Part 52

“The Hole Army has landed after a Saif and Prosperus Voyag across the Black Sea to the Crimea. We--I Mean the English--saled in 7 Collums each of 30 vessels every 2 or 3 Vessels being toad by a Steemer. The Fiteing Force that convoid us was 10 Line-of-Battle Ships besides 50 gun Frigats, 2 screw and 13 small steemers. I herd an Ngineer say to his mait the Smoak was for all the World like the Pit Country. The French and Turkish Fleats we overhawled shortly after saling, the French had 15 Line-of-Battle ships and 3 War Steamers, the Turks 8 Line-of-Battle ships and 3 War steemers. I did not count the transports. But the site of the Flotilla at Sea was tremenjus, and Must have made the Ruskies at Sevastopole shaik in their shose. At Nite with all the Red, Blue, and Green litse hung from the masts it was a good deal like Vauxhall Gardens. N.B. Without the Cold Ham and the Champain, there being Preshus little to Eat on Bord.

* * * * *

“_Day after Landing._

“What do you think of the Froggeys having the Impudens to Move our Boy in the Night from the Plais where It had been ankered by the Admiral of the Flaggship and the Quartermaster-General, thus Bagging the Hole Bay for their Opperations. Nice I don’t Think! We were all Landid without our Tents and Lots of the men without their Napsacks being too week to carry them and lay down on the Beech in the Poaring Rane and you never heard a Grumball, and Colera bissy among them too. Me and my Captain Lord Leighminster and Lieutenant Ardenmore (Whisky) slep in a Cornfield near the Beech and Woak in a puddel 6 in. deep, and the Duke and his Staff past the nite under a Bullok Waggon and seamed rather to Injoy it than Not.

“But if you had seen the jumball we were in, French and English all mixt up together! The Ruskies would have had an Easy Whack if they had made a Sortee.

* * * * *

“_4 Days after Landing._

“We are Moving Against the Russian Position on the River Alma which means Apple, and now my darling Mother on what Perhaps may be the Eave of Axion I must tell you that I Love her with All my Hart. What I shall Do if she will Not Marry me I don’t Know, so perhaps it Wold be Best for Me to get Shott. N.B. It is the girl they called Golden Cloak at Varna. Her Father’s Regiment is with the Turkish Army 2 milse down the Cost. Her Christian name is Zora. She told me I might call her by it....

“The Pity is----” _Scratched out._

“It is Sad to Think----” _Scratched out._

“Perhaps the Cheaf reason I Love her So is Because She has No Hands.”

LXXXIV

The snuff that got the best stories out of Moggy Geogehagan at Ballymullet Workhouse was a pungent, ginger-colored mixture, and an ounce cost fourpence-halfpenny. You sneezed when Mackiboy, who kept the general shop, took the lid of the tin off, but Moggy consumed vast pinches of this luxury without turning a hair. Naygurhead was her weakness when it came to smoking-tobacco. Her dearest treasure was a little old, inconceivably foul, black pipe that had belonged to Jems Geogehagan.

When the Allied Armies landed in the Crimaya, the scene upon that crowded beach was beyond all description. Every voice was swearing, the language was enough to split a stone.... You ate what you could get, or went without, according as luck would have it; and lay down anyhow and anywhere, to snatch your forty winks.

Between the crying of the trumpets, and the calling of the bugles, the shouting of men trying to find their lost regiments, and the noise of the starving beasts that clamored for their fodder, you were awake the greater part of the time you were sleeping. The hullaballoo made you think of the Judgment Day, with Donnybrook Fair thrown in.

At the beginning of the March upon the Alma, according to Moggy, the Hundredth Lancers with two other Light Cavalry Rigiments forrumed the Advance, and when the Armies were halted, and the Commanders-in-Chief rode along the Front, and Lord Dalgan--a grand, fine, bould-lookin’ ould gintleman to look at--dressed in a dark blue frock an’ gray throusers, an’ a plain undhress cap with a gould band, made a spache to the French in their quare lingo, their Commander-in-Chief, Marshal de St. Arnaud--a long, thin, painted gentleman, all over gould and jools--returned the compliment by addressing Her Majesty’s troops in their native tongue.

“Angleesh Soldats!” the Marshal is reported to have said on the occasion: “’Ow do you do? I ’ope you vill faight vell to-day!” Upon which, from the safe anonymity of the ranks, a Hibernian voice retorted:

“Arrah, Froggy! Don’t you know we will?”

