Swordpoint (2011) Read Online Free Page B

Scotland became James I of England,’ Company Sergeant-Major Farnsworth of A Company liked to tell his men, ‘he and his court wore out their brogues on the journey south, so they sent a message back to Edinburgh asking for a thousand more. But by the time the message reached Scotland the word, “brogues”, had become “rogues”. And’ – at this point CSM Farnsworth’s voice always rose ‘–their descendants all seem to be in this bloody battalion.’
    They were sharp, suspicious and individual as Highlanders, which indeed many of them were because they came from the high country of the moors. Edward Yuell himself – a small, nervy, wiry man with jet-black hair and grey flinty eyes – came from a family which farmed two thousand acres of harsh Yorkshire Pennine land west of Ripon. The climate seemed to have bitten into his character so that he reacted to every crisis in the same way that his family had always reacted to crises of weather and livestock on their bleak uplands – in a Yorkshire way, quickly but with remarkably little fuss.
    His men resembled him. Their speech was slow and strong and contained strange words nobody else understood. It was blunt and forthright, flat-vowelled but full of their own brand of humour.
    They came from the hills, the dales and the riversides, and from the streets of ugly wool and steel cities. And although they had no real ill-feeling for the men of Lancashire, in one respect the Wars of the Roses were still being waged. The biannual counties cricket matches, which had always been played by the dictum of ‘If you can’t win, at least don’t bloody well lose’, had produced more boredom for the rest of the country than any other sporting spectacle. To the North Yorkshires, ‘Ilkla Moor’ was more of a national anthem than ‘God Save The King’.
    Because they were a regular battalion, many of them were in it for the sole reason that their fathers, or even their grandfathers, had been in it. Yuell’s great-grandfather had been at Lucknow and the men of his family had served the regiment for over a hundred years. The father of Second-Lieutenant Taylor, who was newly arrived and as wet as a wet day, had been killed with the regiment on the Somme. Mr Zeal, CSM Farnsworth and Corporal Wymark had all had fathers who had been NCOs in the regiment. At leasttwo privates had actually been born into it, seeing life for the first time in the married quarters of the regimental depot at Ripon. Yuell’s second-in-command, Major Peddy, round-faced, spectacled and looking like a schoolmaster, had not thought it possible, living in Harrogate, to join any other regiment. Mark Warley of A Company, though he had no regimental ancestry whatsoever, was as Yorkshire as Wensleydale.
    Like all battalions, it included the good, the bad and the indifferent, individuals despite their uniformity of dress and equipment. In Major Warley’s company alone they were as varied as circus performers.
    First of all among them was Private White. White was an old soldier. After his first term of service in the 1914–18 war something had happened that they often debated but never established, and it had caused him to join up again for the rest of his life. He had a string of good conduct stripes halfway up his arm, three ribbons, two from the last war and one for the North-West Frontier, and he had resisted every attempt to promote him. Though they tormented him unmercifully, his comrades also regarded him with a certain amount of awe which showed in the fact that he was probably the only White in the British army who was not nicknamed Chalky’. Private White had been in so long he seemed to deserve more respect than that and he was always known – even to the officers – by his Christian name, Henry.
    His tattooed sinewy body was still that of an athlete but he had the haggard face and sunken cheeks of an old man, and a set of wobbling false teeth which looked, according to Private Parkin, as if