The war continued to stagger from crisis to crisis. The summer weather was appalling and leading the 19th Lancers through the steadily falling rain, Dabney’s eyes were bleak as the wind blew the drops of water from the rim of his steel helmet on to his cheeks.
Behind him the column of horsemen splashed along the muddy road, occupying most of its surface so that men on their own two feet had to step aside. The road seemed to be packed with troops, shuffling infantrymen, transport units, artillerymen, ambulances, all edging out of the way as the Lancers slogged back to their camp after yet another false alarm, yet another false hope of a breakthrough that would permit them to charge to Berlin. Instead of a charge there had been only a weary wait in the rain, cold and hungry and soaked to the skin, with a few horses and men killed for nothing by shellfire, and then the tramp back again, shapeless figures under the shining rain-wet capes, faces shadowed by heavy helmets, their horses weary, their ears drooping, their coats streaked with water, their legs splashed with mud.
The Flanders countryside looked grey and sodden. Somewhere up ahead where the guns rumbled, soldiers were trying to push forward through the waist-deep morass. Off the road, mules and horses, their coats plastered with mud, were struggling fetlock-deep, and guns were sinking beyond their wheel-hubs as they fired and having to be abandoned because nothing on earth could manage to drag them free. Lorries sent to help, tractors even, sank with them in the increasing wilderness of mud and water.
The rain had laid a thick mist over the land and because the earth was grey, everything else in the sodden landscape was grey, too. Lorries were grey. Guns were grey. Horses were grey. Men were grey. War, Dabney supposed, was a grey business. There was nothing to relieve the monotony of the drabness as far as he could see, nothing but a flat, soaked landscape with broken houses, their shattered rafters sticking up like the ribs of some long-dead animal among the stark and mutilated trees. Already it took nine hours to bring a wounded man from the front line back to safety.
Yet the newspapers continued to call what was happening a success, hailing advances that seemed to bring only casualties but no sign of victory. The Spectator had even congratulated the General Staff on the new blows that were being delivered and was suggesting that all the lessons of the past three years had been well learned and were now being applied with science and resolution. Staff work, they claimed, was irreproachable.
At a bleak crossroads – as bare as a Lincolnshire railway halt – a group of tanks had gathered just off the hard surface. There was a strong smell of petrol fumes and hot oil in the damp air and the ears were filled with the throb of engines as the grey mud-plastered monsters waited.
A colonel wearing the badges of the tank corps was sitting in a car shouting at a young staff officer in an immaculate uniform who stood alongside. It was clear from the cleanness of his uniform that the younger officer had come from headquarters. After this waste of ugliness, headquarters always seemed achingly, spotlessly clean.
‘It won’t work,’ the colonel was raging. ‘I’ve said so before and I’m prepared to say so again! To whoever wants to know! It’s impossible!’
As the staff officer turned away, his face pink with anger, the colonel lifted his head and Dabney saw it was a man he had known at Colchester. He looked up and managed a twisted grin.
‘Hello, Dab,’ he said. ‘You people been trying to charge through the gap again?’
Dabney gave him a bleak smile and the colonel gestured angrily. ‘It’s pathetic, isn’t it? They try on this breakthrough-with-a-charge-into-the-gap thing about once a month, when it ought to be obvious that as far as the tanks are concerned this bloody battle’s finished and done with.’ He gestured at the weeping sky. ‘Flying Corps and cavalry, too, it would seem to me. Can’t you knock some sense into those idiots at headquarters?’
‘I’ve long since stopped trying,’ Dabney said. ‘Is there something new on?’
The colonel drew a hand across his face. ‘They want us to put on another show. You’ll be hearing, I expect. They simply won’t believe it when we tell ’em these monsters of ours are useless in that bloody bog out there.’ He gestured at the grey lozenge shapes just off the road. ‘We could win the war with those beauties you know, given the right conditions – and if we were allowed to say what are the right conditions. The bloody money spent on the initial barrage at Passchendaele would have built over four thousand of those machines. Enough to win any war. At the very least it would have provided the aeroplane engines we need to make ’em go faster. But nobody bothers! All they ask for is another attempt at a breakthrough to exploit your horses.’
