Man Of War mh-9 Page 14

  They marched mounted to Windsor: it was no distance, and Lord Holderness was intent on presenting his regiment to the sovereign in perfect order. Otherwise they would have led for the first half-hour, and boots would have borne the evidence. And a fair sight the Sixth looked, though a mere three hundred, the turrets of Windsor Castle a perfect backdrop to the martial line of blue in the home park, sun glinting on shako plates as the dragoons waited at ease for the King. When the inspection was done they would remove the shako plumes and put on black oilskin covers, the rule for field service.

  It was strange how such a simple amendment transformed the look of a dragoon, thought Hervey as he watched from the serrefile. Rather like a woman gathering up her hair and weaving in a feather. The plume made a dragoon peacock-proud; it was a fact. When he removed it he became more the bird of prey: no gaudy plumage, not so much given to display. Not that the Sixth ought to have been plumed for the inspection, for they were not in review order. They wore overalls and plain boots instead of breeches and Hessians: the King was to see his soldiers almost as they appeared to his enemies – serviceable, not showy. Hervey was one with Lord Holderness, however, on the demands of smartness before the former Regent: those woollen plumes of white and red drew the eye, and most favourably.

  ‘When did you last see His Majesty?’

  Hervey turned to Fairbrother and frowned, a shade apologetic. ‘I have never seen him.’

  ‘Is that not quite astonishing?’ replied Fairbrother, his face suggesting that it was.

  But Hervey looked just as surprised. ‘I don’t think so, not in a regiment of the Line, though I confess I nearly saw him last year, at the Duke of York’s funeral, except that it was in the middle of the night. Do I disappoint you?’

  Fairbrother shook his head in his formerly habitual, airy manner. ‘I confess I am more disappointed for you than for myself. I had supposed that cavalry officers might enjoy a certain favour with the King since he is of so martial a bent.’

  Hervey smiled. ‘He was colonel of the Tenth a good many years, but I don’t think his interest amounted to more than embroidering their uniforms lavishly.’

  ‘And how might he enjoy reviewing his estranged wife’s regiment?’

  The Sixth had once been ‘Princess Caroline’s Own’, as the Tenth had been ‘The Prince of Wales’s Own’, but the distinction had in later years, with the royal estrangement and the Princess’s indiscretions, brought them as much derision as prestige. ‘I confess I had not thought of it,’ said Hervey lightly, and truthfully, for even Caroline’s portrait had been removed from the officers’ mess, as well as her name from their title. He smiled, wryly: ‘Perhaps that is his design in exposing Princess Augusta to us: an act of oblivion rather than of diplomacy.’

  ‘And how did you like Princess Caroline, Colonel-Major Hervey?’

  ‘I confess I never met her either, though I did see her once.’

  ‘Then you have nothing with which to compare the attractions of your colonel presumptive?’

  ‘I have seen her likeness often enough, as I told you: we had rather a fine Romney. It’s the devil of a thing to say, but she was not the greatest beauty of the court.’

  ‘And that taking account of the portraitist’s art too, no doubt.’

  ‘Flattery? Well, the Romney was, shall we say, gay.’

  Fairbrother smiled knowingly. ‘Ah yes. And appropriate she should be remembered thus. A woman more sinning than sinned against.’

  Hervey laughed. ‘Her guilts were not close pent up, that is sure.’

  Lord Holderness’s voice recalled them: ‘Dragoons!’ That cautionary word of command, the familiar ‘Dragoons’ rather than ‘Regiment’ – by which the Sixth, standing or sitting easy, was brought to a more uniform position of ‘at ease’ – was the privilege of the commanding officer. Hervey wondered whether it would ever be his. He turned his head forward, the time for chat over.

  ‘Dragoons, atte-e-enshun!’

  Hervey braced.

  ‘Dra-a-aw swords!’

  Out rasped three hundred blades. Hervey saw from the corner of an eye the procession of carriages. So did Fairbrother: ‘I thought he would be mounted,’ he whispered.

  ‘Sic transit gloria . . .’

  The carriage procession and its escort of Life Guards drew up in front of the regiment.

