Light Cavalry Action

by Max Hennessy

Potter glanced upwards towards the gallery. Among the flowered hats he could see Danny’s face, set and tense.

  ‘It was against all the usages of war,’ he said soberly. ‘From 1914 onwards, all intelligent officers in the line had been aware that horsed cavalry had no hope against massed infantry fire, let alone against machine guns.’

  Moyalan nodded. ‘Please continue, Colonel,’ he said slowly. ‘What happened next?’

  * * *

  From the corner of his eye, Potter saw more horses go down, then to his surprise, he heard a gun rattling away out on his right and realised that the Rolls was moving along with the line, its Vickers gun firing forward, and he saw the men round the machine gun at the right of the valley throw up their arms and fall.

  The gun on the other flank had started to come into action by now, however, a small blue flame spitting from the shadowy bulk of a group of men, and Potter hoped that Higgins had brought up the Hispano as well.

  Murray-Hughes’ grey was pressing into the centre in front of the line now, towards its normal position behind Prideaux’s bay, with Murray-Hughes still clinging to the saddle and yelling with fright, and away ahead, apparently unmoved by the firing, Prideaux was still advancing, his eyes fixed rigidly forward, as though quite indifferent to the fate of the men behind him, his gaze on a distant goal of glory only he could see.

  ‘What damn’ good will it do?’ Potter was asking himself. ‘All we can do when we get there is turn round and come back.’

  He was gripping his sabre with his thumb pressing the back of the handle in line with the blade, alert to grip more firmly at the awful moment of impact. The hoofs around him beat a steady rhythm. The horses were getting out of control now, excited by the noise and movement around them. The pace had quickened and they were almost at a gallop, the reins loose, the horses’ rumps bunching together, each man rising in the saddle as they approached the bottom of the valley.

  Potter thrust his sword in front of him, by the horse’s head. ‘Give points,’ he shouted. ‘Give points!’

  Only the straight-arm engage could carry them through alive, the sheer momentum of the horse’s run plunging the blade straight home and carrying its rider clear at the other side.

  But there were riderless horses breaking away across the valley now, their stirrups swinging, then Potter, half-blinded by the snow, saw his horse’s head go down and the ground heaved up dizzily towards him. Even as he fell, he realised he was shouting bitter imprecations against Prideaux, then the ground hit him in the face and he was only faintly aware of the thunder of hooves.

  When he lifted his head, the line had swept past him.

  * * *

  A Squadron was a mere handful of scattered men now, drawn together by the instinct to support each other. The valley was dotted with dead and dying horses and riders, and the snow, which had looked so smooth and fresh when they had first swept over it, was scarred by the passage of hooves.

  Potter climbed slowly to his feet, blinking the snow from his eyes and spitting out fragments of broken cigar as he tried to get his breath back. He was still swearing bitterly, he noticed; then he saw that on the flanks and following the line down the slope were the Rolls and the Hispano. The Stutz was moving more slowly, its engine backfiring heavily, as though it were giving trouble, and he could see MacAdoo’s head above the wheel, craning forward towards the engine. Ahead, there was a confused tangle of dark shapes in the growing dusk and he could hear shots and shouting.

  As he recovered his breath he saw that out on the flanks, sitting their horses in untidy groups like spectators at a hunt, the two Russian squadrons had pulled away and were waiting on a little rise.

  His sword was bent and useless and he threw it away. His horse was still alive but both its front legs were broken by bullets, and its rear hooves skittered noisily on a patch of stone. As he approached, it lifted its head and he drew his revolver and shot it unemotionally, then he pulled the carbine from the saddle bucket and worked the bolt.

  As he looked up, he saw a solitary figure on a horse approaching him from the direction of the firing. It moved up the valley, as though in a daze, heading towards the rocks at the top from where they had started. It wore no cap and there was blood on its face and in its hair.

  It was Prideaux and he passed Potter as though he were blind. His head turned neither to right nor left and he trotted slowly up the valley, seeing nothing, and Potter realised that, having reached the bottom of the valley, he too had at last understood that they could serve no useful purpose there.

