Man of Honour

by Iain Gale

  Looking about him he tried to make out more men of their company of Grenadiers through the mist. They were the tallest men in the regiment and it was not hard to spot them. He was aware of two men to his right and left, their scarlet coats discernible even in this gloom. But beyond them there were only shapes and voices. Somewhere off to the left lay the remaining nine companies of the regiment, and beyond them the bulk of the allied army under Marlborough. As was the custom, it was the honour of the Grenadiers to advance on the extreme right of the battalion, and as Farquharson’s was posted on the far right of the line, Steel’s company now found themselves at the outer limit of the army. But at this moment Steel felt as if they might as well be on another continent.

  As the snuff began to irritate his nasal passages, Hansam sneezed and spoke through his handkerchief. ‘You’re right of course, Jack. But we’ve been advancing now for close on two hours through this damned fog. For all we know the entire French army could be no more than a few yards directly in front of us.’

  Slaughter coughed, respectfully. ‘Oh no, sir. We had his lordship’s word that the French was well to our front. Other side of that village, sir.’

  ‘Village?’ Steel replied.

  ‘Aye, a village, which, were it not for this fog, you would see plain as day directly over there.’ Guessing, he pointed. ‘The village of Autre-Eglise. Our objective.’

  Hansam strained to peer through the fog. ‘Damned strange name.’

  The younger officer, Tom Williams, the company’s ensign, who until now had remained silent, spoke up eagerly. ‘It means “other church” in French, sir.’

  Hansam smiled at him, ‘Thank you, Lieutenant. I was aware of that. But thank you all the same.’

  Steel spoke, ‘So where d’you suppose the first church might be, Tom?’

  Hansam smiled, and seized the opportunity, ‘Why, Jack, in another village, to be sure. Autre, Autre-Village, perhaps.’

  ‘Very droll, Henry. Now I think we had better follow the men, d’you not. It wouldn’t do for them to find the French before we do, eh?’

  As the officers moved away obliquely to their left and front to find their platoon and they all began to advance as fast as the ground permitted, Steel contemplated how life seemed constantly to bring one full circle. He had come through the slaughter of Blenheim two years ago and last year’s bloody adventure in Spain only to find himself back here again on Flanders soil, where his soldiering had begun and where the British army always seemed to be. Flanders – where, at a godforsaken place called Steenkirk, he had first tasted battle, as a seventeen-year-old ensign.

  He had been fourteen years with the colours since then and naturally he knew why they were really here now. Of course, Marlborough needed a victory. Blenheim seemed an age ago and their Dutch allies were becoming restless. Last year had seen no northern triumphs, just an endless succession of marches and counter-marches. True, they had broken the massive French lines of fortification which traversed occupied Belgium. But there had been no opportunity then to exploit that success with a victory in the field. Now, Steel knew, here and in London, Marlborough’s enemies were again intriguing against him. The only answer was a victory. So, they were here to beat the French and if that meant crossing this filthy bog, then that was what they would do. Snapping back to the matter in hand, he grew aware now that, with every step forward they took, their line of battle was becoming increasingly ragged.

  He turned to Slaughter. ‘Try to dress the line, Sarn’t – wherever it is. We can’t afford to lose any men before we’ve even found the enemy.’

  ‘Right you are, Mister Steel.’

  Steel sighed. ‘And Jacob, do try to just address me as “sir”. At least allow me the appearance of being a captain.’

  Steel, although promoted to captain after Blenheim by Marlborough himself, had not yet had the field promotion ratified by the high command at the Horse Guards. That had been two years ago and now he had almost given up hope. He could only presume that he was out of favour at court and he did not need to guess at the reason. He had a lover in London – if that were the right term for someone with whom you had fallen so surely out of love. Arabella Moore was a jealous mistress, ten years his senior and so dangerously close to the queen as to be able to deny him his captaincy. Doubtless Arabella had heard of the romance that Steel had forged in the days before Blenheim, a liaison with a pretty Bavarian girl who he had hoped might bring him lasting happiness. But now Louisa Weber was beyond his reach. On his return from Spain he had found her married to an officer in the Royals. Well, in truth, he too had not been over-faithful to her and so it was for the best. But it had not prevented Arabella’s jealousy, nor her continuing spite. Clearly, if she could not have him, then she was determined at least to block his advancement in the army.

