'Steady men,' Jack said, 'don't waste ammunition; we don't know when we will get more.'
'Fire as soon as they are in range,' Maxwell ordered, 'and don't allow them to get too close.' Lifting a rifle from the hands of a dead man, he gave an example, aiming and firing at anybody that showed through gaps in the mist. 'Use the advantage the Minie gives us.'
Jack followed his example. The Minie Rifle had an abrupt kick but felt good against his shoulder.
The skirmishers were more cautious than before, remaining in cover to fire and dashing forward to the next tree or outcrop of rock. Their muzzle flashes sparked through the mist, and their firing was accurate, so the 118th soon began to take casualties, man after man falling backwards.
'They're getting good,' Dearden said.
'Too good.' Jack flinched as a bullet hissed past him.
The singing stopped. Jack peered into the mist. 'I can't see a blessed thing,' he said.
The artillery took him by surprise. In their previous assault, the Russian infantry had blocked their guns. Now the guns opened up again, looping over their infantry in a maelstrom of shot fiercer and harder than before that landed on the diminishing 118th.
'Get to ground!' Maxwell ordered.
The Russians knew exactly where the British positions were and pounded away for fifteen hard minutes, levelling much of the breastwork, throwing the sandbags down, killing and maiming the defenders.
'They're set to pulverise us out of existence,' Jack said.
Lying beside him at the bottom of the trench with both hands keeping his shako in place, Dearden shook his head. 'Not so! They're softening us up.'
'Kutuzov will have the Russians lying down too,' Maxwell said. 'They are under the arc of their artillery, but closer to us than on the previous attack.'
Jack nodded. That made sense. When the artillery stopped, the Russians would have less distance to cover as they charged. The British would be diminished in number, shocked by the bombardment and would have less time in which to create a defence. Whatever orders Soimonoff or Dannenberg may have given, he was prepared to wager that Kutuzov had worked this particular move out.
The artillery ended in a stunning silence. There was no singing. There was no firing by the skirmishers. Jack looked up, dazed by the cessation of the cannonade and then the Russians were on them. Thousands of men in grey uniforms advancing at the run, silent save for the shush of feet over damp ground and the rattle of equipment. In the centre were the Cossacks with Kutuzov at their head, shasqua in hand.
'Here they come, boys!' Jack fired the Minie, pulled out his revolver and fired round after round until it was empty. He did not wait to see if he had hit anybody but loaded quickly as the 118th sprang to life, men firing and loading so the front rank of Russians fell in droves. He saw Aitken clap a hand to his face and slide to the bottom of the trench, and then Maxwell was rallying his men, calling on the trumpeter to blow for his life, firing his Minie, dropping it to draw his revolver.
Jack had heard it said that bayonet charges worked by psychology; that no troops ever stood against a bayonet charge and there were no bayonet to bayonet battles in modern warfare. He was not alone in witnessing the falseness of that fable. At Inkerman, British and Russian soldiers both stood against the bayonet charge of the other.
Now the 118th rose from their shattered trench to face the Russians. Only two men turned to run; Jack did not see who they were. Once they came close, the Russians let out a howl that raised the hair on the back of Jack's neck and charged. He saw his men lunge forward in what became the most vicious face to face battle he had ever seen. Men from age 16 to 50, private soldiers and officers from all the corners of the British Isles thrust long bayonets into men from St Petersburg and Ukraine, the Steppes and the bitter north, Crimea and Livonia. The Russians came on in style like the brave soldiers they were, buoyed up by their numbers and the knowledge that they were fighting for their own Holy soil. The British met them with tenacious dogged savagery, knowing that if the Russians broke through here, they could sweep up the flank of the entire British and Allied army, relieve the siege of Sebastopol and perhaps win the war.
There was no thought of retreat and no concept of surrender from either side.
'They're after the Colours!' Corporal O'Hara shouted. 'Rally around the Colours, boys!'
Jack spared time for a single glance at the Redoubt, off to his right; the Colours still flew, proud and defiant with the number 118 hidden in the folds of damp cloth, but still there. As long as the Colours stood, the regiment existed and the British held this section of Inkerman Heights.
