The Winter Soldiers

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  THE WINTER

  SOLDIERS

  Other novels by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  Fancy Jack Crossman Novels:

  The Devil’s Own

  The Valley of Death

  Soldiers in the Midst

  Other fiction:

  Highlander

  Witchwater Country

  In The Hollow of The Deep-Sea Wave

  Spiral Winds

  House of Tribes

  A Midsummer’s Nightmare

  The Navigator Kings trilogy

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2002

  Copyright © Garry Douglas Kilworth 2002

  The right of Garry Douglas Kilworth to be indentified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 1–84119–449–2

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-47210-404-5

  Printed and bound in the EU

  To John Ball, airman, sailor, boxer, jailer –

  oh, and a pretty good marathon runner too.

  Acknowledgements

  My usual thanks go to David Cliff of the Crimean War Research Society and Major John Spiers, now a curator at the Light Infantry Museum, Winchester, for research, advice and encouragement.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  1

  The faces of the men were like stone. They looked bleakly across the heights above Sebastopol. Some of them were indeed only boys, a few as young as ten years. Their eyes appeared to have retreated deep inside their heads, and were empty of any expression but the nursing of a nagging, relentless misery. Those in trenches lay in thick mud, their brittle hands clamped to rifles wrapped around with stiff rags. Those in the lines behind, awaiting duty, were only marginally drier and warmer.

  The soldiers stared keenly at the party of six saboteurs returning from a mission in Sebastopol. This small group had just passed through the outer picquets. They looked well-clothed in fur coats, fur hats and good thick leather boots. On the surface of things, they seemed men to be envied. They appeared to have the freedom to roam at will. In the middle of a Russian winter, in the middle of a foreign war, they did indeed seem kings compared with their fellow soldiers.

  ‘Keep up, Yorwarth,’ growled the tall leader of this group. ‘You’ve been lagging all morning.’

  Fancy Jack Crossman, seconded sergeant from the 88th Connaught Rangers, was the first to cross the line of British trenches, followed in single file by Lance-Corporals Peterson and Wynter, Private Yorwarth from the Australia colonies, a civilian barber named Gwilliams, and finally, taking up the rear as always, a Turkish irregular, Yusuf Ali. Every man kept his head low as there were always Russian sharpshooters ready to take it off his shoulders.

  ‘Yes, keep up, Yorwarth,’ said Lance-Corporal Wynter, ‘don’t dawdle!’

  Wynter’s tone was sarcastic. The words were aimed at his sergeant and not the named man. Wynter was exhausted and he felt everyone in the group had the right to lag behind if they felt so inclined. Wynter was belligerent and nasty but, when it came to comfort and survival, often ingenious. Most recently he had cut a hole in a large thick woollen sock and pulled it over his head. The hole revealed only a small circle of face, allowing the wearer to see and breathe freely. What remained of the sock kept the rest of his head and neck warm. Others, seeing this invention, had followed his example with great alacrity. Now what he had begun in Balaclava was all the fashion in the Heights.

  As they passed a group of rag-bag soldiers, a young subaltern jumped in front of Crossman and made noises like a duck.

  ‘Quack, quack, quack, quack.’

  Crossman glared at the officer, who continued to grin into his face and make farmyard noises. A corporal came up and put his arm around the subaltern’s shoulders, gently steering him out of Crossman’s path, as a mother might do a bothersome child. He then turned to Crossman and tapped his own temple with his forefinger in explanation.

  ‘Sorry, chum,’ he said. ‘Touched. Lost most of his men in a night raid. Came back like that.’

  Crossman nodded, realizing. ‘That’s all right, corporal.’

  A tower was chiming a recognizable tune nearby. Guns were booming along the allied lines and from the distant fortifications of the besieged Sebastopol came dull thumps blanketed by the winter mist. The temperature today was not the sword-sharp cold of some mornings, when the freezing winds came down from the steppes and sliced through shivering under-protected bodies. It was a damp stony cold which crept deep into men’s bones, awakened painful agues and aches, and was unbearably persistent.

  Crossman was not without feelings, even though this war, run it seemed by incompetent commanders, had done its best to drive them out of him. As he passed one regiment he saw that many of the soldiers had cut the sleeves from the greatcoats of dead men and had stuffed them with straw to use as leggings. He pitied their poverty. They had hay and straw bolstering their now brick-coloured tunics, which time had worn thin and filled with holes. With the cold and the shortage of water no one washed any more. Everyone had lice and fungus complaints.

  Officers were almost indistinguishable from rank and file. Lace and gold trimming had completely vanished from one officer’s uniform as he stood with arms folded, shivering under a ragged turban he had obviously bartered from a Tartar or a Turk. Most of the boots were cracked and split. Cavalry troopers had missing spurs, or none at all. Facings were unrecognizable: their former hues had been bleached, drained from them, dirtied, until they were either colourless or some brownish shade with no meaning or purpose any longer.

