The Grass Memorial

by Sarah Harrison

‘At last!’ she cried, eyes shining, clasping her gloved hands.‘We’re really here!’ Exactly, Harry remembered, as he and Hugo had done when free at last of shoes, socks and jackets they ran on to the cool evening sand after the interminable journey north with Salter.

  All morning the operation continued, with the broad beach and its hinterland filling up with men and equipment and the sky with clouds, until at three o’clock it began to rain. With the rain the temperature dropped abruptly, and Emmeline went back into her cabin. A wind got up, not a gale such as they’d endured on the voyage from England but enough to make the exercise considerably more hazardous. Nerves and tempers frayed. The bawling of the sailors which had been good-natured before became impatient and bullying. An activity which would have been all in a day’s work to them, swarming down the sheer side of a steamer on swaying, sodden ropes into small boats which the waves were tugging and tossing in every direction – was a dismaying one for the wretched foot soldiers, many of them sick with colic, dysentery and worse. Fear and discomfort were heaped on indignity. The rain picked up, lashing their faces, and a great many of their kit bundles fell into the sea.

  Harry went down at night after dinner to see the horses. Since leaving Varna he had been assigned another charger, Deny, a heavier horse than Piper, beside whom Betts, a pasty little monkey of a man, was like a dwarf. Betts was only twenty-five, the same age as Harry, but could have been any age from twenty to forty. Until the war he’d earned a living at one of the famous London breweries. One of the great dray horses had gently but firmly stood on his foot a few years back, and he walked with a jerky limp which only added to his all of indomitable cockiness. As well it might for in spite of the limp, his rickety frame and his deathbed cough, he had already survived several bouts of sickness and come through unscathed.

  Down in the hold Harry went first to Deny, a homely bay gelding with feathered heels and a mealy nose, not sufficiently handsome in the first place for the depredations of the voyage to have spoiled his looks. Harry made a fuss of him and he nodded and stretched out quivering, hopeful lips. Deny was sturdy and willing, a horse that a child could have ridden, but entirely unproved. In spite of his name, Harry suspected him of being one of the horses rounded up in Varna, and therefore not accustomed to luxury.

  Betts was crouched down by Clemmie’s legs, rubbing her pasterns with liniment. When Harry arrived he would have got up, but Harry motioned him not to.

  ‘Captain Latimer, sir.’

  ‘Carry on, Betts.’

  ‘Sh.’

  When Harry went to Clemmie’s head she turned her face into his chest in an attitude it was impossible not to interpret as despair. Betts hauled himself up and propped himself with one hand on her flank. He swayed a little with the motion of the ship; blinked fast a few times in the punchdrunk way he had before speaking.

  ‘When are they going to let us off, sir?’

  ‘Tomorrow, I believe.’

  ‘Weather’s foul, sir. How they going to get the horses off in this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I hope there’s going to be some forage for ’em, sir.’ He slapped Clemmie’s side.‘Otherwise you and the other gents’ll find yourselves quicker running after the Russians than riding these poor things. Their saddles’ll be too ’eavy for ’em.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Betts,’ said Harry, more from duty than conviction, ‘we’ll be provided for.’

  ‘Sh.’ Betts hawked richly and spat a yellow gob with fearsome speed and accuracy into the gulley at the foot of the bulkhead. He blinked rapidly. ‘Glad to ’ear it, sir.’

  * * * * *

  All night it rained and the next morning at first light it was still doing so, but in a slow drizzle. Seen through the spyglass, the aspect of the beaches could not have been more different than the previous day’s hopeful bustle. There were only a few tents and on the upper reaches of the sand and among the dunes sleeping men lay in the open, wrapped in their soaking blankets, like corpses in winding sheets. Piles of supplies, still lying where they had been unloaded, looked no longer encouraging but paltry and neglected. Officers, who had waded so proudly through the surf in their splendid full dress, sat about on powder kegs with the water streaming off their rubber capes.

