The Grass Memorial

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by Sarah Harrison


  The exigencies of the voyage had been made bearable by the memory of their glorious send-off and the hope of more glory to come. For the first few days it was as though they could still hear the shouts and cheers of the huge crowd that had followed them to the docks, the boys hallooing and tossing their hats in the air, the old men with tears in their eyes, the women and girls blowing kisses and waving their handkerchiefs. Their ears rang with the music of the bands,‘Cheer,Boys, Cheer’ and ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’, stirring tunes for an expedition whose success, surely, was a foregone conclusion.

  Later, when discomfort, seasickness and apprehension began to bite, they’d been able, borne on the strength of that public belief in their enterprise, to armour themselves in a sense of destiny. This after all was what they were if not exactly trained, then at least intended for. Even when in rough weather Harry went down to help calm the horses panicking in the hold, and saw in their rolling eyes the pure, violent terror of innocent victims he had told himself that the weather would pass, and with it the animals’ panic. Clemmie and Piper had no conception of what lay ahead. It wasn’t dread they felt. The difference between their fear now and their fear of a storm at home was only a question of degree. But the extent of their suffering was still terrible.

  The memory of the battened-down horse-holds during the ceaseless storms in the Bay of Biscay would remain with him for ever. It was nothing less than a vision of hell: dark and noisome, clamorous with the screams of the sick and terrified horses as the pitching of the ship sent them crashing into their mangers in the fitful semi-darkness, and the oaths and shouts of the officers and men, themselves already faint and nauseous, who had stood by their heads for more than twenty-four hours and were now in danger of being trampled to death in the panic of the animals they were there to save.

  Except for a very few there had been no room for the horses to lie down, but in the battering fury of the high seas they fell anyway, thrashing and convulsing against their neighbours, were hauled to their feet and fell again, on boards which were slick with blood, excrement, and vomit. With the smell of the lurching oil lamps, of ammonia, and of the vinegar thrown on the decks and wiped around the nostrils of the horses, the stench was enough to make even a well man retch, and its effect, especially on raw recruits who had never been to sea before, was catastrophic. Harry had been humbled by the stubborn, selfless courage of men, themselves in extremis, who in these terrifying circumstances put the lives of the horses before their own, going down time and again amid the lethally flying hooves, yelling oaths and endearments, using every scrap of their waning strength to right the animal, tugging and coaxing, fighting and cajoling, like a strange sort of lovemaking.

  Of his own horses, Piper had suffered worst, because he trusted least. Clemmie, more familiar with his voice and touch, had seemed to believe that he would see her through, but Piper felt only betrayal. From first to last he trembled with a seismic ague of fear and incomprehension, his nostrils gaped and sucked, his neck and shoulders were encrusted with a scummy lather of sweat. In the rough seas he did not simply fall but hurled himself back on to his hocks, or reared and crashed sideways, causing further mayhem among the horses next to him. All his incandescent youthful fire and energy, the pride of the parade ground, amounted to no more than a liability here.

  After the storms, came the heat. In the Mediterranean the temperature in the horse-holds rose to a toxic one hundred degrees. The surviving animals, themselves more dead than alive, hung alongside those already perished in their canvas slings like sides of meat in an abattoir. Others went mad, something Harry hoped never to witness again, and had to be shot. There would then follow the regular punishing business of dragging the heavy corpses up the companionway on to the deck and throwing them overboard. This activity, though it created more space, disturbed the other horses, so the whole grim business was undertaken against a background of stamping and slithering and the uneasy feeling that a stampede might be about to take place.

  Once as he had stood on deck watching the corpses bobbing in their wake, a man next to him had said: ‘Sad sight, sir, isn’t it?’

  ‘One I never thought to see,’ he agreed.

  ‘Any of yours there, sir?’

  ‘No, thank God.’

  ‘Mine’s gone.’

  Harry refrained from saying what he secretly felt, that the horses now sinking to the bottom of the sea might prove the lucky ones, and confined himself to a safe platitude.

  ‘At least his suffering’s over.’

  ‘Hers. My Lark.’

  Whether this was the mare’s name or a term of endearment Harry had no way of knowing, but it touched him. ‘Poor old girl. I have a mare too.’

  The man cast him a troubled look. ‘Will you be able to get us more horses, sir, when we get there?’

  ‘Of course. It will be an absolute priority.’

  He was shocked, both by the question and by the glibness of his own lie. It was the first time that his own authority had been called directly into account. He was an officer in whom was invested not just rites and privileges but responsibility too. Of course they would need more horses – the bobbing wake of corpses testified to that – but how would that be achieved? And would it even be possible?

  When they disembarked at Scutari the excitement of the horses at their new freedom was pathetic. As they led them, frisking and biting, through the shallow waves in blazing sunshine, the suffering they’d endured was all too plain to see. The pampered pets of Phoenix Park and Rotten Row were a sorry sight, and their released high spirits only emphasised their ribby flanks covered in galling and blisters, their scarred legs and staring coats.

