Until the Colours Fade

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Until the Colours Fade Page 49

by Tim Jeal


  ‘What can y’expect?’ asked the man with the amputated leg. ‘Damned painters niver come nigher the Rooshans than Brighton beach.’

  Surreptitiously Tom got out his small sketch pad and with a soft pencil hastily drew a caricature artist, such as Punch delighted in: a foppish young man with a comic opera pointed beard, floppy broad-brimmed hat, and palette in hand standing languidly on a beach beside his easel, peering out to sea through a telescope – on his canvas: a half-finished cart-horse pulling a gun. It was a rapid but fluent piece of drawing: the work of three or four minutes. Tom looked at it thoughtfully and added a passing steam-tug belching smoke and a small boy gazing critically at the artist’s work. Underneath Tom wrote:

  Insolent Boy: ‘Where’s the smoke, mister?’

  Offended Artist: ‘Smoke? There’s none I can see.’

  In case some of the men could not read, Tom walked over to the soldier who had been reading the paper aloud, and handed him the cartoon, waiting in acute suspense while he examined the drawing. Then the man laughed loudly and reading out the words for the others handed it round. A young soldier with a cropped and bandaged head beckoned Tom over to him, after he had examined the sketch with dark shrewd eyes.

  ‘Can ye make my picture?’ he asked.

  ‘Your portrait?’

  The man nodded.

  During the next two hours Tom made some twenty quick sketches of men, and time and again was brought close to tears by the gratitude shown for such rough and ready work. He asked the sort of questions that Padmore had suggested, and with most who were well enough to talk, found that he had no need to say much himself. Once, three corpses sewn-up in blankets were carried past from the dead house on their way to burial, but this evidently commonplace occurrence hardly caused a break in the conversation. When supper was ladled out from a vast copper, Tom saw that the meat was doled out solely by weight, so that some men got helpings almost entirely of bone and gristle. Those who did better, sometimes gave bits to others less fortunate. Men with scorbutic gums, unable to chew or swallow, sucked their meat to extract the juice, and what they spat out was eaten eagerly by those with healthy mouths. If he were fighting for survival, Tom did not suppose he would be any more fastidious. The thought that most of these maimed men, so resolutely clinging to life, would return home to a life of appalling poverty with little or no hope of improvement, made him burn with anger. Before leaving, he made some sketches of the general scene in the ward, and resolved to do more work of this sort for publication, and also more portraits for men to send home to their families.

  When Tom returned to Myserri’s that evening, his personal unhappiness, which constant work and involvement had kept at bay during the day, returned with undiminished force. The sights he had seen, far from consoling him, or reducing by comparison the significance of his own distress, had merely deepened his depression, making him wonder how he could ever have been naïve enough to suppose that evidence of suffering on such a wide scale could reduce the impact of individual pain. It was true, Padmore had said on their way back, that orderlies could cope best when dealing cursorily with hundreds; but, when charged with responsibility for a few desperately sick men for days at a time, the personal involvement in these individual cases moved them far more deeply and broke their spirits more quickly than work which had daily seen them walking past miles of accumulated pain and misery. In that way, Tom had passed an afternoon with a mere handful, in twenty yards of a single ward, and had been affected, like the orderlies, by the fate of men with names and faces.

  *

  Although life in the officers’ wards at Scutari was far removed from the stinking hell in which the men were obliged to live, George Braithwaite had found much to complain of: especially when the pain in his arm had ceased to absorb the greater part of his attention. He had formed a mess with ten other officers, but much of the food, which they had paid their orderlies lavish sums to bring over from Stamboul, was pilfered en route, and what they finally ate was often half-cooked or burnt. So far all his efforts to obtain a mosquito net to keep the flies off his face had proved unavailing, as had his attempts to get new sheets and bedding; but compared with his loneliness these were minor irritants. True, his father wrote frequently and had despatched numerous comforts: potted meats, books, a dozen cases of claret, cigars and some stone hot-water bottles – none of which had yet arrived; but the expectation of these good things did not compensate George for a more fundamental privation.

