Until the Colours Fade

by Tim Jeal

  ‘Captain Crawford, sir.’

  A trace of exasperation had broken through Parnwell’s deferential façade. Magnus moved towards him threateningly.

  ‘You mean my brother asked Mr Strickland to come here in the first place?’

  ‘He had a letter from him,’ stammered Parnwell, evidently frightened by Magnus’s fury. ‘I suppose he did. Then he told me to stop him going down. He must have changed his mind.’

  ‘But instead you arranged for him to go with the surgeon?’

  ‘He wouldn’t listen to me. The captain said if he couldn’t be dissuaded, I was to send him down with the surgeon’s people.’

  Outside the hut, Magnus covered his face with his hands. His mind was reeling. The tents, the huts, the grey sky, seemed to spin round him. It was a dream; he was running … but where? Where? Magnus stopped and stood in an agony of indecision. Must find him. Find him. As the first wave of panic receded, he was again aware of the guns. Charles sent him to his death, and I sent him to Charles. I sent him to Charles. Grief and anger clashed in his head, reverberated with the distant din of battle. He could be alive … wounded. If I could think … if only I could think. Find one of the stretcher bearers or one of the ladder party. Without a guide there would be no hope of finding the sap-head from which the naval surgeon’s party had gone forward.

  Within half-an-hour Magnus had persuaded a member of the ladder party to lead him through the trenches. Many of those asked had refused, and Ordinary Seaman Hayles had only been won over by the promise of twenty guineas. Before setting out, Magnus went with Hayles to the hospital marquee to find out as much as possible from the surviving stretcher bearers of the first party.

  A hundred yards from the long low tent, Magnus saw men gathered round the entrance flaps and his heart leapt with new hope. He began to run, taking in blood-stained stretchers on the ground, their bearers lying exhausted beside them. Two men were dragging a large tub of water into the marquee. A little closer and he heard ringing screams and moans coming from inside. Let him be safe, pray God let Tom be safe. For the first time Magnus really felt what his friend’s death would mean to him.

  Nobody tried to stop Magnus as he pushed his way towards the cots and amputation tables. Stupefied by the constant cries and the shouts of the surgeons and orderlies, he moved along the tent in a daze, glancing cursorily at sights of appalling suffering: searching only for one face – dismissing all else. Orderlies were administering chloroform as fast as they could, but the sudden flood of wounded had taken them by surprise. For most of those brought in, the initial shock and numbness no longer saved them from the agony of stiffening wounds and the revival of lacerated nerves. He saw a large man lifted down from a table and water hastily sluiced over its red surface before another victim was placed on it and stripped; fragments of metal had forced bits of the cloth of this sailor’s jacket into his flesh and the blood had clotted and caked round the wound making him roar out as the material was ripped and cut away. Somebody shouted: ‘Wet it, you fools.’ Nearly at the far end of the tent Magnus gave up hope; if Tom was still alive he would be out there somewhere. Magnus was making for the entrance when he saw his father’s tear-stained face; he was talking to a surgeon, a small bald man with a bunch of silk ligatures threaded through a button-hole of his spattered coat. Charles was writhing in a cot, his neck arched back and his teeth sunk into his pillow to stop him crying out. His right arm had gone and the bandages covering most of the upper part of his chest were already darkening with new blood. Magnus stood gazing down at him aghast, feeling no more anger, only a surge of desperate pity. The muscles under his brother’s white skin tensed convulsively with each new spasm of pain, and there was a feverish glitter in his wild unseeing eyes. An assistant surgeon covered him with blankets and held a cloth firmly to his mouth until the chloroform left him drowsy and limp. The effect would not last though, and Magnus shuddered at the eternity of pain ahead of him. Magnus heard his father’s voice:

  ‘They think he may live if he survives the shock.’

  Magnus nodded dumbly, feeling a suffocating sickness. Somewhere a man was screaming, his voice sticking on a single piercing note. He felt his father’s hand and returned the pressure as their eyes met. Knowing that he should stay a little longer, Magnus knew that he could not endure it, could not help shoulder even a small portion of his father’s grief with the task that lay ahead of him.

