LXXVI
The Tsar was genuinely puzzled to know—War having been declared between himself and the Sultan—why he could not crumple those thirteen vessels of a Turkish Convoy bound with troops, arms, and ammunition for a certain important port on the coast of the Black Sea without provoking such a deafening outcry from Gallia and Britannia; and, indeed, what the Daily Press of both these countries persisted in calling the “outrage” of Sinope, seems at this distance of time no more than a provoked and unavoidable measure of defense.
A Comic Illustrated Paper of the date represents the Sultan as a curled darling in short socks, strap-shoes, petticoats, and pinafore, sniveling, with his little fist in his weeping eyes—the while he blubbers out to grinning, knickerbockered Russia:
“Hoo—boohoo! You’ve broken my nice new Fleet!... Wait till I tell Nursie France and Auntie Britannia—they’ll give you a good spanking, you—boohoo!—naughty Boy!”
For some reason there was hurry. The Holy Standard was unfurled and the Sacred Shirt displayed; the Moslem, who had suddenly become so dear to us, plunged, with renewed vigor, into hostilities; the Russian Ambassadors quitted London and Paris; but weeks before Great Britain and France leagued themselves with the Infidel against Christian Russia, and War was proclaimed by the Lord Mayor of London from the steps of the Royal Exchange, Her Majesty’s Foot Guards received orders to proceed to the East, and the Second Battalion of the Cut Red Feathers marched out fromSt.George’s Barracks; and the Third Battalion of the White Tufts marched out from the Tower; and the First Battalion of the Bearskins Plainmarched out of Windsor—slept a night at Wellington Barracks; and with bands playing “Cheer, Boys, Cheer,” “We are Going Far Away,” “Oh, Susannah! Don’t You Cry for Me!” and “The British Grenadiers,” they were off and away for Gallipolivia—whyviaMalta?
You may conceive the cheers, the tears, the shaking of the earth by the even tread of battalions of marching men; the waving of hats and pocket-handkerchiefs; the wives, and children, and sweethearts crying and clinging to husbands’, and fathers’, and lovers’ arms. You may imagine the roaring trade done by the venders of oranges, whelks, polonies, pettitoes, and other portable refreshments; and the generosity with which these were pressed upon the rank-and-file; and the lavishness with which the thirst of the British soldier—great even in piping times of peace—was assuaged by copious draughts of foaming beer and liquors even more potent....
The Bearskins Plain got the best send-off, for from Bird Cage Walk to Buckingham Palace, and along the Strand to Waterloo, many thousands of people were gathered to give them God-speed, and the Mall was made gay with bunting and streamers. Jowell, Sewell, Cowell, Towell, Bowell, and Co., of whose cunning, and greed, and rapacity most of these departing warriors were presently to perish—filled an official window in Pall Mall with gorgeous waistcoats and patriotic enthusiasm.
“Noble fellows! God bless ’em!” they cried, and shed tears and waved their pocket-handkerchiefs. They slopped over with patriotic sentiments as the champagne slopped over their glasses; while they told each other how soon those steadily-marching legs would bring their owners back. The whole thing was extravagantly simple. The British Army had but to proceed to the East—quite an enviable trip now the spring-time was approaching—show itself—conquer by the mere show; and return to be thanked and praised.
They were to return so soon, and the climate of Eastern Europe was believed, even in March, to be so warm and genial, that nothing in the way of extra covering had been issued to England’s darling sons. Sire my Friend, had equipped the French Army with a complete outfit of serviceable winter clothing. Stout and easy-fitting bootsprotected its feet, great-coats of heavy waterproofed material were supplied it against the nip of cold or the exigencies of wet weather. Even the Infidel had purchased for his troops, fifty thousand ample capotes of leather lined with sheepskin; but Britannia relied exclusively upon the glow of martial ardor for the generation and preservation of caloric. Hence it came about that whole battalions of the legs that were presently to march away, marched in the trousers of white duck, in which they had returned from service in Bermuda, China, and the East Indies. And the rest in a shoddy summer cloth of dirty bluish gray.
