Until the Colours Fade

by Tim Jeal

  How did I not realise it? he asked himself. They sank their ships across the mouth and so would obviously suppose that no ships would try to enter the approach channel. All the guns previously commanding the harbour had evidently been removed to the casemates facing the sea. Charles felt ridiculous and utterly deflated. Moments before he had thought of heroism and probable death; now he was tortured by the sarcastic comments he might expect from fellow captains. Scylla’s guns were still blazing on both sides, but he was still too stunned to order them to stop.

  The smoke was so thick that he could not see whether Vengeance was clear of the seaward batteries, but he supposed that she must be. Then suddenly it came to him that his action, far from being ridiculous, had been inspired. He would say that he had calculated on there being no guns commanding the mouth, that he had taken the risk of steaming in so close, only because he was certain that the guns had been removed. That he had known that the only way to draw the fire from Vengeance was to present for a short time, but only for a short time, a more tempting target. He would say that he hoped that his attack on the undefended faces would persuade the Russians to replace guns in these case-mates to prevent further attacks on them, which, if carried out regularly, would seriously weaken the whole structure of these forts. His action might therefore ultimately reduce the number of guns in the casemates facing the sea, and this would assist any future general naval bombardment. Charles felt almost light-hearted as he went down to the quarter-deck to give the order to cease firing and to stand out to sea.

  By steaming out from the centre of the channel, Scylla was not exposed to the same intensity of fire, which she had faced when heading straight for Fort Constantine. Before Charles was able to order the retreat from quarters, the spanker gaff had been carried away, a round-shot had ploughed into the captain’s day cabin, demolishing the stern gallery, and another had lodged in the lower counter, narrowly missing the rudder head; but no more lives had been lost.

  As Scylla came in to her anchorage, Charles heard Vengeance’s crew cheering and ordered his own men to repay the compliment. Passing down the main-companion on his way to visit the wounded, Charles was cheered down the entire length of the main gun-deck. Apparently the gun-crews had credited him with the foresight he intended to claim for himself. Amongst those lining the ladder down to the orlop deck, Charles was relieved to see Humphrey, his monkey-jacket white with powder and his trousers torn, but otherwise apparently unharmed. Charles patted him gently on the back and continued his descent to the surgeon’s blood-stained domain. He wished he had been able to drink some rum or brandy before seeing what he knew he would, but now he would have to face it without. He took a deep breath and entered the Cockpit.

  38

  Since dawn, Brandon and half-a-dozen other transports and merchant steamships had been pitching ponderously at anchor within the gentle curve of Balaclava Bay awaiting their respective turns to enter the narrow inlet, in response to signal flags hoisted above the crumbling cliff-top fort at the mouth. During Brandon’s passage from Constantinople, Magnus Crawford had shared a cabin with three young British officers, who had recently purchased commissions and were on their way out to their first war. Their aggressive self-confidence had saddened rather than annoyed Magnus, when he had reflected on the length of time that would elapse before they would order ices again at Gunter’s or walk arm in arm under the striped awnings in Berkeley Square. Nor had he been surprised to be ostracised when they had found out that he was a journalist, and not, as they had at first supposed a ‘Travelling Gentleman’ or ‘T.G.’, as the rich young idlers, now visiting the ‘Seat of War’ for amusement, were called. His fellow-passengers’ contempt for journalists was largely due to Mr Russell’s scathing despatches to The Times and his attacks on Lord Raglan and the Commissary-General.

  Their remarks about Russell distressed Magnus, not because he had ever met the man, but because they once more underlined The Times’s supremacy, both in circulation and general repute, over the other dailies, including the Morning Chronicle, for which he had come out. There were at least a dozen other correspondents in the Crimea, but to date Russell’s despatches had claimed almost all the public’s attention. Yet for all that, Magnus felt fortunate to have been chosen by any paper, knowing as he did that his past military experience had counted for less than the general reluctance of better known correspondents to take on an assignment which seemed likely to last through the winter. Indeed, because of his inexperience, he had felt obliged to accept his editor’s decision to pay him no salary, but only his expenses and a fee for each despatch published. But such poor terms had done nothing to discourage him.

