Blunted Lance

by Max Hennessy

  At a bleak crossroads – as bare as a Lincolnshire railway halt – a group of tanks had gathered just off the hard surface. There was a strong smell of petrol fumes and hot oil in the damp air and the ears were filled with the throb of engines as the grey mud-plastered monsters waited.

  A colonel wearing the badges of the tank corps was sitting in a car shouting at a young staff officer in an immaculate uniform who stood alongside. It was clear from the cleanness of his uniform that the younger officer had come from headquarters. After this waste of ugliness, headquarters always seemed achingly, spotlessly clean.

  ‘It won’t work,’ the colonel was raging. ‘I’ve said so before and I’m prepared to say so again! To whoever wants to know! It’s impossible!’

  As the staff officer turned away, his face pink with anger, the colonel lifted his head and Dabney saw it was a man he had known at Colchester. He looked up and managed a twisted grin.

  ‘Hello, Dab,’ he said. ‘You people been trying to charge through the gap again?’

  Dabney gave him a bleak smile and the colonel gestured angrily. ‘It’s pathetic, isn’t it? They try on this breakthrough-with-a-charge-into-the-gap thing about once a month, when it ought to be obvious that as far as the tanks are concerned this bloody battle’s finished and done with.’ He gestured at the weeping sky. ‘Flying Corps and cavalry, too, it would seem to me. Can’t you knock some sense into those idiots at headquarters?’

  ‘I’ve long since stopped trying,’ Dabney said. ‘Is there something new on?’

  The colonel drew a hand across his face. ‘They want us to put on another show. You’ll be hearing, I expect. They simply won’t believe it when we tell ’em these monsters of ours are useless in that bloody bog out there.’ He gestured at the grey lozenge shapes just off the road. ‘We could win the war with those beauties you know, given the right conditions – and if we were allowed to say what are the right conditions. The bloody money spent on the initial barrage at Passchendaele would have built over four thousand of those machines. Enough to win any war. At the very least it would have provided the aeroplane engines we need to make ’em go faster. But nobody bothers! All they ask for is another attempt at a breakthrough to exploit your horses.’

  ‘The idea of a cavalry attack’s mad,’ Dabney snapped. ‘A man on a horse sticks out like a pea on a drum. If they try to launch us in any numbers the slaughter will make Balaclava look silly. For a commander even to gallop round his squadrons when they’re deployed’s courting suicide.’

  The colonel lit a pipe. ‘Given dry ground and sufficient numbers we could give them their bloody breakthrough,’ he said. ‘But not here. Never here. Here it’ll be just like last time. The bloody things’ll sink into the mud. You still keen on joining us?’

  Dabney nodded.

  ‘You’d lose rank.’

  ‘I might gain some self-respect. I’m only a captain, anyway, by rights, and we’ll all go back to pre-war ranks when it’s over.’

  ‘If we survive. Well, I’ll push it. It’s just possible you’ll be in on the ground floor for the first real tank attack the world’s ever seen. We’ve picked the spot: Cambrai. Clean, undamaged land. We’ll make ’em the gap they want. So long as they don’t wreck it first with one of these bloody barrages they’re so keen on.’ The colonel frowned. ‘I just hope they know what to do with it when they get it.’

  Continuing through the rain, Dabney was aware of the resentment about him. To the rest of the army the cavalry had come to represent nothing. Nothing at all. They not only failed to help the war, they even impeded it, because their horses and equipment filled acres of cramped countryside and their fodder trains jammed the roads.

  Passing alongside a ruined village, they skirted a broken lorry and a group of clotted carcasses where shellfire had destroyed a gun team. The sight made Dabney wince. He wasn’t a squeamish man but the way dead horses were allowed to remain unburied troubled him. He had grown up with horses and these muddy lumps looked like nothing else but mounds of earth, their limbs entangled in their death throes – with each other, with their harness leathers, even with the wreckage of the limber they had been pulling.

