Sickness had raged among them like a wolf in a sheepfold. Nor had the Army of France escaped. That chart of the Pestilential Places had availed it nothing. Even while on the voyage from Marseilles to Gallipoli cholera had broken out virulently among the French troops. Encamped upon the heights north of Varna, the deadly exhalations rising from the smitten British camps had infected them. They had suffered as severely as the white Tufts, and the Bearskins Plain, and the Cut Red Feathers, whose tents were pitched upon the sylvan shores of the Lake of Death, and amidst the blossom-starred, poison-breathing meadows and fruit-laden orchards of Aladyn.
He heard of the Russian evacuation of the Danubian Principalities, and of the Council of the Allied Generals, resulting in the Invasion of the Crimea. He learned how the buoy, set to mark the landing-point of Britain’s forces, had been moved mysteriously in the night. And he knew by whose command the thing must have been done, instantly. And when, after the story of the great battle of Infantry and Artillery that had trodden out the grapes of the vineyards on the banks of Alma and reddened her chalky shallows with the wine of life, came intelligence of the death of St. Arnaud—he realized with a strange, awful thrill, that the master whose service he himself had abjured, had been deprived by Death of his chief confidant and most unscrupulous instrument, and that in this, Fate had been upon the side of England. For the new Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Boisrobert, though willing enough to oblige his master at the Tuileries, lacked the supple skill in lying, and the keen relish for bloodshed, which had distinguished the late intimate of Sire my Friend.
He heard next of the Flank March, and the passing of the ridge of the Tchernaya, and how the harbor of Balaklava, guarded at its narrow, constricted entrance by its two stupendous cliffs of calcareous marl, had become the English base. He was told of the Russian attack, and the battle on the Upland, and the magnificent Light Cavalry charge that had thrilled the watching world to wonder, and admiration, and pity, and wrath, but a few days before....
“There was loss upon our side, naturally. But upon the side of the British it is astonishing what slaughter!” pursued the newsvendor. “And what numbers of wounded there are to be dealt with Monsieur may conceive. In litters, or upon the backs of mules and horses, they are being conveyed to the coast, where the transport-vessels wait to receive and carry them to the Bosphorus. On board—Heaven knows whether they will get any medical aid or surgical treatment until they arrive at the Hospital Barracks of Scutari.... And even there—since the English Army owns no trained nurse-attendants, or sanitary organization—and the building covers some six miles of ground and accommodates—according to the published reports—fifteen thousand men—the greater number of these poor devils are likely to spit up their souls unaided! For what can one young, high-bred English lady, aided by a handful of Catholic Sisters of Mercy and Protestant religieuses, do to assuage the sufferings of thousands? Why—nothing at all! Not even so much as that!”
He shrugged again as he snapped his fingers, and then added, with one of his curious little skips upon the pavement:
“I can picture that young lady, for I, like all my family, have the gift of imagination. She is flat-chested, Monsieur, as are all the English Meeses. She has hair like tow, blue eyes, round, pale, and staring—a nose without charm or character—projecting teeth, bony red hands, sharp elbows, and large flat feet. She is clothed in garments of colors that shriek at you—she carries an English Protestant Bible and a bottle of smelling-salts in her reticule—and a red guide-book under her arm. She is immensely rich and execrably sensible, avec un grain de folie. A little cracked, like all the rest of her tribe. And she will be confident in herself and in her mission to-day, but to-morrow, Monsieur!—to-morrow she will have a crisis of the nerves, and resign her commission from the British War Office. And—I predict it confidently—take a berth on the next passenger-steamer bound for her island of——”
The close of the sentence was snatched from the speaker’s lips by the hurricane-passage of another of the gray-painted expresses, crowded with English troops. It flashed by and was gone. With the thin hair upon his big head yet stirring with the wind of its passage, the hunchback said, pointing to the lowered indicator of the up-train signal:
“The Paris mail is due in another moment.... Monsieur is traveling by that train?”
But Dunoisse, hardly knowing why, responded with another question.
“The English lady who has gone out to the great Hospital of Scutari to nurse the British wounded.... Oblige me by telling me her name?”