It is the morning of Saturday, the 8th September, 1855. For a year now the allied forces have been before Sebastopol; but the flag of St. Andrew is still flying in defiance upon its forts, and on this memorable morning the columns of attack are forming for the great assault. In the preceding June, amid the din of the ceaseless cannonade, poor Lord Raglan had passed away to a quieter world; and the picturesque Sardinians, with their green uniforms, billycock hats, and Bersaglieri plumes--each private a species ofFra Diavolo--had come to aid us in the reduction of this place, the Gibraltar of the Euxine.
It was a cheerless morning. From the sea, a biting wind swept over the land; clouds of white dust and dusky-brown smoke, that came from more than one blazing street and burning ship--among the latter was a two-decker, fired by the French rockets--rose high above the green spires and batteries of Sebastopol, and overhung it like a sombre pall, while shorn of its rays the sun resembled a huge red globe hung in mid-air above us. Gradually it seemed to fade out altogether, and then the whole sky became of a dull, leaden, and wintry gray. By this time our epaulettes had entirely disappeared, and our uniforms were hopeless rags; in some instances eked out by plain clothes, or whatever one could pick up; and the government contractors had such vague ideas of the dimensions of the human foot, that some of the boots issued to the soldiers would not have fitted a child of ten years old, and as they dared not throw away her Majesty's property, many men went bare-footed, with their boots dangling from their knapsack or waist-belt.
"In our present toggery we may meet the Russians," said Dyneley, our adjutant; "but I should scarcely like to figure in them before the girls at Winchester, in 'the Row,' or at the windows of 'the Rag.'"
In great masses, 30,000 Frenchmen were forming to assault the Malakoff, with 5,000 Sardinians as supports.
A long line of cavalry--Hussars with their braided dolmans, Lancers with their fluttering banneroles, Dragoons with glittering helmets, and all with loaded carbine on thigh, had been, from an early hour, thrown to the front, to form a cordon of sentinels, to prevent straggling; while a similar line was formed in our rear to keep back idlers from Balaclava; yet to obtain glimpses of the impending attack, groups of red-fezzed Turks, of picturesque-looking Eupatorians, and fur-capped Tartars, began to cluster on every green knoll at a safe distance, where, in their excitement, they jabbered and gesticulated in a manner most unusual for people so generally placid and stolid.
At half-past eleven A.M. the pipes of the Highland Brigade were heard, as it marched in from Kamara, and got into position in reserve of the right attack; and the fine appearance of the men of those mountains--"the backbone of Britain," as Pope Sylvester called them of old--elicited a hearty cheer from the Royal Welsh as they defiled past, with all their black plumes and striped tartans waving in the biting wind.
During all the preceding day, the batteries had thundered in salvoes against Sebastopol; and hence vast gaps were now visible in the streets and principal edifices, most of which were half hidden in lurid sheets of fire; and by the bridge of boats that lay between the north and south side, thousands of fugitives, laden with their goods and household lares, their children, sick, and aged, had been seen to pour so long as light remained.
Until the French began to move, the eyes of all in our division were turned on our famous point of attack--the Redan; and I may inform the non-military reader, that aredanin field fortification means simply an indented work with lines and faces; but this one resembled an unfinished square, with two sides meeting at the salient angle in front of our parallels,i. e., the trenches by which we had dug our way under cover towards it.
With a strong reinforcement, Nicholaevitch Tolstoff, now, as before stated, a general, had entered the Redan by its rear or open face; and since his advent, it had been greatly strengthened. In the walls of the parapet he had constructed little chambers roofed with sacks of earth, and these secure places rendered the defenders quite safe from falling shells. In the embrasures were excavations wherein the gunners might repose close by their guns, but ever armed and accoutred; and by a series of trenches it communicated with the great clumsy edifice known as the Malakoff Tower.
By a road to the right, the Redan also communicated with the extensive quadrangle of buildings forming the Russian barracks, one hundred yards distant; and in its fear there lay the Artillery or Dockyard Creek. The flat caps, and in other instances the round glazed helmets, of the Russians and the points of their bayonets, bristling like a hedge of steel, could be seen above the lines of its defence and at the deeply-cut embrasures, where the black cannon of enormous calibre peered grimly down upon us.
Our arrangements were very simple. At noon the French were to attack the Malakoff; and as soon as they fell to work we were to assault the Redan, and I had volunteered for the scaling-ladder party, which consisted of 320 picked men of the Kentish Buffs and 97th or Ulster Regiment.
In the trenches of our left attack could be seen the black bearskins of our Brigade of Guards, and massed in dusky column on the hill before their camp, their red now changed to a very neutral tint indeed, were the slender battalions of the Third Division, motionless and still, save when the wind rustled the tattered silk of the colours, or the sword of an officer gleamed as he dressed the ranks. A cross cannonade was maintained, as usual, between our batteries and those of the enemy. The balls were skipping about in all directions, and several "roving Englishmen," adventurous tourists, "own correspondents," and unwary amateurs, who were there, had to scuttle for their lives to some place of shelter.
As I joined the ladder party, I could not help thinking of many a past episode in my life: of Estelle, who had been false; of Valerie, who was lost to me; and of the suspicion that Winifred Lloyd loved me. Ere another hour, I might be lying dead before the Redan, and there forget them all! Our covering party consisted of 200 of the Buffs and Rifles under Captain Lewes; but alas for the weakness of our force, as compared with thousands of men to oppose. The strength of the Second Division detailed against the Redan consisted only of 760 men of the 3rd, 41st, and 62nd regiments, with a working party of 100 from the Royal Welsh. The rest of Colonel Windham's brigade was in reserve.