  ‘Dragoons, royal salute, prese-e-ent arms!’

  The officers’ sabres rose and then lowered, and the Sixth’s trumpeters sounded the stuttering middle Cs and Gs of the royal salute.

  ‘Recov-e-e-r swords!’

  Back came the sabres to the carry.

  Lord Holderness rode forward, saluted and presented his regiment to the occupant of the foremost carriage. ‘Your Majesty’s Sixth Light Dragoons, three hundred sabres, are ready and awaiting Your Majesty’s inspection.’

  The King raised an ornamented walking stick in acknowledgement, as a field marshal raised his baton, and the phaeton began its drive along the double line of dragoons. When it passed the supernumeraries of the serrefile Hervey was at last able to observe his sovereign at close hand, the man who as Regent had been second only to Bonaparte in the life of the fashionable young officer. Bonaparte was dead, however, and the Regent was King, but it would be difficult to picture this sad, bloated man, immobile though by no means ancient, as victor. Hervey felt repelled. He had expected better. He had detested what his poet-friend had once written of the prince – the dregs of their dull race . . . mud from a muddy spring – but oh, what a falling away there had been, what decay since Waterloo. What decay in the army, indeed. So many regiments disbanded, so many reduced. There were a hundred dragoons at the Cape, but even so . . . The regiment mustered a mere three hundred sabres now, scarce enough to see off the mob. ‘Sic transit, to be sure,’ he lamented.

  The trumpeter blew the officers’ call. ‘You, too,’ said Hervey, nodding to Fairbrother as he pressed his gelding forward.

  When, the day before, Lord Holderness had said he must meet the King, Fairbrother had protested that it did not seem fitting, though he was eager enough to be presented. He had wondered if the graciousness were not somehow a means of subordination, a display of effortless ease in welcoming the outsider, as if nothing could touch the superiority of the 6th Light Dragoons; but as the day and then the evening had worn on, the graciousness had seemed wholly genuine, so that he told himself he was bewaring of shadows once more (as Hervey had told him more than once at the Cape). ‘A king and two princesses in the one day: can any officer of the Royal Africans before have boasted such a thing?’

  Hervey smiled. ‘You made the whole Ashanti royal family prisoner, did you not?’

  Fairbrother acknowledged the wit: ‘I am hoist with my own petard.’

  ‘I have observed that powder is a most indiscriminating commodity . . . Just smile at them all: they will be vastly charmed. We “proper” officers shall have to be more formal.’

  Hervey, as senior major, though not on parade as such, was presented first. ‘Major and Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel Hervey, Your Majesty.’

  He saluted. ‘Your Majesty.’

  The King bowed (or rather, nodded) – a somewhat peeved return, thought Hervey, almost disapproving, as if there were a smell beneath his nose. However, the royal eyes fell on the Bath ribbon worn inconspicuously about his neck inside the tunic collar (Hervey was sure he detected some flicker of regard).

  ‘Hervey,’ said the King, nodding slowly, as if weighing the name and what he saw.

  Hervey regarded it as entirely rhetorical, yet silence by reply would have seemed inadequate. ‘Yes, sir.’

  There was what seemed a long pause, and then: ‘Waltham Abbey.’

  Hervey, though taken by surprise, and not knowing whether the recognition was by way of approval or otherwise, answered clearly (and some thought a shade defiantly), ‘Your Majesty.’

  After a further interminable moment, the King made an unmistakable bow of dismissal. Hervey saluted, reined back
three steps, turned to the right and began his return to the rear. As he passed the first of the two carriages – a pony phaeton – drawn forward of the rest, he turned his head left and saluted. Its occupant, a child of about Georgiana’s age, with long ringlets and a large velvet cap, smiled. Hervey, taken by pleasant surprise (a relief following the King’s uncongeniality), returned the smile with a will, which he then found himself embarrassed by when turning his salute to the occupant of the second carriage, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Coburg. She looked at him with amusement, having seen the smile which Princess Victoria had drawn, as if in some conspiracy of indiscipline. It was a look he might have seen in the face of Henrietta.

