Under the Red Dragon 56A Sunday Morning in the Crimea
18
Literature · Romance
Under the Red Dragon 56
A Sunday Morning in the Crimea
GrantEnglish
I must have dropped asleep of sheer weariness and loss of blood, when tottering to the rear; for on waking I found the moon shining, and myself lying not far from the fifth parallel, which was now occupied, like the rest of the trenches, by the kilted Highlanders, whose bare legs, and the word Egypt on their appointments, formed a double source of wonder to our Moslem allies, especially to the contingent that came from the Land of Bondage. These sturdy fellows were chatting, laughing, and smoking, or quietly sleeping and waiting for their turn of service against the Redan, in the dark hours of the morning.
I had lain long in a kind of dreamy agony. Like many who were in the Redan and in the ditch around it, I had murmured "water, water," often and vainly. The loss of Estelle, or of Valerie, for times there were when my mind wandered to the former now, the love of dear friends, the death of comrades, honour, glory, danger from pillaging Russians or Tartars, all emotions, in fact, were merged or swallowed up in the terrible agony I endured in my shattered arm, and the still more consuming craving for something wherewith to moisten my cracked lips and parched throat. Poor Phil Caradoc had perhaps endured this before me, while his heart and soul were full of Winifred Lloyd; but Phil, God rest him! was at peace now, and slept as sound in his uncouth grave as if laid under marble in Westminster Abbey.
In my uneasy slumber I had been conscious of this sensation of thirst, and had visions of champagne goblets, foaming and iced; of humble bitter beer and murmuring water; of gurgling brooks that flowed over brown pebbles, and under long-bladed grass and burdocks in leafy dingles; of Llyn Tegid, deep and blue; of the marble fountain, with the lilies and golden fish, at Craigaderyn. Then with this idea the voice of Winifred Lloyd came pleasantly to my ear; her white fingers played with the sparkling water, she raised some to my lips, but the cup fell to pieces, and starting, I awoke to find a tall Highlander, of the Black Watch, bending over me, and on my imploring him to get me some water, he placed his wooden canteen to my lips, and I drank of the contents, weak rum-grog, greedily and thankfully.
It seemed strange to me that I should dream of Winifred, there and then; but no doubt the last words of Caradoc had led me to think of her. It is only when waking after long weariness of the body, and over-tension of the nerves, the result of such keen excitement as we had undergone since yesterday morning, that the full extremity of exhaustion and fatigue can be felt, as I felt them then. Add to these, that my shattered arm had bled profusely, and was still undressed.
Staggering up, I looked around me. The moon was shining, and flakes of her silver light streamed through the now silent embrasures of the Redan, silent save for the groans of the dying within it. There and in the ditch the dead lay thick as sheaves in a harvest-field--thick as the Greeks, at Troy, lay under the arrows of Apollo. How many a man was lying there, mutilated almost out of the semblance of humanity, whose thoughts, when the death shot struck him down, or the sharp bayonet pierced him, had flashed home, quicker than the electric telegraph, yea, quicker than light, to his parents' hearth, to his lonely wife, to the little cots where their children lay abed--little ones, the memory of whose waxen faces and pink hands then filled his heart with tears; how many a resolution for prayer and repentance if spared by God; how many a pious invocation; how many a fierce resolution to meet the worst, and die like a man and a soldier, had gone up from that hell upon earth, the Redan--the fatal Redan, which we should never have attacked, but should have aided the French in the capture of the Malakoff, after which it must inevitably have fallen soon, if not at once.
