There were times when Gale wondered how noble a cause this Crimean affair could truly be said to be. Many times. He had not been alone in the view, which he had formed while camped at Varna, that the Turks were a horrid set of people to fight for: in the early days, many had averred that they would gladly go over to the Russians and help them against this wretched nation, if that were only the policy of England. In any case, their masters at home seemed to be bitterly inept. The Commissariat was almost criminally inefficient. Supplies were utterly inadequate, if they came at all. During the long months of the winter, watching men die from sickness, fatally weakened by the lack of food or warmth or shelter; seeing horses eating each other’s tails in the cold for lack of forage, he had privately questioned whether this was a campaign worth the fighting. It was a question which was not resolved by hearing some of the younger men call out for their mothers in the hours before death, with nothing to help them.

William had seen sights no civilized man should witness. He had seen men’s bodies hanging from the branches of trees, like broken umbrellas. In the height of battle men and horses had fallen in swathes, like grass before a scythe. The numbers seemed impossible. After Alma he had seen a wounded Russian, offered an easeful sip of brandy from an Englishman’s flask, reward his helper with the blade of a bayonet. And it had been sickening to a man’s soul to witness the women who appeared like vultures after each battle, shears in their hands, harvesting gold braid and buttons from the bodies of the still unburied fallen with no more pity than if they were shearing sheep. Down by the harbour, now, those same women sold snuffboxes carved from the bones of the dead horses.