Company Of Spears

advanced rapidly by purchase and further patronage to major, and was appointed Commandant of the Eastern Frontier by his father in 1825 in the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He and Hervey did share a willingness, perhaps even propensity, however, to disregard the opinion of superior (not to say senior) officers – perhaps even to disdain it. But while Hervey’s occasional disagreements and sometimes more deleterious disputes were ever on matters of military expediency, Somerset’s were of the nature of petulance, and self-serving. Edward Fairbrother had told Hervey that not half a dozen years before, Somerset had been placed in arrest for insubordination to General Donkin when the general had failed to appoint him landdrost of Graham’s Town, and that his father had flown into a rage at Donkin’s presumption, exacting considerable revenge by placing both his sons in superior positions. Fairbrother had said he did not know all the particulars, but that it was well known throughout the Cape: Colonel Henry Somerset was a man to be wary of, not least because his ambition and experience were ill-matched.

But Hervey also knew that for the time being he must get on with the Commandant of the Eastern Frontier. Neither did he want ill-favoured reports reaching London, for he must presume that any letter of Somerset’s would, via his father, reach the hand of Uncle Lord FitzRoy Somerset, now secretary at the Horse Guards. ‘Colonel, may I say to you at once that I am entirely at your disposal,’ he began, though in a tone far from submissive. ‘My commission is to the raising of the Mounted Rifles, but I have known the lieutenant-governor for many years, and it is only natural that he uses me in a rather more ranging capacity. I am conscious, however, of my inexperience here at the Cape, and by contrast your very great knowledge of this place. I will speak plainly: I do not wish to be your enemy in this or any other thing. Besides ought else, I have the greatest respect for Lord FitzRoy, whom I had the privilege to meet before Waterloo.’

Hervey had calculated carefully. The word ‘Waterloo’ excited admiration and resentment in equal measure in those who had not themselves been there. He had no idea of Somerset’s opinion of ‘Indiamen’ (Somerset’s own service in the Cape Colony indicated, however, that he might not share that of a Brighton fashionable), and he did not want to be thought of as a mere dust and heat soldier.

Somerset gave little away by reply. ‘I imagine your work with the riflemen will be taxing enough. A year, your commission?’

Hervey took a sip of his coffee expressly to display a measure of insouciance. ‘That is the expectation, as much to do with the detachment of the troop from my own regiment as with the requirements of the Rifles.’

‘Mm. Your troop – their horses in a bad way.’

There seemed something just a shade censorious in the manner that Somerset expressed himself, but Hervey chose not to take offence. ‘I have a most excellent veterinary surgeon.’

Somerset did not at once reply. When he did, his tone was almost icy. ‘Colonel Hervey, let me be rightly understood. I do not take kindly to officers ranging at the frontier as you did, and I do not approve the conversion of the Cape Corps into a bunch of English burghers in green coats. Raise your Mounted Rifles as you will; it will be regular discipline that checks these savages.’

PART III

THE WOLF ON THE FOLD

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Lord Byron, ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’

XX

TO GLORY WE STEER

Gibraltar

Captain Sir Laughton Peto was not a dressy man. If the officers and crew of His Majesty’s Ship Prince Rupert (120 guns) did not know of his character and capability then that was their look-out: no amount of gold braid could make up for reputation.

Peto’s time with Admiral Hoste, not least in the action at Lissa, his command of Nisus with the East India Squadron, then commodore of the frigate squadron in the Mediterranean, and lately command of Liffey while commodore of the flotilla for the Burmese war – these things were warranty enough of his fitness for command of a first-rate. Not that it was any business of the officers and crew: he, Captain Sir Laughton Peto, held his commission from the Lord High Admiral himself. These things were not to be questioned, on pain of flogging or the yard-arm. Except that he considered himself to be an enlightened captain, convinced that having a man do his bidding willingly meant the man did it twice as well as he would if he were merely driven to it. Threatening to start the last man down a sheet might increase the speed of the watch’s descent, but men fell in their dread of the knotted rope-end. Threatening to start the slowest team in gunnery practice risked the sponging done ill: a ‘premature’ could kill or maim every last one of them. Except, of course, it was one thing to have a crew follow willingly a captain who was everywhere, as he might be able to be on a frigate, but quite another when his station was the quarterdeck, as it must be with a line- of-battle ship. Nisus had but one gundeck. In action the captain might see all. Prince Rupert had three, of which the two that hurled the greatest weight of shot were the lower ones, where the guncrews worked in semi-darkness and for whom in action the captain was as remote a figure as the Almighty Himself. The art of such a command, Peto knew full well, was in all that went before, so that the men had as perfect a fear of their captain’s wrath – and even better a desire for his love – as indeed they had for their Heavenly Maker. If that truly required the lash, he would not shrink from it, but at heart he was one with Hervey: more men were flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.

Rupert had a fair reputation herself. Like the Admiralty’s other first-rates she had not seen action in a long time – Peto thought it probably in the West Indies – but being later built she had been kept in full commission for longer after the peace of 1815. He knew her first lieutenant just a little, and what little he knew he approved of. Rupert looked in good trim, handsome even, as she rode at anchor in Gibraltar Bay against the background of the towering Rock.

Any ship would look handsome at Gibraltar, reckoned Peto, as hands pulled smartly for their wooden world – his wooden world. The barge cut through the modest swell with scarcely any motion but headway: not a degree of observable roll, nor more than ten of pitch – testament to the power with which hands were bending oars.

Peto saw nothing but his ship, his eyes fixed on her from the moment of stepping into his barge. In part it was because he would take the one opportunity to study her as an enemy might see her, before he had her under weigh, for with a freshening westerly and such a sky it would not be long before she could make sail. Those indeed were his orders, to proceed without delay to join Vice-Admiral Codrington’s squadron in the Ionian, there to compel the Ottoman Porte to give up its repression of the valiant Greeks. He might have taken command sooner, but the incapacity of the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, had for some weeks thrown doubt on the enterprise. A year before,