Brigadier Shirley, who was to command the whole, had been ill on board-ship; but the moment the gallant fellow heard that an assault was resolved on, he hastened to join us. Prior, however, to his coming, Colonel Windham and Colonel Unett of the 29th were deciding which of them should take precedence in leading the attack. They coolly tossed up a shilling, and the latter won. Thus he had the alternative of saying whether he would go first, or follow Windham; but a glow spread over his face, and he exclaimed,
"I have made my choice, and I shall be thefirstman inside the Redan!"
However, it was doomed to be otherwise, as soon afterwards a ball from the abattis severely wounded and disabled him. When we had seen that our men had carefully loaded and capped and cast loose their cartridges, all became very still, and there was certainly more of thought than conversation among us. Many of the men in some regiments were little better than raw recruits, and were scarcely masters of their musketry drill. Disease in camp and death in action had fast thinned our ranks of the carefully-trained and well-disciplined soldiers who landed in Bulgaria; and when these--the pest and bullet--failed, the treachery of contractors, and the general mismanagement of the red-tapists, did the rest. Accustomed as we had been to the daily incidents of this protracted siege, there was a great hush over all our ranks; the hush of anticipation, and perhaps of grave reflection, came to the lightest-hearted and most heedless there.
"What is the signal for us to advance?" I inquired.
"Four rockets," replied Dyneley, our adjutant, who was on foot, with his sword drawn, and a revolver in his belt.
"There go the French to attack the tower!" cried Gwynne; and then a hum of admiration stole along our lines as we saw them, at precisely five minutes to twelve o'clock, "like a swarm of bees," issue from their trenches, the Linesmen in kepis and long blue coats, the Zouaves in turbans and baggy red breeches, under a terrible shower of cannon and musketry, fiery in their valour, quick, ardent, and eager! They swept over the little space of open ground that lay between the head of their sap, and, irresistible in their number, poured on a sea of armed men, a living tide, a human surge, section after section, and regiment after regiment, to the assault.
"O'er ditch and stream, o'er crest and wall,They jump and swarm, they rise and fall;Withvivesandcris, with chee0rs and cries.Like thunderings in autumnal skies;Till every foot of ground is mud,With tears and brains and bones and blood.Yet, faith, it was a grim delightTo see the little devils fight!"
"O'er ditch and stream, o'er crest and wall,They jump and swarm, they rise and fall;Withvivesandcris, with chee0rs and cries.Like thunderings in autumnal skies;Till every foot of ground is mud,With tears and brains and bones and blood.Yet, faith, it was a grim delightTo see the little devils fight!"
With wonderful speed and force, their thousands seemed to drift through the gaping embrasures of the tower, which appeared to swallow them up--all save the dead and dying, who covered the slope of the glacis; and intwominutes more the tricolor of France was waving on the summit of the Korniloff bastion!
But the work of the brave French did not end there. From twelve till seven at night, they had to meet and repulse innumerable attempts of the Russians to regain what they had lost--the great tower, which was really the key of the city; till, in weariness and despair, the latter withdrew, leaving the slopes covered with corpses that could only be reckoned by thousands. The moment the French standard fluttered out above the blue smoke and grimy dust of the tower, a vibration seemed to pass along all our ranks. Every face lit up; every eye kindled; every man instinctively grasped more tightly the barrel of his musket, or the blade of his sword, or set his cap more firmly on his head, for the final rush.
"The tricolor is on the Malakoff! By heavens, the French are in! hurrah!" cried several officers.
"Hurrah!" responded the stormers of the Light and Second Divisions.
"There go the rockets!" cried Phil Caradoc, pointing with his sword to where the tiny jets of sparkles were seen to curve in the wind against the dull leaden sky, their explosion unheard amid the roar of musketry and of human voices in and beyond the Malakoff.
"Ladders, to the front! eight men per ladder!" said Welsford, of the 97th.
"It is our turn now, lads; forward, forward!" added some one else--Raymond Mostyn, of the Rifles, I think.
"There is a five-pound note offered to the first man inside the Redan!" exclaimed little Owen Tudor, a drummer of ours, as he slung his drum and went scouring to the front: but a bullet killed the poor boy instantly, and Welsford had his head literally blown off by a cannon ball.
In their dark green uniforms, which were patched with many a rag, a hundred men of the Rifle Brigade who carried the scaling ladders preceded us; and the moment they and we began to issue, which we did at a furious run, with bayonets fixed and rifles at the short trail, from the head of the trenches, the cannon of the Redan opened a withering fire upon us. The round shot tore up the earth beneath our feet, or swept men away by entire sections, strewing limbs and other fragments of humanity everywhere; the exploding shells also dealt death and mutilation; the grape and cannister swept past in whistling showers; and wicked little shrapnels were flying through the air like black spots against the sky; while, with a hearty and genuine English "hurrah!" that deepened into a species of fierce roar, we swept towards the ditch which so few of us might live to recross.
