One of the Six Hundred: A Novel
them!--now the red flashing muzzles of the cannon are passed; the
gunners are throwing themselves under the wheels and limbers, where we
cut them down, and spear or pin them to the turf. Others are rushing for
shelter to their squares of infantry, under whose rifles they lie flat
and securely, while sheets of lead are tearing through us!
Oh, the superlative bitterness of that moment, when, with all our horses
blown, I look back and see that we are without supports!
The guns are taken--the gunners almost annihilated; our horses are
breathless. We have no aid, and no resource but to ride back, under
such a concentrated fire as troops were never before exposed to.
"It's all up--threes about--retire!"
A single trumpet feebly gives the call, and away we go.
Shot--in the heart, perhaps--my Arab steed sank down gently beneath me;
but I received a severe blow from something, I know not what--the
splinter of a shell, probably, which crushed my lancer cap, and almost
stunned me. I must have remounted myself mechanically, for when we
hacked our way back, and reached the rear, I was riding a bay horse of
the 11th Hussars, the saddle and holsters of which were slimy with
blood. The horse fell with me soon after, as it had been disembowelled
by a grape shot.
Of all those glorious regiments who formed the Light Brigade, there came
back but one hundred and ninety-eight men; many of these were wounded,
and many dismounted; and when the rolls were called over at nightfall,
it was found that one hundred and fifty-seven were dead, one hundred and
nineteen were wounded, and that three hundred and thirty fine horses
were killed, leaving more than one hundred and thirty dragoons
unaccounted for.
I had not the heart to number the forty men who represented the two
squadrons which followed Lionel Beverley. There, on the green sward of
that Valley of Death, lay our gallant colonel, cut in two by a round
shot; Travers, torn to pieces by grape shot; Scriven, slain by three
lance wounds; Howard, "the only son of his mother, and she was a widow;"
Frank Jocelyn, our old sergeant-major, and an incredible number of
others killed. The flower of our lancers were there, and among them my
faithful follower, Pitblado, with a rifle bullet in his leg.
Hot, breathless, stiff, sore, and covered with bruises, I now discovered
that in the _melee_--though I was unconscious of having struck a
blow--there were, at least, twenty notches in the blade of my sword,
that I had received three very severe lance prods, two sword cuts, and
that my uniform was torn to rags. When we halted to girth up, I threw
myself on the rich grass of the valley, and, taking off my battered
lancer cap, felt the cool breeze most grateful, as it came from the
distant sea. Then I buried my face among the verdure, less for coolness
than from excess of weakness, and to hide the sorrow that consumed me
for the losses we had sustained.
From a distance came the cheers of the Heavy Brigade, avenging us, and
completing the work we had begun. Then the fierce excitement--the devil
that had possessed me--passed away, and I thought only of the dying and
the dead.
* * * * *
"Is that you, Lanty?" said a voice near me.
"Ov coorse it is--barrin' the tip of an ear."
"Well, thank God, there are at least two of our troop left."
"And the captain here!"
I must have fainted from exhaustion and loss of blood, for after a time
I was surprised to find my jacket open at the neck, and that I was
propped against my dead horse by Dr. Hartshorn, who was binding up my
cuts and scars, while Lanty O'Regan attended, with a short black dudeen
in his mouth, which had been enlarged by a sword cut, and then roughly
patched with plaster, which did not, however, prevent poor Lanty from
talking.
"Me mouth, is it, I'm to take care ov, docthor dear? Sure, if it is
only for the sake ov the girls, I'll do that same; but, be gorra! I
wish that dirty Roosian had been holdin' on the horns of the new moon
wid his fingers well greased, before I came across him."
"Are you sure the farrier-sergeant is dead?"
"Quite sure, docthor."
"You saw him get the sleeping draught?"
"Sure, the draught it was that finished him right off?"
"What the deuce do you mean? I took orf his leg successfully in the
Turkish hospital."
"And sure, afther ye war gone, the Turkish Hospital sergeant, who was
blazing drunk with raki, made up a prescription of all the dhrugs in the
place, saying some o' them would surely compose him."
"Well--well?"
"The farrier-sergeant took it, sir; and he's now composed enough, poor
man, and laying in the trinches, waitin' to be covered up wid green
sods, if they can be got in that red valley ov blood and murder."
Some brandy given by Hartshorn now rallied me a little, and I inquired
for Willie Pitblado. Lanty informed me that he was in a hospital tent,
and enduring great pain.
Pitblado's sword had broken in his hand; he was looking wildly round him
for another, when poor Studhome, who lay dying beneath ahorse, placed
his own sword in Willie's hand, saying--
"Use it, and wear it for my sake. All's over with me!"
Pitblado cut down two Russian gunners, and actually bore Studhome for
some paces in his arms, before he discovered that he was dead, and then
a rifle bullet stretched him on the field.
A few men were now crawling back from the valley, where several
dismounted guns and dead bodies were all that remained of the Russian
host, which had now fallen back.
Numbers of horses, many of them severely wounded, with bridles hanging
loose, and saddles all bloody, careered along the green ridges, where
they were caught by the Turks. Some came trotting quietly into quarters,
when they heard the trumpet sound for "corn"; others cropped the bloody
herbage in the Valley of Death; and not a few who remained beside their
fallen riders were found by the burial parties.
