Beverley's body was discovered, terribly mutilated, stripped, and deprived of the locket which contained the hair of his intended—the girl who was shot in his arms on the retreat through the Khyber Pass.
On surveying the horrors of that day, I asked myself—was it for such work as this that heaven created us?
But such was that glorious and disastrous episode of the war—the charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava.
In foreign armies—as I once heard a brother officer remark—one would have found plenty of officers to lead such a charge, but in what other army would one find soldiers to follow as ours did? Though surrounded on every side by the enemy, though apparently all was over with them, though suffering under a withering fire, and seeing their comrades falling in heaps around them, not a man flinched, or thought of shifting for himself; but all looked to their officers, and followed them as if they had been on an ordinary parade.
"There are eighty-one of ours, sir, to be buried in yonder pit," said a trumpeter named Jones, as he came to my tent next morning.
"Eighty-one!—my God!—the poor fellows!"
"Yes, sir—eighty-one," repeated Jones, sadly.
"Where are they?"
"Some are in the trenches—others coming."
They were borne from the field, where they had lain all night, and where the only tears that fell on them were the dews of heaven, and then they were half lowered, half flung in—eighty-one! all handsome young men—and the Highlanders began to cover them up.