He stood and stepped back, pausing to be sure that the eyes stayed shut. Here was another thing he had never thought to know: how to close the eyes of the dead. More dreadful still, that it was uncertain whether the lids would remain closed. He had seen before that if they were not weighted down, the lids could rise a little over the now clouded, unseeing eyes, like an ill-drawn blind across the darkening glass of a window. But William had no coins for the task and he had not the heart to find stones. Not the stones of this place of death.

Algie had missed the worst of the fighting, arriving as a reinforcement only in December, some four months earlier. He had not seen the clamour above the Alma River; nor, after the great battle at Inkerman Heights, the fallen as numerous as a whole hillside’s worth of sheep. He had not known the increase in weight of a bayonet as hour after hour of fighting progressed. Nor the force required for the blade to do its terrible work, piercing the coats of the Russians, then their ribs: it was butchery. Shot as thick as hail, all but invisible in the fog and smoke, until it found a man’s flesh.

Yet there had been beauty. Frequently at night William had watched the shells flying in their graceful curves and marvelled that destruction could wear so lovely a coat. Seeing a star, it was easy to take it for a shell also and to wonder that it moved so slowly across the blackness of the sky. In the vineyards by Alma, before the fighting began, finches and larks had congregated in flocks. There had been buntings, gold-crested wrens and yellowhammers. The song of linnets had hung in the soft air. The first sight of the little harbour at Balaklava had been delightful, scarcely two ships’ breadths at its entrance, with magnificent high cliffs along each side, higher than any he knew of on the English coast. It had put him in mind of Clovelly.

But a siege was unrelenting work and this was what Algernon had come out to. There was no verdure here at camp; only mile upon mile of mud. In the cold the trampled ground had frozen into hard deep ruts that caused men and horses to stumble. The privations, especially those endured by the men, had been very hard. Every day men were lost in the trenches from grape and shell, but more had fallen from exhaustion, starvation, ague, cholera. Algie had been much afraid, though he had tried to conceal it, even from William. Perhaps especially from William.