Brothers in Arms Read Online Free Page B

peninsula, Steel had watched as battles had begun and developed in their distinctive styles. The opening salvoes; the advance to contact; the salute from one line to the other; and then the neatly dressed lines blown into bloody raggedness and then the mêlée and the rout. But this … this was something new. This battle had not been the usual
mise en scène
but had rather grown piecemeal. The Allies had arrived slowly and been fed into the action as and when they had appeared. The vanguard had excelled itself in a holding action, and by the time Steel and his men had arrived here some two hours before, the fighting had been going on for four hours. Even then it had not been fully committed. It had seemed to him like two dogs circling one another in an alley, vying for possession of territory, taking tentative snaps in the air, edging closer and then backing off. But Steel knew that it was not Marlborough’s intention to allow his adversary to leave this field without a serious bloodletting.
    Cadogan had built his bridges and then had used them effectively to take his men – horse and foot – over the great river and deep into the ground before the enemy position. Steel had huge admiration for the Irish general. He might have been Marlborough’s second-in-command with a prestigious position on the staff, but on the day of battle Cadogan could be counted on to fight like a trooper, leading from the front and giving as good an account of himself as a listed man. And his men knew it.
    Steel could see Cadogan’s scarlet-clad battalions now, British and Hanoverian infantry, as they clustered around the village of Eyne, eight hundred yards to their front and right. That place would surely now be his own objective, and the aim of his brigade would be to shore up the clearly ailing forces of Cadogan, thus reinforcing the entire Allied line. He looked to his right and saw that yet more Allied troops were arriving along the road from Lessines, being disposed according to Marlborough’s wishes with apparent improvisation. It showed the true genius of Corporal John, who had guided them through six years of war, first in Bavaria in the great victory at Blenheim and then back up here in Flanders.
    He caught another snatch of Taylor’s song and again the words rang true:
     
‘For starvation and danger it will be my destiny To seek fresh employment with Marlborough and me.
Who’ll be a soldier, who’ll be a soldier …’
     
    The singing had spread now to the other companies of the battalion and beyond to the other British regiments in the brigade who stood in line behind the grenadiers, waiting at the bridge. Waiting.
    And so the afternoon wore on, and fear and frustration in their turn took hold in the minds of Steel and his men and all the others. And the men in the valley continued to die, singly at times and at times in parcels of four or six or ten, as fate directed the fall of the shot. Steel watched them as they fought in the village, in its fields and orchards and on the plain. He cursed at his commanders’ inaction and wiped his brow of sweat in the sultry July sunshine that played across the scene. Yet still they were not ordered into the attack.
    He called across to Hansam, as he had done at intervals throughout the day: ‘Henry, what time d’you have?’
    The lieutenant drew out his prized timepiece, a gold chronometer taken from the body of a dead French officer after Blenheim: ‘Four o’clock and thirty minutes.’
    Steel nodded his thanks, swatted a fly away from his face and tucked a finger inside the sweat-stained collar band of his shirt, which had again become home to a colony of lice. He had lost them in England and kept clean too while in Brussels, but since they had been on the march the little buggers had come back – and it seemed to Steel that they were making up for their absence. What he would give for a clean shirt, a long soak in a bath, a pitcher of ale and the chance to sleep! Above all