by Tim Jeal
As commander-in-chief, Lyons could not appropriately transfer his flag to a ship in a small detached squadron; nor, given the French fleet’s deficiency in shallow draught steamships, could either of the French admirals advance a claim. Rear-Admiral Sir James Crawford, the author of the plan, had been their inevitable choice.
*
With nothing more to divert him than the chimes of the monastery bells and the harsh echoing tramp of the sentry’s boots passing and re-passing outside the window, Charles’s nerves were badly strained by the time his father made his appearance. Sir James’s troubled and sympathetic eyes made Charles’s heart sink within him when he thought of what he had to say. The admiral stared into the fire and said softly:
‘There’s to be an attack on the Quarries…. You must know why I asked to see you?’
‘How many men will I be leading?’ asked Charles after a brief pause.
‘Two hundred. The Brigade will be providing the ladder parties. Five thousand men will be attacking the Quarries and two thousand more used in diversionary sorties. I’m afraid it’ll be a hard business.’
Charles could imagine clearly how it would be – the shouting, men falling, the crash of gun-fire. In recent days he had thought of the assault so often that at times he could hardly believe that something so vivid in his mind had not already happened. He shrugged his shoulders.
‘It won’t be worse than Inkerman.’
After this matter-of-fact reply, his father said in a thick emotional voice:
‘You mustn’t think the choice had anything to do with me. That was Lushington’s doing.’ He put down his cocked hat on the chair Charles had vacated and sighed. ‘At least there’ll be no question of Humphrey being in on this. I’ve never known such anxiety as during this bombardment. Never.’
‘Three weeks and he’ll be back with the fleet.’
‘And you too, Charles.’
‘Me too,’ he murmured, painfully conscious of the doubts underlying his father’s confident tone. He braced himself to tell him in the heavy silence that followed, but drew back unable to speak until Sir James was less bowed down. When he is more composed, not thinking about the war or death … tell him then.
At first when his father began talking about an expedition to destroy the Tchongar Bridge on the eastern military road, Charles listened only fitfully, supposing it to be some distant project: a device to set them both thinking about the time after the attack on the Quarries; and because Charles wanted to draw his father’s thoughts away from that area, he was glad to encourage this new topic. After this is finished, he told himself, I will say what I must; but wanting to delay a little longer, he began to ask questions. Yes, a squadron might pass undetected into the Sea of Azov, but how could it possibly enter the approaches to the bridge in the same way? The channel at Genichesk was barely a hundred yards across. Even the most ineffectual batteries could inflict terrible damage on ships trying to force the straits. Wasn’t there a risk too that the shallow water in the area of the bridge would already be frozen over? In any case the operation would involve landings from ships’ boats and an overland march to the target.
Charles himself had often thought of methods for interrupting Russian supplies and so knew the difficulties well; but as he listened to his father’s detailed answers to his questions and noted suppressed excitement breaking through the calm surface of his speech, Charles felt his heart begin to pound.
‘When do you sail?’ he asked in a numb small voice.
‘Four days.’
‘Four days?’ he cried. ‘Assemble your marines, equip the boats, give orders to the commanders of the escort ships … in four days?’
‘I think the officers of a navy which landed thirty thousand men at Kalamita Bay can manage it.’
Charles knew that he should show excitement, should say that the plan was excellent, inspired – that it presented a chance for distinction which few flag-officers ever dared hope for – that the prize far outweighed the danger – that…. But Charles found himself unable to say a word. How could he speak of Helen now and thus mar what could well be his last meeting with his father? He might die at the Quarries, his father under the batteries at Genichesk. And, if his father were to die, what futility it would then prove to have told him needlessly. Yet matters might fall out quite differently; Charles himself might be killed and his father survive, to learn from others that his favourite son had known of his wife’s betrayal but had deliberately concealed it from him. His mind a tumult of doubts, Charles forced himself to think. The attack on the Quarries was set for dawn on New Year’s Day. His father could have returned by then, assuming that Genichesk could be reached in three days under steam; but there were many imponderables: perhaps too many.
*
Seeing the expression of dismay and sadness on his son’s face, Sir James felt keen pangs of sympathy. He himself dreaded the possibility of returning from the Sea of Azov to find Charles dead, and knew that Charles would be feeling similar fears for his safety; and he thought: how typical of Charles to shrug off his own peril so lightly, and then to be plunged into a black depression because I face an equivalent risk. Wanting to tell Charles how he admired him for this, Sir James could not find the words. For years they had been bedevilled by this same incapacity; their mutual affection only hinted at by looks and gestures, by what was left unsaid rather than by what was openly admitted. And after every failure, Sir James had told himself that next time he would finally break the barrier of reserve and reticence which they had allowed their own natures and the traditions of their service to impose upon them. But in the past there had always been the promise of future occasions on which to achieve this closeness. And now? Sir James asked himself. And now? A brief silence.
‘Do you remember, ever so many years ago,’ Sir James began hesitantly, ‘how we walked round looking at the ships building in the Gosport yards before your exam?’
‘I hardly saw a thing,’ murmured Charles, with the ghost of a smile.
