"Humph!" again grunted Sturdy. "I don't know about epaulettes; but if a Russian shell or a bigger shot than usual catches us between wind and water, it'll be a halo you'll soon be wearing, instead of epaulettes, lad."
The first great cannonade, then, between our land forces and Sebastopol began on the seventeenth of October, as early as half-past six. The bombardment, the great fight betwixt trench and fort, was fearful, and lasted for four hours—a perfect feu d'enfer.
We—the British—silenced Malakoff Tower and damaged other Russian works. But the French were far less successful; for about ten o'clock the magazine of Mount Rodolph was exploded by a Russian shell, killing and wounding nearly a hundred men, and by half-past ten the batteries of the French were completely silenced.
Our guns, however, kept on: we not only silenced the batteries round the Malakoff, but by three o'clock we had partly destroyed the parapets of the famous Redan, blowing up a magazine, with a loss to the Russians, as we afterwards discovered, of over a hundred men. We had avenged the poor French therefore.
She laid about her right and left.
The calamity, however, which they had fallen under prevented the intended assault on the Flagstaff Bastion, which they were to have made side by side with us. Compared with the French, our losses in this bombardment were but slight—under fifty in all—while in killed and wounded the Russians lost over a thousand.
* * * * *
But alas for Jack Mackenzie's hopes of glory either in the shape of epaulettes or a halo—by the way, though, I do not think that he was particularly anxious about the halo; he said he didn't want to be caught out in his first innings—for neither our own bold ships nor those of the French effected anything worth speaking of, although in all they had brought 1,100 guns into action. The Russians lost but 140 men, the French over 200, and our fleet 320.