Hostile Shores

“Eh, ya do, sir?” Dodd perked up at that prospect, but then as quickly slumped in dread and indecision. “Ah don’t know, sir. I’ve me orders, an’ all. Yet—!”

“Just wheel over yonder and we’ll begin loading,” Lewrie prompted. “There’s a good lad.”

“Well, sir … iff’n they’s waggons enough for your lot, and that regiment’s mess, Ah s’pose they’s no harm,” Dodd surrendered, at last. “You’ve a heavy load, sir?”

“Salt-meat casks, large cooking pots…,” Lewrie began to tick off.

“Best they go ’tween the axles, then, sir,” Dodd said. “That’d be easier on the team, with the road up the mountain steep-lookin’.”

He clucked to his horses, shook the reins, and got the waggon turning round to clatter and rattle over to the shore party.

“Huzzah!” Lt. Westcott shouted. “Heave it up, lads, and hoist it in!”

“You can really protect him from his officers’ wrath, sir?” Midshipman Rossyngton asked in a soft voice once the waggoner was out of ear shot.

“If I have t’convince the poor fellow t’volunteer as a sailor or Marine, sir!” Lewrie told him with a happy bark of laughter.

*   *   *

More bugle calls sounded as the waggon was loaded and the load roped down against shifting, then covered with a large scrap of spare canvas. The army encampment was packed up, and the soldiers were now do

“I had lead soldiers when I was a boy,” Lt. Westcott mused at the sight, “but the real thing is grander by far.”

“Mister Simcock,” Lewrie said, turning to the Marine officer. “You and your men somewhat resemble redcoats, so it might be best if you march ahead of the waggon, and Mister Westcott and our sailors bring up the rear. I’ll come with you, at the head of our column.”

“Pity we don’t have Colours of our own, sir,” Simcock said. “If we’d thought to bring a Harbour Jack or boat Jack? Ah, well.”

“Perhaps we can steal one from another ship’s shore party,” Lewrie suggested, laughing. “The same way we stole our waggon. Let’s get our little company movin’ forward, Mister Simcock. Up close to the head of the baggage train, like we really are guardin’ it.”

He looked down the short length of his column.

We haven’t got bugles, so—? he thought; Might we need to pilfer one o’ those, too? Well, there’s Mister Wheeler.

“Mister Wheeler?” Lewrie called to the Bosun’s Mate. “Do you have a call t’get this shambles movin’?”

“Ehm…,” Wheeler replied, scratching his head for a moment. “How about ‘Stations To Weigh’, sir?” he said, lifting his silver bosun’s call.

“Aye, that’ll do. Tootle away!” Lewrie agreed, laughing.

Christ, what does the Army say? Lewrie asked himself, stumped.

“Forward … march!” he extemporised, waving his arm as the bosun’s call fweeped.

“For’d march!” Lt. Simcock shouted, calling the step for a bit to his Marines, since they had left their fifer and drummer aboard the ship. Lewrie stood beside to admire them, thinking that his Marines were as smart as any of the Army soldiers. The waggon came up level with him, and Private Dodd gave him a shy smile and nod. Then came his sailors, and they were a different proposition. Westcott, the Midshipmen, the Bosun’s Mate … they looked “martial” enough.

Their Purser, Mr. Cadbury, had long ago kitted the men out in red-and-white chequered gingham shirts from the same baled lot, and blue neckerchiefs for all. All hands wore the waist-length, opened jackets with bright brass buttons and white-taped seams of the nautical trade, and white slop-trousers. All had been issued stiff and flat-brimmed, low-crowned tarred hats, and every hand had opted for a bright blue ribbon band to trail off the backs of their hats, with HMS RELIANT block-painted in white.

It was just that no one had ever taught them how to march in step! The captain who tried might have created a mutiny, for “square-bashing” drill was the stuff of “soldiers”, a much inferior lot!

They shambled in four ragged lines, swaying out of order like a weaving worm, their muskets not held at Trail or Shoulder Arms, but over their shoulders any-old-how, like oars or gaffs. There was his cabin-steward, Pettus, without a single clue how to handle a weapon; his personal cook, Yeovill, sporting a red waist-coat and a longer blue coat, with a black civilian hat on his head, and his attempt at a sailor’s queue as bristly as a fox tail, and about as gingerish. His Cox’n, Liam Desmond, and his long-time mate, Patrick Furfy, were near the tail of the column, peering all about wide-eyed, with their hats on the backs of their heads.

No one’ll ever believe we’re supposed t’be here! Lewrie told himself; We look more like a parcel o’ drunken revellers!

With a long sigh, he hitched the sling of his Ferguson higher up on his shoulder and stomped back to rejoin Lt. Simcock.

There was a sudden fanfare of bugle calls, more shouts, and the army lurched into motion, five thousand men in all in both the Heavy Brigade and the Light Brigade of Foot, and the drums began to thunder out the pace for smartly-drilled soldiers to advance at the one hundred steps a minute. Cavalry moved out at the Walk, and the dust clouds rose again as thousands of boots and hooves struck the ground. Artillery batteries clattered and lumbered, and the waggons of the baggage train began their slow groaning forward movement.

“We can’t wedge ourselves into the baggage train, sir,” Lt. Simcock observed as they reached the head of the first waggons. “It might be better did we swing out to the right flank of it, and try to stay level with the leading columns.”

“Sounds right, Mister Simcock,” Lewrie agreed. “Uhm … how does one order that, in Army parlance? You’re the closest thing we have to a proper soldier.”

“Column Half-Right!” Simcock bellowed, turning to march backwards and pointing in the right direction. “Tah!”

“‘Tah’?” Lewrie whispered to him as the Marines altered course.

“That is what my drill-masters shouted when I was learning, and what they used as a word of execution,” Simcock explained in a lower voice, baring a sly smile. “Some prefer ‘Har!’ Makes no bloody sense at all, really. Battalion, Attention, comes out as ‘’Talion, ’Shun!’ for example; Arms in any movement of muskets is said ‘Hahms!’; and so on. It’s all up to the Sergeants’ preference, really. Isn’t that right, Sarn’t Trickett?”

“Whatever the Leftenant says, sir!” Sgt. Trickett barked back.

Their swaying little column angled out from the baggage train, and its cloud of dust, about one hundred yards before Simcock ordered Column Half-Left, with a requisite Tah! to bring them back on their original course, parallel with the waggon train.

The march, or the shambling, continued up the slightly rising slope from the sea towards the Blaauwberg, through a dusty brown haze raised by the regiments ahead of them. The land was deceptively green, at least in the middle distance, though the ground they marched over seemed half-parched by a Southern Hemisphere summer, with most of the grasses only ankle high and sere, and rare patches of taller clumps of reeds and greyish-green bushes here and there. What thickets of trees they encountered were thin and spaced far apart from each other, most of them spiked with long thorns. The denser, greener, and more succulent groves lay ahead near the foot of the Blaauwberg, but even those were widely scattered, and formed no impediment to the skirmishers of regimental light companies or cavalry videttes that rode through them. As they got closer, the Blaauwberg did not look as steep as it had at first, but it was treeless and stony, thinly furred with short green grasses between scattered outcrops of bare rock, appearing at that distance as if the green was a thin covering of moss, or a green mould on a stale loaf of bread.