  What, Steel wondered, would he have to do to achieve on paper the promotion he had earned and now so urgently needed? The bounty from Blenheim and most of that he had gleaned in such danger in the previous year’s campaign had dwindled all too fast. Very soon he would again be in serious debt. Pursued yet again, no doubt for the endless round of an officer’s expenses and mess bills by their assiduous regimental adjutant, Major Frampton. He prayed that this coming fight might yield an opportunity for fortune and glory for, in his experience, one seldom came without the other. And neither could be achieved without that danger to which Steel was now so helplessly addicted. For, despite all his horrors of phantoms in the mist, he knew that it was the thrill of beating fate which made him a soldier; the knowledge that at any moment he could be killed or horribly mutilated and the unparalleled exhilaration which came after a battle, that delirious moment when you knew that you had cheated death, once again. There must now be an opportunity for him to impress again, to bring himself to the attention of Marlborough and even the queen herself. He would be gazetted captain.

  A voice brought him back to the present. Slaughter cocked his musket. ‘Rider, sir. Coming from our left.’

  Again, instinctively, Steel’s hand closed around the grip of his sword and he made to draw the blade.

  The cavalryman rode straight at them through the mist. Steel saw a scarlet coat, but knowing that the French too dressed many of their finest cavalry in red, did not relax his hold on the sword but drew it further from its sheath. Slaughter took aim. It was only at ten yards that they realized that the man had not yet drawn his sword and seconds later they saw the green cockade that he wore in his tricorne hat: the allied field recognition symbol for the campaign. Steel recognized him as a young cornet of English cavalry.

  The man reined up, doffed his hat and spoke in clipped and haughty tones which marked his position as an aide-de-camp. ‘Cornet Hamilton, sir. Attached to the general staff. I carry orders from Lord Orkney for Colonel Farquharson. Can you direct me to him? Where is he?’

  Steel smiled at him and indicated the mist. ‘Your guess is as good as mine, Cornet. I think you’d be just as well to give them to me. Captain Steel – I command Farquharson’s Grenadier company.’

  Hamilton frowned and weighed up his options. ‘Very well. Your regiment is to halt at once, Captain. You have advanced too far. The French are standing just beyond this ground. Ten battalions of them at least, as far as we can tell. You will halt and form your lines, here. No further.’

  Steel nodded; ‘Thank you.’ He turned towards Williams who had appeared from the mist. ‘Mister Williams go and find the colonel. Tell him to halt at once. Form lines here.’

  As Williams hurried over to the left of the regiment, Hamilton replaced his hat and pulled round his horse. Steel watched him gallop away into the mist and losing sight of him, returned to the business in hand.

  A hundred yards away to the left, Cornet Hamilton picked his way with care through the redcoated ranks who now stood at ease in their regiments scattered across the hillside. As he approached the rear formations the mist gradually became thinner until he eventually emerged on the crest of a ridge. From here, even thro
ugh the clouds of grey, the entire allied army was laid out before him. He rode slowly along the front of a regiment of Dutch infantry and found a knot of mounted officers, some of whom were attempting through their telescopes to get a better view of the situation unfolding below them. Looking quickly and unobtrusively at their faces he found the man he was seeking and trotting up, reined in, saluted and whispered towards him.

  Close by, but out of earshot, to the front and centre of the group, an upright figure in a red coat emblazoned with a garter star, his gold-trimmed hat crowning an expensive, full-bottomed wig, darted piercing emerald green eyes across the field. John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, captain-general of the allied army, turned to speak to the man at his side, William Cadogan, his trusted quartermaster-general, ‘You know, William, I would that we had gone into Italy, as I had originally planned. But I do believe that we shall beat the French today. So I really must not protest at that prospect. All things told, you must agree that this is good ground. What say you, Field-Marshal Overkirk? Will it suit your Dutch?’

