The Scarlet Thief (24 page)

The stench was overpowering. It assaulted Jack’s senses, demanding his attention. Its nauseating stink flooded his nostrils, filling his mouth with its foul odour so that he came back to the world of the living retching and coughing.

‘Oi, oi. Someone’s coming back to us.’

Rough hands lifted his head and pressed the cold rim of a tin mug against his lips. The noxious smell of the liquid that was tipped over his sore and swollen lips made him gag, but the hand that held him was unyielding so he could do nothing but swallow the bitter drink.

‘There you go, chum. It ain’t as good as rum but it’s all you’re going to get for the moment.’

Despite its foul stink, the water at least unglued Jack’s mouth and moistened his throat enough for him to question his benefactor.

‘Where am I?’

There was a gentle chuckle. ‘Where are you?’ The voice found the question amusing. ‘Well, chum, you’re in hospital. In the shit-hole they call Scutari. You’ve been raving with the fever the last few days, hollering at the sky. Now rest easy. None of us is going anywhere. Not unless we karks it, that is. And that ain’t something we can do a fucking thing about. So take it as it comes.’

Jack did as he was told and closed his eyes, hoping for the sanctuary of unconsciousness. All soldiers feared the surgeons, feared being incarcerated in the army hospitals where death was as likely an outcome as life. Jack was in the place all soldiers dreaded and it terrified him. His lips formed the words of a silent prayer, one he had learnt as a child. It had crept into his mind unbidden, eerily apt: ‘If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’

Scutari had become infamous in the army even before the battle. It was where the sick were taken to die. Now, after the battle, and overwhelmed by hundreds of injured soldiers, it was rapidly descending into a scene of biblical squalor. Men lay everywhere, their bodies still encrusted in the filth of the battlefield. Nearly two thousand souls had been brought to the hospital which had beds for barely half that number. The handful of orderlies, doctors and surgeons worked tirelessly but they were hopelessly outnumbered by the multitude of broken bodies that begged for their attention.

The beds in which the lucky few were laid were filthy, the floor around them encrusted with ordure. The handful of slop buckets in each dank room overflowed with human waste. The wounded soldiers did not have the comfort of even a single blanket to cover them, their bodies were devoured by lice, they were unwashed and stinking, and they still wore the soiled and reeking rags they had arrived in. The few windows in the rooms were bolted shut, condemning the wounded to lie in the gloom, denied the joy of sunlight or of a breeze that would have eased the stifling, stinking, suffocating heat that tormented their final hours.

The injured soldiers stared at the high, vaulted ceilings and suffered. Their torture had started on the battlefield where they had been left, in some cases for twenty-four long hours before they were carried to the beach for evacuation. From there, if they were still alive, they were taken by ship to the hospital at Scutari three hundred miles away. It sat like a festering sore on the coast of Turkey opposite the splendour and the vibrancy of Constantinople.

The ships struggled to transport the vast number of wounded, who shared the limited space with hundreds of men who had been struck down with fever before the battle had even been joined. The decks were blanketed with the bodies of the sick and wounded; men died in the filth, uncared for and alone. Their bodies were dumped unceremoniously overboard or simply left to rot where they lay. Most ships had just one or two orderlies, or perhaps a single surgeon to cope with the hundreds of men.

The dreadful journey lasted three to five days, each an interminable hell, where minutes crept by like hours and hours felt like days. One ship, the
Shooting Star
, took a dreadful thirteen days to make the trip to Scutari, a period of unimaginable horror for the one hundred and thirty wounded on board. Just under half died in the time it took their vessel to reach its destination.

The hospital at Scutari was a dubious sanctuary for the men whose bodies had been broken in the horror of the fighting. If shock, infection, gangrene or loss of blood did not kill them, then a raft of fatal diseases claimed them – typhus, dysentery, cholera, fevers. Disease stalked the hospital, thriving in the dank and squalid conditions.

Jack gave up counting the bricks in the vaulted ceiling above his head. He had drifted in and out of consciousness for what could have been minutes, or hours, or days. Time had no meaning.

He remembered little of his journey to the hospital save for mere flashes, random memories of being taken to the shore on one of the pitifully few carts the army had available to transport its wounded. Of the short voyage itself, he remembered nothing. He could hazily recollect the pain of his flesh being stitched back together, and the feeling of deft hands binding his wounds, but whether that had been on board the ship or in the hospital, he had no idea.

