Blunted Lance (36 page)

‘Who else have you got out there? What regular cavalry?’

Dabney smiled. ‘None, Father. Not a single regiment. The only regular regiments are Indian. The rest are all Yeomanry from Britain and light horse regiments from Australia and New Zealand – hostilities-only soldiers with rifles and bayonets instead of swords.’

‘If they don’t like you, they’ll make it very clear.’

‘I’ll win ’em round. Jasper Capell was given a battalion. You remember Jasper. Blind as a bat in one eye and wore a monocle. His Aussies thought it a great joke and the second day he was with them every man in the battalion was also wearing a monocle. God knows where they got them. But he beat ’em at their own game. He took out his eyeglass, tossed it in the air, caught it in his eye and said “Bet you can’t do that.” From then on he could do anything with ’em.’

The war persisted in intruding. A cousin was reported missing and another of the Ackroyd boys was killed in France. For Josh, school became merely a repetition of what he heard at home, and, having a grandfather who was a field marshal, what they were told by enthusiastic and elderly teachers – many of them out of retirement to take the places of men who had joined the army – he had already learned several days before.

Things seemed to be short everywhere. Clothes that would normally have been cast off were worn just a little longer, and in addition to their normal work, everybody was cultivating vegetable plots, even at school. Having a farmer in the family was a help but his mother was keeping goats to provide milk because they could hardly expect John Sutton to help them all.

In November, with the stories from Flanders becoming discreetly uninformative, there was a runaway victory at Cambrai. Tanks in large numbers had broken through the German lines and for a trifling cost had captured ten thousand German prisoners and two hundred guns. The newspapers went wild and church bells were rung as talk of an advance to Berlin started. But something seemed to go wrong and, listening to his grandfather’s mutterings, Josh learned that the victory had been wasted because no one had known what to do with it. The infantry had not been able to keep up with the tanks and the cavalry were destroyed once more by German machine guns and, with the reserves wasted in the abortive struggle at Passchendaele, the Germans had counter-attacked and pushed the allies right back to where they had started.

Just when they were all despondent, however, a jubilant letter arrived from Dabney to say the British had smashed through the Turkish Gaza line, chiefly thanks to an attack by the Australian Light Horse Brigade.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he wrote. ‘It just shows that under the right circumstances cavalry can still be used for shock action.’

From time to time, Josh bumped into Hedley Akroyd, still limping a little but fit again and no longer wearing the taut, tired expression he had brought home the previous year. Micah Love appeared surprisingly often with his little yellow car, which he kept these days not in London but in York so that he could catch a train north and pick it up for the last part of the journey. He wore wings now and considered himself a fully qualified pilot. His ambition was to join the squadron that Hedley was expecting to take to France.

To Josh the world was a strange place. Though Braxby had not altered much, everywhere else it had. The Russian Tsar was a prisoner of the Bolsheviks, rationing had started, the papers were full of pictures of American soldiers landing in France, tall men wearing Boy Scout hats and long gaiters instead of puttees, and behind it all there was a curious nervous feeling that touched even Josh that the Germans had something up their sleeve.

Early in March, they were all invited to Hounslow in London to see Hedley Ackroyd’s squadron leave for France. The Field Marshal decided that the journey would be too exhausting and Josh, who was home for half-term, was horrified when his mother claimed that the demands of the hospital precluded her going, too. Just when he was fully expecting that this magnificent opportunity to see the Flying Corps going into action was to be denied him, Rachel and Philippa took pity on him and offered to take him with them.

‘So long as you keep out of the way when we’re saying goodbye,’ Rachel said.

There was a little argument with parents about the two girls going unchaperoned but in the end objection was withdrawn since, with a growing boy of eleven to look after, they could hardly get up to mischief, and they all set off from Braxby carrying small cases for their trip to London. There were messages at the hotel where they had booked and disgusted looks from Rachel and Philippa when they learned they had been invited to a last-minute party.

‘I’ll stay in my room,’ Josh promised. ‘Honest.’

