Crossman stared at the Bashi-Bazouk.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, Sergeant, that some of those Russian soldiers down there are bearing the rifles we seek. I make a good look at one. It is not Minié, or musket, or like any rifle I have seen. They say the bullet goes in breach, not down barrel. A small chamber opens, to drop the bullet in.’
‘A breach-loading rifle?’ said Crossman, his eyes opening wider.
‘Fifty of those soldiers have them. I hear them talking about it. The others have Miniés, also in the same shipment. These they can use. Soon they will wake and find their dead comrades. We must do something quickly. You must make a plan, Sergeant. We need to capture the rifles.’
‘A plan,’ murmured Crossman, his heart racing in excitement. ‘Six men against sixty. It needs to be a magnificent plan to assist us against such odds. I could send Clancy down there to throttle the lot of them, but I fear he would rather enjoy the work too much and my conscience would bother me ever after. I think what is needed here is a game of bluff. I shall go down and tell the Russians they are surrounded by the British army.’
‘And what if it doesn’t work, Sergeant?’ said Devlin.
‘Then you pick off prime targets. Go for the officers and the NCOs. Russian soldiers are given even less opportunity to think for themselves than British rank and file. They are drilled to perfection, but are not expected to use their initiative. Get rid of those who give the orders and they’ll crumble. They’ll fall apart, believe me.’
‘You think this plan is a good one?’ asked Ali.
‘I can’t think of a better one.’
Peterson made a funny sound on hearing this, then when everyone turned to look at her, she said, ‘That’s right, isn’t it? We risk our lives to free Ali, only to send the sergeant down amongst the enemy. They’ll hang you for killing their sentries – they’ll hang you without any further thought.’
‘I expect they might, if they call my bluff,’ said Crossman, ‘but I have to take the risk. Post yourselves in your original positions. Unfortunately for those men down there, we shall have to be ruthless. They need to believe we mean business, but more than that, they need to believe we can carry out any threat I make while I’m down there. Peterson, when I point to one of the Russians, I want you to shoot him dead. I want your best work mind – dead as a doornail. Understand?’
‘Yes, Sergeant,’ Peterson said. ‘I understand.’
‘Something you should know, Sergeant,’ said Clancy. ‘I had to kill another man down there. He was waking up. I left him lying between two of his sleeping comrades.’
‘You killed a man in his bed?’ Crossman said, the chill returning to ripple down his spine. ‘Without waking the two soldiers sleeping next to him?’
‘I’m afraid so, Sergeant. It was necessary. He would have roused the whole camp.’
There was a shout from the camp below them and Crossman knew that the bodies of the sentries had been discovered. They would also know they had lost their prisoner and would be wondering if the two events were connected. No doubt they would be thinking the Turk was responsible for these terrible deaths. The anger in the camp would soon rise to feverish pitch and a lynching mood set in. Soon there would be search parties going out, looking for traces of the Bashi-Bazouk. Crossman did not want this to happen. He wanted all the Russians to remain in the camp until after he had met with them.
Dawn was creeping in now over the hills. Crossman began to descend along the goat track, down to the Russian camp, where cries of alarm were rending the air. Men were rushing to and fro, not knowing what was going on.
A kind of madness sets in when a group of soldiers stir in the morning to find several murdered men amongst them. They wake up and stretch. They look at the morning and think about breakfast. Then they lean over and shake the sleeping man next to them. When that man has not moved they call on him to get up, ask him jokingly if he wants the sergeant-major to bring him breakfast in bed. When he still does not stir, they feel his brow, only to find he is stone cold, with fixed staring eyes. They wonder about this dead man, throttled in his sleep, how close he was to themselves, how no sound was heard nor disturbance felt.
They know it might have been them.
Dead. A mark around his throat like a harlot’s red velvet choker. His mouth is wide open. Terror stamped on his features.
The murderer must have stepped between them, picked his victim from amongst them, straddled the living while dispensing death. Eeny-meeny-miney-mo. That one! Settling for this man over the other, arbitrarily. A whim. But it could just as well have been any of them, anyone at all.
