SEBASTOPOL.

_SEBASTOPOL IN DECEMBER, 1854._

Dawn tinges the horizon above Mount Sapouné; the shadows of the night

have left the surface of the sea, which, now dark blue in color, only

awaits the first ray of sunshine to sparkle merrily; a cold wind blows

from the fog-enveloped bay; there is no snow on the ground, the earth is

black, but frost stings the face and cracks underfoot. The quiet of the

morning is disturbed only by the incessant murmuring of the waves, and

is broken at long intervals by the dull roar of cannon. All is silent on

the men-of-war; the hour-glass has just marked the eighth hour. Towards

the north the activity of day replaces little by little the tranquillity

of night. On this side a detachment of soldiers is going to relieve the

guard, and the click of their guns can be heard; a surgeon hurries

towards his hospital; a soldier crawls out of his hut, washes his

sunburned face with icy water, turns towards the east, and repeats a

prayer, making rapid signs of the cross. On that side an enormous, heavy

cart with creaking wheels reaches the cemetery where they are going to

bury the corpses heaped almost to the top of the vehicle. Approach the

harbor and you are disagreeably surprised by a mixture of odors; you

smell coal, manure, moisture, meat. There are thousands of different

objects: wood, flour, gabions, beef, thrown in heaps here and there;

soldiers of different regiments, some provided with guns and with bags,

others with neither guns nor bags, crowd together; they smoke, they

quarrel, and they bear loads upon the steamer stationed near the plank

bridge and ready to sail. Small private boats, filled with all sorts of

people--soldiers, sailors, merchants, and women--are constantly arriving

and departing. “This way for Grafskaya!” and two or three retired

sailors rise in their boats and offer you their services. You choose the

nearest one, stride over the half-decomposed body of a black horse lying

in the mud two steps from the boat, and seat yourself near the helm.

You push off from the shore; all around you the sea sparkles in the

morning sun; in front of you an old sailor in an overcoat of

camel’s-hair cloth and a lad with blond hair are diligently rowing. You

turn your eyes upon the gigantic ships with scratched hulls scattered

over the harbor, upon the shallops,--black dots on the sparkling azure

of the water--upon the pretty houses of the town, to whose light-colored

tones the rising sun gives a rosy tinge, upon the hostile fleet standing

like light-houses in the crystalline distance of the sea, and, at last,

upon the foaming waves, where play the salt drops which the oars dash

into the air. You hear at the same time the regular sound of voices

which comes over the water, and the grand roar of the cannonade at

Sebastopol, which seems to increase in strength as you listen.

At the thought that you, you also, are in Sebastopol, your whole soul is

filled with a sentiment of pride and of valor, and your blood runs

quicker in your veins.

“Straight towards the _Constantine_, your excellency,” says the old

sailor, turning around to the direction you are giving to the helm.

“Look! she has still got all her cannons,” remarks the lad with the

blond hair as the boat glides along the side of the ship.

“She is quite new, she ought to have them. Korniloff lives on board,”

repeats the old man, examining in his turn the man-of-war.

“There! it has burst!” cries the lad, after a long silence, his eyes

fixed upon a small white cloud of drifting smoke suddenly appearing in

the sky above the south bay, and accompanied by the strident noise of a

shell explosion.

“They are firing from the new battery to-day,” adds the sailor, calmly

spitting in his hand. “Come along, Nichka; pull away. Let’s pass the

shallop.”

And the small boat moves rapidly over the undulating surface of the bay,

leaves the heavy shallop behind laden with bags and with soldiers,

unskilful rowers who are pulling awkwardly, and at last lands in the

middle of a great number of boats moored to the shore in the harbor of

Grafskaya. A crowd of soldiers in gray overcoats, sailors in black

jackets, and women in motley gowns comes and goes on the quay. Some

peasants are selling bread; others, seated beside their samovars, offer

to customers warm drink.

