He looked over his left shoulder, then his right. The lines were ragged. Troop horses had leapt forward, some had run back, others had reared and turned. Barely half the regiment stood as they had been dressed. Even his trumpeter’s grey, a mare which should have known better, was showing a flank and bucking hard, determined to unseat her rider.
Hervey nodded again, the adjutant raised his arm, and the Chestnuts’ second section fired. As the smoke cleared, he could see the first section’s men standing ready, guns reloaded, and second section’s beginning the thirty fevered seconds of swabbing, ramming and tamping before the number one could shout ‘On!’ to tell his section officer that the gun was shotted and re-laid on its target.
Except that there was no shot or target. The Chestnut (more properly the First) Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, fired blank this morning. They did so to accustom the remounts – and recruits – of the 6th Light Dragoons to the noise of battle. It was not much by way of comparison with the real thing, Hervey knew (by God, how he knew!), but it was a good deal better than nothing; and certainly a good deal better than the usual method, the band’s banging and crashing on the square. It was decent of the Chestnuts to oblige them thus, although the Sixth had paid for the powder; and in any case, Hervey thought there must be gain for the Chestnuts too, for there was nothing like the thrill of real powder instead of ‘dry’ drills on the parade ground – even if the gun jumped back not a fraction of what it would when shotted and full-charged. He would have each of them fire in turn now, six nine-pounders, to test the nerve of the horses which had been half petrified into docility by the two salvos. He nodded to the adjutant a third time.
Number one gun fired, and the remaining rooks in the distant elms took flight, so that Hervey imagined there was not a bird perched on any branch on Hounslow Heath.
‘Rugged elms,’ he mused. He liked elms. As a boy he had climbed them, about the churchyard in Horningsham, to test his courage or to see what the tall nests held. Or sometimes on the plain to gain a distant prospect. He loved the elm-lined lanes in high summer, dark leafy tunnels where he might catch sight of a roe deer at midday – still, secret places, a foreign land, far from the safe parsonage and yet within sound of the church bell. There were no elms in foreign lands, though. Or if there were, they were poor specimens: he had seen none he could recall in France, or Belgium, none in the forests of the east – India, Ava – and certainly not in Spain and Portugal. Yet there must have been … but not the ‘rugged elm’. He thought of his Wiltshire churchyard again, ‘where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap’; beneath the tall elms, where ‘the 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.