Until the Colours Fade

by Tim Jeal

  Soon Sir James could see the columns quite clearly, and the frequent glint and flash of bayonets catching the sun. The men’s usual long grey greatcoats hid their legs and made their movement seem unnaturally smooth, as though they were sliding rather than marching along the road. Two hundred yards ahead of the infantry was a troop of cavalry and behind them two or three batteries of horse-artillery, the slight swing of the gun-barrels behind the limbers just perceptible through a steadily held glass.

  The two gunboats anchored in a carefully angled line fifty yards from the shore, with additional stern anchors to prevent them swinging. Their guns were loaded with shell and elevated for nine hundred yards. As the marching men entered the line of fire, Sphinx and Leopard discharged their broadsides together with a hideous crash. Through breaks in the smoke, glimpses could be caught of jets of earth and stones springing up around the road quite silently, for it was several seconds before the explosions were heard by the gun crews and by then they were reloading. Two wide gaps had appeared in the first column of infantry, but for a moment the men on the road seemed frozen. Shouts of triumph went up from officers who had been watching through glasses. Sir James was glad to be distanced from the carnage; when the men started to hurl themselves from the road down the banks on either side, he saw them as dots no larger than match-heads. With a more dispersed target, shots going too long or falling short would kill at random. He reckoned that three or perhaps four of the shells had exploded on the road. As the guns thundered again, he could imagine the terror of the men hearing the approaching tearing shriek of the shells; many of them would only just have realised that the two small smoke-shrouded ships on the shimmering sheet of water were responsible for what was happening to them. Sir James could not rid himself of a vision of Charles advancing on the Quarries under a similar rain of shells from the Redan and Malakoff. After each ship had fired four broadsides, he turned to the First Lieutenant:

  ‘Signal: “Discontinue”.’

  Already the tugs and steamers were rounding the point, with the ships’ boats strung out astern.

  He had thought the first diversionary attack a failure, but he had been mistaken. Without it, the men now dead and dying on the road, would have marched from the town half-an-hour earlier, and would already have reached a position from which they would have been able to cut off any force attempting to get to the bridge overland. Now the survivors would arrive too late, and the worst the marines could expect to encounter would be an isolated company stationed in a guardhouse at the bridge; perhaps not even that. Nothing could go wrong now, and Sir James knew it.

  For the first time he could feel a little warmth from the sun on his cheeks. The sky was dappled with small white clouds, which cast racing shadows on the sage-green hills. Small waves ruffled the water, sparkling like thousands of tiny mirrors. Across the salt-marshes the black smoke from the tall stacks of the tugs was dispersing in thin floating streaks. Yet at the back of his mind a vague discontent.

  I’m a vainglorious fool, he thought, as he realised with a shock that he had half hoped that the landing would be opposed. For what would almost certainly be his last close action with an enemy, he had imagined a spectacular ending: landing with his men under fire to encourage them, the water around them ploughed up by grape and round-shot…. He shook his head, suddenly ashamed of the contradictions in his thoughts. Disgust with war one moment and then infantile dreams of romantic heroism. At any moment passing through the straits he could have been killed or mutilated, and instead of being thankful, he had wanted more. Dear God, at my age. He thought of the letters he had written to his family. Now only the most extraordinary misfortune would make their despatch necessary. For a moment he thought of sending a boat for Magnus once the marines had landed, but a little later the first waves of tiredness hit him and he remembered the many other things that would have to be done after the bridge was destroyed. In imagination he was already back in the Sampson’s captain’s cabin bent over the mahogany table.

  Sir,

  I have the honour to inform you that this morning I hoisted my flag in H.M.S. Hesperus, and having under my direct orders the ships named in the margin, passed through the straits of Genichesk….

  51

  Earlier there had been flurries of snow and sleet, but by four o’clock in the morning, when Tom arrived at the Naval Brigade Camp, the sky had cleared and he could see the glittering points of stars and a full moon silvering the lines of tents. Groups of men were squatting round the watch fires, eating salt pork from mess tins, the flames lending to their pale gaunt faces a mocking counterfeit of ruddy good health. By one fire sailors were queueing for tots of rum from a large brass-bound barrel. Already officers were calling out names and telling off men into parties in readiness for marching them down to the trenches. All around him Tom could sense the taut air of anticipation and fear, which mirrored his own feelings. He had little confidence that the pounding given the Russian works by the British and French siege guns during the past two days would turn out to have been any more effective than previous long-range bombardments. Only surprise could materially assist the attackers, and Tom doubted whether Russian vigilance would have been reduced by their two days under fire. The general opinion was that the Quarries would only be taken after fierce and prolonged fighting, and Tom saw no reason to doubt its correctness.

