Words of Command (Hervey 12) (Matthew Hervey) (36 page)

‘Show me a man’s horse and I will tell you what sort of man he is!’ said Fairbrother triumphantly.

Hervey acknowledged, ruefully. Jessye was long gone – Jessye the ‘covert hack’, as his richer fellow cornets had called her, fit only to ride to the meet, not to hunt. But she’d carried him the better part of the battle that day, when Nero had fallen to French shell (and he with him – and escaping a
coup de grâce
by the closest of shaves), and not once had he wished for another.

‘Handsome is as handsome does.’

‘As you have often said,’ replied Fairbrother, with a knowing smile.

But Ajax – or ‘Greater’ Ajax as Hervey insisted – was indeed a handsome horse: liver-chestnut, sixteen hands, seven-eighths bred (with Cleveland for strength), rising nine and gelded as a yearling, he possessed every quality required of the battle charger of a commanding officer of light dragoons. And although Hervey had paid a good deal more for him than he’d hoped, the price was a good deal less than General Gifford would have got in Leicestershire. And Dolly, a nice-looking bay mare bought from his new brother-in-law, the baron, served him very well as second charger. Both had done the seventy miles from Ostend without casting a shoe. The beautiful grey Orlov, however, which Princess Lieven had sent him, remained in the care of the riding-master at Hounslow, for he’d not yet discerned whether he might keep him. An inkstand was one thing, but a stallion of that quality …

What a coming they’d had of it compared with before – fifteen years before – when they’d had to push the horses overboard to swim for the beach. This time they’d sailed from the very heart of London, the new St Katharine Docks, and in steamers, bringing them on the tide and with a fair wind to the Belgic coast in just twelve hours, every trooper able to disembark by gangway like a foot passenger. It pleased him greatly to watch the regiment –
his
regiment – assemble with all the regularity that had eluded that first hasty reinforcement, when Bonaparte had slipped his leash on Elba, crossed to the mainland of France and marched to Paris gathering his followers as he went.
Les Cent Jours
, the prefect of Paris had called it – ‘the Hundred Days’, from the time the Great Disturber reinstalled himself in the Tuileries to the time of his surrender to the captain of HMS
Bellerophon
, ‘Billy Ruffian’ to her tars.
Waterloo
(so strange a name, yet as English now as
Agincourt
): the battle that had stopped Bonaparte in his tracks, wherever those tracks were meant to be leading (it was most uncertain – and, in truth, probably to nowhere); the battle to end all battles. With what memories he might now conjure, and the soldier’s rhyme –
Were you at Waterloo? / I have been at Waterloo. / ’Tis no matter what you do / If you were at Waterloo
.

Malet rode up and saluted. ‘Colonel, a galloper from the crown prince’s suite. There’s delay in their leaving Brussels. The parade’s now to be at two o’clock.’

Hervey took out his watch – an hour and a half to wait. ‘Very well; the regiment to dismount and loosen girths.’

These things were not uncommon. An hour or so’s ease would do no harm – would be welcome indeed, though the day was by no means as hot as it had been fifteen years ago.

‘Have the Prussians arrived yet?’ he asked, hardly able to contain his mirth.

‘I understand so, Colonel.’

‘Then I’ll go and see them.’

The Netherlanders were already on the field – a regiment of cavalry which at a distance looked much like his own. He could see that they were already messing. He supposed that they themselves would have the canteen waggons brought up sooner or later – Mr Lincoln would make the arrangements in due season. He congratulated himself again on making a regiment of it rather than a detachment. He fancied that his report from Norfolk had disposed the Horse Guards to be generous when he demanded the extra shipping.

