Here we are, fifteen months later, with Balaclava and Inkerman behind us, and the world ringing with the story of our valour; and something here and there being said about the staring incapacity of our commanders and the crass dishonesty and stupidity of our contractors.  The army which left home in such bright array is transformed to a crowd of ragged vagabonds, and all the services are mixed together in the trenches and the camps before Sevastopol.  Here are men of the Horse Artillery whose batteries have lost their horses; and here are cavalrymen dismounted, whether by reason of warlike misadventure or the sheer starvation of horseflesh.  And since folks must do something for their bread in campaigning times, as at more peaceful seasons, the rules and regulations of special branches of the military service are cast aside, and men of every arm are working in the trenches together.  A crowd of vagabonds we are to look at, to be sure; but a year of war, if you only think of it, makes a boy a veteran, and the bronzed, weatherbeaten, and ragged lads of whom the army is in the main composed, have lived in an atmosphere of powder for a year past; have gone marching and counter-marching under shot and shell; and charging, and repelling charges, until the imminent peril of their lives is a great deal more familiar to them than their daily bread.  The peril is there always, and the bread turns up with extreme fitfulness.

On the Christmas Eve of ’fifty-five there was a time of excitement in the second parallel before the Malakoff; and this was not because of any special danger of the siege or any threatened imminent assault, but simply and merely because of the late slaughter of a pig of tender age whose screams had come up from the Turkish camp about the witching hour of midnight.

Amongst the war-worn, ragged, bronzed and bearded crowd is that identical Paddy who reckoned his uniform the livery of his degradation when he first assumed it.  He is as ragged as any Connemara harvester by this time, and as tanned, as plucky, and as impudent in the face of death and hardship as he knows how to stick; and it is he who has brought the news which flutters the spirits of the score of men who are huddled in the trench together, right beneath the gaping embrasure of the Russian guns.

It was near midnight, and an extreme languor of fatigue had fallen upon all men when the tattered slip of Hibernian nobility crawled up on hands and knees so as not to expose himself against the sky-line, and dropped into his own place in the trench.  He dropped with his feet on the stomach of Sergeant Polson Jervase, who denounced his clumsiness in fair set terms, which came as pat to his lips as if he had rehearsed them for a year.

‘Is that you?’ said Paddy.  ’I beg yer pardon, and be damned to you.  And now will ye just listen?  D’ye hear the death cry?’

Everybody heard the death cry, filling the air from barely a third of a mile away:  the voice of pork at the last agony.

’The Lord alone knows where it’s come from, but that Mussulman crush down below has got hold of a pig.  The devil a ration has been served to them for a month past, and they ought to know what hunger means be this time.  But bhoys,’ the speaker went on, with a whispered emphasis, ’we’re Christian men, I hope, and we can’t dream of allowing those poor infidels to peril their immortal salvation by the eating of strange food.  It’s eternal loss to the soul of a Mussulman that puts a knife and fork into a griskin.  And I’m proposin’ a work of Christian charity.  Have ye got the matayrials for a fire handy?’

One of the men sleepily bade him be damned, and turned over in the mud in a scrap of ragged blanket; but all the rest at the bare suggestion of a meal were wide awake.  ‘Sergeant, darlin’, just be giving me half-a-dozen men and we will make an exploitation, and be back in no time with a meal of meat that ought to be good enough for this particular mess from now till New Year’s Day.  Is there any chance of a fire now?’

A member of the hungry, hard-bitten band owned a solitary lucifer; but was afraid that the damp had deprived it of all virtue.

‘Hurry up, boys,’ said one.  ’If once those blessed Bazouks get a fork into piggy, we shall have to fight for a share of him.’

‘We’ve got the makings of a fire here somewhere,’ said the man with the solitary lucifer.  ’But how are we to start it?  This brushwood stuff is all wet, and it won’t catch.’

But one man was there with a providential scrap of newspaper.  There was a moon in the frosty sky, with tatters of windy cloud about it, which gave light enough to show the men each others’ faces dimly, and they all clustered in a rough ring, some kneeling, some standing, and the centre of the throng was the man with the match.  Near him, second only in importance, was the man with the newspaper, and kneeling near was a third who stirred up the loose brushwood below the heaped fuel which had been gathered and hoarded for a month past for a Christmas fire.

