The Valley of Death

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  ‘You poor soul,’ he croaked ironically.

  They then led him out into a courtyard where a rough gallows had been erected. He halted on the steps going down to the yard and looked around him. Where were the rest of the officials? There were only the two guards and a sailor in a bloody, leather apron standing on the gallows, testing the rope.

  ‘I’m to be hanged by a ship’s butcher,’ he said, ‘while Zinski and Korniloff have breakfast in some white room, on white tables, with white tablecloths.’

  Having lived in the dirt for so long he was now, among other things, obsessed with cleanliness, and jealous of those who could have it while he could not.

  He stood on top of the steps, ready to walk down and put himself into the hands of a ship’s butcher who had been chosen to execute him simply because that man was used to slaughtering domestic animals.

  Before Crossman was able to descend, all hell broke loose.

  The world was suddenly full of thunderous noise, of bangs and explosions, of zinging, whizzing sounds. First they came from the direction of the sea, then from all around the city, and finally from the interior. Out in the streets, beyond the courtyard wall, people were running and shouting. A building that loomed above the wall suddenly crumbled on one corner, part of its masonry collapsing. There were bright flashes in the sky, and the ground shook and rocked.

  ‘The bombardment,’ grinned Crossman, talking to himself. ‘The bombardment has started. That’s where they are, Zinski, Todleben and Korniloff. That’s why Zinski’s ordered me to the gallows today. The flags have been raised. They knew the bombardment was about to begin.’

  Round shot began landing everywhere now, and shells from the seaward side of the town were bursting, one landing on the building roof above their heads.

  The guards nervously pushed Crossman forwards, urging him to shuffle towards the waiting butcher, who was staring up at the sky, as if expecting a package of meat to be delivered from that direction.

  Crossman stepped forward, a few inches at a time.

  He could see red flags on the poles. All around Sebastopol red flags had been hoisted to signal the beginning of the bombardment. In the bastions and batteries, guns were being brought to bear on allied positions; were being fired, dropping their shot into enemy salients, inside distant trenches. Embrasures disappeared in clouds of thick smoke and fumes, to reappear moments later, revealing again the black round mouths of guns. Earthworks were struck and erupted in showers of soil and grit. Buildings were blown apart.

  All around Sebastopol warships from the British and French fleets were pounding the harbour and forts, and were being attacked in return.

  In the streets around the Place du Théâtre, where the first enemy shot had fallen, sailors and soldiers, and the convicts alongside whom Crossman had worked, were running in panic through the streets, buildings shattering before their eyes. Above them the heavens were convulsing, filled with puffs of black smoke and the flashings of flying pieces of jagged metal. They could hear the deadly whine of shrapnel and the singing hail of musket balls from bursting cylinder shot. In their nostrils, in their eyes, were the pungent, acrid fumes from their own artillery, returning the storm of allied shot in kind.

  The din was terrible, both from the screaming of the wounded, the groans of the dying, and the cannonade itself.

  Crossman shuffled slowly through all this noise and confusion towards the gallows where he was to hang.

  Suddenly, there was a tremendous explosion directly in front of him. The gallows disintegrated before his eyes, catapulting the hapless ship’s butcher high in the air like a rag doll, to land somewhere in the far corner of the courtyard. The marine on the right side of Crossman vanished.

  Crossman was thrown on his back.

  A massive hole had suddenly appeared in the courtyard wall, behind where the gallows had stood. Crossman could see a cannon there, on the other side, smoke coming from its barrel.

  One of his guards had been carried off by the shot which had first smashed through the gallows. He saw the other one unsling his musket from his shoulder, but the marine was shot dead before he could aim his weapon. Then two dark figures, silhouettes, came running through the blue haze which clouded the hole in the wall. The smoke and dust were so thick they could have been a brace of those demons which had been haunting Crossman in his cell.

  One of them hoisted Crossman on to a strong back. The other made sure the guards were dead. Then the sergeant felt himself being carried, through the havoc in the streets, where shells and shot were still landing. It was not an unusual sight, here and now during the bombardment, to see two men running, one of them with a third man slung over his shoulder. There were wounded everywhere, being transported by whatever means, to a place where they could be tended.

