Company Of Spears

marvel at your way with these men, almost as if they were fellow officers indeed.’

Hervey knew what Fairbrother meant. He had himself observed the stiffness, the necessary distance between officers and men in the ranks of red, but he was intrigued to know more of this impartial observer’s opinion, for such things were ever flattering. ‘The regiment has always been under very strict regulation, but never by the lash.’

‘Of course, in my former corps the men were enlisted for ignoble reasons – to escape the hulks, or the gallows even. We were little more than a penal battalion. They were men from, as I believe, the more disagreeable parts of England.’

Hervey now smiled, and clapped a hand to Fairbrother’s shoulder. ‘Do not imagine that because mine is a regiment of cavalry we invariably recruit a nobler sort! Johnson is from one of the meanest cities, a workhouse pauper, a refugee from the coal pits; and Wainwright I myself found in the filthiest of hovels that would disgrace, I imagine, a plantation in Jamaica.’

‘Then your regiment has made of them a very great deal, Colonel Hervey. That, or Nature would claim them as her gentlemen.’

Hervey smiled the more. ‘Come now, that is a little high-blown; though I concede they are men of special worth. Wainwright has enough courage for a whole troop.’

Fairbrother shook his head to re-emphasize the point: ‘I do not think I have admired anything so much as what passes between you and them. It is as if rank has become of no need. I once heard it said that in an English regiment, the superior officer, if he is a gentleman, will never think of it, and the subordinate, if he is a gentleman, will never forget it. I am sorry to say that I did not observe as much in my former corps. And now it seems to me that it is possible to omit the word “officer” from that dictum.’

Hervey squeezed Fairbrother’s shoulder again. ‘You are a very delightful observer, if perhaps susceptible to sentiment. But I cannot laugh at that. I am glad you think the Sixth thus; I am proud, indeed. And I must say that I have greatly enjoyed these past days. You are – I will say it – exceedingly agreeable company. I would not have better conversation in my mess than I have shared with you at table.’

‘You mean you have been agreeably surprised by the conversation of one who wears the shadowed livery?’

Hervey withdrew his hand, and frowned very pointedly. ‘Fairbrother, I will speak plainly, for I have known you now long enough. If you persist in this resentfulness you will drive away any friendship and embitter yourself terribly. Give it up!’

Fairbrother turned his head from him for a moment, and then back, as if to make a firm break with what had gone before. ‘Hervey, I do most sincerely beg pardon.’

Hervey thought Algoa Bay one of the most beautiful sights he had beheld. On his passages to and from India he had not seen the bay before, his ship standing well out to catch the south-west monsoon, east of Madagascar, or the reverse on the passage home. The shore was white, whiter than anything he recalled of Madras – which in other respects he was minded of – and beyond it was a green that invited rather than threatened (the forests of the Coromandel coast had threatened): a green that promised life, and good life, shared, rather than the fortress-forest whose repellent and repelling occupants persuaded all but the most inquisitive to keep well clear. Hervey felt a powerful desire to be in that inviting green, as others had before him: first the Dutch, and then more and more English, by which of course he must include Irish, for here was land whose title an Irish peasant might own instead of paying the rack-rents to the absent landlord. And surely, in all this country (they had sailed eight hundred miles from Cape Colony), there was enough green for everyone?

But Hervey had read the colony’s historical record, Somervile had revealed to him the contents of the most confidential of papers, and Fairbrother had told him what so many outside the castle believed: the white man lived precariously at the Cape. He knew that what he observed inland of Algoa Bay was not a wilderness, and that out of the abundant green might come at any time native hordes to reclaim all that was settled. And even if those native hordes could be checked, there would surely be more. Could these Cape settlers, a few thousand adventurers, ever know what was to come out of that green heart of Africa – or when? Ex Africa aliquid novi semper: Atilius Regulus had killed the huge African snake, and the spoils of the creature were shipped to Rome for public display. The snake had been real enough, and yet the poets had seen it as boding evil for Rome, so that Africa to their minds became Rome-hating. The Carthaginians – black Hannibal – had almost destroyed the city: the Romans in their revenge had destroyed Carthage, poisoned the wells, ploughed salt into her fertile soil. Would that be what they would have to do here, at the very extremity of the continent, just as Rome had had to do?

