The Winter Soldiers

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  ‘I just came in to lour,’ he said to Yorwarth. ‘Yon fowlk tell’t me thee had a kedge like a mawkin an’ I came to lour.’

  It transpired that the soldier came from Suffolk and his speech was so splattered with dialect words only East Anglians could understand him. A ‘mawkin’ turned out to be a scarecrow. The soldier wanted to know whether Yorwarth’s aberration affected his ability to do everyday ordinary tasks, like eating, because he, the soldier, could not do his duties now. It was impossible for him to pick up a musket, load, aim or fire. Until the surgeons got around to resetting his limb, he was on light duties.

  Other poor creatures came in at odd times after that. Men with feet on backwards. Men with scapulas sticking up like angel’s wings out of their backs. One man had three ribs that had been broken, had exited through his chest, and had subsequently knitted together with their partners to form exposed hoops of white bone. They all took the pilgrimage from whatever part of the Crimea they resided in to meet with the latest victim of wrongly-set fractures. It was as if they were suddenly joined in mind and spirit, were brothers-of-the-bone.

  ‘What a bunch of mishaps,’ cried Wynter. ‘They give me the creeps, Yorry. Don’t you go invitin’ ’em here. It’s enough to turn a sane man, watching that lot drag themselves in and start droolin’ over your cot.’

  Yorwarth could not turn them away, though, once they had made the journey to his bedside. They continued to arrive until finally Crossman put a stop to it. There was a danger that the special nature of their duties would be compromised with outsiders lounging around the hovel.

  One morning Crossman woke and looked out of the hovel window to see his father walking down towards Balaclava Harbour. Crossman dressed hurriedly – no great feat since he was halfway there already – and followed in his father’s wake. Could it be that the old man was finally embarking for Britain? It would be good to get him gone. Crossman felt he could not go anywhere for fear of running into him. Yet, having taken the muddy track down to the waterside, he found his father had merely set up his easel and was finishing a painting he had obviously started at some other time. It was of the ships at anchor.

  The hustle and bustle of humanity in this part of the peninsula was considerable. There were sailors, soldiers, and civilians, some carrying goods, some merely out for the air, all milling around, dodging each other, working derricks and ropes and pulleys. It was pleasant confusion. One could almost imagine oneself back in Portsmouth. Within this great heaving mass of people, Crossman had been able to sneak up behind his father and look over his shoulder without being noticed. He found himself staring in astonishment at what appeared to him, though he was no student of art, a brilliant painting. His father had captured movement as well as form on that stretch of canvas. Crossman now remembered something about his father’s hero, John Constable. It seemed that particular painter had eased himself away from the static, motionless styles of previous centuries and concentrated on showing how the wind swayed and bent the twigs, branches and boughs of trees. Saplings bent further than thicker stems of wood, and those thicker stems less than boughs. Clouds had the appearance of boating, as they did in the real world, across the heavens. The sum of such consideration was that the painting came alive. Figures seemed to be doing things, not just standing there, stiff and posed. Vehicles, ships, wind-blown objects, were actually moving on the landscape.

  Crossman saw that his father was adding the finishing touches to a ship leaving the harbour with all its sails billowing, its hull leaning on waves that battered its bows, its flags fluttering in the breeze. He even recognized the ship. It was the Surprise, a rather elderly craft. Crossman was amazed at how his father had caught the graceful motion of the vessel with just the right strokes of the brush, with a delicate smearing of the paint. Even the sunlight on the water seemed to be dancing to a particular tune of nature. How had he done that? How could he do that? He was a boorish oaf. How had such a man with such an ugly disposition managed to create something so beautiful, so courageously vital, so animated it enchanted.

  At that moment his father turned and looked up at him, pausing in mid-stroke. Crossman was suddenly aware that he must have given an audible gasp of awe. Major Kirk frowned, went that purply-red colour which often preceded a bout of rage, and glared with baleful eyes at his son.

