The Iron Stallions (11 page)

The controversy raged on. As one officer claimed that tanks could be knocked out at will and that the type of war envisaged by Liddell Hart and Fuller was past, another argued that the very people who claimed to love horses were the very ones who should least regret their departure from the battlefield.

Leduc grew angry at the continued delay. ‘All this about hunting making officers quick-witted is sheer bloody rubbish,’ he claimed. ‘It requires much quicker wits to drive a motor car through London. For God’s sake, we should be ready for the
next
war, not the last one, and responsibility, like the Holy Ghost, should be everywhere.’

To Josh horsed cavalry seemed to be as dead as the dodo because the aeroplane and the tank had taken away the only jobs it could do. Yet, not long before, the First Division had turned out at Aldershot with over five thousand horses, over seven hundred horse-drawn vehicles and even the old horse ambulances of the Boer War.

‘An aeroplane or a few civilians with machine guns could have mopped them up without difficulty,’ Leduc said.

It was clear to anyone with an ounce of brains that the army thinking was wrong and that a lot of the training they pursued was pure myth. Wireless, caterpillar tracks and armour seemed to be the keypoints of the new conception of war and the best anti-tank weapon seemed to be another tank, yet little was being produced that seemed worth while.

‘The trouble,’ Leduc said, ‘is that the British army spends so much of its time putting down riots in the colonies they can only design fast, cheap, lightly-armed vehicles, which, while fine for deflecting low velocity bullets fired by tribesmen with old guns, would be useless on a European battlefield.’

Though the Government didn’t seem to know where it was going, however, a few others did and Chloe had never made any bones about her intentions. She didn’t have Ailsa’s dislike of the idea of motherhood and the first arrival was a signal for drinks in the mess between Josh and a rueful Toby Reeves.

‘Extraordinary little thing,’ Ailsa wrote enthusiastically. ‘Fingers and toes, just like a normal human being.’

With a civil war flaring up in Spain and the Germans and Italians sending troops to gain experience, it seemed to Josh hardly an opportune time to bring a child into the world, and Ailsa agreed.

‘Catch me doing it,’ she said. ‘On the other hand, I’m not against the fun that precedes such an event. It’s something you have to give your mind to. A girl doesn’t like to go into that sort of thing half-heartedly and I like to be worked up to full revs.’

If nothing else, she was rarely downhearted and had a great zest for life. Yet Josh knew she had men friends, though he was certain it was nothing more than her warm gregarious nature. The younger subalterns adored her and more than one of them was suffering from a severe case of crush. On the other hand, she loved London almost too much and whenever she could she was there doing the shows because Josh was too busy to be with her.

The Regiment still had horses and took part in the musical ride at the Royal Tournament where trick riders picked up handkerchieves at a stretch gallop for the crowd’s amusement. Because he was an expert horseman, Josh won the Military Steeplechase at Meath and the Heythrop Point-to-Point, then fell heavily in the 19th Lancers’ Challenge Cup on a horse owned by Toby Reeves. A corporal called Winder yanked him to his feet and felt him all over for broken bones.

‘I’m fine,’ Josh said. ‘If you don’t rattle when you get up there’s nothing to worry about.’

Ailsa complained that she never saw him. He didn’t take her complaints too seriously, however. She was a self-contained individual, perfectly happy so long as she was not deprived of the things she enjoyed doing.

‘So don’t start getting broody,’ she warned. ‘I don’t want babies. The world’s too bloody uncertain to bring children into it.’

As it happened, there was little time to become broody about anything because orders arrived that the transformation to vehicles was finally to take place, but in the end it happened so gradually they barely noticed it. Nevertheless, the business of transferring the men’s affection from horses to internal combustion engines started at once. B Squadron was the first to lose its mounts and started training under a squad of instructors from the Tank Corps. C Squadron followed soon afterwards and eventually the others, so that finally there wasn’t a horse to be seen in the cavalry lines. Stables were now garages and instead of the old familiar smell of ammonia, there was the reek of oil, petrol and the exhausts of armoured cars, motor bicycles, wireless trucks and lorries, as well as the dejected private cars owned by subalterns. Where bales of oats, straw and sweet-smelling hay had once stood were now untidy pyramids of oil drums and mounds of drab cotton waste. Even the veterinary hospital had been converted to a workshop, while now, when charging was mentioned, instead of thinking of Balaclava you thought of batteries.

