Sweethearts and Wives (The Regiment Family Saga Book 2)
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Sweethearts and Wives
The Regiment Family Saga Book 2
CL Skelton
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Copyright © The Estate of C. L. Skelton 2017
This edition published 2018 by Wyndham Books
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
First published 1979
www.wyndhambooks.com
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
With the exception of where actual historical events and people are described, this book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover artwork images: Shutterstock © happydancing /VAndreas
By CL Skelton
from Corazon Books
The Hardacre Family Saga
Hardacre
Hardacre’s Luck
The Regiment Family Saga
The Maclarens
Sweethearts and Wives
Beloved Soldiers
Contents
Author’s note
BOOK 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
BOOK 2
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
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Author’s Note
In this sequel to The Maclarens, I have again taken liberties with the actual details of various campaigns. Several of the exploits of the Maclaren Highlanders, a fictional regiment, which are detailed were based on actions fought by some of the great Scottish regiments. Them I salute as the great soldiers they are and always have been.
I want again to thank Major Hugo Macdonald-Haig, M.C., Captain Gordon Mackintosh, and Doctors Peter Sutherland and Edgar Abbas, for the advice and assistance they have given me in the writing of this book. The accuracies are theirs, the errors my own.
Finally I want to dedicate this volume to my friend and comrade of more years than it is good for a man to remember, Barry Gray.
C. L. Skelton
Scotland
August 1978
BOOK ONE
THE IMPERIAL WARS
Chapter One
The north-east wind had brought with it the hoar; that mist which is nearly rain, that fills the air with droplets of water so fine as to be near invisible, but which will cut through a man’s thick woollen doublet and give his shirt a clammy dampness that lies cold and cloying on his skin.
The barrack square was deserted and silent and miserable in that cold, grey, near dawn. It was surrounded by the shadowy piles of the barrack blocks, which glistened pink from the Moray sandstone of their building whenever the sun struck them, but now, in the gloom, were grey and damp. Here and there little rivulets ran half-heartedly down the walls where some imperfection in the guttering allowed the water which had oozed down the Ballachulish slates of the roofs to escape to the earth whence it came.
The square itself, upon which a thousand boots had stamped a million times, was scattered with little pools where the water had gathered wherever there was an indentation in the pounded surface. Here and there a yellow light was reflected fitfully in a pool, a light which gleamed pathetically through a window as it awaited the approaching dawn. But there was no one there, no single person in sight; it was a world damp, deserted, and dead.
It was November, 1883, and the first battalion the Maclaren Highlanders, until recently the 148th Regiment of Foot, were parading at their home barracks just south of Beauly, some nine miles north of Inverness. They were not on the parade ground, for the work they were to do that morning was not a deed that could be performed in an area cocooned among tall buildings of pink Moray sandstone.
They were standing easy, grim faced, on the east side of the buildings which comprised their home. They had formed three sides of a hollow square, the open side of which led down to the mud flats of the Beauly Firth. In the centre of this gap, standing like a grim sentinel, was a single raw, rough wooden post some six inches in diameter, driven into the sandy ground.
They had put it there last night, four of them. They had gone out, stern faced and solemn, to the scrub birch which grew, like a weed, in profusion around the Beauly Firth. There they had felled a young tree. They had stripped it of its bark so that it was slimy to the touch. Then they had adzed a point at one end. They had carried it to the barracks and hammered it firmly into the sandy ground. All of this they had done in total silence, for, rough soldiers though they were, they did not talk of the purpose of their task.
Facing the post the battalion were dressed in review order, kilts, spats, red doublets, crossbelts, and feather bonnets. They carried no packs but leaned silently on their Snider rifles, without even an attempt at an illegal whispered conversation when their pacing N.C.O.s were out of earshot.
Behind the waiting men and out of their sight, shielded by the tall barrack buildings, a small squad of men marched from the armoury towards the guardroom. At the guardroom, Lieutenant Donald Bruce was pacing nervously as the squad halted facing the open doorway. These twelve men had been drawn by lot from the various companies in the battalion, three from each. They stood in open order, six to a file, rifles at the slope, as Donald walked quickly through the ranks in a cursory inspection. Lieutenant Bruce was tall; even taller than his father who commanded the regiment, and Willie was all of six feet. Donald had his father’s looks, reddish-blond hair and blue eyes, but lacked something of the colonel’s ruggedness, the squareness of jaw, and the set of his shoulders. Of course, he was barely twenty and would fill out as he grew older, but his features were more finely etched, gentler. Gentleness was probably his most outstanding characteristic. Willie Bruce had been brought up on a small croft and then in the rough, tough world of the barrack room. Donald Bruce had known none of that, he had always been treated as a gentleman and a gentle man he had become. The eyes of father and son, which were so alike at first glance, were different in reality. The colonel’s seized you with their power and held you until t
hey were ready to allow your release; the colonel’s commanded. Donald’s did not. His eyes welcomed you and inspected you almost with deference. They were the same blue as his father’s, the same blue as all of the Bruces and the Maclarens, but they were not the same eyes.
