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."