The Passage to India

by Allan Mallinson

  ‘You didn’t hesitate in taking command from one so experienced? Brereton’s seen a bit of the world, has he not, and knows the city?’

  ‘No, I did not hesitate, General.’ He didn’t think he needed to add that his brevet gave him no option, or that Lord Hill’s own man – Mackworth – had so urgently requested he do so. Nor did he feel it his place to comment on Colonel Brereton’s service, whatever it was.

  ‘No, I hadn’t supposed that you would.’

  Quite what point he made was unclear, but Hervey wasn’t inclined to ask for clarification. There was always a certain … ambulation in Lord Hill’s approach to questions touching on judgement.

  He got up, beckoning Hervey to stay seated. ‘Sherry?’

  ‘Thank you, General.’

  Lord Hill poured two glasses at a table under a rather gloomy portrait of the late Duke of York, returned to his chair and passed Hervey’s glass across the desk. ‘There’ll be the devil to pay, of course – and rightly so. The second city of England in the hands of the mob for two full days, with more than enough soldiers at a moment’s call … Melbourne’s rattled, for sure. It wouldn’t have happened with Peel at the Home department; that’s what he’s afeared of them saying.’ He took a sip of his sherry. ‘So “Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat.”’

  Hervey took a sip of his, and raised his eyebrows. Since a boy he could recite much of the book of Leviticus by heart: ‘“But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.”’

  ‘Or into the half-pay,’ said Lord Hill, with an amiable smile. ‘But it is no laughing matter, though you yourself have no cause for disquiet. It must be managed rightly, however, which is why a court of inquiry must be assembled with all haste.’

  ‘General Dalbiac is to cast the lots, I understand.’

  ‘He is, but Melbourne wants a lieutenant-general to be its figurehead. That way the press and the Radicals can’t say the army’s dealing with it too lightly.’

  ‘This seems reasonable,’ said Hervey, taking another sip of his sherry, and with rather more relish.

  Lord Hill leaned back in his chair, glass in hand, and nodded. ‘But now, elaborate a little, if you would, on the performance of the yeomanry …’

  A quarter of an hour’s elaboration was quite enough for the commander-in-chief. The situation of the yeomanry was something to be addressed once and for all, he said – ‘When the hurly-burly’s done.’

  The clock struck six, and there was other business. ‘And I’ve to put on levee dress for Monsieur Talleyrand’s.’ Lord Hill thanked him and bid him adieu without the formality of ringing for an aide-de-camp.

  Hervey took his leave much encouraged.

  In Howard’s office again, where one of his own dragoons had just brought a despatch case from Brighton, he told his friend what had passed with Lord Hill. ‘But now I’ll bid you good night, for I know you’re to the French, and evidently you have more reading first,’ he added blithely, nodding to the despatches. ‘Until tomorrow, then – White’s.’

  ‘Ah, yes … I’m afraid we must suspend that pleasure, for I must now attend on Lord Hill at Lord Melbourne’s. It seems he expects there to be further business to discuss after tomorrow’s Cabinet.’

  ‘Very well. Send word as soon as you will.’ He put on his cap, and then paused for a moment. ‘Is all well, Howard? You seem … distracted.’

  Howard frowned. ‘Did Lord Hill say that the inquiry’s now to be presided over by a lieutenant-general?’

  ‘He did.’

  Howard hesitated, then picked up a sheet of paper. ‘A communication from Lord FitzRoy’s office: Sir Peregrine Greville’s to be the president.’

  Hervey tried hard to keep his countenance. He’d never spoken of his connection with Lady Katherine Greville to anyone.

