Morgan recognized a gunner officer whom he had first met on the hunting field in Northamptonshire. ‘Miller, is that you?’ Morgan put as much confidence into his voice as he could muster.
‘Yes, who’s that?’ the gunner replied shading his eyes against the candle-light and squinting across the decking.
‘Tony Morgan of the Ninety-Fifth, we met hunting in Weedon, remember? What’s happened to you?’
‘God blind me, it’s Paddy Morgan! Your lot’s had a hard day, ain’t they? Goddamn shell hit my horse in the belly on Home Ridge, just as we was unlimbering. Next thing I knew I was below her, leg busted like a shot hare, and here I am before I got a chance to put a round at Russ.’
So the conversations rebounded back and forth across the deck, tales of death, pain and lucky escapes the only thing that each officer had in common was that none had the slightest idea of the real progress of the battle. All had snapshots, all had vignettes, some more encouraging than others, but the smoke, mist and undergrowth had served to make the usual chaos of combat utterly impenetrable.
The hours passed. Morgan emptied his flask, took as much rum as the bumptious orderly would let him and dozed. In the evening the naval surgeon at last arrived.
‘Now, Mr...Morgan of the...Ninety-Fifth,’ the surgeon read the paper label that the orderly had painstakingly written and attached to his coat’s lapel, ‘...puncture wound...right upper thigh, through and through,’ he read on. ‘Let’s have a look.’ Morgan had lain for hours with his soaking coat pulled up around his waist, his muddy, bloody trousers rumpled round his knees above his filthy boots, showing the cream skin of his well-muscled thighs and his once white now grey embarrassingly yellowed drawers. Two great scuts of gauze were taped either side of his limb, their snowiness now blotched red. Gently, the surgeon pulled the dressings away looked at the oozing holes for an instant and then smoothed them back in place. ‘Got any movement in the toes of your right foot, young ‘un?’
‘Yes, sir, a little,’ Morgan replied.
‘Good. The muscle’s been ripped badly on the outer side of the thigh, but as long as we can prevent mortification, you’ll be as good as new in six months.’
‘Six months?’ Morgan knew that he was expected to protest.
‘Well, five if you’re sensible. Where’s home? Because that’s where you’re going.’
‘County Cork, sir; but what of the battle?’
‘Cork, eh? Keep out of the saddle as long as you can.’ The surgeon scratched at a purple-coloured form with his pencil. ‘The battle? We—well, you and the loons you command—have won a famous victory—as they say. The goddamn Frogs turned up late and are trying to take the credit, but they reckon that eight thousand of our men have licked fifty thousand Russians and ninety-odd guns. Trouble is, I’m told we’ve lost the flower of our army—not that I’d describe you and these thugs...’ the surgeon pointed to the broken, blanket-wrapped men who lined the bulkheads, ‘...as delicate blossoms. It’s said that you’ll all get a special star for today’s heroics—and so you should. And promotion will be good, too. Half the bloody brigadier-generals are dead, I’ve been stitching colonels all day, there’s hardly a major without a hole in him and look at this sorry lot...’ the surgeon pointed with a jerk of his chin to his torn customers, ‘…most of them will never soldier again—they’ll have to sell out. So, if you want a free step or two up the ladder, get better then get back. We’re going to need men like you: the Tsar and his boys ain’t going to make it easy.’
At that moment a return to the inferno he’d just left was the last thing that Morgan wanted, promotion or not.
***
The Black Sea was mercifully calm. The three-day voyage passed fitfully in unconsciousness and throbbing pain as the months of exhaustion and pressure sloughed off him and there was little to remember about his fellow travellers, either, for they were just as torpid as he. Every day the orderlies told him of burials at sea—the wounded troops on the lower decks seemed to be dying by the dozen—but all that Morgan was fit for were sleep, rum and food.
