles to the rear. Ackroyd got somebody to play the mouth organ and they marched off singing. It was poor singing but they marched in step, their boots barely leaving the cobbled road, their bodies rocking from side to side like automata, using what energy they had left to lift their legs one after the other, concentrating everything in getting each foot forward, as if that were the only way they could move.

As he watched them pass, Dabney noticed Farrar standing near to him. As the column of worn men trudged by, Leduc, who was leading, ordered them to march at attention and ordered ‘Eyes right’. Somehow, the fours of shuffling men picked up the step and found their files. Shoulders were thrust back and heads clicked to the right as they plodded past.

Farrar swallowed. ‘Well done, Lancers,’ he said. ‘Well done, well done!’ He touched Dabney’s arm and gestured. ‘Off you go, my boy. Take care of them. They’re splendid chaps.’

As the last files passed, Dabney saw dirty faces blurred by a fuzz of beard, eyes blank and staring into nothingness. They were a resilient lot and a long sleep and a hot meal would restore them remarkably. These were his men, he thought. They had responded to everything he had asked of them. Their entry into the war as horse soldiers had been short and sweet but in their new role they had let no one down, neither their country nor their Regiment. The army, he decided, was a strange institution. Composed of hard-boiled soldiers not given to emotion, men whose minds were all too often concerned only with food, booze and women, it still had the ability to move a man to the point of tears.

The autumn fields of Yorkshire were full of blue mist that clung to the hollows and gave a ghostly look to the leafless trees. As Josh and his grandfather galloped round the curves of the hills, the sheep scattered in front of them, their resentful baas as harsh as the sound of crows in the tall oaks by the church.

Josh was riding a dappled pony he’d been given for his birthday and the old man was astride an ugly hunter with a fiddle head and a long upper lip which had carried him uncomplainingly across country for years. It was an enormous animal that looked far too strong for the old man but it was a bold jumper which never refused and though it lacked pace it never reached the end of its stamina and perfectly suited the Field Marshal who no longer wished to hurry.

They handed over the horses at the door of the Manor and clumped inside, Josh feeling twice his normal size. He had first been taken hunting by his grandfather and it always gave him pleasure to ride with him when he was not at school. The arrival of the old man’s trap outside the front door of his home and the sight of the grinning face of one of the Ackroyds as he waited to drive him the few miles to where his grandfather would invariably be stamping up and down the hall of Braxby Manor expecting his arrival always set his heart thumping.

In the library the old man poured himself a strong whisky and soda to warm himself, singing to himself as he lifted the decanter.

‘Wrap me up in my old stable jacket

And say a poor devil lies low—’

‘What’s that, Grandpa?’ Josh asked.

‘Song,’ the old man said. ‘Soldier’s song. About cavalrymen.’

‘Finish it.’

‘—And six of the Lancers shall carry me

To the place where the best soldiers go.’

The old man’s voice, quavery and out of tune, wavered to a stop and he looked round sheepishly at his grandson.

‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘Song about death and funerals. Not for a youngster. Old soldiers know a lot of songs like that.’

He moved to the fire and took a long pull at the whisky. ‘Better than tea,’ he observed. ‘Tea’s a flat-footed dismounted drink. Rots your inside.’

The newspaper had been left for him and as he sat down in the leather armchair he favoured, so that Josh could drag off his boots, he lifted it to read the headlines.

RETREAT HALTED, they announced. ALLIED TROOPS MOVE FORWARD ALL ALONG THE LINE. VICTORY IN SIGHT.

‘Tripe,’ he said. ‘Rubbish!’

Placing the boots in the hall, Josh returned in his stockinged feet. ‘Why is it tripe, Grandpa?’

The old man frowned. ‘Ain’t possible, boy. With the size of the BEF and after all the casualties we’ve suffered, we couldn’t possibly be in sight of victory.’

Squatting on the floor near him, Josh began to study the pictures in the illustrated magazine which was delivered with the newspaper especially for his visits. Some enterprising publisher had seen a quick profit in the war, and for the most part its policy was one of unrestrained optimism.

‘It says here,’ he pointed out, ‘that the shellfire’s terrifying at first to new troops.’

‘It’s not all that pleasant to old ones!’

‘It says the Germans ran away. Have you ever run away, Grandpa?’

‘Yes. But never fast enough for me.’

‘Is being afraid the worst thing about war, Grandpa?’

‘Not by a long chalk.’

‘What is?’

‘The way it stinks. ’T ain’t like a field day at Aldershot, y’know.’

Josh hadn’t supposed it was. He knew Aldershot well and visited it often when the old man had been general-in-command. He was familiar with the well-kept barracks, the gravelled squares and whitewashed stones, the messes with their bright window boxes, the spick and span stables, the recruits, the sentries, the cavalry and artillery exercising in the Long Valley and the horses being schooled over the jumps.

As he became silent, the Field Marshal picked up a letter that had been laid ready for him. Putting on his glasses, he began to open the envelope. As he did so, Josh lifted his head again.

‘Mother says the Regiment’s been fighting on foot,’ he said.

The Field Marshal grunted. ‘Nothing wrong with that. A cavalryman’s a maid of all work.’

‘All the same—’ the boy’s face was eager and excited ‘—we did have a charge, didn’t we? It’s here in the paper. “Nineteenth Lancers’ Brilliant Charge.”’

‘Yes—’ the old man’s jaws moved ‘—that’s something.’

‘Mother says that Father wrote that he’d been in action against Uncle Karl’s regiment.’