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Updated: May 10, 2025
Far beyond, in the plain, the French watch-fires were burning, and I could see from time to time the fatigue-parties moving in search of their wounded. At this moment the clock of the convent struck eleven, and a merry chime rang out, and was taken up by the echoes till it melted away in the distance.
Scattered over the mountain-side were fatigue-parties engaged in hunting up the dead, and burying them in shallow graves, hastily dug in clay so red that it seemed as if saturated with the blood shed the day before.
The Royal Picts found themselves posted on the uplands above the Tchernaya valley, very near the extreme right of the British front, and here they took their share of the duties that now fell upon the army, furnishing fatigue-parties to dig at the trenches, and armed parties to cover them as they worked, and pickets by day and night to watch the movements of the enemy.
Men passed on their business; a squad with a captured machine-gun which they tested in a sheltered dip; armourers at their benches busy with sick rifles; fatigue-parties for straw, rations, and ammunition; long processions of single blue figures turned sideways between the brown sunless walls.
The thunder of artillery wakes you in the morning anew, and if you venture out for a walk before breakfast you thread your way through waggons of the army train or fatigue-parties in white jackets.
The water would freeze in our parlors at a very short distance from the fire, for, although the "fatigue-parties" kept the halls filled with wood, almost up to the ceiling, that did not counterbalance the inconvenience of having the wide doors thrown open to the outer air for a great portion of the day, to allow of their bringing it in.
It was well that the course of Crawford and his companions did not lie across Carter's Field; for if it had done so, they must have seen hundreds of lanterns moving about, and hundreds of dark figures moving and toiling the fatigue-parties burying the Union dead and planting the soil of the Old Dominion with more of that martyr seed which may yet spring up to the redemption of the land and the glory of the nation.
The outlying pickets had been relieved, and were marching campwards; the Second Division had had its customary "daylight parade"; the men had stood to their arms for half-an-hour, and, as nothing was stirring, had been dismissed to their tents; the fatigue-parties had been despatched for rations, water, fuel in a word, the ordinary daily duties of the camp had commenced, when the sharp rattle of musketry rang out angrily, and well sustained in the direction of our foremost picket on Shell Hill.
It is, however, occasionally visited by that amazing troupe of variety artistes, known as the Army Pierrots, who provide the men in billets with a most delectable entertainment for 50 centimes, the proceeds being a "deodand," and appropriated to charitable uses. For all that, Bailleul stinks in the nostrils of fatigue-parties.
There is a big circle of seething flame and rolling smoke here, too, a malodorous neighborhood, around which fatigue-parties are working with averted heads; and among them some surly and unwilling Indians, driven to labor at the muzzle of threatening revolver or carbine, aid in dragging to the flames carcass after carcass of horse and mule, and in gathering together and throwing on the pyre an array of miscellaneous soldier garments, blouses, shirts, and trousers, all more or less hacked and blood-stained, all of no more use to mortal wearer.
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