On the 28th of March, I found myself once more in my old tent, and
seeking hard to keep myself warm at the impromptu stove, constructed
by my faithful old servant, poor Jack Evans. I was received with
astonishment, and, I am pleased to say, with genuine satisfaction by
the regiment, even by those who had flattered themselves that they had
gained promotion by my supposed demise. I was welcomed by all, from
the Lieutenant-colonel down to little Dicky Roll, the junior drummer,
and for the first day my tent was besieged by old friends.
I had come back among them as from the dead; but more than one man,
whose name figured in the lists as missing, turned up in a similar
fashion during the war. My baggage had all been sent to Balaclava, the
railway to which was now partly in operation; my letters and papers
had been carefully sealed up in black wax by Philip Caradoc, and with
other private and personal mementos of me, packed for transmission to
Sir Madoc Lloyd, as my chief friend of whom he knew. Many came, I have
said, to welcome me; but I missed many a familiar face, especially
from among my own company, as the Fusileers had more than once been
severely engaged in the trenches.
Caradoc had been wounded in the left hand by a rifle-ball; Charley
Gywnne greeted me with his head in bandages, the result of a Cossack
sabre-cut; Dynely, the adjutant, had also been wounded; so had Mostyn,
of the Rifles, and Tom Clavell, of the 19th, when passing through "the
Valley of Death." Sergeant Rhuddlan, of my company, had just rejoined,
after having a ball in the chest (even Carneydd Llewellyn had lost a
horn): all who came to see me had something to tell of dangers dared
and sufferings undergone. All were in uniforms that were worn to rags;
but all were hearty as crickets, though sick of the protracted siege,
and longing to carry Sebastopol with the cold steel.
"How odd, my dear old fellow, that we should all think you drowned,
and might have been wearing crape on our sleeves, but for the lack
thereof in camp, and the fact that mourning has gone out of fashion
since death is so common among us; while all the time you have been
mewed up (by the Cossacks in the Baidar Valley) within some forty
miles of us; and so stupidly, too!" said Caradoc, as we sat late in
the night over our grog and tobacco in his hut.
"Not so stupidly, after all," I replied, while freely assisting myself
to his cavendish.
"How?"
"There was _such_ a girl there, Phil!" I added, with a sigh.
"Oho! where?"
"At Yalta."
"Woronzow's palace, or château?"
"Yes; but why wink so knowingly?"
"So, after all, you found there was balm in Gilead?" said he,
laughing. "You must admit then, if she impressed you so much, that
all your bitter regrets about a certain newspaper paragraph were a
little overdone, and that I was a wise prophet? And what was this
girl--Russian, Tartar, Greek, a Karaite Jewess, or what?"
"A pure Russian."
"Handsome?"
"Beyond any I have ever seen, beautiful!"
"Whew! even beyond _la belle_--"
"There, don't mention her at present, please," said I, with a little
irritation, which only made him laugh the more.
"If you were love-making at Yalta, with three lance-prods in you,
there was no malingering anyhow."
"I should think not."
"And so she was engaged to be married to that Russian bear, Tolstoff,"
he added, after I had told him the whole of my affair with Valerie.
"Yes," said I, with an unmistakable sigh.
"I think we are both destined to live and die bachelors," he resumed,
in a bantering way; for though Phil had in these matters undergone, at
Craigaderyn and elsewhere, "the baptism of fire" himself, he was not
the less inclined to laugh at me; for of all sorrows, those of love
alone excite the risible propensities.
"And so, Phil, the world's a kaleidoscope--always shifting."
"Not always _couleur de rose_, though?"
"And I am here again!"
"Thank God!" said he, as we again shook hands, "Faith, Harry, you must
have as many lives as a cat, and so you may well have as many loves as
Don Juan; but, _entre nous_, and excuse me, she seems to have been a
bit of a flirt, your charming Valerie."
"How--why do you think so?"
"From all you have told me; moreover every woman to be attractive,
should be a little so," replied Caradoc, curling his heavy brown
moustache.
"I don't think she was; indeed, I am certain she was not. But if this
be true, how then about Miss Lloyd; and she is attractive enough?"
At the tenor of this retort Phil's face flushed from his Crimean beard
to his temples.
"There you are wrong," said he, with the slightest asperity possible;
"she has not in her character a grain of coquetry, or of that which
Horace calls 'the art that is not to be taught by art.' She is a
pure-minded and warm-hearted English girl, and is as perfect as all
those wives and daughters of England, who figure in the volumes of
Mrs. Ellis; and in saying this I am genuine, for I feel that I am
praising some other fellow's bride--not mine, God help me!" he added,
with much of real feeling.
