Until the Colours Fade (19 page)

He screamed out the order for the front line to move forward, and at the trumpet note to trot rode out in front, noticing that, since there would be no room for the normal four phases of the charge, most of the troopers did not know whether to hold their sabres at the ‘carry’ or at the ‘engage’. As the white sea of
panic-stricken
faces grew closer, George forgot to give any more orders; it was as much as he could do to keep hold of his sabre, but the pace of the line increased to a canter regardless. The idea was that the squadron sergeant-major, in the centre of the front rank, should hit the opposition fractionally in advance of the markers on each flank, the whole line going in in an extended arrow-shape; but, as the yeomanry neared their target, all orders to dress by the centre were ignored, and the line thundered
pell-mell
into the screaming crowd, now surging and falling back over itself to escape.

The noise around George was the loudest and most awful sound he had ever heard: groans, shouts, curses, neighing horses and the clash of metal. Whatever will the mob had had to reach the Quadrant had now clearly gone. He could see his men
hacking
wildly with their sabres, drunk with success. ‘Retire!’ he screamed to the trumpeter, as he saw people falling, struck down by hoofs and sabre cuts. A horse sank to the ground, evidently stabbed or shot. A moment later he heard a distinct shot and the whizz of a bullet. The trumpet notes to retire rang out and the line wheeled and backed out of the breaking crowd, leaving thirty or forty wounded men on the dirty slush-covered road. George was shocked to see that one of those struck down was a boy of eleven or twelve. He ordered two troopers to bring him back, but, as the men dismounted, one fell, shot through the shoulder.

Without waiting for more, George cantered back down the street towards the reserve line. The shots were coming, it seemed, from a churchyard to the right of the street, where a length of the railings had been torn down by large numbers of the crowd in their frenzy to escape the charge, and to reach the cover of the gravestones in case the soldiers opened fire. A moment later he
saw a puff of smoke beside the church tower under some yew trees, and then men swarming up a builder’s ladder onto the porch and from there onto the roof of the nave; and from that position, George knew that they would be able to hit his men at almost any point in the street, giving them virtual possession of Horsefair. When another of his men fell from his saddle, he gave the order to dismount and draw carbines.

While they huddled together against a warehouse wall,
ramming
home cartridges and getting rid of cumbersome gauntlets and sabretaches, George picked twenty men, intending to lead them into the churchyard to clear out the armed strikers. He ordered a squad under the troop-sergeant to rip out loose railings when they passed through the gap; his plan being to use them to batter down the locked church door so that he could get men up into the tower. From the top they would need to fire only a few isolated shots down at the nave roof to clear the strikers from it. His legs were trembling with fear at the coming danger, but he also felt sullen resentment and anger. Remembering Magnus’s prophecy of disaster, these feelings intensified; doubtless
Crawford
would laugh at the comic irony that had made George Braithwaite the victim of his father’s stubbornness. If Catherine read in the papers that he had dislodged some armed strikers, she would probably think nothing of it; such proceedings had none of the glamour of war. As it was, he was likely to be blamed for allowing the marchers to get into Horsefair.

Sick with bitterness and fear, George led his men towards the gaping rent in the railings, walking upright, although his
followers
were crouching. But, when a bullet hit one of the railings with a sound like a clapper hitting a cracked bell, he found
himself
following their example. When they reached the gap, bullets cracked and whined about them, as they sheltered a moment under the cover of the low wall on which the railings were mounted. George had no carbine, but raising his useless sabre, he gasped: ‘Forward after me!’, surprised that what he had intended to be a resounding shout had come out little above a high-pitched whisper. His bowels also troubled him and his legs felt as soft as wax as he hurled himself in a stumbling run towards the nearest gravestones. In threes and fours his men sprang through the gap after him.

