Company Of Spears
( Matthew Hervey - 8 )
Allan Mallinson
The eighth novel in the acclaimed and bestselling series finds Hervey on his way to South Africa where he is preparing to form a new body of cavalry, the Cape Mounted Rifles.
All looks set fair for Major Matthew Hervey: news of a handsome legacy should allow him to purchase command of his beloved regiment, the 6th Light Dragoons. He is resolved to marry, and rather to his surprise, the object of his affections — the widow of the late Sir Ivo Lankester — has readily consented. But he has reckoned without the opportunism of a fellow officer with ready cash to hand; and before too long, he is on the lookout for a new posting. However, Hervey has always been well-served by old and loyal friends, and Eyre Somervile comes to his aid with the means of promotion: there is need of a man to help reorganize the local forces at the Cape Colony, and in particular to form a new body of horse.
At the Cape, Hervey is at once thrown into frontier skirmishes with the Xhosa and Bushmen, but it is Eyre Somervile’s instruction to range deep across the frontier, into the territory of the Zulus, that is his greatest test. Accompanied by the charming, cultured, but dissipated Edward Fairbrother, a black captain from the disbanded Royal African Corps and bastard son of a Jamaican planter, he makes contact with the legendary King Shaka, and thereafter warns Somervile of the danger that the expanding Zulu nation poses to the Cape Colony.
The climax of the novel is the battle of Umtata River (August 1828), in which Hervey has to fight as he has never fought before, and in so doing saves the life of the nephew of one of the Duke of Wellington’s closest friends.
COMPANY
OF SPEARS
ALLAN MALLINSON
Also Allan Mallison
AND FEATURING MATTHEW HERVEY
A CLOSE RUN THING
1815: introducing Matthew Hervey, fighting for King and country
at the Battle of Waterloo.
‘I have never read a more enthralling account of a battle … This is
the first in a series of Matthew Hervey adventures. The next can’t
come soon enough for me’
DAILY MAIL
THE NIZAM’S DAUGHTERS
1816: in India Matthew Hervey fights to prevent bloody civil war.
‘Captain Hervey of the 6th Light Dragoons and ADC to the Duke
of Wellington is back in the saddle … He is as fascinating on
horseback as Jack Aubrey is on the quarterdeck’
THE TIMES
A REGIMENTAL AFFAIR
1817: Matthew Hervey faces renegades at home and in North America.
A riveting tale of heroism, derring-do and enormous resource in the
face of overwhelming adversity’
BIRMINGHAM POST
A CALL TO ARMS
1819: Matthew Hervey races to confront Burmese rebels massing in the jungle.
‘Hervey continues to grow in stature as an engaging and credible
character, while Mallinson himself continues to delight’
OBSERVER
THE SABRE’S EDGE
1824: in India Matthew Hervey lays siege to the fortress of Bhurtpore.
‘Splendid… the tale is as historically stimulating
as it is stirringly exciting’
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
RUMOURS OF WAR
1826: while Matthew Hervey prepares for civil war in Portugal, he
remembers the Retreat to Corunna twenty years previously.
‘I enjoyed the adventure immensely … as compelling, vivid and
plausible as any war novel I’ve ever read’
ANDREW ROBERTS, DAILY TELEGRAPH
AN ACT OF COURAGE
1826: a prisoner of the Spanish, Matthew Hervey relives the blood
and carnage of the Siege of Badajoz.
‘Concentrating on the battle of Talavera and the investment of
Badajoz, both sparklingly described, [Mallinson]plays to his
undoubted strengths’
OBSERVER
COMPANY OF SPEARS
1827: on the plains of South Africa, Matthew Hervey
confronts the savage Zulu.
A damn fine rip-roaring read’
LITERARY REVIEW
FOREWORD
The historian Correlli Barnett (Britain and Her Army) describes how ‘thanks to their mercenary army’ Britain as a whole ‘would never feel the burden of world power in the Victorian age … The British could rage at military incompetence when the army they neglected (and never joined) suffered some disaster … they could presume to take pride in victories won despite their indifference. War became a noise far away.’
