Now it has been said that the duties the men had to perform in the trenches, certainly when those of pickets and guards in camp were added to them, were as much as they could bear. But besides, owing to the deficiency of transport, they had to perform much work that ought to have been done by horses and mules. The journey through the quagmire to Balaklava and back, carrying up rations, clothing, huts, or ammunition, frequently took up twelve hours, all which time they were without food, shelter, or rest. Also, they were repeatedly on short rations ; in the Fourth and Light Divisions they were often on three-quarters, two-thirds, and sometimes half rations of meat and rum ; on two occasions they had only quarter rations, and one day they had none at all. For six or seven weeks they were deprived of their ration of rice at the precise time when it would have been so beneficial, a time when scarcely any vegetables were supplied, and hardly a man in the army escaped the prevailing diseases.
The sufferings of the animals were frightful. They were dying all round the camps, and all along the route to Balaklava, of cold, hunger, and fatigue, and as labour could not be bestowed in burying them, their carcases
The Cavalry Horses starved. 1 7 1
formed a dismal feature in the desolate scenery. The artillery horses had so much extra work thrown on them that the efficiency of the batteries was very seriously impaired. Lord Lucan had remonstrated against the position chosen for the cavalry after the battle of Inkerman, as being so distant from the harbour as to endanger the supply of forage. Subsequently, the reason appeared to be that General Canrobert, anticipating a second attack on the same point, and thinking that the mere presence of cavalry might, when told to the enemy by their spies, deter them, had persuaded Lord Raglan to post them in that quarter. Lord Lucan's forebodings were quickly realised. Before the end of November the neighbouring artillery camps were invaded by ravenous cavalry horses, galloping madly in at the sound of the feeding trumpet, and snatching, undeterred by stick or stones, the hay and barley from the very muzzles of the right owners. Painful it was to see the frenzy of the creatures in their first pangs of hunger, more painful to see their quiet misery in the exhaustion that succeeded. Remedy (except removing the camp) there seemed none. The labour of toiling through the slough to Balaklava to fetch their own forage was so great that many horses sank and died in each journey; every day saw the survivors weaker and less fit for the effort ; every frosty night the cold was followed by the death of numbers.
The effect of all this misery was that at the end of November we had nearly 8000 men in hospital. The journey thither was an ordeal fatal to many. Lifted
1 7 2 Sufferings of the Sick.
from the mud of the hospital tent, and wrapt in their wet blankets, the sick were placed on horses, a dismal troop ; some with closed eyes and livid cheeks, little other than mounted corpses ; some moaning as they went, and almost ready in their weariness to relax their hold of the pommel, and bury their troubles in the mire beneath ; some fever-stricken, glaring with wide eyes void of speculation, for whom the passers-by, if they saw them at all in their hurried, insane glances, existed only as more of the phantoms that haunted their delirium. Bound for the great hospital of Scutari, the ghostly train would toil on, wading and slipping past the dying horses, the half-buried bullocks, the skeletons, and carcases in various stages of decay ; past the wrecks of arabas, the squalid men with bundles, who had been down for the clothing they had needed for weeks, the waggon-load of dead Turks going to that yawning pit beside the road which was to be their sepulchre, the artillery waggons, returning at dusk with the forage they set out at daybreak to fetch — and on, always through deep mire, to the place of embarkation.