The Winter Soldiers

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  ‘Let us have a song,’ he said, with the glow of the fire still deep and red. ‘Lieutenant. You give us a song?’

  ‘Oh, no, no.’ Pirce-Smith looked around at the expectant faces in some embarrassment. ‘No, I don’t hold a tune very well. In fact, my father used to forbid me to join with his choir. In any case, I know only hymns – Christian songs. You might not like them, being a Muslim.’

  ‘I no mind Christian songs,’ cried Ali. ‘I like. Here, I sing first.’ He immediately opened his wide mouth and a soulful turku came forth. Ali’s normally forbidding countenance suddenly turned dreamy. He was lost in his own music, the buzzing tune carrying the words on its back. Gwilliams thought he had the knack of it, after two verses, and tried to join in, though he had no idea what he was singing. However, it became plain to him that a Turkish turku was not easily grasped and he fell silent again. However, his impatience could not be contained and as soon as Ali had finished his song, Gwilliams took up with one of his own.

  ‘Oh, the corn liquor jug is dry, and the bottle’s drained of rye,’ he sang, ‘and there ain’t a whisky in the cask – oh what’re we gonna drink I aaaask you? What are we gonna drink, I ask?’

  Suddenly everyone wanted to contribute, with Peterson singing ‘Widdicombe Fair’ all the way through, to the accompanying groans of all the raiders except of course Wynter, who had not gone that night. Only the lieutenant failed to sing a song. Gwilliams remarked to Crossman later that he could never fully trust a man who had no sense of humour, or a man with no visible music in his soul. ‘Clockwork men, that’s what they are, if they can’t find a bit of mirth in themselves, or a melody.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with you,’ replied the sergeant. ‘However, we may be judging him harshly. Perhaps he’s afraid to show us how human he really is, in case we take it for weakness. Some of them are like that – good men – but having to present an impression, a different person to the world – because they’re afraid of discovery. Inside, most of us are vulnerable, but men like Pirce-Smith are worried that their underbelly will show if they join with the rank and file.’

  That night was a particularly cold one. They all slept in a heap, like bears in a cave, keeping each other warm. All except Pirce-Smith who could not be driven closer to the herd, even by a night of freezing winds and low temperatures. In the morning he was so frozen he could not move and they had to carry him to the fire, to thaw him out. Even when he could bend his legs and arms, he still sat there shivering, staring into the flames. Crossman felt for the lieutenant in his misery, but he wasn’t going to attempt to offer sympathy. It was not wanted. Such was the stuff of women and kings, and not required by an officer of foot.

  That day they walked to the first farm. After just a few hours observing the farm, they could see it was inhabited by Tartars. Crossman and Ali paid these good people a visit and were rewarded with information about the bandits. The ‘English’ were two farms along, the house being on the edge of a canyon, and they had caused a great deal of trouble. Farms had been raided, cattle had been stolen, likewise vegetables and even money, though it could not be spent out here. Possessions, such as clocks and lace, had been taken too, presumably required at the captured farmhouse, the occupant of which, the brother of the man Crossman was questioning, had not been seen since. The Tartars did not seem capable of organizing themselves: at least, this was true of the group Crossman visited. They seemed highly relieved that the British soldiers had arrived to sort things out.

  With the farmer’s instructions in mind, Crossman took his men up to some hills behind the farm occupied by the deserters.

  ‘Here’s how we are going to carry this out,’ said Crossman to his men. ‘I shall go in first, to get the lie of the land. I’m not going to put a time on it, because I might have to be with them for five or six days, perhaps a week. Lieutenant Pirce-Smith will be in charge. It will be up to him to decide if and when to attack. Sir,’ he turned to the officer in question, ‘I don’t have to tell you that we’re more than likely outnumbered four or five to one here. Please, no heroics with my men. No frontal attacks which will expose our weakness in numbers. My soldiers are trained for sneak attacks. Send in Ali and Gwilliams first, to cut a throat or two and put the fear of God up the enemy. The idea is to harass them, get them on edge, so that they’re not sure whether they can trust their best friend or not. This is not a battle, with honour at stake. It’s a dirty little combat in a grubby corner of the earth, and it’s about survival of the most cunning. Colonel Hawke wants Reece alive if at all possible. If a few stragglers get away, please don’t pursue them. Our duty is to smash this gang of thugs, not go chasing over the globe for every last mother’s son of them. Peterson can kill one or two at a distance and retire, then come back and kill one or two more. That’s the way we do it, picking them off, until the whole breaks apart. They’ve all deserted the battleground once, they may do the same again, if they think the fighting is going to get tough. Am I understood, sir?’

