A forest of masts fringed the harbor. You saw vessels of every
imaginable class, from the stately Indiaman to the paddle-wheeled
gunboat, tied up in tiers like the mackerel-boats of a Cornish
fishing-village. Upon the oily pewter-colored waters bobbed and
wallowed innumerable carcasses--canine, porcine, equine, and bovine.
“Hair-trunks” the sailors called these unpleasantly-inflated objects;
and as every ship was supposed to tow those in her immediate vicinity,
she naturally left her neighbors to carry the business out.
One bottle-nosed Commander of a screw line-of-battle-ship, putting by
the desire for promotion, earned the gratitude of his fellow-men, and a
deathless name in History, by an appreciation of the peculiar sanitary
demands of the situation, that was at least sixty years in advance of
the age.
Said he, in effect: “These carcasses, ignored by the Executive Heads
of the Army, the Harbor-Master and the Port Captains, are as perilous
to the life of man as effective shelling.... Let others serve their
country after their own fashion. I tow dead cows henceforth.”
So his boats were sent regularly to collect the bobbing hair-trunks
packed with fetid odors, and tow them out of the roadstead crowded
with shipping of three nations, away to the open sea.... And the Fleet
and the Army gave their benefactor the Chinese-sounding appellation of
“Commander Tow Cow.” And the nickname adhered to him to his dying day.
* * * * *
Suppose that you see the Ensign, with his sergeant and section,
tramping down the miry main street of the South-Crimean coast-town,
between villas that had been clean and dapper and habitable when the
Allied Armies rolled down from the North.
An endless procession of men on foot, men on horseback, men driving
beasts or charioteering vehicles of various descriptions, passed up and
down that swarming thoroughfare, all day and nearly all night. Lean
dogs and ownerless swine routed in piles of offal and garbage. And--for
Death constantly dropped in in the shape of shell or round-shot--and
dysentery and cholera were always with the Army--human refuse lay
sprawled or huddled in strange fashion, waiting for the burial which
did not always come....
* * * * *
Shrieking stenches saluted young Jowell’s nose, the din of voices
mingled with the distant bellow of the Lancasters, and the fainter
answer of the great brass sixty-two pounders from the batteries of
Sevastopol.... Faces he knew nodded cheerily to him from windows of
improvised Clubs and temporary restaurants. Hands waved, voices shouted
hospitable invitations. He shook his head and passed on.
Dreadful women beckoned with ringed chalked hands and leered at him
with painted faces, from the upper balconies of abominable houses
where the business of vice went on ceaselessly by day as by night.
Roulette-balls clicked--occasionally revolvers cracked, and knives were
used--under the canvas of gambling-booths where French and German,
Greek and Italian and British gamesters crowded about the green-covered
trestle-board.
Cracked pianos vamped accompaniments to villainous songs, screeched
by red-tighted sirens in _soi-disant_ music-halls. Barrel-organs
ground out popular waltzes for the revelers in crazy dancing-saloons,
where shadows of revolving couples passed and re-passed, thrown on
the crimson blinds by flaring naphtha-lamps. Next door to a house
of this type was another that was an hospital; a single-storied,
mud-walled, windowless and doorless building that stood close upon the
thoroughfare. A lean hog shambled over the threshold as Mortimer Jowell
passed. He looked in, and saw green men, blue men, yellow men and black
men lying upon the bare earth floor in rows, side by side....
* * * * *
Many had been dead for days. The silence of the others rivaled that of
Death itself, for the most part. But sometimes a thready voice cried
on God or Our Lady, or faintly cursed, or asked in vain for drink. And
Mortimer Jowell halted his men; and went in and drove out the hog, and
barricaded the threshold with a broken shutter. As he left the dreadful
place a man came in.
He was a priest, tall, broad-shouldered and sufficiently clean-shaven
to be remarkable, where nineteen men out of twenty were hairy-faced.
He wore a rusty biretta and a thin, torn cassock, and had no other
protection against the piercing cold. He had a canvas wallet slung
about him, and moved with his hands crossed upon his breast as though
something were hidden there.... He glanced at Mortimer Jowell as he
stepped aside to make room for him in passing--and his hard blue eyes
and jutting underlip and long, powerful chin were features distinctive
of a man we have met before.
His name was known to no one in Balaklava. He came over three or four
times a week from the French base at Kamiesch--where he wrought with
many others among the wounded in the hospitals--to minister to the
dying Catholic soldiers in this and similar places of misery and woe.