Hervey knew that Somervile was right. There was no prospect of a diplomatic peace without the military resources to crush the Xhosa if they refused diplomacy: si vis pacem, preparate bellum. But if the Xhosa were only a fraction of the native hordes that might pour into the colony, how might there ever be a settled peace? As Somervile pointed out, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies was not of a philosophical mind. From the perspective of Downing Street, the shores of southern Africa could be colonized in the usual way: cleared, fortified, settled, regulated – and with trade, the benign influence, conducted beyond the pale. Moreover, to Hervey there was no ill in such a vision. Why could not the Xhosa stay east of the Fish River, where by ‘treaty’ they had settled after the terrible fighting seven years ago? What accounted for their recent depredations across the Fish into the Crown Colony? They must know that it brought nothing but retribution. These Cape-Dutch farmers, these burghers (and for that matter the newer British settlers), were not men who would be satisfied with merely recovering their stolen cattle: they would want a reckoning – compensation, reparation, condign punishment.

And so the trouble would inevitably increase. Did the colony possess enough troops to fight a full-scale war with the Xhosa? That indeed was the question to which this preliminary reconnaissance was directed. History was no good presage: the fighting seven years ago had been savage, unpredictable, unconfined, the Xhosa attacking not just isolated farms but forts and the bigger settlements. Even Graham’s Town had been all but overrun. The equal savagery with which the insurrection had been put down – necessary savagery, said everyone, for there had been no alternative – had then sown the seeds of the present state of frontier insolence. In the aftermath of the French war, and with Bonaparte on St Helena, there had been plenty of troops at the Cape, but since Bonaparte’s death and the Xhosa rebellion there had been severe retrenchment; how much more savage now would they need to be if the Xhosa made war again? Must they destroy every kraal, poison the wells and plough salt into the soil beyond the Fish River?

If this magnificent landing – the sea, the beaches and the green beyond – minded Hervey of his first footing in Madras, he was soon persuaded of the difference. Madras had been all white villas the length of the shoreline (and a bustling shore at that), and a massive stone fortress, with the roofs of fine-looking buildings and the spire of St Mary’s church topping the walls, like a Hanse port. Here in Port Elizabeth there were few signs of comparable civilization. The place had been scarcely more than an empty beach not seven years before. On the heights above the Baakens River was not so much a fortress as a redoubt, wood- and earth-built in 1799 when the British had first taken the country from the Dutch. It was named Fort Frederick in honour of the then commander-in-chief, the late Duke of York, and close by were the Batavian barracks, to Hervey’s eye in no greater state of comfort than the day they had been rudely put up. He understood them to house two companies of the 55th (Westmoreland) Regiment – fretting to be on to India, their original destination, Fairbrother had told him. He could not blame them: in India there would be legions of little brown men who for a few annas would shave a private soldier of a morning, dhobi his linen, attend his uniform, black his boots and pipeclay his equipment. Here there were a few Hottentots who couldn’t be trusted with a sweeping brush. As for women, Hervey saw none to compare with that day when he came ashore in Madras.

On a promontory above the beach there was a stone pyramid. Hervey pointed as he and Fairbrother walked along the landing stage. ‘To a colonial pharo, no doubt!’

Fairbrother looked pained. ‘Do you not know?’

Hervey looked askance. ‘It is of some greater significance, evidently.’

‘Hervey, it is all you need to know of a man.’ Fairbrother said it almost wistfully.

Hervey had unconsciously reassumed his military mask on touching dry land, and bridled somewhat at his companion’s obliqueness. ‘Do stop riddling.’

Fairbrother was not in the least perturbed. He was not under military orders in any significant sense (he