Light Cavalry Action

by Max Hennessy

  ‘Did he come willingly?’

  ‘He didn’t seem to.’

  ‘What did Colonel Prideaux say?’

  ‘He told Mr. Murray-Hughes we were going out to have a go at Budenny and that he wanted him to accompany us. Mr. Murray-Hughes said he’d no intention of going back north and Colonel Prideaux said he was going to put up a show and that he wanted to make sure, in case anything happened to him, that people at home would know he’d tried. In the end, when Colonel Prideaux pointed out that the Stutz and the armoured cars were to follow the mounted men and that there was no danger of being cut off and left behind, Mr. Murray-Hughes agreed to accompany the regiment.’

  ‘How did he accompany the regiment?’

  ‘He rode the mare that always followed the Colonel’s bay.’

  ‘The horse known as “Crackpot,” which had once run away with him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know a lot about horses, I believe?’

  ‘I train them. They have been my whole life.’

  ‘I see. Was this horse’s behaviour normal?’

  Kuprin smiled. ‘Cavalry horses are very highly trained and used to their place in the line. In action, when they lose their rider, they will continue with the others, forcing their way into the line if necessary. Transport horses are the same. They get used to their place in the team and will take it instinctively when brought out from the stables for work. But horses are like human beings. Some are intelligent. Some are fools. This one was a fool. It had learned to follow the bay as a transport horse and seemed to feel that this was what it must always do. It could not be broken of the habit.’

  ‘Otherwise there was nothing wrong with it?’

  ‘Nothing. It was a very strong animal but it was quiet so long as it was near the bay.’

  ‘Why did Mr. Murray-Hughes use a horse instead of a motor car? It seems strange.’

  ‘He told me he felt it would be easier to get clear on a horse in case of trouble, especially as the roads were covered with snow. He seemed to think the cars would stick.’

  ‘Did they, in fact, stick?’

  Kuprin paused. ‘There were many times during the following days when I wished I were in a car,’ he said. ‘They managed far better than the transport animal I was mounted on.’

  There was no laughter. The story had reached a point beyond laughter now. Moyalan did not smile either. ‘Carry on, Mr. Kuprin,’ he said.

  * * *

  They gathered their equipment swiftly and clattered out of the barracks, watched by the remainder of the Russian troops. The Russians’ faces were blank and expressionless in the blue-white light that came from the snow.

  The sun, Kuprin noticed, was caught weakly among the green brush of undergrowth outside the town, weak and orange-coloured through the mist, and the faded weeds rustled in the breeze that had risen during the night and now licked at the hummocky ridges of the plains and rattled the twigs of the naked cherry trees. Ahead of them the immeasurable line of hills stretched ominously, eerily empty as they moved uphill away from the town, taking their time and allowing the horses to get their stride.

  Prideaux, his body draped with binoculars and map case, was obviously taking no chances with B and C Squadrons. He had placed half of A Squadron in the lead and the other half in the rear, with B and C Squadrons between. It was an embarrassing arrangement for Kuprin to explain to Nazhintzev and the other Russian officers because he knew exactly what it meant, and he knew that every man in B and C Squadrons also knew what it meant.

  The air was crisp and cold, and the breath of the horses and men hung heavily, purple-blue and whispy about their heads. A few peasants watched them leave, their eyes empty as always, and devoid of friendliness. A man lashing at a couple of foaming horses, in a cart whose wheel had slid into the ditch, stopped as they passed and waited, steaming in the brittle air, to watch them go. At the Vronskins’ gate, wrapped in furs, Katerina and the old woman were standing in the roadway.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Katerina called to Kuprin.

  ‘To meet Budenny. He’s not far away.’

  He saw her hands go to her throat and her quick glance at her aunt, then he was past. A little later, pulling his horse aside for a second to watch C Squadron coming up, he saw that away in the rear the high square shape of the Rolls had stopped outside the house and that she was talking to someone inside it. He presumed it was Higgins, and felt a strange sadness and a deep loneliness that he hadn’t ever felt before.

