The Valley of Death

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  ‘Da,’ said the man.

  Crossman was taken to the cellar and there chained to the wall at a height which allowed him to touch the floor with just the tips of his toes. Then the shirt was torn from his back exposing bare skin. He knew then he was in for a beating and gritted his teeth. The next moment he heard a swish and felt the excruciating pain of a whip on his back. Water sprang to his eyes but he was determined to make no sound.

  From the sound of the weapon he guessed it was a flail rather than a single-strand whip. He felt it cut into his skin and tear the flesh from his ribs and backbone. After twenty strokes it was no longer possible to remain quiet and he let out a groan. He was hanging by his arms now, all the weight on the joints. Now he wondered whether he would get through this flogging alive. Each stroke of the flail sent a jolt of agony through him until he felt he could stand it no longer.

  ‘Stop now,’ he ordered them in his authoritative sergeant’s voice. ‘Stop this instant.’

  But of course they took no notice. In fact he heard one of the men laugh very nervously as he spoke in undertones to his companion. The flogging continued, during which time Crossman passed out once or twice, only to be revived by an extra hard lash of the whip. Such strokes had every nerve in his body at screaming point. He wondered how much pain a man could stand before death safely enfolded him in its soft black cloak.

  The flogging with the horsehair Tartar’s whip went on until he passed out for the duration.

  Afterwards one of the sailors who helped with the flogging was sick. His vomit stank the room, but no doubt he had finally blanched at the sight of white bone through raw flesh. The other one rubbed ointment in Crossman’s wounds, and placed a large towel-sized lint over his back.

  Crossman lay down on his dirty straw and all but died that night, having received over eighty lashes.

  9

  While Crossman was undergoing incarceration, Wynter was busy fomenting discontent amongst the convicts. He had decided that for once – and it was a sobering thought – the responsibility for a mission was now wholly on his shoulders. Wynter did not count the Turk, Yusuf Ali, for Ali was not British and therefore would only ever be a helper.

  Wynter’s prejudices were born out of an age when the British ruled much of the world and even a poor farm boy from a tiny village in Essex considered himself superior to all foreigners, especially those with skins which were dark by nature.

  So, Wynter believed himself to be the commanding officer now and it was up to him to complete the mission.

  ‘I wish the sergeant had told me more about what was to be done,’ he complained to himself.

  But if he lived in an age when the Englishman was king, he was also in an era where communication between superior officers and their subordinates was scant. Soldiers of Wynter’s rank simply did as they were told, with no explanations given, nor any expected. Crossman was more democratic than most senior NCOs and officers, whose autocracy was their power.

  ‘We got to start a riot. Cause a bit of havoc,’ he reminded himself. ‘An’t going to be easy.’

  He began to foster closer relationships with the men who spoke English. With these prisoners he dropped the pretence of being anything but English. Wynter was fond of barefist fighting and began a competition amongst the convicts. He found matched pairs and they fought during their rest hours, the guards betting along with the convicts on the outcome. Sometimes Wynter fought too, but for the most part he encouraged bouts between others. This activity increased his status amongst the hardened convicts, who welcomed any distraction from their work.

  When they were sitting quietly of a late evening, after a poor meal of thin soup and hardtack, Wynter would inform his companions that life was much sweeter in the camps outside Sebastopol. He told them they would be treated with great respect if they went over to the other side. He said the pay in the British army was very good, that the food was excellent and that they would be welcomed with open arms.

  ‘You can’t beat it,’ he told them. ‘I’m a lifer meself – wouldn’t have no other work.’

  Unlike Crossman, who stuck fairly closely to the truth, not promising much which he could not deliver, Wynter was prepared to lie through his teeth to get what he wanted. He was a much more natural undercover agent than Crossman, in that he was prepared to do anything to achieve his end, even if he compromised his honour and integrity. The fact was, Wynter did this kind of thing as a normal course of behaviour in his life. It was part of the survival kit of a man who was trying to escape absolute poverty.

