Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “By Heaven! when is our turn to come?”

  Our turn was near at hand. An hour after we received the order to advance on the Russian guns. With the blame, on whomsoever it may lie of that rash order, I have nothing to do. That vexatious question can never be settled, since he on whose shoulders they place it lies in the valley of Balaklava, the first who fell, and cannot raise his voice to reply, or give the lie, if it be a lie, to his calumniators. If Louis Nolan were to blame, his love for our Arm, and his jealousy over its honour, his belief that Light Cavalry would do the work of demigods, and his irritation that hitherto we had not been given the opportunity we might have had, must plead his excuse; and I think his brilliant courage, and the memory of that joyous cheer which ended in the wild death-cry which none who heard can ever forget, might silence the angry jar and jangle of contention above his grave, and set the seals of oblivion upon his error!

  The order was given us to take the Russian guns. For the first time since we had landed a light of joy and pleasure came into the Colonel’s eyes; and his old smile flashed over De Vigne’s face. We were so sick of inaction, of riding about the Chersonese doing nothing, and letting other men’s names go home in the despatches!

  At ten minutes past eleven we of the Light Brigade shook our bridles and dashed off with Cardigan, in the morning sunlight, towards the Russian battery. Lookers-on tell me they could hardly credit that so few in numbers, entirely unsupported, were going to charge an army in position; and that they gave us up for hopeless destruction as we swept past them full gallop, the sunshine catching the points of our sabres and flashing off our harness. If they did not credit it, we did. We knew it was against all maxims of war for Cavalry to act without support, or infantry at hand. We knew that in all probability few indeed, if any of us, would ever come back from that rapid and deadly ride. But the order was given. There were the guns — and away we went, quickening from trot to canter, and from canter to gallop, as we drew nearer to them. On we went, spurring our horses across the space that divided us from those grim fiery mouths. On we went: Sabretasche’s voice cheering us on, and the delicate white hand that Belgravian belles admired pointing to the guns before us; De Vigne sitting down in his saddle as in bygone days, when he led the field across Northampton pastures. On we went. All I was conscious of was a feverish exultation; a wild, causeless delight; a fierce tiger-like longing to be at them, and upon them. The ring of the horses’ iron hoofs, the chink of the rattling bits, the clashing of chains and sabres, the whistle and screech of the bullets as they flew amongst ns from the redoubt, all made music in my ear. God knows how it is, but in such hours as that the last thing one thinks of is the death so near at hand. Though men reeled from their saddles and fell lifeless to the ground at every step, and riderless chargers fled snorting and wounded from our ranks; though the guns from the redoubt poured on us as we swept past, and volleys of rifles and musketry raked our ranks; though every moment great gaps were made, till the fire broke our first line, and the second had to fill it up; though from the thirty guns before us poured a deadly fire, whose murderous balls fell amongst us as we rode, clearing scores of saddles, sweeping down horses and men, and strewing the plain as we passed with quivering human bodies, and chargers rolling over and over in their death-agony, — on we rode, down into that fiery embrace of smoke and flame, that stretched out its arms and hissed its fell kisses at us from the Russian line. De Vigne spurred his horse into the dense smoke of the blazing batteries as Sabretasche led us in between the guns. Everyone was for himself then, as we dashed into the battery and sabred the gunners at their posts, while the oblique fire from the hills, and the direct fire of musketry, poured in upon us. Prodigies of valour were done there, never to be chronicled. Twice through the blinding smoke I saw De Vigne beside me — the Charmed Life, as they had called him in India — reckless of the storm of balls that fell about him, sitting in his saddle as firmly as if he were at a Pytchley run. We had no breathing time to think of others in that desperate struggle, but once I heard Pigott near me shout out, “The Colonel’s down!” Thank God it was not true; down he was, to be sure, for his horse was killed under him by a round shot; but he sprang up again in an instant, as collectedly as though he were pacing the Ring in Hyde Park, and vaulted on a riderless charger that was by him. That wild mêlée! I remember nothing distinctly in it, save the mad thirst for blood that at such a time rises in one as savagely as in a beast of prey. A shot struck my left arm, breaking the bone above my wrist; but I was conscious of no pain as we broke through the column of Russian infantry, sending them flying before us, broken and scattered like thistle-down upon the wind, and were returning from our charge, as brilliantly as the Scots and Enniskilleners had returned from theirs, when the flank fire from the hill battery opened upon us — an enemy we could not reach or silence — and a mass of Russian Lancers were hurled upon our flank. Shewell and his 8th cut through them — we stayed for an encounter, hemmed in on every side, our little handful shrouded by the dense squadrons of their troops. It was hot work, work that strewed the plain with the English Light Brigade, as a harvest-field is strewn with wheat-ears ere the sheaves are gathered. But we should have broken through them still, no matter what the odds, for there were deeds of individual daring done in that desperate struggle which would make the chillest blood glow, and the most lethargic listener kindle into admiration. We should have cut through them, coûte que coûte, but that horrible volley of grape and canister, on which all Europe has cried shame, poured on friend and foe from the gunners who had fled before our charge, the balls singing with their murderous hiss through the air, and falling on the striving mass of human life, where English and Russian fought together, carrying death and destruction with its coward fire into the ranks of both, and stamping the Church-blessed troops of the Czar with ineffaceable infamy.

