The Winter Soldiers Read online

  ‘There’s nothing mere about it. It’s a huge annoyance.’

  ‘But an irritation, none the less.’

  ‘I’m understating the effect it has on us, because I know that underneath all that muck you’re actually a gentleman. As one gentleman to another, I rather dislike having to beg favours, so I make light of what is in fact a very serious matter. This chiming is undermining morale. It eats away at our spirits. It stops us from sleeping properly, damn it, sergeant.’

  Peterson interrupted. ‘Let’s do it, sergeant. We owe the battalion something. It’s our regiment.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Sleep. He just wanted sleep. ‘Sir, tell the colonel I’ll do my best.’

  The lieutenant allowed himself a smile. ‘Thank you, sergeant. It won’t be forgotten. Now I must get that nag back to Captain Rushbrooke, he’ll be fretting. It’s his darling. Personally, I think it’s got a weak mouth, but since I’m not a field officer, nor ever will be, nor do I have the wherewithal as Rushbrooke does, to purchase a private mount, I must make do with loans and borrows. I’ll be seeing you, sergeant.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Crossman, and fell instantly asleep on Peterson’s cot.

  Peterson stared at her sergeant and shook her head. These men. They were her companions, but they had so little stamina. She ate some of her soup, left the rest on a warm stove, and then climbed the stairs to occupy the bed of Fancy Jack, the sergeant whom the rankers in the 88th suspected of being an officers’ spy (for why would gentry be in the ranks in the first place?) and the officers suspected of having been disgraced by some scandal and hiding in the ranks under an assumed name.

  It was true that ‘Crossman’ was a pseudonym, but it had not been necessary because of any scandal on the sergeant’s part, more that of his hated father, a libertine and whoremonger, who had impregnated Crossman’s mother and let her die in a workhouse, later removing the love-child and giving it to his wife to raise. Crossman had always believed his father’s wife to be his real mother, and continued to treat her as such, but his father was dead to him, though physically only a short distance away, a major in the 93rd Sutherland Highlanders. Until recently his half-brother, James, of whom he was very fond, had also been with the 93rd, but a sick James had recently returned to Scotland.

  When Crossman woke refreshed, much later in the day, he realized what he had done. It had been stupid of him, to make such a promise, but there was no going back on it now. A gentleman’s word and all that. Crossman gathered his peloton around him and told them what he had pledged to the lieutenant. ‘You can refuse to go, of course,’ he added. ‘I’ll leave that option open to you. Peterson and I will go. We’ve already said we would. But I can’t force the rest of you. Especially you, Ali, and Gwilliams. You’re not 88th. You have no obligation. This is not an official mission.’

  ‘I go,’ grunted the Turkish Bashi-Bazouk. ‘You go, I go.’

  ‘Thank you, Ali. I appreciate it.’

  Predictably Wynter said, ‘Well I ain’t goin’. An’ that’s flat. What do I owe them buggers on the Heights?’

  ‘Loyalty,’ suggested Peterson, cleaning her rifle. ‘Comradeship.’

  ‘Bugger those.’

  ‘I’ll go in this coward’s place,’ growled Gwilliams, a large stocky man with a magnificent auburn beard that looked as if it belonged on the chin of an Assyrian king. It was, like his hair, long and curly, and it shone like burnished copper in the sunlight. It jutted from his chin like an oblong wavy block and was cut square at the end. ‘As you say, it don’t mean nothin’ if you ain’t in a regiment, but I’m not one to shy away from a bit of excitement. Not like this mealy-mouthed lizard.’

  ‘You watch who you’re callin’ a lizard!’ cried Wynter, stung more by the word coward than the reptile epithet. ‘One of these days you’re goin’ to get my boot in your back.’

  ‘Any time, lizard.’

  Wynter turned away, his mouth sour-looking. There was still Yorwarth left. Private Dan Yorwarth was an unpredictable seventeen-year-old. Along with his family he had been transported to Botany Bay as a very young child, for the theft of a calf. His mother had died on the voyage to the antipodes, his father later, under the whip of an overseer on an Australian farm. Yorwarth had served his time and returned to Britain, where he found it impossible, as it always had been for one without a trade, to make a living, and so joined the army. God knew, if Sergeant Crossman didn’t, what resentment and hatred Yorwarth harboured for authority and the establishment. He showed nothing, gave nothing away and if anyone tried to probe, as Peterson had done, they were given short shrift. On the surface he seemed placid enough. Perhaps he had forgiven and forgotten, but Crossman doubted it.