‘Here’s a dry pebble,’ said one man, pressing solicitously forward, and proffering his midnight find to the man with the match.  ’Strike her on that, and for God’s sake hold your breath, boys.’

The human centre of interest, the man with the match, took the pebble and polished it to complete dryness on the lining of his overcoat.  Then he struck the match, which emitted a faint phosphorescent glow, and went dark again.

In those days, when a Russian gunner felt aweary, and found a lack of interest in the crawling hours of darkness, he would let bang a gun from the Redoubt, simply pour passer lé temps; and at this minute the skipping ‘zip’ of a shot, a splutter of earth, and then the sullen boom of the discharge came to give variation to the scene.  The lucifer match, however, was the all-absorbing centre of interest just then, and the scratch on the pebble was a much more important sound than any bellow of cannon from the fort.  The lucifer was barely equal to its duties, and half-a-dozen times it gave its feeble spark of phosphorescent light in vain; but at last it struck, and the blue and yellow sulphur bubbled and crackled into flame.  The man with the newspaper was ready, and caught the fire.  The wet twigs smoked pungently, and there was one heart-sinking moment when the last chance seemed to have vanished; but then the fire sparkled up merrily, and the blaze lit the earthen side of the trench and the silky-bearded, bronzed, unwashed faces, and the stalwart, tattered figures of the crowd, with a flickering changeful brightness.

‘That’s all right, boys,’ said the Honourable Patrick Erroll, Private of Dragoons.  ‘And now, Sergeant darlin’, give me half-a-dozen rank and file, and, please God, well have a meal for Christmas morning.’

‘Now, I’m just as keen as any one of you,’ said Sergeant Jervase, ’and just as hungry; but be very quiet about the business, Paddy, and don’t have a row with the Bashis, for the Lord’s sake.’

‘Trust me, Sergeant,’ said the Honourable Mr. Erroll, ’and nurse the fire whilst we’re away.’

Out of the blank darkness of the night the flame and glow from the second parallel seemed to bite a hole; and as its brightness grew, it drew the attention of the gunners of the Malakoff, who banged at it sulkily from time to time.  But the reckless contingent under Paddy’s leadership had already clambered to the open and were making a muddy way in the darkness towards the Turkish camp.

Down in the trench the fire grew to a rich and splendid glow, and one or two of the favoured of fortune, who owned pipes and tobacco, plucked bright embers from it, and, nestling under the shelter of the wall, sucked away at their comfort with simple animal noises of satisfaction.

‘I say, Bill,’ says one, ’was you ever Hingry before you seen this Gawd-forsaken Crimea?’

‘Lor’ love yer,’ says the man questioned, ’I was born hungry, and I’ve been hungry ever since.  But if the Honourable Paddy finds that ’og, and I get hold of a hind leg of him, I won’t complain before to-morrow midnight.’

The fire glowed with a richer and a richer light, and men of hospitable minds wiped their half-smoked clays on the inside crook of a coated elbow and passed on luxury and refreshment to less-favoured neighbours.  It was a time for comradeship, if only for the fact that it was Christmas Eve, and coming fast towards Christmas morning.  But the thought of the slain porker was in all men’s minds, and made them expansive and generous and reserved by turns.  Boom! said the gun from the Redoubt, and the earth spluttered between the collar of Sergeant Polson’s jacket and his neck, and dribbled comfortlessly down his back, colder than any charity he had known of:  lately-frozen earth, half thawed, with wet snow on the top of it, and a sulky boom behind to add a threat to its cold sting.

After long waiting, a voice in ecstatic laughter, and surely the voice of the Honourable Paddy, Shuffling footsteps in the dark, and the hungriest of the whole crowd in the trench climbing to peer into the blackness; a youth who has not yet finished growing, and who finds the irregularity of meals a cruel thing.

‘I’d like to know,’ says the Honourable Mr. Erroll cheerfully, ’who trusted those infernal Russians with a gun?  They’ll be hurting somebody by and by, if they’re not careful.  But here’s the pig, boys, and there’s nobody but poor little Ahmed Bey the worse for us.  I knocked him on the head from behind, and we’ll be none the worse friends to-morrow.’

