Blunted Lance (24 page)

Writing the letter gave him immense satisfaction. At the bottom he added, ‘Your father, Colby William Rollo Goff, Field Marshal.’

It pleased him. He had enjoyed signing his full name and adding his rank. Made it more official. Then he sighed, tore it up and started again.

‘My dear Robert,’ he wrote more calmly. ‘Lord K’s appeal for 100,000 men is not so silly as it sounds and, though it will undoubtedly result in inconvenience for a lot of people, it is nevertheless a far-sighted move that should be warmly applauded—’

Leave at Christmas came unexpectedly for Dabney.

For three weeks from October 16, there wasn’t an officer or man of the cavalry division who was not fighting continuously, and for the first days they had fought alone and unsupported, not a whit of difference between them and the infantry. They had arrived in France superbly mounted and shining with the glitter of peacetime but by the middle of October the shine had all gone. Leather and brass were mud-smeared and the horses had long since been led to the rear. Dabney had washed and had his boots off twice in ten days and had almost forgotten what a horse looked like.

They had still managed to distinguish themselves, however, and one of the sergeants, sent off to deliver a message to another part of the line by horse when cut off by twenty Germans, had drawn his sabre and delivered a one-man charge that had left five Germans dead and won him a Military Medal.

They had finally been relieved by scraped-together infantry battalions and had rejoined their division to find that Indian cavalry was arriving to help. The Indian Army had formerly been considered to have no social status at all. Though the Gurkhas were good and the Sikhs not bad, the Baluchis, Punjabis, Pathans, Dogras, Rajputs, Mahrattas and Garhwalis were just infantry with black faces. The cavalry were accepted, of course, because they were good at polo. But now they were more than welcome to relieve the strain of overwork, and as they had joined the surviving cavalry regiments of the line, their dark faces, blue turbans and lances had been the most wonderful sight Dabney had ever seen, and they had moved forward together through villages where women came to cottage doors with jugs of wine, the children screaming round the horses in search of souvenirs. When pay arrived for the first time, the soldiers flooded the cafés demanding beer and complaining about its quality when they got it.

‘In my opinion,’ Dabney heard, ‘they should pour it back in the ’orse.’

The fact that he had been among the first to be granted leave aroused in him a strong suspicion that the colonel, Johnson, was eager to be rid of him. From considering it a personal insult that the Regiment had had no casualties while under his command, he had now changed his view so much he resented not having been there when they had, and his dislike for Dabney had grown with the bar to the DSO that he had received for the defence of Mortigny.

The fact that his colonel didn’t like him could not be held to be a matter for concern. As a soldier, Dabney was well aware that he ought to be able to handle the situation, but it made life a little more difficult and he was glad to get away. He left the front in darkness, moving with his group among the dim figures at the railhead waiting to climb into the train for the coast. Peaked caps and rifle barrels were caught in silhouette against the sky and the murmur of many voices came from the dusk.

Dawn revealed the train passing through the French countryside with its clumps of wind-stirred trees. Dabney was already stiff from sitting wedged into a packed compartment and was flushed with the stuffy atmosphere and the stale cigarette smoke. Midday brought them to Calais and the train began to jolt and clatter through streets and warehouses, ragged urchins running alongside it, begging in shrill voices for ‘Bullee.’ As the train stopped, the men poured from it, noisy, eager to be in England. A strong salt wind buffeted round the angle of a shed and then in front of him were two tall funnels and the rakish masts of the leave ship.

The day’s newspapers in the saloon were full of rubbish, suggesting that only the Germans were afraid. The panegyrics nauseated Dabney because all soldiers were afraid at times and most weren’t ashamed to admit it, while war cor-respondents were as rare at the front as generals. As he left the ship for the train to London, a line of stretchers was being lifted into ambulances. The men on them were silent, grey-faced and still. A well-dressed woman carrying a small dog indicated them to the animal.

‘Look darling, wounded soldiers.’

The train north was jammed with people, and as it left the cavernous darkness of King’s Cross and sped between the packed houses of London’s suburbs, he found himself dropping off to sleep. As it passed through the outskirts of Sheffield, it stopped across a level crossing. Marching alongside was a battalion of Kitchener’s New Army.

