To Do and Die

by Patrick Mercer

  ‘What are we going to do, your honour?’ Keenan yelled above the noise, pressed hard against the mortar fifteen yards away.

  What indeed? Morgan could barely control his bowels, let alone think coolly. He’d committed both his and Keenan’s groups to this hare-brained scheme, now he must get them out of it. To run back to the last line of trenches was possible, but it would leave them with the same dilemma of mortars that were still dangerous and the enemy in control of the field. No, the only choice was to attack, but would his legs obey him, let alone the men?

  ‘Pegg, get every man reloaded.’ The young lance-corporal nodded, rolled on his back below the horse’s balding belly and busied himself with a cartridge. ‘Saent Keenan, when my party moves, fire as hard and fast as you can at those bastards yonder. Keep firing until you hear me shouting for you or I send a runner back with orders to bring your boys up: got it?’ Sergeant Keenan had to cock his hands behind his ears to hear above the noise, but he nodded his under-standing. ‘Pegg, you ready?’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ said Pegg with no confidence in his voice at all.

  Morgan pulled a signal rocket from his haversack. If he could fire it parallel to the ground, straight into the gun’s embrasure, he would get a trail of smoke that might give them some cover and, if it was a good shot it might cause the gunners to fire blindly into the cloud—if it wasn’t damp and if he didn’t get shot in the process. There were an awful lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘mights’ in that plan, thought Morgan.

  He shuffled out of cover on both knees and aimed the cardboard tube straight at the distant embrasure. A bullet kicked up the dirt nearby as Morgan ripped the wire loop out of the initiator, but the rocket flew remarkably straight, sparks and smoke belching out behind it as it plunged into the gap. He paused; nothing happened except that the veil of smoke began to thin.

  ‘Wait, lads, wait.’ Morgan looked at his men, crouched ready to leap over the dead horseflesh.

  Then the gun fired. The air hummed as it was ripped around them, oak splinters flew from the mortar base and the barrel sang as balls gouged it.

  ‘Come on!’ Morgan was on his feet and running for his life. Those afternoons at school in the new spiked shoes that Mother had bought him, knees pumping round the track, lungs bursting: but there was no smoke in his face then, no pistol in his hand, no shrieking lads at his elbow and no one like this Russian who looked up at him as he leapt, chest heaving, onto the sandbag wall.

  He dodged a jab from a rammer, fired his pistol straight into the man’s neck and was then pushed down amongst the rest of the crew by Pegg’s and the others’ arrival. Rifles fired, butts flew into faces: one Russian struck out with a wooden trail spike, missing Cattray by an inch and got nine inches of slender steel poked hard into his liver. Then it was finished. The men all jostled together in the tiny, corpse-strewn space either side of the gun’s carriage. They were blown, numbed by the sprint and the sudden violence—but alive.

  ‘Some ‘wee-gun’—it’s a carronade.’ Morgan looked at the stumpy, iron barrel on its crude sea-carriage. ‘Reload it; if we can turn it on the enemy, we’ll even the odds a bit.’

  Whilst Pegg and Cattray tinkered with cartridge bags and shot, Morgan took Duffy with him up the trench towards the enemy infantry. For twenty yards the digging was shallow but straight, then it angled hard to the right. A bullet whined over Duffy’s head.

  ‘Bloody hell, sir, that was one of ours.’ The round had been fired by the company, doing their best to support the assault.

  ‘Aye, keep down. Nothing personal, but they’ve got no idea where we are,’ said Morgan as they rounded the angle and looked straight down a long trench-line of sheltering Russian infantry.

  ‘Dear God, fire and run, Duffy!’ But the soldier didn’t need his officer’s order. Throwing his rifle straight into the shoulder he aimed at the nearest Russian, forgetting that he hadn’t reloaded. Russian and Englishman looked at each other, then Duffy dropped his weapon and floored the leading Russian with a punch that would have decided matters if he’d used it in the ring at Weedon all those months ago. Another man tried his luck, this time with the bayonet, but Duffy swept the blade to one side and felled him with a right hook.

  ‘Run, sir,’ and with a pair of bruised Muscovites blocking the trench behind them, they both turned tail.

  Two more rifle bullets snapped past as they hurried back to Pegg and the carronade.

