The Command

by Christopher Nicole

  ‘And while all this was going on, she didn’t say anything?’

  ‘No, she didn’t. She just stared at me.’ His turn to give a little shiver. ‘It’s a good thing I don’t believe in ghosts. And then, when she saw Yeald about to hit the horse with the whip, she looked at her daughter.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Lee gasped. ‘The girl was there?’

  ‘Yes, she was.’

  She was silent for a few moments. Then she asked, ‘What happened afterwards?’

  ‘We took her down and buried her. Hanging is a ghastly death to watch. All death is pretty ghastly, but hanging is the worst. There may be no blood, but everything else in the body is liable to let go.’

  ‘Ugh! Do you know, Murdoch, until poor George...I had never seen a human being die? And then that fight outside the harem...I suppose it’s all commonplace to you.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Death is never commonplace.’

  She gazed at him. ‘You have lived, so much, seen so much. Murdoch, when those men were...lying on me, what did you think?’

  ‘I thought that I hated them, and I hated Chand Bibi. And that I loved you.’

  ‘Oh, Murdoch.’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘Can you ever want to make love to me again?’

  ‘I want to make love to you, right now, my dearest.’

  ‘Right now,’ she said.

  He held her hand and they went to the cabin.

  *

  ‘So there it is,’ Churchill said, lighting a cigar. ‘We have another Socialist Government, and one with a proper majority, too. It may be more difficult to get rid of than the last one. And we have our best soldier in disgrace. It’s a rum world.’

  ‘I don’t know I’m in disgrace, yet,’ Murdoch told him. ‘I’ve only just completed a very long leave. Eight months. Maybe I’ve been retired and don’t know it yet. But I still get my salary.’ He grinned. ‘Under instructions not to give any interviews to the press.’

  ‘Rather like shutting the stable door after the horse has run off,’ Churchill grunted. ‘I’ve read your brother-in-law’s articles. Next thing they’ll be wanting to make a film of your exploits. You really are a little old to be leading cavalry charges, you know, Murdoch.’

  ‘Old? I’m only just forty-nine. And I’m as fit as a fiddle.’

  ‘I must say, you look fit. It’s a damned shame.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That all this has happened. Oh, not only your adventure in Afghanistan, but this Labour victory at the polls. You should be our next CIGS. But I don’t see it happening, now.’

  ‘I didn’t see it happening at all. As you once said, they don’t really want a fighting soldier as the boss. It might alarm too many people.’

  ‘I’m not sure that would be a bad thing. Your friend Hitler is still breathing hell and damnation, you know.’

  ‘Is he? And is he getting anywhere?’

  ‘No. Not at the minute. But politics is a funny business. Were anything to happen to tilt the applecart, a political crisis which brought another humiliation on Germany, or another financial crisis, who can say? You know we’re in the process of evacuating the Rhineland. And there can be no doubt that the German military men are starting to sound aggressive again. Bruening won’t have anything to do with them, but if someone equally aggressive were to become chancellor, a fighting CIGS might be a very useful asset.’

  ‘By then they’ll probably have sent me off as governor of some colony.’

  Churchill smiled. ‘As long as it isn’t somewhere you can cause trouble. How is Lady Mackinder?’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘Must have been quite an ordeal.’

  He was probing. Although the events at Mahrain were now nearly a year in the past, and Harry had developed his articles into a book, the central figure of which had been Murdoch, he had not described what had actually happened to the women, merely related to how they had been in the hands of the Mahsuds for a week, allowed his readers to envisage, according to their knowledge and imaginations, just what that might entail. Churchill had served in India, and had more knowledge and imagination than the average man.

  But Murdoch was not going to be drawn, even by him. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘It was, quite an ordeal. But Lee can take it.’

  *

  It was quite an ordeal, every time he drove through the gates at Broad Acres and looked out at the meadow and up at the house. India, Mahrain, Chand Bibi, even Peshawar and the Bala Hissar, seemed so very far away, a long nightmare which had now ended.

