A Close Run Thing

by Allan Mallinson

  ‘So it indeed seems, Mr Hervey,’ she replied, ‘but tell me, you have spoken before of troops and squadrons in the same breath, as if they were one. How is this so?’

  ‘No, they are not one, Sister, though I understand your confusion,’ he began. ‘A troop may number up to a hundred or so and is commanded by a captain. Usually there are six such troops in each regiment. When there is a royal review both the colonel and the lieutenant-colonel, and the major, too, would each take command of a squadron. The squadron would comprise two troops, and each squadron would carry a guidon. But on campaign it is the lieutenant-colonel who commands, and the senior captains each command a squadron, with command of their own troop devolving impermanently to their senior lieutenant. It sounds perhaps a little complicated but it works well.’

  ‘Oh, evidently so,’ she smiled, as the dragoon they were watching finished saddling. ‘You fit the head-harness last?’ she added with a note of surprise.

  ‘Because it gives time for the animal to adjust to the girth, which can then be tightened before mounting. The breastplate must, of course, be fitted at the same time as the saddle, then the crupper and last the bridle. This is the new 1812 pattern,’ he said, holding up a practical-looking piece of harness. ‘Much better than that we had before, but it can still be the devil of a job to fit in the dark, especially with cold fingers. This rosette here on the crossed face-pieces must be set dead between the eyes, and just below the bridge, or the orderly corporal will round on a man once daylight reveals otherwise!’

  ‘It is a handsome bridle, Mr Hervey, for sure. But what is this chain across the top?’

  He gave a faint smile of satisfaction. ‘That is an additional device which we ourselves – in the Sixth I mean – have made. A sabre-cut through the headpiece would mean the bridle falls away and the rider would lose control of his mount. The chain prevents that.’

  She turned and looked at him intently, and then spoke more softly than hitherto. ‘You are proud of your regiment, not just of your army, are you not, Mr Hervey?’

  He seemed surprised. ‘Oh yes, it is everything!’

  Their parting, a week later, was a curious affair. In the days that had followed their visit to the cloister stalls Hervey had looked forward to subsequent meetings with increasing anticipation. The routine each day had been the same. She would first dress his wound (removing the sutures when the time came). Then followed several hours of sifting papers, and then a half-hour’s catechism (but of no great earnestness). In the afternoon they would walk together – further each day as his leg regained its strength. So that, as the time came for Boulogne, there had formed between them a considerable bond, a respect, an affection.

  Only once had he felt any desire to stay her enquiries. One afternoon, as they walked in the orchard, she had asked him if there were anyone waiting for him at home, to which he had replied that in war a soldier must have no such ties. It was a conviction not unheard of in France, she countered, adding, however, that the denial of any part of God’s creation was innately sinful.

  Already he had been able to tell her that he could deliver the letter to her father in person since the Sixth were to march to Boulogne through the Vendée, and her evident pleasure brought a smile to his lips. So, when they met on the morning that the regiment was to leave, her apparent resumption of the formality of their earlier meetings surprised him, and he felt awkward with what he now intended. He had had one of the armourers fit a shako plate to a piece of ebony to make a paperweight, its cross-pattée seeming especially appropriate. ‘To remember the regiment by, Sister,’ he explained uneasily as he gave it her. ‘It is the Garter cross, from our country’s most honoured order, with the regiment’s numerals in the centre.’

  ‘“Honi soit qui mal y pense,”’ she said thoughtfully, yet with a smile.

  ‘Just so,’ he managed to croak.

  ‘I was happy that we were able to read St Ignatius together, Mr Hervey,’ she began, ‘but there was so little time to begin the discipline of his way. You will not, I think, have time or occasion much to ponder directly on these hours, but there will come a time …’ She paused, as if to assess whether or not she might complete the prophecy. ‘There is a desire in you, a spiritual desire, as there is in all of us, and I have composed this vade-mecum for you,’ she continued gently, pulling from her pocket the diminutive volume. ‘It will tell you how St Ignatius himself might speak to you.’

