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Requiem for the Chiefs

© John Barham

4pm on 19th June. The Russians had exercised their right as victors to temporise over raising the reciprocal white flag to signal the truce to allow for burials and retrieval of the immobile wounded. Finally they had ensured that the ritual would be properly staged managed. The ramparts of the redoubts and the curtains joining them were lined with soldiers and sailors striking triumphal poses which they knew would be emphasised against the blue skyline to the allied burial parties below.

And there was plenty of work for them to do. The gruesome task of literally picking up the pieces had been made even more distasteful by the weather - a night downpour followed by a swelteringly hot day. Captain Clifford, recently appointed Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General at the Light Division Headquarters, had staff responsibilities for the British clear up, and recorded his impressions: "The few wounded officers and men who lay outside the Redan must have suffered dreadfully....by 4 o'clock so bad had been the wounds and so great the heat that the faces of the poor Dead could hardly, and many could not, be recognised. Their faces were quite black and many of them had swollen up and burst.

I was obliged to go about amongst the corpses to get the men to carry them away, and I was sick and vomited many times, and the greater number of men who carried the stretchers did the same. Some, Sir John Campbell amongst others, had already begun to decompose and worms and maggots were beginning to eat away the flesh. I saw as I thought a dead rifleman on the ground partly hid by the grass. I went to the spot. It was the backbone of one with part of his bowels and a lump or two of flesh with a part of his jacket and head by it; all the rest had been blown away by a shell....I could not remain by the large grave dug for all who were collected in rear of the Quarry, the stench was so dreadful, and it takes more than a trifle to upset me now. This is all part of the Honour and the Glory I suppose!"

The mutilated remains might well have been Rifleman Flannery, who had recently arrived and shouldn't have been in action at all - his mates had pulled his leg by telling him he had been warned for the 100 Riflemen cover party. He went to his sergeant who told him it was untrue, but did he want to go? Yes, said Flannery, in order to turn the tables, but it cost him his life -

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