Free Hervey 08 - Company Of Spears by Allan Mallinson Page A

rank-prefix used only very formally. Hervey, a brevet major in acting command, could hardly be addressed as ‘Colonel’, but neither did it seem correct for the officers – the more junior ones at least – to answer to him familiarly. Instead of ‘Hervey’ he was therefore ‘sir’, the form used by the dragoons for any officer, and for a serjeant-major too, as well as for any NCO when there was an officer on parade. As for the veterinarian, whose rank was always anomalous, the Sixth had for many years had their own custom: the officers called him by his Christian name.
    Veterinary-Surgeon Samuel Kirwan was a ‘respectable’ practitioner. Indeed the Sixth had been lucky for twenty years in this regard, having been spared rough ‘cattle doctors’ little better educated than the farriers, getting instead men of learning from the new veterinary schools. Sam Kirwan had come to the regiment on its return from India, six months before. His father, a naval surgeon, had died after the Nile, his mother not long after that, and the orphan Kirwan had lived five years in the Yarmouth workhouse before a distant relative had claimed him. He had worked his way through the London Veterinary College and joined the artillery as assistant veterinary surgeon, until the vacancy with the Sixth gave him his own regimental practice. He was a little older than Hervey, but wholly inexperienced in campaigning, unlike the Sixth’s past veterinarians. He appeared not to have the instinct of a Frederick Selden, who had seen them so sour-tongued through the latter part of the Peninsula and Waterloo, nor the hands of a David Sledge, who had lately endured with them in India; but there was something in him of the science of John Knight, the man who had elevated veterinary surgery in the regiment to a position of indispensability (though – a great mercy in Hervey’s opinion – Sam Kirwan did not have John Knight’s dyspeptic nature).
    He gave the thermometer to the orderly, entered the mare’s temperature in his own notebook, and turned to the acting commanding officer. ‘Not at all encouraging.’
    ‘How certain are you it’s farcy, Sam?’
    The veterinarian took off his spectacles as he turned. ‘That would not be my diagnosis.’
    ‘Indeed? It is entered in the adjutant’s book.’
    Sam Kirwan smiled thinly and shook his head. ‘I reported only the symptoms. The farriers are quick to their conclusions.’
    Hervey was encouraged. ‘Then the symptoms…?’
    ‘The inflammation is as described in the farcy, but there is also, in two of the cases, inflammation of the pituitary membrane which lines the partition along the inside of the nose. It is discernible only by digital examination.’
    Hervey approached the mare, took off a glove and, holding her muzzle down with his left hand, probed gently with his second finger. ‘I don’t know that I can discern anything, Sam.’
    ‘Unless you are in the habit of such an examination, sir, it is unlikely to reveal itself. I would that you washed your hands now in that vinegar-water yonder; the disease – if it is farcy – is very contagious.’
    Hervey did as he was told. ‘Shall you put a name to it?’
    Sam Kirwan sighed. ‘I could, but it would be better instead to refer only to the symptoms, for this virus, if it is the type I have seen before, works in a mazey way. If I tell you it is glanders you will be alarmed.’
    Hervey’s jaw dropped. ‘Good God. If we so much as suspect it then we ought to shoot every one of them!’
    ‘I said you would be alarmed. No, I do not recommend that we shoot them, not now that they are in here. I’ve had sulphur pots placed between the lines. I’ve ordered them lit at dusk. They’ll scrub the air well enough.’
    Hervey shivered. An outbreak of glanders or farcy: besides the depredations on the order of battle (and the inconvenience and expense that would arise) there was the ignominy, the yellow flag flying at the barracks gate, the line in