Matthew Hervey and the 6th Light Dragoons knew about noise far away: they had heard it well enough in India. But they also knew there could be noise at home – if not actual war then certainly something as repugnant, for in 1827 the Metropolitan Police Act was still two years off, and the magistrates’ only recourse was to the army when civil disturbance threatened.
There was Ireland too, restive in its condition of exploitative poverty and discriminatory legislation. Britons were divided over the Catholic question – giving Catholics the vote and removing the obstacles to holding public office – ‘Catholic Emancipation’. There were no riots against Emancipation yet, as there had been the century before; but there was suspicion, and the authorities had no certain idea where it would lead. There was, indeed, ‘noise’ enough to disturb a good night’s sleep from time to time, if not so much as to keep the country awake for too long.
So Matthew Hervey, thirty-six years old, and in the midst of that glorious metamorphosis from a regimental to a commanding officer, finds himself in noisy circumstances once again. And, naturally, he meets those who would put fingers in their ears rather than deal with the noise. For this is an age when change, change in the army, is regarded as unnecessary, perhaps even injurious to those regimental qualities that had assured victory at Waterloo: discipline, personal bravery and boldness in combat.
Meanwhile, in Prussia, a major general not very much older than Hervey – Carl von Clausewitz – who had fought the French that day in 1815, is putting the final touches to his penetrating study of war and its practice, so that if a Prussian army were again required to do its Kaiser’s will it would do so with absolute efficiency. And at the other end of the technological spectrum, in southern Africa, an instinctive soldier, Shaka, King of the Zulu, is consolidating his astonishing military successes; for in truth Shaka and Clausewitz speak the same military language.
It is these old questions and new threats that Matthew Hervey and the 6th Light Dragoons face, and whose new lessons and old truths they will have to learn and re-learn – painfully.
Allan Mallinson
July 2005
Rebuke the company of spearmen…
scatter thou the people that delight in war.
PSALM 68
PART I
PATHS OF GLORY
England
Plan of the Royal Gunpowder Manufactory at Waltham Abbey in 1830 by Frederick Drayson from his A Treatise on Gunpowder. The National Archive, ref. MFII 15/31
I
MANOEUVRES
Hounslow Heath, 12 March 1827
Acting-Major Matthew Hervey nodded to the adjutant, and in as many seconds only as it took for him, the officer in temporary command of the 6th Light Dragoons, to rein round to face front again, the first section of the Chestnut Troop discharged a thunderous salvo. Gilbert, his battle-charger, and at rising fifteen years a seasoned campaigner, threw up his head but did not move a foot. Hervey let out the reins a little so that the iron grey gelding could play with the bit as reward.
He looked over his left shoulder, then his right. The lines were ragged. Troop horses had leapt forward, some had run back, others had reared and turned. Barely half the regiment stood as they had been dressed. Even his trumpeter’s grey, a mare which should have known better, was showing a flank and bucking hard, determined to unseat her rider.
Hervey nodded again, the adjutant raised his arm, and the Chestnuts’ second section fired. As the smoke cleared, he could see the first section’s men standing ready, guns reloaded, and second section’s beginning the thirty fevered seconds of swabbing, ramming and tamping before the number one could shout ‘On!’ to tell his section officer that the gun was shotted and re-laid on its target.
Except that there was no shot or target. The Chestnut (more properly the First) Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, fired blank this morning. They did so to accustom the remounts – and recruits – of the 6th Light Dragoons to the noise of battle. It was not much by way of comparison with the real thing, Hervey knew (by God, how he knew!), but it was a good deal better than nothing; and certainly a good deal better than the usual method, the band’s banging and crashing on the square. It was decent of the Chestnuts to oblige them thus, although the Sixth had paid for the powder; and in any case, Hervey thought there must be gain for the Chestnuts too, for there was nothing like the thrill of real powder instead of ‘dry’ drills on the parade ground – even if the gun jumped back not a fraction of what it would when shotted and full-charged. He would have each of them fire in turn now, six nine-pounders, to test the nerve of the horses which had been half petrified into docility by the two salvos. He nodded to the adjutant a third time.
