"I really can do nothing of the kind."
"But, consider, this requisition will take time to be filled up and signed, and meantime these poor fellows will go."
"I cannot help that."
"I'll be responsible for anything you do."
"Oh, no, that can't be done!"
"Will a requisition signed by the P. M. O. of this place be of any use!"
"Will it answer, if he takes on himself the responsibility?"
"Certainly not."
The surgeon went off in sorrow and disgust.
I appended another special fact for Dr. Smith, the head of the British Army Medical Department. A surgeon of a regiment stationed on the cliffs above Balaklava, who had forty sick out of two hundred, had been applying to the "authorities" in the town for three weeks for medicines, and could not get one of them. The list he sent in was returned with the observation, "We have none of these medicines in store." The surgeon came down with his last appeal: — "Do, I beg you, give me any medicine you have for diarrhœa."
"We haven't any."
"Have you any medicine for fever? Anything you can let me have, I'll take."
"We haven't any."
"I have a good many cases of rheumatism. Can you let me have any medicines?"
"We haven't any."
Thus, for diarrhœa, fever, and rheumatism there were no specifics. Dr. Smith could prove, no doubt, that there were granaries full of the finest and costliest drugs and medicines for fever, rheumatism, and diarrhœa at Scutari, but the knowledge that they were there little availed those dying for want of them at Balaklava.{209}
But with all this, the hand of the plague was not stayed.
Sickness clung to our troops, the soldiers who climbed the bloody steeps of the Alma in the splendour of manly strength, and who defended the heights over the Tchernaya exhausted, and "washed out" by constant fatigue, incessant wet, insufficient food, want of clothing and of cover from the weather, died away in their tents night after night. Doctors, and hospitals, and nurses, came too late, and they sank to rest unmurmuringly, and every week some freshly-formed lines of narrow mounds indicated the formation of a new burial-place.
It must not be inferred that the French escaped sickness and mortality. On the contrary, our allies suffered to a degree which would have been considered excessive, had it not been compared with our own unfortunate standard of disease and death, and to the diminution caused by illness, must be added that from the nightly sorties of the Russians and the heavy fire from the batteries.
According to what I heard from people, I was honoured by a good deal of abuse for telling the truth. I really would have put on my Claude Lorraine glass, if I could. I would have clothed skeletons with flesh, breathed life into the occupants of the charnel-house, subverted the succession of the seasons, and restored the legions which had been lost; but I could not tell lies to "make things pleasant." Any statements I had made I have chapter, and book, and verse, and witness for. Many, very many, that I did not make I could prove to be true with equal ease, and could make public, if the public interest required it. The only thing the partisans of misrule could allege was, that I did not "make things pleasant" to the authorities, and that, amid the filth and starvation, and deadly stagnation of the camp, I did not go about "babbling of green fields," of present abundance, and of prospects of victory.
Suppose we come to "facts." Do people at home know how many bayonets the British army could muster? Do they believe we had 25,000, after all our reinforcements? They might have been told — nay, it might have been proved to them by figures at home — that the British army consisted of 55,000 men. From the 1st of December, 1854, to the 20th of January, 1855, 8,000 sick and wounded were sent down from camp to Balaklava, and thence on shipboard! Shall I state how many returned?