Black Tom's Red Army

by Nicholas Carter

  He had been misled again, whether by accident or design he couldn’t decide.

  Pulled from his planned line of march, dragged across the grain of the land. Coombs, slopes, furze, bog bounded by a steeplechase of hedges and crippled willows.

  And he could see movement behind the hedges, musketeers or dragoons hurrying along the dead ground to his right.

  Hadn’t Telling warned them all he’d seen something move up there? Then why on earth had they deceived him? Playing him for a fool, he couldn’t guess.

  Cursing in German, he yanked his coal-black charger around again.

  “Riders to the King at once. The enemy is deployed for battle before us. My compliments to his majesty, but he must bring the army up with all speed in their existing line of march. For the sake of Christ, hurry.”

  Half a dozen of his messengers turned their horses and spurred back the way they had come.

  Telling had spotted the movement and done nothing. Why hadn’t the fool ridden on and confirmed his suspicions? Unless he was deliberately misleading him?

  Rupert turned his horse and trotted back past the waiting lifeguard. The silent troopers watched him pass, his dark features fixed and terrifying.

  A Prince of darkness made flesh. They didn’t dare catch his eye much less stand against him - and they were on his side.

  By East Farndon and Little Oxendon, June 14, 1645

  The sun was fully up now, bleary sunshine illuminating the broad but shallow valley.

  The King’s army had moved closer still. Shooting from the hedges out on the flank where Royalist musketeers and flanking horse had blundered into Okey’s skirmish line.

  Ragged crackles, odd volleys. Plenty of pops and bangs but the Cavalier squadrons moving down the slope now didn’t seem overly perturbed by the ragged-arsed sharpshooters the other side of the hedge. Sparrow remembered Roundway, the entire Roundhead cavalry force melting away like butter on a grill. This lot were coming on at the same cocksure canter, aiming for the New Model’s left flank.

  By the time he had dragged his eyes away from the nightmare vision Hardress Waller’s regiment had problems of its own.

  A rising roaring tide - popping banging and shouting, swallowed up by a crescendo of drums and bawled orders.

  The king’s rag-tag army had shaken itself out into half a dozen brigades and swarmed forward like hounds unleashed. They double timed up the slope, colours rolling and billowing in the smoke-choked breeze as if they wanted to finish the affair by lunchtime.

  Musketry, ragged volleys now. Drums. Cannons crashing from the ridge behind them. Was it his imagination or were the fools firing too high?

  He didn’t have the time to ponder trajectories.

  The merest blink and the bastard forlorn hope had collapsed, terrified musketeers legging it back up the slope as an enemy regiment bulged from the main Royalist battle line and came on at a gut-busting jog, closing the distance before the skirmishers could manage a couple of ill-aimed shots.

  Bastard one-eyed rabbits couldn’t have hit a barn from the inside. Sparrow checked his helmet strap, weighed the halberd in his gloved fist. They would fire a volley first then charge in. He was in the front row and all, a bloody big target in his smart grey suit.

  Nothing for it now. They were packed in so hard he couldn’t have cut and run if he’d tried.

  Standing about half the morning, with all the time in the world to think and curse and think. Suddenly the battle had jumped in to horrible, life-consuming life. Overtaken them as if, as if they hadn’t been paying attention to events over yonder.

  The colourful masquerades over on their flank had beguiled them, dragging unwary eyes from the real danger to their front. The whorsesons had risen up like snakes from the grass. And here they were!

  “Have a care!” he croaked, throat dried to sandpaper by the drifting smokes.

  Drifting, stinking mists which veiled and wafted over the enemy formation, summoning them from some accursed netherworld. Ensigns rolling their banners this way and that, mesmerising, terrorising displays of angry, challenging kaleidoscoping colour.

  “Stand straight now boys. There’s three of us for every one of those buggers,” Sparrow cried, hoping to Christ it was true. He felt the pikeblock constrict like a steel ribbed fist, holding him in, holding him straight.

