The Command Page 3

  The armoured tractor had simply rolled across the barbed wire. Now it reached the first trench, paused for a moment on the outer lip, appeared to dip, then made contact with the inner lip and continued on its way; the German soldiers were scattered.

  ‘How many men?’ Murdoch asked.

  ‘Only a couple inside the tank. But if your first line consisted of them, the infantry could follow on behind in comparative safety. Even the cavalry could do so.’

  ‘Tanks?’ Murdoch asked. ‘You call them tanks?’

  ‘I call it a tank. It makes me think of a tank on a tractor.’

  Murdoch gazed at the ‘tank’. It was still moving, having crossed the area between the first and second trenches, and then crossed the second trench. There its clockwork gave out and it stopped. He scratched his head.

  ‘It’s an old idea, of course,’ Swinton said modestly. ‘A Captain Bretherton dreamed it up more than half a century ago. But no one was interested then. Besides, he had to use steam power, which was hopelessly inefficient on a small scale like this. The petrol engine has changed all that.’ He grinned. ‘Although nobody, except Mr Churchill, is interested now, either.’

  ‘They will be,’ Churchill promised him. ‘They will be.’

  *

  ‘What did you think?’ he asked as they drove back to London in the dusk.

  ‘It could work,’ Murdoch said. ‘You’d need a lot of them.’

  ‘We shall have a lot of them, eventually. Will you endorse the idea, if you’re asked?’

  Murdoch thought for a moment. It could work. And if the tanks could indeed knock down the other fellow’s barbed wire and make a nonsense of his trenches, it could bring war back to the days of true manoeuvrability, as in South Africa, in which cavalry would have a full part to play...‘Yes, Mr Churchill,’ he said. ‘I’ll endorse the idea, if asked.’

  ‘Good man. How’d you like to drive one?’

  ‘Me? I can’t even drive an automobile.’ Although my wife can, he thought. ‘I’m a horseman, not a mechanic.’

  ‘I think you should learn, Colonel. I can foresee a time when you chaps will have abandoned your horses entirely for tanks.’

  ‘After my time, First Lord.’ He grinned. ‘Besides, it’d be a bit tricky saying the regimental prayer before a charge, with all those engines roaring.’

  Churchill grinned back. ‘I’m sure we’ll find a way, Mackinder.’

  *

  ‘Another medal, eh?’ grunted Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, glaring at Murdoch from between huge eyebrows and his famous moustache. ‘I suppose you wish to be congratulated, Mackinder.’

  ‘I’ve had enough congratulations, sir,’ Murdoch replied.

  ‘Harrumph. So. Back to France tomorrow, eh? Looking forward to that?’

  ‘To rejoining the regiment, yes, sir.’

  ‘And in command. You’re young to be a lieutenant-colonel. Dead men’s shoes. There’ll be a lot of those in this war.’

  Murdoch waited for the great man to say something relevant.

  ‘The situation,’ Kitchener announced. ‘You’ll know Antwerp has fallen. It was never defensible. Sending marines there was a waste of bloody time — and men. Churchill’s idea.’ He brooded for a few seconds. ‘We have to push them back, Mackinder. We have to drive them back. The next offensive will be launched December fourteenth. Just give you time to settle in, eh? All our armies, French and British, will move forward together, and throw the buggers back into their own country. Once we’ve got them going, we’ll keep them going. That’ll be your job, the job of the cavalry, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir, supposing we can break through his defensive system.’

  Kitchener glared at him. ‘We will. We must. We cannot fight a long war. There are shortages already. Shells. There aren’t enough shells. And men. I need more men. If we do not crack them now...’ his shoulders slumped, ‘we may not do it at all. Good luck, Mackinder. We will do it. You will do it.’

  Murdoch saluted and went to the door.

  ‘What I have said is confidential,’ Kitchener growled.

  *

  ‘Well, sir,’ Corporal Reynolds said. ‘Last night in Blighty until Christmas at the least. On the town, sir?’

  ‘Not on the town, George,’ Murdoch said. ‘I’ve a call to make. Get us some tickets down to Sevenoaks for this afternoon.’

  ‘Sevenoaks?’ Reynolds raised his eyebrows and then frowned. ‘You’re not going calling on that Jerry bugger again, sir? Seems to me he’s no friend of yours.’

