‘Hast thou given the horse his strength?
Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?
. . . the glory of his nostrils is terrible.
He paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength:
He goeth on to meet the armed men’
—The Book of Job
Harry 1854
Before it had been horses thrown into the sea. This time it was men.
Cholera followed them on to the transports at Varna and was their fellow traveller as they sailed south to join the fleet at Balchik Bay. Even had infection not been with them to begin with it would soon have taken hold, because the transports were so crowded that it was impossible on many of them even to sit or turn round. Thirteen hundred men were packed on to one ancient man o’ war where no provision for such numbers had been made beyond the removal of the guns. Lack of space dictated that everything except men was dispensable. Piles of clothing, tents, arms and equipment were left. Over five thousand horses – officers’ mounts and pack animals painstakingly rounded up in Scutari and Varna – were herded into a hastily built depot and abandoned to what Harry knew must be certain starvation, or a quicker but even more painful fate at the hands of the Turks. He could almost find it in his heart to be glad that Piper had escaped. Better to think of him galloping until his heart burst in the heat, than rotting to death in what was to all intents and purposes a prison camp.
Emmeline Roebridge was smuggled on board somehow, under cover of the general chaos and confusion, and against the strongly expressed wishes of the divisional commander, Lord Lucan. But no contingency plans had been made to accommodate the hundreds of soldiers’ wives expressly forbidden to continue with the army to the Crimea. The wretched women formed a hysterical mob on the dock, and in the end there was nothing for it but to load them, too, on to the already-overcrowded transports, at the expense of yet more supplies.
Across the unstable makeshift lighters trooped the women, and those horses allocated space, while on the quay the haphazard stacks of summarily unloaded equipment grew, even including medicine chests and ambulance wagons, to the delight of the locals. Not twenty yards behind him, in a cabin where at least one brother officer lay dying behind a rigged-up screen, Fyefield and the rest popped champagne corks and flirted with Emmeline, congratulating themselves on having got her on board. Harry, not wanting to appear prudish but unable to join in the merriment, went out on deck. From the scummy sea water around the transports there protruded bobbing corpses, jettisoned hours before but returned, as they rotted, to the surface, tenacious of their old element, their yellow-green faces puffed up by putrefaction in a mockery of rude health.
The process of embarkation seemed interminable, the confusion and noise beyond anything Harry could have imagined. The smoky air was full of the rattle of drums and the strident blast of conflicting regimental bands, designed to raise spirits but resulting only in a discordant row. The horses, underfed, overtired and agitated by the din, were fretful and hard to manage. But however justifiable their nervousness, to the sailors they were just one more bulky cargo to be loaded, and an inconvenient and contrary one at that. The men had no experience in handling them, and precious little regard for their feelings. Ears, tails, and even flailing legs were grabbed without ceremony, sometimes by more than one burly, cursing seaman, and blows meted out without fear or favour. Betts was enraged by this behaviour and in spite of his fear of water went down amongst the sailors to remonstrate with them, but he was hopelessly outnumbered.
Due perhaps to Piper’s disappearance, Harry was not obliged to leave Clemmie behind, but when he went down to her in the hold it wrenched his heart to see the way her legs were splayed and her head hung as if still dangling in the loading sling, in an attitude no longer of trust but of dull, cowed lassitude. It may have been fanciful, but in spite of Betts’s oft-repeated ‘We’ll see ’er right, sir’, Harry no longer felt that when he laid his hand on the mare she took comfort from it: rather that it was seen as a sign of impending treachery. Yet Clemmie was fortunate in being in the first consignment of horses to be embarked, for not long afterwards a swell got up, making the rickety lighters heave and toss, panicking the animals and sending many of them, with the men leading them, into the water, their yelling and thrashing dreadful to witness, as the impassive dead looked on, riding the waves.
As they pulled out of the harbour, the officer whose last hours had been spent listening to the clink of glasses and the tinkle of Emmeline’s laughter, was slung overboard, wrapped in a horse blanket.
To Harry all this seemed so far removed from his long-nurtured ideal of heroic warfare, that even had he been able to do it justice in a letter he could not have sent it, nor expected those at home to believe what he’d written. Except, perhaps, for Rachel, whose face was becoming more clear to him as it became more distant.
The short voyage south was almost dead calm. Even the least observant and imaginative infantryman could not fail to notice that there was no life to be seen – not a bird, nor a fish, scarcely a cloud that wasn’t caused by their own smoke. It was as if death’s presence on the voyage created a territory around them which no living thing was prepared to enter.
At Balchik Bay it was no better. The stately grandeur of the mountains encircled a scene every bit as harrowing as the one they’d just left. Cholera had also ravaged the fleet here and bodies bobbed like corks among the ships. Through the night, as the vessels rode at anchor waiting for all the transports to arrive, beneath the babel of men and animals the ears of all of them became attuned to the intermittent soft splash of the dead going into the deep.
Even when they sailed on, the tall masts and funnels and the great columns of steam more like a factory afloat than a fleet of ships, it was still not for the Crimea, but north once again to rendezvous with the French at the mouth of the Danube.
Finally, on the afternoon of 11 Sepember the combined fleets set sail eastward across the Black Sea, their leaders having finally decided that they should make landfall near Eupatoria, at a place named Calamita Bay.
Harry read his parents’ letters first, setting Rachel’s aside to be savoured. His mother had written the letters, although his father had added his signature, somewhat unsteadily, to the end of them. Maria’s writing was like her, full of real feeling naturally expressed, but staccato and disjointed, flitting capriciously from subject to subject using half-sentences linked by dashes, or simply running into one another. Harry was poignantly reminded of the last letter he had received from Hugo, on honeymoon in Italy, how its appearance had conveyed his elation as much as the contents.
