Christmas and New Year's day are passed, and we have had a cold, dreary, sloppy, wet and hungry Christmas and New Year; many of our men going to hospital and dying there. Their illness had been caused by hard work in bad weather, and by exposure to wet without any protection. Just think what a tent is, pitched on wet, muddy ground, with the rain beating through the canvas, into which sixteen hungry men, drenched to the skin, have to creep for shelter, after twenty-four hours in the trenches up to their knees in slush, and then reflect what state we must be in, after a night spent in such shelter, lying down without any change of clothing, and as close as we can stow, in wet blankets covered with mud. It rained in torrents all last night and to-day, and floods of mud are flowing through the floors of our tents, making their way down the hill-side; the roads are so bad as to cut off supplies to the camp, and we are accordingly placed on half rations; the horses and mules get stuck in the mud bringing up provisions from Balaklava, and there they lie and die, and the men are dying off faster than the horses, and the Turks dying by the dozen.
Hostilities are almost at a standstill in the trenches; the men are too feeble to work the guns. It is reported the Russians are suffering still more than we are, but they are more numerous, and can afford to lose twenty to our one.
THE CRIMEAN WAR.
When from Balaklava to the front we go,
The Chersonese are covered with mud and snow,
Where the horse, the mule, and the Turk have stuck,
Transporting provisions for our British pluck.
Where the tents are blown down with the furious blast,
And the rain pours down immensely fast,