  ‘He’ll live,’ he said quietly and then turned without another word.

  Outside Hayles was talking to one of the bearers. Magnus sank to his knees and, pulling out his hip flask, took large gulps of brandy. Then he got up slowly and called Hayles over to him.

  ‘Better be going.’

  The man did not move. Magnus thought he looked suspicious and uneasy. Then he remembered the money. He thinks he won’t get his money if I’m killed. Magnus started to laugh hysterically as he fumbled through his pockets, spilling out coins and notes. A slight smile lit Hayles’s leathery face as he dropped to his knees and started counting.

  *

  When Magnus and Hayles reached the approach trenches between the second and third parallels they found themselves caught between the chaotic stream of wounded now being carried to the rear, and the reserves and working parties pushing forwards laden with ammunition boxes, trenching tools and gabions – both movements being due to the sudden slackening of the fire from the Redan. This left Magnus in a state of painful uncertainty; by the time he reached the glacis, Tom might already be being carried back down one of the advanced saps.

  In the third parallel itself the confusion was at its worst. Here shells had burst bringing down large sections of the trench walls, choking it with earth and debris; at some points bearers were having to lay their stretchers across the trench resting the ends on the parapets so that reserves could get by underneath. Magnus asked some of the bearers whether they had seen a young civilian with the naval surgeon but none could remember; probably none would have recognised one surgeon from another. Progress was agonisingly slow and all the time the thought that Tom might be lying wounded barely a quarter of a mile away tortured Magnus.

  All around him he heard the confused and angry shouts of men going forward who had been separated from their companies and officers. The sound of so many country dialects made him want to weep; most of these cold, hungry and sleepless men had been farm labourers a few years past in quiet English villages. At a cost of millions they had been shipped three thousand miles to fight against Russian peasants, who had once led lives almost identical to their own, and had most of them also come thousands of miles from home, in their case having endured the agony of forced marches along snow-covered roads, across frozen rivers and through high mountain passes. What could the Tsar’s claims in Moldavia mean to these men half crazed with passive suffering? No more than ‘the integrity of the Ottoman Empire’ meant to the British soldiers. At least the enemy was sustained by the thought that he was defending his own soil; the French and British had no such incentive, only a blind instinct, a tenacity that was almost a faith, that it was better to die than yield. And although every rational impulse in him cried out that such sacrifices were senseless folly, on a level of pure emotion Magnus was stirred by the nobility of men fighting without hope or belief in their cause. The fighting madness of these men, whose lives had brought them such hardship, was not so much directed towards human adversaries as against fate itself – fate which had cheated and savaged them, but from which they would not run.

  Magnus was still trapped in the third parallel when the Russian shelling started again; not with its former intensity but regularly enough to be terrifying to men moving slowly along a trench, unable to see the trajectories of shells until they were passing overhead or exploding among them. One burst a hundred and fifty yards ahead at the junction of the parallel and one of the main advanced saps, causing indescribable chaos and carnage, and bringing everybody in the trench to an immediate stand-still. A number of officers climb
ed up onto the parapet and called on their men to follow. When Magnus suggested the same course, Hayles vehemently rejected it; so he scrambled up the muddy side of the trench and went on alone.

  Even before reaching the abatis, Magnus realised the futility of his mission; the dead lay in heaps in front of the barrier or hung impaled on the sharpened branches, like seaweed thrown up against a breakwater in a storm and left there by the receding tide. Ahead on the glacis there were three long lines of bodies, recording the positions the storming party had reached when the Russians fired each of their perfectly co-ordinated volleys of grape. Although stretcher parties were busy, there were far too few of them to make any noticeable impact on the square mile over which the wounded were spread. In the distance Magnus saw that one man had managed to fix part of his shirt to his bayonet and had raised this flag to try to attract help. Magnus gave brandy to several wounded men and then threw the empty flask away. One of those to whom he had given a drink had been a very young man in great pain holding open a locket containing a miniature of a grey-haired woman, evidently his mother. Everywhere Magnus tasted the acid reek of saltpetre and blood in his throat and nostrils, carried on the icy wind, which ruffled patches of pale dead grass, small islands in the surrounding ocean of frozen mud. The sky was a whitish grey but darkening to the north.

