The Gold Seekers (46 page)

“Hall—front!” he bade them hoarsely. “If you don’t halt front, my boys, we’re done!”

The men of both regiments obeyed him, officers mixed with their men and Bubb at his side, William saw, his gaunt, smoke-blackened face grimly set. Faced by a resolute line, the lancers and Cossacks who had been pursuing them halted as well, and finally—inexplicably—drew off. There remained the newly arrived squadrons of lancers in their rear, which now started to form up, as if with the intention of taking the offensive and cutting off their retreat, and Lord George said, with admirable calm, “We are going to have to

fight our way out of this, I fear.” He turned to his trumpeter, only to see that the man lay dead at his feet, killed by a Cossack pistol shot, and once again shouted an order to them to form up and charge to their rear.

In response to the urging of their few surviving officers and NCOs, the men of the two regiments, now reduced to a total strength of fewer than fifty, faced about and again formed as compact a line as they could. Their charge was delayed when Alexander Dunn broke ranks to go to the aid of a sergeant of his squadron, who had been cut off and was under attack by three of the enemy lancers. Both rejoined, the sergeant’s horse lamed, but leaving the attackers unhorsed and wounded to the rear.

“Charge, boys!” Lord George Paget bade them. “One last effort, and we’ll be out of here!”

The men raised a defiant cheer and spurred their tired horses at the lancer regiment blocking their retreat. Their charge met with little resistance. The lancers wheeled away, evidently reluctant to meet it, and they galloped past, almost unscathed, halting only when they reached the now-silent line of guns against which the brigade’s original charge had been made.

But now they, with the other shattered and cruelly depleted regiments of Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade, had the mile-long gauntlet of the North Valley to run a second time. Weary and wounded, many of them on foot, others leading lame and bleeding horses, they must once again brave the Russian cannon fire, although this had been rendered less effective by the attack of the French Chasseurs d’Afrique on the Fediukine batteries, which they had charged and silenced to aid their British allies’ retreat.

Nevertheless, for William De Lancey, as for many of the other survivors, the return through the valley was to prove the worst part of their ordeal. The guns on the Causeway Heights still dealt out their awful carnage; the riflemen, on the slopes to either hand, poured down a hail of minie balls from safe concealment, and roving bands of vengeful Cossacks rode down the lame and the unhorsed, the wounded and the disarmed, showing them no mercy.

The whole valley was a shambles, the ground strewn with

dead and dying men and hideously mutilated horses, their agonized cries audible even above the crash and thunder of the guns. Ahead of them, as the 11th Hussars began their painful retreat to their own lines, small groups of men, their uniforms so spattered with mud and blood as to be almost unrecognizable, straggled back, some stumbling blindly over the rough ground, barely able to keep their feet, some leading a horse, miraculously unscathed, on which a badly wounded man clung weakly to the saddle. Others, just able to hobble themselves, dragged a dying mount that they refused to abandon and sought, even in their own extremity, to save.

William heard a strangled cry coming from close behind him and turned to see that his servant Bubb had been hit in the chest by a sharpshooter’s ball. The man fell from his horse, which staggered a few yards and then collapsed almost beside him, its entrails spilling out in a gout of blood.

“Go on, sir,” Bubb urged. “I’m done for—save yourself!”

But that, William knew, he could not do. They had been through too much together, he and Bubb, in India and now here, in the dank wilderness of the Russian Crimea. He dismounted and, with infinite difficulty, for there seemed to be no strength in his arms, picked up his servant and somehow got him onto his own horse’s back. It was then that he realized, for the first time, that he had also been wounded. His right arm was stiff, the sleeve of his tunic soaked in blood, and he lurched along, clinging to his horse’s stirrup, in a state of dazed half-consciousness and well-nigh unendurable pain.

He had no warning of the Cossacks who attacked him, his attention distracted by the sight of Major Halkett, the 4th Light Dragoons’ second-in-command, falling suddenly from his horse as an exploding shell struck him in the back. Attempting to assist the stricken major, William stumbled and lost his grip of his own horse’s stirrup leather, and the Cossacks were upon him, three of them, evidently bent on taking him prisoner.

