A Regimental Affair

by Mallinson, Allan

  Entry was easily arranged, however. The picket corporal, a man from D Troop Hervey didn’t know but who recognized him, pointed the way to regimental headquarters. The man’s uniform was as new – nothing of the patches and fading they had all become used to by Toulouse, and which had scarcely been better by Waterloo. A reward from a grateful government it should have been, sighed Hervey to himself, but likely as not it was from a rich commanding officer. How good it was, though, one way or another, to see the regiment back in proper fettle.

  As he walked towards regimental headquarters, soberly dressed in dark green with a black silk hat, the band struck up on the far side of the square. Hervey had not heard them since Ireland, and then it had been a thin noise they made. Now they filled the barracks with a strong treble and bass alike, the trumpeters’ triple-tonguing was admirably sharp, and the clarionets – still something of a novelty – were altogether less shrill than before. He walked round the square to take a closer look. There were three times the old number, and all as immaculately uniformed as the picket corporal, the four sable bandsmen brilliant in Turkish silks. The bandmaster was not old Mr Merryweather, though. This one was much more active. And when he shouted to the bandsmen – he was shouting a good deal – it was with a heavy German accent.

  Picket turned out as if on review, and a band forty strong with a German bandmaster – Hervey headed for the orderly room convinced he might be in a foot-guards barracks. It was, indeed, an impression of efficiency that wholly belied the scene in Skinner Street.

  The commanding officer received him unusually formally at orderly room. Hervey remained at attention, waiting in vain for the invitation to sit. ‘You will find that much is changed, Captain Hervey,’ said the Earl of Towcester, and with a note of challenge in his voice.

  Hervey thought it best to say nothing beyond ‘Very good, Colonel.’ Lord Towcester’s pale blue eyes were the coldest he had ever seen, and his thin lips parted only a very little when he spoke; just enough to allow the words to slide past with a distinct sneer.

  The adjutant, an extract from the Second whom he had never met, took a step forward. ‘The commanding officer is to be addressed as “his lordship”, Captain Hervey.’

  The tone was of reprimand, and doubly did Hervey resent it, for it was hardly a gentleman’s way of correcting something so minor, quite besides the fact that it had always been the Sixth’s custom that all ranks called their commanding officer ‘Colonel’. He breathed deep. ‘As his lordship pleases.’

  ‘Very well, Hervey,’ replied Lord Towcester, looking up only momentarily. ‘I take note that you shall join for duty at the end of August. And you are aware that your brevet rank is not recognized regimentally?’

  ‘I am, your lordship.’

  ‘Very well. Do you stay to luncheon?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then I shall see you in the mess at that time. Until then, Captain Hervey.’

  Hervey bowed.

  The commanding officer rose and bowed stiffly by return.

  ‘And by the by, Captain Hervey,’ said the Earl of Towcester, turning his back to look out of the window, ‘I had just better say that I want none of those Indian ways in my regiment. We are His Majesty’s light dragoons, not Hindoo horse.’

  Hervey was so taken aback by Lord Towcester’s manner, as well as his sentiment, that he could say nothing. Yet say something he must, for with the commanding officer’s back turned he could not now take his leave. ‘Thank you for receiving me, your lordship,’ he managed at length. He knew it needed a supplementary, but he could think of nothing he might utter. He left the orderly room dispirited.

  There was a full hour to luncheon. Now he wished he were not staying. And that thought made him the more dispirited, for the shared table of the mess was a precious memory. Perhaps he ought to walk the lines. But he was not in uniform, and it might be awkward. He looked at his new watch again (a poor thing, he mourned, after Jessope’s hunter): watering parade would be finished and the stables quiet before the midday feed.

