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The Potter and the Clay

Maud Howard Peterson

Named on the page for Battle of Inkerman.

draft Matched to the battle automatically; not yet reviewed.

Passages that name the battle; the whole book is at Project Gutenberg.

5 November 1854 (24 October Old Style)

Battle of Inkerman

BOOK THREE

The old officer sat up very straight grasping his cane, and then he led direct to the object of his visit, as he had led direct his famous charge into the center of the enemy’s lines, on the heights of Inkerman, way back in ’54.

BOOK THREE

But he loved him, as he was, with all his faults; he loved him for his faults; and the whole thing was hard—harder than the charge at Inkerman.

BOOK THREE

"Of course he will get his uncle to work him back on a home regiment or do something on the strength of his father’s gallant action at Inkerman and his wound." Tom Cameron had said. "Of course he won’t go."

BOOK THREE

He stared at the shadows cast by the flickering lamp on the wall opposite. The vision of the trooper’s ghastly face had faded for the time, but intenser visions appeared and shifted and reappeared again. First there came the shadow face of his mother, who had been dead for years, and then that of his father—his father who had led that charge at Inkerman. The face seemed turned away. Then there came the face of the aunt who had mothered him so long, and then the shadowy forms haltered as the fever grew and the wall became a glowing blank. Later a face appeared, Stewart’s, against the fiery glow. It looked like a dead face—like the dead, ghastly face of the trooper; and then there came Cary’s face. It haunted him in a hundred different guises. It came to him as the child-face, as he had known it years ago down at the sea coast fort; and it faded and came again as the face touched with time’s maturity, as he had seen it when she first came to England; it shifted again and reappeared as it had been that day of the storm, when he and she had been housed in the old Scottish home together, and the tenderness and the fear were on it; it came again to him as he had seen it last before the receding transport and the oncoming mist had stolen it away from him. And it came once more as he had never seen it—horror-stricken, wide-eyed, and pale—as he _would_ see it, when she looked at him again, knowing the truth.

Public domain. Text from Project Gutenberg.