Читать книгу The Story Teller of the Desert—"Backsheesh!" or, Life and Adventures in the Orient - Thomas Wallace Knox - Страница 86

Table of Contents

A Visit to the Crimea—The Porter with the Big Books—The Danger of Siberia—Our Entry into Sevastopol—Terrible Reminiscences of the Crimean War—How we shirked the Cemetery—The Great Dock-Yard of Sevastopol—We Visit a Remarkable Gunboat—What we saw Below-Deck—The Story that our Landlord Told—An Enterprising Tartar—The “Doubter” offers an opinion—How the “Judge” stole a Newspaper—Adventures by the Way—The “Doubter” gets into Trouble—We Fly to the Rescue—Eccentricities of a Selfish Man—We Rise and Depart.

WE went to Odessa, as I said, solely to escape the quarantine on entering Turkey. Being there—less than two hundred miles from Sevastopol—we could not resist the temptation to pay a flying visit to the Crimea.

We reached Odessa in the morning, and found that a steamer left at two o’clock in the afternoon for the ports of the Crimea, and as soon as we had passed the formalities of the Custom-House and the police—no trifling matters—we went to the steamer in question. And, by the way, they put us through very cautiously, and also very politely, when we entered the empire.

Three officers of the police, followed by a porter with an armful of big books, came on board the Metternich, the steamer from Galatz, as soon as she entered the port. They took seats at the cabin table, spread out the passports which had been collected by the purser of the steamer, and then began work.

They disposed of two or three persons, and then came to my case.

“Have you ever been in Russia before?” said one of the officials in French. "Yes,” I answered.

“When was the last time?”

“In 1867.”

“Where were you?” and he looked at me very attentively.

“In a great many places,” I answered. “In Moscow, Petersburg, Warsaw, Kazan, and in Eastern and Western Siberia.

“Ah, you have been in Siberia!” said the official, and he and the others pricked up their ears.

“Nous verrons,” he continued, and he picked up one of the big books and turned to the initial of my name. “Possibly I may have to report your arrival at once,” he remarked, as he scanned page after page of the volume.

When he had finished that, he went for another, and altogether he looked through four or five books.

“There is nothing against you,” he said, as he finished the examination, and, with a smile worthy of a diplomate of the highest rank, he signed my passport and handed it over, with the wish that I might enjoy my trip to the Crimea, and have bon voyage partout, and he was kind enough to attend next to the passports of my companions, as we had no time to spare in getting to the Crimean steamer.

“The Russian Company of Navigation and Commerce,” to which I entrusted myself for the journey to Sevastopol—they call it Sev-as-to-pol there—is a big concern. It has eighty-four steamers, varying all the way from one hundred to thirty-six hundred tons each; nine of them are of the largest class of ocean steamers, and two-thirds of the rest are none of them less than nine hundred tuns. The large steamers run from Odessa to London, to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, to the Red Sea, and the ports of the Indian Ocean. The other steamers navigate the Black Sea and the adjacent waters, including several rivers that flow into that sea and the sea of Azof. I expected to find their boats dirty and badly managed; on the contrary, I found them clean and comfortable, with good service in the cabin and good management on deck.

The advertised time of the Crimea boat to leave Odessa is two o’clock in the afternoon, and it was not more than five minutes past two when our lines were cast off. I am told that the time table of the company is strictly kept, except of course, in case of unforseen accident.

The company was organized after the Crimean war, and has developed a great business. The repair-shops are at Sevastopol, but very little building is done there. All or nearly all the large steamers were built in England. The officers are generally appointed from the navy, and their pay is higher than in the regular service. On one of the steamers I encountered an officer, whose acquaintance I had made in the Okhotsk Sea several years before. “I am out of the government employ,” he said, “having served my full term. I am commanding one of this company’s largest steamers now; the service is harder, but I get much better pay than my rank in the navy would bring me.”

The steamer carried us along toward Eupatoria, and I was up when we steamed into the bay, where the English made their first descent upon the Crimea. There are no docks or piers; nothing but a semi-circular beach, like a bit of yellow lace on the end of a sleeve to a lady’s dress, and an irregular double fringe of houses beyond it. Ships anchor in the bay, and are unloaded by lighters. Our passengers were taken ashore in boats, and the freight and baggage were unceremoniously dumped into a huge launch. Heavy boxes and barrels were placed atop of trunks and valises, and there was a general mess of things.

