Soldiers in the Mist

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  ‘Who goes there?’

  ‘88th Foot!’ called Devlin.

  ‘Give us a name, by which we will know you.’

  ‘Robert the Bruce.’

  ‘Advance friend and be recognised.’

  As they were going through the 93rd’s lines, an officer approached them. He gripped the bridle of Ali’s horse and stared up into the face of the Bashi-Bazouk. Crossman recognised the man as Captain Campbell.

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ asked Campbell of Ali. ‘You look like Beelzebub himself! What are you, Tartar, Turk or Zouave? You ragamuffin types can’t just come and go through our lines as you please. Explain yourself.’

  ‘We are a special contingent of the 88th Foot, Connaught Rangers,’ replied Crossman, from behind the captain. ‘That man, the bridle of whose mount you are gripping, is a member of the Turkish Army.’

  Crossman did not add the customary ‘sir’ to the end of his sentence since he did not want this particular officer to know him as a sergeant.

  Captain Campbell stared rudely into the eyes of Yusuf Ali.

  ‘One of those that ran the other day, shouting, “Ship, Johnny, ship!”’ said Captain Campbell contemptuously. ‘You abandoned the redoubts in the face of the enemy . . .’

  The captain was speaking of the battle of Balaclava, when the Turkish gunners were overcome by a hugely superior force of Russians and had retreated through the ‘thin red line’ of Sutherland Highlanders.

  Crossman, rather unwisely, could not contain himself.

  ‘Those Turks you speak of so scornfully fought for several hours, long and hard, and only gave up the position when it was hopeless. This man was not one of those brave souls in any case. This man has never run from a fight in his life, nor in my experience is he ever likely to. He has killed more Russians with his bare hands than you have with a pistol or sword, and I should be careful not to ridicule him if I were you, captain. He does not take kindly to such talk.’

  ‘And just who the hell are you, sir?’ the captain swore softly, turning on Crossman.

  Crossman bristled with anger, the inherent pride and arrogance of a man of breeding coming to the fore. The sergeant’s head went up and a cold sneer formed on his lips. He stared down at the captain as if peering at a repulsive insect through a quizzing glass. In the more clear reasoning areas of his mind he knew he was overstepping the mark, but decided to play on the rumours of Lovelace as a heroic phantom.

  ‘I should be careful to discover a man’s rank, before cursing him,’ replied Crossman recklessly. ‘You may have heard of a certain major, a man who works in the hills, undermining the efforts of the enemy to reinforce themselves, cutting their supply lines and blowing up their magazines?’

  The captain looked unsure of himself now. Crossman’s educated accent, his aristocratic bearing, despite his ragged appearance, was obviously authentic. Beneath the grime and dirt, the Tartar clothes, there was a British gentleman.

  However, he too had the pride of his class, and was not going to retreat without a Parthian shot.

  ‘Spies and saboteurs!’

  ‘Call us what you will, captain, you have no authority over us. If you have any complaints about our comings and goings, take them to General Buller. In the meantime, sir, I should be obliged if you would step aside. I have a wound that needs attention and if I bleed to death while you bar our way with oaths and curses, you will answer to a higher authority for it. We are carrying urgent information. Delay us any more and that information may prove to be worthless. Time, sir – time is of crucial importance in these matters.’

  Crossman used the word ‘sir’ in the way that gentlemen of equal status use it with one another, not as a ranker speaking with a superior officer.

  The captain eventually let go of Ali’s bridle and stepped aside. The three men rode through the silent ranks of the 93rd. Out of the corner of his eye, Crossman could see Sergeant-Major Jock McIntyre, a twinkle in his eye, watching their progress. Crossman did not dare look at the sergeant-major, for fear one of them should burst out laughing.

  When they reached the Kadikoi hovel, they found Major Lovelace waiting for them. Peterson was there too, and the injured Wynter. The Antigone had been back in Balaclava harbour for hours. Crossman made his report to the major, explaining that one ship had been empty, while the other had gone up with such an explosion that part of the harbour was wrecked.

