The Scarlet Thief

by Paul Fraser Collard

  The exhausted redcoats looked at each other in confusion, unable to comprehend the sudden change in fortune. Out of the smoke of their volley they saw the tightly formed ranks of the Coldstream Guards. Triumphant, their ordered formation belonged to a different world, a place the battered and bloody redcoats had forgotten. With a series of crisp commands, the Coldstreams reloaded their rifles and sent another volley into the fleeing Russian column, mercilessly driving home their attack.

  A ragged cheer emerged from the parched throats of the handful of redcoats who had fought an entire Russian column to a standstill and who now stood in disbelief as the enemy that had come so close to destroying them fled in chaos and disorder.

  With gritty eyes Jack watched the Coldstream Guards advance up the slope towards the great redoubt. He had never known such exhaustion. His body trembled, every muscle ached. He sank to his knees, his bloodied sword still held fast in his hand, his fingers unable to release their grip after holding the sharkskin-covered handle for so long.

  Not many of his men were left. Dodds stood faithfully at his side, silently picking at the blood that was crusted under his fingernails, his eyes dull and devoid of life. Sergeant Baker stared into the distance, his face covered in blood from a vicious wound on his scalp, his uniform hanging in ribbons from where countless Russian blades had scored through the thick fabric. Young Fusilier Flanagan was alive. The stray from 4th Company was bent at the waist, vomiting a thin trickle of green bile on to his boots, his shako still firmly planted on his head. Dawson, Taylor and six other fusiliers from the Light Company sat silently, the whites of their eyes bright against their filthy faces. A handful of survivors. All that remained of Jack’s company.

  The battle continued as the Coldstream Guards assaulted the great redoubt. The Highland Brigade started its attack, the fresh troops advancing on the Russian right. Against all odds Raglan could savour a victory when he so easily might have had to suck on the sourness of defeat. But for the exhausted remnants of the Light Company, the battle was over. They had done their duty. Their stubbornness and defiance had held the Russians long enough for fresh troops to be brought up. Their efforts had not been in vain.

  With a groan Jack used the point of his sword to lever himself to his feet. ‘Sergeant Baker.’ Jack’s voice cracked, his parched throat making speech difficult.

  Despite his wounds, Baker clicked his boots together and stood to attention. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Look after the men. All of them.’ Jack waved a weary arm around him, encompassing the dead as well as the living.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Stay here. Don’t let anyone drag you back into the fight. You’ve done enough. More than enough.’

  Jack said nothing else as he left his company for the last time. Ignoring his tortured body, he abandoned his men to Sergeant Baker’s care and set off back across the slope. He had one last duty to perform.

  Jack traipsed his way towards the fold in the ground where he had hoped to hide the Light Company when Peacock’s terrible error caused the fusiliers to break. His abused body laboured to keep moving and it took all of his dwindling willpower to force it to struggle onwards.

  The ground was strewn with the detritus of battle. His feet stumbled against discarded equipment. The bodies of the dead were everywhere. Jack had to force himself to ignore the mangled flesh, each twisted body a tragedy in its own right. The accumulation of death on such an unimaginable scale enough to soil a soul for all eternity.

  The wounded pleaded for his aid. Voices wracked with pain begged for help, for water, for their mothers, or simply for a bullet to end their suffering. Jack walked carefully past their ruined bodies, careful not to jar his heavy boots against their tortured flesh, deaf to the pitiful pleas that accosted him, his stony expression betraying none of the sorrow that the sight of such suffering caused him.

  As he walked, he thought of his men, the ones still living and the ones who had fallen. He thought of Colonel Morris, of Lieutenant Flowers and of Digby-Brown.

  Finally, he came to the place where the Russian shell had lifted him off his feet. His memory was hazy yet still vivid enough for him to recognise the terrain. He saw the scorch marks on the churned earth where the shell had exploded. He fancied he could even discern the crushed grass that revealed where he had curled on the ground, when the horror had overwhelmed his mind and temporarily displaced his sanity.

