Blunted Lance

by Max Hennessy

  ‘It’s over, my dear,’ he said quietly. ‘Thank God, it’s all over,’ and she knew he wasn’t referring to the wedding.

  Rachel hugged him and Jane kissed him but when he found himself close to Robert he studiously ignored him. Eventually, at John Sutton’s prompting, Josh brought him a chair but he shook his head, trying to ignore the trembling in his weary legs.

  ‘No, boy,’ he barked. ‘I’ll stand through this at least.’

  By the time the toasts had been drunk, however, he was longing to sit down and after a while he managed to slip away. But he was not unseen and, as he moved quietly down the corridors towards John Sutton’s office, he heard a voice call.

  Turning, he saw it was Josh, wearing his best suit, his hair plastered down across his head.

  ‘Going for a bit of a sit-down,’ the old man explained. ‘Keep it to yourself, my boy.’

  ‘Would you like a drink, Grandpa?’

  The old man considered. ‘Might be a good idea,’ he said. ‘Not champagne. Blows you up. See if you can get your Uncle John to give you a quiet whisky and soda for me. I’ll be in his office.’

  Three minutes later, the boy appeared with a glass, and the old man made himself comfortable.

  On the wall was a calendar put out by a seed merchant and on the desk were spikes holding the bills for the farm. It was here that his son-in-law did his paper work and there was a deep leather armchair. Seating himself, he lit a cigar and leaned back to enjoy himself.

  ‘Shall I stay with you, Grandpa?’

  ‘No. You run off. Find your cousin, Aubrey. Not a bad chap for a Cosgro.’

  ‘I don’t mind staying.’

  The old man eyed his grandson approvingly. ‘Yes. Know that. But I’ll probably fall asleep on you. Off you go.’

  An hour later, after Micah Love and Rachel had disappeared for their honeymoon and everybody was looking for the Field Marshal, Josh was at the front door with Aubrey when one of the Ackroyd maids appeared on her bicycle from Braxby Manor. She carried a telegram.

  ‘It’s for the old gentleman,’ she said.

  ‘I know where he is,’ Josh said. ‘I’ll take it to him.’

  The old man had just started awake and was staring at his hands, aware for the first time of their near-transparency. Good God, he thought, no flesh on him anywhere these days! He was growing damned old! Fell asleep when he didn’t want to. Forgot things. Eyes bad. Teeth going. But it still seemed only like yesterday when he’d been thundering down the North Valley at Balaclava after that ass, Cardigan. He found it hard to believe it was so long ago. Where had all the years gone?

  With a bitter reflection that jerked at his sciatica, he thought of Robert, sitting at home throughout the whole bloody war, while everybody else was doing their bit. Robert was an ass. Robert was lazy. Robert was fat. Robert was a coward, a fornicator and probably even a crook. Thank God for Dabney, he thought. Pity he couldn’t have been here today. He sniffed and knocked a tear from his cheek with a clumsy hand.

  He was about to rise but his legs seemed to give way and he flopped back into the chair. God damn it, that confounded flu had knocked the stuffing out of him! He was still trying to pull himself together when Josh’s face appeared round the door.

  ‘Hello, young feller,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Just wondered if you were awake, Grandpa. There’s a letter for you.’

  ‘For me? Well, you were right to bring it here instead of interrupting the party. Let’s have it!’

  Josh held out the envelope, and it was then that the old man realised it was a telegram and guessed what it contained. Who the devil could it be, he thought. The war was over and he had no one in France now.

  Slitting the envelope with a gnarled thumb nail, he stared at the contents.

  ‘…regret to inform you…’

  He was puzzled and suddenly his heart started thumping inside his chest until it seemed it was going to burst.

  ‘Grandpa, is something the matter?’

  Only dimly, he heard Josh’s voice, anxious now and concerned for him, and managed to wave a hand to indicate that he was all right. He looked again at the words on the sheet of buff-paper, still unable to comprehend. Someone must have made a mistake. Dabney wasn’t in France. And, anyway, telegrams went to wives not to fathers.