Thick fall our dead on every hand, and the hoarse boom of the cannon is sounding deep amid the roar of the concentrated musketry. Crawling and limping back to the trenches for succour and shelter, the groaning or shrieking wounded are already pouring in hundreds to the rear, reeking with blood; and, within a minute, the whole slope of the Redan is covered with our redcoats--the dead or the helpless--thick as the leaves lie "when forests are rended!"
One enormous cannon-shot that struck the earth and stones threw up a cloud of dust which totally blinded the brave brigadier who led us; he was thus compelled to grope his way to the rear, while his place was taken by Lieutenant-colonel W. H. Bunbury of ours--a tried soldier, who had served in the Kohat-Pass expedition five years before this, and been Napier's aide-de-camp during the wars of India. The Honourable Colonel Handcock, who led three hundred men of the 97th and of the Perthshire Volunteers, fell mortally by a ball in the head. Colonel Lysons of ours (who served in the Canadian affair of St. Denis), though wounded in the thigh and unable to stand, remained on the ground, and with brandished sword cheered on the stormers.
The actual portion of the latter followed those who bore the scaling ladders, twenty of which were apportioned to the Buffs; and no time was to be lost now, as the Russians from the Malakoff, inflamed by blood, defeat, and fury, were rushing down in hordes to aid in the defence of the Redan. In crossing the open ground between our trenches and the point of attack, some of the ladders were lost or left behind, in consequence of their bearers being shot down; yet we reached the edge of the ditch and planted several without much difficulty, till the Russians, after flocking to the traverses which enfiladed them, opened a murderous fusillade upon those who were crossing or getting into the embrasures, when we planted them on the other side; and then so many officers and men perished, that Windham and three of the former were the only leaders of parties who got in untouched.
The scene in the ditch, where the dead and the dying, the bleeding, the panting, and exhausted lay over each other three or four deep, was beyond description; and at a place called the Picket House was one solitary English lady, watching this terrible assault, breathless and pale, putting up prayers with her white lips; and her emotions at such a time may be imagined when I mention that she was the wife of an officer engaged in the assault, Colonel H----, whose body was soon after borne past her on a stretcher.
When my ladder was planted firmly, I went up with the stormers, men of all regiments mixed pell-mell, Buffs and Royal Welsh, 90th and 97th. A gun, depressed and loaded with grape, belched a volume of flame and iron past me as I sprang, sword in hand, into the embrasure, firing my revolver almost at random; and the stormers, their faces flushed with ardour and fierce excitement, cheering, stabbing with the bayonet, smashing with the butt-end, or firing wildly, swarmed in at every aperture, and bore the Russians back; but I, being suddenly wedged among a number of killed and wounded men, between the cannon and the side of the embrasure could neither advance nor retire, till dragged out by the strong hand of poor Charley Gwynne, who fell a minute after, shot dead; and for some seconds, while in that most exposed and terrible position, I saw a dreadful scene of slaughter before me; for there were dense gray masses of the Russian infantry, their usually stolid visages inflamed by hate, ferocity, by fieryvodka, and religious rancour, the front ranks kneeling as if to receive cavalry, and all the rear ranks, which were three or four deep, firing over each other's heads, exactly as we are told the Scottish brigades of the "Lion of the North" did at Leipzig, to the annihilation of those of Count Tilly.
We were fairly IN this terrible Redan; but the weakness of our force was soon painfully apparent, and in short, when the enemy made a united rush at us, they drove us all into an angle of the work, and ultimately over the parapet to the outer slope, where men of the Light and Second Divisions were packed in a dense mass and firing into it, which they continued to do even till their ammunition became expended, when fresh supplies from the pouches of those in rear were handed to those in front. An hour and a half of this disastrous strife elapsed, "the Russians having cleared the Redan," to quote the trite description of Russell, "but not yet being in possession of its parapets, when they made a second charge with bayonets under a heavy fire of musketry, and throwing great quantities of large stones, grape and small round shot, drove those in front back upon the men in rear, who were thrown into the ditch. The gabions in the parapet now gave way, and rolled down with those who were upon them; and the men in rear, thinking all was lost, retired into the fifth parallel."
Many men were buried alive in the ditch by the falling earth; Dora's admirer, poor little Torn Clavell of the 19th, among others, perished thus horribly. Just as we reached our shelter, there to breathe, re-form, and await supports, I saw poor Phil Caradoc reel wildly and fall, somewhat in a heap, at the foot of the gabions. In a moment I was by his side. His sword-arm had been upraised as he was endeavouring to rally the men, and a ball had passed--as it eventually proved--through his lungs; though a surgeon, who was seated close by with all his apparatus and instruments, assured him that it was not so.
"I know better--something tells me that it is all over with me--and that I am bleeding internally," said he, with difficulty. "Hardinge, old fellow--lift me up--gently, so--so--thank you."
I passed an arm under him, and raised his head, removing at the same time his heavy Fusileer cap. There was a gurgle in his throat, and the foam of agony came on his handsome brown moustache.
"I am going fast," said he, grasping my hand; "God bless you, Harry--see me buried alone."
"If I escape--but there is yet hope for you, Phil."
But he shook his head and said, while his eye kindled,
"If I was not exactly the first manin, I was not long behind Windham. I risked my life freely," he added, in a voice so low that I heard him with difficulty amid the din of the desultory fire, and the mingled roar of other sounds in and around the Malakoff; "yet I should like to have gone home and seen my dear old mother once again, in green Llangollen--andher--she, you know who I mean, Harry. But God has willed it all otherwise, and I suppose it is for the best. . . . Turn me on my side . . . dear fellow--so. . . . I am easier now."
