Until the Colours Fade (58 page)

His eyes glistening with excitement, Tom turned to Watts, who had been watching impassively beside him.

‘They’ve done it.’

‘They’ll try to get it back, don’t you worry.’

Regardless of their own wounded in the battery, the gunners in the Redan now started firing on the Quarries. A large working party with spades and picks streamed towards the captured
position
past the heaps of dead and dying near the ditch; ahead of these sappers lay the formidable task of reversing the work’s defences under fire. After two companies from the reserve had followed the working party across the open ground to the
Quarries,
the senior engineer officer spoke to the surgeons and five minutes later they were picking their way across the shell-pitted ground towards the glacis. Since the Russians now seemed to be concentrating all their fire on the captured battery, and none on the approaches to it, there was now talk of getting the wounded back to the trenches, and indeed the stretcher parties busied themselves with this task the moment they reached the abatis.

Never having seen the immediate aftermath of even a single violent death, the scores of mutilated bodies and still trickling blood, the moans and hysterical cries for help, made Tom’s legs quake under him and his head swim. Yet in spite of himself he could not look away from shattered and torn limbs with bones sticking out through sleeves and trousers, and from chests torn open like carcases in a slaughterer’s yard. He wanted to but could not; and, although feeling that he had come and seen and was now free to return, he did not at once do so.

In the sap-head, he had told himself that he would go as far as the ditch and then return at once to the trenches, but within moments that option seemed a more dangerous one than remaining
where he was. Having seen the stretcher parties taking back the wounded, the Russians now started to drop shells around the abatis to discourage this proceeding and to prevent the men in the trenches thinking that they could reinforce their comrades at will. The ditch beneath the parapet, although choked with corpses, was now the safest place for the living to be, and the
surgeons
and their orderlies were soon at work there, binding up wounds as best they could to stop men bleeding to death. On the other side of the parapet shells were continually falling into the battery, and before long a steady stream of casualties were being brought back to the ditch for attention. Tom caught sight of Watts, the front of his tunic splattered with blood and his hands as red as if his wrists had just been cut.

Still a little dizzy and finding it hard to check occasional sobs of shock, Tom felt firmer on his feet. Soon he was filled with a powerful urge to look inside the battery itself – not merely to see it, or even to be able to say that he had set foot there – but
because
he was intuitively certain that he would come across Charles’s body. He did not wish him dead, but was convinced that he would be, and was sure that he would find him. Even if the living man would never know that the artist he had taunted and despised had reached the Quarries, there would still be, it seemed to Tom, a fitness in the confrontation, even with one party dead. Crawford might even be dying, and he could give him water. Tom wondered what Helen would make of that if she were ever to hear of it. The day before, he had learned about
Admiral
Crawford’s successful coup on the Tchongar Bridge and imagined the pleasure this would bring Helen. Then he pictured her opening the papers to see sketches of the scene in the
Quarries
minutes after their capture and before the first
counter
-attack. Magnus would see that such sketches were published and properly credited. Colnaghi’s could not complain about what would later boost the sales of the lithographs. Tom
suddenly
felt happy; I must be mad, he thought, to be feeling like this. Death and suffering around me and I’m happy. But his light-headedness remained; the shock and his fear and the strangeness of the trenches, the unreality of the moonlight – everything until now had hidden from him the remarkable fact that he was at a spot which within days would be the focus of the nation’s interest; not just one nation’s, but the world’s. What he had just seen and was still seeing with his own eyes would be
described
at second hand, or reconstructed out of what various soldiers said, and written down for millions of people to read
about. It was at once obvious and extraordinary; and all the more so because until this moment he had thought of everything only as it concerned himself and Charles, and Magnus and the men fighting and dying yards away. You’re an idiot, he thought; but if anything his surprise increased, because now he was thinking of the extraordinary sequence of events that had brought him to this spot. Helen, of course; Charles too; but, before either of them, George Braithwaite and a visit with him to Bentley’s. So many chances; yet was any life different? He remembered
reading
some words in a book of maxims, but could not remember the source: ‘In the writing upon the wall, we may behold the hand but see not the spring that moves it.’ His sense of his own
littleness
, even within the pattern of events which had directly shaped his life, increased his light-headedness. The parapet … the
battery
… Charles’s body. Of course. The decision was already made for him. Without fear he clambered up onto the rampart and dropped down into the Quarries.