  Almost as though to humiliate them, Prideaux had placed the armoured cars well to the rear, where they were valueless as scouts, and as they left the road, the Rolls took up a position away on the right flank, with the Hispano on the left, and the Stutz, carrying a Lewis gun hurriedly mounted on an insecure tripod, in the centre behind. Although Prideaux didn’t know it, spread among the cars were the British prisoners who had been brought out of their cells by Higgins after Prideaux had led off with the first men of A Squadron on the road towards Elizabetskaya.

  * * *

  Twenty miles outside Nikolovssk, the territory began to change. The flat plains began to break up into rolling country full of shadowy valleys, through which the regiment moved, with its trumpeters in advance, just behind Prideaux. The pennant carried just to the rear of the Colonel was an uneasy speck of colour above the dark river of horsemen. The head of the column vanished into a hollow and emerged at the other side, with the slowly moving horses flowing in fours behind.

  Out on the flank, watching them pass, Kuprin stared at the Russians, as they trampled the snow to slush, listening to the clatter of arms and the squeaking of leather among the dark khaki-brown mass of the regiment. Their faces above the tossing heads of their mounts were flat, pale and expressionless. Their owners could doubtless remember the first advances into East Prussia in 1914, and the awful fiasco of defeat, with not enough weapons to go round. There were men among them who had seen desertion and, for all he knew, had murdered their own officers and would gladly do so again. Kuprin was full of uneasy imaginings, but he was committed to the flood of movement and there was no turning back.

  They halted that night in a small pine forest, a wretched night without fires, with the men huddled back-to-back trying to keep warm and the horses restless as they nibbled the sparse grass that had been uncovered for them. Nobody believed their discomfort would help much and there was a lot of muttering against Prideaux. But for the fact that the British squadron provided the sentries and had its horse lines split up in such a way that it was impossible for the Russians to desert, Kuprin suspected they would have halved their numbers before morning.

  They were on the move again at dawn, stiff and cold and grey-faced with lack of sleep, small clouds of breath hanging in the air as they yawned and struggled in the half-light to open tins of bully beef. There was little talking as they set off again, trotting out of the pine forest over the criss-crossing tracks of hares that had investigated them during the night. The morning was bitterly cold and the slight breeze made the horses skittish and bad-tempered.

  The armoured cars lay back in the rear, well out of sight, as though they annoyed Prideaux by their very presence, and on the only occasion when Higgins sent the Hispano bounding off across the white plain to investigate a couple of horsemen in the distance who turned out to be nothing more than a couple of exhausted refugees heading across country, Kuprin saw Prideaux turn to Finch and jerk a hand.

  ‘Tell Higgins to keep those damn motors where they belong,’ he snapped. He seemed wound up taut in his excitement, like a spring.

  Kuprin felt a shudder creep over him as he heard the words. The tide of ordained calamity seemed to be rising around him.

  They came to a small stream, not yet frozen over, a clear, pebbly-bottomed trickle black against the snow, and moved along its bank. Above, the clouds split and showed a shred of blue sky, and the sun, peering through, made the snow sparkle in a golden sheen and tinted the tufts of withered grass with gold.
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br />   They were moving blindly, and Kuprin had no idea where they were going because Prideaux hadn’t told them, and he felt vaguely that Prideaux didn’t know either. All he was doing was making a gesture, the sort of gesture that a man of violent passions enjoys making. He sat his mount beside the track, with Finch near him, nervous and ill-at-ease, and Murray-Hughes, on the ubiquitous grey, always just behind him because that was the only place the grey would stay without becoming restive. Prideaux’s face was blank, but Murray-Hughes was constantly watching the folds of the land around them, as though in spite of the scouts that Prideaux had placed out on the slopes, he was afraid they were going to be trapped.

  Away in the distance of the steppe was the cold serenity of the hills, bare of trees and grass and empty of colour, and around them the drab rocks and stunted trees and patchy scrub. The stony track they were following seemed to run for miles into the distance, but there was nothing else on it but themselves, and no other sound but the creak of harness and the jingle of equipment. All around them, the steppe was a waste of deathlike stillness.

