Until the Colours Fade

by Tim Jeal

  As he listened to Milroy and Sutherland, Tom became painfully aware that a word from either of them could set his mind at rest. Presumably they would have heard somebody mention the fact that Sir James Crawford’s wife was there, if such had been the case. He stared fixedly through the cigar smoke at the crudely painted pattern of birds and pomegranates on the opposite wall. Not having eaten since midday the brandy had made him light-headed, but not enough to save him from a mounting feeling of agitation. Several times he was on the point of asking a direct question, but on each occasion he had sat back before speaking. It was absurd, he told himself, to be sitting with a thumping heart unable to make an inquiry which he could have made at any time since his arrival. But before this moment he had never been presented with such a direct temptation to find out. Now it seemed quite plain to him that unless he appeased his craving to know one way or the other, his remaining days in the city would be ruined by the continuing uncertainty. If she was still in Constantinople, it would not be so very terrible, although the thought of being obliged to leave earlier than he had intended was an irritating one. But every moment that he delayed told him more clearly that he would gladly give up far more than three days’ sketching to have his doubt resolved.

  Tom turned to Padmore who had just finished saying something to John Rhodes, one of the junior inspectors.

  ‘Did you go … to the banquet, I mean?’

  ‘Do you think I shouldn’t have done?’ asked Padmore with a convincing show of guilt.

  ‘Of course not. I didn’t mean that at all. I wanted to ask whether somebody was there; a lady.’ Tom saw Rhodes raise his eyebrows and felt the blood rise to his cheeks. ‘I painted her portrait, you see….’ He hesitated awkwardly, having lost the thread of whatever justification he had intended to give. Angry with himself for showing his embarrassment, he added with unnecessary abruptness. ‘Her name is Lady Crawford; Admiral Crawford’s wife.’

  Padmore smiled apologetically.

  ‘I’m afraid the nearest I came to anyone so exalted was a colonel’s lady. Not even the right service. Sorry.’

  Rhodes, who Tom had noticed liked to appear to know the answer to every question, put down his glass and pursed his lips thoughtfully.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘See that fellow over there with Major Pearson?’ He glanced in the general direction of the door. ‘Skene’s his name. Captain Skene. He’s some sort of attaché at the Embassy. He’ll know. Ask him.’

  Tom felt suddenly dizzy and weak.

  ‘Mightn’t he find it rather strange … somebody he’d never met asking him just like that?’

  Rhodes considered this for a moment puffing at his cigar.

  ‘See your point, Strickland. Awkward one this.’ He drummed on the table with his fingers for several seconds and then raised a hand authoritatively. ‘I’ve got the answer. Leave it to me.’

  He got up and Tom watched him walk over to a youngish man in a black evening coat sitting with a group of army officers to the right of the door. Tom strained to catch what was said but there was too much noise in the room. The triumphant smirk on Rhodes’s face as he returned showed that at least he had not been rebuffed.

  ‘Said we were having bets on how many generals’ and admirals’ wives were at the banquet. Obliging fellow told me straight off, no questions asked. Four generals and two admirals … their wives, you understand.’

  ‘He wanted to know which wives,’ interjected Padmore.

  ‘All in good time.’ Rhodes favoured Tom with a self-congratulatory grin. ‘Lady Stewart and Lady Crawford.’

  Tom gripped the edge of the table to steady himself.

  ‘Thank you,’ he muttered, pushing back his chair.

  ‘Nothing to it, if you know who to ask.’

  *

  When the others rose to go to the dining room, Tom slipped out into the darkness of the courtyard with its trellised arcading and orange trees. Standing alone under the shelter of the eaves he watched the rain pattering down on the gravel around the central fountain. The following day he had previously set aside for finishing several oil sketches of the Sultan Ahmet mosque and the Church of the Pantokrator, but now the thought of any kind of work seemed ridiculous. The definite answer he had received, far from bringing him the peace of mind he had predicted, had left him a prey to a new and frightening indecision. Though pained by his reviving memories, he was also animated by a pulsing nervous excitement, akin to fear but not without undercurrents of pleasure.

  In this strange mood he could clearly recall his thoughts before Rhodes’s revelation, but not the feelings and motives behind them. His firm intention had been to leave the city if Helen turned out still to be there; a simple matter of arranging the earliest possible passage to Balaclava. The correctness and inevitability of this course had seemed too obvious to question then, but now….? In England he had persuaded himself that only fear for her reputation had prevented him going to Hanley Park. Yet here he was, planning to sail at once from a foreign city where the risks of any meeting with her being discovered were a fraction of those which would have been encountered in England, with Catherine still at Hanley Park. The plain implication of this astonished him. He had left England, just as he was now planning to leave Turkey, not out of consideration for her, but because of his own fears. If she were to receive him with anger and hostility, his world of memories and make-believe would be shattered. Far easier to leave for the East, dressing up cowardice as gentlemanly concern for a lady’s good name, than to risk an angry and painful confrontation which might destroy past illusions. Yet such a confrontation would be far more likely to cure him than this endless running away.