  On the edge of the village a battalion of infantrymen were just coming out of the line. Their boots barely left the ground, merely sloughing through the thin mud that covered the surface of the road like a flood. Their bodies moved stiffly like clockwork dolls. Their faces were filthy and the eyes that stared from them appeared to gaze into space as if they were bending all their attention only on using the last ounce of energy they possessed to shuffle forward. They stumbled past the horsemen in the downpour, their uniforms plastered to their bodies as if they’d been dipped in water, their rifles tied round the bolt mechanism with rags to keep out the mud. Their expressions were as grey as the landscape with exhaustion.

  Another battalion had been halted by the roadside, whole groups of men fallen asleep in spite of the mud and the passing lorries that threw sheets of grey-brown water over them. An officer was moving among them trying to kick them to life and they were stirring and dragging themselves upright, so dazed with weariness they didn’t appear to know what they were doing. Then one of them saw the column of horsemen clattering past and made a noise of disgust and contempt.

  ‘Silly peacock ba-a-astards!’

  The voice came from the back of the group, full of derision and contempt, and immediately the whole lot came to life and weary faces became twisted with bitterness as they worked out on the cavalry the anger and frustration they felt against their leaders. Men scrambled to their feet, and those who were waiting under their loads like patient mules turned to join the catcalling.

  ‘Git orf them bleedin’ mokes and come and ’elp us sort Jerry out!’

  The jeering started muttering among the riders and Dabney’s face set grimly. It was something they had constantly to endure. He knew how the infantrymen felt. As they moved to and from the line they saw thousands of cavalrymen, thousands of horses, all apparently doing nothing but wait for the weary footsloggers to make a gap they could exploit. Their attitude was traditional. Dabney had heard his father say it had been the same in the Crimea. Now, because of the Commander-in-Chief’s obsession with cavalry, because he was applying the lessons of the Boer War to a war that bore no relation to that struggle, the old derision had changed even to hatred.

  He wasn’t sure he could accept much more of it.

  The anger Dabney felt mounted. When he next arrived on leave he shocked his son by announcing that he’d had enough of France and setting off at once to see his father. His anger was so obvious, Josh begged a lift, pretending he wished to see his grandmother when all he wanted was to know what was in his father’s mind.

  At Braxby Manor, Dabney stalked to the library, his son trailing behind. The Field Marshal was just tucking into his tea and muffin, huddled in his chair in front of the fire, and, feeling out of it and totally unnoticed, Josh sat quietly by the door.

  His father didn’t waste time and he didn’t mince his words. ‘Passchendaele’s no place to wage war, Father,’ he said angrily, and as Josh listened he unfolded a story of marshy Flanders fields turned into a morass by water from dykes and ditches broken by the vast barrages thrown at the Germans.

  ‘In August, Father!’ Dabney said. ‘What will it be like in winter?’

  Sitting quietly out of sight, Josh was startled by the intensity of his father’s rage.

  ‘For sheer lack of imagination,’ he was saying, ‘this war’s never been equalled! When you look at them, it’s hard for a connoisseur of generalship to single out anyone as being especially bad because they’re all so awful. Allenby’s all right and so’s Plumer. As for the rest, God help us! While the men in the trenches wallow in blood the generals wallow only in ink. The infantry at Waterloo didn’t budge, Father, because their generals were there with them. Ours are phantoms twenty m
iles behind the line.

  ‘It could be forgiven,’ Dabney went on, ‘if it were part of a plan. If they knew of the conditions and were accepting them as part of the battle. But they didn’t know, Father! They didn’t know! They never move out of their damned châteaux! They never see it! Yet I’ve seen them pull up exhausted men coming out of the trenches for slovenly marching, or order them to push a bogged staff car free. Father, what’s come over the bloody army?’

  The old man seemed too shocked to answer and merely silently shook his head from side to side.

  ‘Can’t you do anything, Father?’

  ‘Dab, I’m eighty now! I’m a fossil from a bygone age. I rode at Balaclava. That makes me deader than the dodo. People don’t take any notice of me any more.’

  ‘You know Wullie Robertson, the CIGS.’