  On the glacis there were places where the corpses were three deep. Dead or alive, Tom would never be found until an armistice allowed hundreds of men to come forward in safety. All the time Magnus was keeping one eye on the sky and listening for the whistle of approaching shells. Whenever he sighted one, he did not move or lie down until sure where it would fall. He had seen men run at once, often towards the point of impact. The occasional whine of rifle bullets did not distress him, since he knew that these had already missed. The victim never heard the sound of the bullet that killed him. When the shelling suddenly intensified, Magnus did not feel able to face the scenes of panic and fury in the trenches, but instead dropped down into what had hours before been a Russian rifle pit and waited.

  He thought of Charles and wondered how long it would be before gangrene set in; if the amputation did not kill him, his chest wounds surely would. The thought hardly moved him at all. Seeing his brother’s shattered body he had taken in his death at once. His father’s grief would be enough. A feeling of terrible sickness and impotence overwhelmed Magnus as he thought of Tom’s capacity for excitement; he saw him setting out in the darkness towards the trenches in the same mood – an adventure, a test, an experience. Of course he would have known that men would be killed, but it was one thing to expect something but something quite different to live through it. Perhaps he went down looking for subjects, effects of light: like a country child on his first visit to a great city, looking around him memorising, impressed and frightened at the same time. Other memories hurt Magnus more. Tom’s wide-eyed disbelief when they had been ambushed at the gasworks and his immediate faith that Magnus had predicted the disaster and would know what to do. Tom’s faith in him had been the greatest gift he had bestowed; now it was a torment. Who did he have to turn to four hours ago? Was he alone? Did he suffer? And I sent him to Charles; sent him to see him when I had gone and could give him no advice. Earlier occasions: the day Tom had told him he loved Helen. If he had been in my position, and I in his, would he have curtly told me that my love was a charade, its object worthless? Yet I did that; yes, and thought my honesty quite natural. And when Catherine came I sent her away … denied all responsibility … though I had caused him to go to Hanley Park. The evening at the Bull – our last in Rigton Bridge – I promised to help him, pledged myself to it … and afterwards I turned against him.

  So fragile a thing friendship, so few the times that any man or woman senses in another human being an understanding of their inmost half-realised thoughts – something less tangible than thoughts, something beyond definition, a yearning which has been there since birth – its object sometimes glimpsed but never captured. At times music, the smell of burning leaves, a landscape, a memory – almost … a second of completeness, of harmony, and then – nothing. Whatever I searched for and aspired to I sensed the same quest in you, Tom.

  A week ago you came and we were strangers. Perhaps you wanted to die. Did I fail to read even that despair? Magnus started to his feet. The shock of seeing Charles and the scenes on the glacis had so confused him that he had failed to do the one thing he had known was possible – the shock and the shells. He had accepted Tom’s death without proof, without trying to find where the surgeons were working. He felt several light flakes of snow on his cheeks and imagined the horror of bringing back the wounded if thick snow fell. To the north the sky was dark enough.

  A few seconds after leaving the rifle pit he knew that something was wrong, knew it the moment he realised the Russian shells were no longer whistling overhead, knew it before hearing the shouts and shots a hundred yards away and seeing the men running for their lives from the Quarries. The Russians had retaken the battery and were now dashing on in mad pursuit. Furious with himself for not having realised what the renewed bombardment had meant, and then for having failed to notice its sudden ending, Magnus began to run towards the British lines. Looking back he saw Russians bayoneting wounded men. Trembling with hatred, he ran on, and seeing an officer’s corpse bent down, ripped the dead man’s revolver from its holster and broke open the breech – it was loaded, with one chamber empty: five shots. He dropped down on one knee and steadying the gun on his left forearm fired twice, hitting a man in the leg. If he’d had time to load he would have used a Minié. Men were running past him already – the Russians no more than thirty yards behind. He fired again, missed, and then went on running.