  It was with bitter hearts and deadly thoughts that we, the remnant of the Six Hundred, rode back, leaving the flower of the Light Brigade dead or dying before those murderous Russian guns; — and it was all done, all over, in five-and-twenty minutes — less than a fast up-wind fox-hunt would have taken at home!

  De Vigne was unhurt The Charmed Life must still have had his spell about him, for if any man in the Cavalry had risked danger and courted death that day he had done so; but he rode out of the lines at Balaklava without even a scratch. Sabretasche had been hit by a ball which had only grazed his shoulder; the raffiné man of fashion would have laughed at a much more deadly wound. We were not too “fine gentlemen” for that work! Days afterwards he looked back to the plain where so many of his Dashers had fallen, torn and mangled in the bloody jaws of those grim batteries, the daring spirits quenched, the vigorous lives spent, the gallant forms become food for the worms, and he turned to De Vigne with a mournful smile, “Cut bono?”

  True indeed — cut bono? that waste of heroic human life. There was a bitter significance in his favourite sarcasm, which the potentates, who for their own private ends had drenched the Chersonese in blood, would have found it hard to answer. Cut bono indeed! Their bones lie whitening there in the valley of Balaklava; fresh fancies amuse and agitate the nations; the Light Cavalry Charge is coldly criticised and pronounced tomfoolery, and their names are only remembered in the hearts of some few women whose lives were desolation when they fell.

  Winter in the Crimea — the Crimea of 1854-55. The very words are enough to bring up again to memory that sharp, stinging wind, of whose concentred cold-none can imagine in the faintest degree, save those who have weathered a winter in tents on the barren steppes before Sebastopol. Writing those very words is enough to bring up before one the bleak, chill, dark stretch of ground, with its horrible roads turned to water-courses, or frozen like miles of broken glass; the slopes, vast morasses of mud and quagmire, or trackless wastes of snow; the hurricane, wild as a tropical tornado, whirling the tents in mid-air, and turning men and horses roofless into the terrible winter night; the long hours of darkness, of storm, of blindi
ng snow, of howling wind, of pouring ink-black rain, in which the men, in the trendies, and the covering parties and pickets, watched with eyes that must never close, and senses that might never weary; the days when under those pitiless skies officers and men shared alike the common fate, worse clad than a beggar, worse cared for than a cab-horse; — all rise up before one as by incantation, at those mere words, Winter in the Crimea.

