The patrols were called in and sent to the flanks. Leduc’s patrol, heading for Carville, was strengthened and warned to be careful. It was as well Dabney had taken precautions because they had been moving only a couple of hours when a corporal came tearing back at the gallop.
‘Germans, sir,’ he shouted as he drew his lathered horse to a sliding halt. ‘Near Vernhout! Across the line of march.’
‘Lead the way!’ Dabney called for his trumpeter and the column began to move forward at a trot.
His heart was thumping. What would the first sight of the Germans be like? He was not unused to German soldiers because he had seen them when he’d stayed with Helen’s family in Berlin. But then they’d been on parade and moving with the precision of toy dolls. These would be different, and eager to kill him.
The corporal from Leduc’s patrol had moved ahead to find Leduc and now he came tearing back again, clods leaping from his horse’s hooves.
‘They’ve still got ’em in sight, sir.’
They came on the Germans a quarter of an hour later, men in grey uniforms wearing the same flat-topped lancer schapka they wore themselves at home on parade. Their lances appeared to be of metal, like lengths of gas-piping, and as they moved across a stubble field that stretched towards a line of woods, they looked magnificent in the morning sun, a solid line of horsemen, rising and falling in the saddle with a regular cadence as if they were all worked by the same clockwork mechanism.
Raising his arm to stop his own little column, Dabney turned to Leduc.
‘How many do you think, Tim?’
‘A hundred and fifty. Perhaps two hundred. I think we have them.’
‘I think we have. Dismount one troop. Take the rest and work round to your left. Move out on them as soon as we’ve fired five rounds rapid.’
Dabney was totally confident. From what he’d discovered, the German cavalry wasn’t much better than the French, whose failure so far had been calamitous. The lessons of the Boer War had been well learned by the British, however, and they were well trained, but he would need to be careful because the Germans sometimes had Jaeger infantry with them armed with machine guns.
As the Germans caught sight of Leduc, Dabney saw their pace quicken and they began to swing into line, prepared to make a fight of it.
‘Hurry, hurry,’ he called as horseholders moved up and a cart carrying the squadron machine guns appeared.
The Germans began to move forward, leaping into a gallop within a few strides, the lances coming down to the Engage. Aware of every eye on him, Dabney waited, then, as the Germans came nearer, he nodded and the line of dismounted men in front of him burst into a rattle of firing. Several horses went down and he saw their own mounts in the trees behind toss their heads in alarm at the noise.
The German charge was halted at once and, as the horsemen in the meadow began to mill around in confusion, Leduc’s patrol appeared.
‘Cease firing!’
As the musketry stopped, Leduc smashed into the Germans’ flank. A horse stumbled and went down and others began to rear and stagger as the heavier English mounts shouldered them aside. Several Germans were rolling in the grass as Leduc’s men broke through and circled away to the rear.
The machine guns had been set up now and the gunners began to squat behind them. Some of the Germans seemed to think that Leduc’s men were all there were and that they had also been responsible for the firing, and they drew rein at the other side of the road and faced about. As they moved towards the fallen men, one of them coolly dismounted and began to go through the pockets of one of the British soldiers who was lying still in the stubble with one of the aluminium German lances in his side.
As the machine guns began to fire, they remounted hurriedly and, still unclear as to where the firing was coming from, swung across the front of Dabney’s line. More horses and men went down and, as the Germans reined in, turning their horses in bewilderment, Dabney nodded to the trumpeter and, as the clear notes cut the air, he led the rest of A Squadron out of the trees. As they crashed into the fleeing Germans, Leduc, determined not to be left out, set spurs once more to his jaded mount. The German column was scattered and as the clatter and shouting died, the last of them galloped away to the north-east, leaving their dead and wounded behind them, and a dozen riderless horses cantering slowly across the field, their tails in the air.
The Germans were conscripts, all very young, and they hadn’t seemed to know how to use their lances. As they were rounded up and the wounded collected, a young officer was brought to Dabney. He was a slim boy with a yellow collar on his grey uniform and a deep gash on his neck. Sergeant Ackroyd took out his field dressing and applied it to the wound.
