Hervey 06 - Rumours Of War (10 page)

It had been the same the first time he had entered the Tagus, all of eighteen years before. He had been a cornet then, and his new companions likewise. They – the whole regiment, indeed – had sailed from Northfleet in the middle of July (he remembered it well; it had been his father’s birthday), and they had hove to a month later in Mondego Bay. But Sir Arthur Wellesley had had such trouble landing there in the weeks before that in a day or so they sailed again for Lisbon, and much despair there had then been on hearing that a battle was fought and won at Vimeiro, and that the French were asking for terms without the Sixth so much as laying a foot, human or equine, on Peninsular soil. And he remembered the chiding they had all had from the adjutant, an old soldier who had first fought the French in Flanders. Bonaparte didn’t give up after an affair of a few thousand men, he said. It would be long years campaigning: Paris would have to fall, and the man himself put in irons. They need not fret for action, he told them; it would come soon enough, and many would then wish it otherwise.

It had been true. A month they passed in Lisbon, and then Sir Arthur Wellesley was recalled to England to face an angry parliament over the terms afforded the French by the Convention of Cintra, and Sir John Moore had taken command of the army. And then at last they had got on the march for the Spanish border; Hervey had no need of his journal to recall it, so vivid still were those early days’ apprenticeship. It was then indeed that the hardships and privations had begun – three months the like of which the regiment had never known – greater by far than the adjutant could remember in Flanders, ten times worse than the affairs in Mysore. First the advance deep into Spain – ‘King’ Joseph Bonaparte’s Spain – the troops full of ardour, the going good, the little victories easy. Then, in December, the terrible retrograde movement, brightened only by the brilliant affair at Sahagun, and the desperate march through the frozen mountains to the sea, the fighting rearguards, the breakdown of discipline and the sullen morale in too many regiments, becoming instead mere battalions of stragglers. And then the battle at Corunna, the death of Moore and the ejection of the army from Spain. Thank God for the Royal Navy! Hervey shivered at the remembrance of it all, an episode that could only in part be expiated by the glories that followed under the renewed command of Sir Arthur Wellesley, later the Marquess and then the Duke of Wellington.

‘So do you think the place changed, Hervey?’ asked Cope, the Rifles major, as they peered through their telescopes at the distant prospect of the Castelo de São Jorge.

‘I think not in the least, though I hope we shall find the streets a deal less mean.’

‘Well do I recollect it,’ said Cope, taking a silk wipe to the condensation on the eye piece of his spyglass.

‘I confess I have scarce had a more agreeable billet as here, however.’ Hervey seemed almost now to be searching it out. ‘The most gentlemanly of men –
a fidalgo,
of the most upright character. And the most beautiful of daughters too. We were severally enraptured by her.’

‘Ay,’ sighed the Rifles major, with a wry smile, raising his telescope again. ‘I recollect many a green jacket here giving a girl a green gown.’

Hervey smiled as wryly, but was in truth abashed by the memory of his own feeble attempts at lovemaking. ‘Let us hope the years have been kind to all,’ he said, elliptically.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ came a voice from behind.

The two men turned to find Colonel Norris swaddled in a boat cloak. His cocked hat was pulled so far down as to push his ears outwards, his face the same sickly colour as the first day, and his efforts with the razor, although in one sense heroic, had evidently been neither skilled nor determined.

‘Good morning, Colonel,’ they replied as one.

‘What in the name of God happened this morning?’ he grumbled.

They had all had to turn out on deck an hour after sunrise, but Norris had neither felt the ship strike the rock nor, in his unhappy condition, had he understood the urgency with which the pumps had been got up, since when he had sought the seclusion of his cabin and prayed for their early release from the purgatory.

‘There are two passages into the Tagus, Colonel,’ began one of the engineer majors helpfully. ‘One is close to the fort of St Julian, which is narrow and not very deep, and the other further south, which is wider and apparently the one more usually taken.’

‘By which I presume you are to tell me we imprudently took the more northerly one.’

‘Just so, Colonel. The master, it seems, is an old Tagus hand, and so the captain was persuaded to let him bring the ship in without a pilot, for which the master then has half the pilotage. Fortunately we were running so fast that she got off.’

‘Not an auspicious beginning, gentlemen,’ declared the colonel. ‘It will cost someone dear at Gibraltar too; I suppose that’s where she’ll have to go for repair.’

