Said he, in effect: “These carcasses, ignored by the Executive Heads of the Army, the Harbor-Master and the Port Captains, are as perilous to the life of man as effective shelling.... Let others serve their country after their own fashion. I tow dead cows henceforth.”
So his boats were sent regularly to collect the bobbing hair-trunks packed with fetid odors, and tow them out of the roadstead crowded with shipping of three nations, away to the open sea.... And the Fleet and the Army gave their benefactor the Chinese-sounding appellation of “Commander Tow Cow.” And the nickname adhered to him to his dying day.
Suppose that you see the Ensign, with his sergeant and section, tramping down the miry main street of the South-Crimean coast-town, between villas that had been clean and dapper and habitable when the Allied Armies rolled down from the North.
An endless procession of men on foot, men on horseback, men driving beasts or charioteering vehicles of various descriptions, passed up and down that swarming thoroughfare, all day and nearly all night. Lean dogs and ownerless swine routed in piles of offal and garbage. And—for Death constantly dropped in in the shape of shell or round-shot—and dysentery and cholera were always with the Army—human refuse lay sprawled or huddled in strange fashion, waiting for the burial which did not always come....
Shrieking stenches saluted young Jowell’s nose, the din of voices mingled with the distant bellow of the Lancasters, and the fainter answer of the great brass sixty-two pounders from the batteries of Sevastopol.... Faces he knew nodded cheerily to him from windows of improvised Clubs and temporary restaurants. Hands waved, voices shouted hospitable invitations. He shook his head and passed on.
Dreadful women beckoned with ringed chalked hands and leered at him with painted faces, from the upper balconies of abominable houses where the business of vice went on ceaselessly by day as by night. Roulette-balls clicked—occasionally revolvers cracked, and knives were used—under the canvas of gambling-booths where French and German, Greek and Italian and British gamesters crowded about the green-covered trestle-board.
Cracked pianos vamped accompaniments to villainous songs, screeched by red-tighted sirens in soi-disant music-halls. Barrel-organs ground out popular waltzes for the revelers in crazy dancing-saloons, where shadows of revolving couples passed and re-passed, thrown on the crimson blinds by flaring naphtha-lamps. Next door to a house of this type was another that was an hospital; a single-storied, mud-walled, windowless and doorless building that stood close upon the thoroughfare. A lean hog shambled over the threshold as Mortimer Jowell passed. He looked in, and saw green men, blue men, yellow men and black men lying upon the bare earth floor in rows, side by side....