The Third Section (17 page)

That evening Dmitry was blessed with Tyeplov’s company, though the circumstances were hardly convivial. Again, Dmitry had been tasked with inspecting the state of Totleben’s defences – and of the men’s morale – this time in the fourth bastion, regarded as the foulest posting of the lot. When they’d spoken at the barracks, Tyeplov had seemed almost casual in suggesting he come along. The company of any man that night would have cheered Dmitry – that it was Tyeplov meant something more.

Winter had vanished completely and where once the streets had been hardened by frost, now they were a sea of mud. Embedded sporadically in the ground were cannonballs. It was unusual but not unheard of for them to reach into the heart of the city, though most arrived here accidentally. The Allies knew that it was Totleben’s ramparts that stopped them from taking Sevastopol, not the buildings and people within, and so that was where they concentrated their fire. As Dmitry and Tyeplov walked along the bank of the Military Harbour and got closer to the bastion, the concentration of the discarded iron balls became more dense. Eventually they would be gathered up and reused by the Russians, only to be replenished in another bombardment. No guns were firing today – not yet, at least.

As they came out of the city, the road descended into a narrow
trench
, with wooden planks placed intermittently along the sides to prevent the earth from cascading back into what it regarded as its rightful territory. In construction, it was much like the tunnel beneath the Star Fort where Dmitry and Shulgin had made their gruesome discovery – with the exception that it had no roof. As long as Dmitry was free to stand upright, he felt none of the terror of entombment that would otherwise have descended upon him.

As they came closer to the bastion, the dug-out walls of the trench became augmented by gabions. They could absorb some of the blast from a shell and sometimes a direct hit from a cannonball. There had been times where they had proved dangerous in themselves, toppling over and crushing the soldiers they had been constructed to defend, but in most cases they were strapped securely in place.

The trench began to ascend and ended at the inner wall of the fourth bastion itself. There was little to distinguish it from any of the others. A few of the braver men peered out over the top towards the enemy lines. Most sat and hugged themselves to keep out the cold. At least there was no rain tonight, and the wind was not too severe. Dmitry spoke to the first soldier he saw.

‘Where’s your commanding officer?’

The man – a boy really – glanced up, but seemed unimpressed by Dmitry’s seniority. ‘In the naval casemate.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, pointing down another trench that ran parallel with the bastion wall. Dmitry felt no desire to reprimand him; instead he and Tyeplov followed the trench. At the end of it, a wooden door was visible, beside which sat a sailor smoking a pipe.

‘Is it all right to go in?’ asked Dmitry.

‘Just a moment, sir.’ The sailor, showing a better sense of rank than had his army comrade moments before, was on his feet in an instant. ‘I’ll tell them you’re here.’ He opened the door and stuck his head through it. Moments later he stood upright and pushed the door wide open, indicating that the two officers should enter.

Dmitry had never been inside this casemate before. All the bastions had them – some several. From outside there was no hint, apart from the door, that this part of the earthworks was
not
as solidly built as the rest of it, but inside was an entire room, a large one at that, acting as a shelter from the weather and a haven of relative safety. Compared with the others he had visited, Dmitry was struck by the degree of decoration inside. The floor was parqueted, no less; a little bumpy in places, but a leap forward compared with the raw earth or duckboards that he had seen elsewhere. Against the wall at either end stood two beds, with curtains that could provide a modicum of privacy. In the corner near one of them hung an icon of the Virgin, with a pink vigil lamp burning in front of it, resting on a stool. On one of the beds lay a naval officer, fully clothed in the uniform of a
michman
– apparently asleep. At a table in the middle of the casemate, one seated, the other standing, were two infantry officers, each at least ten years Dmitry’s junior.

‘Anatoliy!’ exclaimed the standing officer, embracing Tyeplov as an old friend. Then he turned to Dmitry, offering his hand. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met.’

They had met, in the mess weeks before when Dmitry’s conversation with Tyeplov had been interrupted. He chose not to mention it. Instead he dumped his knapsack beside the door before walking over to shake the officer’s hand.

