The battle casualties were heaped in with the cholera sufferers, who scrambled over the raw stumps of men’s arms and legs as they tried to reach the primitive sanitary arrangements, setting them screaming with pain. In many cases, the sufferers were too weak to move, and with no one to assist them, the lower decks were soon overflowing with blood and filth where sick men soon died and wounded men quickly fell sick. Germs bred in the ill-ventilated bowels of the ships, so men who had embarked suffering in one way arrived at Scutari with additional ills.
Surgeons operating during the voyage found the heavy rolling of the ships brought ghastly errors of judgment when cutting off a limb or probing a deep wound and were forced to leave gangrenous wounds to grow worse. The men who endured the voyage knew only one way to keep sane: They fixed their minds on their arrival at Scutari when they could say goodbye to their ordeal. They could not know their last hope would go when they were carried over the threshold of the Barrack Hospital.
One of the transports being used in this way was Sirocco, and Letty persuaded the embarkation officer to allocate Charles and Jack to that ship, where Byron Porchester had promised the ladies cabins for themselves and their husbands. The sea captain was very distressed by Victoria’s appearance. He had seen her vivid and provocative on the voyage from Portsmouth, melting in her defenselessness at Varna, but now, empty, stony-eyed and lifeless. Remarking on the fact to Letty, who appeared to be taking control of the situation, Captain Porchester repeated his assertion that a battlefield was no place for a lady.
Letty had a suspicion that the breezy man was a little too fond of Victoria but silently vowed to take advantage of his penchant for her friend if his help would make things easier for them. She was herself extremely worried over Victoria’s condition. The girl went about her duties, looking after her husband with silent efficiency, but something had died inside her. When word had come of the move to Scutari she heard it with dazed indifference and began packing the few things they were allowed to take with them. Details of the voyage did not appear to interest her; Letty had arranged everything.
Jack Markham was weak and feverish, but Charles Stanford, although strong enough, was in great pain. His foot had been crushed when others had ridden over him to reach the guns. Victoria was meticulous in her nursing of him, but Letty believed she spoke no word to the man who had survived while his brother had been lost. Hugo’s death had cast a dark shadow over Jack and herself, but she was selfish enough to concentrate on happiness at Jack’s safety and her efforts to bring him back to complete recovery. To this end she used all her energies to make the four of them as comfortable as possible.
Letty’s maid had remained in Balaclava with her husband, who was one of the few survivors of the charge, and Zarina Stokes agreed to serve both ladies, going about her duties faithfully but sadly. Stokes had disappeared with no grave or epitaph, like many others, and Zarina was a widow. She had lost her proud walk and air of flamboyance, but she was lucky to have food, somewhere to live and a small wage. The other soldiers’ widows were stranded and destitute, unless they remarried, or ensured their survival some other way. With the present state of supplies and conditions before Sebastopol, life would be punishing enough for the men; there would be nothing to share with those creatures who had followed the army from England.
It was Letty who took command at Scutari when they arrived to find that the horror on board was nothing to that at the great Barrack Hospital. The approach was appalling enough. Only a short ferry ride across the Bosporus, Scutari had no jetty — just a rickety landing stage that would accommodate no more than caiques or rowboats. The sick and wounded had to be lowered from the transports into these smelly vessels and rowed over choppy seas to shore, where a gang of sulky, unwilling Turks carried them the short distance to the hospital. Frequently, notification of their arrival had gone astray, and men suffering unto death were left outside in rows, with nothing but a torn, gaping uniform to keep away the November cold. Even so, many would sooner have stayed there than enter the building itself, which effused a stench that nauseated those outside its walls and enclosed those whose moans could be heard night and day.
The day before Sirocco put in at Scutari, an English gentlewoman called Miss Nightingale had arrived with a party of nuns and trained nurses to give urgently needed help in the hospital and was given bare rooms running with lice and rats by way of accommodation and advice to remain there. The administrators of the hospital refused to let her or the women anywhere near the sick men. They received no food or water, and there was no furniture in their tiny cells.