‘Then it was my turn to get into a state – though God knows I’d told you a thousand times there’d just be some simple dictation and a few rule of three sums; but you wouldn’t have it.’
‘I thought they’d slip in some Euclid or something quite beyond me.’
‘There I was pacing about waiting for you to come out ages after all the other boys had finished.’
‘I checked everything twice.’
‘I should have known…. Oh dear, such years ago.’ Sir James reached out and took Charles’s arm. ‘You remember the journey? All the way I was thinking of how I first came down by coach on that same road when I’d been on my way to sit the exam, and now it was you. I remembered my own feelings so vividly, my father beside me, just as I was next to you and I couldn’t believe the time had gone….’
Sir James paused hopelessly, knowing that he had utterly failed to convey what he had tried to put into words: the long dusty journey and the sense of personal loss at the memory of his own departed boyhood; all this added to his protective longing to delay his twelve-year-old son’s entrance into that harsh austere world of ships and men. The evening before Charles had gone aboard his first ship, they had dined with the port admiral; Charles immoderately proud of his new uniform, and Sir James remembered so clearly the precise expression of fury and dismay on his face, when, after the cloth had been removed, Lady Erskine had taken him out with the ladies. Sir James still felt a blush of embarrassment that he had not asked that he should be allowed to stay. Then next day, after a night at the George, they had taken the boy’s chest, bedding and carpetbag to the Sally-port and gone out to Electra in Talbot’s gig. Poor boy, he held up so well all the way out in the boat, but the handshake on the main deck had been the last straw; to spare him, Sir James had gone straight down into the gig before saying anything he had meant to, but as they shoved off and pulled away from Electra, he had seen Charles running aft on the upper deck to cry on his own. Sir James found himself blushing fiercel
y as he said:
‘Lord, how I wept on the way back to the Hard when I’d left you. I never landed with such a heavy heart and touch wood haven’t done since.’
He saw Charles looking at him with bewilderment.
‘You never told me that before.’
‘No, no, I didn’t. So many things we never say.’ Sir James was horrified by the pain these last few words seemed to cause Charles.
A few minutes later they walked out under the colonnade and crossed a terrace bordered on one side by acacia trees. The light was fading fast but they could see below them the steep fall of the cliffs and, at their base, jutting from the dark water, tall fantastically shaped rocks. A little to their right the monks had cut terraces into the cliff face and made gardens there, planted with vines and shrubs; from the lowest terrace a zig-zag path led down to a small pebbly beach. The air was windless but very cold. From the chapel came the sound of singing; the monks were at vespers. Sir James saw a glimmer of candlelight and reflected gold from the icons under the darkened porch. A single strong bass voice seemed to hang and linger in the air after the rest had stopped. He found himself both moved and troubled by feelings the sound had evoked. Beneath them the tall black rocks, symbols both of permanence and of a lost faith; within their core, fossils innumerable proving … he knew not what precisely, except that the Bible, that one-time cornerstone of his belief, was now cracked and chipped by the geologists’ remorseless hammers, and scratched by the pens of scholars challenging the truth of the New Testament itself. Remembering his own father’s certainty, Sir James felt a passionate longing to share it still, to say with him that any man who does his duty and trusts in God need fear no danger; do what you can as well as you can, and let the rest remain with Him. But now he could not, and those simple words, once so reassuring, held no comfort. People say that this war is different because of the journalists, the Minié rifle, a steam navy and the overland telegraph, but these are small changes. This war is different, truly different, he thought, because of the weakening of belief; because men’s attitudes to war itself are governed by their faith, or lack of faith, in immortality. The war’s true terror lay, not in the Lancaster’s rifled barrel and the moorsom shell, but in the sense that death, under an empty heaven, in an indifferent universe, was final.
Yet looking out across the darkening sea, he found some comfort; if that were so, it had been always so, whatever men had believed. Seeing Charles’s despondent face, he longed to console him. If death comes to all, soon or late, he thought, the manner of it may not be so unimportant, since it is the only embellishment a man can give to its inevitable coming; and as this thought formed, some lines of Browning came back to him, and turning, he said them out loud:
‘I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forebore, And bade me creep past.’
Even before coming out onto the terrace, Charles had known that he could not tell him; and, as they rode together, part of the way towards the Balaclava col, he felt more light-hearted. His father also seemed less burdened, and during their remaining time together he repeated an artillery officer’s explanation of why so few men were killed by shells, bursting even within six feet of them. Because their bodies exposed no more than eight square feet in all, their chances of being struck were as eight to one tenth of the surface of a sphere in square feet of six feet radius: or in layman’s language chances of seven to one in favour of escape. They laughed because Sir James was sure that he had got it wrong, but had tried to remember the gist of it as some consolation during the bombardment. Charles said:
‘I wonder what happened to the artillery officer?’
But Sir James merely shrugged his shoulders and smiled. At the top of the col they shook hands and parted without tears, both remembering that other parting on Electra’s deck so long ago. As Sir James reached a sharp descent where the track turned, he called back:
‘God bless you, God bless you, Charles.’