On the long grass in the churchyard, the snow still lay thick in places, unmarked save by a thin film of smuts and the footprints of the strikers, most of whom were now either behind the church or up on the roof of the nave. An ominous silence had fallen, as
though they were saving their shot and powder for the time when the yeomanry should reach the open grass in front of the porch. But the brief respite from danger gave George time to collect his wits. Beneath the cap of snow on the soot-blackened stone,
behind
which he was crouching, he made out a banal epitaph.

George was pleased to be calm enough to manage a wry smile at the possibility of being killed in a graveyard. He darted on again, and this time dropped down behind a raised box-tomb. Around him, in an extended line, his men were advancing on the church. When the soldiers reached the last gravestones, George watched the group under the troop-sergeant, armed with their railings, dash towards the cover of the porch and reach it
without
loss under an intense crackle of firing from the roof, while the remainder of the yeomanry, still kneeling behind the
gravestones
, did their best to give covering fire.

Seconds later, as the churchyard echoed to the sound of heavy metal hammering and smashing against the locked door, George was not alarmed by the absence of shots from the roof; the overhanging porch provided perfect cover for the work. When the doors gave way, George waited impatiently for his men to appear on the roof of the tower. Suddenly he was stunned to hear the rattle of musketry coming from behind him. He could not believe it, until a bullet sang past his shoulder, nicking a gravestone and showering him with fine splinters of stone. He threw himself face down in the snow as other shots whipped past. Before he heard the warning shouts from the tower, he realised what had happened. At the first sound of the attack on the door, the strikers on the roof of the nave had crawled to the other side of the leads behind the high parapet and had lowered themselves to the ground by the drain-pipes and creepers on the wall of the north transept. Before starting to break down the door, he should first have surrounded the church. The realisation of his elementary error made his head swim. He had let them escape and steal up behind him, where the gravestones gave them
excellent
cover. Around him men were cursing and crawling flat on their stomachs vainly seeking to escape the raking fire. A
troop-corporal
crawled up to George on his hands and knees, his face grey with fear. A long scream came from a few yards behind him.

‘’ave to do summat,’ he gulped, almost angrily.

‘Shut your mouth,’ snapped George, on the point of telling the man to stand when addressing him. ‘When I make a move, we’ll run for the porch. Tell them that.’

As the corporal crawled away, muttering meaningless filth under his breath, the unpredictable direction of the bullets, as they cracked and whizzed off the tombstones badly unnerved George; so much so that, to stop himself screaming, he forced his knuckles against his teeth until they bled. Then, unable to stand the strain any longer, he leapt to his feet, and brandishing his sword, fled towards the porch. Moments after he and his men had reached their objective, a body of Lancers clattered into the street. Thinking themselves surprised from behind, between ten and twenty armed strikers broke from their
positions
and ran in confusion towards the wall on the far side of the churchyard, their heavy fustian coats dark against the snow.

‘Fire, dammit, fire,’ yelled George, hardly aware of what he was doing after the agonising tension of the past three minutes. His men however, seeing their enemies doing their best to get away, had no wish to detain them, and fired high or wide, reloading slowly. Only one man was hit on the wall.

*

Having left the main body of his men in an adjacent street, Lord Goodchild had ridden through the Quadrant with a small detachment of officers and troopers, and had been greatly
relieved
to find that, although the crowd there was as excited as the people in the market square, no violence had taken place. On entering Horsefair, he was incredulous to find the street empty and could not understand it; only a quarter-of-an-hour before, he had been told that the yeomanry had been overwhelmed,
leaving
the mob in possession of the street. He was still more
perplexed
when he saw sixty or seventy yeomanry troopers smoking and lolling against the wall of a large warehouse. Moments later he caught sight of some bodies in the road and heard the rattle of musketry coming apparently from inside the churchyard. Having sent his adjutant across to ask the yeomanry what they meant by leaving unattended wounded on the ground, he rode on
in the direction of the firing.