  ‘Robertson isn’t all-powerful. Lloyd George would even like to be rid of him. He’d like to be rid of Haig, too, but he’s not strong enough. I sometimes wish he were.’

  Dabney sat in silence for a moment, his anger surging inside him, while the old man hunched miserably in his chair. Aware that he was hearing things he should not have been hearing, Josh cowered in his place, conscious that this concerned no one but his father, his grandfather, and him. This wasn’t news to be spread at school. This was ‘family.’

  The old man lifted an anguished face. ‘What about the Americans?’ he asked. ‘Won’t they make a difference?’

  ‘They haven’t arrived yet.’

  ‘One of them has. Micah Burtle Love’s grandson. You’ll have heard of him, of course.’

  Dabney managed a bleak smile at last. ‘Fleur wrote to me about him. He stayed the weekend, she said.’

  ‘He’s transferred his affection now to Jane’s girls. Rachel’s gone overboard for him. He’s learning to fly at Colney Hatch, but he still manages to get up here a surprising amount. Jane’s worried because it seems to be getting serious.’

  Dabney frowned. ‘Father, tell her that people of young Love’s age have to start getting serious quickly. A pilot’s life at the front isn’t much more than three weeks.’ He paused. ‘How’s Robert?’

  ‘Growing fatter. He’s a K now, of course.’

  Dabney’s face was bitter. ‘A knighthood for churning out uniforms and guns?’

  ‘Somebody has to do it, Dab.’

  There was a long silence, then Dabney spoke again. ‘Father, I’m going to try to get into this war more. I can’t look people in the face. But I want you to promise me something. Just in case anything happens to me.’

  Listening, Josh felt the tears spring to his eyes. Up to that moment it had never occurred to him that something might happen to his father. Other fathers were wounded or killed, but somehow he couldn’t imagine it happening to his. His grandfather had gone through half a dozen campaigns and had suffered little more than flesh wounds, and it had left him with a feeling that Goffs didn’t die. Now, suddenly, he wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Dabney—’ his grandfather was speaking in that funny quavering voice that had developed over the last week or two ‘—I think you’d better ask somebody else. The chances are that at my age it’ll probably happen to me first.’

  ‘I don’t believe it, Father, and I’m worried for Fleur and for Josh and Chloe. I want them to be secure just in case.’

  The old man shifted restlessly. ‘I’ve already thought of that, Dab. There isn’t much money because I’ve never been rich, but this house and this land and the properties on it will be yours when I go.’

  Dabney was silent for a moment. ‘What about Robert?’

  ‘Robert already has more than he needs. He can do without this place. He’ll get the Cosgro fortune through Elfrida because Walter isn’t married and is never likely to be now. Braxby Manor will come to you and eventually to Josh. That way it’ll remain Goff land. I haven’t much else to offer, Dab, but I can do that. Your mother knows my wishes and a will’s made. The Suttons are well enough off and so are the Hartmanns, though God knows what’ll happen to Helen. We’ve not heard. It seems to me best to leave what I have where it’s most needed. And that seems to mean Josh. Robert’s children are well provided for.’

  Dabney frowned. ‘So long as they’re not deprived of their rights, Father. Aubrey’s not a bad kid.’

  ‘Better than Robert deserves,’ the old man growled. ‘Elfrida’s made a better job of them than we ever expected, certainly better than we could have expected from a Cosgro. It’s a pity Robert doesn’t behave as he should.’

  There was a pause then Dabney asked softly, ‘The Balmael woman?’

  Josh wondered who the Balmael woman was and, as his father and grandfather dropped their voices, he decided it was time he made his exit. Moving softly from the chair, he crept through the door and closed it quietly behind him.

  For the next few days, the house was depressing. With his father angry and his mother clearly in a torment of fear, Josh wasn’t sure how to behave. He was doubly kind to his smaller sister and occasionally cycled over to see his cousin, Aubrey, who swam with him in the Brack, or went ferreting with one of the Ackroyd boys in the meadows under the hills.

  Then, just when they were all trying to steel themselves to Dabney’s return to France, a telegram arrived. At first they thought it was to announce the death of yet another friend but instead it called Dabney to London.

