The Street Philosopher (19 page)

Where there had been movement a few moments earlier, there was only stillness. Some twenty seconds passed. The charge did not come.

‘Hold your fire! Stand down!’ Maynard ordered, stepping from his rock. ‘Save your bullets, men, they’ve had enough for now. The Bear will need a tot or two of his vodka before he tries that one again.’

There was some weary laughter. ‘Could use a spot of that meself, Major!’ piped up Private Cregg, who was in the second line, as he packed a fresh cartridge down into his rifle barrel.

Captain Wray, in place somewhere down to the left, started screeching for quiet, promising the lash to all and sundry. Hardly a potent threat, Maynard thought, to men presently under bombardment by heavy artillery.

The sight of Boyce approaching the lines on his grey actually brought Maynard some relief. Here at last, he thought, is someone with the rank to authorise what so plainly needs to be done. ‘Good to have you with us, Colonel,’ he said with a salute, nodding at Lieutenant Nunn. ‘The situation is growing ever more serious. There is a quite desperate need for—’

‘You are not
fighting
, are you, Major?’ Boyce interrupted, looking down at the blood on Maynard’s sword. Maynard hesitated, unsure how to respond. Boyce sighed long-sufferingly. ‘No matter. Make your report, if you please.’

‘As I was saying, Colonel, the enemy has been pressing this sector quite relentlessly. This is a terrible position, sir–we’re exposed to the Russian cannon here, and—’

‘Cannon? But how is he aiming them, Mr Maynard?’

By way of reply, Maynard waved over Major Hendricks of the 55th who stood nearby. He introduced him to Boyce.

‘I know this country, sir,’ Hendricks began. ‘The guns are on raised ground over there,’ he pointed off into the fog, ‘there and there, I believe. All Ivan needs to do is fire roughly in this direction and he can be sure of hitting something. He doesn’t seem too concerned about doing in his own men, either.’

Boyce was clearly unimpressed. ‘So what do you both propose we do?’ he asked with studied hauteur.

‘We must fall back, sir, immediately,’ said Maynard quickly. ‘We must regroup, with artillery support. We must wait for this damned fog to lift. There are enemy troops threatening our flank. Only a staged withdrawal will allow us to confront them properly.’

The Colonel paused for a moment, as if deep in thought, and then shook his head with fierce contempt. ‘You are proposing nothing less than a retreat, Mr Maynard! That will not do at all! If this position is too hot for you, then we will advance. How much ground can we afford to give them, man? We must advance, advance to the Sandbag Battery and retake it in the name of the Queen!’

‘Colonel, did you not hear me?’ Maynard felt a familiar despairing disbelief. ‘There are Russians on our flank. If we advance, they could get behind us, and then—’

‘Enough of this, Mr Maynard! Prepare the men for an attack!’

As Maynard issued Boyce’s orders, he thought of his wife, back home in Ilford; of their last night together, when she had held on to him so tightly, sobbing all the while; of her last letter, full of news of the daughter he’d never seen, and hopes for his speedy return. And then, strangely, he found himself thinking of Richard Cracknell, a grin on that crafty face of his, legs crossed beneath him, a brandy balloon in one hand and a cigarette in the other. ‘Your commander is naught but a fool,’ he was saying, ‘a deceitful, incompetent fool. I’d as soon follow him, my dear Major, as I’d follow Charon into his ferry-boat.’

The sight of Boyce calling Wray from his company dispelled these reflections. Maynard knew that there was a long-standing bond between the two men; something to do with their families, he suspected. It certainly led to all sorts of preferential treatment for the cruel, unpopular Wray. He watched as Boyce issued a sequence of very precise instructions to his nodding Captain, and then handed him a crude iron key.

‘This will open the hut where the fellow is currently being held,’ he heard Boyce say. ‘And no one must know we have it, Archie, d’you hear me? Absolutely
no one
.’

Wray saluted, summoned two corporals to his side and headed off into the mists. Maynard’s eyes widened in disbelief. Boyce had just ordered the Captain of his grenadier company from the battlefield in the middle of an engagement. He would have an explanation for this, rank be damned.

Then the Russian cannons fired, the shells detonating somewhere above them. A hand slapped on to the Major’s shoulder, a little too hard and loose for comfort. As he turned, Hendricks collapsed forward into his arms. Shrapnel had torn into his back. A sharp point of black metal jutted out from the middle of his abdomen. He whispered something, unintelligibly quiet, a name perhaps, blood welling from his mouth as he spoke, and running across his cheek in a red rivulet. Maynard leant in closer, and asked him tenderly to speak up; but Hendricks could offer no reply.

