I think the news with which Jack's cousin had hurried after them lightened every heart in that little party, and so they struggled on, talking gaily enough till they reached the Upland. Sturdy insisted on carrying his share of the medical stores; and indeed he was the hardiest and strongest man of the lot.
The road to-day, Dr. Reikie told the lieutenant, was even less cut up and sticky than usual. "Sometimes, man," he said, "the mud is so deep and tenacious that it sucks the very boots off the poor soldiers' feet—a perfect quagmire."
On their way to the front, Sturdy, hardy sailor though he was, was sickened at the horrible sights he saw on each side of the road. There were men lying there whom it was impossible for the time to assist, struck down with cholera or dysentery on their way back with their bundles from Balaklava.
There were horses dying, horses dead, skeletons of bullocks, some wholly exposed, some half buried, and here and there skeletons even of men, protruding from their all too shallow graves; and although the winter air to-day was crisp and keen, and snow lay on the hillocks that had not been trodden, the stench that filled the air was at times almost unbearable.
Pitiable sight, too, were the Turks whom they met, and who salaamed as they passed, albeit they were carrying their dead on stretchers, or even on their backs, to be buried in one common grave down near to Balaklava.
* * * * *
Sturdy, at his own request, was permitted to spend a few days in camp and in the trenches, so he soon found out something of the terrible life our poor fellows had to endure there.
Badly fed, clothed in rags, with at night scarcely a blanket to cover them from the rain or melting snow, that poured in through the tattered tents; hardly any fuel; no means of cooking their scanty rations; on night duty or day duty, on the march, or under fire in the drains called trenches,—was it any wonder that even those who were not killed or wounded were dying day by day, like braxied sheep, as Dr. Reikie put it?
I am glad, indeed, to drop the curtain over this part of my story, for horrors like these are but little to my taste.
The scene changed as far as our principal heroes were concerned, when one evening Reikie met Sturdy.