  ‘For every man who gets to the British lines,’ he told his fellow workers, ‘there’ll be a reward in sterling. Twenty English pounds for every deserter to the British side. You’ll be treated like heroes. We’ve got every convenience over there – good food, wine, warm clothes, transport. You won’t want for nothing, I can promise you that. You’ll be rich men when this war’s over. I can give it to you reliably that any man who comes out of Sebastopol with me, will be first at the loot when we go back in again. That’s Wynter’s promise.’

  ‘You have much wine over there?’ asked a man with a squint. ‘What about rum and brandy?’

  ‘We’ve got the lot,’ confided Wynter. ‘We’ve got rum coming out of our ears. Why, the navy ships get flagons of it every day. And brandy too.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘Most of our sailor boys are drunk half the time. We’re much too generous with our booze, we are, in the British army.’

  ‘What about my wife and children?’ asked one man. ‘They will be here in Sebastopol.’

  ‘Married men get extra rations,’ said Wynter. ‘I’ll have a word with the quartermaster myself. You can send in food by our secret couriers. I mean,’ he laughed, ‘how did you think,’ I got here?’

  Once this had been translated for the other convicts there was general laughter amongst them. Yes, how did the Englishman come to be among them? Why, they came and went as they pleased, these people. They were having the laugh of Admiral Korniloff and his sailors.

  ‘All it takes,’ Wynter explained, ‘is one good riot.’

  Ali came to him one night, to question his methods.

  ‘What you do?’ asked Ali. ‘I hear things.’

  ‘You let me be,’ said Wynter, who was actually terrified of the Bashi-Bazouk, having seen Ali do things that would make a murderer blanch. ‘I’m doin’ good work here, Ali.’

  ‘We get the sergeant back. We rescue the sergeant.’

  ‘I’m willing to do that,’ Wynter agreed. ‘O’ course I am – but you tell me how we do it. He’s stuck in that blamed big building with guards all over the place. We’d never get him out alive and you know it. Best wait for an opportunity to arise, then we’ll have him away. At the minute we’ve got to do what he wants us to do – get the riots started.’

  The Bashi-Bazouk was not thoroughly convinced by Wynter’s show of concern for his sergeant, but he allowed himself to be persuaded not to go crashing into the place where Crossman was being held. It was true the building was well guarded and it would almost be a suicide mission to get him out by force. They would, as Wynter had said, need to wait for a better time.

  ‘I stay with you now,’ Ali told Wynter. ‘We make the riot together.’

  ‘Aw, I was doin’ good without you, Ali.’

  ‘I stay.’

  ‘Well, I’m in charge then,’ protested the lance corporal, desperately. ‘I outrank you.’

  ‘No. Ali in charge.’

  ‘We’ll both be equal then, because I an’t doin’ what no Turk tells me to do, and that’s flat. I’m a lance corporal. That means somethin’ in the British army, see – and Lord Raglan is in charge of the whole show, so that makes anyone who’s in the British army in charge.’

  ‘Not Raglan. General Canrobert is in charge of whole army. It is the French who says to go or not to go.’

  ‘Blast the damn French,’ expostulated Wynter. ‘Didn’t we beat them at Waterloo? We’re the lads who’ve licked ’em time and tim
e again. You don’t follow orders from someone you’ve pasted in a fight. We’re equal, you and me, and that’s flat.’

  Ali finally seemed to accept that Wynter was not going to be told what to do ‘by a blamed Turk’ and the Bashi-Bazouk decided he would get things done a roundabout way, rather than confront Wynter head on.

  So, the pair of them worked together, and finally they set a date for the revolt of the convicts.

  The day arrived and, when he thought the moment for which he had planned so long was right, Wynter suddenly turned on one of the lax guards and wrenched his musket from his hands. Firing it in the air, he cried, ‘Let’s take ’em lads!’ The convicts rose up – though not as one man, unfortunately – and attacked their guards. Soon, those who were taking part in the riot, which was about a quarter of the total number of convicts, were running through the streets and along the defences, smashing everything.

