Hervey 09 - Man Of War (47 page)

All ranks (i.e. private men, NCOs and officers) were armed with a sword, called in the cavalry a sabre (the lance was not introduced until after Waterloo), and in the early years of the Napoleonic wars with two pistols. Other ranks (all ranks less the officers) also carried a carbine, which was a short musket, handier for mounted work.

And of course there were the horses. The purchase of these was a regimental responsibility, unless on active service, and the quality varied with the depth of the lieutenant-colonel’s pockets. Each troop had a farrier, trained by the farrier-major, responsible to the captain for the shoeing of every horse in the troop, and to the veterinary surgeon for the troop horses’ health. Hard feed (oats, barley, etc.) and forage (hay, or cut grass – ‘green forage’) were the serjeant-major’s responsibility along with other practical details such as the condition of saddlery, allocation of routine duties and, par excellence, discipline.

Although the cavalry often worked independently, sending detachments on escort duty, patrols and pickets, regiments were usually grouped into brigades of three or more, commanded by a brigadier who was a full colonel or major general (brigadier at this time was an appointment not a rank), with a brigade-major as his staff officer. Brigades could in turn be grouped into divisions (most spectacularly in the retreat to Corunna under the command of that quintessential cavalry general Lord Uxbridge, later Marquess of Anglesey) or attached to an infantry division or to a corps of two or more divisions. The cavalry were prized for their flexibility, though Wellington complained that they were too frequently unmanageable in the field, with the habit of ‘galloping at everything’.

The independent-mindedness of cavalry officers had in part to do with the manner of their commissioning. The cavalry (and the infantry) were the responsibility of the commander-in-chief – for most of the period of these cavalry tales the Duke of York, whose headquarters were at the Horse Guards in Whitehall. On the other hand, the artillery, engineers and other technical services were the responsibility of the Master General of the Ordnance, whose ‘explosives authority’ gave him a seat in the Cabinet. To make matters even more complicated, the commissariat and transport were the direct responsibility of the Treasury.

Officers of the MGO’s arms were appointed to their commissions without purchase and promoted on seniority and merit. Those of the cavalry and infantry, with a few exceptions, purchased their commissions and promotion. They actually paid several thousand pounds for the privilege of serving. When it came to their turn on the seniority list, they bought promotion to the next higher rank, which in practice meant selling their present rank through the regimental agents to someone else and paying the difference in price for the higher one. In fact a rich and influential officer did not need to bide his time on the seniority list: he could offer an officer in another regiment more than the going rate for his rank – called paying overprice. The exception was during active service, when the death of an officer meant that the vacancy passed without purchase to the next regimental officer on the seniority list. Hence the officers’ black-humoured toast, ‘To a bloody war and a sickly season!’

The iniquities of the purchase system are obvious, principally in the widespread abuse of the supposedly strict and fair rules. The advantages are less so, but they were nonetheless significant (space precludes a worth-while discussion of the purchase system here, and I commend instead the essay in the first volume of the Marquess of Anglesey’s
History of the British Cavalry
). There is no doubt, however, that with so many men under arms, England (which in Wellington’s time was shorthand for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) was on the whole well served by it.

It did mean, though, that men such as Matthew Hervey, a son of the vicarage, of the minor gentry – the backbone of Wellington’s officer corps – who had little private money, had to watch while others less capable and experienced than they overtook them in the promotion stakes. There were promotions for meritorious service occasionally, but the opportunities were few even in so large an army, and when peace came to Europe in 1815 the opportunities became even rarer.

This, then, is the army in which Matthew Hervey is making his way – a slow, sometimes disheartening progress, but with the advantage of knowing that he serves among friends who face the same odds, and with NCOs with whom he has, so to speak, grown up. The strength of the army was this regimental system, because the regiment was largely self-supporting and self-healing. It remains so today. It is threatened more than ever before, however. For who that has not served in a regiment, directly or indirectly, can truly appreciate its strength? Certainly not the Treasury, and, I begin to doubt, even ‘the War Office’.

WARRIOR

is the new novel featuring
Matthew Hervey and the 6th Light Dragoons
Here’s an exclusive extract

I
THE LIEUTENANT-GOVERNOR

The eastern frontier, Cape Colony, April 1828

The spearhead sliced through the blue serge of Private Parks’s tunic, driving deep into his chest. The dragoon, wide-eyed at the sudden, silent assault, tumbled from the saddle like a recruit at first riding school, dead before his feet quit the stirrups. He lay with the spear stuck fast, and barely a twitch, at the feet of his troop horse, which stood still throughout as if possessed of the same paralysing shock.

Sir Eyre Somervile, lieutenant-governor of the Cape Colony, fumbled with the cartridge for his cavalry pistol. Serjeant-Major Armstrong’s sabre flashed from its scabbard. The covermen closed to Somervile’s side, swords drawn, to quieten his excited little arab. Serjeant Wainwright unshipped his carbine, cocked and aimed it in a single motion, more machine-like than human, and fired.

The spearman was sent to meet his maker with the same rude promptness of Parks’s own despatch.

A second
assegai
winged from the thicket, higher than the first (and thus better seen). Corporal Allott, the coverman on Somervile’s offside, thrust up his sabre – ‘head protect’ – just catching the shaft at the binding to deflect it clear of his charge, who then dropped his cartridge ball and cursed most foully.