It is odd how universal was that conviction that the Expedition to the East was to be nothing beyond a flying visit. When the cheering broke out at the Officers’ Mess House—the Rathkeale Ragamuffins being at that moment quartered at the Victoria Barracks, Dublin; my Aunt Julietta,—who dined with the children at one o’clock, and frugally supped upon cold mutton and the remains of the rice-pudding or custard in the petrified or gelid state, whilst her Golightly was enjoying his seven courses, cheese, and dessert in the society of his peers—my Aunt, learning that the dreaded summons had come, greeted the reappearance of her lord with an outburst of hysterical emotion. Upon which Captain Goliath, whom you may suppose well primed with Mess Port, and subsequent whisky-toddy; jested at her wifely tears, and made light of her tender terrors.
“I tell ye there’s no danger!—they’ll simply send us out and order us back again. We’ll never get ashassat them—more’s the pity!—much less a prod. They’re cowards, rank cowards! They’ll turn tail and run at the first British cheer we’re after giving them. We’re simply being sent out—do you hear me?—to be sent back again. Sure, now, when ye married me, Juley, me own darling!—you didn’t suppose ye were taking anything but a soldier, did ye now? Killed is it?Killed!... Nonsense, ma’am!—there’ll be no killin’ at all, at all! Compose yourself, Mrs. McCreedy—for your own sake and the baby’s! Don’t you hear me saying that they’ll simply send——Will You Be Quiet And Listen to What I’m Telling You!” bellowed Captain Goliath, at the full pitch of a remarkably powerful pair of lungs.
But my Aunt Julietta, unwilling to lose so favorablean opportunity, here went into hysterics after the latest recipe published in the pages ofThe Ladies’ Mentor, and screamed, cried, and laughed so vigorously, that—had not the alarmed and flustered Captain seized and applied the Cayenne pepper-castor in mistake for my Aunt’s silver vinaigrette of Red Lavender—unfavorable results to the expected olive-branch of the McCreedy stem might have supervened.
But my Aunt—in paroxysms of sneezing—recovered sufficiently to scold her clumsy hero; and the Captain departed; to return towards the small-hours in a condition which his military body-servant erroneously described as “fresh.”
Ah, poor gentlewoman! how my Aunt winced at the coarse pleasantries of the man, and the hiccupping genialities of the master! How many times since she pledged to theidol of her soulthefondest vows, etc., had not that idol proved himself a mere lump of sodden, heavy clay.
She dismissed Private Fahy, ungratified in the wish—audibly expressed—for a hair of the dog that had bit the Captain—and herself undressed her prone and wallowing warrior; got him to bed, and while he snored, knelt beside the pillow his hoggishness defiled, and prayed to Heaven—pure, simple, loving creature!—that War might spare him to his wife and children, for many a long year to come!...
For the rest she was as “callum as you please, and as brave as aliness” to quote the Captain; when he gave her his parting hug on Kingstown Harbor Quay.
The month’s installment of a Serial Tale then running inThe Ladies’ Mentorcontained a harrowing description of a similar leave-taking between husband and wife. But it seemed to my Aunt Julietta that thegallantandhigh-souledColonel Reginald de la Vaux and hisyoungandsensitivebride said too much—and said it too coherently to be quite real.
They ought to have gulped out trivialities until the last minute, such as: “Don’t forget the whisky-flask!—it’s in your great-coat pocket.” “Not me, egad! trust a British soldier!” and “Do, now, remember, love!—alwaysto change wet socks!” Then, as the Fifes and Drums squealed, and company after company marched up the gangway, and the Colors were displayed on the quarter-deck, they shouldhave choked and grabbed each other. And with the rasping scrub of a wet mustache upon her mouth, and the smell of wet umbrellas and oilskins in her nostrils, and the strains of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” and “Cheer, Boys, Cheer” in her ears; and the tears rolling down her cheeks as heavily as the rain dripped from the eaves of her bonnet—as the big steamer moved slowly, remorselessly away from the quay amidst cheering and good-byes—my pretty Aunt was left standing in a puddle—much to the detriment of a smart pair of velvet boots.
