On His Majesty's Service

Hervey went first to the leading waggon team. All were dead, though he could not believe it at first since they lay with their legs under them as in a close stall. He doubled back to the second team. Three were dead but a wheeler was breathing, though ill, like broken bellows. He ran a hand along the near foreleg: the cannon-bone was shattered. ‘Mr Agar, your pistol to this animal, please.’ It would have been the work of seconds for him to use his own, but some good might at least be had from the business (it was well that Agar practised his drill now rather than for the first time in front of the enemy). He nodded to Corporal Acton to keep an eye on him.

Next he found the corporal’s horse a case for the veterinary surgeon, not the pistol – no bones of the legs broken, although there were splinters in the near shoulder. ‘Let’s get him up.’

A pistol shot told him that Agar had done his duty (cleanly, was all he could hope).

Fairbrother took the reins, slipped them over the gelding’s head and coaxed him up with clicking noises and soft words, while his friend ran a hand along the backbone to feel for displacement. There were men dead and dying yards away; Hervey was not immune to their cries, but it did not absolve him of dominion over the horse. For lead was too free a medicine on the battlefield – he himself had dosed it too often – and if one steadfast creature could be saved with a little attention, then the effort was worth it.

The other two had rejoined.

‘Take him, if you will, Corporal Acton. Mr Agar, do you suppose you can communicate with yonder officer?’ (indicating one of the staff near the gates). ‘Find the veterinarian.’

‘Sir.’

He looked about and saw there was no more to be done. ‘Captain Fairbrother and I shall carry on to “B” Redoubt. Come after us when you’ve seen to things.’

‘Sir.’

Hervey was becoming accustomed to Agar’s usefulness: for all his inhabitation of the ancient world, he was by no means unpractical. If he himself were to have command of the Sixth, even – perhaps especially – if it were reduced to squadron strength, he would want him with him.

They quit the bloody work of the explosion, and left the partial shelter of the walls for the gabion bailey, to survey the isthmus before crossing to the defence-works.

Fairbrother looked troubled. ‘How do you suppose it happened?’ he asked, as if there might be some mystery attached. ‘The explosion – evidently not a shell that struck.’

Hervey shrugged. ‘Powder’s a deuced hazardous thing.’

‘Quite. So why do they wait until the town’s invested before taking it to the trenches?’

But Hervey was not inclined to see anything untoward. ‘Well, I don’t claim knowledge of how the Ordnance works – in any army, let alone the Tsar’s – but in my experience waggons are always scuttling about. Like ants. Perhaps it’s the best way of making sure the powder keeps dry.’

‘I confess I’d never seen a caisson, strange as it may sound. I think of powder in cartridges. I suppose I’ve never been obliged to think of it otherwise.’

‘There’s no knowing that it wasn’t a fragment of mortar, glowing red still. Deuced ill luck, that’s all.’

Fairbrother could only admire his friend’s phlegm. His own fighting had been in what the French called ‘la petite guerre’. Of organization and method when it came to large armies in the field he was wholly ignorant save from his reading – which did not extend to supply. That, indeed, was one of the attractions of this singular mission – to see what the old Peninsular hands had seen – for a start, this exchange of artillery (although his friend said it was nothing yet). The Turk field pieces had been keeping up (to his mind) a brisk fire against the redoubts since this morning, and the Russian guns, brought ashore from one of the warships and manned by bluejackets, had been answering with equal vigour. He had watched it from atop the walls while Hervey was seeing the esaul. The earth would tremble when the siege guns came up, they all said, but the distant roar of a 6-pounder and the fountains of earth thrown up were infernal enough. He was not afraid to admit that it made him tremble.

But the mortars’ haphazard destruction was behind them in the town, and the field artillery too far away to trouble them; between the walls and the redoubts, the isthmus was empty haven. And Hervey now studied it from beside a wicker gabion which, he observed, had been woven with the skill of the seamstress.

