XCIV
She did not err. The south-westerly breeze had shifted. Sky and water darkened, a cold north wind blew, scattering some sleety drops of rain. And as the squall broke, and the awnings tugged at their reevings, came the splitting crack of the old brass Turkish cannon from the batteries of Deli Talian, and the deeper, more sonorous boom of ships’ guns answering back again.
Eighteen guns. They were coming! they were coming! The quays of Pera and the landing-places of Tophaneh and Scutari were crowded with eager, many-colored sightseers. On the balconies and roofs of houses, on the gardenwalls bordering the Bosphorus, on the decks and in the rigging of the warships anchored in the roadsteads, human figures thronged and clustered. Asusurrationof excitement—a hum of expectation, quickened into a clamor—broadened into a roar. For they were coming—they were coming! the men of Alma and Balaklava and Inkerman,whom their country and the nation they had fought for could never praise and honor enough.
They had passed Therapia, for from the nearer fortresses of Europe and Asia the salute crashed deafeningly. Columns of white smoke rose beyond the promontory, slanted and came down upon the wind. As nervous ladies stopped their ears, expectant of an answering salute, the gorgeous king-dolphin, followed by the flying cloud of variegated parrot-fish, darted round the promontory that as yet hid the first of the approaching ships from view, and fled downstream towards Seraglio Point.
What could have scattered the glittering flotilla? They had gone out, led by the Golden Peacock and the Sublime Umbrella to do honor to the brave. They had fled in panic before something unexpected and appalling; for the retreat was most palpably a flight.
Even as the spectators wondered and questioned, a dark blue mist came down like a lowered curtain upon the scene that had been instinct a moment before with light and movement, and color. The wooded hills, the palaces, and mosques, and shops, and kiosks, the thronged terraces and quays, the vessels, with their manned yards and decks crowded with gayly dressed sightseers, were seen dimly as through a thick gauze veil. And the cold breeze brought with it an appalling stench—a cold and deadly exhalation as of the battle-field, the charnel-house, and the plague-pit—as the first of the three great transports came gliding into view.
They came! and from the flagships of the English, French, and Turkish Admirals anchored at Beshiktash the guns boomed out their welcome—the Three Ensigns dipped as in a royal salute. But the cheers and acclamations died in the throats of the thousands whose eyes were nailed upon those mighty argosies, deep-laden, deck-piled, with Death’s blackening harvest.... The shouts went up, quavered, and broke, and died....
The transports followed each other at an interval of a cable’s length. They moved slowly, laboriously, painfully, like living creatures enfeebled by famine and sick to death. Such canvas as they spread hung crookedly; their tangled cordage, hanging in neglected loops, gave to them a strange air of neglect and dishevelment. Their sails had proveduseless; their auxiliary steam-power alone had proved available. For the wounded and the pestilence-smitten, the dead and the living, were herded and packed and crowded on those dreadful decks, as wantonly as though some giant child had been playing at soldiers with real men and real ships—and had wearied of the game half through, jumbled the men in anyhow—and given each ship a spiteful shake, and gone sulkily away.
Filth flowed from their scuppers and streaked their flanks as the three transports moved slowly towards their anchorage. Bevies of the pretty little Adriatic gull accompanied them, screaming and mewing as in derision; dropping upon the water that had become oily, dark, and malodorous, to feed eagerly; rising, wheeling, and dropping again. And flocks of the tiny blue-breasted gray shear-water that haunts the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles fluttered above them, twittering and piping: “See here! See here!”
Faces crowded at their ports, and beyond these you could see more and more faces.... The bulwarks were hedged with faces; the decks were heaped with them.... The bodies belonging to them were clad in discolored rags of uniforms, or thin, and torn, and tattered shreds of linen underwear, and shivered in the bitter wind unceasingly; with a chattering of the teeth that sounded like the rattle of hail upon wood or canvas—with a vibration that communicated itself to the timbers of the ship.
But you could think of nothing but those faces, haggard and worn with privation and suffering, gaunt and terrible with famine, disfigured with wounds, or hideous from the ravages of pestilence. There were faces lividly blue or greenish-yellow with the discoloration of cholera or dysentery, darkly spotted with typhus, fiercely flushed with rheumatic fever or pneumonia, black with the decomposition of gangrene. And, swathed in clotted rags of bandages; or nakedly exposed to the shuddering sight of men, were faces mutilated by loss of noses or lips; and blind faces, showing red, empty eye-sockets; or mere fragments of faces, shattered, and split, and mutilated by grape, and shrapnel, and shell-splinters; or cloven with great sword-strokes from the forehead to the chin. And among these were faces snow-white, or yellow as wax—upheldby the pressure of the living crowd about them—that showed in the glassy stare and the dropped jaw where Death had taken toll. For the Red Reaper was busy gathering in his harvest. Many of these men would not live to be carried up the hilly road that was to serve as England’s Calvary. They died even as you looked, inwardly crying.... What wanton wreck and waste of splendid life, what reckless spill of strength, and hope, and courage! Was it for this, O God! that Britain has sent forth her pride and flower?—her manly, gallant officers, her stark and sturdy men?
