But Flambeau had gone with the rest. He would never ride the big bay again, feeling the living power between his knees, the demand and response as though he and the horse were one; never feel the thrusting velvet muzzle in the hollow of his apple-bearing hand; never go back to Broomrigg, walking the six miles there and the six miles back on Sundays and holidays that had lit the rest of the week for him.
What had he thought would happen to Broomrigg after Grandfather went out of it to lie beside Grandmother and her kin under the kirkyard yews? He had never truly thought about it. The farm had always been there, the old pear tree by the gable end, the babble of lambs from the February fold. It had seemed that it always would be there, an integral part of life itself.
To his father, the sale had seemed quite a small thing; but to Thomas it had been the end of the world.
It had been in the small sleepless hours of the following night that he had known quite suddenly that he was going for a soldier.
There had been nothing to hold him back; neither his father nor Jamie would be much grieved by his going; there were a couple of school friends he should be sorry not to see again, and Jenny Cochrane the apothecary’s niece … nothing that would not mend soon enough.
It had been quite easy, for with Bonaparte’s “Army of England” massed at Boulogne with their invasion barges ready and the new alliance with Spain that was to gain him control of the Channel long enough to ship them over, the militia was being called out and new regiments formed the length and breadth of the kingdom, including a new battalion of the 78th Highlanders recruiting at Perth.
He had written two letters that night, one to his father conscientiously trying to explain the unexplainable, the other to Mr Sempill apologising for breaking his indentures, and left them lying where Leezy, the old servant, would find them in the morning. Then, with his scanty savings in his pocket, he had climbed out of the window and set out on the long walk to Perth in the chill summer rain.
He had done well in the 78th, his gunsmith’s training standing him in good stead, so that he had gained the position of battalion armourer — not that there had been much competition — even before the regiment had been ordered overseas.
They had had their baptism of fire at Maida in Calabria, as part of a small force landed in southern Italy against French troops already there, the first time that Bonaparte’s crack troops had been defeated by British infantry. Then had come Egypt.
Why the Egyptian expedition nobody had seemed very clear, certainly nobody in the rank and file of the 2nd Battalion 78th Highland Regiment, but seemingly it had something to do with the failure of some British bombardment of Constantinople on behalf of the Russians against whom the Turks had closed the Dardanelles. Something also to do with discouraging the French and Ottoman Empires from joining forces; though it seemed to Private Thomas Keith just as unclear why invading one of its territories and mopping up the Viceroy and his troops should discourage the Sultan and his Sublime Porte in Constantinople, in the very heart of that Empire, from joining forces with whoever they chose.
It was not much more than a month since the British had landed and taken Alexandria. Twice since then, the second time only a few days ago, they had tried to storm Rosetta, the gateway to the cornlands of the Delta. Twice they had been driven off with heavy losses by the Turkish and Albanian troops of the Viceroy’s army. The second attempt Thomas knew about only by confused hearsay, for ten days ago three companies of the 2nd Battalion, together with five of De Rolle’s and the 35th, all as usual under strength, had been detached and sent off four miles further east, with the task of holding the village of El Hamed and the two-mile stretch of reeds and tamarisk-scrub between the Nile and Lake Edko. Eight hundred of them against three times as many of the enemy. But, of course, there were the anti-Turkish Mamelukes camped further upriver; if you counted in their promised cavalry support, that would improve the odds quite a lot. It was a pity the Mamelukes had such a highly coloured reputation for faith-breaking …
Thomas returned to sudden awareness of the other men about the fire. Jock Patterson with the usual stray dog, Willie Moffat with the letter he always wrote to his wife and left behind with the baggage train, the fitful interweaving of sounds that made up the voice of the camp and out beyond, in the full darkness that had come down while he was not looking, the lost-soul crying of the jackals.
“Was it a good dream?” asked the soft Highland voice beside him. “I was thinking that if you are to polish that stock much more, the thing would be polished away entirely.”
“Good in parts.” Thomas grinned and laid aside his oily rag. “Do you mind the night before Maida?”
Donald had got his drum together again and his fingers did not check in their careful adjustment of the pigskin buffs that tightened and tuned the drumskin. “I mind the night before Maida well enough,” he said, and then: “The odds were stacked against us that time, too.”
