When she returned from her room Stokes was standing beside a gray horse she recognized as Hugo’s.
“Your wife left this because she could not write me a note. I have had it with me ever since, but you are the one who should keep it now.”
Stokes took the circus poster and carefully unrolled it, tears coursing down the grimed cheeks — but Victoria had seen men cry often enough in this war.
She put her hand on his arm. “I am so glad you are back, Stokes. I have seen so many go, it is particularly joyful to see one return.” He nodded and mumbled something before mounting the gray. “Perhaps you would tell Captain Esterly…tell him…tell him —” she knew her pride had gone a-begging, but did not care — “tell him I shall pray for his safety in the coming days.”
Stokes saluted and rode slowly away into the darkness.
At 11:00 P.M. Victoria was awakened from an uneasy sleep by a tremendous explosion that shook the ground and set the water jug rattling in the bowl. She jumped from her bed and ran to the window. Over Sebastopol there was a red glow brighter than any sunset she had ever seen. She could only imagine that the guns had started up once more and hit a magazine. However, it could only have been a random shot, for all remained quiet after that. She had only just drifted back to sleep shortly before dawn when her heart began to thud heavily with fright as the whole of Balaclava shuddered yet again — and again and again.
The nuns rushed from their rooms onto the veranda, where Victoria joined them to witness an awesome sight. Over the beleaguered town was the vivid shifting light of enormous leaping flames. Black rolling clouds of smoke spiraled upward into the faintly lightening sky. As they watched, another tremendous roar preceded more smoke and additional red and yellow lights. Sebastopol appeared to be on fire from wall to wall!
So it was that after twelve months of misery, death and destruction on both sides, the Allies captured an empty, ruined town. The Russians, who had evacuated under cover of darkness, after mining the streets and blowing up all their supplies and equipment, were fast getting away across the bridge of boats into the interior. No one was ordered to pursue them. The cavalry watched them go from the top of a hill. The field officers raged, calling down curses on their generals’ heads, and almost wept at their own impotence. Quite a few, Hugo Esterly among them, pressed their superiors to take unauthorized action and earned severe censure for their insubordinate conduct.
One newly arrived officer was heard to ask, “What did we want with Sebastopol, by the way?” None of those who had gone out with the first ships could remember the reason.
The soldiers sat in their tents or trenches and said nothing. A rather simple lad who had been in the previous day’s assault and had escaped unscathed said, “Have we won the war, then?” and was told to shut his gabber before someone did it for him. Where was the glorious victory, the triumphant advance sweeping the enemy ahead of it, the prize? Sebastopol had not so much fallen as retired from the lists. The Allies were left in their maze of trenches and fortifications, their neat circle of camps, their well-stocked harbor, surrounding a useless ruin.
Quickly, the Russian town was invaded by camp followers, men from the Allied ships and adventurous French troops intent on plundering the houses before everything was reduced to cinders. There was a rush on the evacuated town, men returning with priceless silver, pictures, rich clothing, chairs and tables. One great Zouave staggered up from the walls with a piano across his shoulders.
Because the town was still heavily mined and dangerous, and because there was a great stock of liquor available to anyone who walked into the cellars and stores, the British cavalry was used once more to throw a cordon across the plain leading to Sebastopol with orders to prevent anyone who did not have an official pass from entering. They also patrolled the streets of the town, but since their orders did not extend to the troops of their allies, there was a good deal of bad feeling in the British camps, where it was felt that the ban should extend to all or none.
Victoria was kept busy in the hospital, for the retreat of the Russians had enabled the wounded from the disastrous assault to be collected from inside the fortifications. The enemy had left their own wounded behind, and they were treated along with the others. A Rifles officer who could speak Russian was pressed into service as a translator, and he said the prisoners spoke of their relief at being in English hands rather than being put in the hospital in the town, where conditions were as bad, if not worse, than at Scutari. The doctors had fled with the retreating army, leaving the occupants of the hospital to their fate, it appeared. The tale brought much sympathy from the medical staff, but, when it appeared that among the patients were English officers and men who had been captured during the failed assault in June, it was apparent something would have to be done immediately.
Permission was granted for Major Prescott and two other medical officers, plus their staff and ambulance wagons to collect the Allied wounded stranded in the hospitals. Victoria was very quick to ask if she might be included in the party.
“I have watched this war from its beginning,” she said. “Will you not allow me the privilege of entering the town for which my husband and so many of my friends died?” Who could resist such a plea?
From a distance the white-walled houses in Sebastopol looked untouched, but once through the cavalry cordon and into the town itself Victoria could see they were merely shells. Together with her three officer companions she appreciated the truth behind this campaign — the tremendous courage and loyalty with which both sides had clung to life and resisted defeat for an entire year. Evidence lay before them of privation, misery and death equal to that suffered by the besiegers, and the girl found herself admiring those who had withstood it only until it was senseless to continue into yet another winter.
There was something hauntingly tragic in riding through the abandoned town, knowing people had lived, shopped and entertained their friends there not so long before. All over the streets were fragments of shell and round-shot, chunks of masonry, smashed glass, wooden beams and torn curtains blackened by smoke. The horses had to pick their way through the rubble and rolled their eyes with nervousness at the pungent binning smell that still lingered.
