Until the Colours Fade

by Tim Jeal

  The crash of the first volley was still in George’s ears as the Russian field guns flashed out, tearing the air with hissing and shrieking metal; the musket balls did not whistle as with single shots but hummed and whirred like a swarm of bees. Men were falling on every side. From the moment the firing started, time leapt forward again and seemed to race with mad inconsequence. From the corner of his eye George saw General Bentinck’s white horse rear up and sink down, while the Adjutant-General was flung bodily from his saddle by the same round of canister. George saw Colonel Wilson a few yards away, sword in hand, his moustache looking very white against his brick-red face. He was gazing along the ranks of his battalion, as if trying to fix the sight in his mind. Then he took hold of his bearskin and placing it on the point of his sword held it aloft and yelled at the top of his voice:

  ‘Three cheers for the Queen….’

  The cheering rapidly spread from those in earshot to the entire battalion. The Scots Fusiliers and Grenadiers were also cheering. George never heard the command to charge, but seeing the men in the company to his left running forward, he waved his sword and ran too, hearing his men following, their cheers rising to a blood-chilling scream and ending in a low fierce moan.

  Just before the charge began, George had noticed a tangle of brambles halfway across the intervening space, and after what seemed a few strides, saw that he was already level with them. By now some of his company had overtaken him and were firing random shots as they ran. A bullet snicked against a button on his sleeve and another passed inches wide of his face, but in spite of the bursting pressure in his lungs and a paralysing ache in his thighs, George did not slow down; the fatigue of his body helped to dull the awareness of his brain. He had a peculiar sense that he was standing still and the ground under him was moving; the men who fell appeared to be tumbling away backwards. A moment later George came down hard and thought that he had been hit, until he realised that he had tripped over a body. Colonel Wilson’s sightless eyes were a few feet from his own. One bullet had entered the colonel’s chest and another had passed through his cheeks, ripping out his tongue and his upper teeth. Little spurts of blood still pulsed from the mess of flesh and bone that had been his mouth. ‘Be steady. Keep silent and fire low.’ Blinded with tears and retching painfully on an empty stomach, George leapt to his feet. A faint sound came from his lips and then a sobbing roar of rage; he pulled out his revolver with his wounded hand, and gripping his sword more tightly in his right, ran on, drunk with hatred and the desire to maim and kill.

  The Russians’ faces were now clearly visible, pale and high-cheekboned, under strange flat muffin-shaped hats, utterly unlike the spiked helmets George remembered from the Alma. George singled out a tall officer, with a sharp nose and a wiry black moustache. Before he could reach him, one of the leading men in his company, swinging his rifle by the barrel like a club, had caught the officer a crunching blow on the side of the head with the full weight of the stock. Another few yards and George was almost blinded by dense smoke and the flashes of rifles. All around him men were jabbing and thrusting at grey-coated figures with their bayonets as if mad. A wounded Russian caught one of George’s legs and held him firmly. George lashed out with his free leg, but the man tightened his grasp, glaring up with clenched teeth and burning eyes. George brought down his sword on the soldier’s skull with all his strength, splitting it from crown to jaw and splattering brains and blood all over his uniform. He tried to strike at another man but for a moment could not move his arm, so densely packed were the men around him. He managed to fire his revolver into the stomach of the Russian immediately facing him, noticing every detail of his face: the curling reddish hairs on his chin and a sore on the side of his nose. The man quivered and slipped to his knees, his face expressing surprise and fear rather than pain. A massive colour-sergeant was smashing his way forward with short sharp blows of the butt-end of his rifle, and George followed him until his burly leader fell, bayoneted in the side. A man lunged at George with his bayonet and the blade ripped through his sleeve, gashing his arm; he fired and missed, but his assailant slumped down shot with a Minié bullet. A few more strides and George realised that he had passed through the enemy’s lines. All sensation was leaving his left arm, so he sheathed his sword and transferred his revolver to his right hand. In front, a group of Russian gunners were trying to drag away a field gun, and doing their best to fight with sponge-staves and rammers against fully armed infantry. One by one they were hacked down.

