Part 32

Our soldiers, in some instances, when supplying their wounded enemies with water from their canteens, were shot down by the very wretch whose thirst they had just quenched. Captain Eddington, of the 95th, was murdered in this fashion by a Russian rifleman, in sight of the whole regiment, and of his brother, a lieutenant, who rushed in advance to avenge him and fell riddled with bullets. Maddened by several such incidents, our soldiers, with their musket butts, dashed out the brains of several of the wounded, slaying them like reptiles, and undeserving of mercy.

Such details are only calculated to weary and revolt; but the stern scene was not without its brighter features.

Already the surgeons were busy among the wounded, and our gallant seamen were all tenderness, sympathy, and activity, as they conveyed them on board the ships, from the rigging of which the events of that exciting day had been witnessed by thousands.

"Cheer up, sodjer," I sometimes heard them shout, as they bore a maimed victim, pale and bloody, to the boats; "we shall all eat our Christmas duff in Sebastopol."

Many whom they bore away were "booked" for Chelsea, "the poor soldier's last home in the land of the living;" but many were fated to die of their wounds ere the sun of the morrow lit up the waters of the Euxine.

We were now far in the rear of the original Russian position, and were actually riding along the Sebastopol road, when Captain Bolton, of the 1st Dragoon Guards, whose sword hand was muffled in a bloody handkerchief, came galloping after us, to explain that Lord Raglan desired we should fall back at once.

"His lordship fears that you are going too far in advance," said he, "and that the Russian flying artillery may halt and open on you. Give up all pursuit of prisoners; set loose those you have, and simply escort the guns."

On this we halted and liberated more than a hundred prisoners of all ranks, several being officers. Some of the latter shrugged their shoulders contemptuously at the commiseration we expressed for some of the Russian wounded, who lay on the road expiring of weakness and thirst.

"Bah!" said one, in French, to me; "they are only private soldiers--peasants--and will soon die."

His sentiments were worthy of a Russian aristocrat; but he was a grim, stern, and white-moustached officer, evidently of high rank, for his breast was covered from epaulette to epaulette with stars, medals, and crosses.

I had afterwards reason to know that this officer was General Baur, who had commanded the reconnaisance at Bulganak.

As we were retiring, we came among some of the French, and I recognised Mademoiselle Sophie, the _vivandiere_ whom I had seen at Gallipoli and Varna, and who immediately offered me a _petit verre_ of cognac from her little store, which I gladly accepted. She looked pale and excited, and her eyes were bloodshot.

"Our regiment has suffered heavily to-day, monsieur," said she. "I was thrice under fire with it; but so many of my comrades fell--that--that--_mon Dieu!_ it proved too much for me."

"Your friend, M. Jolicoeur, of the 2nd Zouaves," said I; "he, I hope, has escaped to-day?"

"_Helas! mon pauvre Jules!_ he is lying yonder with ever so many more of ours," she replied, pointing with her trembling hand to the Telegraph Battery.

"Wounded?"

"Dead, monsieur, dead! He fell when planting the standard of the 2nd Zouaves on the summit, where you may still see it flying. Poor Captain Victor Baudeuf, who used to flirt so terribly with Rigolboche, and pay such frightful sums for a _fauteuil_ every night she danced, till Mademoiselle Theresa took her place at the _cafes chantants_--well, he, too, and two hundred of our rank and file, are lying there."

The _vivandiere_ wept and wrung her hands.

All great excitements are followed by a painful reaction; and I shall not readily forget the dreary night that followed the day of the Alma.

My troop bivouacked near the old ruined walls that lie on the western flank of the Kourgane Hill.

Vast numbers of dead were lying near; they disturbed us not. But the wounded, the dying--ah, their moans and cries were frightful! I muffled my head in my cloak, and strove to shut out the piteous-sounds, and court sleep beside my jaded charger, close to whose side I crept for warmth.

*CHAPTER XLI.*

Mine own one! years have passed away Since I have seen your thoughtful face; Yet could I every feature trace-- Your image haunts me night and day. A song brings back the time we walked Above the brown cliff's sloping lawn; From music I have even drawn The very words we used to talk. The crumbling church, the upland lea, The river wimpling round the bridge, The brave grey wold--the far-off ridge, The mournful singing of the sea.

