Brothers in Arms Read Online Free Page A

Not for the simple reason that he might make a better target for the enemy’s best shots, but because he considered himself better than the preening popinjays which so many officers soon became. Steel was a fighter. Just that. What need had he of finery? But then what else could one do but acquiesce when the Queen herself presented you with your promotion?
    Still he refused to conform on other points of his appearance. He would not wear the cumbersome full wig sported by other officers, but preferred to have his own hair tied back in a queue, as was the manner with the dragoons. In fact his model in this had been the man who was his inspiration as a young subaltern. Francis Hawley had been a captain in the First Foot Guards and some years Steel’s senior. When Steel had purchased into the regiment, Hawley had been given command of a recently formed grenadier company. Although Hawley had transferred soon afterwards to Berkeley’s Dragoons, Steel and he had kept up their friendship, and at Steenkirk in 1692, as Steel had received his baptism of fire in one of the English and Scots army’s worst defeats at the hands of the French, he had watched in disbelief as Hawley had charged to his death on the bloody strand. Steel had never forgotten Hawley, and as he had grown into the army and adopted his own distinctive fashion, as all officers did, he had always sought to emulate his friend and mentor. It was through Hawley’s example too that he chose not to wear gaiters and spats but preferred more comfortable and hardy half boots.
    Most importantly of all, Steel cherished his weapons. Unusually for an officer, along with his sword he carried a fusil slung across his shoulder, a short-barrelled musket which in his case had originally been a fowling piece. The sword itself was far from regulation issue but a heavy cutting weapon better suited to a cavalryman, with a wicked, razor-sharp blade. Steel alone, with his advantage of height, was able to use it to similar effect. It was a Scottish Highland broadsword, basket-hilted and straight-bladed, made in Italy, that had hung on the wall of his family home in the Lowlands and which more than anything about him betrayed his origins. It had not failed him yet, and had cut a bloody swathe across the battlefields of Europe. Its weight alone was enough to cleave a man, though in Steel’s hand it was as light as a feather, and those who made its acquaintance as enemies seldom lived to tell the tale.
    A noise like distant rolling thunder announced the presence of artillery and made Steel turn his head. But he had already missed the flash of the shot and failed to spot the exact whereabouts of the guns. No ball had passed near them as yet, and it still seemed to him as if they might be watching a distant spectacle with the indifference of a theatre audience. But Steel knew that this was all too easy. He conjured a picture in his mind of the gunners on the opposite slope sweating at the hot barrels, stripped to their shirtsleeves, sponging out, loading, ramming home, damping down their overheated guns. He pictured the cannon bouncing back on their wooden trails with shouts of warning and saw in his mind the shot leaving the muzzle and crossing in an arc high above the battlefield to find its unlucky target. The noise of the cannon provided a bass line to the symphony of battle, the deep boom of artillery beneath the percussive rattle of musketry a sound as familiar to him as London’s musical choruses were to the ear of his opera-mad wife. His hearing was attuned to the pitch of the current melody, the sound of the guns. There was no theatre here on the battlefield. These men were not actors. Yet Steel wondered when the curtain would rise on the next scene and give his men their cue.
    It was, he thought, a battle unlike any he had witnessed before. For the best part of twenty years, from here in Flanders to the plains of Denmark and down among the scalding, sun-bleached rocks of the Spanish