The Winter Soldiers Read online

  ‘You saw an officer?’ Crossman knew that Pirce-Smith had no insignia showing. ‘What rank? Captain? Major?’

  ‘Who the Hell knows what rank,’ growled Reece. ‘You could see he was an officer by the way he was struttin’ around, throwing out orders like some oriental despot, like some damn potentate from a Chinee kingdom. I know an officer when I see one.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I also know ’em by their boots and trouser bottoms.’

  Crossman silently cursed Pirce-Smith. It was something Crossman had noticed too, at the outset, then let it slip his mind. The boots! Good riding boots of high-quality brown leather. Not the sort of boots a common soldier would wear.

  ‘He might have taken the boots from a dead Russian officer.’

  ‘These were English boots. I saw them plain enough through my spyglass. I’m not daft, man.’

  ‘No, you’re anything but stupid, Reece. Well, so we attack this group at dawn?’

  ‘They won’t be expecting us. They’re a bunch of slow tops. We saw their fire, first off – smoke curling up, see? They put it out, quick like, but by that time we had their measure. I rode out with two of my men and made it to a vantage point. When I got them in my spyglass one of them was still trying to stamp out the fire, while the officer strutted up and down, yellin’ at them and shaking his fist into their faces.’

  Something dawned in Crossman’s mind. The only man amongst his peloton who would be stupid enough to light a fire in enemy territory would be Lieutenant Pirce-Smith. Yet if he was the one remonstrating over the lit fire then something else was at work here. There was more to this than a clumsy error on the part of the peloton. Some deeper motive was responsible. Crossman could do nothing anyway, but go along with Reece’s plan of attack, and hope to salvage a victory from it.

  ‘I hope we’re going out with enough men,’ said Crossman, trying a little reverse psychology. ‘They might be stupid at spying, but if a patrol has been sent after us, you can be sure they’re sharpshooters.’

  ‘How many would you suggest?’

  ‘For five or six enemy? At least twenty. To be sure of success.’

  Reece shook his head. ‘Too many. I thought fifteen. This may be some ruse or other, to draw most of us away, so that a larger force can attack our base. Kershaw can lead fifteen men, you amongst them, while we remain on the alert here. This time you’d better prove yourself, sergeant, or I’ll be forced to do something with you. And I’ll want to know where your own group is hiding when you come back. It’s time we sorted things out between us, one way or another.’

  ‘Agreed,’ replied Crossman, promptly. ‘I can assure you, Reece, that you have my full cooperation on the matter.’

  Reece shook his head slowly. ‘God, I hate you sniffy-nosed toffs, I really do. But with more men we could really take control of this area. Turn it into a fortress. Then the bastards would just forget about us. They wouldn’t want to waste good men on bad.’

  Just before Crossman left the room, Kershaw entered with one of those cheerful, triumphant looks on his face.

  ‘Another deserter just come in,’ he said. ‘You want to see ’im, Reece?’

  Crossman’s heart sank to his boots. If this was another one of his men, sent in by Pirce-Smith, there might be problems. If not, then he would be from the right or left attack lines back at Sebastopol, which was equally disturbing, for he might conceivably have information about Crossman’s group. Not everyone in the army was as tight-lipped as Crossman, or Lovelace, would have wished. Orderlies and batmen were privy to conversations and had been around their masters so long they went unnoticed. It was the barber’s shop syndrome. Crossman waited to see who would walk through the doorway.

  It was not one of his own men. It was a soldier from the 47th Foot, or so his cap badge said. He stumbled into the room with a recognizable shade of blue about the lips which Kershaw, and others, had somehow missed. Crossman recognized it though. Reece, too, had noticed the man’s unsteady walk, and combined with the pallor of his complexion, this was enough to make him jump up from behind his table and yell for Kershaw.

  ‘Get him out of here!’ he cried.

  Kershaw looked shocked by the reaction from his leader and grabbed the man by the sleeve. ‘C’mon, fellah, you’re obviously not wanted here.’

  ‘Send him on his way,’ growled Reece. ‘Give him some food and water, but get him gone.’

