Until the Colours Fade (57 page)

Earlier there had been flurries of snow and sleet, but by four o’clock in the morning, when Tom arrived at the Naval Brigade Camp, the sky had cleared and he could see the glittering points of stars and a full moon silvering the lines of tents. Groups of men were squatting round the watch fires, eating salt pork from mess tins, the flames lending to their pale gaunt faces a mocking counterfeit of ruddy good health. By one fire sailors were
queueing
for tots of rum from a large brass-bound barrel. Already
officers
were calling out names and telling off men into parties in readiness for marching them down to the trenches. All around him Tom could sense the taut air of anticipation and fear, which mirrored his own feelings. He had little confidence that the pounding given the Russian works by the British and French siege guns during the past two days would turn out to have been any more effective than previous long-range bombardments. Only surprise could materially assist the attackers, and Tom doubted whether Russian vigilance would have been reduced by their two days under fire. The general opinion was that the Quarries would only be taken after fierce and prolonged
fighting
, and Tom saw no reason to doubt its correctness.

Charles’s note had told Tom to find Mr Parnwell, assistant paymaster, who would tell him where he should go and who would take him there. From previous visits to the camp, Tom knew that the paymaster’s office was in the group of huts where the brigade’s stores were housed – the paymaster himself, besides dealing with wages, performing for the sailors ashore the job done in the army by the commissariat and regimental
quartermasters
. Tom eventually found Parnwell overseeing the paymaster’s clerks in the crowded armourer’s hut, where they were entering in ledgers the number of pistols, revolvers and rounds of ammunition being issued to the members of the ladder parties. The armoury was dimly lit by two hanging lanterns and had the sharp bitter greasy smell which Tom had always
associated
with guns. To the left the yeoman was taking down weapons from the racks and checking them before shouting out the type of firearm and the name of the recipient. Ordinary Seamen were getting pistols, warrant officers revolvers.

Parnwell, a young man with a large nose and a sandy-coloured moustache, glanced cursorily at Charles’s note to Tom, and came out from behind the table.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but you’re not to go down.’

‘What?’

‘I saw Captain Crawford an hour ago and he was quite
explicit.’

‘I must see him then.’

‘I’m afraid he’s already gone down to the first parallel.’

Relieved at first and very much tempted to accept this rebuttal as final, Tom felt suddenly angry. He vividly recalled Charles’s certainty that he would not have it in him to watch the attack from the advanced trenches. Parnwell’s prohibition was just another attempt to dissuade him so that Charles could later
stigmatise
him as a coward.

‘What if I refuse to take Captain Crawford’s advice?’

‘I think it was an order, sir.’

Once again Tom was very close to giving in.

‘Civilians aren’t under orders. I have a pass for the trenches.’

Parnwell looked at Tom with unfeigned bewilderment and then shrugged his shoulders.

‘He said if you insisted you could go down with the surgeon’s party. They’ll be leaving for the second parallel in half-an-hour.’

‘Where can I find them?’

‘The hospital marquee.’

As Tom walked out into the darkness he smiled grimly to
himself.
So Parnwell had merely been an unwitting actor in another of Crawford’s tests. If Charles had genuinely meant to prevent him going on, he would never have given Parnwell instructions to say anything else after advising him not to go. The possibility that Charles had had a real change of heart occurred to Tom, but he dismissed the idea at once. Even if Crawford’s conscience
had
troubled him, Tom did not care. The venture had come to mean more to him than a simple victory over Charles. For his own sake he wanted to prove that he could overcome his lifelong terror of physical danger. He had come out to the war affecting to despise the outlook and mentality of the officers there; considering their notions of honour and duty, maintained in the midst of a
starving
army, as absurd as their habitual pride of caste. And yet, though owing their positions to influence and money rather than to aptitude and merit, he had not been able to deny their
courage
, and he still felt awed by it. When free of this final vestige of admiration for men who made no secret of scorning his calling
and who felt superior by right to every self-made man, however great his gifts, Tom was also sure that he would lose the last traces of humiliation caused by Helen’s rejection. With fear
conquered
, let whosoever wished look down on him. Let them, for he would not care. Never again would any new Captain Crawford have power over him.