"You have heard nothing of the Lloyds since I left you?"
"Nothing."
"Well, take courage, Phil; we may be at Craigaderyn one day yet," said
I; and he, as if ashamed of his momentary sentimental outburst,
exclaimed, with a laugh,
"By Jove, now that I have heard all your amours and amourettes, they
surpass even those of Hugh Price."
"Poor Hugh! his lieutenancy is filled up, I suppose?"
"Yes--as another week would have seen your company, for we could not
conceive that you were a prisoner at Yalta. Awkward that would have
been."
"Deucedly so."
"But now you must console yourself, old fellow, by seeing what Madame
la Colonelle Tolstoff----"
"Don't call her by that name, Phil--I hate to hear it!"
"By what, then?"
"Valerie--anything but the other."
"Then what, as Mrs. Henry Hardinge, she might become, if all
this author (whose book I have been reading) says of the Russian
ladies be true." And drawing from his pocket a small volume, he gave
me the following paragraph to read, and I own it consoled me--a
_little:_--
"The domestic virtues are little known or cultivated in Russia, and
marriage is a mere matter of convenience. There is little of romance
in the character or conduct of the Russian lady. Intrigue and
sensuality, rather than sentiment or passion, guide her in her amours,
and these in after-life are followed by other inclinations. She
becomes a greedy gamester, and a great _gourmande_, gross in person,
masculine in views, a shrewd observer of events, an oracle at court,
and a tyrant over her dependents. There are, of course, exceptions to
this rule."
"Ah, Valerie would be one of these!"
"Perhaps--but as likely not," said Phil; "and on the whole, if this
traveller Maxwell is right, I have reason to congratulate you on your
escape. But we must turn in now, as we relieve the trenches an hour
before daybreak to-morrow; and by a recent order every man, without
distinction, carries one round shot to the front, so a constant supply
is kept up for the batteries."
Soon after this, on the 2nd of April, a working party of ours suffered
severely in the trenches, and Major Bell, who commanded, was thanked
in general orders for his distinguished conduct on that occasion. As
yet it seemed to me that no very apparent progress had been made with
the siege. The cold was still intense. Mustard froze the moment it was
made, and half-and-half grog nearly did so, too. The hospital tents
and huts were filled with emaciated patients suffering under the many
diseases incident to camp life; and the terrible hospital at Scutari
was so full, that though the deaths there averaged fifty daily in
February, our last batch of wounded had to be kept on board-ship.
Phil and I burned charcoal in our hut, using old tin mess-kettles with
holes punched in them. We, like all the officers, wore long Crimean
boots; but our poor soldiers had only their wretched ankle bluchers,
which afforded them no protection when the snow was heavy, or when in
thaws the mud became literally knee-deep; and they suffered so much,
that in more than one instance privates dropped down dead without a
wound after leaving the trenches. So great were the disasters of one
regiment--the 63rd, I think--that only seven privates and four
officers were able to march to Balaclava on the 1st of February; by
the 12th the effective strength of the brigade of Guards was returned
at 350 men; and all corps--the Highland, perhaps, excepted--were in a
similarly dilapidated state.
The camp was ever full of conflicting rumours concerning combined
assaults, expected sorties, the probabilities of peace, or a
continuance of the war; alleged treasons among certain French
officers, who were at one time alleged to have given the Russians
plans of their own batteries; that Menschikoff was dead from a wound,
and also Yermiloff the admiral; that _General_ Tolstoff was now in
command of the left towards Inkermann. (If so, was Valerie now in
Sebastopol? How I longed for the united attack--the storm and capture
that might enable me to see her once again!) And amid all these varied
rumours there came one--carried swiftly by horsemen through Bucharest
and Varna--which reached us on the 7th of April, to the effect that
Nicholas the mighty Czar of All the Russias, had gone to his last
account; and I do not think it was a demise we mourned much. We sent
intelligence of it by a flag of truce to the Russians; but they
received it with scorn, as a "weak invention of the enemy."
And now the snow began to wear away; the clouds that floated over the
blue Euxine and the green spires of Sebastopol became light and
fleecy; the young grass began to sprout, and the wild hyacinths, the
purple crocuses, and tender snowdrops, the violet and the primrose,
were blooming in the Valley of Death, and on the fresh mould that
marked where the graves of our comrades lay.