  The favourite activity of most of his brother officers was writing to and receiving letters from wives or fiancées – a pleasure denied to George and one the lack of which continually brought to mind his painful failure with Catherine. Immediately after his arrival at Scutari, when too weak to write himself, George had dictated letters to be sent to Magnus and Charles telling them what had happened to him, in the hope that they would mention his present situation, when next writing to their sister, and that this in turn might lead Catherine herself to send a note of commiseration, thus making it possible for him to reply. A correspondence started, he might even succeed in convincing her of the change circumstances had wrought in him.

  When thinking about Catherine, George was haunted by a recurrent fear. Remembering the scene he had interrupted in the Statue Gallery at Hanley Park, he did not care to reflect on the fact that Catherine, alone in that vast house, would have ample opportunity to arrange further meetings with Strickland. In fact on one of the few occasions when he had seen Charles Crawford before Inkerman, George had expressed astonishment that Catherine was not staying with her step-mother at the Embassy in Constantinople; suggesting that, since so many eligible young officers dined with Lord Stratford, on their way out to the war or returning home, Catherine was being denied an excellent matrimonial opportunity. Charles had not argued but had observed drily that given a certain personal antipathy between the two women, such an arrangement would be inappropriate. George had then asked Charles whether he was happy that Catherine had so much freedom. To his amazement when he had gone on lightly to allude to his former suspicions of Strickland, Crawford had become furiously angry, dismissing the idea with abusive contempt. So distressed had George been, that until receiving a letter of condolence from Charles, he had feared his friendly relations with Crawford to be at an end.

  As soon as George had been strong enough to walk unassisted, he had taken to visiting men from his regiment in different parts of the Barrack Hospital, offering to try to secure extra comforts and in several cases writing to his father asking him to employ wounded men on his estate.

  On a bitter morning in the first week in December, George was returning to his own ward after such a visit, considerably upset that a corporal from his company, for whom he had brought a game pie and a port wine jelly, had died during the previous night. Walking through the neighbouring ward, George had passed a group of men examining something; on moving closer George saw that they were admiring a drawing: an admirably executed sketch of one of them. Surprised to find such talent among common soldiers, he asked the artist’s name, and was disappointed to hear that he had been a civilian. No longer feeling the same interest in the sketch, George nevertheless felt obliged to show some enthusiasm when it was held up for his scrutiny. Glancing at it, a mild curiosity led him to look at the signature, and, with a sudden shiver of shock, he made out the name: Thomas Strickland.

  That evening, feeling guilty that he had misjudged Strickland, and greatly relieved that his suspicions had evidently been mistaken, George wrote to Charles Crawford, describing the extent of his recovery and relaying general news about the state of affairs in the hospital. In a postscript he apologised for having linked Catherine’s name with Strickland’s. If she had been seeing the man, she could not be doing so any more, since the artist was at present staying in Constantinople.

  45

  Squinting along the line of sight, Humphrey could feel the heat of the 32-pounder’s massive iron barrel scorching his cheek, but he did not mo
ve from his task until he saw, through the pall of white smoke hanging over the opposing batteries, a small bright jet of flame. Provided with this mark to train on, he raised his head and called out to the gun’s No. 1:

  ‘With two handspikes muzzle right three inches.’

  Then, hurrying on to the second of his three guns, he gave similar orders; reckoning his third to be pointing true, he left its line unchanged. Immediately after his No. 1s reported back: ‘Ready,’ Humphrey shouted: ‘Fire!’ covering his ears before the lanyards jerked down the detonating hammers. A split second and the platforms danced and shuddered underfoot, the shock waves from the reports thumping his chest with the force of physical blows.

  ‘Stop the vent and sponge,’ he cried, still reeling, eyes smarting and ears ringing. Through the powder smoke he saw his men sponging and ramming home the fresh charge, then, staggering slightly, he bent once more to the trigger-line and neck-ring, watching tensely for the answering flash. When none came from the same point, he chose a new mark to train on.