  ‘What the Hell do you want, sir? Sneakin’ up on a man like that? Come to stab me in the back, eh, you scamp?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort, Father,’ protested Crossman. ‘I was merely admiring your painting.’

  The old man turned and looked at his work.

  ‘Didn’t know I was an artist, did you, sir?’ The redness left his complexion and he went almost dreamy for a few moments. ‘Not just a military sketcher, but a proper painter, eh? It’s the one thing that helps me relax. Calms me. People seem to like ’em, too. I have a running hind hanging in the palace, believe it or not. Running through the heather and gorse of a Scottish hillside. Painted it one morning in Canlish Glen, just the other side of Ben Law. The dew . . .’ He suddenly seemed to realize to whom he was speaking and stiffened. ‘But that’s no concern of yours. I suggest you get on your way, sergeant. Surely you have duties to perform? Why aren’t you up on the line, sir? I understand you dawdle in that place yonder, kicking your heels all day. Are you a coward, sir? My own son a coward? Even if he is a chance-child, he carries my blood and he should carry it with pride.’

  Crossman bristled. ‘I am not a coward, Father. I have special duties.’

  ‘What, like a cook, or a surgeon’s mate?’

  ‘Not like either of those gentlemen.’ Despite the fact that they were in the regiment to help the sick and wounded, surgeons were regarded as lowly creatures by their fellow officers. Most fighting officers held such creatures in contempt. It therefore followed that the surgeon’s staff was held to be even less worthy. They carried buckets of gore and severed limbs to the body part dumps, where the seagulls and rats grew fat. His father was insulting him in the grossest fashion, as they were buffeted by a crew just flushed from a ship and on their way up to the sutlers’ bazaar. Crossman felt a need to justify himself. ‘I – I am sent out on missions, amongst the enemy. There is in fact a price on my head. Put there by the Cossacks.’

  Even before it was out of his mouth, Crossman felt like biting off his tongue. It was not done, to brag in such a way. His father was of the old school who believed you did something and let other people talk about it. You didn’t parade your virtues, even in front of family. That was brash and vulgar. One could ravish a maid in the pantry. That was not coarse, so long as one was not discovered in the act. But to fly the boasting flag, why that was contemptible. He saw his father grimace in distaste and knew he had to leave the old man to his painting.

  ‘Go home, Father,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘I know you think I’ve lost my dignity, but yours went with the wind. You hang on here as if you believe you’re making a point. What you’re actually doing is making yourself look foolish.’

  There was no greater sin than looking foolish.

  ‘How dare you!’

  Crossman let his father have the last word. He walked away from him, forcing a passage through the many bodies on the quays. His heart was beating fast after this second encounter with the old man. Luckily those around him were too busy to notice how heated the exchanges had been. It would not do to let word get back to Colonel Hawke that Crossman had sought out the old man, for that was how it seemed. And was that so very far from the truth? Perhaps he had been waiting for this chance to have another hot discussion with his father. How stubborn his father was: and how unforgivable. How could you pardon a man who showed no remorse for the wrongs he had done to you and your mother? Not a glimmer of contrition had passed over the face of his father. Chance-child his father had called him. How base and humiliating! Even love-child would have been better than that. But there had been no love in the union. It had not formed part of the seduction. Simply lust on his father’s side
and helplessness on his mother’s. It was a cruel man who took a powerless woman and then left her to die in a world where morals were fashioned of iron.

  Crossman arrived back at the hovel in a miserable state. Peterson immediately tried to engage him in a conversation about her shoulder, telling him she was now fully recovered.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, shortly. ‘Fine. Don’t bother me now.’

  He went up the stairs and to his room.

  Peterson was a veteran soldier with a soldier’s rough ways and cynical tongue, but she was also a woman. She saw that Crossman was agitated and part of her instantly wanted to reach out to him, discover the problem, and offer solace. She was not the type of woman who would offer her breast as a pillow to a man, then stroke the head that lay there, but she still wanted to listen, to sympathize, to heal. Thus she followed Crossman upstairs, while Wynter snored on his cot, Gwilliams continued to darn his socks and Yorwarth wrote a letter home.

