by Max Hennessy
‘Better get those pipes out,’ Brosy said, heaving at his reins. ‘Sergeant-Major Holstead!’
‘Leave ’em, leave ’em,’ Colby snapped. ‘They might be dead soon. If it makes dying easier, then for God’s sake let ’em smoke.’
‘Won’t someone complain?’
‘I’m in command here!’ Colby spoke sharply, suddenly sure of himself. His father had always taught him that the man who ran the circus held the whip.
Brosy stared at him, but he didn’t argue and waved Sergeant-Major Holstead away as he cantered up and began to do elaborate things with his sabre in salute.
The staff-officers seemed to be arguing even more furiously now. The divisional commander was looking bewildered and Colby saw Nolan point down the valley again.
‘He’s got it wrong, surely to God,’ Brosy said.
Colby didn’t answer. His mouth was as dry as if it were filled with ashes and he tried to imagine what it would be like to be dead. Heaven, he thought, with all those angels floating about singing with upraised eyes! It seemed a boring prospect, but the idea of darkness, which was the only alternative, seemed even worse.
Perhaps it would be Brosy who would be killed, he thought, feeling better. Then even that thought troubled him. Brosy and he had been at school together, smoking, drinking, swearing and avoiding work whenever possible. They had spent holidays together, fished together, even joined the regiment together, and, in one of the mad moments of peacetime when Colonel Markham had felt his men needed some knowledge of war, had practiced the rescue of wounded together, so that it had been Brosy Colby placed ‘unconscious’ across the saddle of a led horse and allowed to slide off on to his head so that he ended up with a week in bed with concussion.
In his bewilderment and trepidation, his dislike for his missing superior officer increased rapidly. The responsibility he’d been handed was just too much for someone of his age and experience. But Claude Cosgro had never been known as a man of much sensitivity or even sense, any more than his father, while his younger brother, Aubrey, was said to be even worse. The Cosgros seemed to come in bunches of a dozen, with nothing to choose between them.
The low murmur of voices behind him told him that his men were well aware of what lay ahead. Nolan, obviously not intending to miss anything, had taken up a position now in front of the left squadron of the 17th Lancers and the brigadier-general was cantering his horse across the front of his brigade. He looked flushed and excited and, as he passed, Colby lifted his sword in salute.
‘My lord,’ he said. ‘There are only a few of us but I imagine you’ll be able to use us.’
Lord Cardigan stared at him with his blue pop eyes: he had a reputation as a womaniser, but his whiskers, Colby noted, were beginning to show grey and he looked old and ill.
‘Place yourselves in the middle of the first line,’ he said. ‘On the right of the 17th and the left of the 13th. Might as well have all the lancers together.’
As he rode off, upright and stiff, more men, seeing action impending, galloped up from their different duties about the field and down at the port. The 19th drew rein alongside the sombre block of the 17th – the Death or Glory boys, they called themselves; the Dogs’ Dinners they were known to everybody else from the skull and crossbones on their lance caps. Morris, the officer in command, was still wearing the frock coat of a staff officer, because he had taken over only the night before when the senior officer of the regiment had gone down with cholera.
‘With your permission, sir,’ Colby said, ‘we’ll join you.’
Morris turned, frowning. ‘We’ll be glad of you,’ he growled. ‘See you keep your line.’
Cardigan had moved forward now to a point two horses’ lengths in front of his staff and five lengths in front of the right squadron of the 17th, almost in front of Colby. He looked calmer now than he ever normally looked on parade, stern, soldierly, and upright as a steeple, his long military seat perfect. He wore the full uniform of the 11th Hussars, his old regiment, but his pelisse was not slung like everybody else’s – it was worn like a patrol jacket, its front a blaze of gold, that accentuated his slim waist.
As the last shouts of the troop officers died away, a strange hush fell over the field. Neither gun nor musket spoke on either side as they settled themselves in their saddles and fidgeted nervously with their equipment, two long lines of horsemen, first the 13th Light Dragoons, then the 17th Lancers with the small knot of the 19th between them, and finally Cardigan’s own regiment, the 11th Hussars, known as the Cherrybums from their red trousers. Behind them were the 4th Light Dragoons and the 8th Hussars, and behind them still, the Heavy Brigade, in three lines, with the divisional commander well in front where he could maintain control of both his brigades.