‘The idea of a cavalry attack’s mad,’ Dabney snapped. ‘A man on a horse sticks out like a pea on a drum. If they try to launch us in any numbers the slaughter will make Balaclava look silly. For a commander even to gallop round his squadrons when they’re deployed’s courting suicide.’
The colonel lit a pipe. ‘Given dry ground and sufficient numbers we could give them their bloody breakthrough,’ he said. ‘But not here. Never here. Here it’ll be just like last time. The bloody things’ll sink into the mud. You still keen on joining us?’
Dabney nodded.
‘You’d lose rank.’
‘I might gain some self-respect. I’m only a captain, anyway, by rights, and we’ll all go back to pre-war ranks when it’s over.’
‘If we survive. Well, I’ll push it. It’s just possible you’ll be in on the ground floor for the first real tank attack the world’s ever seen. We’ve picked the spot: Cambrai. Clean, undamaged land. We’ll make ’em the gap they want. So long as they don’t wreck it first with one of these bloody barrages they’re so keen on.’ The colonel frowned. ‘I just hope they know what to do with it when they get it.’
Continuing through the rain, Dabney was aware of the resentment about him. To the rest of the army the cavalry had come to represent nothing. Nothing at all. They not only failed to help the war, they even impeded it, because their horses and equipment filled acres of cramped countryside and their fodder trains jammed the roads.
Passing alongside a ruined village, they skirted a broken lorry and a group of clotted carcasses where shellfire had destroyed a gun team. The sight made Dabney wince. He wasn’t a squeamish man but the way dead horses were allowed to remain unburied troubled him. He had grown up with horses and these muddy lumps looked like nothing else but mounds of earth, their limbs entangled in their death throes – with each other, with their harness leathers, even with the wreckage of the limber they had been pulling.
On the edge of the village a battalion of infantrymen were just coming out of the line. Their boots barely left the ground, merely sloughing through the thin mud that covered the surface of the road like a flood. Their bodies moved stiffly like clockwork dolls. Their faces were filthy and the eyes that stared from them appeared to gaze into space as if they were bending all their attention only on using the last ounce of energy they possessed to shuffle forward. They stumbled past the horsemen in the downpour, their uniforms plastered to their bodies as if they’d been dipped in water, their rifles tied round the bolt mechanism with rags to keep out the mud. Their expressions were as grey as the landscape with exhaustion.
Another battalion had been halted by the roadside, whole groups of men fallen asleep in spite of the mud and the passing lorries that threw sheets of grey-brown water over them. An officer was moving among them trying to kick them to life and they were stirring and dragging themselves upright, so dazed with weariness they didn’t appear to know what they were doing. Then one of them saw the column of horsemen clattering past and made a noise of disgust and contempt.
‘Silly peacock ba-a-astards!’
The voice came from the back of the group, full of derision and contempt, and immediately the whole lot came to life and weary faces became twisted with bitterness as they worked out on the cavalry the anger and frustration they felt against their leaders. Men scrambled to their feet, and those who were waiting under their loads like patient mules turned to join the catcalling.
‘Git orf them bleedin’ mokes and come and ’elp us sort Jerry out!’
The jeering started muttering among the riders and Dabney’s face set grimly. It was something they had constantly to endure. He knew how the infantrymen felt. As they moved to and from the line they saw thousands of cavalrymen, thousands of horses, all apparently doing nothing but wait for the weary footsloggers to make a gap they could exploit. Their attitude was traditional. Dabney had heard his father say it had been the same in the Crimea. Now, because of the Commander-in-Chief’s obsession with cavalry, because he was applying the lessons of the Boer War to a war that bore no relation to that struggle, the old derision had changed even to hatred.
He wasn’t sure he could accept much more of it.