  My left arm turned out so tedious and tiresome that I was obliged to go down to Balaklava for a short time. The day before I went up again to the front, a transport came into harbour with a reinforcement of the — th from England. I watched them land: their fresh healthy faces, their neat uniforms, their general trim, and allover-like-going look, contrast enough to the men in the trenches at the front; and as I was looking at them disembark I saw a face I knew well — the face fair and delicate as a girl, with his long light curls and his blue eyes, and his lithe slight figure, of our little Curly of Frestonhills. Twelve months before, Curly had changed from his captaincy in the Coldstreams to the Lieutenant-Colonelcy of the — th, and had been savage enough at having done so when the Household Brigades went out to the Crimea; but now his turn had come. We met as old friends did meet out there, and had a long haver of the things that had been done in England since we left, and the things we had done ourselves in the Chersonese. Knowing nothing of those fierce words which had passed between Curly and De Vigne, I was surprised at the silence with which Curly listened to my details of the heroic pluck with which our Frestonhills hero had cut his way through the Russian squadrons on the morning of the 25th; knowing nothing, either of the love which had entered into them both for the same woman, I set my foot in it unawares by asking him if he had seen the Little Tressillian before he left? Curly, though Heaven knows life had seasoned him as it seasons us all, busied himself with poking up his pipe, while the muscles of his lips twitched, as he answered simply, “No!”

  “No! What, didn’t you even go to bid her goodbye?”

  “For Heaven’s sake, Arthur, hold your tongue!” said Curly, more sharply than I had ever heard him speak. “It is grossest brutality to jest on such a subject.”

  “Brutality to ask after the Little Tressillian?” I repeated, in sheer amazement “My dear fellow, what on earth do you mean? What has happened to Alma? Is she dead?”

  “Would to Heaven she were, rather than what they say she is: another added to Vane Castleton’s list of victims!”

  The anguish in his voice was unmistakable. I stared at him in amazement The Little Tressillian gone over to Vane Castleton! That girl whose face was truth, and innocence, and candour in itself! I stared at him in mute bewilderment. The bursting of Whistling Dick between us at that moment would not have astonished me more.

  “Alma — Vane Castleton! My dear Curly, there must be some mistake.”

  “God knows!” he answered between his teeth. “I do not credit it, yet there are the facts. She has left St. Crucis; her nurse saw her leave in Castleton’s brougham, and she has never returned. She must have been deluded away; she never could have gone willingly. He may have lured her with a false marriage. God knows! I should have found him out to know the truth, and shot him dead if he had beguiled her away against her will, but I never heard of it until the day before we sailed. I could not leave my regiment at the eleventh hour.”

  “Do you care so much for her, then?”

  “I loved her very dearly,” said Curly, simply, with his pipe between his lips. “Don’t talk of it again, Arthur, please; she cared nothing for me, but I will never believe her face told a lie.”

  He was silent; and since the loss of Alma had stung him so keenly and so deeply, that not even the elasticity of his gay, light, affectionate nature could rebound or recover from it, it was easy to understand how it had overwhelmed De Vigne, if, as I doubted not, the love that Sabretasche had predicted had come between himself and the Little Tressillian.

  The fierce words that had passed between them were not forgotten. De Vigne was not a man to forgive in a moment. Curly sought no reconciliation. Perhaps he harboured a suspicion that it had been to his friend, and not to Castleton, that Alma had flown, for he knew De Vigne would have left the woman he most tenderly loved, at any call to arms. They seldom met — De Vigne being in Lord Lucan’s camp, and Curly in that of the Light Division — and they avoided each other by mutual consent The love of woman had come between them, and stretched like a great gulf between De Vigne and the young fellow he had liked ever since he was a little fair-haired, bright-eyed boy.

  Curly came just in time for that grey wintry dawn, when the bells of Sebastopol rang through the dark, foggy air, and the dense masses of troops, for whom mass had been said, stole through the falling rain up the heights of the valley of Inkermann.