Fishing out his watch, Colby glanced at it. It was eleven-twenty. It seemed a particularly ominous time.
Cardigan’s hoarse strong voice came over the shuffle and snort of horses and the clink of bits. ‘The brigade will advance! First squadron of the 17th Lancers direct.’ He turned his head towards his trumpet-major who jerked at his instrument with an arm decorated with four upside-down stripes under crossed trumpets. Trumpeter Sparks behind Colby began to lick and lap his lips in anticipation.
‘Sound the Advance!’
The trumpet’s notes shrilled sweetly, to be taken up by the squadrons behind. Orders were called, harsh in a curious silence that managed to exist beyond the jingle of equipment, as if everybody was holding his breath. Over it Colby could hear Holstead’s rasping voice.
‘Git yerself in line, do!’ he was snarling at some nervous trooper. ‘And sit yer mount proper. I could read the bleeding Times between yer legs.’
Colby caught Ackroyd’s eye and Ackroyd gave him a reassuring grin, as his grandfather must have given Colby’s father on that muddy June day nearly forty years before in Belgium.
‘19th Lancers–!’
Colby’s voice seemed to have dried up and, as his command came out as a croak, Cardigan’s head jerked round.
‘Not yet, damn you!’ he snarled. ‘Wait for the order!’
Humiliated enough for his fear momentarily to disperse, Colby looked from the corner of his eye at his men. Knowing more about it than he did, they had been slow to respond, and not one lance butt had been jerked from its bucket by the right stirrup. Blushing, facing front again, he saw that Cardigan had wheeled his horse to face the dark mass at the end of the valley. Colby swallowed. He had a stone in his throat and a vacuum in his stomach. He glanced across at Brosy and it was obvious in the quick nervous smile he received that the same thoughts had occurred to Brosy, too.
Feeling he wasn’t very far from meeting his Maker, he tried to think noble thoughts. What things, his frantic mind asked, have I left undone that I ought to have done? What have I done, apart from thinking of Georgina Markham, that I ought not to have done? Let me come out of this one alive, he prayed. He had never had a woman and he desperately wanted to live to go home and claim Georgy Markham as his prize.
‘Please God,’ he murmured. ‘Take care of my mother and father, and my sister Harriet. And, while you’re at it, please keep an eye on yours truly. There aren’t any more Goffs after me.’
Two
‘Pride, discipline and tradition,’ Colby’s father had often said, ‘are what carry a regiment into battle. And pride, discipline and tradition are what bring it out again.’
Because Colby had never before seen them manifested, he hadn’t the foggiest idea what his father had meant and they had remained for him nothing but meaningless abstracts. Now, for the first time in his life, with his heart thumping, his blood thickening and crawling within him, he saw exactly what they stood for.
As he clutched his sabre, a red bandanna twisted round the hilt and round his hand, his mouth felt like sandpaper and his eyes prickled painfully. No man, unless he were an idiot, could advance to what looked very much like certain death without fear twisting his vitals. Yet, as the Walk March sounded, not
a man moved from the line, and it was then that it occurred to him that they were held there not through a desire for glory or a wish to get at the enemy, but simply because nobody else had moved and because the regiment had never turned tail in its history and couldn’t possibly do so now.
He looked sideways at his men. They sat with lances still at the Carry, the nine-foot bamboo shafts vertical, the red and green pennants fluttering, the burnished barbs flashing in the sunshine. It was impossible to tell what they were thinking because their expressions were blank and they seemed to show no emotion whatsoever. But, because his colonel had not measured up to the moment and his squadron officer was still skulking in Balaclava, they were following him – him, Colby William Rollo Goff, the most useless officer in the brigade – simply because he had ordered them to. He felt overcome with pride and remarkably close to tears.
