Matthew Plampin - The Street Philosopher

Cracknell lit a cigar, holding a match to its tip and sucking with relish. ‘Just testing your reflexes, Thomas!’ His accent, usually mild, had been thickened by drink. ‘Have to keep you on your toes, my lad! How will you face the Bear if you can’t manage the more good-natured assaults of your leader? Eh?’ He chortled throatily around his cigar, puffing out small jets of smoke.

Kitson, rubbing at a twisted elbow, did not look convinced. ‘I suppose, then, that I am expected to thank you for the service?’

With a final loud laugh, the senior correspondent hauled himself up, removed his cigar and took another healthy swallow from his flask. As he smacked his tingling lips, he realised that the young illustrator was staring at him in a manner he did not wholly appreciate. Cracknell smoothed down his wild black beard and made a brusque introduction. Then he noticed a small, dark discolouration at the side of the boy’s mouth.

‘Is that a bruise I see there, sir?’ he asked with gruff, slightly menacing good humour.

The illustrator glanced at Kitson. ‘It is, Mr Cracknell. A lieutenant saw fit to strike out at me after–’

‘A lieutenant? ’ Cracknell grinned. ‘You work damned fast, my friend! Why, it took me weeks to be struck in the face by an officer, yet you have achieved it in a matter of hours! A fellow after our own hearts, eh, Thomas?’

Kitson nodded in dry agreement.

‘To be perfectly frank with you, though,’ Cracknell went on, inserting the cigar back between his teeth, ‘I don’t quite see the point of your presence here, myself. The Courier’s foreign correspondence is about words, mine and Kitson’s–the combined efforts of Britannia’s two greatest descriptive minds. We are not the Illustrated London News . We do not, in my view at least, need anything as crude as images to convey our experiences.’ He tapped off an inch of ash. ‘But I have been overruled by my editor. Here you are, Smiles, here you bloody well are, and we shall make the best of it, by God!’

The illustrator looked confused, uncertain whether he had just been endorsed or denounced. ‘I–I thank you, Mr Cracknell. Excuse me though, sir, the name is Styles –S, T, Y—’

Cracknell waved Styles quiet with a meaty, indifferent hand. ‘There is much fodder in this place, is there not, for your work? Grand panorama and so forth?’ Styles lifted up a leather-bound folder, opening his mouth to speak, but Cracknell did not require an answer. ‘You join us late, of course, but that is no loss. The most memorable scenes Varna had to offer were of hundreds of soldiers, felled by cholera long before they could see battle, being buried in ditches–and somehow I don’t think this was quite what that hopeless old muff O’Farrell envisaged when he signed you up.’

The senior correspondent retrieved the wineskin, dropped when he had tackled Kitson, and hefted its sloshing weight. He smiled approvingly; they had made a good inroad into its contents. If there was a man of spirit and courage who was impervious to the robust charms of liquor, Richard Cracknell had certainly never met him.

‘No, young Smiles, this is where the real drama will be staged,’ he went on, ‘here in the Crimea. This peninsula, y’see, has a rich strategic value. It is the promontory from which the Russian Bear exerts its baleful influence over the Black Sea. Thirty miles in that direction,’ he pointed off into the night, ‘lies the mighty fortress-port of Sebastopol; and over yonder,’ he swung his arm in an expansive arc, ‘across the waves, is poor Turkey, Europe’s helpless invalid, ailing and weak–and bound to the British Lion by sacred bonds of honour.’ Cracknell’s excitement was mounting. ‘The Bear has been swiping at this feeble bird of late, snapping at it hungrily–so we will go to Sebastopol and we will knock it down. We have let this Bear grow too hale and hearty, Mr Smiles, and altogether too large, and must now give it a good whipping to remind it of its place! Isn’t that so, Thomas?’

‘It is, Mr Cracknell.’ Kitson had heard all this before, of course, and there was the usual trace of flippancy in his manner. ‘The Lion will, ah, whip the Bear. To rescue the turkey.’

Cracknell’s eyes misted over with alcohol-fuelled passion. ‘A great adventure awaits us, my friends. We shall see the glories of war up close and true, and we will deliver them to the great British public. A more splendid mission is hard to imagine.’ He drew the stopper from the wineskin with a flourish. ‘Let us drink to this team of ours! Let us drink to all we three shall achieve!’

After a long pull of the rough rustic wine, Cracknell lobbed the skin to the illustrator. When they had all partaken, the senior correspondent straightened his lapels, suddenly businesslike. ‘Now, gather yourselves. The camp is abuzz, and we must investigate this alarm on behalf of our readers. There is no time to lose.’

Setting off at a vigorous pace, he led his subordinates back around the pond and into the long, foggy avenues of infantry tents. Everywhere, dark shapes were streaming past stretches of pale canvas, stumbling and jostling as they went. The chilly air hummed with shouts, questions and curses. Torches were evidently in short supply; and when one eventually came into view, weaving through the crowds, it revealed only grim turmoil. Cracknell threw away the butt of his cigar and tried to get his bearings. Over to the right, he spotted a makeshift signpost tacked to a pole beneath a naval lantern. It stood at a rutted, muddy crossroads, with arrows pointing off in every direction. He elbowed his way towards it.

Kitson arrived to his side. Cracknell saw alertness and energy in the junior correspondent that mirrored his own exactly. My protégé is keen for proper experience, he thought. He wishes to demonstrate that he has left his time in the Courier’ s more effeminate regions utterly behind him–that he is fit for manly duty. And his chance surely approaches.

‘This is chaos, Mr Cracknell!’ said Kitson. ‘If the Russians were to attack now, we’d surely be swept back into the sea!’

Cracknell grinned. ‘Indeed, Thomas! I’m beginning to think this invasion may have lost the element of bloody surprise, aren’t you? Well, all the better–it will be a solid fight, with armies meeting on the open field. Glory, my friend, and a swift resolution.’ He clapped his hand on Kitson’s bony shoulder. ‘Do you have a report for today?’

‘I have, sir–the disembarkation of the Light Brigade.’ He hesitated. ‘Also, I feel I should tell you that Mr Styles and I had the misfortune to encounter the grenadier company from the 99th, commanded by none other than Captain Wray. It was then that his Lieutenant, Davy, struck our illustrator about the face. They were looting, Mr Cracknell. Wray destroyed a valuable statuette in front of me, in fact.’

‘Is that so!’ Cracknell had returned his attention to the signpost. ‘Hardly surprising. I trust you made no mention of this incident in your report. We don’t want to puncture the patriotic spirit at this early stage with tales of how soldiers actually behave, now do we?’

‘I had assumed that this would be your view. What about yourself? Did you manage to speak with Lord Raglan?’

Cracknell shook his head. ‘No, our esteemed commander-in-chief eluded me once again. But I found ample diversion in another quarter.’

The senior correspondent looked again at the illustrator, who was attempting, rather hilariously, to act like a consummate, focused professional, to whom the seething camp was no great thing. He remembered the expression on Maddy’s face a few hours earlier, naïve yet sly both at once, as she’d talked about the boy. Cracknell and Madeleine had been lying in each other’s arms in her husband’s tent, their clothing in disarray, and suddenly she had been filled with a burning desire to discuss the Courier’ s latest addition, whom she had apparently befriended on the boat from Varna. ‘Oh, he’s so talented,’ she’d said, ‘and so handsome! And Richard, I do believe he’s a little in love with me…’ Cracknell, familiar with her tactics for eliciting the declarations of devotion to which she was quite addicted, had merely reached for his cigar case.