A Close Run Thing (40 page)

After what seemed an age, but which the adjutant’s journal would record as one quarter-hour only, the sound of Mercer’s troop returning broke the silence –
the
thud of hoofs pounding on soft ground, the clatter of running gear and, above it all, the jingle of harness. The six gun-teams galloped straight through the gap between Vivian’s and Vandeleur’s brigades on to the forward slope and deployed in two sections, the faster way of coming into action than by the usual three divisions. As they did so a thunderous fire erupted far over to the right.

‘I think it has begun in earnest, then,’ said Hervey to his trumpeter coolly. ‘Eleven-thirty, by my reckoning.’

But before the man could make any reply the French battery opened up, ripple fire so that the gunners could better observe their fall of shot and correct. The rounds went high, but one gun at least needed to make no corrections, its shell slamming into the ground and exploding five yards in front of Edmonds. His horse, a fine black mare bought the previous summer at Banbridge, and Edmonds’s pride and joy, was thrown screaming on to her back, legs flaying frantically for several seconds before falling still. The major lay motionless by her side, his body riddled with splinters, his neck broken.

The Sixth let out a groan the like of which Hervey had never heard. One trooper close by threw up noisily; another fell out of the saddle in a dead faint. He himself was frozen with uncommon horror.

‘Mr Hervey, take command of the squadron, please,’ he heard Lankester saying as the captain rode forward to assume Edmonds’s place. RSM Lincoln and the major’s trumpeter, himself bleeding from the
lacerations
of a dozen splinters, were already dismounting to carry their commanding officer to the rear. Lankester had to think quicker than ever before, as, with dismay, he perceived that his first order in command might be to retire – as shameful to him as it was perilous to the unity of the line. The French gunners, with the range thus established, would now be loading solid shot rather than shell, or even double-loading both. In open order the roundshot would go through each of the four ranks like a hot knife through butter, but they were at least drawn up in line of squadrons (by Vivian’s prudence, or the need to show a wide front? – he could not know which). Was there enough time, even, to go threes-about to get behind the crest? But then, if the French corrected high, there might just be … Lankester had it! ‘
Dismount!
’ he shouted.

No reviewing officer could have faulted the steadiness with which the Sixth executed that command. It was as if they saw Edmonds himself observing the movement, and they rendered it precisely as required in the 1801 manual, as he would have wanted it. In open order they did not need to make ready. Taking the time from the man in front, each trooper threw a lock of his horse’s mane into the left hand, at the same time quitting the right stirrup and placing the forefinger and thumb of the right hand on the pommel of the saddle. Then a pause before the second motion. Bearing on the left stirrup, assisted by the right hand, each man brought the right leg clear over the cantle, many a
trooper
repeating to himself the orders his rough rider had barked at him so many times in training: ‘In this position the body is to be kept perfectly upright, the shoulders well back, the breast out, the belly in, without constraint, the back hollow, the thighs and legs together, and the head turned to the front over the left shoulder!’ The third motion brought the right leg to the ground and the left leg from the stirrup. Scarcely had the left foot touched the ground than the four guns fired in unison. Three roundshots whistled just above head-height to go bouncing harmlessly down the reverse slope. The fourth slammed into one of Mercer’s guns, now unlimbered and being aligned with the handspikes. It turned the big nine-pounder over as if a toy, crushing the layer beneath the barrel. He screamed so loud that Mercer’s own fire order could scarcely be heard.

‘
Shell
, one thousand, three degrees!’ he called through a speaking trumpet, while the ammunition-numbers ran forward to the stricken gun. The other layers worked as calmly as if at drill on Woolwich marshes, calculating the angle of the forward slope with the plumbline in order to offset the three-degree elevation on the tangent sight. But Hervey heard the range – one thousand yards – with surprise, and hurriedly pulled out his field sketch.

‘No, sir!’ he called to the astonished artillery captain as he dropped his reins and sprinted towards him. ‘I have
paced
it. Eight hundred!’

Mercer turned with a look like thunder, but Hervey’s
confidence
was unshakeable. ‘Truly, sir, I have
paced
it: it is no more than eight hundred yards – that slope is deceptive.’

