The 4th of October found me with my regiment (my detachment "handed
over," and responsibility, so far as it was concerned, past) before
Sebastopol, which our army had now environed, on _one_ side at least.
And now I was face to face with the Russians at last, and war had
become a terrible reality. Tents had been landed, and all the troops
were fairly under canvas. Our camp was strengthened by a chain of
intrenchments dug all round it, and connected with those of the
French, which extended to the sea on their left, while our right lay
towards the valley of Inkermann, at the entrance of which, on a chalky
cliff, 190 feet high at its greatest elevation, rose the city of
Sebastopol, with all its lofty white mansions, that ran in parallel
streets up the steep acclivity. In memory I can see it now, as I used
to see it then, from the trenches, the advanced rifle-pits, or through
the triangular door of my tent, with all its green-domed churches, its
great round frowning batteries, forts Alexander and Constantine and
others, perforated for cannon, tier above tier; and far inland
apparently, for a distance after even the suburbs had ceased, were
seen the tall slender masts of the numerous shipping that had taken
shelter in the far recesses of the harbour, nearly to the mouth of the
Tchernaya, from our fleets (which now commanded all the Black Sea).
And a pretty sight they formed in a sunny day, when all their white
canvas was hanging idly on the yards to dry.
Nearer the mouth of the great harbour were the enormous dark hulls of
the line-of-battle ships--the Three Godheads of 120 guns, the
Silistria of 84, the Paris and Constantine, 120 each, and other
vessels of that splendid fleet which was soon after sunk to bar our
entrance. Daily the Russians threw shot and shell at us, while we
worked hard to get under cover. The sound of those missiles was
strange and exciting at first to the ears of the uninitiated; but
after a time the terrible novelty of it passed away, or was heard with
indifference; and with indifference, too, even those who had not been
at Alma learned to look on the killed and wounded, who were daily and
nightly borne from the trenches to the rear, the latter to be under
the care of the toil-worn surgeons, and the former to lie for a time
in the dead-tents. The siege-train was long in arriving. "War tries
the strength of the military framework," says Napier. "It is in peace
the framework itself must be formed, otherwise barbarians would be the
leading soldiers of the world. _A perfect army can only be made by
civil institutions_." Yet with us such was the state of the
"framework," by the results of a beggarly system of political economy,
that when war was declared--a war after forty years of peace--our
arsenals had not a sufficient quantity of shells for the first
battering-train, and the fuses issued had been in store rotting and
decaying since the days of Toulouse and Waterloo. This was but one
among the many instances of gross mismanagement which characterised
many arrangements of the expedition. And taking advantage of the
delays, nightly the Russians, with marvellous rapidity, were throwing
up additional batteries of enormous strength, mounted with cannon
taken from the six line-of-battle ships which, by a desperate
resolve of Prince Menschikoff's, were ultimately sunk across the
harbour-mouth, where we could see the sea-birds, scared by the adverse
cannonade, perching at times on their masts and royal-yards, which
long remained visible above the water. Occasionally our war-steamers
came near, and then their crews amused themselves by throwing shells
into the town. Far up the inlet lay a Russian man-of-war, with a
cannon ingeniously slung in her rigging. The shot from this, as they
could slue it in any direction, greatly annoyed our sappers, and
killed many of them, before one well-directed ball silenced it for
ever.
Two thousand seamen with their officers, forming the Naval Brigade of
gallant memory, were landed from our fleet, bringing with them a
magnificent battering-train of ship-guns of the largest calibre; and
these hardy and active fellows lent most efficient aid in dragging
their ordnance and the stores over the rough and hilly ground that
lies between Balaclava and the city. They were all in exuberant
spirits at the prospect of a protracted "spree" ashore; for as such
they viewed the circumstance of their forming a part of the combined
forces destined to take Sebastopol, and they amused and astonished the
redcoats by their freaks and pranks under fire, and their ready
alacrity, jollity, and muscular strength. Guns of enormous weight and
long range were fast being brought into position; the trenches were
"pushed" with vigour; and now the work of a regular siege--the
consecutive history of which forms no part of my narrative--was begun
in stern earnest when the batteries opened on the 16th October. Our
armies were placed in a semicircle, commanding the southern side of
this great fortified city and arsenal of the Black Sea. They were in
full possession of the heights which overlook it, and were most
favourably posted for the usual operations of a siege, which would
never have been necessary had it been entered after Alma was won. A
deep and beautiful ravine, intersecting the elevated ground, extended
from the harbour of the doomed city to Balaclava, dividing the area of
the allied camp into two portions. The French, I have said, were on
the left, and we held the right.
