Blunted Lance

by Max Hennessy

  He heard a movement and looked up to see his father watching him. The old man seemed tired but he looked splendid in his uniform, his chest ablaze with medal ribbons.

  ‘Hello, Father,’ he said, as they embraced.

  ‘Hello, my boy. How’s the regiment?’

  Dabney sighed. ‘Fullerton’s dead. You know that, of course. Hawker and Harbord are wounded. But Tim Leduc’s splendid and so’s young Quibell. Unfortunately, I suspect we’ll be losing Quibell soon. He’ll be leaving us for a machine gun battalion when they get the guns. It’ll mean promotion and he deserves it.’

  ‘What about Johnson?’

  ‘He bothers me, Father. I don’t think he’s good enough. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t seem to be good enough.’

  The Field Marshal indicated the desk. ‘You were reading my letter to Kitchener?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

  ‘Don’t matter, my boy. What do you think of it?’

  ‘I absolutely agree, Father.’

  ‘I’ve just come from York. They’re living in shocking conditions. The local brigadier’s a dug-out. Too fat, too much moustache, too rigid with regulations. Eyes like boiled marbles. I told him to forget the bloody regulations and get them properly housed before they all go down with pneumonia. There was an orderly room clerk listening at the door, I knew, but I didn’t keep my voice down. I wasn’t wanting them to fall on me neck in gratitude – just to know someone was on their side. There’s already too much feeling that senior officers are stupid and that nobody cares.’

  The old man sighed. ‘Kitchener never did have the gift of delegating work and it’s pretty obvious he’s already trying to do too much. Yet everybody’s terrified of him.’ He poured himself a drink. ‘I expect my report will be lost in the piles of paper on his desk.’

  Dabney frowned. ‘The whole business of asking for volunteers was wrong, Father. The bravest, the most patriotic always volunteer first and, since they’re the boldest, the most intelligent who’ve already begun to make their mark in the world, they’re the ones who can least be spared.’

  The Field Marshal sipped his drink. ‘It’s always been the same, my boy,’ he growled. ‘For some god-forsaken reason I’ve never been able to fathom, this country backs away from conscription as if it were the plague. War’s always a contest in blunders and the side that makes the least ends up the winner, but, you know, in this country the greater the inefficiency of the army, the greater seems the contentment of the politicians. I was talking to Haldane the other day about it and he had the bloody nerve to say that in the event of a great national emergency it might well be necessary to resort to conscription. Great God, what greater national emergency can you think of than war?’

  Dabney managed a smile. ‘It isn’t like South Africa, is it, Father?’

  ‘Never supposed it would be. When are we going to get moving, Dab?’

  Dabney frowned and his father noticed the grey hairs and the new lines at the corner of his mouth. He gave his father a grim look and came straight to the point.

  ‘We’re not, Father,’ he said. ‘Mobile war’s finished.’

  Christmas day was a strange affair with everybody trying to be light-hearted and not mention the fighting. With his family, Dabney drove across to Braxby Manor for breakfast and they made the pilgrimage round the stables as they had for years. Both preceded and followed by elderly Ackroyds who could no longer be called upon to serve their country, they progressed past the stalls and loose boxes with their oaken buckets, dandy brushes, body brushes, water brushes, hay whisps, stable rubbers and curry combs. The horses watched them, eager for titbits, their souls in their eyes, and the youngest children were placed on their backs to make sure they knew what was expected of them when they grew up.

  The Christmas service at Braxby Church followed much the same pattern as elsewhere across the country. Prayers were offered for victory and the quicker slaughter of Germans.

  ‘God is on our side,’ the Rector announced confidently.

  ‘That’s what the Germans say,’ the Field Marshal growled as they headed for the trap. ‘They even wear it on their belts. Gott Mit Uns. I expect the Austrians are saying the same, too, to say nothing of the French and the Serbs and the Russians and everybody else, too. I reckon God’s got his work cut out.’

  Goff relations arrived to share nuts and drinks and mince pies, among them Robert and his family.

