The Sabre's Edge mh-5

by Allan Mallinson

  Hervey pondered the notion as Flowerdew laid a plate of fish on the table. 'Have you shared this opinion with the general?’

  'I have sent him a memorandum, just before you came.’

  Hervey wondered how it would be received. The fall of Ava was not essential to the general's reputation. All that was necessary was for him to hold Rangoon. It was not his fault that the Burmans hadn't flocked to his support. If the commander-in-chief wished him to take Ava against such opposition, then he would have to supply him with the means to do so. And yet, the taking of Ava in such very trying circumstances -against the odds - would surely be his making? 'He intends awaiting a general attack for a week or so. He will certainly want the support of your guns. And tomorrow he is going to lead an assault on one of the stockades.'

  'And do you go with him?'

  'Yes. He intends that I should write the despatch.’

  ‘I’ve a mind to come with you, but I’ve called my captains aboard.’

  Hervey smiled. 'There'll be more opportunities, I assure you. The general is determined to have the garrison as active as possible while he waits.'

  Peto helped his guest to a fair portion of fish.

  'Bekti. The best you'll ever taste. Caught this morning and brought upriver by Diana. What a boon she is.'

  Hervey had seen steam on water before, first in a boat no bigger than Liffey's cutter on the Blackwater river in Ireland, and then the barge that had towed their transports steadily upstream on the St Lawrence, six winters ago. But nothing like Diana. Diana was a gunship, her ports painted Nelson-style, and her smokestack half as high as Liffey's mainmast. 'The baby figure of things to come, do you think?'

  'Of some things, perhaps. But Diana could never stand off in a fight. A twelve-pounder would smash her paddles to pieces. I can't risk her in the van too long if the river narrows and the forts get her range.'

  Hervey tried his fish. 'I don't know whether it's because I've not had a spoonful of anything half-decent in a week, but this I agree is uncommonly good.'

  Peto looked pleased. He drained his glass and let Flowerdew refill it. Then he leaned back in his chair. 'Let us speak of agreeable things for a time. I never told you my news, did I? It is signed and sealed and I had a note of it only yesterday.'

  Hervey indulged his friend by laying down his fork and sitting back to receive the evidently happy intelligence.

  'I have bought an estate near my father's living.'

  cAn estate, indeed,’ said Hervey, as impressed as he was surprised.

  'Nothing on any grand scale. And the house shall need attention. But it has a good park, and is but a short drive from the sea.’

  Hervey wondered why a man who so much disdained being ashore should take such a course. cDo you plan going on half pay?’

  'It will come to it, Hervey; it will come to it. I have a tidy sum invested in Berry's cellars, and another in two-per-cents, but I have a notion of something a shade more . . . substantial.’

  Hervey smiled. 'Then you are not contemplating matrimony?’

  Peto raised his glass and took a very urbane sip. 'A man in his right mind who contemplates matrimony will never embark upon it, Hervey. In any case, a house has no need of a mistress - only a keeper.’

  Hervey said nothing.

  Peto realized the import. 'Oh, my dear fellow: I am so dreadfully sorry. I—’

  Hervey smiled and shook his head. 'Think nothing of it. I'll take another glass of your hock, and drink to your arrangements in Norfolk.’

  Peto cursed himself for being the fool.

  Corporal Wainwright came to Hervey’s quarters before first light with a canteen of tea, and returned shortly afterwards with hot water. Their exchanges were few.

  'It's raining, sir.'

  Hervey wondered at the need of this news, supposing that the hammering on the roof was the same that had been for the last fortnight.

  'And the guard says it's been raining all night, sir.'

  This much was perhaps of some moment, since the going would clearly be of the heaviest, perhaps even preventing the general from taking the field piece. Hervey sighed to himself at the thought of another affair of the bayonet. The wretched infantry - no better served now by the Board of Ordnance than if they had been with Marlborough a century past. For ten years - more - he, Hervey, had had a carbine that would fire in the worst of weather, yet the Ordnance showed not the least sign of interest. The notion of a percussion cap when a piece of flint would do seemed to the board an affront to economy. And little wonder if its members were as fat-headed as Campbell.

