Until the Colours Fade (43 page)

‘Starboard two points; full ahead,’ he said quietly.

‘Starboard two points,’ replied the quartermaster as the course was adjusted, and then as the engine-room bell rang: ‘
Engines
full ahead.’

Charles felt the eyes of his officers on him and heard several uneasy coughs. Wilmot came up to him. He looked embarrassed and anxious.

‘I understood our orders were to …’

‘I know our orders, Mr Wilmot,’ said Charles curtly.

‘Aye aye, sir.’

Charles knew what Wilmot was thinking but could not explain to him without others overhearing and realising what a gamble he was taking. The orders had been to turn to port at a thousand yards and to engage Fort Constantine from the front. Charles was now steering straight for the harbour mouth, a course which would inevitably expose his ship to close
simultaneous
fire from the forts on both sides of the entrance. He
calculated
that only by coming close to the guns on the inner southern face of Fort Constantine could he draw the fire of the western seaward face away from
Vengeance.
That he would also have to risk the fire of Fort Alexander from the other side of the harbour mouth could not be helped, but
Leander
would soon be engaging that battery and should occupy the gunners there.
Scylla
had now reached her top speed of thirteen knots, making her a harder target than the slow-moving
Vengeance.
The high trajectories of the short-range mortar shells told Charles that he was now within five hundred yards of the mouth; several seconds later he was thankful to hear
Leander
going into action. On her
new course,
Scylla
’s broadsides would be useless for a few
minutes
yet, but her bow Lancaster was still firing at three rounds a minute.

From the corner of his eye Charles saw that the seaman he had sent up with the ensign had performed his task and had now climbed down to the comparative safety of the mizzen-top. He was easing himself out by the futtock shrouds onto the top of the ratlines, when some chain shot hit him, hurling him from the rigging like a rag-doll, his arms thrown out and his back bent double. Charles thought he had gone overboard, but a moment later saw the body impaled on the davits below the poop,
stomach
ripped open and head lolling forward. Charles heard Wilmot order a mizzen-topman to: ‘Get that thing down,’ and he himself was about to send a midshipman down to the gun-decks with new orders when a shell hit the quarter-deck. The air was splitting apart in a tornado of whistling and screaming splinters and jagged metal; the deck seemed to lurch and leap upwards as he fell. He held his head as every bone in his body danced with the reverberations and shock; he was blinded with smoke, and his nostrils and throat were choked with the suffocating acrid smell of burning powder. As the smoke cleared slightly, and the white popping flashes behind his eyes diminished, he saw that half the officers and men, who moments before had been
standing
on that immaculate white deck, were dead or dying. The master’s massive body was lying slumped against the
binnacle-housing
, his head cleanly severed from his body by a bomb
splinter
; as neatly done as might have been achieved with a knife. Blood was bubbling and gushing from his neck. Wilmot was lying on his back, his right side an unrecognisable pulp of
bleeding
flesh and torn clothing, his face raw and bloody as though it had been flayed. The quartermaster’s right leg had been smashed below the knee, and he was sitting looking at the wound with a surprised and confused expression; the shock still
insulating
him from the pain. Charles steadied himself on the only
surviving
post of the rail round the main-companion hatch; his stomach was heaving and he could taste vomit in his mouth. Men were running up from the waist with stretchers and slipping in the spreading pools of blood. Charles himself picked up a
sand-bucket
and scattered its contents. Another shell exploded on the bulwarks just above the main entry-port, hurling large planks and timbers into the air, but
Scylla
held her course without any reduction in speed. A red hot shot had buried itself deep in the forecastle deck-planks between the fore-mast and the gangboard
gratings over the bowsprit. A cry of ‘Fire!’ went up but, from the size of the flames, Charles did not think it would spread. Shot was now falling on every side, columns of water shooting up and cascading down in fountains onto the decks. Charles
remembered
that he had been about to send orders to the gun-decks; recalled too with a paralysing spasm of panic that he would have entrusted them to Humphrey to take below to get him out of the way before the ship was under the full impact of the forts’ fire. He looked around and saw him standing just aft of the port shot garlands, staring down at the deck as if dazed or in a dream. As Charles touched his shoulder, the boy started and swung round to face him. The air was loud with the whistling of shells and the groans of the wounded. A canister
bouquet
exploded sharply just astern.

‘Don’t be afraid, my boy,’ he murmured. Humphrey made no movement; his eyes looked glazed and there were drops of sweat standing out on his forehead and upper lip. ‘Go tell Mr Machin to let the men fire as they will after a single broadside. He may fire the moment his guns bear on either side.’

