THE CUTTING OF THE COIL
With the better weather things quickened somewhat--the things of
Nature, to life; the things of Man, to death. Man strove with all his
might to end his fellow man, and drenched the earth with blood: and
the spring flowers pushed valiantly through the blood-soaked sods and
seemed to wonder what it was all about.
The boys learned from Greski that the chief bones of contention now
were the rifle-pits.
The lines and burrows of attack and defence had by this time run so
close to one another that in places you could almost throw a stone
from one to the other. No smallest chance of harassing the enemy was
lost on either side. Both sides had learnt by experience what damage
and annoyance to the working parties could be effected by small bodies
of picked marksmen hidden in sunken pits in advance of the lines, and
the struggles over and round and in these tiny strongholds were
endless, and furious beyond description.
He told them how sixty Russians had held their pits near what he
called the Korniloff Bastion, but which Jack and Jim knew more
familiarly as the Malakoff, against five thousand Frenchmen, until
reserves came up and the Frenchmen had to retire. And how some crack
shot in one of the English pits was potting their men even in the
streets of the town, twelve hundred yards away, so that passage that
way was no longer permitted.
He told them that the Allies were mounting more and more big guns, and
prophesied hot work again before long, and feared that this time
"he"--by which simple comprehensive pronoun the Russian soldiers
always referred to the hundred thousand men out there on the
hill-side--the enemy--just as Jack and Jim had always used the term to
designate Sir Denzil in their early days--Greski feared that "he," out
of patience with the long delay and the sufferings it had entailed,
would no longer confine his efforts to battering the forts, but would
probably try to make an end of the town itself.
"In which case," he said, "we may have to move over to the other side
of the water. He can knock down the bastions to his heart's content;
we can build them again faster than he can knock them down. But the
town--that would be another matter."
All the streets leading in from the hill-sides were barricaded, and a
new line of huge entrenchments sprang up among the houses inside the
town, half-way up the slope on which it was built.
From their chosen look-out on that eastward slope the boy watched all
that went on, inside and outside, with hungry anxious eyes. They noted
the immense activities on both sides, and it seemed to them, as it had
done before to Jim that things might go on like this for ever.
"If we are really going to try another bombardment," said Jack
slowly--he always spoke slowly and quietly now, a way he had got into
through fear of straining his chest--"and if they keep it to the
earthworks, it is all wasted time. The only way to end it is to smash
the town and rush it over the pieces. It is doubtful kindness to spare
it. Far better end the matter for all concerned. Then we could all go
home and become human beings again. I've no fight left in me, Jim."
"A couple of months on the flats will make you as sound as a bell,"
said Jim cheerfully. "The air here is full of gunpowder and dead men.
What you want is Carne."
"I've thought a good deal about it all while I lay there and couldn't
talk," said Jack. "You'll have to take it all on, Jim. I shall be a
broken man all my life--I feel it inside me; and Carron of Carne must
be a whole man. You must take it on, Jim."
"Don't let's talk about it, old man. We're not home yet. Time enough
to go into all that when we get there. I wish to goodness Raglan would
come right in and make an end of it."
"It would be an awful business. But I don't see how we're going to end
it any other way. And truly I wish it were ended, for I long to get
home. All I want is to get home."
Their friend Greski had so far escaped the dangers of his unpalatable
duties in a manner little short of marvellous. He shirked nothing, and
took his fair turns with the rest. And, though he hated Russia with
all his heart, he laughingly confessed that when he was in the thick
of things he forgot it all in his eagerness to win the fight.
But such phenomenal luck was too good to last. He went out one night
to join in a sortie, and the morning came without him, and found his
mother and Tatia in woeful depths, certain he was dead.
Jim went off at once for news, and found him at last in the hospital,
with a bullet in the thigh and a bayonet wound in the shoulder.
"It is nothing, it is nothing," said the hurrying surgeon. At which
Greski made a grimace at Jim, and said:
"All the same, if it was only himself now! And the way he hacked that
bullet out! We are getting callous to other folk's sufferings."
"Why, you hardly felt it," said the surgeon. "You said so."
"When one's helpless under another man's knife one says what he wants.
It hurt like the deuce."
"When can I take him home?" asked Jim, in stumbling French.
"After two days, if he behaves and goes on well."
So Jim went home and comforted madame and Tatia; and two days later
they were happier in their minds than they had been since the siege
began, in that they had him there all the time and safe from further
harm.
He grizzled somewhat at being shelved "just when the fun was going to
begin," for he felt assured in his own mind that "he," outside, was
preparing for a general assault, and he would have liked to see it.
And so the boys did their best to keep him posted in all that went on.
They were wakened at daybreak one morning by an uproar altogether out
of the common--one vast, unbroken, terrific roll of thunder, so deep,
so ominous, so far beyond anything they had ever heard in their lives
before that it sounded as though the whole of heaven's artillery had
been mounted on the hill-sides, and brought to bear on the devoted
town, and was bent on battering it to pieces.
Greski called them from his room, and they went in.
"Hurry, hurry, or you'll miss it all! We knew it must be soon, but
could not learn the day. They will come in on top of this, I think.
Keep under cover, and come back and tell me all about it. Oh, ---- this
leg!"
It was a bad morning for any conscious possessor of a chest--heavy
with mist and thick with drizzling rain; a black funereal day, sobbing
gustily, and drenching the earth with showers of bitter tears. The
chill discomfort of it told even on Jim.
"Jack, old man, I wish you'd go back," he said, before they had gone a
hundred yards. "I'll bring you word as soon as I can. They're not
likely to come in at once, and you'll have plenty of time to see all
that's going on. They'll probably hang away at the forts for the whole
day. Do go back."
"Get on!--get on!" coughed Jack. "I want to see." And they pushed on
through the gloomy twilight.
The streets were alive with all the others who wanted to see, and long
compact lines of gray-coats were pressing stolidly towards the front,
to strengthen the lines against the expected onslaught.
Jim was doubtful how far they should venture, but Jack was intent on
seeing. This was history. This was the consummation of all the hopes,
and the weary days and nights, that had gone into those mighty zigzags
up on the hill there. This was his own arm striking as it had never
struck before since time began, and he must see it at its best.
But, though they could hear enough, they could not see much, because
of the mist and the rain and the dense clouds of smoke rolling down
the hill-sides.
The Russian batteries were only beginning to reply, by the time the
boys reached their usual look-out on the eastern slope near the
cathedral, and then the uproar doubled, and the very ground beneath
them seemed to shudder under it.
Jim helped his brother to his usual seat in a niche in the broken wall
of a garden, and tucked his cloak carefully about him, for between his
boiling excitement and the rawness of the morning, he was all ashake
and his teeth were chattering.
"Every gun we have," gasped Jack . . . "hard at it!"
"If they can't see more than we can, they're going it blind," growled
Jim, as he strode about to get warm.
And then, like a bolt from the sky, without an instant's warning, out
of the chill white mist in front came a great round black ball, which
dropped with a thud into the ground almost at Jack's feet. It lay
there, hissing and spitting like a venomous devil gloating over its
anticipated villainy, and Jim rushed at it with an unaccustomed oath
of dismay. It was sheer instinct. He had no time for thought. The
devilish thing was close to Jack, and Jack could not move.
He got his right hand under it to hurl it down the slope. His feet
slipped from under him as he heaved. Then with a splintering crash the
thing burst. . . .
And the Coil of Carne, cut by a stray British shell, lay shattered
about the eastern slope of Sebastopol.