She was well, reported Maria, and his father was trying to eat more, but failing to get any stronger in spite of everyone’s best efforts. She had been trying to cheer him up by having some amusing little parties at which there had been music and singing and one or two parlour games: ‘the funniest, funniest thing imaginable when a person must act some everyday activity “in the manner of the word” – I had to play croquet “passionately”! And then Mrs Carmichael to do “riding a bicycle” in the same way – I am afraid she was comical unintentionally as well – I thought I should weep from laughing!’
In picturing this gathering, though he knew how well his mother meant, Harry could only feel sorry for his father, sitting baffled and below par as the merriment unfolded. But Maria went on to say that Rachel had also been present, ‘and was a marvel, surprisingly (!) full of fun but not much inclined in her condition to caper about like the rest of us so she sat beside your father and quite took him out of himself for a while, even making him laugh from time to time, though whether at our antics or her comments, who knows?’ Harry could see this scene, too, in his mind’s eye and it made him smile. Maria said that she had also discovered, from Mr Carmichael, that it was possible to have letters delivered by Queen’s Messenger from Horseguards, and this she intended to organise if possible, because she had little or no faith in the postal service in a theatre of war. It appeared that this scheme had been effective, because her second letter, though dated six weeks after the first, had apparently arrived within three weeks of it.
It made worrying reading.
‘I cannot pretend,’ she wrote, ‘that there is any smallest sign of improvement, so when you consider that he has been like this for so many months, what is there to say but that he is worse? It is not possible for a man – who has been so strong and vital as you know – to be like this for ever, it is not a life –’ she had underlined these words fiercely ‘– and if he were a horse or a dog I should put him out of his misery. And so, Harry, would you, out of common kindness and love – I cannot bear it and do not know what to do – the doctor is kind but useless, it is not his fault ...’ Here she went on to deliver a colourful litany of the kind doctor’s manifold shortcomings, ending with, ‘The trouble is that he and I both know there is nothing to be done, but he will not say so from pride in his profession, and I will not because I will not, because I cannot bear to ...’
All this brought tears to Harry’s eyes. Surrounded daily as he was by the horrible consequences of mass official neglect and disorganisation – disease and privation on a scale he could never have imagined possible six months ago – he realised that he was becoming habituated to the horrors. But the thought of his father quietly burning out at home in England in spite of every care and attention, however ‘useless’, made him sick with unhappiness.
He turned to Rachel’s letter last. Its tone, as he might have expected, was as different as possible from his mother’s: measured, thoughtful but – he was certain he did not imagine this – full of a real concern not just for his welfare but for his thoughts and feelings, both about the war and his father.
I am sure your mother will have told you that your father is very ill, and of course she becomes so angry and despairing. She is a person who likes to do, and there is nothing to be done. I believe he is far more philosophical than her, and it is wonderful to see the way he does his best to seem cheerful, to please her, so that she will not fret too much. They are so very different, and yet theirs is a marriage of minds and hearts such as most people only dream of, but which I know Hugo and I might have had. Dear Harry, I think often of the happy and loving childhood enjoyed by you and Hugo, and that it must have been that, in part, which gave him his own gift for life. I hope you don’t think me presumptuous for writing in this way about the family that you know and love and from whom you are presently separated. I do so only to express my own feelings for them, and perhaps to bring them in some small way closer to you.
I wonder whether your mother has described to you the jolly soirées held, as she would have it, to divert your father – all sorts of unlikely locals were pressed into service and did valiantly all things considered. Not that they had much choice. Maria as you know is not a woman with whom to take issue, even over charades! I think the evenings may have been as much to divert her, which is no more than she deserves, but seeing her laughing and carefree did make Percy smile, and he and I sat together like Derby and Joan and exchanged some very wicked and, dare I say, witty observations on the other guests and the proceedings generally.
And now, dear Harry, I wonder how it is with you? I read the reports in the newspapers but they only describe the movements of ships and men, and not the sights that you see, the sounds you hear, the smells, the experiences, the excitements and discomforts. Even the horrors, if there already are horrors. When next you write, try to tell me something of all this, because I wish to try to be there with you in spirit. That, I think, is what letters are for, don’t you agree? Not simply for the listing of events, though I am hungry for those too, but for thoughts and impressions, so that it is more like having a conversation, seeing not just what the other person sees, but how he sees it.
But of course I am clamouring like a child for things which for dozens of excellent reasons you will probably not be able to give. Understand that I ask only for what it would be a relief or a blessing, or simply a diversion, for you to write if you have any time at all. And only of course when you have written to your mother and father who deserve your letters so much more. Nothing is too inconsequential nor too terrible for you to tell me – I shall not be shocked, I long for it all. One thing that I wish to ask is about Piper. How is he? I am perfectly patient and philosophical as a woman in my ever-enlarging state must be. Please remain as safe as orders and your own bravery will allow.
Your ever-loving sister-in-law,
Rachel
Harry read these letters on the first night of their crossing, but the comfort he derived especially from Rachel’s was shortlived. On the following night he became ill, with vomiting, diarrhoea and a fever. Sanitary arrangements aboard the Simla were minimal and had not been improved or extended to accommodate the numbers on board. It was almost as well that he believed he had the cholera and would die, or his own condition of incontinent filfth would have been too much to bear. He was largely ignored except, surprisingly, by George Roebridge who attended to most of his more shaming needs with a kind of bluff tenderness while fastidious Emmeline kept to the decks with a book and a lace handkerchief. In fact there were probably more dismayingly intimate acts of kindness to be grateful for than he knew, for he was delirious for over twenty-four hours.
When the fever broke and he was able to take in his surroundings he could scarcely believe he was still alive, and George was equally incredulous.
‘If you fail to come through this little skirmish in one piece, there’s no justice. You’re a man of iron, sir!’
‘Not as much as you are,’ said Harry, with feeling. ‘I have to thank you, George.’
‘Glad to be of service. And naturally I believe you’d do the same for me.’
Harry, white and sweating and weak as a kitten, was not so lightheaded that he couldn’t see with relief the twinkle in George’s eye. He might not have felt so relieved had he known how prophetic a remark this would turn out to be.
