with his left sleeve missing and a bloodstained bandage round his bare arm suddenly appeared and guided Curzon off by a by-road.
‘Halt here, please, sir,’ he said. ‘You will receive orders in a minute.’
And the regiment stood still in the narrow street, the horses steaming in the rain, while the shells burst round them and Curzon tugged at his moustache. To judge by the noise, there was half a dozen batteries in action close at hand; the regiment was in the heart of a battle greater than Mons. The rain began to fall more heavily still, suddenly, just at the moment when the Brigadier came round the corner with his staff and the pale staff officer. Curzon moved to meet them, to be abruptly greeted.
‘What in hell are you doing, Curzon?’ blazed the General. ‘Get your men dismounted and horse holders told off. Quick!’
Generals, of course, had to be allowed their fits of bad temper. It was only natural that a colonel of a cavalry regiment should keep his men ready for mounted action in the absence of express orders to the contrary. Curzon left Valentine to see to the dismounting of the men, while he got off his horse and looked at the map which the brigade-major held open.
‘The brigade is to prolong the line here,’ said the brigade major. ‘You will come up on the right of the Surreys here. The Dragoons will be on your right.’
Curzon stared at the map, on which the raindrops fell with a steady pitter-patter. It was a featureless affair, with featureless names like Saint-Éloi and Kemmel and Messines – he had one like it in his leather map-case.
‘Major Durrant, here, will guide you,’ went on the brigade-major. ‘Site your machine-guns with a good field of fire and get your line entrenched as quick as you can.’
‘Very good,’ said Curzon. It seemed incredible that Carruthers could be talking to a cavalry colonel about machine-guns and entrenchments like this – Carruthers, who, that very summer in England, had argued so vehemently in favour of lance versus sabre. The words brought back that nightmare feeling of unreality again, but the General dispelled it a moment afterwards.
‘Curzon,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re the last troops that can arrive, and we’re going straight into the line. There’s nothing behind us. Nothing at all. If we give way, the war’s lost. So there’s nothing for you to do except to hold your position to the last man. At all costs, Curzon.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Curzon, and the mist lifted from his brain immediately. That was the kind of order he could understand.
‘Right,’ said the General, and then, to Carruthers: ‘Let’s get along to the Dragoons.’
‘Bring your regiment this way, sir,’ said the wounded staff officer, and then, seeing the regimental officers still mounted, he added: ‘They won’t want their horses. You won’t want your horse, sir, either.’
They marched, already weary with much riding, through the streets. Curzon took notice slightly of a long building which reminded him a little of the Houses of Parliament, and then they were out of the town again in flat green fields rising before them in the faintest of elevations.
‘There go the Surreys,’ said the staff officer, pointing over to their left front. ‘You come up on their right.’
As he said the words, the First Battle of Ypres engulfed the Twenty-second Lancers. For two days now each successive parcel of British troops, as it arrived, had just sufficed to patch or extend the wavering front in face of the masses which the Germans were hurrying to the same point. The arrival of the last cavalry brigade enabled the British command to close the last gap with less than a quarter of an hour to spare, for the German attack here was launched just as the Twenty-second Lancers extended into line. There was no time for Curzon to think about entrenchments or a good field of fire for his machine-guns. A sudden hail of bullets and shells fell all about the regiment, and then even as cavalry tradition evaporated and primeval instinct asserted itself in a search for cover, monstrous grey masses came looming through the rain over the slight crest half a mile in front.
There was no time for orders or scientific fire control. It was every man’s business to seize his rifle and begin firing as rapidly as he could at the advancing lines. They wavered and hesitated, came on again, and finally shredded away. Immediately afterwards fresh masses came pouring over the crest, gathering up with them the remains of their predecessors. There were mounted officers in the front, waving swords over their heads as if this were Malplaquet or Waterloo. Curzon, standing staring through his glasses, watched them toppling down one by one as the attack died away. He stared mesmerized until he suddenly awoke to the realization that bullets were crackling all round him. The enemy were lying down firing until fresh impetus could be gathered to renew the attack.
He looked along the line of his regiment. There was no trace of order there; half the men had established themselves in a drainage ditch which miraculously ran roughly in the desired direction and afforded cover to anyone who could bring himself to lie down in its thick black mud. That meant the centre was as solidly established as one could hope to be. Young Borthwick – Lieutenant the Honourable George Borthwick – was in an angle of a tributary ditch to the front with his machine-gun section, the men digging frantically with anything that came to hand, so as to burrow into the bank for shelter. Borthwick had been given the machine-guns, not as the most promising machine-gun officer in the regiment (a distinction the whole mess scorned), but because he had the most slovenly seat on a horse that had ever disgraced the ranks of the Twenty-second Lancers. Curzon realized with a twinge of anxiety that the reputation of the regiment suddenly had come to depend to a remarkable extent on how much efficiency young Borthwick had acquired at his job.
He strode over to inspect Borthwick’s efforts, Valentine beside him. He leaped the muddy ditch, in which the regiment was crouching, so as not to soil his boots, and stood on the lip of the bank looking down at where Borthwick was sitting in the mud with the lock of a machine-gun on his lap.
‘Are you all right, Borthwick?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Borthwick, sparing him just a glance, and then to his sergeant: ‘Is that belt ready?’
Curzon left him to his own devices; this much was certain, that however little Borthwick knew about machine-guns it was more than Curzon did. They went back to the ditch.
‘Better have a look at the flanks,’ said Curzon, and took his leisurely way to the right. The men stared at him. In that pelting hail of bullets they felt as if they could not get close enough to the ground, and yet here was the Colonel standing up and walking about as cool as a cucumber. It was not so much that Curzon was unafraid, but that in the heat of action and under the burden of his responsibility he had not stopped to realize that there was any cause for fear.
The right flank was not nearly as satisfactorily posted as the centre. The little groups of men scattered along here were almost without cover. They were cowering close to the ground behind casual inequalities of level – several men were taking cover behind the dead bodies of their comrades – and only the accident that there were three shell craters close together at this point gave any semblance of solidity to the line. Moreover, there was only a pretence of touch maintained with the Dragoons on the right; there was a full hundred yards bare of defenders between the Lancers’ right and the beginning of the ditch wherein was established the Dragoons’ left.
‘Not so good,’ said Curzon over his shoulder to Valentine, and received no reply. He looked round. Ten yards back one of those bullets had killed Valentine, silently, instantly, as Curzon saw when he bent over the dead body.
And as he stooped, he heard all the rifles in the