  VII

  The Barrack Round

  Hounslow, next day

  THE WEATHER WAS abominable. The rain had begun again soon after he left the Horse Guards, and all night it had lashed the windows at Heston, but so irregularly with the gale that it was almost impossible to sleep. Besides, the thought of Lieutenant-General Sir Peregrine Greville presiding over the inquiry agitated his mind. The wind had now abated, and the rain fell vertically, which at least made less noise at the windows, but it fell in great quantity nevertheless. If only it had rained harder at Bristol …

  It had been a wet year altogether. At the beginning of August there’d been a whole week of thunderstorms, and much hay lost. Yet Collins, the quartermaster, had saved the imprest account, and therefore the Treasury, a considerable sum by buying in June rather than after Michaelmas, as custom and regulation required – and getting far better hay into the bargain. Collins had been Hervey’s covering-corporal in the Peninsula, when Lincoln had been serjeant-major and Armstrong his serjeant. He’d come through those years with scarcely a powder mark, only to lose an arm in ‘the joust on the Brussels road’ the year before. It had put paid to his prospects of being serjeant-major, but it also delivered Hervey from his dilemma in choosing between him and Armstrong. He’d not regretted the gamble in making him quartermaster. Even with his sword arm gone, Collins was a match for obstructive bureaucracy. Lincoln had tried many times, but the Commissary-General clerks wouldn’t approve the buying of hay so early. Collins had simply decided on the expedient of not asking permission and buying on credit, telling the farmers that payment would be later than hitherto on account of losing his writing hand to a French dragoon. (He never actually said ‘at Waterloo’, but, being the consummate quartermaster, saw no reason to be exact if it meant getting his stores.)

  But now he was bedded down a second time – in the first of the winter’s barrack epidemics.

  The surgeon was the same that had amputated his arm on the Brussels road. ‘I confess he’s the first limbless case of catarrhal fever I’ve treated, but if Lord FitzRoy Somerset can be Military Secretary without his right arm …’

  He took a medicinal gulp from his coffee cup.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Hervey, though not entirely sure what Lord FitzRoy’s case had to do with it, but adding for encouragement ‘And Nelson.’

  Then suddenly Surgeon Milne became briskly clinical again. ‘It’s a prodigious fever, and I’ve told Mrs Collins she must dose him with great care, and feed him determinedly. I’ve observed that it’s the most generous diet that promotes recovery, but it’s disagreeable on account of the cough.’

  ‘Have you told Collins he must eat?’ Discourteous as it seemed to enquire of a professional man, Hervey would take no chances – not even with the best regimental surgeon he’d known.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Then he’s as good as recovered, for he’ll follow orders to the letter.’

  ‘I pray so. He’s an excellent specimen of manhood, but there’s no knowing when it comes to catarrhal fever. The pulse is so peculiarly quick and irregular.’

  ‘And the amputation: has it any bearing?’

  Milne shook his head. ‘He made an ample recovery. I’ve no reason to suppose it will be an aggravation.’

  ‘And you now have thirteen in the sick-house.’

  ‘Four more this morning.’

  ‘What will be the best time for me to visit with them?’

  ‘When they’re recovered!’

  Hervey looked dismayed. ‘Some of my dragoons may very well die, and you would not have me see them?’

  ‘No, Colonel; you asked what would be the best time to visit, and I gave you my opinion. You may visit with them when you please, for they’re your dragoons, as you say, but you may very well contract the influenza, as it’s vulgarly known, and then you too would be bedded down.’ He did not add that nor would there be a Mrs Hervey to feed him determinedly (even if there were Annie to stand in loco uxoris).

  Hervey always found Milne’s
gentle airs of Buchan reassuring. He was ten years his senior, perhaps, and Medicinae Doctor Aberdonensis. His wife had died some years before, his son was a flag lieutenant on the West Africa station, and seeing no cause to remain in those parts, he had left his practice in Golden Square and joined the 2nd Dragoons. What had then brought him to the Sixth was not entirely clear, but Lord Holderness had had a way of attracting capable men. Milne had proved deft with knife and ligature, and Hervey was not inclined to dismiss his opinion lightly.

  ‘I shall think on it,’ he said, sounding unusually uncertain. ‘Anything more?’

  ‘No, Colonel, only that I find myself deficient in understanding the significance of Michaelmas hay, which was all that Collins could talk of – having to see to the barns and such like. But I shall enquire of the RM.’

  Hervey smiled. Even if it were the fever talking, it was Collins to a fault. ‘Dine with me this evening and I’ll tell you myself.’