It is a sacred duty to fight for one’s country, a glorious fate to die for her, if need be. But to perish, gaunt with famine and rotten with gangrene, through the neglect and indifference of that same country; to become, living, the prey of flies and the food of maggots that little middlemen may grow fat and flourish—and great Contractors become multi-millionaires—and Nobs and Bigwigs build unto themselves palaces, and the secret animosities working in crowned heads be gratified and glutted—that is to be a martyr, not a hero! Surely the gulls and the little gray shearwaters were crying: “Betrayed! Betrayed! Betrayed!”
One day a great writer will rise up, who will tell this story as it should be told. You will burn and thrill, you will weep and laugh as you read.... Meanwhile, be patient with the feebler pen that stumbles and falters, lost amidst a wilderness of nameless, forgotten graves.
Not that they suffered and died for nought, these men who upheld the honor of England at Alma, and Balaklava, and Inkerman. With the odor of their filthy garments, the stench of their gangrened wounds, the exhalations of fever and pestilence, they brought with them the perfume of sublime obedience and the fragrance of great acts of heroism, forever buried in the silence of official reports.
And the sight of them, grotesque, and strange, and awful as the pipe-dream of an opium or hashish-smoker, fascinated and held those thousands that beheld. In silence, with suspended breath, the men and women of many nations looked, and could not cease from looking; while the gulls shrieked and wheeled, and the tiny gray shearwaterspiped and twittered—and a stranger sound than either of these grew upon the ear and filled it, and presently drowned out every other sound:
“A-a-a-a-a-a-a!”
It was feeble, and faint, and broken, and unutterably pitiful.... It reminded you of the bleating of sheep buried in a snowdrift—or the complaint of young calves being bled by the butcher’s knife—or the whimpering of dogs, bound and tortured by the vivisector’s cruel, skillful hand.... Most of all it suggested the wailing of innumerable pauper babies, pining in the grim nursery-wards of the many workhouses of great grimy London....
“A-a-a-a-a-a!”
It was a sound that plucked at the heart-strings, and brought a choke into the throat, you knew not why or wherefore. Women broke into tears and sobs as they heard it, and a salt stinging mist came before the harder eyes of the men. Not until the warships of the Three Nations anchored at Beshiktash had dipped their Ensigns to the leading transport—not until, in her slow course, she came abreast of the luxurious steam-yacht that displayed the Light Cavalry pennant under her burgee of the Royal Yacht Squadron—were even those who wept to understand.
Then the wail of the dying pauper babies, the bleating of the perishing sheep upon the mountain, came louder than ever.
“A-a-a-a-a!”
And blackened hands waved rags of caps, and even gory bandages; and the woman he had called Laura rushed to Lord Cardillon, as the Brigadier stood—center of the deep half-circle of well-known men and women assembled on the steam yacht’s after-deck—and a gallantly conspicuous figure by reason of his height and bearing, and the brilliant tatters of his Hussar uniform—and clutched him wildly by the arm, and shrieked:
“Oh, Arthur! stop them!—stop them! Oh, for God’s sake, don’t let them moan like that! Oh! will no one have pity and stop them?”
And he thrust her from him, crying:
“You idiot! Can’t you understand they’re cheering? They’ve seen us!... They’ve recognized their officers!... Mildare! Leighbury! Southgrave!” he shouted tothe other wearers of soiled and tattered uniforms: “What the devil has come over you that you don’t know your own Guards and the fellows of the 555th and 442nd? Briddwater! Gauntless! there are your plungers of the Heavies! And the rest are my own!—my men of the Light Brigade!”
And he ran forwards, forgetful of his wound, and leaped upon the bulwarks; and so stood; holding to the ratlines with the hand that was uninjured—and gave back the cheer in his clear, hard, ringing tones:
“Hurrah, my men! hurrah!”
And as though a spell had been broken, a mighty shout of acclamation went up from every British throat in all that vast assemblage, drowning out thevivasof the French, and theHochsof the German Legion, massed upon the crowded slopes of Scutari:
“Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!”