Heaven knows how long the poor soul would have stood there, but that her children’s nurse—a Sloughshire girl, married to a private of the Rathkeales—who made one of a group of disconsolate dripping soldiers’ wives—perching amongst piles or crates and timber-balks and coils of tarry rope to see the last of their men—ran to her, crying wildly: “Oh, ma’am!—ma’am!... my Tom!... Will he ever come back, do you think, ma’am?... Shall I ever see him again?...” And my Aunt wakened out of her desolate stupor, and took the weeping creature’s cold wet hand, and kissed her swollen cheek, and told her: “Of course you will, Mrs. Kennedy! They’re only sending them out to the East to send them home again!”
Ensign Mortimer Jowell—who for two years now had held Her Majesty’s Commission, did not sail with his regiment. A common, infantile complaint, characterized by a rubious rash and yclept the measles—had stricken the only hope of the House of Jowell down on the very threshold of Active Service, much to his indignation and chagrin.
The young man’s bosom-friend and brother-officer Ensign Lord Adolphus Noddlewood, marched in the uniform of a private of the Cut Red Feathers, from the train to the Docks between two of the men of his own company, thus avoiding a sheriff’s officer who—armed with a writ issued by Nathan and Moss of Giltspur Street—had been sent down to arrest this gay young nobleman.
But Morty, frying with fever and boiling with vexation, must perforce remain a prisoner in the huge palatial four-poster in the luxurious bedroom of the suite of private apartments which the fond father had caused to be speciallydecorated and furnished for his only son at the Jowell mansion in Hanover Square. Instead of farewell banquets washed down with the golden, creaming nectar of Sillery and Épernay—followed by bumpers of the Port of Carbonell—the young man perforce must subsist on blameless slops of chicken-broth and barley-water—must be regulated with saline doses of the cooling, nauseous, fizzy kind....
His mother presided over the medical regimen; administered the medicines, turned the pillows—pounded into feather-pancakes by her boy’s aching bullet-head—read him the newspaper-accounts of the departure of his comrades—washed him—scolded him—bore with his fevered grumblings; and—reverting to the days when the big young man was a mere topknotted youngster in plaid frocks, diamond socks, and strap-shoes—heard him say his nightly prayers.
In those early days referred to, young Mortimer—proving himself a true sapling of that sterling stem of stout old British oak, his father,—had been wont to derive profit of the solid, terrestrial description from these orisons, by tacking on to the supplementary petition for parents, requests for toys and treats particularly desired.
“Please God bless my mother, and make her buy me that new engine I saw in So-and-So’s shop-window”—was naturally followed by fulfillment.... Faith is the first of the theological virtues.... What Christian mother would have her boy grow up an atheist? Arguing thus, the poor lady would purchase the engine; and Morty’s prayers would be without addenda for a night, or maybe two. But before a week was over the maternal head, this infant Samuel would be praying for a new gun or a new puppy—and the thing would begin all over again....
To do Morty justice, he loved the meek, sad woman, despised by Jowell as being devoid of “spirit” and “go.” She never dreamed—when her darling went to Rugby—how many pugilistic encounters his promise of never forgetting his daily prayers was to cost a boy whose dogged obstinacy of nature led him to shun the concealment offered by blankets, and persist in saying them out of bed.... It is on record that the boys Morty pounded presently followed his example; while the boys who pounded him had suffered so many contusions in the courseof the contest, that they had no urgent desire to provoke a renewal of war.
Do you hear the embarrassed, clumsy accents of the large young Ensign, mumbling that simplest, noblest, and most Divine of all petitions? Do you see that sorrowful, plain, dowdy woman, sitting in the shadow of his sumptuous brocade bed-curtains, cherishing the big, powerful, hot young hand?