But the impact knocked the sabre clean from Allott’s hand to hang by the sword knot from his jarred wrist. Before he could recover it another Xhosa darted from the thicket and between his horse’s legs, thrusting with his spear to hamstring Somervile’s Arab. Armstrong spurred to his side and cut savagely at the back of the Xhosa’s neck as he scrambled from beneath. The razor-sharp blade left but a few bloody sinews joining head to torso. The Xhosa staggered, then fell twitching in a gory, faecal sprawl.

Somervile jumped from the saddle to check his mare’s leg.

‘No, sir!’ cried Armstrong. ‘Get back up!’

Two more Xhosa ran in. Armstrong cut down one but the other lunged straight for Somervile. The nearside coverman, Corporal Hardy, urged his trooper forward to get his sabre to the guard, but couldn’t make it. An arm’s reach from his quarry, the Xhosa lofted his spear. Somervile could smell the animal odour of his fury as he raised his ball-less pistol, and fired.

At an arm’s length the blank discharge was enough. Flame and powder grain scored the Xhosa’s face, blinding him so that he jabbed wildly but ineffectually with his spear until Corporal Hardy put him out of his frenzied agony with a cleaving slice from crown to chin.

The little Arab hobbled a few steps, her off-foreleg held up pitiably as if begging. Hardy jumped from the saddle. ‘Sir, here!’ He grabbed Somervile by the arm and motioned for him to mount.

Somervile, more exasperated than dazed, made to protest, but Armstrong decided it. ‘Get up, sir! Get astride!’

Hardy heaved Somervile’s paunchy bulk into his trooper’s saddle, as with a deep-throated cry more Xhosa burst from the cover of the bush willow thicket twenty yards away.

There was no time to front with carbine or pistol; it was for each to do as he could. Serjeant Wainwright, nearest, spurred straight at them, sword and carbine in hand, reins looped over his left arm. He parried the spear on his right a split second before the one on the left thrust through his canvas barrel belt and into his side. He fired the carbine point-blank, taking off the top of the spearman’s head like a badly sliced egg, and then carved deep between the shoulders of the first Xhosa with a backhand cut. His trooper halted a few strides beyond, and Wainwright slid helplessly from the saddle, leaving a broad red stripe down the grey’s flank.

The remaining spearmen pressed home the attack with a courage and determination Armstrong had not seen in Xhosa before. He turned his mare just in time to get the reach with his sword arm, swinging his sabre with all his strength down behind the nearest shield, all but severing the Xhosa’s wrist.

Piet Doorn, burgher-guide, coming back up the trail from checking for spoor, fired his big Hall rifle at fifty yards, felling the tallest Xhosa, but the three others sprang at Somervile and his covermen like leopards on the fold. Corporal Allott, sabre now in left hand, made not even a retaliatory cut, the spear plunging into his gut and pushing him clean from the saddle. Corporal Hardy dived between the little Arab’s legs to slash at the nearest bare, black heel. The Xhosa staggered momentarily but just long enough for Somervile to urge his new mount forward, tumbling and trampling him like a corn rig.

The last Xhosa hesitated, as if unsure of his target rather than whether to fight or run, in which time Armstrong had closed with him to drive the point of his blade deep into his side, bowling him over to writhe in a bloody pool which spread with uncommon speed. Now Armstrong could risk turning his back on him to despatch Somervile’s tumbled assailant.

But the Xhosa had no fight left in him. His hands and eyes pleaded.

Armstrong gestured with his sabre. ‘Bind him up, Corp. Hardy. We’ll take him a prize.’ He turned to Somervile. ‘You all right, sir?’ he asked in an accent so strong as to sound strangely alien.

But Somervile knew that it was action that revealed the man, and if Armstrong reverted to the Tyne in such a moment, then so be it: without his address they would none of them be alive. Could they
stay
alive? ‘I am well, Serjeant-Major. The others?’

Armstrong was already taking stock. ‘Corp. Hardy, watch rear, the way we came. Piet, go look ahead, will you? Stand sentry.’

Piet Doorn nodded as he tamped the new charge in his rifle.

Armstrong sprang from the saddle and looked in turn at Corporal Allott and Private Parks, satisfying himself there was no sign of life, before making for where Serjeant Wainwright lay.

‘Jobie, Jobie!’ he said sharply, shaking Wainwright’s shoulder as if it were reveille.

There was no response.

Yet blood was still running from the wound. ‘Come on Jobie, lad – rouse yerself!’ said Armstrong quietly but insistently, unfastening Wainwright’s barrel-belt, taking off his own neckcloth to staunch the flow of blood.

Somervile was now by his side. ‘Brandy, do you think, Serjeant-Major?’

‘Ay sir. Anything that’ll bring ’im to,’ replied Armstrong, taking the flask.

It was not easy to guess how much blood Wainwright had lost – in Armstrong’s experience it always looked more than it was – but to lose consciousness . . .

He lifted Wainwright’s head and put the flask to his mouth, tipping it high to let the brandy pour in copiously.

A spasm of choking signalled that Wainwright was at least fighting. ‘That’s it, Jobie, lad!’ He poured in more.

Another fit of choking brought back up the contents of the flask, and Wainwright’s eyes flickered open at last.

Somervile rose, and shook his head. It had been a deuced ill-considered thing, he reckoned. He was not a military man (although he wore the ribbon of the Bath star for his soldierly bearing during the Vellore mutiny), but he knew it to be a sound principle not to divide one’s force unless it were necessary. And it had not been necessary: he was perfectly capable of holding his own with pistol and sword! Captain Brereton, the officer in temporary command of E Troop, 6th Light Dragoons, had had no need of sending him to the rear so – into the very jaws, indeed, of the wretched Xhosa reiving party they were meant to be evading! What manner of tactician was this new-come captain?