He fired the last round in his revolver, saw a Russian infantryman crumple, ducked under the clumsy swing of a musket butt and kicked out with his boot. Brodie was down, roaring his hate; Jack lifted his discarded rifle, aimed and squeezed the trigger, cursed when he realised it was empty and instead fought with the bayonet.
They kept coming in an endless mass; brave Russian soldiers packed so tightly together that they were unable to properly wield their bayonets until they jumped or clambered over the breastwork, and in those few seconds when the attackers rose above the defenders they were exposed to a bayonet in the thigh, belly or groin. That was how many died, crumbled in screaming agony with their intestines slashed open or a blade thrust through their privates. Even so, there were too many Russians, Jack saw; the 118th could not kill them all. First one, then two, then half a dozen leapt the breastwork unopposed and landed in the trench to fight on more equal terms.
It was a battle of bravery and butchery. The Russians had not expected to survive the fire of a regiment of British infantry. Nor had they expected the British to stand and fight if they reached them in such high numbers. Neither side was prepared to yield.
Men fought, struggled and fell, cursing, men lost their rifles and fought with the bayonet and butt, and when they bent or broke, they fought with boots and fists, head-butting their opponents, gouging out eyes and biting at throats. Jack saw Ryan on the ground with a Russian poised with his bayonet until Logan jumped on the back of the Russian, grabbed his hair and pulled his head back. There was the flash of steel, and the Russian fell, with Logan snarling on top of him with a khanjali in his hand.
A wounded British soldier lay on his face, with every Russian that passed plunging a bayonet into his back. The man groaned and writhed with each wound, yet lived.
Jack looked around. The ground in front of the redoubt was a shifting carpet of dead and wounded Russian soldiers. The trench and breastworks were packed with fighting men, wounded men and the staring dead of both sides.
The battle was in the balance. The 118th was all but done, exhausted, outnumbered, dying by inches, but ordered to stay put until reinforced, they stood and killed and died.
There was a general surge toward the centre as the Russians tried to capture the Colours and the British to defend it. Through the shredding mist, Jack saw Kutuzov lead a substantial body of his Cossacks toward the flag and knew that was where the battle would be decided, win or lose.
'With me O'Neill!' Hacking down a lone Russian with hardly a thought, Jack pushed toward Kutuzov. He did not have to look to know that O'Neill was at his back.
Maxwell was exactly where should be, standing beside the flag with his sword in one hand and pistol in the other, the very epitome of a gallant commander. Except that gallant British commanders do not also act the spy. Nothing is quite as it seemed; life and war and politics and international relations were not as clear-cut or straightforward as the history books make them.
Kutuzov's Cossacks charged straight at Maxwell, with Kutuzov at the rear, directing their movements. The Cossacks sliced down two British soldiers and grabbed at Maxwell, who swung his sabre, neatly transfixing the closest man. The second closed on him, with others following, hauling him down to the ground, prodding bayonets into his arms and legs to disable but not kill him.
'They're trying to capture the colonel,' O'Neill said. 'They must want a
n officer as a prisoner! The Russians get a reward for every British officer they capture!'
Jack felt nothing as Thorpe thrust his bayonet into a Russian and Coleman smashed the man's skull with the butt of his rifle. He remembered that torture chamber in Sebastopol and knew that Kutuzov was particular in the officers he wanted to capture.
Jack paused; he had to make a decision now. He could not allow Kutuzov to capture and torture Maxwell to find out whatever information he had about Bulloch and his organisation. He could not see Helen's father dragged away in front of his eyes. But neither could he leave his men to fight alone.
The Cossacks dragged Maxwell fifty yards in front of the redoubt and dumped him, standing over him as if he was some treasure, which in a way he was, Jack reasoned.
'They've got the colonel!' Dearden yelled. 'The Russians have got the colonel.'
'I'll get him back, sir!' Jack jumped over the breastwork, with O'Neill and Coleman at his side. Logan and Riley were not far behind, and then Thorpe at the rear.
