Brothers in Arms Page 2

  Williams turned to the company’s senior sergeant, a similarly tall, bluff Geordie with an infectious grin named Jacob Slaughter, whose hard-bitten face told of countless actions and larger engagements. ‘Sar’nt Slaughter. Those men there – discourage them from that, if you will.’

  He had learnt his style of command direct from Steel, and the coolly laconic order still did not sit quite as easily as he would have liked on his lips. The sergeant smiled at the boy’s attempt, confident in the knowledge that Williams could do no better than model himself on Captain Steel, and in turn barked a command towards the clowns on the river bank.

  The three men suddenly went quiet and hurriedly buttoned their breeches. Then, turning back towards the company, they scrambled up the muddy slope and returned to the grinning ranks. As they passed their captain, Steel nodded and ensured that they could see his gaze, half disapproving, half amused. As they hurried into rank Slaughter shouted further commands, which were echoed by the other sergeants and corporals of the company. Then, careful to be firm but not too forceful, he began to use the wooden staff of the long sergeant’s half-pike to urge the files back into line and dress the ranks, ready for the long-awaited march attack.

  Steel knew of course that all their muskets were clean and had been checked. In fact they had been cleaned and checked these past two hours, and at all the halts on the long march that had brought them to this place. He knew too that every man’s razor-sharp socket bayonet, newly issued to replace the old plug variety, was slick to perfection with grease so that it would slide smoothly from the scabbard when the time came and slot with ease on the steel nipples at the end of their muskets before slipping just as easily between the ribs of the French when eventually they met them on the field below. But he knew too that in their present condition anything must be done to keep the men’s minds off the carnage now so evidently taking place to their front.

  Steel stared back into the smoke of the battle. He heard the crash of musketry again and the distant cries of anguish caught on the wind that he knew would also be only too audible to the men. Behind him, as if to affirm his fears, one of the younger recruits to his largely veteran company vomited onto the white-gaitered legs of the man to his front, who, naturally, turned and swore at the youngster and, even though he carried his musket at the high porte, still attempted to swing a punch. Sergeant Slaughter shouted to both of them and, mouthing oaths, went to help the terrified and now mortified recruit to regain his composure and wipe the dribbles of vomit from his scarlet coat. Steel turned back towards the enemy. He would give almost anything now to propel his men into a state of readiness, bursting to be at the enemy. Yet at the same time he wanted to make them feel at ease. It was a hard trick, this balancing act. But, he told himself, hadn’t he done it many times before? And didn’t he know most of these men like his own family? Better, now he thought of it. He turned to Williams.

  ‘A song, I think, Tom. Let’s have a song. Who’s the best voice in the company, would you say? Taylor? Dan Cussiter?’

  ‘It must be Corporal Taylor, sir, to be sure.’

  ‘Then Matt Taylor it shall be.’

  Steel scoured the ranks for the man.

  ‘Taylor. Where are you? Come on, Matt. Give us all a tune. Sing up above the guns. And be sure to make it a good ’un. “The Rochester Recruit” or something similar.’

  Corporal Matthew Taylor, a gangly, bankrupted clerk from Hounsditch and for the last six years, since the start of this war, the company’s invaluable and learned apothecary and medical expert on account of his knowledge of herbals, cleared his throat and began to sing in a hearty tenor:

  ‘Oh a bold fusilier came marching down through Rochester,

  Bound for the wars in the Low Countries.

  And he sang as he marched

  Through the crowded streets of Rochester,

  “Who’ll be a soldier for Marlborough and me?”’

  As one the company joined in, with the familiar chorus:

  ‘Who’ll be a soldier, who’ll be a soldier,

  Who’ll be a soldier for Marlborough and me?’

  Steel smiled to see how, as ever, the magic worked so quickly on the terrified men. That was the answer, for now at least: the way to kill a few more idle moments. Set them thinking about their beloved ‘Corporal John’ – John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, ennobled by the Queen after Blenheim – about how he had won so many great victories for them and how today was sure to be another. Blenheim, Ramillies and … What, he wondered was the name of that little hamlet to their front?