Bang, and bang, and bang! sounded the guns from the Russian battery, drawn by the light; but a delicious odour rose upon the air, and the teeth of the little contingent watered.  There was a ramrod with Sergeant Polson at one end of it, and Paddy Erroll at the other, and the loveliest loin of young pork in the middle; and the two, with scorched hands and scorched faces, turned, and turned, and turned the improvised spit.  And there were some less nice in appetite who had raked out heaps of glowing cinders from the fire, and had lain succulent slices thereon and buried them in more cinders, and who were now enjoying a compound feast of pork and charcoal, with such an insane relish as no home-staying epicure could conceive over the lordliest dish the combined cuisine of the whole wide world could show him.

‘What are you up to here, you fellows?’ said a voice out of the darkness.  ‘That’s a jolly appetising smell.’

‘Fresh roast pork, sir,’ responded one man with his mouth full.

‘Fresh roast pork!’ echoed the inquirer.  ’Hillo-that you, Sergeant?  You’re in luck.  I’ll join your mess if you make no objection.’

‘Nobody more welcome than Captain Volnay, sir,’ said Polson.  ’Find that old bread-box, one of you, and give Captain Volnay a seat.’

‘Hurry up!’ said Volnay.  ’That smell is maddening.  How did you men come in for such a treasure trove as this?’

‘I’m Columbus,’ said the Honourable Paddy, tinning the ramrod spit.

‘Why, by Jingo!’ cried Volnay, ’you’ve got a whole pig here.  I say, Sergeant, I’m going to confiscate a leg for our Christmas mess.  You don’t think you fellows are going to be allowed to sit gourmandising here whilst we go hungry!’

One man, sheltered by the shadow, answered sneeringly: 

‘Precious little going hungry amongst your set, sir,’ said he.

‘And precious little you know about it, my good fellow,’ Volnay answered, with his sunny laugh.  ’Life isn’t all beer and skittles amongst your officers, let me tell you.’

‘I’d like to change, sir,’ said the malcontent.

’Would you?’asked the Captain.  ’Well, I dare say you would.  But we all have enough to grumble at, and to spare, if we happen to be built that way.  Just expedite that joint, Sergeant.’

‘It will be all the better for another turn or two, sir,’ said Polson.  ’It’s a deadly pity, but there’s no such thing as a hint of crackling.  Piggy came along with his bristles on, and we have no shaving tackle.’

‘Who goes there?’ cried a voice in the darkness, two score yards away.

‘Grand rounds,’ said another voice.  It was Major de Blacquaire’s, and Polson had not heard it since the day of the Alma, a year and three months ago.

‘Halt, grand rounds, and give the countersign.’

‘Bonnie Dundee.’

‘Pass, grand rounds, and all’s well.’

Grand rounds came tramping down the trench and the men about the fire rose up and stood to attention.

‘What is this?’ asked De Blacquaire.  ‘Who’s in charge here?’

‘I am, sir,’ Polson answered, saluting.

’What’s the meaning of this blaze here?  Can’t you see that you’re drawing the enemy’s fire?  Report yourself to me at noon to-morrow.  Scatter that stuff, and trample it out.’

A foot was thrust into the embers, and they flared up suddenly.  The Major recognised his enemy, and looked from his eyes to the stripes upon the left sleeve of his ragged overcoat.

‘Is that your own coat?’ he asked.  ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Sergeant are you?  I’ll break you for this to-morrow.’

‘That you, old chap?’ drawled Volnay from his seat on the bread-box.  ’Said you were dead.  We’ve got no end of a find here.  Whole pig.  If you’ll let me know where to find you, I’ve bagged a ham, and I’ll invite myself to dine with you, and bring my own rations with me.’

‘Thaanks,’ said De Blacquaire.  ’Don’t trouble.  I shall find it my duty to report this scene of riot and disorder.  Forward.  March.’

Grand rounds went by, and the scattered fire faded.

‘If you can manage to hack a slice of that pork off, Sergeant!’ said Volnay, ‘I’m beastly hungry.’

‘Done, I think, to a turn,’ said Polson.  ’Who’s got anything that will cut?’

