LXXXIX
In the Paris mail, as in the Southern Express speeding to Marseilles, Dunoisse,permedium of the newspapers, plunged once more into the arena of worldly affairs.
At Marseilles he learned of the combined attack of Soimonoff, Pauloff, and Dannenberg in concert with Menschikoff; and of the great battle that had raged two days previously, upon the scrub-bushed slopes that rise to a plateau from the yellow marl cliff, honeycombed with the cave-dwellings of the ancient Tauri, and topped with the gray line of battlements, broken by round towers, that are known as the Ruins of Inkerman. And of the War Council resulting in the decision that the Allied Forces should winter in the Tauric Chersonese.
At the Docks of Marseilles the landing-quays were paved with sick and wounded French soldiers, just landed from two Imperial Government transports, newly returned from the seat of War. Lying upon straw and bedding, awaiting the arrival of the hospital-ambulances, they were very patient, even cheerful—with the smiling spirit of their gallant nation—despite the ravages of cholera, and fever, and dysentery, and the dreadful wounds too many of thembore. Those thus disfigured or mutilated were the merriest. Those whom sickness had robbed of the joy of real fighting regretted their bad luck, and to the pitying exclamations or horrified looks of strangers they had one reply:
“It’s bad, Madame, or Monsieur! but when you lend soldiers to the Sultan of Turkey to play with, you must expect to get them back a little chipped and damaged. We are pretty to look at, compared with those who are coming presently, sacred thunder! But what would you have? It’s the Fortune of War!”
The steamer by which Dunoisse took passage for the East was crowded to overflowing with French and English officers going out to fill up gaps created by Alma and Balaklava casualties. Newspaper correspondents of both nations, Greek and Turkish merchants, were aboard her. Also, a Queen’s Messenger, a Spanish dancer going out in charge of an aunt to fulfill an engagement at the Imperial Opera House of Constantinople, and some ladies of the French and British Diplomatic Staffs, returning to their winter villas at Pera and Therapia.
Great Indiamen crowded with English troops; gray-painted, red-flagged, and numbered transports with drafts of French, thronged the Mediterranean sea-ways. Ship-loads of invalids of both nations passed, with a crowding of haggard, unshaven faces at the taffrail, and troop-deck gun-ports; and a waving of caps in thin hands, and a feeble, unsteady cheer. A few homeward-bound warships towed Russian prizes, and carried Russian prisoners, red-bearded, flat-faced men in gray caps and ragged gray great-coats, on their way to the hulks at Toulon, or Sheerness, or Devonport; who squatted in the ’tween decks or upon the forecastle under sentry guard, and played with noisy laughter and good-humored horse-play a childish game of cards, in which the forfeits consisted of raps upon the nose.
Among his countrymen and countrywomen, Dunoisse had at first feared recognition; but, thanks to the change wrought in him by sickness and mental suffering, the eyes of people whose names and faces were familiar to him, glanced at him indifferently and moved away.
They gossiped in his near vicinity as freely as though he were deaf or ignorant of their language. One day itwas mentioned in his hearing that de Moulny, Secretary-Chancellor of the Ministry of the Interior during the Presidency, had abandoned the diplomatic career, received Holy Orders, and gone out to the Crimea as chaplain-in-charge of one of the war-hospitals at the French base of Kamiesch. Upon another occasion a knot of French officers discussed with mordant relish the funeral ofSt.Arnaud....
The obsequies of the Imperial favorite had taken place, with all the pomp of military and official state, at the Chapel of the Invalides, at the end of October. The galleries had been packed with tearful ladies in black and bugles.... Ambassadors had held the ends of the pall.... The entire Army had acted as chief mourner.... And a representative of the Emperor had conveyed to Madame la Maréchale the following touching message from his Imperial master:
“I simply transfer to you, Madame, the sentiments I entertained for my departed friend.”
“I simply transfer to you, Madame, the sentiments I entertained for my departed friend.”
