The Iron Stallions (3 page)

Chubb grinned. ‘Well, that’s real gentlemanly, I’m sure. I’ll have a double scotch.’

Swallowing the pint with too much haste, Josh set off back through the dark streets. It wasn’t difficult to scramble over the school wall. He’d done it before – as often as not for a dare. All he had to do now was toss a handful of gravel at the dormitory window and sheets would be lowered for him to be hauled to safety with two hundred and fifty pounds in his pocket.

It was as he bent to scoop the gravel up that he heard a footstep behind him and, whirling round, found himself dazzled by the light of a torch.

‘Got you!’ The voice was the headmaster’s.

A hand descended on his shoulder and tried to swing him round but, in the struggle, the torch was knocked from Lamps’ hand.

‘By Heaven,’ he shouted. ‘How dare you assault your headmaster? And you stink of drink! This is an expulsion matter, my boy!’

Suddenly the rasping voice irritated Josh. He still hadn’t been recognised, it seemed, and as the fingers came groping for him again, he placed a hand on the headmaster’s chest and pushed with all his strength. There was a cry and the crashing of foliage.

‘By Heaven, boy, you’ll pay for this!’ Bolting for the shadows, Josh could hear the yells behind him. ‘I shall find you, have no fear!’

Hiding among the bushes, Josh watched Lamps hurry away to call assistance. Scuttling to the window, he flung a handful of gravel, but no knotted sheets came down. Reeves’ head appeared. ‘The yellow swines won’t help me,’ he said, ‘and I can’t haul you up on my own. Better bolt!’

For a moment Josh wondered what to do. By this time Lamps would have all the entrances guarded and within five minutes, lights would be going on and everybody in the dormitories checked. There seemed no alternative.

Turning on his heels, he set off down the drive. The porter was just closing the gate.

‘Open it, please,’ Josh said.

‘Sir, I can’t. I’ve just had instructions to stop anybody who tries to get away.’

‘I shouldn’t if I were you.’

For a moment, the porter looked worried, then he shrugged. ‘I just hope it won’t get me into trouble,’ he said.

‘I’ll write them a letter,’ Josh said. ‘I’ll say I threatened to assault you.’

The porter pulled a face. ‘No need to go that far, sir. That would mean expulsion.’

‘It already means that,’ Josh said as he headed through the gates into the darkness. ‘I’m not sure I’m very worried.’

He spent the night in a small hotel where he was asked no questions but received a lot of strange looks. They knew where he had come from, all right.

The following morning, he slipped into a newsagents’ down the street and bought writing paper and envelopes and sat on the bed to write to his mother, telling her not to worry. Leaving the hotel early, he avoided the town because half the staff and probably half the local police force, too, would be looking for him now, and, setting off walking, caught a train to Ripon at the next stop. Remembering the two hundred and fifty pounds in his pocket, in Ripon he bought nine registered envelopes and addressed them to Reeves, Grayson, Powell and the others. Into each, he put a note saying that, despite winning the raffle, he considered he should share the money.

He was just wondering what to do next, when he realised he was outside the recruiting office. The walls were splashed with posters recommending the army as a life for adventurous young men. Inside, was a middle-aged sergeant, with a bottle nose, medals, ribbons on his cap and a red sash across his chest. He looked up at Josh.

‘Now, young feller,’ he said. ‘Want to join up, do you?’

Josh hadn’t been considering anything at all but he found himself replying in a strong, clear voice devoid of doubt.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve decided.’

The sergeant beamed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve got some nice vacancies in the West Yorkshires. Good regiment, that. They could do with a fine upstanding lad like yourself. How old are you?’

‘Seventeen.’

The sergeant poked his ear. ‘I don’t ’ear so well these days,’ he said. ‘Them barrages on the Somme in ’Sixteen did for me. Did you say eighteen?’

Josh recognised the ploy because he’d heard of it often from his grandfather. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Eighteen. That’s what I said.’

‘Thought you did.’ The sergeant looked at Josh’s black jacket and striped trousers and made a shrewd guess where he’d come from. ‘You ain’t been up to anything you shouldn’t, ’ave you?’ he asked. ‘The army don’t go for young fellers dodgin’ the police, you know.’

‘I’m not in trouble with the police.’

‘A girl?’

Josh grinned. ‘No. Not a girl.’