  ‘Were you in this retreat business, Dab?’ he asked, lightly, as if what they’d gone through had been a bit of a joke.

  ‘Yes,’ Dabney said. ‘I was in the retreat.’

  ‘Doing your stuff, I suppose, in the rearguard?’

  ‘I was on a very slow horse.’

  Games and charades were played with the children, Robert sitting at the back of the room with a whisky in his hand as if it were beneath his dignity to prance about in front of the fire. Dabney entered into the spirit of the games more ardently than anyone, noisy and riotous with the excited children in a way that worried his wife and his parents. He drank more than they had ever seen him drink before and threw himself into charades as if it were the only thing on earth he wanted to do.

  ‘You’ll rupture yourself, old boy,’ Robert said as he watched.

  ‘More than you’ll ever do,’ Dabney snapped back.

  It was unnecessarily sharp but Robert was placid enough not to notice it. It didn’t go unmarked by the Field Marshal, however, and he noticed later that when the children were taken to see a Punch and Judy show put on by one of the Ackroyd boys in the nursery, Dabney went straight to the whisky decanter. The Field Marshal put his hand on it but Dabney gently pushed it away.

  ‘No, Father,’ he said. ‘I need this.’

  ‘France, boy?’

  ‘I suppose so. It’s nothing.’

  ‘If it’s important, as a senior officer of the army, don’t you think I ought to know.’

  Dabney stared at his father for a moment then his eyes dropped. ‘I find it faintly insulting to see Robert sitting there so bloody placidly, Father,’ he said deliberately, ‘while my chaps in France are short of equipment and short of ammunition.’

  ‘If you’re short of ammunition, this isn’t the place to air your grievances.’

  ‘I’ve aired them, Father. In the right places. Not much was done. When the battles start again in the spring, we’re going to have casualties because nobody’s bothered.’

  ‘I’ve bothered,’ the Field Marshal said quietly. ‘I’m still bothering. Unfortunately the fact that we’re at war doesn’t seem yet to have seeped through to the House of Commons. Asquith’s being led by the nose by his colleagues in the Cabinet, Balfour’s trying to score points all the time, and Keir Hardie’s preaching peace.’

  ‘Can’t you stir ’em up, Father?’

  ‘My job’s to work for efficiency. At my age, that’s about all I’m good for. We need someone younger. Someone who isn’t going to take long lunches and is prepared to work late into the night. Winston, for instance, or this feller, Lloyd George.’

  Dabney frowned. ‘He was preaching peace when we were fighting in South Africa,’ he said.

  The old man shrugged. ‘Makes a bit of difference when you’re in power,’ he observed. ‘He’s more to lose nowadays, and I suspect he sees himself as Prime Minister.’

  Eight

  1915 was a sad year.

  It began with the realisation that the war of manoeuvre had come to a stop with the construction of trenches and that the German-occupied area of France and Belgium would have to be regarded as a fortress. It was also clear that it was too big to be invested, yet there was a feeling in France that, with national territory in enemy hands, there could be no letting up on the offensive strategy and, faintly embarrassed by the smallness of her contribution, Britain allowed herself to be dra
gged into a series of useless attacks, which achieved nothing but casualties.

  Though the end of the war, which had been so confidently predicted by so many by the Christmas of 1914, had not come about, the new spring and summer campaigns had been expected to settle things, but nothing was changed except that the new year brought unexpected weapons such as poison gas, zeppelins which began a series of raids on London, naval hit-and-run attacks on British coastal towns and, above all, the U-boat, which up till then nobody had thought of except as an auxiliary to the fleet. The Germans had suddenly realised its potential against merchant ships and had begun to destroy on sight, their greatest success – and their greatest mistake – the sinking of the liner, Lusitania, which carried American passengers. Winston Churchill, an old friend of the Goff family, stopping by for the night en route for a visit to northern shipyards for the Admiralty, put it succinctly. ‘Under the official grief in Whitehall,’ he admitted, ‘there’s also a feeling that this time they’ve gone too far and it’ll bring the Americans in.’

