The Iron Stallions (12 page)

‘Are they going to fight, Josh?’ Ailsa asked as she curled up against him in bed.

‘They’re certainly taking their time.’

‘Why can’t we just declare a draw and all go home?’

Josh laughed. ‘The one thing I love about you, Ailsa, is your sheer inconsequentiality.’

Christmas seemed remarkably normal. There was no shortage of anything and most of the people who had fled London for the countryside had begun to drift back. Houses in remote areas which had seemed so desirable in September now began to seem out-of-the-way and were resold or merely left empty as their owners headed back to the cities. Robert, who had transferred his headquarters to Cosgro Hall which was surrounded by nothing but fields, was now back with his actress mistress near Bradford.

In a way, the gathering at Braxby was sad because, while everybody was cheerful and even optimistic that the war would come to nothing, Josh was inclined to be withdrawn, certain there was more waiting for them in the wings when spring came. His return to France confirmed his belief. The place was teeming with rumours. The Germans were said to have their eyes on Scandinavia, and despite the half-witted bleatings of Chamberlain who seemed to feel that, because there had so far been no great battles, there were now unlikely to be any, nobody in France was deluded.

To Josh the French seemed a dubious lot. While the regular battalions contained some splendid men, he was by no means impressed by the reservists, most of whom were commanded by over-age and unfit officers whose chief concern seemed to be with eating, making themselves comfortable and sneaking off home to their wives. There were a few small consolations, however. With the first draft of new soldiers arriving in the Regiment was one twenty-year-old by the name of Tyas Edgar Ackroyd, who came to Josh’s notice by the simple means of being brought up before him on a charge.

While a bored Josh sat at his desk awaiting the evildoers of the previous day, the Squadron Sergeant-Major formed up his party outside the office.

‘Shun! Laift tahn! Quick march, eft-ight-eft-ight-eft-ight! Eft whee-ohl! Mark time! Ahlt! Still! 19867342 Trooper Ackroyd, T E Sah!’

Josh looked up sharply at the name. The soldier in front of his desk had the same long face and humorous eyes of old Tyas Ackroyd who had taught him to ride. For a moment, he studied him, then he turned to the sergeant-major. ‘What’s the charge, Sergeant-Major?’

‘Fightin’, sir. In billets.’

‘What happened, Ackroyd?’

Ackroyd stiffened. ‘This chap from the Skins, sir – that is, the Inniskillings – it was a dispute as to who belonged to the best regiment.’

Ackroyd was clearly a young man with education and Josh looked at him warmly.

‘Nothing else?’

‘No, sir, nothing else. He said a few things I didn’t like.’

‘Well,’ Josh said, ‘I see no harm in standing up for your regiment. What do you say, Sergeant-Major?’

‘Sah!’ The sergeant-major wasn’t getting involved where discipline was concerned and his answer could have meant anything.

Josh looked again at Ackroyd. ‘I see your name’s Tyas Ackroyd. Are you any relation to that Tyas Ackroyd who rode with the Regiment in the Light Brigade?’

‘He was my great-grandfather, sir. His son, Ellis, had two sons, Hedley and Tom. I’m Tom’s son.’

Ackroyd had fallen within the first age group to be called up under the new National Service Act but when he had been pushed into an infantry regiment, his indignation had been sufficient for him eventually to wangle a transfer.

‘I wasn’t having the infantry, sir,’ he said. ‘I told them about my grandfather at Graafberg, and my great-grandfather at Balaclava.’

‘You a trained man, Ackroyd?’

‘Yes, sir. Driver-gunner.’

Josh looked at the sergeant-major. He was clearly expecting the wrongdoer to be punished.

‘Well, Ackroyd,’ Josh said, ‘whatever the chap from the Inniskillings said, we can’t have fighting. Much better to save your aggressiveness for the Germans. You’ll be given a week’s extra duties and I’m sure I can rely on the sergeant major to make them as heavy as possible. But–’ Josh looked again at Ackroyd ‘–when you’ve finished them, I think you’d better report to me. Since my family have gone to the wars with the Ackroyds since time immemorial, it would seem silly not to do so again.’

With the beginning of the spring, the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway. Despite the fact that everybody in France had been expecting it all along, nobody in England seemed to have, and there was a lot of undignified scrambling about to scrape together a force to resist them. It very soon became clear that, as usual, it was too little and too late.