Tom was almost at the hospital tent when he saw Humphrey, or at least thought he saw him; he was running past about ten yards away, probably carrying some message, and in the
moonlight
it was hard to be sure; but when the boy hesitated as if
recognising
him, Tom turned abruptly and walked behind the row of tents immediately to his left, unable to face talking to Helen’s son; afraid too that Humphrey would ask what he was doing and would argue with him to prevent him going down. Tom waited several minutes, and then, approaching the marquee from the other side, went in. He was not followed.

Shortly before five, an engineer officer led the naval surgeon’s party from the batteries through a confusing series of
zig-zagging
trenches, angled to avoid enfilading fire, into the wider first parallel, already crowded with troops – reliefs, the engineer explained, for the first two storming parties. The men were all silent, leaning against the walls of the trench and some, to Tom’s amazement, lying sleeping on the frozen mud, huddled together in their great-coats, a strange jumble of arms and legs, looking to Tom like bodies awaiting burial. Some of the medical orderlies were already crouching low, as if afraid of a sudden storm of bullets, and this amused the engineer, who pointed out that they were in no immediate danger, being still fifty yards
behind
the second parallel and a hundred from the third; while beyond that, even closer to the enemy, were the advanced saps leading to the British rifle pits. Tom imagined Charles and the ladder parties somewhere in those more hazardous trenches and grudgingly felt certain that he would not be cowed by thoughts of the coming ordeal. As Tom followed the stretcher bearers and orderlies into the next network of approach trenches, he felt a terrible wave of loneliness. Around him in these man-made
fissures
were hundreds of other men and yet this thought brought him no comfort; they at least had good reason to be there – for them refusal would have meant the firing squad. Yet he was moving forwards all the time; every second bringing him closer to the most advanced works, closer to the enemy. Men of action, he told himself, did not think, and lacking imagination could not envisage future horror until actually involved in it. But I am
quite different; never having felt an innate superiority to other men, I am under no obligation, as officers are, to justify their self-esteem with acts of valour. For the first time since parting from him, Tom longed to be with Magnus, to see his
heavy-lidded
grey-blue eyes, and above all to hear his reassuring voice. Magnus had been a soldier and yet combined pride with
sensitivity
, the power to act with the capacity to imagine. Perhaps there were others like him, but Tom only knew that he had never met them. In the dark confines of the trench, Tom remembered the wide skies and open hills above Balaclava, and his friend walking by his side. If their positions were now exchanged, Tom was sure that Magnus would not be at a loss, would feel no
self-pity
, and no sense that his lot was different from that of the men around him, but would face whatever was to come with the same calmness he had once shown facing George across the oval ‘hazard’ table, and walking towards Joseph Braithwaite’s hired thugs between the tall soot-blackened walls of a narrow cobbled lane.

They paused in the second parallel and the surgeon repeated that they would not under any circumstances cross the open ground between the advanced saps and the Russian rifle pits until it was clear that the storming parties had not only taken the Quarries but were able to hold them. But Tom was not much
reassured
by this. The only reason he could think of why surgeons should be sent to the Quarries was that a heavy fire from the Redan and the Malakoff would prevent the wounded being
carried
back to the trenches for many hours after the position had been taken.

They entered the third parallel on the heels of the three hundred men of the 7th Royal Fusiliers, who were to form the right wing of the second body of attack. Some dark ragged clouds had obscured the moon for several minutes, but when they blew over, Tom saw the blue-silver gleam of bayonets and the badges on shakos. A field-officer pushed by, his polished steel scabbard bumping against his thigh. From the trenches behind them came a faint smell of latrines wafted on a slight but piercingly cold breeze. The proximity of so many men and the absolute stillness broken only by an occasional muffled cough and the clatter of a ramrod, was one of the strangest experiences Tom had ever known. Sensing so much fear around him, his own started to diminish, and feeling calmer he tried to memorise the scene around him: the pale glow of moonlight on faces and
shoulder
-straps, making them seem to float, detached from solid
bodies, in a dark void; the myriad gradations of light and shade ranging from evanescent silver through varying depths of
chia
roscuro
to velvet blackness. How could it ever be possible to paint the transition from the high-lights to such darkness while giving a sense of the underlying masses? Because there
were
masses; the points of light did not, as he had at first thought, exist in
isolation
; many of the shadows he had seen as of a single tone, now seemed softer and less uniform; and the mood, that too must be conveyed … by a face, a face close-to, the whole being seen in perspective along the trench, two or three figures dominating in the foreground.