It now seemed tolerably clear to Goodchild that the mob had broken into Horsefair and had then been dispersed by shooting or a charge. He was completely at a loss to work out how they had forced their way in, since two overturned carts, blocking Monkgate Bar and defended from behind by men with sabres, should have made the narrow entrance impassable. He reined in opposite the churchyard and saw men in the yeomanry’s green jackets firing down from the top of the church tower. Answering shots from the ground were puffing out clouds of dust from the stonework around the battlements. Next he saw a group of soldiers, led by an officer with a sword, run for their lives towards the church porch. As the rest of Goodchild’s detachment
clattered
up beside him, some dozen or so men, probably strikers, broke from behind the gravestones and raced towards the far boundary wall. After a pause the soldiers in the porch opened an irregular stammer of fire on them. Goodchild reckoned that the break in the railings had been made by the mob in a desperate attempt to create another escape route when charged by the yeomanry; that the soldiers had then followed these fleeing men into the churchyard made Goodchild almost more angry than the fact that they had incompetently allowed the mob into the street in the first place. The lunacy of risking their own and other lives in an effort needlessly to hunt down armed men in a place
providing
such a variety and abundance of cover, left him speechless. Also shooting tended to attract more guns to an area; the
yeomanry
were lucky not to be already involved in a battle as serious as the one which had taken place outside the workhouse three nights before. At present there could not be more than
half-a-dozen
guns firing regularly at the yeomanry, and these snipers seemed intent only on escaping; if the green-jacketed idiots stopped firing for a few minutes, their adversaries would be able to get over the wall and make a peaceful exit.

Turning, Goodchild saw the yeomanry down the street removing the wounded under his adjutant’s instructions; one of those hurt was little more than a child. So far he had managed to suppress his fury, but the sight of the boy’s bloody matted hair and gashed face made Goodchild curse aloud. Without the
yeomanry
’s bungling, the day might have ended without a single serious casualty. One of the fugitives in the churchyard had clambered up onto the wall, and was on the point of dropping down on the other side, when a volley rang out from the porch; the man spun round, twisted in mid-air and then fell. Goodchild
gritted his teeth and touched his horse with his whip.

George and his men watched in open-mouthed amazement as one of the Lancers set his large black horse at the railings and coaxed him through in a graceful jump. The sight of this officer, in his plumed shako and magnificent uniform, elegantly clearing the tombstones as if on a steeplechase course, while the snipers fired wildly at him, made the yeomanry hold their breath in
anguish
. George could not return the fire in case he hit the officer. Each moment he expected to see the horse rear-up and fall, or the rider to be flung, broken and bleeding from his saddle, but
miraculously
he reached the church unscathed, dismounted, and calmly tethered his horse to the left of the porch out of the line of fire. Then he strode briskly towards the doorway, his tall boots slapping against his thighs. George gasped as he recognised Lord Goodchild, his face scarlet with rage.

‘My lord?’

‘What the devil are you doing, sir?’

‘Dislodging snipers. They fired on us.’

‘If you try to kill armed men they have a habit of trying to do the same to you.’

The scorn and anger in Goodchild’s voice amazed George.

‘My lord, they fired on us first.’

‘Before you had charged an unarmed crowd? I think not, sir.’ Goodchild impatiently flicked the black plume away from his face. ‘The blame is yours for letting the mob into this street.’

The crackle of musketry still echoed across the churchyard from the tower. George was trembling with emotion.

‘If my orders had made sense, I could have defended the Bar. I was told to use only mounted men.’

‘Are you mounted now? Circumstances dictate the method, not general orders. Your orders were to defend Monkgate Bar. How you did so was left to your discretion.’ Goodchild unhitched his sabre which had become caught up with the straps of his sabretache. George’s men had tactfully withdrawn to the back of the porch, where they were exchanging grim smiles, leaving only a corporal and a trooper to cover the approach. ‘You realise an inquiry will be held after the inquests on the men you killed? There will be questions in Parliament.’