The Iron Stallions (28 page)

Aubrey looked solemn, owlish behind his steel-rimmed spectacles. He never managed to look quite like a soldier, always a little untidy, always a little too plump, his eyes popping slightly like his father’s. Winder and Dodgin looked grave but solid as English oak. Packer, Greatorex and Flood all looked confident. They were old soldiers now, knowledgeable in the ways of war. Only Pallovicini seemed not to have recovered from the strain of the desert fighting and his lean features looked more of a caricature than ever. He had never particularly distinguished himself and Josh had often wondered how he would shape up in Europe. The rest were pink-faced boys, incredibly young but bursting with eagerness, and as Josh finished reading the Supreme Commander’s message, he noticed one or two of them shifting from one foot to the other and decided to make his own message short and to the point.

He also wondered if he should offer some sort of prayer as some commanders did. He was not a religious man, though he believed in God in a simple unquestioning way, as if He were a sort of celestial field marshal whom he didn’t expect to be concerned with his daily routine. He decided to compromise.

‘There’s nothing much else to say,’ he had ended, ‘except perhaps to quote the words of Sir Jacob Astley before the battle of Edgehill. They seem very apt. “Oh Lord Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.”’

A few heads nodded. Good old Jacob, he thought. His words must have been quoted a hundred times to soldiers going into action yet, despite that and the distance in time since they were first spoken, there were few prayers that suited a soldier more.

The shore of France had seemed almost too crowded for them to take it all in. Above the hissing waves, the air had been filled with a chaos of sound, from the drone of aeroplanes to the crash of naval guns hurling their enormous shells miles inland to where the German reserves were gathering. An aeroplane came down out of the grey murk of cloud, twisting and turning until it fell into the sea. Small craft returning from the beaches for their next load were bringing back with them men who had not made it, limp sacks splashed with blood like old bundles of clothes, their faces grey and twisted with pain, their eyes bewildered and questioning.

When it was their turn to head into the appalling backdrop of smoke and flame, the landing craft had turned for its run in, the hold grey-blue with exhaust smoke as the tank engines were started. As the great doors in the bow had opened and daylight had come into the gloom, a rhino ferry had appeared, and the first tank had clanged on board. As it filled and moved away, the next rhino moved into place.

Outside the farmhouse, the sky was red with the glow of flames. The night was windy, wet and cold and as Josh moved he heard an aeroplane overhead and the flurry of guns from the ships offshore. The battered building shook.

Was it only three weeks since he had stood alongside Louise in front of the Rector at Braxby? Other Goffs who’d been married there had had distinguished churchmen to marry them. His grandfather had had a bishop who was a distant relative, and his father a dean, a grandson of that same bishop. Josh had had the Rector, old and bumbling, because there’d been no time to contact anyone else, but Louise, her face peaked and elfin as usual but radiant with happiness, had looked as beautiful as any earlier Goff bride.

His mother had tried to do the thing properly and it was incredible how many of the family she had managed to gather together. They had included the past, present and future, because they had ranged from old Ellis Ackroyd, who had been at Omdurman with Josh’s father and grandfather, to Kitty and Rosanna, the very newest members of the family, dressed to within an inch of their young lives as bridemaids.

It seemed, Josh decided as he listened, stiff and dirty and alert to the grating sound of the radio his operator had set up in the kitchen, that he would somehow have to survive the coming battles. He hadn’t yet told Louise about his Uncle Robert’s eagerness to get his clutches on the house and he was desperately afraid if anything happened to him that Robert would contrive to snatch it from under her feet.

Nevertheless, he had made a new will, leaving everything he possessed to her and the two children. He could never, he realised, have left everything to Jocelyn in this manner. She would never have done what he asked. How could you be so doubtful about one woman and so certain of another?

‘Sir! The brigadier!’

Josh rose and moved to the radio. It wasn’t Rydderch but Leduc.

‘Josh,’ he said. ‘Are you ready to move?’

‘In every way, sir.’