  ‘Sergeant?’ she said, peering into the room. ‘Can I say something?’

  Crossman was lying on his own cot. Shielding his eyes from the light at the window. ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘You seem – upset, sergeant.’

  ‘I am a little unhappy, yes.’

  ‘Is it something we’ve done wrong – the peloton?’

  He gave a short ironic laugh. ‘I wish it were.’ For a minute or two he fell silent again, then he felt inclined to talk. ‘No, it’s my father. You know my father is here in the Crimea, Peterson? No, of course you didn’t. Well, he was a major in the 93rd, but now he’s sold out. In order to annoy me he remains here, as a civilian.’

  ‘That annoys you, sergeant?’

  ‘My father and I hate each other.’

  Peterson sucked in her breath. She had never particularly got on with her own parents, a Rutland couple who had a smallholding out in the deep countryside. They had raised her to marry a neighbouring young yokel with seed for brains and a face like a frog. Not that the face had bothered her much, she had not been a pretty girl herself. And the fact that he had been a simple boy, who just happened to inherit a pig farm, could not be held against him either. It was the idea of marriage itself that had frightened her. When she had refused to accept the idea of being wed to this dolt, her parents had bombarded her with recriminations, threats, and various other verbal missiles. Her father had even tried beating her, but she had soon put a stop to that, he being frail and she being wiry and strong at the time. So, wearing her father’s clothes, she had tried her hand at being a cabinet maker and when the men had forced her out of that job she had joined the next regiment that passed through Rutland.

  So, Peterson was not overfond of her own next of kin, but she would never have used the word hate. The fact that Crossman had used it horrified her. If he had said he despised the Holy Trinity it could not have shocked her more.

  ‘Maybe you just have a difference of opinion?’ she suggested, quietly. ‘All folk don’t think alike.’

  Crossman remained silent and she got the feeling that her statement had been so pathetically empty for him they did not even warrant a reply. Then suddenly, he groaned, and said, ‘Oh my God.’ Clearly he was very distressed.

  She knelt by his cot. ‘Sergeant?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Peterson. This is not the way you should see your leader.’

  ‘Leaders are human too. We’re all weak in different ways.’

  ‘That’s true. I never realized how weak I am. It’s a terrible thing to hate one’s father. A terrible thing. I see it tear my mother – my stepmother – I see it tear her in two. I can’t understand how such a lovely, gentle lady could have married an oaf like him. She has such a sweet soul, Peterson. You have no idea what she has to put up with. Yet she did marry him. Was he so very different as a young man? I can’t think it. People don’t change that much. Dashing, I suppose. Looking at his portrait he was a handsome devil, even if the painter lied a little. He rode to hounds magnificently. He was a horseman to the core. I suppose a young woman would be taken with such things. She couldn’t have known him, not properly. I don’t believe she knew him at all. She could not have found out what he was really like until she had lived with him. People don’t, do they? They’re so stiff and formal with each other during the courtship, with chaperones present and their every move watched and monitored. How can you possibly get to know someone in those circumstances? No wonder men and women often marry their cousins, whom they’ve known from the nursery, rather than strangers. It’s not just that their cousins are available to them. They marry them because they have a certain insight to their dispositions, their spirits, their inner selves. One can’t marry one’s brother or sister, so the next best thing is a cousin.’

  ‘Sergeant!’ reproved Peterson. ‘Incest isn’t a nice subject.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I forgot I was talking to a woman.’