‘I’m
Shtabs
-Captain Mihailov,’ said the man, ‘and this is Lieutenant Wieczorek.’ Dmitry always found it difficult to trust Poles who fought for Russia. More than one senior Polish officer had switched sides to the Turks, taking on a Turkish name to hide his treachery. Dmitry knew for a fact the so-called Sadyk Pasha, a leading light of the ‘Sultan’s Cossacks’, was none other than Micha Czaykowski, a Polish turncoat. But it was unfair to judge Wieczorek by the standards of his countrymen; he was, after all, still here. ‘And that reprobate,’ continued Mihailov, picking up a bread roll from the table and hurling it at the sailor on the bed, ‘is
Michman
Ignatyev.’ Ignatyev showed no reaction as the projectile bounced off his chest. ‘Care for a glass of Bordeaux?’ asked Mihailov, lifting a bottle from the table and jiggling it in their direction.

For a brief moment Dmitry hoped against hope that Mihailov had genuinely meant Bordeaux, but he only needed to glance at the bottle to realize that it contained just the local Crimean brew.
It
was a joke he’d heard often enough now to forget its original humour. He accepted a glass anyway, as did Tyeplov.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this on the front before,’ said Dmitry, glancing around him and taking in the room once more.

‘One has to maintain one’s standards,’ replied Mihailov.

‘It’s like a country gentleman chose to transfer his home into a cave. Don’t you think, Tolya?’

‘Quite unique,’ said Tyeplov, after a momentary pause and with an enigmatic smile.

‘Much action out here?’ asked Dmitry.

Mihailov glanced at Wieczorek, who answered, ‘Nothing for two days.’ Dmitry could detect no hint of a Polish accent in his speech.

‘A blessing, I suppose,’ said Tyeplov.

‘Means it’s due,’ came Ignatyev’s voice from the bed.

‘It’s been quiet over the winter,’ said Dmitry.

‘It’s spring now,’ said Ignatyev, using his fingers to tidy his moustache as he sat upright. ‘They won’t give up.’

Mihailov reached forward and refilled Dmitry’s glass. Dmitry hadn’t realized how quickly he had emptied it. If it was Bordeaux, then it hadn’t travelled well. Even its short journey from the vineyards between here and Bakhchisaray had done it little good. Despite that, Dmitry enjoyed the sensation of it on his throat, if not the taste.

‘Listen!’ said Ignatyev suddenly. They all stopped talking. There was no sound to be heard. Dmitry took a breath to speak, but Ignatyev raised a finger to his lips to silence him. Then there was a thud, coming through the ceiling above them.

‘Cannonball,’ said Mihailov, confirming what Dmitry had guessed.

‘You heard that coming?’ Dmitry asked Ignatyev, the incredulity evident in his voice.

‘You get attuned to it.’

They heard the sound of a second impact in the ground above the casemate. Ignatyev leapt off the bed, and Mihailov and Wieczorek were already pulling on their greatcoats and making for the door. Ignatyev wasn’t far behind them. Dmitry didn’t
know
many officers who would be so keen to get out into the battle. He followed, as eager as they for action. Tyeplov was close on his heels.

Outside the settled indolence that had been so evident when they arrived had vanished. The sailor who sat at the door had gone off in search of a more valiant post. Gunners who had been huddling to stave off the cold were now at their positions, looking to pick off the enemy if they tried to advance, hoping to have a lucky shot and disable one or more of the crew members of the big guns. Dmitry rushed to the nearest gap in the wall to see whether an advance was being attempted. Deep, regular blasts came from behind them and to the side, which he knew were their own cannon responding to the combined French and British assault.

Perhaps twice a minute he would hear somewhere near him the whistle and splat of a cannonball finding its way into the trenches. They were wasted shots. At best they would kill two or three men, or maim them – an awful lot of iron and powder for so little gain, doing nothing to damage the defences themselves. A moment later, Dmitry saw the effect of a cannonball on a man for himself. A
ryadovoy
had been running through the trenches towards the edge of the bastion, carrying bags of powder and shot to enable the musket men at the front to reload. Dmitry had not had a chance to see the ball as it swiftly sailed through the air, with almost the same speed as it had exited the muzzle of the cannon, and with an inexorable weight behind it.