  They halted eventually alongside another clump of pines. There was even a little grazing near the trees, which seemed to have kept off the snow, and the regiment dismounted stiffly, with the armoured cars still waiting on the flanks, and prepared a meal of bully beef and tea. The excitement of departure had vanished now and a heavy gloom seemed to have settled over the regiment, in spite of the unexpected fragment of blue sky over their heads.

  A trumpet called the officers towards where Prideaux was sitting on a fallen bough, the dry snow squeaking under their boots as they walked. It was not a very cheerful gathering. The British officers were uneasy and the Russian officers, Kuprin noticed, were frankly anxious.

  Prideaux also seemed to have been touched by the prevailing mood of heaviness. The sublime headlong self-confidence of the previous day had vanished, and he seemed with a strange air of self-justification to be placating them, as though he felt he needed them on his side.

  They were across the road to Nikolovssk, he explained, and on the only route that Budenny could take if he were making a direct approach to the town. And as the method at the moment seemed to be to swallow up towns as fast as possible in an effort to throw the White armies into confusion, this seemed his most likely move.

  ‘We’re across their path,’ he said slowly, Murray-Hughes jotting down notes as he spoke. ‘They can’t pass without riding over us. However, I don’t expect them to be in strength – not at this stage – and I hope to be able to send them back with bloody noses.’

  Kuprin translated for the Russian officers, and Prideaux lifted his eyes to the silent circle of men.

  ‘Any comments?’ he asked, as though he were appealing to them to feel the same exaltation of spirit he felt himself.

  Yurevski, one of the Russians, made a half-hearted protest. He couldn’t trust his men, he said. They were restless and he felt they were looking for a chance to bolt. He would have felt safer with them in the Slavska Barracks.

  Prideaux frowned. ‘Tell him,’ he told Kuprin, ‘that we didn’t come out here and train this regiment for it to remain tamely in the Slavska Barracks.’

  Yurevski seemed determined not to let his protest go unnoticed. ‘I already have four lame horses,’ he pointed out.

  ‘It seems to me,’ Prideaux said, as Kuprin translated, ‘that four lame horses and a dislike of his men aren’t enough reason for him to return to the Slavska Barracks. I expect to come up with Budenny’s people before long. Doubtless that’ll give him a few other things to think about.’

  Kuprin translated unhappily, knowing just what Yurevski was feeling. If any action they took ended in defeat, it would mean certain death for the Russian officers, not merely retreat.

  Prideaux looked round, then he stood up and waved them away. Snow was kicked over the single fire that had been started, and the stamping, arm-swinging men began to mount again, their breath hanging on the frozen air.

  Uneven ground spread in front of them as they moved away from the clump of trees on the river bank. The shred of blue had vanished as the clouds gathered again under the nagging breeze that flirted the freezing snow into little whirls. The sky was leaden again, dark against the icy whiteness of the plain, where the black line of the stream and the dark patch of trees stood out starkly like silhouettes, unearthly in the silence.

  It was as they clattered across the stream by a wooden bridge that the first of the scouts came in. Prideaux’s arm went up and the column stopped, and Kuprin heard the scout talking in a high excited voice.

  ‘Tracks, sir,’ he was saying. ‘Horses’ tracks. At first there were only a few. But there are more now.’

  ‘A troop?’ Prideaux asked. ‘A squadron? A regiment? Come on, man, give me an idea!’

  ‘Oh, no, sir. Outpost, I’d say.’

  Prideaux seemed tense and nervous as he drew rein and turned to Kuprin. ‘Inform B and C Squadrons to close up,’ he said. ‘Then tell Captain Potter to bring the rear half of A up closer.’

  As Kuprin moved back, he saw Potter’s pale eyes had narrowed. The column of horses and men had already begun to tighten their formation. ‘I think, Willie,’ he said, ‘the Colonel is beginning to be afraid.’

  Potter’s head turned. He was chewing at the strap of his cap which he had pulled down under his chin. Though he looked anxious, there was no trace of nervousness.

  ‘Don’t think so,’ he said calmly. ‘Not afraid. But, by the Lord Harry, I think he’s beginning to be worried that he’s done the wrong thing.’

