A Close Run Thing

‘Yes, just,’ replied Hervey, more than ever conscious of the slender divide.

‘No, I ’aven’t found any alive this side of the road, either. Whoever caught these poor beggars was ’orrible neat with the sword. I reckon some over there is nought but into their teens. What in God’s name is Boney doing fighting with slips of boys, d’ye reckon, sir?’

Hervey almost sobbed, conscious that this was indeed the Sixth’s handiwork. Instead he turned his remorse against the orderly, angered at being touched thus. ‘They were old enough to fetch powder and put a portfire to a touch-hole if needs be,’ he snapped.

‘Ay, they were right enough, sir,’ replied the man readily. ‘Found ought worth anything on that one, sir?’ he continued breezily.

The orderly would never know how close he came at that instant to knowing the same sabre that had made its accounts at the battery. Hervey bit into his glove. ‘I have not searched him with any thoroughness,’ he said curtly.

But still the man was not put off. ‘Then, I’ll have a look for meself, sir, if that’s right by you.’

There was no regulation of which Hervey knew that prevented an orderly of the medical services from relieving the dead of their worldly possessions. It was, indeed, a consideration to many, who might otherwise have sought a less sanguinary billet with the commissaries.

‘Wonder if this did him any good, sir,’ said the man after a deal of rummaging, holding out a rosary.

Hervey cursed beneath his breath as the orderly threw it aside. ‘I will have that, if you please,’ he snapped.

‘Right enough, sir,’ came the cheery response, ‘but it’s not worth a ha’penny.’

When the orderly had finished his work Hervey walked over to the furthest gun and sat on the trail of its abandoned limber. He put his head in his hands and searched for a prayer that might transport him from the death and despoiling, and from the monstrousness of the orderly and his work. ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace …’ he began. But his thoughts wandered. Which of these thousands lying before him had been His servants? ‘For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,’ he continued resolutely. Serjeant Strange had been his servant. And Lankester. And Edmonds, too, though he would never admit it. Edmonds — the major had been more to him than his own kin these past six years. He shuddered at the lonely prospect of soldiering without him. But Strange had been worthier than any, in the sight of the Almighty, surely. And yet he had not departed in peace. Would his death torment him for ever?

Only then did he remember the oilskin pouch that Strange had thrust at him on parting, and reached into the deep inner pocket of his jacket where it rested securely with his other keepsakes: Sister Maria’s signet ring, d’Arcey Jessope’s watch, and the prayer-book his father had given him. He took out the pouch and unfolded it carefully. There was a lock of grey hair in the first fold — Strange’s mother’s? Then a letter (Hervey would not open it), and then a miniature, whose likeness was obscure since water had at some time permeated its case. Small enough tokens of sentiment, he concluded, but perhaps no surprise from so taciturn a man as Strange. The doubts began to gnaw at him again. Had there been no other course but to leave him and gallop for the trees? He took out the prayer-book, hoping for some relief in its formularies (in the Thanksgiving perhaps) — ‘For Peace and Deliverance from our Enemies’. ‘O Almighty God,’ he began, ‘who art a strong tower of defence unto thy servants against the face of their enemies,’ (‘servants’ again — service, obligation, duty: the words came crowding), ‘we yield thee praise and thanksgiving for our deliverance from those great and apparent dangers wherewith we were compassed …’

‘Mr ’Ervey sir!’ The voice was its usual insistence. He turned to see Serjeant Armstrong striding towards him, looking to neither left nor right. ‘The brigade-major’s come. I told ’im to wait and said I’d fetch you meself. What are you doing out here? Who are you talking to?’

‘Merely taking time to think, Serjeant Armstrong, that is all,’ he replied.

‘You don’t want to be thinking. What’s past is past — gone,’ he insisted. ‘’Arry Strange did ‘is duty, and that’s it. We’ll say some prayers over ’im in a minute or two with Preacher Sandbache and then it’s on for us. There’s no place for contemplating till everything’s over.’