There are more nights to come. Many more nights of fitful sleep. Perhaps the assassin will come visiting again, in the early hours, to leave his calling card? These ugly thoughts washed through the Russians’ minds.
So, they ran around, like chickens without heads, wishing there was no nightmare amongst them, hoping dead men would jump up and announce it all a jape, praying their commander would call them all together and explain in practical terms that it was not real, but just a test.
Gradually the camp settled down again, fires were lit, coffee was made. The sentries still stared out, their wild eyes darting looks this way and that, peering up into the hills, down on to the plain. But the rest of the men were calmer now, eating breakfast, filling their stomachs.
They talked of the night’s events in whispers, occasionally glancing around them as if expecting a visitor, clutching their weapons as close to them as a threatened child might hug a toy.
It was now that Crossman chose to go down amongst them, tell them of their predicament, hoping his story was credible.
A sentry challenged him as he stepped out of the rocks, aiming a rifle at his chest. Since he was dressed in Tartar style he was not immediately recognizable as a soldier, otherwise the sentry might have shot him without question. He held up one hand in a placatory gesture.
‘Is there an officer here?’ asked Crossman, in German.
He repeated the same phrase in English and French.
A captain duly came out of the trees and confronted him, the rest of the Russian soldiers gathering behind their officer, curious about this newcomer after the night’s horrific events. Perhaps this was one of the Turk’s rescuers. Perhaps they had a victim here, ready to take the blame for the murders. Maybe they would have satisfaction after all.
‘Who are you? What do you want?’ asked the officer in French.
He was a small strutting man with a large moustache, probably hated by his soldiers for his arrogance. It would have helped Crossman to know that he was a brutal man too, and would not be missed by a single soldier.
‘I come to inform you,’ said Crossman, ‘that you are surrounded by several hundred Turkish irregulars. Many of them are sharpshooters. I myself am British, attached to their forces, and am sympathetic to your terrible position, but I fear I cannot prevent a slaughter unless you lay down your arms now.’
A Russian lieutenant understood the French and he passed on the words to his peasant soldiers in Russian. A general murmur went around and the Russians began glancing up into the hills with fearful eyes. The captain stared at Crossman and his face twisted into a look of furious disbelief. Clearly Crossman’s bluff had not worked on this officer.
‘You ignorant pig!’
With these words the captain reached for his revolver and pulled it from its holster, thus saving Crossman the trouble of pointing him out to the sharpshooting Peterson.
The Russian officer was suddenly flung backwards into the mud, a look of surprise on his face. A black hole had appeared on his greatcoat over his heart. Coincidentally, the sound of a shot came drifting down from the hills.
The Tartar who had owned the bear, whose great corpse now lay rotting in the wood, gave out a cry of fear and ran from the place, taking a track which led southwards.
Russian soldiers staggered back from the captain’s body, shouting, and pointing at the spot from when
ce the bullet had come. One soldier raised his rifle to his shoulder and took aim into the general area of the hills. A second shot, this time from Wynter’s position, smashed into the side of the soldier’s skull and killed him. He fell at the feet of his comrades. This caused more confusion in the Russian ranks.
Crossman raised his hands.
‘Lieutenant!’ he shouted in French. ‘Hold your men! Hold your men before there is a massacre.’
The lieutenant seemed to come to his senses. He barked an order. The order had to be repeated several times before the men became calm again. After the events of the night and this morning’s horrible awakening, this new confusing situation was too much for them. They were simple farm hands, most of them peasants from the plains and hills of the Russian Empire. They followed orders without understanding them. It was enough to go to war, into battle, in a land which was as foreign to them as it was to the invading forces, without having to contend with such horrors as night murders and Turkish snipers.
‘Lieutenant, tell your men to lay down their arms,’ ordered Crossman.
‘If we do, we’ll be cut down like wheat in a field,’ said the lieutenant. ‘I will not countenance a slaughter.’
