One of the Six Hundred: A Novel
"The deuce!" I exclaimed, haughtily; "then I shall escape, if I can."
"Pray don't think of it," said he, earnestly.
"Why?" I demanded, with intense chagrin.
"We have rather a summary mode of dealing with prisoners who attempt to
escape. So be wary, my friend."
"Indeed, summary. How?"
"We don't always keep them on our hands," said he, with a smile that was
grimly significant, while he played with the gold tassels of his hussar
busby.
"Well, 'twere better to be shot than kept lingering here."
"Oh, you won't be kept here, my friend."
"Where then?"
"In a few days you will probably be sent with a convoy of sick and
wounded by the way of Perecop and the desert plains towards
Yekaterinoslav."
"I shall escape by the way," said I, doggedly.
"I repeat, my friend, don't think of it, for Trebitski, who will
command, does not stand on trifles; and yet," he added, with a smile,
"there are two persons who seldom fail in what they attempt--a prisoner
and a lover."
"Why?"
"Stendahl, a Russian author, says, 'The lover thinks oftener of
obtaining his mistress than the husband does of guarding his wife; the
prisoner thinks oftener of escaping from his prison than the gaoler does
of keeping him safe within its walls. Therefore, the lover and the
prisoner should succeed.' You see," he continued, laughing, "we have
some authors in snowy Russia, whatever you Britons may think to the
contrary. But here is the general."
Passing through the officers of the 45th, who all made way for us, I was
ushered into the presence of General Baur, the grim soldier, who was
related to the hero of Beverley's interesting anecdote--Karlovitch Baur,
son of Karl, the brother of Michel, the old miller of Husum.
He received me with studious politeness, though he could not help
smiling at my Tambrov uniform. His left arm was in a sling, and, as he
shook hands with me, I felt that he had but two right fingers remaining.
A Turkish sabre had shorn him of the rest at Kalafat, on the Danube, in
the year before.
Baur was every way a man of a severely impressive presence and aspect.
He had an enormous white moustache, the long, snaky curls of which
floated almost over each of his large silver epaulettes. His forehead
was high, massive and stern; his hair, shorn short, was rough and
grizly. His dark eyes were keen, bold, and inquiring at times; but at
others they wore a deep, sombre and melancholy expression, as if he was
always thinking of a world beyond the present--to be looking into it, in
fact--and this was not to be wondered at when we consider that
Karlovitch Baur was the hero of one of the most remarkable episodes ever
committed to paper.
His manner was that of one who is prompt and ready alike in thought and
action, and yet who never unsaid or undid anything.
Over his grass-green and silver-laced uniform, he wore a loose, wide
_souba_, or fur coat with sleeves, for service, and this he cast aside
when the trumpets announced that dinner was served; and then, among many
other orders that glittered on his warlike breast, I saw that of St.
Andrew, which was founded in 1699 by Peter the Great, and is only
bestowed on crowned heads and officers of the highest rank.
It reminded me much of our own Order of the Thistle, being a blue
enamelled saltire; but on the reverse was a Muscovite eagle, with the
initials "S.A.P.R." (_Sanctus Andreas, Patronus Russiae_).
At the table I was seated between the general and his chief
aide-de-camp, Anitchoff, both of whom conversed with me in French.
"How did it come to pass that you were taken prisoner?" asked the
former.
"My horse was shot under me."
"Near the Belbeck?"
"Yes," said I, blushing like a school-girl, as I could not, for the soul
of me, say that a British officer had degraded his epaulettes by the
perfidy of which Berkeley had been guilty.
"Ah! unlucky; but such things will happen. Your troops and the French,
with the Turkish dogs, are now almost in front of Sebastopol."
"Indeed!" said I, with a joy which I could not conceal.
"You think, no doubt, to take it under our moustaches, or, as you
Britons say, under our noses; but you won't," he added with a grave
smile. "St. Sergius has ordained it otherwise, and Todleben, the wary
old Courlander, is busy fortifying it. His sappers are at work day and
night."
"Pho! don't talk of Sebastopol, general," said his aide-de-camp,
laughing. "Our feeding there was so bad that I felt inclined to try
whether the Allies fared better than we did; but after the Alma, I
thought that the less I considered the matter the better."
"Ah, that day at Alma played the deuce with many a family circle in
Sebastopol," said Baur, twisting his moustache angrily.
"Yes," added Anitchoff; "many a widow is there now, weeping for the dear
defunct with one eye, and ogling his successor with the other."
At this jest a dark frown gathered on the long, stern visage of Baur.
Dinner proceeded briskly. It was served up in a kind of hall, which had
arched and painted windows, flanked by the round Genoese towers, whose
gilt cupolas formed the chief features of the fortress.
The walls were simply whitewashed, and the furniture was somewhat of the
"barrack ordnance" description of our own equipments in quarters at
home.
The repast was rather military in fashion, and by no means a dinner _a
la Russe_, all flower vases, bouquets, and kickshaws; but was composed
of substantial edibles for hungry and soldierly stomachs.
We began with small glasses of kimmel, and then came caviare, made from
the roe of the sturgeon of the Don, spread on thin slices of bread; then
followed the fish--turbot and mackerel from the Black Sea;
yellow-fleshed sterlets from the Volga, salted in oil; wild boar hams
from the forest of Khutor-Mackenzie; mutton fed on the Tauridian
steppes; pies of holy pigeons from the gilt domes I had admired at a
distance; piles of Crimean fruit; the wines of Ac-metchet and
Kastropulo, with Cliquot; and there, too, were London stout and Bass's
pale ale, taken from some of our wrecks in the Black Sea.