It hit the
ryadovoy
square on the forehead and found little resistance. The man’s skull cracked into a dozen fragments, which exploded through the flesh of his head as the cannonball tried to supplant the grey matter inside. The shot hit the mud behind him as his body fell forward, still clutching the ammunition he had been fetching. Dmitry felt something warm and moist splatter against his cheek. He wiped it away and flicked it from his fingers on to the ground without looking. He heard the whoosh of another shot coming in and then an explosion, throwing a cloud of smoke and mud into the air that obscured Dmitry’s view of the headless, twitching body. He ran back to the trench, knowing that there would be others wounded, but perhaps some with hope
of
survival. Another blast shook the ground and he reached out to the wall to steady himself, scratching against the compressed earth and feeling a strange sensation of comfort as the dirt penetrated beneath his fingernails.

The haze thrown up by the explosion quickly began to settle, revealing along the trench the damage that it had caused. Dmitry stiffened as he saw Tyeplov leaning forward, a look of distress on his face, but his friend soon straightened up, and Dmitry felt sure that he was uninjured. The same could not be said of the slumped figure towards whom Tyeplov was directing his concern. Dmitry recognized it as the Pole, Wieczorek. His left arm was missing. Dmitry could see a tangled bloody stump where the ball had caught him, just above the elbow. Wieczorek’s face showed the determined stoicism of a man who knew that such an injury almost certainly meant death. Tyeplov turned his head and looked into Dmitry’s eyes.

The sound of the Russian guns was louder now – loud enough to drown out the firing of the Allied cannon, but not to stop the sound of their shot landing nearby. Dmitry glanced up at the sky. It seemed for a moment as though the stars were falling, but it was merely shells breaking up early, leaving their fiery traces across the heavens. Then he heard a new sound, a whistling from something large coming in to land, close enough to hint that he himself might be its hapless target. He threw himself face down on the ground and felt it shake as the projectile splashed into the mud.

Dmitry dragged himself to his feet and looked around. A shell had landed just a little way down the trench and was rolling feebly towards him, like a puppy slowly but eagerly coming to meet its master. He could see the fuse glowing red, but could not guess how long he had until it exploded. When it did it would wreak far more damage that any iron cannonball.

At that instant, Dmitry realized how little he wanted to die, but at the same time the power to move drained from him. He felt a terror that he had never experienced before. He was immobile, half standing, half crawling, staring at the scintillating fuse, counting the seconds until his death. Then his view was blocked, and he felt his body racked by a sudden collision which could only
be
the impact of the exploding shell. The blow picked him up and carried him down the trench and then, surprisingly, round the corner that led back to the casemate. He had not been thrown, but was being carried.

Inside the casemate he was shoved on to the parquet floor and felt a body hurl itself on top of his. He could not see, but he knew simply from the scent of the man – a scent that he had subconsciously absorbed over the past weeks – that it was Tyeplov. Moments later, the explosion shook them both. Dmitry heard a rattle as debris fell through the door and hit the hard wooden floor, but they were too far away for the shell to do them any serious damage.

Tyeplov stood almost immediately. ‘I’ll go take a look,’ he said, his voice confirming, if Dmitry had held any doubt, who he was. Dmitry rolled on to his back and slid across the floor away from the doorway, pushing himself along with his hands. Eventually he felt the wall behind him and stopped, pulling his knees up to his chest and clutching them there. His whole body shook, not from any blast outside but of its own volition.

He breathed deeply and tried to let the music come to him, to be the secret friend and comforter that it had been ever since he was a child. He heard fragments of it, but each one was interrupted by an explosion from outside, be it the sound of a Russian cannon or a French shell. The more he tried to hear his music, the louder the detonations became. He rested his head against his knees, but found he could not even cry. He did not know where the fear had come from, nor why it had arrived so suddenly.