A Close Run Thing mh-1

by Allan Mallinson

  ‘Ah, Heroys, with orders for the night perhaps,’ began the major, with more than a trace of irony. ‘Tell me, are they to be as strenuous as those of the day?’ But he gave the BM no time for reply, thoroughly warming to his opportunity: ‘Let me guess. A brigade steeplechase perhaps? Or a foxhunt? Maybe even a levee, or a masque – yes, I have it, a masque! Now, which might it be? Comus, perhaps; that would seem apt: “What chance, good Lady, hath bereft you thus? Dim darkness, and this leafy labyrinth!”’

  ‘Very droll, Edmonds. You are perfectly well aware that thrift in deploying one’s assets is a sound precept in war.’

  ‘That’s a piss-fire answer!’

  ‘Edmonds, some days you try my patience, and then again others you quite exhaust it!’ replied the brigade major with a resigned smile: he had long years of acquaintance with Edmonds’s vituperation. ‘I have instructions for a comfortable billet, no less.’

  The particulars took Edmonds by surprise: ‘A convent!’ he exclaimed. ‘And where will the nuns be?’

  ‘You need worry not,’ replied Heroys. ‘They are all in the hospitals with the blessés, and probably a good many of our own wounded, too. Never have I seen so many. But you will need to make haste: it will be pitch-dark before the hour’s out. Come, I will guide you down myself.’

  ‘Lead us not into bloody temptation!’ sighed Edmonds as they began the descent into the city.

  * * *

  Hervey had lost more blood than he had supposed. After all but fainting in the saddle on the way down, Serjeant Armstrong and Private Johnson half-carried him to one of the nuns’ cells in spite of his protests that first he must see to the horses. ‘Heaven help us,’ sighed Armstrong aloud. ‘These gentlemen-officers and their duty!’ But neither he nor Johnson had the time to argue, and Hervey, for sure, had not the energy. Leaving him with a lantern, they slammed the door closed, and he lay down on the narrow bed without even unfastening his sword-belt. With the comparative comfort of a straw-filled palliasse beneath him, the first in three months, he fell asleep at once.

  The chapel and cellars had been locked before the sisters had left for the hospitals; nevertheless Serjeant Armstrong reappeared half an hour later with arms full of bottles. One crashed to the stone floor as he pushed the cell door open, and Hervey woke with a start.

  ‘Bordoo, sir – the best. Not like that rot-gut in Spain. Shall we drink to the troop?’

  They had drunk together before, not frequently but often enough for Armstrong’s invitation to be unremarkable. The circumstances had never been quite so intimate, however; and, while Hervey might in the ordinary course of events have welcomed the opportunity of informality with his covering-serjeant, he was uneasy about allowing any intimacy at this time, for there was the business with the ADC to address. Without doubt many an officer, perhaps even the majority, would have chosen to disregard Armstrong’s momentary loss of control since it had been directed at so reviled a man as Regan. Especially might they have been so inclined if the offender were so warmly and genuinely solicitous of their comfort as was Armstrong now. But Hervey could not. He held the simple, if at times uncomfortable, conviction that no case of indiscipline should go at least unremarked, for not to have held so encouraged, in his judgement, a lack of constancy which made for confusion during alarms. Not that this was to advocate a regime of punishment for each and every transgression. Indeed, Hervey’s zeal was tempered by the enlightened attitude which characterized the Sixth, where not a man had been flogged in a decade, but there were other concerns now than simply that of good order and military discipline. He raised himself unsteadily on an elbow.

  ‘Serjeant Armstrong, what in the name of heaven did you think you were doing today? Those dragoons from the Staff Corps were within an ace of arresting you!’

  ‘I’d ’ave tipped ’em both a settler if they’d tried!’

  ‘Well, that would have decided matters! And how do you suppose you would manage on a trooper’s pay?’

  ‘I’d at least have my pride.’

  Hervey sighed. ‘Serjeant Armstrong, I don’t seem to be making my meaning clear, do I? Has Serjeant Strange said anything?’

  ‘Oh ay, Strange has had at me right enough. But he didn’t have to say a thing. I’ve known ’Arry Strange for nigh on ten years.’

