Medi-Evil 3 (24 page)

“My job?”
Sam said with an impish grin. “It’s not so easy. Well … I wouldn’t say it was difficult, but it can be hairy. I mean, how would you like to look after the powder when you’re under fire? It’s no wonder we always keep the supplies wagon a good thirty yards from the gun.”

 
Tom Caxton listened as they each hauled a wheeled cart loaded with twelve-pound cannonballs back across the open heath.

 
“Mind you,” Sam added. “The most dangerous part of all our jobs is defending the gun. We’re usually so far back you may not think enemy cavalry can get to us, but at Waterloo they did. We were fixed in a battery on the Mont St. Jean Ridge. When the French Horse attacked, we had orders to take cover in the squares, but our officers wouldn’t let us. They said the Brunswick
militia were
likely to run so we had to keep pounding, to take the pressure off our infantry. Which we did, to great bloody effect, though a few squadrons got close and that was a nasty tangle.” He shook his head at the fearful memory.

 
Tom nodded
sobrely
. He’d found out early that the quickest way to get round Sam Clegg was to ask about his exploits in the field. Sam was probably only two years older than Tom, fourteen at the most, and was still hugely impressed that he was already a hardened veteran.

 
“Did the crew lose many that
day
?” Tom asked.

 
“Just the one.
Young
fella
name of Davy
Cranshaw
.
French captain put a pistol ball through his skull.”

 
“What did he do? I mean, what was his job?”

 
Sam chuckled. “What do you think? Who do you think
you
were posted to replace?”

 
Tom pondered this as they approached the gun-line. Despite the warm June day, with its twittering birds and myriad scents of the woodland, the air here was smoky and tacky, befouled by a stench of powder.

 
“You two malingering wretches double up and get your damn
arses
over here!” Sergeant
Kilgariff
bellowed. “
There’s
a hundred and seventy-five rounds to fire yet!”

 
They hurried along, the rough
tussocky
ground hampering the wheels of their carts.

 
“It must be a grand thing,” Tom said, “to have fought in a big battle and be able to say you survived.”

 
Sam laughed. “You may get your chance yet, Tom-Tom.” He’d taken to calling Tom ‘Tom-Tom’ as a mark of affection. “Boney escaped once before. He could do it again.”

 
Tom wasn’t sure whether he hoped for that or not. Though he’d long been enthused by tales of derring-do – his grandfather had been at Minden and Warburg – his own arrival in the
colours
had been forced on him by circumstances of poverty, destitution and brutality. Had he been older and wiser, he’d have
realised
that for someone so young his own life had already been an odyssey of human experience, most of it arduous. Even so, he couldn’t imagine anything to compare with Sam Clegg’s terror as he stood in the Mont St. Jean battery and watched thousands of French horsemen come thundering up the slope towards him. But then, neither would anything that he, Sam, or for that matter any of the rest of the gun-crew had experienced compare with the terror they were
all
due to face before the end of that warm summer day in 1816.

*

The gun
crew were
a rough and ready bunch, but they had that unique camaraderie that is only forged in the crucible of war.

 
Tom’s immediate superior was the ‘loader’, Corporal Ned Flint, a tall, thin
Yorkshireman
, hard and knotty as wood, his hair bleached and skin burned nut-brown by the suns of the Sub-continent and the Spanish peninsular. Flint could be a martinet when the mood was on him, but much of the time was affable; he was also a master of his trade, and had been complimented by the Duke of Wellington himself after outstanding work in the batteries at Salamanca.

 
The rest of the crew consisted of equally notable characters. The gun commander and aimer was Sergeant John
Kilgariff
, who was as broad as he was tall, and had a thick red mane and a huge pair of red mutton-chop whiskers. The ‘
spongeman
’ was Gunner Edward
Alker
, a stocky, balding chap who, despite his advanced years, was physically strong and very wily; he was also the most knowledgeable of them – he’d forgotten more about the art of gunnery than many senior ranks had yet learned. The ‘
ventsman
’ was Gunner Dominic Grubber, another short, squat figure, also of considerable strength (in truth, this was a prerequisite for the gunner’s daily tasks), but given to japes and tom-fooling; his grinning ape-face and thatch of spiky ginger hair only added to his non-too-serious air. Last of all was the ‘fire-man’, Gunner Joshua Bytes, perhaps the only member of the crew that Tom had still to make friends with.
Bytes was
a surly sort, darkly handsome with close-cropped hair and sideburns cut into sharp diamonds, but he rarely had a good word to say, and almost never smiled. Several times during Tom’s first few days, Bytes had snarled at him for his incompetence, and threatened to take a fist to him.

 
“Bytes
thinks
he should be a sergeant at least, by now,” Sam Clegg confided to Tom. “He can’t abide officers, but despises himself for being part of the lower orders.
Fella
like that, he’ll never find a place he can be happy.”

 
“Gun commander, elevate a little,” came the thin, wooden voice of Lieutenant
Silverwell
, who’d observed the last discharge from horseback a few yards away. “You’re falling short.”

 
Sergeant
Kilgariff
didn’t argue. In actual fact they were not falling short. Over six-
hundrfed
yards away, the cloth screen suspended between two hazel trees, which provided their main target, had only been struck cleanly a couple of times because heavy rain had fallen a few days previously and the heath was soft. Many shots were burying themselves at first impact rather than skipping on. Nevertheless, he produced his quadrant and plummet, and the twelve-pounder’s barrel was elevated to a fraction above forty-five degrees.