When a further two hundred men of the 33rd Regiment started to move along the parallel from the left, the naval
surgeon
’s party, which had now joined forces with two army
surgeons
from the Highland Division, was escorted forward by their guide into an advanced sap to the right of the area from which the assault would be launched, and led to the sap-head where they were to wait until the Quarries had been taken.

At half-past five the moonlight was as bright as ever and, clambering up the side of the sap, Tom looked out over the top of the gabions at the gentle slope leading up to the Russian rifle pits in front of the Quarries. The silvery radiance of the light and the unbroken stillness made the coming violence seem impossible. When he dropped down into the sap again, he found himself next to a young assistant surgeon, to whom he had talked briefly in the hospital marquee. The man, whose name was Watts, had complained about the way medical officers were treated in the navy. Watts offered Tom some brandy, which he was grateful to take being stiff with cold.

As the sky grew paler, the moon lost its lustre, and men and earth and grass seemed steeped in a chill grey wash. Near his feet Tom noticed a dead leaf, stiff with frost, its skeletal veins starred with minute crystals. He thought of the new leaves of an English spring, pale and translucent; of a green tunnel enclosing a slow dark stream, its surface skimmed by water-boatmen; recalled the slow change of the landscape through a dusty north country summer, until the sycamore wings had come spinning down in Barford’s autumnal woods.

Above the dark rim of the horizon the sky was whitening, dimming the moon to a flat thin disk.

Shortly after six o’clock several sharp cracking reports came from the direction of the Russian rifle pits as the British covering party sprinted across the open ground and took up positions in
shell craters and folds in the ground to keep the Russian marksmen’s heads down while the sailors leapt out from the trenches and dashed forward to place their ladders against the tangled branches of the abatis. Immediately behind the
blue-jackets
came a long scarlet wave of infantry – the first storming party. Only a few shots came from the Quarries and none at all from the rifle pits. The infantry surged over the abatis, like horses taking a jump, and ran on, soldiers and sailors pressing forward side by side, up the slope of the glacis towards the
irregular
ramparts of the Quarries. Behind them several companies of sappers were hacking at the abatis to clear the way for the second body of attack.

Immediately after the first shots Tom had been choked with anxiety, but seeing the attackers sweeping towards their
objective
so easily, relief and elation replaced all former misgivings. There seemed no way they could be stopped; no way at all. For the first time since the start of the attack, Tom thought of Charles, his sword drawn, striving to outpace those around him. Only a hundred yards.

Then from end to end of that dark ridge of broken earth spurted orange tongues of flame, as grape, canister and mitraille were sent screaming into the attackers’ faces, filling the loud air with death, cutting wide lanes through the advancing columns. As the second body of attack left the shelter of the sap-heads to support the first storming party, the Redan opened up, flipping mortar shells over the heads of the defenders in the Quarries, sending up plumes of earth as the new formations ran towards the abatis.

Paralysed and frozen at first, the whole living mass on the glacis began to reel and sway, fragmenting while some still went forward and others started to fall back. Above the crash of
gun-fire
a bugle sounded and the second wave of infantry began to shake out into extended order, company by company, section by section to avoid the shells still whistling down from the Redan. Had the supports been withheld even minutes longer, the
wavering
storming party on the glacis would have broken and fled, but, seeing their compatriots already swarming over the abatis, the survivors pressed on. From five hundred yards away Tom saw the leaders scrabbling at the ramparts with their bare hands, struggling to tear down the rubble-stone work revetting the parapet in order to form a ramp for the final ascent. The Russian riflemen had now mounted the firestep and were discharging
volleys
at the men beneath them, now too close for the field-guns to
be effective. The guns in the British ‘Right Attack’ were at last answering the fire from the Redan and Malakoff. Two more minutes and the second body of attack had reached the parapet, many, in their broken formation, having survived the gusts of grape that had worked such havoc with the storming party. The Quarries were now completely hidden behind dense white clouds of smoke, frequently lit from within by flashes. There was
continual
shouting and the accelerating rattle of musketry often drowned by the deeper crash of the British siege guns shelling the Russian bastions. The small-arms fire slackened and then there was a loud cheer, which was soon taken up by the men in the
forward
British trenches. Since no men were running back, it was clear that the Quarries had been taken.