The Winter Soldiers

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  ‘Oh, yes, I can see it now. The ventsman, the man with the portfire, the spongeman – all preparing a camera for a shot at the enemy.’

  ‘No. Be serious. This is a remarkable change. History is being made.’

  Jarrard shrugged. ‘This Fenton. He seems to be just taking pictures of live officers.’

  ‘No, not necessarily. I’ve seen him photographing the troops too.’

  ‘What I mean is,’ Jarrard continued, ‘he should be taking pictures of dead ones too. Think of the impact back in Britain. Pictures of the battlefield after Inkerman. Soldiers with their guts hanging out. Shattered bodies. Limbs lying around. Men with no heads. Pictures of the cavalry walking back after the Balaclava charge.’ Jarrard appeared to drift away into a dream-place for a minute or two, before he continued. ‘That’d open the eyes of those damned politicians you have sitting on their fat asses in the comfort of their taverns and coffee houses. Maybe if they saw some pictures like that, there’d be no more wars.’

  ‘You have a point there, I concede. Only, better to show the dead and broken horses. That would cause an even greater sensation. Men are expendable, but good horseflesh is worth a lot of money. There would be tutting at Tattersalls. Breeders would be shocked to the core. The public would demand the instant return of the Army of the East, before any more animals were caused distress.’

  Jarrard snorted. ‘Jack, this war is turning you into a cynic.’

  ‘I was a cynic even before I came to the Crimea, Rupert. More to the point, are you getting anything out of this war? It’s gone a little dull on you, hasn’t it? Recently. Not much going on except a few howitzers and mortars lobbing their projectiles in the air, and one or two sorties. What are you finding to write about?’

  ‘Well, for a start your Lord Raglan has had a visit from yet another of my countrymen. A Captain George Brinton McClellan of the United States Army came to have a look at your siege. He wanted coverage in my paper, wouldn’t you guess it. Ambitious man, McClellan. Wants to be a general – don’t they all – and knows the value of publicity back home. I was happy to oblige of course. My editor liked the piece enormously. Folks over the Atlantic are not much interested in foreign wars unless we can tell them that the British have called in an American to give advice on strategy and tactics and all those things warriors need to win a war.’

  ‘Is that what he’s here for? To advise?’

  ‘Not at all,’ replied the unruffled Jarrard, ‘but well Hell, I’ve got to spice up the story for them. What’s the point in saying he’s just here for a jaunt?’

  ‘I believe it’s you who’s incorrigible – not Gwilliams.’

  ‘Don’t let’s get back on to him again. Oh, and I covered a quaint little wedding, with a soldier and his bride jumping over a broomstick to make the marriage official. No priest. Just a damn broomstick. I take it that’s all legal?’

  ‘So far as I know they only need permission from the colonel and to pronounce their intention to be wed and to exchange their vows. Here, in the army, we usually have a “best man” at the wedding too. In case the groom gets killed in battle and the new wife is left destitute. It’s the best man’s job to marry the widow if this happens. Usually he’s a good friend of the groom.’

  ‘He would have to be. And either well-heeled or a handsome son-of-a-bitch, otherwise the new wife might think it better to remain poor. We have it too. But I’ve often wondered, what happens if both the groom and best man are shot to pieces with the same shell?’

  ‘Then one must assume the lady will either go hunting or fall back on her own resources, but you know, if a widow has children to care for – to clothe, feed and provide shelter for – she must have a certain income or they will starve. What could a woman do here in the Crimea? Work as a sutler perhaps, or for one of the more established sutlers, but that’s poor employment – a few pence a day, at the most. I can’t think of any answer to it. I just pity the poor creatures who are left destitute and hope they can make their way back to Britain where the parish can take care of them.’

  ‘I’ve heard,’ said Jarrard, ‘that you have reached into your own pocket.’

  ‘Most right thinking men would, would they not? Especially for wives of the regiment.’

  Crossman spent the best part of an hour with Jarrard, who then said he had to be up and about, looking for copy. ‘Got to keep up with fellahs like Russell. Can’t have The Times getting all the exclusives.’

