Blunted Lance

by Max Hennessy

  Mortigny was full of relieved regiments, infantry and cavalry all mixed up together, wandering about in aimless fashion, all too tired to care. Most of them were bowed and limping, muddy ghosts who looked in their stained uniforms as if they’d been buried and dug up again. Scores had gone to sleep on the pavement, their backs against the walls, indifferent to the appeals of NCOs and officers. Food had been brought up and those who were awake munched thick sandwiches of bread and bully beef, their faces brooding and enigmatic, their mouths pursed round the stumps of Woodbines.

  The wounded were being gathered in a field behind the Mairie. The anaesthesia of shock was wearing off now and pain and thirst were setting in among the torn bodies. A doctor, wearing a bloodstained apron, moved among them giving injections of morphia and anti-tetanus, and the whole area under the Red Cross flag stank of carbolic, ether and chloroform.

  Gathering the regiment together, they began to call the roll. Leduc was swaying with fatigue as he stood near Ellis Ackroyd exclaiming the names in front of Sergeant-Major Waterford. They seemed not to have eaten a proper meal or slept for days and Dabney was light-headed with exhaustion. Somewhere, he knew, he would sleep and that was the only thing in his mind. For the moment, all he knew was that the cavalry corps had virtually ceased to exist.

  Brigadier Farrar was moving through the crowding men. He looked worn-out and the wounded staff officer who had been with him had disappeared.

  ‘Leave them,’ he was saying to a subaltern trying to rouse a group of infantrymen. ‘Let them sleep. I’ve arranged transport. There are buses coming to take them away.’

  Ackroyd had finished calling the roll by this time. It hadn’t taken long, and Sergeant-Major Waterford was now addressing the survivors.

  ‘That lot can go in buses if they like,’ he said. ‘We shall march out. I know they call us the Manure Shifters but we’re more than that. We’re Goff’s Greens. Goff’s Gamecocks. The Clutchers. The Widowmakers. And, by God, we’ve made a few widows these last few days.’

  It raised a smile. It was the old magic working. They weren’t fighting to defend Belgium or save France. Not even to protect Britain or the King. They were fighting for the Regiment. A soldier’s loyalty was always to his regiment. He knew everything about it. It was his family and it was to the regiment that he directed his energy. The British soldier’s feet, like his head, were not his strong point, but they all knew what the Sergeant-Major meant. Marching out was a gesture and, while gestures could sometimes be pointless, this one was being made to indicate that they were the best regiment in the British Army, something every other single regiment in their simple faith also believed.

  Recovered now, the horses were waiting two miles to the rear. Ackroyd got somebody to play the mouth organ and they marched off singing. It was poor singing but they marched in step, their boots barely leaving the cobbled road, their bodies rocking from side to side like automata, using what energy they had left to lift their legs one after the other, concentrating everything in getting each foot forward, as if that were the only way they could move.

  As he watched them pass, Dabney noticed Farrar standing near to him. As the column of worn men trudged by, Leduc, who was leading, ordered them to march at attention and ordered ‘Eyes right’. Somehow, the fours of shuffling men picked up the step and found their files. Shoulders were thrust back and heads clicked to the right as they plodded past.

  Farrar swallowed. ‘Well done, Lancers,’ he said. ‘Well done, well done!’ He touched Dabney’s arm and gestured. ‘Off you go, my boy. Take care of them. They’re splendid chaps.’

  As the last files passed, Dabney saw dirty faces blurred by a fuzz of beard, eyes blank and staring into nothingness. They were a resilient lot and a long sleep and a hot meal would restore them remarkably. These were his men, he thought. They had responded to everything he had asked of them. Their entry into the war as horse soldiers had been short and sweet but in their new role they had let no one down, neither their country nor their Regiment. The army, he decided, was a strange institution. Composed of hard-boiled soldiers not given to emotion, men whose minds were all too often concerned only with food, booze and women, it still had the ability to move a man to the point of tears.