  For two days the naval batteries had been exchanging fire with the Quarries, a recently established Russian battery which owed its name to its cleverly concealed position among the mounds of waste from a disused gravel pit. This new emplacement was not only closer to the allied lines than any other enemy battery – so enabling Russian sharpshooters to pick off men passing by the embrasures in the British batteries – but also lay directly in the path of any future assault on the principal enemy bastions behind it. Since prolonged shelling had not yet persuaded the Russian gunners to withdraw, it was widely assumed that the position would have to be stormed with inevitable heavy loss of life.

  On this, the second day of constant firing, Humphrey had been surprised and relieved to discover that terror, like other powerful emotions, did not last long at the same level of intensity and, although liable to return in sharp bowel-loosening spasms with the approach of well-flighted shells or the infliction of a ghastly wound, it would recede again under constant pressure of laying guns, pointing them, and checking that his exhausted crews always entered the shells correctly, fuses outwards with the correct charges. Although Humphrey was responsible for three guns only, in a battery mounting twenty-seven guns, he was rarely without an immediate task to attend to.

  As the morning brightened, a light wind began to clear the smoke, making it possible to see the effects of the firing. Now, instead of watching for flashes, Humphrey was able to direct his guns from the raised banquette, observing through a telescope where the shots fell, shouting out: ‘Twenty short … fifteen left,’ or whatever most precisely described the point of impact. A man standing on the banquette was partially exposed, but Humphrey felt far safer when he could see the Russian positions. Often after a perfect shot, fired right into an embrasure, he found himself wondering what his father would have thought, had he ever lived to see his milk-sop son, who had rarely been able to hit a partridge on the wing, engaged in sending eight-inch shells and 32-pound shot with deadly aim into an enemy battery. Such thoughts left him feeling both proud and sad. But although sure that his bearing under fire would have met with his father’s approval, Humphrey had noticed few alterations in Charles’s formal coldness.

  Three or four days after Charles had assumed command in the batteries, a mortar shell had crashed down on the sandbagged roof of the magazine, setting the sacking alight. There had been six feet of earth, timber and sandbags between the flames and the powder, but the sight had momentarily paralysed everybody, until Humphrey had jumped up and started stamping out the fire; a moment later he had heard somebody behind him, and had looked round to see Charles helping, his eyes dark with anger, not directed at him, but at the men who had watched a boy do what they themselves should have done. Later, after only the briefest words of commendation, Charles had taken Humphrey aside and told him that, in future, if tempted to risk his life on impulse, he should remember that there would be many occasions, unlike the one just past, when the least dramatic course of action would be the best to pursue. An officer who lived longest, always served his country best. ‘Bravery without discretion, my lord, is as much use as modesty without clothes.’ Still greatly admiring Charles, Humphrey had been deeply wounded by what he took for a rebuke. Especially since, the week before, Charles had picked up a shell, its fuse still burning, and had rolled it over the parapet into the ditch where it had instantly burst – an action undoubtedly saving lives, but one which had involved a risk many times greater than any to be encountered stamping out flames on the magazine roof. Humphrey was also hurt and perplexed that Charles, after being more friendly, had recently become as cold as ever.

  Having loudly cheered a shot which had lifted an enemy gun clean off its carriage, Humphrey heard the look-out yell: ‘Mortar right,’ and flinging himself to the ground from the banquette, heard the sharp whistling of the revolving shell rise to a tearing shriek. With a deep earth-splitting roar a section of the parapet vanished in a red-black inferno of spouting soil and stones. In the choking dust, Humphrey saw a powderman’s arm hanging by his side, shattered from wrist to elbow; an assistant-sponger had been killed outright, almost torn in two pieces. Seeing the fierce bright flow of the dead man’s blood, Humphrey vomited and sank to his knees; but, as usual, within minutes of such an escape, relief soon outweighed shock and horror. An officer gave him some watered rum, and by the time the stretchers had left the battery, everybody’s spirits had started to rise again, as they latched onto inconsequential things to laugh about: anything unrelated to the incident. This soothing collective forgetfulness recurred after every casualty. Whenever obliged to leave his guns, Humphrey took deliberate care to avoid catching sight of the already darkening stains – just as, when a child, he had denied the power of a frightening picture in a book, by averting his eyes, or slamming it tight shut. To a greater or lesser extent, every man present survived by doing the same.

