During these months, the story of Bettesworth's having been a soldier
in the Crimea remained unverified. I was watching for hints of it from
him, and he gave not the slightest; for opportunities of asking him
about it without offence, and not one occurred. And slowly the tale
receded from my mind, and my belief in it dwindled away.
By what chance, or in what circumstances, the mystery suddenly
recurred to me is more than I can tell now. But one rainy May
afternoon--I remember that much--the old man was in the wood-shed,
sitting astraddle on one block of wood, and chopping firewood on
another block between his knees. He looked careless enough,
comfortable enough, sitting there in the dry, with the sound of rain
entering through the open shed door. What was it he said, or I, to
give me an opening? I shall never know; but presently I found myself
challenging him to confess the truth of what was reported of him.
And I remember well how at once his careless expression changed, as if
he had been taxed with a fault, and how for some seconds he sat
looking fixedly before him in a shamefaced, embarrassed way, like a
schoolboy who has been "found out." For some seconds the silence
lasted; then he said reluctantly, "It's true. So I was." And the
circumstantial talk that followed left me without any further doubt on
the point.
It was at the Rose and Crown--a well-known tavern in the neighbouring
town--that he 'listed. His "chum" (I don't know who his chum was) had
already enlisted at Alton, and "everybody thought," as Bettesworth
said, that he too had done so at the same time, for he had the
soldier's belt on, there in the Alton inn. But he had not taken the
shilling there. He returned home to his brother Jim, "what was up
there at Middlesham, same job as old Stubby got now--seventeen year he
had 'long with the charcoal-burners up there"--and Jim urged him to
"go to work." Bettesworth, however, was obstinate. "No," he said, "I
shall go to Camden Fair." "Better by half go to work." "No, I shall
git about." "And I come down to the town" (so his tale continued),
"and there I see my chum what had 'listed at Alton day before. 'Come
on,' he says; 'make up your mind to go with we.' ''Greed,' I says. And
I went up 'long with 'n to the Rose and Crown...."
"How old were you then? It must have been before you were married?"
"Yes; I was sixteen. I served a year and eight months."
"Ah." I looked out at the May foliage and the kindly rain, and thought
of the Crimean winter.
"You saw some cold weather, then?"
"No mistake. Two winters and one summer." He was, in fact, before
Sebastopol, and now that the secret was out, he hurried on to tell
familiarly of Kertch, the Black Sea, the Dardanelles, so glibly that
my memory was unable to take it all in. What was most strange was to
hear these places, whose names to stay-at-home people like myself have
come to have an epic sound, spoken of as the scene of merely trivial
incidents. As it was only of what he observed himself that Bettesworth
told, this could hardly have been otherwise; yet it is odd to think
that Tolstoi, writing his marvellous descriptions of the siege, may
have set eyes on him. To this harum-scarum English plough-boy,
ignorant, rollicking, reckless, it was not the great events, on a
large scale, that were prominent, but the queer things, the little
haphazard details upon which he happened to stumble. Through the
narrative his own personality was to the fore; just the same dogged
personality that I was to know afterwards, but not yet chastened and
made wise by experience.
It was here in the Crimea that, carrying that letter to post to his
brother, as already told in "The Bettesworth Book," he met his "mate,"
and, opening the letter, took out the "dollar" it contained, and spent
it on a bottle of rum, tossing the letter away. "In those days," said
he, "I could drink as much rum as I can beer now. We had rum twice a
day: rum and limejuice. That was to keep off the scurvy. Never had no
cups nor nothing. We had knives, same as that old clasp-knife I got
now, and used to knock off the necks o' the bottles with they."
He remembered well the hard times, and the privations our troops
endured. "Sixteen of us in one o' they little tents. We had a blanket
and a waterproof sheet--not the fust winter, though; and boots that
come up to your thigh, big enough to get into with your shoes on.
There was one little chap named Tickle, he got into his boots with his
shoes on, and couldn't git 'em off again. He was put under stoppages
for 'em. Fifty shillin's for a pair o' they boots. You got into
'em--they was never made to fit no man--and bid in 'em for a month
together--freezed on to ye."