  He stared at the drops of rain falling from the dark leaves of the orange trees and breathed deeply to control a sudden surge of panic. See her, he told himself. See her. Wasn’t that the only way he would ever lay the ghost she had left with him? Perhaps he would discover after this lapse of time that the ideal figure he had made her in his mind had owed more to a lover’s selective imagination than to the woman herself. Anger also came to buttress his resolution. Helen had loved him, and yet he had never once argued against her decision to marry but, like some scared lackey eager to keep his place by acquiescence, had politely handed her the knife to use whenever it might please her to sever their connection. Should he now continue to sacrifice himself for the minimal risks to her reputation which a meeting might involve?

  Later, sitting in his room, Tom had no difficulty in thinking of the most suitable place in which to see her. Only the previous Sunday, Dr Sutherland had mentioned that the Morning Post’s correspondent in the city had placed his house in Orta-köy at the Commission’s disposal for its members’ use while he was with the Turkish troops at Silistria. The village was seven miles from Constantinople: a journey which not even the deplorable roads could extend much beyond an hour in a decently sprung carriage. Since Sutherland had already suggested that Tom make use of this offer to get a sight of the neighbouring countryside before he left, there seemed little possibility of any difficulties being raised.

  He would write a letter tomorrow. No – best write it at once before his mood changed. Possibly in war-time letters not arriving with the diplomatic bag or service mails would be opened and read by the Embassy staff. He would have to write the sort of note which a friend of the family might be expected to send, but one still making it clear that he did not intend to be fobbed off with a refusal to see him. Since Helen would be most unwilling to risk his coming to the Embassy, in case Charles or Sir James should hear about her receiving a young man having nothing to do with the navy or the diplomatic corps, he would need to imply that, if she rejected his choice of day and venue, she could expect him to seek her out at his own time and pleasure. By asking her to lunch with him at Orta-köy, he might be able to prevent her leaving after a few words.

  Still apprehensive, but by now elated too, Tom paced across to his window and gazed out over the glistening roofs, seeing the distant l
ights of Stamboul reflected in the black waters of the Golden Horn; his thoughts though were not of what he saw, but of a building scarcely a mile away, overlooking the Bosphorus. Somewhere in that gigantic square neo-classical palace faced with gleaming stucco, Helen Crawford was living her life in total ignorance of his proximity. Outside her windows would be spacious gardens, guarded by soldiers in white and red sentry boxes; each morning bands would play in the central courtyard at the base of the tall flag-staff. A new life, utterly removed from her old one. A nervous flutter of doubt assailed Tom, but his mind was made up. She had owed him a final meeting and he would have it.

  He had not moved from the window when his opening lines came to him.

  Dear Lady Crawford,

  I was sorry not to be able to bid you a personal farewell before you sailed for Malta. But Charles Crawford came to my house and kindly acquainted me with your immediate plans, so saving me a wasted visit….

  Quite prepared to run to many drafts before reaching a final version, Tom sat down, picked up a pencil and started to write.

  42

  Magnus had seen sights on the battlefield, which, at the time, he had thought impossible to surpass for the depths of suffering and degradation revealed: a Zouave roughly pulling the boots off a screaming Russian soldier, whose legs had been shattered by a round-shot; a sergeant of the Connaught Rangers, who had died in such pain from bayonet wounds to the stomach that he had bitten into the earth – when Magnus had seen him, his limbs had stiffened and one arm was held aloft, the fingers still clutching tufts of earth torn up in his last agony. Only the faces of men killed instantly by bullets in the head or heart, looked peaceful in death. A French chasseur had crawled to quench his burning thirst in a ditch, but had fallen forwards exhausted arid had drowned in the few inches of muddy water he had so painfully fought to reach. Worst of all to watch had been the gangs of Turks clearing the Russian dead from the field, dragging the corpses by the heels towards the shallow communal pits, bumping their heads on the ground, not caring that skulls were split open on stones, and partially severed limbs wrenched clean off. Outside a hospital marquee he had seen a pile of amputated legs with boots and stockings still on them; as he had passed, an orderly tossed out a dozen fingers and toes as coolly as if they had been fowl’s feet.

  Yet within a week of Inkerman Magnus had described scenes of greater horror for his newspaper; no scenes of death were as heart-rending as the processions of wounded on their way down to Balaclava for embarkation to Scutari. At first it had been intended to let the dying remain in the camps, rather than subject them to the additional suffering of a futile journey, but when a week after the battle, a night of heavy snow had been followed by three days of torrential rain and finally a prolonged and intense frost, the hundreds of cases of frostbite, pneumonia and rheumatism could only be accomodated in the hospital tents by evacuating all the battle-wounded, whether recovering or sinking, to the port.

