Master Georgie

by Beryl Bainbridge

  With the exception of the troops who guard our headquarter camps and the French ports of supply, our army, starting from Stresleka Bay, spreads out in a line twenty miles long, runs parallel with the Sebastopol defences until it reaches the Careenage Ravine, enfolds half Mount Inkerman, then doubles back southward along the crest of the Sapouné Ridge.

  I glean all this from Potter, who has pestered a Captain Frampton for information. We are apparently sat between Sir Richard England’s division and General Buller’s brigade. The 21st, under Sir George Cathcart – we haven’t yet set eyes on him – is mainly engaged in manning the trenches. Should Lord Raglan be forced to call for reinforcements to defend Mount Inkerman, we’d have to march two and a half miles across country. I say we, though I don’t intend to budge.

  From our ridge there is a view of the ravine and the Post road which winds towards Sebastopol. Weather permitting and with a fair amount of squinting I can make out the extremities of the harbour, slashed by the masts of ships and the stretch of water that Potter refers to as ‘the Gateway to the Mediterranean’. That bleak gap is apparently the reason for all this misery. As sea and sky are the same ashen shade of grey it is difficult to think of it leading anywhere upon which the sun might shine.

  Potter has become something of an expert on military strategy. He spends hours scratching arrows in the mud, indicating possible sorties from the enemy. George doesn’t like it; whenever he catches him he pretends he hasn’t seen the marks and smears them under his boot. The other afternoon, following an obliteration, Potter cried out, ‘Likeness is none between us, but we go to the self-same end.’ George strode off looking thunderous.

  Each morning, at first light, two squads of picquets march out to relieve those of the night watch. A picquet is composed of an entire company, and as the casualties increase, often the poor devils stay in their mud-filled trenches in excess of forty-eight hours. They return, some still clothed in their once bright summer uniforms – now turned the colour of old beetroot – dragging their feet and with faces old as time. There is little difference between the living and the dead, save that the latter come back on litters.

  The din goes on day and night, though at some distance. I’ve got used to it. Nor do I start back in fear any more when the grey horizon flashes with violet light and throws up fiery plumes. Often the smoke assumes the shapes of ghostly ridges which tremble for a while, turn pink, then melt into the sullen sky. I’ve seen a dwarf oak catch fire and blaze in the night like Moses’s burning bush. The explosions throw up stones which, falling, rearrange themselves in burial mounds.

  I intend to survive. I consulted Potter and he agreed with me that a man, so long as he keeps concentration, can will himself into staying alive. I’m not like those other wretched examples of my class who come from nothing, and who, should they escape the slaughter, are doomed to return to the same oblivion, and be broken men into the bargain.

  I have it planned out. I shall rise in my profession, wed a good woman without airs or graces, and grow old surrounded by my children. I don’t hanker to be over-rich, just comfortable. None of my offspring, God willing, will ever beg for bread as I once did.

  With this in mind, and the photographer having found himself a billet outside the camp, I’ve taken to sleeping in the van, to be out of the damp. I claim it as my own vehicle, seeing it was me who purchased it, the Punch and Judy man having died and gone to his maker. It was also my idea to put in tinted windows and build shelves, though I regret painting the outside white as it can be seen for miles and often draws fire. It’s cramped, and at nightfall I turf some of the chemicals outside, which wouldn’t please my employer if he came back unexpected. If he does, I’m all set to ask him whether he wants a live assistant or a dead one, the condition of the tents being guaranteed to shove one into the grave. Supplies can’t get through owing to the constant barrage from the Russian guns; there is only one blanket apiece and that so encrusted with slime from the waterlogged earth as to be useless. The men who doze within such musty shelters pile together for warmth, stirring and jostling like a litter of pigs.

  Potter and Myrtle have moved inside the hospital tent with George, though that has become no better than a charnel house. Not a day goes by without its quota of wounded. One night, in the space of three hours, ten men were brought in, felled by a howitzer shell. Of these, seven had already lost either an arm or a leg and the remaining three required amputations.