  Six

  The autumn fields of Yorkshire were full of blue mist that clung to the hollows and gave a ghostly look to the leafless trees. As Josh and his grandfather galloped round the curves of the hills, the sheep scattered in front of them, their resentful baas as harsh as the sound of crows in the tall oaks by the church.

  Josh was riding a dappled pony he’d been given for his birthday and the old man was astride an ugly hunter with a fiddle head and a long upper lip which had carried him uncomplainingly across country for years. It was an enormous animal that looked far too strong for the old man but it was a bold jumper which never refused and though it lacked pace it never reached the end of its stamina and perfectly suited the Field Marshal who no longer wished to hurry.

  They handed over the horses at the door of the Manor and clumped inside, Josh feeling twice his normal size. He had first been taken hunting by his grandfather and it always gave him pleasure to ride with him when he was not at school. The arrival of the old man’s trap outside the front door of his home and the sight of the grinning face of one of the Ackroyds as he waited to drive him the few miles to where his grandfather would invariably be stamping up and down the hall of Braxby Manor expecting his arrival always set his heart thumping.

  In the library the old man poured himself a strong whisky and soda to warm himself, singing to himself as he lifted the decanter.

  ‘Wrap me up in my old stable jacket

  And say a poor devil lies low—’

  ‘What’s that, Grandpa?’ Josh asked.

  ‘Song,’ the old man said. ‘Soldier’s song. About cavalrymen.’

  ‘Finish it.’

  ‘—And six of the Lancers shall carry me

  To the place where the best soldiers go.’

  The old man’s voice, quavery and out of tune, wavered to a stop and he looked round sheepishly at his grandson.

  ‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘Song about death and funerals. Not for a youngster. Old soldiers know a lot of songs like that.’

  He moved to the fire and took a long pull at the whisky. ‘Better than tea,’ he observed. ‘Tea’s a flat-footed dismounted drink. Rots your inside.’

  The newspaper had been left for him and as he sat down in the leather armchair he favoured, so that Josh could drag off his boots, he lifted it to read the headlines.

  RETREAT HALTED, they announced. ALLIED TROOPS MOVE FORWARD ALL ALONG THE LINE. VICTORY IN SIGHT.

  ‘Tripe,’ he said. ‘Rubbish!’

  Placing the boots in the hall, Josh returned in his stockinged feet. ‘Why is it tripe, Grandpa?’

  The old man frowned. ‘Ain’t possible, boy. With the size of the BEF and after all the casualties we’ve suffered, we couldn’t possibly be in sight of victory.’

  Squatting on the floor near him, Josh began to study the pictures in the illustrated magazine which was delivered with the newspaper especially for his visits. Some enterprising publisher had seen a quick profit in the war, and for the most part its policy was one of unrestrained optimism.

  ‘It says here,’ he pointed out, ‘that the shellfire’s terrifying at first to new troops.’

  ‘It’s not all that pleasant to old ones!’

  ‘It says the Germans ran away. Have you ever run away, Grandpa?’

  ‘Yes. But never fast enough for me.’

  ‘Is being afraid the worst thing about war, Grandpa?’

  ‘Not by a long chalk.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The way it stinks. ’T ain’t like a field day at Aldershot, y’know.’

  Josh hadn’t supposed it was. He knew Aldershot well
and visited it often when the old man had been general-in-command. He was familiar with the well-kept barracks, the gravelled squares and whitewashed stones, the messes with their bright window boxes, the spick and span stables, the recruits, the sentries, the cavalry and artillery exercising in the Long Valley and the horses being schooled over the jumps.

  As he became silent, the Field Marshal picked up a letter that had been laid ready for him. Putting on his glasses, he began to open the envelope. As he did so, Josh lifted his head again.

  ‘Mother says the Regiment’s been fighting on foot,’ he said.

  The Field Marshal grunted. ‘Nothing wrong with that. A cavalryman’s a maid of all work.’

  ‘All the same—’ the boy’s face was eager and excited ‘—we did have a charge, didn’t we? It’s here in the paper. “Nineteenth Lancers’ Brilliant Charge.”’