It was clear that the Germans’ success in the North was bound to end up with an attack in France, and the officers of the French reserve battalions alongside the 19th Lancers began looking over their shoulders for the best line of retreat. Orders came to move nearer to the Belgian border and Leduc immediately set them practising rearguard exercises.

‘We always start a war with a retreat,’ he said flatly. ‘And it looks very much as if we’ll start this with one.’

Josh found himself billeted in a set of flats on the top floor of which lived two retired madams of brothels whose main pleasure was to bring him titbits for his lunch. The news from Norway grew steadily worse and it was clear from the BBC that the Government at home was under heavy fire in the House of Commons for its inept handling of the war. Many people had derided Chamberlain’s kowtowing to Hitler in 1938 and he had made little attempt since to get the country on a war footing, and half the House of Commons were after his blood. Someone had sailed into Winston Churchill, now back in the Government as First Lord of the Admiralty, but the following speaker had directed his fire not at Churchill, but at the Prime Minister. ‘In the name of God,’ he had said, ‘go,’ and the cry had been taken up in a howl by the Opposition benches. The following morning, from the papers which reached them from England, it seemed as though Chamberlain’s tenure of office was about to be ended.

As the evening shadows lengthened, heading for his squadron, Josh saw French officers standing in the street, their heads cocked. Then somewhere to the east he heard a faint thudding noise. Reeves joined him.

‘I’d hazard a guess,’ he said, ‘that it’s guns. Big ones.’

Josh made sure his squadron was ready. Then, after the evening meal, he was called with the other officers to the room Leduc had made his office.

‘The RAF reports that the Germans are probably on the move,’ he said. ‘We’ve nothing certain yet because it’s too dark to confirm anything but–’ he cocked his thumb ‘–you can all hear that.’

He gestured at the map hanging on the wall behind him. ‘The French say we should expect them to come through Flanders, which means that the French Seventh and First Armies and the BEF will swing eastwards to the River Dyle. The French Ninth Army, which is not mechanised, will act as the hinge.’

In the darkness shaded lamps glowed. Generators were throbbing and exhaust fumes were filling the air. Dodgin, now a sergeant, was watching a fitter completing the final adjustments to the carburettor of an armoured car while the crew finished a quick game of brag.

‘Nearly done, sir,’ he reported. ‘All in tiptop condition.’

A truck that had been topping up petrol tanks lurched away as Josh headed for his billet. His heart was thumping but he was quite calm. This was what he’d been heading for all his life. It was in his blood. It had run through his family all the way back through the Crimea to Waterloo and beyond.

He fell asleep with the faint thudding sound still in his ears, sleeping dreamlessly until he heard the door click. There was just daylight enough to see Tyas Edgar Ackroyd’s face as he pushed forward a mug of tea.

‘There’s a bath ready for you, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s a fine morning and the Germans have invaded France, Belgium and Holland.’

The 19th Lancers were heading eastwards soon after noon. Behind them were the trucks carrying their supplies and petrol.

As they reached the Belgian border, an officious frontier guard stepped forward and held up his hand. Behind him the striped pole of the barrier lay across the road.

‘Find out what that idiot wants, Toby,’ Josh said as Reeves appeared alongside his armoured car.

Reeves came back a moment later. ‘He says he must see our permits before he can let us pass into Belgium,’ he announced. ‘He says he’s had no instructions to allow us through and suggests we go back and get permits. I told him we’d come to stop the bloody Germans and he said he’d be quite satisfied if we contacted headquarters and got them to telephone him.’

Josh gestured briskly. ‘Sergeant-Major Orne! Break down the barrier. We’ll follow you through.’

As he saw the armoured car approaching, the Belgian held up his hand again. Orne slowed but didn’t stop. The Belgian began to yell and eventually to dance with rage. Still the armoured car didn’t stop and eventually the Belgian bolted for the ditch and the armoured car crunched the barrier to matchwood.

In no time, they were passing through the battlefields of the old war, and on the signposts Josh began to see the names he remembered from his father’s letters – Armentières, Poperinghe, Ypres, Menin, Passchendaele. In the late afternoon, the names from an older war still – Quatre Bras, Wavre and Waterloo – began to appear.

Despite the frontier official, they were greeted with ecstatic cheers. British flags of 1914 vintage appeared in windows, flowers and wine were handed over every time they stopped, and a great deal of kissing seemed to be going on. So far there had been no sign of the Luftwaffe but, what was more ominous, no sign of the Royal Air Force either. The bombing was all up ahead and, from the reports they received, was being directed at aerodromes, stations, level crossings and bridges. Towards tea time, a figure in RAF blue appeared from a bar and ran to meet them, waving. As he stopped his vehicle, Josh leaned out.