The anger Dabney felt mounted. When he next arrived on leave he shocked his son by announcing that he’d had enough of France and setting off at once to see his father. His anger was so obvious, Josh begged a lift, pretending he wished to see his grandmother when all he wanted was to know what was in his father’s mind.
At Braxby Manor, Dabney stalked to the library, his son trailing behind. The Field Marshal was just tucking into his tea and muffin, huddled in his chair in front of the fire, and, feeling out of it and totally unnoticed, Josh sat quietly by the door.
His father didn’t waste time and he didn’t mince his words. ‘Passchendaele’s no place to wage war, Father,’ he said angrily, and as Josh listened he unfolded a story of marshy Flanders fields turned into a morass by water from dykes and ditches broken by the vast barrages thrown at the Germans.
‘In August, Father!’ Dabney said. ‘What will it be like in winter?’
Sitting quietly out of sight, Josh was startled by the intensity of his father’s rage.
‘For sheer lack of imagination,’ he was saying, ‘this war’s never been equalled! When you look at them, it’s hard for a connoisseur of generalship to single out anyone as being especially bad because they’re all so awful. Allenby’s all right and so’s Plumer. As for the rest, God help us! While the men in the trenches wallow in blood the generals wallow only in ink. The infantry at Waterloo didn’t budge, Father, because their generals were there with them. Ours are phantoms twenty miles behind the line.
‘It could be forgiven,’ Dabney went on, ‘if it were part of a plan. If they knew of the conditions and were accepting them as part of the battle. But they didn’t know, Father! They didn’t know! They never move out of their damned châteaux! They never see it! Yet I’ve seen them pull up exhausted men coming out of the trenches for slovenly marching, or order them to push a bogged staff car free. Father, what’s come over the bloody army?’
The old man seemed too shocked to answer and merely silently shook his head from side to side.
‘Can’t you do anything, Father?’
‘Dab, I’m eighty now! I’m a fossil from a bygone age. I rode at Balaclava. That makes me deader than the dodo. People don’t take any notice of me any more.’
‘You know Wullie Robertson, the CIGS.’
‘Robertson isn’t all-powerful. Lloyd George would even like to be rid of him. He’d like to be rid of Haig, too, but he’s not strong enough. I sometimes wish he were.’
Dabney sat in silence for a moment, his anger surging inside him, while the old man hunched miserably in his chair. Aware that he was hearing things he should not have been hearing, Josh cowered in his place, conscious that this concerned no one but his father, his grandfather, and him. This wasn’t news to be spread at school. This was ‘family.’
The old man lifted an anguished face. ‘What about the Americans?’ he asked. ‘Won’t they make a difference?’
‘They haven’t arrived yet.’
‘One of them has. Micah Burtle Love’s grandson. You’ll have heard of him, of course.’
Dabney managed a bleak smile at last. ‘Fleur wrote to me about him. He stayed the weekend, she said.’
‘He’s transferred his affection now to Jane’s girls. Rachel’s gone overboard for him. He’s learning to fly at Colney Hatch, but he still manages to get up here a surprising amount. Jane’s worried because it seems to be getting serious.’
Dabney frowned. ‘Father, tell her that people of young Love’s age have to start getting serious quickly. A pilot’s life at the front isn’t much more than three weeks.’ He paused. ‘How’s Robert?’
‘Growing fatter. He’s a K now, of course.’
Dabney’s face was bitter. ‘A knighthood for churning out uniforms and guns?’
‘Somebody has to do it, Dab.’
There was a long silence, then Dabney spoke again. ‘Father, I’m going to try to get into this war more. I can’t look people in the face. But I want you to promise me something. Just in case anything happens to me.’
Listening, Josh felt the tears spring to his eyes. Up to that moment it had never occurred to him that something might happen to his father. Other fathers were wounded or killed, but somehow he couldn’t imagine it happening to his. His grandfather had gone through half a dozen campaigns and had suffered little more than flesh wounds, and it had left him with a feeling that Goffs didn’t die. Now, suddenly, he wasn’t so sure.
