The Winter Soldiers

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  ‘One of them crippled by the look of it!’ cried Pirce-Smith. ‘I was going to suggest we leave a man to assist with the litter.’

  ‘The officer’s crazy,’ muttered Gwilliams. ‘I think we should do away with him too, before he does for us all.’ He was not serious, but Pirce-Smith was shocked enough to stumble backwards and reach for his pistol.

  ‘Put it away, sir,’ Crossman ordered. ‘Unless you’re going to use it on these two.’

  Lieutenant Pirce-Smith seemed to gather himself up all of a sudden. A confrontational expression took the place of a confused and bewildered one. He stared grimly at the group around him. His pistol was now in his hand and pointing directly at Crossman.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he said. ‘I am the senior rank here. This has gone far enough. I am assuming command by right of the queen’s commission. You will now follow my orders.’

  ‘Yorwarth,’ said Crossman, wearily, ‘disarm Lieutenant Pirce-Smith, if you please.’

  ‘Yes, sergeant.’ A swift crack on the lieutenant’s forearm with a carbine stock removed the weapon from his grasp.

  Pirce-Smith gripped his bruised arm. He staggered back. ‘This is mutiny,’ he said. ‘I’ll have you all hung for this.’

  ‘This is not mutiny, sir. You are talking of Buller’s Bastards. Oh yes, that’s what the general used to call us. His bastards. It’s not meant as an insult, it is in fact a fairly accurate description. This peloton is not manned by your common legitimate soldier. We are outcasts from our regiment – illegitimate if you like. Just as kings used their bastards, their out-of-wedlock but often beloved sons, to do their dirty work, so General Buller formed his bastards to carry out his underhand activities.’

  ‘What’s all that supposed to mean?’ growled Pirce-Smith, glowering.

  ‘It means this is not a legitimate unit on a lawful mission. It means that command goes to whoever Colonel Hawke wishes it to go to. Behind the British lines you are a lieutenant and I am a sergeant. Out here I am a brevet general and you are a private soldier. That’s what it means. Now when you decide you can behave yourself, I’ll return your pistol. Until then you will do as you are bid. You wouldn’t be the first British officer I’ve shot out of expediency.’

  Pirce-Smith grumbled something about it being ‘monstrous’ and turned away.

  Now Crossman turned his mind to the problem in hand. The two deserters from the Russian Army were gawking at the exchange between the two British, not understanding what on earth was going on. Since there were no visible signs of rank about any of the group they could not know it was a battle between a sergeant and an officer. Had they known they would have been utterly astonished. In their army the common soldiery was so much muck on the boot of the officer and to have a ranker argue with an officer would have meant a severe flogging at best, but probably a death sentence.

  Crossman stared at the poor pathetic creatures attempting to escape from the army which had conscripted them.

  ‘Are you Poles?’ he asked again in Russian. They nodded dumbly. The trouble was, time had passed and though the two men expected to be shot they were not so resigned to the fact that it had driven out all their terror. He could see how scared they were by the way they held hands, like two women at the funeral of a loved one. Unlike Pirce-Smith they actually understood that it was necessary for them to die. So they waited for the inevitable, one sitting, the other standing by his side, staring with frightened eyes at their captors and executioners.

  Crossman sighed. ‘We’ve left it too long,’ he said.

  The others knew what he meant. Prolonging the shooting made it that much harder. The victims had suffered the torment of waiting for the guillotine to fall. It was a crime against humanity to torture condemned men with the agony of waiting. If it was to be done, the execution should have been carried out within minutes. Now there was familiarity between executioners and victims. It would not do, now. They had come to know their victims as human beings in need.

  ‘I do it, sergeant,’ said Ali, cocking his own pistol. ‘You go on.’

  ‘No, no. It’s too late.’ He spoke to the standing prisoner. ‘You will be pursued, probably caught, since your friend cannot walk. If we let you live now, will you promise not to inform on us? You will not be asked for the information, so I ask you not to volunteer it.’

  Of course, they promised. They promised on their lives, their mothers’ graves, on the heads of their babies, on their own souls. They would not breathe a word of the British group’s whereabouts. Who are you? they asked. Deserters like us, from your own army? Yes, well, deserters did not inform on each other. They helped each other. They were after all in the same boat together, were they not? They were like brothers. Brothers did not hand in brothers. They protected them. And so on.