  First Squadron’s stables were indeed a restorative. There might not have been the complete quality of the Rajah of Chintalpore’s establishment (he could still remember his disbelief on seeing so much blood), but the change here was every bit as striking as with the band. Every trooper looked as good as the chargers most officers were riding at the close of the Peninsula. Even after a year in Ireland, when the regiment had been able to readopt troop colours, they had only achieved uniformity at the cost of conformation and substance. But now A Troop had its bays again, and B its blacks (and, he would find later, E – the smartest – its chestnuts), and they were lookers in the best sense. And, pleasing to see, the Sixth were still disdaining the regulations, for the trumpeters’ mounts were greys. But sadly the regulation was applied in the one thing he hated most: every trooper’s tail was docked. It was not just India that convinced him of the horse’s right to a fly-whisk. No officer in the Sixth who had seen any appreciable service in the Peninsula supported the practice. Hervey lifted a few tails: none had been nicked, thank heavens. That was a device that had never taken hold in the regiment, thanks largely to the Earl of Sussex’s strictures, compelled by a riding master of uncompromising discipline. (‘The horse, sir, will carry its tail just as soon as you allow him to work through his back!’ The words rang in Hervey’s ears, and he remembered how they had stung him so when first he had joined.)

  First Squadron’s lines were peaceful. There was the sound of hay-grinding here and there as the odd trooper had a little to finish, and here and there a jingling as a chain was pulled through its ring in the standing stalls. There was the odd stamp of iron on cobble as a horse shifted its weight, and the occasional snort and whicker. But otherwise he might have been in a cloister. This, he told himself, was what he was returning to – not a peevish colonel.

  The ‘stables’ call summoned him from his musing, as it did the dragoons to the horse lines. Better that he were elsewhere than in the bustle of haying-up, feeding and watering to come, so he walked briskly to the mess. The place was as silent as the stables had been, with a half-hour before the first officers might arrive. Earlier in the season, the ante-room would have been full of those who had had a half-day with hounds, not yet ready to take out a second charger to hear the huntsman blow ‘home’. But this late on, they would be out for a full day no doubt. Perhaps they would be few at luncheon.

  Hervey looked about the walls. There were familiar pictures he had last seen in Cork, and some less so. There was an exceptionally fine portrait of the Earl of Sussex in the uniform of colonel; by the hand of Sir Thomas Lawrence, said an inscription. But he couldn’t find the girlish Romney of Princess Caroline, and he supposed it must be elsewhere, in the headquarters, perhaps. The Times of three days before lay open in a chair, testimony to a recent, perhaps hurried, departure – or to the steward’s indolence. There were copies of regimental orders in leather binders on a table, together with the regimental list. Hervey picked up the latter and settled in a low chair to study it. Half the names he did not recognize. The major’s – Eustace Joynson – he did. ‘An able administrator, I think,’ the Earl of Sussex had said; but Hervey was as certain as the colonel had implied that Joynson had no great instinct for the field, where the actions of the enemy, or even the mere chafing of events and the elements, soon brought even well-laid plans to naught. Second Squadron bore not a single officer he recognized. Its captain, Lord Henry Manners, was one of the Marquess of Selby’s sons. That much was promising, for the marquess had been a much regarded brigadier before a tirailleur had shot him down outside Badajoz. The other troop in the squadron was commanded by a Captain Addy, and the subalterns were likewise unknown to him. Cornet the Marquess Wymondham’s name was there with Third Troop, still to be excised. Hervey sighed at the remembrance of the boy’s broken head resting in his hands in that gloomy alehouse.

  Third Squadron was a mix. Strickland, its captain (and E Troop leader), he knew well enoug
h. Strickland had bought in from the Tenth just before Waterloo and quickly won the confidence of the ranks for his cool head under the heaviest fire that day. Hervey was glad at least of one veteran of the Sixth of Irvine and Edmonds. And there was ‘Saint’ Lawrence, too – the junior cornet at Waterloo, whom Hervey had placed in charge of old Chantonnay and his ravished daughters on the road to Paris. F Troop – black, like B – was as unfamiliar as D. Its captain, Hugh Rose, by reputation a buck, had exchanged from the Thirteenth when they were warned for India. Hervey didn’t suppose he would see him much with London only a chariot’s gallop away.

