The Winter Soldiers

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

Genres: Historical Fiction; War & Military

Synopsis

The fourth Crimea adventure for Sergeant 'Fancy Jack' Crossman and his band of brothers Jack Crossman and the privations of war during a Russian winter, in which a few hardy soldiers cause confusion and havoc among the enemy. After the battle of Inkerman on 5th November 1854 the British Army face a terrible winter with inadequate provisions and clothing. In this grim season Sergeant Jack Crossman and his men are billeted at Kadikoi village near Balaclave harbour, with instructions to blow up the magazine in the Russian Star Fort. Yet it transpires this is not to be Crossman's main mission. His true task is to spy on a British general accused of corruption, and to bring about his downfall. Set against a bleak backdrop it is only the grit and determination of Crossman and his men which allows them to survive against all odds in the field.

Release date: September 1, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 160

Sample

The faces of the men were like stone. They looked bleakly across the heights above Sebastopol. Some of them were indeed only boys, a few as young as ten years. Their eyes appeared to have retreated deep inside their heads, and were empty of any expression but the nursing of a nagging, relentless misery. Those in trenches lay in thick mud, their brittle hands clamped to rifles wrapped around with stiff rags. Those in the lines behind, awaiting duty, were only marginally drier and warmer.

The soldiers stared keenly at the party of six saboteurs returning from a mission in Sebastopol. This small group had just passed through the outer picquets. They looked well-clothed in fur coats, fur hats and good thick leather boots. On the surface of things, they seemed men to be envied. They appeared to have the freedom to roam at will. In the middle of a Russian winter, in the middle of a foreign war, they did indeed seem kings compared with their fellow soldiers.

‘Keep up, Yorwarth,’ growled the tall leader of this group. ‘You’ve been lagging all morning.’

Fancy Jack Crossman, seconded sergeant from the 88th Connaught Rangers, was the first to cross the line of British trenches, followed in single file by Lance-Corporals Peterson and Wynter, Private Yorwarth from the Australia colonies, a civilian barber named Gwilliams, and finally, taking up the rear as always, a Turkish irregular, Yusuf Ali. Every man kept his head low as there were always Russian sharpshooters ready to take it off his shoulders.

‘Yes, keep up, Yorwarth,’ said Lance-Corporal Wynter, ‘don’t dawdle!’

Wynter’s tone was sarcastic. The words were aimed at his sergeant and not the named man. Wynter was exhausted and he felt everyone in the group had the right to lag behind if they felt so inclined. Wynter was belligerent and nasty but, when it came to comfort and survival, often ingenious. Most recently he had cut a hole in a large thick woollen sock and pulled it over his head. The hole revealed only a small circle of face, allowing the wearer to see and breathe freely. What remained of the sock kept the rest of his head and neck warm. Others, seeing this invention, had followed his example with great alacrity. Now what he had begun in Balaclava was all the fashion in the Heights.

As they passed a group of rag-bag soldiers, a young subaltern jumped in front of Crossman and made noises like a duck.

‘Quack, quack, quack, quack.’

Crossman glared at the officer, who continued to grin into his face and make farmyard noises. A corporal came up and put his arm around the subaltern’s shoulders, gently steering him out of Crossman’s path, as a mother might do a bothersome child. He then turned to Crossman and tapped his own temple with his forefinger in explanation.

‘Sorry, chum,’ he said. ‘Touched. Lost most of his men in a night raid. Came back like that.’

Crossman nodded, realizing. ‘That’s all right, corporal.’

A tower was chiming a recognizable tune nearby. Guns were booming along the allied lines and from the distant fortifications of the besieged Sebastopol came dull thumps blanketed by the winter mist. The temperature today was not the sword-sharp cold of some mornings, when the freezing winds came down from the steppes and sliced through shivering under-protected bodies. It was a damp stony cold which crept deep into men’s bones, awakened painful agues and aches, and was unbearably persistent.

Crossman was not without feelings, even though this war, run it seemed by incompetent commanders, had done its best to drive them out of him. As he passed one regiment he saw that many of the soldiers had cut the sleeves from the greatcoats of dead men and had stuffed them with straw to use as leggings. He pitied their poverty. They had hay and straw bolstering their now brick-coloured tunics, which time had worn thin and filled with holes. With the cold and the shortage of water no one washed any more. Everyone had lice and fungus complaints.

