Crossman coughed into his own fist. ‘That’s just it, sir. Greek. You know Ali will sulk for hours if we give her a Greek name. The Turks and their historic enmity with the Greeks? Besides, quite honestly we think Betsy has got used to her name. It’s not Joan of Arc . . .’
‘Thank God,’ said Hawke, having his own historical enmities. ‘We don’t want anything French.’
‘. . . but she does respond to it.’
‘Oh, well, for field purposes we’ll leave her with Betsy, but if I have to put it in some official paper, it’ll need to be changed to a name with a bit of blood and fire about it. Banshee, something like that. That’d go down well with your regiment, sergeant, being Irish.’
Crossman left the colonel running through a variety of female names with ‘edge’ to them. Ali was waiting for him when he got back and was naturally disappointed not to see some sign that Crossman had received his commission.
‘I think he make you an officer,’ growled the Turk. ‘He should make you the ensign.’
‘It won’t happen, old friend,’ said Crossman. ‘Believe me. Things like that are so very rare in the British army. Now you irregulars, you Bashi-Bazouks, you have no need of officers. Every one of you is a chief. Every one of you is a general. Now that’s the kind of army I like.’
In trying to change the subject he had opened a can of worms. Ali’s eyes lit up.
‘When this war is finished – soon – then you leave this pretty-jacket army and its red sleeves. You join with us, the Bashi-Bazouks! My general he makes you a grand officer straight away. You will have gold curtains, here on the shoulders,’ he waggled his fingers over the top of his arm. Then he half-closed one eye as he imparted a confidence. ‘Me, I know people. My cousin’s cousin on my mother’s side is a boyar – you know what is a boyar? – a very important citizen in Turkey. This boyar has the ear of a kneses, a village chieftain, who knows the head-horseman who looks after the stables of none other than Ismail Pasha himself! Ismail Pasha is very fond of his head-horseman. His head-horseman is very important to him.’
Preferment! Crossman was being offered a position in an irregular cavalry force, where he would have a mentor and patron. Advancement would be swift. All he had to do was leave the British army and join with a vagabond gang of wild irregulars. How easy it all was, when you knew someone who knew someone.
‘In that case, Ali, why are you not a general?’
‘Ah, me?’ cried the Turk, who was the very image of the round, genial uncle who arrived with gifts for the children on Christmas day. ‘I have not the countenance. You! You have the countenance of an officer. Tall, thin, with the hard eye. You would wear an officer’s sword with great presence. Men would tremble before you. You have great contempt, great arrogance. I have not the proper arrogance, only a humble pride and a fierce honour, which are not enough to make for a good officer in the Turkish Army, for every Bashi-Bazouk has these noble but common traits. No, Ali would be proud to bow before you. We would fight together as brothers, against the enemies of Turkey and England.’
Crossman was flattered, of course, by this impossible dream. He didn’t exactly care for the idea that he presented himself as arrogant, and hoped that it was Ali’s poor use of English that was at fault here. But it was quite romantic, to picture himself as a son of the saddle, riding some terrifyingly wild horse into battle alongside his companion. What a colourful picture it made. Why, Jane would swoon with delight, wouldn’t she?
The irony of the situation amused Crossman. He and Ali spent that night out in the hills, under the stars, the smell of wood-smoke in their nostrils. Ali was indeed a great friend to him and he would miss the man once this war was over. There was little chance they would meet again, afterwards, unless Crossman ever reached a position where he could send for Ali and use him in some capacity or another. Or the reverse, which seemed even more unlikely. Ali was a rough and ready warrior, eager for action, even though there were more grey hairs on his head than dark ones.
Over the next two weeks Crossman and his men went out with Betsy and practised with the swivel gun. Various charges and types of ammunition were used and Betsy had begun to take it all with great aplomb. The blast of the cannon close to her ear bothered her very little now. Firing from the back of a dromedary was similar to firing from the deck of a ship. A naval gunner would have better known what to do than Yorwarth did, for Betsy dipped and swayed, even when she was standing relatively still. She was actually worse than a ship’s deck, for at least the swell or waves had some sort of rhythm and pattern to them, and could be seen coming, whereas Betsy was completely unpredictable. A shot with a judged low trajectory sometimes finished going almost vertical. ‘Firing at the moon,’ Wynter called it.