‘You can go down to the dining-room,’ Rachel said, her words tumbling over themselves in her excitement. ‘So long as you don’t tell tales.’

They left him at seven o’clock to pick up a taxi and he went gravely downstairs to the dining-room. It was full of women with men in uniform and he solemnly waded through four courses then ordered a lemonade to be sent to his room. The hotel was so warm, he fell asleep on his bed and was only vaguely conscious of the door clicking as someone put their head round.

The following morning, Rachel woke him. She was frowning as though she had a headache.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We haven’t all day.’

The take-off at Hounslow was chaotic. The squadron contained several other Americans besides Micah Love, and they seemed to know every girl in London, all of whom appeared to be present to see them off. There were also a few staff officers from American headquarters, a few civilians and an American colonel called Mitchell who gravely told Josh that, used properly, the aeroplane could win the war and any other wars that might follow.

There was another boy of Josh’s age, who was some relation to one of the pilots and they studied the aeroplanes with interest.

‘SE5s,’ the other boy pointed out.

‘They’re supposed to be better than Camels,’ Josh said.

‘Camels turn better. And they’re terrifically manoeuvrable. But they’re not so fast. They use SEs for chasing the Germans over their own lines.’

They spent a good half hour trying to beat each other at airing their knowledge, then they noticed that everybody seemed to be kissing.

‘They’re off, I think,’ Josh said.

There were tears in Rachel’s eyes as she clutched Micah Love; and Philippa, standing with Hedley Ackroyd, her head on his chest, was uttering little muted whimpering noises that made Josh turn away, faintly embarrassed.

There were nineteen aeroplanes and they were all arranged in position for taking off in formation with the engines already warmed up, with Hedley Ackroyd’s machine out in front and the three flights arranged in a V behind him.

‘Just far enough away from each other so they can’t hit each other’s backwash,’ Josh said knowledgeably.

Hedley lined up his men and someone made a speech, then they climbed into their machines and the engines were started up. The air was full of noise and the smell of hot oil, then a red Very light soared into the air and Hedley’s machine moved forward. Behind it, all the others moved too, until they were all rolling and lurching across the grass. One by one they became airborne and grew smaller until they were merely a line of dots heading towards the east.

Riding towards the station in the taxi, they all sat in silence. A strand of Philippa’s hair had come down and was hanging over her ear, and Rachel’s hat was no longer quite straight. But they seemed unaware of the disorder and stared in front of them with stricken looks on their faces.

On the little jump seat opposite, Josh studied their distress. ‘They were flying SEs,’ he said helpfully. ‘They’re supposed to be the best aeroplanes there are.’

It seemed to Josh that he had hardly been back at school more than a day or two when the newspapers were full of a huge new German attack on the Somme.

Helped by the dense fog, the Germans had overrun the forward British positions almost unobserved and at once the line had begun to crumble. The British troops, most of them conscripts, had been taught how to hold a trench and how to attack it but had no idea what to do when they were faced with what they had been fighting for four years to achieve – open warfare. Doing the only thing they could think of, they retreated and, watching the newspapers, it seemed to the numbed Josh that the Allied armies in France were in desperate trouble and he even began to wonder when the Kaiser would arrive in London to be proclaimed Emperor of the British.

As spring advanced into summer, however, the fears subsided a little because the push seemed to be crumbling and there appeared to be an undercurrent of hope that the war might even finish the following year. The Germans, it seemed, had finally become aware that their advance was doomed and were making preparations to retire on their own lines of communication. In the Middle East, with Allenby in hot pursuit, the British, Australian and New Zealand forces were pushing rapidly north from Jerusalem and the Turkish empire was clearly in danger of crumbling. Austria and Bulgaria were tottering and as the old man at Braxby huddled over his
Times
a letter arrived from Berlin via Holland which indicated that Germany’s days were numbered. Helen had recovered from her husband’s death. The letter was strangely devoid of the affection she had previously shown but it seemed she was still in need of contact with her parents, with England, with Braxby, with her roots.

