Blunted Lance

by Max Hennessy

  The town itself was a drab little settlement that hardly seemed worth attacking, but it owed its importance to the wells to the north and to the fact that it lay on the railway line that ran into the heart of Turkey. As the infantry began to arrive, the cavalry were deployed to the west to keep the Turks busy. Once the Turks were forced to withdraw, it would be the turn once more of the horsemen.

  Waiting as Hedley Ackroyd’s bombers roared overhead, Dabney made his plans carefully. The Turks were expecting the attack to come from the south because a small squadron of Goff’s Bleeding Own had been fired on, leaving one of their horses dead as they fled, its saddlebags containing the information that the Turks sought as to the direction of the attack. Unknown to the Turks, however, the documents they had captured had been specially prepared, and as the bombardment started, Dabney was standing on top of a ridge watching them face the wrong way.

  His men were feeding their horses just behind. The heat, the flies and thirst were driving everybody crazy and they were all dreaming in the stony wadis of long cool beers. As the message to move forward arrived, they spent a back-breaking two hours pushing from one boulder-strewn slope to the next, until they could see Ain ’Aalab, with its shelter and precious water, three miles away across the plain in front. Though the infantry had made progress, the inner line of defences still held and it would soon be dark enough to cheat them of their prize.

  As Dabney watched the dismounted troopers working their way forward over the broken terrain the corps commander appeared behind him, scrambling up to the ridge. He grinned as Dabney turned.

  ‘I think we’re going to have to make an all-out assault,’ he said. ‘I’m going to use your people to take the town before dark.’

  As he left, he made it clear he was expecting a dismounted action, but it occurred to Dabney that, with darkness almost upon them and little more than an hour of daylight left, there was barely time.

  ‘Saddle up,’ he ordered. ‘Have the Jawarlis and the Baratpore Lancers brought forward and assembled south of the track.’

  As the men scrambled to the saddles, he galloped forward with the two commanding officers, his staff, trumpeter and orderlies to look for an assembly area that couldn’t be overlooked and shelled from Ain ’Aalab. His horses were already in poor condition and it was essential that they shouldn’t be panicked by enemy shelling. His mind was full of questions. He knew they had to move quickly but what if the Turkish trenches were protected by wire? Would it result in the same chaos that had befallen the 19th Lancers on the Somme? Would it end in a welter of blood and struggling horses and men? In front of them, he knew, there was a wadi and they had no idea whether its banks were steep or the wadi as deep as some of those they had crossed on their night march. He’d read of Waterloo, had even seen his own grandfather’s letters written from Paris after that campaign, telling of the disaster that had befallen the French cavalry at the sunken road of Ohain. Could he expect the same disaster, with his wave of horsemen crashing to ruin in a wild tangle of broken legs, screaming horses and shattered bodies? His first experience of war had been at Omdurman and that, too, had come close to disaster in a ditch.

  There was no time for a detailed reconnaissance or to bring up machine guns or artillery so he ordered the nearest batteries of horse artillery to do what they could to help. The artillerymen limbered up and galloped forward and, with their guns gouging great scars in the dusty earth, swung round to face the enemy. Within a minute the first round crashed out.

  ‘Right,’ Dabney said to the commanding officers of the two waiting regiments. ‘Now’s your chance! Off you go!’

  As the Indian brigade, under the command of the senior colonel, trotted forward in column of squadrons, they looked a splendid sight, sitting bolt upright with their lances and swords, the dark faces tense and expectant. But their reputation was founded mainly on ceremonial duties and they were by no means as good as they looked. As they swept out of their assembly area, they were spotted at once by the machine guns on the hills and, as the enemy artillery joined in, shells began to explode among the moving horsemen.

  As the advance slowed and halted and the groups of dark-faced horsemen began to scatter across the plains, the Turkish guns lifted and shells began to fall among the Australians in the rear. Spurring his horse, Dabney was just moving down from the ridge when the Australian brigade major appeared. He had blood on his uniform and was bare-headed.

  ‘The brigadier’s down, sir,’ he said.