  ‘Geordie Armstrong, just listen to me for a minute. That you are a fighter is beyond doubt – one of the best. The whole regiment knows it – and most of the army, too, I shouldn’t wonder. But that temper!’

  ‘The pot calls the kettle black-arse!’

  Hervey sighed again. ‘Serjeant Armstrong, if I encouraged you by my own—’But he was not allowed to finish.

  ‘With respect, Mr Hervey sir,’ which was no warranty that any would be manifest, ‘you just look out for General Slade, and I’ll look to me own devices: I’m too small a fish for them staff to concern themselves over.’ And he grinned.

  Hervey could but hope that it might be thus. So much for his withering rebuke! But there was, at least, no good reason any longer why he should not take wine with his serjeant and, albeit without much sense of celebration, that is what he did – a copious quantity, in measures which Armstrong referred to as medicinal. And the Bordeaux was to have its medicinal effect, for Hervey slept until late the following morning.

  The silence first told him it was no ordinary reveille. And then the height of the sun, whose rays streamed into his cell through the window high above his head – he had not lain in bed with the sun so high, nor for that matter with the sun up, for as long as he could remember. Reveille preceded dawn: that was the invariable rule of field discipline, even in quarters. There they might only feed and water the horses, but in the field they stood to, saddled, ready for any alarm which first light might bring. Wellington may have cursed his cavalry, and compared them unfavourably with the hussars of the King’s German Legion, but the Sixth would allow him no cause for complaint over that routine at least.

  Hervey lay motionless, still drowsy though conscious of a dull ache in his leg, but he had no great inclination to discover for himself why he was not on parade. Lowly cornet though he might be, he was confident that the regiment would not have moved on without him, and he was sure that no sleep could be so deep as to shut out the sound of a battle. For once he might let events take their course. In any case, all was silence now, and a curious scent of rosewater, mixed with that of the wine spilled the night before, began to have an uncommonly quiescent effect. Soon he was succumbing to a faintly illicit relishing of the missed exertions of the pre-dawn, labours of which few outside the ranks of a horsed regiment could have any conception. An infantryman merely had to turn out of his bivouac and stand to his arms, but both before and after a trooper’s stand to there was a deal of toiling with mount and equipment, dawn and dusk, day in, day out.

  But the dull throb in his supine leg was increasing, and he forced himself up in order to restore the circulation. There were choice curses at the stiffness as he hobbled round the cell, his sword-scabbard clanking on the flagstones, and the noise was evidently enough to alert his groom who appeared after ten minutes of this clattering and cursing.

  ‘Good mornin, Mr ’Ervey sir. I ’eard thee moving and thought tha could be doing with some breakfast.’

  Hervey shook his head in mock despair. He was Private Johnson’s third officer in a year, though they had now been together for ten months. The others had complained of excessive cheeriness and an impenetrable Sheffield dialect, but Hervey found his ingenuity as a groom more than made up for these alleged shortcomings. Comprehension, he had told them, was ultimately a matter of determination: could they not recognize a black diamond?

  Johnson brought in a canteen of tea, some boiled fowl and a loaf of grey bread. ‘An’ there’s some brandy ’ere an’ all, sir,’ – holding up a silver cup which looked to have been intended originally for a less secular purpose.

  ‘Private Johnson, it is as ever a pleasure to see you of a morning, but unusual in i
ts being so late,’ he replied with a bemused smile.

  ‘Tha means why didn’t I wake thee afore?’

  ‘Just so, Johnson.’

  ‘Well, Johnny Crapaud’s quit t’town, and Cap’n Lankester said tha were on t’sick list. And when tha was awake t’surgeon said that tha were t’ave thee bandages changed.’

  Though Hervey had counted on his not being abandoned, he knew it was the greatest good fortune to have received his wound not a day earlier, if the notion of fortune and a wound were in any way appropriate. Had the regiment moved on after the battle, he would have been left in some makeshift hospital on a pile of filthy straw, struck off strength and already becoming but a memory: the needs of the fit and the necessities of the campaign did not often admit of retrospection. But to remain on strength, local-sick, to be tended by the regimental surgeon who would be answerable to Edmonds, was a different prospect; for, however much Edmonds might curse the surgeon as a cast-off from a parish poorhouse, he would perforce be more diligent than many to be found in a so-called army hospital.