  Because it had, at last, ended. He parked the car, ran up the steps. He had been more tired than he had admitted to Churchill, but it was a mental tiredness, born of frustration and the fear that he would never be employed again. But that had been swept away, the following day, when he had gone to the War Office. That was only yesterday — it seemed like a hundred years ago. But a hundred happy years.

  ‘Lee!’ he shouted. Tee! Philippa! Where is everyone?’

  They came in from the garden. ‘What’s happened?’

  He took Lee in his arms and kissed her, then did the same to his sister. ‘Everything. Everything good.’

  ‘You mean you haven’t been sacked?’ Philippa asked. They had regarded his summons to London with some apprehension.

  Murdoch felt in his pocket and produced the new badge, the crossed swords and baton now surmounted by a crown.

  ‘Oh, Murdoch!’ they screamed together. ‘A lieutenant-general?’ They hugged and kissed him again.

  ‘I’ve even been given another medal.’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  ‘Oh, it’s simply the General Service Medal. Everyone who has served out there gets one.’ He showed them the ribbon, dark blue edged with green.

  ‘The colours clash,’ Philippa complained.

  ‘You won’t even notice it, amongst all the others,’ Lee told her.

  ‘But best of all,’ Murdoch said, ‘Ralph is to get his posthumous VC, and the others their Military Medals.’

  ‘Oh, Murdoch,’ Lee said. ‘I am so glad. I’ll go down to the village right after lunch and tell Jennie.’

  Jennifer had been living with her mother since her return.

  ‘But how on earth did it happen?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Well...what was principally upsetting the powers that be was the reaction of the Afghans to my “invasion” of their territory. The last thing the Government wants is another full-scale war on the frontier. So...Habibullah Ghazi has been overthrown and executed.’

  ‘Oh, good heavens. You mean Amanullah is back in charge? How splendid.’

  ‘No, he’s not. I’m afraid Amanullah is a refugee. The new amir is the man who got rid of Habibullah, a general named Muhammad Nadir Khan. He now calls himself Muhammad Nadir Shah. And he is so delighted that I chased the Mahsuds and walloped them he wants to give me a medal himself; they were allies of Habibullah, you see. On top of all that, there’s been serious trouble in the province, riots in Peshawar, armoured cars on the streets, you name it.

  ‘Oh, good heavens!’ Lee exclaimed, trying to envisage it.

  ‘Thus there are people saying, “This would never have happened had Mackinder still been in command.” So I’m a blue-eyed boy again.’

  ‘And CIGS?’ Philippa asked.

  ‘Ah, no. One can’t have everything, I suppose. I think they feel that to put me in charge of the army would be to show their approval of my “reckless behaviour”. No.’ He pulled his nose. ‘I’ve been put in charge of converting the cavalry from horses to tanks.’

  ‘From what?’ Lee was aghast.

  Murdoch grinned. ‘I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather be fighting the Mahsuds again, to be sure.’

  *

  He had not yet taken up his new duties when the collapse of the American Stock Exchange began to spread across the Atlantic. It happened in fact only a couple of weeks after his promotion. The resulting chaos naturally affected the army: mechanization was put on ice. It affected everyone. Murdo
ch’s own investments, created by his father and grandfather, were mainly in government stock, and as he did not have to sell and continued to receive his dividends, he was not affected by their fall in value — even if his salary, and that of everyone else, was soon cut in the interests of the national economy. Harry was in deeper financial trouble, and Murdoch offered to lend him money, but his brother-in-law reckoned he could manage, although, having written his book, he had to go back to work for his paper. The book, however, was quite successful. He did not inform either Lee or Murdoch of his relationship with Veronica since her catastrophic Indian adventure, but early the following year they were divorced.

  ‘Second casualty,’ Lee remarked. ‘I reckon there are going to be more.’

  ‘Jennie?’ He was concerned. ‘I thought she was settling down quite well.’ He knew she had got herself a job, allowed herself to sink back down the social scale to being a sergeant-major’s daughter instead of an officer’s wife.

  ‘Oh, she is. I was thinking of Linda Ramage.’

  Murdoch hadn’t seen Linda since their return — she had gone back to her parents as well — but he knew Lee had kept corresponding with her.

