Attack on the Redan

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  ‘They’re not going to make it,’ said Lovelace, finality in his voice. ‘No – they’re turning back. What an impossible task . . .’

  Crossman’s spyglass was on the British lines. He said, ‘Our chaps are going in, regardless.’

  Lovelace swung round muttering venomously, ‘Where are our guns? Why aren’t our guns pounding the Ruskies while we advance? God damn the Staff. I could have run a better war when I was six years of age. It’s nothing short of damn butchery.’

  The pair could see the Russians standing four deep behind and around their guns on the Redan. The guns blazed away from the earthworks on the advancing British with something like contempt. Clearly the pounding from the allied barrage the day before had done little to damage the Russian batteries.

  The Rifle Brigade skirmishers went down like hares at a hare shoot at first, before meeting that curtain of swishing grapeshot and canister which chopped them more finely. Those behind them, men of the regiments of foot, rolled in and out of shell holes in the scrubby grassland, more going in than coming out.

  Small things caught Crossman’s eye.

  There was an abattis in front of the Redan. A young ensign was trying to climb through it, getting tangled in the branches of the felled trees, becoming infuriated when his uniform snagged. The young man dropped his weapon in order to use both hands to snap away dead twigs that impeded his progress, now being hopelessly caught and more concerned with freeing himself than killing the enemy. Crossman then saw something with wiry legs flash from the face of the youth, as the boy was finally hit in the head. Whatever it was went flying like a silver spider with bright eyes through the sunlight. It was a moment before Crossman realized they were spectacles which had flown from the lad’s face and now dangled on a bough some twenty feet away from the nose on which they had once rested.

  ‘Poor boy,’ Crossman murmured. ‘Some mother will grieve.’

  There were other soldiers draped in the branches of the abattis, hanging like dead birds on a gamekeeper’s gibbet.

  A senior officer with drawn sword ran out in front to attempt to urge his men forward and was shot stone dead.

  A woolbag man who looked remarkably like Crossman’s old form master at Harrow tried to protect himself by holding his bag in front of him, only to have it punctured by accurate musket fire. The dead man’s fall was broken by his soft load.

  The Naval Brigade was fighting well and gave some hope to Crossman’s fluttering heart, but even they collapsed in the end. Canister and shot did for them as it had done for others. They could no more survive a blizzard of metal than could their comrades.

  ‘It’s a lost cause,’ said Lovelace, removing the glass from his eye and refusing to watch further slaughter. ‘Lost, damn it.’

  Crossman, feeling emotional himself, was nevertheless amazed to see the major wipe away tears from his cheeks. What a harrowing experience this voyeurism was. Yet down below gentlemen travellers, women from various classes, camp followers, civilian traders – all had gathered to watch the battle for entertainment. Crossman’s erstwhile lover, Mrs Lavinia Durham, wife of a quartermaster captain, was down there somewhere in the crowd. How could they do it? It was terrible having to take part in a battle. Worse not being able to. Worse still having to stand and watch the bloody mincing of a thousand courageous young men.

  After the battle the heavy losses were such that a quiet period followed for Crossman and his band. No one, including the usually zealous and irrepressible Colonel Hawke, felt like raising any initiatives. Even his steel soul was not immune to the air of torpor that hung over the allied camps. This heavy mood of depression in the Army of the East permeated from Raglan himself right down through the ranks to the lowest new recruit. Any activity was performed in a listless, apathetic way. Some could not believe the attack had failed, others had merely had their own fears confirmed. Many mistakes had been made. Criticism from London was fierce. There was talk that Lord Raglan would be replaced as commander in chief. He was ill, some said with the cholera, and needed rest and care in a more pleasant environment. The short-lived air of optimism before the battle, when everyone thought they might be going home, had now evaporated completely. They felt they would be in the Crimea forever.

  Several days later Crossman and Lovelace were in the farmhouse office of Colonel Hawke, their senior in this cell of spies and saboteurs. The lean and sharp-eyed Hawke stared down gloomily at the top of a desk made from old barn wall planks and rafter beams. Crossman had never seen his superior looking so defeated, so sorely oppressed by events. Usually the colonel was an optimist, preferring to see the advantages rather than the setbacks.

