The Iron Stallions

by Max Hennessy

  Already, however, four regiments had been selected for disbandment and the mess began to take sides.

  ‘The real trouble,’ Ellesmere said, ‘is that everybody’s sick of war and they’re using it to bring in colossal service cuts.’

  ‘Trust me to join the army just when it’s beginning to fade away,’ Reeves complained. ‘I didn’t join to see it fall apart. I joined for loot and lust, in that order.’

  ‘The Regiment’ll lose men,’ Morby-Smith insisted. ‘We’ll have the NCOs deciding to buy themselves out. Wives have a tremendous influence.’

  ‘Why don’t they amalgamate the regiments?’ someone else asked. ‘The decision would be accepted as a patriotic duty.’

  ‘They’d make a mess of it,’ Ellesmere decided. ‘The regiment’s the foundation of everything.’

  ‘There’d be quicker promotion in the slow regiments.’

  ‘It’d be a self-inflicted wound.’

  For every argument there was an answer and for every answer a new argument.

  ‘What will they do about the traditions, for God’s sake? And what about the uniforms? I can just imagine the 16th giving up their scarlet jackets.’

  ‘Or us giving up the green. I can also just imagine what’ll happen when they bury some field marshal. They’ll get the whole thing wrong, argue about dress, badges and tunes, and then the trumpeter who sounds the Last Post will have the wrong colour busby bag. It’ll make the poor old bugger turn in his grave.’

  If it was baffling to Josh it was even more so to Reeves.

  ‘Is it always like this?’ he asked, bewildered.

  ‘Most of the time.’

  ‘How the blazes do they fight? They spend all their time arguing over niceties of dress or behaviour.’

  ‘Curiously enough,’ Josh said, ‘that’s the very thing that makes them fight better.’

  ‘I’m beginning to wish I’d done what my kid brother did and opted for the RAF.’ Reeves Minor, it seemed, had been accepted for Cranwell, the new RAF college. ‘God knows how he’ll manage,’ his brother said. ‘He’s no head for heights. Ailsa had to get him down when he went climbing at Flamborough Head last summer.’

  ‘How is Ailsa?’ Josh asked.

  ‘Coming down to London next week-end with my mother for the Armistice Day service at the Cenotaph. You’ll remember I lost my Old Man in 1914 and my Cousin George on the Somme, and since the family’s sending a detachment, I’ve got the week-end off.’

  ‘So’ve I,’ Josh smiled. ‘I only just qualify, of course, because my father actually died after the Armistice.’

  ‘Better join us,’ Reeves suggested. ‘My kid brother’ll be there with his girl friend, and Caroline Brett-Johnston’s coming. She’s half-expecting to get engaged to me, I think.’

  ‘She’ll have a long wait,’ Josh warned. ‘Subalterns may not marry, captains might, majors should and colonels must. You’ve a long way to go.’

  Reeves grinned. ‘Oh, well, it’s no loss. She ain’t as good- looking as she used to be, anyway. Too much hunting. Beginning to look like a horse. If you put a saddle on her and sent her down to the starting post for the four-thirty, nobody would notice. Looks like Ailsa’s wait’s going to be a long one, too.’

  ‘Who’s Ailsa engaged to?’

  ‘Nobody. But she’s got her eye on you. Make no mistake about it, old boy. Joining the ranks put the tin lid on it. You can do no wrong.’

  Six

  In his usual easy-going manner, Toby Reeves dawdled over breakfast and, missing the first train to London, they only just managed to clamber aboard the last coach of the second. As they pushed down the corridor towards a first-class compartment, Reeves smiled and nodded to his right and Josh found himself looking at a girl wearing a cloche hat, with good legs and neat dark hair. Reeves had quite recovered his equanimity, despite the rush, and was just working himself up to trying to make her acquaintance when his face changed.

  ‘I say, old boy,’ he murmured, ‘Isn’t that your batman, Bawtry?’