He glanced down at himself. He was thinner than usual, not so well-fed, not so clean as he liked to be and knew he should be. The rifle green of his uniform was stained, the red facings weathered, the gold epaulettes tarnished. His overalls with their double gold stripe were muddy and he could feel a chill round his kidneys where his tunic, following the fashion of military millinery in recent years, failed to cover his middle properly. The campaign hadn’t helped, and his Wellington boots were unpolished because nobody had any polish, and the dyed black-cock’s plumes in his lance cap had long since been removed from the gold-bullion rosette that normally held them. In a situation where they were overworked and outnumbered, spit and polish took too much time.
As Ackroyd edged into position behind him, Colby’s mount snorted as if she sensed something was about to happen. She was shivering with excitement, sidling and fussing, with flickering ears and tail tightly tucked in. She was a lively mare who had been foaled on the Home Farm at Braxby and named Bess after his mother because, his father claimed, ‘she had the same sweet temper but was just as bloody stubborn when she wanted to be.’ She was the only survivor of the string of three he’d embarked in England, because the transport had caught fire in Malta and his second mount had died with fifty-odd others, while his bât horse had been left behind at Varna in Bulgaria at the other side of the Black Sea to come on afterwards. Her coat was rough and staring and, because something had gone wrong with the Commissariat and the bales of hay were sour and weighted with rubbish, she was so thin her saddle was in danger of sliding round her belly or even over her ears.
As the Brigade moved forward, the lines crossed a patch of ploughed land that disturbed the formation a little, but the silence remained, broken only by the jingling of curb chains and bits, the snorting of horses, and the low grumble of the iron-shod hooves. Despite the depletion of disease and death, the Light Brigade made a brave show, the finest horsemen in Europe, drilled and disciplined to perfection. Even Cardigan made a bold figure, stiff-backed, his sword at the slope, as tall and upright in the saddle as a church.
As the pace quickened, the trumpets shrilled again and the walk became a trot. The brigade looked minute in the wide valley. The silence was intense, and it seemed to Colby that he could hear the laboured breathing of every restive horse, the jingle of every bit, the slap of every scabbard. They had moved about two hundred yards, every man in his place, three lines of horsemen now as the 11th dropped back a little, three lines of nodding heads in a splendid show of force, and it seemed almost as if the Russians weren’t going to try to stop them, as if they intended simply to turn tail and bolt as they had before the Heavy Brigade earlier in the morning. But then the men on the slopes on either side came abruptly to life and the riflemen behind every bush and rock flanking their path began to pour a withering fusillade of fire down on them.
Wincing in the leaden sleet, forcing himself to sit upright in the saddle, Colby saw a movement on his right and, turning his head, saw that Nolan, the aide-de-camp, had spurred his horse forward and appeared to be urging them on from their steady controlled pace. His horse, a trooper marked with the number of the 13th, had left the front files and he was galloping forward, waving his sword. He even seemed to be smiling, and deciding that the excitement had gone to his head, it occurred to Colby that Cardigan was not the man to allow this sort of behaviour and that the aide would catch pepper when the thing was over – if any of them lived to see it over!
Morris, of the 17th, who was a friend of Nolan’s, was shouting across the heads of his men at the aide, telling him to return to his place. ‘That won’t do,’ he was calling. ‘We’ve a long way to go!’
The aide didn’t look back. Then, as he began to move up in line with the brigade commander, the guns on the heights opened fire and a shell whirred over Colby’s head with a rushing sound to explode with a crash and envelope Nolan with flame and black smoke. As the smoke cleared and the flying clods of earth stopped rolling, Colby saw that the aide’s body had twisted in a spasm of agony in the saddle, his bridle arm and knees curling together to clutch convulsively at his torn chest so that his horse wheeled and swerved out of line, almost colliding with one of the 13th advancing just behind. Then it began to bolt rearwards, the gold lace and blue cloth of the rider’s uniform burned and scorched round the gaping wound, his face blackened by the smoke. His sword gone but his arm still held high in the air, he was already swaying in the saddle, an unearthly shriek coming from his throat as his lungs collapsed, then he disappeared through the ranks of the 13th to fall from the saddle and sprawl in the grass, his dark hair stirred by the breeze.