Humphrey raised his hand to his cap mechanically.

‘Aye aye, sir.’

As he moved away uncertainly, Charles called out:

‘And stay below unless I send for you.’

Seconds after Humphrey’s departure, shots tore through the starboard gangboard above the waist and another smashed a large hole in the forecastle bulwarks, carrying away dead-eyes, cleats, shrouds and fore-mast ratlines – so much gossamer on the wind. A few more shots like that and the masts would be down. For the first time Charles wondered whether his ship was going to survive. Suppose he had not risked his ship by going in; might
Vengeance
still not have crept to safety? If either
Scylla
or
Ven
geance
were to be lost, there was no doubt which the Admiralty would have chosen to sacrifice:
Vengeance
, the unconverted
sailing
frigate. If he ever survived the loss of his ship he might well face a court-martial for failing to adhere to his orders. Another fifty yards and there would be no turning back; yet Charles never considered this option, although he had already vastly increased
Vengeance
’s
chances of escape. Another shell exploded as it struck the planksheer rail, showering the quarter-deck with splinters and cutting Charles’s forehead above his left eye. He wiped away the blood and cursed the Russians. The hammock netting had absorbed most of the blast and saved him from certain death. He thought of the deluge of shell and shot which
he felt sure would rain down on
Scylla
as soon as she was level with the inner face of Fort Constantine. He imagined the yards and blocks coming crashing down, and felt fury rather than fear; fury that the Russians had blocked their harbour mouth and refused to come out and fight on equal terms; fury with the British public’s belief that the Royal Navy was not as it had been of old. The ignorant blockheads thought that the men who won the Battle of the Saints, the First of June, and
Trafalgar
would have had no trouble in levelling a few harbour forts. None of them remembered that Nelson’s failures had all been against shore positions: the fiascos at Turk’s Bay and
Teneriffe
and his repulse from Boulogne. Did they ever think that the navy’s present impasse in the Black Sea was due entirely to the Russians’ fear of a general action? Not they. Well, let them read in their comfortable chairs about how a British two-decker acquitted herself against overwhelming odds. He saw Bowen and Cunningham, the only two officers of wardroom rank to have survived the shell, both looking at him strangely and he did not find it hard to guess their thoughts. Bowen caught his eye and Charles smiled blandly before turning and ordering the men at the quarter-deck carronades to stand to their guns. A few seconds later he gave the order to fire, and the quarter-deck guns were followed by the entire broadside; port first and starboard just after; the ship heeling in the opposite direction after each discharge, engulfed in smoke from stem to stern. By running up onto the poop and leaning out over the shattered taffrail, Charles was able to see shells and shot pitting the stonework, here and there demolishing the dividing walls between the casemates. The crash of
Scylla’s
guns and the continual rumbling of the truck wheels, made him shiver with excitement and elation. It was almost a minute before he realised that the enemy had not
replied
. At first he assumed that they could not depress their guns low enough to hit him as close in as three hundred yards. Even at five hundred most of the shot had gone through the rigging. But at this range it ought to be easy for them to hit
Scylla
firing mortars at their normal 45° elevation, loaded with short-fuse shells and low charges of powder. Without such weapons the forts would not be able to achieve a continuous line of fire across the channel. His confusion changed to astonishment when he realised that, although close enough to Fort
Constantine
to cause problems over the depression of fixed guns, the same reason could not explain the silence of Fort
Alexander
, seven hundred yards away. Then through gaps in the
smoke Charles saw men hauling up light howitzers and field guns to the parapets. Only then did he realise with a chilling shock that he had engaged the face of an empty battery. There were no guns in the casemates commanding the channel at the harbour mouth.

How did I not realise it? he asked himself. They sank their ships across the mouth and so would obviously suppose that no ships would try to enter the approach channel. All the guns
previously
commanding the harbour had evidently been removed to the casemates facing the sea. Charles felt ridiculous and
utterly
deflated. Moments before he had thought of heroism and probable death; now he was tortured by the sarcastic comments he might expect from fellow captains.
Scylla
’s guns were still blazing on both sides, but he was still too stunned to order them to stop.