Officers were almost indistinguishable from rank and file. Lace and gold trimming had completely vanished from one officer’s uniform as he stood with arms folded, shivering under a ragged turban he had obviously bartered from a Tartar or a Turk. Most of the boots were cracked and split. Cavalry troopers had missing spurs, or none at all. Facings were unrecognizable: their former hues had been bleached, drained from them, dirtied, until they were either colourless or some brownish shade with no meaning or purpose any longer.

Crossman’s thoughts were on this subject many an hour. Something had to be done about the unforgivable lack of warm clothing. Supply ships had been lost in storms, the Commissariat was unyielding in its passion for paperwork which delayed further shipments, the opening of stores already in the Crimea, and the distribution of badly-needed replacement uniforms, most of which had been worn constantly since leaving Britain over a year ago.

How can we continue in this manner, he thought, allowing men to die for want of a pair of socks? It was almost as bad as that. These terrible conditions were exacerbated by the total absence of wood for fires. Not only was the army underclothed, it could not keep itself dry and warm. With command of the Black Sea the British Navy could have shipped in cordwood from the Mediterranean. Two or three shiploads could have kept the army in fires for the whole winter! Yet nothing was done, despite the protestations of junior officers, and some senior ones.

To cap it all, there was the lack of shelter. Worn, torn and leaking tents from another era were in most cases the only cover for most of the British troops. There were supposed to be replacements around, but where were they? And would they ever be released?

None of this applied to the French, who had erected huts, had good supply lines and who ate hot food. It was a pity Lord Raglan disliked his French allies so much, or he could have taken something from their example. The French might well have been on a Riviera holiday, compared with the British, who were in Hell.

Most British officers, as well as their men, would have agreed that the war was being managed by fools. Yet battles were being fought and won, against massive odds, and possibly for the first time junior officers, NCOs and private soldiers were taking the initiative. They had had to, for it was missing from headquarters. More than one soldier grieved the passing of a commander-in-chief like Lord Wellington. Happily it seems to be a fact of army life that whenever there is gross incompetence at the top ingenuity rises up from the bottom to counter it.

The six returning saboteurs were billeted in a hovel in Kadikoi, a small village just north of Balaclava. This area had now been populated by sutlers. They were in the main itinerant merchants, traders, riffraff, gentlemen travellers and sightseers (though not so many of those since the weather had turned bad), oxen handlers, camel owners, several prostitutes and their masters, entertainers, anyone in fact hoping to make a penny out of a war in stalemate. Along with these there were the usual camp followers – wives and others – who trailed after an army on campaign. The collection of makeshift stalls and huts set up by Greeks, Egyptians, Bulgars, Tartars, and a score of other nationalities was known amongst the troops as Vanity Fair – or Donnybrook to the Irish – and if there was any small coin left out of one’s meagre army pay, and that soldier was prepared to trudge along the trammelled and troughed track over the Col, it could be spent here on food and drink, whatever. Prices were high though, and money was scarce. It was a long way to go to be screwed out of hard-earned tuppences for the sake of a weak beer and unleavened bread.

Some of the stall owners greeted the six, especially Wynter, who was well known to several of the young and old whores prepared to freeze their nether regions for a ha’penny.

‘Hey, Harry-boy, you come see Mary tonight, yes?’

‘I’ll be there, sweetheart,’ answered Wynter. ‘You keep the blanket warm for me.’

Lance-Corporal Peterson spat on the ground in front of Wynter.

‘I wonder it don’t break off, like an icicle,’ she observed, nodding down.

Wynter rose to the bait. ‘At least I’ve got one to break off,’ he snorted. ‘That’s your trouble. You wanted to be a man and you ain’t. If you was, you’d know it’s worth a bit of cold.’

‘At least I’m not wasting away, like you men.’

Most the six had lost weight over the last several months: Peterson alone had filled out. When she had first joined Crossman’s peloton she had been a skinny young maiden disguised as a youth, a brilliant sharpshooter but with little else to offer. Most of those close to her now knew her secret, but two of her superiors, Crossman and Major Lovelace, were prepared to overlook it, she having proved her worth. The third, a Lieutenant Pirce-Smith, was new to the world of the spy and saboteur. He was so far ignorant, and kept this way.

Now Peterson had become a burly woman, her beardless chin and cheeks standing out among the hirsute faces of her companions, her small bosom, squashed almost flat by a now extra-tight coatee, normally hidden by the voluminous fur coat she had acquired. Why she put on weight was a mystery to herself and others, since she ate the same fare and underwent the same exercise. It was one of those quirks of nature. Wynter put it down to the selfishness of the female gender. He said she grew large by drawing on the fat of her fellow soldiers, somehow, by the use of Eastern magic.