In his spare time, which because of the nature of his duties was considerable compared with other sergeants of line regiments, he walked and talked with Jane Mulinder. The pair had to be discreet because it would have aroused great indignation if they were seen by Crossman’s superiors. Jane would not have minded, but Crossman would have. There would have been awkward questions, which would have involved revealing private matters. A gentleman’s ‘private matters’ were guarded with great jealousy, even in the less reserved atmosphere of a war front. Crossman indeed had a great horror of being open to view by all. His family, his old friends, his former life: these were taboo subjects, even to someone like Jarrard. The walls had to stay up, the gates closed, and therefore his courting of Jane – for that was what it was, he had now admitted to himself – had to be secret. They would meet under an elderly broken tree, leafless even in the summer, down by a brook where the water trickled over smooth stones.
‘How is your father?’ Crossman asked one balmy evening. ‘Is he well?’
‘Would you wish him not to be?’ she said, teasing.
‘Of course not.’ Crossman recalled a genial old gentleman who had fathered his children late in life, his youth and earlier energy having gone into managing his vast estates. ‘I have a very high regard for your father. I know he doesn’t think much of me. He believes me a bad son.’
‘You know he thought you the very worst scamp for deserting your own father’s household? “Running wild,” he called it. Since very little news came back, except for the fact that you had absconded, he believed you had run up debts or something, and had left your father to deal with them. “Younger sons,” I remember him growling, “they are the very devil when it comes to gambling and frittering away money on fashion. I suppose the boy had several hacks, did not go short on servants while in town, and stayed at the very best hotels?” ’
‘I never did,’ protested Crossman in a high voice. ‘I was very frugal.’
‘Well, Father wasn’t aware of that.’
‘He was ready to believe the worst of me?’
‘Of course. He is an elderly man. Men become rigid in their views when they reach a certain age. My younger brother spent a fortune without Father’s knowledge, until the day when Father had to settle for him. So, when he heard that your father was dashing around the countryside, looking for you, he naturally assumed you had done something of which you were ashamed and that you were hiding from everyone. He might have added some indiscretion with a lady, except that I nipped that idea in the bud. I was quite prepared to believe you had been outrageously extravagant, but I could not countenance the possibility that you were a libertine.’
‘Why not? Why not a rake?’
Jane smiled and took his hand. ‘That would not have suited my dreams at the time.’
‘But, you were prepared to consider me a waster!’
‘Oh, young immature ladies don’t mind things like that in their men. It makes them less stuffy. We think we can cure you of such ills, with love and great affection. Why do you think women marry drinkers and gamblers? Because they don’t mind drunks and gamesters? Of course not, they marry them because they think they are the one woman in the world who can change this man’s lifestyle.’ Jane’s voice dropped a li
ttle. ‘I know that is all stuff and nonsense now, of course. You can’t change a man, once he is set in his mould. Not without great passions and upheavals of both spirits, which the relationship cannot always survive.’
‘Well, I hope you don’t consider me too boring when I tell you I dislike cards and only drink on social occasions.’
She smiled again, shaking her head, but then became more serious once again.
‘No, you are no waster, and I hope no Don Juan, though I feel you are overfond of female company.’ This much was true and he looked away from her eyes for a few telling seconds. ‘I am also sure though that you are at heart an honourable man and able to withstand temptation, if that sense of honour comes near to danger. No, you are not boring, Alex. Not at all. If anything, I fear the other extreme. You seek excitement. You seek glory. That could be as fatal for any woman as drink or gambling. The paths of glory lead but to the grave and no lady wishes for early widowhood.’