Wachten had chosen neither to occupy the isthmus nor to construct any obstacle to movement across it, for it was here that he intended forming up his reserve to counter-attack if the redoubts fell. And since the Turks would face a murderous fire from the gunboats if they themselves tried to cross, it made no sense to offer them shelter by throwing up earthworks. Hervey understood precisely. What Wachten had asked him, however, was to look with an ‘unregulated’ eye; and it was only from the approaches, the vantage of the attacker, that he could do so. He put away his telescope and looked at his friend. ‘Let us take a walk,’ he said, cheerily.

To Fairbrother it felt like stepping from the wings onto a stage – and a very empty one at that – as they slipped from the bailey. And it seemed the strangest thing to be walking alone between two points of danger and yet quite safe from molestation by the enemy (or rather, the Turk). On the other hand, his friend appeared wholly unaware of anything exceptional, and he wondered, as he had done more than once, if it were the quality of every true soldier (as opposed to those like himself whom he thought dilettante) that in the face of the enemy he was not conscious of his own presence. For it seemed to him that Hervey possessed the most remarkable facility in this regard; and yet he knew him to be a not-unthinking man. On the contrary, his friend was capable of (to his mind) ruinous contemplation. Not that he counted himself as possessing excessive caution, only that in Colonel Matthew Hervey caution appeared to be but a consideration rather than an instinct.

Such as now, as they tramped across this empty space, and all he could speak of was his surprise at the ease with which they had quit the walls and the bailey: not a sentry had required them even to halt, let alone show their laissez-passers. And he, Fairbrother, had replied that he supposed it was taken for granted that anyone passing out of the town was friend not foe, and that this did not seem unreasonable – especially since neither of them looked Turk. Yet Hervey had countered by saying that that was how many a ruse had worked. ‘Perhaps you are recognized as a Cossack, then,’ he had tried, and only half-ironically.

The sun was due west, or he was sure he would have seen him earlier – a galloper speeding towards them from the redoubts. He shielded his eyes for a better view, but Hervey remained oblivious to the intruder on the empty boards, more absorbed in crouching to discover the extent of what he called ‘dead ground’ (Fairbrother supposed that a galloper must have been an everyday of the Peninsula).

At a hundred yards he could make him out clearer. ‘An uhlan, Hervey.’

The only uhlans were the general’s aides-de-camp.

He galloped past with a touch to the peak of his czapka.

‘A pretty sight. The best uniform I ever saw on a post-boy,’ tried Fairbrother, hoping it might bring his friend back to the present.

Hervey frowned. ‘Don’t decry gallopers; a general can’t be everywhere himself. But he was rather splendidly arrayed. How many cavalry d’ye suppose could cross the isthmus at a gallop while being enfiladed by the gunboats?’

Once again Fairbrother could only wonder at his friend’s unswerving application. He was minded of the precepts of Marcus Aurelius, of whose wisdom he had long made a study: A man’s true delight consists in doing what he was made for. ‘With you at their head?’ he asked, archly.

Getting into the trenches at the postern in the earthwork curtain of the south-west (B) redoubt was considerably more difficult than getting out of the bailey. Indeed, for all that they were but a few furlongs from the walls of the town, they might have been in a different world. Here was all alertness and edge. The laissez-passers meant nothing to the musketeer of the Azov Regiment who stood sentry at the postern (for he could not read), nor even to the corporal; and the lieutenant was uncertain (and anxious). Only the captain would admit them.

‘Qu’est-ce qui se passe? Que font les Turcs?’ (the cannonade was increasing).

Hervey put the questions so abruptly that Fairbrother expected some coolness in reply, but the captain merely smiled. He had fought as an ensign at Borodino, he explained, and lately against the Persians, and in the years between he had battled with the tribes of the marches; he did not think very highly of Turks. ‘They make a great deal of noise, Colonel; that is all.’

An old soldier – an efreytor (lance-corporal) – was boiling potatoes in a corner of