  ‘Hope you get a bloody knighthood for this,’ Potter shouted after him, but Prideaux continued his slow unheeding passage up the slope without even turning his head.

  Potter turned round again and stared down the valley where he could now see one or two horsemen emerging from the deepening dusk round the fight. The Russian machine guns had both been silenced, and he could see the three cars moving about, blue flames coming from their guns as they were fired in short sharp bursts. Then as he walked slowly down the hill, he saw the horsemen returning, in ones and twos, followed by a few stumbling figures on foot. One of the troopers, his face smeared with blood but still mounted, approached him leading a limping horse.

  ‘’Ere y’are, Mr. Potter, sir,’ he said. ‘Better ’ave this one. It don’t seem to belong to nobody.’

  Potter looked up gratefully and swung to the saddle. ‘You all right?’ he asked, and the trooper grinned.

  ‘Nothing much, sir,’ he said. ‘It was the ’orse what got it, not me. I hit me nose when I landed. It’s broken, I think.’ He jerked his sword uneasily down the slope. ‘We goin’ down there, sir?’

  Potter nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Better see what we can do. And throw away that bloody toothpick, for God’s sake. Use your carbine.’

  They moved hurriedly down the slope into the whining bullets to meet the first of the returning men. As they saw Potter, they gathered round him, all of them panting and some of them wounded and dazed. One of them had been kicked in the chest and as he was helped along he was breathing agonisedly in terrible snoring whispers, as though choking in his own blood, while with every breath his shattered ribs collapsed horribly.

  ‘For God’s sake, sir,’ the man supporting him said. ‘What the ’ell did we go and do a soft-brained thing like that for?’

  Potter re-formed those who were still mounted and moved down the slope with them and, as the stumbling figures approached, he formed a pathetic screen between them and the drifting dark shapes at the foot of the valley. Then someone shouted and pointed.

  ‘Sir, for Christ’s sake, look! They’re bringing up more men!’

  Two or three troops of horsemen were approaching them at a gallop over the lip of the valley, reinforcements which had been out of sight beyond the dip. There were a few scattered shots in their direction and one of Potter’s men fell from the saddle. Potter gripped his carbine tighter and kicked his horse to a trot between the Russians and the dismounted men. Then he saw the dark square shape of one of the cars roaring down the slope across their front, its machine gun rattling. Horses fell and saddles emptied, then the Bolsheviks swung round and disappeared again into the valley.

  ‘Thank God for the motors,’ the trooper with the broken nose said.

  The dismounted men were escaping up the valley now towards the little knot gathering round Prideaux against the darkening skyline. A few more horsemen approached out of the growing dusk, moving slowly on blown horses, and behind them, covering their retreat, came the Rolls, moving backwards and forwards, its gun firing short bursts into the groups of cavalrymen which kept appearing along the lip of the valley. As they approached, Potter saw Finch among them, wild-eyed and exhausted-looking.

  ‘Where’s the Colonel?’ he demanded.

  ‘Up there.’ Potter jerked his hand. ‘Wondering what to do next.’

  The Rolls approached and Higgins’ head appeared.

  ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume,’ Potter said.


  There was a man clinging to the mudguard, his leg stiff and bloody. Inside, another man, whom Potter recognised as Packer, lay with his head bouncing up and down as the car moved. Thick black blood oozed over the feet of the machine gunner and Potter saw Packer’s face was carved up by sabre slashes, his teeth laid bare and one bulging eye floating in a shattered socket.

  ‘Here!’ Potter slid from the saddle and called to the man on the mudguard. ‘You get aboard here. I’ll take your place.’

  He pushed the injured man into the saddle and Higgins turned to Finch, who seemed too dazed to know what he was doing.

  ‘Get these men up to the Colonel,’ he said sharply. ‘We’ll pick up the stragglers.’

  Nobody spoke as the Rolls edged down into the murk again. Bullets were still winging about the valley but the noise had died down abruptly, and the cries of the wounded were deadened by the falling snow. They were all full of dread and blasted hope that was worse than fear.

  ‘How many?’ Potter asked after a while, clinging to the windscreen with frozen fingers. ‘How many do you think we lost?’