  On the sand ahead a pack of yapping, curly-tailed dogs raced excitedly among the new arrivals. When one pack horse stumbled and fell for the last time in the surf, not five yards from terra firma, the dogs fell on it in spite of the best efforts of the men round about and began tearing and shaking it when it was not yet dead, releasing a torrent of dark matter into the clear water, which the rest of them waded through, inured to disgust. Only Piper, darting and leaping like a kite on the end of his taut rein, would not pass through, and Colin was obliged to make a lengthy detour to get him ashore.

  For the brief duration of their stay in Scutari, the conditions of men and horses were reversed, with the latter tolerably stabled, adequately if not satisfactorily fed, and at least content to be on dry land. The army on the other hand were billeted in an imposing but horrifically dilapidated Turkish barrack blocks, the dormitories alive with rats and the bedding so full of fleas that within twenty-four hours they were scratching themselves till the blood ran. The operation of the commissariat had largely failed, much of the supplies they had brought with them had not survived the journey in an edible condition, and very little had arrived here.

  Harry and Hector Fyefield were among those deputed to round up more horses, but it was a dismal scraping-of-the-barrel exercise. Three days’ exhaustive trawling of noisome back-street stables and outlying farms, struggling with the language problem and an apparently intractable reluctance on behalf of the locals to help their brave English allies, resulted in barely three dozen animals of which more than half were runtish and undernourished and fit only for pack-duty.

  Hector was scandalised. ‘These people are nothing but shiftless, filthy, cheating ruffians! Why the devil should we fight for them? I swear I’d rather be lined up with the Russians than with such a crowd of ne’er-do-wells.’

  Harry was tempted to agree. It seemed they had travelled this far, and suffered so much, to meet with nothing but a grudging hostility. It was now that they were glad of the officers’ wives who had accompanied their husbands, and of whom even the plainer and less spirited ones provided a reminder of a more normal life. Even Emmeline Roebridge’s endless piping complaints about the vermin, the diet, the heat, the natives and the need for any of it, were a source of some wry amusement and helped them to put up with it all more stoically.

&nb
sp; They were in Scutari no more than a month when, in early June, the order came through that they were to embark once again for the Bulgarian port of Varna. Though as a journey it did not compare in length to the one they’d recently endured it was still almost intolerable to have to go back on board ship, and especially to consign the horses, old and new, to the stifling torture of life below decks. True to form it was Piper who refused, with every quivering fibre, to do so, and since Harry would allow no one to resort to rough tactics it took half a dozen men exercising superhuman patience for more than an hour to get him up the gangplank and into the cauldron-like heat of the hold.

  They lost no horses on that three-day voyage, but if they had thought that they were moving to more comfortable and better-managed conditions they were wrong.As they approached, the Bulgarian coast presented an aspect of dramatic beauty – the luxuriant green of the alluvial plain backed by purple mountains wearing plumes of dark thundercloud – but greater familiarity did nothing to gladden the heart. The hectic colour and chaos of their arrival in the heat of afternoon provided a temporary distraction from the horrors to come. The quayside was a feverish Tower of Babel, a jabbering confluence of east and west, north and south, packed with more different nationalities, styles of dress, uniforms, and languages than it was possible to count, horses fretting and shying, piles of arms and cannonballs, a motley traffic of waggons and aribas, and the ubiquitous sharp-nosed curly-tailed dogs looking for scraps and spoiling for trouble. But as the troops began to move off, the dismal reality of Varna was apparent. A more desolate, neglected and squalid place would have been hard to imagine, the streets no more than open sewers, littered with dead dogs and busy with fat rats, very much alive. The wretched infantry were obliged to camp close to the town in what had clearly been a graveyard for Russians who had died of disease during an earlier campaign and where the water came up thick and green.

  So it was with mixed feelings of relief and trepidation that the cavalry set out to their own allotted position in Devna, fifteen miles to the north.

  Once clear of Varna, they had at first been struck by the beauty of the countryside. Plump, peachy Emmeline Roebridge, her sturdy gelding unencumbered by any sort of baggage, had been in raptures during the eight-hour march to the site of the cavalry camp.

  ‘Oh, but this is enchanting – look at the flowers! And this little path through the woods is exactly like Hampshire but even prettier, I think, and on a grander scale of course, and the birdsong – listen, George – I never imagined that going to war would be so delightful!’

  The birds were certainly beautiful, from the jewel-like finches flittering among the branches to the storks, trailing their spindly legs behind great white canopies of wing. And far, far above the kites and hawks, motionless on the currents of scorching air. And above them, so high as to be mere specks in the white heat of the sky, the slowly turning black blades that they would in time learn to recognise as vultures.

  Emmeline twittered away like a bird herself, the tribulations of recent weeks quite forgotten, and it would have taken an extremely churlish fellow to disagree with her opinion or dislike her for it. The wide undulating plains, soft hills bathed in sunshine and the dappled shade of the woods were certainly pleasant, and the situation of the cavalry camp itself around a fine lake and its attendant river infinitely more agreeable than the awful place they had just left.