 
The crew made ready. Gunner
Alker
sponged out the bore, making sure to quench any remaining embers before the new charge was introduced. Corporal Flint then inserted the powder bag and the ball, Gunner
Alker
ramming them into place. While this was happening, Gunner Grubber used his soot-blackened thumb to block the vent hole and stop any draught from fanning a flame. Once the gun was fully loaded, Grubber pricked the bag through the vent, and poured in the ignition powder. The men stepped back into their
places,
and – usually at a nod from Sergeant
Kilgariff
, but on this occasion from Lieutenant
Silverwell
– Gunner Bytes lit the powder with his
slowmatch
.

 
The detonation was furious, the resulting cloud of white smoke at first all-enveloping. But restricted vision was no excuse, and the crew went quickly back to work. On each drill today they were expected to fire twenty-five rounds per hour, and each time hit the target as cleanly as possible. All along the gun-line, other crews – thirty-five in total – were going through a similar routine. Normally such
practise
would occur on Woolwich Common near the Thames. But many new men were being inducted into the regiment during the course of this summer, and experienced crews, such as Sergeant
Kilgariff’s
, had journeyed up from London to make way. They were currently on Colton’s Field, a patch of rough untenanted pasture some two miles outside
Cirencester
, which had recently been acquired as an additional training ground.

 
It was hot, tiring work, for which reason the men had stripped down to their breeches, braces and undershirts. Needless to say, Lieutenant
Silverwell
hadn’t. He remained cool and unruffled throughout, resplendent in his blue dress coat with the red cuffs and lapels, and his tilted bicorn with its black cockade and white plume. As the end of the drill approached, he sat rigid on his horse, one eyebrow raised as he regarded his pocket-watch. The moment the hour expired, and all twenty-five rounds had been fired, the guns fell silent, and Sam and Tom were again
despatched
across the heath with their carts and shovels. With an officer of artillery watching, they hurried, mopping the sweat and grime from their faces with their neckerchiefs.

 
This time they didn’t have to stop en route to dig balls from the ground. And in fact when they reached the target, which was maybe twenty feet wide by sixteen tall, they saw that a number of new holes had been punched in the cloth, many of them charred around the edges. Behind it there was a huge embankment of sandbags, and most of the projectiles lay at the foot of this. The lads gathered them as quickly as they could. Again, it was hot work. They would never be able to transport them all back in one go. Six or seven cannonballs were as much as either lad could manage in a single journey, but they assembled the rest in a small stockpile – and at this point
realised
they were several short.

 
“Curse that bloody
Silverwell
,” Sam said. “I could tell Sergeant
Kilgariff
thought we’d elevated the barrel too high. They’ve gone over the bags.”

 
That seemed unlikely to Tom even with his inexperience. The sandbag embankment must have been eighteen feet tall, yet there was no denying it – they were missing three
roundshot
. They wandered around to the rear and, thirty yards beyond it, spotted a birch trunk which had been freshly gashed. One of the missing balls lay beside it.

 
“We’ll pick that up on the way back,” Sam said.

 
They threaded through the trees, scanning the dense June undergrowth.

 
Sam scowled. “We’ll have the devil’s own job finding any bugger in this.”

 
“Sam!” Tom pointed.

 
The belt of woods was only thin and bordered more open heath-land. Before that there was an immense mound covered in lush grass. It rose steeply until it was maybe forty feet at its apex, but it was a good eighty or ninety
yards
in breadth and depth. At the front of it, on a part of the slope in line with the target, two black, roughly circular holes were visible.

 
“They’ve embedded themselves in that hill,” Sam said, stating what to Tom was rather the obvious. “Better go and get a shovel.”

 
Tom did as he was told. When he returned, Sam had climbed up alongside the holes, and was examining them. They were about four feet up from the ground, and located less than a foot apart. When Tom reached him, Sam was sniffing at the air, and looking puzzled. Tom
realised
why: the usual smell of hot iron was absent.

 
“They must’ve gone a long way in,” Sam said, thrusting his arm into the first hole until it was almost at shoulder depth. His puzzlement turned to surprise. “I can’t feel anything, Tom-Tom. I mean nothing.
Nothing at all.
”

 
He withdrew his arm, and they gazed in. Quite clearly, the two balls hadn’t just burrowed their way into a solid mass. There was an extensive cavity in there. The grassy segment between the holes sagged inwards, as if nothing was supporting it. Tom pushed at it. It sagged further, there was a tearing of roots and it collapsed backwards. The aperture left was considerable; a ragged gap maybe three feet by three, which both their heads and pairs of shoulders could fit into it at the same time.

 
“A cave,” Sam said.

 
“I don’t think so,” Tom replied. “Look there.” Daylight showed a floor, which, at roughly the same level as the ground they now stood upon, was flat, smooth and glinting with moisture. “Those are paving stones,” Tom added. He stepped back and regarded the rest of the mound with awe. “I think this was
built
.”

 
Sam looked doubtful. “Why would someone build a hill?”

 
“I don’t know.”

 
Sam gave it some thought, before shaking his head. “We ought to retrieve the iron, or our
hides’ll
pay.”

 
They kicked at the remaining grass and soil until they’d knocked so much of it down that they could stoop through. Even so, it was a minute or two before either could pluck up the courage to actually go inside.