Two days later, as dawn broke, the Crimean coast appeared, a thin, brown line between sun and sea.
Rachel had at first decided to paint a landscape with the White Horse as its focus and centrepiece, but was obliged, dissatisfied, to abandon it. This was because the quality she found fascinating about the horse – one of mutability and movement – was something that was impossible, or that she did not have the skill, to capture. There were times when the creature seemed only just to have landed on the hillside, or to be gathering itself to leap away the next second. On those days when the weather and light were changeable it seemed to move as she watched, its outline trembling with life. Sometimes it appeared proud and angry, a wild horse in defence of its territory; at others it looked playful as a young colt, and in that mood it reminded her of Piper – and so of Hugo.
Though disappointed at having to give up her first idea, she had too much respect for her subject to persist and fail. Instead she determined to paint a view of the house (she planned it as a present for Hugo’s parents) in which the horse could be glimpsed peripherally, like a flash of white light in the near distance.
Having decided on this she went with her materials each day to the west side of the park, near the edge of the wood, and spent two or three hours there if it was fine. She went in the early morning, breaking her habit of attending to domestic and estate business at that time, because that was when the late-summer sun fell across the house in a way she liked, and also on to her as she worked. Jeavons would follow her across the grass, carrying in one hand the basket chair and in the other two cushions, hovering like a mother hen until he was satisfied that she was comfortable and wouldn’t attempt to move the chair on her own. If she remained there past midday, he would emerge from the house with a high-sided butler’s tray on which would be whatever cook had decreed she must eat ‘for the baby’s sake’.
The whole household was solicitous, and even slightly proprietary, about her condition. She appreciated this, and accepted it as a mark not just of their growing regard for her but also of their affection for Hugo, yet it drove her almost to distraction. For the fact was that she had never felt better. So far from being ill, or delicate, or over-tired she was in vigorous health, with a hearty appetite and boundless energy. Every day she thanked God that against all the odds for a woman her age, she had fallen pregnant so soon, and so had this precious legacy of Hugo inside her. She did not concern herself with whether it was a boy or a girl, she wished only for their child to be healthy and to be like its father. It certainly had his restlessness, bumping about inside her like a kitten with a ball of string, though as it grew larger there was less room for manoeuvre and it seemed to be pushing at the walls of her womb with its arm and legs, bending and stretching, eager to be born. Then there were days when it lay low and heavy, its contented hiccups making her body tick like a clock.
The baby was a reminder of Hugo’s love and its manifestation. She would have endured anything for it, so her exceptional wellbeing was an unlooked for blessing. The physical warmth and mental serenity that she enjoyed were his gift, and the solid, fruitful weight of her belly and breasts were like his embrace, making the big bed less empty at night.
Rachel had not known love before, and it had transformed her. Darius Howard had been a clever, distant, ambitious man, devoted to her but preoccupied with his work. Being herself someone who liked her own company and pursuits and did not crave attention, she had been completely content with him. Their marriage was a serene and mutually accepting partnership, and its physical aspect followed the same pattern of tactful understanding. There was no reason for their not to have children, and she had assumed that in due course they would, but when after several years there were none she accepted that, too, and the lack of a family was never discussed between them. Their life together at Vayle Place was characterised by its calm observance of the proprieties. Rachel liked and respected her husband and was content with him, if a little bored. But when Darius had taken his own life, the aspect of the tragedy that most horrified her was that he must have been tormented, and had kept the torment from her. In that moment the whole fabric of her marriage was torn apart and thrown in her face.
Whatever his private agonies his death was an ordered one. His personal papers were meticulously up to date, his finances secure, his developmental project with the Great Western Railway conscientiously completed. On the day of his death he had gone to London on the train, put in a full day’s work at the company’s head office, went (it was later discovered) to the barber’s for a haircut and shave, caught the same train back and shot himself in the middle of a field not far from the station. He was careful to position himself so that he could be seen from the road, and some kindly fate had ensured that he fell with his head amongst a clump of long buttercups so that the puddle of brains and gore exuded by the bullet hole was not fully visible to the two children who found him.
In the long and reasoned letter that was found in his briefcase, addressed ‘To my dear wife’, he told Rachel how sorry he was to inflict this on her, but that he could not continue to inflict on her the far greater wrong of his dishonesty.
‘. . . nor can I,’ he went on, ‘any longer tolerate the burden of my wickedness. Suffice it to say, my dearest Rachel, that though I have lived another life, far beneath the one we shared, my best and highest feelings have always been for you, and you alone.’
She was quite mad with rage. People thought her wonderfully brave but it was anger, not courage, that kept her eyes clear and her head high. Anger that her husband had kept his secrets close, even in death; anger that he had needed ‘another life’ without ever considering that the two of them might have found such a life together; anger that he should speak of his ‘best and highest feelings’ being reserved for her, as though such feelings could never include passion.
Darius’s death left her high and dry – childless, still young, financially secure, and physically unawakened. For four years after it she had sleepwalked through her life until Hugo had burst through the hedge of thorns, fallen in love with her as she slept, and woken her with a kiss.
With him, the world which had been a muffled, shuffling, half realised place burst over her in a wave of clamorous sensation. Sight, sound, smell and even taste were suddenly intensified. His ardour and openness were a revelation to her, and with her love for him came the healing of forgiveness for her husband. Opening and flowering in Hugo’s warmth, she released the bitter resentment and it simply floated away, like thistledown.And after their marriage, over those sensual weeks in Umbria, she had realised that the act of love was not simply a consummation but an initiation, a beginning – for her, a rebirth.
So when she was widowed for the second time her composure was founded on peace, not fuelled by anger. Even in the depths of her misery, just after the accident, when she had felt cheated and half crazed with pain, she had not experienced the corrosive bitterness that had followed Darius’s death. And now, with Hugo’s child in her womb, the happy memories were coming gently back, like true friends, to comfort her.
