Under the Red Dragon 57In the Monastery of St. George
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Literature · Romance
Under the Red Dragon 57
In the Monastery of St. George
GrantEnglish
To be brief, when the effect of the chloroform passed away, I became sensible of a strange sensation of numbness about my left shoulder. Instinctively and shudderingly I turned my eyes towards it, and found that my left arm was--gone! Gone, and near me stood Corporal Mulligan coolly wiping the fat little surgeon's instruments for the next case. Some wine, Crimskoi, and water were given me, and then I closed my eyes and strove, but in vain, to sleep and to think calmly over my misfortune, which, for a time, induced keen misanthropy indeed.
"Armless!" thought I; "I was pretty tired of life before this, and am utterly useless now. Would that the shot had struck me in a more vital place, and finished me--polished me off at once! That old staff sawbones should have left me to my fate; should have let 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 grave-studded valley of Inkermann were growing dim and blue, I found myself again at sea, on board the Kangaroo--a crowded transport (or rather a floating hospital)--speeding homeward, and bidding "a long good-night to the Crimea," to the land of glory and endurance.
Sebastopol seemed a dream now, but a memory of the past; and a dream, too, seemed my new life when I lay on my couch at the open port, and saw the crested waves flying past, as we sped through them under sail and steam.
Onward, onward, three hundred miles and more across the Euxine, to where the green range of the Balkan looks down upon its waters, and where the lighthouses of Anatolia on one side, and those of Roumelia on the other, guide to the long narrow channel of Stamboul; but ere the latter was reached--and on our starboard bow we saw the white waves curling over the blue Cyanean rocks, where Jason steered the Argonauts--we had to deposit many a poor fellow in the deep; for we had four hundred convalescent and helpless men on board, and only one surgeon, with scarcely any medicines or comforts for them, as John Bull, if he likes glory, likes to obtain it cheap. It was another case of Whig parsimony; so every other hour an emaciated corpse, rolled in a mud-stained greatcoat or well-worn blanket, without prayer or ceremony of any kind, was quietly dropped to leeward, the 32-pound shot at its heels making a dull plunge in that huge grave, the world of water, which leaves no mark behind.
I gladly left the Kangaroo at Pera, and, establishing myself at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, wrote from thence to Sir Madoc that I should take one of the London liners at Malta for England, and to write me to the United Service Club in London; that all my plans for the future were vague and quite undecided; but I was not without hope of getting some military employment at home. The Frankish hotel was crowded by wounded officers, also en route for England or France, all in sorely faded uniforms, on which the new Crimean medals glittered brightly. As all the world travels nowadays, I am not going to "talk guide-book," or break into ecstasies about the glories of Stamboul as viewed from a distance, and not when floundering mid-leg deep in the mud of its picturesque but rickety old thoroughfares; yet certainly the daily scene before the hotel windows was a singular one; for there were stalwart Turkish porters, veritable sons of Anak; stagey-looking dragomen, with brass pistols and enormous sabres in wooden sheaths; the Turk of the old school in turban, beard, slippers, and flowing garments; the Turk of the new, whom he despised, close shaven, with red fez and glazed boots; water-carriers; Osmanli infantry, solemn, brutal, and sensual, jostled by rollicking British tars and merry little French Zouaves; and for a background, the city of the Sultans, with all its casements, domes, and minarets glittering in the unclouded sunshine.
Two light cavalry subs, who had ridden in the death ride at Balaclava, and bore some cuts and slashes won therein, three others of the Light Division, and myself, agreed to travel homeward together; and pleasant days we had of it while skirting the mountainous isles of Greece, Byron's
"Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung,"
and the tints of which seemed all brown or gray as we saw them through the vapour exhaled in summer from the Ægean Sea, with their little white villages shadowed by trees, their rocks like sea-walls, crowned here and there by the columns, solitary and desolate, of some temple devoted to the gods of other days--"a country rich in historic reminiscence, but poor as Sahara in everything else."
And so on by Malta and old Gib; and exactly fourteen days after leaving the former we were cleaving the muddy bosom of Father Thames; and that night saw me in my old room at "the Rag," with the dull roar of mighty London in my ears; and after the rapid travelling I went to sleep, as addled as a fly could be in a drum.