She described how difficult it was to buy food, and how in the poorer quarters of Berlin the children were grey with under-nourishment. Queues were everywhere, the colourless women, bent with misery, crowding for hours in the hope of finding something. Sugar was necessary to make the ersatz-kaffee drinkable and to think of milk or eggs was ridiculous. Half of Berlin, she claimed, was subsisting on a greenish pulp which was the indigestible ruins of potatoes spoiled by the winter.

Ellis Ackroyd returned to Braxby, recovered from his wounds but suddenly old and slow and uncertain. In May Josh heard that Micah Love had been wounded and Rachel vanished to London, and a few weeks later, with the summer heat arriving, he turned up in Braxby in his yellow roadster, driving with the hand brake and the hand throttle, because his left leg was stiff where it had been hit by a bullet over St Quentin. Contrary to everybody’s expectations, he wasn’t the slightest bit depressed by the continual retreat in France.

‘It’s all under control,’ he announced. ‘All the Germans have done is advance into a sack. No reserves on our side have been committed, and we have absolute command in the air.’

Two days later he and Rachel announced their engagement and everybody went round to the Suttons to celebrate. Rachel had a new ring on her finger and a smug look on her face, but it was clear her sister was not to be outdone because she was letting it be known that she too was expecting to sport a diamond as soon as Hedley Ackroyd came home.

Toasts were drunk to the happy couple and another one, a little more subdued, to Helen in Berlin. Afterwards, Robert drew his father on one side. His manner was hesitant and uncertain.

‘I’m having a bit of trouble, Father,’ he announced.

‘What sort of trouble?’ the old man asked warily.

‘You have no idea?’

The old man eyed his son. It was sad, he thought, that it was possible to dislike one’s own offspring. What strange genes in his own family and the family of his wife, both of which had always seemed entirely normal, had produced Robert, he couldn’t think. It couldn’t surely, he felt, be his environment or his upbringing, because Dabney, Jane and Helen had had exactly the same and had turned out quite differently. Perhaps somewhere, with Robert, the oldest child, they had gone wrong and, profiting by their errors, had made no mistakes with their other children.

Yet he didn’t think so. They had never been conscious of behaving differently with their first-born and he could only put it down to the fact that, somewhere in the past, there had been the facets of character which Robert showed, tucked away out of sight in the background of both of them and in Robert they had met and made him what he was. He was a moral coward; he was shallow; he was devious and untrustworthy; he was mean and money-grubbing; and he was totally without the humour with which the rest of them all seemed to be blessed. Again and again, the old man had told himself he would change but he never had. He was ambitious and energetic, yet not totally honest, and he’d heard rumours that he’d even been warned about hoarding food at a time when food was short. He had no proof, but it was entirely in keeping and now he knew that Robert’s character had produced some new crisis.

‘I haven’t the foggiest what it’s all about,’ he snapped. ‘Unless, as I suspect, you’ve been working a fiddle with your income tax.’

Robert gave the old man a sour look. ‘It’s not my income tax,’ he said. ‘That’s all in order. It’s something rather more than that.’

‘Go on,’ the old man said coldly.

‘Well, I suspect that you’re well aware of what it might be. You saw me in London at Claridge’s with Daisy Balmael—’

‘Ah! And you want me to be a party to your half-baked liaison?’

‘Elfrida doesn’t know.’

‘And since most of your money is hers, you’re not anxious that she should.’

‘Look, Father, if you’re going to be difficult—’

‘You’ve got a nerve to tell
me
not to be difficult!’ the old man snapped back spiritedly. ‘You’ve always been a gutless character, Robert! When you decided to marry Elfrida, I was entirely against it because she was a Cosgro and I’ve never trusted a Cosgro. However, she’s turned out a damn sight better than you deserve and, as far as she’s concerned, I’m prepared to eat my words. However,
you
threw in your lot with Walter Cosgro and even changed your name to theirs and rejected ours completely. So don’t tell
me
not to be difficult!’

For a while, Robert stared angrily at his father, and he seemed almost about to turn and stalk from the room, but he swallowed his pride and drew a deep breath.