Here we are, fifteen months later, with Balaclava and Inkerman behind us, and the world ringing with the story of our valour; and something here and there being said about the staring incapacity of our commanders and the crass dishonesty and stupidity of our contractors. The army which left home in such bright array is transformed to a crowd of ragged vagabonds, and all the services are mixed together in the trenches and the camps before Sevastopol. Here are men of the Horse Artillery whose batteries have lost their horses; and here are cavalrymen dismounted, whether by reason of warlike misadventure or the sheer starvation of horseflesh. And since folks must do something for their bread in campaigning times, as at more peaceful seasons, the rules and regulations of special branches of the military service are cast aside, and men of every arm are working in the trenches together. A crowd of vagabonds we are to look at, to be sure; but a year of war, if you only think of it, makes a boy a veteran, and the bronzed, weatherbeaten, and ragged lads of whom the army is in the main composed, have lived in an atmosphere of powder for a year past; have gone marching and counter-marching under shot and shell; and charging, and repelling charges, until the imminent peril of their lives is a great deal more familiar to them than their daily bread. The peril is there always, and the bread turns up with extreme fitfulness.
On the Christmas Eve of ‘fifty-five there was a time of excitement in the second parallel before the Malakoff; and this was not because of any special danger of the siege or any threatened imminent assault, but simply and merely because of the late slaughter of a pig of tender age whose screams had come up from the Turkish camp about the witching hour of midnight.
Amongst the war-worn, ragged, bronzed and bearded crowd is that identical Paddy who reckoned his uniform the livery of his degradation when he first assumed it. He is as ragged as any Connemara harvester by this time, and as tanned, as plucky, and as impudent in the face of death and hardship as he knows how to stick; and it is he who has brought the news which flutters the spirits of the score of men who are huddled in the trench together, right beneath the gaping embrasure of the Russian guns.
It was near midnight, and an extreme languor of fatigue had fallen upon all men when the tattered slip of Hibernian nobility crawled up on hands and knees so as not to expose himself against the sky-line, and dropped into his own place in the trench. He dropped with his feet on the stomach of Sergeant Polson Jervase, who denounced his clumsiness in fair set terms, which came as pat to his lips as if he had rehearsed them for a year.
‘Is that you?’ said Paddy. ‘I beg yer pardon, and be damned to you. And now will ye just listen? D’ye hear the death cry?’
Everybody heard the death cry, filling the air from barely a third of a mile away: the voice of pork at the last agony.
‘The Lord alone knows where it’s come from, but that Mussulman crush down below has got hold of a pig. The devil a ration has been served to them for a month past, and they ought to know what hunger means be this time. But bhoys,’ the speaker went on, with a whispered emphasis, ‘we’re Christian men, I hope, and we can’t dream of allowing those poor infidels to peril their immortal salvation by the eating of strange food. It’s eternal loss to the soul of a Mussulman that puts a knife and fork into a griskin. And I’m proposin’ a work of Christian charity. Have ye got the matayrials for a fire handy?’
One of the men sleepily bade him be damned, and turned over in the mud in a scrap of ragged blanket; but all the rest at the bare suggestion of a meal were wide awake. ‘Sergeant, darlin’, just be giving me half-a-dozen men and we will make an exploitation, and be back in no time with a meal of meat that ought to be good enough for this particular mess from now till New Year’s Day. Is there any chance of a fire now?’
A member of the hungry, hard-bitten band owned a solitary lucifer; but was afraid that the damp had deprived it of all virtue.
‘Hurry up, boys,’ said one. ‘If once those blessed Bazouks get a fork into piggy, we shall have to fight for a share of him.’
‘We’ve got the makings of a fire here somewhere,’ said the man with the solitary lucifer. ‘But how are we to start it? This brushwood stuff is all wet, and it won’t catch.’
But one man was there with a providential scrap of newspaper. There was a moon in the frosty sky, with tatters of windy cloud about it, which gave light enough to show the men each others’ faces dimly, and they all clustered in a rough ring, some kneeling, some standing, and the centre of the throng was the man with the match. Near him, second only in importance, was the man with the newspaper, and kneeling near was a third who stirred up the loose brushwood below the heaped fuel which had been gathered and hoarded for a month past for a Christmas fire.
‘Here’s a dry pebble,’ said one man, pressing solicitously forward, and proffering his midnight find to the man with the match. ‘Strike her on that, and for God’s sake hold your breath, boys.’
The human centre of interest, the man with the match, took the pebble and polished it to complete dryness on the lining of his overcoat. Then he struck the match, which emitted a faint phosphorescent glow, and went dark again.