  ‘Tom. What’s the name of that village?’

  ‘Place called Eename, sir.’

  No, thought Steel, that would not do. It hardly had a martial ring to it. Better of course the larger place to their left. Oudenarde. That would look better in the history books and on the broadsheets in the London coffee houses. Blenheim, Ramillies and Oudenarde. Not forgetting Ostend, the lines of Brabant …

  From behind him, above the singing and the noise from the valley, Steel caught the sound of a loud sneeze, and he had no need to guess from whom it emanated. Henry Hansam, his second-in-command, had found his own cure for the battlefield terrors yet again and was indulging in it as ever before an engagement. Hansam took snuff, and at such times as these in such quantities that his consumption increased tenfold. While in other companies and battalions the men might have advanced to the ring of huzzahs and the beating of drums, in Steel’s, for the past six years, the accompaniment to any attack had been embellished with a succession of Hansam’s explosive sneezes.

  Steel turned towards him. The lieutenant saw him and spoke over the resounding noise of the men’s singing.

  ‘Care for a pinch, Jack? Newly arrived consignment from England, via Ostend. Finest Spanish, and I’m reliably informed that it originates from that very shipment taken by Admiral Hobson off Vigo in 1702. Superb stuff. You’re quite sure that you won’t …?’

  ‘No, thank you, Henry. And no matter how you may press me, and whatever its divine provenance, you know quite well that the day will never dawn when I descend to pushing that filthy stuff up my nose. Drink is my vice. And perhaps a round of piquet or whist.’

  ‘And you only have eyes for one lady now, Jack. The lovely Mrs Steel has all your attention. Gone are the days –’

  Steel, laughing, interrupted him. ‘Quite so, Henry. All my roving done. A simple life is what I crave. Glory, promotion, riches. The love of a good woman and the company of such men as I am proud to serve with. I ask for nothing more.’

  Hansam laughed. ‘Well, please yourself. But you don’t know what you’re missing. Rare stuff this. Very sweet. Fragrant as lavender. Calms the nerves.’

  ‘Sweet, Henry? That muck’s as rank as a Holborn sewer. And from the amount of it you shove into your nostrils, I’m surprised you have any nerves left that need to be calmed.’

  Hansam smiled and his face contorted as he was consumed by another sneeze, even more violent than the last. Steel laughed again and was pleased to see Slaughter and his men, for all their singing, grinning as they picked up on catches of the officers’ conversation. It always made them feel relaxed to see their superiors appear so phlegmatic in the face of the enemy. To keep one’s head in battle, as now in the moments before it began, was one of the prime requisites for any officer. An officer, they knew, was bred to such a role. Bred to be a gentleman by birth and by inclination. And with that went a natural confidence. An officer, a real officer, was unassailable, indestructible. And while he might not have been born into any great wealth, Jack Steel, the hard-pressed gentleman-farmer’s son from Lowland Scotland, was surely a natural officer in their eyes. Purchased into the army by his former lover, a court lady at St James’s and wife of an elderly nobleman, Steel had established a reputation for his sang-froid. Yet behind the façade, if truth be told, there still lurked as unwelcome a heart-freezing terror as afflicted the greenest recruit. Who could not be afraid at such a moment?

  St
eel cast an eye over the company and beyond his men to the others of the regiment and took in their parade of well-known, unshaven faces beneath their tall mitre hats, the symbol of their elite status, blue and red embroidery emblazoned with gold wire and white lace. The hats, worn only by grenadiers, were designed to facilitate the throwing of the bombs from which they took their name, and they carried those weapons still, even though those unpredictable weapons were used increasingly less often in battle. Each man carried in a black leather case three of the small black metal orbs, named after the Spanish word for pomegranate, which when lit by a fuse and hurled like a cricket ball were still capable of doing damage to an entrenched position and wreaking havoc within a tightly packed body of troops.