“‘But deliver us from evil.’... And make me a good boy—no! hang it!—I mean a good man and a good officer.... And make me well quick, and let me get to our fellows Out There—before all the fun of the fighting’s over!—And don’t let my mother fret and worry herself—and bring me back safe home to her again. For Christ’s sake, Amen!”
That brought the tears, hard as the mother tried to stop them—pattering, hot, and quick, and heavy, on her brown silk lap. She held the big hand until his tea came—fed him with strips of toast soaked in the blameless infusion—ere she crept away to compose herself in the solitude of her own huge palatial bedroom, before going down to preside over her silver teapot—set at the end of a vast expanse of dining-table spread with the customary complements of the distinctive British meal. The redness of her poor eyelids could not be concealed by any innocent application of cold water and Johann-Maria-Farina, and, at the sight of them Thompson Jowell—who came home early from the City in these days of his son’s sickness—dropped upon the hearthrug the newspaper he had been perusing, and—nimbly as the Zoological Society’s Rhinoceros might have quitted his private pond in the Regent’s Park Gardens—floundered out of his armchair.
“What the devil’s this, ma’am?” he blustered, staring at his wife with eyes rendered even more froggishly prominent than usual by apprehension. “You’re not going to tell me the boy’s taken a turn for the worse, and is in danger?” He added, as she reassured him on this point: “If you had, I wouldn’t have believed you! Tom Tough, my name is—when it comes to a question of constitution—and my son takes after his old Governor! But, Lord!—you’ve given me a start.”
He broke off to swab his face, and the hand that wielded the silk bandanna handkerchief, shook quite as though thegreat Contractor had been a being of common flesh and blood. It was to shake more, erelong. For, as though that curse of Trooper Joshua Horrotian had had real power to bring Misfortune down—strange ill-chances and cross-happenings, eventuating from the dubious business-methods of the parent Jowell, were to place in very frequent jeopardy the one person, of all living beings—whom the man desired should go scot-free. For all the gold that War would pour into his coffers, Jowell would not have risked a hair of the head of this beloved son....
He had always thriven upon disaster. Mildewed harvests brought him golden ones, even as the murrain among cattle and the rot among sheep glutted the storehouses of Cowell with barrels of Prime Salted Beef, and tins of First Class Preserved Mutton, for the nourishment of the British Army. And the skins of the diseased beasts above-named, being sold to Shoell, at a friendly lowness of price, were converted into Boots and Saddlery and so on....
Towell and Sewell, buying whole cargoes of Damaged Cotton—salvage from the spinning-mills that were always being set on fire and flooded with water—and the waste of countless Woolen Manufactories—the first to be woven into soldiers’ shirting, the second to be manufactured into shoddy cloth of gray or blue or brick-dust-red to upholster martial bodies withal—flourished on the same principle of Give as little as you may and Take all you can get.
Bowell, who took over obsolete or damaged medical stores and necessaries from Britannia’s Hospitals and Infirmaries and Workhouses, and sold them back again without a blush upon his tallowy countenance; Powell, who bought thousands of tons of waste and spoiled paper from the Horse Guards and the Admiralty and other Government offices—where paper is wasted and spoiled—and transformed it into cardboard wherewith to strengthen busbies, shakos, helmets, and cocked-hats, and render them proof against bullets and grape, stroke of saber or cut of sword—were in like manner enriched at the mere cost of discomfort to many men, and a man’s life here and there.... But until the War broke out, and the Genius of Jowell spread its leathery bat-wings and soared—none of these enterprising spirits had ever dreamed what wealth, beyond thedreams of avarice, might be gathered and piled up, at cost of misery to thousands, and innumerable lives. When they realized this, they bowed their foreheads in the dust before the roomy patent-leather boots of Jowell, and mumbled them. He grew great in their eyes, and greater still. The sun rose to light his path, and set because he had done with it for the present.... They whispered to each other—behind their ringed and stumpy hands—that he was the devil, the very devil, sir! And as the earthly Vicar and representative of that dark potentate they worshiped him, having forgottenGod.