‘I enjoy an after-dinner cigar.’
‘It’s a great comfort,’ Walters observed., ‘Settles the nerves. I have a feeling that firing over there has died down somewhat.’
‘Maybe. Just a little. But they’re still fighting.’ Murdoch pointed. The eastern sky, now that the sun was all but gone, was bright, as if the lights of a huge city were burning just over the horizon.
‘Yes,’ Walters observed. ‘But it’s definitely moved south.’
‘Because the French are pulling back.’
‘Yes,’ Walters said again. ‘Just as long as they don’t pull back behind us.’ He brooded for a few minutes. ‘Have you heard from Lee?’
‘Not yet. Have you had mail?’
‘No, nothing’s caught up with us, I suppose. What does she think about it all?’
‘I have no idea. And I’d rather not find out, right this minute. I should think she’s having kittens.’
‘Yes. Did you know I was due to retire next year?’
‘I seem to remember Judith saying something about it...oh, a long time ago.’
‘I shan’t now, of course. Unless this thing is over by then. It will be over by then, don’t you think, Murdoch?’
It occurred to Murdoch that his commanding officer was nervous, and also, again with a sense of shock, that he had never actually followed Martin Walters into battle.
‘I should think so, sir,’ he said. ‘If we stop them here, and then the Russians get going over in Poland, why, I should think even the Kaiser will be happy to sue for peace before he gets mangled.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right,’ Walters said. ‘All we have to do is give them a bloody nose here.’ He got up. ‘I suppose we’d better turn in; they may be here tomorrow.’ He took a couple of steps, and then stopped and looked back. ‘When I retire, I’m going to become a pig farmer. That’s something I’ve always wanted to do, farm pigs.’
Murdoch scratched his head. He could not imagine Judith Walters farming pigs.
*
Murdoch followed his colonel’s suggestion and went to his tent as soon as he had finished his brandy and inspected the sentries. He slept soundly, and was awakened by a most unearthly noise, a high-pitched whining followed by an enormous explosion which shook the earth. He rolled out of his sleeping bag and sat up, pushing hair from his eyes, and gazed at a lantern, behind which was Reynolds.
‘My God, sir,’ the corporal said. ‘My—‘ his voice was drowned by another screaming wail, and another explosion.
‘Heavy artillery,’ Murdoch shouted above the din, reaching for his clothes and dragging them on. Cramming his cap on his head, he ran outside. It was very dark, although the village, perhaps a mile away to the right, was burning fiercely and sending a huge red glow over the pre-dawn sky. But the noise was very nearly paralysing. Apart from the screams of the shells and the huge cramps when they struck, there were men shouting, horses neighing and a bugle blaring.
For God’s sake stop that racket,’ Murdoch bawled at Bugler Summerton, who was sounding assembly over and over again. ‘We’re all here. Sergeant-Major Yeald! Where are you, sergeant-major?’
Yeald came hurrying out of the darkness, also only half-dressed. ‘Sir!’
‘Casualties?’
‘None as yet, sir. I don’t think they’re aiming at us. It’s the village what’s getting it.’
The German gunners had obviously laid their sights on those flags, Murdoch thought grimly. ‘Very good, sergeant-major. Put extra men to guarding the horses. Captain Ramage!’
‘Sir!’
‘Find Prendergast and Pinder. We’re reasonably protected by that hillock, save from splinters. Have the men lie down below the brow until the firing stops. Sergeant Alloway!’
‘Sir!’ The quartermaster sergeant came to attention. ‘Have the pioneers strike those tents. They’re only going to attract attention.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Colonel Walters came hurrying up, straightening his tie. ‘What in the name of God is going on?’
‘The Germans are shelling our position, sir. Obviously they mean to advance.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Two thirty. It’ll be daylight in another couple of hours.’
‘There’s another one.’ Walters half-ducked, then stood straight again, giving Murdoch a somewhat shamefaced glance. But that his nerve was shaken was obvious.
‘I think we should take cover with the men, sir,’ Murdoch suggested gently.