  ‘Surely The Times is no competition for your paper in New York?’

  ‘Word gets around though. William Russell is a winner. Rupert Jarrard comes in second. Can’t have that. Oh, and by the way, there’re some point-to-point races tomorrow, in the south valley. Will you be there?’

  ‘If I can make myself small. You know it’s mostly officers at those meets.’

  Jarrard left Crossman, who immediately lit his chibouque. Finding he was creating a fug in the small room cluttered with the cots of his men, he moved to the doorway. The weather had improved and a low, weak sun nestled in the hills to the east. Crimean weather was very changeable, switching from day to day without any sound or apparent reason. Tartars had a saying: If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute. Some days it seemed as if the Arctic had moved down to replace the peninsula in the Black Sea. On others the sky was dark and sombre, with hardly any light penetrating the clouds. Still others it drizzled, or rained, or sleeted, or snowed. On the odd occasion it was like today, a mild, almost spring-weather day, with a water-colour-blue-wash sky.

  So, although it was not warm, it was not unpleasant standing leaning on the doorjamb dressed in an unbuttoned coatee. He puffed away with pleasure on the rough tobacco which had been home-grown out near Yalta and cured at Balaclava. Suddenly a voice bellowed from afar, breaking his reverie. He turned angrily to face the speaker, who was striding towards him. It was an officer from the Highland Brigade, an elderly and rather grizzled major, but not, thank the Lord, Crossman’s father.

  ‘You there,’ said the venerable major. ‘Sergeant, is it?’ He peered closely at Crossman’s coatee, for the stripes had faded almost out of sight.

  ‘Yes, sir. Sergeant Crossman, of the 88th.’ Crossman emphasized the number, so that the major was fully aware that he was not from any Highland regiment. The officer himself was from the 79th Foot, called the Cameron Highlanders. Crossman came to attention as the major strode on and stood before him, hands on hips.

  ‘What are you doing here, sergeant?’ asked the officer, staring at him keenly. ‘Convalescence?’

  There were one or two hospitals in Kadikoi, including Mrs Seacole’s British Hotel, and men were sent down there from the front to recover from wounds or illnesses which were not serious enough – or too serious – to ship them to Barrack Hospital at Scutari, where the firm no-nonsense Miss Nightingale was earning the reputation more suited to a powerful dowager, sweeping through with her army of thirty-eight nurses and demanding that the mattresses be washed, the rotting floors repaired, the vermin cleared and the overflowing sewage cleaned up.

  ‘No, sir,’ replied Crossman, still at attention. ‘Special duties, sir.’

  ‘Special duties?’ The major frowned. ‘What sort of duties?’

  ‘You have to speak to Major Lovelace of the Rifles, for that information. I’m not at liberty to divulge it, Sir.’

  The major’s frown deepened and his drooping grey moustache seemed to drop yet another inch. ‘Well, look here, sergeant,’ he said at last, tapping his boot with a riding crop, ‘you don’t seem to be doing very much at all at the moment. I need someone to teach school. The Highland Brigade has brought only one schoolmaster-sergeant to the Crimea and he’s fallen sick. I’ve got a chapel full of wild urchins, several soldiers and some of the locals waiting to have their heads stuffed with knowledge. You’re the man to do it.’

  A chill of fear went through Crossman. ‘Major Lovelace . . .’ he began, but was interrupted with an impatient, ‘Don’t know the man. Doesn’t seem to be he
re, does he? Can’t be doing with all this. Have a great deal of work on my hands at the moment. Colonel wants a school teacher and, Sergeant Crossman, you’re it. Report to the chapel at the top of the rise, where you’ll find your eager audience waiting.’

  ‘I’m not a fit person to teach school, sir,’ said the panicking Crossman, a last ditch attempt.

