Hervey 08 - Company Of Spears (49 page)

The bearer beamed happily as he tucked in the last of the corners.

‘
Enkosi,
’ said Hervey, trying to be cheery. ‘
Enkosi.
’

The bearer picked up the sweated linen, bowed several times while still smiling broadly, and trotted out of the room.

‘’E’s a good’n, sir, is Thandi. Reckon we should take ‘im back wi’ us.’

‘Perhaps we should.’

The door opened.

Johnson braced. ‘Sir!’

Hervey looked round to discover the cause of Johnson’s sudden soldiery. ‘Somervile! I am glad to see you.’

‘And I you,’ said his old friend, advancing on him with hand outstretched.

Hervey took it, though the vigour with which Somervile shook it reminded him he had a way to go before being back to hale condition. ‘Shall you stay? Will you have tea, or something stronger?’

‘I will have tea with you, gladly. Emma has forbidden me anything stronger in the afternoon.’

Johnson left for his tea-making duties.

‘Is there news from the frontier?’

‘Nothing but tranquillity. No reports of reiving in weeks.’

Hervey let the blanket slip from his shoulders: he was getting hotter and he was certain it did not help. ‘That is gratifying.’

Somervile pulled up a chair. ‘It most positively is. I have just been reading Somerset’s report to General Bourke. Admirable, Hervey; quite admirable.’

Hervey was unclear as to quite what was admirable. ‘I should like to see it.’

‘Oh, you will, you will. Admirable – a most handsome acknowledgement. Your Captain Fairbrother is evidently a man of resource and sensibility. I wonder the castle had never sought to employ him before. And most commending it is of you too – in the fullest terms imaginable. I declare I thought Somerset a tricky man when first I met him, but he has shown himself of a very true disposition.’

‘I am pleased for it. It would not have served without Fairbrother.’

‘You saved Somerset’s life.’

‘We were several. Believe me: no single man could have done anything for Somerset at that moment. I confess I thought him lost.’

‘He says he has written to his uncle FitzRoy;
that
shall do you no harm! And Bourke too has written to the Horse Guards. I very much hope there’s a promotion in it, else I myself shall have to write to Huskisson.’

Hervey tried a self-deprecating smile. He thought the praise overblown. But he would certainly not gainsay it.

‘I have approved your home leave.’

Hervey blinked. ‘But I have not requested it.’

‘You will not decline it?’

‘I cannot leave my command like that!’

‘Your command – both Rifles and dragoons – is well found. Thanks to you. And there are things I would have you advance on my behalf in Whitehall. We have a peace for now in Kaffraria, but I am certain it will not hold indefinitely.
Si vis pacem, preparate bellum?

Hervey nodded.

‘Besides, you have obligations under the law,’ added Somervile, with something of a smile.

‘Law? What law?’ asked Hervey, rallying at the challenge.

‘Mosaic:
When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies.’

Hervey shook his head. ‘I confess I haven’t an idea what you’re speaking of. The fever must be addling me.’

Somervile picked up the bible from the table beside Hervey’s bed. ‘Deuteronomy,’ he said, turning the pages confidently. ‘I’m astonished you need reminding. Here, chapter twenty … verse seven: “And what man is there that hath betrothed a wife…”’ He handed it to him. ‘Read on. And none of your churchy primness! A wise bird, Moses.’

Hervey read. And he smiled (a shade lickerish, thought Somervile) as he tried to imagine complying with the injunction. ‘Oh yes, wisdom indeed!’

‘I fear, though, that our Nation may think the business here but a skirmish compared with the Greek war.’

Hervey quickened. ‘Oh? How so?’

‘Nothing worth your regrets: no work for cavalry, as far as I can make out; nor even for foot,’ he began airily. ‘The whole thing appears to have been decided at sea. We had first news of it this morning, a considerable battle in the Ionian: a combined fleet – English, French, Russian – with Codrington commanding. Appears they sent the Turkish fleet to the bottom of Navarino Bay.’

‘Navarino Bay?’

‘You will know it better as Pylos, perhaps, if you recall Thucydides.’

‘I’m afraid I recall nothing. A considerable affair, you say?’

‘Indeed, a hundred ships and more. Bigger than Trafalgar.’

Hervey sat upright, the blanket quite falling away. ‘Have you the casualty lists?’

Somervile shook his head. ‘I expect they’ll come with the official papers. This is news from
The Times
only. But it was a desperate affair, I think. The report said perhaps four or five thousand.’

Hervey said not a word. His mind was wholly occupied by thoughts of Peto: had he not been under orders to join Codrington’s squadron? His fevered face began losing the remains of its colour.

Somervile leaned forward to steady him. ‘Hervey, my dear fellow, are you quite well?’

THE END

HISTORICAL AFTERWORD

The extraordinary ‘Indian’ gardens at Sezincote, with the statuary that so engaged Hervey and Kezia Lankester, are open to the public. So too is the ‘Mughal’ house.

Private Johnson’s brush with the Bow Street investigators was also not without foundation. At the Court of Exchequer on 29th April 1827,
The King v. Giuseppe Guecco
(on various counts of importing coral without payment of duty), the jury, after retiring for about twenty minutes, returned a verdict for the Crown, with an earnest recommendation of leniency. It was agreed by counsel on both sides to compound for the offence by the payment of £400.

A word on South African history: until Nelson Mandela, Shaka Zulu was probably the most famous southern African in history, though for rather different reasons. He murdered – there is no getting round the word – a million people. He was indeed most singular.

Shaka’s mother, Nandi, was a daughter of a chieftain of the eLangeni clan. Shaka’s father was a chieftain of the small, and then unknown, Zulu clan. But unwed pregnancy and a failed marriage forced Nandi to return to her tribe, where she was less welcomed than she had been then with the Zulus. Shaka grew up fatherless among people who despised him as well as his mother, the butt of every joke, ridiculed for his weakly body (and underdeveloped sexual organs), lonely and bitter.