  Charles’s note had told Tom to find Mr Parnwell, assistant paymaster, who would tell him where he should go and who would take him there. From previous visits to the camp, Tom knew that the paymaster’s office was in the group of huts where the brigade’s stores were housed – the paymaster himself, besides dealing with wages, performing for the sailors ashore the job done in the army by the commissariat and regimental quartermasters. Tom eventually found Parnwell overseeing the paymaster’s clerks in the crowded armourer’s hut, where they were entering in ledgers the number of pistols, revolvers and rounds of ammunition being issued to the members of the ladder parties. The armoury was dimly lit by two hanging lanterns and had the sharp bitter greasy smell which Tom had always associated with guns. To the left the yeoman was taking down weapons from the racks and checking them before shouting out the type of firearm and the name of the recipient. Ordinary Seamen were getting pistols, warrant officers revolvers.

  Parnwell, a young man with a large nose and a sandy-coloured moustache, glanced cursorily at Charles’s note to Tom, and came out from behind the table.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you’re not to go down.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw Captain Crawford an hour ago and he was quite explicit.’

  ‘I must see him then.’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s already gone down to the first parallel.’

  Relieved at first and very much tempted to accept this rebuttal as final, Tom felt suddenly angry. He vividly recalled Charles’s certainty that he would not have it in him to watch the attack from the advanced trenches. Parnwell’s prohibition was just another attempt to dissuade him so that Charles could later stigmatise him as a coward.

  ‘What if I refuse to take Captain Crawford’s advice?’

  ‘I think it was an order, sir.’

  Once again Tom was very close to giving in.

  ‘Civilians aren’t under orders. I have a pass for the trenches.’

  Parnwell looked at Tom with unfeigned bewilderment and then shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘He said if you insisted you could go down with the surgeon’s party. They’ll be leaving for the second parallel in half-an-hour.’

  ‘Where can I find them?’

  ‘The hospital marquee.’

  As Tom walked out into the darkness he smiled grimly to himself. So Parnwell had merely been an unwitting actor in another of Crawford’s tests. If Charles had genuinely meant to prevent him going on, he would never have given Parnwell instructions to say anything else after advising him not to go. The possibility that Charles had had a real change of heart occurred to Tom, but he dismissed the idea
at once. Even if Crawford’s conscience had troubled him, Tom did not care. The venture had come to mean more to him than a simple victory over Charles. For his own sake he wanted to prove that he could overcome his lifelong terror of physical danger. He had come out to the war affecting to despise the outlook and mentality of the officers there; considering their notions of honour and duty, maintained in the midst of a starving army, as absurd as their habitual pride of caste. And yet, though owing their positions to influence and money rather than to aptitude and merit, he had not been able to deny their courage, and he still felt awed by it. When free of this final vestige of admiration for men who made no secret of scorning his calling and who felt superior by right to every self-made man, however great his gifts, Tom was also sure that he would lose the last traces of humiliation caused by Helen’s rejection. With fear conquered, let whosoever wished look down on him. Let them, for he would not care. Never again would any new Captain Crawford have power over him.

  Tom was almost at the hospital tent when he saw Humphrey, or at least thought he saw him; he was running past about ten yards away, probably carrying some message, and in the moonlight it was hard to be sure; but when the boy hesitated as if recognising him, Tom turned abruptly and walked behind the row of tents immediately to his left, unable to face talking to Helen’s son; afraid too that Humphrey would ask what he was doing and would argue with him to prevent him going down. Tom waited several minutes, and then, approaching the marquee from the other side, went in. He was not followed.

  Shortly before five, an engineer officer led the naval surgeon’s party from the batteries through a confusing series of zig-zagging trenches, angled to avoid enfilading fire, into the wider first parallel, already crowded with troops – reliefs, the engineer explained, for the first two storming parties. The men were all silent, leaning against the walls of the trench and some, to Tom’s amazement, lying sleeping on the frozen mud, huddled together in their great-coats, a strange jumble of arms and legs, looking to Tom like bodies awaiting burial. Some of the medical orderlies were already crouching low, as if afraid of a sudden storm of bullets, and this amused the engineer, who pointed out that they were in no immediate danger, being still fifty yards behind the second parallel and a hundred from the third; while beyond that, even closer to the enemy, were the advanced saps leading to the British rifle pits. Tom imagined Charles and the ladder parties somewhere in those more hazardous trenches and grudgingly felt certain that he would not be cowed by thoughts of the coming ordeal. As Tom followed the stretcher bearers and orderlies into the next network of approach trenches, he felt a terrible wave of loneliness. Around him in these man-made fissures were hundreds of other men and yet this thought brought him no comfort; they at least had good reason to be there – for them refusal would have meant the firing squad. Yet he was moving forwards all the time; every second bringing him closer to the most advanced works, closer to the enemy. Men of action, he told himself, did not think, and lacking imagination could not envisage future horror until actually involved in it. But I am quite different; never having felt an innate superiority to other men, I am under no obligation, as officers are, to justify their self-esteem with acts of valour. For the first time since parting from him, Tom longed to be with Magnus, to see his heavy-lidded grey-blue eyes, and above all to hear his reassuring voice. Magnus had been a soldier and yet combined pride with sensitivity, the power to act with the capacity to imagine. Perhaps there were others like him, but Tom only knew that he had never met them. In the dark confines of the trench, Tom remembered the wide skies and open hills above Balaclava, and his friend walking by his side. If their positions were now exchanged, Tom was sure that Magnus would not be at a loss, would feel no self-pity, and no sense that his lot was different from that of the men around him, but would face whatever was to come with the same calmness he had once shown facing George across the oval ‘hazard’ table, and walking towards Joseph Braithwaite’s hired thugs between the tall soot-blackened walls of a narrow cobbled lane.

