Until the Colours Fade (59 page)

On the glacis there were places where the corpses were three deep. Dead or alive, Tom would never be found until an
armistice
allowed hundreds of men to come forward in safety. All the time Magnus was keeping one eye on the sky and listening for the whistle of approaching shells. Whenever he sighted one, he did not move or lie down until sure where it would fall. He had seen men run at once, often towards the point of impact. The
occasional
whine of rifle bullets did not distress him, since he knew that these had already missed. The victim never heard the sound of the bullet that killed him. When the shelling suddenly
intensified
, Magnus did not feel able to face the scenes of panic and fury in the trenches, but instead dropped down into what had hours before been a Russian rifle pit and waited.

He thought of Charles and wondered how long it would be before gangrene set in; if the amputation did not kill him, his chest wounds surely would. The thought hardly moved him at all. Seeing his brother’s shattered body he had taken in his death at once. His father’s grief would be enough. A feeling of terrible sickness and impotence overwhelmed Magnus as he thought of Tom’s capacity for excitement; he saw him setting out in the darkness towards the trenches in the same mood – an adventure, a test, an experience. Of course he would have known that men would be killed, but it was one thing to expect something but something quite different to live through it. Perhaps he went down looking for subjects, effects of light: like a country child on his first visit to a great city, looking around him memorising, impressed and frightened at the same time. Other memories hurt Magnus more. Tom’s wide-eyed disbelief when they had been ambushed at the gasworks and his immediate faith that Magnus had predicted the disaster and would know what to do. Tom’s faith in him had been the greatest gift he had bestowed; now it was a torment. Who did he have to turn to four hours ago? Was he alone? Did he suffer? And I sent him to Charles; sent him to see him when I had gone and could give him no advice. Earlier occasions: the day Tom had told him he loved Helen. If he had
been in my position, and I in his, would he have curtly told me that my love was a charade, its object worthless? Yet I did that; yes, and thought my
honesty
quite natural. And when Catherine came I sent her away … denied all responsibility … though I had caused him to go to Hanley Park. The evening at the Bull – our last in Rigton Bridge – I promised to help him, pledged myself to it … and afterwards I turned against him.

So fragile a thing friendship, so few the times that any man or woman senses in another human being an understanding of their inmost half-realised thoughts – something less tangible than thoughts, something beyond definition, a yearning which has been there since birth – its object sometimes glimpsed but never captured. At times music, the smell of burning leaves, a
landscape
, a memory – almost … a second of completeness, of
harmony
, and then – nothing. Whatever I searched for and aspired to I sensed the same quest in you, Tom.

A week ago you came and we were strangers. Perhaps you
wanted
to die. Did I fail to read even that despair? Magnus started to his feet. The shock of seeing Charles and the scenes on the glacis had so confused him that he had failed to do the one thing he had known was possible – the shock and the shells. He had
accepted
Tom’s death without proof, without trying to find where the surgeons were working. He felt several light flakes of snow on his cheeks and imagined the horror of bringing back the wounded if thick snow fell. To the north the sky was dark enough.

A few seconds after leaving the rifle pit he knew that
something
was wrong, knew it the moment he realised the Russian shells were no longer whistling overhead, knew it before hearing the shouts and shots a hundred yards away and seeing the men running for their lives from the Quarries. The Russians had
retaken
the battery and were now dashing on in mad pursuit.
Furious
with himself for not having realised what the renewed bombardment had meant, and then for having failed to notice its sudden ending, Magnus began to run towards the British lines. Looking back he saw Russians bayoneting wounded men.
Trembling
with hatred, he ran on, and seeing an officer’s corpse bent down, ripped the dead man’s revolver from its holster and broke open the breech – it was loaded, with one chamber empty: five shots. He dropped down on one knee and steadying the gun on his left forearm fired twice, hitting a man in the leg. If he’d had time to load he would have used a Minié. Men were running past him already – the Russians no more than thirty yards behind. He
fired again, missed, and then went on running.

Where were the men’s officers? Probably most of them dead. Nobody was trying to form them up. No more than a hundred Russians had charged on beyond the battery and they were now driving before them twice that number of British soldiers. All from light infantry regiments; madness to have used them after what they had gone through at Inkerman. Glancing over his shoulder, Magnus saw that a sergeant had got together half-
a-dozen
men and formed them in line. They fired, bringing down three Russians and then reloaded; one man so scared that he fired with his ramrod still in the muzzle. After the second volley, four of the six started to run. Magnus saw the sergeant point his rifle at the head of the man nearest him threatening to shoot if either of the remaining two moved before his order. The furthest man turned and the sergeant jerked round his rifle and shot him; a moment later he too fell, killed by a Russian bullet.