  With a heavy tread, Jack turned to plod wearily up the shallow incline of the slope, retracing the path along which he had run in such terror. Around him, the sounds of battle still raged yet to his exhausted senses the cacophony of battle sounded muted, as if it was taking place in the far distance instead of only a few hundred yards away. His senses were dulled to such an extent that he felt almost at peace. His battered mind found nothing remarkable in the occasional Russian artillery shells that exploded nearby or attached any consequence to the roundshot that punched through the air within yards of where he walked.

  The sight of the torso he was looking for made Jack straighten his shoulders. His weariness fell away. He had no difficulty recognising the familiar figure of his orderly.

  He looked down on what remained of Tommy Smith’s face. His stomach churned yet he managed to keep the wave of nausea under control. Tommy Smith was dead, his sightless eyes stared up at the clear blue sky. It was what Jack had trudged all this way to discover; the idea that his orderly might still be alive with such a terrible wound was more than Jack could bear.

  ‘He’s a dead ’un.’

  Jack was not surprised to hear that voice again. Part of him had known that coming to find Tommy Smith would result in having to face Slater one last time.

  ‘And I reckon you should join him, don’t you?’

  Jack stayed still, his gaze fixed on Smith’s staring blue eyes.

  ‘You were a fool not to drill me when you had the chance. But then you always was a soft little turd.’ Slater paused to spit out of wad of phlegm. ‘I reckon you even started to believe you actually was an officer.’

  From deep inside Jack summoned the energy to turn round and face Slater. The former colour sergeant was standing a few paces away. The revolver he was aiming at Jack looked like a child’s toy in his meaty hand.

  ‘You’re a fool, Lark. You were born a fool and you’ll damn well die a fool.’

  The unfamiliar revolver was clumsy in Slater’s hands as he cocked the weapon and curled his finger round the trigger.

  Jack recognised the gun as his own. The barrel pointed straight at his heart. He looked up and stared into the pit of hatred in Slater’s merciless eyes and saw death.

  Jack threw his body forward, diving on to the ground. He moved like an old man, his abused body as supple as a brick. He was slow, so very slow.

  The cough of the revolver blasted into Jack’s ears a fraction of a second after the bullet punched into his body. The impact of the single bullet twisted his diving body, throwing him backwards so that he landed awkwardly on his side. Pain surged through him, an agony so fierce that his vision faded. He heard the revolver firing again and again as Slater wildly emptied all five chambers. Jack’s body tensed, waiting for a second explosion of agony. The air around him was punched with violent force as the bullets flew past but Slater’s wild firing and lack of familiarity with the gun had sent the bullets wide.

  Slater stood with the smoking revolver cradled in his hands, staring at Jack’s twitching body. The fresh blood on the grass confirmed that his aim had been true. His enemy’s desperate dive had not saved him from the fate he so richly deserved. Jack’s body gave a final jerk and then lay still.

  It was over.

  Slater savoured the sweet taste of revenge.

  Jack felt the cold fingers of death slide over his heart. He sensed the nothingness of oblivion pulling at him, an awful void from which there was no return. Some
thing deep inside him flickered, a final spark of life that rebelled against his fate. Jack Lark would not go so meekly to his death.

  He opened his eyes. He saw Slater standing over his prostrate body, gloating. The sight filled Jack with rage, a righteous fury that fuelled his injured body.

  He snapped his legs straight, driving the heels of his boots against Slater’s knees. The sickening crunch of bones breaking was clearly audible.

  Slater crumbled over his shattered kneecaps, the suddenness of Jack’s violent attack taking him completely unaware. He hit the ground hard, his two hands reaching down to his mutilated knees, his screams drowning out the sounds of battle that still rippled and crackled through the air.

  Jack stumbled to his feet, moving away from Slater, his left hand pressed over the wound on the right side of his body. His blood pulsed through his tightly clenched fingers.

  He saw Slater twist on the ground, heard his sobs as the huge man scrabbled towards Smith’s rifle which lay discarded on the ground.

