LXXXIV
The snuff that got the best stories out of Moggy Geogehagan at Ballymullet Workhouse was a pungent, ginger-colored mixture, and an ounce cost fourpence-halfpenny. You sneezed when Mackiboy, who kept the general shop, took the lid of the tin off, but Moggy consumed vast pinches of this luxury without turning a hair. Naygurhead was her weakness when it came to smoking-tobacco. Her dearest treasure was a little old, inconceivably foul, black pipe that had belonged to Jems Geogehagan.
When the Allied Armies landed in the Crimaya, the scene upon that crowded beach was beyond all description.Every voice was swearing, the language was enough to split a stone.... You ate what you could get, or went without, according as luck would have it; and lay down anyhow and anywhere, to snatch your forty winks.
Between the crying of the trumpets, and the calling of the bugles, the shouting of men trying to find their lost regiments, and the noise of the starving beasts that clamored for their fodder, you were awake the greater part of the time you were sleeping. The hullaballoo made you think of the Judgment Day, with Donnybrook Fair thrown in.
At the beginning of the March upon the Alma, according to Moggy, the Hundredth Lancers with two other Light Cavalry Rigiments forrumed the Advance, and when the Armies were halted, and the Commanders-in-Chief rode along the Front, and Lord Dalgan—a grand, fine, bould-lookin’ ould gintleman to look at—dressed in a dark blue frock an’ gray throusers, an’ a plain undhress cap with a gould band, made a spache to the French in their quare lingo, their Commander-in-Chief, Marshal deSt.Arnaud—a long, thin, painted gentleman, all over gould and jools—returned the compliment by addressing Her Majesty’s troops in their native tongue.
“Angleesh Soldats!” the Marshal is reported to have said on the occasion: “’Ow do you do? I ’ope you vill faight vell to-day!” Upon which, from the safe anonymity of the ranks, a Hibernian voice retorted:
“Arrah, Froggy! Don’t you know we will?”
Staff officers rocked in their saddles. Massed regiments were grinning. No one had the least idea as to the identity of the offender. But long after, when Jems Geogehagan was at his dullest, men remembered what he had once said to the French Commander-in-Chief.
The March of the Three Armies was a cure for sore eyes, the greatest sight consaivable. It was for all the worruld an’ a Chaney orange like three great snakes sthreelin’ along. A Red Snake, and a Light Blue Snake, an’ a Dark Blue snake, wid golden scales, an’ diamond hair standin’ stiff along the backs av’ thim. And the Blue Snakes were always between the Red Snake and the sea. The rowl of the Artillery batteries, and the tramplin’ of horse and fut, and the sounding of the trumpets an’ the cryingof the bugles made you think again of the Day of Judgment. An’—more by tokens!—the Last Day was soon to dawn for many that was there.
The roads were more thracks than roads; the counthry Moggy considered to be not unlike the Curragh of Kildare, with a dash of Galway, a sinsation of Bagshot Heath, and a taste of Shorncliffe. There was rowling open plains to begin wid; you could see the Fleets movin’ as the Army moved, the big line-av-battle ships standin’ well out—so as to get the good av their long-range flankin’ batteries—and the smaller war-steamers keepin’ inshore, ready at the wind of a worrud to dhrop in a shell from their pivot-guns. But when the bush-covered slopes began to heave up like solid waves about you, and in front of you, begob! the say might have dhried up! For all you’d have known there was no Army in front of you at all, at all! but for the dead and dying bastes, and the sun-sick and cholera-smitten men it had sloughed as it traveled on. “Don’t leave us!” the sick cried out in a lamentable manner, and good rayson they had to cry, poor craythers! For the ambulances having been left behind at Varna, to lave them was to lave them to be aiting by the buruds av the air and the bastes av the wild. So thim among the women that was able—and many was sick, God pity them!—gave up their places on the wagons to these unfortunates, and footed it beside the thrains.
