On His Majesty's Service

the reins and sprang into the saddle (he would not risk his weight in the stirrup with an unknown horse).

‘It is too early an hour for puns, Hervey – even pert ones,’ groaned Fairbrother, as he took an obliging Cossack’s hand to mount. ‘Deuced early for anything, indeed.’

The sotnia’s exuberance was infectious, however. ‘I have always considered “reveille” to be an order to wake, not a mere notice of the hour of day,’ Hervey replied, relieved that, knowing he’d had a despatch to write, he had not stayed long drinking kvas – and supposing his friend to wish he had had the same pretext to quit.

He glanced at the others – Agar, Corporal Acton and the two dragoons who had volunteered as servants – and felt a curious sort of ‘cornet’s lease’, as if conscious of the sober mask of command (blue or red) that awaited him. In any case he liked pressing Fairbrother on points of military correctness, not least because they brought wit by return, and occasionally a counter that was worthy of serious consideration, and even approval. He had learned much from this most contradictory of men – at one moment the image of apathy, of indolence even; and at another, of the most astonishing address. He owed his life and reputation to him on more than one occasion (and one occasion alone was sufficient to forge a bond between fighting men).

They were at once into a jogging trot – not the way the Sixth would have begun a march – and his little Kabardin mare was anxious to be with the others. But Hervey knew he would just have to content himself with sitting to it and enjoying the jingling of the chaghanas (might the Sixth’s band have use for one?) and the admiration of the infantry. Only after the best part of a mile, with the well-wishing behind them, did they slow from the trot. There were no audible words of command; it seemed that the esaul transmitted his intention by some instinctive means, so that the sotnia simply rippled to a walk. It was unmilitary, but it was not without a certain style; and without doubt it was done with economy.

Hervey and his party marched parallel and to the off-flank, the going either side of the road flat, on good spring grass, ungrazed. In the far distance the rolling, wooded hills – mountains even – lay as a barrier the like of which he had not seen in twenty years, when the duke’s army had at last crossed the Pyrenees into France. The Balkan range, the Haemus Mons of antiquity and his schoolroom – he had never dreamed he would one day behold them. Tunc etiam aerei divulsis sedibus Haemi – ‘the summit even of lofty Haemus shall have crumbled’; the words he had declaimed an age ago at Shrewsbury. They were famous days, simpler days, infinite in their promise, with books innumerable, war, heroes … He envied Agar his Oxford learning and his footing, now, at the threshold of soldiery. And such a threshold – Haemus Mons, which no Tsar’s general had crossed since ancient times. How strange it felt to be at their southern side when still the Turk held them, as if they had come into a house basely.

‘Hervey?’

He woke. ‘I beg pardon. You were saying?’

Fairbrother smiled indulgently. ‘Only that I am excessively grateful for your asking me to accompany you. This is the first I have ridden on the soil of Europe. And deuced fine too. Yonder sea – as blue as at the Cape.’

Hervey nodded. England was, strictly, a part of Europe too, but he could only think of her so when he was in another continent altogether. It was strange, moreover, that they had waited so long to ride, that their journey hither had been so little by land. They had come to St Petersburg by frigate, thence almost at once to Riga by coaster, thereafter along the Dvina by steam to Vitebsk, then a day and a half’s post to Smolensk, and from there on down the Dnieper by sail and steam to Kherson, a mean city in which to wait for onward passage by warship, first to Varna, and finally to Siseboli. He did not complain, for they had seen much, and he had made sketches of what he thought to be of interest to the Horse Guards; they had read much, talked much and written much; except that Fairbrother had written not at all, for he saw no cause for a journal – to whom would it be of interest in the event of his death? he asked – nor occasion for letters, his father being content with but an annual report. He was, he said, and with an admixture of seriousness to the archness, content to pass without note, ‘A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown’.