The memories of battle he locked away in a far corner of his mind and threw away the key. But his dreams betrayed him. They broke down his barriers, replaying the horror so he woke in terror, bathed in sweat, his body trembling with fear. The wounds to his soul ran deep. He tried to remember the past but memories of his childhood or of his early years in the army resisted all his attempts to access them. Even Molly’s face remained stubbornly distant; the image of her he carried in his mind was faded, robbed of its vitality, little more than a vague impression.

He lay on his filthy bed and tried to shut out the constant moans, groans, sobs, curses and pleas of the other inmates. Mercifully, the men on either side of him were silent, although they were pressed so close together that Jack’s bed vibrated with every movement made by the wounded guardsman in the bed to his right. Barely two inches separated the rows of filthy beds. A narrow gap down the centre of the room gave access to any of the scarce medical staff who dared to venture into the foetid space.

Once, Jack had woken to the sound of a fresh patient being brought in. He had watched with morbid fascination as two orderlies deftly settled the man into the bed, and then bound his wounds with bandages stained with old blood. It did not take long, their practised hands worked swiftly. Neither orderly said a word during the few minutes they were in the room.

Jack knew he faced a choice. He could give in to his despair and let the grief and the guilt and the festering horror claim him, body and soul, or he could once again fend for himself. He could rise from this stinking pit and find a way to live.

‘Oi! What’s your game?’

Jack started, his battered nerves jangling at the sudden shout. He had been scraping a metal ladle across the bottom of a wooden bucket that should have held enough fresh water for the whole room but which now yielded only a few thimblefuls of dark brown, scabby liquid.

The desire to bark back at the overweight orderly corporal was hard to subdue; his mind was responding as if he were still a captain who would command immediate respect. The corporal’s florid face twitched with annoyance. He stood staring at Jack, wiping his bloody hands across an apron that was so encrusted with blood and filth that it stood proud of his body, as stiff as thick card.

‘Just getting some water, Corporal.’

‘Well, if you’re recovered enough to be out of bed, you’re well enough to be passed fit. What’s your name?’

‘Smith, Corporal.’

‘Smith? There’s more bleeding Smiths in this here hospital than there are lice in my crotch. You taking me for a ride, sonny Jim?’

‘No, Corporal. My name is Smith. Tommy Smith.’

‘Well then, Tommy Smith. Seeing as you is hail and hearty enough to be up and strolling around, you can give me a hand.’

Jack straightened up, wincing as the wound in his side pulled painfully.

The corporal sneered at him. ‘It’s no good acting like you is hurting now. I’ve got your number. Come over here and grab this dead ’un by his ankles.’

Jack did as he was bid, looking dubiously at the body of the man who had lain so silently in the bed immediately next to his own. ‘Is he dead then?’

‘Well, he ain’t bleeding dancing, is he, poor sod. Is he dead, indeed! Of course he’s bleeding dead on account of the fact that he ain’t been bleeding breathing for the last two bleeding days. Now grab hold and shut up.’

‘Yes, Corporal.’

The two men lifted the dead weight of the redcoat from the stinking bed. Jack was forced to tug at the man’s legs, which were stuck to the filthy sheet. The smell of the dead man was awful.

‘Come on, let’s take this poor sod away. Then I reckon there’s more work for you to do, young Tommy Smith – if you don’t fancy being passed fit for duty, that is.’

Jack staggered as he helped carry the dead redcoat from the room, his legs betraying his weakness. There was a sharp tut of disapproval from the corporal. It was a struggle but between them they carried the body outside to a walled yard that was already piled high with corpses.

‘Bloody hell!’ Jack could not keep back his exclamation of horror. The dead had been dumped without ceremony and lay in all manner of unnatural positions, legs and arms bent at impossible angles. Some lay with their eyes wide open, staring serenely at the clear blue sky, while the faces of others were twisted and terrible, their tongues bulging grotesquely from gaping mouths. The wounds that had killed them were evident on most of them, their bodies missing one or more limbs, or with large holes in what had once been living flesh.

It was a scene straight from a nightmare.

