After the living were mustered next morning, and burial parties
detailed to inter the dead, Caradoc and one or two others dropped into
my tent to share some tiffin and a cigar or two with me; for, as Digby
Grand has it, "whatever people's feelings may be, they go to dine all
the same."
Poor Phil looked as pale and weary, if not more so, than I did. He was
on the sick-list also, and had his head tied up by a bloody bandage,
necessitated by a pretty trenchant sword-cut, dealt, as we afterwards
discovered on comparing notes, by Volhonski just before his recapture.
"I was first knocked over by Cathcart's riderless horse--"
"Poor old Cathcart--a Waterloo man!" said Gwynne, parenthetically.
"Well, Phil?"
"It was wounded and mad with terror," continued Caradoc; "then the
splinter of a shell struck me on the left leg. Still I limped to the
front, keeping the men together and close to the colours, till that
fellow you call Volhonski cut me across the head; even my bearskin
failed to protect me from his sabre. Then, but not till _then_, when
blood blinded me, I threw up the sponge and went to the rear."
"What news of our friends in the 19th?" I asked.
"O, the old story, many killed and wounded."
"Little Tom Clavell?"
"Untouched. Had the staff of the Queen's colours smashed in his hands
by a grape shot. Tom is now a bigger man than ever," said Charley
Gwynne. "By the way, he was talking of Miss Dora Lloyd last night in
my bunk between the gabions, wondering what she and the girls in
England think of all this sort of thing."
"Thank God, they know nothing about it!" said Caradoc, lighting a
fresh cigar with a twisted cartridge paper; "the hearts of some of
them would break, could they see but yonder valley."
"Poor Hugh Price!" observed Charley, with a sigh and a grimace, for he
had a bayonet prod in the right arm; "he was fairly murdered in cold
blood by one of those Kazan fellows--brained clean by the heel of a
musket, ere our bandsmen could carry him off to the hospital tents;
but I am thankful the assassin did not escape."
"How?"
"He too was finished the next moment by Evan Rhuddlan."
Other instances of assassination, especially by a Russian major, were
mentioned, and execrations both loud and deep were muttered by us all
at these atrocities, which ultimately caused Lord Raglan to send a
firm remonstrance on the subject to Sebastopol.
"Is it true, Charley, that the Duke of Cambridge has gone on board
ship, sick and exhausted?" asked I.
"I believe so."
"And that Marshal Canrobert was wounded yesterday?"
"Yes, and had his horse shot under him, too."
"The poor Coldstreamers were fearfully cut up in the redoubt!"
"I saw eight of their officers interred in one grave this morning, and
three of the Grenadier Guards in another."
"Poor fellows!" sighed Caradoc; "so full of life but a few hours ago."
For a time the conversation, being of this nature, languished; it was
the reverse of lively, so we smoked in silence. We were all in rather
low spirits. This was simply caused by reaction after the fierce
excitement of yesterday, and to regret for the friends who had
fallen--the brave and true-hearted fellows we had lost for ever.
Victorious though we were, we experienced but little exultation; and
from my tent door, we saw the burial parties, British and French, hard
at work in their shirt sleeves, interring the slain in great trenches,
where they were flung over each other in rows, with all their gory
clothing and accoutrements, just as they were found; and there they
lay in ghastly ranks, their pallid faces turned to heaven, the hope of
many a heart and household that were far away from that horrible
valley; their joys, their sorrows, their histories, and their passing
agonies all ended now, with no tears on their cheek save those with
which the hand of God bedews the dead face of the poor soldier.
A ring or a watch, or it might be a lock of hair, taken, or perhaps
hastily shorn by a friendly hand from the head of a dead officer as he
was borne away to these pits--the head that some one loved so well,
hanging earthward heavily and untended--shorn for a widowed wife or
anxious mother, then at home in peaceful England, or some secluded
Scottish glen; and there his obsequies were closed by the bearded and
surpliced chaplain, who stood book in hand by the edge of the ghastly
trench, burying the dead wholesale by the thousand; and amid the boom
of the everlasting and unrelenting cannonade, now going on at the left
attack, might be heard the solemn sentences attuned to brighter hopes
elsewhere than on earth, where "Death seemed scoffed at and derided by
the reckless bully Life."
"Here is an old swell, with no end of decorations," said a couple of
our privates, as they trailed past the body of a Russian officer, one
half of whose head had been shot away, and they threw him into a
trench where the gray-coats lay in hundreds. The "old swell" proved to
be the brave Pulkovnich Ochterlony of Guynde; he who had led his
regiment so bravely at Bayazid on the mountain slopes of the Aghri
Tagh in Armenia, when, in the preceding August, the Russians had
defeated the Turks, and laid two thousand scarlet fezzes in the dust.
The episode of meeting with Guilfoyle, his conduct after the action,
and the character he had borne as a civilian, formed a topic of
some interest for my friends, who were vehement in urging me to
denounce this distinguished "cornet" of the wagon-corps to the
commander-in-chief. And this I resolved to do so soon as I was
sufficiently recovered to write, or to visit Lord Raglan in person.