  Once the man, who had spoken not a word, was out of the room, Crossman said, ‘He’ll be dead by morning.’

  ‘I think he knows it, too,’ Reece replied. ‘You could see it in his eyes. Must have been sleeping near a drain or something.’ It was a common belief that the main cause of cholera was inhaling bad smells. ‘Goddamn, you would think these people would know cholera when they saw it, by this time. I don’t want no epidemic runnin’ through this farm. We’ve been free of it, till now. A few bowel problems, but nothin’ so serious.’ Subconsciously, he wiped his mouth, as if to breathe the very air of a cholera victim was deadly.

  Crossman, sensing that tonight was a watershed in their relationship, turned at the door and asked Reece one last question.

  ‘Tell, what really made you run?’

  Reece looked up. ‘From the army? You want to know, don’t you? Not just curiosity, is it? You need to know what makes men like me twist and turn. Well, I’ll tell you, sergeant. I asked the question that no soldier asks. That no soldier even thinks about. I started asking what this war is all about. When you do that you find precious few answers. So far as I could find out, it wasn’t about anything at all, sergeant. Oh, I got a lot a tangled bits about Russia taking over Turkey, and the rest of us being worried about it, but in the end it seemed to be about nothing more than a few princes and political men playing a game . . .’ He pointed to the chess board on his desk. ‘Then I asked myself the next question a soldier shouldn’t ask himself, but which isn’t possible to avoid, once you’ve asked the first. I said, Reece, do you want to die for all this mess? Do you want to freeze to death in a bloody ditch thousands of miles away from the land of your birth, for men like Raglan, men who spend their whole lives grinding you under their heels?’ He paused before adding, ‘Naturally the answer was no. What other answer could there be?’

  What other answer indeed. Reece was quite right. A soldier did not ask questions about why he was fighting. Most had absolutely no idea and were not much interested in knowing. A soldier earned his pay by obeying orders. He got drunk at the canteen, enjoyed the comradeship the army had to offer, went whoring or home to his wife, and complained about his daily fare of salt beef and biscuit. He knew he looked good in uniform, be he the ugliest brute ever to leave a farm. A soldier’s pride came from belonging to a regiment, elite or otherwise, with a glorious history. Every regiment had one or was determined to get one. What and who you were fighting for was, for the most part, irrelevant. Welsh, Irish and Scots soldiers were as loyal and fought as ferociously for their officers as did English soldiers. Nationalism was not a question. Regiments were formed of recruits from all four corners of the British Isles, along with a sprinkling of other nationalities. It always seemed remarkable to Crossman that men from these four separate nations, three of them with a long history of being at odds with the fourth, should hold each other and their common will to win so precious.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ Crossman told Reece. ‘It’s not a pot of worms I would like to put my hand inside.’

  Reece gave him a resigned smile. ‘I don’t blame you, sergeant. I did put my hand inside, and now it’s stuck.’

  Kershaw was impatient to leave.

  ‘There’re not enough mounts for all of us. We’re on foot, so we got to go now, sergeant.’

  They set off over the countryside by the light of the stars. It was slow going. It was not so much the larger boulders which impeded them, as the fist-sized stones that made them stumble and fear for a broken ankle. Still, progress was made. Kershaw let the sergeant into a secret which Crossman had suspe
cted was the case all along.

  ‘Reece, he thinks this is your lot out here. He’s not stupid. I think so too. We think you’re workin’ under army orders, Sergeant Crossman.’ Kershaw grinned the whole time he made this speech, as if he were telling a humorous anecdote. ‘Oh, and by the by, if you’re thinkin’ of doing somethin’ you might like to know that Cartwright, on back of you, has a carbine pointed at you. He’ll let rip if you as much as look like runnin’ or doing anythin’ else unbecomin’ of a deserter from the British Army.’

  Crossman did not look behind him, knowing that Cartwright would indeed be there, loaded carbine at the ready.

  ‘I understand. But you’re both wrong.’

  ‘I hope we are, ’cause I quite like you, sergeant. If you are one of ’em though, I reckon you must be pretty galled. Fancy them lightin’ a fire! No wonder the officer was peeved. We’ll save someone from a floggin’, that’s sure.’