On the very day our batteries opened, I received the notification of
my appointment to a company. This rapid promotion was consequent to
the sad casualties of the Alma; and two days after, when the
trench-guards were relieved, and I came off duty before daybreak, I
crept back to my tent cold, miserable, and weary, to find my man
Evans--brother of the gallant private of the same name who planted the
Red Dragon on the great redoubt--busy preparing a breakfast for
_three_, with the information that Caradoc and Gwynne, who had been on
board the Hydaspes, an hospital ship for officers, had rejoined the
night before, and had added their repast to mine for the sake of
society. But food and other condiments were already scarce in the
camp, and tidings that they had come from Balaclava with their
haversacks _full_, caused more than one hungry fellow to visit my
humble abode, the canvas walls of which flapped drearily in the wind,
that came sweeping up the valley of Inkermann. Without undressing, as
the morning was almost in, I threw myself upon my camp-bed, which
served me in lieu of a sofa, and strove, with the aid of a plaid, a
railway-rug, and blanket, to get some warmth into my limbs, after the
chill of a night spent in the damp trenches; while Evans, poor fellow,
was doing his best to boil our green and ill-ground coffee in a
camp-kettle on a fire made of half-dried drift-wood, outside my tent,
which was pitched in a line with thousands of others, on the slope of
the hill that overlooked the valley where the Tchernaya flows. Though
the season was considerably advanced now, the days were hot, but the
nights were correspondingly chill; and at times a white dense fog came
rolling up from the Euxine, rendering still greater the discomfort of
a bell-tent, as it penetrated every crevice, and rendered everything
therein--one's bedding and wearing apparel, even that which was packed
in overlands and bullock-trunks--damp, while sugar, salt, and bread
became quite moist. Luckily, somehow it did not seem to affect our
ammunition. Then there came high winds, which blew every night,
whistling over the hill-tops, singing amongst the tent-ropes, and
bellowing down the valley of Inkermann.
These blasts sometimes cast the tent-ropes loose by uprooting the
pegs, causing fears lest the pole--whereon hung the revolvers, swords,
pans, and kettles of the occupants--might snap, and compel them, when
hoping to enjoy a comfortable night's rest off duty, to come forth
shivering from bed to grope for the loosened pegs amid the muddy soil
or wet grass, and by the aid of a stone or a stray shot--if the mallet
was not forthcoming--to secure them once more. This might be varied by
a shower of rain, which sputtered in your face as you lay abed, till
the canvas became thoroughly wetted, and so tightened. Anon it might
shrink; then the ropes would strain, and unless you were in time to
relax them, down might come the whole domicile in a wet mass on those
who were within it. Now and then a random shot fired from Sebastopol,
or the whistling shell, with a sound like t'wit-t'wit-t'wit,
describing a fiery arc as it soared athwart the midnight sky on its
errand of destruction, varied the silence and darkness of the hour.