  Curly was in time for Inkermann, and for the winter work in the trenches, where he, so late the Adonis of the Guards, the “best style” in the Park, the darling of Belgravian boudoirs, who at home never began his day till two o’clock, had to turn into the trenches in rain which made the traverses like Dutch dykes, or in blinding snow blown into his eyes; to come back to a tent without fire to food either semi-raw or else burnt black as a cinder; and to sleep rudely, roused by a hurricane that whirled away his sole frail shelter, and turned him out into the bitter black Crimean night That winter showed us campaigning with the gloss off; no brilliant succession of battles, the space between each filled up with the capture of fallen cities, and balls and love-making in friendly ones, such as make the history of the war among the green sierras of Spain so favourite a theme for fiction and romance; but nothing save an eternal cannonading from the dawn of one day to the dawn of another; nothing but months dragging away one after another, seeing horses and men dying off by scores.

  The weary inactivity of the siege, which weighed down even the lightest hearts before Sebastopol, was but one long torture to De Vigne, who longed for danger and excitement as the sole anodyne to a passion which pursued him as the Furies pursued Orestes; while Sabretasche, the most luxurious of voluptuaries, bore uncomplainingly the miseries of that Crimean winter. The wild Chersonese hurricane turned him out at night, shelterless, to the full fury of the storm; his food was such as at home he would have forbidden to be given to his dog; his servant had to fight with another for some scanty brushwood to light his fire; loathsome centipedes crawled over his very bed; he had to wade through mud, and rain, and filth, over paths marked out by the sick and dying fallen by the roadside, with the carrion birds whirling aloft over the spot where the corpses lay. Yet I never heard him utter a complaint, except, indeed, when he turned to me with a smile:

  “How horrible it is, Arthur, not to be able to wash one’s hands!”

  One night, just before we were ordered into Balaklava, a friend of his who was staying on board one of the vessels in the harbour was dining with him — De Vigne, a French colonel of cavalry, whom Sabretasche had known in Paris, a man of the — th Lancers, and myself, making up the party. All of us thought of the Colonel’s charming dinners in Park-lane as we sat down to this, the best money could procure, and miraculously luxurious for the Crimea — a turkey, some preserved beef, and a little jam, with some brandy and whisky, for which his man had paid a price you would not believe, if I recorded it parole d’honneur.

  “I am equally glad to see you, Carlton,” said Sabretasche, “but I’m afraid I can’t entertain you quite so well as I did in Park-lane. Il faut manger pour vivre, else I fancy you would hardly be inclined to touch much of anything we can give you in the Crimea.”

  “The deuce, Sabretasche! we have what we care for; — our host,” said Carlton. “I wonder when we shall have you back among us; I say, you’re quite a hero, and so is De Vigne, in England. Lady Puffdoff and scores of your old loves are gone mad about you, and have been working their snowy fingers to the bone over all sorts of wool things for you and the rest of the Dashers, that are now tumbling about in the holds, and will rot in Balaklava harbour, I suppose, till the
hot weather comes.”

  “Herol Bosh!” said De Vigne, with his most contemptuous sneer. “If the people at home would just believe the men are dying away here, more than three thousand sick in camp, and would provide for them with just a little common practical sense, they’d do us more service than by writing ballads about us, and showering epithets on us that they’ll forget in twelve months’ time, when they are running after some new hobby.”

  (De Vigne spoke prophetically!)

  “But you like campaigning, though you rough it, old fellow!” asked Carlton.

  “By George! I should say so! If I were a medical man, and had to deal with hypochondriacs, frenzied poets, nervous littérateurs, or worn-out public men, I would send them all off to active service. Boot and Saddle would soon have all the nonsense out of them, and send them back much healthier and better fellows. Campaigning is the only thing to put a dash of cayenne pepper into the soup of life.”

  “Our cayenne gets rather damped here,” said Sabretasche. “I confess I miss my reading-chair, my smoking-room, my periodicals, my papers, my whist, my wines, my club — the ‘sweet shady side of Pall Mall;’ — above all, Society. All these are great agrimens of life.”

  “But confess, Colonel, you’re less fastidious and less dandified!” asked De Vigne.