  Josh peered into the third-class compartment at the man reading a newspaper alongside the girl. ‘Yes, by God, it is,’ he said. ‘It’s also my suit, one of my shirts, my umbrella and my second-best hat.’

  Reeves grinned. ‘Tryin’ it on, old man,’ he said. ‘Old rankers stickin’ together.’

  When the train arrived in London Josh was out on the platform at once. As he saw Bawtry descend he touched Reeves’ arm. ‘See you later,’ he said.

  As Bawtry marched towards the exit, lean, upright and smart in Josh’s checked suit with a handkerchief in his breast pocket and a poppy in his buttonhole, he heard a voice behind him.

  ‘Morning, Bawtry!’

  As Bawtry stopped and turned, the smile on his face died abruptly and he stiffened to attention.

  ‘Forty-eight hour pass, Bawtry?’ Josh asked quietly.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Bawtry’s face had gone red. ‘You was goin’ off for the week-end yourself, sir, so I thought I’d put in for one as well.’

  ‘I bet you did. And you thought it was safe to borrow my suit, too, didn’t you? Unfortunately, I didn’t catch the train you expected me to catch.’

  ‘Ah–’ Bawtry began to stammer ‘–well I can explain that, sir–’

  ‘Don’t bother, Bawtry,’ Josh said grimly. ‘I shall be asking for a new batman. In the meantime, you’d better be getting back to barracks.’

  ‘Sir, I’m on a forty-eight–!’

  ‘You were, Bawtry, you were! You aren’t any more. I could have you up before the CO for this, but I’m not going to and, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll do as I say. You’ll go back by the next train and tomorrow you will take that suit and hat to the cleaners and that shirt to the laundry. And you will pay the damage. I shall want to see the bill.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘And I shall check at the guardroom to see what time you returned, so don’t try taking a pint in the local with your pals.’ Josh was about to turn away when he stopped and faced Bawtry once more. ‘And, Bawtry, for the future, don’t try to put anything across me again. I may not be as old as you but, through my family, I’ve been in the army quite as long as you have. Now, beat it.’

  ‘Sort him out, old fruit?’ Reeves asked as Josh slipped in alongside his family near the Cenotaph.

  ‘I think so,’ Josh murmured.

  ‘Up before the CO?’

  ‘No. But he’ll not do it again.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ Ailsa hissed. ‘The King’s arrived.’

  Their bemedalled surplices stirring in the breeze, padres were intoning prayers, then the voices of soldiers and ex-soldiers lifted in unison.

  ‘Oh, God our help in ages past–’

  The faint hooting of motor cars from Trafalgar Square came over the words of the chaplain reading the lesson, then they sang O, Valiant Hearts, and trumpeters of the Household Cavalry raised their instruments for the Last Post. At the first note, the pigeons whirled, clattering, to the roofs but they had settled again on the pavements for the silence as the remembrances were intoned.

  ‘They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old.

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn–’

  Josh felt his eyes pricking as they had not pricked since his grandfather’s funeral. With his father’s grave at the other end of the Mediterranean, that funeral had had to serve for both of them and an enormous sense of loss flooded over him.

  Heels together, chins out, thumbs at the seams of their trousers, they stood stiffly for the two minutes’ silence and the National Anthem. As the final salute was given, the old soldiers marched past behind the bands, heads up in the thin sunshine, campaign medals catching the sun. Josh had no conception of what this ceremony meant to these older men, but he’d heard his grandfather talk of m
emories. ‘They play puck with your inside,’ he had said once, and it was clear it was playing puck with these men today.

  ‘What happens to them when it’s over?’ Reeves asked as the last group marched past and the crowd began to disperse.

  ‘Drinks together,’ Josh said. ‘Then I suppose they hang feedbags on themselves and bed down for the night before going home tomorrow.’

  ‘Gets you,’ Reeves observed. ‘Never realised till now.’

  It was true, Josh thought. The army was a funny institution. Composed of people who were not supposed to be given to emotion, it still brought you close to tears at times.