  ‘Lacy Yea is dead,’ said Hawke. ‘He was a fine officer – one of our finest. Sir John Campbell fell. Colonel Shadforth, gone too. A particular friend of mine, Captain Forman.’ He looked up. ‘Sir George Brown has a lot to answer for.’

  ‘Can we blame one man?’ asked Lovelace. ‘I mean, he commanded, it’s true, but there were others who could have prevented it.’

  Hawke seemed not to have heard him. ‘Half a thousand men, gone at a stroke. We can’t afford such losses. Thirty-one officers! Thirty-one. What a mess. There’ll be no bloody poems about this blunder, that’s for sure. Total humiliation, for both us and the French. To expect 2000 soldiers to cross a quarter of mile of shell-battered glacis without artillery support? Surely they must rid us of that meddlesome field marshal now? We need strong leadership, not damn obsequious clerks running the war.’

  Crossman felt awkward. He did not like being in a room where senior officers were criticizing generals and Staff. He was, after all, only a sergeant. It didn’t sit right with him. This sort of talk should have been for the ears of Lovelace only. Yet Hawke seemed quite oblivious of a the presence of sergeant from a line regiment. The colonel continued to rant, in between praising the courage and actions of the officers, and rank and file, who had taken part in the attempted storming of the Redan.

  ‘Brown and Pennefather are said to be going home. They should take that senile old man with them.’

  ‘Sir . . .’ began Crossman, his discomfort having increased.

  Hawke looked up through misty eyes and seemed to see Crossman for the first time.

  ‘Yes, sergeant?’

  ‘I – nothing. Is there something you wish me to do, sir? Do you have a fox hunt for me?’

  ‘Do I? Oh, yes. Yes, I do. The menace of the Russian sharpshooter is ever with us, sergeant. Sadly it looks as if this war will continue, though we had thought it might end today. I don’t know what the plans of the high command are, but I imagine we’ll be licking our wounds for the next few weeks before trying again. In the meantime, there will be sharpshooters thinning the numbers of our picquets and soldiers in the trenches. I want you to devise of way of thinning their numbers.’

  ‘The sharpshooters.’

  ‘That’s what I said, didn’t I?’

  Crossman did not like to point out that the statement had been ambiguous, that the colonel could have meant the Russian troops and not just those few who took vantage points and picked off unwary allied soldiers.

  ‘Yes, sir, I believe you did. Will that be all, sir?’

  ‘Yes, for now.’ The iron-grey colonel stared keenly at Crossman from behind his desk. ‘I need not emphasise the need for you to remain silent on the manner and content of the conversations that have taken place in this room.’

  Lovelace said, ‘I think I can vouch for the sergeant’s discretion, sir. He is one of us.’

  Hawke looked thoughtful. ‘Yes, he is, isn’t he? Heart and soul, I hope. Well, let me know what you come up with, sergeant. Here’s a chance to reveal what ingenuity lies between those ears. A sergeant, given a chance to use his own resourcefulness! There’s a thing in this modern army.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Crossman left the farmhouse and made his way to the hovel which he shared with his small band of men in Kadikoi village, just outside Balaclava Harbour. He found Peterson
there. Peterson’s gender was not a secret amongst the peloton, though hidden from the army in general. She was one of a rare breed of women wearing the uniform of a soldier. At that precise moment she was staring disgustedly at a shiny new rifle-musket which lay on her cot. Her face was as sombre as a November day at Stonehenge.

  ‘Peterson?’

  The lance-corporal looked up and said glumly, ‘Oh, hello sergeant.’

  ‘You didn’t need to leave the trenches today?’

  ‘There was a need, but no we didn’t go, sergeant. Good job. We’d have been shot to bits, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘In one of the drinking huts.’

  Crossman nodded, looking through the glassless window at the sutlers’ bazaar, which had various names and had grown from a few tents into a large hutted settlement in the last year. Since Crossman’s band came from an Irish regiment they called it Donnybrook. Apart from brothels and drinking huts there was every kind of trade practised there: shoemakers, tinmen, bakers, saddlers, cheese-sellers and there was even a shilling library. For the most part though, it was the more seedy elements which attracted Crossman’s men of an evening: the rough women and the even rougher gin.