Again, "It was starvation done for so many of our chaps out there.
Cold an' starvation. I've bin out on duty forty-eight hours at a
stretch; then march back three mile to camp; and then some of us 'd
have to march another seven mile to fetch biscuit from the sea. And
_then_ you only got your share, same as the rest.... Sometimes the
biscuit was dry; and then again you'd on'y git some as had bin trod to
death by mules or camels.... That was the way to git a appetite....
But there was plenty o' rum; good rum too; better 'n what you gits
about here." The system of pay, or rather the want of system, appears
to have made this abundance of rum a more than usually doubtful
blessing. The men went sometimes "weeks together without gettin' any
pay; and then when we got it, it was very soon all gone." Sixpence a
day--four and twopence a week--(Bettesworth figured it out)--a very
handy sum was this week's pay, I gathered, for buying rum by the
bottle. The price of a bottle of stout was half a crown.
Reverting to the terrible weather, Bettesworth told how he had seen
"strong men, smoking their pipe," and four hours afterwards beheld
them carried by on a stretcher, to be buried. Ill-fed, I inferred,
they succumbed thus suddenly to the fearful cold. Green coffee was
provided, and the men had to hunt about for roots to make a fire for
cooking it. And then, just as they had got their coffee into their
mess-tins, they would be called out, perhaps, to stand on duty for
eight hours together.
The dead were buried "in their kit," with their clothes on. Sometimes,
Bettesworth hinted, money would be found on them and appropriated from
their pockets, but "we wan't allowed no plunder," he added. As for the
graves, "I've see 'em chucked into graves eighteen inches or two foot
deep, perhaps--just a little earth put over 'em; and when you go by a
fortnight or so after, you might see their toes stickin' out o' the
ground. You never see no coffin." The only coffin that Bettesworth saw
was Lord Raglan's. "That was a funeral! Seven miles long...."
At the close of the war Bettesworth came home "among the reductions,"
yet not for several months, during which he was employed on "fatigue
parties" in collecting old metal--guns, ammunition cases, and so
forth--for ballast to the ships in Balaclava Harbour. He described the
Harbour: it was "like comin' in at that door; an' then, when you gets
inside, it all spreads out...." Storm in the Black Sea overtook the
troop-ship, where were "seventeen hunderd of us. Three hunderd was
ship's company.... And some down on their knees prayin', some cursin',
some laughin' an' drinkin', some dancin'.... And the troop-ship we
come home in--might 's well ha' come in a hog-tub. She'd bin all
through the war, and he" (the captain) "reckoned 'twas great honour to
bring her home, and he wouldn't have no tugs. Forty-nine days we was,
comin' home. And she leaked, an' then 'twas 'all hands to the
pumps....' Great pumps...."
Yes, of course he remembered the pumps. It was Bettesworth all over,
to take a vivid and intelligent practical interest in anything of the
kind that there was to be seen. He had had no observation lessons at
school, and had never heard of "object studies"; he simply observed
for the pleasure of observing, instinctively as a cat examines a new
piece of furniture, and if not with any cultivated sense of
proportion, still with a great evenness of judgment. On one other
occasion, and one only in my hearing, he reverted to his Crimean
experiences; and as will be seen in its proper place, the narrative
again showed him observing with the same balanced mind, never
enthusiastic, but also never satiated, never bored.
But what of the "trouble" into which he was alleged to have fallen? I
may as well tell all I know, and have done with it. From Bettesworth
himself no breath of trouble ever reached me. But his avoidance of
this period as a topic of conversation often struck me as a suspicious
circumstance; so that I was not quite unprepared for a statement old
Dicky Martin volunteered when Bettesworth had been some three weeks
dead. He had been "rackety," and had been punished: that was the
substance of the tale. "He got into trouble for goin' into the French
lines after some rum--him an' two or three more. They never stopped,
he told me, to ask 'n no questions, but strapped 'n up and give 'n two
or three dozen for 't."