  Steel knew all these men and their individual characteristics, from Mackay’s thick-set farmer’s frame and Taylor’s scrawny, guttersnipe physique, to Yorkshireman Dan Cussiter’s high-boned bird-like features and Thorogood’s over-long arms, so effective with a grenade. He felt deep affection for most. He had fought alongside many before and was prepared to do everything he could to make sure they got through this war intact of mind and body and emerge with booty and honour. It was no less and no more than he hoped for himself.

  Beyond the grenadiers, high above the Battalion Major’s company, waved the silken squares of the regimental colours. One of them was tattered now, looking no more than a rag, after so long in the field. It was the Colonel’s colour, red and gold above the cipher of their commander, Sir James Farquharson. The other, only recently presented, bore the new Union flag of the united kingdom of England, Scotland and Ireland, in its centre a crown. Lest anyone should be in doubt, the colour made the matter plain. Farquharson might have raised a regiment of Scottish foot who at Blenheim and Ramillies had fought beneath the blue and white of his native country’s saltire, but since last year these were Britain’s infantry. British grenadiers. Proud to serve not only their Queen but their newly united nation. Steel watched the colours catch the sunlight as they rippled in the breeze.

  Behind them, curving back through the marshland and up the hill towards the village of Eename, he saw the mass of the column – a polyglot force, waiting here behind Farquharson’s, to step off in turn from the flimsy wooden bridges resting on tin boats. Among them, he knew, stood some of the finest infantry in the world: Lord Herbert’s Foot, and with them Gibson’s, Farrington’s, Meredith’s and Holland’s. Behind them came Princess Anne’s, Granville’s, Clifton’s and Douglas’s, and those other regiments which like his own had lately made up the Scots army: the Royals, the newly christened North British Fusiliers and the Earl of Angus’s Foot. All of them names that would surely be writ forever in the history of this army.

  To the right of the British brigades were the Allies: the Prussians and Hessians in their distinctive blue, Hanoverians and Swiss in red, and the grey-coated Danes. Singing and swearing in a half-dozen languages, they had all come to this place on the orders of their great general. This was an encyclopedia of Europe’s tribes and races: English, Irish, Scots and Welsh, pale-skinned Scandinavians, men from the Italian and German states and exiled French Huguenots.

  For some time now, too many of the men had been silent. They were watching as their comrades who had arrived earlier that morning met the enemy down in the valley and gave fire and stood to take it and charged and fought and died. They were all powerless, of course. They had been ordered to wait, and increasingly there was no alternative but to watch. Steel realized with a start, however, that his own men were still far from silent and Taylor had not yet finished his song. Or perhaps he has started afresh, thought Steel, and I have not noticed, being so lost in my own daydreams. He listened now as they sang out, mid-verse:

  ‘To be paid in the powder and rattle of the cannonballs Wages for soldiers like Marlborough and me.’

  It might, he thought, have been the song of his own life – a life paid in powder and shot. Such had been Steel’s wages since the age of seventeen. He had come to this war as a lieutenant, transferred by his own request and to the dismay of his fellow officers from the Guards, and he had risen to his present rank not by purchase, as was the usual way, but by proving himself in battle.

  By that, and his new-found skill as an ‘intelligencer’. For Steel had become one of the new breed of officers now emerging who could act as the eyes and ears of their commander. Before Blenheim, four years ago now this summer, Steel had single-handedly foiled a conspiracy against Marlborough, designed to discredit the Duke as a Jacobite traitor and remove him from command. Then two years back he had played a key part in the clandestine taking of Ostend, now the British army’s key point of contact with the homeland and conduit for vital supplies.

  Steel looked at the loops of silver lace that only in the past few weeks he had been reluctantly persuaded to have sewn onto his red coat. He had once sworn that he would do everything he could to avoid using such blatant badges of rank. Not for the simple reason that he might make a better target for the enemy’s best shots, but because he considered himself better than the preening popinjays which so many officers soon became. Steel was a fighter. Just that. What need had he of finery? But then what else could one do but acquiesce when the Queen herself presented you with your promotion?

