Sword of Fortune

by Christopher Nicole

  He gave another signal, and the orderly reached beneath the table, brought out the model of a tractor, wound it up, and set it on the sand. The clockwork shirred, and the toy moved forward.

  Murdoch peered at it with interest. Although it had caterpillar wheels with endless tracks, it was more than just a tractor. It was longer and lower, shaped somewhat like an elongated matchbox with a frame on top, and out of that top there protruded what was obviously intended to be a machine gun.

  ‘The armour would of course have to be thick enough to stop a bullet,’ Swinton said. ‘And this would mean it would not travel very fast — perhaps two or three miles an hour. But it would be unstoppable.’

  ‘Watch,’ Churchill said.

  The armoured tractor had simply rolled across the barbed wire. Now it reached the first trench, paused for a moment on the outer lip, appeared to dip, then made contact with the inner lip and continued on its way; the German soldiers were scattered.

  ‘How many men?’ Murdoch asked.

  ‘Only a couple inside the tank. But if your first line consisted of them, the infantry could follow on behind in comparative safety. Even the cavalry could do so.’

  ‘Tanks?’ Murdoch asked. ‘You call them tanks?’

  ‘I call it a tank. It makes me think of a tank on a tractor.’

  Murdoch gazed at the ‘tank’. It was still moving, having crossed the area between the first and second trenches, and then crossed the second trench. There its clockwork gave out and it stopped. He scratched his head.

  ‘It’s an old idea, of course,’ Swinton said modestly. ‘A Captain Bretherton dreamed it up more than half a century ago. But no one was interested then. Besides, he had to use steam power, which was hopelessly inefficient on a small scale like this. The petrol engine has changed all that.’ He grinned. ‘Although nobody, except Mr Churchill, is interested now, either.’

  ‘They will be,’ Churchill promised him. ‘They will be.’

  *

  ‘What did you think?’ he asked as they drove back to London in the dusk.

  ‘It could work,’ Murdoch said. ‘You’d need a lot of them.’

  ‘We shall have a lot of them, eventually. Will you endorse the idea, if you’re asked?’

  Murdoch thought for a moment. It could work. And if the tanks could indeed knock down the other fellow’s barbed wire and make a nonsense of his trenches, it could bring war back to the days of true manoeuvrability, as in South Africa, in which cavalry would have a full part to play...‘Yes, Mr Churchill,’ he said. ‘I’ll endorse the idea, if asked.’

  ‘Good man. How’d you like to drive one?’

  ‘Me? I can’t even drive an automobile.’ Although my wife can, he thought. ‘I’m a horseman, not a mechanic.’

  ‘I think you should learn, Colonel. I can foresee a time when you chaps will have abandoned your horses entirely for tanks.’

  ‘After my time, First Lord.’ He grinned. ‘Besides, it’d be a bit tricky saying the regimental prayer before a charge, with all those engines roaring.’

  Churchill grinned back. ‘I’m sure we’ll find a way, Mackinder.’

  *

  ‘Another medal, eh?’ grunted Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, glaring at Murdoch from between huge eyebrows and his famous moustache. ‘I suppose you wish to be congratulated, Mackinder.’

  ‘I’ve had enough congratulations, sir,’ Murdoch replied.

  ‘Harrumph. So. Back to France tomorrow, eh? Looking forward to that?’

  ‘To rejoining the regiment, yes, sir.’

  ‘And in command. You’re young to be a lieutenant-colonel. Dead men’s shoes. There’ll be a lot of those in this war.’

  Murdoch waited for the great man to say something relevant.

  ‘The situation,’ Kitchener announced. ‘You’ll know Antwerp has fallen. It was never defensible. Sending marines there was a waste of bloody time — and men. Churchill’s idea.’ He brooded for a few seconds. ‘We have to push them back, Mackinder. We have to drive them back. The next offensive will be launched December fourteenth. Just give you time to settle in, eh? All our armies, French and British, will move forward together, and throw the buggers back into their own country. Once we’ve got them going, we’ll keep them going. That’ll be your job, the job of the cavalry, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir, supposing we can break through his defensive system.’

  Kitchener glared at him. ‘We will. We must. We cannot fight a long war. There are shortages already. Shells. There aren’t enough shells. And men. I need more men. If we do not crack them now...’ his shoulders slumped, ‘we may not do it at all. Good luck, Mackinder. We will do it. You will do it.’

  Murdoch saluted and went to the door.

  ‘What I have said is confidential,’ Kitchener growled.

  *

  ‘Well, sir,’ Corporal Reynolds said. ‘Last night in Blighty until Christmas at the least. On the town, sir?’

  ‘Not on the town, George,’ Murdoch said. ‘I’ve a call to make. Get us some tickets down to Sevenoaks for this afternoon.’

  ‘Sevenoaks?’ Reynolds raised his eyebrows and then frowned. ‘You’re not going calling on that Jerry bugger again, sir? Seems to me he’s no friend of yours.’

  ‘He did save my life once, George,’ Murdoch said. ‘And then tried to cut you down when your back was turned at Le Cateau,’ Reynolds pointed out.

  ‘An act of war. You get the tickets,’ Murdoch said.

  But he wondered why he was doing this. If he and Paul von Reger had been friends once, that seemed a very long time ago now — since last August, a million light years away. Their friendship had not survived Paul’s marriage to Margriet. It was because she, as a bride, had confessed her sins to her husband, and been beaten for those sins. At least, she had claimed so when last they had met. But it was difficult to determine when Margriet was telling the truth and when she was living in some fantasy world of her own.

  Yet the man had once saved his life, when Murdoch had been captured by a Boer commando, infuriated at the destruction of their farms — on Kitchener’s orders — and ready to lynch the first British officer to fall into their hands. That Paul had struck at him from behind outside Le Cateau had undoubtedly been a reflex action.

