The Winter Soldiers

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  There was a lot of sense in what Reece was saying. A gentleman did have very little in common with the ordinary working man. They moved in two separate worlds and only came together when the gentleman wanted to be driven somewhere by coach, or wanted some work done, or wished to be waited upon at the table.

  ‘Which brings me,’ said Reece, ‘to the point I’m chasing after. You’re a gentleman, Fancy Jack. Where do you fit in?’

  Crossman felt the hairs on his neck prickle. He had thought, after the discussion about the prison cell, that he was home and dry with Reece. But the Welsh miner was a clever man. He had gradually put Crossman at his ease, then come in with a question that made his mind reel. What was he to say?

  ‘I was a gentleman once, but no longer. I’m the victim of my own class. They’re just as hard on me – harder in fact – than they have been on you. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Yes, man, I’m interested to hear why you’ve come to visit.’

  ‘I’m the leader of a group of deserters, just like yours. We’ve been holed up in the hills north of Simferopol. Got chased out of there by the cavalry. Now we want to hook up with you. God man, it could benefit us both. Think, if this keeps happening,’ he gave a short laugh, ‘we’ll have our own army.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘How many men? Twenty-two, when I left them.’

  ‘Why would a man like you desert?’

  ‘You know – I was court martialled for murder. They were going to hang me.’ Crossman put on a bitter, hard expression. ‘I wasn’t given a proper defence. They just wanted me out of the way. It was a conspiracy. They don’t like having gentlemen in the ranks.’

  Crossman was hoping and praying that Reece had not heard of him walking around the camp after the Battle of Inkerman. If he had, he would know all this was a lie. Crossman’s hand went surreptitiously to his pocket. He had still not been disarmed and his revolver was of course loaded. Reece was the kind of leader who expected efficiency of his soldiers and perhaps he thought they had checked their prisoner for weapons. The reasons did not matter. What mattered was that Crossman could shoot Reece and be through the window in a moment, should this suddenly become a necessary option. Whether he would get much further than the yard outside was a question he couldn’t answer.

  Reece cocked his head to one side. ‘I don’t recall any talk about the hanging. I’ve seen many men hanged in my time. And many more shot by firing squad. Even when it’s commonplace, there’s still talk around it. The gallows is different to the battlefield or the hospital bed. Even when there’s soldiers falling in their hundreds, or dyin’ of cholera by the dozen, they still talk about a hangin’. Scaffold stories make a fascinating subject, sergeant. Men are interested.’

  ‘No, they kept it pretty quiet, my sentence I mean. The execution was to be carried out in secret, my father being a major in another regiment.’ Crossman forced another quick laugh. ‘You know what us gentry are like about scandals. We hate scandals.’

  Reece paced round the chair, staring down at Crossman with narrowed eyes, and Crossman felt his life was on a thread at that moment. They had already dispatched the Tartar farmer, perhaps others in their course of terrorizing the district. They would think nothing of slitting the throat of a sergeant they suspected of coming to betray them.

  ‘And this joining up you talk about? Who’s to be the chief of that lot?’ asked Reece. ‘You, with your sergeant’s stripes? You outrank a mere corporal, that’s what you’re thinking, eh? I already have a sergeant here, amongst my men. This is not a line regiment.’

  Crossman didn’t want to appear to cave in too easily to demands, he adopted a grave expression, as if this was a serious point.

  ‘Well, that would be for you and I to discuss. I didn’t come here with any set idea in mind. Maybe we could both still command our separate forces? Perhaps come together only when a combined force was needed? I’m open to suggestions.’

  Morgan Reece didn’t answer. Instead he went to the window and stared out at the cold world beyond. Crossman had no idea what was going on inside the man’s head. He kept his grip on the butt of his revolver, prepared to use it. At a moment Reece could call in his minions to dispatch Crossman, or perhaps even do the deed himself, with those big hands. The sergeant was not going to go without taking some of them with him.