As I did what he desired, his warm blood poured upon my hand, through the orifice in his poor, faded, and patched regimentals, never so much as then like "the old red coat that tells of England's glory."
"Have the Third or Fourth Division come yet? Where are the Scots Royals?" he asked, eagerly, and then, without waiting for a reply, added, very faintly, "If spared to see her--Winny Lloyd--tell her that my last thoughts were of her--ay, as much as of my poor mother . . . and . . . that though she will get a better fellow than I----"
"That is impossible, Phil!"
"She can never get one who . . . . who loves her more. The time is near now when I shall be but a memory to her and you . . . . and to all our comrades of the old 23rd."
His lips quivered and his eyes closed, as he said, with something of his old pleasant smile,
"I am going to heaven, I hope, Harry--if I have not done much good in the world, I have not done much harm; and in heaven I'll meet with more red coats, I believe, than black ones . . . . and tell her . . . tell Winny----"
What I was to tell her I never learned; his voice died away, and he never spoke again; for just as the contest became fiercer between the French and the masses of Russians--temporarily released from the Redan or drawn from the city--his head fell over on one side, and he expired. I closed his eyes, for there was yet time to do so. Poor Phil Caradoc! I looked sadly for a minute on the pale and stiffening face of my old friend and jovial chum, and saw how fast the expression of bodily pain passed away from the whitening forehead. I could scarcely assure myself that he was indeed gone, and so suddenly; that his once merry eyes and laughing lips would open never again. Turning away, I prepared once more for the assault, and then, for the first time, I perceived Lieutenants Dyneley and Somerville of ours lying near him; the former mortally wounded and in great pain, the latter quite dead.
My soul was full of a keen longing for vengeance, to grapple with the foe once more, foot to foot and face to face. The blood was fairly up in all our hearts; for the Russians had now relined their own breastworks, where a tall officer in a gray capote made himself very conspicuous by his example and exertions. He was at last daring enough to step over the rampart and tear down a wooden gabion, to make a kind of extempore embrasure through which an additional field-piece might be run.
"As you are so fond of pot-firing," said Colonel Windham to the soldiers, with some irritation at the temporary repulse, "why the deuce don't you shoot that Russian?"
On looking through my field-glass, to my astonishment I discovered that he was Tolstoff. Sergeant Rhuddlan of ours now levelled his rifle over the bank of earth which protected the parallel, took a steady aim, and fired. Tolstoff threw up his arms wildly, and his sword glittered as it fell from his hand. He then wheeled round, and fell heavily backward into the ditch--which was twenty feet broad and ten feet deep--dead; at least, I never saw or heard of him again.
Just as a glow of fierce exultation, pardonable enough, perhaps, at such a time (and remembering all the circumstances under which this distinguished Muscovite and I had last met and parted), thrilled through me, I experienced a terrible shock--a shock that made me reel and shudder, with a sensation as if a hot iron had pierced my left arm above the elbow. It hung powerless by my side, and then I felt my own blood trickling heavily over the points of my fingers!
"Wounded! My God, hit at last!" was my first thought; and I lost much blood before I could get any one, in that vile burly-burly, to tie my handkerchief as a temporary bandage round the limb to stanch the flow.
I was useless now, and worse than useless, as I was suffering greatly, but I could not leave the parallel for the hospital huts, and remained there nearly to dusk fell. Before that, I had seen Caradoc interred between the gabions; and there he lay in his hastily-scooped grave, uncoffined and unknelled, his heart's dearest longings unfulfilled, his brightest hopes and keenest aspirations crushed out like his young life; and the evanescent picture, the poor photo of the girl he had loved in vain, buried with him; and when poor Phil was being covered up, I remembered his anecdote about the dead officer, and the letter that was replaced in his breast.
Well, my turn for such uncouth obsequies might come soon enough now. In the affair of the Redan, if I mistake not, 146 officers and men of ours, the Welsh Fusileers, were killed and wounded; and every other regiment suffered in the same proportion.
The attack was to be renewed at five in the morning by the Guards and Highlanders, under Lord Clyde of gallant memory, then Sir Colin Campbell; but on their approaching, it was found that the Russians had spiked their guns, and bolted by the bridge of boats, leaving Sebastopol one sheet of living fire. Fort after fort was blown into the air, each with a shock as if the solid earth were being split asunder. The sky was filled with live shells, which burst there like thousands of scarlet rockets, and thus showers of iron fell in every direction. Columns of dark smoke, that seemed to prop heaven itself, rose above the city, while its defenders in thousands, without beat of drum or sound of trumpet, poured away by the bridge of boats. When the last fugitive had passed, the chains were cut, and then the mighty pontoon, a quarter of a mile in length, swung heavily over to the north side, when we were in full possession of Sebastopol!
I must have dropped asleep of sheer weariness and loss of blood, when tottering to the rear; for on waking I found the moon shining, and myself lying not far from the fifth parallel, which was now occupied, like the rest of the trenches, by the kilted Highlanders, whose bare legs, and the wordEgypton their appointments, formed a double source of wonder to our Moslem allies, especially to the contingent that came from the Land of Bondage. These sturdy fellows were chatting, laughing, and smoking, or quietly sleeping and waiting for their turn of service against the Redan, in the dark hours of the morning.
