Company Of Spears

Captain Christopher Worsley was a soft-spoken officer, not given to display, rather dull some said. He had joined the Sixth after Waterloo, gone with the regiment to India, but had come back after three years on account of a recurrent dysentery which defied every medical authority in Bengal. After extensive cures in Germany, he had returned to the Active List, bought F (Depot) Troop just before Bhurtpore, and brought them from Maidstone to Hounslow when the Sixth had returned in the autumn. Hervey had never got to know him well, for Worsley had been a bookish subaltern in D Troop, while he himself had spent a good deal of time on detached duty with E. But, dullness apart, Worsley was held in general respect among his fellows, and he possessed the very marked advantage of having a young and most active serjeant-major. Troop Serjeant-major Collins had been born the same year as Hervey, although there was a discrepancy of two years in the age on his attestation papers and that in the baptismal rolls of the parish in which his father, a miller, was churchwarden. Collins had, without his father’s leave, enlisted in the Sixth the year before the French had invaded Portugal. He had given his age as eighteen rather than sixteen, and his first name as John rather than Angel, an early sign of his prudential judgement Hervey considered. Hervey was indeed the one man in the regiment who knew of these delinquencies, for he had once visited the Gloucestershire mill on his way to Ireland the year before Waterloo, where he had found a proud father and a good woman, his wife, long since reconciled to their only son’s chosen way, happy that they received (as they always had) regular letters and assurances of his well-being. Hervey had told them – as far as he could without making it appear that their son had been exposed to excessive danger – of young Corporal Collins’s courage and skill, and that he was certain to come home one day with a serjeant-major’s stripes. That had been all of thirteen years ago. It had perhaps taken longer to get the fourth stripe than Hervey had then imagined, for the reductions in the cavalry after Waterloo had been savage, but Alderman Collins had at last been able to see his son with four chevrons on his sleeve. In a week or so he would give a party in the great tithe barn at Ampney to celebrate the promotion, and the engagement to marry, both of which Alderman and Mrs Collins had long hoped for. Hervey fully intended being there.

He looked long at him, now. Serjeant-major Collins was every inch what a colonel in a fashionable regiment would want. He possessed that invaluable cavalry quality ‘a good leg for a boot’. So did Mr Hairsine. Armstrong did not. Armstrong’s leather and brass may have gleamed more, but Collins’s was a frame made for a tailor. In fighting quality there was nothing to choose between them. In experience Armstrong had the better of his junior by a couple of years, in age by half a dozen. Hervey began to wonder if the old principle of promotion – seniority tempered by rejection – would indeed serve the battle-scarred Geordie Armstrong, or whether it would now favour instead the immaculate Angel Collins. He knew that with luck (and justice), the decision would be his, but it would not be easy, although seniority favoured Armstrong, and there could never be rejection of that record of service.

‘Leave to carry on, sir?’ Worsley sounded uncertain.

Hervey realized he had kept him long. ‘Carry on.’

A march was a good time to think, to mull things over, especially if there was a reliable guide and no chance of ambush. Hervey was grateful of it. ‘What path of glory’s to be had in Hounslow?’ Somervile had asked; yet here they were now, bent on saving parliament or the King himself from popish plotters and their gunpowder. Hervey could not wholly rejoice in the mission, however, certain as he was that no true opportunity for distinction came in aiding the civil power. The best that any soldier could hope for was that his body came out of it whole and his reputation not too badly tarnished, for if every Tory reviled Shelley and his republican notions still, yet they half agreed his picture of ‘An army, which liberticide and prey makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield’. Hervey shook his head. Thank God he had spent the past six years in India, where there were simple certainties – and no poets! Somervile was unquestionably right when he promised a surer path of glory in the Cape Colony. There he might wield his sabre freely and in no doubt as to who were the King’s enemies. With Somervile his judge and patron, he would have his distinction, and his glory even; and with it no doubt further promotion. But it would not be with the Sixth. Would he think meanly of himself for ever thereafter?