‘Right. We might not start today because we’ve still to link up with the Canadians, but we’re to make an all-out effort for Caen. In the meantime, we expect German counter-attacks at Ouistreham and we need armour up there to deal with them. Lion-sur-Mer’s clear, so go along the coast. It’s factory country and you’ll find it difficult, but you can handle it. The Derbyshires and the Hussars will follow you. Get going.’

Dawn was breaking as they set off. All along the route men were waking, cold and stiff from a night of fitful sleep in shallow holes, pinching themselves to make certain they were still alive. Tanks and bulldozers were dragging wreckage aside to ensure the break-out’s success and military police were calmly waving the traffic forward as if the Germans were thousands of miles away. Alongside them, jeep ambulances jolted back between the taped-off minefields towards the beach where in the fields the graves registration squads were burying the dead.

As the sky lightened they could see the contours of the countryside. This would probably be the most important day of the invasion, the day when the counter-attacks would come. At the end of this day they would know whether they were in France to stay or whether the whole thing would have to be called off and the war go on for another ten years and end with a negotiated peace.

‘Louie–’ Rosanna looked up from where she was sprawled on the floor with the daily paper ‘–what’s liberated mean?’

Louise looked down at her.

‘If someone’s liberated it means they’ve been in prison and now they’re free.’

‘It says Brittany and Normandy have been liberated. Have they been in prison?’

‘In a way, the whole of Europe’s been in prison but now we’ve liberated a lot of France and soon, I expect, we shall liberate Belgium and Holland and all the other countries.’

‘Is Josh in Brittany and Normandy?’

‘I don’t think so. He’s further north but I can’t say exactly where.’

‘Is the war nearly over?’

‘I think there’s a long way to go yet but it looks as though it will be before long.’

‘Will Josh come back?’

Louise drew a deep breath. ‘Please God,’ she said.

She had read the newspapers every day, watching progress, dreading the arrival of a telegram. Only the previous week, one had arrived for one of the Ackroyds in the village and every time she heard the postman coming up the drive, she dreaded what he might bring. When he had arrived at the beginning of August he had brought a letter from Konstantin von Hartmann, to inform Josh that Konstantin’s brother, Karl-August, had been executed for a part in the July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler. ‘He recovered his senses at the last moment,’ it ended. She hadn’t been sure what it meant because she still wasn’t certain of the ins and outs of this family she’d married into, but Josh’s mother had tried to explain.

She was still a little afraid. She loved England for its old-fashioned manners, for the wigs and gowns its counsel and judges wore in court, for the banners, the titles, the sheer age. It had nothing to do with snobbishness, just with continuation. On the last day they had had together, Josh had taken her and the children to York and Ripon and solemnly shown her a trumpet in a glass case. It had had a fading coloured cord and looked very ordinary, but to Josh it had seemed like a talisman.

‘Trumpeter Sparks’,’ he had said. ‘With that he sounded the Regiment into action at Balaclava. There’s still a Sparks with us. He’s a wireless operator.’

At York Minster she had stood beneath the tattered banners in the silence, involved in the mystique of history, struggling to understand why they meant so much, why they carried the names of battles on them to remind of all the blood and all the grief.

Slowly, all the little pictures of men in the green and red and gold of the Regiment, all the portraits that hung on the library walls, had slotted into place. She had spent hours studying old photographs of shabby men in lancer uniform, standing by cookhouse stoves in the Crimea, in Zululand, in India. There was one of Josh’s grandfather looking incredibly like Josh, taken just after Balaclava; and one of Josh’s father in the desert after Omdurman with Winston Churchill, one in France with Ellis Ackroyd, wearing a steel helmet, and another in the Middle East, taken shortly before his death, wearing an Australian bush-hat. There was also one of Josh with Eddie Orne, both new recruits and looking mere boys in the full fig of the regimental dress uniform, complete with shapka and plume and swan-necked spurs.

‘They had it taken just after they joined up,’ Josh’s mother informed her. ‘Josh was seventeen.’

It was part of his life Louise knew little about and she wondered if she could fit into it. But there were plenty of soldiers’ wives about to help her – Ellis Ackroyd’s and Sergeant-Major Orne’s. Even Josh’s mother.