  Not that this nunnery was anything like as comfortable as some they had seen in Spain, where they resembled more the houses of grandees than of religious orders. The Convent of St Mary of Magdala had a peculiar austerity, a chill which did not come from the weather, for it was seasonally warm and dry outside. Hervey’s sick-quarters were no cell in the purely figurative sense, for they had every appearance of the clink’s lodgings. The walls were white and in poor repair. A crucifix above his bed was their one adornment. The bed was the only piece of furniture except for a prie-dieu with three books. As Johnson arranged the breakfast in a niche of the thick wall, Hervey picked up each book in turn. The Latin bible, strangely perhaps for a son of the cloth, was the first he had ever opened, and he felt a mild revulsion at seeing the scriptures rendered thus – the Englishman’s revulsion at the martyrdom of Tyndale and others for the vernacular. The second volume was in Spanish, El Via de Perfectión, and he puzzled for a time whether this was ‘The Way to’ or ‘The Way of Perfection’, for his Spanish was still rough. But he understood enough to learn that it was the testimony of St Teresa, the mystic from Avila about whom he knew little, and that only because his father had once made a study of the works of St John of the Cross. If he had felt uneasy at the Vulgate, however, the third volume might have thoroughly revolted him, for in the common consciousness of Hervey and his kind the very word Jesuit proclaimed every perfidy imaginable, and this volume was the work of St Ignatius of Loyola, no less.

  But the title intrigued rather than repelled him – Exercitia Spiritualia Sancti. The coupling seemed somehow discrepant: he had studied books on exercises for light cavalry, manuals on sword exercises and pistol exercises, signalling exercises even, but spiritual exercises – an altogether arresting notion. He sat down and began to leaf through its pages while at the same time struggling to wrest the stringy meat of the fowl’s leg from its bone.

  Meanwhile, Private Johnson had slipped from the cell without his noticing. By the time he reappeared only bones remained of the fowl, and Hervey was wholly engrossed in The Spiritual Exercises. Johnson was grinning broadly but unseen, for Hervey did not immediately lift his head.

  ‘Mr Evans says this sister will change thee bandages now, sir!’ announced his groom at length.

  In his struggle with the complex Latin constructions of St Ignatius’ epilogue, Hervey did not catch this communication from the surgeon. Nor did Johnson wait for any acknowledgement: he was out of the door with the speed of one of the ferrets which travelled in his valise and supplemented the rations with rabbits. He had no intention of being the butt of Hervey’s protests when he tumbled to.

  Hervey looked up absently and was all but transfixed by the image of other-worldliness. A white-habited nun, head bowed, holding strips of cloth and a bowl of steaming water, stood framed in the arched doorway like a phantom, albeit of a distinctly celestial kind. As she stepped into the cell, and light from the window fell on her, he saw that her overmantle was more blood-stained than white, though the habit beneath was brown like those of the nuns in Spain. Her face, what little of it was revealed by the wimple, was also smeared with blood and looked excessively drawn, though it was not old. In other circumstances it might have been described as prettyish, but a haunted look made any such worldly adjective inappropriate. It was certainly unlike those of the Spanish sisters, some of whose more sensual features had been decidedly tempting.

  Suddenly he recollected himself and sprang up, though pain stabbed his thigh as he did so, adding to his discomposure.

  ‘I am sorry, Sister, but I was not expecting—’ he began in French. ‘I really think it better if the surgeon attends to this.’

  ‘Sir, the surgeon has been working throughout the night,’ she replied, in the measured voice of the Languedoc, by contrast with Hervey’s more guttural Alsace, and with evident distaste. ‘There are many soldiers – private soldiers – French and English, yet to be attended.’

  Her tone stung him. In his confusion he had conveyed something wholly other than what he had meant. ‘I am sorry; I did not mean to …’ he stuttered; and then, sensing that any explanation would be pointless, he tried to dismiss her: ‘The dressing is perfectly well, Sister. In the circumstances I think you should return to the wounded.’

  ‘I think we must both do as we are bidden, sir,’ she replied firmly, putting the bowl on the floor and beginning to tear a piece of cloth into bandages with considerable violence.

