‘This constant picking over of the carcass of the Charge is most intemperate and wrong-headed. If Mr Tennyson’s poem about the Charge of the Heavy Brigade on the same day had been the better verse, we might all have been spared this fuss. I do not care to hear poor old Lord Raglan’s name brought into this by people who were quite happily installed at their luncheon tables eating mutton, while so many of us were engaged in war on our country’s behalf. I fail to conceive what it is in the British character which makes defeat so much more appealing than victory! The Heavy Brigade did well that same day and one hears nothing of them. At Inkerman men were fighting from five o’clock in the morning until four o’clock in the afternoon. It was common for men to stand in trenches up to their knees in mud and freezing water for twelve hours at a time. Why should people fix on this one event, which lasted only a matter of minutes?’

‘I had not thought before of how long it took,’ said Alice. She pondered a moment. ‘I suppose it was like a flat race, no sooner begun than ended.’

‘It was no steeplechase, certainly,’ said William, returning to good humour now that he had spoken out.

Yet on the next occasion that he and his wife made a visit, and the time after, the matter of the Charge would once again be raised. William felt it afresh as an insult to those of his fellows who had died, not least poor Algie and his friend Lockwood. If a little pride was piqued in him that an action in which he personally had played no part was the one of which people most often spoke, then he was not sensible of it. A man may be stung and feel it just the same without knowing whether its cause be a wasp or a bee.

On the widow Lockwood it was now his duty to pay a call. His wife’s aunt was to give a dinner to celebrate his homecoming, which would bring him to Cheltenham. Alice was full of the notions of some doctor she had befriended and desirous of introducing the man to William. On the morning of their arrival in the town, he took the pocket watch that Lockwood had handed to him, along with the man’s buttons, his prayer book, a small packet of letters and a pocket-knife with a mother-of-pearl handle. His sword had already been sent to the widow. All his other effects had been auctioned in the Crimea the day after his death. Such auctions had been all too frequent. To many the affairs were most painful, for the articles put up seemed to a messmate or intimate comrade to be almost a part of the dead man himself. Saddles, bridles, bits, boots, plates, buttons, sheets and bedding all went under the hammer.