He wished that Scutari was just as forgettable. He and the rest of the wounded officers were stretchered ashore, put in cots in one of the wards of the big local barracks and nagged to distraction by a series of ill-humoured young women. In the Crimea they had heard and read much of this marvellous corps of volunteer nurses who made life so much better and healthier than anything that the military medical system could achieve, but Morgan saw no marvels. Whilst the ward was clean enough, the bedding and food were acceptable and the doctors were courteous if heavily overworked, the privies were just unspeakable. Hopping with the help of another, he dreaded his trips to what the naval orderlies called ‘the heads’. The plumbing was totally inadequate for the amount of sewage and the rags with which they cleaned themselves, so the filth overflowed leaving his felt hospital slippers soaked and disgusting.
The coven of harridans seemed incapable of sorting this mess out. Instead, they churned about frowning mightily, throwing open windows that were better shut against November’s winds, carrying sheaves of paper but never a bandage or nip of rum. Their idea of therapy was turmoil rather than rest.
His luck improved, though. After less than a week of this Turkish torture, and now as ‘ambulant’—as the medical men would say—as two crutches would allow him to be, Morgan found himself on another ship and bound for England. Arriving first in a cabin with just two berths, he chose the one by the scuttle, throwing down what few bits and pieces he’d kept or managed to acquire in hospital and easing himself onto the thin mattress. Then a din erupted in the companionway outside, before the door of the cabin banged open and a hospital orderly, struggling at one end of a litter, barged in.
‘Oh, sorry, sir, dint know anyone was ‘ere,’ the man grunted under his burden, easing the stretcher through the narrow door as carefully as he could.
‘Who the devil’s that?’ A great, Scots, bad-tempered roar rose from the recumbent form, wagging beard and jumbled hair above a stout, blanket-covered frame, arms waving.
‘Anthony Morgan, Ninety-Fifth’s Grenadiers, and who the devil’s that?’ he yelled back: he wasn’t going to be bawled at by anyone any more.
There was no reply at first. Between the beard and the thatch of hair winked a pair of spectacles, two eyes wide open with surprise stared back at him as the new arrival levered himself up onto his elbows. ‘Morgan, God save us all, Ell be damned—and don’t speak to your adjutant like that!’
‘Christ, McDonald, I saw you killed dead in that God-awful clearing below the Battery—the Muscovites were making you look like a fucking colander—I’m sorry we left...’
‘Don’t bother yourself, man, I’ve got eighteen stab wounds and a shot-hole in me: the surgeon reckon I’d give Saint Sebastian a run for his money...’ both officers and the two orderlies laughed at this, ‘...and if it hadn’t been for Patrick Murphy—you know him, used to be right-marker of Number Six Company—who went at ‘em bald-headed, there’d be another captain’s commission up for grabs.’
So the voyage passed. They were nicknamed the Tin-Cushions’ by the other officers, but both men improved as rest, food and sea air took effect, Morgan soon mastering his crutches and soon helping his chunky companion to get out of bed, then slowly to shuffle round the deck, getting a little stronger and more mobile as each day passed. They managed to piece together as much as they knew about the great battle, the fortunes of their own men and officers and, from the newspapers that arrived only a few days out of date, a list of dead and wounded. But both of them quickly tired of the hackneyed joke about vacancies caused by death and wounds and how much money this would save them. Instead, as the numbers mounted showing how ploughed-up the regiments had been, they just thanked God to be alive and relatively whole.
Just before they touched Malta the surgeons allowed Morgan down to the orlop to see the men for the first time. They lay on palliasses on the broad decks, scuttles open when the swell allowed it
, as clean and comfortable as possible.
A clutch of 95th had gathered in one corner, by far the most cheerful of whom were two men who had lost a leg apiece. Morgan visited daily, jumping down the gangways with increasing speed, to read extracts from the papers to them. Mr William Russell’s accounts of the war in The Times were always greeted with great mirth, for his lurid prose and its focus on generals and admirals had little in common with the experience of the infantry.