A few days after the startling telegram reached Calderwood, the newspapers teemed with despatches and details of the victory at the Alma, the flight of the shattered Russian Army towards Baktchiserai, and the advance of the Allies on Sebastopol.

Among those details were the official lists of the killed, wounded, and missing, furnished by the adjutant-general. How many a home in the British Isles did these fatal lists fill with grief? how many a heart they wrung?

Cora Calderwood, pale, and still suffering from the recent shock, read over the lists; but looked in vain for the name of her cousin Newton. It was not among the killed; neither was it among the wounded or the missing. There was no casualty among the officers of the lancers, save the death of Lieutenant Rakeleigh, who was killed by a cannon shot in the affair of Bulganak, on the evening preceding the great battle of the Alma, "and whose body Captain Newton Calderwood Norcliff, with a few lancers, made a gallant attempt to rescue and carry off."

Poor Rakeleigh! She remembered how well he waltzed, and what desperate love he made to her at the lancers' ball, when flushed by a furious galop and a bumper of the mess champagne. What mystery was this? Dared she hope? Might papa prove right, after all? And might Newton "turn up" as their old friend Dunnikeir had so often done, from under a pile of dead men and horses, in the old Peninsular days? Sir Nigel instantly wrote to the War Office requesting some information regarding Captain Newton C. Norcliff, and was promptly informed that the telegram should have been, "_The name of your nephew is_ NOT _among the killed._"

So the omission of those three letters--one little word--made a mighty difference to poor Cora's anxious and affectionate heart; but the letter from the War Office added, after an apology, "_We regret to state that, a day or two after the passage of the Alma, Captain Norcliff was severely wounded, mutilated, and taken prisoner in a skirmish with the enemy's cavalry--an affair of which no detail has yet reached headquarters._"

Mutilated and taken!--taken by those odious, savage, and terrible Muscovites, of whose barbarities the newspapers were daily giving fresh details! Here was a new horror--another source of anxiety and grief; and Cora and Sir Nigel were never tired of surmising or conjecturing what might be the fate of their kinsman, or of searching the public journals, and the letters from the army with which their columns teemed, for some scrap of information regarding the lost one; but they searched in vain. Time passed on; the Russians sank their fleet across the mouth of the harbour of Sebastopol; Balaclava was captured by the British; and the second week of October saw the first bombardment of the beleagured city. These were important facts; but one was more important still to Cora Calderwood--there came no tidings of her lost cousin Newton. Had he died in the hands of the Russians, or been sent to dig copper in the mines of Siberia?--a place of which she had rather vague ideas, and of which, with its capital, Tobolsk, she had read such thrilling accounts, when at school, in Madame Cottin's celebrated "Elizabeth, or the Exiles," &c. Her heart sank within her at this conjecture, and all that such a fate suggested. She penned several letters on the subject to Lady Louisa Loftus. Now, they could mingle their tears, she wrote; now they could commune and sorrow in common; now----. But she could not tell _her_ that she loved Newton, too, and could only profess a sisterly affection for Louisa.

The responses of the latter were cold--singularly so. She was greatly shocked, no doubt; it made her quite nervous, and all that sort of thing, to think that Captain Norcliff should be mutilated. Had he lost his nose (it was a very handsome one)?--or his ears?--or what had the Russians cut off? If it was a leg, Lord Slubber jocularly suggested that it would mar his fox-hunting and round-dancing for the future; and to think of a husband with a wooden leg, or an iron hook for an arm, like the poor old creatures one sees at Chelsea, would be so funny--so very absurd!

"Oh," exclaimed Cora, "to write thus, how heartless! To write thus, when now, of all men in the world, he most requires commiseration! How horrible! How worldly and selfish she is! She never loved him--never, never loved him--as--as--I do," she dared not add, even to herself.

Then the letter described the new lining of the carriage; the last thing in bonnets, and--but here Cora crushed it up in her quick, impatient little hand, and, with a gesture of impatience, flung it in the fire. November kept on, and the woods in the old sequestered Glen became leafless and bare.