The sergeant eyed him warily. ‘All right then,’ he said. ‘Why are you wantin’ to get into khaki? You got family connections with the army?’

‘Yes.’

‘’Ow about the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry then? One of the Unsurpassable Six. Helped to rout eighty-three squadrons of French ’orse in 1759. Advanced against ’em with drums beatin’ and chased ’em off the field. They’re a good regiment for a feller who’s proud to be a soldier, and you look fit and athletic. You ’ave to be, to keep up with that lot. ’Undred and forty paces to the minute they goes.’

‘I want the cavalry,’ Josh said.

‘There ain’t no vacancies in the cavalry.’

‘If I can’t join the cavalry,’ Josh said, ‘I think I’ll join the Navy.’

As he pretended to turn away, the sergeant called him back. There was a trace of anxiety in his voice. ‘’Ere, ’old on,’ he said. ‘Take it easy. We might just be able to squeeze you in somewhere. What’s your fancy?’

‘The Clutchers. Nineteenth Lancers. They’ve always done their recruiting in this part of the world.’

The sergeant gave him a shrewd look. ‘Somebody ’ere knows ’is way about,’ he said. ‘Ain’t many knows nicknames and recruiting areas afore they puts uniforms on. You got someone in the Clutchers?’

‘Not now. I had.’

‘Killed in the war, was they?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dad?’

‘Yes.’

‘Orficer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t expect no favours. Lots o’ people got commissions between 1914 and 1918. Some of ’em even got to be majors and things like that.’

A smile crossed Josh’s lips. Not many of them got to be field marshals or major-generals, though, he thought.

The sergeant handed him a shilling. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That clinches the deal. Now stand over there and take this ’ere Bible in your right ’and–’

That night Josh lay awake on a hard bed covered with brown blankets and a mattress divided into three portions which looked like army biscuits – which was exactly how they were known. On one side of him a country boy not much older than himself by the name of Edward Orne snored quietly, on the other an older man who had introduced himself as Syd Dodgin lay in an aura of stale beer. Across the aisle which separated the beds, a thin youth called Prescott was crying quietly to himself.

Josh was now 17965238, Trooper Loftus, J, and as he lay awake thinking, he felt very satisfied. This, he decided, was something for which he had been heading all his life.

‘First of all,’ the officer said, ‘consider yourselves lucky. This is a good regiment – the only cavalry regiment in the British army to wear green, because we routed the Polish lancers at Waterloo and when we became lancers ourselves we decided to adopt their uniform.’

The new recruits were in a half-circle, standing stiffly in the position the army laughingly described as ‘at ease’.

‘Goff’s Greens,’ the officer went on, a languid figure in a blue jacket with chain-mail epaulettes, his legs encased in narrow green overalls with a double gold stripe running down the outside. ‘Goff’s Gamecocks. The Widowmakers. The Clutchers. We have all those names.’

Josh listened intently. Though he’d often heard his grandfather giving this little talk to him and had understood it was a tradition to give it to all recruits, it was a new experience to hear it from the other side.

The officer was a tall young man with a yellow moustache who had been introduced by the sergeant as Lieutenant Morby-Smith. It was a name Josh was familiar with. There had been two Morby-Smiths, father and son, both lost in the same action at the Graafberg in South Africa in 1900, where his own father had won a DSO. Though the battle had made his grandfather’s fame secure, the Regiment had suffered heavy casualties in what the regimental history politely euphemised as ‘a too-hasty charge.’ Josh knew, probably better than Lieutenant Morby-Smith himself, that it had been his own Uncle Robert, now Lord Gough, who had launched it.

The field marshal had not loved his elder son much. He had forgiven him for giving up the Regiment but, so Josh had heard, there was more to it than that. Uncle Robert, it seemed, had tried to cheat the old man out of Braxby Manor, and, what was worse, had allied himself to the Cosgro family whom the old man detested. He’d broken one of the Cosgros for cowardice in Zululand and it had never been forgiven by either side.

‘You there!’ Morby-Smith’s voice cut across his thoughts. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Loftus, sir.’

‘Have I seen you before? Your face looks familiar.’

Josh knew very well why his face looked familiar. There were portraits of his father and his grandfather in the officers’ mess and a strong resemblance ran through the family.

‘No, sir.’

‘You an old soldier? You speak like one. You hold yourself like one.’

‘No, sir. I’ve never been in the army before.’

