One day a great writer will rise up, who will tell this story as it should be told. You will burn and thrill, you will weep and laugh as you read.... Meanwhile, be patient with the feebler pen that stumbles and falters, lost amidst a wilderness of nameless, forgotten graves.
Not that they suffered and died for nought, these men who upheld the honor of England at Alma, and Balaklava, and Inkerman. With the odor of their filthy garments, the stench of their gangrened wounds, the exhalations of fever and pestilence, they brought with them the perfume of sublime obedience and the fragrance of great acts of heroism, forever buried in the silence of official reports.
And the sight of them, grotesque, and strange, and awful as the pipe-dream of an opium or hashish-smoker, fascinated and held those thousands that beheld. In silence, with suspended breath, the men and women of many nations looked, and could not cease from looking; while the gulls shrieked and wheeled, and the tiny gray shearwaters piped and twittered—and a stranger sound than either of these grew upon the ear and filled it, and presently drowned out every other sound:
“A-a-a-a-a-a-a!”
It was feeble, and faint, and broken, and unutterably pitiful.... It reminded you of the bleating of sheep buried in a snowdrift—or the complaint of young calves being bled by the butcher’s knife—or the whimpering of dogs, bound and tortured by the vivisector’s cruel, skillful hand.... Most of all it suggested the wailing of innumerable pauper babies, pining in the grim nursery-wards of the many workhouses of great grimy London....
“A-a-a-a-a-a!”
It was a sound that plucked at the heart-strings, and brought a choke into the throat, you knew not why or wherefore. Women broke into tears and sobs as they heard it, and a salt stinging mist came before the harder eyes of the men. Not until the warships of the Three Nations anchored at Beshiktash had dipped their Ensigns to the leading transport—not until, in her slow course, she came abreast of the luxurious steam-yacht that displayed the Light Cavalry pennant under her burgee of the Royal Yacht Squadron—were even those who wept to understand.
Then the wail of the dying pauper babies, the bleating of the perishing sheep upon the mountain, came louder than ever.
“A-a-a-a-a!”