It was at Eupatoria, on Thursday, September 14th, 1854, that the allied army landed in the Crimea. The place, the day, and the occasion will remain for ever memorable in French, English, and Russian history. Fifty thousand soldiers of the allied army were that day landed on Russian soil; of that fifty thousand nearly all are now in their last sleep. They perished in the battles of the Alma, the Tchernaya, and Inkermann; they fell in the trenches during the siege of Sevastopol; or worn out with privation and exposure, or suffering from wounds and disease, crept on board the transports at Balaklava and were borne away to die in the hospitals of Scutari or in their own native lands. In one year from that memorable landing at Eupatoria the fifty thousand had become ten thousand; and when the bugles sang truce and the flag of peace fluttered over the shattered walls and smoking ruins of Sevastopol, there was scarce a vestige remaining of the Grand Army of the Orient, that had sailed so proudly from the shores of France and England and assembled on Turkish soil to prepare for the descent into the Crimea. Death spared neither rank nor condition. Of all the officers and soldiers whose hearts beat high on that day as they saw the tri-color and the red cross waving over the gravelly beach at Eupatoria, very few are now alive.

There had been a fog in the morning, and occasional spittings and spatterings of rain, but it cleared up soon after we left Eupatoria, and the coast of the Crimea, with serrated mountains cutting the sky, and with steppes of sand and white rock here and there, came out clear and distinct beyond the dark waters of the Euxine Sea. Gloriously bright was the sun when a Russian officer pointed to a distant promontory and told me that there was Sevastopol; and deep blue was the sky, with not a patch of cloud to mar it, when we headed our prow toward Fort Constantine, and pushed steadily and fearlessly into the port which so long resisted the assaults of the allied armies of England and France. Away to the left lay the valley of the Alma, and also on our left, but nearer to us, the Inkermann pyramid was visible to mark the field of Inkermann’s battle. White specks of marble near the pyramid marked the resting-place of England’s gallant dead, and not far distant was the cemetery where lay the soldiers who fell there for the glory of France. In front, beyond the harbor, was the tawny mound of the Malakoff, with ugly seams and ridges over all its surface; beyond it were the Redan and the Mamelon Vert, and away to the right was the famous Bastion du Mat. The white walls of the marine barracks and arsenal filled much of the centre of the picture, far too much for Russian eyes, when it is remembered that they were the walls of ruins.

Forts Constantine and Nicholas are passed; no gun speaks from their walls, and not a soldier is visible to note our entrance. The shattered and ruined walls of these forts have disappeared; the present fortresses are new, or at any rate they have undergone a vast amount of repairing since the day the allies left Sevastopol after their work of destruction was finished.

We steamed up to the stone pier, where a dense crowd was gathered to meet us—in the foreground the officials of the port, behind them the well-dressed part of the community, and further away the wide-mouthed and sheepskin-coated peasantry of Russia. Our guide-book had told us of a good hotel a couple of hundred yards from the landing, and as soon as we could get ashore we went to it at a respectable pace. A crowd of hack-men sought to entrap us into riding, but we disdained their offers. We found the hotel, and after selecting rooms and fixing the price, we proceeded to “do” Sevastopol.

“Get us a guide at once and a carriage for three,” I said to the German-Russian landlord, who spoke English, French, or any other language that you might choose to try him in.

He sent a messenger to bring what we wanted and then asked where we wished to go.

I told him we wished to see all that we could that afternoon, and leave in the morning for Yalta. He mentioned the Malakoff, Redan, Inkermann, and other points, including the cemetery, and I interrupted him with:

“Never mind the cemetery; send us somewhere else.”

“Oh, then you are Americans,” he exclaimed; “every Englishman goes at once to the cemetery, and it is the first thing he asks for; but an American always says: “D——n the cemetery; take me somewhere else.’”

