She had got into harbor on the previous evening. Some of the troops on
board--a draft of the 146th--had already been landed. The others came
ashore after the ship broke up.
Fate sent young Mortimer Jowell down from the Front that morning, in
charge of a fatigue-party, detailed to draw rations of hard biscuit,
salt-pork, and the green coffee-berries supplied by a maternal
Government to men who had no fires to roast or mills to grind them with.
The tramp of eight miles through knee-deep, sometimes waist-deep slough
would have been no joke to men full-fed and in hard condition. They
were muddy to the hair, weary and sore-footed, when they passed the
camps of the Four British Divisions--lying under the Argus-eyes and
iron mouths of the French Artillery, whose breastworks crowned the line
of cliffs along their rear and flank. For the Red Snake lay coiled
about the grim fortress-city of Tsar Nicholas, and the Blue Snakes had
lapped themselves between the Red Snake and retreat.
To the eye of Hector Dunoisse that disposition of the Allied Forces
would have spoken volumes. To the uninstructed glance of young Mortimer
Jowell it merely suggested a barely-possible contingency. He said to
himself:
“My eye! Suppose the Emperor of the French and that pasty chap, the
Sultan, were to turn those whacking big guns on us one of these fine
mornin’s! Gaw! I wonder where we should all be then?”
It was the most brilliant thing the Ensign had ever said in the whole
of his life, but he was not conscious that he was being clever. He was
only glad that he had got his draggled party of muddy scarecrows safely
into Balaklava. He was inhaling almost with relief the smells of that
ramshackle, rag-and-bone town.
They went down into her by the Kadikoi Road that skirts the top of
the retort-shaped, jug-mouthed harbor, presided over by the Star Fort
and the Mortar Batteries. Stacks of sleepers and rusty lengths of
rail marked the site of the proposed railway between the Front and
Balaklava. A living-wagon, reversed upon the summit of a mountain of
mud, bore upon its canvas tilt the pithy inscription:
“NO PAI FOR 6 MUNTHS AND HARDLY ENNY
VITTALS.