Until the Colours Fade

by Tim Jeal

  The mist was still lying in dense pockets on the lower plateau, but steadily dispersing with a light breeze blowing from right to left. From what he could see, George guessed that the Russians now had about six thousand men on the plateau and outnumbered the five or six British battalions, resisting them there, by at least three to one. As the mist and the smoke from the musketry rolled across, alternately concealing and revealing, George gradually came to the conclusion that the Russians had an army of thirty or forty thousand men on the slopes beyond the lower plateau. The British he reckoned were opposing them with perhaps four thousand men and would probably be able to muster twice that number when the 3rd, 2nd and Light Divisions had joined them. The 1st Division would have to remain above Balaclava in case of a break through, and the rest of the army would be tied down defending the batteries facing the town. From the dull rumble of heavy firing from the left, it seemed that the enemy was launching diversionary attacks on the French positions to stop them moving troops across to bolster the threatened British right flank. The best odds that could be hoped for in the next couple of hours would be five to one against the British.

  But as George looked down at the chaotic fighting taking place below him, he did not abandon all hope. The thick brushwood and small ravines and hollows, which split the plateau, made it hard for the Russians to use their numerical superiority effectively, since the broken nature of the ground split their formations, and the shifting mist served to conceal the defenders’ positions and helped them to outflank the enemy columns. Nor, when British lines were broken, could the Russians pursue them easily through the brushwood. Already the battle was being fought not in disciplined formations but in small widely scattered groups of broken troops; and this also had the advantage of preventing the Russians using the full capability of their field guns without risk to their own soldiers. But the longer George watched, the clearer the final outcome became. For every one British battalion being sent down into the fighting, the Russians were committing two or three, and whether troops fought in rigid formation or in fragmented groups, sheer weight of numbers would finally tell. The point had almost been reached when it would be impossible to reduce the forces on the ridge any further; it would be on this key position that the Russians would mount their principal assault, and if they were to break through in numbers, the British and French camps and batteries would be taken, and the allies forced down to their supply ports and destroyed there.

  For the five minutes since his arrival on the ridge, George had been watching the battle with such intense absorption that he had to some extent forgotten his own danger. Then the Russians began firing their heavy guns at the formations on the ridge. For reasons which George could not understand, it seemed that General Pennefather, in command of the 2nd Division, only had 9-pounders at his disposal: guns quite useless against the Russian 24-pounders firing from the hills beyond the lower plateau. The first round-shot fell behind the Guards’ position, bouncing and skidding away across the turf like gigantic cricket balls, tearing up large divots. It was a sight that made George’s stomach turn over. Then the enemy started firing shells as well as shot.

  As a company commander, George was standing slightly apart from his men and a few paces in front. Although he was no more exposed than they, his solitary position made him feel that he was. Ahead of his battalion some field-officers were conferring in a group; to his relief, one of them came across and told him to get his company to spread out and lie down. George was annoyed that many officers remained standing to give their men confidence that nothing very terrible was about to happen; he therefore felt obliged to go on standing too, finding it hard not to flinch or lower his head as he heard the shells hissing and whistling overhead. One burst twenty yards behind him and he felt the earth tremble. There were screams and the repeated call for stretchers. Another exploded in the rear rank of the company in front of him, killing three men and showering George with earth and stones, one of which hit his shoulder and bruised him. After this he lay down. Four bandsmen were running with a badly wounded man on a stretcher; a round-shot felled the back two, cutting one in half, and pitching the bleeding man from the stretcher onto the ground where he lay twitching and screaming in agony. Over and over again George heard the awful soft thud as a round-shot hit a man: a noise like a hammer smashing into damp rotten wood.

  When he had come under heavy artillery fire in the trenches, George had felt comparatively safe; even the shallowest depression or hole quadrupled a man’s chances of survival. But the top of the ridge was flat and bare, with none of the thick scrub covering the lower ground. Even a few screening bushes would have helped to stop the round-shot bounding on and killing men at the second or third bounce. George found himself staring fixedly at the ground, noting the texture of the soil and the whitish celery colour of the coarse grass near its roots. He wanted to cover his head with his hands to cut out the noise of the shells and the frightened yelling of the wounded, but he did not dare in case new orders were given and he could not hear them. At the Alma, the desperate dash down to the river and the breathless agony of the charge up the hill on the other side had saved him from his fear. A charge rarely lasted longer than a few minutes, and one side usually gave ground before bitter hand-to-hand fighting developed; but this bombardment could go on for hours, and all that time there would be nothing that any man under it could do to affect the issue.