Fifty yards from the trenches Magnus slowed down,
convinced
that the Russians would not come much closer and risk hand-to-hand fighting with far greater numbers. Determined to fire his last two shots, he flung himself down and steadying his hand on a rock aimed and squeezed the trigger. Nothing. The empty chamber. He tried again but the gun had jammed. Hurling it away in disgust he sprinted on. A man just in front of him was hit in the thigh, ran a few paces more and then fell. The ground was rough and slightly uphill, making Magnus’s breath come in sobbing gasps, but he could see the ridge of the third parallel and the mounds of earth and gabions at the sap-heads. Bullets were still whining and humming past. Looking back he was shaken to see that the Russians had not slackened their pace. They couldn’t think that they could succeed … but they were going to try to take the third parallel … they were. A few panicking men in the trench started to fire, regardless of their own troops fleeing towards them, terrified by the thought of the Russian bayonets. Magnus saw the puffs of smoke along the parapet but heard no sound. By the time the echo reached him, a Minié bullet had torn through his brain.

At
the
end
of
January
1855,
Mr
John
Roebuck
Q.C.,
the
Radical
Member
for
Sheffield
moved
a
motion
of
censure
in
the
House
of
Commons.
One
question
put
by
him
particularly
disturbed
the
House.
If
fifty-four
thousand
men
had
left
Britain
for
the
war
since
the
outbreak
of
hostilities,
and
there
were
now
only 
four
teen
thousand
in
arms
before
Sebastopol,
what
had
become
of
the
missing
forty
thousand?
Heavily
defeated
in
the
vote,
Lord
Aberdeen
resigned
and
the
Queen
invited
Lord
Palmerston
to
form
a
government.
The
war
went
on.
Not
until
the
completion
of
the
Balaclava
railway
and
the
coming
of
spring
did
the
army’s
numbers
stabilise
at
around
twenty-five
thousand.

In
late
February
–
a
time
when
the
British
had
been
able
to
muster
no
more
than
five
thousand
men
fit
for
duty
–
the
French
had
renewed
the
attack
abandoned
on
New
Year’s
Day.
They
took
the
Quarries
and
the
neighbouring
low
hill:
the
Mamelon,
but
were
driven
out
after
forty-eight
hours.
These
works
remained
in
Russian
hands
until
captured
and
held
by
the
allies
on
9
June.

What
was
hoped
would
be
the
final
attack
on
the
Redan
and
Malakoff
was
planned
to
take
place
nine
days
later:
the
anniver
sary
 
of
Waterloo.
The
French
attacked
too
soon
and
the
British
in
insufficient
numbers.
Six
thousand
men
were
sacrificed
to
no
effect.
Ten
days
afterwards
Lord
Raglan
died
–
some
mentioned
a
broken
heart,
his
doctors
cholera.

But
in
spite
of
allied
reverses,
the
Russians’
position
deterio
rated
 
during
the
summer.
From
May
onwards
the
Royal
Navy’s
squadron
in
the
Sea
of
Azov
cut
off
all
sea-borne
supplies
from
the
east,
and
at
the
same
time
allied
reinforcements
built
up 
rap
idly
.
In
mid-August
the
Russian
generals
gambled
and
took
the
field.
They
were
decisively
defeated
by
the
French
army.
On
9
September
the
allies
once
more
attacked
the
principal
Russian
bastions.
Instead
of
waiting
until
the
French
had
taken
the
Malakoff,
whose
guns
commanded
the
approach
to
the
Redan,
the
British
attacked
simultaneously
and
were
driven
back
leav
ing
two
thousand
dead
and
wounded
on
the
ground.
The
French
captured
and
held
the
Malakoff.
During
the
night
the
enemy
evacuated
Sebastopol
and
blew
up
their
magazines.
The
fighting 
was
at
an
end.

*

In
the
first
week
of
October
Sir
James
Crawford
returned
home
at
his
own
request
and
Rear-Admiral
Houston
Stewart
was
appointed
in
his
place.

Early one April morning, six months after the fall of Sebastopol, Helen Crawford walked down through the dewy meadows golden with celandine towards the lake, and watched the high wispy cirrus clouds reflected in the smooth water. Among the reeds, coots and moorhens were nesting; a yellow butterfly
fluttered
past. Spring, she thought, yes spring; and how strange to be still in the midst of such purposive and abundant life when I feel that I am already over, my words habit, my thoughts,
everything
now mere habit. How strange to feel tired and at the same time scared of a life of absolute certainty unruffled by the hot chase of experience. And yet when I accepted James was that not what I wanted? Peace, and an easy passage through the years without pain or passion. Was that really what I felt in the beech woods before Tom came, before the war?

