Blunted Lance

by Max Hennessy

  ‘I’ve told you I don’t give a damn for you. So that, in return, you’ll do something for me. You’ll renounce all claims on this house.’

  ‘What?’ Robert’s face grew red. ‘I’m damned if I’ll do that, Father!’

  The old man faced him coolly. ‘It’s your choice.’

  ‘Dammit, Father, this is my home! This is where my roots lie.’

  ‘You transferred your roots long since to Cosgro territory. You have everything you need. Dabney has precious little.’

  ‘I can’t do it, Father.’

  ‘Then I’m damned if I’ll swear you were with me in London.’

  ‘Father, this house and its contents, everything the family possesses, belong both to me and to Dabney.’

  ‘It’s not so long ago when you were saying it all belonged to you.’

  ‘That wasn’t my intention.’

  ‘I know damn well it was! But never mind, I’ve decided what I want to do. I shall make a new will.’

  Robert hesitated then he nodded. The old man eyed him.

  ‘I haven’t finished, Robert,’ he said slowly. ‘I know what’s in your mind. You’re thinking it shouldn’t be difficult to overturn it, to suggest I’m not of sound mind. You will argue that it should be shared between you and Dabney, then you’ll use your ill-gotten wealth to push Dabney out. No, Robert—’ the old man smiled ‘—it won’t be like that. You’ll come with me to my solicitors to witness the will. Then it must be accepted that you agreed with it.’

  Robert stared at his father, his eyes glowing angrily. But he had no choice.

  The old man turned away, as if he had had enough of his son. ‘I’ll make the arrangements and I shall inform you when to be present. And you will be present. Nothing will stand in your way. Neither your money or the government or Lloyd George or the Lord God Almighty. If you are not there, I shall assume you’ve backed out of the deal and I shall go immediately to Balmael’s solicitors. Is that understood?’

  Robert swallowed. ‘Yes, Father. I understand.’

  The old man headed for the door. ‘Then I think we had better join the others before they wonder what’s happening.’

  The following morning when Josh arrived, he found his grandfather in a strange subdued mood, making notes on a sheet of paper.

  ‘What are you doing, Grandpa?’ he asked.

  ‘Making me will.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because eventually I shall die, and you make wills so that you can go on bossing your family about after you’re dead.’

  The boy looked puzzled and the old man gestured. ‘This house,’ he said. ‘Everything in it. That – that – and that—’ the old hand with its gnarled fingers gestured at the silverware, the statuettes, the spears, the assegais, the banners and the strange weapons which had been collected during a lifetime of fighting ‘—I want them to go to your father and then to you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’re no use to your Uncle Robert. He doesn’t understand them. Your father does. I think you will. I want them to go to someone who won’t merely stick them in the attic or throw them away.’

  ‘I’ll have ’em, Grandpa! I’ll look after ’em!’ The boy paused. ‘Grandpa, do you think we’re winning the war?’

  ‘It begins to look like it.’

  ‘When will it end?’

  ‘Next year. 1919. 1920. Something like that.’

  ‘Could it end before?’

  ‘Could. We seem to have ’em on the run. Why?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be old enough to join the army before it’s over.’

  ‘Your time will come, my boy. There are always enough cads in the world to start decent people killing each other. Trotsky’s one. Ludendorff’s one. Horatio Bottomley’s one. Come to that, your Uncle Robert’s one. If we had a cads’ team for 1918, he’d be captain.’

  ‘Why, Grandpa?’

  ‘Never mind why. Just write him down.’ The old man tore off a sheet of paper from the pad he was holding. ‘Put ‘em down, boy. Cads’ Team, 1918. R Cosgro-Goff, captain.’

  The boy did as he was told and looked up.

  ‘Who’s vice-captain, Grandpa?’

  ‘Bottomley, I think. He’s another who—’ the old man stopped, coughed and left it at that. ‘Bottomley for vice-captain.’

  ‘Better cad than the Kaiser?’

  ‘I think so. The Kaiser’s lost his form. Bit pathetic, now, I think. He’s well down the list.’