  When Magnus clambered up onto one of Brandon’s paddle-boxes to get his first view of the port, he knew precisely why he had come. Believing that the Crimean invasion would prove a disaster, he placed the principal blame on the senior naval and military officers, who had failed to speak out openly about the dangers involved, while there had still been time to hold back. Magnus’s certainty that his father had been as guilty as any of these officers had crystallised the issue for him and had added to his determination to record the consequences of their lack of judgment and foresight. At times he had been shocked to realise that the thought of a national catastrophe did not entirely displease him, but brought with it a grim satisfaction; such an event would, he supposed, finally discredit the ruling élite in politics and in the services – his father not escaping that fate. Without Tom, Magnus’s horizons had shrunk to a single objective: to chronicle the self-destruction of his father’s caste.

  As Brandon steamed slowly between the tall cliffs at the entrance to the harbour, the two companies of Turkish infantry, the majority of the ship’s passengers, started to emerge on deck, stacking their cooking pots, swords, firearms, prayer mats and blankets in confused heaps between the high bulwarks of the forecastle. None, as far as Magnus could judge, seemed unduly surprised by the extraordinary spectacle of upwards of a hundred and fifty vessels moored in two tiers, stem to stern, on both sides of an enclosed inlet, half-a-mile long and at no point wider than three hundred yards. Ships entering or leaving the harbour did so along a central channel between the shipping barely wide enough for a steamer to turn in. The water was evidently deep since most of the ships were moored hard against the banks, their sloping sterns often projecting over the edge of the quays and jetties.

  The town itself was built on a strip of gently sloping land sandwiched between the ships’ masts and the cliffs: a wretched cluster of wrecked houses, some of stone, and others of cracked planks, not unlike dilapidated farm outhouses or ruined market stalls. In the centre of a network of muddy unpaved alleys, so narrow that the tiles frequently touched across them, was a burnt-out church, the skeletal blackened timbers of its onion-shaped dome still standing. Along the waterfront Magnus could make out separate wharves: one for munitions entirely covered with round-shot, piled in vast pyramids many of them ten feet high, another for cattle, a third for forage, a fourth for the disembarkation of troops, and near the head of the harbour, yet another with block and tackle hoists and sheers for unloading heavy guns. From reading Russell’s descriptions of the place, Magnus had expected there to be far less order than there was, and, although the water was stagnant and stinking with the bloated carcasses of dead mules and horses, and the offal from the slaughter-houses, he was impressed by what had already been done. To land, at a tiny fishing port on a foreign coast, three thousand miles from home, all the provisions and munitions of war for the largest army ever to have left England at a single time: with its shot, shells, powder, guns, mortars, gun carriages, platforms, fascines, gabions, trenching tools, sandbags, food, cooking utensils, tents, horses and forage, was not an insignificant achievement. On the bare stony hills above the head of the harbour, he saw rows of white tents, and, imagining what living in them would be like when the snows came, he thought angrily of his father in the secure comfort of his flagship.

  On landing Magnus made
his way to the Commissariat Office to try to get a mule or donkey to carry up his tent and boxes to the plateau before Sebastopol. At that office he learned that the Commissary-General could not authorise transport for civilians without a requisition order from the Deputy-Adjutant-General, Quarter Master General’s Department. An hour later he had further discovered that such an order could only be signed by the Quarter Master General in person, and for this he would have to walk the seven miles up the Balaclava col to staff headquarters. Discouraged and angry he called at the Post Office to see if any of the letters of introduction to influential staff officers, promised by the editor of the Morning Chronicle, were waiting for him. They were not. In a corner he saw a large sack of letters marked ‘Dead’. A postal clerk was busy writing in a ledger with ink, which, he told Magnus, was made with vinegar and soot – all the ink originally sent out from England having been used up. With the existing system of requisitions, memos, orders and overlapping departments, it did not surprise Magnus that there was no ink. When he told the clerk about his difficulties, he was informed dryly, that had he succeeded in getting a mule, he would have found no nails with which to have the animal shod. There had been a ton of such nails in a transport which had been in the port for two weeks, but since this ship’s invoices of cargo had been mislaid by the Harbour Master’s Office, and the vessel had outstayed the period allotted by the Captain Superintendent, the transport had sailed for England with the nails still in her hold.