The clink of shovels and pickaxes came ever and anon from the
trenches, where the miners and working-parties were pushing their sap
towards the city. The sentinels walked their weary round, or stood
still, each on his post shivering, it might be, in the passing blast,
but looking fixedly and steadily towards the enemy. The rest slept
soundly after their day of toil and danger, watching, starvation, and
misery; forgetful of the Russian watchfires that burned in the
distance, heedless of the perils of the coming day, and of _where_ the
coming night might find them. And so the night would pass, till the
morning bugle sounded; then the stir and bustle began, and there was
no longer rest for any, from the general of the day down to the goat
of the Welsh Fusileers; the cooking, and cleaning of arms, parade of
reliefs for outpost and the trenches, proceeded; but these without
sound of trumpet or drum, as men detailed for such duties do
everything silently; neither do their sentries take any complimentary
notice of officers passing near their posts. Ere long a thousand white
puffs, spirting up from the broken ground between us and the city,
would indicate the rifle-pits, where the skirmishers lay _en perdue_,
taking quiet pot-shots at each other from behind stones, caper-bushes,
sand-bags, and sap-rollers; and shimmering through haze and smoke--the
blue smoke of the "villainous saltpetre"--rose the city itself, with
its green spires and domes, white mansions, and bristling batteries.
And so I saw it through the tent-door as the morning drew on, and the
golden sunshine began to stream down the long valley of Inkermann,
"the city of caverns;" while our foragers were on the alert, and
Turkish horses laden with hay, and strings of low four-wheeled arabas,
driven by Tartars in fur skull-caps, brown jackets, and loose white
trousers, would vary the many costumes of the camp. And the morning
sunshine fell on other things which were less lively,--the long mounds
of fresh earth where the dead lay, many of them covered with white
lime dust to insure speedy decay. And then began that daily cannonade
against the city--the cannonade that was to last till we _alone_
expended more than one hundred thousand barrels of gunpowder, and
heaven alone knows how many tons of shot and shell.
Often I lay in that tent, with the roar of the guns in my ears,
pondering over the comfort of stone walls, of English sea-coal fires,
and oftener still of her who was so far away, she so nobly born and
rich, surrounded, as I knew she must always be, by all that wealth and
luxury, rank and station could confer; and I thought longingly, "O for
aunt Margaret's mirror, or Surrey's magic glass, or for the far-seeing
telescope of the nursery tale, that I might see her once again!"
Estelle's promises of writing to me had not been fulfilled as yet, or
her answers to my loving and earnest letters from Malta and the Crimea
had miscarried.
"Welcome, Caradoc! welcome, Gwynne!" cried I, springing off the
camp-bed as my two friends entered the tent, of which I was the sole
occupant, as my lieutenant was on board the Hydaspes ill with fever,
and my ensign, a poor boy fresh from Westminster school, was under one
of the horrid mounds in the shot-strewn valley.
"Harry, old fellow, how are you?--how goes it? Missed the Alma, eh?"
said they cheerfully, as we warmly shook hands.
"All the better, perhaps," said Mostyn, who now joined us, while Price
and Clavell soon after dropped in also; so two had to sit on the
camp-bed, while the rest squatted on chests or buckets, and as for a
table, we never missed it.
"And you were hit, Caradoc?"
"In the calf of the left leg, Harry, prodded by the rusty bayonet of a
fellow who lay wounded on the ground, and who continued to fire
_after_ us when we had left him in the rear, till one of ours gave him
the _coup de grâce_ with the butt-end of his musket. Would you believe
it?--the goat went up hill with us, and I couldn't, even while the
bullets fell like hail about us, resist caressing it, for the sake of
the donor."
"Poor Winny Lloyd!"
"Why poor?" asked Phil.
"Well, pretty, then. I saw her just before I left Southampton."
"This goat seems to be the peculiar care of Caradoc," said Gwynne; "he
rivals its keeper, little Dicky Roll the drummer, in his anxiety to
procure leaves, and buds of spurge, birch, and bird-cherry for it."
Phil Caradoc laughed, and muttered something about being "fond of
animals;" but a soft expression was in his handsome brown eyes, and I
knew he was thinking of sweet Winifred Lloyd, of his bootless suit,
and the pleasant woods of Craigaderyn.
"And you, Charley, were hit, too? Saw your name in the _Gazette_,"
said I.
"A ball right through the left fore-arm, clean as a whistle; but it is
almost well."
