by Ouida
There was no time for speech; that cordial shake of their hands was their silent greeting and farewell, and we rode onwards to form the line on Cathcart’s Hill. I think De Vigne thought more than once of his old school pet, when, from our post, we saw the ramparts of the Redan belching forth fire and smoke, and the ambulances coming down the Woronzoff-road with their heavy and pitiful burdens. Both he and I, I fancy, thought a good deal about Curly that day, as we saw them through the clouds of dust and smoke scale the parapet, then lost them amidst the obscurity which the fire of the musketry and the flames of the burning embrasure raised around the scene of carnage and confusion; and whether he was there among the remnant who were forced over the parapet and fell, or jumped, pêle-mêle into that mass of human misery below, where English pluck was still so strong among them that some laughs they say were heard at their own misery, we could not tell. But late that night, Kennedy, one of his sergeants, told to De Vigne and me and a few other men another of those stories of individual heroism so great in their example, so unfortunate in their reward; telling it in rough, brief words, with an earnestness that gave it eloquence to us, with those frowning ramparts in front, and those crowded hospitals behind:
“We was a’most the first into the Redan, Major. When I see the ladders, so few, and what there was on ’em so short, I began to think as how we should never get in at all, but Colonel Brandling, he leaped into the ditch and scrambled up the other side as quick as a cat, with a cheer to do your heart good, and we went a’course äfter him and scaled the parapet, while the Russians ran back and got behind the traverses to fire upon us as soon as we got atop. What possessed ’em I don’t know, Major, but you’ve heard that some of our men began loading and file-firing instead of follering their officers to the front; so many trench-bred infantry men will keep popping away for ever if you let ’em; but the Colonel led on to the breastwork with his cigar in his mouth, just where he’d put it for a lark when he jumped on the parapet There was nobody to support us, and our force weren’t strong enough to carry it, and we had to go back and get behind the traverses, where our men were firing on the Russians, and there we stayed, sir, packed together as close as sheep in a fold, firing into the Redan as long as our powder lasted. I can’t tell you, Major, very well how it all went on; it wasn’t a right assault like, it was all hurry-scurry and confusion, and though the officers died game, they couldn’t form the troops ‘cause they were so few, sir, and the salient so narrow. But it was the Colonel I was to tell you about, Major. I was beside him a’most all the time. At first he seemed as if nothing would hit him; one ball knocked his cap off, and another grazed his hair, but he took it all as careless as if he was at a ball, and he just turned to me, sir, with his merry smile: ‘Quick work, eh, Kennedy?’ Them was the last words he spoke, sir. Just at that minute the enemy charged us with the bayonet, and the devils behind ’em began to pour volleys on us from the breastwork. Four of them Russians closed round the Colonel, and he’d nothing but his sword against their cursed bayonets. I closed with one on ’em; he was as hard as death to grip with. The Colonel killed two of ’em off hand, though they was twice as big as he, but the third, just as his arm was lifted, ran him right through the left lung. Then he fell straight down, Major, and I was a-going to fight my way to him and carry him off in my arms, and I would ha’ done it, sir, too, but the Russians pressed so hard on the front ranks that they pushed us straight off the parapet, and I only caught a sight of the Colonel lifting himself up on his elbow, and waving us on with a smile — God bless him! — and then I fell over into the ditch, with Pat O’Leary a-top of me, and I see him no more, Major, and he must be dead, sir, or else a prisoner in that d — d city.”
And honest Kennedy, whose feeling had carried him beyond recollection of delicate language or other presence than his own, stopped abruptly. In his own words, he “felt like a fool,” for Curly, like Eman of the 41st, was loved by all the men who served under him.
De Vigne set his teeth hard as he listened. Memories of his Frestonhills’ pet thronged upon him; the little fellow who had been so eager for his notice, so proud of his patronage; the merry, light-hearted child, with his golden locks and his fearless spirits; the wild young Cantab; the dandy Guardsman; the warm, true, honest heart, unstained by the world he lived in; die friend, the rival! Poor little Curly! — and he was lying yonder, behind those smoking ramparts, wounded and a prisoner — perhaps dead!