  ‘That seems fair, after this morning, even if you were only held in reserve.’ He knew the tension and the pressure of waiting to go into battle. Actually going in relieved all that, to a certain extent, while not going in meant it was still there, pent up inside. ‘You didn’t want to go with them?’

  ‘No, sergeant.’ She could not seem to take her eyes off the weapon on her bed. ‘Not much point in me going with that lot, is there?’

  ‘Something wrong, Peterson?’

  ‘It’s this,’ she sighed, flicking her fingers. ‘One of the new rifles. The lieutenant took away my Minnie.’

  Peterson was the best shot in the peloton, a sharpshooter who even Captain Goodlake acknowledged was something special. Peterson had begun a love affair with her rifle-musket from the moment it was in her hands. Since the first weapon given her had been the Minié rifle, an accurate, reliable firearm which far outshone the old smoothbore Brown Bess musket, she thought her search for the perfect partner had ended. Of course it may have done, had she not been in the army, where change is inevitable. New weapons were coming along all the time. Most soldiers were rejoicing at the introduction of a new rifle, which had the words ENFIELD or TOWER stamped on the locking plate. They considered it a superior weapon. Peterson was wedded to her Minié though and this replacement was not welcome in her house.

  ‘Can you do something, sergeant?’ she pleaded. ‘Can you ask Lieutenant Pirce-Smith if I can have my Minnie back?’

  ‘Not yours, Peterson. The army’s.’ He paused for a moment, then said, ‘I’m sure the lieutenant thinks he’s doing you a great favour, by getting you that weapon. So far as I understand, the only division which has been issued with it is the 3rd. I’m sure Lieutenant Pirce-Smith went to a lot of trouble to obtain that rifle. You should be grateful, Peterson.’

  ‘Well I’m not,’ she retorted hotly. ‘Look at this,’ she held up one of the balls for the new rifle-musket, ‘it’s smaller than my Minié bullet.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Crossman, who liked to be up to the mark on the newest inventions of the age, had talked with Jarrard about this particular shoulder arm. Jarrard had a friend in London who kept him informed of developments in the weapon field. ‘Point 577 calibre, as opposed to point 702. Being smaller has its advantages, Peterson. Many leading gunmakers have been consulted in its manufacture – Lancaster and Purdey to name but two. Do you know that Major Lovelace thinks that Purdey will sit on the right hand of God when he goes to meet his creator? A smaller bullet doesn’t necessarily mean that the weapon is less accurate. Think how much lighter your ammunition pouch is going to be.’

  ‘I don’t care about my ammunition pouch. How can a bullet go as far if it’s lighter? Stands to reason. Look at a cannonball, how far that goes, because it’s heavier. This new bullet will just pop out of the end of the barrel.’

  ‘Yes, but – look, the Minnie bullet is heavier, so the trajectory has to be higher.’ He swept a half-circle through the air with his hand to illustrate the said trajectory. ‘But the bullet of that weapon is lighter, so the arc is less pronounced. The curve of the bullet’s flight is flatter. That’s a distinct advantage, Peterson, in trying to hit the target.’

  ‘I don’t have any trouble hitting the target.’

  Crossman shook his head and sighed. ‘You may be a wonderful shot, Peterson, but your science is wild. I can’t sit here and discuss trajectories, barrel lengths, rifling, charges and weight ratios with you, but I can assure you that you’ll find this new rifle-musket as good, if not better, than the old. If you don’t, then I’ll personally intervene for you and get the damned Minnie rifle back.’

  Peterson’s eyes brightened and her bulky form quivered.

  ‘Will you, sergeant? Will you really?’

  Sometimes Crossman felt he was dealing with children, rather than adults.

  ‘I’ve said so, haven’t I?’

  At that moment there came the sound of singing from a group of men walking along the mud road which ran beside the railway track. Crossman could hear Lance-Corporal Wynter’s voice above the others, horribly out of tune, hoarsely grinding out, ‘Drink Old England Dry’. After this song was mangled it was followed without a pause, by ‘John Barleycorn’s a Hero Bold’. In both renderings the lyrics were not only murdered, they were chopped to pieces and the parts scattered over boggy ground.