  ‘Over a hundred at the moment.’ Higgins’ face in the dying light was strained and sombre. ‘But I expect, by the time we’ve rounded everybody up, we’ll find it’s less than that.’

  After a while, they came across the Stutz. It was motionless and, with Hardacre manning the Lewis gun, MacAdoo had lifted the bonnet and had his head half-underneath the engine, swearing. There was a smell of burning.

  ‘Leave it,’ Higgins said shortly. ‘Bring the Lewis and get aboard.’

  While they were still dismantling the gun, the Hispano came up, its Lewis pointing rearwards down the valley. Sergeant-Major Busby’s face was grim and there were several wounded men lying in the back round the feet of the gunner. MacAdoo’s gun was thrown aboard and they discussed briefly the best thing to do as they clustered round the useless Stutz.

  ‘Better get these men back to Nikolovssk,’ Higgins suggested to Potter. ‘We’ll stay and search for more stragglers.’ Potter nodded and climbed aboard the Hispano as Busby revved the engine.

  ‘When you’ve got rid of ’em,’ Higgins called as the Rolls began to move away, ‘load up with petrol and come back. I’ll keep Hardacre with me, out of Prideaux’s way.’

  When Potter reached the top of the hill, the men there were sitting slumped on limping mounts, their faces ugly with defeat, the dismounted men muttering angrily. A few of them lifted their heads as the Hispano roared by with its load of wounded, and one or two waved.

  ‘It was a bloody waste, sir,’ Busby growled in a sombre epitaph to the charge as they rumbled past. ‘They did nothing that the motors couldn’t have done quicker and better.’

  5

  Potter – 2

  Moyalan laid down his papers and took a drink of water. So far he had hardly used his junior counsel but had done all the work himself, and though his action, slow and methodical, seemed one of exhaustion, in fact it was a deliberate manoeuvre to let the court digest the facts about the charge before continuing.

  The gallery waited almost breathlessly, and the feeling of impatience was obvious. The tension had mounted as the story had advanced, and there was no hint of laughter now, because it was clear to everyone in court that for those taking part there had been only pain.

  Potter waited for Moyalan, seeming as he stood in the witness box to be tremendously tall. There was a shuffle of urgency as Moyalan dabbed at his mouth with his handkerchief and picked up his papers again, and once more there was that familiar surge in the gallery as everyone leaned forward, determined not to miss a single word.

  ‘Let us continue, Colonel Potter,’ Moyalan said, and the sense of relief in the court came out in an audible sigh.

  Potter gave a thin smile, waiting, and Moyalan gestured.

  ‘You now proceeded back to Nikolovssk, Colonel Potter?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you not report to Colonel Prideaux?’

  ‘No. He didn’t seem to know what was happening. He seemed dazed.’

  ‘Because of his wounds?’

  ‘Not entirely. Shock, I thought.’

  ‘Did he appear to be – to use the words of our medical witness once more – suffering from “a sense of desperate failure and frustration”?’

  ‘More than likely. Think he’d expected to pull something off and it hadn’t worked out.’ Potter paused. ‘Must have been in quite a lot of pain, too,’ he added.

  ‘Please go on. Tell the court about your return to Nikolovssk.’

  * * *

  The Hispano covered the thirty-odd miles to the town in three hours, with the wind tearing at scudding clouds that were as black as soot and sending the snow whirling in insane flurries to shroud the distance. Long before they arrived, flames in the sky told them that the Communists had taken over already.

  The Slavska Barracks were echoing with emptiness, everything breakable within reach smashed, and the BRITMIS sign outside the gate full of bullet holes. Windows were gaping and the plaster was marked where rifles had been discharged. The body of the old colonel of the Dimitriev Regiment lay in the entrance to the guardroom, the unmelted snow on his cheeks, his pince nez still incredibly on his nose and two frozen tears of pain and terror in the corners of his eyes behind them, and there were two or three more bodies sprawled in the square, one of them a civilian in a moth-eaten fur cap and a greasy sheepskin coat. The cells were empty.

  ‘Thank God we got Hardacre out before we left,’ Potter said.