Charles and Jack were obliged to walk to the hospital, since only those with no legs at all or those in the last throes of death fevers were allowed to use the limited number of stretchers. Victoria and Letty supported their husbands to the doors of the building and were then turned away, Letty with a sinking heart at having to say goodbye to Jack and to leave him in such conditions. Scutari was a dolorous place with nothing but cemeteries, brothels and other places of vice that naturally sprang up around a military settlement, along with mean, vicious traveling peddlers, starving dogs and vermin bloated on a superfluity of rubbish.
Byron Porchester was pressed into immediate service by Letty, who decided she and Victoria must go into a hotel in Constantinople, and, true to his word, the sea captain took them to that city and found them rooms in a quiet comfortable hotel well frequented by English people of quality. He left, promising to call on them each time he came down to Scutari and pledging to do what he could about transporting the rest of their baggage from Balaclava when an opportunity arose.
Letty thanked him very warmly. Victoria spoke as though her thoughts were elsewhere. She did what Letty suggested, ate sparingly and automatically and allowed Zarina to make her look neat and presentable but cared nothing for what went on around her. If Letty said they must travel to England, she would go — or back to Balaclava or to Varna…or to the ends of earth. It did not matter.
Charles, being a senior officer, was housed in the more reasonable General Hospital a quarter of a mile away from the converted barracks, and Jack was lucky enough to be sent there also. Every day it could be managed, the ladies went across on the ferry with delicacies they could purchase in Constantinople, but, although Letty took her gifts to Jack and stayed to cheer him, Victoria handed hers over at the door. There was nothing she and Charles could say to each other.
The news from the Crimea was frightening. Cholera had broken out again with great virulence, the advancing winter was sweeping the British Army on the heights with sleet showers that froze on men and beasts alike, deluges of rain had made the only track from Balaclava to the hills — the only route, since the capture by the Russians of the Woronzoff Road, by which supplies could be taken up to the troops — into an impassable sea of mud in which the pack animals struggled until they sank lifeless to their knees.
Then, on November 14, came the final blow to the army that had marched so bravely through the streets of English ports. The Crimea was hit by a hurricane that blew away tents, supplies, furniture, equipment — everything needed for survival by those encamped around Sebastopol. Horses were snatched up and carried for miles in the teeth of the gale; an entire flock of sheep disappeared. The hospital marquees went in a trice, leaving the patients lying in a sea of mud, exposed to the fury of the storm. The last remaining trees needed so urgently for fuel were uprooted and tossed away like matchsticks, and the wagons were smashed to pieces. In the morning, as men crept from beneath saturated greatcoats, they heard that every ship in Balaclava harbor had been smashed and sunk that night, taking down with them all the supplies for the winter. There was now no warm clothing, no huts, no extra food, no blankets for men and horses, no fuel — no hope!
Hospital ships became more crowded than before, the men piled into them like livestock. As well as those suffering from cholera, dysentery and rheumatic fever, the ships carried appalling casualties from another battle at Inkerman, when the
Russians had attacked in thick fog and precipitated a gruesome and bloody bayonet-against-bayonet struggle. They had been driven back but had left dead and wounded in great mounds.
For several days high seas in the Bosporus had prevented Letty and Victoria from crossing to Scutari, but when they were, at last, able to do so, the sight that met them was so shocking, Victoria was brutally shaken from her apathy. Boats stood offshore unloading men for the hospital. Littering the ground between the landing stage and the entrance to that grim building were hundreds of creatures in rags, bearded and filthy, half starved, shivering, covered in clotted blood and pus and demented with pain. They were once the pride of the British Army; now they were scarlet shadows.
The two women stood speechless, until Victoria whispered, “Letty, we have to do something to help.”