  At first Dr Potter used to go outside when George began his sawing. Now he stays put by the stove, pretending to be absorbed in one of his mildewed books.

  There’s no telling who will live and who will not. A man can have his limbs torn off, the blood draining out of him like a leaking barrel, and recover; another can stumble in with no more than a flesh wound to the groin and snuff it within twenty-four hours. Those whose stomachs have been ploughed up, their innards dangling like pale links of pork, fare the worst. Neither will-power nor medicine can heal them.

  They carried in a drummer boy a few nights back. He was not above twelve years of age and had been put to work in the trenches, there being so many casualties. In the act of shovelling up dirt, body bent and his right hand holding the handle of the spade, he was struck by a round shot which passed between his legs, laid bare an artery and ripped off his cock and scrotum. They hadn’t been able to bring him in right away owing to the ambulance wagon getting stuck in the mud. He was put on the table, where he jerked like a fish on the hook. Myrtle didn’t go near him. Potter says she’s a devoted mother, but I suspect her children function as a cord to bind her more tightly to George.

  Nothing could be done for the drummer boy. George told me to administer chloroform. I’ve taken to helping in this way, and am glad to be of use. If you know they’re asleep and you see their faces smooth out, your belly stops heaving. I held the pad over the lad’s face for a long time, so that he never woke again, not in this world. The chloroform smells fruity, a touch like strawberries, which is pleasant since we all stink, Potter more than most.

  I’ve reminded George of the time he and William Rimmer had me go into the cage with the ape, and how he’d been drunk as a lord on the journey home to Blackberry Lane. I reckon memory is selective because he held it was me who was inebriated, as proved by the way I’d stretched out in the sand while he was conversing with the fisher of eels. He didn’t like my mentioning Rimmer; I could tell that from the way his eyelids fluttered.

  Stung, I said, ‘Rimmer was cock-a-hoop that day. He wanted to take all the credit.’

  George said, ‘I haven’t your memory,’ and turned his back on me.

  I tried to get Potter to discuss what it meant when events were recollected differently. He said he wasn’t in the mood and had enough lapses of his own without fretting over other people’s. Often he talks to his wife Beatrice, which disturbs George. He fears Potter is going out of his mind. I detect no evidence of it, and besides, things being the way they are, removing oneself from the present, by whatever ruse, seems a sensible enough way of keeping cheerful. I try to think of someone I could conjure up should it become necessary, but there’s no one. My mother’s face got wiped clean in the long gone past.

  When the drummer boy was laid down, Potter started mumbling aloud from one of his books. I shall follow his example and read when I get old. He himself once said I was half-way to being a scholar, seeing that the action of the camera goes some distance towards capturing the mystery of human conduct.

  Before they buried the drummer boy I stripped him of his uniform and encouraged Myrtle to wear it. Her dress was too thin for the winter and in any case much bedraggled. She refused outright, but I got George to persuade her, and now she wears a jacket and breeches. She didn’t even have to wash them, the blood having been rinsed off by the rain. All that was needed was a patch – in this case, a square of red petticoat – to cover the holes torn in the trousers. She looks well in such clothes and I would like to take her portrait, only it pours all the
time and the plates would get splattered.

  Most nights, when there’s a lull in the hacking and suturing, we huddle round the stove. There are usually five of us. I’ve chummed up with an elderly man called Charles White. He hails from Ireland and is good-humoured. Starting out poor, he made a fortune out of brick fields but was later ruined owning to a failure of the bank. Unused to penury, his wife faded away and now lies in a pauper’s grave. He himself, until war was declared and he volunteered for military service, was incarcerated in the debtors’ underground prison in Clerkenwell. In spite of this he jokes a good deal. He has a ginger moustache and walks with his feet splayed out. George finds him amusing and has successfully reduced a swelling of the ankles caused by his former shackling.