  Wynter was drunk. No rare thing in an Irish regiment, except that Wynter was not Irish. There was no telling what his ancestors had been since he was born in the workhouse without a father to give him a proper name, but Wynter had been raised in England. The English could drink too, of course, but they usually did it with less noise than the Irish rangers. Not Wynter. He loved to draw attention to himself, always for the wrong reasons, and could get into a drunken brawl over nothing at all.

  Peterson, on hearing the noise, got off her bed and picked up Major Lovelace’s cricket bat, which stood just inside the door. She hid on the opposite side of the door, the bat raised. Crossman could see exactly what she was going to do.

  ‘Peterson, you cannot strike Wynter.’

  ‘Why not? He’s kept me awake for the last two nights with his drunkenness. I plan to cold-cock the sod.’

  She certainly had the strength to do it, having put on a good deal of brawn since she had been in the Crimea. Others had taken it off, but somehow Peterson thrived on the diet.

  ‘I can’t allow it. It’s a shame I came back too early, but there it is. I’m here now and there will be no cold-cocking of Wynters or summers in here.’

  ’A joke,’ muttered a disgusted Peterson, throwing the cricket bat into the corner. ‘I can do without your jokes, sergeant.’

  Wynter then came through the door, his face flushed, his eyes full of gin-lustre.

  ‘Whoa-ho! It’s the sergeant. We’ve bin in the trenches, sergeant. Entitled to a bit of fun after the trenches.’

  ‘You’re lucky to be alive Wynter. If you hadn’t been down in a dirt hole you’d be lying in front of the Great Redan now, half your head missing.’

  Yorwarth, the Australian, nodded his head sagely. ‘He’s right, y’know. Did you see them poor bastards? Got shot to pieces. I’m glad I wasn’t out there. They didn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘You’ll get your chance,’ growled Wynter, sourly. ‘It won’t be the last charge at Sebastopol, you can bet your purse on that.’

  Wynter fell on his cot and was mercifully asleep within a few seconds, his throat rattling with phlegmy snores. Peterson heaved a sigh of relief. There were others now who came in behind the first two. Yusuf Ali was bringing up the rear, along with Gwilliams, the civilian barber from the United States. These two were arguing about various breeds of horses and their merits.

  ‘I say you can’t beat the South
American paso fino horse,’ Gwilliams was saying. ‘He’s got a strong body and hard legs, and three separate gaits.’

  ‘Every horse has four,’ replied Ali. ‘Walk, trot, canter, gallop.’

  ‘No, you disunderstand me,’ Gwilliams argued. ‘Gaits is not walk or trot. It’s moving at cross-country speed. Paso fino is one gait. Then paso corto – you can cover a deal of country with a steady paso corto. Then last is the real fast paso largo. Got fire in its hooves, the paso fino, I tell you, Turk. You won’t find a better little horse than the paso fino anywheres.’

  ‘I had a tarpan once that could not be beaten. I would race your paso fino into the ground, America. You find one. I get a tarpan from the steppes people. We race together, some day.’

  ‘Some day,’ replied Gwilliams. ‘You bet.’

  Crossman gathered his brood together. He was glad Wynter was asleep, because that man always disrupted any discussion, especially when he was drunk on gin. First he would be belligerant, then maudlin, and finally complaining. It was good to have a rest from him. The others had been drinking, but were not too far gone to listen and contribute.

  ‘We’ve been given a task,’ said Crossman. The air around the lamp on the table was swimming with bugs and moths. He turned the wick down, then lit another lamp, placing it at the far end. He wanted a mellow atmosphere, to encourage deep thinking, but he didn’t want anyone falling asleep in a dark corner. ‘We’ve been asked to thin down the sharpshooters on the other side.’

  Peterson blinked. She was a sharpshooter on this side. Sharpshooters were a despised breed amongst soldiery. They killed from a safe distance, coldly and mercilessly. Any soldier in the trenches would cheerfully lynch a sharpshooter, if he could get his hands on one. A vendetta against sharpshooters made Peterson feel uncomfortable, even though they were talking about the enemy. She felt her calling was being criticized.