Chapter Seven
On the afternoon of the day that Brack Cooley killed Bob Walker, Hannah Huckabee received permission from Colonel Grierson to visit Captain John Latimer’s quarters.
“I suppose a visit from a fellow English countryman will cheer him up,” Grierson said. He smiled. “Or should that be English countrywoman?”
Hannah returned his smile. “The latter, I suppose,” she said. “Does he need cheering up?”
“He’s facing a court-martial and possible death sentence,” the colonel said. “I’d say he’s is not in an optimistic frame of mind.”
“Colonel Grierson, you’re an experienced soldier. Do you think John Latimer is a coward?”
“I know the British army does. Cowardice in the face of the enemy is a very serious charge, and for that reason it’s rarely used.”
“Colonel, I asked what you think of John,” Hannah said. “Is he a coward?”
Hannah’s use of Latimer’s first name puzzled Grierson, as did her apparent interest in the man. “He’s not a relative of yours, Miss Huckabee, is he?”
The girl was quick to answer. “No. He’s not a relative.” Hannah had changed out of her tan dress into a plain, blue afternoon gown with white collars and cuffs, and in place of her pith helmet and goggles her hair was tied back with a scarlet ribbon. She had left her Colt and bowie knife behind in her room.
Grierson thought she looked very young, very beautiful, and very formidable.
He smiled. “A glass of sherry with you, Miss Huckabee? The sutler assures me that its original cask came all the way from Spain by steamship.”
“You are most kind, Colonel. Yes, a glass of sherry would be very welcome.”
Grierson was silent as he busied himself with a decanter and glasses, and Hannah did not interrupt, knowing that he was also busy with his thoughts. Finally, he handed Hannah her glass and waited until she’d taken a sip and then another. “The wine is to your liking, Miss Huckabee?”
Hannah nodded. “It has a honey and nut aroma and a simple, balanced palate. I detect flavors of caramel and sugared pecan.” She took another sip. “Ah yes, the finish is as I expected, a mix of mushroom, coffee, pecan, and toffee, pleasant but sticky.” She smiled. “The sutler did not steer you wrong, Colonel Grierson. It is indeed a Spanish sherry, not of the finest quality, but quite acceptable.”
The colonel was surprised. “You are very knowledgeable about wine,” he said. “I’m impressed.”
“When one is an adventuress, one learns about many things, Colonel,” Hannah said. “As you have learned much about soldiers and soldiering.”
Grierson smiled and said, “To answer your question, no, I do not think Captain Latimer is a coward. I read the report the British army sent me, and at the very worst, he was remiss in stopping to brew coffee in what he knew was enemy-occupied territory. If he’d been one of my officers, I would’ve reprimanded him and sent him away with a flea in his ear.”
“Coffee? His court-martial will be about coffee?” Hannah said.
“Not quite. Captain Latimer led a scouting patrol of nine men of the 51st Lancers, including a young lieutenant of good family named Thomas Bentley-Foulkes. That officer had dismounted in an abandoned village when Afghan bandits suddenly attacked out of a stand of thorn trees. According to Latimer, his sergeant, without orders, immediately led his eight lancers into a charge, and they fought well but were quickly overwhelmed. Latimer later said that he saw Bentley-Foulkes and the lancers fall, and then, firing his revolver at the enemy, he made his escape.”
Hannah was silent for a while, then whispered, her voice breaking on each word, “John should’ve charged with the others and died like a British officer and gentleman.”
This girl had an amazing capacity to surprise him, and Grierson looked at her and said, “And that is why he was branded a coward. Captain Latimer decided not to throw his life away in a vainglorious last stand.”
Hannah nodded. “Yes, that was John’s decision.” She laid down her glass and said, “Colonel Grierson, I withdraw my request to visit Captain Latimer.”
“Miss Huckabee, have I said something that—”
“You told me the facts of John’s actions on the Indian Northwest Frontier. I asked, and you told me, and for that I am most grateful. Now, if you will excuse me, I feel a headache coming on and must rest awhile.”
Hannah Huckabee gathered her skirt and walked quickly to the door. She stopped, her back stiff, as she heard Grierson say, “Miss Huckabee, why did you change your mind so suddenly?”
Without turning, Hannah said, her voice firm, “Captain Latimer should have died with his men. He abandoned them and fled to save his own skin. I find that unforgivable.”
“Miss Huckabee, did you know him?” Grierson said. “I mean . . . before.”
“Yes. Captain Latimer and I were engaged to be married, but I thought him lost at sea when the ship bearing him to England sank.”
“And then you heard that he was here at Fort Concho,” Grierson said.
“Yes, the Patterson stage driver told me. He called him, ‘the coward.’”
Hannah turned, her face very pale. “And now I realize that John Latimer is exactly what the British army says he is . . . a coward.”
* * *
After Hannah Huckabee left, Colonel Ben Grierson felt a little guilty . . . he hadn’t told her that earlier in the day he’d spoken at some length with John Latimer and he’d decided that the man was no coward.
