Steel knew all these men and their individual characteristics, from Mackay’s thick-set farmer’s frame and Taylor’s scrawny, guttersnipe physique, to Yorkshireman Dan Cussiter’s high-boned bird-like features and Thorogood’s over-long arms, so effective with a grenade. He felt deep affection for most. He had fought alongside many before and was prepared to do everything he could to make sure they got through this war intact of mind and body and emerge with booty and honour. It was no less and no more than he hoped for himself.
Beyond the grenadiers, high above the Battalion Major’s company, waved the silken squares of the regimental colours. One of them was tattered now, looking no more than a rag, after so long in the field. It was the Colonel’s colour, red and gold above the cipher of their commander, Sir James Farquharson. The other, only recently presented, bore the new Union flag of the united kingdom of England, Scotland and Ireland, in its centre a crown. Lest anyone should be in doubt, the colour made the matter plain. Farquharson might have raised a regiment of Scottish foot who at Blenheim and Ramillies had fought beneath the blue and white of his native country’s saltire, but since last year these were Britain’s infantry. British grenadiers. Proud to serve not only their Queen but their newly united nation. Steel watched the colours catch the sunlight as they rippled in the breeze.
Behind them, curving back through the marshland and up the hill towards the village of Eename, he saw the mass of the column – a polyglot force, waiting here behind Farquharson’s, to step off in turn from the flimsy wooden bridges resting on tin boats. Among them, he knew, stood some of the finest infantry in the world: Lord Herbert’s Foot, and with them Gibson’s, Farrington’s, Meredith’s and Holland’s. Behind them came Princess Anne’s, Granville’s, Clifton’s and Douglas’s, and those other regiments which like his own had lately made up the Scots army: the Royals, the newly christened North British Fusiliers and the Earl of Angus’s Foot. All of them names that would surely be writ forever in the history of this army.
To the right of the British brigades were the Allies: the Prussians and Hessians in their distinctive blue, Hanoverians and Swiss in red, and the grey-coated Danes. Singing and swearing in a half-dozen languages, they had all come to this place on the orders of their great general. This was an encyclopedia of Europe’s tribes and races: English, Irish, Scots and Welsh, pale-skinned Scandinavians, men from the Italian and German states and exiled French Huguenots.
For some time now, too many of the men had been silent. They were watching as their comrades who had arrived earlier that morning met the enemy down in the valley and gave fire and stood to take it and charged and fought and died. They were all powerless, of course. They had been ordered to wait, and increasingly there was no alternative but to watch. Steel realized with a start, however, that his own men were still far from silent and Taylor had not yet finished his song. Or perhaps he has started afresh, thought Steel, and I have not noticed, being so lost in my own daydreams. He listened now as they sang out, mid-verse:
‘To be paid in the powder and rattle of the cannonballs Wages for soldiers like Marlborough and me.’
It might, he thought, have been the song of his own life – a life paid in powder and shot. Such had been Steel’s wages since the age of seventeen. He had come to this war as a lieutenant, transferred by his own request and to the dismay of his fellow officers from the Guards, and he had risen to his present rank not by purchase, as was the usual way, but by proving himself in battle.
By that, and his new-found skill as an ‘intelligencer’. For Steel had become one of the new breed of officers now emerging who could act as the eyes and ears of their commander. Before Blenheim, four years ago now this summer, Steel had single-handedly foiled a conspiracy against Marlborough, designed to discredit the Duke as a Jacobite traitor and remove him from command. Then two years back he had played a key part in the clandestine taking of Ostend, now the British army’s key point of contact with the homeland and conduit for vital supplies.
Steel looked at the loops of silver lace that only in the past few weeks he had been reluctantly persuaded to have sewn onto his red coat. He had once sworn that he would do everything he could to avoid using such blatant badges of rank. Not for the simple reason that he might make a better target for the enemy’s best shots, but because he considered himself better than the preening popinjays which so many officers soon became. Steel was a fighter. Just that. What need had he of finery? But then what else could one do but acquiesce when the Queen herself presented you with your promotion?
Still he refused to conform on other points of his appearance. He would not wear the cumbersome full wig sported by other officers, but preferred to have his own hair tied back in a queue, as was the manner with the dragoons. In fact his model in this had been the man who was his inspiration as a young subaltern. Francis Hawley had been a captain in the First Foot Guards and some years Steel’s senior. When Steel had purchased into the regiment, Hawley had been given command of a recently formed grenadier company. Although Hawley had transferred soon afterwards to Berkeley’s Dragoons, Steel and he had kept up their friendship, and at Steenkirk in 1692, as Steel had received his baptism of fire in one of the English and Scots army’s worst defeats at the hands of the French, he had watched in disbelief as Hawley had charged to his death on the bloody strand. Steel had never forgotten Hawley, and as he had grown into the army and adopted his own distinctive fashion, as all officers did, he had always sought to emulate his friend and mentor. It was through Hawley’s example too that he chose not to wear gaiters and spats but preferred more comfortable and hardy half boots.
Most importantly of all, Steel cherished his weapons. Unusually for an officer, along with his sword he carried a fusil slung across his shoulder, a short-barrelled musket which in his case had originally been a fowling piece. The sword itself was far from regulation issue but a heavy cutting weapon better suited to a cavalryman, with a wicked, razor-sharp blade. Steel alone, with his advantage of height, was able to use it to similar effect. It was a Scottish Highland broadsword, basket-hilted and straight-bladed, made in Italy, that had hung on the wall of his family home in the Lowlands and which more than anything about him betrayed his origins. It had not failed him yet, and had cut a bloody swathe across the battlefields of Europe. Its weight alone was enough to cleave a man, though in Steel’s hand it was as light as a feather, and those who made its acquaintance as enemies seldom lived to tell the tale.