‘Dabney—’ his grandfather was speaking in that funny quavering voice that had developed over the last week or two ‘—I think you’d better ask somebody else. The chances are that at my age it’ll probably happen to me first.’
‘I don’t believe it, Father, and I’m worried for Fleur and for Josh and Chloe. I want them to be secure just in case.’
The old man shifted restlessly. ‘I’ve already thought of that, Dab. There isn’t much money because I’ve never been rich, but this house and this land and the properties on it will be yours when I go.’
Dabney was silent for a moment. ‘What about Robert?’
‘Robert already has more than he needs. He can do without this place. He’ll get the Cosgro fortune through Elfrida because Walter isn’t married and is never likely to be now. Braxby Manor will come to you and eventually to Josh. That way it’ll remain Goff land. I haven’t much else to offer, Dab, but I can do that. Your mother knows my wishes and a will’s made. The Suttons are well enough off and so are the Hartmanns, though God knows what’ll happen to Helen. We’ve not heard. It seems to me best to leave what I have where it’s most needed. And that seems to mean Josh. Robert’s children are well provided for.’
Dabney frowned. ‘So long as they’re not deprived of their rights, Father. Aubrey’s not a bad kid.’
‘Better than Robert deserves,’ the old man growled. ‘Elfrida’s made a better job of them than we ever expected, certainly better than we could have expected from a Cosgro. It’s a pity Robert doesn’t behave as he should.’
There was a pause then Dabney asked softly, ‘The Balmael woman?’
Josh wondered who the Balmael woman was and, as his father and grandfather dropped their voices, he decided it was time he made his exit. Moving softly from the chair, he crept through the door and closed it quietly behind him.
For the next few days, the house was depressing. With his father angry and his mother clearly in a torment of fear, Josh wasn’t sure how to behave. He was doubly kind to his smaller sister and occasionally cycled over to see his cousin, Aubrey, who swam with him in the Brack, or went ferreting with one of the Ackroyd boys in the meadows under the hills.
Then, just when they were all trying to steel themselves to Dabney’s return to France, a telegram arrived. At first they thought it was to announce the death of yet another friend but instead it called Dabney to London.
Suddenly excited, Dabney telephoned his father and got one of the Ackroyds to drive him to York. During the afternoon, there was a telephone call that made his mother cry out with delight and swing Josh into her arms.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Your father,’ she said.
‘What’s happened?’
‘He’ll tell you himself when he gets home.’
When Dabney arrived, he was consumed by excitement that told them he had news.
‘I’m leaving France,’ he said. ‘I’m going to the Middle East!’
To Josh it seemed a demotion. The war seemed only to be in France, but they all climbed into the car and headed for Braxby Manor. Dabney was bubbling with an enthusiasm which his wife shared. Josh had heard them talking together eagerly and heard his mother’s cry of joy, so he could only guess that something tremendous had happened.
At his grandfather’s, his mother disappeared with Chloe into the drawing-room to tell his grandmother the news while his father headed for the library.
‘It was Allenby, Father,’ he said. ‘He was at the War Office. I was just about in despair and thinking of applying for the Tank Corps, quite prepared to drop a rank, but, as it happens, it’s turned out to be unnecessary. They’ve given me a brigade.’
This was unexpected. A field marshal and a brigadier in the same family was better than anything Reeves Major could produce! Josh beamed with pride.
His grandfather had sat bolt upright. ‘That’s good news, Dab,’ he said eagerly. ‘Infantry?’
‘No, Father! Cavalry! Men on horses!’
‘Regulars?’
‘Of course not. That would be too much to expect.’
‘Yeomanry?’
‘Not even that. Mostly they’re Australians and New Zealanders.’
‘I didn’t know we had Australian and New Zealand cavalry in France.’