  Some of them headed towards a huge warehouse where the flour was stored that was used to make the bread for the whole of Sebastopol. Ali had hidden a quantity of explosives and they retrieved this and used it to blow the warehouse to smithereens, sending up a monstrous grey cloud of powder to hover above the city.

  Wynter and some other men began to tear down the defences they themselves had erected, slashing at fascine and gabion baskets with captured swords, cutting them open and letting the rocks and earth spill out so that the earthworks collapsed. Fires were started all along the outer perimeter of the city, and this spread to some of the buildings within the town itself. In this way the garrison was kept busy firefighting, as well as trying to quell the riot.

  Officers were barking superfluous or useless orders, countermanding each other, causing more chaos by their inept actions. The truth was the Russians had not expected the rebellion, since promises of later freedom had been made to the convicts which the authorities thought would ensure their loyalty. No one was prepared for the riot.

  Those convicts not taking part in the revolt stood to one side, neither helping nor hindering the rioters. It was not their business to stop their fellow convicts from destroying the city.

  Gradually, however, the garrison mobilized itself. Wynter found himself in a street with a mob. At the end of the street was a line of marines aiming their rifles. He had just time to drop to the ground when the first volley ripped into the rioters, killing many of them where they stood. A second volley cut down several more. Thereafter, a ragged fusillade picked off those trying to run into side alleys, or climb through windows of nearby buildings.

  Wynter crawled slowly across the street towards an alley, using the dead bodies around him as shields. Fortunately for him there were still enough of the convicts in a panic and on their feet to provide easy targets for the marines. He managed to reach the alley and run along it to the end.

  On the other side he met a squad of armed sailors, trotting at a quick pace up another street, their muskets at the ready. Wynter threw his hands in the air, crying, ‘Not me. I haven’t done nothin’. It was them in the next road down.’

  A trembling sailor immediately detached himself from his fellows and made as if to bayonet Wynter in the stomach, shouting something at him in Russian. The lance corporal could see that the sailor was scared and had reacted out of fear.

  Wynter grabbed the end of the musket, struggled with the weapon, successfully turning the blade away from himself.

  ‘Hey, listen to me. I an’t one of them rioters. I’m one of the good ones.’

  By this time the rest of the man’s squad was almost at the end of the street. The sailor glanced towards his departing comrades, realizing he was being left behind. He yelled to a friend, who halted and turned. Then he tried to kick Wynter in the genitals, several times, anxious now just to free himself of this ragged man with his strange tongue.

  Wynter grimaced as a boot caught him on the thigh.

  ‘Here, I’ve had enough of this,’ he told the sailor.

  Pulling the man towards him, Wynter struck him on the jaw with his fist, sending the sailor reeling against a wall. Another two punches and the man slid down the wall to rest in a sitting position on the ground. Wynter picked up his musket and faced the man’s comrade, who was now running to his assistance.

  ‘Don’t try it, lad,’ warned Wynter, but the sailor came on, his eyes fixed on Wynter’s face.

  Wynter raised the musket and pulled the trigger, hoping the weapon was loaded and ready to shoot.

  A puff of flame went up, but the musket failed to discharge.

  ‘Damn me and my luck,’ whined Wynter. ‘A blamed misfire.’

  The sailor was only a few yards away now and he raised his musket to fire at Wynter. Sailors were not natural users of rifles, since they did not normally employ them in the course of their work, as did marines or soldiers. This one obviously wanted to be close enough to be sure to hit his target.

  Wynter launched his weapon as a spear. It went through the air like an assegai. The bayonet struck the sailor in the abdomen and the poor man dropped his musket immediately, clutching at this object which had penetrated his bowels. He went a sickly green colour and sank to his knees with a groan on his lips. He looked up once at Wynter, a hurt expression on his face, as if the Englishman had played a schoolboy trick on him. Then he managed to wrench the weapon from his abdomen and simply remained kneeling on the ground, his hands covering his wound, staring at the flagstone in front of him.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Wynter, appalled at the horrible wound he had delivered. ‘It an’t the same as on a battlefield, with the roar of the guns in your ears, is it?’