Which noble and touching utterance, for some reason, tickled these Gallic warriors hugely. But he was droll, they said, that fellow Badinguet! Depend upon it, he would presently compose an epitaph which would make everybody laugh like mad.... One of the gossipers suggested that “Morte la bête mort le venin” (which is a polite version of “Dead dogs cannot bite”) would look well in gilt letters upon the memorial tablet dedicated to the virtues of the deceased.
Another quotation occurred to Dunoisse as he stood leaning on the bulwark not far from the chatterers:
“I am taken in mine own toils; I am fallen in the pit I dug for others: Death hath pierced me while I sent forth my swift arrows against the lives of many men.”
Though those men had died, and other men would die, there was no help for it! That was the word brought by those silent ghastly messengers who came drifting down from the seat of War.
As the steamer threaded her way amidst the swirling currents of the Cyclades, their accusing shapes began to start up, in some eddy of water and sunshine, or water and moonlight, under the steamer’s side, and vanish in theflurry of her paddles and reappear in her wake, drifting away....
Sometimes they were animals of draught, and Commissariat and burden, who, despite the bloating of long immersion, had plainly died of want. Or they were shapeless forms, swathed in canvas, of sick or wounded soldiers who had died upon the homeward-bound transports, and had been consigned to the deep, sewn up in hammocks too scantily shotted. Or they came in little knots and groups of red coats and blue coats, consorting and intermingling, parting and drifting on in silent, passionless acquiescence with the will of the winds and tides.
These were the dead, French and Turkish, but chiefly English soldiers who had sailed from Varna in September, and had been thrown overboard during the transit of the Black Sea. They were heralds of the hospital-ships that, packed from stem to stern with unspeakable misery and suffering, would soon be hurrying down the Bosphorus on their way to Scutari.
Young soldiers, raw recruits upon their way to Gallipoli, peeping rosy-gilled or pale-faced through the gun-ports on the troop-decks, would jerk back their heads in consternation as they encountered an eyeless grin of greeting from one of these stark voyagers, of whom the great bossy-mailed turbot, and the giant sturgeon of the Black Sea, grown dainty with full feeding, had merely taken toll, and passed on to the ravenous sharks and the huge rays and octopi of the Ægean, and Ionian, and Mediterranean seas.
“Hail, comrade! Soon shall you be as I am, food for Death the Insatiable!” the silent one would say, and with the wave of a rigid arm, pass on. And the recruit, with a sick heart under his coarse red jacket, would crack a brutal jest, or the older man would comment, spitting into the oily water:
“Poor beggar, he do look bad, surely! Well, War or Peace, that’s what we all will come to at the last!”
Whilst the Zouave or Voltigeur would shrug, pipe in mouth, and say, grimacing at the foul exhalations of corruption, and the fœtid odors of the sludge:
“He stinks, our friend there, sacred name of a pig! and he is not quite so handsome as when his sweetheart last embraced him, but what of that? It’s the Fortune of War! Our Army of France has been pruned; tenthousand out of seventy-five thousand brave fellows have spit up their souls of cholera and dysentery.Saperlipopette! it’s the Fortune of War!”
And the wheeling cloud of gulls that came with and followed the visitors would scream as though in derision, and settle again to their feast in the transport’s wake. And the Voltigeur, or Chasseur, or Zouave would toss off a glass of Cognac and return to the game of dice or cards. But Dunoisse leaned upon the taffrail of the steamer, and stared at the floating dead men with eyes that were full of horror. It seemed to him that the empty sockets glared at him, that the stark hands pointed at him, that the lipless mouths cried to him: “Thou art Cain!”
Had he not been going toherhe could not have borne it.... He said to himself that, of all women living, Ada Merling alone would pity and understand.