  As they made the injured men comfortable, the Vronskins appeared. Katerina seemed to have guessed what had happened.

  ‘Are they coming here?’ she asked.

  ‘Any day,’ Potter said. ‘Better not go into town.’

  As they left again, loaded up with petrol, their way was barred by a two-horse sledge that was drawn across the entrance to the barracks. In it was a blonde woman Potter recognised as Finch’s countess.

  ‘Are the Bolsheviki coming here?’ she demanded.

  Potter’s answer was brisk and uncommunicative. ‘Not far up the road,’ he said.

  ‘What is being done about taking us away to the south?’

  Potter shrugged. ‘That, Madame,’ he said, ‘is not my affair.’

  He signed to his driver and the Hispano drew away and, glancing back, he saw the sledge turning, then the falling snow obscured it as they swung round the corner.

  They re-passed the straggling column of horsemen and its attendant group of stumbling men on foot moving slowly towards Nikolovssk, and this time nobody looked up. With the passage of time, their mood had become one of fear and Potter saw Prideaux, grey-faced, bandaged now and blank-eyed as though concussed; and Finch, crouched wretchedly in the saddle. They were like a company of ghosts emerging from the darkness and the driving snow, that seemed to fill the air like smoke. Their clothes were plastered with white and there were icicles on eyebrows and moustaches and gathering round the nostrils of their labouring mounts.

  The valley where the fight had taken place seemed empty, the dark mounds where the dead horses lay merging into the all-enveloping snow. There was no sign of Higgins but, as they moved back towards the road, a solitary horseman approached them. He sat huddled in the saddle, indifferent in his misery of exhaustion and cold to what was going on around him, and the horse moved with its head down, the reins unheld, plodding slowly towards Nikolovssk.

  As the Hispano roared towards him, the man’s head jerked up, and Potter saw it was Murray-Hughes. As soon as he recognised the car, he slid to the ground and ran stiff-legged towards them, his eyes scared.

  ‘Thank God.’ he said, his teeth chattering with the cold. ‘I thought I’d never see anybody I knew again.’ His face twisted with a sudden anger. ‘That bloody horse,’ he said bitterly. ‘By the time it stopped and I fell off, I’d no idea where I was. I caught this one later.’

  Potter’s face showed little sympathy. ‘It isn’t every war corresponde
nt who has the opportunity to take part in a charge of the Light Brigade,’ he commented.

  Murray-Hughes’ head came up. ‘Charge of the Light Brigade?’ he asked. ‘Is that how it seemed?’

  He climbed into the car and Potter revved up the engine. As they moved off, Murray-Hughes turned.

  ‘Aren’t we going the wrong way?’ he asked.

  ‘No, we’re not. Going to look for Higgins.’

  Murray-Hughes became silent, then after a while, as they jolted along the uneven road, he looked at Potter.

  ‘What were the casualties?’ he asked.

  ‘Sixty per cent, I reckon. At the moment.’

  Murray-Hughes whistled. ‘As much as that?’ He was silent again then he spoke slowly. ‘It was a damn’ brave thing to do,’ he said.

  Potter stared at him. ‘It was bloody useless,’ he said. ‘Achieved nothing and never could have.’

  ‘Oh!’ Murray-Hughes sounded deflated. ‘Oh, I see.’ He paused, then went on again. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘it’ll be something to tell our grandchildren.’

  Potter frowned. ‘Be a lot of men,’ he pointed out, ‘who’ll never have grandchildren to tell it to.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. That’s quite true.’ Murray-Hughes was silent again, and Potter thought he’d finished. Then he spoke again, slowly: ‘Light Brigade, eh?’ he said half to himself. ‘Gallant six hundred. My God!’

  * * *

  They came up with Higgins some time after midnight. The Rolls contained another six wounded men.

  ‘Anybody who’s left now will be dead,’ Higgins said as they transferred the petrol. ‘They don’t take prisoners.’

  ‘What happened to Nazhintzev and Yurevski and the others?’

  ‘They followed Prideaux in. They didn’t come out. They probably didn’t want to.’

  Chill with weariness and a feeling of unease, Potter stared round him at the black boles of the trees silhouetted against the pale snow.