Blunted Lance Read Free

like his father, Tyas Ackroyd, who had served General Goff as orderly, manservant and general factotum for years and now, at over sixty and limping a little from rheumatism, was running the Goff home as butler. The Ackroyds had gone to war with the Goffs for generations but Tyas Ackroyd had always been more than a mere servant; and his son, Ellis, the sergeant behind General Goff, was a great deal more educated than his father and, with a little help from the General, was making sure his sons were more educated even than he was.
    Dabney shifted his feet in the hot sand. He’d be sorry to see the Ackroyds sever the connection they’d had with his family for so long. Originally they’d been labourers on the Home Farm at Braxby, and the general and old Tyas had fished and swum together in the Brack long before they’d departed together for the Crimea. Ellis would probably be the last to act as servant to anybody. They were far too independent–minded a family, something that was already showing in Ellis’ son, Tom, who, at the tender age of eleven and itching to be apprenticed to an engineer, was already learning all about the new-fangled petrol engines.
    The thought led him to think about home. His sister, Helen, had startled them all by marrying a German and seemed quite happy to be translated to a Continental background. Within months, his other sister, Jane, had married the son of the farmer next door and seemed equally happy to be translated from a military to an agricultural heritage. Robert–? Robert, his elder brother, he decided, was a bit of an ass. He had wangled himself a job on Gatacre’s staff and he was well-suited there because Gatacre was considered to be a bit of an ass, too.
    Robert, Dabney decided, would suit his chief well. Robert loved the trappings of the army more than the army itself and Dabney often considered he wore uniform less for the fighting than for the ceremonial.
    Perhaps being part of a military family was to blame, because in the last decade or two cavalry officers had tended to drape themselves in a self-conscious arrogance that came less from their skill than from their splendid uniforms, and Dabney had long had the feeling that the mess of the 19th Lancers, the Regiment, – his regiment – was far from being a repository of original thinking. Robert was an ass. He made his mind up with a young man’s cheerful indifference to the right and wrong of it.
    Aware of Churchill staring at him, he realised he’d been smiling to himself. Churchill was a funny customer, he thought, coming down to earth. But, ebullient, brash and far from popular though he was, there was still something about him and, though he criticised everybody, all too often he was right. Perhaps, Dabney thought, it was because he saw Churchill differently. Among the strings Churchill had pulled to get himself attached to the 21st was the one held by General Goff, who had known his father, so that with Dabney he managed to be more relaxed. And nobody could deny his experience because, despite his youth, he had seen action on the North-West Frontier and had got himself into Cuba to watch the rebellion there against the Spanish. In addition, his mother, like Dabney’s, was an American, which had given them a lot in common, and he had been more than once to Braxby to pick the brains of General Goff for his literary efforts.
    Dabney glanced at his father again. The contemporary of so many great men, it was odd to think he was still on active service. Evelyn Wood was no longer on the active list. Buller was confined to a War Office role. Even Wolseley – once England’s ‘only general’ – was in eclipse these days and little heard of, Commander-in-Chief of the Army at last after years of intriguing.
    The distant noise, the muted buzz that Dabney had heard from the Jebel Surgham – the sound of a swarm of bees in summer – came again, filtering across the plain, mingling with the beating of drums and the mournful