‘I’m tould, sir,’ said a voice out of the darkness, with a rich oily brogue in it, ’that there’s hours of difference between here and Limerick.  Won’t it be Christmas morning in old Ireland, sir?  And will the bells be ringing?’

‘Ye’re out in your reckonin’,’ said another voice amid the shadows.  ’It’s exactly the other way.  Your folks is going to bed in Limerick.  The sun has a knack of risin’ in the east, my lad, and we’re far east of Ireland, or Aberdeen for that matter.  I’m not mindin’ the exact particulars, but it’s a matter of some two hours, I’m thinking.  It’s deep midnight here, and an hour or so beyond it, and they’ll be over their punchbowls, yonner.  That’s so, sir, I’m believin’?’

‘I don’t know, upon my word,’ said Volnay.  ’You’re out of my depth, my lad.  But it’s a bit of a sin to talk about punch-bowls, isn’t it, on a night like this, when there isn’t a hot drink within a hundred miles?  Sergeant, this pork is like manna in the wilderness.  Look me up before you report yourself to Major de Blacquaire, will you?  I’m responsible for the fire, you understand.  It was my duty to retire the whole crowd of you under arrest, I know, but there isn’t a lot of fun going for you beggars here, is there?  Goodnight, Sergeant, and don’t forget the hour in the morning.’

‘Good-night, sir.’  ‘God go with you, sir.’  ’A merry Christmas and a loight harrut to you, sir, for many a year.’

‘That’s your man, nah, Sergeant,’ said one man out of the shadow in a tone that was learned in Rotherham, or very near it.  ’Ah like Captain Volnay as mooch as ah like anybody.  He’s got a kind of a way with him an’ he sits dahn with the like of huz, and he talks to us as if we was men in place o’ bein’ cattle, which is the way with most on ’em.  Here’s good luck to Captain Volnay, an’ if ah’d got a glass o’ that steamin’ poonch they’n got in Aberdeen, ode bird, ah’d scald my throat with a relish.’

They were all full of roast pork, or of pork more or less roasted, and the scent of the sacrifice was yet in the air, and their war-bitten souls were cheered and warmed, if ever so little.

‘Yis,’ said one lad, ‘if half the quality knowed!’

‘Hallo!’ said Polson, turning in the fragrant dark.  ’How far from Bilston were you born?’

‘Wedgebury,’ said the voice.  ‘No furder.’

‘Beacon Hargate, me,’ said Polson.  ‘I’d ha’ guessed it, Sergeant.  I’d ha’ guessed it.  I niver heerd your voice afore to-night, but there’s a kind of a turn of the tongue in it now and then.’

The contingent fell to silence, and a wet clinging snow began, ruled in straight lines.  The embers of the fire hissed under it, and the men drew themselves into such shelter as they could find, and waited in the grey, cold patience for the expected relief from duty.  It was long in coming, and they learned afterwards that the regimental Sergeant-major, whose duty it ought to have been to relieve them on that Christmas morning, was dead from dysentery, poor fellow, and as a matter of fact it turned out that he was buried in the muddy earth and half frozen in there before anybody remembered to take up his duty.

The long, long night went on, and the Russian gunner, finding his attention no longer drawn to the distant fire, had gone to sleep or anyhow fallen silent, when a witching noise rose upon the air, and all the worn, half-sleeping men sat up to listen.  Surely there was the sound of church bells, and there was a rush towards the pleasant noise.  It was only a man from the smithy who happened to have a musical ear and had rigged up a kind of gallows from which he had hung carbine and rifle barrels of varying lengths and calibre, on the which he was beating with an iron rod.  The sulky dull beginning of the dawn on Christmas Day, and there in the trenches the Christmas bells ringing as they might have rung in any village church in old England, two thousand miles away.  And the hearts of the listeners rose to their throats, and men were quiet whilst the music sounded.  The notes reached far, and fell on many a drowsy ear, conjuring up visions in the half-slumbering minds of humble whitewashed village steeples, far and far away.  Polson’s contingent, drawn from a distance of some two hundred yards, stuffed that ingenious musician with half-cold roast pork, and left him well rewarded for his toils.