  Hervey sighed again as he drank the sweet tea in satisfying gulps. Perseverance - that was the soldier's virtue. It was both duty and consolation. 'Corporal Wainwright, I give you leave to remain here and keep things dry.'

  'And I decline it, sir, if you please. Thanking you for the consideration, that is, sir.'

  Hervey smiled. 'It was not entirely for your welfare, Corporal Wainwright. I had a thought to my own comfort on return!'

  'I'll engage one of the sepoys, sir.'

  Hervey smiled again as he rose to his toilet. 'It's not what I said it would be, Corporal Wainwright, is it? Hardly the dashing campaign, with gold to fill the pockets.'

  Corporal Wainwright pulled the thatch from Hervey's boots and began to rub up the blacking while Hervey began lathering his shaving brush. ‘I don't hold with stealing, sir, and it seems to me, from what I've heard, that that's all it amounts to half the time. Prize money's a different thing. But plundering a place is no better than thieving.'

  'Your sensibility does you credit, Corporal Wainwright. The duke himself would applaud it.' Hervey spoke his words carefully, but only because he had regard to the razor's edge.

  'Pistols sir? I'm taking mine.'

  'I suppose so. It is conceivable the rain will cease.'

  'What I should like to know, sir, is how rain stays up in the sky before it begins to fall.'

  Hervey held the razor still. 'You know, I have never given it a thought. Nor, indeed, do I recall anyone else doing so. I suppose there is an answer.' He resumed his shaving.

  'I'll bind the oilskin extra-tight, sir. Wherever this rain's coming from, there doesn't look to be any shortage.'

  In a few minutes more, Hervey was finished. He dressed quickly, thinking the while of the rain question. 'The rain is in the clouds. That much is obvious.'

  Yet that was only a very partial answer (consistent with his knowledge of natural history). The rain outside descended as a solid sheet of water -the noise on the roof was, if anything, louder than when he woke - yet how did it rise to the height of the clouds in the first place, and then stay aloft?

  'Steam. Steam rises’ he said, pulling on his boots. 'That Diana works that way, I think.'

  Corporal Wainwright said nothing, content instead to listen to the emerging theory.

  'A great deal of this rain must have begun as steam.'

  But then why should it now fall as rain? And where did all the steam come from in the first instance?

  'For the rest I must ask Commodore Peto. The weather is his business. For us it is just weather, I fear.' He fastened closed his tunic. It had become a poor affair with a daily soaking this past month.

  Wainwright took away the bowl of water.

  Hervey looked out, observed the downpour and put off his visit to the latrines until after breakfast.

  He sat down at his desk-cum-table still turning over the rain question in his mind. Peto would surely know a great deal more - all there was to know, probably. But what opportunity he would have to pose his query in the coming weeks, he couldn't tell. The commodore had declared he would be taking Liffey and two of the brigs out to blow good sea air through her decks and give the hands practice with canvas again.

  Wainwright was soon back with Hervey's breakfast - excellent coffee (he had been careful to lay in a store of that before leaving Calcutta) and a very indifferent gruel. Hervey thanked his luck for the supper of bekti the n
ight before, and for the lump of salt pork that Peto had pressed on him to bring ashore. It would be their ration today, for the salt beef had now gone, and it was biscuit only again.

  In half an hour the bugle summoned him -'general parade'. He put on his shako, fastened his swordbelt and drew on his gloves. He looked at the pistols, wondering. He picked up both and pushed them into his belt: if the rain did stop, he'd feel undressed without them. He wished he'd brought his carbine, but it had seemed the last thing he would need when he joined the general's staff in Calcutta.

