Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  The sergeant nodded solemnly.

  ‘Well … all right then, I’ll see to it that it’s done, and will make sure it gets to you. Is that all, Private?’

  ‘It is, sir. Thank you, sir.’

  ‘You’re looking mighty poorly yourself. Come on, let’s get you back to the medical tent.’

  ‘Very well sir,’ William gasped.

  Inside his mind, all sorts of horrific recollections – or were they hallucinations, he wondered – were swimming and swirling about with frightening abandon. Things that were too horrible to be real, too tragic to have happened to him, for surely such an immensity of tragedy could not occur in such a short space of time in one person’s existence. Surely the universe could not be so cruel and unkind as that. Surely these images of his friends’ deaths were merely fading stills from some awful nightmare…

  A shudder ran through William’s body and a surreal feeling, like being stuck inside a waking dream, settled with an uncomfortable chill on his shoulders. The sergeant’s gruff voice, however, snapped him quickly out of his trance.

  ‘Come on, hold on to my shoulder then. Let’s go.’

  William took one final look at the closed tent flap behind him, and listened one last time to Captain Liversage’s voice as he chanted in thin and weak tones. He then swallowed his grief and pain, gritted his teeth, gripped the burly sergeant’s shoulder and began the pain-soaked trip back to the tent. As they limped along, through his semi-conscious haze the demon-memories of the battle and the anxious worry about his friends’ whereabouts swirled about him like a chaos of debris in an otherworldly tempest. Little spots of blurry light started to swim at the edges of his vision, and a hoary howl began droning with exponentially increasing volume in his ears, like a gale wind through dry rushes.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he gasped suddenly, ‘I’m—’

  With that, the world plunged into blackness and William crumpled into an unconscious heap on the muddy ground.

  ***

  He was not sure what hour or even day it was when he awoke, but he was back in the medical tent, sprawled out on the cot. It was daytime, and the canvas walls were bright with the light of the afternoon sun.

  With aching arms, he peeled the blanket back and peered down at his body with uneasy eyes, trying to sum up the extent of the damage.

  ‘Oh sweet Lord above,’ he whispered, struck with shock, ‘I’ve been cut up, I’ve been cut up bad…’

  ‘You lost a lot of blood, trooper,’ a stern voice announced from behind him, ‘and you’re not to get up for any reason whatsoever.’

  William turned over on his shoulder, wincing with pain as he did, and he recognised the elderly man talking to him as the doctor he had seen amputating a young trooper’s leg. The doctor’s bone-thin forearms, formerly a slimy crimson with accumulated gore and blood, were now clean and spotless. He looked up from cleaning his surgical instruments and caught William’s gaze.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ he asked coldly.

  ‘Yes sir,’ William croaked. ‘No getting up, sir.’

  ‘Don’t call me “sir”, please. I’m a surgeon and an esquire, but I’m not a military officer. I’m retired, mind you, but I volunteered my services to assist Her Majesty’s armed forces in this campaign.’

  ‘Oh I see, sir. Um, sorry, I mean…’

  The doctor rolled his eyes and shook his head, somewhat melodramatically.

  ‘You’re not very good at taking advice, are you?’

  ‘I’m, I’m—’

  ‘I spent a good few hours stitching up all those sabre cuts of yours,’ the doctor commented dryly, continuing to clean and packing away his instruments with a deft and methodical vigour. ‘Getting that musket ball out of your thigh, now that required some intricate attention, but we managed to extract it in the end, and luckily for you it did not hit the bone; if it had, it would surely have shattered it, and that certainly would have required amputation. The one that hit you in the shoulder was probably fired from a great distance away, as it merely lodged itself in your flesh. If the projectile had not lost so much momentum it would have destroyed the bone and ligaments, and you’d probably never have been able to use your left arm again. Thankfully, though, it didn’t. You’re one of the luckier ones, lad, I can tell you that. Shot twice, cut and stabbed innumerable times … but none of the wounds fatal. Serious yes, but not lethal. Most of your compatriots were not as fortunate as yourself though, I’m afraid. Your Light Brigade has lost half of its horses, and perhaps one fifth of its men, with almost every survivor injured in varying degrees of severity. I expect the tally of dead to rise, unfortunately, as many of the chaps here in the medical tents will not live out the next few days due to the grievousness of their injuries.’