  He looked again at the paper in his hand and realised that someone at the War Office, remembering who he was, had been considerate enough to inform him, and that a similar telegram would be waiting for Fleur when she returned from the reception. Struggling to make sense out of what seemed madness, he read the telegram again.

  ‘…regret to inform you that your son, Major-General DAR Goff, DSO, has died from wounds received during the fighting at Ain ’Aalab on October 30th.’

  Suddenly it dawned on him what it meant and, even in his distress, he remembered Fleur and was concerned that someone should be with her when she returned home. But as he struggled for the door, things began to grow dark and he felt as if he were choking. He must loosen his collar. Let in the air. The light had grown strange and was becoming brighter…

  ‘Not Dabney,’ he managed to say. ‘Not Dabney!’

  He tried to read the telegram again. ‘Let’s have another look,’ he mumbled, his heart pounding in a way that made him dizzy. ‘Died of wounds…’ It was true then. His son wouldn’t be coming home. Never.

  Only the tallest poppies were taken. Poor old Brosy. In his extremity of misery, he confused his son with Fleur’s father, Brosy la Dell, who had died in his arms in Zululand forty years before. Then he stared at the letter again, puzzled, disbelieving, and the thing finally became clear. My son! My favourite! Oh, God, I think I’d like to die!

  Eight

  Standing outside Braxby Manor, Josh watched in silence as the coffin was placed on the gun carriage and strapped in place. The day was bitterly cold and the rooks in the oaks were croaking their mournful calls into the blustery air. The sky was steely grey and the draughts moaned and whistled along the chilly corridors and through the hall.

  It was almost beyond Josh’s comprehension that, screwed down inside that squarish-looking box in front of him, lying on its back, beaky nose cutting the darkness like a scimitar, was all that remained of his grandfather.

  It was as though the world had grown a little darker and, with his limited knowledge, he could only feel that it must have been like this when Queen Victoria had been laid to rest. Those who were left seemed curiously diminished by contrast.

  He felt cold, yet he knew it wasn’t the weather that made him feel chilled. It was because something had gone from his life. As long as he could remember he had regarded his Grandfather as God, and his grandparents as jointly running the world and everybody in it, with his parents administering the law somewhere just beneath, hearing everything, seeing everything, missing nothing, while his sister Chloe and himself, his cousins and aunts and uncles and various other relations hovered in the depths below. Now the very fountain-head of his life had been snatched away, because he was never going to see his father again either.

  A letter had arrived by air from Hedley Ackroyd which had told them what had happened and, soon afterwards, one in Allenby’s own hand which had stated that the action of the Indian and Australian cavalry had resulted in the fall of Ain ’Aalab and destroyed the last Turkish resistance, and that its success had been entirely due to Dabney’s example. With them were a few ill-spelt letters from Goff’s Bleeding Own and the men he had commanded, men not given to emotion who were trying to make clear what they felt.

  The double loss had rocked Josh on his heels but, curiously, because he had seen so little of his father over the last four years, it was his grandfather’s death that had shocked him most. He had loved his father but, deprived of his presence, he had instinctively transferred all his affection
to the old man.

  His grandfather had known everything, had experienced everything. He was wise with the wisdom of old age. But curiously, Josh had never ever expected him to disappear like this. He had come to regard him as part of his surroundings, confident that he would always be there.

  That morning, he had written out his cads’ team for the last time. He knew he would never do it again because it was too painful and reminded him too much of his grandfather. Without the old man’s help, it had been a poor effort. He had felt reasonably safe with some of the names he had set down because they were still around but it had remained incomplete and, for safety, he had removed his Uncle Robert from the captaincy, feeling he should be given the benefit of the doubt without the old man to advise. Because his experience was insufficiently broad, he had also had to bring in two of the school bullies and leave the last place open.

