I remember so many terrible, treacherous things that my eyes, now milky with age, once took in with crystal clarity. The men still fall, gurgling and screaming, the widows still cry out pitifully, the children still clinging to their mother’s dress hems, not understanding but feeling a pain that is not really theirs. In my dreams, men, comrades, dear, dear friends laugh and joke together, bowling curveballs then grinning in triumph as their opponents lost a wicket, sharing a warming brandy in the comfort of such-and-such a clubhouse on countless wintry nights. Then the scene shifts, and I see them, not much older, lying bloody and lifeless, corpses before their time. Their smiles are replaced by limp, open jaws, their creased eyes wide with pain, fear and shock. Each setting contains a friend, dead or dying, their lives pouring from so many wounds, knowing it is the end, their eyes betraying them as they make their final jokes with blood at their lips, or seeping from between their clutching fingers. I crouch beside each one, hunched shoulders shaking as raw sobs escape my lips, I sit beside them calling out their names and knowing that they cannot hear, that they never will again. I wake up in a cold sweat, shouting out their names, crying for help, someone, please!
But there are good times in there too, hidden at the back of the drawer of memories. Shared secrets before battles, joking about them afterwards. Furtive glances conveying mirth in a new commander or member of our team of soldiers. Kissing my Victoria, whose lips haven’t graced mine for fifteen years now, beneath the tinkling chandelier at the ball where I asked her for her hand, feeling her silky skin quivering beneath my eager hands on our honeymoon in the country, countless awakenings to find myself battered and bruised, sometimes with injuries so severe that I never fully recovered from them, but nonetheless alive, if not wholly well.
One of the clearest of all the memories left is the morning of the Charge, the Battle of Balaklava. It was my first real experience of military action, the same year I signed on. That one battle taught me all I know- of how men just twenty years old can become ninety overnight, how a commander can make or break a battle, the feeling of losing a dear friend, or even just an acquaintance, seeing them die before your eyes, or at your feet, and most of all how it feels when your heart beats so hard that you hear every thump, and your lungs feel as if they will explode, and you can feel the seconds of your life running out, like the last grains of sand in an hourglass.
The above is a excerpt starting at the very beginning of my book
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