  Where were the men’s officers? Probably most of them dead. Nobody was trying to form them up. No more than a hundred Russians had charged on beyond the battery and they were now driving before them twice that number of British soldiers. All from light infantry regiments; madness to have used them after what they had gone through at Inkerman. Glancing over his shoulder, Magnus saw that a sergeant had got together half-a-dozen men and formed them in line. They fired, bringing down three Russians and then reloaded; one man so scared that he fired with his ramrod still in the muzzle. After the second volley, four of the six started to run. Magnus saw the sergeant point his rifle at the head of the man nearest him threatening to shoot if either of the remaining two moved before his order. The furthest man turned and the sergeant jerked round his rifle and shot him; a moment later he too fell, killed by a Russian bullet.

  Fifty yards from the trenches Magnus slowed down, convinced that the Russians would not come much closer and risk hand-to-hand fighting with far greater numbers. Determined to fire his last two shots, he flung himself down and steadying his hand on a rock aimed and squeezed the trigger. Nothing. The empty chamber. He tried again but the gun had jammed. Hurling it away in disgust he sprinted on. A man just in front of him was hit in the thigh, ran a few paces more and then fell. The ground was rough and slightly uphill, making Magnus’s breath come in sobbing gasps, but he could see the ridge of the third parallel and the mounds of earth and gabions at the sap-heads. Bullets were still whining and humming past. Looking back he was shaken to see that the Russians had not slackened their pace. They couldn’t think that they could succeed … but they were going to try to take the third parallel … they were. A few panicking men in the trench started to fire, regardless of their own troops fleeing towards them, terrified by the thought of the Russian bayonets. Magnus saw the puffs of smoke along the parapet but heard no sound. By the time the echo reached him, a Minié bullet had torn through his brain.

  Afterwards

  Afterwards

  At the end of January 1855, Mr John Roebuck Q.C., the Radical Member for Sheffield moved a motion of censure in the House of Commons. One question put by him particularly disturbed the House. If fifty-four thousand men had left Britain for the war since the outbreak of hostilities, and there were n
ow only fourteen thousand in arms before Sebastopol, what had become of the missing forty thousand? Heavily defeated in the vote, Lord Aberdeen resigned and the Queen invited Lord Palmerston to form a government. The war went on. Not until the completion of the Balaclava railway and the coming of spring did the army’s numbers stabilise at around twenty-five thousand.

  In late February – a time when the British had been able to muster no more than five thousand men fit for duty – the French had renewed the attack abandoned on New Year’s Day. They took the Quarries and the neighbouring low hill: the Mamelon, but were driven out after forty-eight hours. These works remained in Russian hands until captured and held by the allies on 9 June.

  What was hoped would be the final attack on the Redan and Malakoff was planned to take place nine days later: the anniversary of Waterloo. The French attacked too soon and the British in insufficient numbers. Six thousand men were sacrificed to no effect. Ten days afterwards Lord Raglan died – some mentioned a broken heart, his doctors cholera.

  But in spite of allied reverses, the Russians’ position deteriorated during the summer. From May onwards the Royal Navy’s squadron in the Sea of Azov cut off all sea-borne supplies from the east, and at the same time allied reinforcements built up rapidly. In mid-August the Russian generals gambled and took the field. They were decisively defeated by the French army. On 9 September the allies once more attacked the principal Russian bastions. Instead of waiting until the French had taken the Malakoff, whose guns commanded the approach to the Redan, the British attacked simultaneously and were driven back leaving two thousand dead and wounded on the ground. The French captured and held the Malakoff. During the night the enemy evacuated Sebastopol and blew up their magazines. The fighting was at an end.

  *

  In the first week of October Sir James Crawford returned home at his own request and Rear-Admiral Houston Stewart was appointed in his place.