Brothers in Arms. Iain Gale

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СКАЧАТЬ and Hanoverian infantry, as they clustered around the village of Eyne, eight hundred yards to their front and right. That place would surely now be his own objective, and the aim of his brigade would be to shore up the clearly ailing forces of Cadogan, thus reinforcing the entire Allied line. He looked to his right and saw that yet more Allied troops were arriving along the road from Lessines, being disposed according to Marlborough’s wishes with apparent improvisation. It showed the true genius of Corporal John, who had guided them through six years of war, first in Bavaria in the great victory at Blenheim and then back up here in Flanders.

      He caught another snatch of Taylor’s song and again the words rang true:

      ‘For starvation and danger it will be my destiny To seek fresh employment with Marlborough and me.

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

      The singing had spread now to the other companies of the battalion and beyond to the other British regiments in the brigade who stood in line behind the grenadiers, waiting at the bridge. Waiting.

      And so the afternoon wore on, and fear and frustration in their turn took hold in the minds of Steel and his men and all the others. And the men in the valley continued to die, singly at times and at times in parcels of four or six or ten, as fate directed the fall of the shot. Steel watched them as they fought in the village, in its fields and orchards and on the plain. He cursed at his commanders’ inaction and wiped his brow of sweat in the sultry July sunshine that played across the scene. Yet still they were not ordered into the attack.

      He called across to Hansam, as he had done at intervals throughout the day: ‘Henry, what time d’you have?’

      The lieutenant drew out his prized timepiece, a gold chronometer taken from the body of a dead French officer after Blenheim: ‘Four o’clock and thirty minutes.’

      Steel nodded his thanks, swatted a fly away from his face and tucked a finger inside the sweat-stained collar band of his shirt, which had again become home to a colony of lice. He had lost them in England and kept clean too while in Brussels, but since they had been on the march the little buggers had come back – and it seemed to Steel that they were making up for their absence. What he would give for a clean shirt, a long soak in a bath, a pitcher of ale and the chance to sleep! Above all sleep. He ran his hand across his stubbled chin. That and perhaps a shave and a chance to lie with his new wife.

      He noticed that he was sweating heavily now. The day had crept up on them, and the noise from the valley seemed to amplify the heat. How much longer would they stand here? he thought. Taylor and his men had long since finished their song and silence again descended upon the ranks, letting the fears back in.

      Steel drew himself up and spoke in a clear voice, intending the men to hear him: ‘That was a fine piece of singing back there, Corporal Taylor. Would you mind very much if we should call upon your talents again ere long?’

      Taylor grinned. ‘At your disposal as always, Captain Steel, sir. Lifts the spirits, does a song. That’s what I always say, sir.’ And by way of an afterthought he added: ‘Can’t abide this waiting though, sir.’

      Slaughter glared at him. But Steel was not one, as were some officers, to chide petty impertinence, particularly at such a time as this and from one of his veterans such as Taylor. He nodded. ‘Nor I, Taylor. And you’re right about singing. We’ll hear from you again. But I dare say we’ll be at them soon. Don’t you worry.’

      The man next to Taylor in the company’s front rank, a normally dour Lowland Scot, like Steel himself, named John Mackay, spoke up: ‘And we’ll see ’em off today, sir, won’t we? Just like we did at Ramillies, eh boys?’

      ‘When you were still at your mother’s teat,’ muttered Slaughter.

      There was a short hurrah from the ranks which betrayed more about their boredom and fear than it said about their confidence. Like Ramillies, thought Steel. Perhaps it would be like Ramillies. Like Bleneim too, maybe. But Marlborough’s past triumphs seemed an age away now, as he stood on the bridge – almost another country after all that had happened to him since.

      Before then he had not known his wife, Henrietta. Lady Henrietta Vaughan, to give her her full title. And this was the name by which she would forever be known, it seemed. He himself found it hard to imagine her as ‘Lady Henrietta Steel’. Would he ever become used to it? For she was his wife of little less than a year, now safely billeted in Brussels. He had not wanted her to come out with him from England, but she had prevailed, saying that other wives did as much so why should she not follow her beloved captain?

      Captain Steel. Now that was a style he had no difficulty in adopting. His part in the taking of Ostend had been rewarded at Court with the confirmation of his brevet rank as a full captaincy, by no less a person than the Queen herself. He had been paraded through the streets of London as a hero of the campaign. His praises had been sung by balladeers from Covent Garden to Holborn and talked of by old campaigners in White’s, at Old Man’s coffee house and the late king’s new military hospital at Chelsea.

      He had wondered at the time what his brother’s reaction might have been had he but seen him in such pomp. His elder brother Charles, that was, who had always called him ‘Jack the good for nothing’, who had introduced him as ‘Jack my hapless brother who will come to naught’. To him Steel would forever be the failed lawyer’s clerk, a penniless soldier who had accepted the commission purchased by his mistress. What would he say now to Captain Steel, the hero of Ostend?

      For a moment too he thought of his younger brother, Alexander, a professed Jacobite whose ideals had split the family – what was left of it. Alexander, the baby of the three brothers, two years his junior, who had left home to join the exiled King James at his court outside Paris. Steel had not had news of him now for five years and wondered what might have become of him. Was he still alive? Had he fought for his king? In truth Steel half expected to encounter him on a battlefield in the uniform of the ‘Wild Geese’, those Irish regiments in French service who fought so well for a vanquished dynasty and a conquered land. Perhaps he was wounded or maimed. Steel was overcome by melancholy and a sense of emptiness and the understanding that now, more than ever before, he had left his childhood, youth and roots far behind in Scotland when he had taken the old king’s shilling and joined the Guards as a young lieutenant at his lover’s behest. Now he knew that his real family were those men who stood behind him on this field – them and the pretty, headstrong girl who waited for him in their small and unaffordably expensive apartment in Brussels.

      Although rank and fortune were central to the plan that he had long nurtured for his career, Steel could not help but think that his real prize in the bloody affair at Ostend had been Henrietta. He had rescued her from the hands of a French privateer – no more than a pirate – in the service of the Sun King. That man had held both of them captive as together they had stared death in the face and watched a good man die horribly in an underground torture chamber. Steel had taken her out of that place, and she loved him for that. That was beyond doubt. And now, as the years went by, it would be his task to persuade her to love him for whatever else he was as a man – those virtues she had not yet seen, whatever she and her constant love had the power to make him. It was all very well to fight for yourself, to fight just to stay alive and to make a life as a soldier. But it was quite another thing to fight when you knew that back beyond the baggage lines someone was waiting. He was happy and proud that she had chosen to follow him to Flanders, though in truth he would have expected no less from her stubborn, feisty character. Marlborough’s army always brought in its wake the gaggle of camp followers that came with any army – women, children, wives and lovers. But not many of those who came were attached to officers. It was one of the things he admired about Henrietta, her independent spirit that was intertwined with an unmissable sexuality. He hoped he had СКАЧАТЬ