From those employed in the harbour Jack learnt sad news indeed. During the storm twenty-one vessels had been wrecked. The new steamship Prince, which had arrived but a few days previously with the 46th Regiment, had gone down with a cargo valued at half a million aboard her. The whole of the winter clothing sent out for the troops, and of which they were fearfully in want, was lost. Forty thousand thick suits, with woollen underclothes, socks, gloves, boots, and blankets; hundreds and thousands of pounds of biscuit, salt-meat, coffee, and rice, thousands of gallons of rum; millions of pounds of forage and compressed hay; and millions of rounds of ball-cartridge, with all the artillery reserve ammunition were lost in that terrible storm.
Jack was appalled at the news, and as he made his way back to camp, through a biting snow and sleet storm, it seemed as if the very elements themselves were fighting for the Russians against the Allies.
Those were terrible days! Rain, fog, frost, and snow, followed one another in rapid succession. The winter set in with unwonted severity; the camp became a quagmire, and the men in the trenches were often up to the middle of their thighs in mud and slush for sixteen hours at a time. The road to Balaclava was often impassable, the putrid carcasses and skeletons of horses, camels, and mules lay half-buried in mud from one end of it to the other; and for days no sugar, coffee, tea, or rum was issued to the troops; biscuit and meat were also scarce. There was very little in Balaclava, and it was impossible to get what was there up to the camp. Thus, only half-fed, in rags, exposed to the rigour of a severe climate, working often twenty hours out of the twenty-four, the men broke down. Cholera raged more fiercely than ever, and things looked in a bad way in the camp of the Allies.
The Russians gave them no peace. By day and by night they kept up a heavy fire and made frequent sorties; but the British, with dogged persistence, pushed their parallels nearer and nearer, repulsed the sorties, and snapped their fingers at the cannonading.
‘Heaven help us!’ said Jack to Will one morning about the middle of December. ‘I’m for Balaclava to-day, and my poor horse can hardly stand. It’s no good saddling him, for I know he couldn’t carry me. He won’t last another day, I’m sure.’
‘He’ll only go the way of most of the others,’ said Will. ‘There are only twenty-seven horses fit for duty left in the whole brigade.’
‘I know; we lost five the night before last and three last night,’ said Jack gloomily. ‘Will, unless we soon get big reinforcements from home, with stores and warm clothing, England will wake up one morning to find that her army in the Crimea is a thing of the past.’
‘Serve ’em right too,’ said Will as he proceeded to twist some hay-bands round his legs, his overalls having been worn to tatters weeks before. ‘Jack,’ he continued, ‘have you got a bit of that string left? I might be able to tie the sole of my left boot on so that it will last for another day.’
Jack, who was busy sewing a patch made of a shred of old blanket on his own overalls, passed Will the piece of string he had brought up from Balaclava; then went on with his work.
The boots and fur-coat he had become possessed of on the day of the capture of the convoy by Mackenzie’s Farm proved of the utmost value to him, and in this respect he was better off than Will.