A few officers transferred to safer units or simply retired, and a few of the older NCOs and men disappeared, too. The men who took their places were a very different type, used to mechanical things and not unduly perturbed by a spot of oil on their uniforms, and the old hands began to regard their new mounts rather like newly-married couples inspecting their first home. It was going to seem strange riding on the inside instead of on the outside.

Not that the tanks seemed very frightening. It was as if the top brass, unable to break away from the idea of cavalry charges, had tried to make the tank as much like a horse as possible.

‘They look like chicken runs on wheels,’ a subaltern called Ormonde commented.

Certainly, the new vehicles seemed to leave a lot to he desired. They weighed under five tons and, though they could work up a speed of thirty miles an hour, their armament consisted of a solitary machine gun.

‘It’s an armoured car, not a tank,’ Josh said.

‘It’s
called
a tank,’ Reeves insisted. ‘So it
must
be a tank.’

Not even a tank enthusiast could have called them commodious and, as soon as the turret was closed, Josh found himself in a pandemonium of noise that was powerful enough to pulverise the senses. Sharp pieces of metal were all round him, clearly placed there with no other object than to brain him or gouge his eye out, and his nostrils were assailed by the acrid taste of the exhaust fumes.

‘You get used to it,’ the Tank Corps instructor said.

Shooting into a pothole, they threw up a wave of muddy water, then they drove across a hill at an angle which seemed to suggest they were about to roll over, hit the other side of a gulley with a jolt that seemed to shake Josh’s teeth loose, and stuck in deep mud. The Tank Corps man seemed quite undismayed. He reversed for a few yards then charged at the gulley again and swivelled to the left to climb the hill at an angle. They shot up at what seemed an unbelievable speed, reached the ridge on top and made a terrifying plunge downwards to land with a crash that seemed to shake Josh’s spine apart.

‘How did you find it, sir?’ Dodgin asked as he climbed out.

‘Awful.’

‘Hard luck.’ The Tank Corps man offered his cigarette case. ‘This one’s the most comfortable type we have.’

The new vehicles seemed totally unable to move more than a mile or two in any sort of heavy going without shedding or breaking a track. They had a crew of two – a driver who was instructed what to do by a touch from his commander’s boot on his right or left shoulder, and the commander who worked the machine gun and the wireless and did the navigating.

‘Fall in all officers with six arms and three heads,’ Reeves said.

The talk changed. Instead of discussing hocks and points and thrush, they found themselves discussing magnetos, tracks and the oiling up of plugs, and the shouted instructions changed, too, from ‘Sit still, you’re darting about like a fart in a colander,’ to ‘For Christ’s sake, use those steering sticks with a bit more care. This thing can bring down the officers’ mess.’

Docile or submissive when properly used, a tank could be an imp of wickedness that could snap off those limbs which a fighting man could least afford to spare, while trying to get your eye behind the sight of the machine gun while in motion was the best way imaginable of having it put out.

‘This tank,’ the Tank Corps man explained, ‘is what’s known as a Mark II Light, or Whippet. You’ll find it all right for going to the pub for a drink, but of course you could do that just as effectively on a bike. We are expecting a new one, however, with a crew of four and armed with a two-pounder gun firing solid shot. It’s said to out-class German tanks of a corresponding type.’

He paused while they all looked at each other, reassured, then came back at them with a dry smile and a sardonic voice.

‘On the other hand, of course, we’ve heard rumours that the Germans are now designing new ones, which are bigger and faster and mount heavier guns. It should be fun when the war comes.’

When war finally came, there was nothing very visual about it beyond the fortifications the British Expeditionary Force had been constructing from the moment they had arrived in France.

The conflict had arrived with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. In his obsession with disarmament, the Labour Prime Minister had given Hitler his opportunity, his Conservative successor had made the onslaught more certain, and the failure to back France against Hitler’s march into the Rhineland had clinched the matter. Only Winston Churchill, in the wilderness and entirely without authority, had risked the disapproval of party and people by trumpeting that Germany was again on the warpath.