  Hervey took the primer without a word and opened it. Sister Maria’s handwriting, a compact, almost medieval script, filled its pages, the effort it represented apparent in an instant. He did what he could to find the right words, but he knew that he failed. ‘I hope we may meet again, Sister,’ he added, and this perhaps said what his more formal civilities failed to.

  ‘And I, too,’ she replied, ‘though is it not ironic that our meeting was in war, and peace makes its prolongation impossible, or its repeating unlikely?’

  Hervey smiled, awkwardly, and was about to hold out his hand when, on an impulse, it seemed, she reached into her pocket again to retrieve a gold signet ring with a blue silk handkerchief knotted to it.

  ‘Sir, I have one more kindness to beg. This ring is the de Chantonnay seal. It has been with me for safe keeping these past five years. The title papers of my father’s estates were taken by the revolutionaries, and if he is to recover his inheritance he will need the seal now that the war is ended. Please take it to him, but please on no account place it in anyone’s hands but his. On no account. Better it goes back to England with you than risk its loss.’

  Time was running out for their farewell. The ring begged certain questions (and he would have wished to address them), but it was no hardship to carry a ring as well as the letter. ‘So be it, Sister – I shall do as you bid. We must hope that I find your father home: he will have a long journey to Wiltshire otherwise.’

  ‘We must risk that at least,’ she replied with an empty expression. And then at last she smiled – not the wide, sparkling smile of their earlier hours together, but warm enough.

  He reached out his hand, fully this time, and she took it. ‘Goodbye, Sister. And thank you.’

  ‘God bless you and go with you, Mr Hervey.’ She rose on her bare toes and kissed his cheek. ‘And, please, the ring – you must keep it safe and give it into no one’s hand but my father’s.’

  III

  THE DIVIDEND OF PEACE

  St George’s Day

  SINCE THE RAISING of the regiment, on 23 April 1760 (to consolidate the triumph of the gallant, and late, General Wolfe over the French on the Heights of Abraham), every man of the 6th Light Dragoons had worn a red rose in his head-dress on St George’s Day. Even during the worst of the recent campaigns the Sixth had maintained the tradition, and that morning bud-roses were distributed at muster, as was the custom, by the commanding officer. But at ten o’clock, after watering parade, the major broke with tradition (and thereby instituted a new and cherished custom), for, as the regiment mustered one last time at the Convent of St Mary of Magdala, Edmonds dismounted at the appearance of the elderly abbess and with great gallantry presented her with his rose. And by the time the Sixth had reached the city’s north gate a remarkable number of roses had been plucked from shakos and handed to women of the town – so many, in fact, that Edmonds began to wonder in what state of discipline his regiment had truly been during its ostensible period of interior economy those several past weeks.

  Hervey’s rose did not remain in his shako beyond the convent’s courtyard, for as his troop formed threes and wheeled into column he saw Sister Maria at an open window near the arched entrance. Breaking ranks and trotting over, he stood at full stretch in the stirrups and presented her with the deep-red bloom whose petals were no longer primly clasped. And she in turn presented him with a smile equally open, and a sign of benediction.

  ‘I cannot say that I am sorry to be leaving this place,’ said Laming as Hervey rejoined his file. ‘None of this sisterhood ever looked like
praying with their knees upward.’