  ‘How about you, Yorwarth?’ asked Crossman.

  ‘It’s my regiment too,’ he replied with sweet naivety. ‘The 88th. An Irish regiment. I ain’t never been to Ireland, but I’d like to go, some day. They say it’s very green.’

  ‘Like you,’ muttered Wynter.

  ‘Good.’ Crossman was pleased. ‘That’s enough of us. We can do it without Wynter.’

  ‘We can do anything without Wynter,’ said Gwilliams. ‘Fact is, things is done better without him.’

  But Wynter was not to be goaded into joining the party, if that was the intention. He remained determined to stay behind. When Lovelace returned, Crossman put the proposal to him. Lovelace shook his head. ‘I don’t know anything about this,’ he said. ‘I’m due to go up country today, so I’m leaving without knowledge of this unofficial fox hunt.’

  ‘Understood,’ murmured Crossman.

  The following morning Crossman and his peloton set out for the walk over the Col to the section in the British line held by the 88th. Ali was carrying the haversack with the explosives. The sturdy Turk’s head had almost disappeared down between his shoulders. He had a turtle-like ability to hunch inside himself when the wind was keen. The sun had disappeared again and it was a bitterly cold day. Clouds seemed to hang in the sky above the hills as if their hearts had stopped. There was no animation in the faces of the men: to smile or frown meant to crack the stiff skin on one’s face. Feet and hands were like blocks of stone, encumbrances to the walker. It would have been better had it been just a touch colder, thus numbing their body parts, for there was real pain at this temperature.

  The same lieutenant who had visited them at the hovel was waiting in the trenches. He indicated they should keep low as they came near. ‘Sharpshooter!’ he said. ‘Already killed one of the Flank Company early this morning, returning from piquet duty.’

  They did as they were bid. Once in the trench, ridged with hardened mud and frozen slops, Crossman asked to be shown the tower. Even as the lieutenant was standing on the banquette pointing it out, the bells chimed. In the stillness of the morning it sounded extraordinarily loud. However, so did the guns, from both sides of the siege, when they opened up after a few tolls of the bells, drowning them out.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ said the lieutenant. ‘The guns are louder. But the guns do not go on night and day, without respite. The chimes of that bell do.’ At that moment the guns ceased their barrage. The clock tower was still sounding. Crossman realized it was playing a tune.

  ‘There,’ said the lieutenant. ‘You hear that?’

  Crossman did indeed recognize the melody, as did Peterson, though Ali and Gwilliams remained ignorant. ‘“Widdicombe Fair”,’ Crossman said.

  ‘Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. It used to play a Russian tune, but they’ve adjusted the striking mechanism. They’re mocking us. This might be an Irish regiment, but there’re still many in the 88th who hail from England. I don’t know about you, sergeant, but I cannot stand being ridiculed. It makes me burn. None of us can bear it. Not the colonel, not the sergeant-major, not even the Irish – they know that if the Russians were aware of the regiment’s origins those clock tower bells would be playing “Tipperary”.’

  Crossman nodded. ‘Well, we’ll do our best. We’ll
wait here until dark and then go over there.’

  ‘Right. Some of the men have managed to forage some boxwood from the edge of the French camp. Would you like a hot drink, sergeant – and your men, of course? We can’t offer coffee, but there’s some tea from Major Swetterton’s private mull store.’

  ‘Thank you, yes, sir.’

  Crossman sipped his tea with relish. It warmed his hands as well as his belly. Two soldiers in front of him were about to go out on forward picquet duty. They were squibbing their rifles: firing small blank charges of powder to dry out the damp barrels. Misfires and hang fires were common when the rifles had been left unused for a time in the misty damp area of the trenches. Gwilliams warned the two men that the peloton would be coming past them, and hopefully back, later in the evening. The two Irishmen, one about seventeen, the other in his mid-twenties, promised not to shoot any shadowy figures on sight. Gwilliams, of Irish ancestry himself, chatted to the two men, finding they were uncle and nephew, from Cork, and that they’d joined the army because they were cold and hungry.