  The two men ran into a cobbled square and were passing a wooden horse trough when a shell landed in it. Unfortunately the horse trough was dry and the fuse continued to burn, but a Russian sailor ran and threw himself on it, pulling out the fuse and thus rendering it harmless. The sailor had saved all their lives. They did not stop to thank him.

  All the while they were running they stepped over and around dead bodies, which littered the squares and streets and alleys.

  Finally, they had to stop for a rest. Crossman was unshouldered and put in a sitting position. He found that the person who was carrying him was Yusuf Ali, while Wynter had been running alongside. He had never been so glad to see the faces of friends in his life. For a moment the thunder of the artillery was forgotten.

  Wynter kneeled down beside Crossman and looked into his face.

  ‘Damn me, Sergeant, you’re in a bad way, an’t you?’ The dirty face of the lance corporal grinned. ‘Still, we got you out in time, didn’t we? You was just about to be turned off by that hangman, wasn’t you? Where did he go to, by the way, after we fired the gun at the wall?’

  Crossman croaked, ‘You blew him to hell.’

  ‘Did we, by golly?’ said Wynter. ‘Flipped him off his perch, did we? That must have been his brains splattered on the side of the building. Well, there’s a show for you.’

  Wynter lit up a clay pipe he had extracted from his pocket, probably to calm his nerves.

  ‘Me and Ali had to wait until the bombardment started,’ he said, leaning his back against a wall. ‘Another gun goin’ off amongst all the whizz-bangs of a cannonade didn’t make no difference. The Turk shot the other guard when we came through the hole in the wall.’ Wynter grinned again. ‘Lucky our cannonball didn’t hit you instead of a guard, Sergeant, or we’d be carrying a mess of blood and cartilage through the streets.’

  Crossman said, hoarsely, ‘Where did you get the gun?’

  ‘That blamed cannon? Why Ali pinched it an hour ago from the docks right under their noses. It was stood by the quayside, with the rest of a battery, hitched to a horse. He took the horse, limber, the lot. Just jumped on its back then rode off with it hell for leather, waving a thank-you-very-much-sir.’

  Wynter paused for effect, enjoying his own story.

  ‘When he got back to the wall, I was waitin’ for him. We’d planned it like that, you see. They’ve been shifting guns here there an’ everywhere for the last week or so. We had our eye on a little cannon. We wanted one small enough to run off with and big enough for the job, so to speak.’

  ‘You’re bloody geniuses,’ Crossman said, cracking a smile. ‘You’re lifesavers.’

  ‘And don’t you forget it, Sergeant,’ said Wynter, waving a finger in his face. ‘I’ll make sure you don’t forget this one – providing we get back, that is.’

  He knocked out his pipe when Ali tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘We go,’ said the Bashi-Bazouk, impassively. ‘Come, Sergeant, on my back.’

  ‘Get these damn chains off me,’ complained Crossman.

  ‘All in good time, Sergeant,’ Wynter said, helping Ali up with his cargo. ‘Just wait a bit, till we got somethin’ to get ’em off with.’

>   ‘You steal a damn great cannon,’ grumbled Crossman, suffering the indignity of being thrown and draped over Ali’s shoulders once again, ‘but you couldn’t get a hammer and chisel?’

  ‘We didn’t know you was chained. We found out where you was and that they were goin’ to hang you today, but the codger Ali bribed to give us the information didn’t say nothing about you being shackled.’

  They moved through the streets once again. There were still bodies all over the place. The noise and danger had not abated one bit. Round shot and shells still rained remorselessly down on the city and were being thrown up again in reply. The air remained full of heavy metal which took hundreds of lives that day, especially in Sebastopol itself.

  Yusuf Ali and Wynter carried the sergeant between them to the edge of town, where they had a hideout down an old disused drain. It was cold and musty underground, but they were relatively safe from both the bombardment and the Russians. Ali went out again straight away. He returned with some tools, food and water. While removing Crossman’s shackles he told him that Admiral Korniloff had been killed in the barrage.