  The Royalist regiment stampeded the Forlorn Hope and dressed to the right, avoiding the worst of the furze. A moment straightening the ranks and they came on at the double, careering straight into the trembling belly of Hardress Wallers’ regiment.

  Sparrow dreaded their monstrously, viciously deliberate charge. A colourfully carapaced insect moving as one up, up over the fields through tendrils of smoke.

  He even recognised individuals – a big man in washed out blue breeches, straw whiskers protruding from a wide rimmed helmet, leggings stained bright yellow as if he’d been standing guard in a bucket of piss half his life.

  Further along, out in front a junior officer – thin face, straggling beard, voluminous breeches patched a hundred times with any old rag that came to hand. Another in reckless scarlet and black slashed suit, yellow boots.

  Come to think of it, the regiment had as many flags as that bastard had patches – meaning it had been brigaded together from the remnants of half a dozen odd units. And maybe lost some of its original cohesion on the way. Bled out like a stag on a moor but still ready to close files for its King.

  Maybe the King was running out of men, like that old rogue Wallenstein disguising his baggage whores and camp followers as reinforcements. Distributing flags and colours to bawds and tinkers and grinning children which, from a distance over the hill, might be the straw that broke Gustav Adolph’s back.

  A volley of musketry crashed pinged and whistled to his left. Hardress Waller’s men blasted them back. Formalities over the Royalists turned their muskets upside down and fell on pell-mell into their opposite numbers. The two pike blocks reared like peacocks, then charged, lowering their pikes for the dangerously unpredictable impact.

  “Porte your pikes!”

  Silly bastards came straight to the charge. He felt the block surge, picking him up and hurling him at the enemy pikepoints. He ducked and dodged left and right as the spears whistled past his ears, clanged off his helmet, skittered wildly from his scarred breastplate. Another step and Sparrow thrust his halberd at the jabbing points, knocking the ill-balanced pikes to either side. Another step and he was beyond the greedy points, managing to land a glancing blow on the enemy soldier before the two blocks came together in a lung-busting crush. Blood squirted over his chin and cheek, the screeching Royalist trying to move his arms to staunch the wound.

  “Ye feckin’ besterd look what ye’ve din!”

  “Fuck off out of it then!” Sparrow bawled, raging in bare-bollocked terror. The Royalist was sliding away, beady brown eyes fixed on his. Bleeding out, unable to staunch the gaping flap in his throat. His lifeblood pumped out eagerly, squirts of life that took his life with it. The pressure built as hundreds of men joined the crush, trapping the front rankers in a useless embrace.

  The Royalist assault built, driving the Roundhead mass backwards like bullocks into a barred gate. He felt the block behind him falter and slip. Boots brushing the ground as the press of men lifted him from his feet, the dying Royalist clamped to his chest like a still-born babe.

  “Push you bastards, push ’em back down the slope!”

  But it was the Roundheads who were going backwards.

  *************************

  Locked in the living breathing heaving grunting cursing farting mass of the pikeblock, William Sparrow had sensed the battle shift beneath his boots. Carried backwards by their mad charge, he struggled to stay on his feet as his regiment was rocked back on its heels.

  “Stand! Push the bastards back!” Sparrow croaked, voice lost in the din. The weight was dropping off the back of the block - as if the pit props which kept them straight were being knocked asid
e one by one.

  Sparrow couldn’t see anything apart from the front-ranking Royalists. Red eyed, white cheeked, open mouthed. Shouting or gasping, wretching or crying. But driven on, fortified by the knowledge the red-coated monolith on the top of the hill was slipping back, step by step, yard by yard.

  If Sparrow could have flown out of the steel trap he would have looked down in mortification as dozens of his comrades bounded off down the slope.

  Waller’s regiment was shedding soldiers like a dandelion in a tempest, shrinking to the hard core around the colours.

  Sparrow freed his arms and jabbed the halberd at the pressing enemy pikemen. The Royalist corpse he’d propped up flopped into the furrows to be trampled by his suddenly triumphant comrades.

  “Hold!