Letty shook her head hopelessly. “We cannot help. If Miss Nightingale and her trained nurses are not allowed even to wipe a man’s brow, they would not hear any words of ours on the subject.”
Indeed, they did not get even any word on the progress of their own husbands on arrival at the hospital doors. An angry, distracted doctor in crimson-soaked clothes ordered them away.
“Can you not see the state of our emergency?” he roared. “This is no time for genteel visiting by ladies of quality with arrowroot and eggs in their baskets.”
“Do you not need arrowroot and eggs?” Victoria demanded heatedly.
“No, ma’am. We need a hospital — a real hospital. In fact, we need three of them. If one more shipload arrives the men will either remain out there on the ground or be forced to lie on top of others in this God-forsaken place. They will receive no attention for two weeks either way.”
“Then why will you not allow Miss Nightingale’s nurses to use their skills and humanity, sir?” cried Victoria. “Will you let our soldiers die rather than swallow your masculine pride?”
He became viciously quiet. “I, ma’am, would have taken Miss Nightingale’s help with thankfulness when she first set foot in here. I am a doctor and I will save life by any means at my disposal. If I thought that filthy water out there in the harbor would save just one man, I would bring it drop by drop in my cupped hands. But I am also a soldier and must bow to the commands of those of higher rank who are afraid that a few Sisters of Mercy will make them appear foolish back in England. Stand back, please,” he said swiftly and moved toward a stretcher being brought in. Over his shoulder he added, “Miss Nightingale is now fully employed from sheer necessity…but even that courageous lady will not prevent complete disaster.” He pushed past them. “And neither will baskets of arrowroot and eggs.”
Realizing that chaos did indeed reign within the hospital, they moved away, feeling distressed and helpless. Men begged for water in faint voices, but they had none to give. On an impulse, Victoria took an egg from her basket and offered it to a glaze-eyed Guardsman, suggesting he ask to have it coddled for him when he arrived in the ward, but the man snatched it and ate it whole in its shell before her astonished eyes.
“They are starving,” breathed Letty. “Let us go. It is too terrible.”
As if she had not heard, Victoria walked away from her friend to where she had spotted a Guards officer sitting against a wall and sank down before him. He raised bloodshot eyes to hers and said painfully, “Forgive my manners, ma’am. I cannot stand.”
Her eyes avoided the stump of his right leg. “My husband is Lieutenant-Colonel Stanford of the Hussars, sir. He is in the hospital, already on the mend. I know he will not mind my offering another the things I brought for him today.” She put the handle of the basket in his hand. “There are eggs, arrowroot, fish and some wine. May I hope you will share them with these poor men?”
He looked blankly at the contents of the basket. “Alas, I am not Jesus Christ, ma’am, who fed the multitude with five loaves and two fishes.”
Ridiculously she felt tears start in her eyes at the sound of so beautifully cultured a voice coming from a dirty ragged outcast. Beneath his degradation he was a gentleman.
“You have already done so much that is beyond belief, sir,” she said gently.
He put his hand inside the tattered scarlet jacket and brought out a creased envelope. “Would you think me impertinent, ma’am, to ask you to post this to my mother? It is a very personal matter that needs an urgent reply, and I am not certain when it will get off once I get in there.” His eyes turned toward the hospital.
“Of course.” Overcome by the moment, she took the letter and returned to Letty, trembling with some indefinable anger. The envelope was addressed to the Countess of Kingsmere.
Several attempts by the two young women to speak to Miss Nightingale were unsuccessful, since it was impossible to gain entry to the building. They returned to Constantinople upset and depressed. Victoria had reawakened and could not rest in comfort knowing what was happening across the narrow stretch of water in Scutari. Until well into the night she sat gazing from her window, lost in thought, her eyes on the distant hospital, dark in the winter moonlight.