‘That is what the lieutenant says,’ confirmed Major Cope, with something of a smile. ‘The captain we have not troubled in the matter.’

‘Very wise,’ agreed the colonel, but without a suggestion of a smile. ‘In any case, the captain is making his barge available without delay, and I shall avail myself of it. You may stay aboard or come ashore as you wish.’

Poor devil, thought Hervey. But another quarter of an hour of pitching and tossing in a little boat was clearly to be preferred if it were the speediest means of reaching dry land.

Cope just beat Hervey to the reply. ‘I’m with you, Colonel.’

‘And I, sir,’ added Hervey.

They had managed only a very little conversation with the colonel so far.
Acis’s
captain had dined his passengers the first evening aboard, but Hervey had been unable to gauge his new principal with any confidence. Colonel Norris was an artillery officer. He had been in the Peninsula before, though not, as far as Hervey could make out, greatly exercised. He was, however, the Duke of Wellington’s man, having been on the staff of the Board of Ordnance for the past five years. Manifestly there were depths to him, Hervey conceded. But, there was about him too something that Hervey found troubling. He had observed the same in only a few senior officers, and always the least effectual ones. It was the habit of assuming superior knowledge, of experience and insight. He had noted it that first evening: each time an officer – the captain included – had spoken of a thing, Colonel Norris had somehow sought to trump him or doubt his assertion. It did not augur well for a mission in which a subordinate’s observations and opinion were to form a part of the principal’s judgement.

Out swung the barge, and down, followed by the boat crew on the jumping ladder. Then a gangway was lowered so that the captain, colonel and his officers might descend with proper dignity. They settled as best they could in the little space between the bluejacket oars, braced as the midshipman gave the order to pull away, and set their faces against or away from the spray depending on whether they wished a parting view of the wooden walls, painted Nelson style still, or not.

Hervey’s face was salt-sprayed, for sure. He was transported to that first time they had come here, and the landing of the horses, the unlucky ones by lighter, those more fortunate left to swim ashore. It had been a hard passage for both men and horses. His own ship, a biggish transport, had lost a hand overboard in the Bay of Biscay, the poor devil falling from the mizzen straight into the sea, so far heeled over was she. And a dragoon had split his head open falling down a companionway in the same storm. He had been a long time dying, and pitifully. But it went hardest of all with the horses.

It would have been even worse without the Sixth’s veterinary surgeon, Hervey was sure of it. John Knight had been one of the first names he had heard spoken of on joining for duty, such was the uncommon regard in the regiment for his art. That and the speculation as to his past years, for it was known that he had spent time in the West Indies, though not with His Majesty’s troops. There was, indeed, as mess gossip had it, a ‘touch of the tarbrush’ in Knight’s past, and the fare-ye-wells at Northfleet had seemed to bear it out. But that day in 1808 on the
Granite,
five days out from England, and every one of them storm-tossed, with the lee scuppers awash for the best part of twelve hours, the veterinary surgeon revealed his true mettle.

‘Take this to Mr Knight,’ Farrier-Corporal Martin had bellowed, pushing a steaming canteen at one of the dragoons. ‘He won’t leave ’em.’

Hervey had been officer of the day, new come on duty. ‘Mr Knight is still on the orlop, Corporal Martin?’

‘He is, sir. I don’t reckon he’s been up once since we left England, sir.’

Hervey made his way gingerly down the ladder to the orlop deck where close on a hundred horses were crammed.

‘Little better than blacks on a slaver,’ the troop quartermaster complained.

It was gloomy, for sure, thought Hervey, dimly lit as it was by horn lanterns. And it stank almost as foul, he imagined – frightened horses and the bilges. He thanked heaven that Jessye was not aboard. It would have killed her. Well, perhaps not, for she was a good doer, steady too, not given to breaking out or the colic. Perhaps she would have managed,
just.
But the outbreak of farcy at her layerage had been a good thing if it spared her this torment.

Knight was busy preparing to back-rake one of A Troop’s mares. ‘Who’s that?’ he growled, as Hervey came up on the blind side.

‘Hervey, sir.’

‘You don’t call me “sir”, Mr Hervey!’

‘No, sir.’

‘Get me a clyster then, as you’re here.’

‘Where—’

‘The barrel yonder!’ he barked.

Hervey picked up a bucket and plunged it into the butt of warm seawater, then brought it unsteadily to the mare’s stall.