Many of our officers were afterwards found therein, each with a hand clutching a dead Russian's throat, or coat, or belt, their fingers stiffened in death--man grasping man in a fierce and last embrace. Among others, that stately and handsome fellow, Raymond Mostyn, of the Rifles, and an officer of the Vladimir regiment were thus locked together, the same grape-shot having killed them both. Some of our slain soldiers were yet actually clinging to the parapet and slope of the glacis, as if still alive, thus showing the reluctance with which they had retired--the desperation with which they died. In every imaginable position of agony, of distortion, and bloody mutilation they lay, heads crushed and faces battered, eyes starting from their sockets, and swollen tongues protruding; and on that terrible scene the pale moon, "sweet regent of the sky," the innocent queen of night, as another poet calls her, looked softly down in her glory, as the same moon in England, far away, was looking on the stubble-fields whence the golden grain had been gathered, on peaceful homesteads, old church steeples and quiet cottage roofs, on the ruddy furnaces of the Black country, on peace and plenty, and where war was unknown, save by name.
She glinted on broken and abandoned weapons; she silvered the upturned faces of the dead--kissing them, as it were, for many a loving one who should see them no more; and gemming as if with diamonds the dewy grass and the autumnal wild-flowers; and there, too, amid that horrible débris, were the little birds--the goldfinch, the tit, and the sparrow--hopping and twittering about, too terrified to seek their nests, scared as they were by the uproar of the day that was past.
I felt sick at heart and crushed in spirit now. In the immediate foreground the moonlight glinted on the tossing dark plumes, the picturesque costume, and bright bayonets of the Highlanders in the trenches. In the distance was the town; its ports, arsenals, barracks, theatres, palaces, churches, and streets sheeted with roaring flames, that lighted up all the roadstead, where, one after the other, the Russian ships were disappearing beneath the waves, in that lurid glare which tipped with a fiery gleam the white walls and spiked cannon of the now abandoned forts.
I began to creep back towards the camp, in search of surgical aid, and on the way came to a place where, with their uniforms off, their shirt-sleeves rolled up, their boxes of instruments open, lint and bandages ready, three officers of the medical staff were busy upon a group of wounded men, who sat or lay near, waiting their turn, some impatiently, some with passive endurance, but all, more or less, in pain, as their moans and sighs declared.
"Don't bother about that Zouave, Gage," I heard one Æsculapius say, as I came near, "I have overhauled him already!"
"Is his wound mortal?"
"Yes--brain lacerated. By Jove! here is an officer of the 23rd!"
"Well, he must wait a little."
So I sighed, and seated myself on a stone, and clenched my teeth to control the agony I was enduring. The men who lay about us, with pale, woe-begone visages and lack-lustre eyes, belonged chiefly to the Light Division, but among them I saw, to my surprise, a Russian hussar lying dead, with the blood dry and crusted on his pale blue and yellow-braided dolman. How he came to be there, I had not the curiosity to inquire. A mere bundle of gory rags, he seemed; for a cannon-shot had doubled him up, and now his Tartar horse stood over him, eyeing him wildly, and sniffing as if in wonder about his bearded face and fallen jaw.
The Zouave referred to was a noisy and loquacious fellow, notwithstanding his perilous predicament. He had strayed hither somehow from the Malakoff, and was mortally wounded, as the surgeon said, and dying. A tiny plaster image of the blessed Virgin lay before him; he was praying intently at times, but being fatuous, he wildly and oddly mingled with his orisons the name of a certain Mademoiselle Auréle, a fleuriste, with whom he imagined himself in the second gallery of the Théâtre Français, or supping at the Barrière de l'Etoile; anon he imagined they were on the Boulevardes, or in a café chantant; and then as his mind--or what remained of it--seemed to revert to the events of the day, he drew his "cabbage-cutter," as the French call their sword-bayonet, and brandished it, crying,
"Cut and hew, strike, mes camarades--frappez vite et frappez forte! Vive la France! Vive l'Empéreur!"
This was the last effort; a gush of fresh blood poured into his eyes, and the poor Zouave was soon cold and stiff. In a kind of stupor I sat there and watched by moon and lantern light the hasty operations: bullets probed for and snipped out by forceps, while the patients writhed and yelled; legs and arms dressed or cut off like branches lopped from a tree, and chucked into a heap for interment. I shuddered with apprehensive foreboding of what might ensue when my own turn came, and heard, as in a dream, the three surgeons talking with the most placid coolness about their little bits of practice.