In those days, when a Russian gunner felt aweary, and found a lack of interest in the crawling hours of darkness, he would let bang a gun from the Redoubt, simply pour passer le temps; and at this minute the skipping ‘zip’ of a shot, a splutter of earth, and then the sullen boom of the discharge came to give variation to the scene. The lucifer match, however, was the all-absorbing centre of interest just then, and the scratch on the pebble was a much more important sound than any bellow of cannon from the fort. The lucifer was barely equal to its duties, and half-a-dozen times it gave its feeble spark of phosphorescent light in vain; but at last it struck, and the blue and yellow sulphur bubbled and crackled into flame. The man with the newspaper was ready, and caught the fire. The wet twigs smoked pungently, and there was one heart-sinking moment when the last chance seemed to have vanished; but then the fire sparkled up merrily, and the blaze lit the earthen side of the trench and the silky-bearded, bronzed, unwashed faces, and the stalwart, tattered figures of the crowd, with a flickering changeful brightness.
‘That’s all right, boys,’ said the Honourable Patrick Erroll, Private of Dragoons. ‘And now, Sergeant darlin’, give me half-a-dozen rank and file, and, please God, well have a meal for Christmas morning.’
‘Now, I’m just as keen as any one of you,’ said Sergeant Jervase, ‘and just as hungry; but be very quiet about the business, Paddy, and don’t have a row with the Bashis, for the Lord’s sake.’
‘Trust me, Sergeant,’ said the Honourable Mr. Erroll, ‘and nurse the fire whilst we’re away.’
Out of the blank darkness of the night the flame and glow from the second parallel seemed to bite a hole; and as its brightness grew, it drew the attention of the gunners of the Malakoff, who banged at it sulkily from time to time. But the reckless contingent under Paddy’s leadership had already clambered to the open and were making a muddy way in the darkness towards the Turkish camp.
Down in the trench the fire grew to a rich and splendid glow, and one or two of the favoured of fortune, who owned pipes and tobacco, plucked bright embers from it, and, nestling under the shelter of the wall, sucked away at their comfort with simple animal noises of satisfaction.
‘I say, Bill,’ says one, ‘was you ever Hingry before you seen this Gawd-forsaken Crimea?’
‘Lor’ love yer,’ says the man questioned, ‘I was born hungry, and I’ve been hungry ever since. But if the Honourable Paddy finds that ‘og, and I get hold of a hind leg of him, I won’t complain before to-morrow midnight.’
The fire glowed with a richer and a richer light, and men of hospitable minds wiped their half-smoked clays on the inside crook of a coated elbow and passed on luxury and refreshment to less-favoured neighbours. It was a time for comradeship, if only for the fact that it was Christmas Eve, and coming fast towards Christmas morning. But the thought of the slain porker was in all men’s minds, and made them expansive and generous and reserved by turns. Boom! said the gun from the Redoubt, and the earth spluttered between the collar of Sergeant Polson’s jacket and his neck, and dribbled comfortlessly down his back, colder than any charity he had known of: lately-frozen earth, half thawed, with wet snow on the top of it, and a sulky boom behind to add a threat to its cold sting.
After long waiting, a voice in ecstatic laughter, and surely the voice of the Honourable Paddy, Shuffling footsteps in the dark, and the hungriest of the whole crowd in the trench climbing to peer into the blackness; a youth who has not yet finished growing, and who finds the irregularity of meals a cruel thing.
‘I’d like to know,’ says the Honourable Mr. Erroll cheerfully, ‘who trusted those infernal Russians with a gun? They’ll be hurting somebody by and by, if they’re not careful. But here’s the pig, boys, and there’s nobody but poor little Ahmed Bey the worse for us. I knocked him on the head from behind, and we’ll be none the worse friends to-morrow.’
Bang, and bang, and bang! sounded the guns from the Russian battery, drawn by the light; but a delicious odour rose upon the air, and the teeth of the little contingent watered. There was a ramrod with Sergeant Polson at one end of it, and Paddy Erroll at the other, and the loveliest loin of young pork in the middle; and the two, with scorched hands and scorched faces, turned, and turned, and turned the improvised spit. And there were some less nice in appetite who had raked out heaps of glowing cinders from the fire, and had lain succulent slices thereon and buried them in more cinders, and who were now enjoying a compound feast of pork and charcoal, with such an insane relish as no home-staying epicure could conceive over the lordliest dish the combined cuisine of the whole wide world could show him.
‘What are you up to here, you fellows?’ said a voice out of the darkness. ‘That’s a jolly appetising smell.’
‘Fresh roast pork, sir,’ responded one man with his mouth full.