Staff officers rocked in their saddles. Massed regiments were grinning. No one had the least idea as to the identity of the offender. But long after, when Jems Geogehagan was at his dullest, men remembered what he had once said to the French Commander-in-Chief.

* * * * *

The March of the Three Armies was a cure for sore eyes, the greatest sight consaivable. It was for all the worruld an’ a Chaney orange like three great snakes sthreelin’ along. A Red Snake, and a Light Blue Snake, an’ a Dark Blue snake, wid golden scales, an’ diamond hair standin’ stiff along the backs av’ thim. And the Blue Snakes were always between the Red Snake and the sea. The rowl of the Artillery batteries, and the tramplin’ of horse and fut, and the sounding of the trumpets an’ the crying of the bugles made you think again of the Day of Judgment. An’--more by tokens!--the Last Day was soon to dawn for many that was there.

The roads were more thracks than roads; the counthry Moggy considered to be not unlike the Curragh of Kildare, with a dash of Galway, a sinsation of Bagshot Heath, and a taste of Shorncliffe. There was rowling open plains to begin wid; you could see the Fleets movin’ as the Army moved, the big line-av-battle ships standin’ well out--so as to get the good av their long-range flankin’ batteries--and the smaller war-steamers keepin’ inshore, ready at the wind of a worrud to dhrop in a shell from their pivot-guns. But when the bush-covered slopes began to heave up like solid waves about you, and in front of you, begob! the say might have dhried up! For all you’d have known there was no Army in front of you at all, at all! but for the dead and dying bastes, and the sun-sick and cholera-smitten men it had sloughed as it traveled on. “_Don’t leave us!_” the sick cried out in a lamentable manner, and good rayson they had to cry, poor craythers! For the ambulances having been left behind at Varna, to lave them was to lave them to be aiting by the buruds av the air and the bastes av the wild. So thim among the women that was able--and many was sick, God pity them!--gave up their places on the wagons to these unfortunates, and footed it beside the thrains.

They bivouacked under a dhry sky that night, and marched in the gray of the morning, losing the road and climbing the hills in the tracks the plunging batteries had made. The bush that clad these hills was tamarisk and broom, and furze, and oak-scrub; thorny red-and-yellow berried barberry, wild grape-vines, and a shrub wid shiny leaves and the smell av thim like bog-myrtle. The scent of crushed thyme and worrumwood rose up about your feet, as you tramped on. The sun shone white-hot in a sky of harebell blue.

It was high noon of a scorching hot day when you heard the Fleet’s guns firing. Powerful the banging was. They were shellin’ the Russian Artillery posted on the heights. Then came volleys av muskethry, crackin’ and rattlin’. Clouds of salty-tastin’ powdher-smoke came driftin’ down upon the wind. And the sun bein’ in your teeth, your shadow and the shadows of the women marchin’ with you, and the carts, and the bastes, and the men that dhrove them, loomed thremenjous on the vapor that riz behind you like a wall. But when the big grass garrison-guns the Inimy had cocked up on the rock-ridges above the river began convarsin’--and the French and English Artillery answered wid shrapnel an’ rockets an’ grape--you walked in a white fog laced wid tongues of fire, an’ round-shot as big as melons trundlin’ through it--expectin’ you’d be raising the whilleleu wid the Holy Souls in Purgatory the next minute, or dhrinkin’ tay wid the Blessed in Paradise. The screaming of the bugles split the reek, and pierced the smother; and--in one lull--came the sound of the Zouave drums beating the _pas de charge_.

You know it.... It begins with a low faint throbbing that grows upon the ear and fills it, drowning out all other sounds. It is a hurricane from Hell that blows armed men, like red, and blue, and golden leaves before it, urged by the simultaneous desire to strike, stab, crush, overwhelm, destroy and conquer other men....

The fighting was over, when the women with the seven-mile-long wagon-train, loaded with sick and dying, drawn by gaunt horses, emaciated mules, and starving bullocks, climbed the rise where the Tartar village was still smoldering and reeking. Dismounted field-guns, shattered limbers, dead and mutilated men and horses and bloody mash that had been men and horses, showed where the Inimy’s canister and grape had done its business upon the batteries of our Artillery. Cooking-fires were already lighted, fatigue-parties were digging grave-trenches, the distant trumpets were calling the Cavalry back from the pursuit. It was for Moggy and for many of the women with the wagon-trains, the first sight of a battle-field.