‘I give you my word as a gentleman, that there will be no slaughter,’ promised Crossman. ‘You will be allowed to go on your way. This force of Bashi-Bazouks has been raised for the precise purpose of obtaining those rifles you carry. That’s all we want – the arms – nothing else.’
The lieutenant repeated the words in Russian for the benefit of his men, as they were again becoming restless.
The lieutenant’s blue eyes stared into Crossman’s own.
‘Can I trust you, Englishman? I would rather we died with our weapons in our hands than allow you to execute us. You are an officer, sir. You have given me your word as a gentleman. Now give me your word as an officer of Queen Victoria. Tell me she will be for ever damned to the devil’s terrible care if you break your oath to me.’
Crossman smiled inwardly at this young man’s earnestness.
‘May Her Majesty, Queen Victoria go to hell in a chamber pot if I lie to you this day,’ said Crossman, anxious to have the deed done. ‘There, is that enough?’
The lieutenant, not more than nineteen years of age, nodded, turned to his men and gave an order. The order was repeated by a sergeant and two corporals. Men began to lay all their rifles on the ground, the Miniés too. Crossman told the lieutenant that two or three of his men should gather them up and put them in piles, along with their ammunition pouches. This order too was carried out.
When the rifles had been gathered in, Crossman spoke to the lieutenant again.
‘You will go from this place now,’ he said. ‘Go eastward, towards your lines. Don’t look back. Take your dead with you. You will not be pursued, I guarantee it. Good luck, Lieutenant.’
‘Good luck?’ snorted the lieutenant. ‘I shall be a broken man after this. To go back to my commanding officer without the precious rifles. I’m done for.’
‘Blame it on him,’ Crossman said, indicating the captain on the ground. ‘He’s your scapegoat. Dead men have few arguments to offer. Work it out with your non-commissioned officers. They will want to be off the hook too. If you concoct a good story between you, you should be all right.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as your captain gave you an order to lay down your arms with his dying breath.’
The lieutenant gave Crossman a wistful smile.
‘It could be. Au revoir, sir. Perhaps we will meet again on the battlefield. I pray for it.’
‘And I pray that the next time we see each other, it will be in a Parisian coffee shop off the rue de Moscow, our countries at peace and our brother officers comrades.’
‘No,’ said the fiery young man, ‘the Lord must give me the chance to kill you first, or there is no justice.’
With that he turned and led his men away towards the east, while Crossman watched him go.
When the Russians had gone the others came down from their positions. Wynter let out a whoop of joy.
‘It worked, by golly, it worked. You see how they trailed off, looking so forlorn, eh? We got the rifles. By damn, I thought you was a goner there, Sergeant. I never thought we’d see ’em off. I really didn’t.’
‘That was a good shot of yours, Wynter. And you, of course, Peterson, though I expect it of my sharpshooter. Well done, both of you. Well done all of you.’
Crossman told his men about the conversation that had transpired between himself and the young lieutenant.
Devlin said, smiling, ‘You ought to watch it, Sergeant – he’ll be looking for you on the battlefield.’
‘No he won’t,’ Crossman said wryly. ‘He’ll be looking for a gentleman – an officer of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, not a sergeant.’
Devlin and the others laughed at this.
Their interest then turned to the rifles themselves. Crossman studied one and found it marked ‘Ferguson’. Judging by the colour and condition of the stock, it was a very old piece. The rifle had a plug mounted behind the barrel on a vertical axis. When the plug was fully closed it was flush with the top of the barrel. When fully open, the plug was level with the lower edge of the chamber. The bullet which was dropped into the breech was slightly oversized. A rifleman had to tip the rifle forwards to allow the bullet to roll down and touch the rifling. Then the chamber was filled with powder and closed, after which the plug was again raised and the pan primed separately.
It did not take long for expert riflemen like Peterson and Ali to work out the engineering genius behind this weapon. It lay in the fact that the plug had 12 to 14 rapid twist threads to it, so that a three-quarter turn of the trigger guard lever dropped the plug completely. Being breech-loading the rifle could be cleared and cleaned very quickly, and loaded, in the prone position.