Said a ruddy-haired, high-colored, handsome young British giant to another, graver, older man, and both were officers of a crack Dragoon Regiment going out to fill up Balaklava chinks in Redlett’s Heavy Brigade:
“That white-haired polyglotter in the shabby togs, who answers you and me in English, and talks Parisian French with the French fellows, and Greek with the Cypriote currant-merchant who makes such a hog of himself at the cabintable d’hôte—and is civil in Spanish to the opera-dancer and her aunt from Madrid whenever he can’t avoid ’em—and swops Turkish with the Osmanli Bey who’s been Consul for the Porte at Marseilles—is a queer kind of chap, uncommonly! Do you know, I’ve seen him looking at those floating soger-men as if he’d killed ’em all!”
Answered the speaker’s senior officer, lighting a large cheroot:
“Why should he look as if he had when he hasn’t, and couldn’t have? My dear Foltlebarre, you’re talking bosh!”
“Bosh, if you like, Major,” agreed the ruddy-haired boy good-humoredly; “but such a melancholy customer as that white-haired chap I never yet came across!” He broke off to cry: “By Gad! what a thundering big Government transport! That must beThe Realm, going out with the forage and stores and winter clothing to the tune—a fellow I know at Lloyd’s told me—of five hundredthousand pounds. They’ve been keeping her back in Docks at Portsmouth on the chance of the war being over before the winter, and now they’re rushing her out for everything she’s worth!”
She was a great three-masted screw steamship of two thousand six hundred tons, and as, with her Master’s pennant flying from her main top-gallant mast, and the red Admiralty flag with the foul anchor and the Union Jack canton bannering splendidly from her mizzen halyards—she bustled by—hurrying under full steam and every stitch of canvas for her pilotage through the Dardanelles—she was to the inexperienced eye a gallant sight. But the experienced eye saw something else in her than bigness. And the senior officer who had been invited to admire her, being a keen and experienced yachtsman—shook his head.
“My own opinion—supposing you care to have it!—is that your friend at Lloyd’s—take it he belongs to one of the firms of underwriters who’ve insured her?—is likely to find himself in the cart. For I’ve seen some crank Government tubs in my time, and sailed in ’em—very much to my disadvantage. But never a cranker one than this, give you my word of honor! Why, she sits on her keel with a crooked list to port that a bargeman couldn’t miss the meaning of. And she has no more buoyancy than a log of green wood. Look at our skipper shaking his head at the Second Officer as he shuts his glass up. Lay you any money you please he wouldn’t like to have to chaperon her through a November Black Sea squall! By Jupiter! you were right just now, and I beg your pardon, Foltlebarre!”
He had been following the course of the “thundering big transport” through a Dollond telescope, and the face of the white-haired man in the shabby togs, as he leaned upon the taffrail of the passenger deck forward, had come into his field of view.
He said, after another look: “It’s a disease, the existence of which is denied by the Faculty, but he has got it! That man is dying of a broken heart!”
You were right, Major, who were doomed yourself to die so soon in the freezing mud of Balaklava. But the end did not come for many, many years.
A dark-blue haze hung over the Sea of Marmora. Rainfell, soaking those passengers who, owing to the crowding on board the vessel, had been compelled to sleep on deck. Dunoisse was one of these, and, little fitted as he was to endure hardship, he suffered. The cough returned, and with it fever and pain. But he forgot both when a wind from the southwest lifted the fog, rolled it up like a curtain, and showed the cypress-canopy of the great Cemetery of Scutari hanging like a thunderous cloud against the rose-flushed eastern sky. And as the steamer entered the Bosphorus, the dusk shape of Bûlgurlû Daghi, girt about the flanks with snow-white mosques and glittering palaces and fairy gardens, rose into view; and on the grassy slopes that climbed from the water’s edge—where the Brigade of Guards had camped, and where the black and yellow striped tents of the German Legion now dotted the hillside—you saw, as you see to-day, the great quadrangle of yellow stone, flanked with spire-topped square towers—that had been the barracks of the Turkish Imperial Guard.
One traveler drank the vision in with a sense of revived hope and a wonderful thrill of expectation. And as though his unuttered thought had communicated itself to another, an English infantry officer standing near him turned to another man and said, gravely pointing to the building on the green hillside:
“She is there!”
And the heart of Dunoisse echoed with unspeakable gladness:
“She is there!”