Brothers in Arms Read Online Free

Major’s company, waved the silken squares of the regimental colours. One of them was tattered now, looking no more than a rag, after so long in the field. It was the Colonel’s colour, red and gold above the cipher of their commander, Sir James Farquharson. The other, only recently presented, bore the new Union flag of the united kingdom of England, Scotland and Ireland, in its centre a crown. Lest anyone should be in doubt, the colour made the matter plain. Farquharson might have raised a regiment of Scottish foot who at Blenheim and Ramillies had fought beneath the blue and white of his native country’s saltire, but since last year these were Britain’s infantry. British grenadiers. Proud to serve not only their Queen but their newly united nation. Steel watched the colours catch the sunlight as they rippled in the breeze.
    Behind them, curving back through the marshland and up the hill towards the village of Eename, he saw the mass of the column – a polyglot force, waiting here behind Farquharson’s, to step off in turn from the flimsy wooden bridges resting on tin boats. Among them, he knew, stood some of the finest infantry in the world: Lord Herbert’s Foot, and with them Gibson’s, Farrington’s, Meredith’s and Holland’s. Behind them came Princess Anne’s, Granville’s, Clifton’s and Douglas’s, and those other regiments which like his own had lately made up the Scots army: the Royals, the newly christened North British Fusiliers and the Earl of Angus’s Foot. All of them names that would surely be writ forever in the history of this army.
    To the right of the British brigades were the Allies: the Prussians and Hessians in their distinctive blue, Hanoverians and Swiss in red, and the grey-coated Danes. Singing and swearing in a half-dozen languages, they had all come to this place on the orders of their great general. This was an encyclopedia of Europe’s tribes and races: English, Irish, Scots and Welsh, pale-skinned Scandinavians, men from the Italian and German states and exiled French Huguenots.
    For some time now, too many of the men had been silent. They were watching as their comrades who had arrived earlier that morning met the enemy down in the valley and gave fire and stood to take it and charged and fought and died. They were all powerless, of course. They had been ordered to wait, and increasingly there was no alternative but to watch. Steel realized with a start, however, that his own men were still far from silent and Taylor had not yet finished his song. Or perhaps he has started afresh, thought Steel, and I have not noticed, being so lost in my own daydreams. He listened now as they sang out, mid-verse:
     
‘To be paid in the powder and rattle of the cannonballs Wages for soldiers like Marlborough and me.’
     
    It might, he thought, have been the song of his own life – a life paid in powder and shot. Such had been Steel’s wages since the age of seventeen. He had come to this war as a lieutenant, transferred by his own request and to the dismay of his fellow officers from the Guards, and he had risen to his present rank not by purchase, as was the usual way, but by proving himself in battle.
    By that, and his new-found skill as an ‘intelligencer’. For Steel had become one of the new breed of officers now emerging who could act as the eyes and ears of their commander. Before Blenheim, four years ago now this summer, Steel had single-handedly foiled a conspiracy against Marlborough, designed to discredit the Duke as a Jacobite traitor and remove him from command. Then two years back he had played a key part in the clandestine taking of Ostend, now the British army’s key point of contact with the homeland and conduit for vital supplies.
    Steel looked at the loops of silver lace that only in the past few weeks he had been reluctantly persuaded to have sewn onto his red coat. He had once sworn that he would do everything he could to avoid using such blatant badges of rank.