XCVI
She had got into harbor on the previous evening. Some of the troops on board—a draft of the 146th—had already been landed. The others came ashore after the ship broke up.
Fate sent young Mortimer Jowell down from the Front that morning, in charge of a fatigue-party, detailed to draw rations of hard biscuit, salt-pork, and the greencoffee-berries supplied by a maternal Government to men who had no fires to roast or mills to grind them with.
The tramp of eight miles through knee-deep, sometimes waist-deep slough would have been no joke to men full-fed and in hard condition. They were muddy to the hair, weary and sore-footed, when they passed the camps of the Four British Divisions—lying under the Argus-eyes and iron mouths of the French Artillery, whose breastworks crowned the line of cliffs along their rear and flank. For the Red Snake lay coiled about the grim fortress-city of Tsar Nicholas, and the Blue Snakes had lapped themselves between the Red Snake and retreat.
To the eye of Hector Dunoisse that disposition of the Allied Forces would have spoken volumes. To the uninstructed glance of young Mortimer Jowell it merely suggested a barely-possible contingency. He said to himself:
“My eye! Suppose the Emperor of the French and that pasty chap, the Sultan, were to turn those whacking big guns on us one of these fine mornin’s! Gaw! I wonder where we should all be then?”
It was the most brilliant thing the Ensign had ever said in the whole of his life, but he was not conscious that he was being clever. He was only glad that he had got his draggled party of muddy scarecrows safely into Balaklava. He was inhaling almost with relief the smells of that ramshackle, rag-and-bone town.
They went down into her by the Kadikoi Road that skirts the top of the retort-shaped, jug-mouthed harbor, presided over by the Star Fort and the Mortar Batteries. Stacks of sleepers and rusty lengths of rail marked the site of the proposed railway between the Front and Balaklava. A living-wagon, reversed upon the summit of a mountain of mud, bore upon its canvas tilt the pithy inscription:
“NO PAI FOR 6 MUNTHS AND HARDLY ENNYVITTALS.PRESHUS SIK OF THE HOLE JOBB.”
A forest of masts fringed the harbor. You saw vessels of every imaginable class, from the stately Indiaman to the paddle-wheeled gunboat, tied up in tiers like the mackerel-boatsof a Cornish fishing-village. Upon the oily pewter-colored waters bobbed and wallowed innumerable carcasses—canine, porcine, equine, and bovine.
“Hair-trunks” the sailors called these unpleasantly-inflated objects; and as every ship was supposed to tow those in her immediate vicinity, she naturally left her neighbors to carry the business out.
One bottle-nosed Commander of a screw line-of-battle-ship, putting by the desire for promotion, earned the gratitude of his fellow-men, and a deathless name in History, by an appreciation of the peculiar sanitary demands of the situation, that was at least sixty years in advance of the age.
Said he, in effect: “These carcasses, ignored by the Executive Heads of the Army, the Harbor-Master and the Port Captains, are as perilous to the life of man as effective shelling.... Let others serve their country after their own fashion. I tow dead cows henceforth.”
So his boats were sent regularly to collect the bobbing hair-trunks packed with fetid odors, and tow them out of the roadstead crowded with shipping of three nations, away to the open sea.... And the Fleet and the Army gave their benefactor the Chinese-sounding appellation of “Commander Tow Cow.” And the nickname adhered to him to his dying day.
Suppose that you see the Ensign, with his sergeant and section, tramping down the miry main street of the South-Crimean coast-town, between villas that had been clean and dapper and habitable when the Allied Armies rolled down from the North.
An endless procession of men on foot, men on horseback, men driving beasts or charioteering vehicles of various descriptions, passed up and down that swarming thoroughfare, all day and nearly all night. Lean dogs and ownerless swine routed in piles of offal and garbage. And—for Death constantly dropped in in the shape of shell or round-shot—and dysentery and cholera were always with the Army—human refuse lay sprawled or huddled in strange fashion, waiting for the burial which did not always come....
Shrieking stenches saluted young Jowell’s nose, the dinof voices mingled with the distant bellow of the Lancasters, and the fainter answer of the great brass sixty-two pounders from the batteries of Sevastopol.... Faces he knew nodded cheerily to him from windows of improvised Clubs and temporary restaurants. Hands waved, voices shouted hospitable invitations. He shook his head and passed on.
Dreadful women beckoned with ringed chalked hands and leered at him with painted faces, from the upper balconies of abominable houses where the business of vice went on ceaselessly by day as by night. Roulette-balls clicked—occasionally revolvers cracked, and knives were used—under the canvas of gambling-booths where French and German, Greek and Italian and British gamesters crowded about the green-covered trestle-board.
Cracked pianos vamped accompaniments to villainous songs, screeched by red-tighted sirens insoi-disantmusic-halls. Barrel-organs ground out popular waltzes for the revelers in crazy dancing-saloons, where shadows of revolving couples passed and re-passed, thrown on the crimson blinds by flaring naphtha-lamps. Next door to a house of this type was another that was an hospital; a single-storied, mud-walled, windowless and doorless building that stood close upon the thoroughfare. A lean hog shambled over the threshold as Mortimer Jowell passed. He looked in, and saw green men, blue men, yellow men and black men lying upon the bare earth floor in rows, side by side....
