Blunted Lance

by Max Hennessy

  Copyright & Information

  The Blunted Lance

  First published in 1981

  © Juliet Harris; House of Stratus 1981-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Max Hennessy (John Harris) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 075512801X EAN: 9780755128013

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.

  He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other 'part time' careers followed.

  He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the 'Chief Inspector' Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.

  Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.

  Part One

  One

  The Civil War In America

  by

  Major-General

  Sir Colby Goff, GCB.

  Sitting on a rock on the Jebel Surgham overlooking the Nile at Omdurman, Lieutenant Dabney Augustus Rollo Goff studied the book he had taken from his saddle bag. It was always with him. What his father had set down of the war in America seemed of enormous help to a subaltern uncertain of his skill and dubious of the ability of his commanding officer.

  The Old Man, he thought warmly, was not only more than a little articulate, he was quite a boy. And, at the age of sixty-two, still was. Willing to drop a rank to lead the cavalry under Gatacre, his junior in years and military position, in the force commanded by Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Sirdar of Egypt – who was junior even to Gatacre – he was at that moment inside the zariba, the barricade of timber and thorns the army had built round the mud-walled village of El Egeiga, awaiting on this second day of September, 1898, the arrival of the Dervish army of the Khalifa. And, Dabney decided, he wouldn’t have very long to wait either, because faintly in the distance he could already hear the elephant tusk war-horns beginning to sound in a chorus that was being taken up in the shriller, brassier notes of cavalry trumpets and the drums and fifes of the British infantry standing to arms with their backs to the River Nile.

  The mooings from the south – like the sound of cattle distressed by lack of water – had lifted the head of Dabney’s sergeant and he was staring over the rocks of the ridge they were on, a deep frown on his face, all cars and eyes and nervous concern. As he turned, his gaze fell on Dabney’s book and he grinned because he knew as well as everyone else what it was.

  ‘Just reading what the general would ’ave done, sir?’ he asked.

  Dabney smiled. ‘I’m sure he’d have had some answer, Sergeant.’

  One of a spray of officer’s patrols thrown out by the 21st Lancers, they waited quietly, anxious despite their training. They had cantered out of the zariba in darkness, their instructions to watch the advance of the Dervish army, all a little concerned about the unseen black-skinned figures that might spring up from among the rocks wielding broad-bladed spears, and all more than glad to see the daylight.

  ‘They’ll not come now,’ the sergeant decided. ‘It’ll be tonight. They’ll come in the dark.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Sergeant,’ Dabney said. ‘They’re a bit of an unknown quantity.’

  In front of them the sandy plain stretched away from the river with its fringe of starveling grass and thorn bushes. It was one of the most inhospitable places in the world. You woke in the morning in the same hot wind that sent you to sleep, your eyes, nose and throat choked with sand, the folds of your clothes filled with dust; and to add to your pleasure there were always spiders, scorpions, camel thorn, boils, ulcerated throats, heat apoplexy and enteric fever. Even the horses caught sunstroke.

  The desert was almost salmon in colour and it was already beginning to shimmer and dance in the heat. The hot restless breeze was rattling away in the distance like an approaching train, nagging at the thick thorny bushes by the Nile which looped and turned its muddy course round the army so that wherever you looked it seemed to be there.

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  Even as the sergeant spoke, Dabney saw the Dervish army. They had known all along where it was and during the hours of darkness the one thing they had been afraid of was that it would come when it was hard to tell the direction of the attack. Now, though, as the light paled, they saw the dark mass in front, like a great shadow across the rosy-buff waste of sand, enormous masses of men joined together by thinner lines, like tendrils, while behind and on the flanks the reserves had been halted, like dark blurs and streaks across the desert.

  ‘Jesus,’ the sergeant said quietly, peering over his horse’s back. ‘There’s a lot of the bastards!’

  ‘Yes, Sarge.’ The voice came quietly from among the rocks. ‘And they’ve got their rib-ticklers with ’em. You can see the sun on ’em!’

  It was true. The Dervish army seemed to be lit by a curious glow that came from the first rays of light catching the polished blades of the spears they carried.

  For savages, the Dervishes’ formation was surprisingly professional. There were immense numbers of them, their front nearly five miles long, and ahead of them emirs, scouts and patrols moved. Their cheering was still faint, but i
t came to the Jebel Surgham like the sound waves or the tumult of the sea before a storm.