Mercer’s profession was not about being deceived by slopes – sixteen years an artillery officer, most of them on active service, and this boy from a cavalry regiment was correcting his fire orders in front of his troop! The layers stared at him, frozen for an instant. Yet something in Hervey’s manner was so compelling that, for the first time since leaving Woolwich, Mercer accepted a correction. ‘By heavens, boy, you had better be right!’ he shouted menacingly. ‘
Eight hundred
, two degrees, two guns ranging!’

Number 1 Section’s lead gun fired, followed by the second section’s. Hervey watched with admiration, but anxiously, as the crews worked with mechanical exactness. The ventsmen had their leather-stalled thumbs over the touch-holes in an instant to prevent the ingress of air (blow-back from smouldering powder was ever the risk) while the number sevens swabbed the barrels with sponge-staves. Both shells arched faithfully across the valley to strike their target squarely. The first exploded between two of the guns, felling most of the gun-numbers. The other set light to an ammunition limber, and the secondary explosions at once threw the remainder of the battery into confusion. Mercer confirmed the settings as the number eights were loading the bagged charges and their fixed projectiles. The number sevens turned round their staves and rammed home the charges with the solid end. The ventsmen
stuck
prickers down the touch-holes and primed them with quills of gunpowder, the lead-gun numbers struggling to re-position and re-lay their pieces after the violent recoil.

‘
Fire!
’ shouted Mercer. The gunner-layers ignited the primers with portfires, and the four remaining nine-pounders belched their explosive shells at the horse battery. Twenty seconds it had taken, by Hervey’s reckoning – faster even than a rifleman might re-load!

They wrought a woeful havoc, too, the French gunners who were not yet casualties of the ranging salvo cut down almost to a man by the splintering metal. Cheering erupted from the ranks of the Sixth, but Mercer’s work was not finished. ‘Number One, shell, carry on! Remainder, three rounds shot, three degrees,
fire
!’ he called, adding the extra degree’s elevation for the heavier roundshot. Having killed the gunners, he intended completing the battery’s destruction. It was as much vengeance as military necessity: the French might have killed the Sixth’s commanding officer, but they had also killed three of Mercer’s gunners and destroyed one of his guns.

In two more minutes the gleaming French cannon and limbers were a wreck of shattered wood and twisted metal, the drivers having decided on prudence rather than on bringing their teams forward with shell continuing its ruinous work.

‘Stop! Cease loading!’ ordered Mercer, and his gunners began making safe again, sponging barrels and returning charges to the limbers, while the captain,
grim-faced
, turned and rode up to Hervey’s squadron.

‘Well done, sir. Hervey, is it not?’ he asked, raising his hat.

‘It is, sir,’ said Hervey, returning the salute and wondering how it might be that Captain Cavalié Mercer should know his name.

‘If we had fired at one thousand yards, the rounds would have fallen unobserved beyond the ridge. The French had our range and would have fired off three salvos before we could have corrected on to them. I think they would have broken us,’ said Mercer gravely, before adding with a sigh: ‘That is why Adye’s
Pocket Gunner
condemns contra-battery fire.’

‘Except where the infantry are suffering more than the enemy’s,’ Hervey added on an impulse.

‘Upon my word! A cavalryman who has read the artillery manual. I thought you read only French novels,’ replied Mercer without the trace of a smile, and he reined about and trotted away to lead his troop out of action.

Hervey now looked about for the RSM, praying that there might be news that Edmonds would somehow live, though knowing there could not be. Had he but died
gloriously
, sword in hand, going for the enemy. Not
this
way, unceremoniously, with the opening shot. Even though Hervey had seen men beheaded by shot, or disembowelled by shell splinter, Edmonds’s death was still …
unseemly
.

Lankester called him over. ‘Hervey,’ he began, with a shake of the head, ‘I have not time to begin to
express
to you my regard, for there is immediate business to be about. You are not the senior lieutenant, but Strickland is new to us and, besides, I do not wish to take him away from Third Squadron at this time. So you will keep First Squadron for as long as we are in action this day. But remember this: First has always been the directing squadron, and to re-order that now would be imprudent. It will come to action soon enough, and when we go forward keep the pace steady, or else the supports will take off and there’ll be the very devil of a mess.’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Hervey resolutely.