‘Fresh roast pork!’ echoed the inquirer. ‘Hillo—that you, Sergeant? You’re in luck. I’ll join your mess if you make no objection.’
‘Nobody more welcome than Captain Volnay, sir,’ said Polson. ‘Find that old bread-box, one of you, and give Captain Volnay a seat.’
‘Hurry up!’ said Volnay. ‘That smell is maddening. How did you men come in for such a treasure trove as this?’
‘I’m Columbus,’ said the Honourable Paddy, tinning the ramrod spit.
‘Why, by Jingo!’ cried Volnay, ‘you’ve got a whole pig here. I say, Sergeant, I’m going to confiscate a leg for our Christmas mess. You don’t think you fellows are going to be allowed to sit gourmandising here whilst we go hungry!’
One man, sheltered by the shadow, answered sneeringly:
‘Precious little going hungry amongst your set, sir,’ said he.
‘And precious little you know about it, my good fellow,’ Volnay answered, with his sunny laugh. ‘Life isn’t all beer and skittles amongst your officers, let me tell you.’
‘I’d like to change, sir,’ said the malcontent.
‘Would you?’ asked the Captain. ‘Well, I dare say you would. But we all have enough to grumble at, and to spare, if we happen to be built that way. Just expedite that joint, Sergeant.’
‘It will be all the better for another turn or two, sir,’ said Polson. ‘It’s a deadly pity, but there’s no such thing as a hint of crackling. Piggy came along with his bristles on, and we have no shaving tackle.’
‘Who goes there?’ cried a voice in the darkness, two score yards away.
‘Grand rounds,’ said another voice. It was Major de Blacquaire’s, and Polson had not heard it since the day of the Alma, a year and three months ago.
‘Halt, grand rounds, and give the countersign.’
‘Bonnie Dundee.’
‘Pass, grand rounds, and all’s well.’
Grand rounds came tramping down the trench and the men about the fire rose up and stood to attention.
‘What is this?’ asked De Blacquaire. ‘Who’s in charge here?’
‘I am, sir,’ Polson answered, saluting.
‘What’s the meaning of this blaze here? Can’t you see that you’re drawing the enemy’s fire? Report yourself to me at noon to-morrow. Scatter that stuff, and trample it out.’
A foot was thrust into the embers, and they flared up suddenly. The Major recognised his enemy, and looked from his eyes to the stripes upon the left sleeve of his ragged overcoat.
‘Is that your own coat?’ he asked. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Sergeant are you? I’ll break you for this to-morrow.’
‘That you, old chap?’ drawled Volnay from his seat on the bread-box. ‘Said you were dead. We’ve got no end of a find here. Whole pig. If you’ll let me know where to find you, I’ve bagged a ham, and I’ll invite myself to dine with you, and bring my own rations with me.’
‘Thaanks,’ said De Blacquaire. ‘Don’t trouble. I shall find it my duty to report this scene of riot and disorder. Forward. March.’
Grand rounds went by, and the scattered fire faded.
‘If you can manage to hack a slice of that pork off, Sergeant!’ said Volnay, ‘I’m beastly hungry.’
‘Done, I think, to a turn,’ said Polson. ‘Who’s got anything that will cut?’
‘I’m tould, sir,’ said a voice out of the darkness, with a rich oily brogue in it, ‘that there’s hours of difference between here and Limerick. Won’t it be Christmas morning in old Ireland, sir? And will the bells be ringing?’
‘Ye’re out in your reckonin’,’ said another voice amid the shadows. ‘It’s exactly the other way. Your folks is going to bed in Limerick. The sun has a knack of risin’ in the east, my lad, and we’re far east of Ireland, or Aberdeen for that matter. I’m not mindin’ the exact particulars, but it’s a matter of some two hours, I’m thinking. It’s deep midnight here, and an hour or so beyond it, and they’ll be over their punchbowls, yonner. That’s so, sir, I’m believin’?’
‘I don’t know, upon my word,’ said Volnay. ‘You’re out of my depth, my lad. But it’s a bit of a sin to talk about punch-bowls, isn’t it, on a night like this, when there isn’t a hot drink within a hundred miles? Sergeant, this pork is like manna in the wilderness. Look me up before you report yourself to Major de Blacquaire, will you? I’m responsible for the fire, you understand. It was my duty to retire the whole crowd of you under arrest, I know, but there isn’t a lot of fun going for you beggars here, is there? Goodnight, Sergeant, and don’t forget the hour in the morning.’
‘Good-night, sir.’ ‘God go with you, sir.’ ‘A merry Christmas and a loight harrut to you, sir, for many a year.’