But not until--word having been brought down that the Cavalry would encamp a mile south of the Katscha, and that their women were to follow them--not until their smaller train of vehicles separated from the rest, and began to roll over the ridge, and down the steep banks to the river-ford--did they realize the grim meaning of War....

The trodden slopes that were strewn with shattered Minié rifles and smashed muskets, Highland bonnets, bearskins and shakos, and dead and dying men in kilts and plaids and red coats, lying in queer contorted attitudes (as if a giant child had been playing at soldiers, and had given the green board a spiteful kick and gone away)--were covered with a low shrub like billberry, seemingly laden with a plentiful crop of red fruit, yet they were not berries but blood-drops. The grasses wept--the earth was soaked--the river in the glen-bottom ran blood.

Realizing this, there was an outcry; and pale women huddled at the back of Moggy Geogehagan, as scared ewes will seek refuge behind some aged and weather-beaten herd-mother. Said Moggy, crying herrings for shame upon these tremblers:

“Hooroo, Jude! Are ye women or girshas that do be squaling an’ squaiking? Sure what’s natheral can’t be desperate, an’ what’s more natheral than blood? Her that will lie by her man this night will do as I do. Sthrip off, pluck up, an’ leg through this wid me.”

And the brave wife of Jems whipped off her brogues and footless blue yarn stockings, tucked up her petticoats, and led the way down, striding bare-shinned through the bloody bilberries. The Woman from Clare followed, after came flocking the rest.

LXXXV

Upon the rise beyant the sthrame that ran red, where yet other Tartar peasants’ huts were charring and smoking, brass-bound firelocks were mingled with the scattered Miniés and the broken Brown Besses; and the Highland plaids, and the red coats were infinitely outnumbered by the gray.

Up above on the hills, scored with rifle-pits, bristling with batteries, these gray coats lay in swaths and mounds as though the Divil had been makin’ hay there. And the wearers of the gray coats were pale, flat-faced men in black leather metal-spiked helmets, or white linen forage-caps. Clane-shaven men, wid sizable mouths on them, and little noses, as like wan anodher as pays out av the same pod. Catholics, too, sorrow a doubt on it! The open shirts beneath their unbuttoned coats showed, strung round their thick white necks, medals of the Mother and Child, and Crosses with the Image of the Crucified. The dead had died, grasping these. The dying strove to kiss these--making the Sign with fumbling, groping fingers--gasping out broken sentences of prayer.

And then it flashed on Moggy that this was the Inimy--could be nobody but the Inimy. The Barbarian, with teeth like prongs of hay-rakes--who dressed in sheepskins, relished tallow-candles and soap, and worshiped devil-gods--had never existed at all.

This was a shock, but nothing to the revelation of some seven hours later, when--as Moggy squatted over a fire of dried weeds and Commissariat cask-staves, toasting her man’s supper of salt pork on the end of a broken ramrod--under the black canopy of a starless night, came down the sickly, tainted wind the mournful cry:

“_Oi-oi-oi!_”

Even as Rachel, Russia mourned for her sons and would not be comforted. The huge, beaten army of Menschikoff, retreating down the great trunk road towards Sivernaia, had left a shattered brigade of Imperial Guards and a regiment or two of cavalry encamped upon the Belbek. And that piercing “_Oi-oi_” is the wail of the mujik, who, soldier though he be, is always a peasant at heart. It was the Cossack of the Eastern Caucasus who cried: “_Ai-ai-ai-dalalai!_”

“Mary be about us! What’s that?”

The woman rose up from her task, dropping the frizzling meat upon the dull red embers. She plucked back the shawl that hooded her, listened intently, and said, with her hollowed hand yet cupping the cocked ear:

“_Musha yarra!_ Is it savigees they do be callin’ thim?... May I never break a pratie more av they’re not keening their dead like dacent Irish. Do ye not hear thim? Och! och! your souls to glory!” she cried. “What are we fighting yees for at all, at all? For a dirty baste of a Turk that spit on the Holy Crucifix, an’ shaves his skull as naked as me hand!”

* * * * *

They grew to like the snub-nosed, flat faced Ivan or Piotr in the coarse gray overcoat. The man of dogged imperturbable endurance, who lived on thin kvas and black bread. Who stood up in blocks as big as Trafalgar Square to be shot at. Who advanced on the bayonets or faced the batteries with the bravery of unquestioning obedience; and regarded his Little Father, the Tsar, as the Vicar upon earth of the Great Father in Heaven.