‘Strange. You are the second person in the last few weeks to quote Thomas Gray to me. I might dispute your last remark. There are some who having wed old men for their wealth, cannot wait for such a state, but I do not wish to get into an argument over that cynical thought. I would argue, however, against the idea that I go chasing after glory. I am a quiet man. Were I raised anything but a Scottish Presbyterian I would be a follower of the teachings of George Fox.’
‘You, a Quaker? Never, Alexander. You were born to hold a sword in your hand, I’m afraid. Why did you join the army? To escape your father? No. There were other professions you might have chosen. The church for one. If you are such a peaceful man you would have moved into a peaceful profession and not followed the path of the warrior. I fear for you, because you do not like to maim and kill. That’s what a soldier does and you abhor it, but you can’t follow the drum and not fight. There must be a constant war going on inside you, a great tension that threatens to tear you apart, because you love most things martial, but not war.’
He stared at her. ‘You must think me a shallow creature?’
‘No, you are complex, that is all. Most of us are. If you were shallow you would love the army because it’s a safe place, where the lines of order and discipline are well defined. But it isn’t that, with you. It may be with some men, but not you. With you it’s more complicated. There are many men who do not join the army because they wish to kill and maim. The most common reason is security. It is a job and nothing more. Some join because they like to ride fast horses, dressed in a dashing uniform. Some to escape an ordinary life. None of these apply to you, I think . . .’
‘You told me I seek glory.’
‘Glory and excitement. The glory for your own sense of well-being and worth, which have been stripped from you by your father. The excitement? Well, I think you find that in travel and foreign cultures, meeting strange peoples. I know this because I feel it too.’
He smiled at her now. ‘I could become a missionary. That would do it all just as well.’
‘You could, if you believed, as missionaries do, that people the world over need to become Presbyterians or perish in the fires of hell. No, Alex, I’m not sure of the exact reasons why you feel a need to be soldier. If I did, perhaps I could help you to renounce the life. Can you visualize yourself in any other profession? Why, sir, you renounced the landed gentry in order to become an ordinary foot soldier! The attraction was as strong as that!’
‘True. I threw away comfort and status for these now rather battered marching boots.’
‘Therefore you must go for a soldier, or wither and die.’
He accepted her judgement. ‘There must be other men like me?’
‘Many. They are legion. The army is full of them. I just wonder whether – whether I . . .’ She stopped, realizing that she was about to say something which would leave her vulnerable.
He rescued her, gallantly. ‘Whether you would wish to be good friends with one?’
‘Precisely,’ she breathed, grateful for the lesser charge.
The balmy evening was coming in. A mellow redness filled the western sky which washed into the smoky regions of high cirrus clouds. There were bats out now, diving for insects around the old tree. Bird calls could be heard amongst the scattered stones and clumps of trees. For once the cannons on the lines were silent. A sporting gun was being using, somewhere in the hills, but its hollow-sounding reports were more comforting than alarming. Perhaps that was Lovelace and Pirce-Smith, out bagging game birds? And a church bell was tolling, a long way off. It had none of the melodic notes of English bells ringing the changes, having a rather metallic tone, but it was doing its best to sound hopeful. Dogs barked, in the camp below, and the smell of stabled horses was heavy in the air.
There seemed to be a harmony about it all, which belied the general situation. It was difficult for Crossman to believe that men were desperately ill, even dying, not so very far away. There was still the spectre of cholera haunting the soldiery. Respiratory diseases, stomach complaints, and various other illnesses were carrying men off all the time. The surgeons and physicians did what they could, which was very little. Camp-following apothecaries and vendors of herbal cures, not to say purveyors of old wives’s lore with their dead mice to hang round necks, and their black toads to put in sleeping socks, were all making a good living in the camps. The angel of death also visited, though less seldom than in her guise of sickness, in the form of lead and steel. There were skirmishes, little battles, still going on, even when the howitzers and mortars were silent. And of course, the omnipresent sharpshooter kept his toll mounting, day by day.