  The wind had dropped, and disembarkation of the Light Brigade began. Betts and the other grooms remained behind to assist with the unloading of the horses. As the cavalry officers descended the ladders the sailors held their tongues, canny rather than respectful, though Harry had the impression that if he or a fellow officer had missed his footing it would not have upset them. The hand that met his as he stepped off the ladder was hard as leather and knotty with rope-calluses. The boat, with twenty of them on board, towed like a child’s toy by a team of sailors in a lighter craft, bobbed away from the relative security of the Simla towards the dismal chaos and unknown dangers of Calamita Bay.

  It was a trip of no more than a quarter of a mile to the shore, but George Roebridge’s head was lolling and he was deathly pale. ‘Thought I’d have got my sea legs by now,’ he muttered wanly, before vomiting painfully over the side. They were to be his last coherent words.

  When the boat grounded the others, including Fyefield, leapt out and waded ahead eagerly. It took Harry and one of the sailors a couple of minutes to help George into the water, and once in his progress was slow and weaving as a drunk’s, his weakened legs barely able to cope with his own weight, let alone that of the shallow waves. After only a few yards he fell to his hands and knees, and with a terrible growling groan was sick once more. There was no mistaking the sound and smell nor, as Harry hoisted him to his feet, the blueish shadow of cholera around his mouth. Emmeline was still on board, the cavalry officers’ wives were to disembark last. At this rate, Harry calculated, George would be dead before she reached the Crimea.

  On land there was no cover, no organisation, no apparent chain of command. Harry manhandled his companion to the top of the beach and laid him in the lee of a dune, lying on his own cape and covered with Harry’s. He was now retching with every other breath, his eyes full of the same animal terror that one saw in the eyes of the horses – a trapped panic in the face of the inevitable.

  Stifling his own anxiety, Harry went in search of cover. Such tents as had been brought (and in the confusion of embarkation at Varna there had not been many) had been loaded on to the transports first without thought that they might also be needed first.

  Harry approached a senior infantry officer who appeared at least to be acting constructively, organising teams of men with a couple of arabas to move supplies further inland. When they’d begun leading the brokendown horses along the crowded beach, moving the living and dead roughly out of the way by main force, he asked: ‘Sir, is there any form of cover for the sick?’

  The officer looked at him with a weary expression that said, Trust a cherrybum to ask a stupid question. ‘The sick must go back to the ships.’

  ‘If they can, but it’s impossible while so many are still coming ashore.’

  ‘Then I can only suggest you do what everyone else has done. Find existing cover of some sort and take the sick to it,’ said the officer. The almost insulting obviousness of this advice masked a hard truth: there were to be no more tents.

  Harry thanked him and made a brief sweep of the surrounding area. The beach was severely crowded and as full of noise as a marketplace – shouted orders, groans and coughing, the creak and clatter of the farmcarts, the yells of the sailors in the landing craft and of RSMs bawling at the top of their lungs in a vain attempt to assemble regiments. Some men had taken cover under carts, but as the morning drew on these were being brought into service and the men were flushed out from beneath them like partridges. He did however come across a couple of gun carriages drawn up shaft to shaft about a hundred yards to the north beneath a shoulder of rock and which, with a cape thrown over them, would provide some sort of shelter.

  He had some difficulty in locating George and when he foun
d the correct area there were so many dejected men sitting and lying about among the dunes that it took him another few minutes to identify his friend. If he had ever hoped against hope otherwise, it was now clear that whatever measures he took to ameliorate George’s suffering they would have no effect on the outcome. The poor fellow had taken on the horribly familiar appearance of those dying of cholera – a look common to officer and man, high or low, irrespective of age or nationality. His face seemed to have shrunk and aged even in the half hour that Harry had been away, and his body trembled and convulsed as the life drained out of it. Harry would even have welcomed the fear that had been in his friend’s eyes not long ago – fear was at least a sign of life, a human reaction, but even that had now been replaced by the veiled, inward look of the dying.

  The various regiments were beginning to find one another, and he could see a bright swathe of cavalry officers, still splendid and recognisable having not spent a night in the open, only a few yards away. Fyefield and a pop-eyed young officer named Philip Gough agreed to help move George, the former with a poor grace.