  ‘We will fight the French wherever we may, Your Grace. This is as good a position as I have seen to cross swords with them. My men will not let you down.’

  ‘I am certain of it, Field-Marshal. I have every faith in them.’ He turned back to Cadogan. ‘Is that not so, William? We rank our Dutch allies quite as highly as our own boys.’ Cadogan opened his mouth to reply but was interrupted by a small, dark-haired man with a prominent nose who wore a modest, blue civilian-style coat and sat on a bay horse alongside the duke.

  Mijnheer Sicco van Goslinga, the newly arrived Dutch field deputy to the general staff, had been deep in thought for some minutes. Now he was frowning. He shook his head. ‘I am sorry Your Grace, but I must protest at your opinion. It will not do to deploy on our right. You see the ground there is no more than marsh. With such hedges, ditches and marshes it would be madness to move infantry over such ground. You must agree, sir.’

  Marlborough smiled back at him. ‘Thank you for your advice, Mijnheer. And I shall take note of it and if it should indeed be madness then I give you my word that should it fail I shall summon a physician.’

  Cadogan suppressed the beginnings of a smile.

  Marlborough quickly turned back to his left. ‘Hawkins? Have we intelligence from the right flank? Are Lord Orkney’s men in place?’

  Colonel James Hawkins broke off from his conversation with Cornet Hamilton and nodded to Marlborough. ‘Aye, sir. I have it from the cornet here. They are this moment halted above the village. The right of your line is secure, Your Grace. Although Hamilton here tells me that we just stopped the infantry in time, or our lads would have been on the French already by now.’

  Marlborough laughed. ‘They shall be at them soon enough, James. That will do for the moment.’

  Half a mile away, to Marlborough’s right, another knot of officers stood before their men. Steel peered across the valley. At last the mist was lifting and the countryside was revealed to them. In the course of reforming the line, they had fallen back some fifty yards and found a small area of less boggy ground. Steel gazed now across acres of fields green with young corn, a rolling plateau of open country, quite without hedges or walls of any sort.

  Hansam spoke, ‘This is good cavalry country, Jack. The horses’ll have a field day.’

  ‘I daresay they will, Henry, but it looks rotten bad for us. We’re to take that village and as far as I can see as soon as we step off you can bet that the French artillery will open up. And not so much as a ditch for cover. Nothing to stop a ball from carrying away four, six … ten files of infantry. I wonder that our guns will not do the same, ere long.’

  Beyond the marshes which flanked the stream running below their position on a gentle hill, beyond the waving corn, the entire Franco-Bavarian army stood before them, strung out on a front four miles long. White and blue uniforms as far as the eye could see, punctuated only by the red of the Irish mercenary regiments in French pay – the Wild Geese – and that of the cavalry of King Louis’ own bodyguard, the Gens d’Armes. It was the whole might of France. Well, he thought, they had broken them at Blenheim and they could damn well do it again today.

  Williams spoke, ‘Seems to me there’s more of them here than there were at Blenheim, sir.’

  ‘You may be right, Tom. King Louis has half a million men under arms, they say.’

  ‘But we shall best them again, sir. Of that I’m certain.’

  Steel smiled and clapped the ensign on the back. ‘Aye. I’m as sure as you. Now, look to the men. Don’t have them standing-to for too long at a time. Stand them at ease a while.’

  As Williams looked to his order, Steel gazed down at the ground. For the last few minutes he had been aware that his right leg was slowly sinking into the boggy field. He cursed and began to doubt Williams’ certainty. Not here too? The whole area was sodden. How did Marlborough intend them to advance on this? Struggling to keep his balance and desperate not to reveal his plight to the men, he reached down with both hands to ease his leg free from the mud into which it was disappearing and swore gently into the cool morning. He gave one last pull and with a squelch the tall black boot emerged from the boggy ground. Steel shook his leg, tried to remove some of the mud and looked over his right shoulder.

  Slaughter was grinning, shaking his head. ‘You’re like me, sir. Must ’ave ate too big a breakfast. Don’t know when to stop. Always like that before a fight. Nerves, it is.’