‘You’re workin’ us!’ he accused her. ‘You bought somethin’ from some Afghani faker. I bet you’ve got a monkey’s paw stuck in your haversack. I’m watching you, Peterson.’

Peterson was no longer overawed by soldiers like Wynter, a conniving, cunning and essentially lazy man who had to be spurred into action, but once there was a crafty and useful tool for Crossman. Once upon a time she had hated men, having tried to make her living as a female carpenter in civilian life, but driven out by the prejudices and stupidity of males who saw their livelihood threatened and their territory being invaded by a wench. Now she simply despised most of them. Major Lovelace she treated as a god, but with the distant reverence of a polite member of a religious group, someone who was not so much a believer as a person willing to go along with others for the sake of being a member. In Fancy Jack Crossman she recognized a man who was prepared to accept her for what she could do rather than for what she was. She admired his sense of fairness, expediency and his powers of leadership.

But for the most part she considered herself better than most men, tougher in spirit, stronger in endurance and stamina, more able to withstand hardships and cold, certainly more able with a weapon, and only on occasion lacking slightly in the physical strength needed to lift a cannon out of a rut, or overcome an enemy with her bare hands alone. At such times she would rather die than look to a man for assistance. So far she had managed to escape having to haul cannons and she was never without a knife to hand.

‘It’s not a monkey’s paw,’ she told Wynter this time, as they entered the hovel. ‘It’s the Hand of Fatima. I’ve got it hidden. Soon you’ll be nothing but a walking skeleton, rattling along, all loose bones. It’s the power of the curse, Wynter, you poor fool.’

Wynter stopped short, so that Yorwarth ran into the back of him. They clashed heads. Yorwarth growled, ‘Watch it, you sorry arse,’ but, pushed on by the man behind, tramped to his cot in the corner of the room.

The reason Wynter was disturbed was because he had only been joking, or half-joking, but Peterson’s words had a ring of authenticity about them. Wynter had heard the phrase before, from the lips of Egyptian stall owners who sold slim pancakes they called ‘Fatima’s Fingers’. The Hand of Fatima and the Evil Eye had been imported to the Crimea by Moslem immigrants. The phrases were not understood by the British soldiers, and subsequently remained boxed in mystery and dusted with menace. Peterson’s words were enough to send an icy streak down the back of the sock-headed Wynter, who was superstitious and believed in ghosts, magic and all other mysteries of life and death.

‘That ain’t legal,’ whined Wynter at Peterson, pulling off his tight headgear with difficulty. ‘I’ll see the general. You can’t use gypsy curses in the army.’

‘You’ll see no one,’ said Crossman. He sniffed. ‘When are you going to take a wash, Wynter? Look, you’re dropping fleas.’

‘We all stink, why does everyone pick on me? Everyone picks on me. You can’t use curses like that. It ain’t legal. I’ll . . .’ He changed his mind on meeting Crossman’s eye. ‘I’ll do somethin’ of my own. I’ll use my pet rat on you. You wait, Peterson. You won’t be able to go to sleep peaceful in your cot.’

‘That’s right, get a rat to do a rat’s work,’ said Gwilliams, coming in last but one. ‘That’s right. Anyway, we ate your rat before we went out – remember?’

Wynter remembered. They had run short of meat and Gwilliams had cut the head off the rat Wynter had tamed and roasted it. Fury rose in his breast, for the indifference shown to himself and the lack of mercy shown his rat.

‘An’ you can shut up, too. That rat was my property. You stole my property, you did. Bloody Yankee-doodles. Bloody civilians. Everyone picks on me. Who’s next, eh? Who’s next?’

The last to come through the doorway was Yusuf Ali, a man so formidable in physical appearance, being large, rotund, but without an ounce of fat on his powerful frame, further moist words dried to dust in Wynter’s mouth. He had once seen a seemingly unarmed Ali slit a man’s throat in a split second, the killing stroke visible only by the flash of the knife which had appeared from nowhere, and subsequently disappeared after being wiped on the dying man’s chest, before he hit the ground. In some lights Ali might be mistaken for a jolly uncle in colourful waistcoats, pantaloons and floppy boots. In others for the heartless demon of the lamp. Wynter was terrified of him and turned without another word, to throw himself onto the cot he now shared with Gwilliams, they both being spare, wiry men and beds being short in the hovel.