Taken by surprise by this unexpected counter-attack, the Cossacks staggered, until Kutuzov, still ten yards behind his men, pointed to Jack and roared a string of orders.
'Thorpe, Coleman,' Jack shouted, 'guard our backs!'
The Cossack guards moved to meet them, lunging with their bayonets. Jack parried the first, sidestepped the second and felt utter relief when Logan and O'Neill thrust in with bayonet and rifle butt. Leaving them to deal with the Cossacks, Jack knelt over Maxwell. 'Here we are again, sir.'
The colonel looked up through dazed eyes. 'Hello, Windrush. Did they capture you too?'
'No, sir,' Jack shouted above the noise; 'we've come to rescue you!' He looked up as his men arrived.
'I'll get him, sir.' Although Coleman was slender, he was as wiry and tough as any man in the army. Ignoring Maxwell's cry of pain, he hoisted him on his back and headed back to the Redoubt, with the colonel, wounded in a dozen places by Russian bayonets, leaking blood.
'Back to the line, men,' Jack yelled.
'They're running, sir.' Ryan said, and Jack saw that he was correct. Kutuzov's last push to secure Maxwell had been the high tide of the Russian attack. Now the grey waves were ebbing, bayonetting the British wounded as they retreated and leaving scores of their comrades on the ground.
'Shall we go after them, sir?' Logan asked eagerly.
'No; let them go.' Jack said. He was bone- weary and knew his men must be every bit as exhausted. It was all they could do to hold the line in defence yet alone expend vital energy in chasing a still far more numerous foe.
'Hitchins, you're a strong man; take the Colonel back to our lines. Thorpe will help you; find a surgeon.' He knew it was wrong to give an individual priority because of his rank; he also knew that if the Russians came again with such force or determination, they would break through and capture Maxwell, putting him to whatever devilish tortures that Kutuzov's mind could devise. Better a death by Russian bayonets than the slow agony of torture.
Jack looked around to see what remained of the Fatal Redoubt and nearly wished that he had not.
Dear God; what a mess!
Chapter Twenty-Two
Inkerman Ridge
5th November 1854
Captain Dearden was dead; his mouth open in a soundless scream to protest at the agony of the Russian bayonet that protruded obscenely from his belly. Corporal O'Hara lay across his body, writhing as he stared at the gaping holes in his chest and the blood that pumped from the ragged stump of his left arm. Beside him, Aitken crouched, choking on the blood that filled his mouth and ran in dark rivulets down his chin and chest. Half a score Russian infantrymen lay among them, shot or bayoneted, unheeded in death as the world had neglected them in life.
'Get the bodies,' Jack ordered. 'Pile them up into the breastwork.'
The men stared at him. Their eyes were dazed, their mouths slack with shock, but they did as he ordered, adding the corpses of friends and enemies to the low barricade of sandbags that was their only protection against the dropping musket balls and murderous round shot.
'Here they come again,' Coleman gripped the blood-sticky stock of his Minie rifle and staggered to his feet. The once-proud scarlet of his tunic was torn and shredded; his face was powder stained, gaunt and unshaven; blood congealed on the ragged hole in his trousers just above the left knee.
'Hot as hell and thick as thieves,' Thorpe spat blood on his hands and ran a grimy thumb over the length of his bayonet. 'Just listen to them.'
Jack peered through the shredded mist and rain. Across the ridge, the Russians were not yet visible, but they were vocal enough, chanting that same deep throated battle hymn with which they had advanced so often before. Was it three times or four? It might even be five; he could not be sure, but he knew that each time they recoiled they left the small detachment of British weaker and fewer in numbers.
'Ammunition? Has anybody got any spare ammunition?'
Jack already knew the answer. They had used up all their own in repelling the Russian attacks and had robbed their dead comrades of what they had. He checked the ammunition pouch he had lifted from the dead body of Brodie. 'I have three balls left.'
Thorpe spat again. 'That's one more than any man needs.'
There was no response to the attempted humour. Coleman poked his head beyond the breastwork and shuddered. 'Jesus, there's still thousands of them.'