‘That’s your man, nah, Sergeant,’ said one man out of the shadow in a tone that was learned in Rotherham, or very near it. ‘Ah like Captain Volnay as mooch as ah like anybody. He’s got a kind of a way with him an’ he sits dahn with the like of huz, and he talks to us as if we was men in place o’ bein’ cattle, which is the way with most on ‘em. Here’s good luck to Captain Volnay, an’ if ah’d got a glass o’ that steamin’ poonch they’n got in Aberdeen, ode bird, ah’d scald my throat with a relish.’
They were all full of roast pork, or of pork more or less roasted, and the scent of the sacrifice was yet in the air, and their war-bitten souls were cheered and warmed, if ever so little.
‘Yis,’ said one lad, ‘if half the quality knowed!’
‘Hallo!’ said Polson, turning in the fragrant dark. ‘How far from Bilston were you born?’
‘Wedgebury,’ said the voice. ‘No furder.’
‘Beacon Hargate, me,’ said Polson. ‘I’d ha’ guessed it, Sergeant. I’d ha’ guessed it. I niver heerd your voice afore to-night, but there’s a kind of a turn of the tongue in it now and then.’
The contingent fell to silence, and a wet clinging snow began, ruled in straight lines. The embers of the fire hissed under it, and the men drew themselves into such shelter as they could find, and waited in the grey, cold patience for the expected relief from duty. It was long in coming, and they learned afterwards that the regimental Sergeant-major, whose duty it ought to have been to relieve them on that Christmas morning, was dead from dysentery, poor fellow, and as a matter of fact it turned out that he was buried in the muddy earth and half frozen in there before anybody remembered to take up his duty.
The long, long night went on, and the Russian gunner, finding his attention no longer drawn to the distant fire, had gone to sleep or anyhow fallen silent, when a witching noise rose upon the air, and all the worn, half-sleeping men sat up to listen. Surely there was the sound of church bells, and there was a rush towards the pleasant noise. It was only a man from the smithy who happened to have a musical ear and had rigged up a kind of gallows from which he had hung carbine and rifle barrels of varying lengths and calibre, on the which he was beating with an iron rod. The sulky dull beginning of the dawn on Christmas Day, and there in the trenches the Christmas bells ringing as they might have rung in any village church in old England, two thousand miles away. And the hearts of the listeners rose to their throats, and men were quiet whilst the music sounded. The notes reached far, and fell on many a drowsy ear, conjuring up visions in the half-slumbering minds of humble whitewashed village steeples, far and far away. Polson’s contingent, drawn from a distance of some two hundred yards, stuffed that ingenious musician with half-cold roast pork, and left him well rewarded for his toils.
By one of those surprising fatuities which distinguished this particular campaign almost above all others in which the English private soldier has been engaged, an attack which was ordered for black midnight was ready just in the grey of dawn, and Polson’s ear caught a whispered word of command here and there, and a noise of careful footsteps. The trench of the second parallel was ten feet deep, but there was a ladder of foot-holes just behind him, and he turned and climbed, digging his fingers into the half-frozen turf on the Russian side. There was the grim Redoubt at which the English guns had hammered in vain this many and many a day, still solidly silhouetted against the clearing sky of morning, dark and lowering, quiet as death and yet from old experience holding a threat in the entrails of it. The men—three or four thousand of them, as one might guess—climbed into the trench of the first parallel and were lost to sight. They emerged crouching, and raced across the space which intervened between them and the second, where Polson’s own post lay. They were down like a dumb wind on the one side and up again on the other, and raced, crouching, for the first, into which they again disappeared. The man who shouldered Polson from his place, and whose face as he went by might be distinctly seen, was Major de Blacquaire.
‘Leading a forlorn hope, you devil, are you?’ said the Sergeant to himself; but the words were silent, and he felt a simple throb of admiration for the set mouth and resolute eyes of the man who had climbed past him, and wished himself in his place.
The racing, crouching crowd had dived into the foremost trench and had reappeared again before it was discerned by the Russian sentries; but a hundred yards away from the foot of the glacis, the whole advance was caught and swept and twisted, as by a whirlwind, by a hail of gunshot, canister and rifle fire. The half-melted, new-fallen snow clung to the sloping glacis of the Redoubt, and made a greyish background of dim light against which a watcher could perceive not only the whole motion of the line, but the gesture of any single figure in it. Hate and interest and admiration alike prompted Polson’s eyes to follow the slim, active figure with the waving sword which silently beckoned on his followers. The Redoubt opened, as it were, with an earthquake crash, and all the black front of it went fiery red and yellow, and at the first discharge of this inferno, the figure with the flourished sabre in his right hand fell prone. The double line of the invaders shook and wavered from right to left, and men dropped amongst them as if the scythe of Death were literally sweeping there. The lines advanced, wavered, paused, turned, turned again, advanced again with mad cheering, scarce heard amid the rattle of musketry and the roaring of the guns; and finally broke and ran, utterly routed. The onlooker had no part in this conflict except to bite and ram down a cartridge or two and to send a shot more or less at random into the black oblong of the opposing fort; but clinging with his feet on that precarious muddy ladder, and with his elbows to the frozen turf, he saw clearly the convulsive gesture with which De Blacquaire lifted his sabre in a last effort to wave on his men.
