Читать книгу Royal Regiment - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 18
Оглавление§ 1
At seven-thirty to the second on the Monday morning Major Thomas Rockingham, R.A., once more in khaki with the regulation mourning band round his sleeve, said goodbye to Fanny and took the wheel from Noakes.
A peaceful Sunday had brought his mental processes back to normal. What thoughts he could spare from the strain of driving were exclusively with his battery. Once they were beyond Hammersmith Broadway and on to the Great West Road, he voiced them to the man at his side.
“We'll be sending the horses away today.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The other dragons should be there.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t seem particularly interested.”
“To tell you the truth, sir; I’m not feeling up to much this morning.”
“Not turned you down, has she?”
“No, sir.”
“Then cheer up.”
Both chuckled. Rockingham drove on in silence till they were past the railway gates at Sunningdale.
“Young Gilchrist,” said Noakes then; “he won’t have much to do if you’re only keeping one charger, sir.”
“I shall be keeping both, for the present. They’re still allowed forage. Have you had your breakfast?”
“I managed to get a snack, sir.”
“Good. So did I.”
They relapsed into silence again. Yet each remained pleasurably aware of the other’s companionship—the sharp edge of class distinction blunted by twenty years of mutual memories and the bond of the Royal Regiment, which is stronger than most.
§ 2
Some miles farther on, where the turnpike bifurcates, Rockingham swung sharply to his left. There was still no sun visible through the leafless branches which edged the side road. But the gray morning held no threat of fog.
They came through the trees to commonland, past barracks, a garage and a few shops to the foot of a hill. There they turned left. Another two hundred yards brought them—past the blue flag with the number and the R.A. crest, by the sentry and the guardroom—home.
It struck Rusty Rockingham—braking, telling Noakes, “Take my things along to my quarter; then give the old bus a wash; she needs it”—that any man who thought of this place as “home” must have a peculiar mentality.
For barer, bleakier, uglier, one could hardly find.
Low tin sheds—the original red of their paintwork almost black with age—housing the guns and the horses, brigade office and the four battery offices, bordered this great oblong of pale brown gravel on all four sides. Here, beyond the tin roofs, showed a few leafless treetops; there, through a gap, the raw new brick of the men’s quarters and messrooms.
Yet this place—and similar places—held more of one’s heart than ...
“Than any woman”, he thought suddenly; and because that thought, also, seemed to imply a peculiar mentality, it absorbed him for a moment, as he watched the accustomed scene—a shed door opening, a gun being run out, men leading horses from the stables.
Then he forgot himself as his dog Patrick, with one woof of joy, came leaping across the gravel; lay fawning and slavering at his feet.
“It didn’t take you long to find out I was back, old boy”, he smiled; and stooped, and patted the airedale’s rough head. “Quarters!” he went on; and Patrick, with a sulky look in his eyes, rose; stalked back to Noakes.
Meanwhile another man in khaki had stepped out of another car at the edge of the gravel; and Patrick’s master stiffened to attention, his right hand at the salute.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Morning, Rockingham.”
Lieutenant-Colonel Lampson—“Wily Wilbraham” to his intimates—returned the salute casually, the greeting with a stiff-lipped smile.
“You have that dog of yours well trained, I observe”, he went on. “Wish I could say the same for my daughter. She drives like a perfect fool. Nearly had us in the ditch twice.”
He called to his daughter, who was just reversing away from them, “Don’t play any tricks on the way home, Janice”. She called back, “O.K., Colonel”; and a non-commissioned officer with two stripes, who happened to be passing, could not quite restrain a grin as his right hand, also, went to his cap peak.
“Cause and effect,” remarked the observant brigade commander, stroking his neat gray moustache. “You don’t seem able to discipline your bombardiers quite as well as you discipline your dog, Rockingham. He is one of yours, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sir. Boardman. About the best signaller I’ve got. He rather fancies himself as a humorist.”
“So one perceives.”
Wily Wilbraham, after a few more words, stalked off to brigade office.
“Don’t really like him”, mused his senior major. “Not human enough. I oughtn’t to have volunteered that information about Boardman. It may mean trouble when I want to put him up to lance-sergeant.”
So thinking, he in his turn was saluted—by his second in command.