One of them, approaching at a trot, thrust his lance tip into poor Bubb’s side and sent him crashing to the ground, and then William found himself surrounded and fighting for his life. His sword arm was useless, but he managed somehow to fend them off, his weapon in his left hand. He lunged at them blindly and, by a lucky chance rather than skill, succeeded in unhorsing the nearer of his assailants. But that was the end of his resistance. A Cossack lance struck his left arm, knocking his saber from his grasp, and he went down under a blow from a pistol butt, delivered by the man he had unhorsed.

His senses reeling, he lay where he had fallen, dimly aware that a fight was taking place close at hand. He could hear the clash of steel and heavy breathing, punctuated by cries of pain, and was then dimly aware that hands were grasping him by the shoulders and attempting to drag him along the ground. The hands were not ungentle, and he was aware of an English voice, close to his ear, apologizing for the manner in which he was being manhandled.

“We drove them Cossack swine off, sir, so don’t you worry no more on their account. And we’ll get you back… . It’s not much more’n a quarter of a mile now, and there’s a couple o’ squadrons o’ the Heavies coming out to meet us. You’ll be all right, sir, once we get you back.”

“Major Halkett,” William managed, through tightly clenched teeth. “And Private Bubb of ours, of the Eleventh. Are they—”

“They’re dead, sir, both of “em,” the voice answered with bleak finality. “Them bloody Cossacks did for them. Now, if you can sit a horse, sir …”

But William knew that he could not sit a horse. He tried to shake his head, to tell these men who had saved him from the Cossacks that they must leave him and go on to seek safety themselves. Just as Bubb, good soldier that he was, had told him, a long time ago. Seemingly they did not hear him, for he found himself being bundled into the saddle of a Cossack horse and held there by two of them, when they realized that he could not sit upright unaided.

He recognized one of his rescuers as a crony of Bubb’s, whom he had recently had occasion to reprimand for a minor breach of discipline; the others were men of Halkett’s regiment, the 4th Light Dragoons, and strangers to him. They were talking of poor Halkett, and he heard one of them

say, “Told us to take his money, the major did, afore he died. For the married families left at home, he said.”

“And did you take it, Bob?”

“Aye, I did. And I’ll see it goes to them he wanted to have it, if ‘tis the last thing I do. He were a good bloke, Halkett.”

“And so’s this one,” the trooper of the 11th put in. “De Lancey, they call him—Captain De Lancey. Comes from Australia. Poor old Bubb thought the world of him, but— d’you think he’ll make it, Sar’nt? He’s hurt pretty bad, by the looks of him.”

“We’ll take him back,” the unknown sergeant returned. “Then it’ll be up to the bloody sawbones.” His tone changed. “They say Cardigan came back without a scratch— one o’ the Heavies said so.”

“He led us well, though, Sar’nt, didn’t he?” the 11th man defended. “Never flinched, never turned his face from them guns–just rode straight at “em.”

“Oh, aye,” the sergeant conceded. “But they never ought to have sent us to charge them guns—not just the brigade on its own. Still,” he added philosophically, “no one can call us gilded popinjays now, can they? What’s bleedin’ left of us, that is.”

William attempted to straighten his aching body, but the effort proved too much. He slumped forward, numb fingers losing their grip of the pommel of the Cossack’s saddle. The men’s voices and the now-distant roar of the guns became a meaningless blur of sound, drowned in his pain.

William De Lancey remembered little of the days that followed the Light Cavalry Brigade’s charge into the Valley of Death.

He came perilously near to death himself but was unaware of it and did not know—for the surgeons had no time to tell him—that they had amputated his right arm at the elbow.

He had been conscious of the agony but without realizing its cause, for the 11th’s young assistant surgeon, Henry Wilkin, who had returned unwounded from the charge, was skilled and well practiced in his work, and the amputation of an arm, the muscles of which were already half-severed, took him only a few minutes to complete. There were other wounds, too—lance thrusts, which had had to be sutured, and an ugly contusion on the forehead, where the Cossack’s pistol had descended with savage force.

But this, as Surgeon Wilkin explained to Alexander Dunn, when he came to the forward dressing station to inquire for wounded comrades, was a blessing in disguise.