  Finally Reece said, ‘I’m going to let you live – for now. We’ll talk more later. But before you think that this man’s a soft touch, I’ll tell you a little story. When I deserted, after getting out of that jailhouse, it was with another man, a friend of mine from the valleys. We stole horses and rode off into the hills. After two days my friend’s horse went lame. He didn’t want me to, but I shot the creature. Just as I would have done a pit pony, or any animal in pain. I shot it through the head, though he pleaded with me to just let it go, to roam the grasslands.

  ‘After that we shared the one horse, taking turns to ride or walk, so’s to keep on the move, thinkin’ the troops were after us all the time. In one rocky place my friend slipped, broke his ankle. We strapped it up, with a splint and everything, but it wasn’t any good, you see. It still bothered him so that he couldn’t walk. I was exhausted too. One evening, I could see he was finished. He couldn’t go on, not unless I let him ride all the time, and that would mean I would be finished too.

  ‘I looked at his ankle and told him he was done. He looked back up at me and said angrily, “So, what are you going to do, Morgan? Shoot me like you shot the horse, is it?” I told him yes – and I did.’

  ‘You – you shot your friend?’

  Morgan Reece touched his furrowed brow with his forefinger.

  ‘Right through the head. He didn’t feel a thing. It was him or me, see? Nothing to do with friendship or any of that stuff any more. There was only one horse and he was the one with the injured leg. He was the one holding us back, not me. It had to be done. Look at me, sergeant.’ Crossman looked at him. ‘I’m an emotional man, see. Most of us Welsh are creatures of the heart. It shows in our poetry, in our singing. But I’m not sentimental. That’s a different thing altogether. Sentiment is what destroys a man, cloys his spirit, brings him down in the end.’

  ‘Yes, I can see it would be sentimental of you, to let your friend live and take his chances with the elements and your pursuers.’

  ‘Not funny, sergeant. Not funny at all. I just wanted to illustrate to you what kind of man you’re dealing with. You step out of ranks while you’re here and I’ll have you killed without a further qualm.’ He gave Crossman the first smile he’d seen on the other’s face. It was like a rock crumbling under a great weight. ‘You’ll become one of my stories, my illustrations, to use on people like yourself, when they come stumbling in here with their own tall tales.’

  Crossman realized he had been dismissed. He walked towards the door and opened it, but before he stepped through he said to Reece, ‘And the Tartar in the barn? Was he someone else who was holding you back?’

  ‘That was necessary, sergeant.’ He nodded towards the other room. ‘You’re free to enjoy the rewards of desertion from the British Army, while you’re my guest. Warmth, shelter and hot food. It’s more than the soldiers on the line get. Much more. No drinking during the day. It’s one of my rules. If we’re attacked I want sober men about me, not a lot of drunks. In the evening you can partake, if you have a mind, but not to excess.’ Reece gave Crossman a cryptic smile. ‘See,’ he said, ‘even their officers could not do that – stop them from getting drunk.’

  Crossman could see that no other explanation was going to be forthcoming so he joined the men in the other room. The smell of the stew was overpowering and Crossman suddenly felt that animal called hunger gnawing at his stomach. He went to the woman who was cooking and asked her in the local dialect for a plate of stew. When she ladled some into a tin dish for him, he thanked her in her own language. A ghost of a smile appeared for a moment on her face, then it vanished as one of the men got up and grasped Crossman�
��s wrist.

  ‘What did you say to her, Johnny-boy?’ asked the soldier.

  Crossman stared into the man’s face with hard eyes. ‘None of your damn business. Let go of my wrist or I swear I’ll break your face.’ The words came out with such force and venom the man actually let go of him, then, on realizing how craven and foolish he looked in front of his friends, he said, ‘You better watch your back, sergeant.’

  A butcher’s knife was lying on a wooden block beside the Tartar woman. Crossman snatched it up with his freed hand and said, ‘You threaten me, you trash? I think I’ll kill you now, then I won’t have to watch anything, will I? I’ve just been told there’s no law here, sonny, so what do I have to worry about, killing a cur like you?’

  There was stillness in the room. Hardly a man breathed. The Tartar woman moaned softly. Then a quiet voice from the doorway broke the deadlock.

