Many had been dead for days. The silence of the others rivaled that of Death itself, for the most part. But sometimes a thready voice cried on God or Our Lady, or faintly cursed, or asked in vain for drink. And Mortimer Jowell halted his men; and went in and drove out the hog, and barricaded the threshold with a broken shutter. As he left the dreadful place a man came in.
He was a priest, tall, broad-shouldered and sufficiently clean-shaven to be remarkable, where nineteen men out of twenty were hairy-faced. He wore a rusty biretta and a thin, torn cassock, and had no other protection against the piercing cold. He had a canvas wallet slung about him, and moved with his hands crossed upon his breast as though something were hidden there.... He glanced at Mortimer Jowell as he stepped aside to make room for him in passing—and his hard blue eyes and jutting underlip and long, powerful chin were features distinctive of a man we have met before.
His name was known to no one in Balaklava. He came over three or four times a week from the French base at Kamiesch—where he wrought with many others among the wounded in the hospitals—to minister to the dying Catholic soldiers in this and similar places of misery and woe. Their dull and glassy eyes flickered a little at the sight of him. He made the sign of the Cross, drew out the purple stole—passed it round his neck—and knelt down by one of the prostrate bodies, murmuring a Latin benediction. And, too ignorant of his high, awful function to be conscious of intrusiveness, the Ensign watched and listened to him as he drew a silver pyx from the bosom of his cassock and fed the starving with the Bread of Life.
The ex-State official, diplomat and viveur who had become a priest, and the bullet-headed young English subaltern were never to exchange one word, never again to meet—and yet there was a link between them.... Both were—one quite unconsciously—seeking the Peace that is only gained by the Way of Expiation. And one of them was to find it before the sun went down.
Ignorant of this, the Ensign tramped on, and, having dropped his party at the Commissariat Stores—a row of sheet-iron roofed sheds that had sprung up, with many other buildings of the same kind, on the offal-strewn beach, above high-water mark—was free to wander where he would.
So he strolled along the muddy foreshore among the huge stacks of planking for stables and huts, and the great mountains of food and forage that lay piled up and rotting—rendered useless by lack of transport and plenitude of Red Tape—doomed never to supply the needs of perishing beasts and starving men.
A store-ship sent out many months previously had just unloaded a cargo of Showell’s Army boots by the simple process of digging them out from the hold with shovels, filling boats with them, and emptying the boats on the beach close to low-water mark. And a half-company of Fusiliers, bare-footed, and several degrees more ragged than those of Morty’s fatigue-party, had been marched down and directed to take what they needed from the pile.
The boots were all too small. You saw men eagerly turning over the heaps, sorting and comparing, pitching away and swearing, sitting down and trying in vain to force the ridiculously inadequate coverings on their swollen, bleeding feet. A minority succeeded in getting shod—after a fashion. But upon the hairy faces of the muddy, ragged, hunger-bitten majority, anger and disgust and disappointment were vividly painted; and presently found vent in words.
Their N.C.O’s—in like case with them—vainly endeavored to cast oil upon the troubled waters. Then the officer in command of the party emerged from a low-browed beach café, built of mud, mules’ bones and Army Mess-tins, where a red-fezzed Greek sold coffee, vodka, rum, and Crimean wine. He said—shouldering a net of potatoes, tucking the head of a dead fowl under his sword-belt, and Sucking his mustache, gemmed with ruby drops of generous liquor:
“Whass this, Rathkeales? Sergeant-Major Lonergan, bring these mutinous divvies up before me! Can’t get the boots on, is that whass the matter wit’ you? And whoever thought you could?—and your feet swelled to the size of pontoons with chilblains and frostbite! Whass that you’re saying, Private Biles? ‘Women’s and children’s sizes’? Get to the divvle with your women and children! Do you suppose the Government’s a fool?”