Number one gun fired, and the remaining rooks in the distant elms took flight, so that Hervey imagined there was not a bird perched on any branch on Hounslow Heath.
‘Rugged elms,’ he mused. He liked elms. As a boy he had climbed them, about the churchyard in Horningsham, to test his courage or to see what the tall nests held. Or sometimes on the plain to gain a distant prospect. He loved the elm-lined lanes in high summer, dark leafy tunnels where he might catch sight of a roe deer at midday – still, secret places, a foreign land, far from the safe parsonage and yet within sound of the church bell. There were no elms in foreign lands, though. Or if there were, they were poor specimens: he had seen none he could recall in France, or Belgium, none in the forests of the east – India, Ava – and certainly not in Spain and Portugal. Yet there must have been … but not the ‘rugged elm’. He thought of his Wiltshire churchyard again, ‘where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap’; beneath the tall elms, where ‘the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep’. Yes, the elm had a power to command attention, more so even than the oak. Elms were England’s leafy witnesses – to village-Hampdens, mute inglorious Miltons and guiltless Cromwells, as well as to the great men themselves. What was it in that poem that could conjure a vision of his youth – his simpler, honest, chaste youth? Was it true that General Wolfe (as brave as any man to wear the King’s uniform) had said before battle that he would rather have composed Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard than take Quebec? Hervey did not suppose that Wolfe had meant it to be taken exactly literally, if he had said it at all; nevertheless there lay power in those words, power to invoke a visceral love of country. Was it not time for him, now, to return to the elms of Horningsham, to ‘the blazing hearth’, and to his makings? The question was point-less: behind him, albeit under his temporary orders, was his regiment – his regiment! This was what he had dreamed of for long years. There could never be a going back. Not, surely, without diminution? But was that not to pit himself against Gray’s own injunction: ‘Let not ambition mock their useful toil’? He must not allow himself conceit in this temporary command:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.
(He shuddered)
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Number two gun fired. Gilbert snorted. Number four followed three with but a split second’s interval. The last of the rooks, bravest of the brave, quit the furthest elms. Hervey glanced over his shoulder. The sight was no boast of heraldry, nor of anything else for that matter. He would have the Chestnut Troop blaze away until both ranks of the regiment, three squadrons in line, were dressed with a decent semblance of security (and he wondered if the Chestnuts would run out of powder before then). Then he would have his dragoons draw carbines, load and fire, return carbines, draw sabres and advance in line. They would not finish with a charge, however, as field days usually required: the heath was too broken to risk a gallop in regimental line – not, at least, with so many new men and horses.
Number five gun fired and a trooper from C Troop bolted, its rider, a seasoned dragoon, hauling on the reins for all he was worth but without effect. The Chestnuts’ captain tried to stay number six gun, but it fired prematurely. The sponger was hurled a hundred yards still clutching the ramrod, and the ventsman was thrown to the ground beside the trail.
It oughtn’t to happen, Hervey knew, but it did occasionally: all it took was a piece of wadding still glowing when the next charge was loaded. ‘Insufficient sponging,’ he said to himself. ‘Poor devil.’
The Chestnuts’ captain ordered his first section to continue the firing while the rest of the premature’s crew doubled forward to recover the unfortunate gun number. They found him with not a mark on his face or hands, but motionless, his neck snapped. As they picked the man up, the runaway from C Troop found a rabbit hole and somersaulted twice, driving a shoe into the face of its floored rider. No one moved to his aid; no one would, not without the order of the officer commanding.