The Ivans and Piotrs, aware of their Tsar’s weakness for lightning journeys and anonymous visits of inspection, believed him to be constantly with their Army, though unseen. Over many a bivouac-fire they whispered of a huge officer who sometimes rode with the Headquarters Staff, but oftenest marched with their battalions; a man whose impassive stolid face, with the stony blue, prominent eyes bulging under the spiked black leather helmet, was reproduced in the official colored print that hung in every barrack-room. He had captured the imagination of his people in the Cholera year of ’46, when he thrust his way through the panic-stricken people surging round the Church of Our Lady of Kasan.

You know the story.... Reports had been spread that all sufferers taken to the hospitals were poisoned there. Panic reigned. Revolution was imminent. And Tsar Nicholas drove into the square in his little one-horse droschky--leaped out and mounted the church steps with those long, quick strides of his--turned, and threw open the gray great-coat, showing the glitter of the Orders he wore. Beneath the rim of the spiked helmet his sullen eyes blazed at his people.... His puffy cheeks had lost their crimson and were deadly pale.... He bellowed at the full pitch of that extraordinary voice of his: “Russians, to your knees!” and down they went.... No wonder they believed in their Tsar, those Ivans and Piotrs.

Later they arrived at the pitch of interchanging civilities with the British invader. Sentries who were posted within hailing-distance on the banks of the Tchernaya, would swop pipes or lumps of black bread for bits of biscuit--exchange confidences oddly couched in a jargon of their own. They agreed that the Frantsos were bono, the Ruskies were bono, the Anglichanin were bono; but that the Turk was no bono at all.

Referring to the Child of Islâm, the Piotrs or Ivans would expectorate, and hold their noses, as though those organs were afflicted with an unpleasant odor; while Thomas Atkins or William Brown would affect to run away in terror, squalling: “Ship, Johnny! Ship!”

This inevitable climax never failed to provoke laughter. It recalled how--briskly as some colony of whistling marmot-rats into whose rows of tenanted holes an Army naturalist had poured water--the nimble Asiatic had evacuated the Northern redoubts on the day of the Balaklava Attack.

Hopped out at the rare av the earthworks like flays, they did, whin the Inimy turraned the guns upon thim.... You might have knocked Moggy Geogehagan down with a feather when she saw the blaggyards lep....

Purty as a picther the battle was, with the green hills set round it like a frame, and the blue sea lyin’ on your right hand, so calm you saw the white clouds sailin’ in it.... Nothing Moggy had ever clapped her two eyes on would aiqual it, barrin’ the glimpse they had had of the place they called Sevastopol--a wondrous city, with great quays and populous docks edging the bright blue bay-water, white marble palaces, and yellow churches with green domes, glittering blue and green and silver ridgimints paradin’ in the public squares, and sparkling fountains springing in the sunshine--as the Red Snake and the two Blue Snakes, turning inland, crawled up the rugged heights that tower beyond the Farm of Mackenzie, and streamed down the steep defile in an endless river of dusty, dry-throated, weary, sore-footed beasts and men.

* * * * *

The Red Snake had led the way that day, Moggy remembered.... Riding without scouts, or advance-patrols, quite like a knightly Crusader of ancient story, the “bould ould gintleman,” with his Headquarters Staff and escort about him, had butted into the tail-end of the great Army of Russia as it ebbed away, like a great gray wounded python, towards Simferopol.

Faix an’ troth! an’ a battle there would have been to bate Banagher!--supposin’ the bould ould gintleman to have starruted two hours airlier, as the Frinch Commandher-in-Chief had coaxed him to do. As it was, there was a bit av a skirmish between the throops that did be convoyin’ the baggage-wagons av the Inimy, and our Cavalry.... When the said wagons were delivered to the sturdy hands that had captured them, Jems tasted the joys of loot.

True, his share was only a marbled paper bandbox containing some elderly field-officer’s auburn wig, and a daguerreotype of Mdlle Pasbas of the Imperial Opera, Petersburg. But as plunder, these things were prized above rubies by Corporal Geogehagan.

Often and often.... But at this point the listener would urge Moggy to speed on to the great keening-match in which the wife of Jems so grandly maintained her own against the overweening pretensions of the Woman that hailed from Clare.