  ‘Sit down, Gunner Randle. Who told you to interfere with my guest? Sergeant, put the knife on the block. Listen, all of you, how many times do I have to tell you if we fight amongst ourselves we won’t last a month. You, each and every one of you, are deserters. You’re worse than scum in the eyes of every decent man and woman from your homeland. You have not got a friend in the world, except he sits in this room.’

  ‘He spoke to the woman,’ said Randle, defensively, ‘in Russ.’

  ‘And if he did?’

  ‘They – they might be plannin’ something.’

  ‘Ah, I see. Fancy Jack Crossman and a Tartar wench are going to take on thirty men and kill every damn one of ’em?’

  ‘Well, no, but . . .’

  ‘Randle, if you think something’s wrong, then you tell me, you don’t start one of your artillery brawls in my farmhouse.’

  ‘Yes, corp.’

  ‘Was that a surly “Yes, corp” or an I-see-the-sense-of-this “Yes, corp”?’

  ‘The second.’

  ‘Good.’

  Reece went back into his room and conversation started up again, with Randle sitting in one corner a little apart from the others, silently contemplating his knees. He had been humbled by Crossman in front of his friends and he had to spend time coming to terms with this. Crossman did not want to make an enemy who might cut his throat while he slept, so he went to Randle while he was eating his stew and said between mouthfuls, ‘No hard feelings.’ Randle looked up, slowly. Crossman now saw that beneath the facial hair was a youth of perhaps only eighteen summers. A boy. Crossman suddenly felt sorry for Randle, probably a young man who had been behind a plough in Shropshire until a few months ago, when the recruiting sergeant of some regiment got him drunk and offered him the queen’s shilling, along with a lot of drivel about good pay, good food and exciting world travel with his new ‘family’. ‘You know how it is,’ continued Crossman. ‘Temper’s on a short fuse. It’s this damn war. I never should have left home in the first place.’

  A light entered the boy’s eyes. He nodded, briskly. ‘That’s how I feel.’

  Another man appeared at Crossman’s elbow, a man with a sunnier temperament than most in the room. ‘Our Billy givin’ you trouble, sergeant? He’s all right, ain’tcha lad.’ The man ruffled the boy’s tousled hair with his fingers. ‘Just a bit edgy, eh? What’s to do, sergeant? You come to join the merry band? Outlaws, we are. Just like that there Robin blagger, back in Merry England times. Rob the rich to feed the poor. That’s us,’ he laughed. ‘We’re the poor.’

  ‘Except you’re robbing the poor to feed the poor.’

  The man’s eyebrows went up. ‘That’s good. That’s very good. No flies on you, eh sergeant? What made you run, eh? Me,’ he continued jovially, ‘I thumped a sergeant – beggin’ your pardon. It was the man, not the stripes, what made me do it, you understand. An’ he was not much of a sergeant at that. But if it wasn’t that, it’d be something else. Davy Kershaw’s just not the man to lay down and die of cold or cholera, or wait for his head to be shot off. I was just lookin’ for an excuse to run and the sergeant was it. So, what made you start like a rabbit out of a harvest field and run for the hills?’

  ‘Too much cheerful talk. It got me down.’

  Kershaw guffawed, earning several frowns from the melancholy men who filled the room. ‘I like you, sergeant. You’re a dry one, you are. You an’ me’ll make a team all right. Get this lot out of the doldrums, eh?’

  Kershaw was wearing the uniform of the 13th Light Dragoons. There were one or two other troopers there, which surprised Crossman. They were usually fairly dedicated soldiers, men who loved the cavalry and were there entirely by choice. Had Kershaw been in the fateful charge of the Light Brigade? What had made him so disaffected with the army? Crossman put the question to Kershaw, bluntly.

  ‘My Betsy died,’ replied Kershaw, his head and shoulders dropping. ‘They did it to her.’

  Several soldiers’ wives, accompanying their husbands, had died in the Crimea. ‘I’m sorry. Was it cholera?’

  ‘Cholera? No. They shot her.’

  Crossman was still mystified, his expression obviously revealing that fact.