Large mansions of elegant design had shattered roofs and shell holes in the walls; churches were hollow naves and not much else, the vessels and artifacts having long since been seized by the plunderers. The barracks with its heavy cannon pointing up at the British lines was an enormous place that suggested its occupants had vanished in an instant on the utterance of a magic spell, so alive was it with the ghosts of men who had sat at tables, lain in the iron beds, cleaned their equipment by the windows and fallen in to march to the trenches from its courtyard. The shops had been ransacked until there was not even a signboard outside to tell the nature of their trade, and the gardens and squares were all trampled to gain the fruit growing on the trees or the flowers rioting over low walls.
Victoria rode carefully through this vast fortress, greatly affected by all she saw. Wherever they turned were the dead that had not even been buried by the broken-spirited inhabitants. It was all too dreadfully apparent that hundreds of thousands had perished in the defense of something that was now of no use to anyone — so many that the Russians had been unable to inter them all. Great piles of decomposing bodies lay rotting in courtyards, ditches and huts, casting a nauseating stench over the whole area. The Allied troops had the dreadful task of collecting them all on carts and digging deep pits to contain them.
Victoria had seen death enough, but this was a nightmare of it. Bodies sat against walls with open eyes and arms stiffly extended in a last appeal; some lay naked where they had been stripped for their good uniforms and boots by the victors; others were shattered and unrecognizable. By one, a mere boy, sat a dog, thin and starved, howling for the touch of the hand that had offered it friendship.
The streets were full of military men, French and English, who went about the business of allocating and occupy
ing sections of their prize of ruins, but Victoria rode along the streets seeing Sebastopol through different eyes. Suppose she were a Russian lady riding through a shattered, blackened Brighton, and here was Pavilion with no roof and crumbling walls, the hangings torn and the treasures carried off? What if the hundreds dead here were soldiers from the garrison and residents who had been slaughtered as they desperately defended the elegant seaside resort? What if that dog were Waterloo or Salamanca howling beside the decaying body of his master? A shiver ran through her.
They reached the hospital and encountered a small cavalry piquet. The officer challenged the party. For Victoria there was a smile.
“Good day, Mrs. Stanford. Might I suggest you wait here while these gentlemen enter? Remarkable lady though you are, I really would not recommend the sights to be seen inside.”
For once, Victoria was quite happy to play the protected female and chat to the young subaltern while Major Prescott and his fellows set the ambulance orderlies about their grisly task.
“To tell the truth, I am glad the medical fellows have come to sort this out,” the cavalryman confided as he sat his horse beside Victoria. “I deplore this duty; it gives me chills up the spine. On the first day our people came into the town they heard the most weird wails and cries coming from this place.” He nodded his head at the hospital. “One fellow with a little extra courage entered and found one of our infantry officers lying trapped beneath a pile of dead, quite mad from his wounds and starvation. He must have been there for days.”
“How terrible!” Victoria cried. “Poor man. What an unspeakable plight to be in.”
“Yes, quite so. He might have recovered from the wound, but his mind could not stand what he saw around him. Sad when a fellow cracks up like that.” Instantly a great tide of red flooded his face as he remembered to whom he was speaking, but Victoria just said, “Yes, Mr. Finchley, it is.”
It was after midday when the ambulance wagons rumbled off with several English victims who had been found in the hospital and the medical officers emerged looking white and grim-faced. Victoria had been resting on a wall in a shady place, for the heat was quite as extreme as the cold had been the previous day, and her desire was now to return to familiar ground. A few hours in this town was quite enough, she discovered.
In company with the three officers she followed the main street, and could not help thinking of a circus. French, Sardinian, Turkish and British uniforms filled the town with color as the soldiers trotted their horses or marched hither and thither. Every so often they came upon Frenchmen emerging from premises with loot of every kind, many of them carrying bottles from the cellars and drinking as they went.
One French officer rode up to Victoria in gallant manner to present her with a bottle of perfume and a hand-embroidered altar cloth, which he took from his jacket. With Bacchus to inspire him, he insisted on presenting each of the gentlemen with a small token of his esteem and honored comradeship, then galloped away, reeling in his saddle.
Major Prescott smiled at her. “Those fellows have a way with them, have they not? While we sit glumly in camp, they make the best of the situation.”
She smiled, the extravagant French gesture having amused her. “One cannot blame them, I suppose — and here are a few more, determined on making a victory out of this.”
Around the corner had come a small group of Sardinians. Judging from the way they were singing and laughing they had concentrated their plundering on cellars and wine-stores. In their rather exotic costumes they made a comic picture, arms linked and dancing with intricate but uncertain steps through the cobbled streets. As the group of four riders drew level, the Sardinians greeted them with bows and elaborate gestures of friendship, clustering around them to pat the horses and rub at the polished boots of the officers with their sleeves amid much grinning and excited gabbling.