  ‘Jacob, if I wanted your homespun wisdom on the subject of my diet I would ask for it. It’s the ground, man. D’you see? Too soft. Even here.’

  Slaughter stamped his foot which came down hard on the earth. ‘Ground seems fine and firm here to me.’

  Steel was in no mood to be teased. ‘Shut up, Jacob and dress the damned line.’ He paused, regaining his better humour. ‘We must make ourselves pretty for the enemy gunners.’

  Steel turned back to the front and stared at the army before him. In the centre he saw a puff of smoke and an instant later a single cannon shot broke the silence. He watched as the ball arced from the French lines towards the allied centre. Hansam reached into his pocket and brought out the gold half-hunter that he had taken from the body of a dead Bavarian at Blenheim. One of the few timepieces among the officers of the regiment, while it could hardly be called accurate, it was now his most prized possession. He flicked it open.

  ‘One o’clock, precisely. You would not suppose that your Frenchman would be quite so exact. Do you not think, Jack? Sloppy fellows as a rule, you’d say. And you’d be damned right.’ Hansam replaced the watch in his pocket.

  Steel smiled and shook his head. ‘Never underestimate your enemy, Henry. The French may seem to care more about their food and their women than their fighting, but you should remember. In the thick of it and at their best, they’re just as good as you or I.’

  Hardly had the echo of the single French cannon died away than a battery of six English twelve-pounders in the centre of the allied line opened up in reply, sending a hail of roundshot into the enemy infantry. It seemed to Steel that the instant that they fired the French guns too opened up and he watched mesmerized as the balls criss-crossed in a mid-air ballet. There was a curious beauty to it. But all too fleeting, for the reality soon came upon them. He reckoned the range at around a thousand yards. Long, but not quite long enough to spare them from harm.

  To his right Slaughter growled a command: ‘Steady.’

  Steel watched the black dots of the six cannonballs grow larger as they drew ever closer. As always their progress seemed to be slowed down, until in the last fifty yards he lost them as their true speed became evident.

  Slaughter growled again: ‘Steady now.’

  The French gunners, aware of the boggy ground, had fired high for impact rather than attempting to bounce their cannonballs before the enemy for greater effect. Two of the roundshot flew over the heads of the company but four found their mark, crashing into the line of redcoats
and cutting bloody paths through the ranks. One of them took the head off a grenadier and carried it open-mouthed into the rear ranks, mitre cap and all, gouting blood, before smashing into the front two ranks of a regiment to their rear. Just behind Steel a young private, one of the new intake, threw up his meagre breakfast. He heard Slaughter calling to the leading men of the files, ‘Close up. Close the ranks. Someone get rid of that body. You, Jenkins. Move that bloody mess.’

  This was how it always began. Standing in line, bearing the cannon fire until they were at last given the command to attack. It was the proving ground; what transformed a man into a soldier. And Steel knew that there were no better soldiers at standing under fire than the British and no better men among them than the Grenadiers. This was how you learned your trade.

  Steel looked to his left along the line of the entire regiment. In the centre he could see the two colours of shining silk waving in the breeze, one the blue and white saltire of Scotland, the other the colonel’s own colour with the Farquharson arms in the centre of a red ground, crowned with the motto Nemo Me Impune Lacessit: ‘No one provokes me unpunished’. They would prove those words again today, he thought. Before the colours, mounted on a black charger and flanked by the adjutant, Colonel Sir James Farquharson raised his sword high above his head.

  His colonel had grown up in the past two years, thought Steel. Blooded on the field of Blenheim he had earned the respect of his battalion, including that of Steel. The arrogant, vain colonel had given way to a new man, a man hardened to the reality of battle, alive to the responsibilities of raising a regiment. Farquharson was aware at last that this regiment he had paid for, clothed, equipped and trained was no plaything, but a finely honed tool of war, an instrument to be cherished, nurtured. Yes, thought Steel, you deserve to be our colonel now old man, and we deserve you. As he watched, Sir James brought down the sword, its point levelled towards the enemy. Even above the gunfire, Steel caught the words of command. ‘ ’Tallion will advance … Advance.’