New miseries lay in that last word. Lying amid crowds of other sick and wounded, on the bare planks, in torture, lassitude, or lethargy, without proper food, medicine, or attendance, they were launched on the wintry sea. Their covering was scanty, the roll and plunge of the ship were agony to the fevered and the maimed ; in place of the hush, the cleanliness, the quiet, the silent step, that should be around the sick, were sounds such as poets have feigned for the regions of the
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damned — groans, screams, entreaties, curses, the straining of the timbers, the trampling of the crew, the weltering of the waves. Not infrequently the machinery of the overladen ship broke down, and they lay tossing for days, a hell upon the waters.
Scutari, the longed-for haven, was for weeks the very climax and headquarters of suffering — crammed with misery, overflowing with despair. In those large chambers and long corridors lay thousands of the bravest and most miserable of men. Standing at the end of any of the galleries that traversed the four sides of the extensive building, one looked along a deep perspective, a long-diminishing vista of woe. Ranged in two rows lay the patients, feet to feet ; the tenant of each bed saw his pains reflected in the face of his comrade opposite ; fronting each was another victim of war or cold, starvation or pestilence. Or, frequently, the sick man read in the face before him not the progress of fever, nor the leaden weight of exhaustion, but the tokens of the final rest to which he was himself hastening. With each round of the sun nearly a hundred gallant soldiers raved or languished out their lives ; as the jaws of the grave closed on the prey of to-day, they opened as widely for that of to-morrow. It might be thought that, at this rate, the grave, so greedy, so improvident, would exhaust its victims — that some day it would gape in vain. But no — the sick flocked in faster than the dead were carried out, and still the dismal stream augmented, till the hospitals overflowed, while still faster poured the misery-laden
174 Indignation in England.
ships down the Black Sea, feeding as they went the fishes with their dead.
Had Dante witnessed these scenes, he might have deepened the horrors of his Inferno. Told with more or less exactness, but with a skill that suffered none of their pathos to be lost, they shook the nation with a universal tremor of anger and grief. It could not bear to think that the men of whom it had suddenly grown so proud should be perishing of want, while wealth and plenty reigned at home. The feeling found expression in two ways, very different, but both very natural as impulses of a community. The one was an absorbing desire to afford immediate relief; the other a fretful craving to find scapegoats, and make them atone for all this suffering. Inspired by the first of these, the country became a vast workshop for the manufacture of warm clothing, and great quantities of this, as well as of luxurious food and drink, were despatched in steamers, with agents to distribute them. But before these came, early in December, and all through the month, clothing was reaching Balaklava from Constantinople, whither Lord Raglan had despatched an officer to remedy, so far as might be, the loss of the cargo of the Prince, so that at the end of that month 17,000 blankets and 19,000 new great-coats had been issued to the troops (mostly at Balaklava, whither they went to fetch them) ; and on the I3th January Lord Raglan was able to write : " I believe I may assert that every man in this army has received a second blanket, a jersey frock, flannel drawers and socks, and some kind of winter coat in addition to
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the ordinary great-coat." These defences did not, however, at once check the progress of sickness ; during January and February the numbers in our hospital continued to swell till they reached to nearly 14,000.