Grierson poured himself a drink, sat in his favorite chair beside the fire, and remembered the conversation that had taken place at his request . . .
“To give you a little background, Colonel, in the summer of 1879 the British army was in dire need of heroes. In Zululand, South Africa, the bodies of the fifty-five officers and eight hundred British regulars slaughtered by a Zulu army at the Battle of Isandlwana had been a month in their graves when I was ordered to lead a nine-man detachment of the 51st Lancers and a pack mule on a scouting patrol on the Northwest Indian Frontier, where I’d been stationed for three months.
“I was twenty-six years old that summer, the son of an impoverished country parson who always said that the Lord would provide, though He never did. I joined the army as a boy and rose from the ranks. My fellow cavalry officers were all the younger sons of aristocrats, and I believe they considered me a competent soldier, but I was not a gentleman born, and they treated me as such.”
“And how did that manifest itself?” Colonel Ben Grierson said.
“Well, I was reserved to the point of shyness, and I was not popular in the mess. Back in England I played little part in the social activities of the regiment, the endless cycle of balls, fox hunts, and parties at great houses with ivy on the walls and fifty-year-old brandies in the cellars. By contrast, when I left on patrol that day, the young officer who rode beside the guidon, Lieutenant Thomas Bentley-Foulkes, the youngest son of a belted earl, was the darling of the 51st. He was possessed of a fine singing voice, and he was rich, handsome, dashing, irresistible to women, admired by officers and enlisted men alike . . . and in my estimation, fatally flawed. Bentley-Foulkes made no secret of the fact that he would not return to his father’s estate without a medal on his chest. Several times already, he’d been reprimanded for chasing headlong after Afghan rebels whenever he saw them. Colonel David Gray, the commanding officer of the 51st, delivered those reprimands with great good humor, taking care to compliment Bentley-Foulkes on his gallantry, calling him ‘a young scamp who would be a general one day.’ I considered my second-in-command a glory-hunting fool and predicted that yes, Bentley-Foulkes could be a general one day . . . if he lived long enough. As events would soon show, it was a bunch of Afghan rebels who decided which of those prophecies came true.”
Colonel Grierson, a strict disciplinarian, but a kindly man at heart, prodded Latimer gently. “The Afghans were rebelling against British rule. Was that the case?”
“Yes, sir, they deeply resented the British being in India and Afghanistan at all. Remember, the British government was rocked by the embarrassing defeat of their modern army at Isandlwana by a rabble of spear-wielding natives, and even their victory at Rorke’s Drift a day later did little to assuage their humiliation. The government’s orders to the army were both blunt and brutal . . . destroy the Afghan rebels, occupy their lands, and drag their leaders to Whitehall in chains.”
“And what was the purpose of your patrol, Mr. Latimer?” Grierson said. He lifted a cut-glass carafe and said, “A brandy with you?”
“Please,” Latimer said.
After he accepted his drink and the cigar that went along with it, Latimer said, “I was to scout ahead of the main army column and immediately report back if I sighted the enemy in force. I’d been in the field for some three hours when I came across a deserted Indian village. Judging by the pots and baskets that were scattered all over the well-trampled ground, I decided that the peasants had fled in some haste and that the rebels must be close. It was a barren, desolate, poverty-stricken place, and God knows how those people had managed to survive. Adjoining the village was an extensive thicket of thorn trees and heavy brush and beyond that a vast, desolate, desert wasteland, broken only by patches of scrub.”
Colonel Grierson smiled and said, “It sounds like some of the posts I’ve known.”
“Indeed, Colonel,” Latimer said. “I’m sure it does.”
“Sorry for my interruption, please proceed,” Grierson said. He had an inch of gray ash on his cigar.
Latimer nodded and said, “Lieutenant Bentley-Foulkes kneed his horse next to mine, his handsome young face a mask of disappointment. ‘The damned rebel scoundrels found the village deserted and scampered, ’ he said. ‘They’re probably miles away by now.’
“For once I was in agreement with Bentley-Foulkes, and I told him if we left then we could rejoin the column before dark and I’d make my report, such as it was. But my young lieutenant was having none of it. He wanted to boil up some coffee before we started back. He said, ‘I’m positively dying for a cup.’”
Colonel Grierson refilled Latimer’s glass and then said, “Go on.”
“Well, just then a flock of alarmed sandgrouse burst out of the thorn trees, rapidly gained height, and then veered to the south,” Latimer said. “I followed the flight of the birds and then turned my head as my sergeant, an old solder named Bill Haycock, quietly said, ‘Sir . . .’
“Colonel, it was but one word. One syllable. But it held a volume of meaning. I heard . . . as I remember it, surprise, alarm . . . a voice spiked by sudden fear.”
Grierson nodded. “In the field, I’ve heard that voice many times. It’s hollow, as though a man is speaking in a tunnel. I’ve probably used it myself.”
Latimer said, “By now, Bentley-Foulkes had dismounted and slowly walked his horse toward the village. I yelled to him. ‘Lieutenant, mount up. We’re getting out of here.’ Bentley-Foulkes stopped, turned, and grinned. ‘Not without my coffee, Captain.’ Those were almost the last words he ever uttered.