"And now to breakfast. Look sharp, Evans, there's a good fellow! A
morning walk from Balaclava to the front gives one an appetite," said
I.
"Yes, that one may not often have, like us, the wherewith to satisfy.
An appetite is the most troublesome thing one can have in the vicinity
of Sebastopol," replied Phil.
A strange-looking group we were when contrasted with our appearance
when last we met.
Probably not one of us had enjoyed the luxury of a complete wash for a
week, and the use of the razor having long been relinquished, our
beards rivalled that of Carneydd Llewellyn in size, if not in hue. The
scarlet uniforms, with lace and wings[3] of gold, in which we had
landed, we had marched and fought and slept in for weeks, were purple,
covered with discolorations, and patched with any stuff that came to
hand. Our trousers had turned from Oxford gray to something of a red
hue, with Crimean mud. Each of us had a revolver in his sash (which we
then wore round the waist), and a canvas haversack or well-worn
courier-bag slung over his shoulder, to contain whatever he might pick
up, beg, borrow, or buy (some were less particular) in the shape of
biscuits, eggs, fowls, or potatoes. Caradoc carried a dead duck by the
legs as he entered, and Charley Gwynne had a loaf of Russian bread
hung by a cord over his left shoulder, like a pilgrim at La Scala
Santa; while Price had actually secured a lump of cheese from the wife
of a Tartar, a fair one, with whom the universal lover had found
favour when foraging in the lovely Baidar Valley. We were already too
miserable to laugh at each other's appearance, and our tatters had
ceased to be a matter of novelty. If such was the condition of our
officers, that of the privates was fully worse; and thanks to our
wretched commissariat and ambulance arrangements, the splendid
_physique_ of our men had begun to disappear; but their pluck was
undying as ever.
On this morning we six were to have a breakfast such as rarely fell to
our lot in the Crimea; for Evans, my Welsh factotum and _fidus
Achates_, was a clever fellow, and speedily had prepared for us, at a
fire improvised under the shelter of a rock, a large kettle of
steaming coffee, which, sans milk, we drank from tin canteens,
tumblers, or anything suitable, and Gwynne's loaf was shared
fraternally among us, together with a brace of fowls found by him in a
Tartar cottage. "Lineal descendants of the cock that crew to Mahomet,
no doubt," said he; "and now, thanks to Evans, there they are, brown,
savoury, appetising, gizzard under one wing, liver under the
other--done to a turn, and on an old ramrod."
And while discussing them, the events of the siege were also
discussed, as coolly as we were wont to do the most ordinary field
man[oe]uvres at home.
"The deuce!" said I, "how the breeze comes under the wall of this
wretched tent!"
"Don't abuse the tent, Harry," said Caradoc; "I am thankful to find
myself in one, after being on board the Hydaspes. It must be a
veritable luxury to be able to sleep, even on a camp-bed and alone,
after being in a hospital, with one sufferer on your right, another on
your left, dead or dying, groaning and in agony. May God kindly keep
us all from the 'bloody hospital of Scutari,' after all I have heard
of it!"
"You were with us last night in the trenches, Mostyn?" said I.
"Yes, putting Gwynne's Hythe theories into practice from a rifle pit.
I am certain that I potted at least three of the Ruskies as coolly as
ever I did grouse in Scotland. All squeamishness has left me now,
though I could not help shuddering when first I saw a man's heels in
the air, after firing at him. You will never guess what happened on
our left. A stout vivandière of the 3rd Zouaves, while in the act of
giving me a _petit verre_ from her little keg, was taken--"
"By the enemy?" exclaimed Price.
"Not at all--with the pains of maternity; and actually while the shot
and shell were flying over our heads."
"And what were the trench casualties?" asked Gwynne.
"About a hundred and twenty of all ranks, killed, wounded, and
missing. A piece more of the fowl--thanks."
"A guardsman was killed last night, I have heard," said Hugh Price.