Sir Hussey Vivian’s new brigade-major (Harris had all but lost an arm after they had moved to the centre) seemed rattled. ‘I may tell you, Hervey, that we have a brigade in name only,’ he began, ‘and the butcher’s bill is prodigious. Uxbridge will be lucky to live, by all accounts: his leg was taken clean off. Vandeleur is given command, but there is to be no pursuit, for the army is not up to it. We are merely to follow on the Prussians in the event that Bonaparte turns, although I wager he is making for a ship this very instant. America, they say, will give him sanctuary.’

Hervey said nothing. Instead he rued his own ill-fortune: Uxbridge close to death, a man who might help him. And then he cursed himself for his thoughts.

‘So the brigade is to march for Nivelles,’ continued the BM. ‘The Sixth are to lead — and none too quickly, if you please: as I said, we are not pursuing the French but following the Prussians. All we must do is get to Paris ere they break every window in the city!’

If Hervey had never before seen a battlefield the day after action, neither had he followed in the wake of a full-blown pursuit. The road to Nivelles was a trail of abandoned equipment, some of it no doubt jettisoned purposefully — baggage-waggons and the like, which could only hinder an orderly withdrawal. But much else betokened rout: small-packs, powder-horns, muskets and side-arms, the odd field-piece even. Nothing of value, however; for, vigorous though the Prussians must have been in their pursuit, all the signs of a systematic harvesting of booty were there — chests broken open and empty, bodies stripped and waggons likewise. Occasionally they came across a clothed body — a Prussian dragoon or hussar — his sword thrust into the ground and his helmet on its pommel, the minimal honouring of the dead before the needs of the pursuit had driven his comrades on. In Nivelles that night the Sixth sold the prize-horses to a livery stables at well over the official price. Twelve hundred pounds for the relief fund. Hervey was well pleased, and the regiment’s spirits began to revive with the issue of salt-beef and coffee (and the modest purchases of wine) as at last the commissary waggons caught up with them.

Subsequent entries in the regiment’s journal would read like milestones along the high road to Paris: Charleroi, Maubeuge, Laon, Soissons. Sometimes there were unhurried halts; other times they marched through the night. But never did they see a Frenchman offering resistance. Except once. And for weeks afterwards their gallant allies were, in consequence, held in some disregard by the regiment. Already, indeed, the Prussians’ wanton destruction en route was occasioning resentment. The duke’s instructions for his own troops had been most particular in this respect, as they had been after the Pyrenees: he had even ordered that troops should only of necessity cross standing crops, and in single file. Yet the Prussians had put the torch to anything and everything.

And so, in the late afternoon of the last day of June, fewer than ten miles short of St-Denis in the very outskirts of Paris, the plight of a lone Frenchman brought the Sixth to anger. They had seen the small chateau some distance off. It stood in the middle of open pasture, a handsome-looking house but without any sign of life. Had it been later in the day the Sixth might have made their billet there, but instead Hervey determined only on a watering halt. As the point-troopers rode into the yard, however, a shot rang out from a lower window, devoid of all glass and shutterless. Both men turned at once for the cover of the walls, dismounting and snatching their carbines from the saddle-boots in which they had rested idly for all but a fortnight. Scarcely had they pulled cartridges from pouch-belts, however, than out from the doorless chateau came an old man in his nightshirt raving like a madman and waving a sabre wildly. The pointmen, sensing this was no serious resistance, clipped the carbines to their pouch-belts and drew their sabres instead. Disarming the defender of the chateau took but seconds, so that by the time Hervey and the forward detachment rode into the yard the old man was simply raving harmlessly. ‘Je suis Bourboniste! Pourquoi vous me persecutez?’ he was shouting.

Hervey dismounted. No one meant him any harm, he said: ‘Est-ce que vous etes seul ici, monsieur?’

The wild eyes darted about as more of the squadron came into the courtyard, and he glanced anxiously more than once towards the house, which bore the scars of what appeared to have been a brisk fight. ‘Oui, oui!’ he replied.

Hervey asked what fighting there had been around the chateau.

‘Rien, monsieur, pas du tout,’ he replied, and then his brow furrowed. ‘Monsieur, vous n’etes pas