‘And that’s just what I hoped you’d say,’ Pennefather leaned on his saddle’s pommel. ‘But you were at their head and...’ he pointed towards the long files of fresh troops who were tramping towards the next battle, ‘...they all need every bit of leadership they can get.’
Morgan smiled wryly to himself, that phrase seemed to be on everyone’s lips at the moment.
‘No, I reckon that you’ve turned the key that will unlock Sevastopol today: you’ve done the Ninety-Fifth proud, young Morgan...’ Pennefather turned his horse back to his command, ‘...there’ll be promotion in it.’
Promotion: was that really what he wanted? thought Morgan. Promotion meant more of this terror and pride, more of this doubt and triumph, didn’t it? But promotion meant commanding more of the men he’d learnt to love and respect, watching their simple faith in him and knowing that, whilst he drew breath, he could never betray them.
‘Thank you, sir, I’ll pass on your comments to the men.’ Morgan was too numb with exhaustion to think of anything more to say.
Morgan stiffened to attention as Pennefather rode away and as he did so, four of the boys stumbled past carrying a heavily-laden, grey blanket, the number 1124 inked on its edge. That was poor, dead Cattray: he’d had his last promotion.
THE END
Glossary
Adjutant: the commanding officer’s principle staff officer, usually a captain
Aliwal: battle in the first Sikh War, January 1846, where the 16th Lancers, Finn’s old regiment, won the day
Battalion: an infantry unit of about seven to eight hundred men commanded by a lieutenant-colonel. Confusingly, the term can be synonymous with ‘regiment’, thus, 95th Regiment of Foot that was only one battalion strong in the Crimea
Bourrach: Gaelic for a mess
Bore: the inside of a weapon’s barrel
Brevet: an honorary rank, given as a reward that carried extra pay but no authority
Brigade: in the Crimea, a British brigade consisted of three infantry battalions or five cavalry regiments, commanded by a brigadier-general
Caisson: a wheeled, horse-drawn wagon that contained artillery ammunition
Cap pouches: the small, leather pouch in which percussion or detonating caps for a rifle were kept
Canister: bullets contained in a cloth bag that was used by artillery against cavalry or infantry at short range
Carbine: a short musket or rifle carried by cavalry and specialist troops
Chobham: the town in Surrey close to which the first, all-arms’ exercises occurred from 1852
Coatee: a waist-length jacket with swallow-tails
Colours: the pair of flags carried by each infantry battalion. They were carried by two ensigns and protected by two colour-sergeants
Commissariat: military logistics train
Company: the basic infantry unit, about seventy men strong, commanded by a captain. Each battalion had ten companies, two of which remained at the home depot for administration. There were two, specially picked companies: the Grenadiers and the Light
Craic: Gaelic for fun or banter
Croppies: Irish rebels of 1798, so named because of their short hair
Division: in the Crimea, six battalions of infantry or ten regiments of cavalry commanded by a major-general
Dress the line: the practise of straightening a line of troops Dura mater: one of the three coverings of the brain, or meninges, that lie below the skull
Earthwork: fortification made from spoil rather than from masonry
Embrasure: narrow slot cut in the wall of an earthwork from which artillery could be fired
Ensign: the most junior, commissioned rank in the infantry, later known as a second-lieutenant
Farrier: specialist cavalrymen who dealt with the horses’
shoes and metal-work.
