An officer wheeled round and fired his revolver in the air, whereupon a dead Russian came toppling from the parapet with a fearful thud almost at Denis's feet. But the fierce fellows struggling for the biscuits took no notice of either incident. Stained with powder, caked with blood, bearded, tattered, torn, they fought with their rough good-humour, for their first food since the night before, and with their mouths full rallied each other on their appearance.
"You ain't fit for Birdcage Walk," panted one. "I'd like to let them nursemaids see you now!"
"It's about time I fired a round," said another, snapping caps to dry his nipple. His bayonet was bloody to the muzzle. A third was replenishing his pouch from that of a dead comrade, with grim apologies to the corpse. There was less levity among the officers. It was at this period that Lord Henry Percy twice scaled the parapet,--a simple slope to the enemy--in order to clear it with his sword. Each time a well-aimed fragment of rock threw him backward over; the second misadventure left him senseless where he fell; and Denis, who was now reloading, sprang with others to his assistance.
"Get yourself something to eat," said a brother officer of the fallen Colonel, brushing the private aside.
"Thank you, sir, I had plenty in camp. I'm waiting for the next charge!"
said Denis, with his cartridge between his teeth; and he bit off the end, dropped the powder into the muzzle of his piece, reversed and rammed home with no other thought in his heated head. He had been speaking to the gallant officer who had led him into his first action.
He did not realize that it was Ralph Devenish. He had forgotten that there was such a being in the world.
CHAPTER XXX
THE SANDBAG BATTERY
Denis had not long to wait. There was a sudden agitation at the northern shoulder of the redoubt. Shouts and shots rose in an instant to the continuous din of desperate combat, as the strokes on a gong ring into one. A sulphurous cloud brooded over the struggling throng, worked its way down the inner wall of the battery, and clung to the angle of the first embrasure; inch by inch the bearskins were overborne, and between them pressed the cross-belts and the infuriate sallow faces in the peaked caps. Just then Denis saw a handful of his comrades, not actually in the path of the Russian avalanche, forming for a flank attack upon the intruders; in an instant he was one of them, and in another they had leaped upon the enemy with ball, butt, and bayonet. The Russians were pinned against the wall of the work. Those whom they had been driving rallied and drove them. Murderously assaulted in front and flank, the invading battalion turned and fled as they had come, leaving the ground thick with their dead.
Again Denis stopped to breathe. His bayonet was bent nearly double; he put his foot in the crook, detached it with a twist, and was about to replace it with the bayonet of a ghastly Grenadier when he found the butt of his own piece plastered with blood and hair. So he exchanged muskets with the dead man, but wiped his hand without a qualm. He remembered whirling his Minie by the barrel when the bayonet bent; he could remember little else. Of his life before the fight, of his own identity, he had lost all sense; his ordinary being was in abeyance; he was a fearless and ruthless madman, smothered in blood and gasping for more.
Comparatively calm intervals he had throughout the fight, intervals in which for one reason or another, he was a momentary spectator of the scenes in progress all around him. It was these scenes that lived in his memory; even at the time they moved him more than those in which he had a hand. Once the Guards were fighting on the other side of the Sandbag Battery, between it and the long lip of the ravine; he had to wait for accounts of the battle long afterward to learn how they had got there, or what relation this phase of the action bore to the whole. At the time he was one of a handful of furious Grenadiers, fighting for their lives in the fresh fog which their powder had brought down upon them, and a moment came which Denis felt must be his last. He had tripped headlong over a dead Russian, and a quick Russian stood over him, aiming his bayonet with one hand while the other grasped the stock high above his head. But a British officer flung out his revolver within a few feet of the deliberate gray-coat, and it was the sensation of being shot from behind at such a moment that Denis anticipated more poignantly than that of being transfixed where he lay. The man fell dead on top of him. Anon he saw his friend the red-headed sergeant, being led captive down the hill by two of the enemy, suddenly wrest the carbine from one of them, club them both with it, and bayonet one after the other before they could rise. That also made Denis shudder. And yet he was biting a cartridge at the moment, having killed with his last, at arm's length, a splendid fellow who had grasped his bayonet while he poised his own.