  ‘The Company are firing at us, Pegg,’ Morgan was stumbling as fast as he could go back down the trench, ‘...and there’s a whole lot of Musco...’

  ‘Don’t I bloody know it, sir...’ Pegg was beckoning Morgan as hard as he could, ‘...get out the way, shall yer?’ Pegg and Cattray had managed to manhandle the carronade up onto the back of the trench to cover a slight slope where the enemy could mass unseen—and that’s exactly what they were now doing.

  Morgan and Duffy’s brawling had brought the Russians spilling out of their forward position determined to eject the British from their trenches: fifteen, twenty of them had tumbled into the saucer of land and were now trotting into the attack.

  ‘Just get fuckin’ down, both on yer.’ Pegg yelled, flapping his arms almost hysterically. Morgan needed no further persuasion. Duffy and he dashed themselves to the ground as Pegg touched off the gun, a sheet of iron fanning lethally above their heads.

  If Pegg lacked maturity and morality he almost made up for it with flashes of common sense. He’d anticipated a counter-attack and had the gumption to get the brutish, heavy carronade into a position to deal with it and now his handiwork lay sprawled in front of him. Even at Alma’s charnel house or the abattoir of Inkermann, Morgan had never seen a single discharge cause such execution. Where there had been a score of husky Muscovites bent on their destruction there were now just mounds of bleeding flesh. The carronade was designed to clear ships’ decks of boarding parties at very close range, the short, broad barrel allowing the shot to spread wide and fast: that was precisely what it had done here. Men lay torn and ripped, some dead, most wounded, whimpering and calling for their mothers.

  ‘Well done, Corporal Pegg.’ Morgan and the others stared at the appalling destruction. ‘Reload, there’s plenty more where they came from,’ but no sooner had he spoken than another Enfield bullet whipped between them.

  ‘Sir, our own lot’ll have us away unless we let them know we’re here,’ Cattray rasped as they all shrank under the lee of the Russian gabions.

  Whenever there was a crisis, Morgan’s mind flashed to the pictures at home. In the kitchen corridor at Glassdrumman there was a print of a young lion of his father’s time, hoisting his scarlet coatee on a flagpole at some siege or other to show his comrades that he was king of the Froggie’s castle—if it had worked then, it might work now. He peeled off his smock, ripped the scarlet jacket from his back and jumped across to the signal mast dressed only in a gaudy, regimental-yellow silk shirt that he’d bought for a joke in Scutari during a subaltern’s spree—it was all that he had that was clean.

  ‘Fuckin’ell, sir, our boys’ll never shoot you in that...’ Pegg shouted from the safety of the trench, ‘...they’ll be laffin too ‘ard.’

  As if to prove Pegg right, one of his own men’s bullets chipped the signal-mast six feet above his head as Morgan struggled with the halyards.

  ‘Aye, Corporal Pegg, remind me to order more musketry practise,’ said Morgan as the red coat at last ran up the pole. But if the coat stopped the British fire it had the opposite effect on the Russians, for as Morgan tied off the rope, shots flew at him from further up the trench sending him scuttling for cover.

  ‘They’re coming again, boys, be ready,’ and as if to confirm Morgan’s words, two round black grenades about the size of cricket balls came arcing towards them. One bounced off the back of the emplacement and skipped away harmlessly, but the second landed perfectly amongst them.

  ‘Geddown, sir!’ Cattray pushed Morgan round an angle of the trench as the bomb exploded with a yellow fla
sh, sending fragments whipping and whining around them all. Cattray was hurled bodily by the blast against the carronade’s carriage, blood pouring from several jagged wounds in his back and thighs. His face lay flattened against the wood of the gun’s base, both legs thrown heavily over Morgan’s calves.

  ‘Fire, Pegg, for God’s sake!’ shouted Morgan, pushing Cattray’s dead weight off him and groping for his pistol.

  Corporal Pegg was still reeling from the concussion of the grenade, but he stumbled towards the breech of their car-ronade, pulled its lanyard and produced another ear-tearing bang that flung a canister blindly at the assaulting Russians. How effective it was none of them could tell, for the three survivors now sprawled at the bottom of the emplacement, tensed against the enemy who would appear over the lip of the trench at any moment. They all scrabbled to bring their weapons into the aim and as a clutch of Muscovites hung breathlessly above the defenders, they all fired, knocking the Russians back and out of sight.