Behind a temporary screen of gabions the members of the working party were digging like men possessed, desperately attempting to throw up a breastwork, thick enough and tall enough to stop the shells and round-shot fired at flat trajectories from the Redan. Other men were hastily dragging the Russian fieldguns from one side of the battery to the other and placing them at the embrasures in the new breastwork. Gunners were feverishly working at the breeches of pieces that had been spiked too hurriedly by the departing Russians to be irreparably damaged. It seemed extraordinary to Tom that men who had just fought so fiercely to take the position, should now be working harder than he had ever seen men work before. Every so often those with spades sank to their knees and others at once snatched up the tool and went on digging, tossing up so many spadefuls a minute that Tom lost count. After a shell had killed three sappers, he dived behind a traverse, affording him some shelter from the splinters of shells falling short. Everybody in the work seemed so taken up with what they were doing that none appeared aware of the constant danger and the devastation around them: overturned guns, shattered balks of timber and the scarred and pitted earth they moved upon. Nobody spoke to Tom or seemed aware of his existence. He pulled out a small pad and started hastily drawing the men digging, sensing, as he drew, the urgency of their task but still not understanding the need for them to work at such a frenzied pitch. The idea that the Russians might counter-attack within half-an-hour of being driven out,
had not occurred to him.

Whenever a shell did any damage to a section of the
breastwork
, the hole was at once plugged with gabions and no time wasted filling it with earth. During Tom’s first five minutes in the battery, no shell burst closer to him than thirty yards, and the impact of that one had been entirely absorbed by a traverse. Feeling much bolder, he began to move about, still sensing that he would find Charles. On one occasion he was cursed for getting in the way of a man carrying ammunition boxes across to the guns, and on another was pushed aside by a group pulling on a rope trying to right an overturned truck-mounted gun. But everywhere he looked there was no sign of Charles’s corpse. He had given up his search when he heard an officer scream:

‘They’re coming!’

Other orders came with bewildering speed: ‘Load with case, stand to the parapet….’ Riflemen were rushing over to the new breastwork and kneeling or crouching behind it. Seconds later he heard the hiss and crack of bullets and was no longer in any doubt what was happening. The blood rushed to his head as he leapt back towards the parapet he had climbed over ten minutes before. From somewhere he heard a frightened cry:

‘To the right…. They’re behind us to the right.’

From the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of grey
uniforms
and a gunner swinging his sponge stave in a wide arc. Tom was on the parapet, jumping and then falling, the ground rising sharply to meet him – a burning numbness in his side. He twisted slightly as he tumbled down into the ditch, and banged his leg on something hard; for a moment he was more frightened by the thought that he had broken it than by the creeping numbness in his chest. He had fallen across a corpse and was trying to move away when he fell back and saw bright blood on his hand and on his coat. Faint and thirsty he looked for his water bottle but his eyes were not focusing. Feeling little pain, he was not afraid. The surgeons could not be far away. The firing from behind the
parapet
had become indistinct; a pleasant sound like heavy drops on canvas or the beat of distant hooves. Men were running past and clambering into the battery; fresh troops, he thought joyfully; then, frightened they would tread on him, he tried to shout and was surprised to hear a choking groan. Seconds of fear were
followed
by a delicious floating sensation and a vision of flickering golden rods in front of his eyes.

Later he saw the crystals of frost and the moonlight again and realised that he was crying. If I could paint those rods, but how?
So much work, when I get home. Just remember what they looked like. That was the thing. He imagined himself on a stretcher being carried back. Everything was taking so long though; already it seemed hours since the men had passed him. Time hung brooding in the air, its seconds marked only by the small fountains of warm pain now spurting in his chest … filling him with pain. Lapping wavelets and then pouring like an
incoming
tide: an engulfing ocean. A dark ocean, himself a tiny light.

He writhed with a sudden convulsion; a heavy heated iron was pressing down deep into his flesh. So much heat and yet he was shivering; his limbs felt like ice. His mind lapsed, and, when he came to again, he felt better: no longer immersed in pain, but floating in clouds, dispersed and separate from him.

I never understood any of them, he thought. Never. Not really. But it did not trouble him. Thirst again; parched earth. Rain would be nice, a light fine rain. But above him the sky was clear and very bright.

He was being moved. Somebody was bending over him; a blurred face – like a gargoyle eroded by wind and rain. So many gargoyles and carvings and none of the artists known; no names at all. The face loomed closer and then withdrew.