  ‘It’s sad, of course, but we’re wasting our time,’ he drawled as they carried George down the beach.

  ‘If he’s not going to live he might as well die in whatever comfort can be found,’ said Harry. ‘And in privacy.’

  Gough, breathing heavily, asked: ‘When will the horses come ashore?’

  ‘Soon now, I believe.’

  ‘Good,’ said Gough.‘Then we can ride inland and make a halfway decent camp.’

  All three understood that it was not just the establishing of a camp that made the horses’ arrival so desirable. The lack of them was a great leveller now the army was on land, reducing the proud centaurs of the Light Brigade to the status of ordinary foot soldiers.

  They reached the gun carriages. Another man had crept beneath them in Harry’s absence, but when they gave him a shake to move him over it turned out that he had done so like a sick dog, to die. They dragged the wretch out and laid George in his place, wrapping him close in his own cape and spreading Harry’s over the shafts above him.

  ‘No point whatever in staying,’ commented Fyefield, dusting his hands. Gough, uncertain where the balance of power lay, glanced from one to the other.

  Harry said: ‘His wife must know as soon as possible. We must ensure that a message gets to her.’

  ‘The poor lady,’ said Gough. ‘She’s surely not still on board?’

  ‘No, no, the ladies are with us,’ said Fyefield. ‘I saw them taken to the tents.’

  With a heavy tread Harry approached the cluster of tents in a hollow of ground some few hundred yards inland. To his dismay Emmeline was standing outside, holding her hat with one hand and protecting the side of her face from the blowing rain with the other. For the great events of today she had affected an appropriately military look: a dark blue riding habit with gold buttons. When she saw him she gave a little wave and walked to meet him, watching her step on the rough ground, holding her skirt up daintily out of the muddy grass. All he could think of was her excitement of yesterday, the way she had clapped her hands like a child and cried, ‘We’re here, we’re really here!’ as if she were on holiday; and then of George’s face as he had last seen it, in the dripping shadow of the gun carriage.

  He could not assemble the words to say what he must. He could only pray that God, or instinct, would provide. But as she drew nearer he stopped and saluted, and she must have read something in his face because she too stopped and her hands went to her cheeks.

  ‘You have something to tell me?’

  ‘I do. I’m afraid that your husband is very ill.’

  ‘So he is not dead!’

  She was clutching at straws, and Harry knew he must be careful. ‘When I last saw him he was still alive. We succeeded in finding shelter for him – I can take you to where he is.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  As she hurried down the beach beside him he could hear her quick shallow breathing and stifled sobs, but when he offered his arm to help her through the throng she declined, and her face was set and pinched. He hoped against hope that when they reached the gun carriage her husband would already be dead so that she would not have to see him in the worst extremity of suffering.

  George Roebridge was certainly dead, but whether from sickness or the iron-clad wheel of the gun carriage which had been roughly dragged across him, it was difficult to tell. The story was plain enough to see – the artillerymen had taken him for a corpse and in moving the carriage by the shortest route had unknowingly put him out of his misery.

  Emmeline sank down on her knees on the sand, weeping loudly. Harry saw that she did not touch George, but bent over him as if trying to reconcile what she saw before her with the husband she remembered. When she turned to Harry he was shocked by the look on her face.

  ‘You said that he was alive!’ she screamed. ‘You told me you had found shelter!’ ‘We had done so, madam, but the gun carriage has been removed while I went to fetch you.’

  ‘And look!’ She gestured at the body with a grimace of revulsion. ‘He has been injured.’

  ‘I cannot account for that. Perhaps the carriage—’

  ‘He is injured! I hardly know him . . .’ Her voice was distorted by sobs. ‘I would not have known him. He is all . . .’ She shook her head like a hurt animal and Harry only just caught the last words: ‘All . . . spoiled.’