She had left the house to escape the frenzy of the wedding preparations; the frequent arrival of the carter’s waggon with boxes and packages, the comings and goings of the dressmakers fussing over the bridesmaids’ dresses. Had their white satin boots arrived? Would there be enough old point-lace for this dress? Were the ostrich feathers for the bride’s going-away hat not a little yellow? The size and magnificence of Catherine’s trousseau almost suggested that some new law had been enacted forbidding ladies to buy any clothes after they married. Helen had seen enough cambric and Valenciennes peignoirs to last
several
women a lifetime. Passing Catherine’s door earlier that morning she had glimpsed a floor strewn with bonnet-boxes, trunks and packing cases. On the table had been mother-
of-pearl
glove boxes, inlaid caskets, embroidered pin-cushions and a boudoir ink-stand in lapis-lazuli. On the sofa: a heap of silk, moire, muslin and cashmere receiving the attention of the French milliner summoned from London. Catherine had wanted to be married from Leaholme Hall, but, shortly before the
outbreak
of war, Sir James had let it on a four-year lease.

In the midst of this wedding finery, Helen had been choked to see Catherine in a simple morning gown which she had often worn during her first summer at Hanley Park. Later in the day the men from Gunter and from Fortnum would be arriving
bringing with them the usual monuments of crystallised sugar decked with silver foliage and orange blossom. Helen’s own kitchen staff had already been driven half mad by the army of invaders; but in two days it would all be over, and Catherine, Miss Crawford no longer, would be departing for Dover and a continental honeymoon, her trunks all neatly labelled:
Mrs
George
Braithwaite.
Looking across the water at the green copper dome of the mausoleum, Helen thought of her own
marriage
to Harry Grandison when she had been a girl of not quite twenty.

Leaving the lake she made for the woods. Birch and sycamore were in leaf, some elms and chestnut too, but the beeches which Sir James had been so eager to sketch two springs ago, had not yet unfurled their pale green-yellow leaves. In the distance she heard the dull thump of an axe and imagined the white sappy chips of a young ash flying to the ground. A thrush was singing very close to her but it was still too early for the cuckoo’s
mocking
notes she had heard so clearly on the day Sir James had
proposed
. Walking among the delicate white wind flowers, she recalled James’s predictions of a distant war. The sameness of the woods and so great a human change. Tom and Magnus dead, her son a boy no longer, serving in the Caribbean. Catherine marrying.

Time and again during the first weeks after her husband’s return, Helen had heard him reproach himself for having failed to find the time to talk to Magnus on the voyage back from
Genichesk.
For days on end he had seemed to think of nothing else; often reliving the harrowing circumstances of their last brief meeting. Trying to comfort him, she had never reached him in his private world of grief. And then he had been gone once more. First to attend the exploratory sessions at Vienna and after that the Paris Peace Conference – his head filled with the
Bessarabian
frontier, the neutralisation of the Danube’s mouth and the limitation of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

Even now he was away in London at the Admiralty,
preoccupied
with his new obsession, perusing plans for ironclads and turret-ships; his only passion: to see a new navy building before his retirement, so formidable that no nation on earth would dare during his lifetime menace any part of the Empire by sea. Then blind folly and forgetfulness alone would have the power to
persuade
the country’s rulers to involve her in another land war with a European nation.

And yet Helen knew that even if he had remained quietly by
her side, she would still have felt no closeness. In time perhaps, as the memory of Tom’s death faded, and she forgot the misery she had suffered during Charles’s long convalescence at Hanley Park, she would feel differently. Now, his sea days over, Charles had gone to Pembroke Dockyard as captain superintendent; and with Catherine’s departure for her new home more links with the past would be severed.

In a very few months, Helen herself expected to be making the journey south to take up residence at Admiralty House,
Portsmouth,
where Sir James would be appointed port admiral at the next vacancy. By the time he retired, Hanley Park would be Humphrey’s, and Leaholme Hall, Sir James had hinted, would be made over to Charles. After Portsmouth Helen tried to
imagine
a house in Clarence Parade, Southsea, or in the Hampshire countryside within easy reach of her husband’s beloved Solent, on whose grey waters he would watch through his declining years the death of old navies and the birth of strange new ships beginning their voyages into the future – without us, she thought; for we, like the sailing ships of yesterday, are now becalmed and will never beat past the point we sought to reach or make the landfall we desired. Already the tide was ebbing fast. The youthfullness of the woods’ springtime haunted her. She could not bear it.

On the way back to the house she was surprised to think of Tom without pain – his youth embalmed by death, her vision of him unchanged and unchanging; time cheated at last. Age would find other faces on which to exercise his mocking artistry, her own among them; but Tom would always be as he had been that summer before her marriage.