Their dull and glassy eyes flickered a little at the sight of him. He
made the sign of the Cross, drew out the purple stole--passed it round
his neck--and knelt down by one of the prostrate bodies, murmuring a
Latin benediction. And, too ignorant of his high, awful function to be
conscious of intrusiveness, the Ensign watched and listened to him as
he drew a silver pyx from the bosom of his cassock and fed the starving
with the Bread of Life.
The ex-State official, diplomat and _viveur_ who had become a
priest, and the bullet-headed young English subaltern were never to
exchange one word, never again to meet--and yet there was a link
between them.... Both were--one quite unconsciously--seeking the Peace
that is only gained by the Way of Expiation. And one of them was to
find it before the sun went down.
Ignorant of this, the Ensign tramped on, and, having dropped his party
at the Commissariat Stores--a row of sheet-iron roofed sheds that
had sprung up, with many other buildings of the same kind, on the
offal-strewn beach, above high-water mark--was free to wander where he
would.
So he strolled along the muddy foreshore among the huge stacks of
planking for stables and huts, and the great mountains of food and
forage that lay piled up and rotting--rendered useless by lack of
transport and plenitude of Red Tape--doomed never to supply the needs
of perishing beasts and starving men.
A store-ship sent out many months previously had just unloaded a cargo
of Showell’s Army boots by the simple process of digging them out from
the hold with shovels, filling boats with them, and emptying the boats
on the beach close to low-water mark. And a half-company of Fusiliers,
bare-footed, and several degrees more ragged than those of Morty’s
fatigue-party, had been marched down and directed to take what they
needed from the pile.
The boots were all too small. You saw men eagerly turning over the
heaps, sorting and comparing, pitching away and swearing, sitting down
and trying in vain to force the ridiculously inadequate coverings
on their swollen, bleeding feet. A minority succeeded in getting
shod--after a fashion. But upon the hairy faces of the muddy, ragged,
hunger-bitten majority, anger and disgust and disappointment were
vividly painted; and presently found vent in words.
Their N.C.O’s--in like case with them--vainly endeavored to cast oil
upon the troubled waters. Then the officer in command of the party
emerged from a low-browed beach _café_, built of mud, mules’ bones
and Army Mess-tins, where a red-fezzed Greek sold coffee, vodka, rum,
and Crimean wine. He said--shouldering a net of potatoes, tucking the
head of a dead fowl under his sword-belt, and Sucking his mustache,
gemmed with ruby drops of generous liquor:
“Whass this, Rathkeales? Sergeant-Major Lonergan, bring these mutinous
divvies up before me! Can’t get the boots on, is that whass the matter
wit’ you? And whoever thought you could?--and your feet swelled to
the size of pontoons with chilblains and frostbite! Whass that you’re
saying, Private Biles? ‘Women’s and children’s sizes’? Get to the
divvle with your women and children! Do you suppose the Government’s a
fool?”
But the production of a bundle of elastic-sided foot-coverings of
unmistakably feminine proportions reduced even the Captain to silence;
and a pair of little clump-soled shoes brandished in a gaunt and grimy
hand, put a clincher on the case.
“Who says they’re not child’s sizes now?” shouted the owner of the
grimy hand hoarsely. “Are these men’s boots? Maybe you’ll look and
say!” He added: “And may the feet o’ them that has palmed ’em off on
us march naked over Hell’s red-hot floor, come the Day o’ Judgment! If
there’s a God in Heaven, He’ll grant that prayer!”
He threw down the little hobnailed shoes, and went over, muttering,
and scowling, and staggering in his gait, to where the stark body of
a long-booted navvy lay in the shadow of a pyramid of Commissariat
crates.
His comrades and officers and Mortimer Jowell watched in silence, as
he sat himself down opposite the dead man, and measured the soles of
his feet against the rigid feet. They were of a size. He nodded at the
livid blue face of their late owner, and said grimly:
“You and me, matey, seem about the same size in corn-boxes. Maybe
you’ll not grudge to part with your boots to a covey who’ll be in your
shoes next week or to-night!”
Mortimer Jowell sickened as the ghastly process of removal was
completed, but the ugly fascination of the scene held him as it did
other men. Nobody had noticed the blue haze creeping in from the sea,
pushed by a wind that had veered suddenly. As the soldier stood up in
the dead navvy’s boots, the gale yelled, and broke....