  Less than an hour later he saw Emmeline returning to the ship, the body of her husband no doubt beside her in the boat as a sailor rowed. Her head was turned as if in mortification away from the land which had let her down so badly. She would never see her husband take part in the famed élan of a Light Cavalry charge. No sooner had they arrived than they were going back, the great adventure over. All spoiled.

  When Betts had asked Harry how the horses were to be unloaded he could never have foreseen the method that was eventually employed. Attempts to land them on insubstantial homemade rafts and float them ashore proved unsuccessful for the same reason they had failed at Varna – the animals were upset after the long voyage and simply too agitated to handle: their legs flailed about pathetically as they descended, and were unable to hold them steady on the rafts once they were there, even with the help of the grooms and the less careful assistance of the sailors. It didn’t take long for the latter to settle on a more effective course of action: the horses were simply bundled overboard and made to strike out for the shore. They were accompanied by the men who could swim, but many, Betts included, could not do so and were too terrified to try. The result was that while the non-swimmers were transported to land, numbers of horses were running loose on the beach, wild, cold and frightened, and with no means of identification or capture beyond a slippery wet headcollar.

  Betts when he did arrive was quite beside himself ‘I never seen such a thing, sir! They was bad enough aboard ship without all this, and them ruddy sailors is only making matters worse with their yelling and larking about!’

  This last was nothing less than the truth. The attitude of the sailors seemed to be that the army could not have landed nor even have been here without them, and that this entitled them to claim certain bonuses, one of which was a free ride. As the quaking horses skittered out of the surf whooping sailors chased them and scrambled on to their backs, hanging on round their necks like monkeys and fearlessly galloping them around in the edge of the water. Even allowing for the reduced state of the horses it was a bravura display of unorthodox horsemanship which did nothing to endear them to those trying to find their mounts.

  Betts, already mortified by his own inability to swim, was outraged. Spotting an animal he took to be Deny, he ran down the beach and tried to intercept him. But a small man with a limp was no match for a large, nervous horse being ridden at speed, and it was lucky for Betts that this particular midshipman lost his balance as he swerved to avoid him and crashed into the water. Harry could easily imagine the stream of imaginative abuse that was hurled
at him before Betts went to recover the horse who had come to a standstill with his flanks heaving like bellows. Luckily Clemmie was led ashore, and by the end of the afternoon the Light Cavalry and most of their horses had moved inland to camp for the night.

  Their three-day sojourn at Calamita was a cheerless and dispiriting business, made worse by the obvious superiority of the French commissariat. In spite of even more seriously overcrowded transports the French had disembarked sooner and more quickly in a bay just to the north, flown a jaunty tricolour and established a flourishing, well-supplied camp a full day ahead of their allies. Consequently they had also been able to infiltrate the surrounding countryside and collect together what there was in the way of additional food, transport and forage for horses. The sight of rows of snug French tents, and the appetising smell of cooking fires tended by cheerful vivandières, did little to cheer the British troops, dispersed mostly in the open and with only their meagre three-day subsistence rations.

  There were tents for the more senior officers, but Harry and his colleagues had to content themselves with a sulky fire made from damp brush, and a meal of pork, biscuit and rice boiled to a sludge, only made palatable by wine. Out on the austere grassy plain the horses were like a dark low forest, the steam rising from their coats in a mist. In the far distance beyond even the French camp could be heard the wild celebrations of the bashi-bazouks to whom nothing, apparently, was so bad that it couldn’t be overcome with raki.

  ‘Perfect country for cavalry at least,’ commented Fyefield, lighting a cigar. ‘I can’t wait to get at them.’

  Harry warmed his glass by the pale flames. ‘We need one or two days’ respite, though, if only for the horses.’

  Fyefield made a dismissive gesture. ‘The horses will recover when they’re put to the use they were brought here for. Just like us.’

  A little later they were presented with coffee, bitter and watery and full of gritty flotsam, but nonetheless a triumph on the part of the cooks who had had to grind beans between stones and fetch water a distance of some two miles to produce it. And it was at least warming – as the weather cleared and the night drew in the air became cold and they moved in closer to the fire.