Now the Sandbag Battery seemed out of sight, because it was quite another thing from this side, and now they were back in it, sweeping the Russians out once more. Denis did not know that the work had changed hands, half-a-dozen times before his company came into action, but even he saw the uselessness of a redoubt from which our soldiers could only see one way, and that in the direction of their own lines. The dead, indeed, now lay piled to the height of any banquette. No wilful foot was set on them. It was only the living for whom there was neither shrift nor pity on that bloody field.
This was the last that Denis saw of the Sandbag Battery; he was one of those who, led by a bevy of hot-headed officers, incontinently scaled it as one man, flung themselves upon the ousted enemy, and hunted him down-hill in crazy ecstasies. A hoarse voice in high authority screamed command and entreaty from the crest where the Grenadier colours drooped in the haze, deserted by all but a couple of hundred bearskins. It was as though the curse of the Gadarene swine had descended on this herd of inflamed Guardsmen. Down they went, if not to their own destruction, to the grave peril of the remnant up above. An officer in front of Denis was the first to recognize the error; he checked both himself and a rough score of the rank and file; and together these few came clambering back to the colours on the heights.
Breathless they gained the edge of the plateau, to swarm over as the Russians had so often done before them, and to find matters as grave as they well could be. The crimson standard and the Union Jack swayed in the centre of a mere knot of Guardsmen, already sorely beset by broken masses of the enemy. And even now a whole battalion was bearing down upon the devoted band, marching to certain conquest with a resolute swing and swagger, and yet with the deep strains of some warlike hymn rising incongruously from its ranks. In a few minutes at most the little knot of Grenadiers must be overtaken, overwhelmed, and those staggering and riddled colours wrested from them for the first time in the history of the regiment. But the officer whom Denis was now following was one of the bravest who ever wore white plume in black bearskin; and he had the handling of a team of heroes, some of whom had fought at his side against outrageous odds at an earlier stage of the battle.
"We must have a go at them, lads," said he; "we can keep them off the colours if we can't do more. Are you ready? Now for it, then!"
Denis had come to himself; here at length was certain death; and for the last moments of conscious life he had turned his back upon the battle's smoke and roar, while his eyes rested upon a clear and tranquil patch in the green valley of the Tchernaya, with tiny trees and a white farmhouse set out like toys. His thoughts were not very clear, but they were flying overseas, and as they still flew the officer's voice rang in his ears. So this was the end. A few Russians in loose order led the column; they were soon swept aside; and into the real head of the advancing multitude the twenty hurled themselves like men who could not die.
Denis never knew what happened to himself. He remembered his captain being bayoneted through the folds of his cloak, and cutting down two Russians at almost one stroke of his sword; he remembered longing for a sword of his own, as his piece was wrenched from his grasp by a dead weight on the bayonet. Yellow faces hemmed him in, their little eyes dilating with rage and malice; he remembered striking one of them with all his might, seeing the man drop, being in the act of striking another.... His fists were still doubled when he opened his eyes hours later on the moonlit battle-field.
A great weight lay across his legs, so stiffly that Denis thought the dead man a log until his hand came in contact with damp clothing. His own throat and mouth were full of something hard and horrible. His moustache and beard were clotted with the same substance. One side of his face felt numb and swollen; but his sight was uninjured, and the pain not worse than bad neuralgia. He got upon his hands and knees and looked about him.
The day's haze had vanished with the smoke of battle; it was a still and clear night, brilliantly lighted by the moon. The Tchernaya lay like a tube of quicksilver along the peaceful plain whereon Denis had gazed before the end; he could see a light in the white farmhouse. The heights of Inkerman twinkled all over with scattered weapons, and all over were mounds more like graves than bodies waiting for the grave. The Sandbag Battery rose sharply against the moonlit sky. Denis was not near enough to see the fearful carnage there, but he remembered what it had been quite early in the day, and he had only to listen to hear the groaning of the wounded who had yet to be disentangled from the dead in the shadow of those ill-starred parapets. The night was so still that a groan, nay, a dying gasp, could be heard even further than sight could penetrate through the rays of that glorious moon; and yet it was so light that the glimmer of lanterns round about the fatal battery was not at first apparent to the eye.