  When all the officers had been presented, and had retaken their places – Fairbrother the last – the King and his party began taking their leave.

  ‘Dragoons, three cheers for His Majesty the King: hip, hip, hip!’

  ‘Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!’

  The carriages wheeled right, the King raised his hat, and the trumpeters sounded the royal salute.

  ‘Not an especially happy king, I should say,’ suggested Hervey, recovering his sabre.

  ‘I do not suppose I would know,’ replied Fairbrother, a little archly. ‘Was the “Merry Monarch” so very cheery?’

  ‘You are at times very contrary.’

  ‘I could not admit it. But I would say that Princess Augusta will be an adornment to you all.’

  When the formal dismissals were made, Lord Holderness assembled his principal officers under one of the many great elms in the home park, and read them the general’s orders for the manoeuvres:

  Information. The enemy is in possession of the whole of the country to the North of the R. Thames, and has a lodgement to the depth of half of one mile to the South of the bridge at Dorney. All other bridges up and downstream to a distance of thirty miles are destroyed.Intention. 6th Lt Dgns accompanied by section of 1st (Chestnut) Trp RHA are to seize the bridge at Dorney by first light tomorrow and hold it until relieved. In the event that the bridge cannot be held against superior forces, it is to be destroyed . . .

  He continued through the various special instructions, the method of communicating with the divisional headquarters (as the general’s orderly room was to be known), the limits of manoeuvre, paroles and the like. Hervey could not but mark how different was the scene from the old days, in the Peninsula and Belgium, for every officer was studying his map, and a good map too – one of the Ordnance Survey’s admirable new sheets. They had had nothing its like in the French war.

  ‘How great an obstacle is the river?’ whispered Fairbrother. The two sat to the rear of the active officers (his friend already beginning to fret at his status as a mere observer).

  ‘You saw it as we crossed at Eton, though not so wide as there,’ whispered Hervey in reply. ‘But the rain will have swelled it to some consequence.’

  Lord Holderness now laid aside the orders. ‘Well, gentlemen, as you perceive, a straightforward enough assignment, though by no means easy – which, I conclude, is the general’s purpose. We have a bridge to capture, three or so leagues upstream, and by five o’clock tomorrow morning. That is the long and the short of it. I would hear your opinion in the matter.’

  It was not unknown for a commanding officer to consult with his troop leaders before action; nevertheless Hervey thought such candour augured well, for many a new man (and this was Lord Holderness’s first manoeuvres with the regiment) would have wished to display early his own mind and will.

  Captain Myles Vanneck, in temporary command of First Squadron, spoke at once to the essence of the matter. ‘Colonel, do we believe the “enemy” is of a mind that the river is impassable? Since if he does, he will expect that we have no option but to make a direct assault on the bridge.’

  Lord Holderness nodded. ‘As soon as I learned the general scheme of things this morning I sent the riding-master and his staff to reconnoitre the river as far as they might, and to look for boats. They report that every one has been tied up on the far bank or else placed in bond, so to speak, by the general’s staff. The riding-master believes that swimming is too perilous an undertaking: the river is swelled to a great speed. He likens it to the Esla.’

  There were few in that gathering who had been at the near-disastrous crossing of the Esla that day, fifteen years ago, when the Duke of Wellington began his final push to evict the French from Spain, but ‘Esla’ was seared deep in the collective memory of the regiment. And it was not, after all, a true enemy that was to be attacked: was the enterprise worth a single dragoon’s life? Hervey was keen to hear the verdict.

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Captain Christopher Worsley, in temporary command of Second Squadron, ‘that it is above all a test of our powers of éclairage in the dark, if such a word is not thereby inappropriate.’

  Lord Holderness smiled. ‘I think, in a way, the word is really most apposite. Shall we say au clair de la lune?’

  There was polite laughter.

  Fairbrother was intrigued by the jousting; but Christopher Worsley, he knew, had been with Hervey at Waltham Abbey – had been shot down, indeed – and by comparison, a ride through the night in peaceable Berkshire must be nothing. ‘There is a moon, I take it?’ he whispered.