  ‘He did save my life once, George,’ Murdoch said. ‘And then tried to cut you down when your back was turned at Le Cateau,’ Reynolds pointed out.

  ‘An act of war. You get the tickets,’ Murdoch said.

  But he wondered why he was doing this. If he and Paul von Reger had been friends once, that seemed a very long time ago now — since last August, a million light years away. Their friendship had not survived Paul’s marriage to Margriet. It was because she, as a bride, had confessed her sins to her husband, and been beaten for those sins. At least, she had claimed so when last they had met. But it was difficult to determine when Margriet was telling the truth and when she was living in some fantasy world of her own.

  Yet the man had once saved his life, when Murdoch had been captured by a Boer commando, infuriated at the destruction of their farms — on Kitchener’s orders — and ready to lynch the first British officer to fall into their hands. That Paul had struck at him from behind outside Le Cateau had undoubtedly been a reflex action.

  Murdoch straightened his tie as the military doctor escorted him along the corridor of the prison hospital. ‘You’ll find Colonel von Reger almost fully recovered,’ he said. ‘He’ll leave here in another week.’

  ‘And go to a prison camp?’

  ‘I have no idea, Colonel Mackinder. I presume so, although he is a prominent man in Germany.’ He opened the door. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Mackinder to see you, Colonel.’

  Paul von Reger stood up. Even in a dressing gown and pyjamas he managed to look military — and Prussian. His yellow hair had been allowed to grow by the hospital staff, but his back was as straight as ever Murdoch recalled it, his manner as precise, his big features as stiff. ‘You are returning to service,’ he remarked.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘I also, hopefully,’ Reger said.

  Murdoch raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I am to be exchanged. I have been told this.’

  ‘Then I congratulate you, assuming you wish to return to the front.’

  Reger stiffened even more. ‘Do you suppose I am a coward?’

  ‘I never supposed that, Paul. But you are nearly forty. This war is young man’s work.’

  ‘Your work, you mean.’ Reger glanced at Murdoch’s tunic. ‘A bar to the DSO. You are a much decorated man.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Always leading heroic charges, eh? One day your luck will change.’

  ‘Everyone’s luck changes eventually,’ Murdoch said. ‘When you return to Germany, will you give my regards to Margriet, and young Paul?’

  ‘To Margriet, and young Paul. Yes, I will do that.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Murdoch hesitated, then held out his hand. When last he had seen Reger, in this very room, after he had been able to leave his hospital bed, his offered hand had been refused. He realized it was going to be refused again now, and let it fall back to his side.

  ‘I wish you to know,’ Reger said, ‘that I have no regrets at having tried to kill you at Le Cateau.’

  ‘I do not expect you to. I was trying to kill you.’

  ‘And the next time we meet, I shall succeed,’ Reger told him.

  ‘We’ll both be trying then, too,’ Murdoch agreed. ‘If there is a next time. But when the war is over, I would hope we can be friends again, Paul.’

  Reger stared at him. ‘When the war is over, Murdoch, Great Britain will have been defeated. She will have been humbled. You will have been humbled. Yes, perhaps then we
can be friends.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to that,’ Murdoch said, and left the room.

  ‘As unpleasant as ever, I’d reckon,’ Reynolds remarked as the train chugged them back to London.

  ‘As ever,’ Murdoch said. ‘He’s a frightened man, George. Maybe all the enemy are. They’ve started something they’re no longer sure they can finish. And if they can’t...’

  ‘No one is going to weep for the Kaiser, Mr Murdoch.’

  ‘Or any of his people,’ Murdoch agreed. ‘That’s what’s frightening them.’ And me, he thought.

  *

  ‘Troop, atten-tion!’

  The recruits brought their heels together and straightened their backs. There were thirty-seven of them, most of whom Murdoch had met already when he had visited regimental headquarters in Bath a week previously. Presumably other drafts had been sent off while he had been in hospital; he knew the regiment had suffered more than thirty-seven casualties during the fight at Le Cateau alone.

  ‘Lieutenant Ralph Manly-Smith, sir!’ The young man, wearing an obviously brand new uniform, stood in front of his colonel and saluted. He was the officer Murdoch had been warned would be accompanying him to France, straight out of Sandhurst, but who had not been at the depot. He was somewhat small, and dark and intense, and surely could not have been more than eighteen.

