CHAPTER II
GORDON'S FIRST BATTLES
The Crimean War had been going on for several months when, on New Year's Day 1855, Gordon reached Balaclava.
The months had been dreary ones for the English soldiers, for, through bad management in England, they had had to face a bitter Russian winter, and go through much hard fighting, without proper food, without warm clothing, and with no proper shelter.
Night after night, and day after day, in pitilessly falling snow, or in drenching rain, clad in uniforms that had become mere rags, cold and hungry, tired and wet, the English soldiers had to line the trenches before Sebastopol.
These trenches were deep ditches, with the earth thrown up to protect the men who fired from them, and in them the men often had to stand hour after hour, knee deep in mud, and in cold that froze the blood in their veins.
Illness broke out in the camp, and many men died from cholera. Many had no better bed than leaves spread on stones in the open could give them.
Some of those who had tents, and used little charcoal fires to warm them, were killed by the fumes of charcoal.
A "Black Winter" it was called, and the Black Winter was not over when Gordon arrived. He had been sent out in charge of 320 huts, which had followed him in the collier from Portsmouth, so that now, at least, some of the men were better sheltered than they had been before. But they were still half-starved, and in very low spirits. Officers and men had constantly to go foraging for food, or else to go hungry, and men died every day of the bitter cold. And all the time the guns of the Russians were never idle.