One of the men approached Victoria, rolling his eyes knowingly, and pulled from beneath his loose tunic a lady’s petticoat, beribboned and covered in lace frills. Salaaming unsteadily, he offered it to her, dark eyes flashing and a grin revealing yellowed teeth.
Victoria drew back. The man pressed nearer, thrusting the garment at her with drunken determination and shouting something in angry tones.
Major Prescott said, “I think you had better accept it, ma’am. It might be the most diplomatic thing to do, under the circumstances.”
Trying to look pleasant, Victoria took the crushed petticoat and nodded in acknowledgment, but her action aroused surprising emotion in the men, who gave a yell and became tremendously excited. The donor of the gift took hold of Victoria’s skirt and shook it vigorously. The Sardinians crowded around the mounted group more closely, frightening the horses, who stamped and tossed their heads.
The ringleader was still tugging at Victoria’s skirt and repeating the same phrase that brought a concerted yell from his henchmen. Then it dawned on her that the men wanted her to put the petticoat on, and the first stirrings of alarm began deep inside her. Major Prescott seemed to sense danger at the same time and said in a loud voice, “Stand away! Stand away and let us pass!” and when this met with no response brought his reins down like a whiplash on the man tormenting Victoria.
In that instant the mood of the drunken men changed. Three of them seized the major and dragged him from his horse. The other two officers drew their swords — an act that exploded the Sardinians into a fury of hatred — and Victoria watched appalled as the three British officers were hurled to the ground and attacked with knives. She just had time to see one run his sword through the arm of a burly Sardinian before they all went down, and disappeared beneath a mêlée of thrashing drunkards and shying horses.
Next minute, rough hands seized her legs and tumbled her from her mare, then her arms were-taken and twisted behind her as the ringleader tore off the skirt of her riding habit. There was no time to cry out, for all her efforts were concentrated on her struggle. One of them ripped her petticoat from her. She kicked out frantically at him, but he only laughed in her face with a belching breath of sour liquor. Wild, terrible thoughts came to her as he seized her feet and she was carried toward a house by the two men. Conscious only of the sun beating down to blind her, the filthy animal smell of the Sardinians, and the savage sounds of the three officers being murdered by men driven crazy by drink, she cried aloud for someone to save her. Nothing could stop what they meant to do, and she moaned in growing dementia, praying to God to spare her from the horror to which they meant to subject her — praying that they would simply kill her as they had the men.
The house into which they staggered with her was entire except for the roof that was open to the sky and had once plainly been owned by a wealthy family. Her feet were dropped, and one of the men snatched a green cloth from a circular table, spreading it on the floor with a lewd flourish, before the other man forced her down upon it and began tearing at the brown cloth of her jacket.
During the next few moments her reason began to fade as she fought to hold them off. She sobbed to think this was going to be the terrible end to it all. She sobbed for all that was past — for the first time she had been ravished by Charles, for the son who had lived for such a short time within her as a result of that union, for the steady impersonal submissions she had suffered since then, but mostly for Hugo, her dear beloved Hugo. Her body that he had respected with such honor was to be taken and destroyed by savage strangers who would leave her here to be found by some passing soldier. He would never know she had been thinking only of him at the end.
Her strength had gone now. “No-o!” she cried out in a terrible wail, knowing there was no one to hear her.
*
The day was stifling, the stench sickening and the duty onerous. Hugo was brooding and bad-tempered, moods reflected by his men, who watched the Allies plundering gleefully while they sat upon their mounts in the streets of Sebastopol. The rollicking, boisterous foreigners were making a fortune over their spoils, and the British soldier was a l
aughingstock in the Allied camps.
Slowly, they patrolled the ravaged streets, the men sullen, Hugo lost in his own remorse and suppressed longing. It was a moment or two before the noise of a fracas reached the Hussar patrol and registered in the mind of its leader.
When it did, Hugo halted his men to listen for the direction, then set off at the canter. As they advanced down the street the hollow clopping of hooves raised a sound so deafening that when they turned a corner and into a milling mass of men and horses that Hugo judged to be a dangerous mob, he had to shout at the top of his voice an order to draw swords and advance.
Having his own men with him this time, he used his new methods to bring them speedily from their rigid formation into skirmishing order and led them straight into the pile of Sardinians who had gone completely crazy at the sight of blood and were now attacking each other quite as fiercely as they had their first victims.
Hugo began attacking with the flat of his sword until the group parted and he saw, to his horror, the uniforms of British officers somewhere among the tangle of arms and legs. Shouting to his men, he forced a gap with the gray horse, then began to lay about him in earnest. Within a few moments the Sardinians were begging for mercy and throwing their knives to the ground, many of them having sustained severe injuries to arms and heads as the Hussars surrounded them.
Hugo jumped to the ground and went down on one knee to assist Major Prescott. He was deathly white and his left sleeve was saturated with blood. The lieutenant lying beside him had several stab wounds in his chest and a swollen cheek where boots had kicked without mercy. The other subaltern was trying to drag himself to his feet but was held by the sword knot around his wrist that attached him to a weapon firmly fixed into a Sardinian right up to the hilt.
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