  ‘Save him how?’

  ‘By blowing out his lights,’ said Kershaw with another broad grin. ‘Not much point in floggin’ a dead man, is there?’

  At dawn the raiders were creeping along a gully which snaked up and above the place where Crossman had left his men camped. They emerged on a small plateau which overlooked a series of cliffs and caves. Beyond these geographical features, in the very far distance, was the deserters’ farm, sparkling in the morning frost. There was no movement around the caves. Kershaw trained a spyglass on the area.

  ‘I can see where they lit the fire,’ he told one of his cronies. ‘Maybe they’re all inside the caves.’

  ‘They must have left a sentry out,’ replied the man. ‘They can’t be that daft.’

  Kershaw took a look at the peaks surrounding the caves but could find no sign of a sentry.

  ‘We’ll go up there, on that cliff edge. When they come out of the caves, we’ll cut ’em down.’ It was a reasonable plan.

  The deserters found themselves nooks and crannies, with vantage points overlooking the caves in question. Kershaw posted two men at the rear, guarding the exit to the gully, in case they were attacked from that direction. There was no other way up onto the plateau, so Kershaw felt that his men were reasonably secure. Crossman sat leaning against a rock, observing the scene below. Cartwright remained at his back.

  The morning crept on. A weak sun came out, slanting directly into their eyes. Kershaw realized he had not taken the light into account and was at first a little upset at his own lack of foresight. However, they were looking downwards and the light was not a big issue. Still no one emerged from the caves, however, and it came to the point where even if their pursuers were all sluggards, they would have needed to leave their beds to relieve themselves or drink something. Noon eventually arrived. Kershaw knew he had come too late. ‘They’ve moved,’ he said. ‘We need to do a search. We’re still fifteen against six, so I don’t want you men to get jittery. We’ll go down to the caves and see if we can pick up their tracks.’

  The file of deserters returned down the gully, then used a goat track to reach the caves. Kershaw went first, peering into the darkness of the caves. His mistake was to assume the caves were empty and to be too easily satisfied of that fact, because in truth he could not see to the very rear of them. All he could actually see were three dark tunnels which wormholed into the soft rockface. Since his was a surprise attack, and there were no sentries posted by the enemy, his firm conviction was that any occupants of the caves would have come out long ago. He had no inkling that the whole thing was a trap and that he and his men had been lured to an exposed position with no cover at their backs.

  He called his men forward and as they stood there, contemplating the remains of the camp, a volley of fire came from within the caves. Muzzle-flames flared out of the darkness. The stink of gunpowder was coughed from within the tunnels. Four of the deserters dropped immediately, Kershaw among them. The others either stood stunned and helpless, or ran like game birds this way and that, looking for cover that was not there. One even ran towards the mouth of one of the caves and lost half his head to a bullet which came out to meet him. Then some began shooting, wildly. Two men lay prone on the ground, their training coming to their aid, but after discharging their weapons they had to come up to reload, and exposed themselves to fire again.

  One of those who stood shocked and gawking at the carnage was Cartwright. Crossman’s revolver was out in a flash and he shot the luckless man through the chest before Cartwright could gather his wits. Another of the deserters saw the incident and fired at Crossman. The round creased Crossman’s cheek. He turned to fire two shots at his attacker and missed with both. Ali came flying out of one of the caves at that moment and stabbed the man repeatedly in the back of the neck, until he fell with a groan to the ground. By this time three more deserters, one of them wielding a Highland Brigade broadsword, lay on the frosty ground. With ten of their number gone, within as many seconds, the others threw their weapons to the ground, yelling for quarter.

  Pirce-Smith emerged from a cave with smoking pistol in his hand. He was followed by a grim-faced Gwilliams. The others came out of the remaining two caves. ‘Corporal,’ said Pirce-Smith to Wynter, ‘bind the prisoners, one to the other, in a line.’

  ‘What with?’ cried Wynter, reasonably, looking round.

  ‘Haven’t you got any cord, man?’ asked the officer, irritably.