  By now resigned to spending another night in Brandon, Magnus walked back along the waterfront in the fading light and sat for a while on an overturned cart outside the main forage yard, watching officers and men passing on their way to and from the various wharves. He was amazed by the contrast between the new drafts in their bright clean uniforms and the condition of the troops who had evidently been in the Crimea since the start of the campaign. But for their swords, officers would have been indistinguishable from their men. Torn and patched full-dress coats now ranged through various shades of port wine colour to dirty tints of brown and dull copper. Gold lace and epaulettes, where they survived, were black and tarnished, and many officers appeared to be wearing no shirts under their coats. A tiny minority were wearing cumbersome padded jackets lined with rabbits’ fur, and hardly a man, whatever his rank, seemed to have continued shaving: their beards, Magnus supposed, providing badly needed extra warmth about the neck and throat. At midday the weather had been warm enough, but now, just before sunset, the cart-wheel tracks and hoof-marks in the previously yielding mud were freezing into hard ruts and ridges underfoot.

  By the cattle wharf, Magnus passed two mounted officers, one riding a donkey, his long legs almost touching the ground on each side. Behind him wound a procession of carts and arabas loaded with shell boxes and cartridges, some dragged by a dozen men, others by mules and oxen, with one even pulled by a dromedary. Magnus was walking on, when he felt a touch on his shoulder. He turned and saw that the officer who had been riding the donkey had dismounted and was facing him. The man’s hair was unkempt and greasy and the lower part of his face concealed by a fair wispy beard. His pale blue slightly protuberant eyes looked out anxiously from under a strapless forage cap pulled down over his ears. A thick nose between grey sunken cheeks accentuated his sickly emaciation. On his sleeves were four gilt cuff buttons sewn on in pairs – denoting either the Grenadier or Coldstream Guards, Magnus was not sure which. The officer was staring at him with uncertain screwed-up eyes. With a gasp of recognition, Magnus remembered the night he had arrived in Rigton Bridge, and in the darkness, a very different face under a yeomanry shako.

  ‘George,’ he murmured, horrified by the change in his once sleek and slightly puffy features.

  *

  It took George Braithwaite ten minutes to accomplish what Magnus had failed to achieve in half a day – the acquisition of a pack pony, borrowed in this case from a team brought out by the recently arrived railway surveyor and his party. Magnus was surprised by George’s apparently genuine desire to help him, not only because of their past quarrels, but also because of the attitude to journalists displayed by the officers in Brandon. Yet George, and Bartlett, the other officer with him, showed Magnus no ill will at all when he told them why he had come out.

  ‘Somebody’s got to tell the public what they don’t want to hear,’ was the opinion George expressed, as they rode off together with the carts and waggons following. He laughed mirthlessly as he held up a hand in a worn leather glove. ‘Forty shillings for a pair of gloves like this, and damned lucky I was to get them. Had to pay a guinea for a small tin of cocoa yesterday…. It’s the same with everything. If you don’t believe me, try getting a fur-lined coat under a hundred.’

  ‘Nobody’ll sell at that price,’ muttered Bartlett dismissively. Magnus looked more carefully at George’s companion. Probably no more than twenty, but already he had sunken eyes and deep lines on each side of his mouth. Three months of war and two major battles and he looked nearer thirty.

  ‘Surely some winter clothing’s been issued?’ put in Magnus quietly.

  ‘Hardly any,’ replied George. ‘Haven’t changed this coat for six weeks and it can be devilish cold at night too. We’ve hardly enough fuel to boil a can of water, let alone make a decent fire with.’