I had lain long in a kind of dreamy agony. Like many who were in the Redan and in the ditch around it, I had murmured "water, water," often and vainly. The loss of Estelle, or of Valerie, for times there were when my mind wandered to the formernow, the love of dear friends, the death of comrades, honour, glory, danger from pillaging Russians or Tartars, all emotions, in fact, were merged or swallowed up in the terrible agony I endured in my shattered arm, and the still more consuming craving for something wherewith to moisten my cracked lips and parched throat. Poor Phil Caradoc had perhaps endured this before me, while his heart and soul were full of Winifred Lloyd; but Phil, God rest him! was at peace now, and slept as sound in his uncouth grave as if laid under marble in Westminster Abbey.
In my uneasy slumber I had been conscious of this sensation of thirst, and had visions of champagne goblets, foaming and iced; of humble bitter beer and murmuring water; of gurgling brooks that flowed over brown pebbles, and under long-bladed grass and burdocks in leafy dingles; of Llyn Tegid, deep and blue; of the marble fountain, with the lilies and golden fish, at Craigaderyn. Then with this idea the voice of Winifred Lloyd came pleasantly to my ear; her white fingers played with the sparkling water, she raised some to my lips, but the cup fell to pieces, and starting, I awoke to find a tall Highlander, of the Black Watch, bending over me, and on my imploring him to get me some water, he placed his wooden canteen to my lips, and I drank of the contents, weak rum-grog, greedily and thankfully.
It seemed strange to me that I should dream of Winifred, there and then; but no doubt the last words of Caradoc had led me to think of her. It is only when waking after long weariness of the body, and over-tension of the nerves, the result of such keen excitement as we had undergone since yesterday morning, that the full extremity of exhaustion and fatigue can be felt, as I felt them then. Add to these, that my shattered arm had bled profusely, and was still undressed.
Staggering up, I looked around me. The moon was shining, and flakes of her silver light streamed through the now silent embrasures of the Redan, silent save for the groans of the dying within it. There and in the ditch the dead lay thick as sheaves in a harvest-field--thick as the Greeks, at Troy, lay under the arrows of Apollo. How many a man was lying there, mutilated almost out of the semblance of humanity, whose thoughts, when the death shot struck him down, or the sharp bayonet pierced him, had flashedhome, quicker than the electric telegraph, yea, quicker than light, to his parents' hearth, to his lonely wife, to the little cots where their children lay abed--little ones, the memory of whose waxen faces and pink hands then filled his heart with tears; how many a resolution for prayer and repentance if spared by God; how many a pious invocation; how many a fierce resolution to meet the worst, and die like a man and a soldier, had gone up from that hell upon earth, the Redan--the fatal Redan, which we should never have attacked, but should have aided the French in the capture of the Malakoff, after which it must inevitably have fallen soon, if not at once.
Many of our officers were afterwards found therein, each with a hand clutching a dead Russian's throat, or coat, or belt, their fingers stiffened in death--man grasping man in a fierce and last embrace. Among others, that stately and handsome fellow, Raymond Mostyn, of the Rifles, and an officer of the Vladimir regiment were thus locked together, the same grape-shot having killed them both. Some of our slain soldiers were yet actually clinging to the parapet and slope of the glacis, as if still alive, thus showing the reluctance with which they had retired--the desperation with which they died. In every imaginable position of agony, of distortion, and bloody mutilation they lay, heads crushed and faces battered, eyes starting from their sockets, and swollen tongues protruding; and on that terrible scene the pale moon, "sweet regent of the sky," the innocent queen of night, as another poet calls her, looked softly down in her glory, as the same moon in England, far away, was looking on the stubble-fields whence the golden grain had been gathered, on peaceful homesteads, old church steeples and quiet cottage roofs, on the ruddy furnaces of the Black country, on peace and plenty, and where war was unknown, save by name.
She glinted on broken and abandoned weapons; she silvered the upturned faces of the dead--kissing them, as it were, for many a loving one who should see them no more; and gemming as if with diamonds the dewy grass and the autumnal wild-flowers; and there, too, amid that horrible débris, were the little birds--the goldfinch, the tit, and the sparrow--hopping and twittering about, too terrified to seek their nests, scared as they were by the uproar of the day that was past.
I felt sick at heart and crushed in spirit now. In the immediate foreground the moonlight glinted on the tossing dark plumes, the picturesque costume, and bright bayonets of the Highlanders in the trenches. In the distance was the town; its ports, arsenals, barracks, theatres, palaces, churches, and streets sheeted with roaring flames, that lighted up all the roadstead, where, one after the other, the Russian ships were disappearing beneath the waves, in that lurid glare which tipped with a fiery gleam the white walls and spiked cannon of the now abandoned forts.
I began to creep back towards the camp, in search of surgical aid, and on the way came to a place where, with their uniforms off, their shirt-sleeves rolled up, their boxes of instruments open, lint and bandages ready, three officers of the medical staff were busy upon a group of wounded men, who sat or lay near, waiting their turn, some impatiently, some with passive endurance, but all, more or less, in pain, as their moans and sighs declared.
"Don't bother about that Zouave, Gage," I heard one Æsculapius say, as I came near, "I have overhauled him already!"
"Is his wound mortal?"
