A Close Run Thing Read online

  ‘Go to your post, Serjeant Armstrong,’ it commanded, in mellow tones of Suffolk. And then, with admirably contrived understatement: ‘Mr Hervey, sir, is there some difficulty?’

  Hervey’s composure began returning. The voice had often steadied him – steadied many of them – and more so now for its being unexpected.

  ‘Serjeant Strange, I am in arrest. General Slade appears to think we abandoned our post. Have you come with orders?’

  ‘No, sir,’ replied the troop serjeant, in a manner so matter-of-fact they could have been at a review, ‘only with a report of guns moving in the direction of your picket.’

  ‘Well, they do not move any longer,’ said Hervey with a sharp edge. ‘Look, Serjeant Strange, you had better take command. I will tell you briefly of the circumstances and then you must send someone to report to Major Edmonds.’

  Serjeant Strange listened impassively as Hervey gave a hasty account of the disabling of the battery.

  ‘I trust Mr Regan here will have that wound attended to properly and with all dispatch, sir?’ was all that Strange said in reply, turning to the ADC.

  Of course he would, said the lieutenant testily. ‘I do not need to be reminded of my business, thank you, Serjeant!’

  Serjeant Strange saluted, reined about and trotted over to the patrol, leaving Hervey feeling not a little awkward at his own intemperance compared with this non-commissioned officer’s bearing.

  Matthew Hervey was not invariably quick-tempered. Twenty-three years old, six years with the cavalry, most of it on active service, he still retained a surprising belief in humanity. But the proverbial wrath of the patient man could from time to time overwhelm his cautious instincts, a risky proclivity for an officer who valued his prospects: anyone who thought that survival in this war depended merely on fighting the enemy was naïve in the extreme. Jealousy, snobbery, intrigue and patronage were the preoccupations of men of ambition in the Marquess of Wellington’s army; and Hervey and others like him, decent officers with little but their ability to recommend them, were increasingly resentful of Wellington’s indifference to it all. Indeed, many believed he actively connived at it. But they remained wholly powerless to effect any change whatever; and, besides, they each had a stake in the system, however small, so long as their commissions were obtained by purchase and held their value.

  Lieutenant Regan’s dislike of Hervey, inasmuch as it could be rationally analysed, stemmed from just these preoccupations. Intensely jealous of the distinction which his campaign service might bring – though few would suppose that he envied the service itself – he regarded Hervey’s lack of means with open distaste. Six years’ service and still a cornet. He, Regan, had purchased his lieutenancy even before his regiment had seen him at a field day! And if he had known Hervey to be distantly related to the earls of Bristol he would doubtless have dismissed the connection with a sneer at the Whig propensities of that family. Whatever ecclesiastical influence the Herveys may have had (and, in truth, they had none, for Bishop Hervey of Derry had been dead these past ten years), they were wholly without influence in the military. It had not been long before someone in Regan’s family had managed to get him appointed to a general’s staff. And what a general – John Slade, ‘Black Jack’ as he was known throughout the Peninsular army, as incompetent an officer as was ever placed in command of a brigade of cavalry, and a coward, too, by common consent. But, if Hervey had only qualified contempt for the system which could put an officer like Regan where he was, his contempt for the man himself was absolute. As he unbuckled his sword-belt and handed him his sabre he saw the utter triumph on the ADC’s face, and he knew that there was not the slightest thing he could do about it.

  Serjeant Strange chose to send the news to Edmonds with Hervey’s covering-corporal, for he could not trust Serjeant Armstrong to deliver a coherent report in the circumstances, let alone a detached one. And he knew that the combination of Edmonds’s temper and Armstrong’s was the very last thing that was needed now. Corporal Collins’s big gelding had once been the proud possession of the commanding officer of a regiment of French hussars, but the corporal had cut him down in a brilliant little affair at Campo Mayor three years before. Even a French aristocrat’s charger could rarely outpace a good British troop horse, but this gelding was an exception and the corporal covered the three-quarters of a mile or so, to where the rest of the 6th Light Dragoons were drawn up, in a fast straight line.