  Murdoch returned the salute, then held out his hand. ‘Welcome, Mr Manly-Smith.’

  Manly-Smith’s grasp was eager and his eyes were shining; he was shaking hands with a legend. ‘Troop is ready for inspection, sir.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Murdoch walked in front of the second-lieutenant, spurs jingling in the crisp November air, heels thudding on the courtyard of the depot. ‘Which of you didn’t I meet in Bath?’ he asked the troop.

  There was a moment’s hesitation, then someone said, ‘Me, sir.’

  Murdoch glanced along the rank, and felt his jaw dropping. ‘Johnnie?’ he asked in amazement.

  ‘Trooper Morton, sir,’ the man replied.

  Murdoch gazed at him in astonishment. Johnnie Morton had been the senior lieutenant when he had joined the regiment in Bath, fifteen years ago. An instant mutual dislike had grown into a very real friendship beneath the African sun and the bullets of the Boer sharpshooters. Then Johnnie had gone with the main part of the regiment to India, while Murdoch had been sent to Somaliland with his squadron. There he had gained fame and fortune, while in India Johnnie had contracted syphilis and been invalided out, under a cloud.

  But he had been retired with the rank of major.

  ‘Trooper Morton?’ Murdoch asked softly.

  ‘Yes, sir. A man must fight, sir.’

  Murdoch gazed at the moustached face, the square shoulders, and remembered a great deal.

  ‘I am fit again now, sir,’ Morton said.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Murdoch said. There were a million questions scouring his tongue, but not one he could ask. He was the regiment’s commanding officer, and Morton, for whatever reason, was now a trooper. Revelations would have to wait. He completed his inspection of the men and their kit, and returned to where the lieutenant waited, like everyone else intrigued by the exchange. ‘Very good, Mr Manly-Smith,’ he said. ‘Fall the men in. The train is waiting.’

  Manly-Smith gave the orders, and the troop mounted and walked their horses out of the yard, the two officers at their head. ‘Morton is an old soldier, is he, sir?’ Manly-Smith could restrain his curiosity no longer.

  ‘Yes,’ Murdoch said.

  ‘He looks a little old to be a trooper.’

  ‘He is,’ Murdoch agreed. Tut, as he said, a man must

  fight. Let us go and do that, Mr Manly-Smith.’

  Chapter Two: France, 1915

  ‘Good morning, sir. Cold today.’ Reynolds had not had to change his greeting for weeks.

  Murdoch scratched his head, got out of bed, shuddered. The farmhouse, situated a dozen miles north-east of St Omer, was like an icebox. But at least he had a farmhouse. He stood at the window, rubbed a clear spot in the condensation, looked out at the tents of the regiment; some of the more enterprising troopers had even built small huts, scattered over the rolling green countryside. Beyond the camp, the horses were tethered in straight lines. Healthy horses; they had had little to do all winter save exercise.

  Another day. A quiet day; there was hardly more than the odd ‘burrp’ in the distance which meant a shot — the front line was only a few miles away. But it might have been a million miles, as far as the cavalry were concerned. Even during the offensive, which had lasted from just before Christmas right up to Easter, when the guns had boomed day and night and the stream of casualties brought back from the line had been no less continuous, he and his men, the entire cavalry division, had sat on their horses and waited for the gap to be created into which they would gallop, but it never had. And a fortnight ago the battle had ground to a halt, mainly because the artillery had run out of shells, with hardly a yard of ground gained to show for all the effort. But with a quarter of a million British casualties. The French losses were unthinkable.

  This was warfare on an unbelievable scale, for most people. Only one or two men, in farmhouses like this one but situated in the English countryside, were trying to think about it, seriously. The rest were going through the motions, and dying.

  And Mother had expected him home for Christmas. Now she and Philippa and Lee and the children were in the firing line too. Well, perhaps not quite, down in Somerset. But he could remember the wave of anger which had swept through the British ranks in January when news had been received of a zeppelin bombing raid on England. No soldier had really believed the tales of German ‘frightfulness’ perpetrated by the newspapers during the invasion of Belgium last summer — but bombing civilians was a newly horrible aspect of war.