  Jack reached the rifle just before Slater’s meaty paws wrapped round the stock. He snatched it away and ruthlessly crushed the grasping fingers under his boot. Slater bellowed. He reached for Jack’s ankle, fighting on.

  Jack felt the thick fingers claw at this flesh. Without hesitation he brought the rifle round until the long barrel pressed hard against Slater’s temple. For a fleeting instant he thought of Molly. He smiled as he pictured her blowing away the errant curls of hair from her face, the knowing smile on her face as she saw him watching her. The memory fled, leaving just the twisted face of the man who had killed her.

  Jack was certain he saw the flare of fear deep in Slater’s eyes, the realisation that he was about to die triggering a spasm of horror.

  Jack felt nothing as he pulled the trigger. The bullet punched through Slater’s skull, killing him instantly in a grotesque shower of blood, brain and bone.

  As Jack looked down at Slater’s body, a violent storm of emotion shuddered through his pain-wracked body. It scoured his soul and released the passions that he had kept contained for so long.

  He screamed at the heavens, a single incoherent shriek of bitter grief.

  In the sudden silence that followed, Jack’s head sagged forward, all emotion spent, his soul an empty husk.

  He staggered back to Smith’s corpse. He ignored the wounds to his own body, was hardly aware of the flow of blood that pulsed out of his side with every beat of his racing heart. He did not care about the future, the past did not concern him.

  His charade was over.

  With the final vestiges of his strength, Jack bent low and started to strip the uniform from Tommy Smith’s corpse. He sobbed as he dragged off the heavy red coat that was stiff with dried blood. His fingers felt the cheap cloth of Smith’s jacket; the heavy weave was so different from the beautiful scarlet fabric that he had stolen.

  He had lived up to his desire to better himself, he had proved that he could lead men in the tumult of battle. He had not let Molly down.

  It was time for Captain Sloames to die.

  The stench was overpowering. It assaulted Jack’s senses, demanding his attention. Its nauseating stink flooded his nostrils, filling his mouth with its foul odour so that he came back to the world of the living retching and coughing.

  ‘Oi, oi. Someone’s coming back to us.’

  Rough hands lifted his head and pressed the cold rim of a tin mug against his lips. The noxious smell of the liquid that was tipped over his sore and swollen lips made him gag, but the hand that held him was unyielding so he could do nothing but swallow the bitter drink.

  ‘There you go, chum. It ain’t as good as rum but it’s all you’re going to get for the moment.’

  Despite its foul stink, the water at least unglued Jack’s mouth and moistened his throat enough for him to question his benefactor.

  ‘Where am I?’

  There was a gentle chuckle. ‘Where are you?’ The voice found the question amusing. ‘Well, chum, you’re in hospital. In the shit-hole they call Scutari. You’ve been raving with the fever the last few days, hollering at the sky. Now rest easy. None of us is going anywhere. Not unless we karks it, that is. And that ain’t something we can do a fucking thing about. So take it as it comes.’

  Jack did as he was told and closed his eyes, hoping for the sanctuary of unconsciousness. All soldiers feared the surgeons, feared being incarcerated in the army hospitals where death was as likely an outcome as life. Jack was in the place all soldiers dreaded and it terrified him. His lips formed the words of a silent prayer, one he had learnt as a child. It had crept into his mind unbidden, eerily apt: ‘If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’

  Scutari had become infamous in the army even before the battle. It was where the sick were taken to die. Now, after the battle, and overwhelmed by hundreds of injured soldiers, it was rapidly descending into a scene of biblical squalor. Men lay everywhere, their bodies still encrusted in the filth of the battlefield. Nearly two thousand souls had been brought to the hospital which had beds for barely half that number. The handful of orderlies, doctors and surgeons worked tirelessly but they were hopelessly outnumbered by the multitude of broken bodies that begged for their attention.