Here, on the upper steps of the landing, are strewn about, pell-mell,

rusty shot, shell, canister, cast-iron cannon of different calibres;

there, farther away, in a great open square, are lying enormous joists,

gun-carriages, sleeping soldiers. On one side are wagons, horses,

cannon, artillery caissons, stacks of muskets; farther on, soldiers,

sailors, officers, women, and children are moving about; carts full of

bread, bags, and barrels, a Cossack on horseback, a general in his

droschky, are crossing the square. A barricade looms up in the street to

the right, and in its embrasures are small cannon, beside which a sailor

is sitting quietly smoking his pipe. On the left stands a pretty house,

on the pediment of which are scrawled numerals, and above can be seen

soldiers and blood-stained stretchers. The dismal traces of a camp in

war-time meet the eye everywhere. Your first impression is, doubtless, a

disagreeable one; the strange amalgamation of town life with camp life,

of an elegant city and a dirty bivouac, strikes you like a hideous

incongruity. It seems to you that all, overcome by terror, are acting

vacuously; but if you examine the faces of those men who are moving

about you, you will think differently. Look well at this soldier of the

wagon-train who is leading his bay troitka horses to drink, humming

through his teeth, and you shall find that he does not go astray in this

confused crowd, which in fact does not exist for him, for he is full of

his own business, and will do his duty, whatever it is--will lead his

horses to the watering-place or drag a cannon with as much calm and

assured indifference as if he were at Toula or at Saransk. You notice

the same expression on the face of this officer, with his irreproachable

white gloves, who is passing before you, of that sailor who sits on the

barricade smoking, of the soldiers who wait with their stretchers at the

door of what was lately the Assembly Hall, even upon the face of the

young girl who crosses the street, leaping from stone to stone for fear

of soiling her pink dress. Yes, a great deception awaits you on your

arrival at Sebastopol. In vain you seek to discover upon any face

traces of agitation, fright, indeed even enthusiasm, resignation to

death, resolution; there is nothing of all that. You see the course of

every-day life; see people occupied with their daily toils, so that, in

fact, you blame yourself for your exaggerated exaltation, and doubt not

only the truth of the opinion you have formed from hearsay about the

heroism of the defenders of Sebastopol, but also doubt the accuracy of

the description which has been given you on the north side and the

sinister sounds which fill the air there. Before doubting, however, go

up to a bastion, see the defenders of Sebastopol on the very place of

the defence, or rather enter straight into this house at whose door

stand the stretcher-bearers. You will see there the heroes of the army,

you will see there horrible and heart-rending sights, both sublime and

comic, but wonderful and of a soul-elevating nature. Enter this great

hall, which before the war was the hall of the Assembly. Scarcely have

you opened the door before the odor exhaled from forty or fifty

amputations and severe wounds turns you sick. You must not yield to the

feeling which keeps you on the threshold of the room, it is an unworthy

feeling; go boldly in, and not blush at having come to look at these

martyrs. You may approach and speak with them. The wretches like to see

a pitying face, to relate their sufferings, and to hear words of charity

and sympathy. Passing down the middle between the beds, you look for the

face which is the least rigid, the least contracted by pain, and on

finding it decide to go near and put a question.

“Where are you wounded?” you hesitatingly ask an old, emaciated soldier,

seated on his bed, watching you with a kindly look, and apparently

inviting you to approach. You have, I say, put this question

hesitatingly, because the sight of the sufferer inspires not only a

lively pity, but also a sort of dread of hurting his feelings, joined

with a profound respect.

“On the foot,” replies the soldier; and nevertheless you notice by the

folds of the blanket that his leg has been cut off above the knee.

“God be praised!” he adds, “I shall be discharged.”

“Were you wounded long since?”

“It is the sixth week, your excellency.”

“Where do you feel badly now?”

“Nowhere only in my calf when it is bad weather; nothing but that.”

“How did it happen?”

“On the fifth bastion, your excellency, in the first bombardment. I had

just sighted the cannon, and was going quietly to the other embrasure,

when suddenly something struck my foot. I thought I had fallen into a

hole. I looked--my leg was gone!”

“You didn’t have any pain at first, then?”

“None at all, only just as if I had scalded my leg; that’s all.”

“And afterwards?”

“None afterwards, only when they stretched the skin; that was a little

rough. First of all things, your excellency, we mustn’t think. When we

don’t think we don’t feel. When a man thinks, it is the worse for him.”

