The Winter Soldiers
Page 33
As he had predicted, when speaking with Jane, the terror welled up within him like hot lava which threatened to smother his reason. His mind was ragged and frayed and he felt he was staggering through a horrible dream. In the flashes and smoke the ground took on a dirty yellow hue, which removed him somehow from reality. He wanted to get out of there, find a cool green spot under a tree, by a stream, and regain his sanity. If he could just have time to collect his wits, gather his senses and calm himself, he felt he could fight with more conviction.
He resisted the urge to turn round with all his strength of will, keeping his feet treading one after the other in a straight line. Blinding lights flickered and zigzagged in his racing brain. The air became hot, and the biting smoke from rifle and gun stung his eyes and took the lining off his mouth. The membranes of his nostrils burned. He was walking through the hazardous sulphur fires of Hell and he knew if he lost his footing he would perish in them, never to rise again.
Crossman suddenly became aware that Wynter had fired his Minié just over his right shoulder. He stopped himself, aimed, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. He realized he must have already fired the weapon somewhere along the charge. It took him twenty seconds to reload, fire again, and once more he ran through the hot air, still filled with bits of singing metal. Around his feet the stones danced, occasionally splitting in two as a musket ball struck them squarely. Once something flicked at his cap, like a lead wasp passing through. On, on he went, time stretching, his body obeying the commands of his brain reluctantly.
Until now, Crossman, like his comrades, had simply been treading in the footsteps of the officers. Those brave souls at the front, some of them mere boys, turned occasionally, waved a sword, and encouraged the rank and file to follow. Crossman now noticed another wave of British soldiers coming in from a different angle. He suddenly realized his group was not assaulting the Quarries directly, from the front, but was the left hook of a pincer movement. In fact they were attacking the flanks of the Mamelon: two equal forces from two sides. In this way they had managed to skirt the very edges of the minefields, losing the minimum of men to the field of fougasses. His heart filled a little, as the Quarries suddenly seemed a reachable objective. He was nearly there! How long had it been? A minute? An hour? An eternity?
With musket balls still zinging through the air, the two groups of attackers stormed the Quarries. They overwhelmed the Russians, rolled on and over them, driving them back. Crossman was exhilarated by a feeling of victory. He began to feel himself invulnerable, invincible. He had survived the charge! Surely then he would survive the day, whatever happened? A great joy washed through him. All the terror left him to be replaced by a rapidly swelling arrogance: a contempt for the weapons of the enemy and for that which issued forth. The words of a hymn came to him clearly: Immortal, invisible, God only wise.
He felt like God at that moment, as he and his comrades did exactly what they had severely criticized the French Zouaves for doing just a few minutes before: they continued on, towards the next objective. In their case this was the mighty Redan, which was as strongly fortified as the Malakoff, which those foolish French soldiers had tried to take.
A struck pebble hit him just below the knee and caused him to wince in pain. Just in time, Crossman remembered he was not God. He was not even an angel. He was a mere man, with mortal flesh. The wound was not bad, but it was enough to remind him that he could be killed at any moment. A British officer was shot to death a moment later, just under the walls of the Redan. Seeing this, Crossman sobered. He suddenly asked himself what he was doing out there, when the objective had been the Quarries. Wheeling about he would have returned to the Quarries where he was supposed to be. At that moment he heard the order to lie down and fire on the Redan’s embrasures. He did so, alongside many other British soldiers, while from behind him came the sound of a distant cheer and bugles signalling an advance. A second charge was taking place from the British lines.
Of course, he now recalled, our own reinforcements are coming up behind us. The 62nd are coming. The 62nd would consolidate the attack. Now the job was to allow them time to do it. Like those lying with him, he continued to pin down the Russian gunners with accurate fire, until finally ordered to retreat back to the Quarries. There they settled in with quiet pride, knowing they had completed their task. Men lay dead or wounded between the Quarries and the allied trenches, some of them Russians, many of them British. Crossman suddenly thought about his own men.
After a quick search, he found Wynter, Peterson and Yorwarth, all intact. They had all made it through. Flushed with success, and pride in themselves and the regiment, they just had time to share a cup of coffee between them, handed to them by a small drummer boy whose expression was a mixture of simple joy and anxiousness to please.
It was not over. The French held the Mamelon. The British held the Quarries. But the Russians were not going to lie down. Their counter-attacks began a short while later. The enemy came on again and fought desperately to regain their lost positions. Now it was the turn of the British in the Quarries to suffer the deadly showers of scalding rain. All night long it fell, pausing only for Russian ground attacks to take place.
In those pauses a many-throated animal rolled across the rough ground as a great grey wave in the half-light. It was a bristling gigantic beast with spines of steel. On either side of this huge shrieking monster were masters with sticks, driving it on, goading it to rush at the defenders of the Quarries. Each time it was driven back, leaving some of its scales lying on the ground. After the great beast had recoiled, and finally retreated back to its lair, those scales once more became men: soldiers from a different army, with different masters. Men who would never again see home.
In the Quarries there were other men, as desperate to hold on to what they had seized as those who tried to regain it. They moved backwards and forwards between utter exhaustion and frantic activity. The night made unimaginable what would have been terrible enough during daylight. Men drifted in and out of madness. Men needed to be frenzied and fever-brained to stay on this side of death. They fired their weapons until the barrels were so hot the powder cooked and burned before it was rammed down. They fired blindly, crazily, until their pouches were empty of cartridges.
And when their ammunition was gone they fought with fists and working tools. They threw rocks and bottles and foul curses into the faces of the enemy. They grappled with them, bit them, punched them, kicked them, drove them back time and time again. Having gained this stronghold, Crossman and his comrades were not going to let it go. They became primitive savages, almost animals, in that long night: snarling and growling, tearing at the clothes and bodies of enemy soldiers in the dark, pulling hair out from its roots, smashing down with rifle butts and boots on flesh and bone. And when they were not fighting they were digging, hot tears of tiredness mingling with the sweat that ran down their dirty faces as they scooped up dirt and stones with their bare hands to plug holes in the defences, listening with one ear, waiting for that screeching and shrieking from the Russians which preceded another assault.
At one relatively quiet point many of the British defenders of the Quarries fell fast asleep from sheer fatigue, dropping where they stood. But then a crucial moment arrived in the battle and a captain and a colonel climbed the makeshift wall together, and urged the men to rise and meet a new enemy attack. They came out of their deep slumber to fire musket and pistol haphazardly into a howling wave of Russians out in the night. Once again they used every resource to hand, especially their voices, with which they damned the enemy and dared them to advance. Light began to crawl up the sky from the east. The day was dawning on these men from the villages, towns, and cities; from the country shires of Great Britain and Ireland; from highlands, lowlands and islands; from valleys and downs; from estuaries and flatlands and wooded vales; from ridges and fells and river banks and marshes and coves.
And when morning finally came these exhausted shadows of what had on
ce been strong bold men were still holding the Quarries.