  But in what would be his own squadron – First – came the real surprise, for there, with B Troop, he read the name of Ezra Barrow. Barrow had been adjutant for half a dozen years or more, brought in on commissioning from serjeant-major by Lord George Irvine, and so Hervey supposed that his getting a troop must be field promotion rather than purchase. Yet how that had been, he couldn’t imagine, for so rapidly were regiments being disbanded – all but the first two ‘twenties’ had gone – that there could hardly be room for promotion without purchase. In any event, Barrow’s was not the name he would have chosen for his second troop, though it was at least one he knew, and one that had known the regiment under Irvine and Edmonds. The Sixth hadn’t had a troop leader from the ranks for a decade or more. It was always tricky. He’d seen one or two in other regiments, and good they’d been too, but often as not it was the men themselves who disliked it most. He wondered how the lieutenant colonel was taking to it. But then he read one name that cheered him heartily – Seton Canning, now a lieutenant. At Waterloo, Seton Canning had been his only officer by the time he had had to step into command of First Squadron. ‘The boots’ had brought out First Troop from the terrible mêlée after the Greys had run on, and with all the skill of an old hand, though it had been his first time shot-over. Good, good, thought Hervey: Canning and Armstrong – a start, at least. How he had missed Serjeant Armstrong’s straight talking and powerful sword arm in India. How grand – as Armstrong himself would have said – to see him again. Just as he was about to turn the page to study the quartermasters’ lists, a noise in the entrance hall announced the arrival of the first for luncheon.

  They were a dozen at table. And a good table it was too, thought Hervey, even for a high day (which it was not) – plover’s eggs, turbot and a baron of Somerset beef, with hock and a Chambertin. The troop leaders were there, less Manners, as well as a couple of new cornets. There were two officers from the Rifles, guests of Addy, and the DAAG from the district headquarters. But there were no quartermasters and no riding master, no surgeon (medical or veterinary) nor paymaster. Perhaps, thought Hervey, they were all at duty elsewhere, but it still seemed strange.

  Hervey sat between Joynson and Strickland, almost directly opposite Lord Towcester. The lieutenant colonel’s manner was markedly different from that at orderly room. Hervey might have called it exuberant, even. Yet although Lord Towcester’s mouth smiled, his eyes did not, and there was an edge to his manner still which Hervey could not quite fathom. Conversation seemed also less than free, dictated more by the colonel than flowing naturally, as he remembered it at its best.

  ‘Might we have the cellars better found, Joynson?’ said Lord Towcester, frowning at the Chambertin. ‘I can scarcely ask the Prince Regent to disturb his digestion with this.’

  It was well known to all at the table but Hervey that the colonel was intent on entertaining the Regent as soon as he might. ‘Whatever your lordship wishes,’ replied Major Joynson obligingly.

  There was the beginning of a silence that Hervey thought he might ease. ‘Where is the portrait of Princess Caroline, sir?’ he asked Joynson.

  The major turned red.

  The adjutant answered for him. ‘His lordship has ordered its removal.’

  Hervey realized the danger too late, for the mess had long held a truce on the matter. Until the end of the Peninsula, Caroline had officially remained their colonel-in-chief (unofficially, they had been known as Princess Caroline’s Own), and there had remained an affection for her, especially among the quartermasters and serjeants, with many old hands able to recall her warm if sometimes indelicate manners during her visits. There had been many an opinion in Cork that the Regent had ill-used the princess.

  ‘She is grown monstrous fat, I hear,’ said Lord Towcester abruptly.

  Hervey was taken aback, and evidently visibly, for Ezra Barrow shook his head at him, warning him to let it go.

  ‘What’s that, Barrow? You know otherwise do you?’ challenged Towcester, his face reddening and his eyes narrowing.

  ‘I know nothing of the princess, your lordship,’ replied Captain Barrow quickly. ‘Except that it would be a pity if Her Royal Highness were to tax her constitution as badly as does the Regent.’

  The response did not please the commanding officer. ‘Do you say that the Prince Regent is obese, sir?’

  Barrow remained more perfectly in control of matters than Hervey would have supposed possible. ‘I do not say so, your lordship. One more opinion would scarcely be of any point when there are so many already on the matter.’