‘You been shot down?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘That was quick. The balloon only went up yesterday.’

The RAF man gave him a cold look. ‘For us,’ he said, ‘it went up nine months ago. I was shot down in January and I’ve been interned ever since by the bloody Belgians. When the Germans came, I did a bunk.’

The weather was incredibly beautiful. The sun was hot and the roadside was full of flowers. As they roared through village streets, the villagers were sitting on chairs on the pavements to watch them go by. Guns, Bren carriers and motor lorries rumbled past while, on the other side of the road, going the other way, were thousands of refugees, old people, young people and children, riding in cars, on carts, on bicycles, or pushing wheelbarrows or prams with all their possessions. Some of the cars carried mattresses on top or lashed against the side as a defence against machine-gun bullets and it was only then they learned that the Luftwaffe were strafing the roads.

They reached their positions on the Dyle just before midnight, only to discover the Belgians were already falling back. Dispersing in a small wood, they could see flickering lights along the horizon where they knew the Belgian army was trying to hold back the flood. The Dutch, they heard, were folding already.

‘That makes Belgium next for the chopper,’ Leduc said grimly as they bent over the maps.

That night there were several alarms as young soldiers reported lights in the sky which they believed to be parachutists coming down. Older heads decided they were tracer bullets from the aircraft they could hear droning about in the dark. Then came reports of lights being switched on and off as signals, one of them at a house occupied by an elderly Belgian baroness. They managed to pinpoint the house on the outskirts of the village, where a light could be seen flickering on and off.

‘Certainly looks like a signal, sir,’ Corporal Winder said.

‘On the other hand,’ Josh pointed out, ‘it could be that someone’s just left a light on and is moving backwards and forwards in front of it.’

The door was opened by a blushing maidservant and it turned out that the light came from a scullery where, hiding behind a large wine cask, they found a sheepish farm labourer who had been in the habit of bedding down with the maid on a mattress on the floor.

During the next two days, the stream of refugees became a flood. Farm wagons entirely filled with children led motor cars, crammed with suitcases and shapeless rope-tied bundles and topped by striped mattresses, which chugged slowly along, their engines over-heating as they were forced to the pace of the horse-drawn traffic. Cyclists, their machines festooned from handlebars to mudguards with packages, pushed in and out of the stalled vehicles. Old peasants trudged by on foot, among them women tottering along on high-heeled shoes already breaking down under the wear and tear of walking. One carried a sewing machine, one a bird in a cage; some were driving chickens, pigs, even young lambs.

The following morning, they were ordered forward again and, as they lifted over a slight rise in the land, Josh saw his first Stukas. They came towards him like an arrowhead high in the sky, cranked-winged machines with fixed undercarriages and spats. As they drew nearer, the point of the arrowhead wavered and it didn’t take him long to understand the significance of the wobble as the machines circled, taking up positions one behind the other.

‘Take cover!’ he roared and everybody bolted for the shelter of ditches and walls.

Crouched in a narrow trench with Ackroyd and Sergeant Dodgin, he peered upwards, curiosity stronger than any other emotion. The blue sky was spotted with the white puffs of bursting shells as the leading machine did a half-roll and dived. As its speed built up, his ears were filled with a maniacal high-pitched scream that froze his blood. With Ackroyd and Dodgin, he stared, petrified for a moment, then they all dived for the bottom of the ditch, clutching each other, convinced the plane was heading for them and nobody else.

A regiment of mechanised French cavalry trying to reach a bridge over a stream at the far end of the village, concertinaed as the leading vehicle stopped dead. The refugees were filling the air with shrieks and cries, and Josh saw a child fall. As the crowd scattered, a woman darted back, snatched up the child and began to hurry away again just as the Stuka’s bomb burst. As if she were paper caught in a gust of wind, she was flung aside and the ground seemed to heave in clouds of grey and yellow smoke, like a heavy swell rolling in on to a shore. Before it had subsided, the second bomb struck and the bottom of the ditch seemed to jump up and hit Josh in the chest, then a nearby house collapsed with a roar, gushing forward like a broken dam, bricks and tiles bouncing across the road and slicing the air through clouds of smoke lit with red flame.