"Yes; poor Evelyn of the Coldstreams; he was first blinded by dust and
earth blown into his eyes by the ricochetting of a 36-pound shot, and
as he was groping about in an exposed place between the gabions, he
fell close by me."
"Wounded?"
"Mortally--hit in the head; he' was just able to whisper some woman's
name, and then expired. He purchased all his steps up to the majority,
so there's a pot of money gone. I think I could enjoy a quiet weed
now; but, Clavell, there was surely an awful shindy in your quarter
last night?"
"Yes," replied Tom, who, since he had been under fire, seemed to have
grown an inch taller; "a sortie."
"A sortie?" said two or three, laughing.
"Well, something deuced like it," said Tom, testily, as he stroked the
place where his moustache was to be. "I was asleep between the gabions
about twelve at night, when all at once a terrible uproar awoke me.
'Stand to your arms, men, stand to your arms!' cried our adjutant;
'the Russians are scouring the trenches!' I sprang up, and tumbled
against a bulky brute in a spike-helmet and long coat, with a smoking
revolver in his hand, just as a sergeant of ours shot him. It was all
confusion--I can tell you nothing about it; but we will see it all in
the _Times_ by and by. 'Sound for the reserves!' cried one. 'By God,
they have taken the second parallel!' cried another. 'Fire!' 'Don't
fire yet!' But our recruits began to blaze away at random. The
Russians, however, fell back; it might have been only a reconnoitring
party; but, anyhow, they have levanted with the major of the 93rd
Highlanders."
"The deuce they have!" we exclaimed. And this episode of the major's
capture was to have more interest for me than I could then foresee.
"These cigars, five in number," continued Tom, "were given to me by a
poor dying Zouave, who had lost his way and fallen among us. I gave
him a mouthful of brandy from my canteen, after which he said, Take
these, monsieur l'officier; they are all I have in the world now, and,
as you smoke them, think of poor Paul Ferrière of the 3rd Zouaves,
once a jolly student of the Ecole de Médecine, dying now, like a
beggar's dog!' he added, bitterly. 'Nay,' said I, 'like a brave
soldier.' 'Monsieur is right,' said he, with a smile. Our surgeons
could do nothing for him, and so he expired quite easily, while
watching his own blood gradually filling up a hole in the earth near
him!"
"Well, the Crimea, bad as it is," said Caradoc, as he prepared and lit
one of the Frenchman's cigars, "is better than serving in India, I
think; 'that union of well-born paupers,' as some fellow has it, 'a
penal servitude for those convicted of being younger sons.'"
"By Jove, I can't agree with you," said Mostyn, who had served in
India, and was also a younger son; "but glory is a fine thing, no
doubt."
"Glory be hanged!" said Gwynne, testily; "a little bit of it goes a
long way with me."
"See, there go some of the Naval Brigade to have a little ball
practice with a big Lancaster!" cried Tom Clavell, starting to the
tent-door.
"Getting another gun into position apparently," added Raymond Mostyn.
As they spoke, a party of seamen, whiskered and bronzed, armed with
cutlasses and pistols, their officers with swords drawn, swept past
the tent-door at a swinging trot, all singing cheerily a forecastle
song, of which the monotonous burden seemed to be,
"O that I had her, _O_ that I had her,
Seated on my knee!
O that I had her, _O_ that I had her,
A black girl though she be!"
tallying on the while to the drag-ropes of a great Lancaster gun,
which they trundled up the slope, crushing stones, caper-bushes, and
everything under its enormous grinding wheels, till they got it into
position; and a loud ringing cheer, accompanied by a deep and sullen
boom, ere long announced that they had slued it round and sent one
more globe of iron to add to the hundreds that were daily hurled
against Sebastopol. On this occasion the fire of this especial
Lancaster gun was ordered to be directed against a bastion on the
extreme left of the city, where the officer in command, a man of
remarkable bravery, who had led several sorties against us, seemed to
work his cannon and direct their fire with uncommon skill; and it was
hoped that we should ere long dismount or disable them, and if
possible breach the place.