"Yes--brain lacerated. By Jove! here is an officer of the 23rd!"
"Well, he must wait a little."
So I sighed, and seated myself on a stone, and clenched my teeth to control the agony I was enduring. The men who lay about us, with pale, woe-begone visages and lack-lustre eyes, belonged chiefly to the Light Division, but among them I saw, to my surprise, a Russian hussar lying dead, with the blood dry and crusted on his pale blue and yellow-braided dolman. How he came to bethere, I had not the curiosity to inquire. A mere bundle of gory rags, he seemed; for a cannon-shot had doubled him up, and now his Tartar horse stood over him, eyeing him wildly, and sniffing as if in wonder about his bearded face and fallen jaw.
The Zouave referred to was a noisy and loquacious fellow, notwithstanding his perilous predicament. He had strayed hither somehow from the Malakoff, and was mortally wounded, as the surgeon said, and dying. A tiny plaster image of the blessed Virgin lay before him; he was praying intently at times, but being fatuous, he wildly and oddly mingled with his orisons the name of a certain Mademoiselle Auréle, afleuriste, with whom he imagined himself in the second gallery of the Théâtre Français, or supping at the Barrière de l'Etoile; anon he imagined they were on the Boulevardes, or in a café chantant; and then as his mind--or what remained of it--seemed to revert to the events of the day, he drew his "cabbage-cutter," as the French call their sword-bayonet, and brandished it, crying,
"Cut and hew, strike, mes camarades--frappez vite et frappez forte! Vive la France! Vive l'Empéreur!"
This was the last effort; a gush of fresh blood poured into his eyes, and the poor Zouave was soon cold and stiff. In a kind of stupor I sat there and watched by moon and lantern light the hasty operations: bullets probed for and snipped out by forceps, while the patients writhed and yelled; legs and arms dressed or cut off like branches lopped from a tree, and chucked into a heap for interment. I shuddered with apprehensive foreboding of what might ensue when my own turn came, and heard, as in a dream, the three surgeons talking with the most placid coolness about their little bits of practice.
"Jones, please," said one, a very young staff medico, "will you kindly take off this fellow's leg for me? I have ripped up his trousers and applied the tourniquet--he is quite ready."
"But must it come off?" asked Jones, who was patching up a bullet-hole with lint.
"Yes; gun-shot fracture of the knee-joint--patella totally gone."
"Why don't you do it yourself, my good fellow?" asked the third, who, with an ivory-handled saw between his teeth, was preparing to operate on the fore-arm of a 19th man, whose groans were terrible. "Gage, did you never amputate?"
"Never on the living subject."
"On a dead one then, surely?"
"Often--of course.'
"By Jove, you can't begin too soon--so why not now?"
"I am too nervous--do it for me."
"In one minute; but only this once, remember. Now give me your knife for the flap; and look to that officer of the Welsh Fusileers--his left arm is wounded."
So while Dr. Jones, whom the haggard eyes of the man, whose limb was doomed, watched with a terrible expression of anxiety, applied himself to the task of amputation, the younger doctor, a hand fresh from London, came tome.
After ripping up the sleeve of my uniform, and having a brief examination, which caused me such bitter agony that I could no longer stand, but lay on the grass, he said,
"Sorry to tell you, that yours is a compound fracture of the most serious kind."
"Is it reducible?" I asked, in a low voice.
"No; I regret to say that your arm must come off."
"My arm--must I lose it?" I asked, feeling keener anguish with the unwelcome announcement.
"Yes; and without delay," he replied, stooping towards his instrument case.
"I cannot spare it--I must have some other--excuse me, sir--some older advice," I exclaimed, passionately.
"As you please, sir," replied the staff-surgeon, coolly; "but we have no time to spare here, either for opposition or indecision."
The other two glanced at my arm, poked it, felt it as if it had been that of a lay figure in a studio, and supported the opinion of their brother of the knife. But the prospect of being mutilated, armless, for life, and all the pleasures of which such a fate must deprive me, seemed so terrible, that I resolved to seek for other advice at the hospital tents, and towards them I took my way, enduring such pain of body and misery of mind that on reaching them I should have sunk, had brandy not been instantly given to me by an orderly. It was Sunday morning now, and the gray light of the September dawn was stealing over the waters of the Euxine, and up the valley of Inkermann. The fragrant odour of the wild thyme came pleasantly on the breeze; but now the rain was falling heavily, as it generally does after an action--firing puts down the wind, and so the rain comes; but to me then it was like the tears of heaven--"Nature's tear-drop," as Byron has it, bedewing the unburied dead. A red-faced and irritable-looking little Deputy Inspector of Hospitals, in a blue frogged surtout, received me, and from him I did not augur much. The patients were pouring in by hundreds, and the medical staff had certainly no sinecure there. After I had been stripped and put to bed, I remember this personage examining my wound and muttering,
"Bad case--very!"
"Am I in danger, doctor?" I inquired.
"Yes, of course, if it should gangrene," said he, sharply.
"I don't care much for life, but I should not like to lose my arm. Do you think that--that--"
"What?" he asked, opening his box of tools withsangfroid.
"I shall die of this?"
"Of a smashed bone?"
"Yes."
"Well, my dear fellow, not yet, I hope."
"Yet?" said I, doubtfully.