A moment later he apologized for his intimation that my countrymen were universally profane; but reiterated his assertion that every Englishman visiting Sevastopol goes at once to the cemetery, while every American prefers to do something else. I can well understand this. So many English were buried there, that every British visitor is sure to have occasion to look after the grave of a relative or friend; or, at all events, he has been requested to look out the burial-place of somebody and report its condition. Few Americans are likely to have anything more than ordinary curiosity to attract them to the cemetery at Sevastopol.

In a little while the carriage and guide were ready, and we started. The guide was a Greek—he may have been a Greek brigand—who had not been long in Sevastopol, and didn’t know enough about the place to hurt himself to any alarming extent. He spoke English fairly, but not over elegantly, and was, on the whole, satisfactory.

We drove off along the street leading upward from the hotel, and in the direction of the Malakoff and other fortresses of the days of the war. We were soon on the edge of the bluff overlooking the southern harbor, and could gaze down almost perpendicularly on the ships at anchor there. As we looked toward the end of the harbor, we discovered just beyond it a new building, and I asked what it was.

“That is the railway station,” was the guide’s reply. “The government is building a railway from Sevastopol to connect with the line from the Sea of Azof to Moscow and St. Petersburg. They have surveyed all the line, and a good deal of it is finished. They are going to lay the track all round this harbor, so that ships can be loaded right from the trains and the trains from the ships.”

I looked and saw the grading ready for the rails on both sides of the harbor and sweeping round the hill-side toward Inkermann.

Had this railway existed twenty years ago the allies would have failed to capture Sevastopol. It was their primitive mode of transportation more than anything else that caused Russia’s defeat. She learned then the importance of railways, and has since been putting her knowledge into practice.

We climbed to the top of the Malakoff, where a single Russian soldier holds peaceful possession of what thousands were once unable to defend. From the summit of the casemate we looked over the field, traced the lines of the contending armies, and then turned toward Inkermann and the defenses in that direction. The ground all round is cut and torn with rifle-pits, trenches, approaches, and defenses, and is a picture of desolation. Sevastopol is a mass of ruins; its inhabited dwellings are not a tenth the number of the fallen or falling walls, and you can ride or walk through whole squares of what were once rows of handsome edifices, but are now nothing but heaps of stones. It is more like Pompeii than any modern city I have ever seen.

Sevastopol must have been beautiful twenty years ago; she is the reverse of beautiful now, and I do not wonder that the Russian who walks through her half silent and almost deserted streets vows with compressed lips and lowering brow that Sevastopol must be avenged. She is majestic in her ruins. One feels her greatness, or what it must have been, at every step he takes; and no one can call Russia a barbarous nation when he looks at the remains of her dockyards, which were her pride and glory. To destroy these docks required months of labor on the part of French and English engineers. What must have been the labor to create them!

There had been much talk about a new kind of gunboat then at Sevastopol, and by the kindness of Admiral Popoff, the inventor of the system, I was permitted to visit and examine the Novgorod, as the pioneer vessel is called. She was built at Nicolayeff, on the River Bug, and was brought to Sevastopol to be finished. Another boat of the same class, but larger, to be called the Popofka was under construction, and intended to be followed by several others. The Novgorod is something like our monitors, though with a difference. When the original Monitor came out we were told to imagine a cheese-box on a raft; in the present instance you may imagine a cheese-box without any raft. The Novgorod is circular, and about a hundred feet in diameter; her sides where they rise above the water are perpendicular, but they do not rise very high—not more than a couple of feet. From the edge toward the centre there is a gentle incline, and this incline is covered with small cleats of wood to enable one to preserve his foothold. About twenty-five feet from the edge there is a circular wall of iron, fifteen inches thick, forming a turret like that of one of our monitors. This turret is fixed and made as firm as possible; inside of it is a movable turret, containing the guns, and pierced with two holes, through which the guns are to be discharged. The turret is firmly fastened to the platform which sustains the guns, and it can be raised or lowered at will by means of machinery. The guns are eleven-inch breech-loaders, and are very well finished; the carriages are of an improved pattern, and altogether the turret and its contents are highly creditable to their designers and makers.

Workmen were busy both in and out of the boat, and there was an unsatisfactory lot of fresh paint on nearly everything, so that it was necessary to be cautious in one’s movements.