  Sweat was dripping down George’s forehead from under his bearskin and running into his eyes. Every pore in his body seemed to have opened, making his mouth and throat feel parched and swollen. He thought of the churchyard at Rigton Bridge and his overpowering panic after the first few shots, and how he had been almost too weak to get to his feet and order the men to run for the porch. And am I still the same? Still a coward? He imagined hearing the order to advance and saw himself unable to rise, and this brought him closer to hysteria. He recalled Lord Goodchild riding across the churchyard with a calmness bordering on contempt, and felt a furious resentment that he had been constituted so differently. At this moment, he thought, I would do anything, accept any conditions, to escape from this ridge if my departure were to be unknown; even, if need be, live the rest of my life in poverty provided I were safe. No comforts were essential; life was all that mattered. Oh God let me live. If I live I will make amends for past pleasure-seeking; I will build model dwellings, open soup kitchens, set aside capital for a charity to assist army widows. I will do anything, God, if I live. But the shells still came down and at each approaching whistle he felt an iron collar tighten round his throat and his heart leapt in his chest. After every miss he experienced relief so intense that the greatest pleasures he had ever known seemed trivial by comparison; but this emotion lasted no longer than a second, and vanished with every new danger.

  Then after twenty minutes of bombardment there was a lull. With the ebbing of his fear George felt disgusted with himself for his collapse; and once, he thought, I believed that proximity to death could change and elevate a man. In hours or minutes I may be dead, yet nothing in me has changed. I am no wiser, no less shallow and indecisive than I was before. My thoughts were not about what may lie beyond death or the meaning of life. I always avoided such subjects and I still avoid them now. Looking back on my life what memories have I, except blurred images of prostitutes, horses, and cards? No woman will shed tears at my death. Catherine will receive the news of my passing with mild regret but without pain. Helen would probably smile ironically. Poor George killed by his father’s wealth and snobbery. Nothing but the Guards for George; no matter that many of the officers wouldn’t talk to him. What did his father care about that, provided he could boast about his son in the Brigade? He vividly recalled his stumbling utterances among the statues at Hanley Park. So that had really been his last chance with her. A fine way to have used it. A fine way. And now he would never see Catherine again.

  When the shells started to fall once more, George’s anger did not desert him. He was still scare
d, but the near conviction that he was about to die unloved, without, as it seemed to him, ever having performed a single useful or memorable action, no longer filled him with self-pity but with rage. His experience of war had brought him no religious or philosophical revelations but it had at least forced him to recognise the emptiness of his past. And now, when he believed himself capable of leading a better life, he was not to have the chance.

  Shortly after half-past seven George saw the Duke of Cambridge, his divisional general, and General Bentinck, his brigade commander, ride across the face of the regiment and spend several minutes talking to a group of officers, which included the colonels of the Scots Fusiliers, the Grenadiers and Colonels Wilson and Townshend of the two Coldstream battalions. Knowing that this meeting probably meant that the Guards were soon to go into action, George got up and walked to the front of the ridge.

  During the shelling the Russians appeared to have occupied most of the lower plateau and to have driven the British back to the Sandbag Battery, which was now the focus of most of the fighting. The emplacement itself, containing no guns, and with walls too high for riflemen to fire over, was of little or no value; but the elevated spur of land immediately behind it was clearly of crucial importance, since it commanded the lower ground which the Russians would have to cross before launching their final attack on the ridge. George was now certain that the Guards would be ordered to re-take the position as soon as the outnumbered defending troops retired. The vicious nature of the hand-to-hand fighting and the hundreds of bodies already lying on the slopes horrified him. Yet suddenly George knew that he did have a final opportunity. He could die well; as stoically as aristocrats like Townshend, or any other officer or man in the Brigade. When a shell burst a few yards behind him, its concussion knocking him over as if he had been felled by a violent punch, his panic did not return. The surface of his body felt numb and strangely alien, giving him a light-headed feeling of inviolability. Only a minute or so later did he see that a splinter had cut his left hand. A private in his company ran forward to help him to his feet, but George ordered the man back and then shouted to the men to dress ranks, taking a perverse pleasure in seeing that the lines were as straight as on a parade ground. He heard the advance sounded, and as the battalion began to march, felt a warm glow of contentment like a man in the first pleasurable stage of intoxication. At the head of the columns the colours were flapping slightly against their corded staves. Around him he could hear words of command after each shell fell into the moving columns: ‘Close up, close up by the centre.’

  *

  From the high ground immediately in front of the 2nd Division’s camp, Magnus had watched the horrifying shelling to which the men on the ridge had been subjected, and had been amazed at the length of time it had taken the Royal Artillery to bring up some heavy guns to silence the Russian 24-pounders on the opposite hills. Later he learned that two A.D.C.s, sent by Lord Raglan with the necessary orders to the commander of the siege-train, had been killed on their way there. Generally by the time orders could be conveyed to battalions in the fighting, the situation had changed so drastically that they were useless; and even when they did arrive in time to be acted upon, few commanders in the field were able to communicate them to their widely scattered men. In the past, the voice or trumpets had proved more or less adequate, but in the chaos of fog, broken country, and shattered formations, neither was having any effect.