But to take action in the matter soon proved impossible, as he was
taken prisoner the next day by some Cossacks who were scouting near
the Baidar Valley, and who instantly carried him off. Some there were
in the camp who gave this capture the very different name of wilful
desertion, from two reasons; first, he had been gambling to a
wonderful extent, and with all his usual success, so that he had
completely rooked many of his brother officers, nearly all of whom
were deserving men from the ranks; and second, that on the day after
he was taken, the Russians opened a dreadful fire of shot and shell on
one of our magazines, the exact _locale_ of which could only have been
indicated to them by some traitor safe within their own lines; and
none knew better than I the savage treachery of which he was capable.
It was now asserted that we should not assault Sebastopol until the
arrival of fresh reinforcements, which were expected by the way of
Constantinople in a few weeks. There were said to be fifteen thousand
French, and our own 97th, or Earl of Ulster's, and 99th Lanarkshire
coming from Greece, with the 28th from Malta; but that we were likely
to _winter_ before the besieged city was now becoming pretty evident
to the Allies, and none of us liked the prospect, the French perhaps
least of all, with the freezing memories of their old Russian war and
the retreat from flaming Moscow still spoken of in their ranks; and
the cruel and taunting boast of the Emperor Nicholas concerning
Russia's two most conquering generals--January and February.
So when the wood for the erection of huts began to arrive at
Balaclava, and the winter siege became a prospect that was inevitable,
I thought of having a wigwam built for myself and two other officers;
and confess that as the season advanced, some such habitation would
have been more acceptable than my bell-tent, which, like much more of
our warlike gear, had probably lain in some of John Bull's shabby
peace-at-any-price repositories since Waterloo, and was all decaying.
Hence the door was always closed with difficulty, especially on cold
nights, the straps being rotten and the buckles rusty. Add to this,
that our camp-bedding and clothes were alike dropping to pieces--the
result of constant wet and damp. Already no two soldiers in our ranks
were clad alike; they looked like well-armed vagrants, and wore
comically-patched clothing, with caps of all kinds, gleaned off the
late field or near the burial trenches. Some of the Rifles, in lieu of
dark green, were fain to wear smocks made by themselves from old
blankets, and leggings made of the same material or old sacking, and
many linesmen, who were less fortunate, had to content them with the
rags of their uniforms. Happy indeed were the Highlanders, who had no
trousers that wore out. Alas for those to whom a flower in the
button-hole, kid gloves, glazed boots, and Rimmel's essences, were as
the necessaries of life! But ere the wished-for materials for _my_ hut
arrived, circumstances I could little have foreseen found me quarters
in a very different place. Every other day I was again on duty in the
trenches, and without the aid of my field-glass could distinctly see
the dark groups of the enemy's outposts, extending from the right up
the valley of Inkermann, towards Balaclava.
The rain rendered our nights and days in the trenches simply horrible;
as we had to shiver there for four-and-twenty hours, literally in mud
that rose nearly to our knees, and was sometimes frozen--especially
towards the darkest and earliest hours of the morning, when the cold
would cause even strong and brave fellows almost to sob with weakness
and debility, while we huddled together like sheep for animal warmth,
listening the while, perhaps, for a sound that might indicate a
Russian mine beneath us. Those who had tobacco smoked, of course, and
shared it freely with less fortunate comrades, who had none; and under
circumstances such as ours, great indeed was the solace of a pipe,
though some found their tobacco too wet to smoke; then the Russians
and the rain were cursed alike. The latter also often reduced the
biscuits in our havresacks to a wet and dirty pulp; but hunger made us
thankful to have it, even in that condition.
"By Jove," one would say, "how the rain comes down! Awful, isn't it?"
"Won't spoil our uniforms, Bill, anyhow."
"No, lads, they are past spoiling," said I, and often had to add,
"keep your firelocks under your greatcoats, men, and look to your
ammunition."
And such care was imperatively necessary, for on dark nights
especially we never knew the moment when an attempt to scour the
trenches might bring on another Inkermann. So we would sit cowering
between the gabions, while ever and anon the fiery bombs, often shot
at random, came in quick succession through the dark sky of night,
making bright and glittering arcs as they sped on their message of
destruction, sometimes falling short and bursting in mid-air, or on
the earth and throwing up a column of dust and stones, and sometimes
fairly into the trenches, scattering death and mutilation among us.
Erelong, as the season drew on, we had the snow to add to our
miseries, and for many an hour under the lee of a gabion I have sat,
half awake and half torpid, watching the white flakes falling, like
glittering particles, athwart the slanting moonlight on the pale and
upturned faces and glistening eyes of the dead, on their black and
gaping wounds, and tattered uniform; for many perished nightly in the
trenches, on some occasions over a hundred; and at times and places
their bodies were so frozen to the earth, that to remove or tear them
up was impossible, so they had to be left where they lay, or be
covered up _pro tem_, with a little loose soil, broken by a sapper's
pickaxe. And with the endurance of all this bodily misery, I had the
additional grief that no letters ever came from Estelle for me. My
dream-castle was beginning to crumble down. I began to feel vaguely
that something had been taken out of my life, that life itself was
less worth having now, and that the beauty of the past was fading
completely away. I had but one conviction or wish--that I had never
met, had never known, or had never learned to love her.