  The adjutant now joined the colloquy and piled the coals higher. ‘I hear tell she wore a gown so sheer in Naples last month it was as if she wore none at all!’

  ‘Scarcely an alluring sight,’ scoffed the colonel.

  This was really most unbecoming, thought Hervey, and his fault, too, for mentioning the picture.

  ‘She seduced Murat there, y’know,’ continued the adjutant, blithely. ‘And now she’s living openly with a Mussulman of all things – the Dey of Algiers!’

  There was an anxious silence.

  Strickland broke it. ‘And she is happy, as the Dey is long!’

  It was a mercy, for there was laughter all round. Indeed, so keen was it that the chaplain must have laughed had he been there.

  It even seemed to restore Lord Towcester’s equilibrium. ‘Call for the port, someone,’ he said, taking a cigar from the box which the steward had brought. ‘Now’s as good a time as any to announce our good fortune. Gentlemen,’ he beamed, ‘this autumn we are to furnish the escorts at Brighton!’

  There was a general hubbub, during which Ezra Barrow leaned across to Hervey and shook his head again. ‘Time for me to go, this news. I can’t afford the expense of that place. It ain’t soldiering.’ The Birmingham vowels were as strong as ever.

  Hervey wasn’t so sure. There was nothing like ceremonial to fill a regiment with pride – except a famous victory. He thought it no bad thing at all that the Sixth be given this trial, for it would take effort indeed to be fit for the Regent’s eyes, as well as for those of the population of Brighton, doubtless become expert during the past decade. And what gentler way, too, to begin the married state than wintering by the English seaside? ‘Let’s take a walk after this is done,’ he said to Barrow.

  But spirits were high about the table. ‘Where is the betting book?’ came a voice from the end.

  A footman brought it to Captain Rose. ‘Very well. Cornet Finucane wagers Mr Seton Canning the sum of five guineas that the measurement from stifle to hock of Eclipse did not exceed twenty-four inches!’

  The wager provoked intense discussion all round. ‘And who is to adjudicate?’ asked Captain Addy.

  ‘The hippogrammarian,’ declared Lord Towcester, blowing a great deal of smoke across the table. ‘One of his horse-butcher friends dissected the animal if I’m not mistaken.’

  There was appreciative laughter.

  Hervey felt himself back in the Sixth he knew – a place of raucous, even at times tasteless, good humour as well as of cultivation. There were always ups and downs. Better, then, to dwell only on the happy side. Perhaps things were more promising than he’d imagined.

  It was past three before they were able to break away from the commanding officer’s court, and so Hervey and Barrow had to content themselves with a stroll around the manège yard instead of outside the
walls. Barrow was the longest-serving of the Sixth’s mess after Joynson and Hervey. Coming from the Royals with Lord George Irvine after Corunna, he had never endeared himself to the regiment’s officers in the way that his patron had (being as short on ceremony as he was long in experience). Nevertheless he had been respected as a diligent and efficient adjutant. He was a man of the Midlands, the industrial Midlands, perhaps the only one in the regiment, and he had never quite seemed one of the Sixth before. But now, Hervey was more than happy to walk with him as a comrade-in-arms. After all, they had first borne the battle’s heat together, as well as the sun’s, at Salamanca almost five years before.

  ‘Things have changed, Hervey.’

  ‘The army never changes, so Joseph Edmonds used to say.’

  ‘I didn’t say the army’s changed. Things have. The regiment’s not the same.’

  Hervey had little enough cause to be enamoured of the new commanding officer after the business in the orderly room, but he had no wish to become further depressed by Barrow’s spirits at the very time he was returning to all he loved best. ‘There are bound to be some differences with a new colonel. I have to say the regiment’s looking smarter than I’ve seen it in many a year.’

  ‘Oh, that I grant you. And I’d be the first to own we’d grown rag-arsed, even in Ireland. But it’s not the only thing. You don’t have efficiency solely through smartness.’

  ‘And the horses are better than I’ve ever seen them, too,’ added Hervey, still unwilling to share Barrow’s discouragement.

  ‘That I grant you.’

  ‘Well, what is it, then? The NCOs do their duty as before, do they not?’