The snow powdered white the bare scalps of the hills, and old Willie Pitblado, the keeper, predicted that the coming winter would be a bitter one, for numbers of strange aquatic birds had been floating on Lochleven and in the Forth above Inchcolm; and one morning the woods round the Adder's Craig, and all the slopes of the Western Lomond, were covered by flocks of wild Norwegian pigeons--large white birds, whose appearance in Scotland always indicates a severe winter in the Scandinavian peninsula--a winter in which all the north of Europe is sure to share; so Cora trembled, in her tenderness of heart, as she thought of our poor soldiers before Sebastopol, and her secret love, Newton, who, if surviving, was a suffering prisoner in the hands of the Russians.

Cora often visited the cottage of old Willie, in the copse near King Jamie's Well (though the rows of half-decayed hawks, wild cats, and weasels, with which its eaves were garlanded, made the atmosphere thereabout redolent of anything but perfume), for Willie's heart, like her own, was with the army of the East; and he "devoured" all the newspapers she gave him for intelligence of the war. But he used to shake his white head, and speak often of the old times of Wellington and his boyhood--of the many fine lads who had gone forth to Spain and Holland--"forth frae the Howe o' Fife, to return nae mair," and he greatly feared such would be the fate of his Willie, now that the poor young master was gone.

The veteran keeper's spirits had sunk considerably. He was rheumatic and ailing now; but he still crept about the woods and preserves with his old double-barrelled Joe Manton and his favourite dogs, and said hopefully, at times, "Aye ailing, ye ken, never fills the kirk-yard, Miss Cora."

But Cora's visits to the gamekeeper's lodge, to the Adder's Craig, the ruined castle of Piteadie, and other old familiar haunts, became circumscribed, when she had the annoyance of Mr. Brassy Wheedleton's company. For there were times when that legal sprout came on the circuit, or visited Sir Nigel on business "anent the bond," or begged leave to have a few blundering shots at the pheasants; and he seldom failed to combine these objects with a more ambitious one, by a pretty close attention upon Cora, and a marked attention, that to her was only productive of extreme annoyance.

Yule-tide had come and gone at Calderwood; again Cora's pretty hands had spiced the great wassail bowl, and all the household had partaken of its contents; but there were heavy hearts at the Glen, as in many a home circle elsewhere. For every icicle that hung from the eaves; every flake of snow that drifted past; every biting gust that swept through the bare woods, made old Sir Nigel and his people think of the horrors our poor fellows were enduring among the frozen trenches of Sebastopol. The golden pheasants and the brown partridges were alike forgotten, and old Pitblado wandered about, alone and forlorn, among them, "though sic a season for breedin' he couldna ca' to mind!"

The meets of the county pack took place at Largo, at Falfield, and elsewhere. The foxes, tan, grey, and brown, were thick as blackberries in Calderwood Glen--ay, thick as the black rabbits on the Isles of the Forth--but the "M.F.H." heeded them little. He had only ridden to the hounds once that season, and preferred in the cold evenings his seat by the ruddy dining-room fire, with his steaming tumbler of toddy on a gueridon table close at hand; and there he dozed in his cosy easy-chair, with his favourite dogs at his slippered feet; or he beat time dreamily to Cora, as she ran her fingers over the keys of the cottage piano, and sang some such old-fashioned song as the "Thistle and the Rose."

*CHAPTER XLII.*

Alas! what evils I discern in Too great an aptitude for learning! And fain would all the ills unravel That aye ensue from foreign travel. Far happier is the man who tarries Quiet within his household _lares_. Read and you'll find how virtue vanishes, How foreign vice all goodness banishes, And how abroad young heads grow dizzy, Proved in the under-written Odyssey. RELIQUES OF FATHER PROUT.

The letter from the Under Secretary of State for War, which announced my capture by the Russians, unfortunately proved more correct in its tenor than the telegram; but the mode in which I fell into their hands, through the foul treachery of Mr. De Warr Berkeley, shall be detailed by myself in the following chapter.

On the 23rd of September, early in the morning, we bade adieu to the Alma, and to all those sad mounds that now lay along its southern bank, marking where seven thousand seven hundred and eighty soldiers were taking their last long slumber.