They joined Billy Hobbs and the headquarters staff, near the brow of the hill, crouching behind some bushes and in a slight hollow, while the shells continued to scream overhead. Murdoch soon left them and crawled from group to group of troopers to reassure them. In fact, it was remarkable how little damage the shells were doing to their position—mainly, he supposed, because the Germans were indeed concentrating their fire on the burning village. However, he could not help remembering how the Boers had always come up, full of fight and apparently unscathed, after the heaviest British bombardments in South Africa. The noise remained ear-shattering and unceasing, and would, he knew, soon have its effect on morale: too many of the dragoons had never seen action.
‘Why can’t we fire back, sir?’ asked Corporal Matheson. ‘Don’t we have any artillery of our own?’
‘Indeed we do, corporal,’ Murdoch agreed. ‘But the enemy obviously don’t have our position pin-pointed. It’d be a shame to tell them where we are, now wouldn’t it?’ He grinned at the anxious faces just becoming visible as the darkness began to fade. ‘And if we did them as much damage as they are doing to us, it’d be an awful waste of ammunition.’
The bombardment stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the silence was quite deafening. All sounds were for the moment blocked out by ringing in the ears. By now the darkness was definitely going fast. Murdoch stood up and looked down the slope to the canal, where the infantry had already been called forward to their positions and were lying or kneeling in a long line of hardly distinguishable figures in the slowly lightening gloom. That they must have suffered some casualties was obvious from the number of shattered trees and the shell craters which dotted the ground; these had in places burst the canal bank itself, threatening to turn the whole area into a bog. He could see the busy parties of stretcher bearers, hear the cries and groans which seeped out of the morning.
‘My God!’ Walters was at his elbow. ‘Look over there.’
Murdoch levelled his binoculars at the distant copse where the Uhlans had been seen the previous day, on a rise perhaps a mile and a half from the canal itself. As he watched he saw the entire hillside become covered with men, grey-clad troops, advancing in an orderly mass, bayoneted rifles thrust forward, spiked pickelhaube helmets making them appear almost like thousands of spearmen against the sudden red that filled the eastern sky.
‘There must be thousands of them,’ Billy Hobbs commented in an awed whisper.
Murdoch wondered if the Highland Brigade advancing on Magersfontein Ridge had appeared like that to the Boers.
There was a drumming of hooves, and Brigadier-General Gough himself galloped up to them; he had left his staff far behind. ‘There seem to be a great number of those fellows, Martin,’ he remarked to Walters. ‘We need every rifleman we can get. Sir John would like you to take your regiment down to the canal, next to the Buffs.’
‘Oh, indeed,’ Walters agreed. ‘Bugler...’
‘Let’s keep them guessing, sir,’ Murdoch suggested. ‘The men are all standing by.’ He ran off, sending Hobbs in the other direction, and within five minutes had all three squadrons ready. The horses were left under the care of half a troop; the other five hundred and fifty men, having abandoned their swords, moved forward down the slope to the canal bank. Here a gap had been left for them by the Buffs, the East Kent Regiment, who had suffered heavily during the bombardment and been ordered to close up. The two regiments greeted each other with affectionate chaff—they each knew the worth of the other—and th
en the dragoons prepared themselves for the coming contest.
‘Easy now, lads,’ Murdoch told the troopers, walking along behind them. ‘Settle yourselves and take your time. Remember to pick your target and aim at it. You have all the advantage here, lying down while the enemy are standing up and advancing. Just keep your eyes on them and cut them down.’
He spoke quietly and confidently, and yet had a feeling of total unreality as he watched the approaching Germans. There could hardly be less than twenty thousand of them, he estimated, in virtual parade order, trampling through the grass and round the bushes. He did not suppose anything like this had been seen since Waterloo, when the French infantry had toiled up a hillside very like this to attack the British position. But the Germans were coming down the hill, and at Waterloo it had not been possible to kill a man at much over a hundred yards. This was 1914, and the Germans were already well inside the mile.