  Crossman nodded and made a motion for his peloton to follow him up the next slope.

  ‘They will tell, sergeant,’ said Gwilliams. ‘They’ll do what they can to save their own hides.’

  ‘I know, I know. But it was too late. We’ll have to return by a different route.’

  ‘They’ll probably freeze to death before any Russian party catches up with them,’ Peterson offered. ‘Look, they can’t move from there, can they? Not both of them, anyway. It’s all of a piece.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Crossman replied.

  ‘If they’re going to die, we might as well shoot them now,’ Gwilliams said. ‘Ali said he’d be the one.’

  ‘I’ve made my decision. We’re on our way.’ Crossman strode out in front. Pirce-Smith caught him up. At first Crossman thought there was going to be an apology and reconciliation. Nothing of the sort.

  Pirce-Smith said with a sneer on his face, ‘Don’t think because you finally agreed with my decision that it’s going to help you at your court martial.’

  ‘Oh, stuff it, sir,’ called Wynter. ‘It won’t wash, you know. Not out here in the field. What the sergeant says, goes. There, you don’t often get that out of me, but there it is, for all to swallow.’

  Pirce-Smith said nothing more. He was clearly fermenting inside. He dropped back, to walk in his regular place, looking like the whipped dog who will one day tear the throat out of his beater.

  Over the next few days and nights the group crawled over the frozen wasteland. This was an ancient landscape, whereon tribes and peoples had fought over the millennia. Here there had been Venetian colonies. There was the palace of the Tartar Khans in Bakhchiserai, between Sebastopol and Simferpol. The Byzantines and Genoese had been here, fought here, died here. Crossman was by no means invested with a sense of the paranormal, but he felt the presence of ghosts on the uplands, of warriors like himself. And, although the terrain had a rolling untroubled surface, there was no swift means of travel in such weather. It was a case of plodding on. At night they stopped in gullies, mere creases in the undulating grasslands, finding what shelter they could in this open world.

  On the fifth day they entered a valley where the local climate was somewhat milder than that up on the dull-green grasses of the trapezoid downs. From the top they could see the narrow isthmus joining the Crimean peninsula to mainland Ukraine. To the east was the Sea of Azov, to the west, the Black Sea. Descending to the valley from the undulating plateau steppe they discovered three yurts and a herd of goats near a force of water cascading from the side of a cliff.

  ‘Who are they?’ Crossman asked of Ali.

  ‘Khazars, maybe. I think so.’

  Crossman nodded. Lovelace and he had talked about the history and geography of the region in which they operated. These talks had made Crossman more aware of his environment. Lovelace was a wholly professional intelligence officer. He deemed it necessary to arm himself with as much knowledge as possible about a wide variety of subjects, but all to do with the work in hand. Were he in India he could tell you all about its history and its peoples, their religions and cultures and what they ate for breakfast and what they did in their beds at night. The same if he had been in some region
of Africa. As it was, Lovelace knew the Black Sea and its surrounds and very little about India or Africa.

  Crossman had likewise learned about the area. He had learned about various groups of pastoral nomadic people on the Caucasus. One of these was an ancient Turkic-speaking people called the Khazars, who at one time ruled an empire which in the south had extended along the northern shore of the Black Sea from the lower Volga and the Caspian Sea in the east to the Dnieper River in the west. Although it had begun as a commercial empire, with merchant traders gathering new regions and minor kingdoms, it ended with the Khazars exacting tribute far and wide, from Alani and other northern peoples, to Magyars around the Donets River, from the Goths and Greeks, and from various other Bulgar and Slavic tribes. However, by the twelfth century their power had dwindled and died and they ceased to be mentioned in the records.

  Crossman knew that, although such races and cultures disappeared from the written record, they were often kept alive by the locally spoken word. These ‘Khazars’ he had come across were probably the last remnants of the descendants of the original tribes. No doubt like most other European peoples – Celts, Saxons, Goths, Vandals, whatever – the Khazars were now only there in spirit, the tribal blood like their language and much of their culture having long since been altered.

  ‘Are they likely to be hostile?’ he asked Ali.