Jack Crossman went straight away up the uneven stone stairs to the room above, where he knew he would find Major Lovelace. The major was sitting on the edge of his timber-frame bed trimming his beard. In contrast to some of the less fortunate officers at the Crimea, the major was clean, smart and well-fed. He was not, however, one of the princely group who had more money than was good for them. He was not one of those whom Crossman despised for their thoughtlessness and arrogance.

Those were officers who had hampers sent from England, taking up hold space on ships which should have been carrying the much needed supplies. Those with chests full of dress uniforms, civilian shooting suits, Runciman boots, black dancing pumps. Those who stepped out of a Sunday morning in tweeds, going for a brisk walk over the Russian landscape with hardly a care in the world, almost as if they were on their family estate back in Britain.

Some of them even imported their eccentricities. One habitually wore a fez and carried a walking stick.

Major Lovelace, though possessing a normal young man’s vanity, was not a popinjay. He was dedicated to the gathering of information and the surreptitious destruction of the enemy’s property. In order to carry out such work he often had to resemble a Tartar workman or farm hand. Off duty, he liked to be clean and reasonably smart.

Lovelace looked up from admiring himself in his mirror.

‘Well, how did it go?’

‘We destroyed a small arsenal in Star Fort. You must have heard it go up?’ The two men were on familiar terms for a lowly sergeant and a field officer. It was not due to the fact that they had both attended Harrow which was responsible for this, but because the intimate, devious and insidious nature of their work made a detached and formal relationship impossible.

Lovelace smiled. ‘I think we heard something, amongst the boom and blast of cannon and mortar.’

‘Sorry, I forgot there was a bombardment today. Yes, you’re right, the explosion would have been just another bang from here. Well, we did it all right. No one left behind, either. Look,’ for a moment he almost called Lovelace by his Christian name, but then stopped short of this leap towards unthinkable familiarity, ‘can I speak to you about a problem?’

‘Of course,’ Lovelace put down his scissors, ‘that’s what I’m here for.’

‘I don’t like having this man Gwilliams in the peloton.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Where do I start? He’s an American . . .’

‘He says he’s Canadian. Says he’s spent a lot of time below the border, in the west, but he has Canadian citizenship. That makes him loyal to the queen. Anyway, you’re not prejudiced against Americans, are you? You seem to like that correspondent for the New York Banner. Jarrard.’

‘I know an American accent when I hear one. He didn’t just pick that up while he was travelling. He’s American. He’s a civilian. I’m not prejudiced against any man’s nation. And Rupert Jarrard’s different: I don’t have to take him out into the field.’

‘Gwilliams was a corporal in the Canadian marines. He’s got his discharge papers to prove it. Now he’s one of the official army barbers. You know Colonel Hawke proposed him for our merry band of saboteurs? He said a barber must be good with a razor,’ he drew the blunt edge of the one in his hand across his throat, ‘and that will make him invaluable on assassination missions, now that our Irish-Indian Thug, Clancy, has unhappily drowned himself and taken his skill with the knotted cord to his watery grave with him.’

Crossman realised this man Gwilliams told different stories to different people.

‘That may be so, sir,’ Crossman was growing frustrated, ‘but Gwilliams is not in the marines now. I have no control over him. Oh, he hasn’t done anything terrible yet, but I don’t want to find myself in a position in an emergency where I need instant and immediate response to an order only to have him blow a wet raspberry at me. The man’s positively menacing. And he upsets the others with his continual bragging about the famous characters he’s supposed to have shaved – Kit Carson, Henry Wells and Bat Robertson.’

Lovelace’s eyes opened wide. ‘Never heard of any of them, myself. Who on earth is Bat? Does he play cricket? Or does he clear belfries of flying vermin?’

‘Neither. He was a criminal and is now what they term a lawman – and, I understand, well known to citizens of several isolated settlements of the American hinterland. Kit Carson was an army scout whose exploits caught the imagination of the ordinary populace. Henry Wells is the main founder of a new and rapidly growing stagecoach line which links the continental towns of North America. You would have to read some of these pamphlets Gwilliams waves under everyone’s noses. They have titles like The Cowardly Killers of Sheriff Dan Skerrit and Who Shot Black Jake of Cutler’s Creek? Jarrard used to write them at one time, before he landed a newspaper job. He said he made most of them up.’

‘They sound a little lurid for my taste. And this fellow Robertson – one can be both criminal and a policeman?’

