49
WILLIAM
27th October 1854
An entity was creeping up William’s legs with a slowness that was almost tortuous. Through the fog of sleep, melded with a growing awareness of being awake – and the pain, the ever-present, inescapable pain – he opened his eyes, not sure of where he would find himself.
Canvas walls. Bloodied bandages. The pungent reek of death and sickness and vomit and piss and shit and gore.
The medical tent. Back, back, always stuck. The crawling up his legs turned out to be the rays of the morning sun inching a languid passage up his naked skin, invading the space of the tent through the open flap and sticking to William’s bare legs after he had, it seemed, kicked his blankets off during some fitful nightmare.
A pervasive and almost crippling stiffness seemed to have caused his body to be suspended in a state of semi-paralysis. Every muscle burned and ached, including many muscles of whose very presence and existence he had not formerly been aware. Even the act of breathing hurt, and a crushing weakness seemed to pin him beneath the ponderous weight of mountain roots probing the depths of the Earth’s core.
A raking thirst, however, pressed him to move, so he leaned over, reaching with a groan for a mug of water on the floor. The pain of the effort was almost excruciating in its intensity, but the relief that the cool liquid brought to his parched throat was worth it. He downed the contents of the mug in seconds, and was desperate for more, but no more was to be found.
Beside him in the tent, a number of other troopers lay sleeping. Here, one with his right arm amputated. There, one with both legs gone. Another with a hand missing, another whose whole head was wrapped in blood-caked bandages with just his nose exposed so that he could breathe. All young, all in the prime of their youth … and all now mutilated, now cut, now made unwhole. William felt rising vomit tickling the back of his throat, so he turned away to stare at the canvas walls, hoping that his mind would not project a horror-reel of nightmarish memories onto its cream-coloured blankness.
His hopes were futile, however; in this place, with its blood-soaked wounded, its odours of hasty surgery and bodily discharges and death, coupled with the omnipresent pain that wracked his own body, there was no escaping those nightmarish recollections.
‘Oh Father above,’ he whispered to himself, ‘What ha’ we done? What ha’ I done? Why are we here? How did I get m’self intae this nightmare? Will I e’er wake from it?’
He lay back, pulled the blanket over his body with pain-stiff arms and then fell back into a fitful slumber.
***
3rd November
William awoke with a start, clutching the top of the blanket in a tight bundle in his fists. With a chest heaving with terror, he found himself gasping wildly for breath, while his eyes darted from left to right, and back again, as he tried to make sense of his surroundings. When he realised that he was in the medical tent, he fell back onto the cot and draped a weary forearm over his forehead, burying his face in the crook of his elbow.
The last few days had been an almost hallucinatory, blended-together haze of confusion; a molten mess of nightmares, dreams, and half-awake bouts of cold-sweat-drenched panic. The only people he had seen had been the doctors and their assistants, drifting phantom-like in and out of the tents, carrying in more wounded, or occasionally removing those patients whose will to live had not been as strong as William’s. Indeed, he and one other trooper, a twenty-three-year-old with an amputated left arm, were the only original occupants of this tent who still drew breath.
Today, the pain that had previously been so paralysing in its intensity did not feel quite as crippling as it had before. It remained, of course, but now William felt as if he could at least get up and move about for a bit. With a racket of grunts, groans and curses he hauled himself out of his cot, and then began putting on the fresh uniform that had been left for him. He fumbled and heaved with overeager haste, knowing that should the cantankerous doctor or one of his cold-faced assistants come by, he would be forced to stay in bed.
Finally, after a few moments of pain, clumsiness and cursing he was attired in a clean uniform, likely taken from some dead trooper, as the fit was far from perfect, and it had been patched in a few places. With a brief burst of curiosity he wondered what had become of his former uniform. It had been cut to ribbons, and had been so caked in blood and mud that it had surely not been salvageable, he surmised.
Next to his personal effects a small rosewood box had been placed. He opened it and looked inside, and saw that it contained a glass jar, inside of which was a human heart, preserved in embalming fluid.
‘Ah, Captain Liversage,’ he murmured, staring sadly at the heart. ‘I’ll no’ forget my vow tae you, sir. But fir now, wha’ tae dae first?’
In an action that had now become second nature, he reached inside the jacket and curled his fingers around the portrait of Aurora.
‘The officer’s commission,’ he whispered to himself, suddenly remembering the promotion that Captain Liversage had conferred on him. ‘I must take care ay this before I dae anything else.’
He stuffed the paper into one of his pockets, and then squeezed his aching feet into the new pair of boots next to his bed, grimacing as pain shot up his legs. With a sigh of relief he finally got his feet into the boots, and with that he stood up on shaky legs and hobbled out of the tent.
Outside the morning sky was thick with cloud, but the sun shone bright through a small gap in the massed ranks