The secret was to seek even the smallest improvements at whatever cost of time; that way he could capture the moonlight. The secret was … to treat a trifling matter with gravity – a child’s seriousness in play. Treat what? Art? Life? He could not remember. Those rods again – fragmenting now. Try to remember. No. Best enjoy them in case they disappeared.

*

Watts returned with a stretcher party ten minutes after first looking at Tom’s wound – a bad one, but men had survived worse: Major Bailey with eight bayonet stabs in the chest at Inkerman and not found for fifteen hours. Others died of shock after no more than a graze. It was hard to tell, but Watts prided himself on his powers of prediction.

He let Tom’s hand fall in irritation. Dead all right, and he’d had a definite feeling that he’d come through. Some surgeons said the more they saw, the less they knew, but Watts didn’t feel like that, and he was angry to be proved wrong. A man was groaning further along the ditch.

‘Let’s get on then,’ Watts shouted.

Thirty hours already without sleep, and God only knew how many more to come if they went on attacking; and they would. He could count on that.

By quarter-past eight Magnus was beside himself with irritation and anxiety. He had left Cathcart’s Hill to keep his appointment with Tom still uncertain of the outcome of the attack on the Quarries. The British had then still been in possession but were being increasingly hard-pressed by determined Russian sorties. As Magnus waited impatiently for Tom, the ceaseless sound of gun-fire, echoing across the plateau, increased his agitation.

Magnus had called at the Naval Brigade’s camp on his way to his hut and had learned that Charles had not returned. Out of the one hundred and twenty members of the ladder party only thirty had come back unscathed and less than a dozen wounded sailors had so far been brought in. The day before, when his father’s squadron had anchored off Balaclava, Magnus had not even known that an attack was imminent, let alone that Charles would be involved. But when in possession of these facts, he had at once done his utmost to find Tom to postpone their ill-timed meeting. Not only had he failed to find him, but had even been unsuccessful in his attempts to discover where he was billeted.

At half-past eight Magnus decided that Tom had forgotten, and returned to Cathcart’s Hill in time to see the British repulse the largest counter-attack to date, but only by committing half their reserve. Two more determined enemy sorties and the
Quarries
seemed destined to be back in enemy hands by the early afternoon.

Shortly before ten o’clock, Magnus took advantage of a
temporary
stalemate in the fighting to return once more to the naval camp to make further inquiries about his brother. He learned from a group of officers congregated outside the commodore’s tent that three more wounded sailors had been brought back but as yet no officers. The Russians were still shelling the ground
between
the advanced British trenches and the Quarries to prevent reinforcements reaching the work, and the severity of this fire had all but stopped further efforts to bring in wounded. Throughout the camp there was an air of deepening
despondency
.

Magnus was walking dejectedly away when he saw Humphrey sitting on the ground at the side of Lushington’s tent. His eyes
were red-rimmed with crying. Magnus came over and sat down beside him.

‘He’s sure to be dead, isn’t he?’

The boy’s bitter personal grief made Magnus feel
momentarily
ashamed of his own less vehement feelings.

‘If he was hit crossing the glacis, he’s probably still alive.’

‘But if he reached the parapet?’

Magnus sighed.

‘His chances won’t be so good.’

Humphrey nodded and swallowed hard. After a brief silence he said:

‘Your father’s in with the commodore.’

‘I don’t think I’ll see him till we know what’s happened.’

‘I haven’t been in either.’

Not wishing to build up false hope, Magnus could think of nothing to say; his own belief was that Charles had been killed shortly after the attack began. He was imagining what it would have been like to have been among the first to reach the ditch, when he heard Humphrey saying something about having seen Tom in the camp several hours before dawn.

‘Doing what?’ he asked in astonishment.

‘I don’t know. I saw him near the armoury and then lost sight of him.’

‘Have you seen him since?’

‘No. I don’t suppose I’d have remembered unless I’d seen you.’

Magnus felt a knot of fear tightening in his stomach. Of course there was nothing ominous about an artist or journalist coming to see the men marching down to the trenches, but then why had Tom not been on Cathcart’s Hill when the attack started? Possibly he
had
been there; with over a hundred officers
clustered
round the look-out post and the light so bad, it would have been easy enough to have missed him; and yet Magnus had made a point of looking for him to put off their meeting. He turned to Humphrey.

‘Do you know the name of the officer on duty in the armoury last night?’

‘No, but they’d tell you in the paymaster’s office.’