“There’s a degree of amnesia in Captain De Lancey’s case. We’re evacuating him, with the rest of the severely injured men, to Scutari by steamer in the next few days. I’m afraid it won’t be a pleasant voyage, but he, at least, won’t know much about it.”

And William did not. The hours he lay on the wharf at Balaclava with the other casualties passed as a bad dream; the days, in the overcrowded lower deck of a paddle-steamer, fighting its way through a vicious Black Sea storm, were a nightmare, to be endured and then forgotten.

On November 6—eleven days after the battle—he was lowered into a caique and rowed to a rickety landing stage outside the great, imposing bulk of the barracks hospital at Scutari. From there, after a lengthy delay, a stretcher party of Turks, indifferent to the suffering their jolting progress caused, carried him, with a score of others, into the hospital.

From outside, the hospital presented the magnificent appearance of a Sultan’s palace. Inside, it was dank and dark, a maze of long, echoing corridors and vast, badly ventilated rooms, the walls cracked and streaming with damp, the floors unswept. The whole place was filthy and verminous and, as a hospital, deplorably inadequate to care for the thousands of sick and wounded men who were now crowded into it. Destitute of furniture, lacking medical supplies, drugs, comforts, and proper cooking facilities, it was also short of physicians and surgeons and staffed by untrained, overworked orderlies recruited from invalid battalions.

The arrival, a few days earlier, of Miss Florence Nightingale and her band of forty officially appointed nurses— twenty-four of whom were Catholic and Anglican sisters— had not been welcomed by the surgeon superintendent, who had informed them that he considered female nurses in a military hospital “an unwise indulgence, unfavorable to military discipline and to the recovery of the patients.” They

were permitted in the wards only when under the superintendence of a doctor and might not dress wounds until the patients had been examined by a member of the surgical staff.

In consequence, the sick lay in long lines, half-naked, on the floor, the majority without bedding, cholera and dysentery sufferers lying cheek by jowl with those injured in battle, and it was often several days before they were examined or had their wounds dressed by a surgeon. Miss Nightingale, although she had been appointed superintendent of the Female Nursing Establishment of the British General Hospitals in Turkey by the Secretary of War, was compelled to restrict her activities, and those of her nurses, to attempts to clean the wards and improve the diet of those who occupied them.

William’s bearers had deposited him, none too gently, on a pile of reeking, verminous straw, spread out thinly over the cracked tiles of the floor. The fact that this narrow corridor was designated an officers’ ward made little difference as to the conditions—they were no better than those of the other ranks in the huge, barnlike rooms beyond. There were fewer officers, that was all; but to compensate for this, there were fewer orderlies to attend to their needs. At present there was only one—a wizened, unshaven old pensioner, who had found the fresh influx of casualties from the ships too much for him. After fortifying himself in the canteen, he had crawled away to seek temporary oblivion in sleep, deaf to the pitiful pleas for water from those for whom it was his duty to care.

William was as parched as the rest, but he did not cry out, too far gone to care now whether he lived or died. He lay where the stretcher-bearers had set him down, a ten-day growth of stubble on his cheeks, the stump of his right arm wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage, and his frogged hussar jacket torn and tarnished, the sleeve cut away to expose the arm the surgeons in the field hospital had taken off. He saw it and recognized what they had done, no longer caring about that either, since he believed himself doomed.

Night fell, and he drifted into an exhausted sleep, only

occasionally disturbed by the moans and cries of those near

to him.

The vision of Jenny Broome’s face, which had come to him at intervals and momentarily sustained him, came again as he slept, bringing him fresh hope. But when he wakened, it was gone, and with it his hopes and the fading remnants of his courage. “Father in heaven,” he whispered brokenly, “I beg thee to let me die. I have no strength to go on.”

Then the sound of a slow, measured footfall reached him, and the rustling of the straw scattered about the floor of the corridor. William looked up, to glimpse the faint, flickering light of an oil lamp and, silhouetted behind it, a woman’s slight form, clad in a starched white dress and apron. He watched as she bent over one of his fellow sufferers to hold a cup of water to his lips, heard her voice, speaking very softly, and as she moved on to the next in the long row, he struggled to sit up, raising himself with infinite difficulty on his one good arm and willing her to come to him.