Jack joined him. Coleman was right. A chance slant of wind blew a gap in the mist, revealing the full strength of the Russians. They seemed to stretch right across the ridge, an unbroken wall of flapping grey coats and wickedly long bayonets advancing slowly and steadily through the stunted, tangled oak trees of the Inkerman Ridge.
'I thought somebody said the Russians could never face British bayonets,' Logan curled disproportionately large hands around the stock of his Minie.
'Aye, but nobody told them that,' Thorpe tilted the barrel of his rifle, looked down the fouled bore and dropped in his last bullet. Once that was fired he had only his bayonet and as much courage as remained after the long, long day of horror and death.
'Are we so important?' Raeburn raised his voice, 'are we so important that they must throw the entire Russian army at us?' He looked around; his eyes red-rimmed with fatigue and wide with fear. 'There's only a few of us left!' At that moment he looked all of his seventeen years, a boy in a man's world, a child near to the brink of tears.
'It's not us that's important,' Jack told him. 'It's the position. If they take this redoubt and the battery they have the lynchpin of the whole British line. We must hold.'
'Listen to him!' Thorpe mocked. 'If they take this redoubt! There's not even a gun left in the bloody thing! And who do you think you are, anyway? Bloody Wellington? Not Lord Raglan anyway: you haven't the stupidity!'
'I'm your officer!' Jack reminded. But he knew that hardly mattered just now. They were about to die beneath a torrent of Russian bayonets. He was the only surviving officer within this company of malcontents, an interloper in a closed society of men who had been fighting merely to exist since the day the world had cursed them with birth. He no more belonged here than he belonged anywhere else, but now it seemed that he would die beside these hard-faced, bitter-eyed men that he would have despised in another place, another world.
The singing increased, accompanied by the rhythmic drumbeat of boots on the ground and the sinister swishing of the long grey coats.
'Up we go men!'
There was a weary sigh, a long drawn out curse and the half-hidden sound of somebody praying, but the red-coated soldiers rose from the slight sanctuary of their corpse- and- sandbag barricade and looked outward toward the advancing enemy.
The Russians were closer so that Jack could make out details of their flat, expressionless faces as they marched forward. They had advanced before, and the company had sent them reeling back, as the tangled bodies on the ground proved, but this time there were many more of them and correspondingly fewer of the regiment t
o fight. He looked around the thinned ranks. They had started with nearly five hundred men, but now there were less than thirty fit to fight. They had probably a hundred rounds in total, and there must be two thousand Russians closing on them.
'They're brave men,' the Bishop gave a calm opinion. He sighted along the barrel of his rifle. 'Thank God for the grace of the Minie though. These beauties can kill two or three men at once.'
'Well, when God granted us that. I would have liked him to grant us another thousand men as well. We're the 113th, the worst regiment in the British Army. A regimental disgrace, that's what we are.' Thorpe gave a twisted grin.
'So why fight for that?' Coleman jerked a stubby thumb at the flag that drooped from its staff.
Jack looked over his shoulder. He had nearly forgotten than Colonel Maxwell had thrust in the flagpole a few hours and a lifetime before, but now it was there, flapping above them with the multi-crossed flag of Union, the symbol of British pride and fortitude and hope in the canton with that alien number embroidered in black across the buff field.
'If we're such a bloody disgrace, why fight for that regimental flag?'
'Drag the bloody thing down!' Logan agreed. 'It's nothing to do with us anyway!'
'What?' Jack stared as his youthful ideas of honour and patriotism surfaced once more. 'It's got the British flag on it!'
'The British flag!' Riley mocked. 'Would that be the same Britain that rejected you and me?'
Fletcher leaned against the sandbags and said nothing. He Fletcher had no education, but he was as sharp and perceptive as any university-trained solicitor. His deep eyes switched from Jack to Riley and back.
'Yes. Take the flag down boys!'
Jack reached for the flap of his holster, remembered his revolver was empty and raised his voice. 'We will not surrender; the Russians are coming!'
The bayonet was cold against his throat as he stared into the slum-bitter eyes of Logan and heard that harsh gutter voice grate in his ear.
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