  Ahead of George was a hundred yards of open ground and then three Russian battalions drawn up immediately in front of the Sandbag Battery. The hopelessness of charging these columns seemed obvious to George, but nothing that he or any other officer shouted, could stop the men charging on, cheering like madmen after their initial success. Then George saw that the men were right. Hundreds of Russians were hurling themselves back towards the Sandbag Battery to the security of their own lines. When these panic-stricken soldiers collided with their own advancing troops, three hundred Grenadiers and Coldstream Guards flung themselves into the disordered Russian ranks. George watched the line waver and then start to break; he saw enemy officers vainly trying to rally their men, threatening and even pleading with them, but to no purpose. Within minutes Russians were crashing away through the brushwood on the slopes of the spur and into the valley below. Two companies retreated to the Sandbag Battery and held their ground bravely. The men who had broken through the lines of the Russians’ second division had expended all their ammunition by the time they reached the battery, but they outnumbered the defenders and killed them with rifle butts and stones. From a hundred and fifty yards away, George even saw men fighting with their fists.

  When he reached the emplacement, the ground was thick with dead and wounded of both sides. From every part of the battery came cries for water and continual moans of pain interspersed with screams. Guardsmen were embracing each other, shouting excitedly about what had happened to them. The air was reeking with smoke and the soldiers’ sweat-streaked faces were blackened with it. A Russian near George had been shot in the throat and was gurgling and spitting blood, as he fought for breath. A private from his own company was lying pressing his hands against a gaping stomach wound, trying to hold in his escaping intestines.

  To George’s amazement several of the most aloof and reserved officers in his battalion were sobbing like children, less in grief at the carnage around them than with relief at the ending of the unendurable tensions of the past ten minutes. George too felt the reaction, his legs trembled uncontrollably and he was aware of the pain in his arm and hand, dully at first, but then with a sharper edge. During the next quarter-of-an-hour some of the men who had been in the trenches the night before lay down and slept. George could feel the stickiness of blood drying on both his hands, some of it his own, some belonging to others. A dark stain outlined the rent in his sleeve; he felt very thirsty; after drinking some water from his canteen, he gave the rest to several other wounded men from his company. Then he sat down next to a mortally wounded major in the Grenadiers, who tried to convey some wish to him, but failed owing to a natural lisp much aggravated by a perforated lung. George had been sitting some minutes when he saw Towers on the other side of the battery. He was lying next to an embrasure, one leg twisted sharply out of alignment; his thigh smashed by a bullet: the sort of complicated fracture which inevitably meant an amputation. George had a vision of Towers cursing because he had got his feet wet in a puddle; recalled his ironic tone of voice: ‘They might have waited till after breakfast.’ With the help of another man, George managed to pull Towers up into a sitting position with his back against the rampart: an action which caused the wounded man such anguish that he clawed up handfuls of stony earth to stop himself screaming. His eyes were glittering and his face white, and beaded with sweat.

  ‘I want to see it.’

  George shook his head, but Towers was so insistent that he gave in, cutting away the upper part of the tr
ousers with a bayonet. There was not much blood since the ball was still in the thigh, and had evidently hit no artery. Two dark purple ridges showed where the bone had snapped and was pressing against the skin. Towers twisted his neck to see it, and touched the swellings with his fingers, then he rested his head against the sandbags and shut his eyes. There was no sign of any stretcher parties.

  ‘Braithwaite,’ he murmured. George bent close to him, expecting some personal request in case Towers died of shock during the amputation. The corners of his handsome mouth lifted slightly. ‘Braithwaite,’ he whispered, ‘you owe me eighty-seven pounds from last night.’ George nodded and looked away as tears sprang to his eyes. ‘No surgeon’s going to get you off.’

  ‘’course not.’

  A longish silence followed.

  ‘Why d’you go rushin’ out this morning without waiting? Couldn’t wait to get at ’em, eh?’

  ‘Thought I’d be killed in the tent.’

  Towers smiled; apparently thinking George was being modest.

  ‘You’re not so bad, Braithwaite. Good fellow, in point of fact.’

  Not trusting himself to speak, George squeezed his friend’s hand and then, seeing that he had no revolver, left him his with his ammunition pouch. Russian ‘corpses’ had a habit of coming to life and shooting French and British wounded.