And generous they were certainly being, for at first they’d said the horses were to be had from the Belgics, but he’d argued that it would scarcely be to the prestige of Great Britain and the House of Hanover to send a demounted regiment of cavalry (nor, indeed, much of a compliment to their royal colonel-in-chief), and the King had been of that opinion too when somehow (and it was as well that these things were privy) he’d learned of the proposed economy. And then once it had become known that a regiment of cavalry was to be sent to the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, the foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, had asked that their stay might be prolonged to take part in the summer manoeuvres, for the French and Prussians had been invited to send regiments too, and he thought it no bad thing that ‘we might keep watch on what Talleyrand and the King of Prussia are up to’. And so Hervey had found himself in the office of yet another minister of the Crown, being entrusted with the ‘safeguard of what we gained at Vienna’ – though in truth his lordship’s words were so Delphic that he wondered if anyone in the Foreign department truly knew what was in the mind of anyone else.

‘Let us go and pay our compliments to the Prussians,’ he said to Fairbrother as Malet turned away. ‘And I’ll show you the place we stood for most of the day waiting for them.’

His original design had been to ride the whole of the battlefield with the regiment the day before, and he had engaged as guide an officer – an expert in survey and topographical drawing – whom Lord Hill had commissioned to make a model of the battle (for the French had such a one at Les Invalides), but a thunderstorm even worse than that which had soaked them in 1815 kept all in their billets, and it had been only that morning that they had been able to see the field, but from atop the ridge of Mont St Jean; they would ride the rest tomorrow.

Hervey cursed again. ‘That damned mound!’

A hill perfectly regular, unnatural, and not at all in keeping with the country around, stood now in the middle of the battlefield (that part of it where the day had been decided); and atop it a huge bronze lion, its front paw upon a sphere, signifying victory – the
Butte du Lion
.

‘Well, I fancy it’ll afford a fine view at least,’ said Fairbrother, inclined to regard monuments as the privilege of the victor.

‘I wonder if they consulted the duke before piling up so much earth.’

‘You don’t think that would have been to elevate him to a status inconsistent with protocol?’ replied Fairbrother, with a hint of mischief. ‘A king need hardly ask leave to pile up earth in his own realm.’

‘Well it’s a deuced mountain in such a place. An arch would have been enough – and in the village rather than where the fighting was.’

‘And a statue of the duke atop – the “Arch-Duke”?’

‘Don’t try me. Besides, here he’s Prince of Waterloo.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

Hervey smiled ironically. ‘You should make careful study of these things.’

‘Come, you know I don’t make light of the battle.’

‘Of course.’

‘And, you know,’ continued Fairbrother, now more solemnly, ‘it’s shrewd of the king – the Dutch king – to build such a monument, for otherwise it’s only the duke’s battle, or Blücher’s, which hardly serves to fortify his dominion over the Belgics. And if the place of that mound is where the crown prince shed blood – he did shed blood, did he not? – then it’s a sort of hallowing.’

Hervey frowned.

Fairbrother knew why. ‘Oh, I know it’s all nonsense if you care to examine it as would a scientific, but that’s not the way with these people, is it? We’ve seen for ourselves how wary they are still. This has been the cockpit of Europe for three hundred years, has it not? I fancy William is ever mindful of that.’

‘Indeed I suppose he must be. You yourself are ever thoughtful in these matters.’

‘Perhaps only because I have the time.’

‘Ha!
Time
– the only supply that Bonaparte refused his generals.’

‘He was not always wrong.’

‘Now you
do
try me!’

They trotted on in amused silence until coming on the Prussians beyond the crossroads above La Haye Sainte – three squadrons of the ‘Death’s Head Hussars’. They’d messed together in the week before (and woken next morning with, said the wags, heads like death), and so Hervey was able to pass the time of day with their colonel without formality, though he was a Prussian of decidedly less warmth than old Prince Blücher, before saying he wanted to show his friend the left-most extent of the line at Mont St Jean ‘before you came to our relief that day’.

Calculated flattery, but harmless, he reckoned. And, indeed, whatever now the recollections of that day – the duke’s own recollections, he’d heard tell – the coming of the Prussians hadn’t been a moment too soon.

And so after a rather formal acceptance of schnapps, talk of ‘La Belle Alliance’ and more saluting, they took their leave.