Man is a very complex creature, and he will not be finally analysed and done with until this planet is very much older than it was in the nineteenth Christian century. Whether it was hate, or personal pride, or a sudden flash of admiration for a man whom he had hitherto despised, Polson Jervase could not have told you to his dying day.
But though the motives which inspired him were very wildly mixed and very uncertain in their origin, there is no doubt whatever as to the deed to which amongst themselves they inspired him that Christmas morning. The Malakoff belched hell. The flying crowds hustled him and threw him twice or thrice. But he was on his feet again, racing towards that prone figure. He dropped into the front trench and trod upon a wounded man who screamed beneath his heel, and climbed out on the further side. The air was musical with hooting shell and singing shot and hissing bullet as if a whole diabolic orchestra were fiddling and bugling. Polson found the fallen body of his foe, and hugged it in his arms, and raced back as hard as he could tear. He tumbled into the trench of the first parallel almost anyhow; but he gripped the man he hated, and in his soul was a great rejoicing. He tore up the opposite side, and came out upon the open slope again, with the unconscious man still in his arms.
‘You’ll ruin me, you devil!’ said Polson, as he ran breathlessly with the wind of shot and shell in his ears. ‘And I’m to report myself to you to-morrow, am I? We may report ourselves to Almighty God together, but you are safe for the minute, I guess.’
He was within a yard of his own post when these mad exaltations of an excited fancy crossed his mind, and at that instant a musket shot took him in the neck and he fell with his burden into the trench before him.
We swoop, as it were, to the skies, and we drop, as it were, to the very sea bed, and we are seasick to the souls of us, one and all; and of the five hundred men the staunch boat carries, there are a round four hundred and fifty wounded, and a round four hundred who will never see the skies with conscious eyes again. We are bound for Scutari, where an enlightened intelligence, awakened at last to some beginning of elementary necessity, has established a hospital; for Government, as usual in such matters, after five hundred years of more or less victorious prowling to and fro in the world and more of gathered experience than any other body of men ever had in the history of the world, has positively made up its mind to shelter broken bones and sick bodies from the mere inclemencies of the weather.
It would not have done so much had it not been for the intervention of a lady whose name deserves to be immortal so long as the British Empire paints itself red upon the map; but Florence Nightingale had enlisted the sympathy of English hearts more quickly than the Queen’s shilling had enlisted fighting men, and the Crimean hospitals were the centre of a thousand human interests. The authorities had somehow caught and impounded the good ship Cæsar at Odessa, and had despatched it to a desert bay with no landing place or chartered sounding, near Ouklacool Aides, and, having loaded it there with wounded, had ordered it across to the Black Sea and down the Dardanelles. The stout Ayrshire heart of the captain was sick and sore within him many a time on that grim voyage, for before it was half over he had spent his last round shot on board and his last bit of spare canvas in the sewing up and weighting of men who were fated to be buried in the deep.
Amongst those who escaped this dreary fate were Polson Jervase and the enemy he had rescued at so grave a risk of his own life, and they two, with about one half the original human cargo of the ship, reached Scutari, and were landed there, and carried into hospital. A rough sea voyage in January weather in the Black Sea affords no pleasant nurture for a wounded man, and the poor fellows who were carried or helped ashore were a pitiable crew indeed. Neither Polson nor his enemy was conscious at the hour of landing, or had been truly conscious throughout the whole of the long and trying voyage. They were lowered in their stretchers from the ship’s side to the caiques which were brought alongside, pulled to the shore and carried by hand to the hospital. They were luckier in this respect than the majority of the men, who were huddled into the straw of the lumbering octagonal-wheeled arabas. The rustic Turk had not yet mastered the art, even if he has mastered it to-day, of constructing a cartwheel in a circle. He makes it eight-sided, and builds his vehicles without springs, and the wounded went along the vile road with a compound jolt for every foot of ground they traversed. There are men yet living who remember that piercing scene, and the cries which were wrung from the hearts of the stoutest fighting men in the world along that via dolorosa. It happened that the rescued and the rescuer were laid side by side, each on a bed some twenty inches in width; and there they were tended many days before either of them awoke to a real knowledge of his surroundings. In their waking hours they babbled deliriously, the pair of them, letting out the secrets of their very souls, if anybody had been there to listen. Day by day, and night by night, Polson, as he remembered afterwards, heard the best loved voice in the world from time to time, and sometimes with it and sometimes alone the voice he hated most. The wind was blowing the rain against the windows of the grey-stone house on Beacon Hill, and Irene and his father were whispering secrets together in the parlour. Then De Blacquaire was chattering there and saying all manner of things which were not pertinent to the case in hand, and Irene was answering him. John Jervase was talking by turns to all three, and was sometimes absurdly sentimental, dropping tears on the listener’s upturned face. All this was so strange and confused, so much a dream of delirium, that when at last the sufferer awoke to reason, he attached no meaning to it.
