Free Hervey 08 - Company Of Spears by Allan Mallinson

adjutant, the riding-master and the veterinary surgeon could cast their eyes over the entire regiment’s stables in a quarter of an hour, and as a consequence every man was a better horsemaster.
    But that was all behind them. He laid down the orders and took up the adjutant’s occurrence book. He read it quickly, for it contained no more than the usual number of defaulters, routine comings and goings, receipts and issues, reports and returns. Then under the heading ‘Veterinary’ he saw ‘three horses from A Trp confined in isolation, symptoms of the farcy’.
    This was something he would rather not have read. There was always a certain number of the regiment’s horses unfit for duty – lameness, sores and abrasions, thrush, a cough – albeit a smaller number, the Sixth flattered themselves, than in other regiments. But the farcy was a different business altogether, an ulcerous death, and spread like the plague.
    But he was jumping to conclusions. After all, the entry read symptoms of the farcy. The symptoms might as easily betoken something else: a cold, and sores from ill-fitting saddlery, or stall-chafing. Harmless enough. The trouble was, a regiment quartered in barracks rather than billeted on innkeepers and the like circulated its ailments all too easily. If it were farcy it might be round the entire lines in a week.
    He cursed. He had seen the farcy only once before, in a livery stables in Sussex when first the Sixth had paraded for the Peninsula. He had taken Jessye there, and two of his fellow cornets had taken their chargers too, to rest before embarkation. The symptoms in one of the post horses had gone unnoticed, and the infection had spread, so that the lairage was put in quarantine and Jessye missed Hervey’s first campaign – a thing he had always been grateful for since she would likely as not have perished with the others at Corunna. How she had not contracted the farcy there was beyond him – beyond any of the farriers even to explain. They had better pray hard that the symptoms here now were of something else. He would summon the veterinary surgeon at once. No, he would go to the infirmary lines and see for himself.
    As a rule evening stables parade was finished by watch setting, and timings being advanced by three hours perforce made no difference to the routine. The mounting of the quarter-guard, which even in barracks the regiment knew as the inlying picket, signalled the change from the day’s routine to the night’s, just as in the field the evening stand-to-horses signalled that change. It was not customary for the commanding officer to visit in the barracks during the ‘silent hours’, the regiment at this time being in the care of the picket officer, but the commanding officer could go when and where he liked, and Hervey was of the mind that these were circumstances that permitted a variation in custom.
    The infirmary lines were no different from the troop lines except that they were built with loose boxes rather than standing stalls in order to allow the patient to lie down at full stretch. They were high-ceilinged, allowing a good circulation of air, they were weatherproof, clean, well drained, and they smelled of new straw and tar. These lines were as good as they came, reckoned Hervey, and they were set well apart from the others. Not a bad beginning for quarantine.
    He was surprised to find the veterinary surgeon still at duty, however, when there was scarce a dragoon to be seen anywhere else. ‘Sam, I am sorry to see you here so late.’
    The veterinarian was taking the temperature of one of the isolation mares. ‘Good evening, sir,’ he replied, without taking his eyes from the thermometer. ‘Up five degrees,’ he said matter-of-factly to the orderly, who duly recorded it in the book.
    The Sixth’s form of address among officers was a touch unusual. All except the commanding officer, who was called ‘Colonel’ by the newest dragoon, were on familiar terms, the