Jack dropped the legs of the fresh corpse he carried and bent double, vomiting out his horror at the dreadful sight.

‘Come on, lad. That’s enough of that. These poor sods don’t care. Not any more.’ The corporal let go of his end of the body and reached forward to place an unexpectedly soothing hand on Jack’s back, rubbing it in small circles like a parent winding a child.

Jack wiped the saliva that dangled from his mouth on his soiled cuffs and straightened up. The corporal was right. The dead were past caring.

‘Good, lad.’ The corporal turned to lead Jack from the charnel house. ‘Plenty more to shift,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Officers too. Not that the Jack Puddings get dumped outside. Oh no. We have a special room for the toffs.’

The corporal led Jack through a confusing maze of gloomy corridors.

‘Here we are. One officer recently expired.’

Jack followed the corporal’s corpulent figure into a dark side room that contained a single bed. The body of a young man lay peacefully in it, a sheet neatly tucked round it. Somebody had taken the time to undress the unfortunate officer; his uniform lay folded on top of a travelling chest that had been placed to one side of the bed so that it could double as a bedside table.

‘He’s dead?’

‘What is it with you? Yes, he’s a dead’un all right.’

‘What killed him? He looks like he’s just asleep.’

‘Fever. He’s been here nigh on a fortnight. From before the battle. I was only speaking to him yesterday. He seemed as right as rain. Telling me all about his new commission and everything.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well,’ the corporal perched his oversized backside on the corner of the bed, relishing the opportunity to talk. ‘His ma and pa died a little while back and he just got his inheritance, you see. Now a clever chap, like you and me, would spend that wisely, on beer or women, or something worthwhile like that. But this young fool blows the whole bleeding lot on a captaincy. And not just that but a captaincy in a regiment stationed in bleeding India of all places. He was going to make his fortune, or so he thought, the daft bugger. Why anyone would want to go to that heathen place is beyond me, like it’s beyond him now, poor sod.’

Jack looked down at the ill-fated officer who had died just as he had secured the same rank that Jack himself had risked so much to take as his own. ‘What was his name?’

‘His name? Let me think. Danbury, I think it was, yes, that’s it. Lieutenant Danbury. Or Captain Danbury, I suppose now.’

Jack smiled. ‘Danbury. That’s a good honest name. I like it.’

The Battle of the Alma resonates in our history. Many towns boast an Alma Terrace or a pub called The Heights of the Alma and countless little girls have been named after the battle fought over one hundred and fifty years ago. Yet it appears to have disappeared from our national consciousness. Ask people about Waterloo and all will know of the great battle where Wellington defeated Napoleon. Ask about the Alma and you will be greeted with blank looks or given directions to a nearby hostelry.

The tale of battle happens largely as described in
The Scarlet Thief
. The King’s Royal Fusiliers have stolen the role of the 33rd Regiment of Foot and for that I humbly apologise to the men who fought on that bloody day in the ranks of that most illustrious regiment. General Raglan did indeed fling his troops against the heart of the Russian position and one has only to look at the enormous casualties those leading regiments took to see what it cost the men ordered to advance towards the massed ranks of the Russian army. Raglan rightly received harsh criticism in the national press, much of it written by officers so appalled that they broke the gentleman’s code of not ‘croaking’ by writing to the newspaper in droves.

Raglan and Codrington existed, as did the charismatic Colonel Lacy Yea who did indeed order his battalion to ‘
Never mind forming! Come on, men! Come on, anyhow
.’ Otherwise the characters are from my own imagination, yet I hope they convey something of the men who had the mettle to fight in that mot terrible of battles.

Anyone wishing to study the battle in more detail will find a wealth of resources available. I would not hesitate to recommend
The Battle of the Alma
by Ian Fletcher and Natalia Ishchenko for a wonderful account of the battle from both a Russian as well as a British perspective. For more detail on the life of the redcoat I cannot speak highly enough of
Redcoat
by the unsurpassed Richard Holmes, a book that is never far from my side.

Jack Lark will soldier on. Somehow he will find the strength to put Molly’s death and his memory of the bitter fighting behind him. His adventures will take him far and wide and without a tie to a regiment or even to a name he will venture across a British Empire that was at its very peak in the middle of the nineteenth century.