"Well, immediately, I mean. There is already much sign of inflammation, and consequent chance of fever. The os humerus is, as I say, smashed to pieces, and the internal and external condyles of the elbow are most seriously injured. Corporal Mulligan, a basin and sponge, and desire Dr.----" (I did not catch the name) "to step this way."
The corporal, a black-bearded Connaught Ranger, who had lost an eye at Alma, brought what the surgeon required; he then placed a handkerchief to my nostrils; there was a bubbling sensation in the brain, but momentary, as the handkerchief contained chloroform; then something peaceful, soporific, and soothing stole over me, and for a time I became oblivious of all around me.
To be brief, when the effect of the chloroform passed away, I became sensible of a strange sensation of numbness about my left shoulder. Instinctively and shudderingly I turned my eyes towards it, and found that my left arm was--gone! Gone, and near me stood Corporal Mulligan coolly wiping the fat little surgeon's instruments for the next case. Some wine, Crimskoi, and water were given me, and then I closed my eyes and strove, but in vain, to sleep and to think calmly over my misfortune, which, for a time, induced keen misanthropy indeed.
"Armless!" thought I; "I was pretty tired of life before this, and am utterly useless now. Would that the shot had struck me in a more vital place, and finished me--polished me off at once! That old staff sawbones should have left me to my fate; should have let mortification, gangrene, and all the rest of it, do their worst, and I might have gone quietly to sleep where so many lay, under the crocuses and caper-bushes at Sebastopol."
"After life's fitful fever" men sleep well; and so, I hoped, should I.
Such reflections were, I own, ungrateful and bitter; but suffering, disappointment, and more than all, the great loss of blood I had suffered, had sorely weakened me; and yet, on looking about me, and seeing the calamities of others, I felt that the simple loss of an arm was indeed but a minor affair.
Close by me, on the hospital pallets, I saw men expiring fast, and borne forth to the dead-pits only to make room for others; I saw the poor human frame, so delicate, so wondrous, and so divine in its organisation, cut, stabbed, bruised, crushed, and battered, in every imaginable way, and yet with life clinging to it, when life had become worthless. From wounds, and operations upon wounds, there was blood--blood everywhere; on the pallets, the straw, the earthen floor, the canvas of the tents, in buckets and basins, on sponges and towels, and on the hands of the attendants. Incessantly there were moans and cries of anguish, and, ever and anon, that terrible sound in the throat known as the death-rattle.
Sergeant Rhuddlan, Dicky Roll the drummer (the little keeper of the regimental goat), and many rank and file of the old 23rd--relics of the Redan--were there, and some lay near me. The sergeant was mortally wounded, and soon passed away; the poor boy was horribly mutilated, a grape shot having torn off his lower jaw, and he survived, to have perhaps a long life of misery and penury before him; and will it be believed that, through red-tapery and wretched Whig parsimony, two hours before the attack on the Redan, the senior surgeon in the Quarries was "run out" of lint, plasters, bandages, and every other appliance for stanching blood?
I heard some of our wounded, in their triumph at the general success of the past day, attempting feebly and in quavering tones to sing "Cheer, boys, cheer;" while others, in the bitterness of their hearts, or amid the pain they endured, were occasionally consigning the eyes, limbs, and souls of the Ruskies to a very warm place indeed. Estelle's ring, which I had still worn, was gone with my unfortunate arm, and was now the prize, no doubt, of some hospital orderly. Next day, as the wounded were pouring in as fast as the dripping stretchers and ambulances could bring them, I was sent to the monastery of St. George, which had been turned into a convalescent hospital. The removal occasioned fever, and I lay long there hovering between life and death; and I remember how, as portions of a seeming phantasmagoria, the faces of the one-eyed corporal who attended me, and of the staff doctors Gage and Jones, became drearily familiar.
This monastery is situated about five miles from Balaclava and six from Sebastopol, near Cape Fiolente, and consists of two long ranges of buildings, two stories in height, with corridors off which the cells of the religious open. The chapel, full of hospital pallets, there faces the sea, and the view in that direction is both charming and picturesque. A zigzag pathway leads down from the rocks of red marble, past beautiful terraces clothed with vines and flowering shrubs, to a tiny bay, so sheltered that there the ocean barely ripples on the snow-white sand. But then the Greek monks, in their dark-brown gowns, their hair plaited in two tails down their back, their flowing beards, with rosary and crucifix and square black cap, had given place to convalescents of all corps, Guardsmen, Riflemen, Dragoons, and Linesmen, who cooked and smoked, laughed and sang, patched their clothes and pipe-clayed their belts, where whilom mass was said and vespers chanted. Others were hopping about on crutches, or, propped by sticks, dozed dreamily in the sunshine under shelter of the wall that faced the sparkling sea--the blessed high road to old England.
My room, a monk's cell, was whitewashed, and on the walls were hung several gaudy prints of Russian saints and Madonnas with oval shining metal halos round their faces; but most of these the soldiers, with an eye to improvement in art, had garnished with short pipes, moustaches, and eyeglasses; and with scissors and paste-pot Corporal Mulligan added other decorations from the pages ofPunch.
Sebastopol had fallen; "Redan Windham," as we named him, then a Brigadier-general, was its governor; and by the Allies the place had been plundered of all the flames had spared (not much certainly), even to the cannon and church bells; and now peace was at hand. But many a day I sighed and tossed wearily on my hard bed, and more wearily still in the long nights of winter, when the bleak wind from the Euxine howled round the monastery and the rain lashed its walls, though Corporal Mulligan would wink his solitary eye, and seek to console me by saying,
"Your honour's in luck--there is no trinch-guard to-night, thank God!"