*
The sun was just shaking clear of the shallow lift of land eastwards, and the irrigation ditches which veined the whole countryside were beginning to give back a shining pallor to the growing brightness of the sky; the scene had taken on edge and substance and the shadows of men and bushes lay long-fingered across the land as the British force advanced into action. And for Thomas at least, the queasy coldness in the belly that had been with him through the dark hours and turned the hard tack of the morning issue into sawdust in his mouth, had given way to an odd eager expectancy. He was aware of all things with an etched sharpness that was almost painful: the new light splintering on belt clasp and musket barrel, the heavy flick forward of his kilt against the back of his knees with every step, the company Colours away to his left up-reared against the brightening sky above the roll and rattle of Donald’s drum and the skirl of the pipes playing “Hielan’ Laddie”. High overhead the kites quartering the morning emptiness on tilted, motionless wings.
Most of all, from his position on the extreme right flank, the post of most danger and most honour, usually bestowed on the Grenadiers in any battle line, he was aware of empty ground away to the right, stretching towards Lake Edko where surely — surely to God! — the Mameluke cavalry should have come in to their support by now!
Somewhere beyond the low ridge ahead of them there leapt up suddenly the distant challenge of Turkish trumpets, and across the bush-grown crest their own scouts were falling back.
The British ranks were being extended as they advanced in an attempt to avoid being outflanked on that unprotected right, drawing out long and thin like a piece of fraying rope, even before the moment when they saw the lines of Turkish horsemen waiting for them and filling, it seemed, the whole low skyline from east to west. They advanced steadily, holding their fire in stubborn obedience to their orders, though they themselves were coming under fire now from the Albanian infantry.
Keep moving. Keep station —
The clarity of that earlier moment was gone, and Thomas’s memory of the El Hamed action remained ever after extremely hazy. He had a confused impression of the two battle lines rolling together and the battle shout of the 78th — “Cuidich’n Righ! Cuidich’n Righ!” — and the high Turkish yell seeming to beat together in the swirling clouds of dust and powder-smoke around them; the rattle of their own unleashed musketry at last and the screams of stricken men and horses … and then the knowledge that they had ceased to advance, and were surging to and fro over the same ground in all the ugly chaos of close combat.
He never knew how long it lasted or quite how it came to an end, but a time came — it might have been a minute or many hours later — when the British had broken off and were in retreat.
Ever afterwards he was to remember as through that haze of dust and gun smoke, the Grenadiers pulling back on that exposed right flank, unsupported when they should have been covered by the Mameluke cavalry, contriving somehow to maintain contact with the companies of the 35th on their left, keeping the mass of Turkish horsemen in check. The familiar wicke
d kick of the rifle against his shoulder. Load-aim-fire, load-aim-fire, load while retiring — kneel — aim — fire …
Out of the drifting dust cloud the Albanian infantry were swarming up from the cover of the irrigation dykes to their right and rear, while the jagged turmoil of a moving fight boiled up from their left. They were an island now, cut off and surrounded, men dropping every moment beneath the bitter hail of musket fire. They were making their last stand in the midst of scrubby harvest land and the reapers were closing in …
From the crest of an irrigation dyke which the tattered remnant of the Grenadiers had taken and were holding as though it were a fortress, Thomas, still firing steadily through the choking waves of smoke, glimpsed for a few moments the blurred figure of Colonel MacLeod sitting his horse on the crest of the ridge and looking about him as though taking stock of the situation, as though maybe even now looking for some belated sign of the promised Mameluke support. Then a fresh wave of Albanians surged into view and the solitary figure in their path went down.
After that there was only smoking chaos, the smell of blood and filth and burned powder; Willie Moffat falling beside him with half his head shot away, and somewhere in the midst of it all the scream of the pipes still playing “Hielan’ Laddie”.
And then something that was not so much pain as a sense of enormous shock as though he had been kicked just below the left hip by a mule. He was down on his face in the mess of Willie’s blood and brains. He managed to struggle to his elbow and get in one more shot. But the time for shooting was over; his ears were full of the nearing hoof-drum of the Turkish cavalry and all around him men were fixing bayonets. The chaos began to swim and darken as the battle rolled over him.
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