The dying Marshal St. Arnaud--for he took the field literally in a dying state--wished us to advance on the day immediately after the battle, as his intention was to be at Sebastopol by the 23rd, at latest.

"If," said he, in one of his letters, "I land in the Crimea, and it pleases God to give me a smooth sea for a few hours, I shall be master of Sebastopol and of the whole Crimea; I will push on this war with an activity and energy that shall strike the Russians with terror!"

But the humane Lord Raglan declined to advance until the wounded of all countries were attended to; and to that high-spirited hero and Christian gentleman, Dr. Thompson, of the 44th--still remembered in his native Scottish village as "the surgeon of the Alma"--was committed the care of seven hundred and fifty Russian soldiers, who had lain in their blood on the field for sixty hours. Accompanied by one attendant, with only a flag of truce displayed upon a lance to protect him from the savage and vindictive Cossacks who were hovering about, that self-devoted man worked without ceasing in the care and cure of those miserable creatures, who were all lying side by side, collected in one place--the acre of wounded--a task which proved too great in the end for his energies, as he died of fatigue and cholera soon after the battle.

The day after we marched, Death, who had hovered beside the great French marshal, even while his baton directed the movements of his zouaves and riflemen, seized more firmly on his victim, and on the 29th St. Arnaud died of cholera--that fatal pest, which still hung upon our skirts.

Our wounded, after the Alma, were conveyed in great numbers in those _kabitkas_, some of which I had personally secured; and these, after delivering their suffering and dying loads to the boats' crews, had to bring back supplies to the camp. Many of those open carts broke down, and were abandoned on the road with their contents; and thus, after we marched, it was no uncommon event for us to find seven or eight soldiers, dead, or dying of wounds and cholera, above the bags of biscuit intended for the use of the troops.

The morning of the 23rd beheld us set forth hopefully on our march to Sebastopol, where we hoped to crown our efforts by its speedy capture and destruction.

No enemy was visible to oppose our advance, and save here and there a broken-down _kabitka_, a dead Russian, who had fallen in his flight, and lay by the wayside in his leather helmet and long coat, with the vultures hovering over him; save these, and a deserted cannon, and the deep wheel-tracks in the rough old Tartar road, no trace remained of the great host we had swept before us in disorder and dismay.

In the afternoon of that day, we reached the beautiful valley of the Katcha (seventeen miles from Sebastopol), a river which has its source among the mountains of Taurida, and flows into the Black Sea, a little below Mamachai.

The valley is fertile, and we had all the enjoyment of abundant provender and water. We occupied the pretty little village of Eskel, which Baur and Kiriakoff's retreating Cossacks had plundered and partially destroyed, and piles of broken furniture around the tastefully-decorated villas of the more opulent residents evinced their destructive spirit.

Studhome, Travers, Sir Harry Scarlett, and I possessed ourselves of a pretty little villa, with painted lattices of coloured glass, and rooms neatly--even handsomely--furnished. A piano, and some pieces of music from Rossini's "Guillaume Tell," Strauss's waltzes, &c., were scattered about, showing that the fair occupants had fled at our approach; but nearly all the furniture and every utensil had been destroyed.

With his carbine, Pitblado had shot a brace of fine fat ducks, just in time to anticipate those most active of foragers, the Zouaves, and they were stewed in a warming-pan, which he had luckily discovered, and utilized for culinary purposes, the fuel used being the front door of the villa, the wood that came most readily to hand.

We had a comfortable supper, and Travers and Scarlett, who were wont to be fastidious enough with the mess-waiters about the icing of their sparkling hock or Moselle, were now content to wash down their stewed duck with a draught of water from a stale wooden canteen. But then we had gorgeous bunches of emerald green and dewy purple grapes, from the vineyards close by, and melons and peaches, too; and these we ate in defiance of prudence and the cholera.

We had just lit our cigars, and my cornet, Sir Harry, was trying his hand on the piano, through which some inquiring Cossack had poked his lance two or three times, when the trumpet-major arrived with letters for us all; the mails from England had just come in and been distributed. Many a letter was there for those whom we had left in their graves behind us!