  ‘Hindenburg?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Ludendorff, too. Better put down Henry Wilson. He’s still not as shiny white as he ought to be. Lloyd George, too. Then Lenin and Trotsky and that lot.’

  ‘That’s only eight.’

  ‘Well, what about Ferdinand of Bulgaria. He’d do. He came into the war hoping to get something out of it. You could also put down this Turkish Johnny, Kemal Whatever-his-name-is.’

  The boy looked at what he’d written.

  R Cosgro-Goff (captain)

  H Bottomley (vice-captain)

  Kaiser W

  Hindenberg

  Lewdendorff

  H Wilson

  Ferdinand

  Kemal?

  Lenin

  Trotski

  ‘That’s only ten, Grandpa. We need one more.’

  ‘Put down A N Other. I’m sure we’ll find someone. There are plenty of ’em about.’

  The boy studied the names for a moment. ‘I’m glad we’ve never had to put down Father’s name,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, no!’ The old man smiled. ‘Not your father’s. He wouldn’t have a chance in a team like that. Not even at the bottom of the list.’

  The boy thought for a moment. ‘I wonder what he’s doing,’ he said.

  Seven

  It seemed to Dabney that the war in the Middle East was as good as won.

  The Australians and the New Zealanders were always difficult and their antics in Cairo were already a legend, but, like the men of the Yeomanry and the sowars of the Indian cavalry, most of them were farmers who were unafraid of a wide countryside and had grown up among horses since childhood. Their roots were deep in the soil and they were sufficiently good to have been issued with swords.

  At first they were inclined to be derisive about them but they’d gone into action at Beersheba with nothing in their fists but bayonets, and the sword, in spite of what they said, had a tremendous moral effect both on them and on the enemy. The result inevitably was that there were officers who began to insist once more that mechanical contrivances like the tank and the aeroplane would never take the place of a man on a horse armed with a sabre but, certainly, even if horsed cavalry was having its last fling, it was having it under Allenby in a resounding crescendo that had never been seen since it had first arrived with a shock that upset all calculations on its first battlefield two thousand years before. Beersheba had set the pattern and had raised the curtain on a magnificent reappearance. The Arabs had risen in revolt under a man called Lawrence who was disliked at headquarters because he preferred Arab dress and sandals to uniform, but Allenby had seen the possibilities and Dabney was expecting at any moment to see the campaign brought to a conclusion.

  He was still making his preparations when, to his surprise, Hedley Ackroyd turned up, a lieutenant-colonel running a bomber wing of the new Royal Air Force, with the news that he and Philippa were engaged.

  ‘They offered me the choice of a fighter squadron in France or a bomber wing out here,’ he said. ‘The Field Marshal’s advice was succinct: Take the wing.’

  There was a rash of promotions and Dabney became an acting major general. Fresh bombers had also been flown out for Hedley Ackroyd, and, with the Indian cavalry regiments all armed with sword or lance, the cavalry were cavalry again in the
true sense of the word.

  The heat was searing and they were plagued by mosquitoes, centipedes and spiders, to say nothing of malaria and sandfly fever which had turned them all into ghosts poor as crows, their horses gaunt from picking up sand with their scanty feed. But they were well led and Dabney’s troopers were splendid men, tall, strong, independent and full of spirit. Their first reaction to him had been one of wariness because they had no love for British generals. But everything went well from the day when Dabney, wearing only breeches and shirt and riding alone, without any badges of rank, had found a group of them watering horses at a stream. Believing in making contact quickly, he had stopped to talk to them.

  ‘What are you lot?’ he asked.

  One of the Australians, tall, lean and leathery-skinned, eyed him up and down, alerted by his English accent.

  ‘I’m what’s known as a bleedin’ Light ‘Orseman, cobber,’ he said sharply. ‘What might you be?’

  Dabney grinned at the reply. ‘I’m what’s known as a bleedin’ general,’ he said.