  The Bashi-Bazouk spat on the ground. ‘Goat people,’ he said. ‘Not fighters any more. Of course, if you steal their goats, they will kill you. Or,’ he added, on reflection, ‘if you take their daughters. Yes, then they will kill you. But for now we can speak with them. Take tea. Eat bread. Come, we go to see their headman.’

  They went to the tents and the nomads invited them in. Indeed, they were most hospitable. The tea was nothing like Crossman had ever tasted, but it was palatable. There were also some immensely sticky cakes, hard and layered, like Greek baclava. Wynter enjoyed himself with the cakes. So did Peterson. The others found them too cloying and needed vast amounts of tea to wash them down. Crossman asked his hosts, through Ali, whether they had seen any more people like him, foreigners. On being told they had seen an ‘English’ by the headman, Crossman became a little excited. The deserter bandits were supposed to be operating in the area to the north-east of the Crimean uplands, which was where the group were at that moment.

  ‘Ask him when he saw this man,’ said Crossman.

  Ali had a few short words, which as always sounded aggressive to Crossman, though the headman took no offence.

  Ali turned to Crossman. ‘Two years ago,’ he said, grimacing.

  ‘Two years ago?’

  ‘Yes. He see him at Chufut Kale.’

  ‘Way down there? Oh, wait a minute,’ Crossman recalled something. ‘There was a Scot who climbed Chufut Kale, in 1852. Laurence – Laurence Oliphant. He was looking for the Karaim.’

  ‘Ah, Jew peoples tribe. Not at Chufut Kale, or Mangup. Not lately. All gone down to coast, to Evpatoria and Yalta.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what Oliphant found. All that remained were the ruins of the ancient synagogue. So, they haven’t seen our deserters? But it must have been Oliphant they saw two years ago. When did they arrive here?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  Crossman realized they had no more up-to-date information than he had himself. He thanked the headman for his time and for the hospitality. Then he ordered his men out of the tent.

  ‘Ah, can’t we stay here an’ sleep?’ asked Wynter, staring at one of the headman’s daughters.

  ‘Out.’

  They found a rock overhang where they could light a fire. Gwilliams and Yorwarth went off to look for fuel. Peterson was put on sentry duty. Ali remained with the descendants of the Khazars a while longer. Wynter was sent for water. Lieutenant Pirce-Smith took himself to one side, away from the group, while Crossman studied the maps given him by Lovelace (who had torn them out of a book written by an English traveller in the region) in order to make a decision as to where they should start looking for the deserters. Of course, if they stayed long enough in the area, the bandits would make themselves evident, but Crossman wanted to surprise them, rather than have them descend without warning upon his encampment in the early hours of one morning.

  One map had details of local farms marked. Crossman saw that the nearest of these was some four or five miles up the valley. That was where he would start. He folded the maps carefully and wrapped them in goatskin, before putting them in his haversack. By that time Wynter was back with the water. ‘Bloody heavy that. Why do I always do the heavy stuff?’ Pirce-Smith came across as if looking for an argument. ‘I should like some of that to wash in.’

  ‘Help yourself, sir,’ said Crossman. ‘Wynter can always go for another load.’

  ‘ ’Ere!’

  Pirce-Smith took a pan full of water and walked back to the spot he had chosen for himself, away from the others. He washed his hands and face and wet his hair before smoothing it down and combing it. Wynter watched the officer with an expression which was a mixture of indignation and amusement, not an easy look to acquire. Firstly, he considered it a waste of good cooking water. Secondly, why wash away a good warm layer of dirt, which would be needed in the middle of the night.

  Once the officer’s ablutions were over, Crossman walked over to him.

  ‘Would you like me to explain my plans?’ Crossman asked.

  ‘If you feel you must, but please, not on my account.’

  ‘I was asked to keep you informed of everything, so that when the time came for you to take out your own peloton, you would have some experience in these matters.’

  Pirce-Smith stared, before saying, ‘Do not presume too much, sergeant. I’m a hunter myself, at home. Stag as well as fox. One learns one’s own tracking techniques. If I can follow a stag’s spoor through the Cumberland hills and the Scottish Highlands, I think I can do as well here.’