  It was an opinion which seemed to be shared by the German leaders because they offered to stop the sinkings if the British navy would relax its blockade. The noose, it seemed, was already tightening, as Helen’s letters, still coming regularly through Holland, showed. ‘Why are you trying to strangle Germany?’ she asked with a note of bitterness. ‘German women and children have no quarrel with you but, when food grows short, it will be they who suffer.’

  A faint trace of distrust lay over all her letters these days. ‘Germany has no quarrel with Britain,’ she kept insisting. ‘Russia is her most dangerous enemy and she asks nothing from Britain and France but to be left alone.’

  ‘She’s talking like a dyed-in-the-wool Prussian,’ the Field Marshal muttered.

  He was feeling old these days and was made very much aware of his age by the fact that Tyas Ackroyd had finally had to retire to one of the cottages by the Home Farm. For a while it had seemed as if the end of the world had come, because Tyas Ackroyd had been with him ever since the middle of the previous century. He had ridden alongside him at Balaclava, and had saved the Field Marshal’s life when he’d been wounded at Yellow Tavern. He had never before left the Field Marshal’s side and his disappearance brought home to him the fact that he, too, no longer had much time left. Though it didn’t frighten him, it was a sobering thought.

  If only, he felt, he could be spared to see the success of British arms. But the news from the war made him feel ill. French was proving a disaster as commander-in-chief and, still moving mercurially between enthusiasm and black despair, was blaming his failure at Neuve Chapelle on the shortage of shells.

  The summer changed nothing and when French failed again at Loos as the warm weather ended, the writing seemed to be on the wall. It was clear French was trying to discredit Haig, even as Haig tried to discredit him, so that in addition to a casualty list of staggering proportions, the army was also being treated to an unedifying squabble between senior officers.

  Autumn arrived with the government now a coalition and Haig getting what he wanted, the job of commander-in-chief. Even Kitchener’s position was insecure now, because he had been held responsible for the shell shortage and with Northcliffe, of the Daily Mail, determined to bring him down, Lloyd George had been given the job of Minister of Munitions.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the Field Marshal said, ‘it’ll begin a new sort of war.’

  Almost before they knew where they were, however, they were telling themselves the same things all over again.

  1916 would settle the Germans’ hash. By then the mass of the new Kitchener Armies, not a hundred thousand as had been originally intended, but vastly more, would be trained and ready for action. A few had already been in the trenches, a few had even been in battle, and, despite their inexperience, their intelligence had shown them to be adaptable and capable of learning quickly, while their fierce patriotism made them go on trying when everybody else had given up.

  But the Dardanelles, the one hope of getting into the German fortress by the back door, had proved a failure. Out of office suddenly and trying to get a command in France, Churchill made his feeling clear to the Field Marshal.

  ‘The guns and the shells and the men,’ he said, ‘were held back for France where they were wasted on futile frontal attacks that got us nowhere.’

  Now everything was concentrated on the narrow strip of land that ran all the way across France from the sea to Switzerland, stale, covered with the rubbish of war and soured with the hundreds of bodies that were buried in it. Criss-crossed by rusty barbed wire, it represented the dead hopes of military and political leaders on both sides. The opposing armies had fought since 1914 over this same narrow area of bloodstained ground in which occasionally a salient was bitten off or another thrust out, the futile finishing point for some ambitious attack that had cost thousands of lives, and the war had sunk into a wretched stalemate from which only the New Armies could be expected to rescue it.

  Studying his paper, his grandson at his feet, the Field Marshal brooded. Nobody had heeded his exhortations about the new men. They had not been intermingled in the experienced brigades and divisions of the Regular Army as he had advised, but had been formed into entirely new units with untrained NCOs and untrained officers. Apart from a few, they had not even been given the chance to learn in small trench actions, and those who had were derisive of the old army’s methods.

  ‘Does no-bloody-body have any sense these days?’ he muttered.