The road from the camps did not end so much as disintegrate, the single mud track breaking into a profusion of smaller paths like the branches of a tree departing from the trunk. There was no indication as to which might lead to the pickets. Cracknell selected one and they hurried along it; but, after leading them several hundred yards up an undulating, rocky hillside, it petered out. They were left at the mercy of the fog.

The noises of battle were everywhere–the shouts, the clash of steel, the popping and blasting of gunpowder–but they came in a riotous clamour, and were effectively useless for the purposes of guidance. Indeed, they seemed to suggest a number of different directions; Kitson suspected that many were echoes, bouncing between rocky ravines and cliff-faces. The
Courier
team looked at each other. None had spoken since their melodramatic encounter with Madeleine Boyce and Annabel Wade. Cracknell was scowling at his juniors around his cigarette, plainly having decided that both Styles’ intemperate advances to Mrs Boyce and Kitson’s interruption of the illustrator’s dressing-down were signs of grave disrespect; and Styles was mired in a baleful, disconsolate silence, deliberately allowing the cut on his forehead to bleed unchecked. Kitson turned away, amazed by them both.

He felt something against his face–the faintest hint of a cold breeze. ‘Come,’ he said impatiently, heading towards it. ‘This way.’

After fifty yards or so, the hillside levelled out into a long, flat-topped ridge. The sea wind struck Kitson full on, grating his throat raw as he breathed it in; and a heavy layer of fog melted away. He saw that they stood close to a rocky outcrop, beyond which was a wide expanse of sloping ground, growing gradually steeper as it ran down into the Chernaya valley. In the centre of this slope, about two hundred yards from their position, was the brown block of the Sandbag Battery. Greatcoated soldiers from the two armies could be seen packed around it, battling hard against each other. More men dropped every second, adding themselves to the mounds of dead; but new troops from both sides were streaming in constantly, directed by their commanders to rush into the abattoir.

‘At bloody last.’ Cracknell sucked in a last lungful of smoke from his cigarette, flicked the butt away and took out a field telescope. This magnified view of the fighting made even the indomitable senior correspondent falter for a second. ‘The–the Guards are down there,’ he reported, summoning back his steadiness. ‘I can see the bearskins. Coldstreamers, I believe. They seem to be pulling back.’

Kitson took out his pocketbook and started to write. He noticed that Styles had fallen to work also, rapidly delineating the landscape before them on a piece of drawing paper.

‘The Russians are different,’ Cracknell continued. ‘At the Alma they had spiked helmets. These ones are in caps, a sort of brimless cap. Reinforcements, I should think, from the mainland … Ye gods, there are thousands of them. A fine spot we’ll be in if—’ He stopped suddenly. ‘The 99th are there. I can see Maynard.’ Cracknell was growing excited, his equilibrium vanishing. ‘They’re in front of the battery. They’re … damn it all, they’re totally over-extended. Why the devil would Maynard do such a bloody foolish thing? He knows better than this!’

Even without the aid of the telescope, Kitson could see all too clearly what was happening. Three fresh regiments of Russians, several thousand men, were moving up the slope from the valley, driving back the main body of the British
force; but one group of soldiers, only a few hundred strong, had pressed too far forward, past the Sandbag Battery and a good way down towards the River Chernaya. Soon they would be entirely encircled by the enemy. Kitson stopped writing, all words eluding him. These soldiers were surely doomed.

A nearby blast sent shrapnel clattering among the rocks of the outcrop. As well as affording them a view of the battlefield, Kitson realised, the partial retreat of the fog had exposed the
Courier
men to the sight of a pair of Russian gunboats, which had sailed out to the mouth of Sebastopol harbour. Another shell exploded, slightly closer this time; a shard of flying metal nipped a chunk from Kitson’s coat. He looked around. Close to their position was a series of narrow ravines, leading into the Chernaya valley.

‘There!’ he cried. ‘Quickly!’

Cracknell dashed past him, leaping into the first one he came to. Styles hesitated, not through fright but a reluctance to leave their vantage point. Kitson grabbed his sleeve, dragging him to the ravine and all but pushing him in.

Together, they skidded down to its floor in a small landslide of stones and mud. It was dotted with gorse bushes, rocks and spent cannon-balls, which lay clustered and inert like gigantic black marbles. Cracknell was already on his feet, clearly exhilarated by the plunge. He made a few quick observations about the Russian ordnance that had just been directed at them–exploding shells fired from ships were apparently a recent Russian innovation–and then announced that they would follow the ravine out into the valley, circling back around to the left towards Inkerman Ridge.