Meanwhile, a woman dressed in gray, with a black kerchief tied around

her head, approaches, joins in the conversation, and begins to give a

detailed account of the sailor: how he has suffered, how his life was

despaired of for four weeks, how, when wounded, he made them stop the

stretcher on which he was being carried to the rear in order to watch

the discharge of our battery, and how the grand-dukes had spoken with

him, had given him twenty-five rubles, and how he had replied that, not

being able to serve any more himself, he would like to come back to the

bastion to train the conscripts. The good woman, her eyes sparkling with

enthusiasm, relates this in one breath, looking at you and then at the

sailor, who turns away and pretends not to hear, busy with picking lint

from his pillow.

“It is my wife, your excellency,” says the sailor at last, with an

intonation of voice which seems to say, “You must excuse her; all that

is woman’s foolish prattle, you know.”

You then begin to understand what the defenders of Sebastopol are, and

you are ashamed of yourself in the presence of this man. You would have

liked to express all your admiration for him, all your sympathy, but the

words will not come, or those which do come are worthless, and you can

only bow in silence before this unconscious grandeur, before this

firmness of soul and this exquisite shame of his own merit.

“Ah, well, may God speedily cure you!” you say, and you stop before

another wounded man lying on the floor, who, suffering horrible pain,

seems to be awaiting his death. He is blond, and his pale face is much

swollen. Stretched on his back, his left hand thrown up, his position

indicates acute suffering. His hissing breath escapes with difficulty

from his dry, half-open mouth. The glassy blue pupils of his eyes are

rolled up under the eyelids, and a mutilated arm, wrapped in bandages,

sticks out from under the tumbled blanket. A nauseating, corpse-like

odor rises to your nostrils, and the fever which burns the sufferer’s

limbs seems to penetrate your own body.

“Is he unconscious?” you ask of the woman who kindly accompanies you,

and to whom you are no longer a stranger.

“No; he can still hear, but he is very bad;” and she adds, under her

breath, “I have just made him drink a little tea. He is nothing to me,

only I have pity on him; indeed, he has only been able to swallow a few

mouthfuls.”

“How do you feel?” you ask him.

At the sound of your voice the wounded man’s eyes turn towards you, but

he neither sees nor understands.

“That burns my heart!” he murmurs.

A little farther on an old soldier is changing his clothes. His face and

his body are both of the same brown color, and as thin as a skeleton.

One of his arms has been amputated at the shoulder. He is seated on his

bed, he is out of danger, but from his dull, lifeless look, from his

frightful thinness, from his wrinkled face, you see that this creature

has already passed the greater part of his existence in suffering.

On the opposite bed you see the pale, delicate, pain-shrivelled face of

a woman whose cheeks are flushed with fever.

“It is a sailor’s wife. A shell hit her on the foot while she was

carrying dinner to her husband in the bastion,” says the guide.

“Has it been amputated?”

“Above the knee.”

Now, if your nerves are strong, enter there at the left. It is the

operating-room. There you see surgeons with pale and serious

countenances, their arms blood-splashed to the elbows, beside the bed

of a wounded man, who, stretched on his back with open eyes, is

delirious under the influence of chloroform, and utters broken phrases,

some unimportant, some touching. The surgeons are busy with their

repulsive but beneficent task, amputation. You see the curved and keen

blade penetrate the healthy white flesh. The wounded man suddenly comes

to himself with heart-rending cries, with curses. The assistant surgeon

throws the arm into a corner, while another wounded man on a stretcher

who sees the operation turns and groans, more on account of the mental

torture of expectation than from the physical pain he feels. You will

witness these horrible, heart-rending scenes; you will see war without

the brilliant and accurate alignment of troops, without music, without

the drum-roll, without standards flying in the wind, without galloping

generals--you will see it as it is, in blood, in suffering, and in

death! Leaving this house of pain, you will experience a certain

impression of well-being, you will take long breaths of fresh air, and

will be glad to feel yourself in good health; but at the same time the

contemplation of these misfortunes will have convinced you of your own

insignificance, and you will go up into a bastion without hesitation.