*

Once Magnus had found the Assistant Paymaster, it took him few questions to discover that Tom had gone down to the trenches with the surgeon’s party, none of whom, with the
exception
of a few stretcher bearers, had been seen since. Sick with fear for his friend, he rounded furiously on Parnwell.

‘Why in Christ’s name did you let a civilian go down?’

‘I don’t have to answer your questions.’

‘My brother is Captain Crawford. Now, why did you let him go down?’

‘I tried to put him off. I had no powers of arrest, sir. I told him what the captain had said. What else could I do?’

Parnwell’s face was ashen with tiredness and his hands were shaking.

‘The captain?’ repeated Magnus.

‘Captain Crawford, sir.’

A trace of exasperation had broken through Parnwell’s
deferential
façade. Magnus moved towards him threateningly.

‘You mean my brother asked Mr Strickland to come here in the first place?’

‘He had a letter from him,’ stammered Parnwell, evidently frightened by Magnus’s fury. ‘I suppose he did. Then he told me to stop him going down. He must have changed his mind.’

‘But instead you arranged for him to go with the surgeon?’

‘He wouldn’t listen to me. The captain said if he couldn’t be dissuaded, I was to send him down with the surgeon’s people.’

Outside the hut, Magnus covered his face with his hands. His mind was reeling. The tents, the huts, the grey sky, seemed to spin round him. It was a dream; he was running … but where?
Where?
Magnus stopped and stood in an agony of indecision. Must find him.
Find
him.
As the first wave of panic receded, he was again aware of the guns. Charles sent him to his death, and I sent him to Charles. I sent him to Charles. Grief and anger clashed in his head, reverberated with the distant din of battle. He could be alive … wounded. If I could think … if only I could think. Find one of the stretcher bearers or one of the ladder party. Without a guide there would be no hope of finding the
sap-head
from which the naval surgeon’s party had gone forward.

Within half-an-hour Magnus had persuaded a member of the ladder party to lead him through the trenches. Many of those asked had refused, and Ordinary Seaman Hayles had only been won over by the promise of twenty guineas. Before setting out, Magnus went with Hayles to the hospital marquee to find out as much as possible from the surviving stretcher bearers of the first party.

A hundred yards from the long low tent, Magnus saw men gathered round the entrance flaps and his heart leapt with new hope. He began to run, taking in blood-stained stretchers on the ground, their bearers lying exhausted beside them. Two men
were dragging a large tub of water into the marquee. A little closer and he heard ringing screams and moans coming from inside. Let him be safe, pray God let Tom be safe. For the first time Magnus really felt what his friend’s death would mean to him.

Nobody tried to stop Magnus as he pushed his way towards the cots and amputation tables. Stupefied by the constant cries and the shouts of the surgeons and orderlies, he moved along the tent in a daze, glancing cursorily at sights of appalling suffering: searching only for one face – dismissing all else. Orderlies were administering chloroform as fast as they could, but the sudden flood of wounded had taken them by surprise. For most of those brought in, the initial shock and numbness no longer saved them from the agony of stiffening wounds and the revival of lacerated nerves. He saw a large man lifted down from a table and water hastily sluiced over its red surface before another victim was placed on it and stripped; fragments of metal had forced bits of the cloth of this sailor’s jacket into his flesh and the blood had clotted and caked round the wound making him roar out as the material was ripped and cut away. Somebody shouted: ‘Wet it, you fools.’ Nearly at the far end of the tent Magnus gave up hope; if Tom was still alive he would be out there somewhere. Magnus was making for the entrance when he saw his father’s tear-stained face; he was talking to a surgeon, a small bald man with a bunch of silk ligatures threaded through a button-hole of his spattered coat. Charles was writhing in a cot, his neck arched back and his teeth sunk into his pillow to stop him crying out. His right arm had gone and the bandages covering most of the upper part of his chest were already darkening with new blood. Magnus stood gazing down at him aghast, feeling no more anger, only a surge of desperate pity. The muscles under his brother’s white skin tensed convulsively with each new spasm of pain, and there was a feverish glitter in his wild unseeing eyes. An assistant surgeon covered him with blankets and held a cloth firmly to his mouth until the chloroform left him drowsy and limp. The effect would not last though, and Magnus shuddered at the eternity of pain ahead of him. Magnus heard his father’s voice:

‘They think he may live if he survives the shock.’