  *

  When George Braithwaite had seen the surgeons working through the night after Inkerman, and for most of the following day, he had been ashamed to ask these men, red with blood to the elbows, to turn their attention from gravely wounded soldiers to deal with his torn hand and lacerated arm. For a while he had sat in line, and many times had seen the fearful cut made, the white flesh spring back and the saw laid against the bone. The surgeons had been so hard-pressed that they had often pinched the arteries together with their fingers, only tying them with ligatures when the limb was off and tossed aside. Men with similar wounds had been able to see every movement and had writhed and groaned not so much with pain as with terrified anticipation. The chloroform had soon been exhausted, and then the roars and screams of men under the knife had been more than George could bear and he had fled to his tent, having his servant bind up his wounds with an old shirt. Next day his arm was swollen and caused him such pain that he had been forced to return to his regiment’s hospital marquee. Later the surgeons had been pleased by the steady ooze of ‘laudable pus’ from his arm, but when this suppuration had shown no signs of diminishing, and the inflammation had grown worse, he too had been ordered down to Balaclava with the rest.

  The shortage of stretchers and the absolute impossibility of dragging the heavy British ambulance waggons, with their gun-carriage wheels, through the quagmire of mud on the sloping track, meant that many of the wounded had to be carried on the backs of men often themselves suffering from exposure. Others were strapped to mules and horses, but the lack of forage had so decimated the army’s baggage train that even with teams from the artillery and cavalry, there were far too few, and most so weak that they constantly stumbled, causing terrible agony to men with freshly amputated limbs and open wounds.

  George had initially been fortunate enough to be strapped to one of the upright mule-seats lent by the French; but on seeing many far more severely wounded men struggling through the mud on foot, he had asked to be taken down so that the seat could be given to one of them. He did not feel heroic to have made the sacrifice, since, just as in the hospital tent, he had felt shamed by the greater distress of others; now he was unable to allow himself to be carried when his legs were whole and men in crude splints were limping by, using their rifles as crutches. In spite of his sling, his arm hurt him with each step, and the half-frozen mud was so thick and adhesive that every few yards he was obliged to rest for several minutes before once more lifting his soil-clogged boots and squelching on. He thought of the impeccable uniforms of the regiments which had embarked with the Coldstream at Portsmouth and looked around him in incredulity. Some of the officers had tied hay in sacking round their rags of trousers to keep out the cold; others had made leggings of sheepskins and horse hides. He saw a colonel on a stretcher with a mess-tin cover pulled down over his ears. To save their faces from frostbite, a number of private soldiers had bound strips of old blankets round their heads, layer upon layer, leaving only the mouth and eyes exposed, making their skulls appear swollen and deformed.

  Many of those on the mules were almost past pain and caring, with eyes sunk deep in their sockets, dull and dead, mouths open and faces gaunt and grey, tinged with blue. A Turk was carrying a handsome dark-haired man roped to his back; the blanket covering him had slipped exposing the bandaged stump of his left arm, cut away a few inches from the shoulder. The only way of knowing which of the worst cases were alive was the film of their breath, visible in the raw cold air. One who passed by, strapped upright in a mule-seat, was obviously dead, his head lolling drunkenly with every lurch of the animal, and teeth clamped hard on his already blackened tongue. Often a death remained unnoticed for several miles, when the fixed stare of an eye or the rigid set of an arm would announce that all was over. If the eyes were closed, the lids would be prised open and the pupils peered into for any signs of life. If dead, the man’s body was lifted down and left by the side of the track, while another took his place in the seat. Many seats and stretchers had had several occupants before Balaclava was reached.

  George’s arm burned and throbbed sharply, but the sight of so much suffering on every side gave him strength, convincing him of his own insignificance in comparison with so many deaths and so much pain. He was also humbled by the uncomplaining stoicism of the ordinary soldiers; men at whom in England he would never have glanced a second time, but whose courage in two battles and now, on what would for many be their last journey, made him wince at his past arrogance and blindness. Only once had he entered the work-house at Rigton Bridge, and had almost vomited at what he had then considered a sub-human stench only possible among derelict working men; and now he stank more vilely than any pauper in that workhouse, and could not write on a sheet of paper without it being covered with lice. He remembered the hatred he had felt for the mob on the day of the election and could no longer understand or remember his reasons. His only anger left was for those responsible for sending an army to fight in these conditions with woefully inadequate supplies and so small a chance of survival.


  *

  Early in the morning Magnus had learned with misgiving that just over a thousand wounded were to be transferred from the 2nd and 4th Division’s camps to the port. On previous occasions, he had heard it said that, when as few as two hundred had been embarked, they had been left unattended by the landing stage for hours on end while two or three boats ferried them out to a hospital ship in an endless relay of trips.

  When Magnus arrived at the quay, he passed within twenty yards of the spot where George Braithwaite was lying, but did not see him. All around on the muddy ground were prostrate men, some groaning feebly, others too weak to make a sound. A light rain was turning to sleet, slanting across the harbour with freezing gusts of wind. No awning had been erected, and Magnus saw only three covered stretchers; the vast majority of the men were lying on the bare earth, without as much as a blanket under them. Two assistant-surgeons and half-a-dozen medical orderlies were wandering amongst their charges doling out water.

  Magnus went up to an orderly and asked why the men were getting no food, since many would not have eaten since the previous evening; he was told that they would have all they required on board. Estimating that less than half of those waiting would have left the quay by mid-afternoon, Magnus asked why they could not have some arrowroot and beef essence at once. The orderly explained wearily that ground rice and sago was all that was left in store, and that since the principal medical officer had not given any instructions, none would be issued.