by Max Hennessy
He frowned. Dammit, if a girl came at you with her undergarments at the slope, what could a man do but oblige? A cavalryman was supposed to have an eye for opportunity.
He was still surprised that anyone as devoted to overheated rooms as Georgy should want a horse-smelly type like himself, but she had clearly had it all planned and he realised now it had all been part of a campaign. He looked again at the letter she had sent, opening it furtively once more inside the newspaper. Her words seemed to burn in his brain. Marriage meant ‘love, honour and obey’ and ‘till death do us part’, and at twenty-five, with the whole world before him, it seemed a dreadful prospect.
He supposed he would have to marry some time. His father would begin to imagine there was something odd about him if he didn’t, and the old man was a stickler for the line continuing because there had been Goffs at Braxby probably since Adam. But Georgy! The idea of lying alongside that flaccid white body every night, while she expected him to do his duty as a husband, listening to her conversation, drinking her everlasting cups of tea – a flat-footed dismounted drink if ever there were one – seemed like a distant view of Hell.
Yet he couldn’t see any way out of it. If he tried to back off, she’d have her father round like a shot, demanding, accusing, talking of the honour of the regiment. And his own father, stiff with pride and rigid with integrity, would back him up. The prospect was terrifying.
He became aware of his father speaking again. ‘Following this business in America, boy?’
He hurriedly got his thoughts into line and dressed by the right. A quick glance at the paper put him in order, because The Times and the Morning Post were full of the war in the States. And a damn funny affair it was, too! Civil war was strange enough in any event, but this one seemed to be conducted in a manner based on a cross between the viciousness of a blood feud and the class consciousness of a vicarage tea party. While men were killing each other between the two capitals, in New York vacant stores had been opened as recruiting booths, and pullers-in from the social register or the nearest political office had appeared on the sidewalks to encourage enlistment – on the under-standing, of course, that when the regiment was raised, they would be its officers. Everybody had wanted to be in the war. And still did. Even Brosy la Dell.
‘My cousin’s with the Morning Advertiser,’ he had written the previous day from Dover where he was energetically pursuing the daughter of a naval captain, ‘and I suggested that, since Billy Russell of The Times seems to be making a botch of things over there, they might be glad to have me go over to write it all up for them. He replied that they could certainly do with someone, as the chap they sent out last year has just got himself shot by accident, but that, since I couldn’t even write a bill for a load of coal, I’m not the man they want.’
Brosy’s letter showed all his old undimmed cheerfulness. Like Colby he had advanced in rank not by purchase but by the simple process of stepping into dead men’s shoes, and also like Colby, seemed to have the same skill at survival.
Colby was aware of his father still waiting for his answer. ‘Yes, Father,’ he said. ‘I’ve been following it. Who do you think’ll win?’
‘South.’ The old man had no doubt. ‘The South’s got the cavalry. They were the horse-owners, and horse-owners are good horse-masters. I can’t imagine horse-masters coming from New York where they only use horses to pull carriages, can you?’
‘All the same, Father, they haven’t yet got Kentucky and Missouri to secede, Arkansas and Tennessee are now in Northern hands, and they’re already beginning to encircle the South.’ Colby gestured with his paper and, as he did so, the thing hit him like a blow in the face. Good God, he thought, it’s the answer to everything!
‘How long do you think it’ll go on, Father?’ he asked.
‘Two or three more years.’
Colby was sitting bolt-upright now, his brain racing. In two or three years Georgina would surely have decided it wasn’t worth waiting and turned to someone else. ‘That’s what I felt, Father,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And here I am excused duty until I’m recovered. Where better for my health than Virginia, where they’re fighting? Warm, dry and no malaria. Good place to get over an illness. I could write for the newspapers. Everybody’s at it these days.’
The general thought for a moment. ‘How about your career?’ he asked.
Colby beamed. ‘Won’t suffer, Father. Could even open the way to a staff appointment. I think I’ll take the train to London tomorrow and go and see the Morning Advertiser.’
Four
‘Lying in the shadow underneath the trees,
Goodness, how delicious, eating goober peas!’
Riding slowly down the dusty Maryland road, one leg cocked over the horn of his saddle, Colby sang softly to himself. Just behind, with a mule in tow carrying their luggage, Ackroyd looked up.
‘What’s goober peas?’ he asked.
‘Dunno.’ Colby smiled. ‘Just a song I heard. Eggs laid by a goober bird, or something, I dare say.’
Ackroyd nodded and, as he lapsed into a satisfied silence, Colby went on singing, well content with the way things had turned out.
It had not taken him long to get the measure of the Morning Advertiser. They were very much uncommitted and anxious to avoid personal views of the war because Russell of The Times had got himself into trouble with a speech at a St Patrick’s day dinner that had not only been repudiated by his editor but had also made things difficult for himself in the States.
‘Avoid opinions,’ Colby had been told. ‘Avoid anything controversial.’
‘What do you want?’ he had asked cheerfully. ‘Sermons or recipes? Or shall I send you a hymn?’