  Shortly after ten o’clock the Russians attacked in overwhelming numbers and drove the Guards out of the Sandbag Battery, forcing them to leave their wounded where they lay. The Guards made a stand further back on the spur and repelled the first charge. Several officers advanced calling on their men to follow them, but very few did. George himself tried to lead his company forward, but seeing the annihilation of several other small groups, he ordered them back. Not long afterwards the Brigade, or what was left of it, retired to the ridge.

  Towards noon, the Guards with two regiments from the 4th Division managed to re-take both the spur and the Sandbag Battery, but George Braithwaite was not with them. At the beginning of this second advance he fainted through loss of blood from his wounded arm. He did not, therefore, see the heroic charge of the 77th on the principal Russian battery, nor witness the critical intervention of fresh French troops and the decisive attack by the Chasseurs d’Afrique and the Zouaves, which finally swung the battle in the allies’ favour.

  George had heard much of this by nightfall; but not until the following day did news of what the Grenadiers had found when they stormed the Sandbag Battery for the last time, reach George’s hospital marquee. All the wounded officers and men left behind had been hacked to death. Lieutenant Towers had escaped this fate; he had shot himself with an Adams service revolver.

  Of the fifty-two men in George’s company, who had gone into action, only nineteen returned to the camp on their own feet. The Brigade of Guards lost six hundred men: half their strength. The whole army suffered less, but was still reduced by a third. The victory was named the battle of the Inkerman after the ruins on the cliffs overlooking the eastern side of the plateau. The Russians left almost five thousand dead on the battlefield: a total nearly twice the combined British figure for killed and wounded. Russian wounded were thought to be over ten thousand. Yet in relation to the total numbers each side could dispose in the Crimea, the British had lost a higher proportion of their fighting strength. Since the defences of Sebastopol had not been significantly weakened by the defeat of the Russian field army, Inkerman would prove a pyrrhic victory.

  The choice facing Lord Raglan was no longer when to attack the town; but whether to raise the siege, or to subject the remains of his army to a winter campaign. Against the advice of three divisional commanders, he decided to stay.

  41

  Tom Strickland clambered up from the caïque onto the crowded landing stage at Galata and paused to gaze back across the waters of the Golden Horn at the twin minarets of the Yeni-Cami and the distant dome of the Suleymaniye on the Stamboul skyline. As he pushed his way past the fruit sellers and money changers at the end of the quay and skirted the fish market, large drops of rain started to fall from a leaden sky. Dodging between a heavily laden donkey and a porter bent double under a gigantic swordfish, Tom hurried on towards his hotel, stuffing his sketch books under his coat as he went.

  *

  Two months before, Magnus had told Tom of his own plan to go to the Crimea, and had offered to recommend him as a potential war artist to various newspaper editors; but Tom had refused to consider this at the time. He had not yet forgiven Magnus for his criticisms of Helen, and had thought pity responsible for his friend’s kindness. Only a week later he read in the papers that Sir James Crawford’s squadron had sailed from the Bosphorus for Balaclava; from this Tom had concluded that Helen would already be on her way home. Miserable though he had been in the months after Helen’s marriage, her residence in Turkey had saved him from the temptation of trying to see her. But as soon as he had thought her back in England again, his old longing to force from her the final meeting, which he had previously been denied, had returned with obsessive force. And when this happened, his work, which until then had kept him sane, no longer served to divert him. Soon he had started to give in to compulsions he had hitherto resisted.

  He had revisited Blandford’s Hotel, walked past the Belgravia house, and even spent a day at Barford. But his most frequent waking-dream had been to return to Hanley Park. Only the fear that Catherine would see him there had prevented him going at once; and then he had forced himself to imagine the horrifying consequences of discovery for Helen. Unable to decide what to do, incapable of work, and finding his only pleasure in thinking of the past, Tom had finally decided that his duty to himself and to Helen was to leave the country. Though Magnus had by then left for the war, his suggestions had still been fresh in Tom’s mind; and while he had not supposed that even the novelty and horror of war would destroy his every memory of Helen, he had been unable to think of anything more likely to help him see his loss in a more rational perspective.