During dinner I was amused by hearing the ideas entertained by the
Russians of our British soldiers, with whom they were now for the first
time in actual conflict; for Prince Menschikoff had industriously spread
among his troops a rumour that we were only beardless seamen, dressed up
as soldiers; and that, however formidable on the ocean, we were
worthless ashore.
To this contemptuous notion was added a sublime faith in their own
valour, and the miracles to be wrought by St. Sergius, whose image they
bore at Alma, and whose fourth reappearance was confidently predicted by
Innocent, Archbishop of Odessa, in his sermon to the garrison of
Sebastopol, for Sergius was a patriotic saint and warrior who defeated
the Tartars--whose "uncorrupted body" lies in a silver shrine, like a
four-post bed, and whose shoes (sorely worn at the heels) are still
preserved in the Troitza, or monastery, of the Holy Trinity at Moscow.
General Baur, a man deeply imbued with the most gloomy superstition,
believed in all these delusions devoutly. His aide-de-camp and Vladimir
Dahl, however, laughed at him covertly; but admitted that the appearance
of the Highland regiments filled the columns on the Kourgane Hill with a
strange terror; for being, as the author of "Eoethen" records, "men of
great stature, and in a strange garb, their plumes being tall, and the
view of them being broken and distorted by the wreaths of smoke, and
there being, too, an ominous silence in their ranks, there were men
among the Russians who began to conceive a vague terror--the terror of
things unearthly; and some, they say, imagined that they were being
charged by horsemen, strange, silent, and monstrous, bestriding giant
chargers."
Dinner was drawing to a close, or giving place to the dessert, when my
former acquaintance under less pleasant circumstances, Lieutenant Adrian
Trebitski, of the Tchernimoski Cossacks, appeared, travel-stained, and
splashed with the mud of a journey on his boots and sabretache, having
arrived on duty with sick soldiers, and a deserter, who was to be shot
on the morrow.
"Why not to-night?" asked the stern Baur.
"The sentence says to-morrow, general," replied Anitchoff consulting a
despatch.
"Then to-morrow be it--I am not a messman, and so don't begrudge the
poor wretch his last supper. Is he one of your corps, Trebitski?"
"Yes, general, I regret to say, a Cossack of our sotnia, from the Lena,
in Siberia," replied Trebitski, who was eyeing me with an aspect of
discomposure, evidently fearing that I might report the pillage I had
undergone at his hands. But this fear subsided when I drank wine with
him, clinking my glass over and under his, for I felt that my position
was too perilous to make an enemy of this man, especially as Anitchoff
informed me that he was to have command of the convoy which would take
me towards Perecop.
"I hope he will treat me with courtesy," said I, "and remember that I am
a commissioned officer."
"Why do you doubt him?" asked Anitchoff, with a quiet smile.
"I--I don't like the expression of his eyes."
"They are as keen as those of a Tartar; but, then, he has Tartar blood
in him, for his mother was a woman of the middle Kirghis hordes, lately
added to our empire."
"Are they remarkable for a curious expression of eye?"
"Yes; any Tartar can discern a single Russian horseman at a quarter of
the distance that a Russian will discover a whole troop of Tartars, even
with lances uplifted; hence they make our best vedettes."
I now heard complete details of the defeat of twenty thousand Russians
at Khutor-Mackenzie; and that, on the morning of the 26th September,
Balaclava had been taken, that its safe and secluded harbour was now
full of our war ships and transports, and that already our army was on
the heights above Sebastopol.
And so, while the great game, on which the eyes of all the world were
turned, was being played by my noble comrades, I--the victim of
treachery, ignorant alike of my fate and of the future--was to be
marched towards the desert plains of Yekaterinoslav, in the custody of
an unscrupulous ruffian like Trebitski, _parooschick_ of the
Tchernimoski Cossacks; one who knew as little about the position or
feelings of a British officer as he did about those of the Great Llama.
On my bed that night I tossed restlessly to and fro, revolving a hundred
plans for escape, but could decide on none. Bribery will achieve
anything in Russia; but I had no money. I was also without weapons, a
horse, or knowledge of the language. I determined, however, to look
well about me; to study a map of the Crimea if I could find one; to act
surely, warily, and resolutely; and to take the first opportunity of
escaping, even if I should be shot down in the attempt. I was all the
more free to make this essay, that, as yet, not a word had been spoken
either of parole or exchange by the gloomy General Baur, or 'his more
genial aide-de-camp.
By dawn next morning, the hoarse roll of the wooden drums summoned the
garrison of Kourouk to witness the execution of the deserter; and by the
time I came forth, as a spectator, the battalion of the 45th was under
arms, formed in three sides of a hollow square, facing inwards; all
silent, motionless as statues, closely ranked in their grey capotes and
flat blue caps, with rifles shouldered and bayonets fixed.
The fourth side of the square was enclosed by the inner wall of a
rampart, and there stood the culprit, pale and dejected in aspect,
accompanied by a silver-bearded priest of the Greek church in white,
with a gorgeous stole of cloth-of-gold, edged with fine lace. A dog
bounded towards them--a fox-headed, snow-coloured, and red-eyed Russian