  ‘I have heard of your success, from other sources,’ said Lovelace. ‘I’m very pleased with you, sergeant. General Buller shall hear of it too. I only wish we could reward you in some way, with a promotion in the ranks, but as we’ve already discussed, it’s not possible at the moment.’

  ‘We killed a lot of innocent people in those explosions,’ said Crossman. ‘I don’t mind killing Cossacks, but the fox hunt this time was not to my taste.’

  ‘There are no innocents in war, sergeant. Those men were in uniform. You have to learn that in modern warfare all targets are legitimate. We no longer live in an age where war is regarded as a game presided over by gentlemen. The age of the Brudenells has gone,’ he said, referring to Lord Cardigan’s family name, ‘Napoleon’s ruthlessness rules the field now.’

  ‘If you say so, sir. You didn’t hear the screaming of dying men. I find such things hard to get out of my head.’

  ‘If you had been up in the trenches around Sebastopol lately, sergeant, you would hear the same screams.’

  Suddenly, Lovelace became concerned.

  ‘You’re wounded, sergeant! Why didn’t you say something? Let’s get you to a surgeon, man.’

  ‘No, sir. I prefer to let Ali look after it. If it weren’t for him the thing would be festering and raw. Whatever it is he’s put on it seems to be doing the trick. It’s healing nicely, thank you very much. It’s only a sword cut. Those Cossacks keep their blades nice and shiny and clean, so if the poultice does its work, I should escape infection.’

  The major shrugged. ‘You know your own body best. Now, what of Private Clancy. I see he’s not with you.’

  ‘I’m afraid he drowned, sir.’

  Crossman went on to explain the flight through the Straits of Kerch and the subsequent squall which had taken the life of Private Clancy. He told Lovelace about the farm and the Cossacks, taking time to emphasise the bravery of both Devlin and Ali. Finally, he came to the part where they had come through the lines of the 93rd Foot, the Sutherland Highlanders, north of Kadikoi village.

  ‘We were stopped and questioned by a rather arrogant captain. I lost my head a little, when he came on rather too strong. I’m afraid I gave the impression I was you, sir. I didn’t say as much, but I implied it.’

  ‘You impersonated me?’

  ‘In a way.’

  This was a very serious offence, for an NCO to impersonate a field officer, and Crossman waited for the worst.

  Lovelace, however, seemed more amused than upset.

  ‘So if I get called out by some puffed up infantry captain and shot to death I have you to thank for it, do I?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir, though I rather think it would be the captain who would be lying on the ground after such a duel.’

  ‘Or both of us. Well, we’ll let it pass. Don’t make a habit of it though, sergeant.’

  ‘No, sir – thank you.’

  The major stared into the middle distance.

  ‘Sad about Clancy. He was a good man to have on your team. Good at assassination. We’ll have to find another silent artist for you. Someone good with their hands.’

  The major might have been speaking about a craftsman good at turning wood, or stitching leather, rather than the cold-blooded killer Clancy had been.

  Clancy, an ex-Thug, had been an expert with the garotte, despatching Russian soldiers in the night with his greasy piece of knotted cord.

  ‘Whatever you say, sir,’ replied Crossman.

  15

  Peterson wept when she heard that Clancy had drowned. Although she had been around men a long time, had
seen the horrors of war at close hand, she was still a woman and had been very fond of Clancy. It was not that men did not weep on hearing of the death of comrades, but her tears were more copious than a man’s, and they fell not in secret as men’s tears often do, but in the full and open company of her fellow soldiers.

  ‘Crikey!’ said Wynter, surprised by the waterworks. ‘He weren’t that good a chap. Anyone would think he was your brother, the way you’re goin’ on.’

  ‘He was my brother,’ cried Peterson, fiercely. ‘Not in flesh and blood, but he was my brother-in-arms.’

  ‘Brother-in-arms?’ Wynter repeated. Wynter did not understand what all the fuss was about. Men died every day in the Crimea. Clancy had been all right, sometimes, but no one to shed tears over. ‘Life’ll go on without Clancy.’