"Nor will there ever be again for me," I would reply.
The inspector of hospitals had informed me that, so soon as I could travel, sick leave would be granted me, that I might proceed to England; but I heard him with somewhat of indifference. Would Valerie join her brother Volhonski at Lewes in Sussex, was, however, my first thought; she would be free to do as she pleased now that the odious Tolstoff--Butwashe killed by Rhuddlan's bullet, or merely wounded, with the pleasure of having Valerie, perhaps, for a nurse? He certainly seemed to fall from the parapet as if he were shot dead. Why had I not gone back and inspected the slain in the ditch of the Redan, to see if he lay there? But I had other thoughts then, and so the opportunity--even could I have availed myself of it--was gone for ever. These calculations and surmises may seem very cool now; but to us then human life, and human suffering, too, were but of small account indeed.
One evening the fat little staff surgeon came to me with a cheerful expression on his usually cross face, and two packets in his hand.
"Well, doctor," said I, with a sickly smile, but unable to lift my head; "so I didn't die, after all."
"No; close shave though. Wish you joy, Captain Hardinge."
"Joy--armless!"
"Tut; I took the two legs off a rifleman the other day close to the tibia--ticklish operation, very, but beautifully done--and he'll toddle about in a bowl or on a board, and be as jolly as a sand-boy. Supposeyourcase had been his?"
"When may I leave this?"
"Can't say yet awhile. You don't want to rejoin, I presume?"
"Would to God that I could! but the day is past now When I do leave, it will be by ship or steamer."
"Unless you prefer a balloon. Well, it was of these I came to wish you joy," said he, placing before me, and opening it (for I was unable to do so, single-handed), the packet, which contained two medals; one for the Crimea, with its somewhat unbecoming ribbon, and two clasps for "Inkermann" and "Sebastopol."
"They are deuced like labels for wine-bottles," said the little doctor; "but a fine thing for you to have, and likely to catch the eyes of the girls in England."
"And this other medal with the pink ribbon?"
"Is the Sardinian one, given by Victor Emanuel; and more welcome than these perhaps, here is a letter from home--from England--for you; which, if you wish, I shall open" (every moment I was some way thus reminded, even kindly, of my own helplessness), "and leave you to peruse. Good evening; I've got some prime cigars at your service, if you'll send Mulligan to me."
"Thanks, doctor."
And he rolled away out of the cell, to visit some other unfortunate fellow. The medals were, of course, a source of keen satisfaction to me; but as I toyed with them and inspected them again and again, they woke an old train of thought; for there wasone, who had no longer perhaps an interest in me (if a woman ever ceases to have an interest in the man who has loved her), and who was another's now, in whose white hands I should once with honest pride have laid them. Viewed through that medium, they seemed almost valueless for a time; though there was to come a day when I was alike vain of them--ay, and of my empty sleeve--as became one who had been at the fall of Sebastopol, the queen of the Euxine.
"I fear I am a very discontented dog," thought I, while turning to the letter, which proved to be from kind old Sir Madoc Lloyd.
For months no letters had reached me, and for the same period I had been unable to write home; so in all that time I had heard nothing from my friends in England--who were dead, who alive; who marrying, or being given in marriage. Sir Madoc's missive was full of kind thoughts and expressions, of warm wishes and offers of service, that came to me as balm, especially at such a time and in such a place. Poor Phil Caradoc, and many others, were sorrowfully and enthusiastically referred to. Sir Watkins Vaughan was still hovering about the girls, "but with remarkable indecision apparently." The tall Plunger with the parted hair had proposed to Dora, and been declined; for no very visible reason, as he was a pleasant fellow with a handsome fortune.
On an evening early in September, the very day that a telegram announcing the fall of the Redan reached Craigaderyn, they were dressing for a county ball at Chester--a long-looked-for and most brilliant affair--when their sensibility, and fear that I might have been engaged, made them relinquish all ideas of pleasure, and countermand the carriage, to the intense chagrin of Sir Watkins and also of the Plunger, who had come from town expressly to attend it. Two day afterwards the lists were published, and the account of the slaughter of our troops, and the death of so many dear friends, had made Winifred positively ill, so change of air was recommended for her, at Ventnor or some such place.
A postscript to this, in Dora's rapid hand, and written evidently surreptitiously (perhaps while Sir Madoc had left his desk for a moment), added the somewhat significant intelligence, that "Winny had wept very much indeed on reading the account of that horrible Redan" (for Phil's death, thought I; if so, she mourns him too late!) "and now declares that she will die an old maid." (Itisso!) "When that interesting period of a lady's life begins," continued Dora, "I know not; if unmarried, before thirty, I suppose; thus I am eleven years off that awful period yet, and have a decidedly vulgar prejudice against ever permitting myself to become one. Papa writes that Sir Watkins is undecided; but I may add that I, for one, know that he isnot. Our best love to you, dear old Harry; but O, I can't fancy youwithout an arm!"
I was in a fair way of recovery now. The state I had been in so long, within the four walls of that quaint little chamber--a state that hovered between sense and insensibility, between sleeping and waking, time and eternity--had passed away; and, after all I had undergone, it had seemed as if