  Pirce-Smith snarled, ‘Of course you’re understood, sergeant. I’m not a monkey.’

  ‘Then I’ll be off.’

  Crossman left them on the ridge, heading towards the curl of smoke he could see in the distance. His Tranter was in his pocket and there was a German hunting knife in the top of his boot. On the way down he amused himself and kept his fear at bay by inventing devices in his mind. He did this in rather a general fashion, so that he could picture his machines, but not in detail. He was no engineering genius, but he did have a love of brass and glass instruments, of railway engines, of gadgets and contraptions. When he and his friend Rupert Jarrard got together, they exchanged all the latest gossip on what was new in the world of machines. It was a passion both shared, along with smoking and good conversation. Crossman had not seen Rupert for some weeks and he missed his company. He wondered about Gwilliams and his friend. They were both Americans, yet they seemed to despise one another. Crossman wondered whether it was the neighbour syndrome. Almost every nationality had a near neighbour they hated, or at least disliked in the extreme. With the Scots it was the English. With the Norwegians it was the Swedes. With the Basques it was the Spanish, with the Bavarians it was the Prussians, and so on, and so on. Perhaps Gwilliams and Jarrard came from different parts of North America, parts which had a distrust of each other. There was the north–south animosity, but so far as Crossman knew, both came from the north-west. It was most intriguing . . .

  ‘Hey! You! Stop there.’

  A scraggy-looking individual was leaning over a rock, levelling a rifle at Crossman. Crossman put his hands in the air.

  ‘I’m unarmed,’ he called. ‘Are you British, sir? Like me? I heard there were British at this farm.’

  Crossman’s accent had a mixture of Scottish lowland and Northern English counties about it – border country – but anyone with half an ear could tell it was not the accent of a common soldier. He knew this would make the rifleman suspicious and that it would take a little more persuading to get the man to come out from behind the rock. Crossman didn’t want to be shot out of hand.

  ‘I’m not an officer,’ he called. ‘I’m a sergeant. Was. Till I ran off. Fancy Jack’s the name. Fancy Jack Crossman. You could’ve heard of me. 88th Connaught Rangers? A lot of people know me.’

  ‘Oh, is that right? Never heard the name.’

  ‘Well someone might have, at that farm there. Why don’t you take me there, so I can talk to someone?’

  ‘Why don’t I just shoot you where you stand, Fancy Sergeant Jack? It don’t mean much to me. I’ll be hung anyways, if I get caught. It won’t matter I killed another man.’

  ‘It’ll make a difference to you, and you know it. They’ll post up a list of your crimes on the parish church notice board for all to read. Do you want your mother to hang her head in shame for having a son who’s called a murderer, as well as a deserter? Running away from a fight in panic’s one thing. Killing a man in cold blood is another.’

  The desert
er with the rifle emerged from behind the rock. He strode towards Crossman. At first Crossman thought he was going to receive a rifle butt in the face. But either the man thought better of it, or that had not been his intention in the first place, because all he said was, ‘You come with me, Fancy Jack. Morgan’ll want to see you.’

  3

  The man who led Crossman through the frost-covered farmyard was as unkempt and unwashed as himself. It was obvious he had been on guard, exposed to the raw weather, for many hours. A straggly beard and moustache thick with icicles hung heavily from his chapped cheeks. His long matted hair stuck out from beneath his torn forage cap like dirty straw. The clothes on his back were a motley collection of local furs and army uniform. He was a hunched figure, with bandy legs, pinched face and hollow chest. Crossman guessed he was actually from an English town, rather than a village, which made Crossman’s former warning about notices posted up in the parish church less potent.