Knight had already pushed a clyster pipe into the mare’s rectum, to which he now attached the drenching horn. ‘Pour it in gently then.’

A dragoon pulled the blanket from the mare’s back and replaced it with another soaked in hotter water.

‘Easy goes,’ said Knight, watching for the sign that his medicine would work. Then the sphincter spread, and he withdrew the pipe. ‘A good evacuation,’ he pronounced a few seconds later. ‘Keep her warm now, man. And a mash of scalded bran and oats.’

Knight rinsed the tube in the bucket, then handed it to one of the assistant farriers.

The other dragoon proffered a canteen. ‘It’s coffee, sir.’

Knight took it. ‘As long as it’s not brine I’m not inclined to fret what it is.’

The veterinary surgeon’s ill humours were proverbial, though most dragoons found them as endearing as they were unnerving.

He sat down on a sack of oats and put the cup to his mouth carefully, but even so he managed to spill coffee on his coat. Not that the nominally white stable coat would betray the stain after his exertions of the past five days.

‘May I ask the reason for the physicking, Mr Knight?’ said Hervey, standing by in his still-new regimentals.

‘You may. I ordered that each man attends most carefully on his horse to see if the evacuations are less than the fodder consumed. It is overcrowding of the digestive organs which is the source of most sickness at sea.’

Daniel Coates, and therefore Hervey himself, was of similar mind too. Overcrowding was also the frequent, if not principal, cause of sickness on dry land. Coates, his mentor in all things military and equestrian, would no doubt have done the same as Knight. But Hervey wanted to know everything of the veterinarian’s opinion. ‘And the sea exacerbates the overcrowding?’

Knight had not yet registered (at least, he did not say) that here, for a regimental cornet, was an uncommon interest in the internals of a horse. The interest as a rule lay solely with the animal’s galloping powers. ‘It does. The motion of the ship affects the brain, and this in turn reacts on the stomach and intestines. Have you ever seen a horse’s gut, Hervey?’

‘I confess I have not.’

‘Well, you’ll see ’em aplenty once the guns begin to play.’

There was just something in Knight’s tone, a challenge perhaps, that made Hervey stiffen. ‘I shall hope to bear it well, sir.’

Knight finished his cup. ‘Ay, I’m sure you will,’ he replied, and with a note of conciliation now. ‘Do you know how long is the horse’s gut?’

Hervey was brightened, like a schoolboy answering well on his declensions. ‘Upwards of thirty yards, I understand.’

Knight nodded approvingly.

The troop farrier’s voice interrupted the tutorial. ‘Mr Knight, sir, Sultan’s bad.’

The veterinarian was up at once. He hurried to the end of the stalls where the big black trooper stood – hung, almost – in slings. Knight looked at him in despair; it had been so quick.

‘The sleepy staggers you think, sir?’

Knight looked weary for once. ‘It matters little, Corporal Martin. The swellings are universal,’ he said, bending this way and that. ‘And the slings won’t allow of him his evacuations.’

‘Shall I take ’em off, sir?’

The veterinarian had three fingers of his left hand to the groove of the gelding’s cheek, and in his right his hunter watch. ‘No. He’d fall and be cast. We’d never get him up.’

Farrier-Corporal Martin looked baffled; there seemed no other course to take.

‘Pulsations are strong,’ said Knight after half a minute’s counting. ‘I’m certain it’s an apoplexy. I’ll have to bleed him.’

Hervey’s veterinary knowledge was that of Clator, Coates’s lore and the farrier’s variously understood. Here before him was science, and he wanted to learn it. ‘May I ask exactly what is an apoplexy?’

Knight was already rummaging in a small chest, one of half a dozen he had brought aboard. ‘Apoplexy is the incapacity of sense or movement through arterial blockage or rupture in the brain,’ he replied without looking up, but as if reading from one of his text books.

Hervey put what he now knew of apoplexy with his understanding of the circulation of blood and concluded that bleeding was the obvious therapy, even though Daniel Coates had railed against the practice for years.

Out from the ready-chest came fleam and bleeding stick. ‘And the measuring cup, Martin,’ snapped Knight, as he began unwrapping the instruments. ‘As a rule, Hervey, I do not hold with venesection. Not, at any rate, as a universal practice. But when there is such pressure of blood in the brain it can only be efficacious to relieve it by drawing off a little.’