  With contacts of his own from the days when he had worked for an engraver, Tom had not been defeated by Magnus’s absence. After several failures, he had managed to persuade Colnaghi to commission him to produce a series of portraits of senior officers serving in the Crimea, with supplementary drawings of other aspects of life in the camps and trenches: the end result to be a book of chromo-lithographs.

  Tom had arrived in Constantinople a few days after Inkerman, his intention being to spend a week in the Turkish capital before embarking for Balaclava.

  *

  The rain was sheeting down by the time Tom reached Myserri’s Hotel. The hall was as crowded as usual, and resounding to the clink of spurs and the clatter of scabbards. A number of officers were evidently sailing for the Crimea later that evening, since porters were dragging out trunks and portmanteaus. Ever since the first ship-loads of wounded from Inkerman had started arriving at Scutari on the other side of the Bosphorus, the mood of the guests had been one of unrelieved gloom, and the presence in the hotel of the members of the Sanitary Commission, sent out from England to inquire into the state of the army hospitals, did little to improve morale. Three days before, the commissioners had found that the Barrack Hospital’s entire supply of drinking water had been flowing through a conduit partially blocked by the decaying carcase of a horse; the day after that, the scandal had been latrines sited next to water tanks in the courtyard. But while stories of rats gnawing at the hands and feet of dying men had not improved Tom’s appetite, they had at least increased his respect for the determination of Dr Sutherland and his fellow commissioners and inspectors to change matters. In fact he had quickly come to enjoy their company more than that of most of the officers in the hotel.

  On entering the smoking room, Tom saw Dr Sutherland and his colleague Mr Milroy sitting at a table on the far side of the room, drinking brandy and water with other members of their party. After Sutherland had invited him to join them, Tom pulled up a chair. A heated dispute was in progress ab
out whether the Inkerman victory banquet, held the night before at the Embassy, should ever have taken place. While some claimed it had been a necessary gesture to bolster Turkish confidence, others argued that it had been inexcusable for the ambassador to lay on a feast for five hundred guests when, scarcely a mile away across the Bosphorus, thousands of wounded were dining on salt pork and watery broth.

  Apart from Tom, the only other person at the table taking no part in the discussion was Dr Padmore, a slim pale-faced man in his late thirties, whom Tom liked for his slightly wistful sense of humour and retiring manner. Padmore, the Commission’s chief medical officer, was also a keen archaeologist, and had accompanied Tom on several of his sketching expeditions which had involved visits to Roman monuments in Stamboul such as the Cisterna Basilica. Because of Padmore’s mildness, it had come as a surprise to Tom to hear that his cross-questioning, when the Commission sat taking formal evidence, was merciless.

  A servant in a red fez and matching cummerbund had just brought more brandy when Milroy began to bemoan the five to one discrepancy between men and women at the ball which had followed the Embassy banquet.

  ‘My God, man, didn’t you dance with Lady Stratford?’ asked Sutherland.

  ‘Her ladyship dance with a Sanitary Commissioner? My dear Sutherland, the cabinet may have given us certain powers and priority, but there are limits, you know.’

  ‘What about her daughters then? Nice-looking girls too.’

  Tom was usually amused by Milroy’s stolid refusal to see anything amusing in Sutherland’s good-humoured mockery, but tonight the exchanges between the former Borough Engineer and the Government Inspector of Hospitals had a quite different effect on him – all talk of the Embassy banquet serving to remind him of Helen’s time as the ambassador’s guest. So certain had Tom been that she would return home after her husband’s departure for the Crimea that he had never entertained any serious suspicion that she might have stayed on, until his second day at Myserri’s when he had seen her name listed in a recent number of the United Service Magazine, as one of those present at an Embassy reception attended by the Sultan. This function had taken place just over a month earlier, but by then Crawford’s squadron had undoubtedly sailed for the Black Sea. Though disconcerted, Tom had not abandoned his previous conviction; after all there was nothing very surprising about her staying for another week or so after the fleet’s departure. Yet though he fought against it, a needling doubt had entered Tom’s mind, not sufficiently disturbing to make him seriously reconsider his plan to remain a full week in Constantinople, but a source of underlying tension none-the-less.