  Hervey sighed. His fellow cornet held the vow of chastity in scant regard after Spain. Laming’s own rose was gone by the time their troop had left the elegant square outside the convent, and in truth he had need of three more before they were clear of the city walls. And as they left this place, whose welcome had been as warm as it had been surprising, their minds turned once more to those who were unable to join that final march. The bones of 150 dragoons, and more, lay in pits, or whitening on bare hillsides between Corunna and Toulouse, for it had been four years since the regiment had left Southampton, and of the 600 or so who had landed in the Peninsula that day in May 1810 almost half had been killed, or wounded, or else evacuated home sick – broken men with scant likelihood of entire recovery. Some of these invalids might by now have acquired a skill with which a cripple could eke out a living. Others might have become inpensioners at one of the veterans’ establishments. Many more would be reduced to begging in the streets, desperate to avoid the workhouse. Some would, without doubt, have found themselves back in the jails whence they had been all but impressed, or to avoid which they had elected to enlist – ‘paying with the drum’. The horses had fared even worse. There were scarcely four score of the original 600 (and a dozen more of these would fail to finish this march): ‘You would have thought that someone in the Treasury might have been discomposed,’ said Hervey. ‘What economy is it to deny us a new saddle at forty shillings, only to have us replace the wretched animal itself a month later at thirty pounds when its back is done?’

  ‘My dear Hervey, you and I know that our boast as a nation of horsemasters amounts to little more than that a few stud-grooms know their business,’ Laming replied, taking Hervey aback by the unusual candour of his opinion.

  If it had been left to Edmonds, then further loss might at least have been avoided, but the decision to march to the Channel ports had, in his view, been the final testimony that no one cared in the least measure for man or beast now that Bonaparte had been brought down, and his anger had been profound and brooding as a consequence. Had it not been for Barrow, so rumour in the squadrons held, Edmonds would have knocked down the staff captain in Wellington’s headquarters (which he had visited in spite of Heroys’s advice to the contrary) when that officer loftily dismissed him with the explanation that they were marching to Boulogne to spare the horses the distress of the passage through the Bay of Biscay. But why they should now be taking so indirect a route, avoiding the towns and adding more than fifty leagues to the journey, was wholly beyond him, and not even the most languorous staff officer could advance a plausible reason. The sullenness of the country people was in marked contrast to what they had become accustomed to in Spain, and indeed Toulouse, but they hardly constituted a threat. Rests and bivouacs – and these were few enough – were solitary affairs indeed. Only in the Vendée was there any respite. The wretched condition of the towns and villages in the other départements had brought the regiment hateful glowers. Or that at least was the interpretation placed upon them: apprehensiveness might equally have been the reason, for if the Grande Armée had so fearful a reputation for rapaciousness in its own country, then why should the British be expected to be any better? Once or twice the Sixth had the opportunity to demonstrate their good faith when, outpacing the commissary waggons, they had to find their own forage, and in doing so astounded the corn merchants by exchanging properly receipted promissory notes rather than merely making off with the feed. But as to how the population truly regarded them the Sixth were at a loss. The wretched condition of the people was in part the result of the Royal Navy’s complete and utter blockade of the Continent, but Bonaparte’s war taxes had made greater ravages. It was not the British who had ordered the levée en masse, putting every man, woman and child, sick or healthy, to war-work intermittently for the past twenty years. The people might have complained about the infamous gabelle and the sundry other extortions of the ancien régime, but what had revolution profited the peasantry if the evidence now were anything to judge by?

  In the Vendée, at least, it appeared that this was understood. There, things looked even more wretched at times, but royalist colours flew from the public buildings and from a good many private houses, and the regiment was made welcome. The brigade was permitted a four-day billet, and the Sixth quartered themselves in the little town of Clisson, near Nantes. And in Clisson they were presented with evidence for the first time that they might indeed be liberators rather than conquerors, for while there was much work for the troopers, and even more for the farriers, the officers found the hospitality of the noblesse most generous.

  Nor was it a hospitality born of plenitude, for there had been an intermittent reign of terror since the uprising. The château to which the officers had been invited on the second evening had little remaining of the fine paintings and furnishings that had once filled it. Its master and his châtelaine, the former of whose three brothers, and their two sons, had died by the guillotine or the firing squad during the past two decades, had dug up their plate that very morning, the first time it had seen daylight during that same period. But the red wine of the Loire valley had filled the elegant silver decanters of the unearthed service, and these in turn had kept the officers’ glasses full throughout the night until the adjutant, at Edmonds’s bidding, had called the party away to its unsteady attendance at morning stables.