Donald had a habit, whenever questioned, of drawing the three middle fingers of his right hand slowly down the line of his jaw-bone and stopping at the point of his chin. Then he would rub his lips together and, having made his consideration, give you his reply in a softly modulated tone. He was slow to talk, as if words were important to him, but he was quick to listen, ever willing to hear the other point of view. Those who met him in civilian clothes were always surprised to discover that he was a soldier. A cleric or a doctor, yes, but Donald Bruce did not give the impression of being the military type. However this was not quite a fair assessment, for he had studied at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst with rare distinction, winning that august establishment’s highest award, the Sword of Honour. He had joined the regiment flushed with success, only to have his father make it abundantly clear to him that academic prowess and the Sword of Honour were no guarantee of a good regimental officer.
The inspection over, he stood the men at ease and continued his fretful pacing, expressionless. He glanced quickly at the other party which stood waiting in front of the guardroom; four men, two on either side of a long box of rough pine, painted black. Then with equal haste he averted his gaze. Donald glanced at his watch. It still wanted ten minutes until nine o’clock; that would be dawn, officially. He tried with no success to keep his mind off that which he knew was taking place beyond the door of the guardroom, and what he would have to do during the next fifteen minutes. In his mind’s eye he could see his father reading out the sentence of the court martial and the warrant for the execution of that sentence. It had been the only possible verdict. But it had had to go to the office of the Commander-in-Chief Scotland, in Edinburgh, for confirmation. So the condemned man had lived on a few more days waiting for the inevitable return of his sentence of death. It had arrived the previous afternoon and now Jimmy Grigor would be listening to Willie Bruce as he read it.
The formalities over, the colonel would leave the cell and Jimmy Grigor would be alone with the chaplain. The Maclarens did not boast a chaplain of their own. Mr Campbell, grey haired and a little bent from years of devoted service to his parish, was the minister at Beauly within which parish the Maclarens’ barracks fell.
Mr Campbell had seen many people die and he knew that he had in nearly every case been able to ease the passage of the soul out of this life. But this was the first time that he had been in the company of a man so obviously full of life and so obviously to be dead within the next half hour. It was no easy task. He had visited Grigor on several occasions since sentence had been passed and he had mildly accepted the oaths and blasphemies which had been flung at him. It saddened him that he could find no way of reaching this man. He hated the whole business, or he would have done had he been capable of hate. The brutality of it all was so foreign to his nature and now they were alone together. He looked down at his own thin bony hands which clutched at his Bible, searching for words and wishing that this useless time would pass. And then he condemned himself for wishing a man’s life away. But it was only for a moment or two and then they would come out, the prisoner, the minister and two guards, and then Donald Bruce would take Jimmy Grigor out before the assembled battalion and kill him. He would not kill him with his own hands, but he would say the word upon which the twelve men in his party would send Jimmy’s soul speeding to Eternity.
Earlier Donald had superintended the loading of the rifles, ten with ball and two with blank according to the regulations, so that no man in the firing party could ever know for certain that it was he who had fired the fatal bullet. The rifles had been drawn at random from the armoury and now all was ready for the grim ritual of killing Jimmy Grigor.
Donald was fighting back the feeling of nausea that was welling within him. He kept telling himself that it was wrong to feel sympathy for Jimmy Grigor and that his punishment was well earned. The crime for which he was now about to suffer was one of brutal and deliberate murder. Lance-Sergeant Murdoch, young and recently promoted, had caught Grigor and three others gambling in the barrack room and as was his duty had immediately placed them under open arrest. Grigor, a one-time corporal who had lost his stripes for losing his temper, had flown into a violent rage, seized a bayonet, and before anyone could move to stop him, had stabbed the unfortunate Murdoch half a dozen times. Murdoch had died the next day in the regimental sick bay. Sergeant Murdoch had been a good man. He had only been with the regiment for five and a half years, and in those days of slow promotion had risen dramatically once his training period was over. He had had all the markings of a good soldier, a man who might even have emulated his commanding officer’s feat and risen from the ranks. He had been respected by officers and men alike. Lance-Sergeant Murdoch had had that rare ability of being able to command men without causing rancour or resentment. Had he been permitted to live he would have commanded. But it was not to be, for at the age of only twenty-four he had been savagely cut down by a drunken oaf.