Beverley's body was discovered, terribly mutilated, stripped, and
deprived of the locket which contained the hair of his intended--the
girl who was shot in his arms on the retreat through the Khyber Pass.
On surveying the horrors of that day, I asked myself--was it for such
work as this that heaven created us?
But such was that glorious and disastrous episode of the war--the charge
of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava.
In foreign armies--as I once heard a brother officer remark--one would
have found plenty of officers to lead such a charge, but in what other
army would one find soldiers to follow as ours did? Though surrounded
on every side by the enemy, though apparently all was over with them,
though suffering under a withering fire, and seeing their comrades
falling in heaps around them, not a man flinched, or thought of shifting
for himself; but all looked to their officers, and followed them as if
they had been on an ordinary parade.
"There are eighty-one of ours, sir, to be buried in yonder pit," said a
trumpeter named Jones, as he came to my tent next morning.
"Eighty-one!--my God!--the poor fellows!"
"Yes, sir--eighty-one," repeated Jones, sadly.
"Where are they?"
"Some are in the trenches--others coming."
They were borne from the field, where they had lain all night, and where
the only tears that fell on them were the dews of heaven, and then they
were half lowered, half flung in--eighty-one! all handsome young
men--and the Highlanders began to cover them up.
"God rest them," said I, lifting my cap, as I leaned on the trumpeter's
arm.
"Ay, sir," said he, sadly; "the next trumpet they hear will be a louder
one than Bill Jones's!"
*CHAPTER LII.*
Then I thought of one fair spring-time,
When she placed her hand in mine,
And, half-silent, said she loved me,
And, half-blushing, seemed divine.
Then I thought of that same winter,
When the earth was dead and cold;
Fit time, in sooth, to marry one
She worshipped for his gold.
I had been some days in Messirie's Hotel, at Pera, before I realized or
quite became reconciled to the idea that I was going home on sick leave,
worn in mind and body, and smarting still with many wounds, for some of
the lance prods had gangrened, the iron having been, perhaps, rusty.
Many other officers were also at Messirie's, on their way home, some
with amputated limbs, but all leaving the army with regret. All were
pale and lean enough, with bronzed faces and bushy beards, their red
shell-jackets or blue surtouts out-at-elbows, threadbare, patched, and
stained by the mud of the trenches, and there were one or two lisping
idiots, with flyaway whiskers, hair divided in the centre, and yaw-haw
tones, whose "pwivate affairs had become wemawkably urgent!"
I had with me poor Willie Pitblado, whose left leg was well-nigh useless
now. No surgeon had succeeded in extracting the ball; their attempts
had produced torture, which brought on a low fever, and Willie was going
home with me now--only, I feared, to die.
And now, on the last evening of this most memorable year, I sat alone,
muffled in my cavalry cloak, looking from the hotel window down a long
and narrow street, paved with rough, round stones, where the _humauls_,
or Turkish porters, British tars, half-furious with raki, Zouaves, with
cigar in mouth and hands in pockets, dragomans, with pistol and sabre,
indolent, sensual, and brutal Osmanli soldiers, and other nationalities
and costumes, made up a strange and varied scene. From another window I
could see Stamboul, its flat roofs, round domes, its mosques and
minarets, stretching in the distance far away; the Golden Horn; with the
three-deckers of the _Sultan_ lying idly at anchor; and the new bridge
that spans the harbour; and, over all, the weird-like glories of a
crimson moon.
The December twilight stole on, and, as I mused, it seemed but yesterday
since all those lancers who had died of cholera at Varna or elsewhere,
and those whom I had seen cast into the great trench, had been alive,
and riding by my side.
The embarkation of the wounded at Balaclava harbour, whither they had
been borne on stretchers, minus legs and arms, hands and feet, with
faces pale, slashed, gashed, and battered; our British men-of-war, the
_Sanspareil_, _Tribune_, _Sphinx_, and _Arrow_, ranged in line, with
open ports to sweep the valley; all the episodes of our departure--the
somewhat mournful cheers given by the seamen as our transport, the
_Napoleon III._, of Leith, got up her steam and cleared the
harbour--cheers to which we could scarcely respond; the receding shores,
where the iron voice yet rang the knell of many a human life from
battery and bastion; the last rays of the sun, as they lit up the
impending bluffs of Cape Aya, and ruddied all the rocks of red and white
marble that guard the rugged coast, and repel the storms of the Euxine;
all these, as they had melted into sea and sky, seemed like an old dream
now, and, battered in body and broken in spirit, I was seated alone in
Messirie's Frankish hotel, on my way home!
Well, well! For weeks past I had been as useless at Balaclava as at the
Hospital of Scutari, from whence I had been transferred to the suburb of
Pera. I had been unable to share in the two battles of Inkermann, in
both of which the Russians were totally defeated, and in the last of
which our losses were fearful; and I had no share in the battle of the
Ovens, on the 20th of November. By landing at Scutari on the 13th, I
escaped the terrible hurricane by which so many of the shipping perished
in the Black Sea, and by which the survivors of their crews were
subjected to be mercilessly massacred by the Russians.
My poor comrades! Be a soldier but for six months, and you will never