  Glancing across the plain, Dabney saw that evening was already on them and that any hesitation would allow the Turks to retreat through the wells, destroying them as they went. Making up his mind, he galloped to where the Australians were waiting, sending the brigade major ahead.

  ‘Bring ’em on,’ he said.

  As the Australians halted again, a column of orderly confusion with tossing heads, he took up his position in front of them.

  ‘Troops into line!’

  The evolution was mechanical, carried out in silence and without undue haste. There was a thudding of hooves on the flank as a horse plunged, and a few curses. Each troop, as though on a ceremonial parade, swung round on a pivot to front the enemy.

  Calling the colonels to him, Dabney told them his plans. ‘We go straight in,’ he said. ‘No waiting. No hesitating. Understand?’

  The Australians nodded. One regiment was armed with swords, the other only with bayonets, their rifles still in the leather buckets.

  Placing himself at the head of Goff’s Bleeding Own, Dabney waited for the order to draw swords, then waved his arm and kicked at his horse’s flanks. The whole line immediately swept into a gallop behind him. As they appeared, the Turkish artillery switched to the new target, but the Australians were moving too fast and the shells exploded behind them. As the machine guns opened up, a few horses fell, but the horse artillery had swung round on the flank and begun to hammer the strong points on the hills. In a cheering mass, the Australians thundered forward, scooping up the hesitant Indians as they passed, to surge on towards the Turkish trenches. The short Eastern twilight had almost ended and the flash of rifles and artillery and exploding shrapnel filled the dusk. Above the charging mass of cheering horsemen there was an enormous cloud of yellow dust that reduced visibility and hid what lay ahead.

  It was almost dark now and Dabney could barely see the men thundering along behind him. By the grace of God, there was no wire and as he reached the Turkish trench, he could see no alternative but to put spurs to his mount and leap the obstacle like a steeple-chaser. The men behind him were as used to horses and riding as he was and they followed suit enthusiastically in a wave of leaping animals, then, without waiting for orders, sprang from the saddle and lunged into the trench with sword and bayonet. The increasing darkness was filled with shouts and screams, while the Indian regiments rode up and down on the flanks, spearing any Turk who managed to scramble to safety. Within five minutes the position was in their hands, and the Australian officers were rallying their men.

  ‘Into the town,’ Dabney ordered. ‘Take as many prisoners as possible!’

  With Goff’s Bleeding Own leading the way through the darkness, they swept through the streets. Scattered bunches of Turks tried to stop them, but the horsemen rode them down, driving them like partridges and keeping them on the run. As they rallied and began to reform, they were half-blinded as great gouts of flame leapt skyward.

  ‘They’re blowing up the dumps,’ Dabney yelled. ‘Keep going! Keep going! Get the wells!’

  As the Australians swept on, he gave orders for the Indians to chase the Turks from the town and, leaving the Baratpores and Jawarlis trotting up and down looking for victims, he galloped after his leading elements.

  The railway station was on fire, the flames lighting up the darkness and silhouetting the running figures of Turks as they fled into the houses and narrow streets. They ha
d achieved their object. Ain ’Aalab was securely in their hands; and it had been achieved solely by cavalry action, even if not by traditional cavalry methods. There seemed to be dead men, dead horses and shell holes everywhere. Already, great hordes of prisoners were being rounded up and it was clear they had captured a vast quantity of guns, stores and animals. Riding forward to rally the Australians, Dabney found them already grouping together, but the Turks, knowing the importance of the wells, had established themselves behind a wall and, as he galloped up, a machine gun began to fire. A horse went down with a crash and two men rolled from their saddles. Immediately the Australians began to scatter.

  Turning, Dabney saw the machine gun and the dark faces of the Turks behind it and, without thinking, he clapped his spurs into his jaded horse’s flanks. As he moved forward, the startled Australians recovered from their surprise and began to swing round to form a line. Their faces, in the dancing red of the fires, were elated, lean, leathery, and hungry for victory.