  ‘Sure, I’m still hungry,’ said the uncle with typical Irish humour, ‘and a lot colder, besides.’

  They went off after that, into the gloom of the falling twilight, though it was still afternoon.

  Once the darkness was complete, Crossman and his men set out too, over the rough ground. Yorwarth and Gwilliams were carrying carbines, slung over their shoulders. Crossman had his private weapon, a five-shot Tranter revolver. Ali carried a variety of pistols and knives. Only the sharpshooting Peterson carried a conventional British infantryman’s rifle, a 0.70 calibre long-range Minié which she would not part with, even on such an enterprise. It fired a ball the size of a man’s thumb and she had more faith in her rifle than a bishop in his God.

  They could see a lit cross out there in the darkness, hanging suspended on the edge of the night. This belonged to the church which stood in front of the clock tower. The cross was cut in the wall, making a window, with votary candles behind it. Normally such crosses were used to guide wayfarers, shepherds and travelling strangers to the church at night, should they be lost in the hills. Now, as Peterson pointed out, it was guiding a motley collection of saboteurs to their target.

  They passed through the inner picquets with whispered code words and over rocky and bouldered ground to the outer picquets. The two Irishmen had been talking in Erse to each other, but changed to English when the peloton arrived. They waved them cheerfully through, murmuring that they would tell their mothers if they didn’t return, but not their fathers in case they got the wrong man. It was meant to be a joke, but Crossman felt a sharpness enter his soul, thinking that in his case it would be the wrong woman. Crossman was pleased that Wynter was not with them, since he could never pass an Irishman or Scotsman without an argument of some kind. Without a doubt Wynter had Celt in him too, but he only needed a small excuse for a fight of some kind and if someone came from another country that was good enough for him.

  As they neared the Russian defences, crawling on their bellies, Crossman could see that the enemy was preparing for a night bombardment, moving guns from embrasures to barbettes. The former obviously offered better protection to the weapons and the gunners in daylight hours, but a hole in a wall has a narrow field of fire. Up on the platforms and firing over the wall they could turn their cannons in any direction, their protection being the darkness. Allied guns could return fire at the flash, but the chances of striking their target were greatly reduced.

  There was a picquet hole just in front of a low drystone wall, beyond which lay gravestones and wrought iron crosses. The two Russian picquets were talking to one another in growling murmurs. Crossman indicated by sign language that they should slip by the sentries, without disturbing them. It seemed a little harsh to send in Gwilliams with his razor, and Ali with his knife, to slit their throats, when all they were doing was guarding a church and clock tower. If his men were put at risk, of course, Crossman would have little compunction if they had to kill the Russians.

  His men slipped amongst the graves like shadows. The picquets were looking outward, still chattering, towards the British lines. Soon two parties went around the two ends of the church. On the far side it was peaceful and still. At this point the Russian line curved, to sweep behind both the church and the clock tower. The saboteurs were able to lever open the wooden door to the tower with the minimum of noise. Ali and Yorwarth drifted inside. It was their job to place and set the charges in and around the chiming mechanism itself. They had thought about blowing up the tower, but this would have been an unsure business.

  There were no sappers amongst the six: Ali was the explosives expert. The army in its wisdom had chosen its saboteurs by the cut of their character, rather than any talents and skills they might possess. This was the way the army did things. If you were a cook in civilian life, in the army you became a roughrider responsible for managing horses. If you were the son of a butcher, used to slaughtering livestock, you were put in the artillery. There were those who would have liked to think the army was all for increasing a man’s width and breadth of expertise, but their cynicism and actual belief in the recruitment service’s indifference to such matters as putting the best man in the right job was not misplaced.

