In the Paris mail, as in the Southern Express speeding to Marseilles,
Dunoisse, _per_ medium of the newspapers, plunged once more into
the arena of worldly affairs.
At Marseilles he learned of the combined attack of Soimonoff, Pauloff,
and Dannenberg in concert with Menschikoff; and of the great battle
that had raged two days previously, upon the scrub-bushed slopes that
rise to a plateau from the yellow marl cliff, honeycombed with the
cave-dwellings of the ancient Tauri, and topped with the gray line of
battlements, broken by round towers, that are known as the Ruins of
Inkerman. And of the War Council resulting in the decision that the
Allied Forces should winter in the Tauric Chersonese.
At the Docks of Marseilles the landing-quays were paved with sick and
wounded French soldiers, just landed from two Imperial Government
transports, newly returned from the seat of War. Lying upon straw and
bedding, awaiting the arrival of the hospital-ambulances, they were
very patient, even cheerful--with the smiling spirit of their gallant
nation--despite the ravages of cholera, and fever, and dysentery, and
the dreadful wounds too many of them bore. Those thus disfigured or
mutilated were the merriest. Those whom sickness had robbed of the
joy of real fighting regretted their bad luck, and to the pitying
exclamations or horrified looks of strangers they had one reply:
“It’s bad, Madame, or Monsieur! but when you lend soldiers to the
Sultan of Turkey to play with, you must expect to get them back a
little chipped and damaged. We are pretty to look at, compared with
those who are coming presently, sacred thunder! But what would you
have? It’s the Fortune of War!”
The steamer by which Dunoisse took passage for the East was crowded to
overflowing with French and English officers going out to fill up gaps
created by Alma and Balaklava casualties. Newspaper correspondents of
both nations, Greek and Turkish merchants, were aboard her. Also, a
Queen’s Messenger, a Spanish dancer going out in charge of an aunt to
fulfill an engagement at the Imperial Opera House of Constantinople,
and some ladies of the French and British Diplomatic Staffs, returning
to their winter villas at Pera and Therapia.
Great Indiamen crowded with English troops; gray-painted, red-flagged,
and numbered transports with drafts of French, thronged the
Mediterranean sea-ways. Ship-loads of invalids of both nations passed,
with a crowding of haggard, unshaven faces at the taffrail, and
troop-deck gun-ports; and a waving of caps in thin hands, and a feeble,
unsteady cheer. A few homeward-bound warships towed Russian prizes,
and carried Russian prisoners, red-bearded, flat-faced men in gray
caps and ragged gray great-coats, on their way to the hulks at Toulon,
or Sheerness, or Devonport; who squatted in the ’tween decks or upon
the forecastle under sentry guard, and played with noisy laughter and
good-humored horse-play a childish game of cards, in which the forfeits
consisted of raps upon the nose.
Among his countrymen and countrywomen, Dunoisse had at first feared
recognition; but, thanks to the change wrought in him by sickness
and mental suffering, the eyes of people whose names and faces were
familiar to him, glanced at him indifferently and moved away.
They gossiped in his near vicinity as freely as though he were deaf or
ignorant of their language. One day it was mentioned in his hearing
that de Moulny, Secretary-Chancellor of the Ministry of the Interior
during the Presidency, had abandoned the diplomatic career, received
Holy Orders, and gone out to the Crimea as chaplain-in-charge of one of
the war-hospitals at the French base of Kamiesch. Upon another occasion
a knot of French officers discussed with mordant relish the funeral of
St. Arnaud....
The obsequies of the Imperial favorite had taken place, with all the
pomp of military and official state, at the Chapel of the Invalides, at
the end of October. The galleries had been packed with tearful ladies
in black and bugles.... Ambassadors had held the ends of the pall....
The entire Army had acted as chief mourner.... And a representative of
the Emperor had conveyed to Madame la Maréchale the following touching
message from his Imperial master:
“_I simply transfer to you, Madame, the sentiments I entertained for
my departed friend._”
Which noble and touching utterance, for some reason, tickled these
Gallic warriors hugely. But he was droll, they said, that fellow
Badinguet! Depend upon it, he would presently compose an epitaph which
would make everybody laugh like mad.... One of the gossipers suggested
that “_Morte la bête mort le venin_” (which is a polite version
of “Dead dogs cannot bite”) would look well in gilt letters upon the
memorial tablet dedicated to the virtues of the deceased.