  They ate at the Café Royal and because the weather was good they strolled in the park. As the two Reeves brothers paired off with their girl friends, Josh found himself with Ailsa, and because it was cold, she clung to his arm.

  ‘Not done in best cavalry circles,’ he observed. ‘Supposed to walk very straight, carry an umbrella, wear your bowler top-dead centre, avoid smoking in the streets and, above all, eschew strolling in Hyde Park with a pretty girl on your arm.’

  Somehow – Josh decided later it was a put-up job – the Reeves brothers managed to lose them and he found himself with Ailsa on her own. Because it was sunny, he took her to Hampton Court and they ate a tea of cream cakes. In the evening, he suggested seeing her to her mother’s hotel before heading for the station to catch the train back to barracks.

  ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you to the station. Stations are places for goodbyes, not hotel foyers.’

  On the platform, Ailsa stood very close to him. As the guard went along the train slamming doors, he touched Josh’s arm. ‘We’re going now, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’ Josh looked down at Ailsa. She was gazing up at him in a way he’d never noticed before and, abruptly, he bent down and kissed her. She kissed him back eagerly, then stepped back, her eyes shining. ‘Don’t forget to write, Josh,’ she said.

  As the train drew out, he saw her standing on the platform waving a handkerchief, small and forlorn, and he found himself wondering what he’d started.

  Back at barracks he found the place in ferment. Rumour had it that the regiment was to amalgamate with the 23rd Lancers.

  ‘Good God,’ Reeves said. ‘They’re only a half-baked lot who were formed at the end of the last century! They don’t know one end of a horse from the other.’

  ‘19th/23rd Lancers,’ Josh murmured. ‘It sounds like a chemical formula.’

  ‘They wear blue,’ Ellesmere pointed out. ‘We wear green. What the devil will we wear now?’

  ‘Blue and green stripes, I expect,’ Reeves said.

  ‘What’s their motto?’

  ‘A star.’

  ‘What a bloody unimaginative lot! How about the title? Anybody know?’

  ‘First at everything. In Latin, of course. Ubique primus. Something like that.’

  ‘How the hell do you marry Aut Primus Aut Nullus with Ubique Primus?’

  ‘Since cavalrymen are supposed to be as good at love as they are at riding,’ Ellesmere said, ‘how about “Our arms are our defence”?’

  ‘My girl friend,’ Morby-Smith smiled, ‘would probably prefer “Our arms their recompense.’

  ‘How about a new one,’ Josh offered. ‘Love and ride away?’

  ‘If we’re going to be mechanised,’ Reeves said, ‘it ought to be “Screw and bolt.”’

  Leduc’s saturnine face was smiling. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we’d better stick to the conventional and make sure we keep ours. After all, the 23rd were only an East India Company Regiment. Bengal Light Cavalry, weren’t they? Came into the British Army in 1860.’

  For the next three weeks, the Colonel, the adjutant and the squadron commanders seemed to have vanished without trace as they held urgent and acrimonious discussions with the colonel and senior officers of the 23rd as to what they were to wear and what their motto and title should be. The Colonel of the 19th proved to be either the tougher bargainer or the more seasoned campaigner, because he brought a few powerful names into the argument at War Office level and they ended up with the information that, though the 19th were to give up their green jackets for the blue of the 23rd, they were to retain the red plastron as it was common to both regiments, while overalls would remain the gold-striped green of the 19th.

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ Leduc observed. ‘We’ll still be able to borrow a pair from the Inniskillings if things go wrong.’

  Compromise on the motto was to be achieved by placing the 19th’s clutching eagle on the background of a star, while the motto was to remain Aut Primus Aut Nullus. The 19th decided that if they had not won a major victory, at least they had come off best. But, as they settled back to enjoy their success, information arrived that the amalgamation had fallen through and instead they were to prepare themselves for mechanisation.

  ‘Can you imagine it?’ Josh said. ‘Cavalry barracks without a horse, the stables changed to garages, and instead of the smell of dung the stink of oil, petrol and exhausts.’