What are the sufferings and the death of an atom like me, you will ask

yourself, in comparison with these innumerable sufferings and deaths?

Besides, in a short time the sight of the pure sky, of the bright sun,

of the pretty city, of the open church, of the soldiers coming and going

in all directions, raises your spirits to their normal state. Habitual

indifference, preoccupation with the present and with its petty

interests, resume the ascendant. Perhaps you will meet on your way the

funeral cortege of an officer--a red coffin followed by a band and by

unfurled standards--and perhaps the roar of the cannonade on the bastion

will strike your ear, but your thoughts of a few moments before will not

come back again. The funeral will only be a pretty picture for you, the

growl of the cannon a grand military accompaniment, and there will be

nothing in common between this picture, these sounds, and the clear,

personal impression of suffering and death called up by the sight of the

operating-room.

Pass the church, the barricade, and you enter the most animated, the

liveliest quarter of the city. On both sides of the street are shop

signs, eating-house signs. Here are merchants, women with men’s hats or

with handkerchiefs on their heads, officers in elegant uniforms.

Everything testifies to the courage, the assurance, the safety of the

inhabitants.

Enter this restaurant on the right. If you want to listen to the

sailors’ and the officers’ talk, you will hear them relate the incidents

of the night before, of the affair of the 24th; hear them grumble at the

high price of the badly cooked cutlets, and mention the comrade recently

killed.

“Devil take me! we are badly off where we are now,” says the bass voice

of a pale, blond, beardless, newly appointed officer, his neck wrapped

in a green knit scarf.

“Where is that?” some one asks.

“In the fourth bastion,” replies the young officer; and at this reply

you attentively look at him, and feel a certain respect for him. His

exaggerated carelessness, his violent gestures, his too loud laughter,

which would shortly before have seemed to you impudent, become in your

eyes the index of a certain kind of combative spirit common to all

young people who are exposed to great danger, and you are sure he is

going to explain that it is on account of the shells and the bullets

that they are so badly off in the fourth bastion. Nothing of the kind!

They are badly off there because the mud is deep.

“Impossible to get up to the battery,” he says, pointing to his boots,

muddied even to the upper-leathers.

“My best gun captain was instantly killed to-day by a ball in his

forehead,” rejoins a comrade.

“Who was it? Mituchine?”

“No, another man.--Look here! are you never going to bring me my chop,

you villain?” says he, speaking to the waiter.--“It was Abrossinoff, as

brave a man as lived. He took part in six sorties.”

At the other end of the table two infantry officers are eating veal

cutlets with green pease washed down by sour Crimean wine, by courtesy

called Bordeaux. One of them, a young man with red collar and two stars

on his coat, is telling to his neighbor with a black collar and no stars

the details of the fight on the Alma. The first is a little the worse

for liquor. His frequently interrupted tale, his uncertain look, which

reflects the lack of confidence which his story inspires in his auditor,

the fine part he gives himself, the too high color of his picture, lead

you to guess that he is wandering away from the absolute truth. But you

haven’t anything to do with these tales, which you will hear for a long

time yet in the farthest corners of Russia; you have one wish alone,

that is, to go straight to the fourth bastion, which you have heard so

many and so varied reports about. You will notice that whoever tells you

he has been there says it with pride and satisfaction; that whoever is

getting ready to go there either shows a little emotion or affects an

exaggerated _sangfroid_. If one man is joking with another, he will

invariably tell him, “Go to the fourth bastion!” If a wounded man on a

stretcher is met, and he is asked where he comes from, he will answer,

almost without fail, “From the fourth bastion!” Two completely different

notions of this terrible earthwork have been circulated; the first by

those who have never put their foot upon it, and for whom it is the

inevitable tomb of its defenders, the second by those who, like the

little blond officer, live there and simply speak of it, saying it is

dry or muddy there, warm or cold.