  As he watched the flickering flame of the machine gun, Dabney felt something crash against his left leg that almost tore him from the saddle. An over-excited trooper, bursting away from the swirling mass, urged his horse into a gallop. As it reached the wall it hesitated then, trying to leap, faltered, straddled the wall, flinging its rider from the saddle, and crashed down on top of the machine gun.

  Scrambling from beneath the kicking hooves, the Turks snatched at rifles as the Australians arrived.

  ‘Come on, the Bleeders!’ someone yelled.

  As they sorted themselves out into a surging wave of tossing heads, flowing manes and fierce Australian faces under wide-brimmed hats, Dabney, dizzy with the pain in his leg, spurred in front to give them the line.

  Struggling, with his frantic horse, he raised his sword and shouted – ‘Troops into line! Charge!’ – and the flood of horse-men crashed on to scatter the Turks who turned tail and began to bolt into the darkness.

  The war was clearly almost over. They all knew it. It became clearer every day and, in France, the Germans – faced now with a fresh new army from America – were in full retreat.

  The attacks were coming now in sharp succession, one after the other in different parts of the front, so there was no chance for them to move reserves. The huge salient at Verdun had been pinched out and the line had now reached the Ardennes so that Paris was no longer in danger. The old obstacle, the mud, continued to hold up the advance, but, suddenly, the front in Salonika blazed into life and the Bulgarians were suing for peace because the Germans were too heavily involved to plug the hole that had been made and there were rumours of a budding revolution in Germany.

  It was suddenly beginning to look as if the end of the war was going to take them all by surprise. Rachel, who was intending to go back to Virginia with Micah Love and was already trying to cultivate a Southern drawl, had set her wedding for the middle of November but, with the Ottoman Empire collapsing and taking down with it the Austro-Hungarian edifice, it looked very much as though the end of the war was going to interrupt. People in Prague and Zagreb had gone to bed as subjects of the Habsburgs and awakened to find themselves independent, while the Czechs, the South Slavs, the Poles and the Rumanians became allies instead of enemies. Hungary broke away and, with the Austrians seeking an armistice, the Germans had found their rear wide open and the Allied armies preparing to advance into Southern Germany. At the end of October, the German fleet mutinied and within a day or two the Kaiser had abdicated.

  ‘Thank God I managed to live to see the victory,’ the Field Marshal said.

  He had not been well for some time. Spanish flu had appeared in Europe and was said to be in epidemic proportions in London where people were collapsing in the streets. Schools and offices had been closed, there were swelling obituary columns in The Times, and the hospitals were so full ordinary patients couldn’t be admitted. In Germany, people were said to be dying like flies.

  Two of the older and more frail of the Ackroyds and a Goff cousin had gone, but Braxby seemed not to have been hard hit until the news came that Walter Cosgro had been struck down. With his wealth and the care he could summon in the shape of the best nurses and doctors in the country, they hadn’t even thought he could die, but he had surprised them all by succumbing remarkably quickly, leaving Robert in complete charge of the vast business empire.

  The armistice was signed two days before Rachel’s wedding and on the 11th the guns stopped firing. Suddenly Europe was silent. After a brief flare-up of noisy celebration, the desolated lanes of Northern France became even more desolate under the heavy hand of winter.

  It was Josh who brought the news. His school closed because of the influenza epidemic, he was at home, and he tore up on his bicycle and clattered through the echoing corridors to find his grandfather.

  ‘Grandpa! Grandpa! It’s over. The war’s over!’

  Immediately, the whole household flooded into the drawing room and champagne was opened and they all stood round in excited groups, uncertain what to say or think or do, because what it had been like to be at peace was almost forgotten after four years. The noise and the excitement tired the Field Marshal but he gave Josh a sovereign for being first with the news.

