Company Of Spears

That, however, was not his immediate impression as he came into Waltham Abbey. The town was sleepier even than Enfield. As he turned north into Powdermill Lane and began trotting alongside the river he was at once struck, and to his immense surprise, by how pastoral, how green and pleasant, was the scene: no towering foundries, no ‘dark Satanic mills’, no winding gear to lower poor colliers to the infernal regions, no smoking chimneys to begrime the country thereabout. There were so many trees he might have been in Epping Forest still, or else nearby on good Queen Bess’s old chase. There was no noise but for the creaking of waterwheels, no noxious vapours to sting the eyes and throat, no hurly-burly of any sort; only sailing barges which plied the sluggish Lea as peacefully as if they carried flour to City bakers rather than gunpowder to the Woolwich arsenal. But he knew full well how violence could suddenly intrude even on such a bucolic scene (he had drawn sabre and pistol in the English countryside before). And even here, in the quietness of birdsong and a light breeze in the oaks and elms, there was ever the threat of explosion as great as any he might hear on the battlefield. Greater, indeed: as loud as the magazines at Corunna and Ciudad Rodrigo when their powder had taken a spark; and as unpredictable as a volcano.

He rode north for almost a mile, and still the land was the Board of Ordnance’s. In among the trees he could see the little curved-roof stone buildings, or else flimsy wooden ones which would blow apart readily rather than contain the blast and do fearful destruction to all inside. The more he saw the more astonished he was, for His Majesty’s principal gunpowder mills would, he felt sure, have been at once familiar to great Henry himself when first the manufacture of powder began here three centuries ago. It was a most curious, almost primitive affair, the advances of science and engineering having passed by this very heart of the nation’s machinery of war. There was not even a wall around the site to speak of, nothing to keep out male-factors, although he supposed the road might easily be closed at the southern and northern ends, and then the river on the one side would form a barrier, and the part-canalized Mill Head on the west another. Indeed there were so many cuts and sluices to channel the power-water or let small boats take powder from one process to the next that it appeared to him a veritable little Venice. He would have wished for a more thoroughgoing reconnaissance; all he could do now was gain an impression of the ground over which they might manoeuvre, if ‘manoeuvre’ was not too pretentious a description of a scramble at night after Irish hoddy-noddies.

He had yet to discover it for certain, but he felt sure the place must be stoutly patrolled by watchmen, to whom even a navvy fortified by spirits and armed with a pickaxe handle was not too formidable an opponent, for the watchmen would, of course, be firearmed, or have access to firearms. Doubtless the ringleaders would be carrying pistols; perhaps even muskets. They would think themselves well set up for the night’s work, expecting nothing out of the ordinary of the watch, so that a sharp fusillade from the Sixtieth might confound them altogether. Not that it would be a fusillade: aimed shots was what the Sixtieth’s riflemen would deliver, even in the dark, for there would be moon enough tonight to make out figures at fifty yards. And that was something that spoke of the intruders’ inaptness too: a bit of a moon they no doubt considered to their advantage – enough to light their path but not enough to give them away. Hervey shook his head. Poor fools! It would be no hunter’s moon tonight, but enough to give the pursuer his line; and with each dragoon carrying a torch those who escaped the Sixtieth’s marksmanship would not evade the following sabre. Poor fools; poor, damned, gullible, Irish fools!