  The beds in which the lucky few were laid were filthy, the floor around them encrusted with ordure. The handful of slop buckets in each dank room overflowed with human waste. The wounded soldiers did not have the comfort of even a single blanket to cover them, their bodies were devoured by lice, they were unwashed and stinking, and they still wore the soiled and reeking rags they had arrived in. The few windows in the rooms were bolted shut, condemning the wounded to lie in the gloom, denied the joy of sunlight or of a breeze that would have eased the stifling, stinking, suffocating heat that tormented their final hours.

  The injured soldiers stared at the high, vaulted ceilings and suffered. Their torture had started on the battlefield where they had been left, in some cases for twenty-four long hours before they were carried to the beach for evacuation. From there, if they were still alive, they were taken by ship to the hospital at Scutari three hundred miles away. It sat like a festering sore on the coast of Turkey opposite the splendour and the vibrancy of Constantinople.

  The ships struggled to transport the vast number of wounded, who shared the limited space with hundreds of men who had been struck down with fever before the battle had even been joined. The decks were blanketed with the bodies of the sick and wounded; men died in the filth, uncared for and alone. Their bodies were dumped unceremoniously overboard or simply left to rot where they lay. Most ships had just one or two orderlies, or perhaps a single surgeon to cope with the hundreds of men.

  The dreadful journey lasted three to five days, each an interminable hell, where minutes crept by like hours and hours felt like days. One ship, the Shooting Star, took a dreadful thirteen days to make the trip to Scutari, a period of unimaginable horror for the one hundred and thirty wounded on board. Just under half died in the time it took their vessel to reach its destination.

  The hospital at Scutari was a dubious sanctuary for the men whose bodies had been broken in the horror of the fighting. If shock, infection, gangrene or loss of blood did not kill them, then a raft of fatal diseases claimed them – typhus, dysentery, cholera, fevers. Disease stalked the hospital, thriving in the dank and squalid conditions.

  Jack gave up counting the bricks in the vaulted ceiling above his head. He had drifted in and out of consciousness for what could have been minutes, or hours, or days. Time had no meaning.

  He remembered little of his journey to the hospital save for mere flashes, random memories of being taken to the shore on one of the pitifully few carts the army had available to transport its wounded. Of the short voyage itself, he remembered nothing. He could hazily recollect the pain of his flesh being stitched back
together, and the feeling of deft hands binding his wounds, but whether that had been on board the ship or in the hospital, he had no idea.

  The memories of battle he locked away in a far corner of his mind and threw away the key. But his dreams betrayed him. They broke down his barriers, replaying the horror so he woke in terror, bathed in sweat, his body trembling with fear. The wounds to his soul ran deep. He tried to remember the past but memories of his childhood or of his early years in the army resisted all his attempts to access them. Even Molly’s face remained stubbornly distant; the image of her he carried in his mind was faded, robbed of its vitality, little more than a vague impression.

  He lay on his filthy bed and tried to shut out the constant moans, groans, sobs, curses and pleas of the other inmates. Mercifully, the men on either side of him were silent, although they were pressed so close together that Jack’s bed vibrated with every movement made by the wounded guardsman in the bed to his right. Barely two inches separated the rows of filthy beds. A narrow gap down the centre of the room gave access to any of the scarce medical staff who dared to venture into the foetid space.

  Once, Jack had woken to the sound of a fresh patient being brought in. He had watched with morbid fascination as two orderlies deftly settled the man into the bed, and then bound his wounds with bandages stained with old blood. It did not take long, their practised hands worked swiftly. Neither orderly said a word during the few minutes they were in the room.

  Jack knew he faced a choice. He could give in to his despair and let the grief and the guilt and the festering horror claim him, body and soul, or he could once again fend for himself. He could rise from this stinking pit and find a way to live.

  ‘Oi! What’s your game?’

  Jack started, his battered nerves jangling at the sudden shout. He had been scraping a metal ladle across the bottom of a wooden bucket that should have held enough fresh water for the whole room but which now yielded only a few thimblefuls of dark brown, scabby liquid.