  They had not seen it in a week, but the tables declared there to be one. ‘Yes; and fullish,’ replied Hervey.

  Myles Vanneck spoke again. ‘But we may expect for sure that the Grenadiers will be picketing every approach to the bridge. One of their company officers told me they would be nine-hundred strong in the field.’ The First Guards, the Grenadiers, were the principal element of the opposing forces, and Vanneck did not underestimate them, for all that their days were tied to parades in the capital. ‘Do we know where the rest of the GOC’s force is, Colonel?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lord Holderness assuredly. ‘They do not march from their barracks until tomorrow morning. These are preliminary trials for us and the Grenadiers, since we had no field inspection last year. It is, in truth, a contest of horse and foot. We and the Guards shall have the general’s undivided attention for a full twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Do we have any information regarding what else the Grenadiers may be doing, or are they entirely disposed to keeping us from the bridge?’

  ‘I am proceeding on that assumption,’ replied Holderness. ‘If they have other assignments then that is to our advantage. But the ratio, as you perceive, is three-to-one against us, and we the attacking force. Not what the strategian would call favourable.’

  ‘But we have the initiative,’ suggested Vanneck.

  ‘We do,’ agreed Worsley. ‘But we need more of it. Do they have any guns?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Holderness. ‘But we may learn more when we meet with the Chestnuts in one hour.’

  The little group fell silent.

  ‘What is your opinion, Hervey?’ asked Lord Holderness, raising his voice slightly to include his erstwhile second in command.

  Hervey could see no immediate course but the application of ruthless logic. A direct assault was impossible: the odds were too strongly against them, even (perhaps especially) at night. Yet if there were nine hundred Grenadiers within half an hour’s forced march of the bridge (as must be assumed), then it would avail the regiment nothing to capture it too early by, as the French called it, coup de main, for a determined counter-attack would hurl any but the strongest force from the bridge. If, however, the coup de main were left until the last minute – until just before first light – there would be no time for a secondary plan to be put into action if that were to fail. The only conclusion possible was that coup de main must be combined with ruse de guerre. But how, he could not yet fathom.

  ‘I see no alternative to getting across the river between here and Dorney, Colonel, and making a surprise attack from the rear with a small number of men, say a dozen, and then to employ some ruse – which I cannot yet conceive – to persuade the Grenadiers that a counterattack would be futile.’

/>   Lord Holderness nodded, intrigued.

  ‘I am not proposing we disguise ourselves and try one of the bridges; the general will have them well posted with sentries, and even if we were to hoodwink them, the general would certainly disallow it once he discovered it – as he surely must do. No, we must admit the bridges destroyed as if by powder.’

  Captain Worsley looked doubtful. ‘You saw the river when we crossed at Eton, Hervey. I don’t think I ever saw it worse in all the time I was there.’

  Hervey nodded. He had no doubt of his brother officer’s courage. ‘The means of crossing is a practical question. First we must decide what the mission demands.’

  Fairbrother pulled at Hervey’s sleeve. ‘There is a way,’ he whispered.

  ‘You have an opinion, Captain Fairbrother?’ said Lord Holderness.

  Hervey beckoned his friend to speak.

  ‘My lord, I know a way to get them across – a few at least. By towing. It was a means we used in Jamaica when the bridges were swept away. A rope is tied to a tree, or something equally firm, on the far side, and the end, in a loop, goes round the horse’s neck. The current takes it to midstream and then the horse is able to swim the rest of the way, like a pendulum.’

  Lord Holderness looked obliged, though without the least condescension pointed out the obvious flaw in the method. ‘But how, sir, is the rope to be got across the river in the first place?’

  ‘If there are no boats to be had, my lord, then there is no alternative but to swim.’

  Lord Holderness now looked incredulous. ‘But if we do not believe the horses are able to swim . . .’

  ‘I should gladly volunteer, my lord.’

  Lord Holderness looked pained. Before him was evidently a solution, but it turned on the willingness, and capability, of a man he scarcely knew. ‘Major Hervey?’