  ‘They cry,’ he said. ‘He was good leader to them.’

  ‘I suppose he was,’ said Crossman, ‘though I find it difficult to feel sorry. It was he who ordered my hanging, through Major Zinski.’

  ‘You have to hang,’ Ali said practically. ‘To Russian people you are one bad spy.’

  ‘That’s true enough. The Cossack regiments would be toasting Korniloff had the victory been theirs. What about you, Wynter? You did a good job with the revolt after I left. Zinski and Todleben were disgusted with the convicts’ rebellion.’

  Wynter grinned. ‘We burned a big magazine of flour. They didn’t like that one bit, the Russians. Lots of other damage too. It went down well, though not many of us got over the defences and into allied lines.’

  ‘You said us,’ murmured Crossman, feeling weary. ‘Did you go and come back again?’

  ‘I sort of half went and then decided I couldn’t leave you and Ali here.’

  ‘Very noble of you, Wynter. Are you sure you didn’t think about deserting? You could have got clean away. They would have thought you were dead. You could have been out of this war and in some comfortable place.’

  Wynter’s eyes turned a little cold. ‘I thought about it, Sergeant, I won’t deny it. I thought about doin’ it, going off and finding some farm or other. I’m good at farming. But I changed me mind in the end. I dunno why.’ He grinned. ‘One of life’s myst’ries, I suppose. I mean, why would I want to risk me life for you, a bloody gentleman’s son who gives me what for all the time? Damn that, eh? But I did, and there’s no accounting for it. No accounting at all.’

  ‘Lance Corporal Wynter, I do believe you’ve got streaks of honour and loyalty in you. I’m amazed.’

  Wynter grinned again. ‘If it’s them I’ve got, I’m bloody well amazed meself, Sergeant, you can be sure of that.’

  11

  Ali and Wynter managed to find their way through the Russian lines and into high country on the other side. They were pondering on how they were going to get the sick Sergeant Crossman back to the hovel where he could be nursed. Crossman was against being delivered into the regimental surgeon’s hands.

  ‘He’ll have me in some damn field hospital, or on a boat going to Scutari. They’ll kill me in there, that’s for certain. Just get me to the house. I’ll mend in good time.’

  He was too weak to walk, and Ali was about to go off and steal an araba to carry him in, but by a lucky stroke a squadron of 17th Lancers met up with them.

  ‘Who are you, sirs?’ cried a Light Brigade captain. ‘Make yourselves known to me.’

  ‘We’re 88th Foot, Connaught Rangers,’ cried Wynter. ‘Got a sergeant here who’s in a bad way.’

  The captain was astonished that the ragamuffins facing him were infantry from his own army. He looked suspiciously at the Turk and queried if he too was 88th Foot. Wynter told him he was seconded to the Connaught Rangers as a scout, but was in fact a Bashi-Bazouk.

  ‘Are you telling me the truth, sir?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, Captain,’ said Wynter. ‘You can arrest us if you like and we’ll sort it all out later, but this here man has got to have medical treatment. Can you lend us a nag?’

  A kind of rippling went through the troop, a clattering and jangling of stirrups and scabbards, as the riders shuddered and mounts shied at this horrifying idea.

  ‘Loan you a – a horse?’ cried the captain. Then he stared down at Crossman, who was bent over double, hardly able to keep upright even in a sitting position. He wheeled his mount and cried, ‘Private Feltam, if you please. Take the sergeant to the hospital on your horse.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the trooper, dismounting.

  Crossman was lifted carefully up on to the charger and then Feltam got up behind him. Most awkward was the lance, which was handed up to Feltam after the pair were settled. The nine-foot ash pole sporting its red and white shalloon pennon was then attached to the lancer’s upper arm by a lanyard, with the shoe of the lance in a leather socket near the stirrup, leaving both of the rider’s hands free.