When Denis saw the lanterns, he got up and tried to stagger toward them, but collapsed at once, and had to lie where he fell until they came to him.
"Come on, boys, I see a Rooshian!" called Linesman, holding his lantern level with his shako.
"Wait a bit, here's one of our chaps," replied a voice that Denis knew.
"S' help me if it ain't our old sergeant. I'd know him by his ginger nob a mile off! And him in such a stew to get at 'em this morning! It's more'n ever I was, though I'd as lief be on that job as this ... ugh!"
Denis soon attracted their attention, and in a few more moments his original rear-rank man was stooping over him.
"Why, you're stuck through the face!" he cried, screwing up his own behind the lantern. "But the glue seems set, and don't you go for to move and melt it. There's a wounded officer wants to see you."
Denis whispered something inarticulate. It was his first attempt to speak.
"What's that? Yes, it's our captain," said the other, "and he's waitin'
to hear if you're alive. If you're sound below the teeth we can give you an arm apiece and take you to him in ten minutes. He's on'y in one o'
the Second Division tents."
Denis could ask no questions, but he had strength enough to act upon this suggestion, and in a few minutes he was among the lighted tents.
They put him vividly in mind of his first night at Ballarat. That was the last time he had spoken to Ralph Devenish until the morning of this dreadful day.
Now Ralph was lying in a military tent, a candle and a tumbler of champagne on the service trunk at his elbow, and an army surgeon on a camp-stool beside the bed.
"Is that the man you want to see?" asked the surgeon, but bundled Denis from the tent next instant, and made his conductors hold both lanterns to his face. "Don't you try to speak!" he went on to Denis. "Your wound has practically frozen; and we must keep it so as long as we can. Hold this wad to it till you come out. I oughtn't to let you go in--but he's worse than you."
The caution was repeated to Ralph; then Denis took the camp-stool, and the two were left alone.
"I am glad to have seen you again," murmured Ralph in hollow tones. "Do you know when I saw you last? I never thought of it till this moment. It was on the far side of the battery. Some fellow was going to bayonet you where you lay, and I--I was just in time."
Denis was nodding violently. He also had remembered. He stretched out a trembling hand. But Ralph drew his beneath the blanket.
"Wait a bit," he whispered. "You see, I never thought of its being you; but I'm rather glad it was. Badly hurt, I'm afraid?"
Denis shook his head.
"I am. Lungs. I'm afraid it's a case. Do you remember this early morning?"
The disfigured face made a ghastly protest. Devenish only smiled.
"It was a good sort of duel," he whispered. "And you see, you've won!"
He stretched out a deathly hand for the champagne. Denis reached it for him.
The surgeon stood in the opening of the tent, advanced a step, shrugged, and retired unseen. Ralph had not hidden his hand again. Denis held it in both of his.
"Ask her to forgive me," gasped the shallow whisper. "No.... I can't ask you.... I don't. But you might tell her--when it came to this sort of thing----"
And the deathly face lit up with such a smile as it had worn that morning, when Ralph Devenish waved his sword, and led his company to the succour of their comrades before the Sandbag Battery.
CHAPTER XXXI
TIME'S WHIRLIGIG
John Dent was a Yorkshire yeoman, born in the last years of the eighteenth century, of that hardy northern stock which is England's biceps to this day. As a very little boy he was sent to Richmond Grammar School, and there eventually educated beyond the needs of his vocation, which was to live all his days upon the land of his fathers. John Dent was quite prepared to do so when he had seen something of the world; and by thirty he had not only seen more of it than was usual in those times, but had fallen in love on his travels with a young Irish girl of a social station indubitably above his own. What was more important, the young Irish girl had fallen in love with John Dent, who was handsome, huge, and gentle, with no great sense of humour, but of tenderness and strength compact.