  Shivering a little, he watched the ceremony going on just outside the door. His grandmother, straight-backed and in mourning, was standing with his mother, behind them all the Suttons and the Cosgro-Goffs, except Aubrey, the new Lord Cosgro, who had sneaked forward to be near Josh.

  ‘What are they doing?’ he whispered.

  ‘Securing it to the gun carriage.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So it won’t fall off.’

  With the Regiment in France, it had been difficult to raise an escort, but a field marshal was a field marshal and the Royal Horse Artillery had provided a gun carriage drawn by six horses in the charge of a sergeant and six men. They were New Army men and they wore khaki but, under the circumstances, it was agreed that the dead man wouldn’t have minded. The 19th had managed to raise an officer, a sergeant, a bearer party and a dozen men from the depot, and had even managed to equip them with full dress uniform, rifle-green overalls, jackets with red plastrons, and schapkas with dyed horse-hair plumes. They were all newly-conscripted men but they had been drilled to the point of collapse and knew exactly what to do. The band of a Territorial battalion waited to one side, with a full company of the same battalion under the command of a York lawyer who was their officer.

  The arrangements had troubled Josh as he had enquired anxiously about them.

  ‘Will the band of the 19th be there?’ he had asked his mother.

  Her face pale with sorrow, she had answered him gently. ‘No, darling. The war’s only just over. They’re using a Territorial band.’

  ‘But he wanted the regimental band. He asked for it.’

  ‘I think everyone’s done their best and I think he’d approve, Josh.’ Fleur’s voice was quiet because she knew the boy’s warm affection for the old soldier.

  ‘What’ll they play?’

  ‘The Dead March in Saul, I expect.’ Fleur was thinking that her own man had not had that privilege and lay buried in some sandy graveyard on the Turkish border. ‘That’s what they usually play.’

  ‘He wanted them to play Morning from something or other. I can’t remember it now. That’s what he said.’

  ‘I expect they’ll play something fitting, darling.’

  ‘He said if he couldn’t have the band, he’d settle for two trumpeters from the Regiment to play Reveille and the Last Post. He said even that wouldn’t really matter and that a violinist from the theatre in York would do.’

  No one had taken any notice of him and now, deeply troubled, he watched the sergeant of the escort twitching the Union Jack into place over the coffin, with a feeling that somehow he had let down his grandfather and, through him, his father, too.

  The red, white and blue of the flag looked garish in the grey light as the men of the 19th took their places behind the gun carriage, their rifles reversed. The officer moved in front of them, just ahead of the sergeant. He moved stiffly, his face pale and blank-looking.

  The high scream of the commands lifted Josh’s head and set the rooks cawing again. Curtains were drawn in the village for the passing of the cortège and doors had bows of black crêpe hanging from the knockers. Under the cold sky that silhouetted the hills above Brackdale, the carriages and cars took their place behind the marching men. Alongside his mother and grandmother, Josh felt the awfulness of the occasion, and tried to sit a little straighter.

  The sound of muffled drums and brass instruments beat against his mind as the notes of the Dead March, carried away on the wind, were lost in the wide spaces of the Dales. The village street was lined with people and among them he noticed a few old men standing stiffly at attention. Some of them were shabby-looking but they wore medals on their chests and he knew they were old Clutchers who had managed to make their way to Braxby for the occasion. As the coffin moved past, hats tumbled like a small wave running up the street.

  Balaclava! Shalipore! Ransi! The Wilderness! Yellow Tavern! Ashanti! Isandhlwana! Tel-el-Kebir! Chitral! Ulundi! Omdurman! Graafberg! The boy knew them all because he’d often sat in Tyas Ackroyd’s pantry and recited them, the names of the battles where one of the Ackroyds had always followed the Field Marshal. They sounded to him like signal guns from an age of vanished armies.

  He tried to imagine the old man as he had been at Balaclava but the only picture he could conjure up was as he had last seen him, stiff and old with veined cheeks and white whiskers wearing a rifle-green uniform that no longer fitted perfectly, accompanied by Tyas Ackroyd in a black jacket and green baize apron, as he had looked when he polished the silver.