  He watched the boy with a warm feeling of affection. Ever since 1914, he had been his constant companion, drawing on the old man’s fund of experience, building knowledge in his mind for the future, just as his father, Dabney, had done. Already he believed in the Regiment, not with the blind faith of a man who saw nothing but ceremonial, to whom the colour of a saddle blanket was more important than the health of the horse and the man riding it, but because his heart was with it. His belief would be the one thing that would support him in adversity. He was barely old enough to understand it yet, but already his mind ran on the same lines as his father’s. The Regiment was his religion after God, its sorrows and its triumphs his own. The successes they had scored at Vernhout and Mortigny in 1914 had brought him joy just as the disaster on the Somme had brought him sadness. He was set in the same mould as his father and his grandfather, and those forefathers who had fought at Waterloo, with Wolfe, and with Eyre Coote at Wandewash, and even beyond the Regiment’s foundation.

  As the Field Marshal stood in front of the library fire, deep in thought, a wave of sadness swept over him as he remembered why Josh had come, what the celebration had been about, and he tried to decide what, after four years of bloodshed and suffering, had been achieved. He crossed to the table to study the map. He had been told the influenza had left his heart weak and had been warned to take things easy but he preferred to go on as before rather than live out his life as a cabbage.

  It was sad, he thought, that Helen could not be with them, sadder still that Karl-August was dead like his father, who had gone in 1916. But Jane had done well for herself and had two splendid daughters. Micah Love was an excellent fellow, part of the family by habit now and certainly by tradition, while Hedley was clearly a son-in-law they were going to be proud of. His sons? Robert? The old man pushed Robert hurriedly to the back of his mind. Robert was best forgotten, though by the grace of God, his sons, Aubrey and Claude, thanks to Elfrida, seemed to be turning out well. Dabney? Ah, Dabney!

  It always pleased a man to see himself in his son and in Dabney the Field Marshal saw his own image, his own moods, his own beliefs, his own faiths. Dabney was brave without being stupid, with a courage that was tempered by common sense and a feeling for his men who, as always, were going to win the medals their commanding officer wore. ‘It is the common soldier’s blood that makes the general a great man.’ It was something he’d heard from his father who had heard it before Waterloo, and it remained as true in 1918 as it had been then. A good officer was never a glory seeker. He was a man who did his duty with imagination but with care for his men’s lives. And this kind of sense Dabney had to a large degree.

  He was a thinking soldier and would go far. The
Field Marshal had decided so in South Africa. He had heard it from Morby-Smith, who had been killed at the Graafberg. He had heard it from Ellesmere, from Haig, from French, from Allenby. His tenets were simple. He believed in preparation and deception, not in casualties. The old man gave a secret smile. The future lay with Dabney and with his son, Josh.

  Rachel’s wedding was like all weddings in Braxby, not a private affair but one which belonged to the whole village. Like Tyas Ackroyd’s funeral, it attracted everybody, and since Micah Love had no immediate family present, the Field Marshal and his wife sat with Fleur and her children on the right of the church with the Ackroyds, while the other side was packed with Suttons from North Yorkshire and the Dales. Begged by Rachel to appear in full uniform, the Field Marshal walked into the church, a green, red and gold toy soldier, his legs stiff and brittle, his face pale, his eyes bright, two pink feverish spots on his cheeks. His wife by his side, he moved slowly, putting his feet down with care so that no one should realise that these days he could barely see them without the glasses he had no intention of wearing on this day of all days. He was well aware that he was growing frail but he was still straight, his head held high, his shoulders back, a stiff doll-like figure from another age.

  A story in the Yorkshire Post had ensured that the village would be full of people. Although the war was over, the weeping had not yet stopped and the ceremonial had been kept to a minimum. A canon from York conducted the service because he was a distant relative and a grandson of the bishop who had married the Field Marshal himself. Micah Love’s soft voice drawled the responses which were answered by Rachel in a whisper, then they all lined up, with the Field Marshal insisting on keeping well to the rear, for the procession out of church. Though the smiles were for the bride and groom, there was also a little subdued clapping when the Field Marshal appeared.

  Legs aching, he endured the business of the reception, wondering all the time when he could get away from the uniforms and the morning coats and large hats. In her happiness, his wife’s eyes were sparkling and she reminded him of the girl he had first met in America during the Civil War. Fleur stopped in front of him and kissed him. She had a tranquil expression that spoke of subdued fears now dispersed.