  During the course of this conversation, Peterson had somehow taken Crossman’s hand in her own. While he talked she was holding his hand tightly, a sort of comfort and encouragement for him to get it all off his chest. It was almost an unconscious gesture, the holding of hands, but now they had become aware of it. He realized that she had rough, coarse skin – not the hands of a gentle maid – and she was chagrined to find that his skin, though chapped and hardened by the Crimean war, was basically silkier than her own. The hands of a gentleman put to common work later in life. He had never chopped wood as a child, never washed clothes in crude soapy water with a pumice stone, never hacked at nettles with a sickle or dug thorny thistles from ditches, never done a thousand things that Peterson had done as ordinary everyday chores during her growing-up. They both became embarrassed, aware of their different stations in life, and the hands were dropped almost simultaneously.

  ‘Perhaps your father will soon get tired of baiting you, sergeant,’ she suggested, after a suitable silence. ‘Perhaps he’ll go home.’

  ‘I would like to think so.’ The tender moment had passed. Peterson’s mothering instinct was hidden again. She was back to being a soldier, sympathizing with one of her comrades.

  Downstairs there was some kind of commotion going on. Wynter’s voice could be heard raised in excitement. Someone played softly on a bugle: a haunting tune that in any other atmosphere might have forced a silence on war and had even the enemy looking into their own souls. This was followed by a few rasping notes on the instrument, some cries and jeers, and the sound of heavy boots taking the stairs two at a time.

  Peterson leapt to her feet just as Wynter entered the room. There was a split second when a shadow of suspicion crossed Wynter’s face, then the excitement came back, and he cried, ‘Sergeant? Peterson? I’m learnin’ to play the bugle! Lance-Corporal Mainwaring, down the stairs, he said not many people can blow a bugle first time. Well, I did. It seemed to come natural. Like I’ve got music in my blood. I might be a trumpeter one day, if I practise hard, like Mainwaring says.’ He put the battered instrument to his lips, his cheeks puffed, his eyes bulged, his nostrils flared. To Crossman’s horror he then sent out a note that would have indeed been enough to awaken the dead in the morning. It blasted through the room like a warning from an archangel that the world was about to come to an end. It brought water to Crossman’s eyes. He sat bolt upright on his cot.

  ‘You do that just once more,’ he told Wynter, ‘and I’ll have you strapped to the wheel and flogged before you have time to inhale again.’

  The triumph went out of Wynter’s expression, to be replaced by a hurt look. He turned to Peterson for some kind words. She, after all, was a woman, and would appreciate music more than a man like the sergeant.

  ‘You don’t need to blow out your cheeks like that,’ advised Peterson, unimpressed by the blare. ‘In fact it’s better you don’t. The sound comes from the lips, not from the lungs.’

  ‘What do you know about playing the bugle?’ cried Wynter, now thoroughly miffed.

  She snatched it out of his hand, wiped the mouthpiece carefully, a
nd then gave a passable rendition of ‘Greensleeves’.

  ‘Huh!’ said Wynter, taking it back. ‘You would, wouldn’t you? You always take it away from me, whatever. I find I’m good at somethin’ and you take it away from me. That’s typical, that is. A man can’t find somethin’ in his soul that’s his own. You always have to spoil it. Well Mainwaring says I’ve got the stuff, and if I practise . . .’

  ‘If you practise here, Wynter, I’ll have you shot from the mouth of a cannon.’

  ‘But sergeant – I need a hobby,’ replied Wynter, stubbornly, seeing his fun evaporate before his eyes.

  ‘Take up embroidery.’

  Wynter stamped from the room. Peterson watched him go, hoping he had not seen her kneeling by the sergeant’s cot. It had all been perfectly innocent, but the circumstances looked strange. Strange enough to feed Wynter’s imagination. Hopefully he had seen nothing, or if he had it had been too swift for him to be sure of anything.

  ‘I think you had better join the others, Peterson,’ said Crossman, standing up. ‘Make sure that Lance-Corporal Mainwaring takes his instrument of torture with him when he leaves.’

  ‘Yes, sergeant.’ She went to the head of the stairs.

  ‘Oh, and Peterson?’

  ‘Yes, sergeant?’

  ‘Thank you – for the – the comfort.’ He added dryly. ‘There’s not much that can be done for a tortured spirit like mine, but the thought is very much appreciated.’