‘The Brunswick was a bitch of a rifle,’ said Wynter. ‘The bullet being bigger than the barrel it took all your strength to ram it down. Me right hand was always a mass of calluses, ramming that damn bullet down the barrel of a Brunswick. And try to do it layin’ down! Why, it was murder.’
‘And even the Minié,’ said Peterson, talking of her favourite weapon. ‘You always have to expose your head when you’re reloading. With this one you can keep your head down all the time.’
It did indeed seem to the group that the Ferguson, old as it appeared, was a much superior weapon to any the army currently had to offer.
‘Clancy,’ said Crossman, ‘get back up there to a good viewing point. I don’t want us to be surprised by anyone. In the meantime, we need to bury these, somewhere where they won’t be found by the Russians.’
‘I thought we was supposed to take ’em back?’ Wynter argued.
Devlin said, ‘How can we take them back, you diddlehead? We were expecting a caravan – beasts to carry the weapons – which we have not got. Would you like to carry ten of these back in your arms?’
Wynter, who complained at having to lug one carbine over hill and dale, saw his point and said nothing more.
They found a suitable spot well away from the wood, in some soft soil up amongst the rocks, and dug a deep hole with their bayonets. The rifles and ammunition of both types were buried there and one of the rocks marked with a few deep scratches which would appear to the Russians to be made by some wild animal, but was in fact a set of cricket stumps. Since the rifles could not be wrapped in oilcloth, they would soon deteriorate in the earth, but Crossman could see no choice before him.
A hoot came from above and soon Clancy came tumbling down the hillside at a fast rate.
‘Cavalry,’ he cried. ‘Cossacks. Coming down the valley.’
‘Bloody Cossacks,’ said Crossman. ‘Let’s move. Come on. The infantry must have run across them and told them where to find us.’ He stared at the terrain surrounding them. ‘If we climb back up they’ll have us cut off from our lines. We’d better go down through the next valley.’
The Bashi-Bazouk led the way, along the track taken by the Tartar who had run from the Russian camp. It was a race over uneven ground. The Rangers finally found a dry watercourse, the bed of a braided river, where the going was slow but over which the Cossacks could not ride. As well as pebbles and rocks the size of a man’s head there were huge boulders which had tumbled down from the sides of the hills into the wide river plain. These served as cover for the British.
The Cossacks could not ride the group down over ground which was covered in rocks and stones. There was a kind of standoff, with the British moving down the gully in the general direction of Balaclava while the Cossacks were able to keep in touch along the banks of the dry river by riding parallel to their flight. Clearly the cavalry commander believed it was just a matter of time before he caught the runaways, since there was no desperate attempt to clatter over the rocks and stones and risk breaking the legs of the horses. He waved his sabre in the air, the sunlight flashing on the blade, as if to signal his intention to put every man to the sword once they were caught.
‘Are we going to get out of this, Sergeant?’ cried a breathless Clancy, clambering over huge smooth stones. ‘I only joined you lot a few days ago – now it looks like you’ve done for me.’
‘Stop moanin’,’ Wynter shouted at him. ‘Save your breath for running . . .’
A Cossack bullet zinged from a rock, narrowly missing Wynter’s head.
‘Pity he’s such a bad shot,’ muttered Clancy. ‘He might’ve earned himself a medal there.’
More shots from Cossack carbines rang amongst the stones of the dry creeks. Crossman’s men returned the fire on occasion. Neither side had much success because one group was firing from horseback and the other on the run. Every so often the dry river bed would narrow, allowing both parties to come into closer contact and Crossman’s men had to dodge from boulder to boulder, crouching down, firing as swiftly as they could to keep the Cossacks at bay. Wynter and Peterson would hold the flanks while the others funnelled through them, then Ali and Devlin would take over until the other two caught up.
Eventually they came to a bridge. Six or seven Cossack horsemen raced for this structure, hoping to reach it before Crossman and his men, which they did with ease. Crossman’s heart sank a little. He expected the Cossacks to dismount and take up a line across the bridge, thus effectively cutting off the British retreat.
The Valley of Death Page 6