For an instant De Vigne’s eyes flashed with eagle glance over the stormed city, lying there grim and gaunt, in the shadow of the grey-hued day; I believe he would not have hesitated to cross those death-strewn lines alone, and rescue Curly or fall with him.
The Crimea is not so far distant but the world knows how we were awakened, the morning after, by the Russian general’s masterly retreat, by thunder louder than, that which had stunned our ears for twelve months long, by the explosion of the Flagstaff and Garden batteries, by the tramp of those dense columns of Russian infantry passing to the opposite side, by the glare of the flames from Fort Nicholas, by the huge columns of black smoke rising from Fort Paul, by the sight of that fair and stately Empress of the Euxine abandoned and in flames. Little did the people at home — hearing Litanies read and hymns sung in the village churches among the fresh English woodlands — dream what a grand funeral mass for our dead was shaking the earth with its echoes that Sabbath morning in the Crimea.
It was as late as Wednesday before De Vigne and I got passes from the Adjutant-General’s office, and went into the town before whose granite ramparts we had lain watching and waiting for twelve weary months. What a road it was through the French works! A very fair Rosamond’s maze of trenches, zig-zags, and parallels, across the sap, threading our way through the heaps of dead, where the men lay so thickly one on the other, just as they had fallen, shoulder to shoulder, till we were inside the Malakoff.
Four piles of dead were heaped together like broken meat on a butcher’s stall — not a whit more tenderly — and cleared out of the way like carrion; the ground was broken up into great pools of blood, black and noisome; troops of flies were swarming like mimic vultures on bodies still warm, on men still conscious, crowding over the festering wounds (for these men had lain there since Saturday at noon!), buzzing their death-rattle in ears already maddened with torture. That was what we saw in the Malakoff, what we saw a little later in the Great Redan, where among cookhouses, brimful of human blood, English and Russian lay clasped together in a fell embrace, petrified by death; where the British lay in heaps, mangled beyond recognition by their dearest friends, or scorched and blackened by the recent explosions; and where — how strange they looked there! — there stood outside the entrance of one of the houses, a vase of flowers, and a little canary!
But we did not stay to notice the once white and stately city, now black and broken with our shot; we went straight on towards Fort Paul, as yet untouched, where stood the hospital, that chamber of horrors, that worse than charnel-house, from which strong men retreated, unable to bear up against the loathsome terrors it enclosed. That long low room, with its arched roof, its square pillars, its dim, cavernous light coming in through the shattered windows, was a sight worse than all the fabled horrors of painter, or poet, or author; full of torment — torment to which the crudest torture of Domitian or Nero were mercy — a hell where human frames were racked with every possible agony, not as a chastisement for sin, but as a reward for heroism! De Vigne, used as he had been to death and pain, closed his eyes involuntarily as he entered. There they lay, packed as closely together as dead animals in a slaughter-house — the many Russians, the few English soldiers, who had been dragged there after the assault, to die as they might; they would but have cumbered the retreat, and their lives were valueless now! There they lay; some on the floor that was slippery with blood like a shamble; some on pallets saturated with the stream that carried away their life in its deadly flow; some on straw, crimson and noisome, the home of the most horrible vermin; some d
ead hastily flung down to be out of the way, black and swollen, a mass of putrefaction, the eyes forced from the sockets, the tongue protruding, the features distended in hideous grotesqueness: others dead, burnt and charred in the explosion, a heap of blanched bones and gory clothes and blackened flesh, the men who but a few hours before had been instinct with health and hope and gallant fearless life! Living men in horrible companionship with these corpses, writhing in torture which there was no, hand to relieve, no help from heaven or earth to aid, with their jagged and broken limbs twisted and powerless, were calling for water, for help, for pity; shrieking out in wild delirium or disconnected prayer the name of the woman they had loved or the God who had forsaken them, or rolling beneath their wretched beds in the agony of pain and thirst which had driven them to madness, glaring out upon us with the piteous helplessness of a hunted animal, or the ferocious unconsciousness of insanity.