  ‘I think she wants a divorce too,’ Lee said.

  ‘Does Peter know?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She’s waiting until the regiment gets home this year. But I don’t think she’ll ever be able to bring herself to sleep with a man again.’

  ‘Um.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘I’m so glad you’re you.’

  ‘I’ll second that motion. What a foul world it is.’

  ‘It’s only foul if you let it get on top of you. You’ve never done that.’

  But Linda Ramage had. The night before the regiment landed at Plymouth, she died from an overdose of sleeping pills.

  *

  ‘If only she’d waited,’ Peter said. ‘I’m sure we could have worked something out.’

  ‘I think she died in Mahrain,’ Murdoch said. ‘She was only going through the motions of breathing and moving. I wish there was more we could have done. I am so terribly sorry, Peter.’

  Peter sighed. ‘And here I am, a brigadier.’ He had handed over command of the regiment to Colonel Lowndes. ‘I was so proud of that, so wanted to make her proud of it, too. What the hell am I going to do, now?’

  ‘You’re going to give me a hand, turning our dragoons and hussars and lancers into mechanics.’

  *

  With the fall of the Government in 1931, as the depression became worldwide, and the formation of a National Party which was swept to power on a wave of optimism, the mechanization of the cavalry at last got under way.

  Murdoch had used his time over the previous two years, when he had been without a command, to study the whole question of mechanization, and had found his research utterly fascinating. If his every instinct was against the phasing out of horse cavalry, his experience told him it was inevitable, and his concern was to make the British cavalry again the best in the world — he was appalled at the amount that needed to be done.

  The main issue between the various tank experts, in various armies, was whether the tank of the future should be a heavily armoured slow-moving gun platform, like the Stars of the Great War, or more lightly armoured but capable of considerably more speed and manoeuvrability, like the Whippets. The British had developed the idea of the tank, but they had largely been overtaken by the French even during the Great War; at the end of 1918 the French army had actually had about half as many tanks again as the British — close to four thousand. No other country had any sizeable tank force at all.

  The main French tank was built by Renault, and to Murdoch’s mind combined the worst features of either alternative. Although about the lightest in existence, weighing only six tons as against the Whippet’s fourteen, it was also very slow. But then, the entire French concept of war was different to that of the British. The French army was dominated by the infantry, and tanks were intended only for close support of the foot soldier, not for combat on their own. Pursuing this theme, the French had also been building, during the twenties, huge sixty-eight-ton monsters, armed with a turret-mounted seventy-five millimetre cannon, truly moving fortresses. By the early thirties they had ten of these, far heavier and more heavily armed than anything dreamed of by the British.

  The British concept was truly of mechanized cavalry. Even before the end of the war they had developed the Medium D which could travel at twenty miles per hour — for brief periods. Built by Vickers, some hundred and sixty of them went into service by 1928. But they were lightly armoured, and lightly armed, with not more than half the firepower of the giants, and by the time Murdoch became involved the British too were making slow, heavy tanks for infantry support.

  Murdoch was naturally not involved in the infantry’s plans, but he was concerned at the proliferation of ideas about medium and light tanks. The Vickers were officially described as medium, but now along came absurdly little things, called ‘tankettes’ which carried two men and were armed only with light machine guns. They were faster than anything else, and were undoubtedly useful for reconnaissance, but were really of little use in battle.

  His dream was of a corps of medium tanks, sufficiently well armed and armoured not only to devastate enemy positions, but to engage and defeat enemy tanks. He sought to recreate the cavalry battle of the past, only with vehicles instead of horses. And with the development of a Vickers-Armstong six-tonner, armed with a thirty-seven millimetre gun, he began to realize his ambition. These vehicles remained lightly armoured, and could not stand up to enemy artillery, but their speed and striking power made them a potentially brilliant weapon in the hands of an aggressive commander.