Hervey had remonstrated with him, lest his friend think him in thrall to either fortune or fame: he did not seek either, merely the command to which he was by temperament and long years of service suited. And Fairbrother, while protesting that he had never intended to suggest anything base, had pressed him nevertheless to answer ‘to what end?’ To which Hervey had replied that there was no end: the judicious exercise of command was of itself sufficient. He had no ambition then, Fairbrother had asked. Indeed he had, Hervey had answered – the perfection of his command, so that it accomplished whatever the Horse Guards ordained, and with the greatest economy of life, effort and treasure. And Fairbrother had smiled, for he knew that he himself could never give his life to such a thing (or so he said), while acknowledging – exalting, even – the ideal itself; and he had even quoted the Iliad, when the Trojan prince Sarpedon urges his comrade Glaucus to fight with him in the front rank of the coming battle: ‘’Tis ours, the dignity they give to grace/ The first in valour, as the first in place.’ And Hervey had pondered a good deal on it.

He woke again. A night heron flapped unperturbed across their line of march, and in the distance, along the shore and around the great lake behind Bourgas, there were grebe and ibises, and more geese than he thought he had ever seen. It was a fine place; it seemed a fine country; and for the briefest moment he thought that they intruded, that they had no cause to be here. Whose was this land that these Cossacks – men every bit as fine as the country, and whose company he was relishing – came to fight over? Would the Tsar wade through more slaughter to a greater throne, and trample the country and the poor souls living here? He shrugged; it was not his business – only to observe the methods by which they made war. It was difficult, anyway, not to side with a former ally, especially one that had in great measure helped bring down the tyrant Bonaparte. And although he did not bear the Turks ill will for the crippling of his old friend Peto (these things were the ‘exigencies of the service’, and to be borne without bitterness), he could not think of the Sultan without the epithet ‘cruel’. He had no romantic attachment to Athens; he was no philhellene of the Byron mould. He supposed it was unnatural that the Turk should be master of the land of the Greeks – and of almost the whole of the country between the Black Sea and the Adriatic – but that was the way of history, was it not? And the Turks were, as the word ran in London, ‘an ancient ally’. Yet all this was of no import when riding in the company of Cossacks (though he had explained his situation to the esaul, who had replied that he did not understand neutrality but nevertheless understood what were its practical constraints). And so now he and his party rode just a little apart from the sotnia, as if by this he somehow made his situation plainer.

But the esaul … Hervey liked him, liked him very much, thought him the sort of man to rely on in battle. In any other circumstances he would gladly have ridden with him stirrup to stirrup.

They marched all day – with the briefest of halts as the sun reached its highest (though it had as yet no great heat) – at the jog-trot, which the Kabardin seemed to prefer to walking collected or even on a long rein. Perhaps the kvas last evening had magnified the Kabardin’s quality in Hervey’s mind. They would climb mountains, cross torrents, fight with wolves, the esaul boasted; the Kabardin mare foaled onto frost-bitten earth – little wonder her progeny would carry her rider for hours on end without so much as a blade of grass. Hervey had expressed his admiration, if perhaps (he was not sure he remembered) guardedly, but would readily admit, now, that his was the most tractable mare he had ridden in some time. What, he marvelled, might come out of her by an English Thoroughbred!

They saw few people, nor even animals, wild or pastoral. It was as if the word ‘Cossack’ had gone before them, emptying every dwelling, fold and byre. But not once had the sotnia fallen out to loot – not even to raise water from a well – so that Hervey began wondering if it were not they from whom the populace had fled but the Turks who were marching hither. The people of Roumelia – Bulgars for the most part, hereabouts at least – had no love of Ottoman rule, and, no doubt, a healthy fear of marching armies of any flag. Empty country he always found dispiriting to cross, as he had the rolling plains of Natal and the Cape Colony, but he would own that this was indeed deuced fine country, wholly belying its reputation as a wild and brutish place where brigandage stalked.

An hour before sunset they fell out to bivouac in an abandoned vineyard. Hervey was surprised they had not made camp in the deserted village they had passed through half an hour before; it had been a mean sort of place, and godless, the little church ruined, but, as the soldier’s saying went, a half-decent billet was better than a good