Morby-Smith eyed him doubtfully. ‘You don’t look old enough, that’s the truth. Well, pay attention. Now – where did we get these names? At Waterloo, our motto – motto, remember, never badge; and title, never motto – was a buffalo head. But when we became lancers we took the French eagle and to make it fiercer, it was given large claws. Hence “The Clutchers”, to which was added “The Widowmakers”, because we’d made quite a few of those in the Peninsula.’ Morby-Smith paused. ‘There is also another name – “The Pot Carriers” – which we earned by announcing after Salamanca that we had captured Marshal Marmont’s treasure wagon. We don’t often use this name, however, because the “treasure wagon” turned out to be a private commode, and a chamberpot is hardly the sort of thing you wear on your drum cloths.’

It raised a polite chuckle, as it always did, and Josh almost laughed out loud. His grandfather had first spoken these words as a squadron officer in the Eighteen-seventies and they had become legendary.

‘We are one of the only two regiments in the army to share a number,’ Morby-Smith continued.’ The 19th Hussars and the 19th Lancers. It sprang from the mistake of a Whitehall clerk and has now become tradition, and because tradition is important in the army it has never been changed.’ He touched his cap. ‘Under the motto on your lance-caps you will see the words,
Aut primus aut nullus
. That’s Latin and it doesn’t mean “Out with the primus or there’ll be no tea” but
The best or nothing
. The 2nd Dragoons, the Greys, have the motto,
Nulli Secundus
, which means
Second to None
, but of course they’re second to us. And don’t believe it if anybody tells you we’re a junior cavalry regiment. We were first formed in 1642 but, due to the carelessness of someone who allowed us to be disbanded, were a little late in the field when we were reformed in 1760 by Joshua Goff.’

Josh listened avidly. He had drunk all this in ever since he’d been able to understand what it was all about. It was nonsense, but it mattered because a soldier’s loyalty lay not with the King or the army but with his regiment, and because of that he had to know it as well as he knew his own family.

‘It has been said,’ Morby-Smith continued, ‘that the cavalry exists to look pretty in peacetime and get killed in war. That’s because we’re expected to look better on parade than anyone else but in wartime we’re always the first to bump into the enemy and the last to withdraw. Sometimes we’re called on to charge, though what exactly we charge
with
, these days nobody seems very sure, because at the moment horses appear to be a little
de trop
.’

‘How about tanks, sir?’ Josh suggested quietly.

‘Quiet, that man,’ the sergeant snapped.

Morby-Smith’s eyebrows had lifted. ‘There seems to be someone in our midst who’s studied tactics,’ he said. ‘And perhaps he’ll prove to be right. In the meantime, however, we learn to ride horses. Before that great day arrives, however, you will learn to conduct yourselves like soldiers and to remember that cleanliness is next to Godliness, which here means bright buttons and shining souls.’

To Josh, as he marched away, it had been a very satisfying introduction to army life. It was almost as if he’d been listening to his grandfather.

As they crammed for haircuts into a hut where a barber was working at full speed, they were hailed with shouts.

‘Siddown, siddown, siddown! Don’t block up the bleedin’ gangway!’ The barber pushed away the man he had been shearing, his head like a wire brush. ‘Next!’

Josh took his place.

‘Fancy a massage?’ the barber said.

Josh grinned. He’d even heard all this before.

‘I’ll just have a nice shampoo.’

‘Well, go and stick your ’ead under the tap. Next.’

‘God,’ Orne said as they emerged, draughty about the cars. ‘They ought to give you gas with haircuts like these.’

Their teeth were inspected, their eyes were tested and they were jabbed with needles, at which more than one giant went down like a felled tree. Under the showers, the new recruits were surprisingly modest, though Josh, who had grown used to public nakedness at school, was unworried. They were issued with Bedford cord breeches, SD tunics, SD slacks, greyback shirts, boots and long swan-necked spurs.

‘And be careful ’ow you turn,’ the stores corporal advised as the spurs clanked on to the counter. ‘You get them things caught together, and you go on your bloody ear.’

Their barracks towered higher than infantry barracks because underneath lay the stables, brooms, scrubbers, mops and burnished buckets laid out for inspection in a neat pattern. Everything in the army, Josh discovered, was in patterns. Beds, kit-boxes, uniforms, swords and rifles all stood in patterns. Even the empty lance racks stood in patterns, all painted spotless white.