He studied them with interest. They were among the finest-looking men he’d ever seen wearing British uniform, and he knew they were by far the most intelligent. They included works managers, newspapermen, sons of wealthy manufacturers, stock exchange dealers, architects, lawyers, university lecturers, graduates and undergraduates, a thousand splendid men with steelworkers and miners to add the brawn to the leadership qualities of the others.

They were singing. But not the bellicose songs the Germans and French favoured. For them it wasn’t ‘The Watch On The Rhine’ or ‘The Marseillaise’, but self-denigratory songs that showed their sense of humour.

‘Send for the boys of the Girls’ Brigade

To set old England free

Send for my mother, send for my sister,

But for God’s sake, don’t send me…’

Changing trains in York, he bumped into Hedley Ackroyd. He was wearing the uniform of the 19th and looked well in it, too. Recognising Dabney he slammed to attention and saluted.

‘Cut that out, Hedley,’ Dabney smiled. ‘How are you? I seen you’ve joined our lot.’

Hedley smiled. ‘Only temporary, sir. A ruse of the Field Marshal’s to get me into the Flying Corps.’

‘Been home?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Seeing Philippa, I’ll be bound.’

The boy gave a sheepish grin. ‘Yes, sir, I have. I start to fly in the New Year.’

He was a good-looking young man with his mother’s features and the Ackroyds’ strength and carriage. At least, Dabney thought, Philippa Sutton’s affection wasn’t a flash in the pan. It had been going on a long time now and she had never wavered.

He was talking earnestly now about the little experience he had. ‘Training seems to be a bit slow,’ he was saying, ‘because when the wind’s blowing they say it’s too dangerous and when it’s not they say there’s no “lift” in the air. In any case, everything we use is out of date and the one thing we need is a machine with a gun to fire through the propeller. It would revolutionise war.’

Dabney smiled and headed for his train to Braxby. As he turned away, he looked back. ‘I think the war’s already been revolutionised, Hedley,’ he said. ‘As quite a few of us have found out.’

Braxby was grey and silent with winter. The stone walls had a purple-violet look about them, the lowering slopes of the hills were heavy, and the water of the Brack looked leaden. Because his leave was unexpected, there was no one to meet Dabney, but the village grocer was passing in his trap and stopped to talk.

‘You won’t find your family at ’ome, Mr Dabney,’ he said. ‘I saw ’em get on the train to York. They was all going Christmas shopping.’

‘How about dropping me at my father’s place then?’ Dabney said. ‘I can get a lift from there.’

His mother greeted him with tears in her eyes and for the first time in his life he realised she was no longer young; and that, in its turn, made him realise how old his father must be.

‘Where is he?’ he asked.

‘Inspecting some battalion in York,’ Lady Goff said. ‘He likes to be part of this New Army. He thinks they’re such splendid men.’

There was an unexpected tremulousness about her, a mixture of happiness and sadness that puzzled him and he wondered for a moment if his father were ill.

‘Oh, no, he’s all right.’ His mother managed a twisted smile and brushed the tears from her eyes. ‘It’s a letter that came from Helen.’

It had arrived via Holland. The Hartmanns were all safe and well and Karl-August was on the staff on the Eastern front facing the Russians. The letter was full of longing for England, for the need to see her parents and be reassured through the miseries of war that she was still loved. Though she didn’t say much about it, it was clear the Germans were suffering from the same sort of war fever that had gripped England and she was lonely as her neighbours regarded her askance. The children were not finding it easy at school but she was constantly reassured by the letters she received from Karl-August who remained tolerant and encouraging, while his father, the Graf, had made it clear that she was under his wing so that things had improved a little.

Though the letter was full of affection and longing, it was curiously devoid of any other news beyond her family, and Dabney realised that Helen was trying hard to be loyal to her new country and avoiding writing anything that might be of help to its opponents. It was a curious sensation to feel his own sister was withholding information because they were enemies.

He mixed himself a whisky and soda. His mother watched him anxiously.