Lankester smiled. ‘You will do your duty well enough, Matthew.’

But it did not come to action as promptly as Lankester had expected. Midday passed with the noise of battle continuing to their right but still nothing of consequence to their front. Hervey sat motionless before his squadron. It was not the first time he had seen clear air between himself and the enemy, but hitherto behind him had been no more than a picket, a half-troop at most. He wished profoundly, however, that the circumstances had been different – that in front of him, two horses’ length, and to his left, there might have been Edmonds. He raised a hand to wipe away the moistness in his eyes. ‘Mr Canning!’ he bellowed.

Cornet Seton Canning closed up from ‘A’ Troop and saluted. ‘Sir?’

‘Mr Canning, if we are to advance, you will keep the
pace
steady and remain within strict support distance, do you understand? There must be no bunching or running on to “B”, and in this heavy going it will not be easy. I do not wish to be bumped!’

‘I shall do my best, sir; you may depend upon it,’ he replied eagerly.

‘I know you will,’ said Hervey encouragingly; and then, as if they were at some field day, he began examining his cornet’s understanding of the battle. ‘Canning, why do you suppose that battery came into action against us?’

‘To test our strength, sir?’

‘Perhaps, yes. But what did it achieve?’

‘Nothing, sir, in the larger scheme of things.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well … I …’

‘Let me put it to you that it has told the French two things. First, that they cannot tempt us from this flank too easily; and, second, that the duke will send guns here if we are threatened.’

‘I see, sir. But to what use would the French put that intelligence?’

‘How do you suppose Bonaparte will fight this battle? He would not risk manoeuvring against this flank with the Prussians close enough to take him in
his
flank as he did so. And he is too much of a general to attempt a frontal assault.’

‘So he will manoeuvre against our right?’ suggested Canning.

‘That is what
I
should do, having first tried to tempt
the
duke to reinforce elsewhere along his line at the expense of that flank. So do you now think there might have been purpose in that battery’s otherwise imponderable action?’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Canning, in evident awe of his senior’s grasp of strategy. Yet not long after Cornet Canning’s admiring response, at about one o’clock, there began a series of events which astonished them both – astonished them all. A cannonade like the crack of doom erupted from the massed batteries in the French centre, so loud that it made the horses start even on this distant flank. Nero all but threw his rider, who had dropped the reins to record some detail in his sketchbook. Though Hervey could not see the guns because of the lie of the land and the smoke now drifting across the valley – nor, indeed, any fall of shot – he concluded somehow that the cannonade was directed on the centre of the line. To what purpose, however, he could not immediately discern. Canning, too, thought they must be directed at the very place they had bivouacked. ‘Why do they pound the centre, sir? Do they expect the duke will reinforce it?’

‘That could be so, yes, but it is now so late in the day that Bonaparte is chancing much by doing so. It will be telling with what he follows, for it is the very devil of a hard pounding.’

‘Will not all the infantry in the centre be carried away by shot?’ asked Canning incredulously.

‘If they were to stand in its way, yes,’ replied Hervey, ‘but the duke will have disposed them on the reverse of
the
slope. They will be sorely plagued there, but by no means as ill as if on the for’ard.’

Canning nodded, feeling foolish for not having come to that conclusion for himself. But the cannonading continued longer than ever Hervey had supposed likely – for a full half-hour or more. And the sound of the guns carried to Brussels, where the doors and windows shook, and to Antwerp. And even across the Channel to Kent where two days later, before news of the battle reached England, the
Kentish Gazette
would report that ‘A heavy and incessant firing was heard from this coast on Sunday evening in the direction of Dunkirk’.

‘Hervey, how will the French attack?’ asked Canning at length.

Hervey at first confessed himself puzzled. ‘Yet if they
do
assault the centre they must first break up the duke’s line, for the musketry of those battalions would be too great for advancing infantry to withstand. He may suppose, of course, that his artillery has shaken our infantry so badly that they will not stand. Bonaparte has, too, a fairish quantity of heavy cavalry, and if these move against the centre, then the brigades will have to form square, thereby reducing the number of muskets that can be brought to bear. He must support them with horse batteries, of course, or our own cavalry and artillery would frustrate him. But if he followed up at once with infantry in large numbers he might gain the crest.’