  The sense of respite and relief, however temporary, prevented them from sensing the damp fumes of infection that rose from every fold in the land and even from the shining lake itself. George Roebridge thought it quite a joke to report to the others one pellucid evening that he had been speaking to one of the exotic, brigandly bashi-bazouks, who had told him that the place was known to the Turks as The Valley of Death. Amid the facetious bravado that greeted this information, Harry alone was quiet, contemplating for the first time the possibility that he might not see Rachel again.

  The Russian retreat from Silistria on the Danube in late June, following several months’ ferocious besieging of the town and a spirited (but almost spent) defence by the Turks, had little effect except to induce a slightly greater respect in the British Army for their despised allies. As Hector Fyefield commented languidly after dinner one night not long afterwards: ‘Thank God the ruffians are on our side . . . I heard they cut off Russian heads, ears, noses, whatever they could, and displayed them like damned hunting trophies on the walls of the city.’

  ‘Before they ate them, I dare say,’ said Harry drily, but the tenor of his remark was lost on Hector, and George.

  ‘Shouldn’t be in the least surprised!’ agreed the latter. ‘Plenty of fire but not a finer feeling between the lot of them!’

  ‘So first blood to the infidel,’ sighed Hector. ‘And much help we were to them.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Harry, ‘this means we’ll get out of this wretched hole.’

  George huffed. ‘I should hope so, or the Ruskies will be starting to think we don’t care to deal with them!’

  Since then thousands more had succumbed to cholera, and there was still not the least sign that Lord Raglan and his staff intended to move them. Day in day out they drilled in the heat. Weakened men were hastened to their crowded graves by the perverse insistence on ‘smartness’, and horses already ill-fed and in poor condition were ridden to a standstill. In between times their brigade commander lay around in the shade outside his pleasantly situated requisitioned villa, conserving his energy, sipping champagne and endlessly devising new kinds of meaningless activity. The officers and men under Cardigan entertained mixed feelings for their commanding officer. They smarted under his lash – both literally, in the case of those flogged for feeling to meet his exacting standards, and that of his cruel tongue – but they also felt a degree of pride in being who they were, the chosen ones, the swiftest and most skilful horsemen in the army, glittering in their matchless uniforms.

  At the end of June Cardigan departed with nearly two hundred men – hussars and light dragoons – to make a reconnaissance along the banks of the Danube. The party made a splendid sight as they left, brisk and unencumbered, because their leader had decreed that food and forage be kept to a minimum and tents were unnecessary. All but the most sceptical felt a certain stirring of the heart to see them. And then they disappeared. What had been foreseen as mission lasting no more than a few days stretched to a week, and more, and there was still no sign of them.

  It was nearly a fortnight later when Harry rode out with Emmeline Roebridge, he on Clemmie, she on the lighter and somewhat reduced Piper. In the wake of the epidemic military routine had relaxed, both of necessity and for the husbanding of men and resources. Even uniforms had been adapted and altered, in some cases discarded altogether in favour of more practical native clothing – loose cotton tunics and waistcoats, voluminous trousers, even, in the case of some of the more daring officers, turbans. Out of deference to Emmeline on this scalding afternoon Harry wore his uniform but it felt like a strait-jacket, and the innumerable insect bites all over his body were chafed raw by the rough material and smarted with sweat.

  They rode out of the valley, and into the cool shade of the low trees that crowned the hill to the north. Here they paused and let the horses hang their heads for a moment. It might have been the rising ground, the smooth grassy hill, Piper next to him, but Harry was swept by the memory of the last ride he had taken with Hugo, when they had stood on the edge of the flat-topped hill in the clean English weather to gaze at the White Horse. When Hugo had said there was no such thing as loving too much, and when they had encountered Rachel walking in the secret woods . . .

  ‘You’re miles away. Captain Latimer,’ said Emmeline.

  ‘My apologies.’

  ‘Were you in England?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Emmeline cocked her head flirtatiously. ‘A penny for your thoughts.’

  ‘They’re not worth even that much, I assure you.’

  ‘Then why not give them away?’<
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  ‘I was remembering a ride I took with my brother. Just something about the aspect of this place, the way it falls away . . . It couldn’t be more different in most respects but it put me in mind of that ride.’

  ‘Your brother remained at home?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  There was no point in sparing her discomfort, since Harry knew she would only continue her dainty interrogation until she was satisfied. Her hand flew to her mouth, there was no doubting her mortification.

  ‘No! Now I’m so ashamed.’ ‘There’s no need. How could you know?’

  ‘I do hope you didn’t think that I was implying anything . . . that your brother . . . Oh, dear, I can be such a fool!’

  Harry rebuked himself for having been too blunt, and was about to end the exchange by suggesting they move on when a man came round the shoulder of the hill below them and to their right, leading a horse at a snail’s pace.

  ‘Look!’ exclaimed Emmeline, her sympathy directed as usual towards the animal. ‘The poor thing – its leg – shall we go down?’

  ‘Wait a moment.’ He got out his spyglass and focused on the figures. Horse and man resembled an illustration from Cervantes – attenuated, spavined, barely able to remain upright, the animal limping so badly that its head nodded like that of a rocking horse. Though hatless, and coated with dust and grime, the man’s uniform was just distinguishable as that of the Hussars.

 

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