Gradually emerging from her state of shock, she began to feel again. Again, she felt as she had at Varna when men were going down with cholera and had no one to console them or give them hope. That time Charles had told her the second-in-command’s wife could not go around the hospital tents, but he was not here now to prevent her. The more she considered it, the greater grew her conviction that here lay her salvation. She had turned to it before when Hugo rejected her; now that he was gone, it was the one thing that could make her life worthwhile.
The minutes passed as she came to terms with herself. Hugo had loved her as she had loved him. She knew that for all time. It would be a betrayal of that love if she let her own life be wasted as his had been. Ahead of him had lain a brilliant career in the army; could she not make it possible for some other young man to conclude what he had begun? Her thoughts went to the youthful Guards officer of that morning. Would an answer to his letter ever reach him?
In her mind she traveled painfully back to Wychbourne and an innocent child telling a blindfolded figure that she would be patroness of the Hussars. In her personal grief she had abandoned the regiment — forsaken those who still remained. She had foolishly dreamed of leading a host of glittering horsemen; could she refuse to help the ragged broken survivors? If only one man could be saved by her efforts, she would have repaid to Hugo the debt he was owed.
Burning now with impatience, she knew herself hopelessly ill-equipped for what she proposed. But as she gazed at the outline of Scutari where the casualties had been exposed to the elements that morning, she knew there were many things that needed only the natural qualities of a woman to perform. It was to that end that she would direct her energies.
The following morning saw the two ladies, together with Zarina Stokes, take the ferry to Scutari. With them were three small boys laden with boxes, and no sooner had the party arrived than the three began walking among the men who were being landed from the ships, offering cups of milk, slices of bread spread with butter, pieces of goat cheese, raw eggs and jellies. The men took what they were offered, as many seeming unable to bring themselves to eat as those who wolfed the items whole, but each one was grateful for the milk held to his lips by gentle hands.
Victoria went about her task with an aching heart, seeing in each pair of eyes the pain Hugo must have suffered and in each broken body the one she had never found out in the valley. Within a quarter of an hour it was clear that her store of courage was lower than she had thought, and it was an effort to continue.
Her problem was solved in an unpleasant way by a loud voice saying behind her, “Stop this at once!” and she looked up to see the same doctor they had encountered yesterday, just as angry as he had been then.
“What do you mean by this damned dangerous practice?” He peered closely at Victoria. “You were here yesterday with eggs and arrowroot. I thought I told you then that Lady Bountifuls had no place at this hospital.”
&nb
sp; Victoria rose to her feet, shaking. He was a youngish man, aged by despair, with a shock of red hair and fierce eyes. He had on a filthy white coat and trousers, and his hands were stained reddish-brown.
“It seems that manners have no place in this hospital either, sir,” she said.
“No, madam, not when men are dying in thousands,” he snapped. “I am not an aristocrat in a scarlet uniform — just a doctor who is too far beneath their uptilted noses until he is expected to perform miracles. I cannot afford the time for fancy manners when limbs are waiting to be amputated.”
“Then why are you out here, sir?” she pointed out acidly.
“To prevent the harm you are doing with your high-minded helpers. Most of these men are starving, besides suffering from dysentery or cholera. Eating food such as you are giving them will shortly cause them great agony, even death in some cases. They require special diets.”
She was still trembling. “Will they receive special diets in there?”
Suddenly, he sagged and put his hand through his hair. “No…no, they will not. I still cannot allow you to increase their suffering by this ridiculous indiscriminate feeding.
“Tell me what we must give them, in that case,” she cried. “If you have none in the hospital I will purchase it myself.”
“We could not allow that,” he said firmly. “These men are our responsibility.”
She looked back at him with intense eyes. “They are the responsibility of us all, sir.”
He grew angry again. “I don’t know who you are, madam, but you are making extreme nuisances of yourselves. Do you realize that the British Army is dying here at the rate of three hundred souls per week? What we need cannot be supplied by society ladies living in luxury in Constantinople who trip across the Bosporus with baskets of eggs because they have nothing better to do.”
Scarlet Shadows Page 35