“About fifty Afghan rebels, sand falling from their drab robes, burst out of the thorn tree thicket armed with British Martini-Henry rifles and that terrible curved knife they call a peshkabz. Bentley-Foulkes saw the danger and tried to remount. He got a foot in the stirrup, but his frightened mount shied away from him, and he stumbled and fell. I saw him jump to his feet, holding the reins of his horse in his hand. He drew his revolver, fired into the running Afghans, and dropped one in mid-stride. I fired my own weapon . . .”
“Which was?” Grierson said.
“A .450 Adams revolver. I shot into the rebel ranks and one fell, and then another. Bentley-Foulkes staggered as he was shot several times, but still kept his feet.
“The rebels were closing fast, and my command was in danger of being enveloped. I opened my mouth to order a retreat . . . then disaster struck.”
Latimer swallowed hard. He stared out the window, not at the dusty Fort Concho parade ground, but once again seeing a mean Indian village and a horde of Afghan tribesmen screaming for British blood.
“And what was it that happened then, Mr. Latimer?” Grierson prompted.
“Then? What happened then?” Latimer said. He looked haunted, like a man waking from a bad dream. “Then Sergeant Haycock, for a reason that he’d never live to explain, called out, ‘Forward the Fifty-First!’
“No!” I yelled.
“But it was too late. Led by Haycock, my eight cavalrymen set spurs to their mounts, lowered their lances and charged into the melee. They hit hard at a gallop, their steel lance heads driving into the sweating bodies of several rebels. Colonel, I remember the blood, bright scarlet, fountaining into air that was thick with dust. The Afghans wavered and fell back from my lancers and their battle-crazed horses. For a moment, it looked like we would prevail and rescue Bentley-Foulkes, who had lost his revolver and was now on his knees, slashing around him with his saber.
“But it was a forlorn hope. What followed was swift, bloody, and brutal. A bullet to the throat killed Haycock, and one by one the other lancers were pulled from their saddles and died under the rise and fall of bloodstained knife blades. I didn’t see Bentley-Foulkes fall, but I heard the young officer cry, ‘God save the queen!’ followed by a scream that could only come from a man with a foot of steel rammed into his gut.
“Now the Afghans had tasted blood, and they came for me. For a few moments I stood my ground and emptied my Adams into the oncoming ranks and then swung my horse around and with only seconds to spare galloped out of danger. Behind me, my men lay sprawled in death . . . and for Captain John Latimer, a living death had begun.”
“What happened after you retreated from the field?” Grierson said.
The colonel could have said, “Fled the field,” but he didn’t. And for that, John Latimer was grateful.
“When I made my report, Colonel Peter Anderson, the commanding officer of the 51st, said, ‘You did not ride to Lieutenant Bentley-Foulkes’s aid, Captain? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’
“I told him that the Afghans came on at the run, and Lieutenant Bentley-Foulkes was surrounded before I could act. ‘Yet Sergeant Haycock and the rest of your command made a gallant attempt to save the officer, did they not?’ Colonel Anderson said.
“I said, ‘Gallant, yes. But foolhardy. They charged into a much superior rebel Afghan force and threw their lives away.’
“‘But you held on to yours, Captain. You managed to save your own skin, did you not?’ the colonel said.
“I knew the question and what it implied was unfair and that I was being stabbed in the back. But it was obvious that Colonel Anderson’s mind was made up, and nothing I could say would change that. The disaster of Isandlwana had hardened attitudes, and the British public demanded revenge and they wanted heroes. The army had obliged by handing out eleven Victoria Crosses to the defenders of Rorke’s Drift and was eager to award more. What it very much didn’t need was to brand an officer of the empire a coward. But justice, as the army saw it, had to be done.
“Finally, I said, ‘I did what I believed to be right.’”
“‘Then it seems that your version of right and the British Army’s version of right are two very different things,’ the colonel said. ‘You rose through the ranks, so you are not a gentleman, but damn it all, man, you should’ve tried to rescue Lieutenant Bentley-Foulkes and died with your command. I don’t like the idea of officers escaping on horseback while their men on foot are being killed, and for that reason you will take no further part in this expedition. You will be returned to London to face court-martial.’
“Sir, may I ask what I am to be charged with?” I said.
“‘You may,’ Colonel Anderson said. ‘The charge is cowardice in the face of the enemy.’”
Grierson shook his head. “Mr. Latimer, you had a hard go of it, and no mistake.”
“Worse was to follow,” Latimer said. “As I opened Colonel Anderson’s tent flap, but before he could step outside in the heat of the African morning, his voice stopped me. ‘Captain, it’s not too late to do the honorable thing,’ he said. ‘That’s why I did not take your revolver.’”
Latimer managed a wan smile. “It seemed that every officer and private soldier for miles around had lined up to see me walk to the detention tent. As I passed, one by one they turned their backs on me, making obvious their contempt for the coward who had brought such disgrace to the 51st Lancers and to the entire British army in India.”