Magnus nodded dumbly, feeling a suffocating sickness.
Somewhere
a man was screaming, his voice sticking on a single
piercing
note. He felt his father’s hand and returned the pressure as their eyes met. Knowing that he should stay a little longer, Magnus knew that he could not endure it, could not help shoulder
even a small portion of his father’s grief with the task that lay ahead of him.

‘He’ll live,’ he said quietly and then turned without another word.

Outside Hayles was talking to one of the bearers. Magnus sank to his knees and, pulling out his hip flask, took large gulps of brandy. Then he got up slowly and called Hayles over to him.

‘Better be going.’

The man did not move. Magnus thought he looked suspicious and uneasy. Then he remembered the money. He thinks he won’t get his money if I’m killed. Magnus started to laugh hysterically as he fumbled through his pockets, spilling out coins and notes. A slight smile lit Hayles’s leathery face as he dropped to his knees and started counting.

*

When Magnus and Hayles reached the approach trenches
between
the second and third parallels they found themselves caught between the chaotic stream of wounded now being
carried
to the rear, and the reserves and working parties pushing forwards laden with ammunition boxes, trenching tools and gabions – both movements being due to the sudden slackening of the fire from the Redan. This left Magnus in a state of painful uncertainty; by the time he reached the glacis, Tom might already be being carried back down one of the advanced saps.

In the third parallel itself the confusion was at its worst. Here shells had burst bringing down large sections of the trench walls, choking it with earth and debris; at some points bearers were having to lay their stretchers across the trench resting the ends on the parapets so that reserves could get by underneath. Magnus asked some of the bearers whether they had seen a young civilian with the naval surgeon but none could remember; probably none would have recognised one surgeon from another. Progress was agonisingly slow and all the time the thought that Tom might be lying wounded barely a quarter of a mile away
tortured
Magnus.

All around him he heard the confused and angry shouts of men going forward who had been separated from their
companies
and officers. The sound of so many country dialects made him want to weep; most of these cold, hungry and sleepless men had been farm labourers a few years past in quiet English
villages
. At a cost of millions they had been shipped three thousand miles to fight against Russian peasants, who had once led lives
almost identical to their own, and had most of them also come thousands of miles from home, in their case having endured the agony of forced marches along snow-covered roads, across frozen rivers and through high mountain passes. What could the Tsar’s claims in Moldavia mean to these men half crazed with passive suffering? No more than ‘the integrity of the Ottoman Empire’ meant to the British soldiers. At least the enemy was sustained by the thought that he was defending his own soil; the French and British had no such incentive, only a blind instinct, a tenacity that was almost a faith, that it was better to die than yield. And although every rational impulse in him cried out that such sacrifices were senseless folly, on a level of pure emotion Magnus was stirred by the nobility of men fighting without hope or belief in their cause. The fighting madness of these men, whose lives had brought them such hardship, was not so much directed towards human adversaries as against fate itself – fate which had cheated and savaged them, but from which they would not run.

Magnus was still trapped in the third parallel when the Russian shelling started again; not with its former intensity but regularly enough to be terrifying to men moving slowly along a trench, unable to see the trajectories of shells until they were passing overhead or exploding among them. One burst a hundred and fifty yards ahead at the junction of the parallel and one of the main advanced saps, causing indescribable chaos and carnage, and bringing everybody in the trench to an immediate stand-still. A number of officers climbed up onto the parapet and called on their men to follow. When Magnus suggested the same course, Hayles vehemently rejected it; so he scrambled up the muddy side of the trench and went on alone.

Even before reaching the abatis, Magnus realised the futility of his mission; the dead lay in heaps in front of the barrier or hung impaled on the sharpened branches, like seaweed thrown up against a breakwater in a storm and left there by the receding tide. Ahead on the glacis there were three long lines of bodies, recording the positions the storming party had reached when the Russians fired each of their perfectly co-ordinated volleys of grape. Although stretcher parties were busy, there were far too few of them to make any noticeable impact on the square mile over which the wounded were spread. In the distance Magnus saw that one man had managed to fix part of his shirt to his
bayonet
and had raised this flag to try to attract help. Magnus gave brandy to several wounded men and then threw the empty flask
away. One of those to whom he had given a drink had been a very young man in great pain holding open a locket containing a miniature of a grey-haired woman, evidently his mother.
Everywhere
Magnus tasted the acid reek of saltpetre and blood in his throat and nostrils, carried on the icy wind, which ruffled patches of pale dead grass, small islands in the surrounding ocean of frozen mud. The sky was a whitish grey but darkening to the north.