  Suddenly excited, Dabney telephoned his father and got one of the Ackroyds to drive him to York. During the afternoon, there was a telephone call that made his mother cry out with delight and swing Josh into her arms.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Your father,’ she said.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘He’ll tell you himself when he gets home.’

  When Dabney arrived, he was consumed by excitement that told them he had news.

  ‘I’m leaving France,’ he said. ‘I’m going to the Middle East!’

  To Josh it seemed a demotion. The war seemed only to be in France, but they all climbed into the car and headed for Braxby Manor. Dabney was bubbling with an enthusiasm which his wife shared. Josh had heard them talking together eagerly and heard his mother’s cry of joy, so he could only guess that something tremendous had happened.

  At his grandfather’s, his mother disappeared with Chloe into the drawing-room to tell his grandmother the news while his father headed for the library.

  ‘It was Allenby, Father,’ he said. ‘He was at the War Office. I was just about in despair and thinking of applying for the Tank Corps, quite prepared to drop a rank, but, as it happens, it’s turned out to be unnecessary. They’ve given me a brigade.’

  This was unexpected. A field marshal and a brigadier in the same family was better than anything Reeves Major could produce! Josh beamed with pride.

  His grandfather had sat bolt upright. ‘That’s good news, Dab,’ he said eagerly. ‘Infantry?’

  ‘No, Father! Cavalry! Men on horses!’

  ‘Regulars?’

  ‘Of course not. That would be too much to expect.’

  ‘Yeomanry?’

  ‘Not even that. Mostly they’re Australians and New Zealanders.’

  ‘I didn’t know we had Australian and New Zealand cavalry in France.’

  ‘We haven’t. This is Palestine, Father. Open country. Cavalry country. I’m to leave at once. Allenby believes in movement and it’s his ambition to break through the Gaza-Beersheba line and get to Jerusalem and Damascus and into Turkey. They’re already using cavalry out there and, with the Arabs in revolt against the Turks, he has firm hopes of success. I’d come to the conclusion that if there were promotion to be won out of this mess it wasn’t going to come sitting astride a horse, but it seems I was wrong.’

  There was a long silence. ‘You’ll find Australians bloody difficult,’ the Fie
ld Marshal said slowly. ‘They always were.’

  ‘I’m fully aware of that, Father. They have a way with brigadiers they don’t like. There was an Australian regiment near us who swamped their brigadier in sewage when they were in the line. They’d spend the morning penning up a mass of slime behind a temporary barrier while they built a new outflow and when they learned he was on his way, they picked their moment just as he was half-way down a deep trench and broke down the dam. It washed him away like the Egyptians in the Red Sea.’

  There was a thin chuckle of laughter from the Field Marshal and Dabney went on eagerly.

  ‘Allenby’s on his way out at once,’ he said. ‘The idea’s to knock the Turks out of the war and he asked for me. I think that little affair of ours against the Uhlans in 1914 helped. He’s always been particularly pleasant to me.’ Dabney grinned, unable to contain his pleasure, more alive than Josh had seen him for months. ‘I could have kissed him when he told me. A cavalry brigade, Father! Think of it! In country where cavalry can work. No mud. No barbed wire.’

  ‘Who else have you got out there? What regular cavalry?’

  Dabney smiled. ‘None, Father. Not a single regiment. The only regular regiments are Indian. The rest are all Yeomanry from Britain and light horse regiments from Australia and New Zealand – hostilities-only soldiers with rifles and bayonets instead of swords.’

  ‘If they don’t like you, they’ll make it very clear.’

  ‘I’ll win ’em round. Jasper Capell was given a battalion. You remember Jasper. Blind as a bat in one eye and wore a monocle. His Aussies thought it a great joke and the second day he was with them every man in the battalion was also wearing a monocle. God knows where they got them. But he beat ’em at their own game. He took out his eyeglass, tossed it in the air, caught it in his eye and said “Bet you can’t do that.” From then on he could do anything with ’em.’