Under the Red Dragon: A Novel
mortification, gangrene, and all the rest of it, do their worst, and I
might have gone quietly to sleep where so many lay, under the crocuses
and caper-bushes at Sebastopol."
"After life's fitful fever" men sleep well; and so, I hoped, should I.
Such reflections were, I own, ungrateful and bitter; but suffering,
disappointment, and more than all, the great loss of blood I had
suffered, had sorely weakened me; and yet, on looking about me, and
seeing the calamities of others, I felt that the simple loss of an arm
was indeed but a minor affair.
Close by me, on the hospital pallets, I saw men expiring fast, and
borne forth to the dead-pits only to make room for others; I saw the
poor human frame, so delicate, so wondrous, and so divine in its
organisation, cut, stabbed, bruised, crushed, and battered, in every
imaginable way, and yet with life clinging to it, when life had
become worthless. From wounds, and operations upon wounds, there was
blood--blood everywhere; on the pallets, the straw, the earthen floor,
the canvas of the tents, in buckets and basins, on sponges and towels,
and on the hands of the attendants. Incessantly there were moans and
cries of anguish, and, ever and anon, that terrible sound in the
throat known as the death-rattle.
Sergeant Rhuddlan, Dicky Roll the drummer (the little keeper of the
regimental goat), and many rank and file of the old 23rd--relics of
the Redan--were there, and some lay near me. The sergeant was mortally
wounded, and soon passed away; the poor boy was horribly mutilated, a
grape shot having torn off his lower jaw, and he survived, to have
perhaps a long life of misery and penury before him; and will it be
believed that, through red-tapery and wretched Whig parsimony, two
hours before the attack on the Redan, the senior surgeon in the
Quarries was "run out" of lint, plasters, bandages, and every other
appliance for stanching blood?
I heard some of our wounded, in their triumph at the general success
of the past day, attempting feebly and in quavering tones to sing
"Cheer, boys, cheer;" while others, in the bitterness of their hearts,
or amid the pain they endured, were occasionally consigning the eyes,
limbs, and souls of the Ruskies to a very warm place indeed. Estelle's
ring, which I had still worn, was gone with my unfortunate arm, and
was now the prize, no doubt, of some hospital orderly. Next day, as
the wounded were pouring in as fast as the dripping stretchers and
ambulances could bring them, I was sent to the monastery of St.
George, which had been turned into a convalescent hospital. The
removal occasioned fever, and I lay long there hovering between life
and death; and I remember how, as portions of a seeming
phantasmagoria, the faces of the one-eyed corporal who attended me,
and of the staff doctors Gage and Jones, became drearily familiar.
This monastery is situated about five miles from Balaclava and six
from Sebastopol, near Cape Fiolente, and consists of two long ranges
of buildings, two stories in height, with corridors off which the
cells of the religious open. The chapel, full of hospital pallets,
there faces the sea, and the view in that direction is both charming
and picturesque. A zigzag pathway leads down from the rocks of red
marble, past beautiful terraces clothed with vines and flowering
shrubs, to a tiny bay, so sheltered that there the ocean barely
ripples on the snow-white sand. But then the Greek monks, in their
dark-brown gowns, their hair plaited in two tails down their back,
their flowing beards, with rosary and crucifix and square black cap,
had given place to convalescents of all corps, Guardsmen, Riflemen,
Dragoons, and Linesmen, who cooked and smoked, laughed and sang,
patched their clothes and pipe-clayed their belts, where whilom mass
was said and vespers chanted. Others were hopping about on crutches,
or, propped by sticks, dozed dreamily in the sunshine under shelter of
the wall that faced the sparkling sea--the blessed high road to old
England.
My room, a monk's cell, was whitewashed, and on the walls were hung
several gaudy prints of Russian saints and Madonnas with oval shining
metal halos round their faces; but most of these the soldiers, with an
eye to improvement in art, had garnished with short pipes, moustaches,
and eyeglasses; and with scissors and paste-pot Corporal Mulligan
added other decorations from the pages of _Punch_.
Sebastopol had fallen; "Redan Windham," as we named him, then a
Brigadier-general, was its governor; and by the Allies the place had
been plundered of all the flames had spared (not much certainly), even
to the cannon and church bells; and now peace was at hand. But many a
day I sighed and tossed wearily on my hard bed, and more wearily still
in the long nights of winter, when the bleak wind from the Euxine
howled round the monastery and the rain lashed its walls, though
Corporal Mulligan would wink his solitary eye, and seek to console me
by saying,
"Your honour's in luck--there is no trinch-guard to-night, thank God!"
"Nor will there ever be again for me," I would reply.
The inspector of hospitals had informed me that, so soon as I could
travel, sick leave would be granted me, that I might proceed to
England; but I heard him with somewhat of indifference. Would Valerie
join her brother Volhonski at Lewes in Sussex, was, however, my first
thought; she would be free to do as she pleased now that the odious
Tolstoff--But _was_ he killed by Rhuddlan's bullet, or merely wounded,
with the pleasure of having Valerie, perhaps, for a nurse? He
certainly seemed to fall from the parapet as if he were shot dead. Why
had I not gone back and inspected the slain in the ditch of the Redan,
to see if he lay there? But I had other thoughts then, and so the
opportunity--even could I have availed myself of it--was gone for
ever. These calculations and surmises may seem very cool now; but to
us then human life, and human suffering, too, were but of small
account indeed.