  Shortly after the Russians stopped shelling the ridge, Magnus positioned himself close to the commander-in-chief and his staff. Although he could not understand why the regiments defending the Sandbag Battery were not being supported, he could not help feeling a grudging admiration for Lord Raglan’s impassive almost weary manner, and his quiet unchanging voice. Staff officers galloped up in alarm and left apparently reassured by this pacific-looking old man in a plain blue frock-coat and black cravat – more the clothes of a country gentleman than a British commander-in-chief. Around him clustered his mounted staff with their yards of gold lace and white plumed cocked hats, which attracted a steady fire from the enemy guns; but Raglan remained staring attentively ahead of him at the smoke-filled ravines and dells below the ridge. Magnus, who now had no doubt that a Russian victory was inevitable, did not envy his lordship. The fate of being held responsible, and unjustly so, for the first major British defeat since the American War would be enough to make many men break down and weep; but Lord Raglan showed no visible emotion when a grey wave of Russians poured into the Sandbag Battery and rolled the British off the spur. This Magnus could see was the prelude to a series of attacks on the ridge. He wondered what plans, if any, Raglan had to save the camps and batteries, if the ridge fell before large French reinforcements entered the battle. Seconds later a shell burst among the staff. From the amount of blood on their uniforms, Magnus thought most had been mortally wounded. Going closer with a sinking heart, he realised that a shell had entered a horse and exploded in the abdomen showering blood and entrails over all those nearby. General Strangways of the Royal Artillery was the only casualty; the lower part of his shin was hanging by a few strands of flesh. Magnus distinctly heard the old man ask: ‘Will any one be kind enough to lift me off my horse?’ He had heard many anecdotes about the stoicism of wounded men, but he was still amazed to witness such calmness. He had heard it said that when Lord Raglan’s left arm had been amputated after Waterloo, he had politely asked for the limb to be returned so that he could remove a ring from a finger. Only now did Magnus believe this story to have been true.

  As Strangways was being carried away, Lord Raglan sent an A.D.C. galloping down towards the Brigade of Guards. Even when Magnus saw the direction in which the staff officer was going, he could not believe that the Guards were going to be ordered to re-take the Sandbag Battery. Twelve or thirteen hundred men against two divisions would have no chance at all, if logic played any part in military proceedings. It seemed incomprehensible that Raglan should be committing his élite troops before the ridge came under direct infantry attack. But minutes later, Magnus was convinced that this was what the commander-in-chief intended to do.

  With a lump in his throat he watched the Guards move off in perfect column of battalions, the three regiments of the Brigade marching in echelon. Earlier some of the men had been wearing greatcoats but now these had all been taken off and the red jackets stood out sharply against the sodden dark brown earth. As the Brigade moved down steadily towards the spur, the regiments were advancing in three parallel squares, forming a broken diagonal across the lower slopes of the ridge. Then under heavy shell-fire they began a disciplined slow wheel to the left, the Scots Fusiliers, in the leading position on the extreme right, marking time, while the Coldstream, in the centre, marched in slow-time, and the Grenadiers, behind on the left, continued at their previous pace, until all three regiments were level, and the diagonal of squares had become a straight line. In this formation Her Majesty’s Brigade of Guards marched onto the spur towards the Russian divisions drawn up in a wide arc in front of the Sandbag Battery.

  And once, thought Magnus, I would have laughed at the months of drill needed to attain such precision, and would have thought the time far better spent in improving marksmanship. But the slow solemnity of the movement he had just witnessed, performed on rough ground under fire, had impressed him beyond words, and he had no doubt about the demoralising impact the sight of such discipline would have on the waiting enemy.

  Three hundred yards from the Russians, the Guards halted to fix bayonets, and moments later, Magnus saw small puffs of white smoke spread along the front ranks, as they fired a succession of volleys, which were immediately answered by the enemy’s field guns. Closing ranks, and leaving the wounded where they fell, the Brigade advanced by the centre, until fifty yards from their objective, they cheered, lowered their bayonets, and charged.

  *

  In the couple of seconds after George’s company had formed two ranks and fixed bayonets, the Russian field guns fell silent,
and George could clearly see the gunners loading again; this time with grape and canister. The momentary stillness after the roar of the guns gave him a strange and eerie feeling of timelessness. Moment by moment he expected his colonel to give the order to fire, moment by moment he predicted the next salvo from the field guns; and the intensity of his anticipation extended his awareness of the present; small sounds, the clink of a sword against a scabbard or a cough seemed unnaturally loud, as though his ears and all his senses had suddenly been sharpened as never before. Under his feet long grass, flattened by the night’s rain, above him a low grey sky, around him the last sights he might ever see. One flight of grape, one volley of musketry, and the end of all sensation. Nothing. He wanted to pray but remembered the self-disgust he had felt after his prayer on the ridge. No more hypocrisy. He gazed ahead at the dense mass of men immediately in front of him. How far across that narrow strip of grass will I get? To that bush? That rock? Or to those grey-coated ranks? Till that moment he had been certain that he would be killed before reaching the enemy. But I may not be, he thought, feeling an agonising constriction in his chest. To be shot was one thing, but to be stabbed or bludgeoned to death was very different. He clutched at memories of sword exercises which he had never fully mastered: ‘right guard’, ‘parry’, ‘cut’, ‘left guard’. Thrust and twist upwards to make the wound worse. Go for the stomach. A sharp sword properly wielded can take a man’s head or arm off at a blow. He felt the swooning numbness a man feels being beaten unconscious, when he can resist no more. Then he heard Colonel Wilson’s clear resonant voice:

  ‘When I give the order to fire, don’t hurry your shots. Be steady. Keep silent and fire low. Ready. Present. Fire.’