It was the 1st of February, as he found out afterwards, and he had been crazy for five weeks. He stared feebly up at the ceiling and wondered as to his whereabouts. He tried to lift a hand, but he might have worn a gauntlet of lead, it felt so heavy; though, when at last he struggled into a changed posture, it looked as if it were made of egg-shell porcelain, it was so thin and worn.
‘I wonder,’ he said within himself—and this was his first conscious thought, ‘I wonder if I saved that sweep.’ And then at his side he heard De Blacquaire’s voice.
‘Thank you,’ it was saying. ‘You’re awfully sweet and kind, and I’m very much obliged to you. That is much easier.’
Polson was greatly interested, but in the very act of turning over to look at his enemy, and to find out whom he was addressing, he fell into a deep sleep. The next time he came back to consciousness it was dark, except for a sickly burning oil lamp on a sconce fixed against a wall at a little distance. He began to be aware of the fact that he was amazingly hungry, and the memory of what he imagined to have been his last meal came back to him. He laughed feebly, and he spoke.
‘I wonder what the beggars did with the rest of that pig.’
There was the sound beside him as of an emotional snuffle, and John Jervase blew his nose resoundingly, so that Polson knew that his father was there before the old man bent his head above him. He was too weak to be surprised at anything, and had no earthly notion as to his own whereabouts.
‘Why, you’ve come round again, Polly,’ said his father. ‘You know me, don’t you?’
It was in Polson’s mind to return a hearty nod in the affirmative, but all he managed to do was to close his eyes and open them again.
‘Why, that’s hearty!’ said Jervase, smoothing the bedclothes above him with a tremulous hand. ‘That’s hearty, old chap. They said you wouldn’t pull through, but I knew better all along. Now, you was to take this, if you woke up, and you’ve got to keep very still and quiet. This is the very best beef tea as you can get for love or money in all Asia Minor. You let me tuck this napkin under your chin, Polly, and I’ll feed you with a golden tablespoon. You’d ‘ardly believe it, but I bought this in Vienna on my way out here, and it used to belong to the Empress Catherine of Rooshia, and I gave a twenty-pun’ note for it, and it’s got her monogram. You don’t mind me chattering, old chap, but I don’t want to excite you, and it’s the doctor’s orders that I mustn’t; but it’s pretty nigh on two years now since I set eyes on you, and when you get stronger and begin to walk about again, I shall have a heap of things to tell you.’
The wounded man lay face upwards, and sipped at the tepid liquid presented to his lips with a huge physical enjoyment. In his whole life he had never conceived of so complete a pleasure. Only the convalescent knows the joys of the table.
‘That’s the last spoonful, Polly,’ said John Jervase, wiping the pale lips with the napkin he had tucked beneath the invalid’s chin at the beginning of the meal. ‘You’d like more, wouldn’t you?’
Folson tried to nod again, and again achieved nothing more than a lowering and raising of the eyelids.
‘You haven’t got to have it, you know, old chap. You’ve got to be kept hungry. It’s been touch and go for weeks, but you’ll be all right now, if we take care of you. And I reckon we’ll do that amongst us.’
A weary voice rose from the neighbouring bed.
‘Stop that infernal cackle, whoever you are, and let me sleep. Don’t you know better than to make a row like that in a hospital?’
Once more Polson—this time wide awake—was conscious of the voice of his enemy.
‘It’s all right,’ his father whispered. ‘I’ll come back next time you’ve got to be fed, old chap, but he doesn’t like me, and he’s been down on me a hundred times already.’
The sick man stared at the ceiling where the oil lamp in its sconce on the wall had made a smoky semi-circle, and where the yellow light now slept upon the whitewash within the limits of the smoked half-ring. He was too weak to think very deeply, and too weak to feel very strongly; but the sense of home within his mind, and the father was the father, and the voice and the hand had never been unkind since he could remember, and the scorn and passion of his heart had somehow worn away, and he was not angry or contemptuous or full of hatred as he had been.