‘You are thinking very hard,’ said Jane. ‘I can see the ploughman’s furrows on your brow.’
‘Oh. I was just – just being thankful for this lovely evening. A warrior appreciates beauty too, you know.’ He might have added, which is one of the reasons why you attract me so much, but failed at the first fence.
‘I must be getting back. Lavinia will be concerned for me.’
He snorted at the mention of Mrs Durham’s name. ‘Lavinia! Now there’s a warrior for you. Had she been born a man she would be a general by now.’
‘Had she been born a man,’ repeated Jane, ‘she would be dead, for she would surely have been at the front of the Light Brigade’s charge on the Russian cannons. I accused you of seeking glory, which disturbed you. Had I accused Lavinia of the same, she would have considered it a compliment. My dear and precious friend Mrs Lavinia Durham is as excited by a battle as some women on being invited to a ball at the royal palace. She would rather watch a fight than dance a waltz, that much is certain. I love her dearly and do not mind speaking of her faults thus, for she does not regard them as faults at all, but considers them merits.’
Crossman agreed. ‘She is beloved of the troops. They may quake before they go out to face the guns, but they are proud too, of doing their duty. If she does not tell them all personally that she thinks them heroes, her shining eyes after a battle reveal the feelings in her breast. I swear that many of them come off the battlefield and take a detour, just to get some praise from those eyes. Every war should have a Lavinia Durham. The men need to be praised. Lord knows they had little enough of it from Lord Raglan, though I’m sure their own colonels gave them their due.’
‘Well, we have a new commander in chief now.’
‘Not much better than the old one, I’m told,’ said Crossman. ‘I wonder if it is possible to get a good commander simply by appointing greybeards. Nelson and Wellington were not above middle age when they commanded over navy and army. For my money Sir Colin Campbell stands head and shoulders above the old men they keep sending us.’
And that was the problem, he thought, as the pair of them made their way down the slopes to the settlement below. The old men did not know when to step aside. His namesake, Alexander the Great, was barely out of his knee-breeches when he led his men to glory. Julius Caesar had earned many of his laurel wreaths by his thirties. On his forty-forth birthday an ambitiou
s Mongol horse-warrior had defeated all his enemies and had proclaimed himself Genghis Khan, or ‘Emperor of All’. Crossman did not know how old Tamerlane had been, when his Mongols destroyed most of central Asia, but he would wager the man had not been in his dotage. Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, otherwise known as El Cid, was in his fourth decade when he defeated the Moors. Napoleon of course, damn his Corsican soul, had been in his twenties when he took the French army from the brink of defeat against the Austrians, to the first of many such victories under his generalship.
‘Yet they keep sending us these doddery old clerks who cannot make a decision as to whether their breakfast eggs should be hard or soft.’
‘I do beg your pardon?’ said Jane, with an amused smile.
‘Oh, sorry, was I speaking out loud? It was but a thought, really.’
‘You often do. It’s a good job you don’t harbour any dark secrets. I should soon learn them all, Alexander.’
He laughed at that, linking arms with her to prevent her falling in the darkness, as they descended to the lights below.
7
Wynter had been sent with a message to Colonel Hawke just before dawn. He had left in a mood of thunder, having been woken from his sleep by Major Lovelace. There was not a lot of enjoyment stumbling over the dark ground at the rag end of the night and those who were awake could hear Wynter’s grumbling until he was out of earshot.
Crossman rose from his bed as Lovelace fell into his. The sergeant went to the window and stared out over the unkempt terrain beyond Kadikoi village. The line of sight was broken by a mountain village called Karani. It was here, in April, that the Sardinian army had assembled: 15,000 of them, under General La Marmora. The Sardinians had settled in well, bothering no one, taking on their duties with little fuss. Alongside the British they looked fresh and smart. The British infantry were quite jealous of the Sardinian hats: broad-brimmed, with a sweeping feather and reminiscent of those of the Royalist cavaliers during the English Civil War. Dashing was the word that was used.
Attack on the Redan Page 20