Another quotation occurred to Dunoisse as he stood leaning on the
bulwark not far from the chatterers:
“_I am taken in mine own toils; I am fallen in the pit I dug for
others: Death hath pierced me while I sent forth my swift arrows
against the lives of many men._”
Though those men had died, and other men would die, there was no help
for it! That was the word brought by those silent ghastly messengers
who came drifting down from the seat of War.
As the steamer threaded her way amidst the swirling currents of the
Cyclades, their accusing shapes began to start up, in some eddy of
water and sunshine, or water and moonlight, under the steamer’s side,
and vanish in the flurry of her paddles and reappear in her wake,
drifting away....
Sometimes they were animals of draught, and Commissariat and burden,
who, despite the bloating of long immersion, had plainly died of want.
Or they were shapeless forms, swathed in canvas, of sick or wounded
soldiers who had died upon the homeward-bound transports, and had
been consigned to the deep, sewn up in hammocks too scantily shotted.
Or they came in little knots and groups of red coats and blue coats,
consorting and intermingling, parting and drifting on in silent,
passionless acquiescence with the will of the winds and tides.
These were the dead, French and Turkish, but chiefly English soldiers
who had sailed from Varna in September, and had been thrown overboard
during the transit of the Black Sea. They were heralds of the
hospital-ships that, packed from stem to stern with unspeakable misery
and suffering, would soon be hurrying down the Bosphorus on their way
to Scutari.
Young soldiers, raw recruits upon their way to Gallipoli, peeping
rosy-gilled or pale-faced through the gun-ports on the troop-decks,
would jerk back their heads in consternation as they encountered an
eyeless grin of greeting from one of these stark voyagers, of whom the
great bossy-mailed turbot, and the giant sturgeon of the Black Sea,
grown dainty with full feeding, had merely taken toll, and passed on
to the ravenous sharks and the huge rays and octopi of the Ægean, and
Ionian, and Mediterranean seas.
“Hail, comrade! Soon shall you be as I am, food for Death the
Insatiable!” the silent one would say, and with the wave of a rigid
arm, pass on. And the recruit, with a sick heart under his coarse red
jacket, would crack a brutal jest, or the older man would comment,
spitting into the oily water:
“Poor beggar, he do look bad, sure_ly_! Well, War or Peace, that’s
what we all will come to at the last!”
Whilst the Zouave or Voltigeur would shrug, pipe in mouth, and say,
grimacing at the foul exhalations of corruption, and the fœtid odors of
the sludge:
“He stinks, our friend there, sacred name of a pig! and he is not quite
so handsome as when his sweetheart last embraced him, but what of that?
It’s the Fortune of War! Our Army of France has been pruned; ten
thousand out of seventy-five thousand brave fellows have spit up their
souls of cholera and dysentery. _Saperlipopette_! it’s the Fortune
of War!”
And the wheeling cloud of gulls that came with and followed the
visitors would scream as though in derision, and settle again to their
feast in the transport’s wake. And the Voltigeur, or Chasseur, or
Zouave would toss off a glass of Cognac and return to the game of dice
or cards. But Dunoisse leaned upon the taffrail of the steamer, and
stared at the floating dead men with eyes that were full of horror.
It seemed to him that the empty sockets glared at him, that the stark
hands pointed at him, that the lipless mouths cried to him: “Thou art
Cain!”
Had he not been going to _her_ he could not have borne it.... He
said to himself that, of all women living, Ada Merling alone would pity
and understand.
* * * * *
Said a ruddy-haired, high-colored, handsome young British giant to
another, graver, older man, and both were officers of a crack Dragoon
Regiment going out to fill up Balaklava chinks in Redlett’s Heavy
Brigade:
“That white-haired polyglotter in the shabby togs, who answers you
and me in English, and talks Parisian French with the French fellows,
and Greek with the Cypriote currant-merchant who makes such a hog of
himself at the cabin _table d’hôte_--and is civil in Spanish to
the opera-dancer and her aunt from Madrid whenever he can’t avoid
’em--and swops Turkish with the Osmanli Bey who’s been Consul for the
Porte at Marseilles--is a queer kind of chap, uncommonly! Do you know,
I’ve seen him looking at those floating soger-men as if he’d killed ’em
all!”