When neither horse nor rider rose, Hervey turned to the adjutant. ‘Have C Troop bring in their man,’ he said, sounding weary.
* * *
The Chestnuts thundered away for a full ten minutes more. Slowly the Sixth’s lines began to straighten, and the troopers to stand quiet. Hervey was at last gratified. It had been barely a year since they had stood before the walls of the great fortress at Bhurtpore, where thirty times the number of guns had each thrown three times the weight of shot that horse artillery could dispose, and yet the regiment could not be called ‘steady to fire’. It was not their fault, and certainly not his predecessor’s in command, for the regiment had not brought those battle-hardened horses back from India with them, exchanging them instead (as required by the War Office for reasons of economy) with the outgoing regiment at Hounslow.
Predecessor in command: he ought to say predecessors, for there had been three officers with the privilege of commanding dragoons in the past twelve months or so. Hervey sighed. What a sorry procession it had been. Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Ivo Lankester, Bart, whose elder brother had been killed in temporary command of the regiment at Waterloo, had died at the head of his men in the storming of Bhurtpore, leaving a wife of but a year, and with child. Command had devolved without purchase therefore on the senior major, Eustace Joynson, a man much loved by all ranks for his devotion to duty, and facility with administration. But Joynson was a tired man and full of sadness (a wayward daughter – his ‘life sentence’ as he confessed to Hervey). He was ill-fitted to command, and he knew it, and so he had taken the windfall lieutenant-colonelcy to the regimental agents (it was said he would get fifteen thousand for it at least), and in the interim, while the commander-in-chief’s staff considered the bids, so to speak, the Sixth had come under the orders of Hervey’s old friend Major Benedict Strickland. Strickland had been senior to him by months only, but Hervey had looked forward nevertheless to rejoining the regiment after his ill-starred mission in Portugal. In all likelihood, Hervey reckoned, Strickland had been the first Catholic to have command of a regiment under a Hanoverian king, albeit temporary command, for the Test Act required that all holders of military office be communicants of the Church of England (as well as taking the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, denying the
doctrine of Transubstantiation). The Relief Act of 1793 had opened a door to Catholic officers, if a very small one, requiring a simple oath of loyalty rather than anything troubling to tender consciences; and Strickland had observed his religion discreetly. Even so, he had not always found things easy. When the Earl of Towcester – infamous memory! – had commanded, ten years past, ‘damned papists’ had been his taunt, but always protected by position, so that Strickland would have been on uncertain ground had he called him out.
Well, thought Hervey, watching C Troop’s orderly corporal bringing the motionless dragoon to where the surgeon stood, Strickland had endured those years with commendable dignity. He had deserved his honour. It had been the cruellest fate that in three months he was dead too, killed in a smash with the Oxford mail as his chariot raced back to Hounslow along the foggy turnpike. Hervey had dined with him that very evening, and Strickland had taken him back to the United Service Club afterwards. Hervey’s last words on bidding his old friend goodnight had been a promise to join him at Hounslow within the week.
And how he had looked forward to that. The Spanish business (or ought he to say Portuguese?) had left a bitter taste. He had gone to Lisbon full of hope. Kat – Lady Katherine Greville – the much younger wife of old, absentee Lieutenant-General Sir Peregrine Greville, and some years now Hervey’s lover-patroness, had got him the commission through her influence with the Duke of Wellington. And then affairs had rapidly turned sour. He had fallen out with his commanding officer, Colonel Norris, over the best means of deploying the army of intervention (he could not feel much regret for that, since Norris was a tedious, pedantic, narrow-thinking artilleryman; though he had been his commanding officer), and although Hervey had been vindicated in his estimate of what was the best course for the army, he had paid a heavy price: he had never expected to see the fortress of Badajoz again, and certainly not as a prisoner. He had escaped – not without bloodshed – but to the prospect of court martial. Had he not had friends, ‘friends at court’ (and Kat was, as ever, his most assiduous friend in that regard), he was sure he would have been finished.
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