‘According to Jarrard, one rarely becomes a lawman in the American west without first becoming an outlaw. The latter seems to be a prerequisite for the job of thief-taking and peacekeeping. Something about being one to know one. Apparently the lines are fuzzy between the areas of employment in any case. Ordinary decent American citizens, like Jarrard, distrust both outlaws and lawmen. And politicians, of course, but I think we share that bias with them. Jarrard also has grave misgivings about Gwilliams by the way. He speaks of him as “a low reprobate” and untrustworthy.’

‘I think there’s a little bit of the green-eyed monster in Jarrard. He’d like to be in this war too, but he has to remain an observer, looking in from the outside. I think he’s jealous that we’ve taken on Gwilliams. Now look, sergeant, none of the people in your peloton are entirely palatable creatures. They’re all in there because there’s something unsavoury about them, all except Peterson, and we know why the regiment wanted to get rid of her.’

‘Her small stature,’ replied Crossman, diplomatically.

‘Precisely.’

Lovelace began to put on his uniform, while Crossman, actually exhausted after his mission into Sebastopol, lay on his commander’s bed and locked his hands behind his head for a pillow.

‘Don’t get too comfortable. You’re coming to see the general.’

Sergeant Crossman was just expostulating when Lieutenant Pirce-Smith, the second-in-command, walked through the door. Both the men in the room could see by his face that he was dreadfully shocked. The sight of an unkempt sergeant lying on a bed, while a major stood beside it, had stunned him, robbed him of speech.

Lieutenant Pirce-Smith had recently replaced the late Lieutenant Dalton-James, but only physically. In all other respects, from their hyphenated names to their immaculate dress, they were twins. Not soulmates, for they appeared to share the same soul, though one was now dead and the other walking God’s earth exactly in the other’s footprints.

‘I was just telling the sergeant that Colonel Hawke wished to see all three of us at our convenience.’ He turned to Crossman. ‘Which as you know, sergeant, means now. So get your dirty feet off my blankets and if I were you I’d change those stinking socks before we go.’

‘These stinking socks, sir, are all I have.’

‘Then borrow a pair of mine, man, but wash them before return, or you’ll get a laundry bill.’

The colonel was as usual buried beneath a pile of paperwork. Hawke – known by many as Calcutta Hawke due to the fact that his mother was an Indian lady and wife of an East India Company man, though in fact he had been born in a small country cottage in Surrey – had taken over from General Buller. ‘A hawk for a bull,’ Jarrard had said. ‘It’s extraordinary how many men take on the attributes of their names. Buller was short-sighted, Hawke is keen-sighted. Or reputed to be.’ Hawke was lean, with iron-grey hair at the temples. Men termed him a handsome devil and women were known to be afraid of him. His office, and bed, were in a Tartar barn at the bottom of a pleasant slope, beyond which was a peach tree orchard. He greeted the two officers first and then turned to Crossman.

‘Been out on a fox hunt, eh? Remind me.’

‘Star Fort, colonel,’ said Crossman, knowing the colonel was perfectly aware of his mission. ‘One of their arsenals.’

The colonel’s eyes crinkled at the edges as he narrowed them in approval. ‘Well done.’ He then turned to Pirce-Smith. ‘Invaluable soldier, the sergeant. Speaks Russian now, eh? And pretty good at French and German, I understand. Comes of a fine education, somewhere, which he won’t tell me about.’ He paused to stare at Crossman, before adding, ‘In the meantime, I want to get rid of a general.’

Crossman’s heart sank. He had a strong suspicion that he was going to be ordered to do something quite unpalatable. It was not so long ago he had been ordered to shoot a traitor, someone from their own side, a British officer. It had not been a pleasant mission by anyone’s judgement. Crossman was not as cold and ruthless as at least two other men in the room. Pirce-Smith he did not know at all, but he guessed that the lieutenant was a kitten compared with Lovelace. The major had not been available for the mission, or Crossman would never had had to commit murder, that being the proper name for an assassination. Lovelace would have done it without a qualm, in the name of duty and patriotism. There was, Crossman supposed, nothing wrong with being a patriot. What worried him were the precedents they were setting for the future.

‘A general?’ he repeated, bleakly. ‘I hope you are not asking me to shoot one of our generals, sir?’