Their favourite diversion, though, was Punch. The men crowed with pleasure at the magazine’s ruthless pursuit of certain generals—the martinet sir George Brown in particular—and regiments like the 46th that had been foolish enough to catch the editor’s eye. Next to Punch they adored the serialization of Hard Times in Charles Dickens’s own Household Words, listening intently to the convolutions of his story whilst puffing at their pipes. Although Morgan knew most by sight, none was from his company, but young Conaughton—who had lost two fingers from his left hand—swore that he’d seen Colour-Sergeant McGucken, alive and swearing hard, being loaded onto another hospital ship.
Morgan scarcely dared hope that McGucken had survived that ghastly melee in the brush. He thought back to how the burly Scot had bandaged his hands and encouraged him before regimental boxing back in Weedon; how he’d beaten that damned rifleman off him at the Alma; how he’d supported his every decision on picket and in the trenches; how he’d protected the men—and him—from that swine Carmichael and how he’d fought like a lion at the Battery. It was a strange thing, but despite the huge social gulf that separated the Glasgow tough and the Cork gentleman, Morgan had no better friend. As long as they lived they would always be ‘sir’ and ‘Colour-Sergeant’ to each other, but whatever the titles suggested, they were as equal and close as any brothers.
***
‘Goddamn you, Finn.’ Morgan grinned at the groom as he limped back into the tack-room in Glassdrumman and threw himself down in the big cracked leather chair, the stuffing of which was just beginning to stick out from both arms. ‘You’ve hardened poor Daisy’s mouth good style with your great clumsy cavalry ways.’
The chestnut mare had just been bought by Billy Morgan before Tony went to the Crimea and he’d never ridden her. So now he’d taken her for a canter over the meadows below the house and found her slow to respond to the bit—a sure sign that his father had spent more time astride her rather than the gentle, careful Finn.
‘Clumsy cavalry, is it, yer honour?’ Finn retorted. He was rubbing some dubbin into a bit of age stiffened, leather tack whilst he spoke. ‘If the papers are to be believed, yous was damn glad o’ the Light and Heavy brigades at Balaklavy. Showed them Muscovites how to fight didn’t we, so?’
‘Fight! The bloody donkey-walloping cavalry?’ Morgan bellowed in mock outrage. ‘They don’t know the meaning o’ the word. Why, there’s only one thing that puts Russ in his place and that’s a bit of Birmingham steel with one of the old 95th on the end of it!’
‘Spoken like a true flat-foot infantryman, all due respect to ye.’ Finn crowed in response, ‘Always the bloody same you lot was, whenever there was fight out in the Punjab, the cavalry had to save the day.’
Morgan thought back to one of the last times that he and Finn had been together here in the tack-room. Then the rubicund Colonel Kemp and Finn had relived the glories of slaughtering Sikhs back in the Forties—Morgan could still remember how their faces glowed over the tales of death and destruction. He wondered, as the years passed, if time would soften the memories that haunted him at the moment? When he was as old as Kemp, would he remember the suffering and misery with a rosy affection?
‘But, sir, the papers tell us what a dreadful fix you’re in out there.’ Finn dropped the craic as quickly as Morgan had started it. ‘Bad rations, no warm clothes and too few men to do the job. Is it true that the Frogs have had to take over most of the British siege lines—and will Austria get involved like The Times keeps saying she ought to?’ Finn may only have been a groom and an ex-lancer, but he was nobody’s fool, thought Morgan.
‘Why ask me, Finn? I’m just an infantry subaltern who’s more interested in rum rations and sentry rosters than the bloody politics. Why, I scarce saw a Frog the whole time I was out there—all the buggers did, as far as I could see, was fart away on their trumpets and then claim that they won Inkermann for us when they did nothing worth telling.’ Morgan realized that he was in danger of lapsing into a caricature of himself. ‘But yes, you’re right about the tents, the food and the sheer amount of work that we have to do with not enough troops.’ He added more thoughtfully, ‘Mind you, it must have been much worse after I left, what with the storms and the cold that the papers tell us about. As for the Austrians, God knows. If you listened to all the shaves around camp last November, you’d have thought that the Tsar’s lads were ready to chuck in the towel, but it didn’t seem like that at Inkermann, I can tell you. They fought like very devils, they did, and reckon that we’ll need every pair of willing hands if we’re going to take Sevastopol this year. So, Austrians, Italians, Froggies—the more the bloody merrier, I say, and if it saves my boys from getting their cocks shot-off, then I’m all for it.’
