passage for both men and horses. His own ship, a biggish transport, had lost a hand overboard in the Bay of Biscay, the poor devil falling from the mizzen straight into the sea, so far heeled over was she. And a dragoon had split his head open falling down a companionway in the same storm. He had been a long time dying, and pitifully. But it went hardest of all with the horses.
It would have been even worse without the Sixth’s veterinary surgeon, Hervey was sure of it. John Knight had been one of the first names he had heard spoken of on joining for duty, such was the uncommon regard in the regiment for his art. That and the speculation as to his past years, for it was known that he had spent time in the West Indies, though not with His Majesty’s troops. There was, indeed, as mess gossip had it, a ‘touch of the tarbrush’ in Knight’s past, and the fare-ye-wells at Northfleet had seemed to bear it out. But that day in 1808 on the
‘Take this to Mr Knight,’ Farrier-Corporal Martin had bellowed, pushing a steaming canteen at one of the dragoons. ‘He won’t leave ’em.’
Hervey had been officer of the day, new come on duty. ‘Mr Knight is still on the orlop, Corporal Martin?’
‘He is, sir. I don’t reckon he’s been up once since we left England, sir.’
Hervey made his way gingerly down the ladder to the orlop deck where close on a hundred horses were crammed.
‘Little better than blacks on a slaver,’ the troop quartermaster complained.
It was gloomy, for sure, thought Hervey, dimly lit as it was by horn lanterns. And it stank almost as foul, he imagined – frightened horses and the bilges. He thanked heaven that Jessye was not aboard. It would have killed her. Well, perhaps not, for she was a good doer, steady too, not given to breaking out or the colic. Perhaps she would have managed,
Knight was busy preparing to back-rake one of A Troop’s mares. ‘Who’s that?’ he growled, as Hervey came up on the blind side.
‘Hervey, sir.’
‘You don’t call me “sir”, Mr Hervey!’
‘No, sir.’
‘Get me a clyster then, as you’re here.’
‘Where—’
‘The barrel yonder!’ he barked.
Hervey picked up a bucket and plunged it into the butt of warm seawater, then brought it unsteadily to the mare’s stall.
Knight had already pushed a clyster pipe into the mare’s rectum, to which he now attached the drenching horn. ‘Pour it in gently then.’
A dragoon pulled the blanket from the mare’s back and replaced it with another soaked in hotter water.
‘Easy goes,’ said Knight, watching for the sign that his medicine would work. Then the sphincter spread, and he withdrew the pipe. ‘A good evacuation,’ he pronounced a few seconds later. ‘Keep her warm now, man. And a mash of scalded bran and oats.’
Knight rinsed the tube in the bucket, then handed it to one of the assistant farriers.
The other dragoon proffered a canteen. ‘It’s coffee, sir.’
Knight took it. ‘As long as it’s not brine I’m not inclined to fret what it is.’
The veterinary surgeon’s ill humours were proverbial, though most dragoons found them as endearing as they were unnerving.
He sat down on a sack of oats and put the cup to his mouth carefully, but even so he managed to spill coffee on his coat. Not that the nominally white stable coat would betray the stain after his exertions of the past five days.
‘May I ask the reason for the physicking, Mr Knight?’ said Hervey, standing by in his still-new regimentals.
‘You may. I ordered that each man attends most carefully on his horse to see if the evacuations are less than the fodder consumed. It is overcrowding of the digestive organs which is the source of most sickness at sea.’
Daniel Coates, and therefore Hervey himself, was of similar mind too. Overcrowding was also the frequent, if not principal, cause of sickness on dry land. Coates, his mentor in all things military and equestrian, would no doubt have done the same as Knight. But Hervey wanted to know everything of the veterinarian’s opinion. ‘And the sea exacerbates the overcrowding?’
Knight had not yet registered (at least, he did not say) that here, for a regimental cornet, was an uncommon interest in the internals of a horse. The interest as a rule lay solely with the animal’s galloping powers. ‘It does. The motion of the ship affects the brain, and this in turn reacts on the stomach and intestines. Have you ever seen a horse’s gut, Hervey?’
‘I confess I have not.’
‘Well, you’ll see ’em aplenty once the guns begin to play.’
There was just something in Knight’s tone, a challenge perhaps, that made Hervey stiffen. ‘I shall hope to bear it well, sir.’
Knight finished his cup. ‘Ay, I’m sure you will,’ he replied, and with a note of conciliation now. ‘Do you know how long is the horse’s gut?’
Hervey was brightened, like a schoolboy answering well on his declensions. ‘Upwards of thirty yards, I understand.’
Knight nodded approvingly.
The troop farrier’s voice interrupted the tutorial. ‘Mr Knight, sir, Sultan’s bad.’
The veterinarian was up at once. He hurried to the end of the stalls where the big black trooper stood – hung, almost – in slings. Knight looked at him in despair; it had been so quick.
‘The sleepy staggers you think, sir?’
Knight looked weary for once. ‘It matters little, Corporal Martin. The swellings are universal,’ he said, bending this way and that. ‘And the slings won’t allow of him his evacuations.’
‘Shall I take ’em off, sir?’
The veterinarian had three fingers of his left hand to the groove of the gelding’s cheek, and in his right his hunter watch. ‘No. He’d fall and be cast. We’d never get him up.’
Farrier-Corporal Martin looked baffled; there seemed no other course to take.
‘Pulsations are strong,’ said Knight after half a minute’s counting. ‘I’m certain it’s an apoplexy. I’ll have to bleed him.’
Hervey’s veterinary knowledge was that of Clator, Coates’s lore and the farrier’s variously understood. Here before him was science, and he wanted to learn it. ‘May I ask exactly what is an apoplexy?’
Knight was already rummaging in a small chest, one of half a dozen he had brought aboard. ‘Apoplexy is the incapacity of sense or movement through arterial blockage or rupture in the brain,’ he replied without looking up, but as if reading from one of his text books.
Hervey put what he now knew of apoplexy with his understanding of the circulation of blood and concluded that bleeding was the obvious therapy, even though Daniel Coates had railed against the practice for years.
Out from the ready-chest came fleam and bleeding stick. ‘And the measuring cup, Martin,’ snapped Knight, as he began unwrapping the instruments. ‘As a rule, Hervey, I do not hold with venesection. Not, at any rate, as a universal practice. But when there is such pressure of blood in the brain it can only be efficacious to relieve it by drawing off a little.’
Hervey at once saw the logic. Why did opinion differ so much over blood-letting?
‘A little, mind. A quart at most. I don’t hold with running it off like—’ He glanced at the farrier. ‘Ready, Martin?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The veterinarian felt with his left forefinger along the jugular groove until he was satisfied he had found the spot. He deftly nicked the vein with the bleeding stick and then with thumb and index finger pressed either side of the incision to open it up, while Farrier-Corporal Martin collected the blood in the quart measuring cup.
‘You see, Hervey, there’s a deal of nonsense coming from the veterinary college at present. There are too