  But it was no use - Sparrow could feel the weight of two dozen bodies lifted from his shoulders. Pikemen jabbed and ducked once again as the constricted blocks broke up and freed their weapons from the mad tangle above their heads.

  He brought the halberd around in a short, powerful sweep, dragging half a dozen unbalanced pike heads aside and creating a dangerous clearing between the front rankers. He rolled his back against the thrusting poles, knowing he was past the dangerous points.

  An enemy pikemen dropped his useless spear and groped for his sword, but Sparrow dealt the rogue a stunning blow as he brought the shorter, handier halberd around again. More of his pikemen piled forward, sealing the gap in an instant.

  “Hold your ground!”

  The Royalists recoiled, charging files finding easier going around the flanks, away from the dangerous kernel at the heart of the regiment. But their momentum was carrying the whole flank away, a flood tide undermining the fast-disolving cliff.

  *************************

  General Skippon had watched the frontline regiments give way from the left, odd clumps of men running back among the walking wounded. Exhausted and terrified they may be, but this was not the panic-stricken flight that had robbed them of half a dozen battles in the past.

  The old general waved them back, nodding like an indulgent grandfather as they stopped running and recovered their arms.

  “Reform behind the second line lads. You’ve done well enough and there’ll be work for you yet, aye.”

  If he’d stood there screaming and bawling at them they might have snapped altogether - swept past him in an unstoppable red tide and legged it all the way back to the village. But Skippon’s familiar, avuncular advice stopped them in their tracks, nipped the potential rout in the bud.

  Individuals, twos and threes became dozens, loose congregations of pike reformed their ranks, wild eyed musketeers grasping for their powder pots. Hundreds of fugitives from Skippons, Pickerings and Waller’s regiments turned around like guilty schoolboys and quietly reformed on the back of Pride’s men.

  Sparrow felt the extra weight pressing in on the hard-core of pikemen and musketeers who had stuck with the colours. Extra files of pikemen appeared on either side of his hard-pressed fighters. Strangers in red coats, shouting and jeering and urging their mates to push them on.

  Buttressed by fresh pike and shot from the second line, the wavering Roundhead line stiffened. Then held.

  Sparrow stumbled as the careering juggernaut found its feet once more, ground down on the tiring Royalist assault. Blowing hard, red faced, streams of spittle hanging from his mouth, he felt himself boosted onto his tiptoes, carried along in the rush by eager, fresh-faced reinforcements.

  Their momentum carried the whole struggling mass of men back the way it had come. This time it was the Royalist regiment which shed soldiers.

  Exhausted front rankers without a breath left in their body, wounded pikemen clutching wounds they hadn’t realised they had received. Musketeers who had been clubbed and stabbed and kicked away from the protective embrace of their block.

  Pride’s musketeers knelt, second and third ranks closing above them to deliver lethal close range volleys of shot into the wavering mass of men. Dozens crumpled. Shredded by shot, their colours dipped and drooped as wounded ensigns sank to their knees.

  Sparrow found his feet, strode forward with the gored halberd at porte. Pikes clattered around him as the front three ranks charged, a hedge of points prodding the despondent Royalists back down over the slope they had conquered.

  *************************

  The awful, rib-busting pressure on his chest had slackened as the rear ranks reformed. One moment he had been hawking his last powder charged breath in the middle of the slowly constricting block, boots barely brushing the turf as the press of bodies lifted him like a steer in the shambles.

  The next – the next he’d been set loose or spat out, he wasn’t sure which but gulped air anyway. He might need it, if the bastards had broken through on the flank, or Rupert’s demons had taken them from behind. You never knew what was around the corner in a fight this big.

  He filled his lungs, popping half a dozen buttons on his new doublet, still too small despite months of wear.

  Around him pikemen inflated themselves like pig’s bladders before a village kickabout. Sighs of relief as crushed lungs drew welcome breath. Life flowed back into dead arms.

  A minute, ten, an hour, two? God knows how long they’d been at it, stitched together with pikes steepled and useless six feet above their locked heads.