  As he clattered away, he heard a shout of laughter go up behind him and the following afternoon, reviewing a regiment of Mounted Rifles, he became aware that the leading horseman was the Australian of the day before and that he was carrying a banner on which was printed ‘Goff’s Bleeding Own.’

  Apart from their tendency to wear shorts – and hot men on hot horses with bare knees rubbed raw on horses’ flanks led to sores and blood poisoning – they gave him remarkably little trouble. The old hunting maxim, ‘Care for your horse in the stable as if he were worth five hundred pounds and ride him in the field as if he were not worth half a crown’, was still a good one and Dabney taught them that to a horse rubbing down was as massage was to a man, and eventually he had them so they would spend long over the regulation time at the job and walk miles for the chance of acquiring a bundle of green fodder.

  For the most part they accepted his demands without a murmur because he had arrived with Allenby, and Allenby had gone through the camps like a strong reviving wind when everybody was discouraged and cynical. During the long hot months of the summer the army had languished, its problems chiefly medical, but now they were pushing north in an extraordinarily bold conception involving the largest mass of cavalry since Napoleon.

  Deception was practised with wireless traffic, thousands of dummy horses made of canvas, and men marching during the day and counter-marching at night to give the impression of a vast mass movement. False headquarters were built and the Arabs under Lawrence spread wrong information, while Hedley Ackroyd’s bomber wing bombarded the Turks from the air with propaganda leaflets which had the effect of setting thousands of deserters on the move south.

  By the beginning of September they were well on their way, hard, lean Australians and New Zealanders alongside dark-faced Indians, British Yeomanry and the picturesque French Spahis. Overhead, Bristol fighters and an occasional Handley Page dropped bombs to the north. As the artillery barrage fell on the startled Turks, the infantry rose and began to advance. Within minutes a breach had been made and a message came back to where Dabney was waiting with his brigade. As he waved his arm, the trumpets shrilled and, led by ‘Goff’s Bleeding Own’, thousands of horsemen began to thunder through the gap. In ten minutes they were well beyond the Turkish line and heading up the coast. Within an hour two divisions of mounted men had poured through the break and were thundering across the plain towards Megiddo and Caesarea. Within two days they had captured Nazareth, the roads and defiles of the mountains encumbered with guns, wagons, motor lorries and all sorts of stores all moving north. Two Turkish armies had vanished in thirty-six hours.

  There was no stopping. Pressing on, Hedley Ackroyd’s bombers caught the Turks in a ravine. Truck drivers jumped out, leaving engines running so that the vehicles ran into the tail of the artillery in front, and the guns were carried on into the transport wagons, until finally an accumulation of dead horses and wreckage brought the avalanche to a stop. It took them days to extricate the guns and burn the carts.

  North of the Sea of Galilee the Turks were routed again and the great column continued to stream northwards, the light armoured cars in the van, the cavalry moving at a speed that combined haste with the preservation of horseflesh – trotting twenty minutes, walking twenty and halted five. The cavalry had come into its own again and it was a paradox that a war which had seen them reduced to virtual impotence was also seeing one of the greatest cavalry campaigns in history as Allenby’s men advanced from the frontiers of Egypt towards the borders of Turkey in a movement that was classic in conception and superb in execution.

  Outside Haifa, the advance came to a stop as they blundered into quicksand and Dabney came across Australians struggling on foot to drag their mounts clear, filling the air as they did so with a tremendous barrage of oaths. The Turks had to be given no chance to consolidate, however, and, galloping across the front of his Indian regiments, he led them past the cursing Australians into the city centre. Fire was coming from roofs and corners and here and there strong points had been set up. A few horses crashed to the ground but there was no stopping them.

  As they galloped down the dusty street between the mud-coloured houses, a Turkish officer in a fez and waving a sabre hurtled from a side street directly in front. Dabney’s horse came to a tearing halt, ploughing up the dust, forefeet extended, muscles bunched. Before the parry was completed, Dabney’s right leg was urging, the rein caressing. The Turk came round to his offside and lunged, but the sword was still in the air as Dabney bore in with his blade and the Turk rolled over the tail of his horse to disappear among the flying hooves.

