Company Of Spears

rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep’. Yes, the elm had a power to command attention, more so even than the oak. Elms were England’s leafy witnesses – to village-Hampdens, mute inglorious Miltons and guiltless Cromwells, as well as to the great men themselves. What was it in that poem that could conjure a vision of his youth – his simpler, honest, chaste youth? Was it true that General Wolfe (as brave as any man to wear the King’s uniform) had said before battle that he would rather have composed Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard than take Quebec? Hervey did not suppose that Wolfe had meant it to be taken exactly literally, if he had said it at all; nevertheless there lay power in those words, power to invoke a visceral love of country. Was it not time for him, now, to return to the elms of Horningsham, to ‘the blazing hearth’, and to his makings? The question was point-less: behind him, albeit under his temporary orders, was his regiment – his regiment! This was what he had dreamed of for long years. There could never be a going back. Not, surely, without diminution? But was that not to pit himself against Gray’s own injunction: ‘Let not ambition mock their useful toil’? He must not allow himself conceit in this temporary command:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.

(He shuddered)

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Number two gun fired. Gilbert snorted. Number four followed three with but a split second’s interval. The last of the rooks, bravest of the brave, quit the furthest elms. Hervey glanced over his shoulder. The sight was no boast of heraldry, nor of anything else for that matter. He would have the Chestnut Troop blaze away until both ranks of the regiment, three squadrons in line, were dressed with a decent semblance of security (and he wondered if the Chestnuts would run out of powder before then). Then he would have his dragoons draw carbines, load and fire, return carbines, draw sabres and advance in line. They would not finish with a charge, however, as field days usually required: the heath was too broken to risk a gallop in regimental line – not, at least, with so many new men and horses.

Number five gun fired and a trooper from C Troop bolted, its rider, a seasoned dragoon, hauling on the reins for all he was worth but without effect. The Chestnuts’ captain tried to stay number six gun, but it fired prematurely. The sponger was hurled a hundred yards still clutching the ramrod, and the ventsman was thrown to the ground beside the trail.

It oughtn’t to happen, Hervey knew, but it did occasionally: all it took was a piece of wadding still glowing when the next charge was loaded. ‘Insufficient sponging,’ he said to himself. ‘Poor devil.’

The Chestnuts’ captain ordered his first section to continue the firing while the rest of the premature’s crew doubled forward to recover the unfortunate gun number. They found him with not a mark on his face or hands, but motionless, his neck snapped. As they picked the man up, the runaway from C Troop found a rabbit hole and somersaulted twice, driving a shoe into the face of its floored rider. No one moved to his aid; no one would, not without the order of the officer commanding.

When neither horse nor rider rose, Hervey turned to the adjutant. ‘Have C Troop bring in their man,’ he said, sounding weary.

* * *

The Chestnuts thundered away for a full ten minutes more. Slowly the Sixth’s lines began to straighten, and the troopers to stand quiet. Hervey was at last gratified. It had been barely a year since they had stood before the walls of the great fortress at Bhurtpore, where thirty times the number of guns had each thrown three times the weight of shot that horse artillery could dispose, and yet the regiment could not be called ‘steady to fire’. It was not their fault, and certainly not his predecessor’s in command, for the regiment had not brought those battle-hardened horses back from India with them, exchanging them instead (as required by the War Office for reasons of economy) with the outgoing regiment at Hounslow.

Predecessor in command: he ought to say predecessors, for there had been three officers with the privilege of commanding dragoons in the past twelve months or so. Hervey sighed. What a sorry procession it had been. Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Ivo Lankester, Bart, whose elder brother had been killed in temporary command of the regiment at Waterloo, had died at the head of his men in the storming of Bhurtpore, leaving a wife of but a year, and with child. Command had devolved without purchase therefore on the senior major, Eustace Joynson, a man much loved by all ranks for his devotion to duty, and facility with administration. But Joynson was a tired man and full of sadness (a wayward daughter – his ‘life sentence’ as he confessed to Hervey). He was ill-fitted to command, and he knew it, and so he had taken the windfall lieutenant-colonelcy to the regimental agents (it was said he would get fifteen thousand for it at least), and in the interim, while the commander-in-chief’s staff considered the bids, so to speak, the Sixth had come under the orders of Hervey’s old friend Major Benedict Strickland. Strickland had been senior to him by months only, but Hervey had looked forward nevertheless to rejoining the regiment after his ill-starred mission in Portugal. In all likelihood, Hervey reckoned, Strickland had been the first Catholic to have command of a regiment under a Hanoverian king, albeit temporary command, for the Test Act required that all holders of military office be communicants of the Church of England (as well as taking the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, denying the doctrine of Transubstantiation). The Relief Act of 1793 had opened a door to Catholic officers, if a very small one, requiring a simple oath of loyalty rather than anything troubling to tender consciences; and Strickland had observed his religion discreetly. Even so, he had not always found things easy. When the Earl of Towcester – infamous memory! – had commanded, ten years past, ‘damned papists’ had been his taunt, but always protected by position, so that Strickland would have been on uncertain ground had he called him out.

Well, thought Hervey, watching C Troop’s orderly corporal bringing the motionless dragoon to where the surgeon stood, Strickland had endured those years with commendable dignity. He had deserved his honour. It had been the cruellest fate that in three months he was dead too, killed in a smash with the Oxford mail as his chariot raced back to Hounslow along the foggy turnpike. Hervey had dined with him that very evening, and Strickland had taken him back to the United Service Club afterwards. Hervey’s last words on bidding his old friend goodnight had been a promise to join him at Hounslow within the week.

And how he had looked forward to that. The Spanish business (or ought he to say Portuguese?) had left a bitter taste. He had gone to Lisbon full of hope. Kat – Lady Katherine Greville – the much younger wife of old, absentee Lieutenant-General Sir Peregrine Greville, and some years now Hervey’s lover-patroness, had got him the commission through her influence with the Duke of Wellington. And then affairs had rapidly turned sour. He had fallen out with his commanding officer, Colonel Norris, over the best means of deploying the army of intervention (he could not feel much regret for that, since Norris was a tedious, pedantic, narrow-thinking artilleryman; though he had been his commanding officer), and although Hervey had been vindicated in his estimate of what was the best course for the army, he had paid a heavy price: he had never expected to see the fortress of Badajoz again, and certainly not as a prisoner. He had escaped – not without bloodshed – but to the prospect of court martial. Had he not had friends, ‘friends at court’ (and Kat was, as ever, his most assiduous friend in that regard), he was sure he would have been finished.

A sudden hubbub to the left of the line made him turn, and testily, imagining another dragoon had involuntarily dismounted (such an unfortunate was always the butt of ribald advice, even if he were an officer – more so, indeed, for greater would be the sconce on return to barracks). He smiled, however: a big dog fox trotted parallel to the line not fifty yards off, stopping every so often and giving the ranks a glance, wary rather than timorous, then trotting on with an air of indifference. It was strange, thought Hervey, that he should break cover so close, when there was nothing before them but a mile and more of heath. Perhaps the sight of several hundred horses was not of itself alarming if they were not accompanied by hounds? Or perhaps here was one fox who had never been hunted, and therefore inclined to see a regiment of cavalry rather than a field of hunting men? He now halted directly to the front of where Hervey stood, as if one horse in advance of the rest deserved particular scrutiny. Hervey saluted him: he was a fine fellow, clean-coated, full-brushed – last year’s cub, possibly. Many a time on Salisbury Plain with Daniel Coates he had observed the fox as close, and even in Spain, but he did not think