  *

  Charles rode past the Artillery Depot and, dismounting near the Light Division’s Camp, tethered his pony and squelched through the mud towards a huddle of tents and huts erected near the wall of the engineers’ siege park. Here on the heights, the rumble of gun-fire from the batteries echoed and reverberated like distant thunder; at times sounding deceptively close.

  The shelter Charles made for was neither hut nor tent, but resembled the skilfully improvised structures put up by the Turks: having low stone walls, banked up with earth, and a crude but effective roof of planks, brushwood, and clay, covered over with skins and tarpaulins. Thrusting aside the canvas door-flap, Charles fumbled with a box of lucifer matches in the windowless gloom, and lit a candle stuck to the top of an empty ammunition box. Then he sat down on the bed: a straw-filled mattress resting on an old door, raised off the mud floor on wooden chocks. The bedclothes consisted of a filthy quilt and a matted sheepskin. Next to the bed, a large black tin-chest, balanced on two casks, evidently served as a writing table; on its lid stood a brass candlestick, an inkpot and a mess of papers. On another empty meat cask was a cracked mirror, a razor and a broken horn comb full of greasy-looking hair. Two threadbare Turkish carpets had been nailed to the walls to keep out the draughts. Charles shifted his position to take out his watch, dislodging as he did so a pyramid of empty bottles at the foot of the bed. After passing five minutes inside, he went out again and paced up and down impatiently.

  Charles had visited Magnus’s hut for the first time on the day before the start of the bombardment, but, having failed to find his brother, had left him a note asking him to be there at ten o’clock two days later. It was now nearly twenty-past ten, and Charles did not have unlimited time to spare, since his turn of duty in the batteries began at noon. On the previous day he had spent sixteen hours under fire and afterwards the tautness of his nerves and a painfully throbbing head had kept him awake most of the night. Feeling as he did next morning, Charles would normally have gone to any lengths to avoid seeing his brother, but the arrival of George Braithwaite’s letter had le
ft him in a state of such perplexity that he looked upon the coming interview as an absolute necessity.

  When a dishevelled and bearded figure appeared, plodding up towards him from the direction of Balaclava, Charles did not at first recognise his brother until he was some twenty yards away. Their only meeting since Magnus’s arrival in the Crimea had been a chance encounter on the col: a brief and ill-tempered affair, since Charles had thought it all but certain that his brother’s sole motive in coming out was to embarrass his father.

  Before going into the hut, they shook hands with awkward formality; and as their eyes met, Charles was once more shaken by his inability to hazard even an imprecise guess as to what Magnus might be thinking; a failure which at once made Charles feel uneasy and defensive. Inside, Magnus lit more candles and poured some madeira into a couple of chipped cups; having taken his, Charles handed his brother George’s letter, without comment, except for a thumb marking the relevant paragraph. Magnus read it without apparent interest or surprise. Charles watched him intently, wishing that there was a window in the hut, so that he could note his expressions better.

  ‘Did you know Strickland was in Turkey?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does it not surprise you?’ snapped Charles. Magnus drained his cup and moving, Charles thought, with exaggerated slowness, poured himself more madeira, and held out the bottle to him.

  ‘I asked a question,’ returned Charles, covering his cup with his hand.

  ‘You did. The answer is, no. I am not surprised.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Because I suggested he came out with me as a war artist.’

  ‘But he didn’t.’

  Magnus got up and offered Charles a cigar, which he declined.

  ‘That’s right. He obviously changed his mind later.’ Magnus smiled. ‘Not everybody’s as decisive as you, Charles.’

 

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