  Murdoch straightened his tie as the military doctor escorted him along the corridor of the prison hospital. ‘You’ll find Colonel von Reger almost fully recovered,’ he said. ‘He’ll leave here in another week.’

  ‘And go to a prison camp?’

  ‘I have no idea, Colonel Mackinder. I presume so, although he is a prominent man in Germany.’ He opened the door. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Mackinder to see you, Colonel.’

  Paul von Reger stood up. Even in a dressing gown and pyjamas he managed to look military — and Prussian. His yellow hair had been allowed to grow by the hospital staff, but his back was as straight as ever Murdoch recalled it, his manner as precise, his big features as stiff. ‘You are returning to service,’ he remarked.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘I also, hopefully,’ Reger said.

  Murdoch raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I am to be exchanged. I have been told this.’

  ‘Then I congratulate you, assuming you wish to return to the front.’

  Reger stiffened even more. ‘Do you suppose I am a coward?’

  ‘I never supposed that, Paul. But you are nearly forty. This war is young man’s work.’

  ‘Your work, you mean.’ Reger glanced at Murdoch’s tunic. ‘A bar to the DSO. You are a much decorated man.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Always leading heroic charges, eh? One day your luck will change.’

  ‘Everyone’s luck changes eventually,’ Murdoch said. ‘When you return to Germany, will you give my regards to Margriet, and young Paul?’

  ‘To Margriet, and young Paul. Yes, I will do that.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Murdoch hesitated, then held out his hand. When last he had seen Reger, in this very room, after he had be
en able to leave his hospital bed, his offered hand had been refused. He realized it was going to be refused again now, and let it fall back to his side.

  ‘I wish you to know,’ Reger said, ‘that I have no regrets at having tried to kill you at Le Cateau.’

  ‘I do not expect you to. I was trying to kill you.’

  ‘And the next time we meet, I shall succeed,’ Reger told him.

  ‘We’ll both be trying then, too,’ Murdoch agreed. ‘If there is a next time. But when the war is over, I would hope we can be friends again, Paul.’

  Reger stared at him. ‘When the war is over, Murdoch, Great Britain will have been defeated. She will have been humbled. You will have been humbled. Yes, perhaps then we can be friends.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to that,’ Murdoch said, and left the room.

  ‘As unpleasant as ever, I’d reckon,’ Reynolds remarked as the train chugged them back to London.

  ‘As ever,’ Murdoch said. ‘He’s a frightened man, George. Maybe all the enemy are. They’ve started something they’re no longer sure they can finish. And if they can’t...’

  ‘No one is going to weep for the Kaiser, Mr Murdoch.’

  ‘Or any of his people,’ Murdoch agreed. ‘That’s what’s frightening them.’ And me, he thought.

  *

  ‘Troop, atten-tion!’

  The recruits brought their heels together and straightened their backs. There were thirty-seven of them, most of whom Murdoch had met already when he had visited regimental headquarters in Bath a week previously. Presumably other drafts had been sent off while he had been in hospital; he knew the regiment had suffered more than thirty-seven casualties during the fight at Le Cateau alone.

  ‘Lieutenant Ralph Manly-Smith, sir!’ The young man, wearing an obviously brand new uniform, stood in front of his colonel and saluted. He was the officer Murdoch had been warned would be accompanying him to France, straight out of Sandhurst, but who had not been at the depot. He was somewhat small, and dark and intense, and surely could not have been more than eighteen.

  Murdoch returned the salute, then held out his hand. ‘Welcome, Mr Manly-Smith.’

  Manly-Smith’s grasp was eager and his eyes were shining; he was shaking hands with a legend. ‘Troop is ready for inspection, sir.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Murdoch walked in front of the second-lieutenant, spurs jingling in the crisp November air, heels thudding on the courtyard of the depot. ‘Which of you didn’t I meet in Bath?’ he asked the troop.

  There was a moment’s hesitation, then someone said, ‘Me, sir.’

  Murdoch glanced along the rank, and felt his jaw dropping. ‘Johnnie?’ he asked in amazement.

  ‘Trooper Morton, sir,’ the man replied.

  Murdoch gazed at him in astonishment. Johnnie Morton had been the senior lieutenant when he had joined the regiment in Bath, fifteen years ago. An instant mutual dislike had grown into a very real friendship beneath the African sun and the bullets of the Boer sharpshooters. Then Johnnie had gone with the main part of the regiment to India, while Murdoch had been sent to Somaliland with his squadron. There he had gained fame and fortune, while in India Johnnie had contracted syphilis and been invalided out, under a cloud.

  But he had been retired with the rank of major.

  ‘Trooper Morton?’ Murdoch asked softly.

  ‘Yes, sir. A man must fight, sir.’

  Murdoch gazed at the moustached face, the square shoulders, and remembered a great deal.

  ‘I am fit again now, sir,’ Morton said.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Murdoch said. There were a million questions scouring his tongue, but not one he could ask. He was the regiment’s commanding officer, and Morton, for whatever reason, was now a trooper. Revelations would have to wait. He completed his inspection of the men and their kit, and returned to where the lieutenant waited, like everyone else intrigued by the exchange. ‘Very good, Mr Manly-Smith,’ he said. ‘Fall the men in. The train is waiting.’

  Manly-Smith gave the orders, and the troop mounted and walked their horses out of the yard, the two officers at their head. ‘Morton is an old soldier, is he, sir?’ Manly-Smith could restrain his curiosity no longer.

  ‘Yes,’ Murdoch said.

  ‘He looks a little old to be a trooper.’

  ‘He is,’ Murdoch agreed. Tut, as he said, a man must

  fight. Let us go and do that, Mr Manly-Smith.’

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