  When the weeping had stopped, Wynter said, ‘He weren’t a Russian and that’s the best I’ll say about him.’

  ‘That’s because you’re a pig without any feelings,’ retorted Peterson.

  ‘What makes you think pigs ain’t got feelings?’ Wynter retaliated, missing the point of the insult. ‘Pigs has got feelings, same as people. I’ve worked with pigs all me life. Pigs is quite feeling animals, I can tell you.’

  Wynter was right about one thing: Clancy’s death made little difference to life in the Crimea. It was said that back home in Britain, a long raggedy beard was now referred to as a ‘crimea’ after drawings of the hirsuit troops had appeared in newspapers. Most of the men looked wild, in odd clothes and with their unkempt hair and beards. Some still shaved, especially amongst the officers, but there are always those British who like to keep up appearances. Some of the officers still dressed for dinner occasionally, but these were few.

  In general, the Commissariat was still failing in its duty to get warm clothing to the men. Ships in Balaclava harbour still remained loaded with badly needed goods and medical supplies. These were watched over by jealous purveyors, who demanded certificates signed by officials in London before they would distribute supplies to the troops.

  Soldiers on the siege line spent days in damp uniforms, were worked so hard they never had the chance to get thoroughly dry or even take off what they were wearing. Even if they had, they would have nothing to change into. Their boots were often worn right through and let in water. Some had abandoned proper footwear and wrapped their feet in rags. There were no beds, no adequate toilets or washing facilities, no proper food. The result was skin diseases, scurvy, cholera, dysentery and a host of other illnesses which took men away by the hundred.

  Those who were left had to fill in for those who had gone. These men should have been given rest, but they were given more duties. They were ragged with lack of sleep, weak from malnutrition. They froze at night. They staggered from one day to the next, sometimes not making it because a bullet, or shell, or bayonet, had prevented their progress. Small wounds festered into large wounds. Even a scratch was a potential killer in such conditions. It was little wonder that Wynter did not want to go back to his regiment in the line.

  Apart from their clothes, their gunpowder too was often damp. Their weapons would not fire half the time, after they had been on duty in moist conditions for a few hours. The soldiers skirmished with bayonets in clammy dawns, after spending the whole night on picquet duty, unable to use their rifles. They went back to worn tents that let in the rain, and went to sleep in sodden blankets. Their workplace was damp, their beds were damp, their souls were damp.

  Only a few officers, rich and able to transport their goods to the Crimea privately, were shaved, well-dressed and lived anything like a comfortable life. Many of these gentlemen were shod with Runicman shooting boots. They wore new uniforms, the colours still bright and the gold braid still gleaming. Those off-duty often appeared in brown shooting suits.

  Affectations abounded out of sight of senior ranks. One young officer, fresh from North Africa, wore a fez and carried an ebony walking stick. Another dressed in a scarlet pelisse, and yet another carried tools for chipping fossils from rocks in a cowhide Russian knapsack. These eccentrics were envied by rankers and other officers alike. Being in a regiment was a fine thing, but it stunted individualism. Once in a while a man wants to be different from his neighbour.

  As for civilians, ‘gentlemen adventurers’ were beginning to arrive, to view the fighting at first hand. They came to observe, to write, to sketch, and some to extract excitement from the war. They wandered about at will.

  Mary Seacole’s ‘British Hotel’ was dealing successfully with many cases of cholera. Mary, or ‘Mother Seacole’ as she was known affectionately to the soldiers, was popular with all ranks. She had gained great experience in the disease in Cruces, a frontier town in Panama, and on the gold rush trail to California, when it was hit by a cholera epidemic. After performing a secret and illegal autopsy on a young cholera victim, she devised a new method of treating the illness. This experience had later been fortified by a similar epidemic which struck her home island of Jamaica, where she was placed at the head of medical services at a British military base near Kingston.

  Another woman, disguised as a man, was also much in evidence. Dr James Barry was a medical officer who went amongst the soldiers, doing what she could for their suffering. Some of the wives of the soldiers – there had been six per hundred men allowed to follow their husbands to the Crimea – also did what they could to help with dysentery and other problems.