They bivouacked under a dhry sky that night, and marched in the gray of the morning, losing the road and climbing the hills in the tracks the plunging batteries had made. The bush that clad these hills was tamarisk and broom, and furze, and oak-scrub; thorny red-and-yellow berried barberry, wild grape-vines, and a shrub wid shiny leaves and the smell av thim like bog-myrtle. The scent of crushed thyme and worrumwood rose up about your feet, as you tramped on. The sun shone white-hot in a sky of harebell blue.
It was high noon of a scorching hot day when you heard the Fleet’s guns firing. Powerful the banging was. They were shellin’ the Russian Artillery posted on the heights. Then came volleys av muskethry, crackin’ and rattlin’. Clouds of salty-tastin’ powdher-smoke came driftin’ down upon the wind. And the sun bein’ in your teeth, your shadow and the shadows of the women marchin’with you, and the carts, and the bastes, and the men that dhrove them, loomed thremenjous on the vapor that riz behind you like a wall. But when the big grass garrison-guns the Inimy had cocked up on the rock-ridges above the river began convarsin’—and the French and English Artillery answered wid shrapnel an’ rockets an’ grape—you walked in a white fog laced wid tongues of fire, an’ round-shot as big as melons trundlin’ through it—expectin’ you’d be raising the whilleleu wid the Holy Souls in Purgatory the next minute, or dhrinkin’ tay wid the Blessed in Paradise. The screaming of the bugles split the reek, and pierced the smother; and—in one lull—came the sound of the Zouave drums beating thepas de charge.
You know it.... It begins with a low faint throbbing that grows upon the ear and fills it, drowning out all other sounds. It is a hurricane from Hell that blows armed men, like red, and blue, and golden leaves before it, urged by the simultaneous desire to strike, stab, crush, overwhelm, destroy and conquer other men....
The fighting was over, when the women with the seven-mile-long wagon-train, loaded with sick and dying, drawn by gaunt horses, emaciated mules, and starving bullocks, climbed the rise where the Tartar village was still smoldering and reeking. Dismounted field-guns, shattered limbers, dead and mutilated men and horses and bloody mash that had been men and horses, showed where the Inimy’s canister and grape had done its business upon the batteries of our Artillery. Cooking-fires were already lighted, fatigue-parties were digging grave-trenches, the distant trumpets were calling the Cavalry back from the pursuit. It was for Moggy and for many of the women with the wagon-trains, the first sight of a battle-field.
But not until—word having been brought down that the Cavalry would encamp a mile south of the Katscha, and that their women were to follow them—not until their smaller train of vehicles separated from the rest, and began to roll over the ridge, and down the steep banks to the river-ford—did they realize the grim meaning of War....
The trodden slopes that were strewn with shattered Minié rifles and smashed muskets, Highland bonnets, bearskins and shakos, and dead and dying men in kilts and plaids and red coats, lying in queer contorted attitudes (asif a giant child had been playing at soldiers, and had given the green board a spiteful kick and gone away)—were covered with a low shrub like billberry, seemingly laden with a plentiful crop of red fruit, yet they were not berries but blood-drops. The grasses wept—the earth was soaked—the river in the glen-bottom ran blood.
Realizing this, there was an outcry; and pale women huddled at the back of Moggy Geogehagan, as scared ewes will seek refuge behind some aged and weather-beaten herd-mother. Said Moggy, crying herrings for shame upon these tremblers:
“Hooroo, Jude! Are ye women or girshas that do be squaling an’ squaiking? Sure what’s natheral can’t be desperate, an’ what’s more natheral than blood? Her that will lie by her man this night will do as I do. Sthrip off, pluck up, an’ leg through this wid me.”
And the brave wife of Jems whipped off her brogues and footless blue yarn stockings, tucked up her petticoats, and led the way down, striding bare-shinned through the bloody bilberries. The Woman from Clare followed, after came flocking the rest.