  ‘Yes—’ the old man’s jaws moved ‘—that’s something.’

  ‘Mother says that Father wrote that he’d been in action against Uncle Karl’s regiment.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that Uncle Karl was safe in a staff job somewhere else.’

  The old man grunted again. He’d read the letter, because Fleur had brought it to him at once. It was good to hear there was little chance of Dabney and Karl-August coming face to face. That would have been too awful, but it was no certainty that a staff job was safe. There had been a great many staff officers killed in France already.

  He turned over the letter in his hand. It was from Robert and, like most epistles that came from Robert these days, it immediately gave him a headache.

  ‘Dear Father,’ Robert wrote, ‘I hope you have been in better health than of late, but of course none of us are getting younger…’

  The old man scowled. Robert looked the picture of health and always would, because he never risked his neck at anything.

  ‘I have been intending to come over and see you for some time,’ the letter continued. ‘In view of the war, there are a great many matters of property that we ought to discuss and one of these days we really must try. Elfrida complains of the problems of getting help. Already the war has affected us and I expect it’s affecting you, too, because I’ve heard Ellis Ackroyd and one or two others have joined the forces. I think Kitchener must have been off his head when he appealed for 100,000 men.’

  The old man scowled and adjusted his glasses.

  ‘Obviously,’ Robert went on, ‘men won’t be able to leave the mines or the steel and munitions works to join up – as I well know, because I have the problem of dealing with them and they are already beginning to demand higher wages – so that the only people free to go are those in other jobs. And this inevitably covers servants. It wasn’t too bad until this stupid retreat from Mons, but now, suddenly, everybody’s rushing to join the colours and we are left short. I was wondering if you couldn’t use your influence with Lord Kitchener, whom I know you know well, to persuade him to put such people in reserved jobs. It isn’t that I’m not patriotic. It’s just that it makes life a lot more difficult for people like me.’

  Difficult! The Field Marshal shifted in his chair. Life was even more difficult for the boys in the Regiment who had been mutilated in the stand at Mortigny. It was even more difficult for Chapman who’d been blinded, and more difficult still for Fullerton, who’d been killed. Robert, as usual, was thinking only of Robert. And the Field Marshal wasn’t in better health of late. He was in worse health. He was too bloody old and in danger of dying. Bobs was already dead. He’d been visiting the Indian troops in France and had caught a chill which had turned to pleurisy. The Field Marshal grunted. The old ass ought to have known better. In his eighty-third year, he was in no state to go gallivanting round France. The Field Marshal had gone to the state funeral which had been attended by the King and even the German press had not missed the occasion. He had wondered often if Graf von Hartmann hadn’t had a hand in it. He had once met Bobs at Braxby, and the report in the Lokalanzeiger which the Field Marshal had been shown at the War Office – ‘There are in war moments when we salute the enemy with the sabre instead of destroying him’ – had the touch of Von Hartmann, who, for all his self-complacency about Prussian superiority, was always a gentleman.

  It was a brief flicker of chivalry and the Field Marshal had a suspicion that they wouldn’t see much of it in the future. An invasion scare had brought about a spy neurosis and enemy agents were being seen behind every hedgerow. Income tax was up, beer was up and there were alarming stories of shoddy uniforms and poor army boots – the Field Marshal often wondered how much Robert and young Cosgro were involved! – together with a great deal of shiftiness in the matter of pay and allowances. Bitter public protests had resulted and Kitchener hadn’t helped with his instructions to the police to picket the public houses to make sure that wives didn’t misconduct themselves. As far as the Field Marshal could see, soldiers’ wives couldn’t afford to misconduct themselves – but Kitchener was a bachelor and didn’t always show a lot of sense.

  He looked down again at Robert’s letter. For God’s sake, he thought sourly, how else did you face up to a nation with over a million men under arms except by calling for volunteers up to the number of a hundred thousand. There’d be a need for a second hundred thousand before long and probably more, and then Robert’s worry about servants might have some meaning. Robert, the Field Marshal considered, had little to complain about.