She had, too, seemed to see Harry for the first time. Perhaps because Hugo had been such a bright light, his younger brother had been cast in shadow. If she was truthful she had barely noticed him to begin with. There had been a dinner party at which they were introduced, but beyond a pleasant, serious face and a civil manner, more like that of a young doctor or academic than a cavalry officer, he had made little impression. Since then, he had become a friend. Over the arrangements for Hugo’s funeral he had not just agreed with her ideas, but put those ideas into practice in a way that suggested he understood their provenance – indeed, understood her. He never claimed precedence, as he might easily have done, nor questioned even by implication her right to make delicate decisions. She remembered every step of that long, quiet walk to the hilltop church with the men – Harry included – pulling the cart, and Piper prancing and sidestepping alongside. In the churchyard Maria had been heavily veiled, Percy pinched and thin-lipped, over a hundred mourners waiting there in silence, a mass of faces turned towards her like pale flowers, reflecting her sadness.
Harry had read in a clear, boyish voice, a few fines from the Book of Job beginning: ‘Hast thou given the horse strength . . .?’ And she’d noticed as he closed the Bible that his officer’s hands were red raw from the shafts of the cart.
On his final visit, to say farewell before leaving for the Crimea, she had been aware of something, some depth of feeling, that he was too honourable to express. And as he’d led her down the hillside on the horse’s broad back there had been a humility in his manner which moved her. Here, she realised, was a truly good man.
There had been an incident since his departure which had brought him suddenly closer in a way nothing else could have done. Mrs Bartlemas had come to the door, white-faced with shock, to tell Rachel of her son’s death. It was no surprise that she came on her own; her husband Dan Bartlemas was a mild, tongue-tied giant of a man who worked in the yard and cellars of the Flying Horse – all delicate negotiations and family matters were seen by him as female work. The two women sat quietly together in the sunny drawing room. Rachel, keenly aware of their relative positions, she expecting her first child, Mrs Bartlemas robbed of hers, had said little but allowed her guest to talk. She had showed Rachel the letter sent to her by Captain Latimer.
My dear Mr and Mrs Bartlemas,
I write to tell you that your good and brave son, my dear childhood friend Colin, has died of the cholera here in Varna. He showed the greatest courage to the end, and had a digni fied funeral which I witnessed myself. Please accept the deepest sympathy of one who also feels his loss keenly, though so much less than you yourselves must do.
Your servant always,
Harry Latimer
Rachel would have cried herself at this letter had Colin’s mother not been so grimly dignified. Instead she read it through twice in order to memorise it, and then handed it back.
‘You must both be proud of your son, Mrs Bartlemas, though I know that pride can be no consolation.’
‘He never even fought . . .’ Her voice trembled.
‘He fought sickness. Captain Latimer says so. To bear pain courageously is a triumph.’ She heard herself sounding like an embroidered sampler, and reached out to cover the other woman’s hand. ‘I am so sorry. I can’t think of anything more dreadful than to lose a child.’
‘No, mum . . . thank you.’ Mrs Bartlemas sniffed. ‘It’s a nice letter.’ She folded it carefully and put it in her pocket. ‘My Mercy read it to us. Harry was a dear boy, and Captain Latimer would never tell us a lie, would he?’
‘No,’ Rachel had replied. ‘He never would.’
The place where she now sat with her painting was not two hundred yards from where Hugo had died. She could recall it without undue pain, rehearse each detail as if reading a poem. She had been at her desk in the drawing room and seen, in the mirror on the wall to her left, the reflection of Piper careering riderless towards the house with his harness flying, as if he would simply plunge through glass and brick and gallop over her. She’d got up and rushed to the window as he stopped, and Colin had picked up his reins. She saw at once what had happened and had walked steadily from the room, across the hall and out of the main door. At the edge of the wood among the creamy splashes of early narcissus she saw the two brothers, one lying, one kneeling. But on seeing her Harry had got to his feet and backed away respectfully. And had remained there, standing a little way off with his head bowed, like a guard of honour protecting her grief.
The combined fleet sailed up the Crimean coast as if performing a march-past. There was a certain splendour in such hubris, thought Harry, but hubris it surely was, when the Russians clustered on the ramparts of Sevastopol to watch them go by, and at night they were a seaborne city of twinkling lights and lanterns.
They were to disembark on the morning of 14 September. Harry still felt weak and faint, his bowels like water and his stomach resistant to everything but the smallest amount of liquid. Still, officers were to disembark in full dress with sword, and all men with three days’ ration of salt pork and biscuits and full canteens of water, though the general weakness of the troops had led to their being ordered to leave their packs behind and to take with them only what they could manage to wrap in their blankets.
At eight a.m. the weather was perfect, carrying the warning of fierce heat later on. The bay was wide and sandy, one of a series of similar bays that scalloped the coast in either direction. On the way they had passed areas of beach with huts, striped canvas tents, and bathing machines bearing brave little flags. Here too it was pleasant enough: the sand rose into dunes in some places, low cliffs in others, and beyond these were shallow grassy hills reminiscent of Norfolk, where as boys Harry and Hugo had once spent a holiday with their governess, the kind but whiskery Salter. The sea had been so shallow for so great a distance that although Harry had not then been able to swim he could run straight out for over a hundred yards, with the waves still only around his legs, and then splash and lunge about while Hugo swam back and forth a little further out where it was deeper. Salter, who was terrified of the water, would occasionally lurch up from her deck chair, both arms windmilling wildly, her frantic warnings made tiny by distance . . . There was something sombre about today’s inversion of that childhood scene – he standing smartly dressed and armed on the deck of the Simla, waiting to wade through the water to the empty beach and whatever lay beyond it.
It seemed he was not the only one sunk in reflection. After all that had happened in the past weeks, so many men and animals dead or lost, so many still sick, it was chastening at last to be so close to their destination. Waiting for the order to disembark, there was a momentary lull in the shipboard clamour as fears and memories passed over them like a shadow.