Fermoy: major military depot in County Cork
Field officer: the mounted officers of an infantry battalion, viz the commanding officer, the senior major, the junior major and the adjutant
File firing: the practise of firing by alternate ranks
Firelock: a musket or rifle
Full screw: slang for a corporal
Gabion: large basket that, when filled with spoil, would protect personnel against shot and shell
Gaffs: iron spurs for game-cocks
Gallus: Gaelic for over-confident or showy
Greenjacket: British term for rifle regiments, the slang term
being ‘greenfly’
Haar: Gaelic for mist or fog
Hat: used by grenadiers as a term of contempt for non-grenadiers. It originated when grenadiers were given tall, mitre-like caps to wear which allowed them to hurl a grenade without knocking their headdress off, unlike the tricorne hats of the other companies
Jaunty: small gig or carriage
Limber: the wooden frame used to tow guns and their ammunition into action
Lunette: a crescent-shaped trench or earthwork
Malakoff: the main, Russian earthwork defending Sevastopol
Mamelon: a lesser, Russian earthwork designed to screen the Malakoff from assault
Minie: the principle by which an expanding lead bullet fits into a rifled barrel; named after the French inventor Musket: smooth-bore firearm
Oltenitsa: battle of 4th November 1853 on the Danube where the Russians were defeated by the Turks
Orlop: deck or decks below the water-line
Overalls: tight fitting trousers worn by all cavalrymen and infantry officers
Parapet: the front lip of a trench as opposed to the parados, the back lip
Parallels: trenches that were used to approach a besieged town
Phoenix Park: Dublin’s central park
Picket: a small group of dismounted lookouts or guards
Piece: an artillery gun’s barrel
Pipeclay: white dye used to stain leather equipment for parades
Poshteen: Hindi word for sheepskin outer coat
Queen’s regiments: units belonging to the Crown rather than the Honourable East India Company
Redan: a technical term for an earthwork of acute, defensive angles, used to name one of the lesser Russian defences outside Sevastopol
Redoubt: an earthwork usually designed to mount artillery pieces
Regiment: a cavalry or artillery unit, but see ‘battalion’
Sabot: the wooden disc that held a round shot stable in the bore before firing
Scunner: Gaelic for an irritating person. Also used to ‘take a scunner’ to someone
Sepoys: Indian infantrymen
Sergeant-Major: in the 1850s, the senior, non-commissioned rank in a battalion or regiment
Shamrock: Irish slang for a prod with a bayonet Sharpshooter: specially trained marksman usually, by the 1850s, armed with a rifle
Shell: explosive ordnance, a ‘star-shell’ being an illuminant Shell jacket: the waist length, undress jackets worn for informal parades or field work
Sinope: the port on the south coast of the Black Sea where the Russian Admiral Nachimov sank a Turkish fleet in November 1853
Sir Harry: Sir Harry Smith, the victor of Aliwal
Subbies: slang for subalterns, the most junior commissioned ranks
Tape: a chevron or badge of rank
Thurible: small container for incense used in religious services
Tranter: a designer of revolving pistols popular with officers in the 1850s
Wing: half a battalion, usually four companies commanded by a major. Also, the heavy, gold bullion shoulder straps worn by officers in the light and grenadier companies
Zouave: French-Algerian troops that saw much service in the Crimea
Historical Note
An infantry battalion on active service tends to exist in a bubble of its own (at least, that was my experience) and all the diaries and contemporary accounts of the Crimea would lead me to believe that things were exactly the same then. Officers and soldiers were consumed with survival and the everyday
needs of supplying large numbers of troops in the field whilst keeping the enemy at bay. But, whilst Morgan and McGucken would, doubtless, have told statesmen, politicians and generals to ‘go hang’, readers might like a slightly broader perspective of the war.
First, the term ‘Crimean War’ is a misnomer. Until Kinglake published his eight volume Invasion of the Crimea in 1877, it was more generally known as the ‘Russian War’, and so it should be. Similarly, modern public perception of the war revolves around a single cavalry charge and the doings of a handful of militant nurses, but the reality is rather different.
In fact, the conflict that lasted from 1853-1856, caused more casualties than the American Civil War and ranged over several different fronts from the Baltic to the Atlantic via the Black Sea and the Caucuses, with Britain playing a mainly maritime part and a less significant role in the ground war than many imagine. It plunged a continent into turmoil, sowed the seeds of revolution in Russia, caused the redefinition of several European countries and their colonial influences, destroyed a government in Britain and, perhaps most significantly, provided the platform for the emergence of a new Germany. Indeed, had the Russian War never occurred or the result had been different, would the events of 1870, 1914 and, arguably, 1939 followed?