  ‘Nonsense. You sound as if you’ve had some education. Not out of the gutter, are you? Sound like a steward from some provincial noble’s estate, or a store clerk aspiring to the gentry if you ask me, sergeant. Couldn’t care less which. Haven’t the time to bother. Indeed at some other time I might resent a common soldier puffing himself up, trying to escape his station in life, but at the moment I’m desperate for anyone. Now, you will go to the chapel, and you will take care of this matter. Am I understood? You don’t have to teach ’em Greek or Latin. Just adding and subtraction, multiplication and division, reading, writing, stuff like that. Get the youngsters reading the Bible. If they read the Bible they’ll learn the difference between good and evil and stop thieving from the tents and sutlers’ stalls and we’ll have a lot less urchin-crime.’

  Crossman’s heart sank. He knew he was trapped. The major was watching him like a hawk. He was going to have to do what he was told and there was no help for it. Tapping out his pipe on his boot heel, he went back into the hovel and collected his fur coat, hat and gloves. He joined the major a few moments later and the pair of them walked up the rutted street towards the chapel. At the top of the street the major parted company with him. ‘I know you now, Sergeant Crossman of the 88th. I shall send someone to check on you later. Do a good job and I’ll recommend you to your colonel. Do a bad one, or try to skip duty, and I’ll hang you up by your testicles from the chapel flagpole. Am I clear?’

  ‘Oh, very clear, sir,’ replied Crossman, resigned.

  Crossman continued trudging towards the chapel, which loomed large at the end of the village. It was a square stone-and-mortar building, one room, with comparatively elaborate-looking internal architecture in parts, due to the fact that it had been built as a Russian Orthodox church for the peasants. It had been abandoned as a place of worship and had become a barn to shelter livestock through the winter. When the Highland Brigade took it over, the roof had collapsed in the middle and the door was off its hinges. A little work from the regiments restored it sufficiently to be of use as a storeroom and school. Down one end there were boxes, crates and canvas bundles filling about half the floor space, down the other were some benches. It was into this area that Crossman dragged his feet. He was thoroughly daunted by what he saw.

  Sitting on the benches was every assortment of childhood – except children in fine clothes. Most were dirty-faced and dressed raggedly, though some had rough but serviceable coats. There was one young boy, matted hair like that on a camel’s rear, a filthy face with two white eyes staring from it, crooked teeth and ears like large coins stuck to the side of his head, a girl’s ragged dress underneath and a cut down frock coat with the tails dragging at his heels over all. In his grubby hands he clutched a fur hat that appeared to have caught the mange.

  This child was fairly typical of the whole class. Some of the girls wore boys’ trousers. Some of the boys, like this one, wore dresses. It all depended on whether they had an older brother or sister, for hand-me-downs were all that was available to most families. Why waste good money on materials, needle and thread, for something that the child was going to shed within the year? No one would think of making fun of a boy in girl’s clothes: it was too common to be unusual. For Crossman it was difficult to tell the difference, since all had long, greasy hair, countenances covered by layers of grime, and big boots.

  There were of course not only army brats there, but local urchins too, sent along by their mothers to get them out of the way. That education might improve their lot was an enlightened view which would have been difficult to find. Some of the local children had chosen to be there, rather than clearing fields of stones, or chopping wood. It was a hard world for a youngster and sitting on a bench learning a foreign alphabet by rote was a lot easier than hauling water. At that age they learned very fast and most of them now spoke English and French: they needed to, to sell anything they could get their hands on to the soldiers. They learned their numbers too, for the same reason, and it was a cunning soldier who could cheat a six-year-old Tartar out of a farthing.

  So far as the army was concerned, camp followers’ children were better off under the watchful eye of a schoolmaster-sergeant than running wild around the camps. They too thieved: anything edible for the most part, but also kit to sell. They would wander out into the spent battlefields to look for weapons and equipment, left by dead and dying soldiers, which they could sell, even to the Russians during a truce. The French would buy Russian and British arms, and the British would purchase French and Russian weapons. There’s nothing a soldier likes more than a souvenir of his holiday in the Crimea, to take home and hang on the wall of his house.

  Crossman surveyed the rest of the class with a wary eye. At the back of the room sat the soldiers: would-be paymaster-sergeants, orderly room clerks, quartermaster-sergeants, and the like. It was for their benefit that the army had formed these schools. As more and more administrative work was devolved to ordinary soldiers, more education was needed by those soldiers. The children, and anyone else that liked to be present, were an add-on to the original idea. There were even two wives in the room, prepared to listen while they sewed, though education was of little use to such women.