  Crossman’s thoughts were on this subject many an hour. Something had to be done about the unforgivable lack of warm clothing. Supply ships had been lost in storms, the Commissariat was unyielding in its passion for paperwork which delayed further shipments, the opening of stores already in the Crimea, and the distribution of badly-needed replacement uniforms, most of which had been worn constantly since leaving Britain over a year ago.

  How can we continue in this manner, he thought, allowing men to die for want of a pair of socks? It was almost as bad as that. These terrible conditions were exacerbated by the total absence of wood for fires. Not only was the army underclothed, it could not keep itself dry and warm. With command of the Black Sea the British Navy could have shipped in cordwood from the Mediterranean. Two or three shiploads could have kept the army in fires for the whole winter! Yet nothing was done, despite the protestations of junior officers, and some senior ones.

  To cap it all, there was the lack of shelter. Worn, torn and leaking tents from another era were in most cases the only cover for most of the British troops. There were supposed to be replacements around, but where were they? And would they ever be released?

  None of this applied to the French, who had erected
huts, had good supply lines and who ate hot food. It was a pity Lord Raglan disliked his French allies so much, or he could have taken something from their example. The French might well have been on a Riviera holiday, compared with the British, who were in Hell.

  Most British officers, as well as their men, would have agreed that the war was being managed by fools. Yet battles were being fought and won, against massive odds, and possibly for the first time junior officers, NCOs and private soldiers were taking the initiative. They had had to, for it was missing from headquarters. More than one soldier grieved the passing of a commander-in-chief like Lord Wellington. Happily it seems to be a fact of army life that whenever there is gross incompetence at the top ingenuity rises up from the bottom to counter it.

  The six returning saboteurs were billeted in a hovel in Kadikoi, a small village just north of Balaclava. This area had now been populated by sutlers. They were in the main itinerant merchants, traders, riffraff, gentlemen travellers and sightseers (though not so many of those since the weather had turned bad), oxen handlers, camel owners, several prostitutes and their masters, entertainers, anyone in fact hoping to make a penny out of a war in stalemate. Along with these there were the usual camp followers – wives and others – who trailed after an army on campaign. The collection of makeshift stalls and huts set up by Greeks, Egyptians, Bulgars, Tartars, and a score of other nationalities was known amongst the troops as Vanity Fair – or Donnybrook to the Irish – and if there was any small coin left out of one’s meagre army pay, and that soldier was prepared to trudge along the trammelled and troughed track over the Col, it could be spent here on food and drink, whatever. Prices were high though, and money was scarce. It was a long way to go to be screwed out of hard-earned tuppences for the sake of a weak beer and unleavened bread.

  Some of the stall owners greeted the six, especially Wynter, who was well known to several of the young and old whores prepared to freeze their nether regions for a ha’penny.

  ‘Hey, Harry-boy, you come see Mary tonight, yes?’

  ‘I’ll be there, sweetheart,’ answered Wynter. ‘You keep the blanket warm for me.’

  Lance-Corporal Peterson spat on the ground in front of Wynter.

  ‘I wonder it don’t break off, like an icicle,’ she observed, nodding down.

  Wynter rose to the bait. ‘At least I’ve got one to break off,’ he snorted. ‘That’s your trouble. You wanted to be a man and you ain’t. If you was, you’d know it’s worth a bit of cold.’

  ‘At least I’m not wasting away, like you men.’

  Most the six had lost weight over the last several months: Peterson alone had filled out. When she had first joined Crossman’s peloton she had been a skinny young maiden disguised as a youth, a brilliant sharpshooter but with little else to offer. Most of those close to her now knew her secret, but two of her superiors, Crossman and Major Lovelace, were prepared to overlook it, she having proved her worth. The third, a Lieutenant Pirce-Smith, was new to the world of the spy and saboteur. He was so far ignorant, and kept this way.

  Now Peterson had become a burly woman, her beardless chin and cheeks standing out among the hirsute faces of her companions, her small bosom, squashed almost flat by a now extra-tight coatee, normally hidden by the voluminous fur coat she had acquired. Why she put on weight was a mystery to herself and others, since she ate the same fare and underwent the same exercise. It was one of those quirks of nature. Wynter put it down to the selfishness of the female gender. He said she grew large by drawing on the fat of her fellow soldiers, somehow, by the use of Eastern magic.

  ‘You’re workin’ us!’ he accused her. ‘You bought somethin’ from some Afghani faker. I bet you’ve got a monkey’s paw stuck in your haversack. I’m watching you, Peterson.’

  Peterson was no longer overawed by soldiers like Wynter, a conniving, cunning and essentially lazy man who had to be spurred into action, but once there was a crafty and useful tool for Crossman. Once upon a time she had hated men, having tried to make her living as a female carpenter in civilian life, but driven out by the prejudices and stupidity of males who saw their livelihood threatened and their territory being invaded by a wench. Now she simply despised most of them. Major Lovelace she treated as a god, but with the distant reverence of a polite member of a religious group, someone who was not so much a believer as a person willing to go along with others for the sake of being a member. In Fancy Jack Crossman she recognized a man who was prepared to accept her for what she could do rather than for what she was. She admired his sense of fairness, expediency and his powers of leadership.