  ‘They’re coming this way, sir! It won’t be safe here much longer.’

  The sergeant sounded a trifle uneasy and Dabney stuffed his father’s book into his saddle bag.

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Time we were getting back. Mount the men, Sergeant!’

  As they cantered back, another patrol from further north joined them, led by Winston Churchill, of the Hussars. The horses looked far from their best because, while the infantry had been brought most of the way to Omdurman in barges, the cavalry had been obliged to make their own weary way, and the long march alongside the chocolate-coloured water of the Nile had brought a serious deterioration in the condition of the mounts.

  Churchill looked eager and ready for action, however. ‘Hello there, Goff,’ he rasped in his strong lisping voice. ‘Been getting a view of the Mahdi’s tomb?’

  Dabney smiled. Neither of them belonged to the 21st, whose men they were leading, and both had pulled strings to get themselves attached for the campaign.

  ‘Drill’s good,’ Churchill observed as they rode alongside each other. ‘Kitchener’s going to get his battle after all.’

  There was a feeling in the 21st that Churchill was too big for his boots, because he was a nephew of the Duke of Marlborough and Randolph Churchill’s son. He was considered to be bumptious and said to collect campaign medals because he intended to go into politics, and a season of having fought for the Empire would do him a lot of good. It was well-known that Kitchener disliked him, because he detested newspapermen and, in addition to his duties as a soldier, Churchill was representing one of the London dailies.

  In front of them now were the brown masses of the British and Egyptian infantry, with a fringe of cavalry dotting the plain in front. Churchill’s hand moved as he gestured at the vultures wheeling in the brassy sky above them.

  ‘They know,’ he said.

  He drew rein, turned in the saddle and stared back over the plain to where the Dervish mass was still moving towards them.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it confounds all the optimists who insisted they’d come last night. Smith-Dorrien didn’t want a night attack.’

  ‘Smith-Dorrien,’ Dabney pointed out, ‘like my father, was one of the survivors of the massacre at Isandhlwana. Neither of them are keen on hand-to-hand fighting. They prefer to keep ’em at a distance.’

  The zariba looked strong enough as they approached it. The previous night had been brilliant as the rain had stopped and the soldiers had been nervous, but there had been nothing but breeze and shadows and, in the distance, the ominous throbbing of drums and the moans of elephant tusk war-horns. They had been roused before daylight, grumbling after an uneasy sleep full of nervous muttering and peering into the darkness. There had been the usual hawking, spitting and lighting of pipes, as they had rubbed chilled bones and dressed by the light of the moon, throats raw from the perpetual wind and the everlasting sand. They were all now hoping the Dervishes would attack them. With the same hope of standing in defence, doubtless the Dervishes were hoping the British would attack them.

  As the patrols moved back, the infantry were checking their rifles and the artillery were busy over their guns, the one thought in every man’s mind ‘Were they going to have to fight their way into Omdurman?’ Dabney’s father had been at the relief of Lucknow and Dabney had often heard him tell of the confusion of battling through the narrow streets.

  The army, which had just begun to form up outside the zariba, ready for yet another move forward, were with-drawing again now behind the hedge of thorns. As the patrols rejoined the Lancers, Martin, the colonel, insisted on written reports. There was little to tell him save that the Dervishes were on the move and that if he stayed where he was he’d damn’ soon know they were. But Martin was a fussy man, determined that his newly-raised regiment, which had never been in battle before, should somehow in this campaign collect its first battle honour to decorate its drum cloths. Dabney’s father didn’t trust him too much.

  ‘A damn’ sight too much tally-ho,’ he had said quietly to his son.

  As Dabney dismounted, the sergeant appeared.

  ‘What about water, sir?’

  A veteran charger champed its bit because of a bridle sore, and the farrier, a single horseshoe on his sleeve, moved round it, checking for cuts and bruises. Horses were good and bad. Some were trained, some not. Some were perfect, some were devils. One was a star-gazer, one a slug; another had a cold back, a devil for the first few minutes of every day and able to throw its rider whenever it chose. But a man’s life depended on his mount and they had to be carefully watched.

  ‘Let ’em drink,’ Dabney said. ‘But see they don’t get too much.’