Jervase leaned over him in a momentary farewell, and Polson saw that the old man’s eyes were full of tears. One dropped plump and warm on the tip of his own nose, and there was something comic and touching in the fact, and he giggled and snuffled over it to the verge of a weak hysteria.
‘I wasn’t to disturb you, Polly,’ said Jervase, ‘and I’m misbehaving myself. I’ve got to go, and you’ve got to go to sleep; but I’ll be back as soon as ever they’ll let me, and in a day or two’s time you’ll be strong enough for you and me to have a talk together.’
‘I wish,’ said the feeble, drawling voice from the neighbouring bed, ‘that you would hold your tongue or go. I want to sleep.’
John Jervase stooped to kiss Polson on the forehead, and went his way down the silent ward, with his boots creaking with a fainter and fainter sound, until he reached the folding doors at the far end of the dormitory.
The lad lay quiet. He had parted with his father in bitter disdain and anger, but somehow these emotions had all departed from him by this time, and had left him as if they had been an evil spirit, banished by some better influence. He did not know—he was too weak and tired to think about things—but at his side there was an angry stirring and a peevish voice spoke to him.
‘That’s you, is it?’
Polson, a little strengthened by the food he had taken, managed to roll round upon his shoulder, and looked his late enemy in the face.
‘It’s I,’ he said. ‘Indubitably. And it’s you, to a certainty. Where did you get hit?’
There was so long a silence that each thought that the other had fallen asleep; but when it had endured for perhaps the space of twenty minutes, De Blacquaire began to turn and murmur, and at last his words found an articulate form.
‘I say,’ he began, ‘you there! You! Sergeant! Are you awake?’
‘Wide,’ said Polson.
The man beside him lay with pallid face and big bird-like eyes, staring at the smoked semi-circle on the ceiling, and after the inquiry he had offered and the answer given, there was silence again, whilst a man might have counted twenty.
‘They’ve told me all about it,’ said Major de Blacquaire, ‘and I don’t understand it.
And I want to understand. What in the name of hell did you fetch me out for?’
‘You go to sleep,’ said Polson, ‘and don’t ask ridiculous questions.’
‘I want to know,’ said De Blacquaire.
‘I’ll tell you to-morrow,’ the Sergeant answered. ‘But it’s no good thinking about things just now.’
Again there was a silence, and it lasted for a full hour. The rank petroleum lamp in the sconce burnt out and left a sickening stench upon the air. The whole space in which the wounded men lay went dark, and the wild free wind and the cruel driving rain beat at the window. In the black darkness voices spoke here and there. There were notes of fever from wounded men, and once or twice there was a last message whispered to a nurse’s ear, never to be delivered. Dark and storm, and the heroic long-suffering soul released from the heroic long-suffering body, and going home at midnight.
Sick men who have been half-starved for a year or two, and who have run through every note of the gamut of emotion, may be quicker to appreciate these influences than common people are: but Polson Jervase, lying on his back and staring upwards in a futile endeavour to trace the semi-circular ring of smoke upon the ceiling, felt them all deeply.
Whilst he lay there, staring upwards, there was a sudden patter of bare feet on the bare floor at his side, and a hand clutched him.
‘Look here,’ said Major de Blacquaire, and even in his half dream he knew the voice instantly, as if he had been wide awake and the room had lain in broad daylight. ‘Look here, what the devil did you do it for?’
‘Get back into bed,’ said Polson, ‘and I’ll try to talk to you.’
The beds were not more than twenty inches in width, and there was barely a foot between them, so that a man by the stretching of a hand could touch a comrade.
Out of the dark, to the Sergeant’s intense surprise, there came a groping hand, which sought his own, and found it and Clutched it.
‘What the devil did you do it for?’ said De Blacquaire.
‘Well,’ said the wounded Sergeant, ‘it’s pretty hard to say. I suppose it’s a mixed-up kind of thing altogether. I saw you drop, and you promised to break me in the morning, and if I’d let your chance go by, d’ye see——’
‘See! ‘said De Blacquaire, holding on to the hand in the darkness. ‘You’re not half a bad fellow, Jervase.’
‘Ain’t I?’ said Jervase. ‘You go on like this, Major, and I shall begin to think that you’re a better sort than I fancied you were.’
The two men went to sleep together, each holding the other’s hand. It was an odd thing, and quite unlikely to have been prophesied by anybody; but it happened.