Hector Fyefield, scanning the land with his spyglass, said beneath his breath: ‘We are not alone.’ He handed the glass to Harry, pointing with his other hand. ‘Take a look and tell me what you see.’
A row of horsemen was drawn up on the crest of one of the little hills. There might or might not have been several hundred more in the valley beyond. These appeared alert. Their leader was busily engaged in making notes in a book, and beneath his arm was a large document, possibly a map. As Harry looked, he raised the binoculars that were hanging round his neck and seemed to be looking straight back. Harry experienced the perverse and childish temptation to wave.
Fyefield held out his hand for the spyglass and Harry returned it.
‘Cossacks . . . They appear to be leaving.’ He snapped the glass shut and gave a supercilious laugh. ‘One can scarcely imagine the effect of all this on the poor fellows.’
Harry refrained from making his own observation, which was that there was something in the Cossacks’ calm scrutiny and their officer’s unruffled note-taking which did not denote abject terror.
When the order came, the quiet at once exploded into seething bustle and noise as the bands struck up and disembarkation began. The sunshine, the activity, the inviting emptiness and accessibility of the Russian beach and, above all, the long-awaited sense of purpose, dispelled anxiety.
The Light Cavalry were to wait until the infantry divisions were on land. Emmeline availed herself of George’s spyglass and gave a running commentary on what all could see anyway – the soldiers swarming down the sides of the ships like ants into the waiting boats, the sailors shouting coarse encouragement (which made her blush, especially where it was directed towards the Scotsmen in their kilts) and the proud sight of the troops eagerly jumping out of the boats and wading thigh-deep to shore.
‘At last!’ she cried, eyes shining, clasping her gloved hands.‘We’re really here!’ Exactly, Harry remembered, as he and Hugo had done when free at last of shoes, socks and jackets they ran on to the cool evening sand after the interminable journey north with Salter.
All morning the operation continued, with the broad beach and its hinterland filling up with men and equipment and the sky with clouds, until at three o’clock it began to rain. With the rain the temperature dropped abruptly, and Emmeline went back into her cabin. A wind got up, not a gale such as they’d endured on the voyage from England but enough to make the exercise considerably more hazardous. Nerves and tempers frayed. The bawling of the sailors which had been good-natured before became impatient and bullying. An activity which would have been all in a day’s work to them, swarming down the sheer side of a steamer on swaying, sodden ropes into small boats which the waves were tugging and tossing in every direction – was a dismaying one for the wretched foot soldiers, many of them sick with colic, dysentery and worse. Fear and discomfort were heaped on indignity. The rain picked up, lashing their faces, and a great many of their kit bundles fell into the sea.
Harry went down at night after dinner to see the horses. Since leaving Varna he had been assigned another charger, Deny, a heavier horse than Piper, beside whom Betts, a pasty little monkey of a man, was like a dwarf. Betts was only twenty-five, the same age as Harry, but could have been any age from twenty to forty. Until the war he’d earned a living at one of the famous London breweries. One of the great dray horses had gently but firmly stood on his foot a few years back, and he walked with a jerky limp which only added to his all of indomitable cockiness. As well it might for in spite of the limp, his rickety frame and his deathbed cough, he had already survived several bouts of sickness and come through unscathed.
Down in the hold Harry went first to Deny, a homely bay gelding with feathered heels and a mealy nose, not sufficiently handsome in the first place for the depredations of the voyage to have spoiled his looks. Harry made a fuss of him and he nodded and stretched out quivering, hopeful lips. Deny was sturdy and willing, a horse that a child could have ridden, but entirely unproved. In spite of his name, Harry suspected him of being one of the horses rounded up in Varna, and therefore not accustomed to luxury.
Betts was crouched down by Clemmie’s legs, rubbing her pasterns with liniment. When Harry arrived he would have got up, but Harry motioned him not to.
‘Captain Latimer, sir.’
‘Carry on, Betts.’
‘Sh.’
When Harry went to Clemmie’s head she turned her face into his chest in an attitude it was impossible not to interpret as despair. Betts hauled himself up and propped himself with one hand on her flank. He swayed a little with the motion of the ship; blinked fast a few times in the punchdrunk way he had before speaking.
‘When are they going to let us off, sir?’
‘Tomorrow, I believe.’
‘Weather’s foul, sir. How they going to get the horses off in this?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I hope there’s going to be some forage for ’em, sir.’ He slapped Clemmie’s side.‘Otherwise you and the other gents’ll find yourselves quicker running after the Russians than riding these poor things. Their saddles’ll be too ’eavy for ’em.’
‘Don’t worry, Betts,’ said Harry, more from duty than conviction, ‘we’ll be provided for.’
‘Sh.’ Betts hawked richly and spat a yellow gob with fearsome speed and accuracy into the gulley at the foot of the bulkhead. He blinked rapidly. ‘Glad to ’ear it, sir.’
* * * * *
All night it rained and the next morning at first light it was still doing so, but in a slow drizzle. Seen through the spyglass, the aspect of the beaches could not have been more different than the previous day’s hopeful bustle. There were only a few tents and on the upper reaches of the sand and among the dunes sleeping men lay in the open, wrapped in their soaking blankets, like corpses in winding sheets. Piles of supplies, still lying where they had been unloaded, looked no longer encouraging but paltry and neglected. Officers, who had waded so proudly through the surf in their splendid full dress, sat about on powder kegs with the water streaming off their rubber capes.
The wind had dropped, and disembarkation of the Light Brigade began. Betts and the other grooms remained behind to assist with the unloading of the horses. As the cavalry officers descended the ladders the sailors held their tongues, canny rather than respectful, though Harry had the impression that if he or a fellow officer had missed his footing it would not have upset them. The hand that met his as he stepped off the ladder was hard as leather and knotty with rope-calluses. The boat, with twenty of them on board, towed like a child’s toy by a team of sailors in a lighter craft, bobbed away from the relative security of the Simla towards the dismal chaos and unknown dangers of Calamita Bay.