  Crossman kept his temper even. ‘Hunting animals is a good deal different from hunting men. I’ve been on the Crimean peninsula for over six months. That’s five months longer than you, sir. You may believe you know everything there is to know about finding an animal that can think as readily and as keenly as yourself but you would be wrong. There is nothing to replace experience in such matters.’

  ‘I would hardly compare the intellect of a deserter with my own – I was educated at Eton and Cambridge.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with education and everything to do with cunning and resourcefulness. What makes you think that because a man is a deserter he’s simple? For all we know this Corporal Reece is your, or my, intellectual equal. Perhaps he’s brighter than both of us. Just because a man is born into poverty it doesn’t mean to say he can’t think. I have known some very smart men who dug peat for a living. I have known even cleverer ones in household service. There’s a few aristocrats I could name who rely on servants to think for them.’

  ‘I don’t need to be patronized by you, sergeant. I am well able to learn by observation. You just keep doing whatever it is you do and I shall stand back and be amazed by it all.’

  Crossman saw he was going to get nowhere here. He walked back to where Gwilliams and Yorwarth were lighting a fire. At that moment Ali came up from the yurts. He had one large giggling woman in tow. With his free hand he was waving Crossman to come down to meet him. The sergeant did so, wondering what Ali was up to. The Turk seemed to have wives – or women – all over the place. Surely he had not found another one way out here?

  ‘This woman,’ said Ali, presenting the chubby girl, wrapped in goatskins which had not been completely cured, ‘is willing to sleep with me. There is one down in tent who want sleep with you. I tell her, no, he is too skinny man, no good stamina, but she still want sleep with you.’ He gave Crossman a broad grin, then said, ‘Go down, sergeant. Go on, go on. Her father not mind. I speak with him. We pay him a little money – not much – just a few coins. He happy to lend his wife to me. I do same for him, sometime, maybe. You go to older daughter.
She very ample,’ he cupped his hands to his chest. ‘She nice round lady.’

  ‘I think not, Ali.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ Ali waved a hand as if giving up on Crossman as a good sport. ‘You always like the Durham lady, in the camp. I see you sleep with her many time. But she no mind, you want to keep warm one night out in steppe. She no mind. Anyway, you no tell her, eh?’

  Crossman looked over his shoulder to make sure Pirce-Smith was not privy to this dangerous conversation.

  ‘Ali, you mustn’t keep saying I sleep with Mrs Durham. I don’t.’

  The Turk looked affronted. ‘You do. I see you.’

  ‘That was a long time ago. Several weeks ago,’ replied Crossman, becoming desperate. ‘I was ill. I – I was hardly aware of what I was doing. Besides, Mrs Durham and I are old friends.’

  ‘You be friendly with this girl, down in tent. She be friends with you. Easy.’

  ‘No, I can’t. I can’t really explain why I can’t, but I can’t.’

  Ali closed one eye and looked thoughtfully at Crossman. Then he nodded slowly. ‘Ah, now I see. You having troubles with the pissing, eh? You having troubles with water? Ali get you herb tonight, fix you right. All right, you no go with girl yet. It make you sore to go with her. I fix it up, later. Now, I go back to tent with this one.’ He pinched her breast, lightly, and she gave a low throaty laugh. ‘Not long, sergeant.’

  Ali returned to the camp later to perform his own ritual ablutions and to cook the meal. He preferred to do it himself, knowing that British soldiers were the worst cooks in the world. He was in fact a very good cook, especially when he was dealing with his own type of food: meat dishes like karniyarik and hunkar begendi with goat’s meat in place of beef. Of course, the soldiers did not mind someone doing the cooking, and it was a bonus when the meal was edible let alone delicious.

  After eating, Ali licked the fat off the fingers of his right hand, the left being retained for other less mentionable duties, and gave a deep sigh. He had drunk tea with Khazars, slept with a woman, and eaten his fill of his own food at a campfire. This was all that could be expected of life for a warrior such as himself, except for the occasional war, to liven it all up. He was one of those who had followed Xerxes across half a continent to teach the Greeks a lesson. So far as Ali was concerned, the lesson still had to be taught, since they hadn’t learned it all the other times. This thought normally irked him, but tonight he felt very good. He felt like a true warrior on the plains.