"Jones, please," said one, a very young staff medico, "will you kindly take off this fellow's leg for me? I have ripped up his trousers and applied the tourniquet--he is quite ready."
"But must it come off?" asked Jones, who was patching up a bullet-hole with lint.
"Yes; gun-shot fracture of the knee-joint--patella totally gone."
"Why don't you do it yourself, my good fellow?" asked the third, who, with an ivory-handled saw between his teeth, was preparing to operate on the fore-arm of a 19th man, whose groans were terrible. "Gage, did you never amputate?"
"Never on the living subject."
"On a dead one then, surely?"
"Often--of course.'
"By Jove, you can't begin too soon--so why not now?"
"I am too nervous--do it for me."
"In one minute; but only this once, remember. Now give me your knife for the flap; and look to that officer of the Welsh Fusileers--his left arm is wounded."
So while Dr. Jones, whom the haggard eyes of the man, whose limb was doomed, watched with a terrible expression of anxiety, applied himself to the task of amputation, the younger doctor, a hand fresh from London, came to me.
After ripping up the sleeve of my uniform, and having a brief examination, which caused me such bitter agony that I could no longer stand, but lay on the grass, he said,
"Sorry to tell you, that yours is a compound fracture of the most serious kind."
"Is it reducible?" I asked, in a low voice.
"No; I regret to say that your arm must come off."
"My arm--must I lose it?" I asked, feeling keener anguish with the unwelcome announcement.
"Yes; and without delay," he replied, stooping towards his instrument case.
"I cannot spare it--I must have some other--excuse me, sir--some older advice," I exclaimed, passionately.
"As you please, sir," replied the staff-surgeon, coolly; "but we have no time to spare here, either for opposition or indecision."
The other two glanced at my arm, poked it, felt it as if it had been that of a lay figure in a studio, and supported the opinion of their brother of the knife. But the prospect of being mutilated, armless, for life, and all the pleasures of which such a fate must deprive me, seemed so terrible, that I resolved to seek for other advice at the hospital tents, and towards them I took my way, enduring such pain of body and misery of mind that on reaching them I should have sunk, had brandy not been instantly given to me by an orderly. It was Sunday morning now, and the gray light of the September dawn was stealing over the waters of the Euxine, and up the valley of Inkermann. The fragrant odour of the wild thyme came pleasantly on the breeze; but now the rain was falling heavily, as it generally does after an action--firing puts down the wind, and so the rain comes; but to me then it was like the tears of heaven--"Nature's tear-drop," as Byron has it, bedewing the unburied dead. A red-faced and irritable-looking little Deputy Inspector of Hospitals, in a blue frogged surtout, received me, and from him I did not augur much. The patients were pouring in by hundreds, and the medical staff had certainly no sinecure there. After I had been stripped and put to bed, I remember this personage examining my wound and muttering,
"Bad case--very!"
"Am I in danger, doctor?" I inquired.
"Yes, of course, if it should gangrene," said he, sharply.
"I don't care much for life, but I should not like to lose my arm. Do you think that--that--"
"What?" he asked, opening his box of tools with sangfroid.
"I shall die of this?"
"Of a smashed bone?"
"Yes."
"Well, my dear fellow, not yet, I hope."
"Yet?" said I, doubtfully.
"Well, immediately, I mean. There is already much sign of inflammation, and consequent chance of fever. The os humerus is, as I say, smashed to pieces, and the internal and external condyles of the elbow are most seriously injured. Corporal Mulligan, a basin and sponge, and desire Dr.----" (I did not catch the name) "to step this way."
The corporal, a black-bearded Connaught Ranger, who had lost an eye at Alma, brought what the surgeon required; he then placed a handkerchief to my nostrils; there was a bubbling sensation in the brain, but momentary, as the handkerchief contained chloroform; then something peaceful, soporific, and soothing stole over me, and for a time I became oblivious of all around me.