The incident was a dramatic and horrifying start to the attack and even seemed to contain a kind of awful justice. But it was also unsettling and frightening, especially as every one of the Russian guns and every man ranged on three sides of the advancing horsemen was now pouring in a murderous storm of fire, filling the shallow bowl of the long valley with flame, smoke, flying clods of earth and puffs of dust that were slashed through by red-hot splinters of metal.
Colby’s breath seemed to stick in his throat and his heart was thundering in his chest. The order ‘Draw swords’ was greeted with a cheer as the blades came up and the lances shifted to the Guard. Cardigan, riding in front, didn’t seem to hear, still staring down the valley, his back straight, his seat as unbending as ever as he rode into the increasing smoke.
A few paces behind him, Colby was struggling to hold his mare to the pace Cardigan was setting. But she was worried by the noise and almost out of control, and having already once been reprimanded, he was terrified of what Cardigan would say if he found Colby Goff charging up alongside him like the field approaching the first fence at a point-to-point. As the thoughts raced through his brain like frightened mice, he heard Ackroyd just behind him swearing in a steady monotone like a litany, one oath, it seemed, to every stride of the horse.
‘Shut up, Tyas,’ Colby snapped, taking out his anxiety on the orderly. ‘And make sure you keep your dressing.’
Battery after battery and rank after rank of riflemen were pouring in shot, shell and bullets now at point-blank range. A man cried out and vanished from the saddle, then a horse crashed to the ground, its rider rolling over and over like a ball. The pace remained steady, but then a shell brought down a whole knot of horsemen in a cloud of dust and smoke, from the centre of which a sabre spun upwards end-over-end and a dragoon’s shako bounced away until it was trodden down by a flying hoof, and the speed began to increase.
‘Get up close to your ’orse,’ Sergeant-Major Holstead yelled to a fallen trooper, and Colby saw the running man dive for the shelter of a dead animal.
Cardigan showed no alarm. ‘Steady there, Morris,’ he called towards the 17th, then, glancing to his left, he saw Colby looking scared not far from his elbow.
‘Steady there, boy,’ he warned in a voice that for once wasn’t full of irascibility. ‘Watch your dressing.’
For most of the campaign, it had been Colby’s view that his brigadier had no more skill than the average corporal but, at that moment, he would have followed him anywhere, because he
seemed unafraid and understanding, and knew exactly what he was doing, his deep sonorous voice coming again and again. ‘Steady, 17th! Steady, 19th! Close up and keep your dressing!’
Through the inferno of smoke from the bursting shells, Colby saw the battery at the end of the valley glare red with the flame from a dozen mouths then vanish in the whirl of smoke as the shells cut down more men and horses like a sickle through grass. As the smoke cleared, he became aware of a new phenomenon. The line was extending to clear the fallen animals, then closing again to the shouts of NCOs and officers – ‘Close in! Close in to the centre!’ – opening and shutting like a huge concertina.
It seemed to Colby as if they’d been riding down the valley for hours. The bonds of discipline still held, however, and only the terrified horses forced the pace.
There was a curious exhilaration, too, beneath the fear. The thunder of hooves, the yells, the crashing of explosions was like a dreadful nightmare that would end eventually to leave him shaking and sweating with terror, but at that moment, also as if in a nightmare, he was being swept along on a high pitch of excitement.
The inner squadron of the 17th had broken into a canter now. The 19th’s rear rank followed suit and, as the pace quickened, some of the stronger pullers pushed to the front. Forced to quicken his own pace to keep ahead, Colby spurred the mare to keep his distance, but as he drew level with Cardigan, an arm shot out and waved him back irritably.
‘Get back, boy, blast you,’ Cardigan snarled. ‘Don’t ride in front of your brigade commander!’
But it was impossible to hold the horses now and one after another they were breaking into a headlong gallop, and even Cardigan was forced to let his charger have its head to avoid being ridden down.