  The farmhouse was a ramshackle affair with bowed stone walls and a turf roof which had collapsed at the northern corner. A door with leather hinges hung on its post, its bottom edge resting on the porch floorboards: it would have to be lifted every time it was opened or closed. Such windows as there were looked tiny and mean, like the sunken eyes of some sick, ill-tempered beast. Crossman was led to a barn which looked more substantial than the house itself. The deserter opened the doors to the barn and told Crossman to go inside and wait. Once he was in there, the doors were closed and barred, leaving him in partial darkness.

  Crossman was able to see after a few minutes, if only dimly, for barns are seldom made so tight that no light enters. There are always cracks between the boards and in between the walls and the roof. Weak light found its way in. Moving around in the semi-darkness, Crossman tried to get his bearings. At one point he struck his chin on something, right in the middle of the barn. He reached out and, after feeling it, discovered a pair of woollen socks. These socks were occupied by the feet of a hanged man, who dangled from the central rafter by a long hemp rope.

  ‘God save us!’ exclaimed Crossman, shocked to discover the body. Now he realized he could smell the corpse, even though the temperature inside the barn was probably as low as it was outside. If anything Crimean buildings tended to lock the winter inside, even when the sun came out again, and thus they became ice houses for the preservation of meat. Here was some sorry piece of flesh, swinging back and forth a little where Crossman had started it off, like a creaking pendulum. He reached out and grasped one of the feet, to stop the cadaver from spinning. It was icy cold to the touch and as hard as stone.

  As his eyes became used to the darkness, Crossman studied the clothes of the corpse and decided this was the farmer, the Tartar brother, who had gone missing. He realized now that Morgan Reece and his gang would never surrender to the authorities. There was no hope that they would escape the gallows. Crossman decided he had still done the right thing, for he had to gauge the strength of the farmhouse, both as a fortification and from the point of view of how many defenders it had, where its weaknesses were, and what was the best attack.

  Crossman remained in the barn for the better part of three hours, before someone came to fetch him. It was not the man who had originally taken him there, but another, a Derbyshire man from the sound of his accent. Crossman was taken from the barn to the house. Just inside he found a roomful of men, some twenty of them, draped around, eating stew. They stared at him with hard eyes as he passed through, though not one spoke to him. Crossman sensed despair amongst them, almost as a disease like a cancer, spreading and growing. For the most part they were not upright men. They hung on their own bones, like the clothes of a scarecrow hang on sticks, and, although like flints, their eyes were ringed with darkness. They looked nervous and uneasy, like men who have pitched their all into one wager and were hoping for a miracle, knowing that in real life miracles were few and far between. Far, far back in those haunted eyes was the look of doom.

  A Tartar woman was cooking for the men. She looked up with moist, bleak eyes as Crossman passed her and he guessed she was the dead farmer’s wife or sister: one of the victim’s relatives.

  Crossman was pushed through another doorway and the door closed behind him. He found himself in a room in which boxes had been arranged like a desk, with a man seated behind them. The man was writing in a ledger of sorts and he motioned for Crossman to sit in a rickety chair, opposite him, but implied that silence was to be observed. It was as if he were some bank manager preparing a mortgage for an important client, while a debtor waited in forced patience for his attention. A wood-burning stove was throwing out a great heat from one corner of the room and Crossman enjoyed the comfortable feeling of home-fire warmth for the first time since he had been in Colonel Hawke’s office. For a moment it lulled his senses into believing he was in a croft back home, with one of his father’s tenant farmers wishing him well and bidding him sit by the grate where the heat would soften his boots for him.

  Crossman did as he was asked. The writer had to be Morgan Reece. Crossman could see a corporal’s stripes on the sleeves of a coatee which hung on a hook behind the makeshift desk. The coatee looked surprising well-brushed and the buttons were clean. There was webbing hanging there too, and a Minié rifle was propped against the wall, looking as well cared for as the clothes, with an oiled stock and metal parts.