  It would not have taken a practised eye to discern that the Sixth had been on campaign for several seasons. For though they stood in perfect order of three squadrons in line, numbered from the left, they were in double rank only, the regiment’s strength having fallen to two troops in each squadron. The troops were still able to front the regulation sixty men, however (less the half-troop of Hervey’s patrol from Number 1 Squadron), and twenty or so dragoons stood with the farriers as supernumeraries to the rear. The horses were a mixed bag, Irish mainly and beginning to regain the semblance of sleekness as their winter coats grew out. Some were of real quality: those which the regiment’s colonel had purchased when they had been in England, and for which he had reached deep into his own pockets. Since arriving in the Peninsula, however, remounts had been found under collective arrangements, and from divers sources, and some were barely up to weight. It was the lament of every cavalry mess that England must indeed be in peril to have run short of troop horses. The same in its way could have been remarked of the dragoons themselves: without doubt, many of the troopers would never have got the better of a recruiting serjeant’s pride in peacetime. As for their clothing, an untutored observer might have concluded that a hatmaker had reached some advantageous arrangement with the quartermasters, for every shako seemed as new compared with the rest of the uniform, which was faded and patched to a marked degree. In truth the shakos were new, of a pattern only recently authorized, and although they were nothing in appearance to compare with the older Tarleton helmets they stayed put in action and the oilskin covers kept them dry. At a distance of fifty yards the regiment was a fine sight: only closer inspection would reveal the signs of wear, as it would, too, that ‘A’ Troop’s jackets were in distinctly better condition, their captain having used his own wealth to engage the services of Spanish tailors during winter quarters.

  The Sixth were sitting easy on the same piece of ground they had occupied since first light that morning. Many of the troopers were leaning forward on the rolled cloaks over the saddle arches, and a good number were smoking clay pipes. Corporal Collins found Edmonds not in his appointed position to the front of the regiment but as a serrefile to the left of the first squadron, doubtless attempting, but vainly, to conceal his frustration with the regiment’s enforced inactivity. Edmonds’s bad humour was exacerbated, too, by the worst toothache he had ever known. He had already taken two sizeable draughts of laudanum that morning, more than three times the quantity prescribed as efficacious by the regimental surgeon, and it would be many hours before he could expect to have the offending molar drawn by a tooth-operator. He certainly had no intention of risking the surgeon’s pelican after that hamfisted fool had dislocated one poor trooper’s jaw earlier in the week.

  Scarcely had Corporal Collins begun his report but Edmonds began to rage. ‘Damn it, all he had to do was sit on a hill and watch for a few Frenchmen fool enough to cross the canal! What in God’s name …?’

  The major’s facility with words extended also to those of the barrack room. Indeed, they frequently seemed his natural and preferred idiom.

  ‘No, sir, wait, that’s not all.’

  Edmonds’s notorious temper, and his present irritability, would have unnerved many an NCO, but Strange had picked his man well: the victor of the single combat with the French colonel would not be frighted by the major’s anger. Besides, the cannier NCOs (and Collins was one of the canniest) knew what lay beneath it. The corporal did what he had done many times before, since the days when he had been a young dragoon in the then Captain Edmond
s’s troop: he affected blithe unawareness, and pressed his report with determination. The major listened to the account of the attack on the battery, and what followed, with mute but growing disbelief until another pang of excruciating pain made him explode again. ‘Why, for mercy’s sake, was he placed in arrest, then? What the devil is going on up there?’

  Corporal Collins judged it beyond the responsibilities of his rank to comment, though he could for certain have given a perceptive enough appreciation. Instead he sat silent: opinions about the staff would have to wait for the canteen. The major, taking a strong but not altogether effective grip of his anger, and biting hard into a lint wad soaked in oil of cloves, summoned ‘A’ Troop’s leader who, as one of the senior captains, was also the officer commanding Number 1 Squadron.

  ‘Captain Lankester, I may presume that you heard our corporal-galloper, and it will be no shave, I’ll warrant. A very pretty mess indeed! I wish you to send an officer at once to the flank picket to relieve Serjeant Strange.’