  Reynolds had Murdoch’s hot water for shaving and his cup of coffee waiting, and downstairs Madame Bosnet had his breakfast, bread and butter, honey and more coffee. If Monsieur Bosnet was away, fighting the Boches, Madame and her teenage son — daily expecting his call-up papers —were happy to minister to the English Colonel.

  And his senior officers. Breakfast was as much a social gathering as a review of the coming day’s activity. Major Billy Prendergast, the adjutant, hurried in; he had already been out on inspection. With him were the three captains, Peter Ramage, John Lowndes and Tommy Hunter; with a steady stream of replacements the regiment was just about at full strength, three squadrons of two troops each, each troop a hundred men. Nowadays each troop also had a Lewis gun section, and of course, as dragoons, his men were equipped with carbines as well as swords — sabres and lances were for the other chaps. While waiting behind the lines, indeed, Murdoch had attempted to train his command as he had trained his squadron as a captain back in the days of peace, dismounting from a gallop and taking up firing positions in the least possible time; and even more, in the vain hope that they would one day be loosed against the enemy, in firing their rifles from the shoulder while at the canter, as in pictures he had seen of American Indians. He did not suppose they would ever attain any accuracy at such a novel practice, but it might have a certain surprise value. With farriers and cooks and the newfangled wireless operators added, he was now responsible for about seven hundred men.

  Prendergast sat down with a sigh. ‘You’d better tell him,’ he suggested gloomily.

  ‘I have seven men on sick parade,’ Ramage said.

  ‘I have eleven,’ Lowndes said.

  ‘I have eight,’ Hunter added.

  Murdoch raised his eyebrows. ‘Sudden. Flu?’

  ‘Ah, no.’ Prendergast glanced at Madame, fussing over her range. ‘Do you think she understands English, Murdoch?’ he asked in a hoarse whisper.

  Not a word.’

  ‘Ah. Well, the fact is, Trooper Clarke has a boil which requires lancing, and ah...’ He checked again.

  ‘Somewhere awkward?’

  ‘The other twenty-five have, well...RSM Yeald says i
t’s gonorrhoea.’

  ‘Yeald should know,’ Ramage muttered.

  Murdoch put down his coffee cup. ‘Twenty-five of my men have contracted VD? In one night?’

  ‘Well...apparently it takes a couple of weeks to come out. Yeald says,’ Prendergast added hurriedly. ‘And just over a fortnight ago we were pulled back from the line and were able to give our chaps a night in St Omer. There is, apparently, a...ah, house there.’

  ‘And how many men have been there since?’ Murdoch asked in a steely voice.

  ‘Well, as we are officially enjoying rest and recuperation, I’ve been giving a couple of dozen passes every night. Well, I mean, the poor devils deserved it.’

  ‘You mean you have given roughly half the regiment VD. With the other half waiting eagerly to get it.’

  Prendergast drank some coffee noisily. He and Murdoch were old friends. Together they had lived through the trauma of the Curragh Mutiny and together they had charged the enemy at Le Cateau; hastily promoted to major when Colonel Walters had been killed and Murdoch wounded, Billy had commanded the regiment until their new lieutenant-colonel had returned to duty. ‘Yeald says it takes only a couple of weeks to clear up, with treatment. I’ve sent a report over to Doc Sansom.’

  ‘That doesn’t alter the fact that we are going to have one hell of a proportion of our ration strength out of action for the foreseeable future. Have you spoken to Dai?’

  ‘Well, no, not yet. I felt it was more a matter for Doc Sansom than the padre, right now.’

  ‘He’ll have to be told. Reynolds, have my horse saddled.’ Murdoch stood up. ‘You...no, you’d better stay here, Billy. To explain things to Doc Sansom,’ He frowned. ‘Let me see the names of the affected men.’

  The three captains held out the pieces of paper. But Prendergast knew what was in Murdoch’s mind. ‘Johnnie Morton isn’t amongst them.’

  ‘Thank God for that. I’ll take him with me.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Prendergast was alarmed.

  ‘Into St Omer.’

  ‘But...I say, Murdoch. And taking Morton...anyway, the house doesn’t open until the afternoon. Seems the girls have to sleep, some time. I mean, sleep.’