The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood Part 17

CHAPTER XI.

AFTER THE BATTLE.

The Battle of the Alma was won! Three short hours had sufficed to finish it, and by four o'clock the enemy was in full retreat. It was a flight rather than a retreat--a headlong, ignominious stampede, in which the fugitives cast aside their arms, accoutrements, knapsacks, everything that could hinder them as they ran. Pursuit, if promptly and vigorously carried out, would a.s.suredly have cost them dear. But the allies were short of cavalry; the British, greatly weakened by their losses in this hard-fought field, could spare no fresh troops to follow; the French, although they had scarcely suffered, and had a large force available, would do nothing more; St. Arnaud declared pursuit impossible, and this, the first fatal error in the campaign, allowed the beaten general to draw off his shattered battalions.

But, if the allied leaders rejected the more abiding and substantial fruits of victory, they did not disdain the intoxicating but empty glories of an ovation from their troops. The generals were everywhere received with loud acclaims.

Deafening cheers greeted Lord Raglan as he rode slowly down the line.

The cry was taken up by battalion after battalion, and went echoing along--the splendid, hearty applause of men who were glorifying their own achievements as well.

There was joy on the face of every man who had come out of the fight unscathed--the keen satisfaction of success, gloriously but hardly earned. Warm greetings were interchanged by all who met and talked together. Thus Lord Raglan and Sir Colin Campbell, both Peninsular veterans, shook hands in memory of comradeship on earlier fields. Few indeed had thus fought together before; but none were less cordial in their expressions of thankfulness and cordial good-will. They told each other of their adventures in the day--its episodes, perils, narrow, hair-breadth escapes! they inquired eagerly for friends; and then, as they learnt gradually the whole terrible truth, the awful price at which victory had been secured, moments that had been radiant grew overcast, and short-lived gladness fled.

"Next to a battle lost, nothing is so dreadful as a battle won," said Wellington, at the end, too, of his most triumphant day. The slaughter is a sad set-off against the glory; groans of anguish are the converse of exulting cheers. The field of conquest was stained with the life's blood of thousands. The dead lay all around; some on their backs, calmly sleeping as though death had inflicted no pangs; the bodies of others were writhed and twisted with the excruciating agony of their last hour. The wounded in every stage of suffering strewed the ground, mutilated by round shot and sh.e.l.l, shattered by grape, cut and slashed and stabbed by bayonet and sword.

Their cries, the loud shriek of acute pain, the long-drawn moan of the dying, the piercing appeal of those conscious, but unable to move, filled every echo, and one of the first and most pressing duties for all who could be spared was to afford help and succour.

Now the incompleteness of the subsidiary services of the English army became more strikingly apparent. It possessed no carefully organised, well-appointed ambulance trains, no minutely perfect field-hospitals, easily set up and ready to work at a moment's notice; medicines were wanting; there was little or no chloroform; the only surgical instruments were those the surgeons carried, while these indispensable a.s.sistants were by no means too numerous, and already worked off their legs.

Parties were organised by every regiment, with stretchers and water-bottles, to go over the field, to carry back the wounded to the coast, and afford what help they could. The Royal Picts, like the rest, hasten to send a.s.sistance to their stricken comrades. The bandsmen, who had taken no part in the action, were detailed for the duty, and the sergeant-major, at his own earnest request, was put in charge.

As they were on the point of marching off, General Wilders rode up. He had been separated, it will be remembered, from part of his brigade, and had still but a vague idea of how it had fared in the fight.

"I saw nothing of you, colonel, during the action. Worse luck I went with the wrong lot, on the right of the village."

"It is well some of the regiment escaped what we went through," said Colonel Blythe, sadly. "My left wing was nearly cut to pieces. I was never under such a fire."

"How many have you lost, do you suppose?"

"We are now mustering the regiment: a sorrowful business enough. Seven officers are missing."

"What are their names?"

"Popham, Smart, Drybergh, Arrowsmith--"

"Anastasius--my young cousin--is he safe?" hastily interrupted the general.

Colonel Blythe shook his head.

"I missed him half way up the hill; he was carrying the regimental colour, but when we got into the battery it was in the sergeant-major's hands. I wish to bring his--the sergeant-major's--conduct especially before your notice, general."

"The sergeant-major's? Very good. But if he took the colour he must know what happened to Anastasius. Call him, will you?"

Sergeant-major McKay came up and saluted.

"Mr. Wilders, sir," he told the general, "was wounded as we were breasting the slope."

"You saw him go down? Where was he hit?"

"I hadn't time to wait, sir."

"I should think not," interrupted Colonel Blythe; "but for him, general, we should never have carried the battery. I was dismounted, the men were checked, and just at the right moment the sergeant-major led them on."

"Bravely done, my lad! You shall hear of this again; I will make a special report to the commander of the forces. But there, that will keep. We must see after this poor boy."

"I was just sending off a party for the purpose," said the colonel.

"That's right. You have some idea, I suppose"--this was to McKay--"of the place where Mr. Wilders fell?"

"Certainly, sir. I think I can easily find it."

"Very well; show us the way. And you, Powys"--this was to the aide-de-camp--"ride over to the Royal Lancers and tell Hugo Wilders what has happened."

Then the little band of Good Samaritans set out upon its painful mission. The autumn evening was already closing in; the night air blew chill across the desolate plain; already numbers of men were busy amongst the wounded, a.s.suaging their thirst from water-bottles, covering the prostrate forms with blankets, and lending the surgeons a helping hand.

Half an hour brought the searchers of the Royal Picts to where young Anastasius Wilders lay. McKay was the first to find him, and he raised a shout of recognition as he ran forward to the wounded officer.

Unslinging his water-bottle, he put it to his cousin's lips; but young Wilders waved the precious liquid aside, saying, although in a feeble voice--

"Thank you; but I can wait. Give it to that poor chap over there; he is far worse hit than I am."

It was a private of the regiment, whose breast a bullet had pierced, and whose tortures seemed terrible.

But now the rest of the party came up. General Wilders dismounted, flask in hand, and the wounded lad was rewarded for his self-denial.

A surgeon, too, had arrived, and he was anxiously questioned as to the nature of young Wilders's wound.

The right leg had been shattered below the knee by a round shot; the wound had bled profusely, but the poor lad managed to stanch it with his shirt.

"Can you save it?" whispered the general.

"Impossible!" replied the surgeon, in the same tone.

"We must amputate above the knee at once," and he turned up his sleeves and gave instructions to an a.s.sistant to get ready the instruments.

The operation, performed without chloroform, and borne with heroic fort.i.tude, was over when Hugo Wilders rode up to the spot. Anastasius recognised his brother, and answered his anxious, sorrowful greeting with a faint smile.

"What is to be done with him now?" asked the general.

"We must get him on board ship--to-night, if possible; but how?"

"We will carry him every inch of the way," said one of the bandsmen of the Royal Picts. Young Wilders was idolised by the men.

"It is three miles to the sea-sh.o.r.e: a long journey."

"They can march in two reliefs, four carrying, four resting," said McKay.

"You must be very careful," said the surgeon.