  ‘Me, I have cord,’ said Ali, retrieving his knapsack from a cave. ‘I make prisoners.’

  Once the deserters were secure, sitting in a roped circle, with bowed heads and Peterson guarding them, Crossman spoke with Pirce-Smith.

  ‘Whose idea was this plan?’

  ‘My idea, sergeant,’ snapped the lieutenant, defensively. ‘You disapprove?’

  ‘No. Not at all. I left you with the problem of drawing them out and avoiding a frontal attack. It was well devised. However, I thought the first shooting was a stupid act, especially since I’d been amongst the deserters less than twenty-four hours, but this was good. To divide and conquer. Simple but effective. You handled it well, sir.’

  ‘I don’t need your approbation, sergeant. And I take exception to being called stupid . . .’

  ‘I didn’t call you stupid, I said the incident was stupid. If you like to assume the mantle, do so. Can we leave it there, sir, and stop arguing amongst ourselves? I am still in charge of this fox hunt. You’re now back in the role of an observer. There’s still the matter of fifteen or sixteen deserters back at that farm. The odds have been considerably reduced now. We might well consider a direct attack.’

  ‘It’s still more than two to one.’

  ‘You forget, I know their dispositions now. I know the way their leader thinks. There’s one problem. They have mounts.’

  Pirce-Smith nodded. ‘Cavalry against infantry.’

  ‘I was thinking more that they could escape without our being able to follow.’

  At this moment the Bashi-Bazouk came over to shoulder the officer out of the way, saying, ‘I fix sergeant.’ Ali referred to Crossman’s cheek wound, which the Turk treated with a poultice of some healing plant he always carried with him. Crossman was told to press the poultice against the seared groove on his face, but this became tiring after a while and even though Ali remonstrated with him, he found he could not keep it up.

  Gwilliams was placed on sentry duty, along with Peterson. Yorwarth asked Crossman, ‘Do we go in and cut a throat or two, now?’

  ‘No, Reece’ll be on the alert when Kershaw and his men don’t return.’

  ‘What about setting fire to the place?’

  ‘They have a hostage. A Tartar woman. I’m certain Reece would let her burn. We shall post ourselves in two and threes around the farm. The source of their water, the well, is at least thirty yards from the farmhouse itself. Reece has ordered a bathtub to be filled with drinking water, but with fifteen men in the house, that won’t last long. Sooner or later they’ll have to attempt the run to the well. When they do, we’ll pick them off.
I’m hoping our first attack will cut them up enough to drain their confidence in their superior numbers.’

  He explained his plan to all those who were not on sentry duty.

  ‘We go in first as a complete group tonight.’ Crossman drew a plan of the farmhouse on the ground. ‘Here,’ he pointed with a stick, ‘is the room in which they normally congregate. Reece is usually in this one, next to it. We begin by pouring fire into the main room through the windows, hoping to wound as many as possible. We have to hit them hard and quickly, while they’re still wondering where their raiding party has got to. After a first furious attack, we split into three smaller groups and post ourselves at three separate points around the farm, but not so far apart that we can’t protect each other against a cavalry attack. Thereafter we wait until dawn and pick them off as and when they show themselves.’

  ‘What if they try to use the horses to escape?’ asked Pirce-Smith.

  ‘Then we hit as many as we can. There are not enough horses for all of them, so I’m hoping for a rift amongst them. Since they can’t all ride off into the night, the argument will at first be that they all stay and fight together. When this breaks down they’ll start fighting amongst themselves for the mounts, in order to escape. As I said before, they may decide to attack us using the horses. Some of them can’t ride at all. Others not well. They’re mostly infantry soldiers, though a few will be farm boys and used to horses of a kind. Any cavalry attack will not be well coordinated and our groups will be close enough to produce flank fire. Any questions?’

  Ali said, ‘Maybe they double ride? Two man to one horse?’

  ‘Maybe. If they think of doing that, many of them will probably get away. We can’t cover all possibilities. In which case, we shall continue to hunt them down. My hope is that without enough experienced riders they won’t be able to organize such a retreat.’