It was a trip of no more than a quarter of a mile to the shore, but George Roebridge’s head was lolling and he was deathly pale. ‘Thought I’d have got my sea legs by now,’ he muttered wanly, before vomiting painfully over the side. They were to be his last coherent words.
When the boat grounded the others, including Fyefield, leapt out and waded ahead eagerly. It took Harry and one of the sailors a couple of minutes to help George into the water, and once in his progress was slow and weaving as a drunk’s, his weakened legs barely able to cope with his own weight, let alone that of the shallow waves. After only a few yards he fell to his hands and knees, and with a terrible growling groan was sick once more. There was no mistaking the sound and smell nor, as Harry hoisted him to his feet, the blueish shadow of cholera around his mouth. Emmeline was still on board, the cavalry officers’ wives were to disembark last. At this rate, Harry calculated, George would be dead before she reached the Crimea.
On land there was no cover, no organisation, no apparent chain of command. Harry manhandled his companion to the top of the beach and laid him in the lee of a dune, lying on his own cape and covered with Harry’s. He was now retching with every other breath, his eyes full of the same animal terror that one saw in the eyes of the horses – a trapped panic in the face of the inevitable.
Stifling his own anxiety, Harry went in search of cover. Such tents as had been brought (and in the confusion of embarkation at Varna there had not been many) had been loaded on to the transports first without thought that they might also be needed first.
Harry approached a senior infantry officer who appeared at least to be acting constructively, organising teams of men with a couple of arabas to move supplies further inland. When they’d begun leading the brokendown horses along the crowded beach, moving the living and dead roughly out of the way by main force, he asked: ‘Sir, is there any form of cover for the sick?’
The officer looked at him with a weary expression that said, Trust a cherrybum to ask a stupid question. ‘The sick must go back to the ships.’
‘If they can, but it’s impossible while so many are still coming ashore.’
‘Then I can only suggest you do what everyone else has done. Find existing cover of some sort and take the sick to it,’ said the officer. The almost insulting obviousness of this advice masked a hard truth: there were to be no more tents.
Harry thanked him and made a brief sweep of the surrounding area. The beach was severely crowded and as full of noise as a marketplace – shouted orders, groans and coughing, the creak and clatter of the farmcarts, the yells of the sailors in the landing craft and of RSMs bawling at the top of their lungs in a vain attempt to assemble regiments. Some men had taken cover under carts, but as the morning drew on these were being brought into service and the men were flushed out from beneath them like partridges. He did however come across a couple of gun carriages drawn up shaft to shaft about a hundred yards to the north beneath a shoulder of rock and which, with a cape thrown over them, would provide some sort of shelter.
He had some difficulty in locating George and when he found the correct area there were so many dejected men sitting and lying about among the dunes that it took him another few minutes to identify his friend. If he had ever hoped against hope otherwise, it was now clear that whatever measures he took to ameliorate George’s suffering they would have no effect on the outcome. The poor fellow had taken on the horribly familiar appearance of those dying of cholera – a look common to officer and man, high or low, irrespective of age or nationality. His face seemed to have shrunk and aged even in the half hour that Harry had been away, and his body trembled and convulsed as the life drained out of it. Harry would even have welcomed the fear that had been in his friend’s eyes not long ago – fear was at least a sign of life, a human reaction, but even that had now been replaced by the veiled, inward look of the dying.
The various regiments were beginning to find one another, and he could see a bright swathe of cavalry officers, still splendid and recognisable having not spent a night in the open, only a few yards away. Fyefield and a pop-eyed young officer named Philip Gough agreed to help move George, the former with a poor grace.
‘It’s sad, of course, but we’re wasting our time,’ he drawled as they carried George down the beach.
‘If he’s not going to live he might as well die in whatever comfort can be found,’ said Harry. ‘And in privacy.’
Gough, breathing heavily, asked: ‘When will the horses come ashore?’
‘Soon now, I believe.’
‘Good,’ said Gough.‘Then we can ride inland and make a halfway decent camp.’
All three understood that it was not just the establishing of a camp that made the horses’ arrival so desirable. The lack of them was a great leveller now the army was on land, reducing the proud centaurs of the Light Brigade to the status of ordinary foot soldiers.
They reached the gun carriages. Another man had crept beneath them in Harry’s absence, but when they gave him a shake to move him over it turned out that he had done so like a sick dog, to die. They dragged the wretch out and laid George in his place, wrapping him close in his own cape and spreading Harry’s over the shafts above him.
‘No point whatever in staying,’ commented Fyefield, dusting his hands. Gough, uncertain where the balance of power lay, glanced from one to the other.
Harry said: ‘His wife must know as soon as possible. We must ensure that a message gets to her.’
‘The poor lady,’ said Gough. ‘She’s surely not still on board?’
‘No, no, the ladies are with us,’ said Fyefield. ‘I saw them taken to the tents.’
With a heavy tread Harry approached the cluster of tents in a hollow of ground some few hundred yards inland. To his dismay Emmeline was standing outside, holding her hat with one hand and protecting the side of her face from the blowing rain with the other. For the great events of today she had affected an appropriately military look: a dark blue riding habit with gold buttons. When she saw him she gave a little wave and walked to meet him, watching her step on the rough ground, holding her skirt up daintily out of the muddy grass. All he could think of was her excitement of yesterday, the way she had clapped her hands like a child and cried, ‘We’re here, we’re really here!’ as if she were on holiday; and then of George’s face as he had last seen it, in the dripping shadow of the gun carriage.
He could not assemble the words to say what he must. He could only pray that God, or instinct, would provide. But as she drew nearer he stopped and saluted, and she must have read something in his face because she too stopped and her hands went to her cheeks.
‘You have something to tell me?’
‘I do. I’m afraid that your husband is very ill.’
‘So he is not dead!’
She was clutching at straws, and Harry knew he must be careful. ‘When I last saw him he was still alive. We succeeded in finding shelter for him – I can take you to where he is.’