‘Name?’ Dabney asked.
‘Werner Raus-Willing, Leutnant.’
‘Regiment?’
‘I don’t have to answer that.’
‘I think I know.’ Dabney was looking at the German’s buttons. ‘You’re the 19th Prussian Lancers. I’ve seen you in Berlin.’
The German eyed him suspiciously. ‘You speak excellent German, Herr Major.’
‘I have German cousins.’
The German frowned. ‘Then perhaps we ought not to be at war with each other.’
‘Perhaps not. What do you think of it all?’
‘I don’t know what to make of it, Herr Major. I’m not even sure what it’s all about. My men were called up for training only a few weeks before it broke out and they are not what you would call “full of fight”. Some of your men even refrained from running them through because their backs were turned. I am grateful for their forebearance. I am a reserve lieutenant and I joined them when my class was called to the colours. What is the name of your cousin, Herr Major?’
‘Karl-August von Hartmann.’
The young German’s face broke into a smile. ‘He is a good man, Herr Major. I know him well. He left the regiment for staff duties further south.’
They were all cock-a-hoop at the thought that in a war where the rifle and the machine gun were master of the field, they had not only fought a mounted action but had actually routed German cavalry.
Sending off a messenger to inform Johnson that the road was clear, they were still elated when they reached the Carville–Mortigny highway to await the arrival of the regiment. But their messenger was still there and informed them that Johnson had moved ahead during the night and was now a long way in front.
‘Mount the men, Tim,’ Dabney said, faintly irritated. ‘We’d better push ahead and rejoin.’
Two miles further along they ran into the first column of refugees, and the sight of so much human misery immediately brought the war back into perspective. Long strings of wagons, carts and people on foot crawled through the hedge-less countryside. All along the line of march they were emerging from side roads, a whole province emptying itself into the main stream as they clung to the troops. Two great currents were forming, on the right a twenty-mile-long column of military wagons and soldiers, on the left a vast flood of civilians; huge farm carts loaded with beds, bedding and children; grandmothers dressed in their black best; drays pulled by slow-trudging oxen, mules or asses; pony-carts and dog-carts; decrepit landaus and victorias pulled by decrepit horses; bicycles and barrows; in mile after mile of flooding wretchedness, the only thing in their minds the disaster of 1870 when the French army had collapsed and the Germans had spread across the whole of France.
They looked grey like ghosts because their black clothes had become coated with dust and they poured past in stony silence, their faces expressionless with despair. Two young girls who looked like sisters were helping each other along, the blood from their torn feet oozing through low silk shoes; an old sick woman was balanced somehow on a perambulator; an elderly couple walked arm in arm as they had probably walked arm in arm round their garden for years; a small boy tried to encourage his mother who was sinking under the weight of two babies. Some of the carts must have contained the entire infant population of a village pushed aboard pell-mell, all wide-eyed and bewildered. Behind them the growing mutter of guns was interspersed with the occasional crash of a shell.
For two days it went on, a sense of shame flooding through the British, the bitterest incident of all when their horses’ hooves trod underfoot a strip of cloth across a village street which had once hung in greeting – ‘Welcome To Our British Saviours.’ Exhaustion, already close on their heels after their prolonged advance, swept over them. The sun never let up and the dust grew thicker, filling the eyes, nostrils and mouth, clogging the pores, lying on the ungroomed coats of the horses and in the folds of uniforms. The first day the march went on far into the hours of darkness and, as they halted, the men in the saddles began to droop further and further forward in sleep until one after another fell to the road with a crash. The danger now was not from the enemy guns but from sheer weariness. The horses trudged on with their heads down and their ears drooping, listless and indifferent.
Dabney’s mount had always been a spirited animal but now he had to use his spurs even to coax it to a trot. Its coat was shaggy and its shoes had worn wafer-thin; half the time the farriers’ tools were missing because the ‘shoeys’, like the grooms, the saddlers, the bandsmen, and the signallers, were needed for other duties.