By one of those surprising fatuities which distinguished this particular campaign almost above all others in which the English private soldier has been engaged, an attack which was ordered for black midnight was ready just in the grey of dawn, and Polson’s ear caught a whispered word of command here and there, and a noise of careful footsteps.  The trench of the second parallel was ten feet deep, but there was a ladder of foot-holes just behind him, and he turned and climbed, digging his fingers into the half-frozen turf on the Russian side.  There was the grim Redoubt at which the English guns had hammered in vain this many and many a day, still solidly silhouetted against the clearing sky of morning, dark and lowering, quiet as death and yet from old experience holding a threat in the entrails of it.  The men-three or four thousand of them, as one might guess-climbed into the trench of the first parallel and were lost to sight.  They emerged crouching, and raced across the space which intervened between them and the second, where Polson’s own post lay.  They were down like a dumb wind on the one side and up again on the other, and raced, crouching, for the first, into which they again disappeared.  The man who shouldered Polson from his place, and whose face as he went by might be distinctly seen, was Major de Blacquaire.

‘Leading a forlorn hope, you devil, are you?’ said the Sergeant to himself; but the words were silent, and he felt a simple throb of admiration for the set mouth and resolute eyes of the man who had climbed past him, and wished himself in his place.

The racing, crouching crowd had dived into the foremost trench and had reappeared again before it was discerned by the Russian sentries; but a hundred yards away from the foot of the glacis, the whole advance was caught and swept and twisted, as by a whirlwind, by a hail of gunshot, canister and rifle fire.  The half-melted, new-fallen snow clung to the sloping glacis of the Redoubt, and made a greyish background of dim light against which a watcher could perceive not only the whole motion of the line, but the gesture of any single figure in it.  Hate and interest and admiration alike prompted Polson’s eyes to follow the slim, active figure with the waving sword which silently beckoned on his followers.  The Redoubt opened, as it were, with an earthquake crash, and all the black front of it went fiery red and yellow, and at the first discharge of this inferno, the figure with the flourished sabre in his right hand fell prone.  The double line of the invaders shook and wavered from right to left, and men dropped amongst them as if the scythe of Death were literally sweeping there.  The lines advanced, wavered, paused, turned, turned again, advanced again with mad cheering, scarce heard amid the rattle of musketry and the roaring of the guns; and finally broke and ran, utterly routed.  The onlooker had no part in this conflict except to bite and ram down a cartridge or two and to send a shot more or less at random into the black oblong of the opposing fort; but clinging with his feet on that precarious muddy ladder, and with his elbows to the frozen turf, he saw clearly the convulsive gesture with which De Blacquaire lifted his sabre in a last effort to wave on his men.

Man is a very complex creature, and he will not be finally analysed and done with until this planet is very much older than it was in the nineteenth Christian century.  Whether it was hate, or personal pride, or a sudden flash of admiration for a man whom he had hitherto despised, Polson Jervase could not have told you to his dying day.

But though the motives which inspired him were very wildly mixed and very uncertain in their origin, there is no doubt whatever as to the deed to which amongst themselves they inspired him that Christmas morning.  The Malakoff belched hell.  The flying crowds hustled him and threw him twice or thrice.  But he was on his feet again, racing towards that prone figure.  He dropped into the front trench and trod upon a wounded man who screamed beneath his heel, and climbed out on the further side.  The air was musical with hooting shell and singing shot and hissing bullet as if a whole diabolic orchestra were fiddling and bugling.  Polson found the fallen body of his foe, and hugged it in his arms, and raced back as hard as he could tear.  He tumbled into the trench of the first parallel almost anyhow; but he gripped the man he hated, and in his soul was a great rejoicing.  He tore up the opposite side, and came out upon the open slope again, with the unconscious man still in his arms.

‘You’ll ruin me, you devil!’ said Polson, as he ran breathlessly with the wind of shot and shell in his ears.  ’And I’m to report myself to you to-morrow, am I?  We may report ourselves to Almighty God together, but you are safe for the minute, I guess.’

He was within a yard of his own post when these mad exaltations of an excited fancy crossed his mind, and at that instant a musket shot took him in the neck and he fell with his burden into the trench before him.