  The sortie paraded outside the north gate. They were six companies, three British and three native, together with two field pieces - a six-pounder and a howitzer - some five hundred men in all, and another fifty dhoolie-bearers. They gave an impression of unity by their red coats, except for the artillerymen, who wore blue, but close to they were rather more disparate than a Calcutta inspecting officer would have been used to. It was but a fortnight since the landing, and already some of the troops had a ragged appearance which spoke of their exertions and the flimsiness of their uniforms, as well as the lack of supply. For the most part, the trousers were white, summer pattern, but heavily patched, and the sepoy companies had abandoned their boots. Some of the officers wore forage caps. The general, indeed, wore one. Hervey would have been appalled had he not witnessed all that had gone before: an officer of the Sixth never wore a forage cap but in the lines. That it should have come to this in one month beggared belief.

  There was no doubting the effect as a whole, however. In close order, and from a distance, these men looked like a solid red wall. They would stand, come what may. And their muskets - they would know how to handle them, for sure. Five rounds in the minute at their best - how could the Burmans match or bear it? The trouble was, the best volleying was only possible with dry powder.

  General Campbell was rapt in conversation with the sortie's lieutenant-colonel, a short, stocky man whose voice was said to be the loudest in the expedition. Hervey studied the general carefully. He had not fully appreciated his height before, for he seemed now to stand taller than any man on parade. Without doubt, Sir Archibald Campbell had the crack and physique to convince a subordinate of his competence; Hervey pushed all his doubting thoughts to the back of his mind.

  Would Campbell address the sortie? The rain hammered so loud it would be pointless but for a few men in the front rank. So they would just turn into column of route and march off down the track into the forest. Poor infantry - trudge, trudge, trudge, a mouthful of black powder biting the cartridge, a minute of rushing blood in a bayonet charge, and then . . .

  Then it was the same for all of them - kill or be killed. The soldier's life was nearest Nature -lowly, nasty, brutish, and all too frequently short.

  It was, of course, why they made comrades of one another so quickly. Everyone knew that. Hervey had seen it in his first week at the depot squadron, and he supposed it was why, perhaps, decent society could sometimes hail the soldier, for all his licentiousness. The quality certainly liked an officer in his regimentals. He wondered if they ever imagined them as they appeared this morning, however - sodden, tattered, grubby. Or what they looked like when rent with grape, ball, or the point of iron and steel.

  It was strange he should think now of Henrietta. Now, when things stood at their most brutish. But Henrietta had had a good imagination of the truth, for all her feigning otherwise. Not so Lady Katherine Greville. Hervey did not suppose she had ever thought of it, let alone was capable of imagining it. Regimentals were not for this. They were for the delighting of her and those like her - a mark of potency rather than aught else. He did not suppose it, indeed; he knew it. Her letters told him as explicitly as she had implied the day they had ridden together in Hyde Park. That was four, nearly five years ago, and still she wrote. He wrote too, not exactly by return, but with sufficient despatch to keep the correspondence lively. It flattered him. She might have her pick of officers in London - and no doubt did - and yet she penned him letters. He smiled to himself, now, at her questions. Did he wish to be an ADC? Did he wish for an appointment at the Horse Guards? If he would not return soon to London, did he wish a place on the commander-in-chief's staff, or even the Governor-General's? There was not much, it seemed, that Lieutenant-General Sir Peregrine Greville could not arrange if his wife were to ask him. 'Sir?'

  Hervey turned.

  'I asked if you still don't want your cape, sir,' said Corporal Wainwright, water running down his shako oilskin as if it were an ornamental fountain. 'I can fetch it quick enough.'

  Hervey shook his head. 'No. I think we're beyond all help in rain like this. It'll be sodden in minutes and then a dead weight. Why don't you take yours though?'

  'No, sir. It'll be just as sodden. And I'd as soon kick off these boots.' He smiled.

  Hervey smiled back. Corporal Wainwright had been wearing shoes when first he had seen him on Warminster Common, though the rest of the inhabitants of that sink had been barefoot. 'Easier going in the approach, I grant you, but just wait till you get a bamboo splinter!'