‘You know,’ said Fairbrother, as they kicked into a trot and put confidential distance between them and the ‘Death Heads’, ‘for my own part I count this adventure worthwhile purely to meet the Prussian. What a singular race.’

‘Better an ally than an enemy, I should hazard,’ said Hervey. ‘By the bye, I think yon
oberst
was perplexed by your appearance.’

‘My complexion or my coat?’

‘I’ve no notion what he makes of your complexion, only your coat.’

‘As I’ve said before, to wear a captain’s coat would confuse matters. And a black one was good enough for the duke that day.’

‘I can’t deny it, but …’ His thoughts were interrupted by the sudden appearance of rooftops. ‘Now, see there.’

They pulled up half a mile on, opposite the hamlets of Papelotte and La Haye a few hundred yards across the valley to the right. Hervey pointed.

‘The left flank?’

‘I think it was here exactly. We’d come up in column from the other side of the crossroads – there were so many men that morning, and so few marks to go by – and I recall how we executed a very smart turn from column into line – really, it was as if on parade – and we came to a halt on this slope facing across the valley with the sun on our faces. My troop was in the second line forming the support to “B”, and Edward Lankester called me forward and asked if I supposed this was where the duke intended.’

‘Because you’d ridden with the duke on his exploration.’

‘Just so.’ Hervey had a moment’s recollection of Lankester, the finest of men, who would have become Kezia’s brother-in-law had he lived; and of his brother, Ivo, killed at the head of the regiment too, ten years on – men whose boots he now filled … ‘And I pointed out the scattering of farms below us – mark the roofs yonder, just as they were – where he’d placed the Nassauers. And the farm at La Haye Sainte below the crossroads, over on the right – which you may just see if you stand in your stirrups: he’d garrisoned it with some of the German Legion and the Rifles. We can’t see the château at Hougoumont from here, for it’s a mile beyond the farm – you saw its roof when we rode the ridge this morning: he put four companies of the Guards there. And, here, look …’ (he took out the sketch map from that day, which he’d made after the ride with the duke and preserved all these years in an oilskin): ‘there’s nothing to our east but the Forest of Ohain, and then a couple of leagues or so beyond the forest were the Prussians.’

Fairbrother shook his head. ‘
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!
Oh, to have been with you instead of that fort at Goree!’

Hervey looked grave. ‘I’m so very glad you were not, for had you been there you might well not have been here now. Edmonds, Lankester … so many good fellows were struck down.’

For once his friend was moved to silence.

Hervey sighed. ‘But it’s all in the past. So very much in the past. And so much has been in the years since … Come, we must get back for our prince – indeed, our princess.’

The landau came on at a good trot with two outriders in Saxon green astride well-matched greys, the same as the coach-horses, four of them – high-stepping, active still after their dozen miles from the outskirts of Brussels where the Princess Augusta had taken up residence for the celebrations.

Hervey stood with Malet and the regimental serjeant-major at the end of the double line of dragoons drawn up for inspection, behind them their chargers, grooms, orderlies and covermen waiting. Two grooms stood in advance with a handsome little Trakehner, got up with a side-saddle (one of Monsieur Pellier’s new design, with a balance strap and second pommel, the ‘leaping head’) over a regimental shabracque with the colonel’s Bath star atop the crown sewn onto the points. Princess Augusta was to ride with her regiment over the field of Waterloo – at its head, indeed – and Hervey had been determined that she did so duly mounted. Malet had therefore toured the liveries until he found a gelding that looked the part and was schooled to the Pellier saddle, and a second for the lady-in-waiting, and Mr Lincoln had engaged seamstresses and wire-workers in Brussels to make the saddle-cloth.

The carriage pulled up, footmen alike in Saxon green slipping down gracefully to open the door.

Hervey and party saluted – and did so in some astonishment, for Princess Augusta wore tunic and shako. How she’d got them, and the Sixth’s crossbelt, all exactly
comme il faut
, he couldn’t imagine. ‘Good afternoon, Your Highness,’ he said, smiling with the compliment she paid them.