  ‘There must be plenty of trees to use for fuel,’ said Magnus firmly, disturbed by George’s and Bartlett’s resigned matter-of-fact tone.

  ‘Trees?’ Bartlett sounded almost scornful. ‘The engineers cut them down weeks ago to use in the batteries – gun-platforms and props for the magazines mostly.’

  They rode on in silence for a short distance, until George turned to Magnus with a reassuring smile.

  ‘Nobody can understand it when they come out…. Hundreds of ships packed full of stores and every sort of shortage in the camps.’

  All the way up the long hill from the port to the heights, the unmetalled track was lined with shattered gun-carriages, wrecked limbers and the unburied carcasses of scores of mules and horses, which had died hauling up the guns.

  ‘That’s one reason,’ said Bartlett, pointing to a dead mule with a grotesquely inflated stomach. ‘Too few pack-animals. You’re lucky to have got the one you’re sitting on; wouldn’t have had a chance if it’d been here a month. As soon as fresh ones get here, they’re worked to death dragging up ammunition. There’s hardly any forage up at the camps, stores weren’t built up and now something else is always more important – cartridges and shells for a start.’

  Magnus had read plenty about the army’s lack of provisions, but this was beyond anything he had expected.

  ‘What about cavalry-horses?’ he asked.

  ‘Starving,’ returned Bartlett flatly. ‘Tether them near each other and they gnaw each others’ tails. The Russians did us a favour cutting up the Light Brigade … saved us the trouble of shooting our own horses.’

  The young man’s weary pessimism shocked Magnus, but the small groups of haggard and ill-dressed men they passed and their broken-down animals bore out everything he had been told. The hills around them were bare and rocky with hardly a bush in sight and no trees at all. The only small village he saw had been burned and reduced to rubble; not a door or window-frame was in place, all, he supposed, having been used for firewood. Bartlett was humming tunelessly to himself.

  ‘Things could be worse,’ murmured George. ‘Men aren’t starving and enough ammunition reaches the batteries.’

  ‘In a month?’ asked Bartlett with the same ironic tone Magnus had noticed before.

  ‘We’ll attack before then … bound to,’ replied George with a forced laugh.

  ‘We’d better.’

  Having parted with Bartlett at the top of the col, George and Magnus went on a further mile to the Second Division’s encampment. Outside George’s tent they found his orderly frying salt pork over a small fire, having spent an hour, he said, digging up enough roots to provide fuel for the cooking. George had brought up some onions from Balac
lava, which were peeled and sliced, ready to be put in with the pork. Still watching the meat, the orderly began grinding up some green-looking coffee beans in the hollow of an 8-inch shell, pounding them with a round-shot. The tent was circular and had a sunken floor to exclude draughts, and an external drainage trench to prevent flooding.

  Magnus followed George in and saw two officers playing cards by the light of a dim lamp hanging from a bracket screwed onto the central pole. The air was thick with cigar smoke and the fumes from a charcoal brazier. Balanced on the top of this smoking stove was a basin of mulled wine. Horse blankets served as a carpet, and, apart from a broken-down sofa taken from a house in Balaclava, piled up shell-boxes and barrels did duty for chairs and tables. George described how that morning he had woken to find the canvas above him frozen into a stiff glassy sheet and how beads of ice had studded his beard and blanket. George and the officer he shared with – the younger of the two card-players – slept on bread sacks placed over straw pallets resting on boards. Magnus was assured that he would be welcome to sleep on the sofa till he had his own tent.

  George ladled out four glasses of mulled wine and introduced Magnus to the two officers. When Magnus tasted his wine, he discovered that it contained almost as much rum as claret. Harrington, the older of the two officers, put away the cards and handed over some notes to Towers, a willowy young man with a superior manner and a habit of stroking his drooping dark moustaches when he talked. Harrington was a stout thick-necked major with pale thinning hair adhering greasily to his pink scalp. He had pleasant hazel eyes, and small plump hands with very dirty nails. Getting up, he strode over to George.