47
He had arrived at Balaclava under an inky sky, pierced here and there by narrow shafts of white light, where the booming northeaster had torn ragged holes in the heavy clouds. Above the harbour, the cliffs and hills were black, brown and grey, as if rinsed of all warmer colours by the storm; but Tom was not displeased by his first sight of this sombre landscape, since it so well accorded with his mood. Whether the grief he had known in Turkey had been worse than the emptiness he now felt, Tom could not judge, since the occasional stabs of active pain he still suffered, came with an almost retrospective feel, like the sharp twinges a man ‘imagines’ in a limb already hacked away. But at these moments, his mood was angry as well as leaden. The knowledge that she had truly loved him, and probably still did, had not, as he had expected, brought peace of mind but a deeper hopelessness.
Few men, passing for the first time under the overhanging sterns of the ships moored along the wharves, found consolation in the sights and smells around them; but Tom was relieved to be where he was. Here at least, at the war, among these thin grey-faced men in their patched and filthy uniforms, there would be no room for ‘High Art’s’ heroic themes. Among the men of a devastated army, Tom thought his inner desolation would serve him well in his task.
Confronted with scenes such as those he had already witnessed at Scutari, and feeling as he did, he would not be tempted to impose lofty sentiment or add elevating moral tags to his subjects. Let other artists back in England paint men with clean hands and faces writing letters by a camp fire’s light: entitled Thoughts of Home, or companion pictures of A Soldier’s Death and A Widow’s Sorrow – this last selling in thousands as a print: the young woman gazing with tearful but beatific eyes at her husband’s last letter, sword, epaulettes and lock of hair, sent home from the fatal battlefield; no anger at a life thrown away, no haggard grief-stricken face, but an expression of sorrowful and yet proud acceptance of a death so noble.
For Tom a brief flirtation with improving themes was over. If assuring him of no other benefit, his personal emptiness would save him from false sentiment. He would not portray heroes fighting for Queen and Country, but merely men killing other men, some shooting, others being shot. That would be all. No more for him ‘High Art’s’ agonising imperative: to make a picture ‘say’ and ‘be’ more than a literal presentation of certain facts. For scenes of war, there should be no artist’s interpretation, however morally impeccable, between the beholder and these facts. He should be given nothing more. Why should he be, when there was nothing else to give?
On his first night in the Crimea, Tom slept under the table in a cramped cabin used as an office by the Assistant-Agent for Transports. Next day he intended to make other arrangements. One more brush with the past was inevitable: he would have to visit Magnus, rather than be sought out by him; but with Magnus, as with all Crawfords, Goodchilds and Braithwaites, the future demanded, if not an absolute severance, at least a new distance and detachment. Never again could he allow himself to depend upon Magnus’s help. A new life, even if it were to be an empty one, required that caution.
*
After several days of high wind and sleet, Magnus woke to see a clear sky and the plateau bathed in soft sunlight. The air was sharp and cold, and the puddles around his hut still frozen. After lighting a small fire to boil some water, he pulled his sheepskin blanket around him and lay down with a flat stone for a pillow, enjoying the smell of wood-smoke and the sound of the larks overhead. Far away, two guns were firing at each other at lengthy intervals, like talkers involved in a dull conversation, demanding no heated or urgent replies; their occasional thudding making the intervening stillness seem more pleasantly tranquil than on mornings of unbroken silence. From the Light Division’s Camp, away to his right, blue wisps of smoke from breakfast fires curled upwards in slow spirals. By the time the water on his own fire was boiling, Magnus had started to doze.
On hearing his name, he opened his eyes and saw Tom looking down at him; the pan of water had slipped down, extinguishing part of the fire. H
e jumped up, and still slightly dazed, clasped his friend’s hands, and began asking him about his journey; when he had arrived, where he had spent the night, what his work would involve, how long it would take, and many other questions. Had he eaten that morning? Perhaps he would like some ham or dried fruit? He had a pound of excellent raisins – good ones were very rare, even at extortionate Balaclava prices.
While Magnus was speaking, Tom was saddened almost to tears by the sight of such obvious pleasure. Couldn’t he see that everything had changed? That the past lay between them like a wall? Magnus’s inability to understand his love for Helen, and his own failure to speak openly of it, had irrevocably destroyed the trust they had once shared – Helen’s marriage merely setting the final seal on what had been already over.
But when Magnus offered to show him the lay-out of the batteries and trenches from Cathcart’s Hill, Tom did not feel able to disappoint him so soon after their reunion. Afterwards, by the time they reached the hut again, the sun had melted the ice in the ruts and puddles on the track and the ground was soft underfoot. The distant strains of a band came from the direction of the French camps; no guns were firing in the batteries.
Sitting on empty ammunition boxes on either side of the embers of the fire Magnus had lit an hour earlier, they faced each other in silence. Just outside the siege park an 18-pounder was being limbered-up; its team of skeletal horses waiting to drag it down to the batteries. At first, Magnus had tried to persuade himself that Tom’s uncommunicative mood had been due to the strangeness of his new situation, but when all his attempts at cheerfulness met with the same lack of response, he could bear it no longer.