During the half hour you have been in the restaurant the weather has

changed and the fog which spread over the sea has risen. Thick, gray,

moist clouds hide the sun. The sky is gloomy, and a fine rain mixed with

snow is falling, wetting the roofs, the sidewalks, and the soldiers’

overcoats. After passing one more barricade you go along up the broad

street. There are no more shop-signs; the houses are uninhabitable, the

doors fastened up with boards, the windows broken. On this side the

corner of a wall has been carried away, on that side the roof has been

broken in. The buildings look like old veterans tried by grief and

misery, and stare at you with pride, one might say with disdain even. On

the way you stumble over cannon-balls and into holes, filled with water,

which the shells have made in the rocky ground. You pass detachments of

soldiers and officers. You occasionally meet a woman or a child, but

here the woman does not wear a hat. As for the sailor’s wife, she wears

an old fur cloak, and has soldiers’ boots on her feet. The street now

leads down a gentle declivity, but there are no more houses around you,

nothing but shapeless masses of stones, of boards, of beams, and of

clay. Before you, on a steep hill, stretches a black space, all muddy,

and cut up with ditches. What you are looking at is the fourth bastion.

Passers become rare, no more women are met. The soldiers walk with rapid

step. A few drops of blood stain the path, and you see coming towards

you four soldiers bearing a stretcher, and on the stretcher a face of a

sallow paleness and a bloody coat. If you ask the bearers where he is

wounded, they will reply, with an irritated tone, without looking at

you, that he has been hit on the arm or on the leg. If his head has been

carried away, if he is dead, they will keep a morose silence.

The near whiz of balls and shells gives you a disagreeable impression

while you are climbing the hill, and suddenly you have an entirely

different idea from the one you recently had of the meaning of the

cannon-shots heard in the city. I do not know what placid and sweet

souvenir will suddenly shine out in your memory. Your intimate _ego_

will occupy you so actively that you will no longer think of noticing

your surroundings. You will permit yourself to be overcome by a painful

feeling of irresolution. However, the sight of a soldier who, with

extended arms, is slipping down the hill in the liquid mud, and passes

near you, running and laughing, silences your small inward voice, the

cowardly counsellor which arises in you in the presence of danger. You

straighten up in spite of yourself, you raise your head, and you, in

your turn, scale the slippery slope of the clay hill. You have scarcely

gone a step before musket-balls hum in your ears, and you ask yourself

if it would not be preferable to go under cover of the trench thrown up

parallel with the path. But the trench is full of a yellow, fetid,

liquid mud, so that you are obliged to go on in the path; all the more

since it is the way everybody goes. At the end of two hundred paces you

come out on a place surrounded by gabions, embankments, shelters,

platforms supporting enormous cast-iron cannon, and heaps of

symmetrically piled cannon-balls. These heaps of things give you the

impression of a strange and aimless disorder. Here on the battery

assembles a group of sailors; there in the middle of the enclosure lies

a dismounted cannon, half buried in the sticky mud, through which an

infantryman, musket in hand, is going to the battery, pulling out with

difficulty first one foot and then the other. Everywhere in this liquid

mud you see broken glass, unexploded shells, cannon-balls--every trace

of camp life. You seem to hear the noise of a cannon-ball falling only

two yards away, and from all sides come the sound of balls, which

sometimes hum like bees, sometimes groan and split the air, which

vibrates like a violin-string, the whole dominated by the sinister

rumbling of cannon, which shakes you from head to foot and fills you

with terror.

This is, then, the fourth bastion, this really terrible place, you say

to yourself, feeling a little pride and a great deal of repressed fear.

Not at all! You are the sport of an illusion. This is not yet the fourth

bastion; it is the Jason redoubt, a place which, comparatively, is

neither dangerous nor frightful. In order to reach the fourth bastion

you enter the narrow trench which the infantryman follows, stooping

over. You will perhaps see more stretchers, sailors, soldiers with

spades, wires leading to the mines, earth-shelters equally muddy, into

which only two men can crawl, and where the battalions of the Black Sea

Sharpshooters live, eat, smoke, and put their boots on and off, in the

midst of the débris of cast-iron of every form thrown here and there.

You will perhaps find here four or five sailors playing cards in the

shelter of the parapet, and a naval officer, who, seeing a new face come

up, and a spectator at that, will be really pleased to initiate you into

the details of the arrangements and give you an explanation of them.