  ‘At least,’ Reeves pointed out, ‘we’ll have workshops and be able to get our cars repaired more cheaply. My brother says the RAF encourages officers to use workshop facilities for their cars so they’ll get to know more about engines in general. After all, there can be nothing worse than floating around at ten thousand feet and have the plugs oil up.’

  The prospect of mechanisation produced vehement discussion.

  ‘How the hell can we go on calling ourselves lancers?’ one of the senior captains growled. ‘A lancer’s a horsed soldier armed with a lance. Sitting in a tank you’re nothing but a blasted mechanic.’

  ‘I think I’ll resign,’ another senior officer observed. ‘I got into a tank during the war and, having got out of it, have never experienced any desire to get in another. Dammit, tanks only go at a few miles an hour and they need petrol.’

  Leduc joined in quietly. ‘And horses require fodder,’ he pointed out. ‘In 1917, the amount of fodder we needed stopped the army dead. Because we don’t understand it, we’re throwing away an opportunity. They discovered long since that by fitting an aeroplane engine they could get a Mark V tank up to twenty miles an hour. Let them do that and we’re back in business. In our present form, we’re an anachronism retained purely for traditional or sentimental reasons. And personally, having tried both, I’d far rather face machine guns surrounded by armour plate than sitting in a saddle like a tit on a mountain.’

  It stopped the argument dead.

  The great Fuller appeared, to make clear what was intended, or at least what he thought was intended.

  ‘Let’s face it,’ he said, ‘the Aldershot tattoo, though a fine spectacle, has nothing to do with soldiering and the only reason for it is the army’s love of fuss and feathers. We need tanks, but everybody’s scared stiff that one day we shall have a grubby tank man commanding a division. Should we disperse them throughout the whole of the army? Should they go at their own speed or should they go at a speed which the infantry feels they ought to go at? – the speed of a heavily-loaded soldier on foot, because if they don’t they’ll out-distance a marching man. And, anyway, how would they be supplied?’ He paused. ‘Why not put the infantry in tanks? Why not put artillery in tanks? Why not put supplies in tanks? And before anybody asks the usual question about how is it going to be afforded, let me point out that mass production’s arrived.’

  It seemed to make sense and Josh found that more and more he was beginning to accept the idea of mechanisation, and even beginning to look forward to the arrival of the first powered vehicle in front of the stables, which was where they’d have to put it because there was nowhere else.

  ‘I’m glad to see you’re showing sense, my lad,’ Leduc said quietly. ‘Because we’re going to need tactics in the next war, not cenotaphics. We nee
d a little more thought to keep our soldiers alive and a little less to mourning those who’re dead.’ It seemed a shocking sentiment, so soon after Armistice Day, but Leduc was unrepentant. ‘There’s too much emotion,’ he insisted. ‘And most of it’s civilian emotion. Civilians could never understand how a soldier could strip the boots off a dead man and put them on his own feet. But a soldier with bare feet never saw much wrong in it. It’s an attitude we’re going to need. In 1914, it was the French who wanted revenge for 1870, now it’s the Germans who want revenge for 1918.’

  It gave Josh a lot to think about. There was still no sign of vehicles, however, and they were still dependent on the horse-drawn cart for supplies, and always there was the mind-numbing business of documentation, the filling in of forms to satisfy the War Office. Life became a round of office routine, stables, and leave. Because they hadn’t yet received vehicles, they still had to train recruits to ride. They were even still occupied with the business of breeding and choosing horses – all of which would probably end up pulling milk carts – the cost of saddlery they weren’t going to need, the fit of a rifle bucket, the quality of a picketing rope. While all the time, the Government, influenced by the depression that had the whole world by the throat, seemed to think only of cutting. Establishments were closed down, officers were retired early, regiments diminished in size, despite the fact that there were thousands of unemployed who would have been more than willing to exchange the dole queues for a uniform and three good meals a day.