The Iron Stallions Read Online Free PDF Page A

tunics, SD slacks, greyback shirts, boots and long swan-necked spurs.
    ‘And be careful ’ow you turn,’ the stores corporal advised as the spurs clanked on to the counter. ‘You get them things caught together, and you go on your bloody ear.’
    Their barracks towered higher than infantry barracks because underneath lay the stables, brooms, scrubbers, mops and burnished buckets laid out for inspection in a neat pattern. Everything in the army, Josh discovered, was in patterns. Beds, kit-boxes, uniforms, swords and rifles all stood in patterns. Even the empty lance racks stood in patterns, all painted spotless white.
    ‘If it moves, salute it,’ the corporal advised. ‘If it doesn’t, paint it.’
    The ‘Let’s-get-back-to-some-real-soldiering’ attitude that had become prevalent since the Armistice was not so strong in the 19th as in some regiments, but it was clearly there, much to the disgust of the old soldiers. Some had signed up for a ‘pontoon’ – twenty-one years. Some were the dregs of humanity and believed in what they called ‘a nap hand’ – syphilis, gonorrhoea and five red marks on their crime sheets. Their paradise was a brothel or a bar, and it didn’t take them long to notice Josh.
    ‘You a deserter from another lot?’ one of them asked.
    ‘No, I’m not.’
    ‘How’s it you know so bloody much about the army then?’
    ‘You’re not really an old soldier, are you?’ Orne asked as they sat in the canteen. ‘You’re always being asked.’
    ‘No, I’m not an old soldier,’ Josh reassured him. ‘It’s just that I’ve heard my father talk. And my grandfather. They were both soldiers.’
    ‘In this lot?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘That’s perhaps why Morby-Smith thought he knew you.’
    By this time, Josh was aware of other names he knew. In A Squadron there was a Lieutenant Lord Ellesmere and he guessed he was the son of his grandfather’s old chief of staff. There were also a Radliffe and a Johnson, both names he’d come across in his grandfather’s writings. And among the other ranks and NCOs there was a Trumpeter Sparks who Josh guessed was some relation to that Trumpeter Sparks who’d sounded the charge at Balaclava; a Threader, who was surely connected to the Sergeant Threader who had died of enteric in Bloemfontein; even a Corporal Ackroyd, who came from the northern hills of Yorkshire and must have been a distant relation of the family at Braxby. The only name that seemed to be missing was Goff.
     
    The army didn’t appear to have changed much since his father’s day, but Josh was surprisingly happy. At night he lay in a torpor that sprang from hard work and fresh air. On pay-day he swaggered with Trooper Orne to the Olde Light Horseman, the nearest pub. From the old soldiers he learned to cut the stitches from the lining of his SD tunic to make a pocket big enough to hold a packet of Woodbines without a bulge, how to tuck matches in his puttees, and how to swear because it was considered cissy not to.
    He was careful, however, to write regularly to his mother, informing her he was well and that before long he’d be coming to see her. He had also written to Reeves, and even to Lamps, the headmaster, apologising for pushing him into the bushes. Feeling he had left nothing undone, he settled back to enjoy himself. It wasn’t hard because everything seemed simple.
    Like his father and his grandfather, he was lightly built, though taller than they had been, and he had a natural military posture. Drill came easily and he was often brought forward to show the others how to perform intricate manoeuvres. He even knew how to handle a rifle, was a good shot, and was neat and tidy both in himself and in his bed space. He had learned the tricks of kit inspection from Tyas Ackroyd in his butler’s pantry, and the corporal wasn’t slow to note that he didn’t need showing.
    Sword drill was another thing he was good at because Tyas Ackroyd had taught him that with the fire-irons when