The British field guns opened fire, sending bursting little balls of smoke to explode over the heads of the advancing infantry. Even at a distance and without glasses it was possible to see men falling this way and that. But the advance never checked.
Gough had returned to be with them. ‘I would say they are within range now, Martin,’ he remarked quietly.
‘Regiment will prepare to fire,’ Walters said, joining Murdoch to walk up and down behind the men. ‘Choose your targets. Take your time. Now, rapid fire at will.’
The rifles rippled, the Hotchkiss guns chattered; the entire British position erupted in flame and smoke. The day was now quite bright, although the sun had not yet risen, and the grey mass was starting to become individuals. It was also starting to lose its confidence as the bullets tore into it. Men fell right and left. It was impossible to accept that they were human beings, or that it was the regiment’s bullets which were destroying them so easily. But they were capable of replying. As the line crumpled, men began to drop to their knees and level their rifles, and there were sinister thuds and crumps from all around them. The officers remained standing, of course—it was traditional in the British Army—but Murdoch thought it was a miracle none of them were hit, although of course the Germans were hardly in a position to take deliberate aim, under fire themselves and no doubt exhausted by their march.
Remarkably, they were still advancing, having fired off a volley, with the courage of brave and totally dedicated men, while the British, all along the canal bank, poured more and more fire into them. Murdoch saw Peter Ramage himself lying down with a rifle, firing with his men—he was almost tempted to do the same. The Germans struggled to within a few hundred yards of the water, and then at last began to fall back, leaving little grey clumps scattered all over the meadow. The British burst into cheers as the order to cease fire spread along the ranks.
‘Coffee, sir?’ Corporal Reynolds arrived bearing a tray. ‘I added a little shot of brandy,’ he said in a hoarse whisper.
‘That was thoughtful of you, George. Colonel?’
Walters took a cup. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We certainly settled that one in a hurry.’ He surveyed the meadow, now quite bright as the sun was up, and the dead and dying Germans. He turned his head as Hobbs and the Reverend Dai Llewellyn came up. ‘Casualty report, Mr Hobbs?’
‘Three men slightly wounded, sir.’
‘It was like a miracle,’ Llewellyn said. He was apt to get carried away at moments like this. ‘One almost felt the beating of invisible wings above our heads. But those poor fellows...how many of them do you suppose have fallen for the last time.’
‘One hell of a lot,’ Murdoch told him. ‘Have some coffee, padre. Billy?’
‘Rather! I must say, the whole battle was rather like potting—’ He gave a little gasp and half turned, while blood splattered the tunics of both Llewellyn and Murdoch. Then Hobbs slumped to the ground, the coffee cup rolling away from his hand.
‘My God!’ Walters said.
Murdoch knelt beside Hobbs. He had been shot through the head, and was dead. For a moment Murdoch felt quite numb. If they had never been the closest of friends, Billy Hobbs was still virtually the first person he had spoken to on joining the regiment, and over the past few years he and Amy had often made up a four to play auction bridge with Lee and himself. Now, to see him lying there with his brains scattered across the grass...yet oddly, Murdoch felt no great sense of anger, merely an immense sadness, that Billy should have been the first member of the regiment to be killed in this war, and on Britain’s first day of the war, virtually.
But it was unlikely that he would be the last.
Murdoch looked up at Walters and Llewellyn, both of whom were standing as if turned to stone, far more shocked than he was by the suddenness of what had happened. ‘I think perhaps we should take some cover, gentlemen,’ he suggested. ‘Those fellows aren’t bad shots, after all.’
*
The Germans attacked again, twice more during the day. They had obviously been given orders to sweep the ‘contemptible’ little British army from in front of them, and they were determined to do so. But it was impossible for flesh and blood to prevail against the hail of accurate rifle and machine-gun fire which played upon them as they came forward across the meadow. For all their immense training, their marvellous courage and determination, they simply had not gained the experience of ever fighting against well-trained riflemen—and, thanks to the grim lessons learned in the Boer War, every soldier in the British Army was a marksman, thus quadrupling the fire-power of the little force Sir John French had been able to bring into action.
