An Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer Page B

Ghent."
    "Ghent? Who is going to Ghent?" asked Audley.
    "You are, my boy," replied Fremantle comfortably.
    "When?"
    "Tonight or tomorrow. Don't know for certain. The news is that Harrowby and Torrens are arriving from London today for a conference with the Duke. He is going with them to Ghent, to pay his respects to the French king."
    "Damnation!" exclaimed Audley. "Why the devil must it be me?"
    "Ask his lordship. Daresay he noticed your fine new dress uniform last night. He must know mine ain't fit to be taken into Court circles. Why shouldn't you want to go to Ghent, anyway? Very nice place, so I'm told."
    "He's got an assignation with the Fatal Widow!" said Gordon. "That's why he's so beautifully dressed! New boots too. And just look at our elegant sash!"
    Colonel Audley was saved from further ribaldry by the sudden opening of the door into the inner sanctum. The Duke came out, escorting the Prince of Orange. He did not, at first glance, appear to be out of humour, nor did the Prince bear the pallid look of one who had had the ill-luck to find his Grace in a bad temper.
    However, when the Duke returned from seeing his youthful visitor off, there was a frosty look in his eye, and no trace of the joviality which had surprised Lady Worth at the Hotel de Ville. He had, at the fete, given everyone to understand that he was entirely carefree, and perfectly satisfied with all the preparations for war which had been made.
    But the Duke at a ball and the Duke in his office were two very different persons. Lord Bathurst, in London, had been quite anxious to see him at the head of the Army as any in Brussels, but Lord Bathurst was shortly going to be made to realise that his Grace's arrival in Belgium was not to be a matter of unmixed joy for officials at home.
    For the Duke was not in the least satisfied with the preparations he found, and did not hesitate to inform Lord Bathurst that he considered the Army to be in a bad way. He had received disquieting accounts of the Belgian troops, thought the English not what they ought to be, and expressed a wish to have forty thousand good British infantry sent him, with not less than a hundred and fifty pieces of field artillery, fully Horsed. It did not appear to his Grace that a clear view of the situation was being taken in England. "You have not called out the militia, or announced such an Intention in your message to Parliament," he complained. "… and how we are to make out 150,000 men, or even the 60,000 of the defensive part of the treaty of Chaumont, appears not to have been considered." His boldly-flowing pen travelled on faster. He wanted, besides good British infantry, spring wagons, musketball cartridge carts, entrenching-tool carts, the whole Corps of Sappers and Miners, all the Staff Corps, and forty pontoons, immediately, fully horsed. "Without these equipments," he concluded bluntly, "military operations are out of the question."
    Yes, the Duke might not yet have taken over the command of the Army, but he was already making his presence felt. General Count von Gneisenau, the Prussian Chief-of-Staff, whom his Grace had visited at Aix-la-Chapelle on his journey from Vienna, also had a letter, written in firm French, to digest. General Gneisenau had proposed a plan, in the event of an attack by the French, of which the Duke flatly disapproved. Nothing could have been more civil than the letter the Duke wrote from Brussels on April 5th, presenting a counter-plan for the General's consideration, but if his Excellency, reading those polite phrases, imagined that a request to him to "take these reasons into consideration, and to let me know your determination," meant that his lordship was prepared to follow any other military determination than his own, he had a great deal yet to learn of the Duke's character.
    A copy of this suave missive was enclosed in the despatch to Bathurst, a formal note sent off to the Duke of Brunswick, and the returns presented by the Prince spread out