There is a strangely contemporary feel to this war, as well. It saw the unravelling of Russia followed by a new regime in that great empire, Germany more powerful, catastrophic friction between Christians and Muslims, Chechens and Russians and the emergence of hotspots like Jerusalem, Istanbul, Sarajevo and Grozny. All of those names continue to make headlines today.
I last served with the descendants of Morgan’s Regiment in 1998. Had I said then, with uncharacteristic prescience, that their next, serious, bout of active service would be in Afghanistan not many miles from where their great-grand-fathers fought, I would have been laughed to scorn—and quite right too! Today, though, if someone predicted that the same regiment would one day be told to embroider the battle-honour ‘Sevastopol’ on their Colours for the second time in one-hundred and fifty years, how many of them would dismiss the possibility?
Author Note
I have a photograph of Anthony Morgan fifty years after he fought in the Crimea. It shows an old man dressed up in his campaign kit to delight his grandson, a boy of four who’s holding his grandfather’s hand outside their house in County Cork. Whilst the boy smiles, though, the old soldier lours out at us, his clay pipe firmly clamped between his teeth, his jaw set and determined.
There’s another photograph in the Regimental History taken in the same year, 1904, at the Sandbag Battery at Inkermann. A gang of old 95th men, all white whiskers and watch-chains, are visiting the site of one of the greatest feats of arms in British military history.
In 1992 I tried to find this desolate spot outside Sevastopol (I think I was the first Briton to do so since those veterans eighty-eight years before), but after much searching and swearing amongst a tightly-planted fir wood, I still wasn’t sure that I had found it. Certainly, there was an eroded bank of the right dimensions facing in the right direction, but it was only when I scuffed my boot through the loose soil and rough grass that I was convinced. Just below the surface were the bones of the men who had perished there. Ribs, femurs, fragments of skull were mixed up with spent bullets, percussion caps, the broken tip of a Russian bayonet and even a British regimental button. The story had to be told.
Tony Morgan was a real man in a real regiment - 95th (The Derbyshire): both were at the heart of some of the most vicious fighting of the Crimean War, but there the similarity ends. I’ve used the triumphs of the regiment as faithfully as I can as the framework for the fictitious Morgan’s story, taking names, personalities and vignettes from the war and bending them around the actual battles and skirmishes.
The characters speak as my soldiers and their women did in the late twentieth century with a veneer of Victorian slang, for I feel sure that whilst weapons and technology have changed, fear, boredom, loyalty and plenty of military mores have not. Where I have used an obscure word, I have tried to make its meaning clear in the context, precise meanings being given in the glossary. Similarly, I hope that the weapons, tactics and formations of the time are explained in enough detail.
Patrick Mercer.
If you enjoyed To Do and Die you might be interested in Doctor Watson’s War by Patrick Mercer, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from Doctor Watson’s War by Patrick Mercer
Chapter One: 221b Baker Street
It was the smell of the place. The rooms that I'd agreed to take at 221b Baker Street with my new acquaintance, Mr Sherlock Holmes had been agreeable enough, close to the centre of Town, to the libraries and the hospitals where I studied, and the clubs where I could eat adequately. They were clean, warm and we were well looked after by the housekeeper, Mrs Hudson. But they smelt. They smelt incessantly and almost unendurably. They smelt of the damned chemicals that Holmes kept there, the chemicals with which, when he wasn't scraping away on his bloody violin, he tinkered all the time. Now, I can hear you asking, 'what sort of a medical man is it who can't abide the smell of chemicals? Ain't they the tools of his trade, don't he smell them all the time when he's in the laboratory and won't he get so used to them there that he don't notice them?' And I'd answer, 'yes, in the lab they're fine, because that's what you expect to smell'. But it's outside the lab, when they're somewhere you don't have to smell them that they bring back the ghosts.