  ‘Sir—’

  ‘“Doctor”, lad; get it right please. I have no time to repeatedly correct your ignorance.’

  ‘Doctor, please, I need word ay my friends. I must ha’ word ay them, please. Their names are Michael—’

  The doctor held up a stern finger to silence William.

  ‘I don’t know anything about them, I can tell you right now. I don’t know their names and I don’t even know your name, and nor do I care to. I apologise if I sound callous, but I have a lot of work to do and many more troopers to attend to on this dark day. I’ve no time for idle conversation with you Private, I’m afraid. My time is very precious, and not just to myself, but to the other wounded who so desperately need my attention. Now you stay in that cot and eat your meals, and do not get up – consider that an order, if that will make you obey it to the letter. There is a bedpan under the cot for when you should need to relieve yourself. Get some rest. Good day to you!’

  ‘But Doctor, please, my—’

  ‘I said “good day”, trooper, so do as I’ve instructed. Once more, I bid you good day!’

  The elderly doctor hurried out of the tent in a huff, muttering under his breath.

  William turned over in his cot and closed his eyes for a few moments. As he began to fall into an uneasy slumber, nightmarish images of his experience on the battlefield came crashing through the gates of sleep, drowning his mind in a deluge of terror and horror, and at once he sat bolt upright in the bed, his eyes white and bulging from their sockets as he gasped in great heaves of panic.

  He tried to lean over to get up, but crippling agony ripped through him and he fell back onto the cot with a groan.

  ‘My friends,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Michael, Paul, Andrew … where are you lads? Where are you? These awful things I see in my head, they cannae be the truth. They cannae be what really happened.’

  He reached up to his throat to retrieve the portrait of Aurora that he kept around his neck, but with suddenly panicking fingers he discovered that it was gone.

  ‘No … no! No no no no no no!’

  His heart started racing with a debilitating and chilling fear.

  ‘Where is it? Where’s it gone? No! Where is it?!’

  He rolled over in his cot, oblivious now to the pain, caring only about finding his lost portrait of Aurora. With a heaving sigh, relief coursed through his body like a shot of morphine as he saw, on the ground, a freshly folded uniform, upon which his personal effects had been placed. The portrait of Aurora was there, as was the letter from Captain Liversage, and a few other things.

  William reached over, grunting with pain, and picked up the blood-stained portrait. He kissed the painted face with soft lips, and clasped the portrait in his palms.

  ‘At least you’re here with me,’ he whispered. ‘At least you’re here…’

  With that, he faded out of consciousness and sank back into the realm of dreams and nightmares.

  49

  WILLIAM

  27th October 1854

  An entity was creeping up William’s legs with a slowness that was almost tortuous. Through the fog of sleep, melded with a growing awareness of being awake – and the pain, the ever-present, inescapable pain – he opened his eyes, not
sure of where he would find himself.

  Canvas walls. Bloodied bandages. The pungent reek of death and sickness and vomit and piss and shit and gore.

  The medical tent. Back, back, always stuck. The crawling up his legs turned out to be the rays of the morning sun inching a languid passage up his naked skin, invading the space of the tent through the open flap and sticking to William’s bare legs after he had, it seemed, kicked his blankets off during some fitful nightmare.

  A pervasive and almost crippling stiffness seemed to have caused his body to be suspended in a state of semi-paralysis. Every muscle burned and ached, including many muscles of whose very presence and existence he had not formerly been aware. Even the act of breathing hurt, and a crushing weakness seemed to pin him beneath the ponderous weight of mountain roots probing the depths of the Earth’s core.

  A raking thirst, however, pressed him to move, so he leaned over, reaching with a groan for a mug of water on the floor. The pain of the effort was almost excruciating in its intensity, but the relief that the cool liquid brought to his parched throat was worth it. He downed the contents of the mug in seconds, and was desperate for more, but no more was to be found.