  Hervey had missed this entertainment, however. He had ridden some thirty miles eastward, to the Château de Chantonnay, in a fruitless attempt to deliver Sister Maria’s letter and ring into her father’s hand, learning as he arrived that the family had left for Paris the day before. He was glad at least that he would not have occasion to describe to her what he found, for the house was a veritable ruin. From the one man who did not run away on seeing him, a crabbed old gardener from the former estate, he learned that the family had been living in what had been the stables after the house had been requisitioned and turned into a button-making factory. Sister Maria de Chantonnay’s injunction had been uncompromising, however: the ring was to be given to no one but her father in person, so all that Hervey was able to do was hand her letter to the vieillard, whom he hoped was a faithful enough remnant of the household. The ring would go with him to England after all.

  That four-day billet was indeed a labour: ‘I’ve fair pissed me tallow dawn to dusk since we stopped ’ere, Mr ’Ervey,’ complained Johnson on the last morning. The farriers had re-shod every horse, and the dandy brushes had been hard at work removing the vestiges of winter coats. There had been green fodder to cut – there was no commissary provision on the march – and saddlery and harness had been stripped down, cleaned and mended. But there had been opportunities, too, for diversion; and when the regiment left on the fifth day it was amidst more emotion, even, than at Toulouse. Indeed, the final muster bore so little resemblance to a military parade, so numerous and pressing were the onlookers, with buttons, rings, notes and promises being tearfully exchanged, that the exasperation of the adjutant and Mr Lincoln was plain to behold. Edmonds himself was so alarmed at the suspension of good order and military discipline that once under way he trotted the regiment hard for four hours on and off to put bite back into them.

  The country through which they passed subsequently was never as pretty, and in no degree as friendly, as the Vendée. They were jeered and spat at in Le Mans, and stones were thrown at them in Rouen, although the flats of a few troopers’ swords exacted swift retribution. The flats, mind, for the British trooper could possess an uncommon magnanimity. Prussians, Austrians, Russians – all seemed to perceive it their duty to avenge their national dishonour, a dishonour which thereby became a personal quest for vengeance, and a vengeance which might therefore be exacted indiscriminately. Beyond the immediate right to quench his prodigious thirst the British trooper cared not overmuch for loot, unless it could buy more drink. Wanton destruction and rape sometimes followed from too much of it, but terror and pillage were not instruments of
war or conditions of service, and, though it was of little consolation, those of the fair sex who were taken in such moments were not ravished with method, the Sabine way. It was true enough that Britain had never been invaded by Bonaparte, but the ranks of the Sixth (and the Sixth were in this respect not untypical) were scarcely made up of idealists. They were not inspired by royalist fervour in the way that so many French were inspired by revolutionary fervour. There were upright and loyal subjects of King George in the ranks: there were as many, probably more, who were the flotsam and jetsam of the realm, the sweepings of the alehouses and the streets, and occasionally of the prisons. But they were under authority; and under that authority, these men, these very dregs of the country, comported themselves with no little chivalry. They did not habitually put to the sword prisoners of war and civilians caught in a siege. And they were more likely to share a scarce canteen of water with a wounded enemy than do him further harm. Authority could make of them tolerably fine fellows: Hervey could not conceive of a life without them.

  At Boulogne the regiment had two further days’ rest while the commissary officers arranged their loading in three transports, all merchantmen. One was a particularly filthy Kent coaler in which Edmonds flatly refused to embark men or horses until a working party from the town gaol had scrubbed its holds. ‘Damn it, man!’ he had thundered to the startled embarkation officer, ‘we had better to take us off at Corunna, even!’ And the regiment had smiled. They liked to hear the major’s ranting occasionally. It seemed to reassure them that at bottom there was nothing to worry about; for if the major raved, then it must be because things might be changed thereby, and if things might be changed then the situation could not be so bad. Few would have allowed the thought that such explosions might mask Edmonds’s growing sense of powerlessness in what he perceived to be the regiment’s imminent betrayal.