“Surely the resources of the country——”
He answered harshly:
“The resources of the country, reported to be vast, were in our ease non-existent. We could get nothing! We were upon the soil of a nation for whose liberty we were about to fight, and they treated us from the first as enemies. There’s no question about it! The native Bulgarians refused to sell us grain, forage, fuel and provisions, nor would they supply us with wagons, and beasts of burden and draught, or serve us as drivers, guides or interpreters! They let us encamp where cholera and fever were rife—and so we invaded the Crimea with a weakly, invalidy, crippled army, two-thirds of ’em too weak to carry their packs and the rest horizontal—disabled or moribund! And Burgoyle rode up to the head of Varna Harbor when his Division was being put on board the transports. He shook his fist and howled—he was quite beside himself. ‘Sick men to fight the Russian Imperial Guards with! Better give me dead ones!’ But that we have achieved what we have, ma’am, we owe to the pith and pluck and endurance of these sick men.”
“They’re glorious!” she said. “They’re glorious....”! And the Brigadier went on:
“They were exhausted from exposure, dropping from want of sleep, half-starved from shortage of rations when they carried the Great Redoubt, and smashed two-thirds of Menschikoff’s army into gray lumps on the Alma. On the day of the Balaklava Attack neither men nor beasts had had bite or sup since the middle of the day before.... How the Light Brigade charged I hardly know; their horses’ legs were tottering under ’em! And they lay down after the battle, round their smoky fires of green wood, with their baggage and camp equipment knocking about on board the transports, and nothing but a sopping wet blanket between half of ’em and the sky! And then they couldn’t sleep for the neighing of the horses, and the row made by the camels and mules and bullocks. For you can’t teach animals to starve in silence!—they’ve no pride like two-legged brutes! There’s a verse I’d liked at Eton, about the lions roaring and asking their meat from God. Well, the row made me think of that and wonder whether He heard them?... And—— But I suppose they’re quiet enough now!”
XCI
They were—but there a silence that is clamorous in the hearing of the Eternal. Do you see those pinched ghosts of gallant Cavalry horses tethered in the driving blizzards behind the low stone walls? A few rags of tents shivered in the piercing wind that blew from Sevastopol.... Here and there shanties of mud and earth sheltered officers, but the rank-and-file of Britannia’s Army had gone down into the ground where the dead were, that they might keep the life in them. And for Blueberry and his kind there was nothing but to stand and wait for death.
Blueberry’s beautiful blue-black eyes were glazed with fever, and gaunt with famine. Dreams of the full rack and the brimming manger tortured the suffering beast. And Joshua Horrotian leaned his cheek upon the broad front of his dying charger, and begged him to keep up!—and tried to comfort him. He had no fodder to give the horse—nothing but promises and kind words. He promised him Old England and plenty of sound oats again—a grassy paddock to kick his heels in—everything else a good horse might desire, if only he would keep on living.... He scraped wood-shavings fine as paper and offered them to him—and when Blueberry snuffed at them feebly, and turned his sorrowful eyes away, the tears rolled down his master’s weather-beaten cheeks for the creature he had bred. He took the dying head in his ragged arms and fairly moaned over him:
“Oh Lord! Oh Lord!—my poor old Blueberry! why ever did us go a sogering?”