  Josh looked up. ‘Grandpa,’ he said. ‘Why do the Germans kill Belgian babies?’

  ‘They don’t.’ The old man’s reply was short and to the point. ‘Neither did the Boers. Newspaper talk, boy. That’s all.’

  ‘Don’t newspapers tell the truth?’

  ‘Truth’s always the first victim of war. Newspapers are run by a set of cads who make profits out of other people dying. They call it stirring up the war effort. If you were to sit down there and write out a football team for cads, Lord Northcliffe would be the captain.’

  ‘Would the Kaiser be in a team for cads?’

  The old man grinned. ‘Without a doubt. Von Kluck and a few others, too.’

  ‘What about Lord Cosgro? I heard Mother say he was a bit of a cad.’

  ‘The Cosgros have always been cads,’ the Field Marshal growled. ‘Without any doubt Cosgro would be in the team. Probably vice-captain in case Northcliffe was unable to play.’

  ‘How about the Emperor Franz-Joseph of Austria? Is he a cad?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. Bit too old. Like me. But you could put him down.’

  Josh reached for a piece of paper and a pencil and began to write. ‘How about Joffre? After all, he lost to the Germans.’

  ‘Why not?’ The old man’s humour began to improve as the boy distracted his attention from the letter in his hand. ‘You could include Henry Wilson, too, for that matter.’

  ‘Which Henry Wilson?’

  ‘General Wilson. Tall feller. Moustache. Brigade major to Lyttelton at Colenso. Intriguer and mischief-maker. You could perhaps even include John French.’

  ‘Sir John French.’

  ‘That’s the feller.’

  ‘I thought he was leading the BEF.’

  ‘Not so damn well, it seems to me. He’s a bit shifty, anyway. Never liked him.’

  Josh looked at what he’d written and lifted his head. ‘We’ve nearly got a team, Grandpa. We only need three more.’

  ‘How about Lloyd George?’ The old man was thinking less of the war than of the stories he’d heard round Whitehall. ‘And you could shove down that bloody man, Bottomley.’

  ‘Which bloody man, Bottomley, Grandpa?’

  ‘Horatio Bottomley. John Bull. Goes round spouting about the need for patriotism and draws a fee for doing it.’

  ‘That’s ten. I can’t think of anybody else.’

  For a long time there was
silence as they applied their minds to the problem.

  ‘Better put down Mrs Astor,’ the old man said eventually. ‘She’s always going on about Women’s Rights.’

  ‘She’s a woman.’

  ‘She could play in goal.’

  Josh grinned. ‘That makes eleven. We’ve got a team.’ There was a silence then he looked up. ‘Grandpa?’

  ‘Yes, boy?’

  ‘Is Uncle Robert a cad? Mother said he was. To Father. Just before he went to France.’

  The old man knew exactly what they’d been referring to. This blasted business with Lady Balmael. He’d heard rumours and had been wondering for a long time what he ought to do about it.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he conceded reluctantly.

  ‘Is it possible for a Goff to be a cad, sir?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Make no mistake about that. There’s one in every family.’

  ‘All the same, I don’t like putting a Goff down with the Kaiser and Von Kluck.’

  ‘Put him down as first reserve then. Then he’s part of the team but he isn’t in it.’

  ‘That’s a good idea.’ Josh wrote for a while then he handed the list to the old man. He read:

  ‘L Northcliff (Captain)

  Kaser

  Von Cluck

  Lord Cosgro(vice-captain)

  Frans-Joseph

  Joffer

  H Willson

  J French

  L George

  H Botomly

  Mrs Aster.

  1st Reserve R Cosgro-Goff.’

  ‘Good team, that,’ the old man said enthusiastically. ‘Of course, you’ll have to change it as the war goes on. Cads come and go, y’know. Some improve and become non-cads, while other people appear who qualify better. We’d better make a habit of it.’

  Tyas Ackroyd appeared with a cup of tea and a muffin. The Field Marshal stared at them indignantly.

  ‘What’s this, Tyas, for God’s sake?’