01 The Forging by Richard Woodman

Author:Richard Woodman [Woodman, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

DUNBAR

September 1650

‘Steady men, steady!’

Monck’s voice seemed lost in the drizzle and the close blackness of the wet night. He looked left, along the line of his own pike-men whose shapes were soon indistinct in the sodden gloom, betrayed only by the pallid gleam of helmets and pike-heads. To his right Reade’s men stood in echelon, right flank refused. Far to the left and out of sight lay Hacker’s foot.

‘Colonel Hacker!’ he shouted. ‘Do your men stand, sir?’

‘As a rock, General Monck!’ Hacker’s reassuring voice called back out of the night.

Monck’s position lay across the main road to Berwick, along which General David Leslie’s Scots had harried them all day. Somewhere behind Monck’s rear-guard the horse and foot of General Cromwell’s New Model Army sought bivouacs and the balm of sleep amid a cluster of bothies and stone walls that formed a small deserted habitation on the road west of Haddington. The lucky few among them were wracked by no more than the pangs of hunger and the lassitude of fatigue, but most suffered the humiliating and unpredictable promptings of dysentery, the shivers of fever and ague, and all were soaked to their skins after days of retreat.

Only Monck’s iron will and ruthless discipline had held the rear-guard to its task, as now it had faced about and awaited Leslie’s cavalry. Leslie knew his enemy; he had fought alongside Cromwell and Fairfax at Marston Moor and had the measure of his opponents. And Monck had met him before, as he had told King Charles in Christchurch garden. Always circumspect in the presence of the foe, Monck marked the encounter with particular care. Disintegration of the rear-guard, easy enough on such a wet night amid the extremity of privation, would be disastrous. The English Army in Scotland would be destroyed and if that happened – as seemed likely in the extremity of its circumstances – God alone knew what would be the consequences for England. That his rear-guard stood in the face of that awesome cataclysm was the conceit that held Monck to his charge that foul night.

His pickets had come in half-an-hour earlier with tales of the jingle of harness and Monck’s intuition told him Leslie would make one more attack that day – or perhaps it was the first of the next, for it must be close to midnight. Monck hefted his officer’s half-pike; undeterred by the appalling conditions or the weight of his great responsibility. It gave him a grim satisfaction, for to serve ‘from the pike up’ was the only path by which a soldier of fortune – as he had once been – could begin to mount the ladder of military achievement and this melding of command of the rear-guard with the dire necessity of having to stand as a common pike-man to put heart into his demoralised men was much to Monck’s liking.

He knew that few among the distinguished but essentially amateur warriors that held high commands of the English Army in Scotland were inclined to undertake – or incapable of achieving – that duty of holding men together under such duress.

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