Hope - Lesley Pearse [200]
She felt his sense of guilt that he hadn’t been able to save more men, and his anxiety that this was surely the first of many more bloody battles.
‘It won’t be like that again,’ she assured him. ‘They’ll get things right by the time of the next battle.’
He opened his eyes and looked at her sadly. ‘I doubt it, Hope. There are too many obstacles. Now we are to lay siege before Sebastopol. But as yet there are no tents, and precious little in the way of provisions or medicine. You sailed past Sebastopol this morning. It isn’t a tiny place like Balaclava, it’s big and it’s fortified, bristling with cannons and Russians who will fight to the death to keep it.
‘Furthermore, all the supplies for the army will come in here, and the only way to get them to our boys at the siege is up that steep track on to the Heights. Easy enough now while the ground is dry, providing we’ve got horses or mules. But what about when the autumn rains come? Or in winter when it’s freezing? How will they get the wounded back here?’
‘It will be over by then,’ she said hopefully.
‘I doubt that,’ he said gloomily. ‘Not when the generals can’t even agree how and when to attack.’
On the morning of 27 October, Hope woke to find Bennett had slipped out without waking her. The Pride of the Ocean, which had been their home, had left for Scutari two weeks earlier, taking many of the wounded to the hospital. Now, until such time as they could find better accommodation, they had a tent.
It was pitched a few hundred yards from the hospital, behind the main street, and just far enough up the hill to be away from the filth and commotion of the quayside.
The small port now had more in common with Lewins Mead than the picturesque sparkling harbour that Hope had seen when she first arrived. The hundreds of wounded men might be gone, sent back by ship to Scutari, where rumour had it they would die faster than if they were left here on the quay. But a different, less understandable squalor had taken its place. Piles of unloaded goods littered the quayside because no one knew where to take them. Some of them were foodstuffs, and after a few days of the sun burning down, or rain soaking them, they rotted. Livestock brought in on ships were slaughtered and their entrails thrown into the water. Corpses often floated back into the harbour, bobbing up to the surface because the weights tied to them weren’t heavy enough to keep them down. Along with the gallons of slops created by the now vast number of residents, and the waste from horses, mules and oxen, the stench was overpowering and the water murky.
It seemed strange to Hope, who knew so little about army campaigns, that all those tens of thousands of troops which she had seen in Varna were now here in the Crimea, somewhere, but she didn’t know where or how close to the port. The cavalry were reported to be camping up on the plain above Balaclava. She’d seen a few of their men in the town, but she hadn’t seen Captain Pettigrew. She was terribly frustrated by being unable to speak to him about Nell. Nursing filled every minute of the day, but her thoughts kept turning to her sister, and she’d have given anything to have some sort of positive picture of Nell to help her overcome the endless horror she was subjected to daily in the hospital.
She knew that thousands of men had been marched around Sebastopol to lay siege before the town. She’d seen picks and shovels being carted up the track to dig the entrenchments, just as she’d noted the incredible amount of ammunition and cannons being hauled up that way. The French army were based in a place called Kamiesch Bay, which she understood to be along the coast nearer Sebastopol. She had no idea where the Turks had camped.
But even though there were far fewer wounded men, the hospital was almost as full as it had been on her first day at the port, only now most of the patients were cholera cases.
If the port of Balaclava was to have a motto, Hope thought it should be ‘Not Enough’. For they finally had beds at the hospital now, and bed pans, bowls and some