  Another spasm jerked him as if a musket ball had struck his jaw. ‘Corporal Collins, you stay here. Go and rejoin your troop!’ he barked.

  Joseph Edmonds reined about to face front again, and cursed audibly and even more foully than before. It was not the pain so much – he had endured worse under the surgeon’s knife during his service – but the way that all before him seemed to be unravelling, like a loose horse-bandage. He had not the slightest control over matters, and seemingly no influence. He began wishing Lord George Irvine were back; that damned tirailleur’s bullet which had smashed the colonel’s shoulder at Croix d’Orade three days earlier had been about the worst-timed shot of the campaign! He was relishing this acting command right enough, albeit without even a brevet promotion to lieutenant-colonel (as he might have expected), but he knew General Slade despised him – a conclusion it was not difficult to come by, although Slade seemed to despise everybody, especially if they showed the remotest chance of doing something that might reflect his own inadequacy.

  ‘Laming will relieve Serjeant Strange, sir,’ Lankester informed him after dispatching his lieutenant to the picket. He might as easily have resumed his place in front of his squadron, and with every propriety, for Edmonds had all but formally dismissed him; but Lankester had seen the storm cones hoisting and experience suggested that a weather eye would be prudent.

  ‘Captain Lankester, do you suppose that damned stupid fellow has the remotest idea what he is about?’

  ‘You refer to General Slade, sir?’

  ‘Indeed I do, sir, though I cannot claim any novelty in that description, as you very well know. It was Lord Uxbridge’s, and never has his opinion of Slade been more fully justified than during these several past months. What deuced ill-fortune has placed us in his brigade? And now it seems that his own staff are every bit as stupid as he!’

  ‘I think he has never recovered from the affair at Maguilla.’

  ‘I do not think that Wellington himself has recovered from Maguilla. The whole Maguilla business was absurd. A few of the Royals’ squadrons become over-excited, press on too far for their own good and get a fraction cut up, and Wellington says that all his cavalry are fit for is drilling on Wimbledon Common! What a confounded insult! What a—’ Yet another spasm contorted his face, and a string of expletives followed. ‘And now Slade tries to curb all vigour in his subordinates, and hangs the arse at any price rather than risk another of Wellington’s scoldings. The man’s fit only for a depot squadron!’

  ‘It has certainly made him cautious,’ Lankester agreed, with a greater disposition towards discretion.

  ‘Uxbridge at least would have been able to advocate a little more equanimity,’ continued Edmonds. And then, casting aside all reserve, he opined that if the Earl of Uxbridge had remained the cavalry commander for this second expedition to the Peninsula, instead of Sir Stapleton Cotton, Wellington might by now have been prevailed upon to have Slade dismissed. He could but wonder, he declared with a sigh, at the complicated web of patronage that made Wellington drive his army so hard and yet at the same time ignore such monstrous inaptitude.

  But he knew at least that it was a web, a web as unfathomable as that which was the Fates’. The strands might be barely discernible but they could hold a man like him fast; and, for all the twenty-five years which separated them, he and now Hervey were caught like worthless carrion while others who knew its secrets were able to traverse the delicate threads and go wherever they pleased. He had accepted it with remarkable forbearance during most of his service, but he had of late become of the mind that when skilfulness amounted to a disadvantage because of a superior’s resentment, then the web was no longer merely recondite – it was corrupt. Why it had taken him so long to reach this conclusion, when he pondered on it, puzzled him, for a full five years earlier he had had a taste of Slade’s ineptness. There, at Sahagun, he had deftly manoeuvred his own squadron while Black Jack, in action for the first time, had fiddle-faddled at the head of his brigade and almost let the French slip – and all this in front of Uxbridge too (who had never troubled to conceal his poor opinion of his subordinate). Edmonds’s mere proximity ever afterwards could excite Slade’s resentment, and that his subsequent advance to major had been by field promotion rather than by purchase (a manner of advancement that Slade had more than once in his hearing derided as fit only for officers from the ranks) had done nothing to assuage the general’s envy and detestation. Jealousy and snobbery, patronage and intrigue – the web.

  ‘By heaven,’ Edmonds sighed, ‘the French are nothing to fear compared with that blackguard.’