‘Thank you.’
As she hurried down the beach beside him he could hear her quick shallow breathing and stifled sobs, but when he offered his arm to help her through the throng she declined, and her face was set and pinched. He hoped against hope that when they reached the gun carriage her husband would already be dead so that she would not have to see him in the worst extremity of suffering.
George Roebridge was certainly dead, but whether from sickness or the iron-clad wheel of the gun carriage which had been roughly dragged across him, it was difficult to tell. The story was plain enough to see – the artillerymen had taken him for a corpse and in moving the carriage by the shortest route had unknowingly put him out of his misery.
Emmeline sank down on her knees on the sand, weeping loudly. Harry saw that she did not touch George, but bent over him as if trying to reconcile what she saw before her with the husband she remembered. When she turned to Harry he was shocked by the look on her face.
‘You said that he was alive!’ she screamed. ‘You told me you had found shelter!’ ‘We had done so, madam, but the gun carriage has been removed while I went to fetch you.’
‘And look!’ She gestured at the body with a grimace of revulsion. ‘He has been injured.’
‘I cannot account for that. Perhaps the carriage—’
‘He is injured! I hardly know him . . .’ Her voice was distorted by sobs. ‘I would not have known him. He is all . . .’ She shook her head like a hurt animal and Harry only just caught the last words: ‘All . . . spoiled.’
Less than an hour later he saw Emmeline returning to the ship, the body of her husband no doubt beside her in the boat as a sailor rowed. Her head was turned as if in mortification away from the land which had let her down so badly. She would never see her husband take part in the famed élan of a Light Cavalry charge. No sooner had they arrived than they were going back, the great adventure over. All spoiled.
When Betts had asked Harry how the horses were to be unloaded he could never have foreseen the method that was eventually employed. Attempts to land them on insubstantial homemade rafts and float them ashore proved unsuccessful for the same reason they had failed at Varna – the animals were upset after the long voyage and simply too agitated to handle: their legs flailed about pathetically as they descended, and were unable to hold them steady on the rafts once they were there, even with the help of the grooms and the less careful assistance of the sailors. It didn’t take long for the latter to settle on a more effective course of action: the horses were simply bundled overboard and made to strike out for the shore. They were accompanied by the men who could swim, but many, Betts included, could not do so and were too terrified to try. The result was that while the non-swimmers were transported to land, numbers of horses were running loose on the beach, wild, cold and frightened, and with no means of identification or capture beyond a slippery wet headcollar.
Betts when he did arrive was quite beside himself ‘I never seen such a thing, sir! They was bad enough aboard ship without all this, and them ruddy sailors is only making matters worse with their yelling and larking about!’
This last was nothing less than the truth. The attitude of the sailors seemed to be that the army could not have landed nor even have been here without them, and that this entitled them to claim certain bonuses, one of which was a free ride. As the quaking horses skittered out of the surf whooping sailors chased them and scrambled on to their backs, hanging on round their necks like monkeys and fearlessly galloping them around in the edge of the water. Even allowing for the reduced state of the horses it was a bravura display of unorthodox horsemanship which did nothing to endear them to those trying to find their mounts.
Betts, already mortified by his own inability to swim, was outraged. Spotting an animal he took to be Deny, he ran down the beach and tried to intercept him. But a small man with a limp was no match for a large, nervous horse being ridden at speed, and it was lucky for Betts that this particular midshipman lost his balance as he swerved to avoid him and crashed into the water. Harry could easily imagine the stream of imaginative abuse that was hurled at him before Betts went to recover the horse who had come to a standstill with his flanks heaving like bellows. Luckily Clemmie was led ashore, and by the end of the afternoon the Light Cavalry and most of their horses had moved inland to camp for the night.
Their three-day sojourn at Calamita was a cheerless and dispiriting business, made worse by the obvious superiority of the French commissariat. In spite of even more seriously overcrowded transports the French had disembarked sooner and more quickly in a bay just to the north, flown a jaunty tricolour and established a flourishing, well-supplied camp a full day ahead of their allies. Consequently they had also been able to infiltrate the surrounding countryside and collect together what there was in the way of additional food, transport and forage for horses. The sight of rows of snug French tents, and the appetising smell of cooking fires tended by cheerful vivandières, did little to cheer the British troops, dispersed mostly in the open and with only their meagre three-day subsistence rations.
There were tents for the more senior officers, but Harry and his colleagues had to content themselves with a sulky fire made from damp brush, and a meal of pork, biscuit and rice boiled to a sludge, only made palatable by wine. Out on the austere grassy plain the horses were like a dark low forest, the steam rising from their coats in a mist. In the far distance beyond even the French camp could be heard the wild celebrations of the bashi-bazouks to whom nothing, apparently, was so bad that it couldn’t be overcome with raki.
‘Perfect country for cavalry at least,’ commented Fyefield, lighting a cigar. ‘I can’t wait to get at them.’
Harry warmed his glass by the pale flames. ‘We need one or two days’ respite, though, if only for the horses.’
Fyefield made a dismissive gesture. ‘The horses will recover when they’re put to the use they were brought here for. Just like us.’
A little later they were presented with coffee, bitter and watery and full of gritty flotsam, but nonetheless a triumph on the part of the cooks who had had to grind beans between stones and fetch water a distance of some two miles to produce it. And it was at least warming – as the weather cleared and the night drew in the air became cold and they moved in closer to the fire.
As they sat there an extraordinary group emerged from the darkness. It consisted of three exhausted-looking men, one carrying a pitchfork and the other two lugging between them the head of a cow, not freshly killed but with one eye still, and enough flesh on it to give a thoroughly macabre appearance, its enormous flannelly tongue lolling almost to the ground as it bobbed along. Two of the men had blankets tied round their shoulders and the other one a piece of sacking, and a strip of the same stuff about his head like a gypsy bandanna, stained with blood. All three were filthy and wet, it was possible to hear the squelch of their boots as they passed by, and the smell given off by the men and their grisly burden. The effect of all this combined with the pitchfork was eerie. They ignored or were too tired to notice the officers around their fire, but when they’d disappeared into the night Fyefield gave a low whistle.
