Chapter Ten
Ten
Colour-Sergeant Harris inspected them with his usual thoroughness, tugging at a strap here, adjusting a bayonet there, saying little beyond the necessary corrections. Lieutenant Carter stood by, arms folded, watching in silence. When the line was deemed satisfactory, Harris gave a single nod.
“Western Heights, gentlemen. March.”
They set off westward along the coast road, then turned inland toward the great earthworks and bastions that crowned the ridge above the town.
The path rose steadily, first gentle, then steep; the chalk dust rose in small clouds with every step.
Laurence felt the familiar ache begin in his calves, then climb to his thighs.
Beside him Ensign Taylor breathed hard but kept pace; Finch muttered under his breath about the weight of the Brown Bess; Langley and Hammond marched in grim silence; Merton, still the palest of them after the sea voyage, lagged a little but did not fall out.
After forty minutes the road ended at the foot of the principal scarp of Western Heights.
The earthworks loomed above them—steep grass slopes, steep ditches, high parapets—designed to command the approaches to Dover from the landward side.
A slim figure in scarlet waited at the base of the principal ascent: Captain Owen Jones, the regimental commandant of the light companies, a man of thirty with a narrow face, quick dark eyes, and the reputation of being able to march any man in the regiment into the ground.
He stood with hands on hips, coat unbuttoned at the throat, hat set rakishly forward. When the six subalterns halted before him, he gave them a single, measuring look.
“Good morning, my ladies,” he said, his Welsh lilt light but edged. “You have come dressed for the ball, I see. Full kit, splendid. Now then—we shall have a little run to the summit. I shall meet you there. Try not to keep me waiting.”
Without another word he turned and set off up the slope at a steady, punishing trot.
Behind him his seventeen chosen men—the fittest of the light company—followed in loose order, rifles at the trail, moving with the easy stride of men who had done this before.
The six subalterns set off with them, the whole party now twenty-three men climbing the slope together.
Captain Jones reached the top first. He stopped upon the level ground beside the flagstaff, turned, and waited. The twenty-three men were dissipated behind him at different distances. He numbered the first ten to nearer the crest.
“You may rest here, gentlemen,” he said to them. “The rest of you—down again. Smartly now.”
The thirteen remaining men turned without protest and jogged back down the slope. At the bottom Captain Jones was already waiting. He raised his voice in a clear, carrying shout.
“To the top, if you please! Faster this time!”
They ran again. Laurence felt his lungs burn, his legs turn to lead. Sweat ran into his eyes; the greatcoat strapped across his back seemed to weigh a hundredweight. He kept his place in the middle of the pack, refusing to fall behind, refusing to be the last.
When the second group reached the summit, Captain Jones numbered off the first five to arrive.
“Rest here. The remainder—down.”
Eight men turned wearily and descended once more.
The third ascent was worse. Laurence’s vision narrowed to the grass immediately before his boots; each breath came in short, painful gasps.
He passed Merton, who had dropped to a walk and was being quietly encouraged by one of the light company men.
He passed Finch, who was swearing softly in time with his steps.
Ahead of him Taylor stumbled once but recovered; Hammond, grim-faced, kept moving.
Laurence reached the top among the first five now. His knees trembled; his heart hammered against his ribs. Captain Jones, who had run every ascent himself and still stood straight, numbered them off.
“Rest here, gentlemen. The last three—down once more.”
The final descent and ascent were accomplished in near silence. When the stragglers reached the summit for the fourth time, every man was spent: faces crimson, coats soaked, legs shaking. Captain Jones waited until the last man had arrived, then stepped forward.
He surveyed them with calm satisfaction. “What lesson have you learned today, my ladies?”
No one answered at first. Breathing was too difficult.
Captain Jones supplied the answers himself, counting them off on his fingers: “One. It is better to arrive with the captain—or before him. Two. If the captain can do it, you can do it too. Three. The last might die of exhaustion.”