  ‘Aaa-hem,’ said the nervous Crossman, clearing his throat.

  One ferret-faced child immediately wrote this down on her slate. Two others, seeing this, did the same, laboriously, the chalk squealing and setting teeth on edge. ‘Ahem. Can – can anyone tell me where the last lesson left off? What was the content or the subject?’

  Blank looks were the reply to this general question. Thirty pairs of eyes stared straight into his face. When he stared back in apprehension, several of those pairs were suddenly diverted, switching to study rafters, floor and walls, equally terrified that they would be asked a question directly. What the students saw was a tall, rather stern-looking figure with a fierce look in his eyes, whose toffee-nosed speech indicated that he was learned beyond any ordinary schoolmaster-sergeant. Clearly this man knew everything there was to know in the world and would come down hard on those who failed to live up to the same standard.

  ‘Come, come,’ cried Crossman, unconciously adopting the phrases of his old schoolmasters, ‘surely we know what the last lesson was about? Anyone? You, the soldier at the back. Yes, the lance-corporal?’

  ‘Me, sir?’

  ‘I’m not sir, I’m Sergeant Crossman. Perhaps I should have told you that at the outset. My name is Crossman, Sergeant Crossman. It’s no good you telling me all your names, I’ll never remember them. Now, corporal, what was it that the last tutor was teaching you?’

  ‘Why pick on me, I ’aven’t done anythin’, sergeant.’ He sounded so much like Wynter that Crossman wanted to bark at him straight away, but managed to refrain.

  ‘I’m not picking on you as a punishment, man. I thought you looked intelligent enough to remember what happened yesterday. Clearly I was wrong.’ Again, to his discredit, his old schoolmaster’s voice came out of his mouth. ‘You appear to have the retention span of a cranefly.’

  ‘It was numbers,’ said one of the women, without looking up from her sewing. ‘Addin’ up and takin’ away.’

  ‘Good,’ said Crossman, sweating a little despite the coldness of the room. ‘Numbers. Let’s start with you. The child in the front. What is the sum total of five and three?’

  The child immediately burst into tears.

  ‘Not that child then, another one,’ said Crossman, wildly. ‘Anyone? You, the bigger boy.’

  ‘Ate.’

  ‘Very good. Yes, eight. The sum of five and three is eight. Now, what about three and five? Is that the same answe
r?’

  The boy, wearing the hat of a French Zouave, screwed up his face. ‘Is that a trick question?’

  ‘It’s just a question. An ordinary question. Anyway, you don’t have to answer. One of the others. The girl with the runny nose.’

  The children all turned to look at each other, to see who had the runny nose. Several of them started to reply at once, after their neighbour had pointed to them, while others ran a well-practised sleeve under the offending organ.

  ‘Oh, God,’ groaned Crossman, to himself. ‘I knew it would be like this.’

  At that moment the lean figure of the elderly adjutant from the Highland Brigade poked his head around the doorway and, seeing Crossman in place, said, ‘Well done, sergeant! I knew you’d take to it like a fish to water. You chaps who aspire to higher things! I envy you. I’ve nowhere to go, being as it were, at the peak of my ambition. Where next for a man of noble blood?’ He confessed quietly, ‘I never wished for a colonelcy. Too much responsibility.’

  With that, the major was gone, out into the sunshine again. If he did but know it, that was Crossman’s own sole ambition at the moment. To be out in the sunshine. Nothing more. Instead he was stuck in a classroom full of expectant students. If he could have cried ‘Woe is me!’ without frightening thirty men, women and children, he would have done so without question. Now they stared at him like an exhibit in a museum. What was he to do? Carry on with this arithmetic, which did not seem to be going well at all, or start some new train of learning? Suddenly he had a bright idea. Why not teach them something he was interested in himself? Surely his enthusiasm would be catching and they would all enjoy the lesson, instead of treating it like some cavalry skirmish, he being the cavalry and they being the Russian gunners at their guns? Inventions and discoveries, that was the thing!