Theirs Was The Kingdom (53 page)

The river was narrower here so that the rate of the current increased and he was obliged to give his full attention to keeping a reasonably straight course. It was on this account, perhaps, that he did not connect the source of a sudden glare of light with anything close at hand until a strong backdraught of smoke and flame shot from the stern companionway, blotting out everything about him as the vessel began to veer hard to port. Then as the smoke momentarily cleared, he saw a tongue of flame shoot vertically from the engine room and take a hold on the deck and the base of the deckhouse.

His only thought then was for that poor devil of a corporal trapped below, so that he abandoned the kicking sweep to run forward, but before he had taken three strides he was assailed, seemingly from every point of the compass, by a murderous crossfire of small arms. As he dropped flat on his face, the prow of the vessel came into violent collision with something more solid than a sandbank, the impact bringing it up short and tossing Alexander back into the stern.

Miraculously, or so it seemed to him, he was not hit but the firing continued unchecked, as though a whole battalion was aiming at the ship, the hundreds of isolated explosions merging into a metallic fusillade as the bullets smacked against plates, super-structure, funnel, and paddle hoods. By then the ship was on fire from the engine room to bows and a number of other collisions ensued as it threshed about in the fading light. Distractedly he heard about him a chorus of howls and screams and behind them a long, grinding splintering sound, as of rending timbers. It at once occurred to him, staggering drunkenly about in the confined space astern of the engine room hatchway, that they had collided with another vessel and tossed its occupants into the water. Then, without being conscious of more than a tap on the side of his head, the whole crazy scene dissolved.

He came to in a tent lit by a single swinging lamp, aware of a sharp smarting in his right temple and was lifting his hand up to touch bandages when a man with the badges of a captain on his tunic grinned down at him, saying, “No more than a scratch, lad. Just a graze that put you out for a spell. Was there anyone else aboard the tub of yours?”

“My corporal,… in the engine room, he was…” But he saw from the man’s expression that it was futile to make enquiries concerning the luckless McTavish, who had probably been suffocated before the fire took hold of the deck.

The man said, with a shrug. “Then he’s gone. Are you from Khartoum?”

“No… we found the steamer, a derelict. Corporal McTavish got her working and eased her into mid-stream. The steering was gone… we made do with a sweep. I was taking camels to Gadkul…”

But then the Captain said something quite incomprehensible for him, something about “showing commendable initiative, creating a timely diversion, and resorting to Drake’s fireship tactics,” so that he gathered the flaming hulk had butted into Fuzzy’s reinforcements as they made the crossing from east bank to west, interrupting a renewed attack just when the post was running low on ammunition.

“You probably did for a score or more of them, either by drowning, or that cracking rifle practice you gave us on the way in. I would have sworn there were a score of you aboard. Take it quietly now. You’ll have a sore head for a day or so but nothing worse!” And he drifted away, leaving Alex to lie still under the lamp, trying to make sense of a jumble of recollections since he had first noticed that curl of smoke from the engine-room hatchway.

In the event it was several days before he made a coherent pattern of the sequence of events between McTavish shaking his foot, and telling him that camels and drivers had melted into the night, and those final moments of uproar and enveloping flames. McTavish, poor devil, must have burst the ancient boilers in his efforts to put on steam when they were running through the dervishes and the comment of the Captain, concerning his “cracking rifle practice,” supplied another clue. The flames in the boiler room had touched off that box of rifle ammunition he had carried down there, giving the impression of the arrival of a company of river-borne riflemen during a lull in the dervish attack on the bridgehead guard.

When he was satisfied that this was so he made out his report, but glumly, reasoning that his superiors were not likely to regard the exchange of fifty-odd camels for one burned-out hulk as a bargain that would appeal to the Quartermaster. To his relief, however, he heard no more about the incident for weeks when, as one of the lightly wounded, he was detached to guard stores during the abortive advance to Metemna and Khartoum and the fighting withdrawal that followed it, a campaign that reflected little credit on anyone concerned.

It was much later, in the midst of what the enraged press was already calling “The Scuttle” (of which the dead Gordon was the hero and Mr. Gladstone the arch villain), that Alex received a summons from his immediate superior, Colonel Kitchener, and answered it with some trepidation. A man who had reconnoitred in the desert for seventeen days at a stretch disguised as an Arab, and escorted by no more than twenty Bedouins, was unlikely to look kindly on a subaltern who slept whilst fifty-seven of Her Majesty’s camels vanished into the night.

The hypnotic stare over the enormous black moustache was blank when he presented himself and saluted, but the tone of voice seemed conciliatory when Kitchener glanced up from a study of what Alexander recognised as his report, saying, “This statement, concerning the incident at Merowe six weeks ago. It represents the facts as you recall them, Lieutenant?”

Alexander said respectfully that it did, whereupon Kitchener Scowled and said, brusquely, “You received a wound in the head, Lieutenant. In the circumstances let me make a suggestion. Take it away and rewrite it. As far as I am concerned one of my junior officers, finding himself separated from his company in enemy-held territory, refloated a derelict steamer, sailed downstream, and halted an enemy attack on the flank of the British army. I am recommending you for a decoration, and I have to inform you you will be gazetted to the rank of captain, back-dated to the first day of January. Let me have the amended report by sundown, Captain Swann. That is all, except to congratulate you on your initiative.”

Alexander returned to his quarters in a daze but slowly the extent of his unbelievably good luck established itself in his mind, so that he took a pen and set to work on a report that read rather differently to the original. He did not lie, exactly, but merely let certain factors be inferred, so that anyone reading the statement (from which all mention of the missing camels was omitted) could have been forgiven for supposing that Lieutenant Swann had himself repaired the engines and had, moreover, set deliberate course for the embattled flank, fired the vessel en route, and discharged over a hundred aimed rounds at such boats as he failed to ram in midstream.