  But for the most part she considered herself better than most men, tougher in spirit, stronger in endurance and stamina, more able to withstand hardships and cold, certainly more able with a weapon, and only on occasion lacking slightly in the physical strength needed to lift a cannon out of a rut, or overcome an enemy with her bare hands alone. At such times she would rather die than look to a man for assistance. So far she had managed to escape having to haul cannons and she was never without a knife to hand.

  ‘It’s not a monkey’s paw,’ she told Wynter this time, as they entered the hovel. ‘It’s the Hand of Fatima. I’ve got it hidden. Soon you’ll be nothing but a walking skeleton, rattling along, all loose bones. It’s the power of the curse, Wynter, you poor fool.’

  Wynter stopped short, so that Yorwarth ran into the back of him. They clashed heads. Yorwarth growled, ‘Watch it, you sorry arse,’ but, pushed on by the man behind, tramped to his cot in the corner of the room.

  The reason Wynter was disturbed was because he had only been joking, or half-joking, but Peterson’s words had a ring of authenticity about them. Wynter had heard the phrase before, from the lips of Egyptian stall owners who sold slim pancakes they called ‘Fatima’s Fingers’. The Hand of Fatima and the Evil Eye had been imported to the Crimea by Moslem immigrants. The phrases were not understood by the British soldiers, and subsequently remained boxed in mystery and dusted with menace. Peterson’s words were enough to send an icy streak down the back of the sock-headed Wynter, who was superstitious and believed in ghosts, magic and all other mysteries of life and death.

  ‘That ain’t legal,’ whined Wynter at Peterson, pulling off his tight headgear with difficulty. ‘I’ll see the general. You can’t use gypsy curses in the army.’

  ‘You’ll see no one,’ said Crossman. He sniffed. ‘When are you going to take a wash, Wynter? Look, you’re dropping fleas.’

  ‘We all stink, why does everyone pick on me? Everyone picks on me. You can’t use curses like that. It ain’t legal. I’ll . . .’ He changed his mind on meeting Crossman’s eye. ‘I’ll do somethin’ of my own. I’ll use my pet rat on you. You wait, Peterson. You won’t be able to go to sleep peaceful in your cot.’

  ‘That’s right, get a rat to do a rat’s work,’ said Gwilliams, coming in last but one. ‘That’s right. Anyway, we ate your rat before we went out – remember?’

  Wynter remembered. They had run short of meat and Gwilliams had cut the head off the rat Wynter had tamed and roasted it. Fury rose in his breast, for the indifference shown to himself and the lack of mercy shown his rat.

  ‘An’ you can shut up, too. That rat was my property. You stole my property, you did. Bloody Yankee-doodles. Bloody civilians. Everyone picks on me. Who’s next, eh? Who’s next?’

  The last to come through the doorway was Yusuf Ali, a man so formidable in physical appearance, being large, rotund, but without an ounce of fat on his powerful frame, further moist words dried to dust in Wynter’s mouth. He had once seen a seemingly unarmed Ali slit a man’s throat in a split second, the killing stroke visible only by the flash of the knife which had appeared from nowhere, and subsequently disappeared after being wiped on the dying man’s chest, before he hit the ground. In some lights Ali might be mistaken for a jolly uncle in colourful waistcoats, pantaloons and floppy boots. In others for the heartless demon of the lamp. Wynter was terrified of him and turned without another
word, to throw himself onto the cot he now shared with Gwilliams, they both being spare, wiry men and beds being short in the hovel.

  Jack Crossman went straight away up the uneven stone stairs to the room above, where he knew he would find Major Lovelace. The major was sitting on the edge of his timber-frame bed trimming his beard. In contrast to some of the less fortunate officers at the Crimea, the major was clean, smart and well-fed. He was not, however, one of the princely group who had more money than was good for them. He was not one of those whom Crossman despised for their thoughtlessness and arrogance.

  Those were officers who had hampers sent from England, taking up hold space on ships which should have been carrying the much needed supplies. Those with chests full of dress uniforms, civilian shooting suits, Runciman boots, black dancing pumps. Those who stepped out of a Sunday morning in tweeds, going for a brisk walk over the Russian landscape with hardly a care in the world, almost as if they were on their family estate back in Britain.

  Some of them even imported their eccentricities. One habitually wore a fez and carried a walking stick.

  Major Lovelace, though possessing a normal young man’s vanity, was not a popinjay. He was dedicated to the gathering of information and the surreptitious destruction of the enemy’s property. In order to carry out such work he often had to resemble a Tartar workman or farm hand. Off duty, he liked to be clean and reasonably smart.

  Lovelace looked up from admiring himself in his mirror.

  ‘Well, how did it go?’

  ‘We destroyed a small arsenal in Star Fort. You must have heard it go up?’ The two men were on familiar terms for a lowly sergeant and a field officer. It was not due to the fact that they had both attended Harrow which was responsible for this, but because the intimate, devious and insidious nature of their work made a detached and formal relationship impossible.