Pirce-Smith said, ‘You forget yourself, sergeant.’ Hawke waved a hand at the lieutenant. Then to Crossman, he said, ‘He is one of our generals, but he’s a thorn in my side. I almost didn’t need you. He was hit by a Russian sharpshooter while out riding the other day, but the damned fool only struck him in the hand.’ The colonel continued. ‘They took off two fingers with a bread knife, but he managed to avoid infection, and there’s no gangrene, so he’s walking around again.’ The colonel paused, as if all present should contemplate the vagaries of life. How could fate be so cruel as to let his enemy get away with a clean flesh wound? ‘Yes, bread knife, eh?’ The regimental surgeons were down to using whatever tools were available for their amputations and various sorts of kitchen knives were being used in the butchers’ tents where the operations took place. ‘No, what I want you to do is to spy on the beggar. General Enticknap. Just keep me informed as to what he’s up to, what he’s saying to people, that sort of thing.’

‘Is this – well, I mean, for the general good of the war?’ Hawke stared at him again, this time the narrowed eyes were not commendatory. He knew exactly what Crossman was saying. He had been told that there had been the same sort of disapproving tone and manner when General Buller, the previous head of Espionage and Sabotage, had ordered Sergeant Crossman to assassinate a traitor. The problem was the sergeant was always seeking moral justification for his actions. He failed to see what the colonel saw – that this was war. Lord Raglan was much the same, possibly worse. Always seeking to keep things gentlemanly and honourable, instead of looking to expediency.

Lovelace broke the silence. ‘In a sense,’ he said to Crossman, ‘it is for the general good. General Enticknap is a blocker and a fusser. He blocks plans just for the sake of it. He fusses over details. Forgive me, sir,’ he said to Hawke, ‘but to speak freely, if I may, General Enticknap has the mind of a bank clerk. Give him ts to cross and is to dot and he is a happy man. Given a plan of attack with a reasonable chance of success and an acceptable percentage loss of men, he worries, and frets, and eventually decides to veto it when Lord Raglan asks for a vote in that peculiar democratic way he has of shrugging off responsibility.’ Lovelace paused, before adding, ‘In short, General Enticknap is lengthening the war and costing the lives of soldiers who die in the trenches of disease, enemy shelling and the cold. The sooner we force an all-out attack the better, and then we can all go home.’

‘You’ve got that barber fellow,’ said Colonel Hawke, turning from Crossman and assuming that Lovelace’s speech was enough for any man to nod his head in agreement. ‘Use him. Get him into the staff officers’ dwellings, cutting hair, shaving, that sort of thing. Men say things with a barber around that they wouldn’t tell their mothers. A barber is like a valet, invisible after a while. You don’t notice him. Get Gwilliams in there, in Enticknap’s little circle, and see if we can get something on him. That’s all, sergeant. Well done, on the fox hunt. I expect you’re looking forward to the next one, eh? That’s the stuff.’

Crossman saluted and left the room, as the colonel was saying, ‘Now, lieutenant, I’ve been meaning to have a chat with you. You can stay, Lovelace. Nothing you can’t hear . . .’

Crossman walked the long mile back to Kadikoi feeling grim. He was certain that an animosity, a vendetta possibly, existed between Colonel Hawke and General Enticknap, and that he, Crossman, was being used as a secret weapon in this personal war. Lovelace had not helped by intervening. Crossman was sure the major had only done so as a diplomatic move to keep the peace, for there was no doubt who would have lost such an encounter. Crossman knew that Lovelace valued him, did not want to lose him, and would rather he swallowed his principles. He could of course neglect to tell Gwilliams to spy on Enticknap, but the efficient Lovelace would smoke that out in a very short time.

Since there was little he could do about it now, Crossman tried to put the whole thing out of his mind. It was one of those unusually bright days that appear as if by magic in the middle of January. For some reason the guns had stopped firing. It gave the scene a false air of tranquillity and hopefulness, for there would be men dying in the trenches: if not by a sharpshooter’s bullet, a victim of the elements, melancholy or some dread infection of the body. Yet Jack Crossman could not help but feel lifted, despite his dissatisfaction with those who ran the army. Columns of smoke were curling up from the hills behind the battle area: crofts perhaps, or even hovels. It didn’t matter. They were signs of normal life. They were not the black choking smoke of cannons, but white smoke from farmhouses lucky enough to have stockpiled wood for the winter.

A girl, a young woman, came down the track on his left, heading for the edge of Balaclava harbour. In front of her she ushered a flock of complaining geese. Crossman knew the goose girl by sight. He had seen her several times, passing