It did not cause him much surprise, therefore, when a war correspondent sought him out on his return to Cairo in February, and pumped him dry of the facts for a story in
The Times
. Or that, in due course, an account of the incident appeared under the arresting headline
Subaltern’s Charge in Blazing Steamer
, with a subtitle, almost equally arresting, reading,
Two Men Rout an Army on Upper Nile.

To the end of his life Alexander Swann never did discover the underlying reasons for his superior’s deliberate distortion of the facts. How was he to know that, searching the wreck as it lay piled up among the debris of the Merowe encounter, Intelligence officers had found and pieced together fragments of final despatches from Khartoum that went some way towards exculpating the army, and fastening the blame firmly upon Mr. Gladstone’s shoulders. Indeed, it might almost be said that Swann, a tiny cog in an extremely complex piece of machinery, had brought about the fall of the Liberal Government and ensured years of Conservative rule in Westminster. But of this also he remained permanently unaware.

Something to his advantage he did learn, however, and that was, in times of stress, the army could be relied upon to look after its own. That, in the light of his subsequent career, was almost worth the singlehanded capture of Khartoum.

3

Alexander, having donned the military straitjacket, had most of his problems solved for him. The same did not apply to Giles, spending his final term at the school on the moor.

News of his scholarship to university had come through in the first week of the Lent term, but it did no more than confuse issues that were already confused enough. He did not see himself spending three years in the rarefied atmosphere of Oxford, sensing somehow that there came a point in one’s life where books should be laid aside in favour of the experience.

He had been very happy at West Buckland, and was to look back upon the five years he had spent there as among the most fulfilled of his life. He got along very well with Thompson, the headmaster, and most of the staff, and he grew to love this high, windswept corner of the land more than any place on earth, finding here time to absorb all he wanted to absorb, plus a physical stimulus that seemed lacking elsewhere. The persistent cough of his earlier years had ceased to trouble him and although he stopped growing when he had reached a height of five feet eight inches (four inches short of his young brother, Hugo) there was never a day when he did not feel fit and toned up and ready, if necessary, for a five-mile lope across the moor, or down through the woods that clothed the twisting valley of the Bray.

He read deeply and widely, reimbibing all his favourite poets, from Spenser and Marlowe, to Herrick, Waller, Gray, Hood, and Cowper, from Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Shelley, to contemporaries like Matthew Arnold, and moved on to John Stuart Mill, Kingsley, Dickens, the Brontes, and George Eliot, reading their books at the rate of about two a week. Perhaps his favourite book, however, was Carlyle’s
French Revolution
, which some found difficult to read but Giles read and reread with a sense of actually participating in the event, and finding there the answers to some of the questions he had been asking himself ever since political science attracted his attention at the meeting in Exeter Hall when he was a boy.

For a lad passing through his teens, however, he was well-informed on current affairs, reading many of the political debates in the headmaster’s copy of
The Times
, supplemented by a radical master’s
Pall Mall Gazette.
Thus he found himself absorbed in the topics of the day, only ripples of which reached this far west. As a privileged senior during his last two years, he had stayed up late and discussed matters like Home Rule, the extension of the franchise, the disestablishment of the Irish Church, and, above all, the Soudan Scuttle, with some of the younger masters, and always he found himself siding with Gladstone, who seemed to Giles justified in assuming himself to be the chosen instrument of God, destined to bring true democracy to a society now exercising dominion over vast areas of the earth.

One would have thought, in these circumstances, that he would have welcomed translation to the most famous University in the world, but his instincts were against it. As the weeks passed, and his long stay up here drew to a close, he made his decision, discussing it with his father when Adam paid a call on the school during one of his visits to the West Country to find someone to replace the failing Hamlet Ratcliffe.

They had gone out one bright forenoon in early spring and taken the easterly road, turning north at the East Buckland crossroads and climbing up towards Forty Beeches, where they paused and leaned on a gate giving a distant view of the school a mile or so to the west.

Adam had always been puzzled by his son’s identification with a place that seemed to him little more than a gaunt, rather tumbledown collection of stone and brick, set down somewhat haphazardly in what he thought of as heartbreaking farmland. To his mind the hills lacked the grandeur of Lakeland, where he had spent his own youth, and also the softness and sophistication of the landscape adjoining the Weald of Kent. It was a prehistoric land, from which little could be milked in the way of trade, but he had not come up here to discuss the countryside, having more than an inkling that the most promising of his children was engaged in some inward struggle that had to do, in some way, with Giles’s future. He said, bluntly, as was his way, “Spit it out, lad. You’ve won yourself a free place at Oxford but you’re not disposed to go there. That’s about it, isn’t it?” And Giles, smiling at his father’s lack of finesse, admitted that it was.

“It’s a matter of value for money, sir, and you’ll understand that better than most people. On the face of it, it looks dazzling. Three years, maybe four, at the fountain of all wisdom. But I’ve read a lot about Oxford, and talked to several chaps who were up there, and it strikes me as a bit of a lotus-eater’s land.”

“Surely it’s what a man makes of it, isn’t it?”

“No, not entirely. There are so many pressures, you see—religious, social, athletic, and intellectual. You get caught up in one coterie or another, and frankly I’ve never been much good at that kind of thing. I like to look at things, think about them in private, and then form independent conclusions. Does that sound frightfully smug?”

“About as smug as your sister Stella, when she rattles on about her farm and family, but go on, I get the drift of what you’re trying to say.”

“Well, how I look at it is this. The object of education isn’t to stuff yourself with facts. That makes a chap a bore and a pedant. The real purpose, surely, is to learn how to
live
, evaluate the people you live with and the civilisation that surrounds them.”