There was no unity in the nation. Many had been near starvation on the dole, and those in work had sought a false anodyne in the picture palaces; while the national tendency to understatement had helped the men in Germany who were in the habit of saying more than they meant.

Not only were the fighting services starved, but senior officers seemed able to see a future only in the traditional past. Yet, while men had left the army to use their pens to goad the War Office or tried to build tanks in their back gardens to prove they had a value, the Germans were busily studying the writings of Fuller and a new authority in France called De Gaulle.

For years, the only tanks Britain had possessed were on paper. They had been used extensively in theoretical manoeuvres but they had no value whatsoever because the only way to get experience of a tank was by getting inside one. Yet, thanks to the flaccidity of British and French statesmen, Hitler had regained the Saar and the Rhineland without fighting and when the League of Nations had failed to act against Mussolini’s attack on Abyssinia, growing even more confident, he had drawn the Italian dictator into his intrigues. He had occupied Austria, and gauging to a nicety the moral cowardice of Western leaders, had demanded Czechoslovakia. Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, had virtually grovelled to him and having, within less than a year, added ten million Germans to the Third Reich, it was little wonder that to his people he seemed a consummate statesman. As Czechoslavakia was swallowed whole, he had immediately started demanding Danzig and the Polish corridor. Finally, when Britain and France belatedly and shamefacedly guaranteed Poland’s inde-pendence he had retaliated with a cynical non-aggression pact with the communist Russians, and gone to war.

The immolation of Poland had proved conclusively how wrong all the critics of mechanisation had been. The Polish horsed cavalry had dashed themselves in vain against the German tanks and Poland had fallen within three weeks.

The outbreak of war caught the 19th Lancers in a state of flux. They had just begun to grow used to their ungainly little steeds when they had been ordered to hand them over to an infantry battalion being converted to armour, and had been given armoured cars in their place. Nobody had been very pleased, particularly as the Morris armoured car was under-engined, under-armed, under-armoured and already obsolescent.

The beginning of hostilities reminded Josh of 1914. The old men were withdrawn from the Regiment and the ranks filled with younger reservists, while the Colonel had been promoted to brigadier and given a training command on the grounds that he was too old, so that Leduc was now commanding officer and the regiment was as fully prepared as an armoured car regiment with poor equipment could be.

They went ashore at St Nazaire and were based just inside the French border facing Belgium. The number of anti-tank ditches that were dug and the number of anti-tank teeth and pill-boxes that were erected baffled the imagination. Josh couldn’t quite see the point of them. Nor, for that matter, of the famous Maginot Line. With its deep underground barracks and guns that commanded every possible line of approach, it was tremendously strong, but since it ended at the Franco-Belgian border it all seemed to be rather a waste of money. The Germans only had to direct their tanks round the end through the Flanders plain which, as Josh had heard so often from his grandfather, was the traditional approach for invading armies and the way they were likely to come if they came at all.

The autumn dragged on. Though there was no fighting, there were still things to watch, among them over-anxious NCOs. Soldiers were like packs of hounds, not troops of performing dogs, and it seemed to Josh better to have men do things because they were willing than because a man with a stripe on his arm was forcing them to. News came from home occasionally: Chloe had produced another child. His grandmother had been down with flu but, despite her age, seemed to be recovering.

In the meantime, they had to remember that despite the lack of aggression from either side and the fact that casualties came chiefly from the blackout or inter-unit football matches, the fundamental principles of war remained the same and they could at least repair some of the damage of the past by being on their toes.

At Christmas, a few of them were allowed home on leave. England seemed very different with the blackout and, after nearly four months away, Josh noticed that there seemed an attitude of bored indifference. It was impossible to pass a leave without visiting his grandmother, who was now over ninety and might not be alive for his next, but the North seemed even more detached from the war than the South, and, apart from the fact that all windows now had blackout curtains and you could only find public houses in the dark by the small shaded lights in their entrances, didn’t seem to have been affected very much. After the first panic when cinemas and theatres had been shut, everything was open again and most people seemed even to be enjoying the new situation.