The smoke was so thick that he could not see whether
Ven
geance
was clear of the seaward batteries, but he supposed that she must be. Then suddenly it came to him that his action, far from being ridiculous, had been inspired. He would say that he had
calculated
on there being no guns commanding the mouth, that he had taken the risk of steaming in so close, only because he was certain that the guns had been removed. That he had known that the only way to draw the fire from
Vengeance
was to present for a short time, but only for a short time, a more tempting target. He would say that he hoped that his attack on the
undefended
faces would persuade the Russians to replace guns in these case-mates to prevent further attacks on them, which, if carried out regularly, would seriously weaken the whole
structure
of these forts. His action might therefore ultimately reduce the number of guns in the casemates facing the sea, and this would assist any future general naval bombardment. Charles felt almost light-hearted as he went down to the quarter-deck to give the order to cease firing and to stand out to sea.

By steaming out from the centre of the channel,
Scylla
was not exposed to the same intensity of fire, which she had faced when heading straight for Fort Constantine. Before Charles was able to order the retreat from quarters, the spanker gaff had been carried away, a round-shot had ploughed into the captain’s day cabin, demolishing the stern gallery, and another had lodged in the lower counter, narrowly missing the rudder head; but no more lives had been lost.

As
Scylla
came in to her anchorage, Charles heard
Vengeance
’s crew cheering and ordered his own men to repay
the compliment. Passing down the main-companion on his way to visit the wounded, Charles was cheered down the entire length of the main gun-deck. Apparently the gun-crews had credited him with the foresight he intended to claim for himself. Amongst those lining the ladder down to the orlop deck, Charles was relieved to see Humphrey, his monkey-jacket white with powder and his trousers torn, but otherwise apparently unharmed. Charles patted him gently on the back and continued his descent to the surgeon’s blood-stained domain. He wished he had been able to drink some rum or brandy before seeing what he knew he would, but now he would have to face it without. He took a deep breath and entered the Cockpit.

Since dawn,
Brandon
and half-a-dozen other transports and merchant steamships had been pitching ponderously at anchor within the gentle curve of Balaclava Bay awaiting their
respective
turns to enter the narrow inlet, in response to signal flags hoisted above the crumbling cliff-top fort at the mouth. During
Brandon
’s passage from Constantinople, Magnus Crawford had shared a cabin with three young British officers, who had
recently
purchased commissions and were on their way out to their first war. Their aggressive self-confidence had saddened rather than annoyed Magnus, when he had reflected on the length of time that would elapse before they would order ices again at Gunter’s or walk arm in arm under the striped awnings in Berkeley Square. Nor had he been surprised to be ostracised when they had found out that he was a journalist, and not, as they had at first supposed a ‘Travelling Gentleman’ or ‘T.G.’, as the rich young idlers, now visiting the ‘Seat of War’ for
amusement,
were called. His fellow-passengers’ contempt for
journalists
was largely due to Mr Russell’s scathing despatches to
The
Times
and his attacks on Lord Raglan and the
Commissary-General
.

Their remarks about Russell distressed Magnus, not because he had ever met the man, but because they once more underlined
The
Times
’s supremacy, both in circulation and general repute, over the other dailies, including the
Morning
Chronicle
, for which he had come out. There were at least a dozen other
correspondents
in the Crimea, but to date Russell’s despatches had claimed almost all the public’s attention. Yet for all that, Magnus felt fortunate to have been chosen by any paper,
knowing
as he did that his past military experience had counted for less than the general reluctance of better known correspondents to take on an assignment which seemed likely to last through the winter. Indeed, because of his inexperience, he had felt obliged to accept his editor’s decision to pay him no salary, but only his expenses and a fee for each despatch published. But such poor terms had done nothing to discourage him.

When Magnus clambered up onto one of
Brandon
’s
paddle-boxes
to get his first view of the port, he knew precisely why he
had come. Believing that the Crimean invasion would prove a disaster, he placed the principal blame on the senior naval and military officers, who had failed to speak out openly about the dangers involved, while there had still been time to hold back. Magnus’s certainty that his father had been as guilty as any of these officers had crystallised the issue for him and had added to his determination to record the consequences of their lack of judgment and foresight. At times he had been shocked to realise that the thought of a national catastrophe did not entirely
displease
him, but brought with it a grim satisfaction; such an event would, he supposed, finally discredit the ruling élite in politics and in the services – his father not escaping that fate. Without Tom, Magnus’s horizons had shrunk to a single objective: to chronicle the self-destruction of his father’s caste.

