Chapter LXV: The Cutting of the Coil

With the better weather things quickened somewhat--the things of Nature, to life; the things of Man, to death. Man strove with all his might to end his fellow man, and drenched the earth with blood: and the spring flowers pushed valiantly through the blood-soaked sods and seemed to wonder what it was all about.

The boys learned from Greski that the chief bones of contention now were the rifle-pits.

The lines and burrows of attack and defence had by this time run so close to one another that in places you could almost throw a stone from one to the other. No smallest chance of harassing the enemy was lost on either side. Both sides had learnt by experience what damage and annoyance to the working parties could be effected by small bodies of picked marksmen hidden in sunken pits in advance of the lines, and the struggles over and round and in these tiny strongholds were endless, and furious beyond description.

He told them how sixty Russians had held their pits near what he called the Korniloff Bastion, but which Jack and Jim knew more familiarly as the Malakoff, against five thousand Frenchmen, until reserves came up and the Frenchmen had to retire. And how some crack shot in one of the English pits was potting their men even in the streets of the town, twelve hundred yards away, so that passage that way was no longer permitted.

He told them that the Allies were mounting more and more big guns, and prophesied hot work again before long, and feared that this time "he"--by which simple comprehensive pronoun the Russian soldiers always referred to the hundred thousand men out there on the hill-side--the enemy--just as Jack and Jim had always used the term to designate Sir Denzil in their early days--Greski feared that "he," out of patience with the long delay and the sufferings it had entailed, would no longer confine his efforts to battering the forts, but would probably try to make an end of the town itself.

"In which case," he said, "we may have to move over to the other side of the water. He can knock down the bastions to his heart's content; we can build them again faster than he can knock them down. But the town--that would be another matter."

All the streets leading in from the hill-sides were barricaded, and a new line of huge entrenchments sprang up among the houses inside the town, half-way up the slope on which it was built.

From their chosen look-out on that eastward slope the boy watched all that went on, inside and outside, with hungry anxious eyes. They noted the immense activities on both sides, and it seemed to them, as it had done before to Jim that things might go on like this for ever.

"If we are really going to try another bombardment," said Jack slowly--he always spoke slowly and quietly now, a way he had got into through fear of straining his chest--"and if they keep it to the earthworks, it is all wasted time. The only way to end it is to smash the town and rush it over the pieces. It is doubtful kindness to spare it. Far better end the matter for all concerned. Then we could all go home and become human beings again. I've no fight left in me, Jim."

"A couple of months on the flats will make you as sound as a bell," said Jim cheerfully. "The air here is full of gunpowder and dead men. What you want is Carne."

"I've thought a good deal about it all while I lay there and couldn't talk," said Jack. "You'll have to take it all on, Jim. I shall be a broken man all my life--I feel it inside me; and Carron of Carne must be a whole man. You must take it on, Jim."

"Don't let's talk about it, old man. We're not home yet. Time enough to go into all that when we get there. I wish to goodness Raglan would come right in and make an end of it."

"It would be an awful business. But I don't see how we're going to end it any other way. And truly I wish it were ended, for I long to get home. All I want is to get home."

Their friend Greski had so far escaped the dangers of his unpalatable duties in a manner little short of marvellous. He shirked nothing, and took his fair turns with the rest. And, though he hated Russia with all his heart, he laughingly confessed that when he was in the thick of things he forgot it all in his eagerness to win the fight.

But such phenomenal luck was too good to last. He went out one night to join in a sortie, and the morning came without him, and found his mother and Tatia in woeful depths, certain he was dead.

Jim went off at once for news, and found him at last in the hospital, with a bullet in the thigh and a bayonet wound in the shoulder.

"It is nothing, it is nothing," said the hurrying surgeon. At which Greski made a grimace at Jim, and said:

"All the same, if it was only himself now! And the way he hacked that bullet out! We are getting callous to other folk's sufferings."

"Why, you hardly felt it," said the surgeon. "You said so."

"When one's helpless under another man's knife one says what he wants. It hurt like the deuce."

"When can I take him home?" asked Jim, in stumbling French.

"After two days, if he behaves and goes on well."

So Jim went home and comforted madame and Tatia; and two days later they were happier in their minds than they had been since the siege began, in that they had him there all the time and safe from further harm.

He grizzled somewhat at being shelved "just when the fun was going to begin," for he felt assured in his own mind that "he," outside, was preparing for a general assault, and he would have liked to see it. And so the boys did their best to keep him posted in all that went on.

They were wakened at daybreak one morning by an uproar altogether out of the common--one vast, unbroken, terrific roll of thunder, so deep, so ominous, so far beyond anything they had ever heard in their lives before that it sounded as though the whole of heaven's artillery had been mounted on the hill-sides, and brought to bear on the devoted town, and was bent on battering it to pieces.

Greski called them from his room, and they went in.

"Hurry, hurry, or you'll miss it all! We knew it must be soon, but could not learn the day. They will come in on top of this, I think. Keep under cover, and come back and tell me all about it. Oh, ---- this leg!"

It was a bad morning for any conscious possessor of a chest--heavy with mist and thick with drizzling rain; a black funereal day, sobbing gustily, and drenching the earth with showers of bitter tears. The chill discomfort of it told even on Jim.

"Jack, old man, I wish you'd go back," he said, before they had gone a hundred yards. "I'll bring you word as soon as I can. They're not likely to come in at once, and you'll have plenty of time to see all that's going on. They'll probably hang away at the forts for the whole day. Do go back."

"Get on!--get on!" coughed Jack. "I want to see." And they pushed on through the gloomy twilight.

The streets were alive with all the others who wanted to see, and long compact lines of gray-coats were pressing stolidly towards the front, to strengthen the lines against the expected onslaught.

Jim was doubtful how far they should venture, but Jack was intent on seeing. This was history. This was the consummation of all the hopes, and the weary days and nights, that had gone into those mighty zigzags up on the hill there. This was his own arm striking as it had never struck before since time began, and he must see it at its best.

But, though they could hear enough, they could not see much, because of the mist and the rain and the dense clouds of smoke rolling down the hill-sides.

The Russian batteries were only beginning to reply, by the time the boys reached their usual look-out on the eastern slope near the cathedral, and then the uproar doubled, and the very ground beneath them seemed to shudder under it.

Jim helped his brother to his usual seat in a niche in the broken wall of a garden, and tucked his cloak carefully about him, for between his boiling excitement and the rawness of the morning, he was all ashake and his teeth were chattering.

"Every gun we have," gasped Jack . . . "hard at it!"

"If they can't see more than we can, they're going it blind," growled Jim, as he strode about to get warm.

And then, like a bolt from the sky, without an instant's warning, out of the chill white mist in front came a great round black ball, which dropped with a thud into the ground almost at Jack's feet. It lay there, hissing and spitting like a venomous devil gloating over its anticipated villainy, and Jim rushed at it with an unaccustomed oath of dismay. It was sheer instinct. He had no time for thought. The devilish thing was close to Jack, and Jack could not move.

He got his right hand under it to hurl it down the slope. His feet slipped from under him as he heaved. Then with a splintering crash the thing burst. . . .

And the Coil of Carne, cut by a stray British shell, lay shattered about the eastern slope of Sebastopol.