This officer, seated on a cannon, is rolling a cigarette with such

coolness, passes so quietly from one embrasure to another, and talks

with you with such natural calmness, that you recover your own

_sangfroid_, in spite of the balls which are whistling here in greater

numbers. You ask him questions, and even listen to his tales. The sailor

will describe to you, if you will only ask him, the bombardment of the

5th, the state of his battery with a single serviceable cannon, his men

reduced to eight, and, moreover, on the morning of the 6th, the battery

fired with every gun. He will tell you also how, on the 5th, a shell

penetrated a bomb-proof and struck down eleven sailors. He will show

you, through the embrasure, the enemy’s trenches and batteries, which

are only thirty or forty fathoms distant. I fear, however, that, leaning

out of the embrasure in order to examine the enemy better, you will see

nothing, or that, if you perceive something, you will be very much

surprised to learn that this white and rocky rampart a few steps away,

and from which are spouting little clouds of smoke, is really the

enemy--“_him_,” as the soldiers and sailors say.

It is very possible that the officer, either through vanity or simply,

without reflection, to amuse himself, will be willing to have them fire

for you. At his order the captain of the gun and the men, fourteen

sailors all told, gayly approach the cannon to load it, some chewing

biscuit, others cramming their short pipes in their pockets, while their

hobnailed shoes clatter on the platform. Notice the faces of these men,

their bearing, their movements, and you will recognize in each of the

wrinkles of their sunburned faces with high cheek-bones, in each muscle,

in the breadth of the shoulders, in the thickness of the feet shod with

colossal boots, in each calm and bold gesture, the principal elements

that make up the strength of Russia--simplicity and obstinacy. You will

also see that danger, misery, and suffering in the war will have

imprinted on these faces the consciousness of their dignity, of high

thoughts, of a sentiment.

Suddenly a deafening noise makes you quake from head to foot. You hear

at the same instant the shot whistling away, while a thick powder-smoke

envelops the platform and the black figures of sailors moving about.

Listen to their conversation, notice their animation, and you will

discover among them a feeling which you would not expect to meet--that

of hatred of the enemy, of vengeance. “It fell straight into the

embrasure; two killed. Look! they are carrying them away,” and they

shout for joy. “But he is getting angry now, he is going to hit back,”

says a voice, and in truth you see at the same instant a flash and

spurting smoke, and the sentinel on the parapet calls, “Cannon!” A ball

whizzes in your ears and buries itself in the ground, digging it up and

casting around a shower of earth and stones. The commander of the

battery gets angry, renews the order to load a second, a third gun. The

enemy replies, and you experience interesting sensations. The sentinel

again calls, “Cannon!” and the same sound, the same blow, and the same

throwing up of earth are repeated. If, on the other hand, he cries,

“Mortar!” you will be struck by a regular, not disagreeable hissing,

which has no connection in your mind with anything terrible. It comes

nearer and with greater rapidity. You see the black ball fall to the

ground, and the bomb-shell burst with a metallic cracking. The pieces

fly in air, whistling and screeching; stones hit each other, and mud

splashes over you. You feel a strange mixture of pleasure and fright at

these different sounds. At the instant the projectile reaches you, you

invariably think it will kill you. But pride keeps you up, and no one

notices the dagger that is digging into your heart. So when it has

passed without grazing you, you live again; for an instant a feeling of

indescribable sweetness possesses you to such a degree that you find a

special charm in danger, in the game of life and death. You would like

to have a ball or a shell fall nearer, very near you. But the sentinel

announces with his strong, full voice, “Mortar!” The hissing, the blow,

the explosion are repeated, but accompanied this time by a human

groan. You go up to the wounded man at the same time with the

stretcher-bearers. He has a strange look, lying in the mud mingled with

his blood. Part of his chest has been carried away. In the first moment

his mud-splashed face expresses only fright and the premature sensation

of pain, a feeling familiar to man in this situation. But when they

bring the stretcher to him, and he unassisted lies down on it on his

uninjured side, an exalted expression, elevated but restrained thoughts,

enliven his features. With brilliant eyes and shut teeth he raises his

head with an effort, and at the moment the stretcher-bearers move he

stops them, and addressing his comrades with trembling voice, says,

“Good-by, brothers!” He would like to say something more, he seems to

be trying to find something touching to say, but he limits himself to

repeating, “Good-by, brothers!” A comrade approaches the wounded man,

puts his cap on his head for him, and turns back to his cannon with a

gesture of perfect indifference. At the sight of your terrified

expression of face the officer, yawning, and rolling between his fingers

a cigarette in yellow paper, says, “So it is every day, up to seven or

eight men.”