‘We haven’t. This is Palestine, Father. Open country. Cavalry country. I’m to leave at once. Allenby believes in movement and it’s his ambition to break through the Gaza-Beersheba line and get to Jerusalem and Damascus and into Turkey. They’re already using cavalry out there and, with the Arabs in revolt against the Turks, he has firm hopes of success. I’d come to the conclusion that if there were promotion to be won out of this mess it wasn’t going to come sitting astride a horse, but it seems I was wrong.’
There was a long silence. ‘You’ll find Australians bloody difficult,’ the Field Marshal said slowly. ‘They always were.’
‘I’m fully aware of that, Father. They have a way with brigadiers they don’t like. There was an Australian regiment near us who swamped their brigadier in sewage when they were in the line. They’d spend the morning penning up a mass of slime behind a temporary barrier while they built a new outflow and when they learned he was on his way, they picked their moment just as he was half-way down a deep trench and broke down the dam. It washed him away like the Egyptians in the Red Sea.’
There was a thin chuckle of laughter from the Field Marshal and Dabney went on eagerly.
‘Allenby’s on his way out at once,’ he said. ‘The idea’s to knock the Turks out of the war and he asked for me. I think that little affair of ours against the Uhlans in 1914 helped. He’s always been particularly pleasant to me.’ Dabney grinned, unable to contain his pleasure, more alive than Josh had seen him for months. ‘I could have kissed him when he told me. A cavalry brigade, Father! Think of it! In country where cavalry can work. No mud. No barbed wire.’
‘Who else have you got out there? What regular cavalry?’
Dabney smiled. ‘None, Father. Not a single regiment. The only regular regiments are Indian. The rest are all Yeomanry from Britain and light horse regiments from Australia and New Zealand – hostilities-only soldiers with rifles and bayonets instead of swords.’
‘If they don’t like you, they’ll make it very clear.’
‘I’ll win ’em round. Jasper Capell was given a battalion. You remember Jasper. Blind as a bat in one eye and wore a monocle. His Aussies thought it a great joke and the second day he was with them every man in the battalion was also wearing a monocle. God knows where they got them. But he beat ’em at their own game. He took out his eyeglass, tossed it in the air, caught it in his eye and said “Bet you can’t do that.” From then on he could do anything with ’em.’
The war persisted in intruding. A cousin was reported missing and another of the Ackroyd boys was killed in France. For Josh, school became merely a repetition of what he heard at home, and, having a grandfather who was a field marshal, what they were told by enthusiastic and elderly teachers – many of them out of retirement to take the places of men who had joined the army – he had already learned several days before.
Things seemed to be short everywhere. Clothes that would normally have been cast off were worn just a little longer, and in addition to their normal work, everybody was cultivating vegetable plots, even at school. Having a farmer in the family was a help but his mother was keeping goats to provide milk because they could hardly expect John Sutton to help them all.
In November, with the stories from Flanders becoming discreetly uninformative, there was a runaway victory at Cambrai. Tanks in large numbers had broken through the German lines and for a trifling cost had captured ten thousand German prisoners and two hundred guns. The newspapers went wild and church bells were rung as talk of an advance to Berlin started. But something seemed to go wrong and, listening to his grandfather’s mutterings, Josh learned that the victory had been wasted because no one had known what to do with it. The infantry had not been able to keep up with the tanks and the cavalry were destroyed once more by German machine guns and, with the reserves wasted in the abortive struggle at Passchendaele, the Germans had counter-attacked and pushed the allies right back to where they had started.
Just when they were all despondent, however, a jubilant letter arrived from Dabney to say the British had smashed through the Turkish Gaza line, chiefly thanks to an attack by the Australian Light Horse Brigade.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he wrote. ‘It just shows that under the right circumstances cavalry can still be used for shock action.’
From time to time, Josh bumped into Hedley Akroyd, still limping a little but fit again and no longer wearing the taut, tired expression he had brought home the previous year. Micah Love appeared surprisingly often with his little yellow car, which he kept these days not in London but in York so that he could catch a train north and pick it up for the last part of the journey. He wore wings now and considered himself a fully qualified pilot. His ambition was to join the squadron that Hedley was expecting to take to France.