Kitson got up, rubbing at a bruised elbow. They could not hope to survive in the bloody mayhem they had just seen from that outcrop. To believe otherwise was madness. ‘Towards the battlefield, you mean?’ he asked tersely.

Cracknell, sensing his objection, rolled his eyes. ‘Yes, Thomas, towards the battlefield. To
observe
. That is what we are here to do, you remember! Besides, it behoves me, as a friend, to discover how Maynard is faring.’ He began picking his way through the rocks and bushes.

‘And what precisely are you intending to do, should you discover the Major to be in dire trouble?’ Both knew that the revolving pistol, following its submersion in the River Alma, was locked away in Cracknell’s sea-chest, acquiring a light film of rust. ‘D’you expect us to leap into the middle of a pitched battle armed only with our
pencils
?’

The senior correspondent continued on his way. ‘I’ll ignore that,’ he said crossly, without looking around. ‘Don’t make me talk to you about courage, man!’

Cracknell had not taken ten steps out into the valley before bullets started to strike the ground around him. He quickly retreated back into the ravine, pointing towards a low cave, half-hidden behind a large slab of stone. The three men rushed inside. It was surprisingly deep, filled with a rich vegetable smell and the sound of dripping water. Moss coated every surface, a strange, pale phosphorescence glittering within it, making the walls of the cave sparkle and shift as they passed. They did not pause to appreciate this magical effect, however, instead scurrying rapidly behind a pile of rocks close to the cave’s end.

Kitson crouched down and attempted to catch his breath. He looked over at Styles. The illustrator was curled up in amongst the rocks; his face was entirely hidden in the shadow thrown by the brim of his cap, nothing but a black profile against the weak glow of the cave wall. Cracknell, who was peering over their cover, prodded Kitson’s shoulder. Rising to his knees, the junior correspondent saw a group of Russian infantry out in the ravine, stepping from stone to stone with their muskets ready in their hands. He hunched back down with a shiver. Then, to his horror, he felt a hand close around his boot.

‘
Vadaa
,’ whispered a voice faintly. ‘
Vadaa.
Pozhalujsta.’

A young Russian soldier, no more than sixteen, lay hidden in the darkness at the back of the cave. His head was bare, his eyes were sunken, and the lines of his skull were clearly visible beneath his skin. His thin neck was covered with flea bites; his musket, which looked as if it dated from the previous century at the very latest, was propped up against a rock. The body of one of his comrades, clearly dead, lay on the floor beside him.

Outside, the searching Russians called to each other. The soldier forced out a few more words through parched lips. His meaning was clear enough.

‘He wants water,’ Kitson said quietly. ‘I have none. Have you any, Cracknell? Styles, how about you?’

The soldier grew angry as his request was not met. Speaking with more strength, he hauled himself up to a sitting position and looked over them with scorn in his eyes. He had heard the men outside, and realised the power he had over these three lost invaders. He started to raise his voice. Kitson moved forward, making placatory gestures, speaking softly; Cracknell offered the soldier a cigarette. This was knocked aside. The soldier jabbed an accusatory finger into Cracknell’s round belly, spat out a few hard-sounding words, and put a hand on the stock of his musket.

In the months that followed, Kitson tried many times to recall exactly when he had realised what was about to happen there in the cave. It was certainly at a point when it was too late to do anything to prevent it. He had watched Styles rise to his haunches, and pick up a stone about the size of a man’s fist; he had watched him twist around, leaning back into the cave; and he had watched, his mouth now open, as the illustrator struck the stone against the side of the soldier’s head with all the force in his body. Whether or not this had killed the boy soldier outright Kitson would never know, but there had been a dreadful sound, uncannily like the breaking of china, and he had slumped to the ground beside his lifeless companion.

Cracknell leapt to his feet, putting a hand over his mouth to stifle an involuntary exclamation. Styles leant back, letting the stone drop on to the cave’s floor, where it clacked down amongst its fellows.

They remained in silence for some minutes. Eventually, Cracknell said, ‘Well, that was certainly one way to deal with him.’ His voice was hoarse and forced, a ghostly approximation of his usual tone.

Styles stared out of the cave. ‘The fog’s settling again,’ he said impassively. ‘Those soldiers will have trouble spotting us now. I think we should leave.’

Kitson knew that he had to collect himself. He clasped his hands together and nodded firmly. ‘We–we should go right, though, I feel. Up the valley. Inland.’

Cracknell nodded also, for once too shaken to assert his authority. ‘Agreed.’

Without a backward glance, the three men left the glittering cave and headed off into the fog.