  White was telling one of his tall tales when a soldier bounded in with his ear blown off. There was any amount of blood but he wouldn’t let George see to him. He kept shaking our hands in turn and saying how happy he was to meet us. His name was Harry St Claire, a name he recited over and over, as though it had value. He said losing his ear was the best thing that had ever happened to him. White thought this meant he was under the delusion that he would now be sent home, and assured him that he’d be back on duty within two days, at which the poor wretch cried out, ‘Capital, capital,’ and did another round of handshaking, the blood flying in all directions as he pumped.

  His story was a strange one, and being educated he told it well. Some months before, as yet he was not sure how many, he had been a pupil at a school of high repute in the south of England. As clear as he could remember – there was a blue sky and the college cat was stalking the bushes – he had taken umbrage over a fellow of his own age speaking disrespectfully of his mother, a widow woman recently keeping company with a titled gentleman. Mad to defend his mother’s honour, he had challenged the youth to fisticuffs beneath the chestnut trees at the boundary of the playing fields. It went badly for him. In his head he’d retained an image of the cat, the sunlight shivering across its brindled fur; that and the sparkles of his own sweat darkening the hairs on his arm. Then the blackness descended.

  Weeks later, he had found himself enlisted and on a ship bound for Malta. He hadn’t the slightest idea of who he was or where he had come from. When required to give his name he had said he didn’t know it, at which he had been written down as Private Knowlitt. This tickled Charles White, who laughed himself into a fit of coughing.

  An hour ago, marching back from picquet duty, a shell had landed in the rear of the column and an iron fragment had sliced off Knowlitt’s ear. At the moment of impact – he had dived through the air like a swimmer – he had remembered his name and his former life. ‘I am Harry St Claire,’ he had called out, and now repeated the information, adding, ‘I am the happiest man alive.’

  Suddenly, his face whitened. From outside, like the beating of wings, came the dull clapping of the guns. He stared into the distance, his eyes grown huge. Then he dropped dead. George said it was due to exhaustion, that and blood loss.

  Myrtle took it hard. She sat with her knees splayed wide, hands held in front of her, tapping the air with invisible sticks, as though the drummer boy had come back to claim his soul. Potter curled upon his stool, hands covering his ears.

  White and I slung Knowlitt between our shoulders and dragged him outside. His dead man’s boots slurped through the mud. A fearful detonation cracked the darkness, followed by a flash of sickly light, exposing for an instant the tin glitter of the river below and the slopes sluiced with rain. The world was drowning.

  I didn’t go back to George. Instead, I tumbled into the van and got at the photographer’s reserves of Bulgarian wine.

  I woke early, the drink having dragged me awake with a dry mouth. I had a cloudy memory of keeping company with a corporal of the 55th with a boil on his neck. He had been willing to swap a watch for a pigskin valise. The watch had gone and there was no sign of the valise, which brought me out of my stupor with a vengeance. I had a small heap of trophies plucked from corpses, wrapped in a cloth and stuffed behind the developing trays. My conscience doesn’t trouble me. The enemy rifle the bodies after an engagement and I reckon I’m doing our dead a service by keeping their possessions out of foreign hands.

  I stepped down into a fog as thick as wool. The customary stand-to had begun, but though I could hear the shouted orders and the whinnying of horses, it was impossible to see anything. If I stretched out my arm and held up my hand, my fingers vanished. I was caught in a white bale of mist, through which I heard the solemn ringing of church bells. I reckoned the sound drifted up from Sebastopol and that I had woken on a saint’s day, either that or it was Sunday. Stumbling forwards, I came across a lumpen form slumped before a ghostly leap of flame. It was Potter, swaddled in his greatcoat at the fire, waiting for the pot to simmer. I tapped his shoulder and said, ‘Just listen to those bells.’

  He said, ‘You hear them too? I thought they were in my head. I woke dreaming of my wedding day. Beatrice had a speck of soot on the edge of her veil—’

  ‘Dear me,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t take too kindly to that.’

  ‘Was it the bells that caused the dream,’ he pondered, ‘or had the dream already begun and I merely incorporated the sound?’

  I said I would have to leave that question unanswered.

  ‘I presume you were never married,’ he probed. ‘You not being the marrying sort.’

  I told him he presumed rightly, but that I’d lived for two years with a widow woman, until the drink had bloated her out and scuttled my desire.