Frankie Gibson, sometime ghillie, sometime poacher, and now Colour Sergeant of C Company, a position once held by the commanding officer himself, walked slowly round the ranks assembled at the bottom of the hollow square and facing the stark, solitary post. He was a small man, dark, and with a lined, weather-beaten face. A man of great humour, whom old Colonel Sir Henry Maclaren had accepted into the regiment with the words: ‘Your wages will be more than covered by the salmon I save.’ But there was nothing to laugh at today.
‘Frankie.’ It was Corporal Munroe standing at the rear of C Company who hissed his name.
‘What is it, Johnny?’
‘When are we going to get this bloody business over wi’?’
‘Bide yoursel’,’ replied Frankie. ‘Jimmy Grigor’s in nae hurry.’ And then turning on a young private in the rear rank, ‘Pull yoursel’ taegether, sodger.’
Frankie had recognized the signs. The man was swaying and clutching on to his rifle for support. It was young Peter Leinie, C Company’s newest recruit, a man who looked considerably less than the eighteen years he claimed.
‘Ye’ll see a damned sight worse than this when we get to Egypt.’ And he spat upon the ground. He hated this business as much as any man in the regiment.
‘Squad! Squad, attention! Present arms!’ called Lieutenant Bruce, drawing his broadsword and holding it at the salute. It was that same broadsword that he had so proudly received from the hands of the Prince of Wales at the passing-out parade at Sandhurst. A beautiful thing it was too with the blade finely chased and his name engraved upon it and the little splash of red velvet peering through the intricate workings of the basket hilt. He stood there, tight lipped, as his father Colonel Bruce emerged from the guardroom.
Willie Bruce returned the salute. Donald was looking at a point somewhere over Willie’s head and Willie fixed his gaze on the top button of his son’s doublet. It was not a time for looking a man in the eye. His left hand tightened on the crumpled piece of paper which he had just read to the condemned man.
‘Carry on, Mr Bruce,’ he snapped, and turned away in the direction of the battalion.
Willie’s leathery face, the legacy of many campaigns and long service under the hot suns of the Empire, was expressionless as he strode away, concealing the emotion which he felt within himself. He hated the fact that it had fallen to his son to do this filthy job. ‘What a bloody awful way to blood a man,’ he had said the previous day when he had lunched with Andrew Maclaren over at Culbrech House, ancestral home of the founders of the regiment. Andrew Maclaren, who had commanded the regiment before him until a burst of fire from a Gatling gun, their own, in India had shot away the lower part of his right leg, was sympathetic towards his old friend. They had been boys together, served together all of their adult lives, loved t
he same woman, and they were half-brothers.
‘Bring the whole family over to dinner tomorrow,’ Andrew had said. ‘I’ll try and lay something on to take Donald’s mind off it.’
Willie carried on between the barrack blocks to where the men were waiting. It was Frankie Gibson who spotted him.
‘Ser’nt-Major,’ he called. ‘C.O.’s coming.’
Regimental-Sergeant-Major Macmillan took up his position at the rear of C Company and called the parade to attention.
At the guardroom Lieutenant Bruce gave the order:
‘Reverse arms, left turn.’
They made the turn almost with gratitude, for the command meant that they would not have to face their victim. There were two drummers and a piper about three paces ahead of them and they too turned with them. They were all looking intently ahead. All brutally conscious in that silence so intense that every creak, every breath they took, every drip of water which slid from the guardroom roof into a little puddle below registered on their minds. Their minds were numbed, insulated against the act that they were about to perform. They tried to think only of what they could see, and what they could see was the back of the neck of the man in front of them. Some of them tried to count the hairs. Private Wilkie, standing behind Billy Anderson, intently studied a burgeoning boil on the back of his thick, red, pock-marked neck.
In all of them there was a terrible desire to get the damned business over with and yet every one of them realized that each minute they prolonged their duty was another lifetime to Jimmy Grigor.
It was only a moment in actual time after the command to turn had been given that the drummers, their instruments muffled in black cloth, raised their sticks, while the piper inflated his bag and the first plaintive notes escaped from the drones.
A moment later the minister emerged, followed by Grigor, flanked by two guards holding him under the arms. He was wearing fatigue dress, the buttons stripped from his tunic, and his pinched and pointed face was grey.