  Beside him in the tent, a number of other troopers lay sleeping. Here, one with his right arm amputated. There, one with both legs gone. Another with a hand missing, another whose whole head was wrapped in blood-caked bandages with just his nose exposed so that he could breathe. All young, all in the prime of their youth … and all now mutilated, now cut, now made unwhole. William felt rising vomit tickling the back of his throat, so he turned away to stare at the canvas walls, hoping that his mind would not project a horror-reel of nightmarish memories onto its cream-coloured blankness.

  His hopes were futile, however; in this place, with its blood-soaked wounded, its odours of hasty surgery and bodily discharges and death, coupled with the omnipresent pain that wracked his own body, there was no escaping those nightmarish recollections.

  ‘Oh Father above,’ he whispered to himself, ‘What ha’ we done? What ha’ I done? Why are we here? How did I get m’self intae this nightmare? Will I e’er wake from it?’

  He lay back, pulled the blanket over his body with pain-stiff arms and then fell back into a fitful slumber.

  ***

  3rd November

  William awoke with a start, clutching the top of the blanket in a tight bundle in his fists. With a chest heaving with terror, he found himself gasping wildly for breath, while his eyes darted from left to right, and back again, as he tried to make sense of his surroundings. When he realised that he was in the medical tent, he fell back onto the cot and draped a weary forearm over his forehead, burying his face in the crook of his elbow.

  The last few days had been an almost hallucinatory, blended-together haze of confusion; a molten mess of nightmares, dreams, and half-awake bouts of cold-sweat-drenched panic. The only people he had seen had been the doctors and their assistants, drifting phantom-like in and out of the tents, carrying in more wounded, or occasionally removing those patients whose will to live had not been as strong as William’s. Indeed, he and one other trooper, a twenty-three-year-old with an amputated left arm, were the only original occupants of this tent who still drew breath.

  Today, the pain that had previously been so paralysing in its intensity did not feel quite as crippling as it had before. It remained, of course, but now William felt as if he could at least get up and move about for a bit. With a racket of grunts, groans and curses he hauled himself out of his cot, and then began putting on the fresh uniform that had been left for him. He fumbled and heaved with overeager haste, knowing that should the cantankerous doctor or one of his cold-faced assistants come by, he would be forced to stay in bed.

  Finally, after a few moments of pain, clumsiness and cursing he was attired in a clean uniform, likely taken from some dead trooper, as the fit was far from perfect, and it had been patched in a few places. With a brief burst of curiosity he wondered what had become of his former uniform. It had been cut to ribbons, and had been so caked in blood and mud that it had surely not been salvageable, he surmised.

  Next to his personal effects a small rosewood box had been placed. He opened it and looked inside, and saw that it contained a glass jar, inside of which was a human heart, preserved in embalming fluid.

  ‘Ah, Captain Liversage,’ he murmured, staring sadly at the heart. ‘I’ll no’ forget my vow tae you, sir. But fir now, wha’ tae dae first?’

  In an action that had now become second nature, he reached inside the jacket and curled his fingers around the portrait of Aurora.

  ‘The officer’s commission,’ he whispered to himself, suddenly remembering the promotion that Captain Liversage had conferred on him. ‘I must take care ay this before I dae anything else.’

  He stuffed the paper into one of his pockets, and then squeezed his aching feet into the new pair of boots next to his bed, grimacing as pain shot up his legs. With a sigh of relief he finally got his feet into the boots, and with that he stood up on shaky legs and hobbled out of the tent.

  Outside the morning sky was thick with cloud, but the sun shone bright through a small gap in the massed ranks of grey above. William squinted his eyes against the deep green of the hill, dotted all over with white tents, dazzling in the sunlight like so many winter bonfires. He limped over to an officer who was busy brushing his horse’s coat, and there he stood at attention – in as straight a posture as he could handle – and saluted.

  ‘Good morning sir!’

  The officer, a youngish, well-built man with a face framed by curly blonde muttonchops, paused his work and turned around.

  ‘Good morning Private,’ he answered in a gruff, husky voice. ‘Is there something I can help you with, pray tell? Egads, you’re looking rather pallid! Should you not be in one of the medical tents?’