  Words of command now rippled through the ranks, like dominoes toppling. Back up to attention came the companies; they shouldered arms, moved to the right in column of route, then struck off to the dull thud of soggy-skinned drums and watery fifes - a cheery enough display for the general, thought Hervey, even if the sepoys did look distinctly ill-used to marching in torrents of rain. The King's men, he didn't doubt, would have marched in many times worse, and some of them in the Peninsula, where the rain could fall as a stinging hail of ice rather than as a warm drench. Poor, wretched infantry - the regiments of foot - and their feet often as not cold and wet. The cavalryman knew privation, and worked the harder for having a horse to look after as well as himself, but his feet bore nothing like the punishment of the infantryman's.

  'Nice tune, sir,' chirped Corporal Wainwright as he picked up the step.

  'Yes,' said Hervey, in a vague way.

  'Don't you recognize it, sir?'

  'No?' Corporal Wainwright obviously thought it of significance.

  'The rain it fell for forty days!'

  'Of course,' he said, smiling - black humour, the soldier's privilege. 'But I'm afraid the drum-major is excessively an optimist. The rains will be an affair of months, I fear.'

  ★ ★ ★š

  They were not set off more than half an hour, and only a short distance into the jungle, when the first shots were fired. In this rain they defied belief. Hervey could not conceive how any powder might be dry enough, especially in Burman hands.

  There was at once a great cheer and the leading men went at the pickets with the bayonet. It was over in a minute. Hervey saw nothing.

  The column halted and the general pushed his way to the front, Hervey with him. They found a half-finished stockade built directly across the track and extending the length of a cricket pitch each side into the forest, empty of all but redcoats, and half a dozen Burman musketeers too slow on their feet. General Campbell peered at the bodies, as if they might reveal something of the campaign before him. ‘Pull the place down!' he snapped. ‘Press on, Colonel Keen!'

  They left a sepoy company to the work, and the column trudged on into jungle made increasingly dark by the heavy skies. In another half-hour they passed three more stockades just as hastily abandoned, and then not a sign of the enemy in five miles of swamp and thicket until the artillerymen were too exhausted to pull their guns any further.

  'In God's name get the sepoys to the ropes!' cursed the general.

  Hervey despaired. He had taken gallopers into the jungle - two-pounders dismantled, and carried by packhorses. But guns like these ... it would not serve. 'Sir, I believe the effort may not be worth it. And when it comes to withdrawing, we could never afford to abandon them.’

  'I agree, General,’ said Colonel Keen.

  Campbell looked vexed. He wanted to blow in a stockade and tell the Burmans there was nowhere safe for them. But he had brought the wrong gun
s and he knew it. The Madras artillery's commander had told him so last night. 'Very well. The sepoy company will remain guarding them until we return.’

  There were no packhorses, of course. Not one. Indeed, there was not a single animal in the entire expeditionary force. But this was to be an entirely novel campaign, one that did not observe the normal usages of war. Hervey seethed. Who were these officers who would undertake a campaign without a few ready horses?

  The next two miles were done much quicker without the guns. They did not find the enemy, however, nor any sign of him, and in an hour the column emerged from the forest into green padi fields six inches deep in water.

  Colonel Keen halted the column to allow the general to come forward.

  'What do you make of it, Colonel?’ asked Campbell, sounding confident still.

  The colonel had the advantage of two minutes’ survey through his telescope, but even so there was not much he could tell him. 'I feel the want of a map very sorely, General. I suppose yonder village is fortified, or at least has some hasty stockading erected, for they must have known of our approach these several hours.'

  General Campbell now surveyed the ground for himself.

  The village lay half a mile ahead astride the track by which they had come. Without a map it was impossible to tell if it ran through the village and beyond, in which case the village commanded further advance, or whether it ended there. Colonel Keen thought the question apposite since, he reasoned, the Burmans would be bound to defend the former whereas they would probably have abandoned the latter.

  The general nodded to the logic, but either way he would have the place. 'And if I find so much as a loophole in yonder buildings I'll raze the entire village.'

  Colonel Keen folded his telescope. 'Column of companies, I think, General?' 'If you please.'

  The colonel turned to his adjutant. 'Column of companies if you please, Mr Broderick.'