The Iron Stallions Read Online Free Page A

they?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Dad?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Orficer?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Don’t expect no favours. Lots o’ people got commissions between 1914 and 1918. Some of ’em even got to be majors and things like that.’
    A smile crossed Josh’s lips. Not many of them got to be field marshals or major-generals, though, he thought.
    The sergeant handed him a shilling. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That clinches the deal. Now stand over there and take this ’ere Bible in your right ’and–’
    That night Josh lay awake on a hard bed covered with brown blankets and a mattress divided into three portions which looked like army biscuits – which was exactly how they were known. On one side of him a country boy not much older than himself by the name of Edward Orne snored quietly, on the other an older man who had introduced himself as Syd Dodgin lay in an aura of stale beer. Across the aisle which separated the beds, a thin youth called Prescott was crying quietly to himself.
    Josh was now 17965238, Trooper Loftus, J, and as he lay awake thinking, he felt very satisfied. This, he decided, was something for which he had been heading all his life.

 
     
Three
     
    ‘First of all,’ the officer said, ‘consider yourselves lucky. This is a good regiment – the only cavalry regiment in the British army to wear green, because we routed the Polish lancers at Waterloo and when we became lancers ourselves we decided to adopt their uniform.’
    The new recruits were in a half-circle, standing stiffly in the position the army laughingly described as ‘at ease’.
    ‘Goff’s Greens,’ the officer went on, a languid figure in a blue jacket with chain-mail epaulettes, his legs encased in narrow green overalls with a double gold stripe running down the outside. ‘Goff’s Gamecocks. The Widowmakers. The Clutchers. We have all those names.’
    Josh listened intently. Though he’d often heard his grandfather giving this little talk to him and had understood it was a tradition to give it to all recruits, it was a new experience to hear it from the other side.
    The officer was a tall young man with a yellow moustache who had been introduced by the sergeant as Lieutenant Morby-Smith. It was a name Josh was familiar with. There had been two Morby-Smiths, father and son, both lost in the same action at the Graafberg in South Africa in 1900, where his own father had won a DSO. Though the battle had made his grandfather’s fame secure, the Regiment had suffered heavy casualties in what the regimental history politely euphemised as ‘a too-hasty charge.’ Josh knew, probably better than Lieutenant Morby-Smith himself, that it had been his own Uncle Robert, now Lord Gough, who had launched it.
    The field marshal had not loved his elder son much. He had forgiven him for giving up the Regiment but, so Josh had heard, there was more to it than that. Uncle Robert, it seemed, had tried to cheat the old man out of Braxby Manor, and, what was worse, had allied himself to the Cosgro family whom the old man detested. He’d broken one of the Cosgros for cowardice in Zululand and it had never been forgiven by either side.
    ‘You there!’ Morby-Smith’s voice cut across his thoughts. ‘What’s your name?’
    ‘Loftus, sir.’
    ‘Have I seen you before? Your face looks familiar.’
    Josh knew very well why his face looked familiar. There were portraits of his father and his grandfather in the officers’ mess and a strong resemblance ran through the family.
    ‘No, sir.’
    ‘You an old soldier? You speak like one. You hold yourself like one.’
    ‘No, sir. I’ve never been in the army before.’
    Morby-Smith eyed him doubtfully. ‘You don’t look old enough, that’s the truth. Well, pay attention. Now – where did we get these names? At Waterloo, our motto – motto, remember, never badge; and title, never motto – was a buffalo head. But when we became lancers we took the French eagle and to make it fiercer, it was given large claws.