As
Brandon
steamed slowly between the tall cliffs at the
entrance
to the harbour, the two companies of Turkish infantry, the majority of the ship’s passengers, started to emerge on deck, stacking their cooking pots, swords, firearms, prayer mats and blankets in confused heaps between the high bulwarks of the forecastle. None, as far as Magnus could judge, seemed unduly surprised by the extraordinary spectacle of upwards of a hundred and fifty vessels moored in two tiers, stem to stern, on both sides of an enclosed inlet, half-a-mile long and at no point wider than three hundred yards. Ships entering or leaving the harbour did so along a central channel between the shipping barely wide enough for a steamer to turn in. The water was
evidently
deep since most of the ships were moored hard against the banks, their sloping sterns often projecting over the edge of the quays and jetties.

The town itself was built on a strip of gently sloping land
sandwiched
between the ships’ masts and the cliffs: a wretched cluster of wrecked houses, some of stone, and others of cracked planks, not unlike dilapidated farm outhouses or ruined market stalls. In the centre of a network of muddy unpaved alleys, so narrow that the tiles frequently touched across them, was a burnt-out church, the skeletal blackened timbers of its onion-shaped dome still standing. Along the waterfront Magnus could make out separate wharves: one for munitions entirely covered with round-shot, piled in vast pyramids many of them ten feet high, another for cattle, a third for forage, a fourth for the
disembarkation
of troops, and near the head of the harbour, yet another with block and tackle hoists and sheers for unloading heavy guns. From reading Russell’s descriptions of the place,
Magnus had expected there to be far less order than there was, and, although the water was stagnant and stinking with the bloated carcasses of dead mules and horses, and the offal from the slaughter-houses, he was impressed by what had already been done. To land, at a tiny fishing port on a foreign coast, three thousand miles from home, all the provisions and
munitions
of war for the largest army ever to have left England at a single time: with its shot, shells, powder, guns, mortars, gun
carriages
, platforms, fascines, gabions, trenching tools, sandbags, food, cooking utensils, tents, horses and forage, was not an
insignificant
achievement. On the bare stony hills above the head of the harbour, he saw rows of white tents, and, imagining what living in them would be like when the snows came, he thought angrily of his father in the secure comfort of his flagship.

On landing Magnus made his way to the Commissariat Office to try to get a mule or donkey to carry up his tent and boxes to the plateau before Sebastopol. At that office he learned that the Commissary-General could not authorise transport for civilians without a requisition order from the Deputy-Adjutant-General, Quarter Master General’s Department. An hour later he had further discovered that such an order could only be signed by the Quarter Master General in person, and for this he would have to walk the seven miles up the Balaclava col to staff headquarters. Discouraged and angry he called at the Post Office to see if any of the letters of introduction to influential staff officers,
promised
by the editor of the
Morning
Chronicle,
were waiting for him. They were not. In a corner he saw a large sack of letters marked ‘Dead’. A postal clerk was busy writing in a ledger with ink, which, he told Magnus, was made with vinegar and soot – all the ink originally sent out from England having been used up. With the existing system of requisitions, memos, orders and
overlapping
departments, it did not surprise Magnus that there was no ink. When he told the clerk about his difficulties, he was informed dryly, that had he succeeded in getting a mule, he would have found no nails with which to have the animal shod. There had been a ton of such nails in a transport which had been in the port for two weeks, but since this ship’s invoices of cargo had been mislaid by the Harbour Master’s Office, and the vessel had outstayed the period allotted by the Captain
Superintendent
, the transport had sailed for England with the nails still in her hold.

By now resigned to spending another night in
Brandon,
Magnus walked back along the waterfront in the fading light
and sat for a while on an overturned cart outside the main forage yard, watching officers and men passing on their way to and from the various wharves. He was amazed by the contrast
between
the new drafts in their bright clean uniforms and the
condition
of the troops who had evidently been in the Crimea since the start of the campaign. But for their swords, officers would have been indistinguishable from their men. Torn and patched full-dress coats now ranged through various shades of port wine colour to dirty tints of brown and dull copper. Gold lace and epaulettes, where they survived, were black and tarnished, and many officers appeared to be wearing no shirts under their coats. A tiny minority were wearing cumbersome padded jackets lined with rabbits’ fur, and hardly a man, whatever his rank, seemed to have continued shaving: their beards, Magnus supposed,
providing
badly needed extra warmth about the neck and throat. At midday the weather had been warm enough, but now, just before sunset, the cart-wheel tracks and hoof-marks in the
previously
yielding mud were freezing into hard ruts and ridges underfoot.