Answered the speaker’s senior officer, lighting a large cheroot:
“Why should he look as if he had when he hasn’t, and couldn’t have? My
dear Foltlebarre, you’re talking bosh!”
“Bosh, if you like, Major,” agreed the ruddy-haired boy good-humoredly;
“but such a melancholy customer as that white-haired chap I never yet
came across!” He broke off to cry: “By Gad! what a thundering big
Government transport! That must be _The Realm_, going out with the
forage and stores and winter clothing to the tune--a fellow I know at
Lloyd’s told me--of five hundred thousand pounds. They’ve been keeping
her back in Docks at Portsmouth on the chance of the war being over
before the winter, and now they’re rushing her out for everything she’s
worth!”
She was a great three-masted screw steamship of two thousand six
hundred tons, and as, with her Master’s pennant flying from her main
top-gallant mast, and the red Admiralty flag with the foul anchor
and the Union Jack canton bannering splendidly from her mizzen
halyards--she bustled by--hurrying under full steam and every stitch
of canvas for her pilotage through the Dardanelles--she was to the
inexperienced eye a gallant sight. But the experienced eye saw
something else in her than bigness. And the senior officer who had been
invited to admire her, being a keen and experienced yachtsman--shook
his head.
“My own opinion--supposing you care to have it!--is that your friend at
Lloyd’s--take it he belongs to one of the firms of underwriters who’ve
insured her?--is likely to find himself in the cart. For I’ve seen
some crank Government tubs in my time, and sailed in ’em--very much to
my disadvantage. But never a cranker one than this, give you my word
of honor! Why, she sits on her keel with a crooked list to port that
a bargeman couldn’t miss the meaning of. And she has no more buoyancy
than a log of green wood. Look at our skipper shaking his head at the
Second Officer as he shuts his glass up. Lay you any money you please
he wouldn’t like to have to chaperon her through a November Black Sea
squall! By Jupiter! you were right just now, and I beg your pardon,
Foltlebarre!”
He had been following the course of the “thundering big transport”
through a Dollond telescope, and the face of the white-haired man in
the shabby togs, as he leaned upon the taffrail of the passenger deck
forward, had come into his field of view.
He said, after another look: “It’s a disease, the existence of which is
denied by the Faculty, but he has got it! That man is dying of a broken
heart!”
You were right, Major, who were doomed yourself to die so soon in the
freezing mud of Balaklava. But the end did not come for many, many
years.
A dark-blue haze hung over the Sea of Marmora. Rain fell, soaking
those passengers who, owing to the crowding on board the vessel, had
been compelled to sleep on deck. Dunoisse was one of these, and,
little fitted as he was to endure hardship, he suffered. The cough
returned, and with it fever and pain. But he forgot both when a wind
from the southwest lifted the fog, rolled it up like a curtain, and
showed the cypress-canopy of the great Cemetery of Scutari hanging like
a thunderous cloud against the rose-flushed eastern sky. And as the
steamer entered the Bosphorus, the dusk shape of Bûlgurlû Daghi, girt
about the flanks with snow-white mosques and glittering palaces and
fairy gardens, rose into view; and on the grassy slopes that climbed
from the water’s edge--where the Brigade of Guards had camped, and
where the black and yellow striped tents of the German Legion now
dotted the hillside--you saw, as you see to-day, the great quadrangle
of yellow stone, flanked with spire-topped square towers--that had been
the barracks of the Turkish Imperial Guard.
One traveler drank the vision in with a sense of revived hope and a
wonderful thrill of expectation. And as though his unuttered thought
had communicated itself to another, an English infantry officer
standing near him turned to another man and said, gravely pointing to
the building on the green hillside:
“She is there!”
And the heart of Dunoisse echoed with unspeakable gladness:
“She is there!”