A letter from Sir Nigel! I recognised his bold, old-fashioned handwriting. There was none from Cora (but she had scarcely ever written to me), and there was none yet from Louisa Loftus!

Alas! I had ceased to hope for one from her. Yet I paused with good Sir Nigel's letter unopened in my hand, while my friends were busy with theirs.

How was it that, as doubt, jealousy, and irritation gathered in my mind concerning Louisa, I thought more of Cora, and that her soft features, her sweet, earnest expression, her nose, that bordered on the retrousse, her thick dark hair, and brilliantly fair complexion, came before me?

I opened my uncle's letter. It contained little else than country gossip, and his usual ideas on things in general; but some of these seemed odd and startling to me then, as I read them in that Russian villa, far away in Crim Tartary, with the hum of our camp mingling in my ears with the rush of the mountain Katcha, as it poured through its stony vale towards the sea.

The letter had been posted before news had reached Calderwood of our departure from Varna.

"So the army is to remain inactive till half its number die of cholera; and then the rest are to open a campaign against Russia at the beginning of winter. History has no parallel for such--shall I call it madness? But I tell you," continued the furious old Tory, "that the Whigs--a party which never yet made war with honour--have sold you to the Russians, and _Punch_ alone dares boldly to expose it." (Pleasant, thought I, to read this within a short ride of Sebastopol!) "Every Scottish statesman had, and still has, his price. In the olden time they were always ready to sell Scotland to England, and why should one of the same brood hesitate in selling both to the Russians now?

"My friend, Spittal of Lickspittal, the M.P., of course ridicules this idea; but that is no proof of our suspicions being incorrect. He and the Lord Advocate--that especial ministerial utensil for Scotland--have put their small brains in steep to prepare some bill for the assimilation of our laws; but strive though they may, they can never assimilate them. And while Englishmen may bow with respect to the decision of Mr. Justice Muggins, to our ears an interlocutor sounds better when delivered by my Lord Calderwood, Pitcaple, or so forth.

"By the way, Cora has had a dangler, a new admirer, for some time past; and who the deuce do you think he is? Young Mr. Brassy Wheedleton, son of old Wheedleton, the village lawyer here--one of those fellows who should be in front of Sebastopol just now, with sixty rounds of ammunition at his back, instead of loafing about the Parliament House with his hands in his pockets.

"He is a greater snob than your brother officer, Mr. De Warr Berkeley (whose patronymic was Dewar Barclay, and who once asked, when I was fishing six miles up the Eden, if I ''ad 'ooked many 'addocks'). Whenever little Brassy comes here anent that d----d bond, he lays close siege to Cora, with flowers, books, music, and pretty nothings; but she only laughs at this Edinburgh goose, who neither speaks English nor Irish, Scotch nor the unknown tongue; who pronounces lord 'lud,' and cat, what, or that as 'ket, whet, or thet,' and so forth. Believe me, Newton, there is no more grotesque piece of human carrion than a genuine Scotch snob, in a high state of Anglophobia.

"I am sorry to say it, but the honourable position of the Scottish bar is simply traditional--a thing of the past. To the English barrister, the House of Lords, the woolsack, and the highest offices of the state are open; but to his poor Scotch brother, since the Union, after blacking the boots of the Lord Advocate, and scribbling in defence of his party, whatever it may be, a wretched sheriffship is all he may get, unless, like Mansfield, Brougham, or Erskine, he casts his gown inside the bar, and crosses the border for ever.

"Any way, I don't like Cora's dangler; but the fellow is plausible, and will be deuced hard to get rid of, unless Pitblado could mistake him for a partridge, or Splinterbar bolt across country with him, after we have given her a feed of oats, dashed with brandy.

"I wish you could see Cora, as the good girl sits opposite me just now, reading. Her dark hair smoothly braided over her tiny ears; a muslin dress of pink and white, fastened by your old Rangoon brooch; and she blushes scarlet with pleasure as she desires me to send her love to you."

So ended this eccentric letter.

I felt irritated. But why should I? Cora might have a lover if she chose. But then to throw herself away upon old Wheedleton's son--old Wheedleton, whose father was the village tailor!