  ‘Right, lads, we’ve only our bayonets now...’ said Morgan as he dropped his Tranter and picked up Cattray’s rifle, ‘…remember what they did to Mr Parkinson, die hard!’ The trio dragged themselves to their feet, steel pointing at the parapet ready for the end.

  Then feet pounded and in an instant the trench was topped by ten, a dozen Russians led by an officer, panting, looming over them. But they paused, staring, the Muscovites at the defiant handful below them, the British at the last sight they would see. The officer raised his sword slowly, his men bringing their muskets carefully into the aim.

  Like a vast scythe a volley cut into the enemy. Enfield balls thumped home, pitching the officer forward on top of them, catching the others in the head and shoulders, hurling them away and out of sight of Morgan, Pegg and Duffy. They ducked as another pulse of lead swept over their heads, the enemy officer twitching at their feet.

  ‘It’s the company, sir...’ Pegg could hardly believe that he was still alive, ‘...Jock McGucken must be bringing them forward.’

  Indeed he was. In no time Colour-Sergeant McGucken was peering down at them, his rifle levelled across his belly, a broad smile on his powder-grimed lips.

  ‘Why are you wearing that fuck-off shirt, sir?’

  ***

  The Malakoff’s and the Redan’s guns still raged in the distance, but here in The Quarries it was quiet. The men went about their duty in a trance, their eyes dull and flat as they dug pits for the dead, cleaned their weapons or were simply overcome by the brain-numbing exhaustion that battle brings.

  ‘And let me know how much ball we need...’ Morgan, his gaudy shirt clinging to him in the breeze, was sitting on the lip of a trench alongside Sergeant Keenan, ‘...and get as many illumination and signal rockets as you can lay your hands on before dark; but you’ll need to be sharp, every-one’ll be after them and the quartermaster won’t have brought up enough, that’s one thing you can be certain of.’ He was rambling whilst trying desperately not to let his tiredness show.

  ‘Aye, sir, I’ll get all that lot sorted out.’ Keenan was wrestling with a notebook and blunt pencil. They’d accounted for all their dead but the non-commissioned officers were still trying to find out where the scattered wounded were; meanwhile they needed more ammunition for whatever lay ahead. Keenan’s brow was furrowed as he struggled to add up the long column of figures. ‘And I’ll see whether Doctor Fergusson has picked up Slater an’ Rhodes. Sar’nt Ormond thinks that they made their own way back to the dressing station, but I’ll check when I go back to the quartermaster, your honour.’

  From the trenches at the bottom of the hollow where they were sitting, the outer defences of The Quarries formed a shell-smashed horizon, only about two hundred and fifty paces away. The June sky was clear and blue and against it figures shuffled into a little crowd where the doctor and his pair of nurses were doing their best to sort and dress the wounded. Mostly they were Russians, but one or two of their own men had been carried there by their comrades. At the same time, both Keenan and Morgan had noticed Mary’s silhouette as she bandaged and dabbed at the injured.

  ‘Yes, do that, and give my compliments to Doctor Fergusson and Mrs Keenan and thank them for what they’re doing for the men.’ Morgan had seen how the doctor and his people had followed close—too close—behind the fighting. But before you go, I must deal with Corporal Pegg, can you get him, please, Sar’nt Keenan?’

  ‘I will, sir. It’ll be about that priest, will it? That was an ugly business and the men are talking about it already. What’re you going to do with him?’

  ‘I don’t know, yet: let’s see what he’s got to say for himself, shall we?’

  Pegg was shouted for and in no time he was there. It was almost as if he’d been waiting to be called, expecting a fillip or some word of praise. The very moment he heard his name he’d pulled his smock tight, straightened his cap and pushed his pouch and bayonet well back on his hips. Now he broke into a few paces of a regulation march as he approached his company commander, snapping to a halt just by the sandbag wall where Morgan and Keenan waited. The smart little stamp would have impressed them all had it not come crashing down on the glass detonator of a fougasse that no one had seen.

  On the ridge Mary and the others felt the bang before they heard it. A rolling thud echoed across the saucer of land and by the time that the doctor’s party turned to look, a dirty cloud of dust and smoke hung over the very spot where the nurse’s husband and lover had been.