  They rode off, leaving Wynter, Ali and the squadron of 17th behind them, with Feltam holding Crossman on with one arm and using the reins with the other.

  ‘You all right, Sergeant?’ asked the private. ‘You look a bit banged up. You feeling well?’

  ‘As well as can be expected, thank you,’ replied Crossman in a weak voice, ‘but I beg you will take me to Kadikoi village, where I have my quarters. I have no desire to die in a filthy hospital with some surgeon hovering over me, a bloody knife in one hand and my liver in the other.’

  ‘You don’t sound like no sergeant. You sound like an officer,’ said Feltam.

  ‘That is the cross I have to bear.’

  Feltam appeared to digest this piece of information without further comment.

  However, he did say later on, ‘My cross is that we haven’t seen no action yet – not proper action. We get ribbed by you infantry fellows all the time. Insults and all that.’

  The horse plodded patiently on, taking ground rough and smooth with equal footing.

  ‘Yes, you’ve been rather left out of it, you cavalry. Well, perhaps you’re being saved for some dramatic endeavour? Who knows what is in Lord Raglan’s mind? I must admit he seems to be treating his cavalry like some delicate treasure, to be cosseted and kept, but not to be used. I’m sure Lords Cardigan and Lucan feel the same way you do.’

  ‘Lord Look-On!’ snorted Feltam. ‘We’re a blooming laughing stock, we are. Even the Cossacks and Russian hussars have the laugh of us, having done more than we have.’

  ‘How is the bombardment going?’ asked Crossman, to change the subject. ‘Have we made an assault yet?’

  ‘There’s another blooming thing. We could have charged right in there when we first came down. They had no defences to speak of. We’ve sort of left them to build their walls, bring up their guns, and now we’ve got something to knock down we can’t seem to do it. The French magazine blew up on Mount Rudolph just after the barrage started. That meant we was on our own from then on, the French guns having packed it in.’

  Crossman learned that after the French magazine blew up, the Russians attacked Mount Rudolph with a small force, to put the French guns out of action. The Chasseurs de Vincennes charged the Russians and routed them before they could do any damage. Feltam spoke of this charge wistfully, as if he wished he were French and able to take part in the action.

  The British navy had not fared well in the battle with the forts. The screw-ship Agamemnon, with Admiral Lyons on board, had steamed into the fight only to be holed in several places by the Russian guns. The London and Sanspareil were almost blasted out of the water, while the Bellerophon burst into flames. Over 300 sailors were killed in the battle and when Admiral Dundas signalled the end of the attack to his fleet, the Russians were virtually unscathed.

  Crossman told Feltam a
bout the shell which had landed in the horse trough and the bravery of the man who had leaped on it and drawn its fuse before it exploded.

  ‘Ah, that’s because I hear tell they get awarded the Cross of St George if they do that.’

  Crossman shrugged. ‘Why would a man want a medal that much?’

  ‘Because I also hear tell that having the Cross of St George stops them from going on the wheel.’

  ‘You mean, if it’s awarded to a soldier or sailor it exempts the man from corporal punishment?’

  Feltam nodded. ‘So’s I hear tell.’

  ‘Well, what Wynter would do for one of those crosses!’ said the sergeant to himself. ‘Then I would have nothing to use to threaten the man.’

  Finally, after a long and dusty journey at a very slow pace, they reached the village of Kadikoi. Feltam was not too happy at taking the sergeant to a hovel, especially when there was a hospital just near to the house. Crossman told him he would take full responsibility for his own death, should that occur as a result of not receiving proper medical attention.

  ‘That’s all right,’ said the worried Private Feltam, ‘but you’ll be dead, and not able to vouch for me.’

  ‘True, true. I’ll think of some way of leaving a message.’

  When Peterson, Devlin and Clancy came out of the hovel to answer Feltam’s halloo, they discovered a very sick sergeant of the Connaught Rangers. They carried him inside and up the stairs to his old room. There they laid him on a bed of straw and blankets. Peterson made some soup. Clancy made a fire in the room. Devlin went off somewhere to fetch help.