You have just seen the defenders of Sebastopol on the very place of the

defence, and, strange to say, you will retrace your steps without paying

the least attention to the bullets and balls which continue to whistle

the whole length of the road as far as the ruins of the theatre. You

walk with calmness, your soul elevated and strengthened, for you bring

away the consoling conviction that never, and in no place, can the

strength of the Russian people be broken; and you have gained this

conviction not from the solidity of the parapets, from the ingeniously

combined intrenchments, from the number of mines, from the cannon

heaped one on the other, and all of which you have not in the least

understood, but from the eyes, the words, the bearing, from what may be

called the spirit of the defenders of Sebastopol.

There is so much simplicity and so little effort in what they do that

you are persuaded that they could, if it were necessary, do a hundred

times more, that they could do everything. You judge that the sentiment

that impels them is not the one you have experienced, mean and vain, but

another and more powerful one, which has made men of them, living

tranquilly in the mud, working and watching among the bullets, with a

hundred chances to one of being killed, contrary to the common lot of

their kind. It is not for a cross, for rank; it is not that they are

threatened into submitting to such terrible conditions of existence.

There must be another, a higher motive power. This motive power is found

in a sentiment which rarely shows itself, which is concealed with

modesty, but which is deeply rooted in every Russian heart--patriotism.

It is now only that the tales that circulated during the first period of

the siege of Sebastopol, when there were neither fortifications, nor

troops, nor material possibility of holding out there, and when,

moreover, no one admitted the thought of surrender--it is now only that

the anecdote of Korniloff, that hero worthy of antique Greece, who said

to his troops, “Children, we will die, but we will not surrender

Sebastopol,” and the reply of our brave soldiers, incapable of using set

speeches, “We will die, hurrah!”--it is now only that these stories have

ceased to be to you beautiful historical legends, since they have become

truth, facts. You will easily picture to yourself, in the place of those

you have just seen, the heroes of this period of trial, who never lost

courage, and who joyfully prepared to die, not for the defence of the

city, but for the defence of the country. Russia will long preserve the

sublime traces of the epoch of Sebastopol, of which the Russian people

were the heroes!

Day closes; the sun, disappearing at the horizon, shines through the

gray clouds which surround it, and lights up with purple rays the

rippling sea with its green reflections, covered with ships and boats,

the white houses of the city, and the population stirring there. On the

boulevard a regimental band is playing an old waltz, which sounds far

over the water, and to which the cannonade of the bastions forms a

strange and striking accompaniment.

_SEBASTOPOL IN MAY, 1855._

Six months had rolled by since the first bomb-shell thrown from the

bastions of Sebastopol ploughed up the soil and cast it upon the enemy’s

works. Since that time millions of bombs, bullets, and balls had never

ceased flying from bastions to trenches, from trenches to bastions, and

the angel of death had constantly hovered over them.

The self-love of thousands of human beings had been sometimes wounded,

sometimes satisfied, sometimes soothed in the embrace of death! What

numbers of red coffins with coarse palls!--and the bastions still

continued to roar. The French in their camp, moved by an involuntary

feeling of anxiety and terror, examined in the soft evening light the

yellow and burrowed earth of the bastions of Sebastopol, where the black

silhouettes of our sailors came and went; they counted the embrasures

bristling with fierce-looking cannon. On the telegraph tower an

under-officer was watching through his field-glass the enemy’s soldiers,

their batteries, their tents, the movements of their troops on the

Mamelon-Vert, and the smoke ascending from the trenches. A crowd

composed of heterogeneous races, moved by quite different desires,

converged from all parts of the world towards this fatal spot. Powder

and blood had not succeeded in solving the question which diplomats

could not settle.