Rosanna was a fountain of knowledge. She was proud of Josh and knew who Marlborough and Wellington were. She knew that the Churchill tank had eleven bogies and that the Sherman weighed thirty-three tons and that the German Tiger could do twenty-seven miles an hour. She had even discovered from Sergeant-Major Orne how the Regiment got its nickname.

‘It’s the eagle,’ she explained. ‘They took it from the French at Waterloo. And to make it fierce they gave it big claws. They were also called the Widowmakers, and Goff’s Greens because they wore a green uniform and were founded by our grandfather. They ’ave another name, too – the Pot Carriers – because they captured Napoleon’s chamberpot at Waterloo and wore it on top of their flagpole.’

It didn’t sound right but it seemed to have a grain of truth in it somewhere.

The children took all of her time. She’d tried riding with Rosanna but she’d had to give it up because a new excitement had come and a new fear. She had found it hard to believe after the disasters with George but she was taking no chances. The impossible seemed to have happened and Josh’s mother was quietly pleased and kept her fingers crossed.

For weeks the armies had struggled to break out of their restricting bridgehead. The Germans were fighting with a dogged fanaticism, digging in every bit of the way back, going to ground in elaborate earthworks which could withstand all the bombs and shells that were thrown at them, then climbing up to man their guns again. Ideal for defence, the country was terrible for the attackers.

It was a perfect evening, warm and still as it had been since the end of the gales of the invasion. A truck had just brought up mail and everywhere Josh looked men sat with their letters in their hands. For himself there were several, one from Wightman, the solicitor, informing him what was being done at Braxby in his name and the cost, and expressing the hope that he was well and safe, and one from his mother telling him of her delight in Louise.

There was also a letter from Rosanna informing him about her progress as a horsewoman. It included a photograph of her in the saddle, and a note from Orne confirming her boasts. The last letter was from Louise and the tail made him sit bolt upright.

‘
Josh, I am pregnant. The doctor confirmed it this morning
…’

He could barely see the next few lines telling him of her delight and disbelief.

‘…
Perhaps George was wrong,
’ she wrote.
‘
Perhaps it wasn’t my fault. Perhaps even the child he boasted about wasn’t his, after all. Judging by some of the women I saw him with, it probably wasn’t. But perhaps this is too unkind. Perhaps it’s simply because I was unhappy with him and now I couldn’t be happier
.’

He could scarcely believe his eyes. It was something that had often occupied his thoughts, because, though he now had children, they were both girls who would marry and go elsewhere to live, and the idea of another Goff at Braxby pleased him enormously. If anything happened to him, Braxby would now remain in the family because his Uncle Robert would no longer be the only ‘true’ Goff.

For the rest of the evening, he sat outside his headquarters ten-tonner, smoking as the summer twilight turned to dusk. His mind was full of the future, and what he intended to do. Should he retire when the fighting ended? He had commanded his own regiment, which was the height of a soldier’s ambition, and could do it now without rancour or any sort of chip on his shoulder. The army would be reduced after the war and he suspected that England would be a great deal poorer, yet behind him he had twenty years which he would never willingly have given to any other profession.

He had travelled widely and made friends with all kinds and classes of men, yet he had never consciously decided to become a soldier; he had just assumed he could never be anything else. And in the same way that his grandfather had once said the 19th wasn’t a regiment but a religion, he’d never thought of himself as being in the army, only of being in the 19th Lancers.

He had even been lucky with the women in his life. Though the memories were precious, not all of them were happy, but he had had a splendid grandmother and mother, Ailsa had been a good wife. And now Louise had miraculously taken her place. Even Jocelyn had probably been good for him because they had come together at the right time and parted without bitterness.

He was still thinking in the darkness when Rydderch appeared. He jerked his head at the headquarters truck and they climbed inside.

‘We’re off, Josh,’ he said as Josh handed him a drink. ‘At once. There’s to be a night attack with two armoured columns, one each side of the Caen–Falaise road. The leading infantry will be in carriers and you’ll be guided to the railway line by tracer shells from the light ack-ack and searchlight beams and compasses. Don’t waste time.’