  Far more difficult than choosing the tanks with which to replace the horses was finding the men to man them. For the most part the cavalry was scandalized at the idea. And at the training involved. Training a cavalry trooper was basically a business of drilling him and teaching him how to ride, and in the case of the dragoons, how to shoot as well. Once he had mastered those fairly straightforward arts he could be as thick as a brick, for from then on his every action was governed by the commands of his officers.

  Training men to operate in tanks was a different matter. They had to be mechanically minded as well as tough minded, for the inside of a tank was no place for psychological hang-ups which might not be noticeable galloping along in the fresh air on the back of a horse. The psychological factor was indeed of prime importance, because the operative word was ‘in’ a tank. It was quite possible for a cavalry trooper to be at odds, however temporarily, with the men to either side of him; it was not possible for seven men to spend hours at a time cooped up in a tiny, odiferous, noisy and highly dangerous compartment unless they all got on extremely well.

  ‘I have to thank God I’m retiring, Sir Murdoch,’ Yeald said. ‘I could never adapt myself to riding in one of those things.’

  Ironically, they sat on their horses to watch the tank crews manoeuvring their vehicles beneath them; Murdoch could legitimately spend more time with the Westerns than any other regiment, for they had done him the great honour of choosing him as their new colonel-in-chief.

  ‘I’m not sure I could either,’ Murdoch agreed. It’s a young man’s game.’ He was delighted that both Ian and Fergus had accepted the necessity of change, albeit reluctantly, and were proving adept tank commanders. So were Colonel Lowndes and Major Destry. ‘But the regiment still won’t be the same without you, Sergeant-Major.’

  ‘Thirty-three years, sir, man and boy.’

  ‘I’m only six months your junior, in length of service. There were some good times.’

  ‘And some pretty sticky ones, sir. But I enjoyed them all, with you riding in front.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Buy a newsagent’s shop in the village, sir. Jennie’s keen. She’ll help me run it. And the kids’ll soon be old enough to make the deliveries.’

  ‘She should get married again,’ Murdoch
said. ‘She is such a lovely girl.’

  ‘She won’t ever marry again, Sir Murdoch. Not after Mr Manly-Smith. Do you know she keeps that Victoria Cross on her bedside table, and she says her prayers to it every night?’

  *

  The depression gripped ever more relentlessly and coldly during 1931 and 1932 — to Lee’s disappointment she had been unable to throw a really big party for Fergus’s twenty-first birthday in 1931, while Ian’s had been celebrated in India, just before the regiment’s return — but by the end of 1932 there were signs that the worst might be over. Of principal importance seemed the election of Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency of the United States in November 1932. Lee, whose family had always voted Democrat, was tremendously excited, and Murdoch also felt that the promotion of this strong, clear-minded, and above all optimistic man was going to provide America with the leadership she had seemed to lack during the previous four years.

  There were, of course, less happy appurtenances of the financial gloom. Japan undertook open aggression in Manchuria, desperately seeking outlets for her manufactured goods which were now being closed in the West as tariff walls went up. The West, politicians and newspapers, screamed their indignation, a commission was set up which condemned the Japanese for aggression — and the Japanese responded by leaving the League of Nations and in effect thumbing their noses at the rest of the world...who did nothing about it.

  Then in India the disturbances grew as a conference called in London, and attended by Ghandi, ended in disagreement. Churchill had not been offered a ministerial post in the Coalition Government, partly because he was anathema to the Socialists who formed part of it — MacDonald was still Prime Minister — but equally because of his outspoken views on India, which he had outlined to Murdoch back in 1924 and which he never changed.

  But the most startling event occurred at the end of January 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed as Chancellor of Germany.

  *

  Hitler’s position had dramatically improved as the world, and most of all Germany, had again been plunged into financial chaos. Too many people remembered 1923, only six years before the American stock market crash, and were not prepared to put up with another slow haul back to prosperity, with the possibility of another crash a few years further on. Hitler promised an end to all that. As to exactly how he was going to do it, he remained vague — on the hustings. And while a great many people had read Mein Kampf, which had become a bestseller, few seemed to take his vision of the Nazi — as his party was now called — world, in which Germany would initially finance itself by expropriating Jewish property, and then seek its future in the east, at all seriously.