The Sabre's Edge by Allan Mallinson Page B

the commander-in-chief's staff, or even the Governor-General's? There was not much, it seemed, that Lieutenant-General Sir Peregrine Greville could not arrange if his wife were to ask him. 'Sir?'
    Hervey turned.
    'I asked if you still don't want your cape, sir,' said Corporal Wainwright, water running down his shako oilskin as if it were an ornamental fountain. 'I can fetch it quick enough.'
    Hervey shook his head. 'No. I think we're beyond all help in rain like this. It'll be sodden in minutes and then a dead weight. Why don't you take yours though?'
    'No, sir. It'll be just as sodden. And I'd as soon kick off these boots.' He smiled.
    Hervey smiled back. Corporal Wainwright had been wearing shoes when first he had seen him on Warminster Common, though the rest of the inhabitants of that sink had been barefoot. 'Easier going in the approach, I grant you, but just wait till you get a bamboo splinter!'
    Words of command now rippled through the ranks, like dominoes toppling. Back up to attention came the companies; they shouldered arms, moved to the right in column of route, then struck off to the dull thud of soggy-skinned drums and watery fifes - a cheery enough display for the general, thought Hervey, even if the sepoys did look distinctly ill-used to marching in torrents of rain. The King's men, he didn't doubt, would have marched in many times worse, and some of them in the Peninsula, where the rain could fall as a stinging hail of ice rather than as a warm drench. Poor, wretched infantry - the regiments of foot - and their feet often as not cold and wet. The cavalryman knew privation, and worked the harder for having a horse to look after as well as himself, but his feet bore nothing like the punishment of the infantryman's.
    'Nice tune, sir,' chirped Corporal Wainwright as he picked up the step.
    'Yes,' said Hervey, in a vague way.
    'Don't you recognize it, sir?'
    'No?' Corporal Wainwright obviously thought it of significance.
    'The rain it fell for forty days!'
    'Of course,' he said, smiling - black humour, the sol d i er's privilege. 'But I'm afraid the drum-major is excessively an optimist. The rains will be an affair of months, I fear.'
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    They were not set off more than half an hour, and only a short distance into the jungle, when the first shots were fired. In this rain they defied belief. Hervey could not conceive how any powder might be dry enough, especially in Burman hands.
    There was at once a great cheer and the leading men went at the pickets with the bayonet. It was over in a minute. Hervey saw nothing.
    The column halted and the general pushed his way to the front, Hervey with him. They found a half-finished stockade built directly across the track and extending the length of a cricket pitch each side into the forest, empty of all but redcoats, and half a dozen Burman musketeers too slow on their feet. General Campbell peered at the bodies, as if they might reveal something of the cam paign before him. ‘P ul l the place down!' he snapped. ‘P ress on, Colonel Keen!'
    They left a sepoy company to the work, and the column trudged on into jungle made increasingly dark by the heavy skies. In another half-hour they passed three more stockades just as hastily abandoned, and then not a sign of the enemy in five miles of swamp and thicket until the artillerymen were too exhausted to pull their guns any further.
    'In God's name get the sepoys to the ropes!' cursed the general.
    Hervey despaired. He had taken gallopers into the jungle - two-pounders dismantled, and carried by packhorses. But guns like these ... it would not serve. 'Sir, I believe the effort may not be worth it. And when it comes to withdrawing, we could never afford to abandon them. ’
    'I agree, General, ’ said Colonel Keen.
    Campbell looked vexed. He wanted to blow in a stockade and tell the Burmans there was nowhere safe for them. But he had brought the wrong guns and he knew it. The Madras artillery's commander had told him so