  He glanced towards Kitchener, who was standing just in front, a tall man younger than many of his subordinate commanders. He had succeeded to the command of the Egyptian army to the dismay of rivals who had thought it might be theirs, but had since managed to win most of his enemies over with his competence. Sitting his horse nearby, watching over the heads of the infantryman, was Dabney’s father, General Goff. He was trim, built more like a jockey than a soldier, slim, a perfect light horseman still despite his age and grey hair. Dabney smiled warmly as he watched him. The old man had not played with him much as a child, as the fathers of other boys played with them, and, leaving the business of the family to his wife, had not even seemed to notice him much. But he had managed nevertheless to gain the whole-hearted respect and admiration of his son in the same offhand way with which he had always held the respect of his soldiers – as if he didn’t consider it necessary to try.

  As he stared across the burning plain, his face moist under the brassy sun, Dabney could see the shimmering waves of heat, the faint outline of Omdurman and the yellow-brown bulge that was the Mahdi’s tomb. It represented the reason why they were there. There had been a lot of talk of ‘British interests’ and ‘making Egypt safe’ but the real truth, he felt sure, was pure vengeance. His father had been with the force that had arrived just too late to save Gordon, who thirteen years before had been butchered with his garrison at Khartoum just across the river from where he now waited, and he suspected that in Kitchener, who had also been involved, there was an itch to put right that defeat.

  The Mahdi was dead now but the troops facing them across the tawny desert were the same men who had followed him, the men who had stormed Khartoum, massacred Hicks’ men at El Obeida and broken the square at Abu Klea, and he wondered if Kitchener’s military skill measured up to his ambition. If it didn’t, the whole lot of them would be lying dead on the sand before the day was out.

  Kitchener was watching the plain, dour and arrogant – but obsequious, so Dabney had heard, to anyone who might advance his career. His beefy face was red from the heat of the sun, his pale eyes and opulent moustache making him look somehow more like a sergeant than a general. Churchill’s description of him had already got around. ‘He may be a general,’ he had said, ‘but he’s never a gentleman.’

  All the same – Dabney studied his Commander-in-Chief carefully – you had to admit the man’s skill. Under his tuition, the despised Egyptians had become a force to be reckoned with and he had managed to transport his army across four hundred miles of desert to the threshold of the Khalifa’s capital. His military railway and his movement up the Nile of his fleet of gunboats was a remarkable achievement by any standard.

  Kitchener was talking to General Goff now, pointing towards the Dervish army. Among the men behind them was General Goff’s orderly, Sergeant Ackroyd, dark and lugubrious like his father, Tyas Ackroyd, who had served General Goff as orderly, manservant and general factotum for years and now, at over sixty and limping a little from rheumatism, was running the Goff home as butler. The Ackroyds had gone to war with the Goffs for generations but Tyas Ackroyd had always been more tha
n a mere servant; and his son, Ellis, the sergeant behind General Goff, was a great deal more educated than his father and, with a little help from the General, was making sure his sons were more educated even than he was.

  Dabney shifted his feet in the hot sand. He’d be sorry to see the Ackroyds sever the connection they’d had with his family for so long. Originally they’d been labourers on the Home Farm at Braxby, and the general and old Tyas had fished and swum together in the Brack long before they’d departed together for the Crimea. Ellis would probably be the last to act as servant to anybody. They were far too independent–minded a family, something that was already showing in Ellis’ son, Tom, who, at the tender age of eleven and itching to be apprenticed to an engineer, was already learning all about the new-fangled petrol engines.

  The thought led him to think about home. His sister, Helen, had startled them all by marrying a German and seemed quite happy to be translated to a Continental background. Within months, his other sister, Jane, had married the son of the farmer next door and seemed equally happy to be translated from a military to an agricultural heritage. Robert–? Robert, his elder brother, he decided, was a bit of an ass. He had wangled himself a job on Gatacre’s staff and he was well-suited there because Gatacre was considered to be a bit of an ass, too.

  Robert, Dabney decided, would suit his chief well. Robert loved the trappings of the army more than the army itself and Dabney often considered he wore uniform less for the fighting than for the ceremonial.

  Perhaps being part of a military family was to blame, because in the last decade or two cavalry officers had tended to drape themselves in a self-conscious arrogance that came less from their skill than from their splendid uniforms, and Dabney had long had the feeling that the mess of the 19th Lancers, the Regiment, – his regiment – was far from being a repository of original thinking. Robert was an ass. He made his mind up with a young man’s cheerful indifference to the right and wrong of it.