Particularly ether. That strange, thin, acidic smell that gets into your clothes and your hair and sticks up your nostrils and, whilst it’s meant to deaden pain, tells you that there's a devil of a lot of it that you're just about to impose on someone else or have inflicted upon you. And that's why Baker Street could be unbearable; Holmes kept ether by the gallon and the place reeked of it. And the last time that I'd smelt ether out of its natural habitat held bad memories, bloody bad memories. That chemical smell was combined with the stink of hot canvas, the canvas of the dressing station of the 66th Regiment in a corner of hell. A dressing station is meant to be a place of help, succour and recovery, a pretty rough and ready place of recovery, I'll grant you, but not the blood-soaked charnel house that it became in late July a couple of years ago, just a few days after we'd marched from the banks of the Helmand into that godforsaken desert.
And those couple of years had been difficult. It wasn't the bullet in my shoulder that was the problem; not at all. That came out as good as gold in the hospital in Kandahar leaving me, I know, jerky with my left arm and a little hunched, but none the worse. No, it was the scar on my mind. I know others have seen things just as bad - I can remember those old Crimea and Mutiny boys whom I met when I was a lad, the poor old files who, even if they had all their fingers and toes, jumped a league when something went bang. They couldn't seem to concentrate on much and, so often, could be found flogging matches with their ribbons pinned to their chest and a faraway look in their eyes, not much good for anything else. Indeed, it was their stories and their case studies that got me so interested in medicine in the first place, never expecting I'd become a subject for some other sawbones to whet his appetite upon one day.
But, it wasn't bangs or loud noises that lit my fuse. No, it was odd things, the high-pitched cry of a newspaper seller, the sort of screech that you hear from a certain type of working girl which passes for laughter: unusual human noises. A particular note or timbre could bring all that yelling and shouting back to me as the tribesmen closed in, their steel flashing as bright as their eyes, blades hacking and stabbing till there wasn't a blind thing left alive around me. And even now, even two years later, such noises could still set off a sort of numbed panic or rip me shivering from sleep. So, I withdrew, I know I did. I tried to keep such things from my mind, I tried not to read the newspapers, I shunned my friends from the Regiment, even Private Bowler who's been with me throughout that ghastly time, from Kandahar to Gereshk and back again. Even loyal, decent, brave Bowl
er who'd slung me across the back of a mule when I was bleeding like a slaughtered sheep and protected that native girl like she was his own sister: even Bowler. I just wanted to rub all those memories out, to screw up the piece of paper upon which the wretched, painful story was written and to throw it in the fire.
How I misjudged the man with whom I chose to share those less than fragrant rooms in Baker Street. When Stamford first introduced me to him in the hospital laboratory - all set about by ether-like smells, please note - and Holmes had straight-away observed that I had the mark of Afghanistan upon me, I'd laughed and tried to ignore it. Why would he know, how could he know? It must have been a lucky guess. But I'd no sooner settled into our quarters and the smell had begun to settle on me, than the subject came up again. Holmes had already impressed me with his powers of deduction, his wonderful empathy, what he called his intuition, then, to illustrate the point, he'd volunteered how surprised I'd looked when first we'd met and he'd immediately linked me to Afghanistan. He explained the train of thought went through his mind - I'll remember it always:
"Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the Tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the Tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan."
As if these observations weren't enough, I'd been sharing rooms with Holmes for less than a week when he gave me another demonstration of his powers that utterly staggered me. After lunch he would write at a desk facing out of one of the rear windows. This, I’d noticed, was a daily habit of his, he'd be there for no more than forty-five minutes - I never asked what he wrote - and I would usually take this time to read the paper or just to think, sitting deep in an armchair with Holmes hunched over his papers on the other side of the room.
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