So when the wood for the erection of huts began to arrive at Balaclava, and the winter siege became a prospect that was inevitable, I thought of having a wigwam built for myself and two other officers; and confess that as the season advanced, some such habitation would have been more acceptable than my bell-tent, which, like much more of our warlike gear, had probably lain in some of John Bull's shabby peace-at-any-price repositories since Waterloo, and was all decaying. Hence the door was always closed with difficulty, especially on cold nights, the straps being rotten and the buckles rusty. Add to this, that our camp-bedding and clothes were alike dropping to pieces--the result of constant wet and damp. Already no two soldiers in our ranks were clad alike; they looked like well-armed vagrants, and wore comically-patched clothing, with caps of all kinds, gleaned off the late field or near the burial trenches. Some of the Rifles, in lieu of dark green, were fain to wear smocks made by themselves from old blankets, and leggings made of the same material or old sacking, and many linesmen, who were less fortunate, had to content them with the rags of their uniforms. Happy indeed were the Highlanders, who had no trousers that wore out. Alas for those to whom a flower in the button-hole, kid gloves, glazed boots, and Rimmel's essences, were as the necessaries of life! But ere the wished-for materials for my hut arrived, circumstances I could little have foreseen found me quarters in a very different place. Every other day I was again on duty in the trenches, and without the aid of my field-glass could distinctly see the dark groups of the enemy's outposts, extending from the right up the valley of Inkermann, towards Balaclava.
The rain rendered our nights and days in the trenches simply horrible; as we had to shiver there for four-and-twenty hours, literally in mud that rose nearly to our knees, and was sometimes frozen--especially towards the darkest and earliest hours of the morning, when the cold would cause even strong and brave fellows almost to sob with weakness and debility, while we huddled together like sheep for animal warmth, listening the while, perhaps, for a sound that might indicate a Russian mine beneath us. Those who had tobacco smoked, of course, and shared it freely with less fortunate comrades, who had none; and under circumstances such as ours, great indeed was the solace of a pipe, though some found their tobacco too wet to smoke; then the Russians and the rain were cursed alike. The latter also often reduced the biscuits in our havresacks to a wet and dirty pulp; but hunger made us thankful to have it, even in that condition.
"By Jove," one would say, "how the rain comes down! Awful, isn't it?"
"Won't spoil our uniforms, Bill, anyhow."
"No, lads, they are past spoiling," said I, and often had to add, "keep your firelocks under your greatcoats, men, and look to your ammunition."
And such care was imperatively necessary, for on dark nights especially we never knew the moment when an attempt to scour the trenches might bring on another Inkermann. So we would sit cowering between the gabions, while ever and anon the fiery bombs, often shot at random, came in quick succession through the dark sky of night, making bright and glittering arcs as they sped on their message of destruction, sometimes falling short and bursting in mid-air, or on the earth and throwing up a column of dust and stones, and sometimes fairly into the trenches, scattering death and mutilation among us. Erelong, as the season drew on, we had the snow to add to our miseries, and for many an hour under the lee of a gabion I have sat, half awake and half torpid, watching the white flakes falling, like glittering particles, athwart the slanting moonlight on the pale and upturned faces and glistening eyes of the dead, on their black and gaping wounds, and tattered uniform; for many perished nightly in the trenches, on some occasions over a hundred; and at times and places their bodies were so frozen to the earth, that to remove or tear them up was impossible, so they had to be left where they lay, or be covered up pro tem, with a little loose soil, broken by a sapper's pickaxe. And with the endurance of all this bodily misery, I had the additional grief that no letters ever came from Estelle for me. My dream-castle was beginning to crumble down. I began to feel vaguely that something had been taken out of my life, that life itself was less worth having now, and that the beauty of the past was fading completely away. I had but one conviction or wish--that I had never met, had never known, or had never learned to love her.
[CHAPTER XXXIX.--A MAIL FROM ENGLAND.]
THE dreamy conviction or thought with which the last chapter closes, proved, perhaps, but a foreshadowing of that which was looming in the future. On the day after that terrible storm of wind, rain, and hail in the Black Sea, when some five hundred seamen were drowned, and when so many vessels perished, causing an immense loss to the Allies; a terrific gale, such as our oldest naval officers had never seen; when the tents in camp were uprooted in thousands, and swept in rags before the blast; when the horses broke loose from their picketing-ropes, and forty were found dead from cold and exposure; when every imaginable article was blown hither and thither through the air; and when, without food, fire, or shelter, even the sick and wounded passed a night of privation and misery such as no human pen can describe, and many of the Light Division were thankful to take shelter in the old caverns and cells of Inkermann--on the 15th of November, the day subsequent to this terrible destruction by land and water, there occurred an episode in my own story which shall never be forgotten by me.
Singular to say, amid all the vile hurly-burly incident to the storm, a disturbance increased by the roar of the Russian batteries, and a sortie on the French, a mail from England reached our division, and it contained one letter for me.
Prior to my opening it, as I failed to recognise the writing, Phil Caradoc (wearing a blanket in the fashion of a poncho-wrapper, a garment to which his black bearskin cap formed an odd finish) entered my tent, which had just been re-erected with great difficulty, and I saw that he had a newspaper in his hand, and very cloudy expression in his usually clear brown eyes.