  ‘Mother of God,’ murmured Mary, hardly loud enough for anyone to hear. Then, in a garbled shriek, ‘Pass that satchel, will you, Mrs Polley?’ Her hand was shaking as she reached across to snatch a bag of dressings from her companion. She’d never run so hard. Even at Inkermann as the splinters buzzed around her, she couldn’t remember ever having dashed like that before, her boots skidding on the gravel slope, one hand grasping the satchel, the other pulling her skirt and petticoat high to free her legs.

  By the time he’d gathered his wits and pushed himself out of the trench where the explosion had thrown him, Mary was beside Morgan. The yellow shirt was spattered with earth and grass, his ears sang, he could see nothing except the great flash that had imprinted itself on his eyeballs, but one glance told her that he was shocked and battered but not much else. He stumbled about trying to take in the scene.

  Everything smelt of explosive, and by a blackened crater no more than twelve inches across lay the scorched form of Lance-Corporal Pegg. He twisted slowly, unconsciously, every bit of clothing up his right side charred by the flame that had briefly engulfed him.

  ‘Here, Tony, help me sit him up can’t you?’ Mary only had time for Keenan. Now she was beside her husband, pushing and pulling him into a sitting position. ‘Here, jewel, take a wee sip, now.’ Keenan was semi-conscious, his beard, whiskers and hair had been singed into a frizzy, evil-smelling tangle whilst his face and hands were already blistered. Mary held a flask of spirits to his lips whilst Morgan, his own senses barely recovered, crouched behind the man, doing his best to support him. The liquor spilled from Keenan’s cracked lips as he coughed.

  ‘We’ve done too much of this, Captain Morgan.’ Mary gently held her husband’s head, instantly reminding Tony of the Alma where the pair of them had first knelt round a torn James Keenan. ‘When are we going to be away from this hell?’

  ‘Mary, my love, I don’t know...’ but their muttered conversation was never allowed to finish.

  ‘All fart and no shit, lucky for you, sir.’ McGucken had been at the far end of the trench line checking weapons when he’d heard the bang. Grabbing a gaggle of men, he’d raced back to his company commander’s position. ‘The charge was damp—must have been a ‘partial’—how is he?’ McGucken asked one of the regimental hospital orderlies who, breathless after he’d dashed to the scene, was dabbing at Pegg with a pad of lint.

  ‘He’ll be all right, Colour-Sar’nt. Won’t ‘ave to shave for a while, mind,’ replied the orderly.

  ‘Aye, he only had a b
it o’ bum-fluff anyway,’ said McGucken without much sympathy in his voice. ‘How’s your man, Mrs Keenan?’

  ‘I’ve seen him worse, thank you, Mr McGucken,’ and she had. The burns were bad enough, but they were superficial and nothing like the great hole in his neck that had pumped blood so frighteningly at the Alma.

  ‘Right, yous lot, get these two on the stretchers and get them up to Doctor Fergusson over there.’ McGucken pointed up to the skyline above. ‘Come on, then, they won’t get any better with you lot gawpin’ at ‘em, move yerselves.’ The soldiers needed the rasp of the Colour-Sergeant’s tongue to jolt them out of the torpor that battle brings.

  The two stretchers bobbed away up the slope, one weary man on each corner and a pale girl fussing around the blanket that covered Sergeant Keenan. As the party left, Mary turned; ‘We’ve much to talk about, Tony.’ One hand rested on her husband’s shoulder, but her eyes were full of love for Morgan. ‘You know where to find me.’

  ***

  ‘Stand up!’ McGucken had seen the approaching horsemen long before Morgan, now he leapt to his feet and saluted. Company commander and colour-sergeant had been deep in discussion about the details of casualties, reinforcements, where the next rum ration would come from and a host of other things, absorbed in their own, battle-weary world, scarcely noticing as files of fresh troops tramped past. Only the noise of hooves close by distracted them.

  ‘Well, young Morgan, you won’t realize it just yet, but that was a prime bit of soldiering.’ Brigadier-General Pennefather and one of his Staff officers had trotted over from the marching ranks of the 2nd Division. ‘Those mortars were the key to the whole position: The Quarries are ours and now we’re all set to go for the Redan.’

  Morgan, exhausted, hauled himself to his feet. ‘Thank you, sir, but it’s these boys that have done it, not me.’ He nodded wanly towards a group of his men who were shovelling earth over Russian bodies collected at the bottom of a trench.