  Still he refused to conform on other points of his appearance. He would not wear the cumbersome full wig sported by other officers, but preferred to have his own hair tied back in a queue, as was the manner with the dragoons. In fact his model in this had been the man who was his inspiration as a young subaltern. Francis Hawley had been a captain in the First Foot Guards and some years Steel’s senior. When Steel had purchased into the regiment, Hawley had been given command of a recently formed grenadier company. Although Hawley had transferred soon afterwards to Berkeley’s Dragoons, Steel and he had kept up their friendship, and at Steenkirk in 1692, as Steel had received his baptism of fire in one of the English and Scots army’s worst defeats at the hands of the French, he had watched in disbelief as Hawley had charged to his death on the bloody strand. Steel had never forgotten Hawley, and as he had grown into the army and adopted his own distinctive fashion, as all officers did, he had always sought to emulate his friend and mentor. It was through Hawley’s example too that he chose not to wear gaiters and spats but preferred more comfortable and hardy half boots.

  Most importantly of all, Steel cherished his weapons. Unusually for an officer, along with his sword he carried a fusil slung across his shoulder, a short-barrelled musket which in his case had originally been a fowling piece. The sword itself was far from regulation issue but a heavy cutting weapon better suited to a cavalryman, with a wicked, razor-sharp blade. Steel alone, with his advantage of height, was able to use it to similar effect. It was a Scottish Highland broadsword, basket-hilted and straight-bladed, made in Italy, that had hung on the wall of his family home in the Lowlands and which more than anything about him betrayed his origins. It had not failed him yet, and had cut a bloody swathe across the battlefields of Europe. Its weight alone was enough to cleave a man, though in Steel’s hand it was as light as a feather, and those who made its acquaintance as enemies seldom lived to tell the tale.

  A noise like distant rolling thunder announced the presence of artillery and made Steel turn his head. But he had already missed the flash of the shot and failed to spot the exact whereabouts of the guns. No ball had passed near them as yet, and it still seemed to him as if they might be watching a distant spectacle with the indifference of a theatre audience. But Steel knew that this was all too easy. He conjured a picture in his mind of the gunners on the opposite slope sweating at the hot barrels, stripped to their shirtsleeves, sponging out, loading, ramming home, damping down their overheated guns. He pictured the cannon bouncing back on their wooden trails with shouts of warning and saw in his mind the shot leaving the muzzle and crossing in an arc high above the battlefield to find its unlucky target. The noise of the cannon provided a bass line to the symphony of battle, the deep boo
m of artillery beneath the percussive rattle of musketry a sound as familiar to him as London’s musical choruses were to the ear of his opera-mad wife. His hearing was attuned to the pitch of the current melody, the sound of the guns. There was no theatre here on the battlefield. These men were not actors. Yet Steel wondered when the curtain would rise on the next scene and give his men their cue.

  It was, he thought, a battle unlike any he had witnessed before. For the best part of twenty years, from here in Flanders to the plains of Denmark and down among the scalding, sun-bleached rocks of the Spanish peninsula, Steel had watched as battles had begun and developed in their distinctive styles. The opening salvoes; the advance to contact; the salute from one line to the other; and then the neatly dressed lines blown into bloody raggedness and then the mêlée and the rout. But this … this was something new. This battle had not been the usual mise en scène but had rather grown piecemeal. The Allies had arrived slowly and been fed into the action as and when they had appeared. The vanguard had excelled itself in a holding action, and by the time Steel and his men had arrived here some two hours before, the fighting had been going on for four hours. Even then it had not been fully committed. It had seemed to him like two dogs circling one another in an alley, vying for possession of territory, taking tentative snaps in the air, edging closer and then backing off. But Steel knew that it was not Marlborough’s intention to allow his adversary to leave this field without a serious bloodletting.

  Cadogan had built his bridges and then had used them effectively to take his men – horse and foot – over the great river and deep into the ground before the enemy position. Steel had huge admiration for the Irish general. He might have been Marlborough’s second-in-command with a prestigious position on the staff, but on the day of battle Cadogan could be counted on to fight like a trooper, leading from the front and giving as good an account of himself as a listed man. And his men knew it.