Hope - Lesley Pearse [225]
A rumour came that Menshikoff, the Russian General, was dead, confirmed a day or two later, and there was jubilation that this would end the war. But the Russians kept firing their guns, the wounded kept coming, and now the talk changed to an all-out assault on the town. The general belief was that if gunfire alone couldn’t make Sebastopol crumble, then it would have to be done with bayonets.
Hope shuddered at the thought, for hand-to-hand fighting would mean even more carnage. Meanwhile, newspapers sent from home told her that Lord Cardigan had arrived back in England to a hero’s welcome. She could hardly believe what she read – that his picture was in every shop window, his biography in every newspaper. They’d even copied his woolly jacket and called it a cardigan.
This was the man who had lived on his yacht while his men were shivering in tents up on the plain and their horses had no shelter at all. When the horses were dying of starvation and the Commissariat had said there was no transport to get forage to them and he must either collect it himself or bring the horses down to feed, Cardigan had refused to do either. He stubbornly insisted on keeping his men and their horses ready for a Russian attack. Troopers had to watch the horses trying to eat bridle straps and each other’s tails as they stood knee-deep in mud, the bitter wind whipping their emaciated bodies. The troopers couldn’t even shoot them to put them out of their misery as Cardigan had given an order that shooting was only for broken bones.
Sometimes the horses took three days to die, lying in the mud in agony, for no one dared defy Cardigan and shoot them and run the risk of a flogging. Yet the people back in England thought this pompous, cruel and self-serving ass was a hero.
Hope knew the real heroes of this war were still here, lice-ridden, thin and weary, battling it out in the trenches, or lying in a vast hospital ward in Scutari with missing limbs.
As each day passed, Hope saw that the doctors in the main reception ward were becoming stretched to breaking point with the sheer volume of wounded, and her frustration grew. As Angus had pointed out, the orderlies could easily take care of the men on her ward, but try as she might, she couldn’t gain permission to leave them to it and go and help with the recently wounded.
The baffling thing was that she couldn’t find out who was so intent on keeping her out. She could see in the weary faces of all the doctors that they wanted her help, but to a man they stubbornly said they’d had orders that only recognized army personnel were to work in acute wards.
In early May, Hope had arrived on her ward at six in the morning and by eight she had finished all her duties. Regular doctors’ rounds were a thing of the past now that the hospital was so frantically busy, but having found one patient, a Pole, with an infected wound, she went looking for a doctor, leaving the orderlies doling out the porridge for breakfast.
Once through into the main hospital she found a scene very reminiscent of her first day here. It was chaos – there had clearly been a huge influx of men at the same time. Men brought in on stretchers had been placed on the floor because there were no more free beds to put them in, every field dressing she glanced at was bloody, men were vomiting on the floor, others were writhing and screaming with pain. Almost all of them had blackened faces from gunpowder.
Four surgeons were hard at work in the smaller room off the main ward, removing bullets and shells and amputating limbs, and assistants were giving chloroform. But most of the orderlies clearly had no idea what they were supposed to do.
Hope hesitated for a second or two. She knew that obeying orders counted for everything in the army, even to the point of insanity like the fateful Charge of the