  ‘The doctor says I’m fine, sir,’ William lied. ‘And yes sir, there is something you could assist me with, sir.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘Could you please direct me tae Lord Cardigan’s tent, sir?’

  The officer raised an eyebrow and gave William a good looking over for a few seconds, but he nonetheless decided to help him.

  ‘Very well. You see the smith’s tent over there at the end of this row? Yes, there, you can see him repairing a lance point. Go just past his tent, then turn left and head up the hill. You’ll find Cardigan and his retinue up at the very top there. He’ll likely be having his caviar and tea about now.’

  ‘Thank you most kindly, sir. That’s a beautiful mount you’ve go’ there, by the way.’

  The officer smiled proudly.

  ‘Yes, she is rather splendid, is she not? She is one of the few who survived the charge at Balaclava.’

  A spear of horror and dread stabbed into William’s gut at the mention of the charge. He swallowed slowly and turned away, hoping that the officer had not noticed the look of abject fear that had stained his visage with such abruptness.

  ‘A lucky one then sir,’ he managed to utter through a suddenly chattering jaw. ‘I’ll, er, I’ll be on my way now. Good day tae you, sir.’

  ‘Good day, Private.’

  William hobbled off as briskly as he could with his myriad injuries, trying to force the wash of nightmarish recollections back into the recesses of memory as he felt his heart rate climbing and his rate of breathing steadily quickening. He reached inside his jacket and clutched at the portrait of Aurora with trembling fingers, closing his eyes and trying to picture her, his protective goddess who would drive away the evil of these intrusive visions with the light of her love and goodness.

  On aching, lead-heavy legs he made his way up the hill, grunting and gasping with every laboured step, until at last he reached the resplendent tent at the top. Here Lord Cardigan and some other officers were seated around a table, the surface of which was strewn with terrain maps, which in turn were scattered with carved wooden pieces, representing various army unit
s.

  William stood on the outskirts of the circle of officers for a while, unsure of how to approach without interrupting them and appearing rude. With each passing moment that they remained seemingly oblivious to his presence, his anxiety and nervousness grew exponentially in magnitude. Eventually he coughed as loudly as he could – and then felt a gush of heat flooding his cheeks as they all ceased their discussion and turned to look at him.

  ‘Yes Private?’ asked a portly old officer with a shiny bald pate and ruddy jowls featuring white mutton-chop sideburns. ‘Did Lord Raglan send you?’

  ‘Er, no sir,’ William replied sheepishly. ‘Nobody sent me, sir.’

  Anger flared up in the officer’s thickly lidded eyes.

  ‘Then what in the blazes are you doing here, boy?! Have you gone mad?! You do not simply come here and make idle chit-chat with the commanders of the entire British Army, unless it’s being lashed to a cannon wheel and flogged to within an inch of your miserable life that you’re after!’

  ‘I, er, actually, Captain Liversage sent me, sir,’ William managed to stammer. ‘Before he passed on, sir.’

  ‘Well he’s been dead for days now man, days! Why did you not come as soon as you were sent?! By Jove, I really do have half a mind to have you flogged for this outrageous insolence!’

  Lord Cardigan held up a finger to silence the angry officer.

  ‘Hold on there, Whittington, hold on, let the lad speak. Go on Private, tell us what you’re here for.’

  A wash of relief temporarily cooled the heat of William’s of embarrassment and anxiety.

  ‘Lord Cardigan, sir, Captain Liversage, um, before he passed on, he recommended that I be promoted, sir. Tae lieutenant, sir.’

  The old ruddy-faced officer sprayed out a mouthful of tea as he heard this, and he glared furiously at William with rage-bulging eyes.

  ‘What?!’ he spluttered, incredulous. ‘You, a fresh-faced private from the common ranks, be promoted to lieutenant?! Surely Captain Liversage had no part in such rash foolishness, as strange as many of his ideas were! Is this your idea of a joke, boy?! Who put you up to this?! Tell us at once and end this ridiculous jesting! So help me, I’ll thrash you myself for this insult, and when I find him, I’ll have the culprit behind this humbug flogged senseless as well!’