  Milne having exercised his right of first call at Commanding Officer’s Orderly Room, ‘Defaulters’ now took its usual bracing course. Hervey’s only consolation was knowing that in a regiment of Foot there’d be five times the number.

  Owthwaite’s, though, was a sorry affair. The adjutant read out the charge – and then silence.

  Hervey eventually looked up and across his table at the delinquent NCO. ‘Tell me, Corporal Owthwaite, why a non-commissioned officer of such experience and capability, one so highly prized by the riding-master, finds himself before his commanding officer on such a charge?’

  Owthwaite stood ramrod straight, furnished and burnished as if about to stand before the King at Windsor, his eyes blue and bright, his face close-shaved, and his hair as sleek as a seal’s. All the regiment knew his weakness, and the consequent ‘trouble’ that accompanied his looks.

  ‘No excuse, Colonel, sir.’

  ‘As you were, Corp’l!’ barked Armstrong.

  ‘Sir! Beg pardon, sir. No excuse, sir.’

  Hervey sighed inwardly. It was hardly a point on which evidence turned, but, there again, the Orderly Serjeant had been drilling it into them for half an hour: Commanding Officer’s Orderly Room was a parade; ‘Sir’ was the reply, not ‘Colonel,’ or even ‘Colonel, sir.’

  ‘I did not ask for an excuse, Corporal Owthwaite, but for an explanation.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Silence.

  ‘Answer the commanding officer, Corp’l!’

  Armstrong was becoming hoarse – or perhaps it was for effect. Either way, Owthwaite flinched. And Owthwaite was not a flincher.

  ‘Sir!’

  Silence again, but this time lawfully: Owthwaite had first to acknowledge the serjeant-major’s order – ‘Sir!’ – and then to answer Hervey’s question, and as it called for self-examination, his answer could hardly come at once.

  But in truth, Hervey had meant the question to be rhetorical. He’d long believed that more men were flattered into virtue than were bullied out of vice.

  ‘I couldn’t help myself, sir.’

  ‘You couldn’t help yourself.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘You, uniquely among men, have not been granted free will by your Maker.’

  Silence.

  ‘Answer the commanding officer, Corp’l!’

  ‘Sir!’

  Silence again.

  Hervey wondered for an instant if it were fair to expect a rough-rider to be conversant with the doctrine of the Fall, but Owthwaite had attended enough church parades in his time …

  The procedure was, in any case, still novel, parliament having only lately amended the Mutiny Act. Hitherto, Owthwaite would have been tried by regimental court martial. Besides requiring seven officers to sit in judgement (or five overseas), which was an excessive inconvenience for a regiment of cavalry, dispersed over many miles as it usually was, it could lead to unedifying dispute, which might well linger. Now, at least, the district court martial, made up of officers of various regiments, dealt with matters at a healthy remove. Except that a district court martial could not be manipulated, and sometimes – such as in Owthwaite’s case – it were better done ‘within the family’. But Hervey had conceded that Armstrong was right to insist Owthwaite be tried ‘by the book’; that is, that the proper charge be brought against him – even though because of its seriousness the commanding officer had no power to deal with the charge summarily and therefore must remand Owthwaite for court martial (unless he were to dismiss it for want of evidence; and in this case the evidence ran to many pages). The trouble was, reduction to the ranks was the only possible outcome (assuming the court martial were indeed to find him guilty), and Hervey had dearly hoped there might be another way. Whichever way, the formality of regimental orderly room was just that – a formality. Everyone knew it, including the prisoner.

  And so all that he, Hervey, could now do was bring ‘orders’ to a close before there was a miscarriage not of justice but of dignity. ‘Well, Corporal Owthwaite,’ he began, in his best voice of disappointment, ‘disagreeable though my duty is – especially when I myself witnessed your conduct in the breach at Bhurtpore, conduct of the highest order – I shall not hesitate to do it.’

  Silence. He let it continue a good many heartbeats.

  ‘Remanded for court martial. March out.’

  Armstrong’s words of command came in a split second. Owthwaite was fairly doubled out.