You must know that on the inland side of the Valley, bottomed with coarse grass, where the Light Brigade were encamped, rose a hill that had served as a signaling-station for the Russian coastguard; and from its summit the squadron-women watched the battle throughout the livelong day.

It was when these watching women saw a cloud of men in blue and crimson and gold and scarlet--mounted on black and brown and bay horses--sweeping down the Valley towards the Cossack squadrons that had clumped in a dusk mass behind their guns on the banks of the green Tchernaya--crushing down the vines and the tamarisk-bushes and oak-scrub, falling under the plowing fire from the Russian batteries posted on the Woronzoff Ridge and the Fedioukkine Heights, vanishing in the smoke to wheel and return upon their own bloody path--that the Woman from Clare screeched out, and clapped her hands, and dropped as though she had been shot.

She had long been a thorn in Moggy’s side, by rayson of the gabbin’ an’ blather she made, claiming to be descinded from the Seven Champions of Gortgorla in Ballynahinch Knockmalone.... Wild as an aigle and brown as the say-weed, she was; and eyes like two blazing yellow torches under the red thatch of hair she had. Her man was a young color-sergeant in Lord Cloneen’s famous Hussar Regiment, and she knew him to be end-file rider on the right of the single squadron that brought up the rear.

Watching from her eyrie with those piercing yellow eyes of hers, she had seen the shell burst, and the plumed busby fly, and the little gay-colored speck that was all her joy tumble out of the saddle, as Houlahan’s riderless horse swept on, borne by the rest.

Fell wid a screech she did, an’ then riz up, an’ the eyes of her might have been sewn in wid red worsted.... Her blue Galway cloak flapped like wings as she cried, tossing up her lean freckled arms:

“Och! my grief for the sthrong men! the fine big sthrapping men that do be lying dead below the hillside! Blood on the sod, an’ the yellow fat laughing from the deep belly-wounds! Father av Heaven! Was it for this that their fathers begot and their mothers suckled them? Christ and Mary pity the wounded, comfort the dying, help for the souls av the departed, even if they passed widout a prayer!”

She clapped her hands and swayed herself, gathering all her forces, and not an Irishwoman there but clapped and rocked with her. She cried:

“Och vogh! my grief! for my own grand young husband Michael Houlahan! For the hoofs of the horses are tangled in his bowels an’ his brains are spilt like curd upon the ground! Man that I always knew you--why did I turn from you--last night when we lay togedher undher the wet tent av the sky? ‘Sleep,’ I said, ‘Sleep! that ye may be sthrong to meet the morrow!’ An’ he turned from me an’ slept, wid the cowld raindrops on his cheek.... Och! vogh, vogh! Ochone!--for my own man, Michael Houlahan! Darlin’, darlin’, why did you die? Why did I deny you, avourneen, jewel of my heart! that sought to lave a son of your race behind you? A graft to bear, a seed to spring in the womb! Blessed Saints, pray for the desolate widow of Michael Houlahan! Holy Souls! pity----”

The strained voice of lamentation cracked--just in time. For Moggy Geogehagan could bear no more. For all she knew Jems Geogehagan was killed like the rest of them--and here was this unconscionable woman monopolizing the good offices of every One of Thim Above.

She tore out a handful of her coarse black hair, cast it from her with a superb gesture, clapped her hands, and took up the theme. Ordinary language was far too poor to do justice to the merits of the departed. She gave him all the grandest words she knew.

“Woman!” she began, with a clap of her hands and a toss of her head. “Away wid you! I am extenuated wid your lamentations! What call have you to be bragging of your Mike Houlahan? Sure, beside the man that was Jems Geogehagan your Mike Houlahan showed no bigger than a flay! Of a configuration that excogitated the behoulder wid revelations av martial splindhour, where was his aiqual? What modher’s son iver got the betther av him? Whilleleu! Och, och! whatever will I do at all?”

She shrieked like a locomotive, reveling in the glory of her wretchedness, and drew her ten nails down the length of her face. The woman from Clare had collapsed by this time into a blue rag-bundle. The other women came crowding about Moggy--laying hands upon her--pointing, vociferating.... With the power that was upon her in that great hour, they fell off her elbows, she said, like a bundle av sthraws....

“Whoo! My bitther black curse upon the vagabone that kilt Jems Geogehagan! May he die like a dog in a ditch, the big murdherin’ rogue! May he----”