Finn had seen how the young officer was when he got home not long before Christmas. The whole household had expected him to be full of vim and vigour, wounded but glamorously so, brimming with tales of blood and thunder. Instead they’d found him quiet, almost dejected, painfully thin and endlessly tired, obviously glad to be home but irked and frustrated by his injury. Now he was short-tempered where he’d always been full of fun with the servants and even the blue-eyed Jeanie Brennan—who’d quite fancied her chances now that Mary was out of the way—had found the young master ‘...really not himself, so he’s not.’
‘Jesus, Finn, the Crimea’s bloody ghastly—it’s not the fighting so much—it’s just the ceaseless pressure of having to put a good face on everything for the sake of the men and pretend that it’s all going to be one, great glorious victory.’ Despite all sorts of kind enquiries from all sorts of kind people, Morgan hadn’t felt ready to talk to anyone about the real face of the war since he’d got home almost three months ago, ‘Some of the bastards that pretend to be officers, you know, Finn, all puffed-up with self-importance until the lead begins to fly and then where are they? Bloody skulking miles to the rear.’
‘Sure, your honour, we had an officer just like that in the Sixteenth.’ But as Finn charged off down one of his Sikh Wars byeways, Morgan’s attention wandered.
He couldn’t admit to Finn the paralysing fear that he some-times felt—he could hardly admit it to himself, but all the marks were there, especially the terrible dreams. No matter how much brandy he’d had to keep the night horrors away, still they came back, some nameless, horrid, shapeless thing stalking him through brush and braes. Whatever this malign presence was, it meant him a great deal of harm and the hours between three and five were usually spent in jumpy, nervous dread of...of what? His lowest point came when he woke cold and wet with piss. It happened only a handful of times, Seamus his valet stripping the bed personally but never mentioning it.
All this made Morgan a poor suitor for Maude Hawtrey. Their first meeting after his return was at church on Christmas Eve, she dressed in dark-red velvet, hat and veil, he in his best coat and an odd, leather slipper on his bloated foot. Maude charmed, almost gushed in her chilly way, asking him if he would come to her family’s Winter Ball in January—it was for the soldiers’ charity after all—before she was overcome with embarrassment when she realized her gaffe. He was polite, he was courteous, but try as he might he could put no gallantry or real warmth into his answers. What on earth did he now have in common with people like that—gentle, decent folk for sure—when his mind and soul were still at the war?
Meanwhile, the newspapers never rested from lambasting the conduct of the war. He’d half-expected that the pasting given to the Russians at Inkermann would mean that the Allies could push even harder at a weakened
Sevastopol, taking the city before the worst of the winter weather set in. But no, the opposite was true. A dreadful storm soon after the battle had destroyed quantities of siege stores, ammunition was scanty, no one had thought about getting reinforcements out to the Crimea in meaningful numbers and the men were woefully short of decent rations and proper clothing. Punch made him smile. There was one cartoon of a tattered Guardsman and a bearded, pipe-smoking tramp, from the Line discussing things as a storm whipped around their threadbare uniforms.
‘Well, Jack! Here’s good news from home. We’re to have a medal,’ said the Guardsman.
‘That’s very kind. Maybe one of these days we’ll have a coat to stick it on?’ answered the other ruefully.
Each day came more news of dwindling numbers caused not by battle but by disease, hunger and incompetence with every sign that the garrison of Sevastopol was snug and smug inside its walls. As he read of his friends’ and the regiment’s hardships, he struggled to understand his own feelings. He was warm, comfortable and, above all, no one was shooting at him here in Glassdrumman; he was a certified hero with holes in him to prove it; even if he were burning to return his wounds prevented it; he’d done more than most; and, anyway, by the time he’d be fit for duty, Sevastopol must have fallen. But if everything were so damned rosy, why was he so damned wretched?
To Do and Die Page 27