  Hervey could not have been more dismayed. Though the idea of being ministered to by a nun was by no means alien, since he had seen them, and women of rank, in hospitals in the Peninsula, this nun made him uneasy. To begin with, there was her spectral appearance. And, though the Marquess of Wellington may have issued instructions that the army was to enter France not as conquerors but as liberators, it seemed prudent first to be certain that this was how the French themselves regarded them. How he was to dispense with her ministration, however, was entirely beyond him; and at length, after it became apparent that no amount of protest would weaken her resolve, and with more chagrin than he could lately remember, he gave up, sat down and removed his blood-stained overalls. He need not have been concerned, for pain soon proved a great distractor: he suspected that this sister might be more devout than most, but she could scarcely have been less tender, cutting the dressing off briskly, and none too gently wiping away the caked blood.

  ‘It is clean, but some of the sutures are broken. I do not think the wound will putrefy, but I think they must be replaced.’

  Hervey bit his lip and nodded, and she re-bandaged his leg without speaking. Her eyes were reddened, and he surmised that she had had no sleep for three, maybe four days, for that had been the duration of the lighting. And, though the armies may have had sleep, those tending the wounded could not have found their work slackening during that time. He would have asked her of the blessés, but her manner seemed not to invite it; and he suspected, too, that she was a woman of few words, perhaps ordinarily under a vow of silence. Instead he thanked her as she left, but she made no reply, glancing only at the Spiritual Exercises lying next to him and then bowing slightly. Hervey noticed for the first time that her feet were bare, and thought of the broken glass which, in stepping over, she must have taken to be evidence of his carousing.

  The rest of his day promised little, and for a while he limped around the convent’s grounds to try to keep the leg from stiffening, though he might have wished for a less congested place to do so. The courtyard had become a forum for what seemed like every staff officer in the army, as it emerged that the Marquess of Wellington had also made it his advanced headquarters for the formal surrender of the city. The place had, indeed, more the air of Bedlam than of a convent, or even than of a cavalry billet. Had he suspected that in the midst of this seeming babble there might be the commander-in-chief he would have taken pains to make himself scarce; but nothing suggested such a distinction, and he almost lit
erally stumbled on him around the east corner of the cloisters. Sir Stapleton Cotton, one of several generals in the assemblage, spied him before he could turn away.

  ‘Cornet Hervey! How are you, my boy? Come hither!’

  He tried hard not to limp as he crossed the yard, wanting no sympathy.

  ‘Lord Wellington, this is Cornet Hervey of the Sixth. It was he who saw off the sortie on our left yesterday.’

  The commander-in-chief nodded without smiling. ‘Smart work, boy, smart work,’ he said simply.

  It was very probably the first time he had said anything complimentary to anyone in the cavalry for months, certainly to anyone in the Sixth. For all the regimental ambivalence towards Wellington, however, Hervey could not but feel a warm glow in those sparse words of praise. There were some in the cavalry, and Hervey would count himself among them, who would own that his strictures were all too frequently justified. If a regiment could not be relied on to rally after a charge – the marquess’s principal and recurring lament – then to what purpose was it in the field? Hervey knew full well that there was many an officer, though mercifully few in the Sixth now, who derided outpost work and the like and considered mere celerity of movement to be the criterion of efficiency. And it seemed that all were to be judged in Wellington’s eyes by their meagre accomplishments. But for a cornet to air such deprecating views risked regimental oblivion, as he had once discovered when venturing the opinion that the cavalry’s horsemastership was deficient – only that Edmonds had somewhat unexpectedly agreed with him. Wellington’s chiding for Maguilla and Vitoria had been a different matter, however. The affair at Maguilla had been misconstrued because Slade had not had the courage to tell him that his intelligence was faulty. As for Vitoria, with its rapaciousness and letting slip Marshal Jourdan and much of his army, no-one could but denounce it; but to single out the cavalry when all they had done was steal a march on the infantry in the pillaging seemed not a little peevish. The day had been hot and long in its coming, and there had been wine in riverfuls. Hervey had detested the orgy of relief as heartily as any, but such was the mood of the army. Nor had Wellington himself fared ill from it, for the Eighteenth had taken the marshal’s baton, and Wellington had sent it to the prince regent. ‘You have sent me the baton of a marshal of France,’ wrote the prince in reply, ‘and I send you that of an English one in return.’