  Lieutenant St Alban closed his order book and waited for the word. Hervey signed the disposal and handed it to him. ‘Deuced fool. He’d be serjeant in five years if he’d once learn to moderate his passions.’

  ‘Indeed, Colonel.’

  ‘Deuced trying, remanding a man for certain reduction who did what he did at Bhurtpore. It’ll make a fine plea in mitigation, but it won’t save him.’

  ‘No, Colonel; on which point – Bhurtpore, I mean – will you see Corporal Stray now?’

  Interviews customarily followed ‘Defaulters’, except on occasions when there was no one in arrest. Hervey found it helped restore the spirits. This morning there was just the one, however – the quartermaster-corporal – and the purpose of the interview was entirely agreeable.

  Hervey smiled wryly. ‘You are not, I imagine, well acquainted with Corp’l Stray’s … broader reputation.’

  ‘I regret not, Colonel – only that he pulled the sar’nt-major from a gallery that fell in.’

  Stray had long been the fattest man in the regiment – in the army, some said. Yet there was not a man in the Sixth who was more at home in the field than he. His economy with stores was celebrated, and he could fashion any necessary from the most unpromising raw materials, and quickly too, but it was his soldier’s solidness that the old hands admired above all. Stray was utterly imperturbable in the face of the enemy and superiors alike. Once, in Paris after Waterloo when he’d been a private dragoon, he was posted as a single sentry on a bridge which for retributive reasons the Prussians were intent on blowing up. After they’d laboured a good while to put the powder kegs in place, the officer of engineers asked him to quit the span and seek cover, to which Stray had replied, ‘Not until properly relieved by the corporal, sir.’ The Prussians had lit the fuses, but still Stray would not budge, standing on-guard with his sabre when they tried to remove him bodily, so that in the end the engineers had had to rush about frantically pulling the fuses from the kegs. Corporal Stray was not a man to have in the front rank at a review, but he was without doubt a man to have at hand on campaign – or even a tiger hunt.

  Hervey leaned back in his chair, his smile widening. ‘During the siege works at Bhurtpore – as well as pulling Serjeant Armstrong, as he then was, from the gallery – Corp’l Stray was attacked from nowhere by Jhauts as he drove his bullock cart from camp. They killed the bullocks one by one – six in all, I think it was, perhaps even eight – and then closed in to deal with him. But he just stood on the box as if he were at sword exercise and cut down half a dozen, until the rest took fright and galloped off. You’d scarc
ely credit it, would you?’

  ‘No-o-o. Well, possibly.’

  ‘Why uncertain?’

  ‘Well, Colonel, I know him of course only by appearance, and his leave has evidently been … productive; or, I might even say, reductive.’

  ‘Getting a wife – the promise of a wife – you mean?’

  ‘That and new regimentals.’

  Hervey looked intrigued. ‘You allude to the red?’

  ‘I think I should have him marched in, Colonel.’

  ‘Very well; I love a mystery as much as the next man.’

  It was one of the Sixth’s happy customs that a man sought ‘permission’ before marriage. Permission for a private man was delegated to his troop captain, while an NCO had the privilege of hearing the commanding officer’s will in person (an officer, as a courtesy, wrote to the colonel of the regiment). Why was uncertain, but Lincoln had attested to its being the practice before the regiment went to the Peninsula, and so the custom had returned with peace. Hervey imagined it possible that someone had thought it a way to emphasize the gravity of the undertaking – ‘not by any to be enterprized, nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts, and appetites’ – and, indeed, more than one dragoon had withdrawn from the promise on learning that he would have to march in front of his captain. On one occasion too, a dragoon had been refused permission – unlawfully, for there was nothing in King’s Regulations or the Mutiny Act – his captain believing the man to be too young and callow; and being young and callow, the man had accepted the ruling without demur, and was seen whistling happily at stables an hour later, as if relieved (‘Oh no, sweet maid, I cannot marry thee, for my captain won’t let me on’).

  Dragoons for interview were not marched in, hatless, like defaulters. They entered without words of command, halting and saluting in their own time. Corporal Stray entered with unprecedented spring in his step. ‘Good morning, Colonel.’