A noise like distant rolling thunder announced the presence of artillery and made Steel turn his head. But he had already missed the flash of the shot and failed to spot the exact whereabouts of the guns. No ball had passed near them as yet, and it still seemed to him as if they might be watching a distant spectacle with the indifference of a theatre audience. But Steel knew that this was all too easy. He conjured a picture in his mind of the gunners on the opposite slope sweating at the hot barrels, stripped to their shirtsleeves, sponging out, loading, ramming home, damping down their overheated guns. He pictured the cannon bouncing back on their wooden trails with shouts of warning and saw in his mind the shot leaving the muzzle and crossing in an arc high above the battlefield to find its unlucky target. The noise of the cannon provided a bass line to the symphony of battle, the deep boom of artillery beneath the percussive rattle of musketry a sound as familiar to him as London’s musical choruses were to the ear of his opera-mad wife. His hearing was attuned to the pitch of the current melody, the sound of the guns. There was no theatre here on the battlefield. These men were not actors. Yet Steel wondered when the curtain would rise on the next scene and give his men their cue.
It was, he thought, a battle unlike any he had witnessed before. For the best part of twenty years, from here in Flanders to the plains of Denmark and down among the scalding, sun-bleached rocks of the Spanish peninsula, Steel had watched as battles had begun and developed in their distinctive styles. The opening salvoes; the advance to contact; the salute from one line to the other; and then the neatly dressed lines blown into bloody raggedness and then the mêlée and the rout. But this … this was something new. This battle had not been the usual
mise en scène
but had rather grown piecemeal. The Allies had arrived slowly and been fed into the action as and when they had appeared. The vanguard had excelled itself in a holding action, and by the time Steel and his men had arrived here some two hours before, the fighting had been going on for four hours. Even then it had not been fully committed. It had seemed to him like two dogs circling one another in an alley, vying for possession of territory, taking tentative snaps in the air, edging closer and then backing off. But Steel knew that it was not Marlborough’s intention to allow his adversary to leave this field without a serious bloodletting.
Cadogan had built his bridges and then had used them effectively to take his men – horse and foot – over the great river and deep into the ground before the enemy position. Steel had huge admiration for the Irish general. He might have been Marlborough’s second-in-command with a prestigious position on the staff, but on the day of battle Cadogan could be counted on to fight like a trooper, leading from the front and giving as good an account of himself as a listed man. And his men knew it.
Steel could see Cadogan’s scarlet-clad battalions now, British and Hanoverian infantry, as they clustered around the village of Eyne, eight hundred yards to their front and right. That place would surely now be his own objective, and the aim of his brigade would be to shore up the clearly ailing forces of Cadogan, thus reinforcing the entire Allied line. He looked to his right and saw that yet more Allied troops were arriving along the road from Lessines, being disposed according to Marlborough’s wishes with apparent improvisation. It showed the true genius of Corporal John, who had guided them through six years of war, first in Bavaria in the great victory at Blenheim and then back up here in Flanders.
He caught another snatch of Taylor’s song and again the words rang true:
‘For starvation and danger it will be my destiny To seek fresh employment with Marlborough and me.
Who’ll be a soldier, who’ll be a soldier …’
The singing had spread now to the other companies of the battalion and beyond to the other British regiments in the brigade who stood in line behind the grenadiers, waiting at the bridge. Waiting.
And so the afternoon wore on, and fear and frustration in their turn took hold in the minds of Steel and his men and all the others. And the men in the valley continued to die, singly at times and at times in parcels of four or six or ten, as fate directed the fall of the shot. Steel watched them as they fought in the village, in its fields and orchards and on the plain. He cursed at his commanders’ inaction and wiped his brow of sweat in the sultry July sunshine that played across the scene. Yet still they were not ordered into the attack.
He called across to Hansam, as he had done at intervals throughout the day: ‘Henry, what time d’you have?’
The lieutenant drew out his prized timepiece, a gold chronometer taken from the body of a dead French officer after Blenheim: ‘Four o’clock and thirty minutes.’
Steel nodded his thanks, swatted a fly away from his face and tucked a finger inside the sweat-stained collar band of his shirt, which had again become home to a colony of lice. He had lost them in England and kept clean too while in Brussels, but since they had been on the march the little buggers had come back – and it seemed to Steel that they were making up for their absence. What he would give for a clean shirt, a long soak in a bath, a pitcher of ale and the chance to sleep! Above all sleep. He ran his hand across his stubbled chin. That and perhaps a shave and a chance to lie with his new wife.
He noticed that he was sweating heavily now. The day had crept up on them, and the noise from the valley seemed to amplify the heat. How much longer would they stand here? he thought. Taylor and his men had long since finished their song and silence again descended upon the ranks, letting the fears back in.
Steel drew himself up and spoke in a clear voice, intending the men to hear him: ‘That was a fine piece of singing back there, Corporal Taylor. Would you mind very much if we should call upon your talents again ere long?’
Taylor grinned. ‘At your disposal as always, Captain Steel, sir. Lifts the spirits, does a song. That’s what I always say, sir.’ And by way of an afterthought he added: ‘Can’t abide this waiting though, sir.’
Slaughter glared at him. But Steel was not one, as were some officers, to chide petty impertinence, particularly at such a time as this and from one of his veterans such as Taylor. He nodded. ‘Nor I, Taylor. And you’re right about singing. We’ll hear from you again. But I dare say we’ll be at them soon. Don’t you worry.’
The man next to Taylor in the company’s front rank, a normally dour Lowland Scot, like Steel himself, named John Mackay, spoke up: ‘And we’ll see ’em off today, sir, won’t we? Just like we did at Ramillies, eh boys?’