  ‘After the charge,’ explained the trooper. ‘There weren’t nothin’ wrong with her, but they shot her anyway. She had blood on her, but it weren’t hers. More like mine, or some other beggar’s blood. Wilson, probably. He was shot to bits next to me. We was covered in Wilson, pieces of him, Betsy and me. I yelled at ’em, but they took no notice. They went around shooting all the lame and wounded horses and they killed my Betsy by jammy. She was the best mount a man ever had. I punched the staff sergeant that did it.’

  ‘Then you ran.’

  ‘Like the wind, sergeant,’ said Kershaw, his face lighting up again, grinning. ‘Like the blessed wind.’

  All for a horse, thought Crossman, wonderingly. This man was going to hang for a horse. A flash of anger over a mute beast and a man’s life was forfeit. And he knew it too! Kershaw knew his sudden fit of rage had put his whole existence in jeopardy. He covered his despair well, with jocular quips and dry humour, but it was all a theatrical show, for underneath the man was festering. The grin was false, the light within artificial. He was a dead man already, and all for the love of Betsy, a mare who cared only for the hand who fed her oats.

  Crossman left Randle and Kershaw whispering to each other. He went to another part of the room where he could be alone to finish his stew. The rest of that day and that evening he simply observed what went on around the farmhouse. Strangely enough, or perhaps not, it was run on strictly military lines. There were duty rosters posted up on the wall and each man had his daily tasks to perform. Picquets were posted and relieved at the normal regulation times for a well-run army. Reece was a stickler for discipline and clearly the other men were afraid of him. He was a formidable personality as well as being a large man who was obviously handy with his fists and boots. It seemed the deserters had given up one regimen, one set of masters, for another not so dissimilar. The main difference was they had their physical needs catered for here, whereas back at Sebastopol their welfare was at the bottom of the list.

  That night some of the men went out on a raid for stores. It seemed this was becoming more and more dangerous as the local people now expected them and had of course armed themselves accordingly. Their weapons were older and less reliable than those of the deserters, who for the most part still had Miniés or carbines, but still they managed to kill one of the raiders. When they returned, Reece gave a little speech on being told of the loss and reminded them they were still at war and that casualties are part of any war. Reece could have been a general, handing out platitudes to his weary troops. What was more, the troops seemed to accept these words, nodding gravely to one another, forgetting they were not part of a legitimate army and were actually despised bandits who, if they were caught, would be hanged while others sneered in contempt. There was a lot of talk about ‘comradeship’ for a while, then the dead man was forgotten and the talk went on to dividing up a large wheel of cheese which had been stolen from one
of the raided farms.

  Later that day Reece sent for Crossman. ‘You’re going out on the next raid,’ he told him. ‘It’ll give you a chance to prove yourself.’

  ‘I’m used to leading, not following.’

  ‘It won’t hurt you to take orders for once, damn you. I’ve been taking orders all my life from lesser men than myself.’ Reece was standing out by the barn in a sharp wind which brought out the rawness in his cheeks. They were mapped by red veins, like tiny cracks in his skin. ‘If it came to it, I’d take orders again. You may be a sergeant now, maybe even a deserter, though we’ll find the truth of that in due course, but for most of your life, Fancy Jack, you’ve had it easy. Hunting, shooting, fishing on your da’s estate? Silk shirts and breakfast at eleven in the morning, eh? A dog at your feet by the fire while a servant brings in the brandy?’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Try crawlin’ along a black hole a hundred feet down in the earth, just enough room for your shoulders to brush the sides of the tunnel, the blackness hot and airless around you, the whole weight of the world pressin’ down on your back. There’s a panic in your breast like a wild beast, clawin’ to get out, but you can’t let it free because you’d go mad before you got to good clean air, and you’ve got eight to ten hours down there before you see the day or the stars again.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve seen ’em dragged out of the mine, screaming fit to wake the dead, their eyes like saucers. It’s enough to choke you with fright. And it wouldn’t be so bad if your masters – the ones who grow rich on your sweat and fear – actually cared about you. But I’ve seen ’em seal off a collapsed tunnel, men still alive in there, then go off to some damn lunch at the town hall, to laugh and joke with the mayor and corporation.’

  ‘I can’t believe that.’