‘Your father will be home soon,’ she said. ‘Go into the library. I’ll have tea sent in.’

Dabney held up his glass. ‘This’ll do me, Mother.’

In the library, everything about his background was around him. The pictures were all of cavalrymen, most of them wearing the rifle-green uniform of the 19th with its gold-striped overalls, red plastron and plumed schapka. There was a statuette of a lancer in silver which had been presented by the Regiment to his father on being made a Field Marshal; strange spears and curious firearms; pictures of officers in ceremonial dress; statuettes of horses; assegais; mounted spurs; a sabre; a rake, poker and shovel said to be made out of French cavalry swords collected by his grandfather on the field of Waterloo. As a boy he remembered his father using them to demonstrate weapon drill.

He moved about the room, looking at the books on the shelves, picking up objects with which he was familiar, among them the sword he had carried himself at Omdurman. It was bent like a question mark and, as he held it in his hand, he wondered why they had thought
that
such a terrible business. After Mortigny, Omdurman seemed no more dangerous than a Saturday night scuffle outside a public house.

On his father’s desk was a letter. It was a report on an inspection the old man had made on a Kitchener battalion at Leeds, and he saw with surprise that it was addressed to Kitchener himself at the War Office.

He couldn’t help reading it. His father was making his feelings very clear. ‘The one thing we must never do,’ he had written, ‘is to allow them to go untrained into battle. One of our first tasks should be to weed out the clever and see they are given experience with regular battalions so that they can become officers. There are also far too many technical men among them who would be better using their skill in manufacturing the needs of the army. I feel it was a bad mistake not to use the Territorial Army machinery to recruit, train and equip these men…’

He knew exactly what his father was getting at. Kitchener’s dislike of the Territorials – Saturday Afternoon Soldiers, he called them – was well known, but the Territorials were already acquitting themselves well in France and their organisation had been good enough to allow them to fit smoothly into the regular army.

He looked at the letter again. ‘Let us have men back from France as soon as the situation there makes it possible, to train them, to give them some idea of what modern war is like. I am desperately afraid that they are likely to be sent into action in the old dangerous formations I saw as far back as the Crimea. Wounded men should not be returned to their battalions but attached to the new K battalions to give them the benefit of their experience. Whatever Douglas Haig feels about cavalry breakthroughs, I think we have to face the fact that this is going to be an infantry war of siege and entrenching, and these new men must be instilled with the knowledge of how to behave in those conditions…’

He heard a movement and looked up to see his father watching him. The old man seemed tired but he looked splendid in his uniform, his chest ablaze with medal ribbons.

‘Hello, Father,’ he said, as they embraced.

‘Hello, my boy. How’s the regiment?’

Dabney sighed. ‘Fullerton’s dead. You know that, of course. Hawker and Harbord are wounded. But Tim Leduc’s splendid and so’s young Quibell. Unfortunately, I suspect we’ll be losing Quibell soon. He’ll be leaving us for a machine gun battalion when they get the guns. It’ll mean promotion and he deserves it.’

‘What about Johnson?’

‘He bothers me, Father. I don’t think he’s good enough. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t seem to be good enough.’

The Field Marshal indicated the desk. ‘You were reading my letter to Kitchener?’

‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘Don’t matter, my boy. What do you think of it?’

‘I absolutely agree, Father.’

‘I’ve just come from York. They’re living in shocking conditions. The local brigadier’s a dug-out. Too fat, too much moustache, too rigid with regulations. Eyes like boiled marbles. I told him to forget the bloody regulations and get them properly housed before they all go down with pneumonia. There was an orderly room clerk listening at the door, I knew, but I didn’t keep my voice down. I wasn’t wanting them to fall on me neck in gratitude – just to know
someone
was on their side. There’s already too much feeling that senior officers are stupid and that nobody cares.’

The old man sighed. ‘Kitchener never did have the gift of delegating work and it’s pretty obvious he’s already trying to do too much. Yet everybody’s terrified of him.’ He poured himself a drink. ‘I expect my report will be lost in the piles of paper on his desk.’