The Rose of Sebastopol (49 page)

“If the poor soul thought anything at all it was the same as everyone else. She feared him and she disliked him in equal measure I’d say. But then he could be charming as well as curt. He had his dark little ways—the villagers learnt to keep a particular eye on their young daughters when he was about—but he could also make a grand gesture. I believe that it was my connection with the family that persuaded him to employ me, so I’m grateful for that, although he couldn’t stand the sight of me and would never so much as let me change the sheets on his bed when he was sick.”

“What happened to the Fairbrothers in the end?”

“Well now, that was something I never quite got to the bottom of. Before Max would take up his commission in the army he did an odd sort of deal with his father: that he would forgo any entitlement to the estate if the wretched cottages down by the river were demolished and the families found a home elsewhere, but until that happened he would not go near his regiment. So my poor cousins the Fairbrothers lived in a brand-new place in the village, and though they hadn’t the wits to thrive, at least they had some comfort. None of the family is living now.”

A number of officers’ wives overtook us on horseback, followed by the redoubtable Mrs. Seacole, who rode alone, her face framed by a flapping sunbonnet and her mule laden with panniers. Our conversation was at an end, because as we drew nearer the battlefield the din of musket fire and artillery was bone-shaking even though we learnt from returning ambulance wagons that the fighting was already in its dying gasps, and that the Russians were on the brink of a crushing defeat.

We gathered on a hilltop behind a throng of British onlookers, just above reserve squadrons of English and French cavalry in perfect formation though their horses were wild-eyed and straining forward. To our left French and Sardinian troops were lined up waiting for the signal to attack and others were streaming down the hillside. In the valley there was chaos under clouds of smoke, a churning mass of bodies, the clash of bayonets, and the pounding of cannon balls fired from the great guns positioned above.

Though the River Tchernaya was narrow and shallow it flowed between steep little banks upon which the soldiers floundered. Along the hillside to our right ran an aqueduct raised several feet above the ground to carry water from a reservoir in the hills to Sebastopol Harbor. Bodies were piled up along its perpendicular sides, felled by enemy gunfire as they attempted to cross. Within ten minutes of our arrival, wave upon wave of Russians had fallen as the French and Sardinians chased them across the river and up the hillsides.

I had already learnt that in a war everything looks better from a distance. This scene, a riot of blues, browns, and reds, was from the same ideal of battle as when my heart had thumped for joy at the sight of the march-past of troops before Buckingham Palace. From my lofty height even the clambering of Russian soldiers on the sides of the aqueduct resembled the antics of children in a party game. The allies had waited for the Russians to reach halfway up the valley-sides before chasing them back under blistering fire, leaving heaps of brown-coated bodies as if the retreating army was a carelessly packed bale shedding straw. At one point I saw a line of half a dozen Russians bowled over by a single cannon ball.

After an hour the remains of the Russian army had retreated to their encampment on the heights and a quiet fell over the battlefield, punctuated from time to time by the odd burst of fire. I half expected everyone to get up, shake themselves down, and walk away, but no, the fallen men stayed fallen and gradually, from all sides, a stream of soldiers, officers, doctors, and orderlies moved doggedly forward and started work among the dead and wounded.

I followed Nora across parched, tussocky grass. The field was still smoking and from time to time a crack of rifle fire was followed by a howl of pain. A nearby French orderly cursed the retreating Russians, who were known to shoot indiscriminately both at wounded enemy soldiers and the fatigue parties who went out to carry them from the field, but the threat meant nothing to me. I was too absorbed by the thousands of dead men, their atrocious wounds, the riverbanks draped with bodies, the stained waters of the Tchernaya, and my own inadequacy, as we began our search for the living. Some had fallen as if frozen in time with their arms flung out and their expressions fixed in surprise or excitement, others had curled up to die, hands over their faces. While some had stomachs, legs, arms, even heads missing altogether, others appeared untouched. They were all so fleshy, so recently scythed down, so far beyond my experience in their sudden shift from life to death that I felt light and helpless as a feather in the wind.

When a living man called out to me I knelt to give him a sip of water. His head was too heavy to support in my hand, so I rested it on my lap and it was only then that I realized from the color of his bloody uniform that this was a Russian. His foreignness repulsed me, the coarseness of his features and skin, his black, cropped hair, beaky nose, scabby beard, the fact that though his head was pillowed by my thigh, he and I had not a single thing in common, not even a word. But then he raised his hand and took a loose lock of my hair between his finger and thumb. His skin was ingrained with dirt and the thumbnail discolored by a bruise, yet he held the strand softly and rubbed it to and fro, as if to polish it. Then he looked up, gave me a misty smile, and tried to speak.

“What?” I whispered. “How can I help you?”

His lips again formed a word and I put my face nearer his. “What are you saying?”

A French ambulance party was approaching; they were upon us, had plucked him up by his knees and armpits, so that he gave a howl of pain, dropped him onto a stretcher, and carried him away down to the river, where he would lie among other enemy wounded.

I stayed where they had left me and wrapped the same lock of hair round my finger. I swear that the word he had spoken was
Rosa
.

Nora was a few feet away kneeling over a French soldier as she raised his arm, supported it against her bosom, and applied a neat bandage to a gaping wound in his wrist. Despite his lack of understanding she was chatting away to him and I could well imagine the mix of encouragement and instruction as she fixed him with her stern eye. Then she stood up and summoned a stretcher-bearer, pressed her hand to the small of her back, and braced her shoulders for the next casualty.

We learnt later that more than eight thousand Russians fell during that battle, nearly two thousand French, and a hundred or so Sardinians. Many considered that the allies should have pursued the Russians while they were in retreat and thereby gained a more conclusive victory but as it was we all returned to the camp.

The next day I braved Mrs. Shaw Stewart’s office and asked if I might be allowed to work in the hospital. She was at her desk, writing what looked like an immense report, and she stared at me in disbelief. “Have you any experience as a nurse? Then what you ask is absurd. I have enough to do responding to memos from Dr. Hall about the ones who are already there without yet another untrained lady drifting about causing havoc. You would have no idea how to behave.”

“I only ask to act as a kind of orderly or...”

“If I’d thought that all this time your intention had been to worm your way into the hospital I’d never have let you stay.”

“But I was at the battlefield yesterday...”

“Who gave you permission?”

“I didn’t ask permission. I didn’t think...”

“Exactly so. You are not a nurse, Miss Lingwood. You have no idea of the discipline required. Our reputation as nurses in these military hospitals is sufficiently fragile that we cannot risk any more scandal. There is no question of your working on the wards and I wonder you should ask.”