One evening the fat little staff surgeon came to me with a cheerful
expression on his usually cross face, and two packets in his hand.
"Well, doctor," said I, with a sickly smile, but unable to lift my
head; "so I didn't die, after all."
"No; close shave though. Wish you joy, Captain Hardinge."
"Joy--armless!"
"Tut; I took the two legs off a rifleman the other day close to the
tibia--ticklish operation, very, but beautifully done--and he'll
toddle about in a bowl or on a board, and be as jolly as a sand-boy.
Suppose _your_ case had been his?"
"When may I leave this?"
"Can't say yet awhile. You don't want to rejoin, I presume?"
"Would to God that I could! but the day is past now When I do leave,
it will be by ship or steamer."
"Unless you prefer a balloon. Well, it was of these I came to wish you
joy," said he, placing before me, and opening it (for I was unable to
do so, single-handed), the packet, which contained two medals; one for
the Crimea, with its somewhat unbecoming ribbon, and two clasps for
"Inkermann" and "Sebastopol."
"They are deuced like labels for wine-bottles," said the little
doctor; "but a fine thing for you to have, and likely to catch the
eyes of the girls in England."
"And this other medal with the pink ribbon?"
"Is the Sardinian one, given by Victor Emanuel; and more welcome than
these perhaps, here is a letter from home--from England--for you;
which, if you wish, I shall open" (every moment I was some way thus
reminded, even kindly, of my own helplessness), "and leave you to
peruse. Good evening; I've got some prime cigars at your service, if
you'll send Mulligan to me."
"Thanks, doctor."
And he rolled away out of the cell, to visit some other unfortunate
fellow. The medals were, of course, a source of keen satisfaction to
me; but as I toyed with them and inspected them again and again, they
woke an old train of thought; for there was _one_, who had no longer
perhaps an interest in me (if a woman ever ceases to have an interest
in the man who has loved her), and who was another's now, in whose
white hands I should once with honest pride have laid them. Viewed
through that medium, they seemed almost valueless for a time; though
there was to come a day when I was alike vain of them--ay, and of my
empty sleeve--as became one who had been at the fall of Sebastopol,
the queen of the Euxine.
"I fear I am a very discontented dog," thought I, while turning to the
letter, which proved to be from kind old Sir Madoc Lloyd.
For months no letters had reached me, and for the same period I had
been unable to write home; so in all that time I had heard nothing
from my friends in England--who were dead, who alive; who marrying, or
being given in marriage. Sir Madoc's missive was full of kind thoughts
and expressions, of warm wishes and offers of service, that came to me
as balm, especially at such a time and in such a place. Poor Phil
Caradoc, and many others, were sorrowfully and enthusiastically
referred to. Sir Watkins Vaughan was still hovering about the girls,
"but with remarkable indecision apparently." The tall Plunger with the
parted hair had proposed to Dora, and been declined; for no very
visible reason, as he was a pleasant fellow with a handsome fortune.
On an evening early in September, the very day that a telegram
announcing the fall of the Redan reached Craigaderyn, they were
dressing for a county ball at Chester--a long-looked-for and most
brilliant affair--when their sensibility, and fear that I might have
been engaged, made them relinquish all ideas of pleasure, and
countermand the carriage, to the intense chagrin of Sir Watkins and
also of the Plunger, who had come from town expressly to attend it.
Two day afterwards the lists were published, and the account of the
slaughter of our troops, and the death of so many dear friends, had
made Winifred positively ill, so change of air was recommended for
her, at Ventnor or some such place.
A postscript to this, in Dora's rapid hand, and written evidently
surreptitiously (perhaps while Sir Madoc had left his desk for a
moment), added the somewhat significant intelligence, that "Winny had
wept very much indeed on reading the account of that horrible Redan"
(for Phil's death, thought I; if so, she mourns him too late!) "and
now declares that she will die an old maid." (It _is_ so!) "When that
interesting period of a lady's life begins," continued Dora, "I know
not; if unmarried, before thirty, I suppose; thus I am eleven years
off that awful period yet, and have a decidedly vulgar prejudice
against ever permitting myself to become one. Papa writes that Sir
Watkins is undecided; but I may add that I, for one, know that he is
_not_. Our best love to you, dear old Harry; but O, I can't fancy you
_without an arm!_"
I was in a fair way of recovery now. The state I had been in so long,
within the four walls of that quaint little chamber--a state that
hovered between sense and insensibility, between sleeping and waking,
time and eternity--had passed away; and, after all I had undergone, it
had seemed as if
"Thrice the double twilight rose and fell,
About a land where nothing seemed the same,
At morn or eve, as in the days gone by."
This had all passed and gone; but I was weak as a child, and worn to a
shadow; and by neglect had become invested with hirsute appendages of
the most ample proportions.
And so, without the then hackneyed excuse of "urgent private affairs,"
on an evening in summer, when the last rays of the sun shone redly on
the marble bluffs and copper-coloured rocks of Cape Khersonese--the
last point of that fatal peninsula towards the distant Bosphorus--and
when the hills that look down on the lovely Pass of Baidar and the