  * * *

  Kirkham started off his cross-examination of Kuprin with a bluster. ‘In your evidence,’ he said loudly, ‘you make no reference to the other troops who were engaged in this action that was about to take place.’

  Kuprin shrugged. ‘There were no other troops,’ he said.

  Kirkham frowned. ‘Do you mean to suggest that this one regiment of cavalry were the only troops involved?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  Kirkham tapped a book that lay open on the table before him. ‘I have here Mr. Murray-Hughes’ book,’ he said. ‘It makes it quite clear that other troops were involved. Names are quite clearly mentioned.’ He glanced at the book. ‘I quote,’ he went on. ‘“In Nikolovssk were the Kezintzi Battalion, the Dimokiev Battalion, the 103rd Karazounin Infantry Regiment, the Namisov Engineers.’”

  While he was reading, Higgins slipped a note to Moyalan. ‘They weren’t there,’ it said.

  Moyalan glanced at him. The note entirely reflected his personality. It was quiet and unruffled and wasted no words. He pushed it back. On it, he had scribbled in red ink, ‘Take the strain. We’ve found Finch.’

  Higgins glanced at him and Moyalan gave him a sidelong smile.

  Kirkham was still reciting names as Moyalan got to his feet at last. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘if I may point out to the court, the passage referred to mentions these troops as being in Nikolovssk or the Slavska Barracks and, while references to them are continually being made in the matter concerning the fight, there is actually not one single direct reference to them being present at Dankoi or even of them ever leaving Nikolovssk.’

  Kirkham blustered. ‘If I may show you the passage, my lord…’

  Godliman looked up. ‘I have a copy of the book here, Sir Gordon,’ he pointed out mildly. ‘And I have to agree with Mr. Moyalan. There is no direct reference to them taking part. This does not, of course, mean that they were not there and did not take part. It may simply be a loose form of writing. It might well be the author’s intention to suggest that they were there. But he does not say so. The jury will be given a chance to see the book, of course, and doubtless you will be able to address them on the matter.’

  Kirkham bowed and turned again to Kuprin. ‘Very well,’ he said, his manner a little subdued. ‘Let’s put it this way: Are you suggesting that there were no other troops on the way to Dankoi but the Kouragine Regiment of Hussars?’

  K
uprin nodded. ‘I am,’ he said firmly.

  ‘Then what about the Dimitriev Infantry Regiment from the Slavska Barracks? What about the engineers? What about the artillery? What about the infantry battalions from Nikolovssk – the Kezintzi and the Dimokiev and the Karazounin Battalions?’

  Kuprin shrugged. ‘When I had gone into the town for the signals,’ he said, ‘I had seen the men of these battalions. They were a rabble, and useless as soldiers. They never left the town. The engineers remained in the Slavska Barracks, as also did the artillerymen. The breeches of their guns had been buried where they could not find them. The Colonel of the Dimitriev Regiment, as we had expected, had informed us that there wasn’t the slightest chance of his men obeying any order to move against the Bolsheviks, and they also remained in the barracks.’

  Kirkham’s bluster grew as he tried hard to shake Kuprin’s evidence, but the little man with the grey hair refused to budge from what he’d said, like Hardacre and the others rigid with a sort of suppressed indignation that could not be silenced. As Kirkham sat down, Moyalan rose again.

  ‘Mr. Kuprin,’ he said quietly. ‘How many men, in fact, made the journey from Nikolovssk towards Dankoi?’

  ‘About six hundred, I think.’

  ‘And how many of them were British?’

  ‘About two hundred, including the men in the cars.’

  ‘So that in the British squadron there were available around one hundred and eighty or one hundred and ninety mounted men?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  Moyalan nodded. ‘Thank you. That is all.’

  4

  Potter – 1

  Potter’s strange bonelessness was more pronounced than ever as he approached the witness box the following day. He had not been able to resist seeing Finch served with his subpoena. As Moyalan’s clerk had handed over the document, Finch’s face had reddened and he had blustered as he had thought it was from his wife’s solicitors, then as Moyalan’s clerk had explained, his cheeks had sagged and gone grey. Potter had not dared to wait to see what happened, but Finch, he noticed, had looked an old man.