He let the words settle.
“Now then,” he continued, “does anyone of you know a military song? No? Then I shall teach you one.”
He turned to his twenty-three men, who had formed a loose semicircle behind him.
“‘The British Grenadiers,’ if you please. From the beginning.”
The light company men drew breath and began, their voices rough but true:
“Some talk of Alexander, and some of Hercules,
Of Hector and Lysander, and such great names as these…”
Captain Jones joined in, his tenor clear and unforced, carrying the melody above the wind with the ease of a man who has sung this particular song on a great many heights and in a great many weathers, and who expects to sing it on a great many more.
After the first verse, he turned his attention to the six subalterns, who stood at the edge of the semicircle in various attitudes of exhaustion, and gestured to them with the particular economy of a man who has long since ceased to waste words on what a gesture will accomplish.
“Come, gentlemen. You are part of the regiment now. Sing.”
Laurence, who was still engaged in the business of recovering his breath, managed the second verse in a voice that was not precisely what he would have wished it to be, though it was the best he had to offer under the circumstances.
Taylor joined him, and then Finch, and then Langley.
By the third verse Merton and Hammond had found sufficient air in their lungs to add their own notes to the whole, uncertain at first, and then less so, until the song had gathered something of the character that Captain Jones had evidently intended for it—not polished, not ceremonial, but present, and collective, and carrying across the heights toward the sea with the indifference of the wind.
When it ended, the captain gave a single nod of the sort that conveys neither praise nor censure but merely the acknowledgement that a thing has been done and that the next thing may now begin.
“Dismissed to your billets. March easy. And remember—tomorrow we do it again.”
The six subalterns turned and began the long descent, this time at a walk, which was a mercy that none of them remarked upon aloud, though each of them was sensible of it.
No one spoke for several minutes, the silence between them being of the companionable rather than the awkward variety—the silence of men who have recently undergone the same experience and find that they have not yet arrived at the words for it.
It was Taylor who broke it at last, limping slightly on his left side in a manner he was clearly attempting to conceal, though without great success.
“I begin to think the sea was kinder,” he said quietly to Laurence, who was walking beside him.
Laurence gave a short, breathless laugh—the kind that costs something—and considered the proposition with the seriousness it perhaps deserved.
“Perhaps,” he allowed. “But at least the ground does not heave.”
They walked on in silence after that, the ache in their limbs already settling from the sharp and immediate into the dull and persistent, which is the variety that announces itself as the reliable companion of the following morning.
Yet beneath the exhaustion, if one were disposed to attend to it, there lay something that was not quite pride—pride being too large and too certain a word for what it was—but rather the faint, grudging recognition that they had survived what the captain had demanded of them, and that survival, in its small and unglamorous way, was beginning to feel, if not like progress exactly, then at least like the precondition of it.
At the foot of the scarp, they parted from the light company men, who saluted them with the casual respect of soldiers who have watched other men suffer a thing they themselves have already mastered, and who are not without sympathy for it.
Laurence shouldered his firelock once more and set his face toward Dover, the wind at his back now, which was the one concession the afternoon had seen fit to make.
The day’s lesson had been simple, and brutal, and—though he was not yet prepared to admit as much, even to himself—effective in precisely the manner that Captain Jones had intended it to be.
Laurence had arrived among the last five.
He was aware of this fact with the particular clarity that attaches to facts one would prefer to have been otherwise.
He was equally aware that he intended to be among the first tomorrow.
However, he could not have said with any certainty whether this intention arose from pride, or from stubbornness, or from some quieter and less easily named quality that had been present in him all his life and had not, until today, been given quite this form to take.
That night, Laurence did not write home.
There were no words yet adequate to describe what he had begun to understand—or rather, there were words enough, but not the right ones.
He had already learned that silence should sometimes be preferred to the wrong words, which was, he supposed, either a virtue or a failing, depending upon the occasion.
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