  In the meantime, surgeons such as George Lawson cut away limbs from men with appalling injuries caused by shells, round shot and other such missiles. Lawson’s duties in the Crimea should by now have hardened him to the screams of men, to the weeping of men, to the dying groans of men, but it was still with a sickened heart that he added to the pile of severed limbs, knowing as all surgeons did, that a more horrible death, a rotting, wasting death, awaited those who avoided amputation.

  On the Russian side of the Crimea, Prince Menshikoff was building the strength of his troops in the Chernaya Valley, immediately north of Sebastopol. He now had a hundred and twenty thousand men at his disposal: three times the number he had fought with at the Battle of the Alma. Facing these many battalions, ignorant of the size of the Russian Army, were a mere twenty-five thousand British soldiers, ill-equipped and in poor health. The French had forty thousand, also ravaged by injury and disease.

  Even after the relatively small-scale battle on the Inkerman ruins, the day after the Battle of Balaclava, Lord Raglan had not reinforced the British front in that weak area. The 2nd Division were camped on Home Ridge, the Guards Brigade was close to the post road, near an old windmill, and the Highland Brigade still blocked the pass at Balaclava. The 3rd and 4th Divisions were stretched in a line west of the Guards camp, the former north of the Woronzoff Road, the latter south of it. The Light Brigade, or what was left of it, were encamped near the Guards, and the Heavy Brigade protected Lord Raglan’s headquarters on the col at the eastern end of Wellway Gully.

  Studying these positions together, Major Lovelace and Sergeant Crossman spoke about the difficulty of convincing the high command that an attack was imminent.

  ‘You say Ali heard substantial troop movements out on the road?’ asked Lovelace.

  ‘We all did. Ali’s ear is more finely tuned than mine, and no doubt he can give you an approximation of numbers. They sounded quite large to me.’

  Lovelace sighed, looking away from the charts and out of the window, towards the headquarters of Lord Raglan

  ‘Well, I’ll have another try at convincing our masters of the dangers. I can’t take you with me, you understand. You have eloquence, sergeant, but no credibility. No one takes seriously a gentleman who prefers the ranks to a commission.’

  Crossman gave nothing away by his expression.

  ‘No, sir. I understand.’

  Lovelace spun on his heel and stared directly into Crossman’s eyes.

  ‘Why are you in the ranks, sergeant? Do you dislike your peers so much?’

  Cros
sman took time in considering his reply.

  ‘No, sir – at least, not all of them. I’m not overfond of the purchase system. I think we lose good officers to bad. I know captains in their fifties who should have been majors in their twenties, but because they have not the price of the next rank, they remain forever stuck in the mud.

  ‘I have also known quite incompetent officers who have risen rapidly to the highest ranks and are colonels in their late twenties or early thirties.’

  While the two men were speaking, Rupert Jarrard had entered the room. His eyes lit up on hearing the conversation between the two Britons. Jarrard was forever picking at the intricacies of the British Army, wondering about its strange rules, its codes, its foibles. The British Army to him, and to most Americans, was an aristocratic anachronism.

  Ignoring the presence of a third party, Lovelace gave Crossman a wry smile. ‘You’re speaking of men like Lord Cardigan and Lord Lucan?’

  ‘I would not point the finger at any individual, sir, but those two are cases in question. Lord Cardigan is loathed by the general public at home, and many men in the army, for his empty-headed vindictiveness towards officers who served in India, for his obsession with drilling and smart uniforms, for his failure to control a violent temper. His first action in war, for which he has supposedly been preparing himself since being a subaltern, is one of the worst bungles in the history of the British Army.’

  Crossman turned to Jarrard. ‘Rupert, this is a private conversation. If it appears in print I shall be flogged and Major Lovelace cashiered.’

  ‘Point taken,’ said Jarrard, rubbing his hands. ‘I shall use pseudonyms. Captain Smith and Sergeant-Major Jones.’

  The two Britons continued their argument.