To Josh the world was a strange place. Though Braxby had not altered much, everywhere else it had. The Russian Tsar was a prisoner of the Bolsheviks, rationing had started, the papers were full of pictures of American soldiers landing in France, tall men wearing Boy Scout hats and long gaiters instead of puttees, and behind it all there was a curious nervous feeling that touched even Josh that the Germans had something up their sleeve.
Early in March, they were all invited to Hounslow in London to see Hedley Ackroyd’s squadron leave for France. The Field Marshal decided that the journey would be too exhausting and Josh, who was home for half-term, was horrified when his mother claimed that the demands of the hospital precluded her going, too. Just when he was fully expecting that this magnificent opportunity to see the Flying Corps going into action was to be denied him, Rachel and Philippa took pity on him and offered to take him with them.
‘So long as you keep out of the way when we’re saying goodbye,’ Rachel said.
There was a little argument with parents about the two girls going unchaperoned but in the end objection was withdrawn since, with a growing boy of eleven to look after, they could hardly get up to mischief, and they all set off from Braxby carrying small cases for their trip to London. There were messages at the hotel where they had booked and disgusted looks from Rachel and Philippa when they learned they had been invited to a last-minute party.
‘I’ll stay in my room,’ Josh promised. ‘Honest.’
‘You can go down to the dining-room,’ Rachel said, her words tumbling over themselves in her excitement. ‘So long as you don’t tell tales.’
They left him at seven o’clock to pick up a taxi and he went gravely downstairs to the dining-room. It was full of women with men in uniform and he solemnly waded through four courses then ordered a lemonade to be sent to his room. The hotel was so warm, he fell asleep on his bed and was only vaguely conscious of the door clicking as someone put their head round.
The following morning, Rachel woke him. She was frowning as though she had a headache.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We haven’t all day.’
The take-off at Hounslow was chaotic. The squadron contained several other Americans besides Micah Love, and they seemed to know every girl in London, all of whom appeared to be present to see them off. There were also a few staff officers from American headquarters, a few civilians and an American colonel called Mitchell who gravely told Josh that, used properly, the aeroplane could win the war and any other wars that might follow.
There was another boy of Josh’s age, who was some relation to one of the pilots and they studied the aeroplanes with interest.
‘SE5s,’ the other boy pointed out.
‘They’re supposed to be better than Camels,’ Josh said.
‘Camels turn better. And they’re terrifically manoeuvrable. But they’re not so fast. They use SEs for chasing the Germans over their own lines.’
They spent a good half hour trying to beat each other at airing their knowledge, then they noticed that everybody seemed to be kissing.
‘They’re off, I think,’ Josh said.
There were tears in Rachel’s eyes as she clutched Micah Love; and Philippa, standing with Hedley Ackroyd, her head on his chest, was uttering little muted whimpering noises that made Josh turn away, faintly embarrassed.
There were nineteen aeroplanes and they were all arranged in position for taking off in formation with the engines already warmed up, with Hedley Ackroyd’s machine out in front and the three flights arranged in a V behind him.
‘Just far enough away from each other so they can’t hit each other’s backwash,’ Josh said knowledgeably.
Hedley lined up his men and someone made a speech, then they climbed into their machines and the engines were started up. The air was full of noise and the smell of hot oil, then a red Very light soared into the air and Hedley’s machine moved forward. Behind it, all the others moved too, until they were all rolling and lurching across the grass. One by one they became airborne and grew smaller until they were merely a line of dots heading towards the east.
Riding towards the station in the taxi, they all sat in silence. A strand of Philippa’s hair had come down and was hanging over her ear, and Rachel’s hat was no longer quite straight. But they seemed unaware of the disorder and stared in front of them with stricken looks on their faces.
On the little jump seat opposite, Josh studied their distress. ‘They were flying SEs,’ he said helpfully. ‘They’re supposed to be the best aeroplanes there are.’