An hour or two later, when the elder Jervase stole in on tiptoe, with a new cup of priceless beef-tea, he saw the two men lying there, with their faces turned to each other, as if they had been lovers, and hand holding hand. He took Polson by the wrist, and shook the grasp gently asunder.
‘You’ve got to take this, old chap,’ he said, and setting down the candle he carried, and fixing it by its own grease to the rough hospital table at the bed head, he began to feed the boy once more.
You are not to imagine the ward silent all this time. There are valiant souls of men passing with every hour, and groans of death and anguish, and all the living axe conscious.
When Jervase had fed the Sergeant to the last teaspoonful, he retired again, leaving the candle burning on the table at the bed head.
‘These poor chaps,’ he said, ‘may find a little bit of comfort in a light, and any way, good English wax don’t stink like Turkish lamp oil, does it, old chap?’
The ‘old chap’ winked. He had no strength to express himself in any more emphatic manner; but he had got to love his father once again, for, after all, the ties of blood are strong, and a man may have been a wrong doer without giving his own son an eternal cause to hate him. And when a man has a bullet hole through the neck, and has been unconscious for many days, and delirious for many weeks, and finds a once familiar face bending over him, habit asserts itself; and any hatred or despite which may have come in between two people long ago is likely to be scattered. It was a foreign air which howled about the gables and chimneys. It was a foreign wind which wept and moaned about that abode of sorrow, and drove the rain against the window panes. But to the boy, the feel of whose father’s hand was still warm in his own, it was home, home, home. The candle dwindled down, and he had been watchful enough to prevent the whole place being set on fire by waiting to blow out its final flame as it drove towards the bare wood on which it rested. Darkness came down and slumber with it; and then on the top of slumber a quiet whisper and a dawning light which waked many men in the long bare corridor. There was a candle carried by a hospital nurse in the sombre uniform of her craft, and behind it came a lady whom every waking man there present turned to thank, if it were only by a movement of the enfeebled hand, or a droop of the eyelid, or a motion of the deadened lips. Men who are dying after long sickness in hospital cannot cheer. Men who fall in the full tide of the strength of manhood on the battlefield can acclaim their leader. The wasted forces had naturally gone, but as the gleaming candle light led Florence Nightingale from couch to couch, the wakers turned and gave such signals as they could. The pitying, watchful, gracious face went by, and the candle light departed.
A good many weeks and months went by before the name of the owner of that gracious face and that memorable smile was known even to the parting souls and suffering bodies which were cheered by it.
Spring comes up earlier in the region of Scutari than it does in London, and there were many scores of ragged silken-bearded fellows rambling up and down the streets of the place on crutches before the first leaf had declared itself in any park in London, and almost before the first wayside flower had bloomed in any English country hedgerow.
Away to the north-east of the hospital lies that cemetery which for many a year to come will be a place of pilgrimage for the British globe-trotter. There are the hunched, high-shouldered monuments of many buried men, with the turban with its wreathen carvings to indicate the resting place of the master sex. In those days, when the shallow graves were being very quickly filled, the convalescent inmates of the hospital made the cemetery their favourite promenading ground, and it was here, upon a shining March Monday, that Polson and Major de Blacquaire encountered each other on their wanderings amid the tombs, the one on crutches, and the other painfully supporting his footsteps by the aid of a walking stick.
‘Since they began to sort us about,’ said De Blacquaire, ‘I’ve lost sight of you. And you’ve never answered my question. Now, what the devil did you do it for?’
‘Look here,’ said Polson, using his favourite locution, ‘you’ve threatened two or three times to make an end of me.’
‘Yes,’ said the Major, nodding and drawling on the word. ‘That’s right enough, But what’s that got to do with it?’
‘Well, you see,’ said Polson, ‘I’d got to give you the chance to do it.’
‘Had you?’ said Major de Blacquaire.
The one man was leaning on his crutches, and the other was stooping on his crutch walking-stick, and there was nobody near so far as either of them could see.
‘I don’t know,’ said De Blacquaire, in a drooping voice. ‘I may be all wrong, and in a sort of way knocked to pieces, don’t you know. But I think on the whole, Sergeant, that you have acted like an unusually damned good fellow. Do you mind?’—he pointed to a sunken tomb by a motion of one of his crutches, and he sat down upon it. ‘What has a fellow got to do when another fellow has fetched him out of the fire at the risk of his own life, and one fellow hates the other fellow like the very devil? I’ll tell you straight, Polson,’ said De Blacquaire, in his old-mannered drawl, ‘I’d have seen you damned and done for before I’d have reached out a finger to save you. And I think that you are the blamedest kind of an ass and a duffer to have pulled me out. And yet I don’t know—I’m not so cursed certain that you’ll suffer for it.’