  Seeing he could do nothing for the man, Wynter raced away, back down the street, towards the edge of the city.

  The rioters were now being cut down by the garrison and some of them were going over the dykes and walls, towards the British and French lines. Picquets there, not knowing what was going on inside Sebastopol, thought they were under attack and began firing on the escaping convicts. Some got through, however, and blurted out in broken English that they were deserting to the other side. The word went up along the line that the Russians’ convicts were defecting.

  Wynter made his way over the wall and began a zigzagging run away from the harbour, northwards towards the Inkerman ruins. He had some idea in his head now that if he kept going, he could be out of this war for ever. He could steal a horse and ride out of the battle area. Or indeed, walk from it. In the north there were many farms and vineyards where he might find work. He was a farmer’s boy after all, and had skills to offer. They were not all Tartars who owned the farms. He would find a place which suited him and be out of this bloody mess.

  But the argument with himself was brief. He knew in his heart of hearts that he would not be happy on some foreign farm. And though he had few qualms about leaving Crossman back there in some dungeon, it seemed to him that there were only the two alternatives: run away, or go and get Crossman. If he returned to his lines without the sergeant, he knew he would be sent back to the regiment, to do ordinary duties.

  And though he did not feel he owed the sergeant anything, he acknowledged a kind of bond between them now. They had been through things together, like two poachers out on some Essex country estate, sharing the experience of being chased by gamekeepers and laughing at it over a drink at the inn. They were not exactly brothers-in-arms – he could never have a close love for an aristocrat – but they were now certainly cousins of a kind. Wynter found it strange to realize that he would be a little upset to have to leave the sergeant there, rotting in that jail. It was a new feeling to him, this worrying over another man.

  He retraced his steps and once again entered the city. A sort of calm had fallen over the place now. The rest of the day Wynter spent in a broken-down shack at the edge of the docks, then in the evening he went looking for Yusuf Ali where he knew he would find him waiting.

  Indeed, he found the Turk in the very street where he expected him to be. There the two men got together and dis
cussed how they were going to release the sergeant. Wynter felt peculiarly noble, standing with Ali, talking about their next move like two veteran enemy agents. A maturity had fallen on his shoulders from the sky and he liked the wearing of it.

  10

  Jack Crossman had lain for some days, he knew not how many, hovering between life and death, at the end of which a gloating Major Zinski came to tell him the riots had failed to bring down the walls of Sebastopol.

  The whipping Crossman had received, on top of the privations they had put him through – the beatings and the starvings – had almost completely broken his resistance. His spirit was almost shattered and his will to live all but drained from him.

  His dreams were fitful and demons predominated, proliferating in hallucinations which visited him night and day. The guards had all but ceased to feed him now, since he had been condemned to death, for why waste precious food on a man who is to die anyway, especially during a siege? They did give him water. And they had ceased to torture him, which was blissful relief. His body was racked with pain, his will was almost gone, but it was his mind which saved him from slipping into the dark kingdom.

  In his head, to keep himself from going, he constructed marvellous inventions, machines which would astonish the world with their innovative creativity.

  This exercise ensured there was still the remains of a fire in Sergeant Crossman, still a glowing ember, when they came to fetch him to hang him one cold morning in October 1854.

  Using what little Russian he had learnt from Yusuf Ali, he asked the guards for the date.

  ‘What is the number of this day?’ he asked awkwardly. ‘I want to know the date if I am to die.’

  After many shrugs and blank looks, they finally understood what he wanted and enlightenment shone in their eyes.

  ‘Seventeen October,’ he was told.

  He nodded gravely as he shuffled unsteadily between the pair of them, the chains on his wrists and ankles hobbling him. Crossman saw himself in a full-length mirror in the hallway, which the soldiers used to primp themselves before going into Major Zinski’s office to face their superior. He was horrified to see an emaciated creature with a grey-fringed beard and wearing rags. There were sores on his skin, blemishes and black bruises showing through the dirt and grime. His lips had bursting pustules on them, while the nose was raw and veined. He stared at his image with dull, listless eyes buried in a bearded face full of hollows.