  Two regiments in furious but fairly harmless embrace. The worst he’d suffered in three years of pushes was the odd knock to his chin as an enemy helmet rim caught him in the gob. For once, spitting blood wasn’t a death sentence.

  Strolling about a battlefield picking fights with strutting swordsmen, that’s what got you killed. Sparrow had learnt that lesson and all. He stuck to his men, hoping to Christ they stuck to him.

  And they had. Or the most of them at any rate.

  He’d felt them shift, aye, a hundred yards and more back on their supports, the Royalist momentum driving the Roundhead regiments off their precious ridge.

  But he’d not felt the ranks and files give way behind him. A glance beneath his helmet rim confirmed a file of fearful faces lined up behind him.

  He expanded his shoulders, blessed relief from the musclebound embrace of the block.

  So had they won the round? Were they regrouping, maybe leading the Roundheads on down the slope just as the Normans had tricked the Saxons in 1066.

  The two bodies parted abruptly, a drunk rolling from a snoring whore. Once they’d parted through, the musketeers would step up into the breach, let fly in your face.

  William Sparrow staggered, damn near losing his footing as the press behind him coughed and spat, opening their order as the enemy pressure slackened. Taking ground the enemy had left.

  Pikes clattered on shoulders and clanged from helmets making owners jump then curse some more. Powder pots clattered on heaving chests as musketeers, freed from the press at last, lowered their pieces and groped around their arses for ball and powder horns all tangled in the next man’s crossed belts.

  By the time he had steadied himself and lowered his halberd ready the enemy ranks before him had fallen away again, receded in a tide of dirty laundry.

  Bodies, some dead others wishing they were. Lamed pikemen clutched knees and slashed shins. Officers tried to prise themselves from the trampled grass, pick somebody else’s sword from the furrows left by the scrambling boots of the spent Royalist pikeblock.

  Their musketeers were frantically reloading, butter fingers dropping ball and spilling powder as they walked then trotted and finally ran for it.

  Away from this much vaunted new army. This New Noddle, the wags had called it.

  The New Model Army had held its ground and the King’s men would wince to think they had dared doubt its prowess.

  Muffet’s men were ready and primed before their counterparts had managed to lift their sack flaps. From the corner of his eye, Sparrow saw Butcher’s fowling piece sweep left and right. He turned in time to see the grinning apprentice pick his
target and fire.

  The fancy fellow in the yellow doublet, silver-ringed sleeves up his arms, a pistol freed in one hand and his boot-crushed hat in the other.

  A cloud of smoke and spewed sparks and the captain’s knees gave way beneath him. Staring sightlessly from the third eye just below his hairline he raised his hat as if to point, then fell sideways.

  The weight again, pressing him on, out of the packed ranks. Scrambling on worn boots, he held on as the regiment engulfed him again.

  Had he still been captain he would have turned and bawled at them to stand and dress ranks. Not his place. Oh no, not any more. His mind wandered, ready to ladle more poison into the fermenting brew that bubbled and pulsed through the veins and furrows pressed up tight against his sweaty helmet lining.

  William Sparrow had commanded and led, good Christ that time in the ford near Bath he’d not known one end of a musket from the other. He’d taken over when professional officers, picking fights with peacock-feathered counterparts, had been dropped in their turn.

  He’d led his men off bloodier fields than this, and yet today…today he was one of the fools being bawled at and led. Sergeant? Sergeant and he’d been damned lucky to cling on to that. His resentful reverie was interrupted by a high pitched hooting as Billy Butcher lowered the fowling piece – pushing the slim butt into the dirt a yard and more off so the short-arsed monkey could get his black fingers to the barrel.

  “Five today, mark me now boys.”

  Butcher was widely reckoned to be the best shot in the regiment, if not the entire bloody army. A poacher of game turned poacher of peacocks in fancy yellow doublets. Lawn and lace made a poor defence against a half ounce of carelessly cast lead.

  Butcher made his own, rubbed them smooth as jewels.