By the cattle wharf, Magnus passed two mounted officers, one riding a donkey, his long legs almost touching the ground on each side. Behind him wound a procession of carts and arabas loaded with shell boxes and cartridges, some dragged by a dozen men, others by mules and oxen, with one even pulled by a
dromedary
. Magnus was walking on, when he felt a touch on his
shoulder
. He turned and saw that the officer who had been riding the donkey had dismounted and was facing him. The man’s hair was unkempt and greasy and the lower part of his face concealed by a fair wispy beard. His pale blue slightly protuberant eyes looked out anxiously from under a strapless forage cap pulled down over his ears. A thick nose between grey sunken cheeks
accentuated
his sickly emaciation. On his sleeves were four gilt cuff buttons sewn on in pairs – denoting either the Grenadier or Coldstream Guards, Magnus was not sure which. The officer was staring at him with uncertain screwed-up eyes. With a gasp of recognition, Magnus remembered the night he had arrived in Rigton Bridge, and in the darkness, a very different face under a yeomanry shako.

‘George,’ he murmured, horrified by the change in his once sleek and slightly puffy features.

*

It took George Braithwaite ten minutes to accomplish what Magnus had failed to achieve in half a day – the acquisition of a
pack pony, borrowed in this case from a team brought out by the recently arrived railway surveyor and his party. Magnus was surprised by George’s apparently genuine desire to help him, not only because of their past quarrels, but also because of the
attitude
to journalists displayed by the officers in
Brandon.
Yet George, and Bartlett, the other officer with him, showed Magnus no ill will at all when he told them why he had come out.

‘Somebody’s got to tell the public what they don’t want to hear,’ was the opinion George expressed, as they rode off
together
with the carts and waggons following. He laughed
mirthlessly
as he held up a hand in a worn leather glove. ‘Forty shillings for a pair of gloves like this, and damned lucky I was to get them. Had to pay a guinea for a small tin of cocoa
yesterday
…. It’s the same with everything. If you don’t believe me, try getting a fur-lined coat under a hundred.’

‘Nobody’ll sell at that price,’ muttered Bartlett dismissively. Magnus looked more carefully at George’s companion. Probably no more than twenty, but already he had sunken eyes and deep lines on each side of his mouth. Three months of war and two major battles and he looked nearer thirty.

‘Surely
some
winter clothing’s been issued?’ put in Magnus quietly.

‘Hardly any,’ replied George. ‘Haven’t changed this coat for six weeks and it can be devilish cold at night too. We’ve hardly enough fuel to boil a can of water, let alone make a decent fire with.’

‘There must be plenty of trees to use for fuel,’ said Magnus firmly, disturbed by George’s and Bartlett’s resigned matter-of-fact tone.

‘Trees?’ Bartlett sounded almost scornful. ‘The engineers cut them down weeks ago to use in the batteries – gun-platforms and props for the magazines mostly.’

They rode on in silence for a short distance, until George turned to Magnus with a reassuring smile.

‘Nobody can understand it when they come out…. Hundreds of ships packed full of stores and every sort of shortage in the camps.’

All the way up the long hill from the port to the heights, the unmetalled track was lined with shattered gun-carriages, wrecked limbers and the unburied carcasses of scores of mules and horses, which had died hauling up the guns.

‘That’s one reason,’ said Bartlett, pointing to a dead mule with a grotesquely inflated stomach. ‘Too few pack-animals. You’re
lucky to have got the one you’re sitting on; wouldn’t have had a chance if it’d been here a month. As soon as fresh ones get here, they’re worked to death dragging up ammunition. There’s hardly any forage up at the camps, stores weren’t built up and now something else is always more important – cartridges and shells for a start.’

Magnus had read plenty about the army’s lack of provisions, but this was beyond anything he had expected.

‘What about cavalry-horses?’ he asked.

‘Starving,’ returned Bartlett flatly. ‘Tether them near each other and they gnaw each others’ tails. The Russians did us a favour cutting up the Light Brigade … saved us the trouble of shooting our own horses.’

The young man’s weary pessimism shocked Magnus, but the small groups of haggard and ill-dressed men they passed and their broken-down animals bore out everything he had been told. The hills around them were bare and rocky with hardly a bush in sight and no trees at all. The only small village he saw had been burned and reduced to rubble; not a door or window-frame was in place, all, he supposed, having been used for firewood. Bartlett was humming tunelessly to himself.

‘Things could be worse,’ murmured George. ‘Men aren’t starving and enough ammunition reaches the batteries.’

‘In a month?’ asked Bartlett with the same ironic tone Magnus had noticed before.

‘We’ll attack before then … bound to,’ replied George with a forced laugh.