  Just as Ali was about to ascend the tower’s spiral staircase the Russian barrage opened up. Howitzers, cannons and mortars brought the night crashing down around their ears. Flashes went along the flanks to either side of the group, and Crossman noted that there was a concentration of mortars behind the church, protected as it were, by the holy site itself. The Russian fire was of course quickly answered by the artillery from the British side. Shells burst overhead, raining hot pieces of metal over the area. No round shot was used, because of the idea that one did not destroy an ancient holy monument, while shells were essentially weapons which blew men to bits, not property.

  ‘You see that?’ said Yorwarth. ‘A whole bank of mortars!’

  Peterson was infuriated. ‘They’re not playing fair,’ she said. ‘We should do something about them.’

  ‘We’re here for the clock tower,’ Crossman reminded them. ‘We’ll report them when we get back, but we’re sticking to our original objective.’ He could see the disappointment in the faces around him in the flashes from the shells. ‘I know, I know,’ he said, acknowledging their expressions. ‘But deviations to laid plans are apt to gang aft a gley. Maybe we’ll come back another night.’

  Once the barrage had finished, Yorwarth and Ali entered the tower again, striding up the spiral staircase using a thin beam of light from a dark lantern to light their way. Crossman and the others kept watch below. The smell of gunsmoke was in the air and fumes drifted up the stairwell. It was as much as they could do to swallow and remain silent. The minutes went by. Suddenly the clock chimed, sending out its notes across the now black and still landscape.

  ‘Bloody “Widdicombe Fair”,’ muttered Peterson, as the last notes died away. ‘Damn me if they haven’t got a cheek.’

  ‘Just think of those two up there,’ Crossman reminded her, nodding towards the top of the tower. ‘It was loud enough down here.’

  Still the minutes continued to pass by, with no sign of Ali or Yorwarth. Crossman began to grow anxious. It was a delicate business, laying a charge, but there was a limit to the time it should take. Just when he was about to go up and see for himself what the matter was, Yorwarth arrived breathless at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Stuck!’ he announced, dramatically. ‘Ali. Stuck fast. Plugged in a hole up there.’

  ‘Have you lit the fuse?’ whispered Crossman.

  ‘Burning away.’

  Crossman ordered, ‘You three stay here. If it goes up, get back to the British lines. Don’t come looking.’

  Crossman snatched the blinkered lamp from Yorwarth’s hand and took the stairs three at a time, passing first one side chamber, then a second, to finally come to the belfry itself. There he heard the sounds of a struggle. He open
ed a shutter on the lamp from a slit to a wider beam and witnessed a backside and a thick pair of legs protruding from the ceiling. The corpulent Ali was wedged firmly, a round body in a square hole. The legs were windmilling as their owner struggled.

  ‘Ali,’ said Crossman. ‘Can you hear me?’

  The boards were thin, with gaps, and Ali could hear him perfectly well.

  ‘Stuck!’ grunted the Turk.

  ‘I can see that. Can you reach the fuse?’

  ‘No. Two metres away.

  ‘God in Heaven. Look, I’m going to hang on to your legs and try to dislodge you.’

  Crossman, who was taller than Yorwarth and able to get a better hold on the Bashi-Bazouk, gripped him round the knees and pulled. He lifted his own feet off the floor and swung there, like a monkey from a rope, for a few moments. Ali moved about two inches then stuck again. The trouble was, he was not fat in the ordinary sense, he was just large of girth. It was all muscle. There was nothing to give really, around his waist, it being firm and solid. Crossman knew they had about five minutes left to free the Turk and get out of the tower. The charge they had laid would not bring down the tower but it would go through several floors and ceilings, and both men were likely to be killed.

  Ali said, ‘Go, sergeant. Leave me.’

  ‘No.’

  Ludicrously, the quarter hour struck, and having heard the song so many times in the barracks, the names automatically went through Crossman’s head: Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davey, Dan’l Whiddon, Harry Hawk, Tom Cobbleigh. Crossman found himself wishing he had Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, along with Tom Pearse and his grey mare, to help unplug Ali from the hole. The notes of the tune were deafening. They rang in Crossman’s head even after the bells had silenced themselves. He tugged and twisted, pulled and wrenched, and finally heard a tearing sound, as Ali’s coat ripped apart and he came loose, crashing down on top of him. The pair jumped to their feet and rolled down the spiral staircase like a pair of manic balls.