A Close Run Thing

ranks, but in addition Strange held a curious authority because no-one, but no-one, had ever heard him swear — not an obscenity, nor even a faintly indecent remark, not an oath, nor the mildest profanity even. He was a temperance Methodist, though he would preach at no-one. He kept his own company and permitted no-one to become close. No-one, that is, but Serjeant Armstrong — Armstrong, the hard-drinking, frequently foul- mouthed ex-miner. Armstrong was no Methodist: he was not even baptized. What they saw in each other had long been a matter for speculation in the officers’ mess. The simple attraction of opposite natures seemed an inadequate explanation. There were some who said that the reason for their enlistment might reveal a cause. But neither man seemed the sort to be afraid of the deep mine or the deep sea, nor the sort to run from some domestic sorrow. Besides, Strange was married, was he not? Hervey thought meanly of himself for not knowing more about both of them, though Strange would not have volunteered the smallest piece of intelligence, he felt sure. In any case, Hervey would always recall his first troop-leader’s advice: Do not get too close — sending them to their deaths will be all the harder. A humane, if cynical, doctrine, it had been sound enough counsel for a young cornet in his greenness. Perhaps that advice was as good now as it had been, but Hervey could no longer bring himself to believe so.

‘Good evening, Mr Hervey sir,’ Strange said quietly, and with a relaxed salute. ‘The major looked thoughtful.’

‘Yes, he was thinking of home.’

‘Major Edmonds was my lieutenant when I joined, sir. He and his lady taught me to write.’

This was possibly the first time that Hervey had exchanged any talk with Strange that was not strictly related to duty — certainly the first time he could recall — and even after six years’ campaigning he did not feel at his ease doing so. While many a dragoon liked the attention of the officers, Strange seemed to have no need of their company. Or, that is, as little need of theirs as any other’s. And soon, despite his initial discomfort, Hervey could not but feel a warm glow at this initiation of intimacy.

‘What will you do when we get to Canterbury, Serjeant Strange?’

‘I have not seen my wife for nigh on six years, either,’ he answered without a trace of emotion, ‘nor my father or mother.’

It was the same mellow Suffolk again, curiously soothing, reassuring. Hervey probed gently. ‘What will you do if the regiment disbands?’

‘I have two years to a pension,’ he replied resolutely. ‘I reckon they would pay me off fairly, but I would have liked my own troop, and then to be a quartermaster if Colonel Irvine wanted me.’

Hervey would ordinarily have shared Strange’s trust that Parliament would treat fairly with them, but Edmonds’s cynicism these past weeks had begun to erode that confidence. He wondered how many other good men would be lost to the king’s service in this way — indeed, whether he himself would be placed on half-pay — and he shuddered at the thought in the cool evening breeze. The intimacy was fleeting, however, for Serjeant Strange suddenly stepped back, as if the act of so doing were necessary to break that intimacy, and took his leave formally saying he had to be about his duty below. Hervey thought of staying on deck awhile but instead he, too, went below, to the cabin he was to share with three other cornets. There was a half-hearted attempt to carouse, with wine they had brought aboard, but they were all more tired than they had cared to admit. In less than an hour they were happy to turn in, and Hervey slept tolerably well as the ship gently pitched and rolled in the Channel’s swell.

* * *

He was awakened at dawn by cheering from the upper deck and straight away went up to see the cause. The bows and fore-rails were packed with troopers peering towards the land three miles distant, the chalk-white cliffs reflecting the first streaks of daylight. Though few of these men, if any, had ever seen those cliffs before, they were an image of England as powerful as the standard of St George itself. Within the hour the transports were reefing sail in Dover’s outer harbour and the towing-boats were approaching to take them in to berth on the morning tide. The frigate had left them moments before, firing one of its eighteen-pounders in farewell and breaking out what seemed like every yard of remaining sail so as to take her in a fast turn back towards France — so fast that she heeled over at a breathtaking angle with the wind, exaggerating her speed still further. ‘Who is she?’ Hervey asked one of the transport’s crew.

‘Nisus, mister,’ replied the hand, with evident respect for the name.

‘Nisus, was she not the frigate that—’

‘Ay,’ said the man before he could finish. ‘It was ’er an’ Euryalus that shadowed them French durin’ the night before Trafalgar and signalled the rest of the fleet to follow. Blue light ev’ry hour if standing to the southward or the Straits; three quick guns ev’ry hour if headin’ westward!’

‘You sound as though you might have been there?’

‘Was I, sir,’ he replied with passion, and with the same vowels as Armstrong. T watched them lights all night from the nest o’ Royal Sovereign — one of Admiral Collingwood’s “Tars of the Tyne”, I were. If Cap’n Blackwood’s an’ yon frigate ’ad lost them French, it would’ve been different next day.’ And then he chuckled and held up the stump of his right arm: ‘This would’ve been a mite longer for a start!’

How Bonaparte had thought he might defeat a navy with men like this, or an army of men like those now crowding the fore-rail, Hervey could only marvel. The Corsican had, it seemed to him, failed to heed his own dictum that the fighting spirit of a man was worth three times the weapons he bore. And Bonaparte had paid the price for underestimating that spirit in these men, for sure.

CHAPTER FOUR. ‘THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF DIRECTS …’

Dover, Sunday, 12 June

Before the transports were berthed a torrential downpour had begun, making disembarkation of both horses and men more than usually hazardous. And in the middle of this operation Edmonds found himself confronted by an envoy from the institution he reviled only fractionally less than Parliament. Even above the noise of the rain and the occasional peal of thunder his voice could be heard haranguing the unfortunate messenger from the Horse Guards.

‘Cork! Immediately? What in God’s name …?’

And then another peal of thunder, deafening this time, making it impossible for the onlookers to catch the precise terms in which Edmonds was expressing his opinion of the Horse Guards’ administration. The messenger, a young Coldstream ensign, stood rigid in blank astonishment.

Joseph Edmonds’s inclinations mattered not the slightest, however. The orders were explicit: ‘The Commander-in-Chief directs that a regiment of light dragoons be dispatched with all urgency …’ So the first to land were to be re-embarked as soon as was expedient, and were to sail for Cork — tomorrow possibly, or the day after, just as soon as transports could be found. Why Cork? he asked. Was there yet more trouble there? To which the ensign replied that, from what he read in The Times and The Daily Courant, there was trouble periodically everywhere.

By prodigious efforts, and not a little cursing of innkeepers and proprietors of livery stables (for even in this busiest of ports the Sabbath seemed to be kept with remarkable fastidiousness), Edmonds and the quartermasters managed to get covered standing, and on straw, for all the horses, and billets for the dragoons. Hervey found himself on picket once more, and it was well past midnight by the time he finished his rounds, so scattered about the town was the regiment. The officers’ lodgings were in a decent enough hotel; and there, a little before one o’clock, he found Edmonds sitting at a writing-table in the drawing room, quite alone.

‘Hervey, come over here,’ he said without looking up. ‘Take some of this Madeira and sit down. I have an assignment for you.’

Though he was happy to be sharing Edmonds’s company again — and by this time the major seemed truly to have regained his usual robust spirits — Hervey would in truth have preferred his bed, for there were only three