The field marshal handled his resources with consummate skill, pushing up fresh units as they arrived to fill any gaps in the line, personally overseeing the disposition of the men and making them aware of his presence. When towards evening the Germans withdrew for what was obviously the last time, leaving several thousand casualties scattered across the once green but now brown and grey and red meadow, the British soldiers raised a great cheer.
‘That’s what we came here to do, sir,’ RSM Yeald said. ‘To teach the bastards a lesson.’
Murdoch went from squadron to squadron to discover the casualties. They had been quite amazingly light. Apart from Billy Hobbs, four men had been killed and a dozen wounded, only three of them seriously. He told Prendergast to form a burial party, and although the Reverend Llewellyn was not happy at such haste, the five men were interred immediately, each squadron being represented at the ceremony by ten men, while the work went on of preparing for the night; it was a close August evening, and Murdoch did not care to think what that meadow was going to be like in another twenty-four hours. Then he and Walters and the padre visited the wounded; the most serious were being prepared for despatch back to the base hospital in Le Cateau.
‘Means a spell in Blighty,’ Walters told them, lighting their cigarettes for them.
‘Just as we were winning,’ said Trooper Graves.
‘You did your bit,’ Murdoch assured him.
‘Now I have to write to poor Amy,’ Walters said, as they walked back to where the regiment was preparing dinner, leaving only sentries to watch the canal.
‘Hobbs wasn’t even really a combat officer,’ Llewellyn remarked.
‘I don’t think this war is going to make much distinction,’ Murdoch said, and then cocked his head. ‘Brass.’
Two motor cars drew up, and the great men got down. ‘Colonel Walters! Major Mackinder! My congratulations.’ Sir John French looked tired but triumphant. ‘Your men performed splendidly. In fact, every man in the army performed splendidly. I am proud of you all.’
‘Will you join us for supper, sir?’ Murdoch asked. There was an immensely savoury smell of chicken stew coming from Reynolds’ cooking pot, and he thought it diplomatic to ask the field marshal to partake before French thought of asking where the chickens had come from.
‘Why, that is very decent of you, Murdoch. Have you enough for us all?’
‘I think so, sir.’ Reynolds never under-catered.
T
hey ate chicken and drank brandy, and enjoyed both the magnificence of the evening and the euphoria of having achieved a complete victory; that the troopers also felt at peace with themselves and the world was evidenced by the cheerful chatter coming from only a few feet away.
‘Damned bad luck about Hobbs,’ French remarked. ‘I am going to have to issue a general order requesting officers to take more care. Same thing happened in South Africa. Not that I want to interfere with an officer’s duty, of course. His men have to see him. But there are limits.’
‘Will they come again tomorrow, sir?’ Walters asked.
‘They may well, if they are foolhardy enough. But if they do, we’ll kill some more. In any event, if the frogs have done half as well on either side of us, we should be thinking about counter-attacking by tomorrow afternoon. We should hear from them fairly soon.’
In fact, they had only just completed their meal and were lighting up their cigars when a staff officer rode into the encampment and dismounted.
‘My God, Warrington,’ the field marshal remarked. ‘You look done up.’
The major’s uniform was stained with dust and his horse was blown. Reynolds hastily gave him a glass of brandy, which he tossed off at a gulp. ‘General Lanzerac is in retreat, sir,’ he said.
French frowned at him. ‘In retreat? No one told me he was planning to retreat.’
‘The orders came through just after I reached him, sir,’ the major explained. ‘His people have been under heavy attack all day, and he is now pulling out, after having suffered heavy casualties. It appears the Germans got right up to the canal in the French sector and were only driven back after severe hand-to-hand fighting. They are still there, Sir John. I saw them, grey and red and blue, scattered around at bayonet range.’
‘They wanted to fight with the bayonet,’ Gough commented. ‘No rifle fire for them.’
‘And now they’re pulling back, without informing anyone,’ General Douglas Haig, commanding the army corps, commented in disgust. ‘Damned frogs.’
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