‘What the deuce was that?’
Gough laughed nervously. ‘Old Nick by the look of it, serving us a grim warning!’ And then added, none too convincingly: ‘Locals, I suppose.’
‘Maybe,’ suggested Harry lifting his glass, ‘we should not drink on short commons.’
It was almost an hour later when it dawned on them what they’d seen, and he said softly,‘Poor fellows’, to think what British soldiers were reduced to.
The following morning when the soft breeze wafted the smell of fresh coffee and bread from the French camp, two hundred and fifty men of the Lights, with two guns from the Horse Artillery, were ordered to saddle up and accompany the same number of infantrymen on a reconnaissance expedition to bring in supplies. There on the edge of the infantry camp, as the Lights rattled briskly past, was the cow’s skull, picked clean and shining in the sun.
That day turned into one of scorching heat such as they hadn’t known since leaving Varna. It seemed that they were constantly to be buffeted by extremes of temperature and conditions, and to find themselves equipped for neither. The men who had been obliged to swathe themselves in blankets and sacking for the previous night’s foraging were this morning dragging at their collars, sweating and cursing. The gently rolling plain, the perfect cavalry country of which Fyefield had spoken, now shimmered like a desert, an impression confirmed by an occasional sighting of camels. These fantastic creatures at least broke the baking monotony, and had the effect of cheering the foot soldiers, who laughed and jeered when the animals broke into their comical, loping stride.
There were scarcely any farms, precious little food and forage and virtually no water. All through the middle of the day they were tortured by mirages which trembled and gleamed, always in the middle distance. They came across one substantial lake but the horses showed no interest in it, understandably, for when the men plunged their faces into it open-mouthed they found it to be thickly saline. To make matters worse those who failed to wipe the solution off their skin were badly burned. The cavalry did succeed in acquiring half a dozen arabas but the only thing they carried back to camp were infantrymen collapsed through dysentery, cholera or heat exhaustion, several of them dead on their return.
Neither did Fyefield’s bullish predictions about the horses prove correct. They were disastrously out of condition and in need of shoeing, and Harry was not the only officer who walked back into camp that evening, his feet slick with blood inside his boots (causing him to wonder what on earth the surviving infantry must be suffering) and Deny nodding at the end of his rein like a seaside donkey. He was only glad that he had not ridden Clemmie, who would certainly not have survived the day, and whom he had left in the tender care of Betts. For the whole of the dismal trek back he was haunted by the memory of Hugo on Piper, thundering through the trees in the fresh green English spring . . . and of the words spoken at his funeral: ‘He paweth in the valley and knoweth not fear . . . the glory of his nostrils is terrible . . .’ Perhaps it was true that the poor chargers needed to ‘smell the battle afar off’, but at this most dispiriting juncture it was hard to imagine them being anything but cowed by the prospect.
Though the cavalry did not for some days come to hear of Lord Raglan’s decree that they should be kept ‘in a band-box’, there could be no doubt that they would now have to be rested, and that consequently there could be no advance for at least another thirty-six hours. The time was spent tolerably profitably, with the saddlers and carriers working long hours, kit and arms brought up to scratch and inspected, convalescent men ditto, and the usual drill for those men and horses well enough to do it.
On each of the two nights in camp, aching and blistered after a day which began at five a.m., Harry wrote his reply to Rachel. Though he had determined not to tell her ‘everything’ as she had requested, the picture of her which the act of writing conjured up, and her own injunction that their correspondence should be like a conversation, persuaded him otherwise. He tried, though, to paint a picture of events as he saw them rather than a litany of largely depressing facts. So that when he told her about Piper bolting he did not conceal his own distress, but added what was also true, that in view of all that had happened since it was a glorious escape. He described the voyage, the illness, the death of so many good men including Bartelmas and Roebridge, the kindness of Roebridge when nursing him, the devotion of Betts and his gallows humour, the suffering of the horses and the chaos of camp life. He described the sailors galloping in the surf, the strange, diabolical group who had passed the fire on the previous night, the loping camels and the cruel mirages. It was a comfort to do so, and his writing became less careful as he progressed. But when he turned to more personal matters he paused, and chose each word with the utmost care.
‘I have done as you said and spared you nothing,’ he wrote. ‘And I only hope that I have not said too much nor said it too baldly, but I believe you capable of all women of absorbing these things. I have found it a great solace to be able to write of them so freely, and perhaps you knew this when you urged me to do so. If this is so, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. In addition, I can scarcely tell you how much it means to me to know that you are near my parents at this time when I cannot be, and that you are so good to them. They are, as you say, both unusual people whom it is not always easy to understand, and that you have done so after what is a relatively short acquaintance, disfigured by tragedy, is a marvel to me. Again, dearest Rachel, my thanks.’
His pen hovered for a moment as he debated whether to cross out ‘dearest’, but he left it in place and ended: ‘I have no way of knowing when this letter will reach you, but it is my dearest hope that I shall receive another from you very soon, whenever our trials and tribulations allow. I remain your affectionate brother-in-law and friend, Harry.’
The morning after he completed this letter, the allied armies struck camp. The French were ready two hours before the British, whose preparations for departure were characterised by all the usual confusion.
At last, at nine a.m., sixty thousand men were massed and ready to move off. At this time in the morning the sunshine seemed a blessing, the air was balmy and sweet with the scent of flowers, warm grass and wild thyme, the sweeping plain melted, softly inviting, into the haze. Thin and pure above the armies’ boom, a lark was heard to sing.
And then they surged forward in a wave a mile long of brilliant scarlet, green and blue, shining flashes of white, glittering gold and silver . . . the swing of capes, the gallant bobbing of cockades, the jingle of harness and the creak of leather. A gorgeous, mighty force riding out in the hope of a terrible glory.