§ 3
Captain Patterson of the Turban battery—who wore the blue and red ribbon of a Distinguished Conduct Medal won at Le Cateau as well as the white and violet of a Military Cross awarded three years later—had never ventured to call the idol of his boyish hero-worship “Rusty”. But latterly they had become “Tom” and “Wilfrid” to each other. And that sufficed.
“I’m glad you turned up so early”, said Patterson. “We’ve had a spot of trouble over the weekend ... Godden.”
“Damn! What’s he been up to? Godden’s about the best young N.C.O. we’ve got, Wilfrid.”
“Don’t I know it. But it doesn’t look as though we’ll be able to keep him.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s like this ...”
Patterson glanced over his shoulder to make sure he was not overheard. On the far side of the gunpark, the battery commander could hear Sergeant-Major Cartwright shouting, “Horse parties, Number!”
“Go on”, he said; and the other spoke, low-voiced, for the best part of three minutes.
Listening in silence, watching the play of emotion on this face—usually so stolid, and still as typical of the mounted services as though it had been modelled from some old-fashioned recruiting poster—Rockingham frowned.
“How far’s it gone?” he asked at the end of the story.
“The usual distance, I should imagine, though Cartwright says they both deny it.”
“Any gossip?”
“Cartwright says, ‘No’. But he’s always a bit of an optimist. Godden’s asked to see you. If we have to transfer him just when we’re mechanising it’ll be the very devil.”
“Quite. But do you imagine anything I can say will have the slightest effect? You know what the troops are when there’s a woman in the case.”
“Don’t I, just. There’s nothing like a married woman to play merry hell with a good soldier.”
The words rekindled recollection. Almost thus, Cowley might have spoken.
“He really is one of the fellows we can least afford to spare”, went on Patterson.
“We can’t afford to spare any of ’em these days”, thought Rockingham; and again the Hawk’s “We shan’t count as much as a pinch of snuff next time”, troubled his mind.
“Time we were getting on parade”, he said stiffly.
They set off across the gravel.
“It’s funny to think of the battery without its bays”, said Patterson, as they approached the horses. “Makes one feel quite sentimental.”
“No more stable pickets anyway”, smiled Rockingham; but in him, also, was more of sentiment than he cared to admit.
The other three batteries had already mechanised. Dragons roared, the acrid fumes from their exhausts offending one’s nostrils. Here stood one’s own four dragons, silent. Close by, the horse parties awaited the battery commander’s order to move off.
“Kid” Masters, Rockingham’s only subaltern—whom his men had nicknamed Belinda Blue-Eyes, and who, according to the only senior lieutenant in the brigade, was “A bit too Journey’s End for my taste, though thank the lord he doesn’t shoot his mouth off like some of ’em”—clicked the heels of his regulation three-buckled fieldboots.
“All ready, sir”, he said.
“Good. I’ll just have a look round. Anything for me to sign?”
“The papers”—Patterson spoke in his parade voice—“have been dealt with, sir.”
“Good”, repeated Rockingham. But sentiment had him again as he walked up and down the line of horses, inspecting them for the last time.
The Turban battery’s bays! Exactly seventy of them in these three parties. So proud he’d been of them. He knew each by name, each by number, every single one’s place in gun team or wagon team.
These drivers, too, had been proud of their horses. Good lads. Ought one to make them a little speech?
But the only speech that came to one’s lips was, “They may as well go off now, Sergeant-Major”; and immediately Cartwright was bawling:
“Horse parties! Prepare to mount”.
§ 4
“That Arborfield lot won’t come to any harm”, Rusty Rockingham caught himself thinking as he watched the first forty of his bays, destined for “Remounts”, file away, led horse and ridden, across brigade square.
But the fate of his next twenty horses troubled his imagination a little, though Patterson said, “They ought to fetch nice prices at auction”; and he watched thoughtfully till the rear pair, “Blinkers” and “Boss-shot”, wheelers of number two gun, turned their croups on him.
The “knacker party”, also, he watched, till all of them were away, hoping that they might be killed, decently and humanely, in England, not shipped alive, maybe without fodder, maybe without water, to Belgium or Holland ...
The thought enraged him.
Ten of one’s own bays. Ten of the Turban battery’s bays. Going away. Going abroad. To be butchered. Butchered cruelly, clumsily, in a foreign shambles to make a few pounds of illegal profit for some cheating civilian, ready to shout with the rest of his kind, “No more war!”