At the age of twenty-three he was called to serve as a warrior with the Mtetwa clan and did so for the next six years. In his first battle he fought the Butelezi, winning territories that included those of the Zulu. The Mtetwa chieftain, Dingiswayo, saw his leadership qualities and earmarked him to be chieftain of the Zulu, thus making them a buffer to the Mtetwa territory. Dingiswayo made him leader of the Mtetwa army, meanwhile, and here Shaka refined his battle tactics and weapons, as well as the army’s organization. When Senzangakona Zulu died, Shaka was made chieftain.

Shaka worked his Zulu warriors ruthlessly, punishing any the sign of the slightest hesitation with death. The first people he attacked were the eLangeni clan, sparing only those who had showed him and his mother kindness. He destroyed the Butelezi clan, leaving few survivors, taking Butelezi maidens to form a seraglio which eventually numbered over a thousand. But, convinced that any offspring might someday oppose him, he shied from full consummation.

By 1817, Zulu territory had increased fourfold, and Shaka and Dingiswayo compacted to engage in a major expedition to win even more. Dingiswayo died, however, and so by 1820 Shaka ruled most of southeast Africa and Natal.

In 1824 Shaka’s mother, Nandi, died. In hysterical grief at the funeral he ordered several men to be executed, but in the chaos, over 7,000 people died. The true extent of his mental instability was revealed when he then practically ordered the clan’s death by starvation in reverence to Nandi. After three months, sense of a kind was restored, but the seed of doubt against Shaka – and perhaps in his own mind too – had been sown. Shaka and his army began to go downhill, which is where, in the winter of 1827, Matthew Hervey and his men meet them.

Students of early Zulu history may dispute my account of the first contact with Shaka’s army. They would be right to do so. Chief Matiwane owed no allegiance to Shaka. His clan, the Ngwanes, although one of the Nguni people like the ‘pure’ Zulu, had for a decade resisted incorporation into Shaka’s greater Zulu kingdom. In the course of evasion, however, they became a marauding tribe as troublesome as the Zulu to the Xhosa and others of Kaffraria. But at the time of Hervey’s brush with them the precise status of Matiwane’s warriors was unknown, and their depredations were lumped together with those of Shaka in the reports reaching Cape Town. Scholars also disagree: while published sources have tended to make Matiwane
non
-Zulu, later academic research has not been so certain. For instance, John Burridge Scott in a very thorough doctoral thesis (The
British Soldier on
the Eastern Cape frontier 1800-1850,
University of Port Elizabeth, 1973) calls Matiwane’s tribesmen unequivocally Zulu. And, indeed, after Shaka’s death Matiwane declared his allegiance to the new king, Dingane, Shaka’s half-brother – as Matthew Hervey, his dragoons and the Mounted Rifles will discover to their cost in future adventures.

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON’S CAVALRY

AN EXPLANATTORY NOTE

Here is a picture – a very incomplete one – of the cavalry in the Duke of Wellington’s day. The picture remained the same, with but minor changes, until after the Crimean War nearly half a century later.

Like the infantry, the cavalry was organized in regiments. Each had a colonel as titular head, usually a very senior officer (in the case of the 10th Light Dragoons, for instance, it was the Prince of Wales; in the case of the fictional 6th Light Dragoons it was first the Earl of Sussex and then Lord George Irvine, both lieutenant generals) who kept a fatherly if distant eye on things, in particular the appointment of officers. The actual command of the regiment was exercised by a lieutenant-colonel. He had a major as his second in command (or ‘senior major’ as he was known in the Sixth and other regiments), an adjutant who was usually commissioned from the ranks, a regimental serjeant-major (RSM) and various other ‘specialist’ staff.

A cavalry regiment comprised a number of troops identified by a letter (A Troop, B Troop, etc.), each of a hundred or so men commanded by a captain, though in practice the troops were usually under strength. The number of troops in a regiment varied depending on where it was stationed; in Spain, for instance, at the height of the war, there were eight.

The captain was assisted by two or three subaltern officers – lieutenants and cornets (second-lieutenants) – and a troop serjeant-major, who before 1811 was known as a quartermaster (QM). After 1811 a regimental quartermaster was established to supervise supply and quartering (accommodation) for the regiment as a whole – men and horses. There was also a riding-master (RM), like the QM usually commissioned from the ranks (‘the ranks’ referred to everyone who was not a commissioned officer, in other words RSM and below). With his staff of rough-riders (a rough was an unbroken remount, a replacement horse) the RM was responsible for training recruits both human and equine.

Troops were sometimes paired in squadrons, numbered First, Second, Third (and occasionally Fourth). On grand reviews in the eighteenth century the colonel would command the first squadron, the lieutenant-colonel the second, and the major the third, each squadron bearing an identifying
guidon,
a silk banner – similar to the infantry battalion’s
colours.
By the time of the Peninsular War, however, guidons were no longer carried mounted in the field, and the squadron was commanded by the senior of the two troop leaders (captains).

A troop or squadron leader, as well indeed as the commanding officer, would give his orders in the field by voice and through his trumpeter. His words of command were either carried along the line by the sheer power of his voice, or were repeated by the troop officers, or in the case of the commanding officer were relayed by the adjutant (‘gallopers’ and aides-de-camp performed the same function for general officers). The trumpet was often used for repeating an order and to recall or signal scattered troops. The commanding officer and each captain had his own trumpeter, who was traditionally mounted on a grey, and they were trained by the trumpet-major (who, incidentally, was traditionally responsible for administering floggings).