They had landed in New York where, as befitted a man holding the Queen’s commission, Colby had stayed in the best hotel he could find. It had a perpendicular railway called an elevator going through each storey and was full of politicians and salesmen masquerading as soldiers. But, where he had expected to see an embattled city, there had seemed instead to be more of an emotional fervour than a desire to get to the front. The women dressed their children in outlandish costumes as soldiers, the politicians were still playing at politics, and the negroes, despite the avowed declaration that they were equal, were feared and hated, something that showed very plainly when riots broke out over the introduction of conscription and most of the victims proved to be black.
The real contact with the war started at Washington. With its cobblestones and iron wheels, its hoop skirts, livery stables, taverns and high stoops, Washington was more Southern than Northern in character and its charm had been enhanced by the gentle widow of a Northern cavalry colonel who had taken a fancy to Colby and allowed him to use her home as his own.
In the last weeks, however, the war seemed to have changed. The Northern army had been moulded only slowly after many humiliations at the hands of a much smaller, worse-supplied force, and seemed even now to be composed of volunteers, conscripts and bounty jumpers whose quality varied from splendid to awful. The businessmen and politicians who had been the original officers and leaders had disappeared, however, and there was now a dangerously aggressive mood in the air, so that the sort of officer who abandoned his regiment when the weather was bad had gone.
And since the great battle at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania that summer, it was becoming clear that the power of the Confederacy, once so virile and strong, was at last in decline. Its losses had been enormous and while the North’s had also, the North could accept them, and people who before had gone about their business dourly, feeling that whatever they did the South did better, were now holding their heads up as though they could at last see the light at the end of a long dark tunnel. The North was scenting victory and was pushing hard to win it. Things were being tightened up. The gentlemanliness was disappearing from the war and paroles to captives were no longer permitted, because the one thing the South needed was men.
‘There’s a smell of victory in the air,’ Colby said o
ut loud.
Dozing in the saddle in the late autumn sunshine, Ackroyd lifted his head. He obviously hadn’t the same sense of smell, though, bought out of the army to accompany Colby as his general factotum, he had shown a remarkable ability for getting away the newsletters Colby wrote, able to find a telegraph that was working when no one else could and managing to bypass delays to get the reports to New York. It had been Ackroyd who had discovered they could use ordinary mails, with the occasional expedient of the mail steamer at Boston or New York, and Ackroyd who learned that certain items could be speeded up by use of the telegraph to Nova Scotia, from where, if their arrival coincided with the departure of a fast steamer, they took only seven days to London instead of fourteen.
Colby went back to his thoughts.
His sympathies were mixed. He liked the forthright attitude of the Northern soldiers he had met but, because the South was less hostile to Britain and had been so successful against the odds, there was the romantic aura about the Confederates of a lost cause.
More than anything else he had noticed the changed methods. Precision weapons and long-range artillery had ended the old habit of advancing in close order, and it looked as though this would be the pattern for the future. And while, once, an army a long way from its base was finished when it had lost ten thousand men, here in America they had discovered armies could be reinforced by rail and stay in the field. Soldiers had become moles and the movement of cavalry was as strange to Colby as it was mysterious. Its use was not for shattering infantry but for marauding expeditions, cutting railways, destroying crops, capturing wagons; as far as a pitched battle was concerned, it didn’t seem to be of much use at all because it was invariably employed as mounted infantry, never using the sabre and only utilising its horses to get at speed from one part of the field to another. His father, Colby decided, would have been horrified.
Magruderville was typical of the small towns of Maryland. One or the other of the two armies had recently passed through it and it was a ruin of blackened chimneys and fire-scarred walls.
As they moved down the main street, a hound with a voice like a trumpet came out from under a porch, yelled at them for a moment or two then slunk back, and a few children stared at them from doorways. The hotel had been shattered, the lounge a ruin, the mirrors starred by bullets, the stuffing ripped from the chairs. A torn portrait of Abraham Lincoln taken from a magazine and tacked to a wall had been punctured by a dozen revolver shots.
The owner’s wife was a large woman with red hair and a bosom like a frigate under full sail. ‘Sure,’ she said in reply to Colby’s question. ‘We can give you a room.’
The landlord gestured with the whisky jar he held. ‘Good, light and plumb airy,’ he grinned. ‘Window got knocked out.’
Colby was staring round him. ‘What happened?’
‘Them goddam Rebs. Came through here raidin’ and burnin’, toot-tootlin’ on their bugles and stealin’ everythin’ they could lay their hands on. We ain’t had time to get things straight yet.’
Maryland and South Pennsylvania had been scoured clean as Lee had swept up to Gettysburg and they were scared sick in case he came again. The whole area had been cleared of shoes by the barefooted men – even women’s and children’s shoes had been snatched up for their families back home – and there had been uproar all along the Mason–Dixon line, with burned townships, fresh graveyards, ruined farms and shattered homes.
The landlord gestured at his wife. ‘Flora there wrapped the Stars and Stripes across her front and stood on the porch to show ’em what she thought of ’em. But one of them there Texicans saw her and yelled out ‘Lady, take care! We’re good at storming breastworks when the Yankee colours is on ’em! She took ’em off right quick and went inside.’