  ‘It has always occurred to me as singular that adultery should be grounds for dismissal during times of war.’

  Lankester’s proposition did not immediately reveal its sense to Edmonds, who was all but lost in contemplation of his brigade commander. ‘What? Slade – adultery?’

  ‘No, Uxbridge!’

  Edmonds shook his head with disbelief at his own slowness. ‘Well, perhaps it was hardly the breaking of the seventh commandment but the manner.’

  ‘Another commandment, you mean,’ smiled Lankester. ‘Thou shalt not elope with the Marquess of Wellington’s sister-in-law?’

  Edmonds could not but reflect the smile, the first he had been tempted to that day. ‘Well, certainly not in a post-chaise from under the very nose of his younger brother!’

  Lankester thought he perceived the storm cones to be lowering. ‘It occurs to me that, if Nelson had been deprived of his command because of Lady Hamilton, the French fleet might still be at sea instead of under it at Cape Trafalgar – and we might yet be patrolling the Sussex coast.’

  Edmonds nodded and frowned: Lankester had judged the storm’s passing over-hastily. The major’s bile rose again at this reference to the Royal Navy, whose utilitarian principles he had long held in admiration. ‘I do not see why we must be foisted with knaves and imbeciles when the Admiralty are perfectly able to order their affairs in so eminently businesslike a fashion,’ he snorted.

  ‘Or does the Navy have its patronage, too,’ countered Lankester, ‘less manifestly connected with birth perhaps, but patronage none the less?’

  ‘All I know is that if Nelson had been an officer under Slade’s command he would not have risen beyond a troop!’ rasped Edmonds, deciding that it was time he took up his position in front of the regiment, and pressing his charger forward with sudden urgency.

  * * *

  Major Joseph Edmonds, his left eye almost closed by the pain in his jaw, peered into the distance as the infantry pressed their assault across the Languedoc Canal towards the outer defences of Toulouse, the first city they had reached since coming down from their winter quarters in the Pyrenees. He might rant against the likes of Slade, but the object of his profoundest disapproval – the conduct of the campaign itself – he kept privy. With a concealed passion he utterly disputed the need to fight Soult here, especially since rumours had been circulating for days that Bonaparte was finished
, dead even. The French had been deserting in droves: many had given themselves up to the Sixth’s own patrols. And, so far as he was able to make out, Bonaparte’s more general situation was no more felicitous. In the east the Continental allies – Austria, Prussia, Russia and Sweden – were making ever better progress towards Paris. A month ago Wellington had occupied Bordeaux, but to what end? Surely now there was no more need than to invest, with the merest token force, any garrison which stood in their path. Paris was the cornerstone of Bonaparte’s edifice; there was little purpose, therefore, in trifling with outworks. Edmonds began to wonder whether anyone had any notion of strategy other than fighting the enemy wherever and whenever he stood, as if every last French musketeer must be slaughtered, or put into a prison hulk, before victory might be claimed. Was there no campaigning art? Were they to continue breaking windows with guineas? Edmonds knew his history and despaired that the commander-in-chief seemed not to share his perception of the wars of antiquity, of Caesar and Hannibal. Why was Wellington so Fabian a general? Quintus Fabius Maximus – Cunctator (‘the Delayer’) – reviled in life for his caution and then lauded for it in his later years: Rome would never have been defeated at Cannae with such a general, the Senate had mourned. But why so many officers, Wellington included, took Fabius Maximus as their paradigm rather than Hannibal was quite beyond him. No wound in the dozen or more during his service had cut him so deeply as the rebuff he had received two winters before when he had submitted a stratagem worthy, he felt sure, of the grace of Baal himself, to manoeuvre the French out of Spain. It had been returned with a peremptory note that the commander-in-chief did not wish to distract his field officers from their first duty of attending to their commands. Afterwards he had brooded, and contemplated selling out, but in the end he had turned once more to his trusty volume of Seneca and, taking deep draughts from the treatise on ‘The Steadfastness of Wise Men’, he had redoubled his stoic efforts in the place that Fortune had appointed him.