We passed through one of these chambers of terrors, our hearts sickened and our senses reeling at the hideous sight, the intolerable stench, that met us at every step. Great God! what must those have endured who lay there days and nights with not a drop of water to soften their baked throats, not a kind touch to bind up their gaping wounds, not a human voice to whisper pity for their anguish; before their dying eyes scenes to make a strong man reel and stagger, and in their dying ears the shrieks of suffering equal to their own, the thunder of exploding magazines, the shock of falling fortresses, the burst of shells falling through the roof, the hiss and crash and roar of the flaming city round them!
We passed through one chamber in which we saw no one who could be Curly, or at least who we could believe was he; for few of the faces there could have been recognised by their nearest and their dearest, since not Edith’s quest of Harold wanted so keen an eye of love as was needed to seek for friend or brother in the hospital of Sebastopol.
We entered a second room, where the sights and the odours were yet more appalling than in the first Beside one pallet De Vigne paused and bent down; then his dark bronze cheek grew white, and he dropped on his knee beside the wretched bed — at last he had found Curly. Curly! still alive, in that scene of misery, lying on the mattress that was soaked through with his life-blood, the wound in his shoulder open and festering, his eyes closed, his bright hair dull and damp with the dew of suffering. that stood upon his brow, his face of a livid blue-white hue; the gay, gallant, chivalrous English gentleman, thrown down to die, as he would not have had a dog left in its suffering. On one side of him was a black charred corpse, swollen in one place, burnt to the bone in another; the woman that loved him best could not have known that hideous mass! On the other side of him, close by, was a young Russian officer but just dead, with his hands, small and fair as a girl’s, filled with the straw that he had clutched at in his death-agony; and between these two dead men lay Curly.
De Vigne knelt down beside him, lifting his head upon his arm. “My God, Arthur, is he dead?”
At the familiar voice his eyes unclosed, first with a dreamy vacant stare in them — his mother’s heart would have broken at the wreck of beauty in that face, so fair, so delicate, but a few days before!
“Curly, Curly, dear old fellow! — don’t you know me!”
Curly looked at him dreamily, unconsciously. “What! is that the prayer-bell? Is the Doctor waiting?”
His thoughts were back among the old school-days at Frestonhills, when we first met at the old Chancery — when we little thought how we were doomed to part under the murderous shadow of Fort Paul.
De Vigne bent nearer to him. “Look at me, dear old boy. You must know met Curly.”
But he did not; his head tossed wearily from side to side, the fever of his wounds had mounted to his brain, and he moaned out delirious, disconnected words.
“Why don’t they form into line, Kennedy — why don’t they form into line? If there were more of us, we could take that breastwork. Water? — water! Is there not a drop of water anywhere? We shall die of thirst I should like to die in harness, but it is hard to die of thirst like a mad dog — like a mad dog — ha! ha!” (Both of us shuddered, as the mocking, hideous laughter rang through the chamber of death.) “Alma! Who talked of Alma? Can’t you bring her here before I die? I think she would be kinder to me now, perhaps; I loved her very much; she did not care for me — she loves De Vigne. You know how I have hated him — my God! how I have hated him — and yet — Oh, for mercy sake, give me water — water for the love of Heaven!”
At the muttered raving words De Vigne’s face grew as livid for the moment as that of the dead Russian beside him, and his hand trembled as he took a flask from his belt that he had filled with brandy before starting, and held it to Curly’s lips. How eagerly he drank and drank, as if life and reason would flow back to him with that draught! For a time it gave him strength to fling off the faintness and delirium fastening upon him, his eyes grew clearer and softer, and as De Vigne raised him into a sitting posture, and supported him on his arm with all the gentle care of a woman, he revived a little, and looked at him with a conscious and grateful regard.