The men were dirty, their uniforms stained, their cheeks bristling with beard. Straggling increased daily as the bad characters got hold of liquor, and away in the rear trailed a little group of men whose horses had foundered, struggling along with whatever equipment they could carry. The numbers were growing horrifying and at the halts Dabney hobbled stiffly round those who remained, urging the officers to keep a tight hold on their troops, haranguing the sergeants, exhorting the weary men.
B Squadron appeared, under the command now of a lieutenant, because the captain who had taken over when Hawker had been wounded, had also been hit. They had been sent back to rejoin A squadron but they had no idea where Johnson had got to. He had forced the pace but had then announced that he must see the general again and had disappeared with C Squadron and they hadn’t seen him since. They were in poor shape, as though they had been too hard-driven, but there was no possibility of rest and they tagged along behind, as relieved as A Squadron at the unexpected increase in numbers.
The retreat continued. The horses stumbled ahead like sleepwalkers, moving alongside infantry staggering along like ghosts, unconscious of what was going on around them, grey-faced, unshaven, their eyes dead, some of them supporting a man with a bandaged chest or head. In front, a sergeant was doggedly playing ‘Tipperary’ on a mouth organ. ‘Keep the step, lads,’ he kept calling. ‘Keep the step. It’ll ’elp. You’ll get back.
I’ll
get you back. Just pick up the step.’
Among them were the French, shuffling along with no attempt at military bearing, small men for the most part, red-breeched, blue-coated and often heavily bearded. Their cavalry wore breastplates, high jackboots and plumes on their cloth-covered brass helmets, and they rode small horses.
‘Christ,’ someone muttered. ‘Any smaller and all you’d see under the saddles would be arses and ’eads.’
They passed through a town whose Mairie had been smashed by shells and was full of hurt soldiers. Around it, the pavement had been torn up and there were dead horses and dead men in every corner of the neighbouring streets, the air full of the cloying smell of burning oil from a wrecked lorry. The cheering formations of a fortnight before were depleted and exhausted and Dabney was close to tears as he saw the stumbling figures scarcely capable of advancing a yard, and the drooping heads and staring coats of the horses.
Toiling along the by-roads, trying to avoid the jam of soldiers and civilians in an attempt to find C squadron, they finally managed to make contact just as the order came to hurry. In the darkness they caught up with a troop left behind to find them just as it was dragged out of its billet in a drab French town. Mounted orderlies were already clattering over the cobbles and an order came to quicken the pace. Johnson was still missing and the lieutenant in command conferred hurriedly with Dabney about what they should do.
They moved out of the village again at a tired trot to the jingling of equipment and the squeak of leather. As they reached the countryside again in the early hours of next morning, they finally came up with the rest of C squadron and Dabney had just sent a message ahead to inform Johnson that he had rejoined when he heard a roar like an approaching express train. There was a shattering explosion and he heard a horse screaming, and a team pulling an ambulance bolted, the tail gate still down, stretchers and equipment bouncing out on to the road.
Riding forward to see what had happened, he found a smoking hole in the road, its edges seared by heat, and two horses in the ditch, one dead, its hooves sticking up stiffly like the branches of a tree, the other struggling with a broken back to drag itself away. Bulging eyes stared at him as he slid from the saddle, and froth blew across the road as the animal let out a squeal of pain and terror.
Dabney’s stomach squirmed at the animal’s agony then, as Ellis Ackroyd levelled his rifle and pulled the trigger, the great eyes glazed and the heavy head thumped down on the road.
‘Where’s the Colonel? What happened?’
Fullerton, of C Squadron, a sick look on his face, gestured to the other side of the road. By the wall of the cottage, on a patch of grass, a man lay stretched out, his chest and throat covered with blood. Nearby, Johnson was leaning against the cottage wall, with the doctor bent over him. He looked up as Dabney appeared, his expression twisted with pain.
‘Where the devil have you been, Goff? You’ve let us down badly.’
It was manifestly unjust but Dabney put it down to the pain Johnson was suffering.
‘Buggering about trying to pick up a bit more glory, I suppose,’ Johnson snarled. ‘Trying to add a bar to your DSO. Get back to your squadron, sir. Fullerton’s going to need steady men, not glory-seekers.’