Grinning at his wife’s blushes, he studied Colby’s clothes. ‘You English?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Your goddam Queen better not recognise them Rebs! What you payin’ with?’
‘Yankee money.’
The proprietor grinned again. ‘Better’n Confederate notes,’ he said. ‘Ain’t much to eat, but we druv the chickens and shoats into the woods. We could do fried pig-meat or chicken.’
Colby shrugged. ‘Shan’t complain,’ he said. ‘Two of us.’
‘Only one bed. And you take your spurs off before you lie down. Got any arms?’
‘Just a couple of Colts for our own protection.’
‘Don’t wear ’em around. Guy gets at the whisky he likes to shoot the chandeliers down. Stables round the back. Advise you not to stay in Magruderville. There’s somethin’ brewin’ up.’
‘What sort of something?’
The landlord shrugged. ‘Battle, I guess,’ he said. ‘A big one. The army’s just passed through.’
‘Which army? Yours or theirs?’
‘Depends where your sympathies lie. Northern, matter o’ fact. They say the hills is full of Rebs.’
Ackroyd brought the saddlebags upstairs. He accepted the cigar Colby offered and, pulling the coverlet of the bed down, indicated the grubby sheets.
‘’E said the Northern army just passed through. I think they all slept in this ’ere bed.’ He grinned. ‘Considering ’ow big this bloody country is, sir, it’s thoughtful of ’em to fight their battle so ’andy.’
Colby put his feet up on the bed, and sat back while Ackroyd produced a flask and poured them both a drink. Leaning back against the soiled pillow, Colby fished out the last letters from home that he’d received via Washington. One of them was from his sister, Harriet, to say that Georgina Markham had at last got married – to Claude Cosgro. Harriet seemed pleased. For some reason she seemed fond of her younger brother and had never liked Georgina; while for Claude Cosgro, who had once tried his tricks with Harriet and got her fist in his eye for his trouble, she had a sheer active dislike. She seemed to think they were well suited and Colby wondered if the union had been the result of another big seduction scene. Judging by the participants, it seemed likely, one way or the other. At least, he decided, it ought to be safe enough now to go home.
The only other worthwhile item of news was that Brosy la Dell was also now in the States. He had returned to the regiment but had taken six months leave and written to Washington to say he was going to have a look at the war, too – from the South, passing through the blockade via Mexico.
Because it was Saturday, there were a lot of soldiers in the town, staging a get-together in the lounge of the hotel with fiddlers, hard cider, whisky and girls. They made enough noise to wake the dead but, since they might well be among the dead themselves before long, Colby had a feeling they probably deserved it. Among them was a pale-faced young man in a blue suit that had a military cut to it but was not a uniform.
‘Von Hartmann,’ he introduced himself. ‘Hans-Viktor von Hartmann. 19th Prussian Lancers.’
‘Colby Goff. 19th (Prince Leopold’s Own) Lancers.’
Von Hartmann smiled. ‘We have much in common, I think. Almost we are brothers.’ He spoke excellent English with only a slight accent.
‘You with the Northern troops?’ Colby asked.
‘No.’
‘Newspaper?’
Von Hartmann’s lips tightened. ‘Hardly the profession for an officer. I am a military observer from the Prussian Government. I’m here to find out all I can about American methods.’
The noise was growing louder round the bar so they took their drinks and sat outside on the stoop where they could talk.
‘We take a different view of the army in my country,’ the Prussian said. ‘Ours is a martial capital, and war belongs to the province of social life. We believe in studying other people’s methods. It’s such a help if you have to fight them. Do you do the same?’
‘We have rather more chance of first-hand experience. In Egypt, Africa and India.’
Von Hartmann stiffened. ‘We are a young army,’ he said. ‘But we have already beaten the Danes.’
‘Beating the Danes is
nothing to boast about,’ Colby observed dryly.
‘No, of course not.’ There was a hint of resentment at Colby’s words. ‘But it establishes a principle. “In Gottes Namen drauf!” That was what von Wrangel said at Duppel: In the name of God, forward! That’s our policy. We don’t look back. Only forward to the next conflict. There will be greater battles than Duppel. Against Austria perhaps. We are determined that the leadership of the German peoples shall not rest solely in the hands of the men in Vienna. With Austria out of the running, we shall then organise a Federation of North German States, and it will be controlled by Prussia.’
‘And then?’
Von Hartmann shrugged. ‘Perhaps France,’ he said. ‘Few nations have had so bad a neighbour as Germany has had in France. They have invaded our country fourteen times in a hundred and fifty years. Who do you think will win the war here?’
‘The North.’
‘Exactly,’ The stiff smile appeared as the Prussian approved of Colby’s view. ‘They have made it technical and that is what we believe in. We too, are perfecting the railway machine. With the railways and the telegraph, a commander-in-chief can handle vast numbers of men and move his troops by mathematical calculations, not guesswork. Everything that can be done before a battle should be done, and this, of course, reduces the question of luck. Our general staff has a plan in the case of a war with Austria or even a war with France.’
‘What about a war with England?’ Colby asked.
Von Hartmann’s eyes flickered. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ he said.