  When Reece finally put down his pencil and stood up, Crossman could see that he was a very large man, hard-muscled, with enormous, powerful-looking hands. Those hands were ingrained, like the brow and the neck, with black grime. Crossman guessed this was coal dust and that most likely Reece had been a miner. In fact he must have been a miner so long that subterranean explosions and daily contact with coal dust had permanently tattooed him.

  There was a certain fastidiousness about Reece, at odds with his rough, granite looks, which caused Crossman to think that if those stained parts of his skin could have been cleaned, then Reece would have ensured this was done. His hair was marble grey and stood up stiffly, about one inch, from his head. Unusually, it hardly grew at all around his neck and ears. The skin there was as creased as a well-used map. Crossman guessed the man’s age was about forty, or thereabouts: he had been expecting a younger man.

  ‘So – Fancy Jack, is it?’ said Reece in a strong, lilting Welsh accent. ‘I’ve heard of you. In fact I spoke to you, once, before a battle. What was it? Inkerman, I think. In the stockade together, we were.’

  Crossman did not remember him. The sergeant had been thrown into a prison cell, accused of murdering a British officer. There had been a number of men already in the cell. It had been dimly lit, a battle was going on outside, and Crossman was understandably at the time in an agitated frame of mind. It was not surprising that he could not recall this man.

  ‘You don’t know me, do you?’

  ‘No,’ confessed Crossman. ‘If you were there, I didn’t notice you.’

  ‘I was down for a flogging.’ He was wearing only a shirt in this hot room, while Crossman was suffering still inside his furs. ‘They weren’t going to beat me, not again. I’d had enough of that. When the walls were blown down by that round shot . . .’ Crossman did remember this, for it was when he escaped from the cell himself. ‘I took to my heels. I ran. And I kept running, you see, and ended up meeting with others on the trail through the hills. Men who had had a bellyful of battle, who’d seen their comrades fall with their guts spilling out, or half a head missing. They’d had enough of officers who had slush for brains, who’d used them like cannon fodder, throwing them into a battle not of their making. Cowardly bastard officers, who kept well out of the way, when it came to it.’

  ‘Many officers fought bravely and died beside their men,’ replied Crossman, quietly. ‘There were generals who fell in that battle.’

  Reece turned and nodded his great head. His large hands gripped the edge of Crossman’s chair. They were hands that could crush a man’s windpipe with ease, if the owner so wished. />
  ‘Yes, you’re right, some of them. Not all of them sat and watched. But then it is a war of their making. Men like me – and maybe you, sergeant? All we want to do is earn a shillin’. I’d had enough of the mines, you see. They killed my father and my older brother, who coughed up black sludge from their lungs as they died. That wasn’t for me. I wanted to join the navy – all that clean fresh sea air – but it was a long walk to Cardiff and I found myself in the army instead. The regiment came to town, I was drunk, and there you have it. Now I find myself breathing cannon smoke and killing people I don’t want to kill. Men like me. Poor men. Working men. Have you seen the way the Russian officers and NCOs take cudgels to the common soldiers, to make them fight harder? Treat them like animals, they do.’

  ‘Russian officers are different. They treat their men differently.’

  ‘Listen, man,’ said Reece, leaning over him and breathing into his face, ‘British officers have got more in common with Russian officers than they’ve got with us. The two of them speak the same way – I mean they talk about balls, and hunts, and dining out at clubs – all that kind of thing. They’re both gentry, you see, with gentry pastimes. We don’t have pastimes, we’re too busy working. The British gentleman has nothing in common with us at all. We’re like two different creatures: dogs and rats. We’re the rats. We scrape about for a bit o’ cheese, while they’re fed on cream chicken and God knows what, given it like, in a silver bowl, without having to raise a finger. We’re the ones who raise the fingers. We work them to the bone for gentlemen, British and Russian alike.’