  ‘You surprise me,’ he said.

  ‘I surprise myself,’ I countered, and asked after Myrtle.

  ‘She cried herself into sleep, and must now be her old self.’

  ‘Hardly old,’ I corrected.

  He agreed I had a point, and fell silent. I thought that was the end of it, but he presently asked, ‘What was it that George did all those years ago … to make her love him?’

  ‘Did?’ I said. I felt uncomfortable, love not being a word I care to bounce about. I told him he should ask George, not me.

  ‘He won’t remember,’ Potter said. ‘It’s not as if he’s a man swayed by emotion.’

  It hit me that he wasn’t as clever as I’d believed; either that or his old books had finally clamped him tight between their pages. I know about men, and knew George to be softer than most. He could cry like a woman at the mention of his mother.

  I said, ‘Possibly he told her where she came from.’

  ‘Would that be enough?’ He sounded unconvinced. His face kept slipping in and out of the mist.

  ‘What more would be needed?’ I asked. ‘It’s useful to know one’s beginnings.’

  ‘There are more urgent things to contemplate,’ he muttered, ‘one’s end for instance,’ and the water having come to the boil, made tea. We drank it to the clump of boots as the fatigue detail set off on the dawn search for wood and water. Close by, a horse pissed, its splatterings diminishing as it trotted on.

  ‘These are times in which the truth should be told,’ Potter announced portentously. ‘Do you not think so, Pompey Jones?’

  ‘What truth would that be?’ I asked. His face had vanished again.

  ‘In this case,’ he said, ‘I’m speaking of pictures.’

  I thought he meant photographs, and told him straight that I couldn’t see eye to eye with him. ‘Some pictures,’ I confided, ‘would only cause alarm to ordinary folk.’ I was thinking of the studies of exit wounds taken for the College of Surgeons.

  ‘I had in mind,’ he said, ‘a view of ships in the Mersey, seen from the hill on which the Washington Hotel now stands.’

  He had me utterly confused. Perhaps, after all, George had been in the right of it when he’d held that Potter was leaving his mind.

  ‘You may remember it hung on the wall in the study,’ he continued. ‘It was moved some weeks before you were barred from the house.’

  It was true I’d been banned fro
m visiting Blackberry Lane, though that hadn’t stopped George from seeing me. One night he’d sent a note to my lodgings asking me to meet him on the north side of the Washington Hotel. I’d had every intention of complying, but when I strode down the hill I’d glimpsed yellow flames rolling through the sky above the river. When I reached the Custom House, the blazing sails of ships skimmed like kites across the crimson waters, and it hurt to breathe. Even at this distance in time I recalled the howl of the fire as it hurtled towards the stars. When the tobacco warehouse collapsed and the sparks sprayed out in ostrich feathers, the crowd had burst out cheering. It wasn’t just the conflagration that had prevented me from keeping my appointment with George – it rankled that he’d stipulated the kitchen entrance rather than the front steps of the hotel. I was finished with being consigned to the shadows. Next morning he was waiting for me by the pump in my street. He’d given me one of his old cameras which I sold later that day for sixteen shillings, as I had a better one of my own.

  Potter said, ‘First it was positioned above the desk. You may recollect a blue vase with a fluted neck that stood below it. Then it was found askew on the wall to the right of the door.’

  Flummoxed, I uttered not a word.

  ‘I stayed up two nights … in an effort to solve the mystery. I was not then a man used to going without sleep. In the scale of things it is of small importance, yet I would be grateful for an explanation.’

  ‘I can’t help you,’ I said, and left him.

  Once inside the van I set about smartening the shelves in case the photographer returned. Though I had been careful in my handling of the glass plates and the positives, the numerous bottles were in a jumble and the trays not sufficiently clean. The thief who had sat with me the night before had slopped drink on to the work bench. After storing the chemicals in a more orderly fashion I inspected the cameras, of which there were three, one being for portraits and fitted with a Ross three-inch lens, the others of the bellows construction and made by Bourquien of Paris.