When the bombardment slackened again, he limped out on Jim's sound arm to gather news, and managed to keep a portentously long face as his fellows in the café told them of the taking of the Mamelon and Sapoune by the French, and the closing of the harbour road leading out to Inkerman.
But alone with Jim and his own people, he let his feelings have play.
"Now we're getting on a bit. I mean you are. The Mamelon is one of the keys to the door. I see the end in sight But your people are strangely, dilatory or overcareful. From what they were saying down there you could have got in more than once if you'd only come on."
"I wish they had come on," said Jim heartily. "Maybe there are too many cooks at the pie."
Ten days later came the fourth bombardment, and in the comparative safety of their cellars they heard the neighbours' houses crumbling and falling, and the upper part of their own came down with a crash which blanched the women's faces, till the ruins settled into position and left them still alive.
Then one day, in an appalling cessation of the thunders to which their ears were accustomed, Jim and Greski, stealing out to the south slope, heard on the hill-side the solemn wail of the Dead March, and presently a great salute of unshotted guns, and learned later that Lord Raglan was dead, and, according to Greski, was succeeded by one Sampson, whom Jim failed to recognise under so large a name.
Sebastopol was becoming one great hospital, one might almost say charnel-house, for the wounded were beyond their capacity for tending, and the dead lay for days in the streets unburied. And over it all the summer sun shone brightly, and flowers bloomed gaily among the shattered columns and fallen walls of houses which had once made this one of the fairest cities of the East.
The siege lapsed again into dullness, in spite of Greski's prophecy. The thinned ranks behind the bastions were replenished from the northern camps. All day long the harbour was alive with the boats that brought them across. And the bastions themselves grew stronger and stronger, with the myriads of men working on them and the tons of shot rained into them from the outside.
Working parties streamed up to the front all day long, carrying great stakes and poles for the abattis, and fascines and gabions for the ramparts, and in this work every English and French prisoner they had taken was employed.
Jim found it refreshing to hear the hearty British oaths which rattled about such fatigue parties, and he generally hailed the speakers and got a hearty word in reply.