Company Of Spears

There was Ireland too, restive in its condition of exploitative poverty and discriminatory legislation. Britons were divided over the Catholic question – giving Catholics the vote and removing the obstacles to holding public office – ‘Catholic Emancipation’. There were no riots against Emancipation yet, as there had been the century before; but there was suspicion, and the authorities had no certain idea where it would lead. There was, indeed, ‘noise’ enough to disturb a good night’s sleep from time to time, if not so much as to keep the country awake for too long.

So Matthew Hervey, thirty-six years old, and in the midst of that glorious metamorphosis from a regimental to a commanding officer, finds himself in noisy circumstances once again. And, naturally, he meets those who would put fingers in their ears rather than deal with the noise. For this is an age when change, change in the army, is regarded as unnecessary, perhaps even injurious to those regimental qualities that had assured victory at Waterloo: discipline, personal bravery and boldness in combat.

Meanwhile, in Prussia, a major general not very much older than Hervey – Carl von Clausewitz – who had fought the French that day in 1815, is putting the final touches to his penetrating study of war and its practice, so that if a Prussian army were again required to do its Kaiser’s will it would do so with absolute efficiency. And at the other end of the technological spectrum, in southern Africa, an instinctive soldier, Shaka, King of the Zulu, is consolidating his astonishing military successes; for in truth Shaka and Clausewitz speak the same military language.

It is these old questions and new threats that Matthew Hervey and the 6th Light Dragoons face, and whose new lessons and old truths they will have to learn and re-learn – painfully.

Allan Mallinson

July 2005

Rebuke the company of spearmen…

      scatter thou the people that delight in war.

PSALM 68

PART I

PATHS OF GLORY

England

Plan of the Royal Gunpowder Manufactory at Waltham Abbey in 1830 by Frederick Drayson from his A Treatise on Gunpowder. The National Archive, ref. MFII 15/31

I

MANOEUVRES

Hounslow Heath, 12 March 1827

Acting-Major Matthew Hervey nodded to the adjutant, and in as many seconds only as it took for him, the officer in temporary command of the 6th Light Dragoons, to rein round to face front again, the first section of the Chestnut Troop discharged a thunderous salvo. Gilbert, his battle-charger, and at rising fifteen years a seasoned campaigner, threw up his head but did not move a foot. Hervey let out the reins a little so that the iron grey gelding could play with the bit as reward.

He looked over his left shoulder, then his right. The lines were ragged. Troop horses had leapt forward, some had run back, others had reared and turned. Barely half the regiment stood as they had been dressed. Even his trumpeter’s grey, a mare which should have known better, was showing a flank and bucking hard, determined to unseat her rider.

Hervey nodded again, the adjutant raised his arm, and the Chestnuts’ second section fired. As the smoke cleared, he could see the first section’s men standing ready, guns reloaded, and second section’s beginning the thirty fevered seconds of swabbing, ramming and tamping before the number one could shout ‘On!’ to tell his section officer that the gun was shotted and re-laid on its target.

Except that there was no shot or target. The Chestnut (more properly the First) Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, fired blank this morning. They did so to accustom the remounts – and recruits – of the 6th Light Dragoons to the noise of battle. It was not much by way of comparison with the real thing, Hervey knew (by God, how he knew!), but it was a good deal better than nothing; and certainly a good deal better than the usual method, the band’s banging and crashing on the square. It was decent of the Chestnuts to oblige them thus, although the Sixth had paid for the powder; and in any case, Hervey thought there must be gain for the Chestnuts too, for there was nothing like the thrill of real powder instead of ‘dry’ drills on the parade ground – even if the gun jumped back not a fraction of what it would when shotted and full-charged. He would have each of them fire in turn now, six nine-pounders, to test the nerve of the horses which had been half petrified into docility by the two salvos. He nodded to the adjutant a third time.

Number one gun fired, and the remaining rooks in the distant elms took flight, so that Hervey imagined there was not a bird perched on any branch on Hounslow Heath.