  The Rector was standing by the church gate as the procession came to a halt.

  ‘I am the resurrection and the life saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live—’

  While the boy was trying to work out this apparent paradox, they slid the coffin from the gun carriage on to the shoulders of the bearers. It was done in silence, though the boy could see the sergeant’s lips moving and guessed he was whispering instructions.

  The lesson was read by Ellis Ackroyd, a pale shadow of the ruddy-faced soldier Josh had known. There was moisture in his eyes and Josh realised that it was not only for the Field Marshal but also for his son, whom Ellis had followed to war.

  The service over, by a miracle the bearer party got the coffin on to their shoulders again without dropping it and began to move out of the church to the graveside behind the Rector, stumbling between the crooked gravestones to the corner where all the other Goffs were buried, one who had fought at Waterloo, others who had been at Quebec and Wandewash and Fontenoy and other long-forgotten battles. Josh followed unwillingly. He dreaded the graveside, remembering from Tyas Ackroyd’s funeral the hollow sound as the handfuls of soil were tossed on to the coffin. The thought that the man in the grave would soon be covered by several feet of damp earth and that the grass and the flowers would eventually grow over him, and the trees wind their roots around him was all a little beyond him, but he was aware of a restriction in his chest and the effort he was making not to cry.

  As they stopped, Goffs, Suttons and Ackroyds, all standing in an untidy group, the sergeant in command of the firing party got his men lined up on either side of the grave. As they filed round, one of the young soldiers slipped on the damp earth and Josh was quite certain he was going to disappear into the open grave before the coffin. Pink-faced and embarrassed, he managed to reach his place with nothing more than a glare from the sergeant.

  As everybody moved forward, Josh sidled up with Aubrey to stand alongside Ellis Ackroyd and he noticed that with him were all the old men he’d seen in the village street, the straight gnarled-faced old men with big moustaches and medals on the breasts of their shabby suits. They were stiff, their faces like granite, and he tried to stand as still as they did as the coffin was lowered into the hole.

  They’d managed to get a trumpeter from the 16th Lancers, the Scarlet Lancers, and he was wearing full uniform, blue overalls, red jacket with blue plastron, and the Lancers’ shapka, licking and lapping
at his lips, preparing himself. As the Rector’s voice stopped, he lifted the silver instrument to his mouth.

  The high plaintive notes cut across the air like whiplashes. Josh knew the difference between a good trumpeter and a bad one because his grandfather had often explained, had even made him listen when they were sounding at the barracks. This trumpeter was a good one, as if the Lancer regiments had found their very best for a man who was a field marshal and, above all, had ridden at Balaclava.

  He remembered things his grandfather had said about the Last Post. Military funerals. Muffled drums and lonely graves in empty fields all over the world. Cavalrymen who’d gone ahead. Notes of loneliness and the exile of men far from home. As he fought to hold back the tears, he noticed that the old men alongside him were stiffer than ever, their faces bleak, their mouths taut as they listened. ‘A trumpet can play puck with your inside,’ his grandfather had once said, and as he saw a tear steal out of Ellis Ackroyd’s eye and trickle down his cheek, Josh knew that it was playing puck with at least one man there that day.

  When it was all over, Josh requested permission to remain behind. His mother gave him a curious look but she didn’t object. She knew how attached he had been to the old man and he was old enough now to know what he was doing. As the cars drove off and the gun carriage clattered away, he stood with Aubrey by the lych gate of the church, two boys uncomfortable in their best suits, their hair plastered down in spikes.

  There were things to do. Josh had thought about his problem for a long time before putting it to Aubrey. Somehow, he felt, the adults had betrayed the two dead men. It had not been as his grandfather had suggested. They had done the thing as they’d pleased and hadn’t bothered to consult him, the only one, he felt, who knew what the dead man had wanted.