  Studying his illustrated magazine, which showed the war in a much cleaner and more honourable light than it seemed to the Field Marshal, Josh looked up.

  ‘What did you say, Grandpa?’

  ‘I said—’ the old man paused ‘—I said, that this seems to be a very dirty war, boy.’

  ‘Aren’t all wars dirty, Grandpa? You once said they were.’

  ‘Of course they are. But most wars move about. This one stays in the same place. One long, dirty, muddy, sour, stinking strip of land that runs across the whole of Europe where men have to live like moles to survive.’ The old man was more than usually bitter.

  ‘But there were trenches in the American Civil War and trenches in the Franco-Prussian War and the Boer Wars, Grandpa. You said so.’

  ‘Yes.’ The old man sighed. ‘But nobody remained in ’em long and they didn’t bury their dead where they were living and eating and sleeping. By comparison, those were gentlemen’s wars. This is a cads’ war, boy. With submarines sinking ships without warning and zeppelins dropping bombs on women and children, there isn’t even any honour any longer. And poison gas! Good God, boy, what are we coming to?’ He warmed to his theme. ‘In South Africa, where your father and I fought, it was a gentleman’s war. I suppose we were still a bit old-fashioned in those days – but there was a lot of courage, boy, and headquarters weren’t in a château miles behind the front. They were in the saddle. Perhaps we weren’t very bright and neither were the men, but we fought together, and in the cruelty of war, men’s behaviour to each other is the only thing that lifts it out of the depths of barbarism. We abandoned our wounded, knowing perfectly well they’d be cared for, and so did the Boers. We didn’t contribute willingly to brutality and we never needlessly took life. For God’s sake, boy, look at this war: Ypres, fifteen thousand. Neuve Chapelle, thirteen thousand. Aubers Ridge, twelve thousand. Loos, eight thousand. And that doesn’t include French casualties which must run into hundreds of thousands by now.’

  ‘My War Illustrated says our troops are always cheerful.’

  The old man’s eyes grew misty. ‘They always are, boy,’ he said. ‘That’s the incredible thing. They lose all their friends, they don’t get fed, they have fools put in command of ’em, and they still remain cheerful. I’m damned if I know how they do it. I never did. Yet those bloody politicians in London have always kept ’em short of everything they ever needed. This is
a cads’ war, boy, and no mistake, and it’s time we picked another cads’ team.’

  Finding a pencil, Josh eagerly began to write in the margin of his magazine. ‘The Kaiser, of course,’ he said. ‘He has to be captain.’

  ‘Yes. Then you’d better put down Asquith. And Bottomley. He’s still there. And Woodrow Wilson—’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘President of the United States. He ought to be coming to our rescue.’

  ‘But he’s an American and the Americans aren’t fighting.’

  ‘No. Better leave him out then. There are plenty better cads than he is.’

  ‘Sir John French? Father doesn’t seem to like him.’

  ‘No. Not French. He’s in nobody’s team. He’s out. No longer even a player. He’s already forgotten. How about Haig?’

  ‘But he’s commander-in-chief in France!’

  ‘Thanks to his own tittle-tattling. If he’d behaved like that at school, he’d have been called a sneak. I don’t like Haig. Put him down.’

  The boy looked bewildered but he did as he was told. ‘How about Enver Pasha?’ he asked. ‘After the Dardanelles, we ought to have a Turk in the side.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘How about Uncle Robert? He was first reserve last time but when I told Father about our team when he was on leave he said he ought to be captain.’

  The Field Marshal sighed. ‘Not captain,’ he said.

  ‘Well, Father said he had no right to live the way he did when men were dying in France.’

  ‘No boy, I suppose he oughtn’t. Better make him vice-captain.’

  The old man’s heart was heavy. Robert’s return to the army had been short-lived. When yeomanry units had been whipped abroad to take the place of the decimated regiments of the Regular cavalry, he had suddenly discovered he was too busy producing uniforms and guns to be a soldier and had resigned.