“De Vigne! How do you come here! Where am I? Oh! I know; is the city taken, then?”
Dying as he was, the old spirit in him rallied and flashed up for a brief moment, while De Vigne told him how the Russians had retreated, leaving Sebastopol in flames. But he was too far gone to revive long; he lay with his head resting on De Vigne’s arm, his eyelids closed again, his breathing faint and quick, all his beauty, and his manhood, and his strength, stricken down into the saddest wreck that human eyes can see and human passions cause. Few could have recognised him in the wounded wretch who was stretched on that gore-stained pallet, with his life ebbing away simply for want of that common care that a friendless beggar would have been given at home.
“Is the city won!” he asked again; his low and feeble words scarcely heard in the shrieks, the moans, the muttered prayers, the groans, the oaths around him.
“Yes; they have abandoned it to us,” De Vigne answered, not heeding the pestilence of which the air was reeking, and from which many a man as strong as he had turned heart-sick away.
“I am glad of that,” said Curly, dreamily. “England is sure to win; she is never beaten, is she? I should like to fight once more for her, but I never shall, old fellow; the days here — how many are they? — have done for me. It is hard to die like this, De Vigne?” And a shudder ran through his frame, that was quivering with every torture. “But tell my mother I die quite content, quite happy. Tell her not to regret me, I have thought of her often, very often — and bid my father if he loves me, to be kinder to Gus — Gus was a good old boy, though we made game of him.”
Curly paused; slowly and painfully as he had spoken, the exertion was greater than his fading strength could bear; he, three days before, full of manly vigour, grace, and beauty, was powerless as a new-born child, helpless as a paralysed old man; stricken down like a gracious and beautiful cedar-tree by the hacking strokes of the woodman’s axe, its life crushed, its glory withered, only to be piled amidst a heap of others to make the bonfires for a conqueror’s ovation!
De Vigne bent over him, his cheek growing whiter as he thought of the boy’s early promise and sunny boyhood, and of the man’s death, amidst such horror, filth, and desolation as England would have shuddered to compel her paupers, her convicts, nay, the very unowned dogs about her streets, to suffer in; yet made small count of having forced on her heroes, to die in like murrained cattle.
“Curly, dear Curly,” he whispered, pushing off the clammy hair from Brandling’s forehead as gently as any woman, “why talk of death? Once out of this d — d hole you will get well, old fellow; you SHALL get well. We shall have many a day together still at home.”
Curly smiled faintly:
“No! I do not die from the wounds; what has killed me, De Vigne” — and at the memory the old delirious vagueness grew over his eyes, which wandered away into the depths of his dire prison-house— “have been the si
ghts, the scents, the sounds. Oh, my God, the horrors I have seen! In sermons we used to hear them try sometimes to describe a hell; if those preachers had been here as I have been, they would have seen we don’t want devils to help us make one — men are quite enough! The stench, the ravings, the roar of the flames round us, the vile creeping things, the blasphemy, the prayers, the horrible thirst — O God! I prayed for madness; prayed for it as I never prayed for anything in all my life before, and yet, I am no coward either!”
He stopped again, a deathly grey spread over his face, and a cold shiver ran through him; the brain, last of all to die, the part immortal and vital amidst so much death, triumphed yet awhile over the dissolution of the body. Curly knew that he was dying fast, and signed De Vigne down nearer still to him.
“When the war is over, and you go back to England, first of all try and seek out Alma.”
The fierce red blood crimsoned De Vigne’s very brow; had it been a living and not a dying man who had dared to breathe that name to him, he would have provoked a reply he would have little cared to hear. All the mad passion, all the infinite tenderness there were in his heart, for his lost love, rose up at the abrupt mention of her.