  As the Turkish soldiers rose to meet them, they were knocked over by the galloping horses and speared as they tried to run. Up ahead the sky was full of brown smoke where Hedley Ackroyd’s bombers were pulverising the reserves near the Jordan.

  Their next action was at Shehba when the Indians, light, spare men with an advantage of weight over their white comrades, charged at full gallop a Turkish line established behind a cactus hedge. The red swords and lances showed how many they had killed. At El Affule, they captured seventy-five Germans, two hundred Turks, ten engines, a hundred lorries and three aircraft, marching seventy miles in thirty-four hours for a loss of only twenty-six foundered horses. It was a stupendous feat, most of the march being made in the cool of the Palestinian early light. At Jenin, the Australians burst into the town and found a store of champagne which they proceeded to demolish before a guard could be put on it, while men, women and children, screaming ‘Arab, Arab’ to let them know they weren’t Turks, ran before them to fling themselves on the stores of food, clothing and equipment the Turks had left behind.

  There was charge after charge as they moved north. In one, owing to the number of lamed horses that had dropped out after climbing a steep ridge, there were only fifteen mounted men, yet they routed the defence. The fleeing Turks were butchered in the desert by the Arabs and the following horsemen heard shrieks in the night and saw the vultures that were always in the air, gathering ahead of them where they’d been caught.

  Acre fell, then Amman. At Nahr Barbar, the charge was delivered by Australians, Spahis and Chasseurs d’Afrique. At Irbid, there was a disaster as bad as Balaclava when the Indians, facing five thousand Turks, failed to pull off their charge. Deraa was in flames when they arrived, with Turks, stripped of every scrap of clothing they possessed, lying dead in the streets among the litter of smashed equipment, burned documents and ruined machinery.

  Damascus was next. Lawrence’s men were the first to reach the city and, as Dabney led his men in, the place was in a state of anarchy, with the Arabs arguing and squabbling among themselves, the place mismanaged and containing a ghastly hospital with every disease known to man within its walls and not a scrap of bandage, drug or disinfectant.

  There were Turkish troops to the north, however, still capab
le of fighting, and the farther they retreated, the worse became the difficulties for their pursuers. There was an increase in malaria, to which was added the deadly Spanish influenza which was sweeping a world undernourished and tired after a long war. Aleppo was now the target and then the Turkish border. Tyre, Sidon and Beirut were occupied and the cavalry moved north yet again.

  The shock actions continued, the losses in horses always higher than the losses in men, because they were sacrificed to stop the Turks escaping. Almost every charge was delivered in extended formation and forced home at a gallop.

  His command reduced by a worrying sick list, Dabney pushed on in hot, turgid weather. Though ordered to halt, he pressed forward until they heard Aleppo had fallen. The war seemed to be virtually over in the Middle East but even as he prepared to halt, instructions came to press on again.

  By this time one of his brigadiers was sick and the weary horses were staggering, the tired troopers gaunt, their faces burnt almost black by the sun. Half the time they slept in the saddle, snatching food when they could. When they halted they were almost too weary to pull themselves back on to their stumbling mounts and often fell asleep standing alongside them.

  Called back to a staff conference, Dabney found himself sitting next to Hedley Ackroyd.

  ‘An attempt’s being made to stand at Ain ’Aalab,’ the corps commander informed them. ‘It’s up to you people to see they don’t. Their right flank rests on the river and their left on the hills. The only way past them’s through the middle, and the wells in the area have been destroyed.’

  With the surviving wells beyond the Ain ’Aalab line, the cavalry was in trouble. The area was surrounded by a tangled mass of rocky hills, steep, seamed with deep wadis, often impenetrable and entirely without water. Not a tree broke the skyline and the sun was beating down like a brass gong on a plain devoid of shade. Two lines of defences had been constructed to add to the obstacles provided by nature, and Ain ’Aalab was surrounded by freshly-dug trenches.