  They paused in the second parallel and the surgeon repeated that they would not under any circumstances cross the open ground between the advanced saps and the Russian rifle pits until it was clear that the storming parties had not only taken the Quarries but were able to hold them. But Tom was not much reassured by this. The only reason he could think of why surgeons should be sent to the Quarries was that a heavy fire from the Redan and the Malakoff would prevent the wounded being carried back to the trenches for many hours after the position had been taken.

  They entered the third parallel on the heels of the three hundred men of the 7th Royal Fusiliers, who were to form the right wing of the second body of attack. Some dark ragged clouds had obscured the moon for several minutes, but when they blew over, Tom saw the blue-silver gleam of bayonets and the badges on shakos. A field-officer pushed by, his polished steel scabbard bumping against his thigh. From the trenches behind them came a faint smell of latrines wafted on a slight but piercingly cold breeze. The proximity of so many men and the absolute stillness broken only by an occasional muffled cough and the clatter of a ramrod, was one of the strangest experiences Tom had ever known. Sensing so much fear around him, his own started to diminish, and feeling calmer he tried to memorise the scene around him: the pale glow of moonlight on faces and shoulder-straps, making them seem to float, detached from solid bodies, in a dark void; the myriad gradations of light and shade ranging from evanescent silver through varying depths of chiaroscuro to velvet blackness. How could it ever be possible to paint the transition from the high-lights to such darkness while giving a sense of the underlying masses? Because there were masses; the points of light did not, as he had at first thought, exist in isolation; many of the shadows he had seen as of a single tone, now seemed softer and less uniform; and the mood, that too must be conveyed … by a face, a face close-to, the whole being seen in perspective along the trench, two or three figures dominating in the foreground.

  When a further two hundred men of the 33rd Regiment started to move along the parallel from the left, the naval surgeon’s party, which had now joined forces with two army surgeons from the Highland Division, was escorted forward by their guide into an advanced sap to the right of the area from which the assault would be launched, and led to the sap-head where they were to wait until the Quarries had been taken.

  At half-past five the moonlight was as bright as ever and, clambering up the side of the sap, Tom looked out over the top of the gabions at the gentle slope leading up to the Russian rifle pits in front of the Quarries. The silvery radiance of the light and the unbroken stillness made the coming violence seem impossible. When he dropped down into the sap again, he found himself next to a young assistant surgeon, to whom he had talked briefly in the hospital marquee. The man, whose name was Watts, had complained about the way medical officers were treated in the navy. Watts offered Tom some brandy, which he was grateful to take being stiff with cold.

  As the sky grew paler, the moon lost its lustre, and men and earth and grass seemed steeped in a chill grey wash. Near his feet Tom noticed a dead leaf, stiff with frost, its skeletal veins starred with minute crystals. He thought of the new leaves of an English spring, pale and translucent; of a green tunnel enclosing a slow dark stream, its surface skimmed by water-boatmen; recalled the slow change of the landscape through a dusty north country summer, until the sycamore wings had come spinning down in Barford’s autumnal woods.

  Above the dark rim of the horizon the sky was whitening, dimming the moon to a flat thin disk.

  Shortly after six o’clock several sharp cracking reports came from the direction of the Russian rifle pits as the British covering party sprinted across the open ground and took up positions in shell craters and folds in the ground to keep the Russian marksmen’s heads down while the sailors leapt out from the trenches and dashed forward to place their ladders against the tangled branches of the abatis. Immediately behind the blue-jackets came a long scarlet wave of infantry �
� the first storming party. Only a few shots came from the Quarries and none at all from the rifle pits. The infantry surged over the abatis, like horses taking a jump, and ran on, soldiers and sailors pressing forward side by side, up the slope of the glacis towards the irregular ramparts of the Quarries. Behind them several companies of sappers were hacking at the abatis to clear the way for the second body of attack.

  Immediately after the first shots Tom had been choked with anxiety, but seeing the attackers sweeping towards their objective so easily, relief and elation replaced all former misgivings. There seemed no way they could be stopped; no way at all. For the first time since the start of the attack, Tom thought of Charles, his sword drawn, striving to outpace those around him. Only a hundred yards.

  Then from end to end of that dark ridge of broken earth spurted orange tongues of flame, as grape, canister and mitraille were sent screaming into the attackers’ faces, filling the loud air with death, cutting wide lanes through the advancing columns. As the second body of attack left the shelter of the sap-heads to support the first storming party, the Redan opened up, flipping mortar shells over the heads of the defenders in the Quarries, sending up plumes of earth as the new formations ran towards the abatis.