Many had been dead for days. The silence of the others rivaled that of Death itself, for the most part. But sometimes a thready voice cried on God or Our Lady, or faintly cursed, or asked in vain for drink. And Mortimer Jowell halted his men; and went in and drove out the hog, and barricaded the threshold with a broken shutter. As he left the dreadful place a man came in.
He was a priest, tall, broad-shouldered and sufficiently clean-shaven to be remarkable, where nineteen men out of twenty were hairy-faced. He wore a rusty biretta and a thin, torn cassock, and had no other protection against the piercing cold. He had a canvas wallet slung about him, and moved with his hands crossed upon his breast as though something were hidden there.... He glanced atMortimer Jowell as he stepped aside to make room for him in passing—and his hard blue eyes and jutting underlip and long, powerful chin were features distinctive of a man we have met before.
His name was known to no one in Balaklava. He came over three or four times a week from the French base at Kamiesch—where he wrought with many others among the wounded in the hospitals—to minister to the dying Catholic soldiers in this and similar places of misery and woe. Their dull and glassy eyes flickered a little at the sight of him. He made the sign of the Cross, drew out the purple stole—passed it round his neck—and knelt down by one of the prostrate bodies, murmuring a Latin benediction. And, too ignorant of his high, awful function to be conscious of intrusiveness, the Ensign watched and listened to him as he drew a silver pyx from the bosom of his cassock and fed the starving with the Bread of Life.
The ex-State official, diplomat andviveurwho had become a priest, and the bullet-headed young English subaltern were never to exchange one word, never again to meet—and yet there was a link between them.... Both were—one quite unconsciously—seeking the Peace that is only gained by the Way of Expiation. And one of them was to find it before the sun went down.
Ignorant of this, the Ensign tramped on, and, having dropped his party at the Commissariat Stores—a row of sheet-iron roofed sheds that had sprung up, with many other buildings of the same kind, on the offal-strewn beach, above high-water mark—was free to wander where he would.
So he strolled along the muddy foreshore among the huge stacks of planking for stables and huts, and the great mountains of food and forage that lay piled up and rotting—rendered useless by lack of transport and plenitude of Red Tape—doomed never to supply the needs of perishing beasts and starving men.
A store-ship sent out many months previously had just unloaded a cargo of Showell’s Army boots by the simple process of digging them out from the hold with shovels, filling boats with them, and emptying the boats on the beach close to low-water mark. And a half-company of Fusiliers, bare-footed, and several degrees more ragged than those of Morty’s fatigue-party, had been marcheddown and directed to take what they needed from the pile.
The boots were all too small. You saw men eagerly turning over the heaps, sorting and comparing, pitching away and swearing, sitting down and trying in vain to force the ridiculously inadequate coverings on their swollen, bleeding feet. A minority succeeded in getting shod—after a fashion. But upon the hairy faces of the muddy, ragged, hunger-bitten majority, anger and disgust and disappointment were vividly painted; and presently found vent in words.
Their N.C.O’s—in like case with them—vainly endeavored to cast oil upon the troubled waters. Then the officer in command of the party emerged from a low-browed beachcafé, built of mud, mules’ bones and Army Mess-tins, where a red-fezzed Greek sold coffee, vodka, rum, and Crimean wine. He said—shouldering a net of potatoes, tucking the head of a dead fowl under his sword-belt, and Sucking his mustache, gemmed with ruby drops of generous liquor:
“Whass this, Rathkeales? Sergeant-Major Lonergan, bring these mutinous divvies up before me! Can’t get the boots on, is that whass the matter wit’ you? And whoever thought you could?—and your feet swelled to the size of pontoons with chilblains and frostbite! Whass that you’re saying, Private Biles? ‘Women’s and children’s sizes’? Get to the divvle with your women and children! Do you suppose the Government’s a fool?”
But the production of a bundle of elastic-sided foot-coverings of unmistakably feminine proportions reduced even the Captain to silence; and a pair of little clump-soled shoes brandished in a gaunt and grimy hand, put a clincher on the case.
“Who says they’re not child’s sizes now?” shouted the owner of the grimy hand hoarsely. “Are these men’s boots? Maybe you’ll look and say!” He added: “And may the feet o’ them that has palmed ’em off on us march naked over Hell’s red-hot floor, come the Day o’ Judgment! If there’s a God in Heaven, He’ll grant that prayer!”
He threw down the little hobnailed shoes, and went over, muttering, and scowling, and staggering in his gait, to where the stark body of a long-booted navvy lay in the shadow of a pyramid of Commissariat crates.
His comrades and officers and Mortimer Jowell watched in silence, as he sat himself down opposite the dead man, and measured the soles of his feet against the rigid feet. They were of a size. He nodded at the livid blue face of their late owner, and said grimly:
“You and me, matey, seem about the same size in corn-boxes. Maybe you’ll not grudge to part with your boots to a covey who’ll be in your shoes next week or to-night!”
Mortimer Jowell sickened as the ghastly process of removal was completed, but the ugly fascination of the scene held him as it did other men. Nobody had noticed the blue haze creeping in from the sea, pushed by a wind that had veered suddenly. As the soldier stood up in the dead navvy’s boots, the gale yelled, and broke....