The inner part of the town itself seemed perfectly untouched, the white houses shone brightly and freshly in the sun, and the bells of a Gothic chapel were ringing out lustily in the frosty air. Its tall houses running up the hill sides, its solid look of masonry, gave Sebastopol a resemblance to parts of Bath, or at least put one in mind of that city as seen from the declivity which overhangs the river. There was, however, a remarkable change in the look of the city since I first saw it—there were no idlers and no women visible in the streets, and, indeed, there was scarcely a person to be seen who looked like a civilian. There was, however, abundance of soldiers, and to spare in the streets. They could be seen in all directions, sauntering in pairs down desolate-looking streets, chatting at the corners or running across the open space, from one battery to another; again in large parties on fatigue duty, or relieving guards, or drawn up in well-known grey masses in the barrack-squares. Among those who were working on the open space, carrying stores, I thought I could make out two French soldiers. At all events, the men wore long blue coats and red trousers, and, as we worked our prisoners and made them useful at Balaklava, where I had seen them aiding in making the railway, I suppose the Muscovite commanders adopted the same plan.
Outside the city, at the verge of the good houses, the eye rested on great walls of earth piled up some ten or twelve feet, and eighteen or twenty feet thick, indented at regular intervals with embrasures in which the black dots which are throats of cannon might be detected. These works were of tremendous strength. For the most part there was a very deep and broad ditch in front of them, and wherever the ground allowed of it, there were angles and flèches which admitted of flanking fires along the front, and of cross fires on centre points of each line of attack or approach. In front of most of the works on both the French and English sides of the town, a suburb of broken-down white-washed cottages, the roofs gone, the doors off, and the windows out, had been left standing in detached masses at a certain distance from the batteries, but gaps had been made in them so that they might not block the fire of the guns. The image of misery presented by these suburbs was very striking—in some instances the havoc had been committed by our shot, and the houses all round to the rear of the Flagstaff Battery, opposite the French, had been blown into rubbish and mounds of beams and mortar. The advanced works which the Russians left on the advance of our allies still remained and it was hard to say whether there were any guns in them or not, but they were commanded so completely by the works in their rear that it would have been impossible to hold them, and they would have afforded a good cover to the Russians, while the latter could fire through the embrasures of the old works with far greater ease than the enemy could get at them.
They threw up their new earthworks behind the cover of the suburb; when they were finished, they withdrew their men from the outer line, blew down and destroyed the cover of the houses, and opened fire from their second line of batteries. Their supply of gabions seemed inexhaustible—indeed, they had got all the brushwood of the hills of the South Crimea at their disposal. In front of the huge mounds thrown up by the Russians, foreshortened by the distance, so as to appear part of them, were the French trenches—mounds of earth lined with gabions which looked like fine matting. These lines ran parallel to those of the enemy. The nearest parallel was not "armed" with cannon, but was lined with riflemen. Zigzags led down from trench to trench. The troops inside walked about securely, if not comfortably. The covering parties, with their arms piled, sat round their little fires, and smoked and enjoyed their coffee, while the working parties, spade in hand, continued the never-ending labours of the siege—filling gabions here, sloping and thickening the parapets there, repairing embrasures, and clearing out the fosses. Where we should have had a thin sergeant's guard at this work, the French could afford a strong company.
It was rather an unpleasant reflection, whenever one was discussing the range of a missile, and was perhaps in the act of exclaiming "There's a splendid shot," that it might have carried misery and sorrow into some happy household. The smoke cleared away—the men got up—they gathered round one who moved not, or who was racked with mortal agony; they bore him away, a mere black speck, and a few shovelsful of mud marked for a little time the resting-place of the poor soldier, whose wife, or mother, or children, or sisters, were left destitute of all solace, save memory and the sympathy of their country. One such little speck I watched that day, and saw quietly deposited on the ground inside the trench. Who would let the inmates of that desolate cottage in Picardy, or Gascony, or Anjou, know of their bereavement?
A RECONNAISSANCE.
We descended the hill slope towards Upton's house, then occupied by a strong picket of the French, under the command of a couple of officers. From the front of this position one could see the heights over Inkerman, the plateau towards the Belbek, the north side, the flank of the military town opposite the English, our own left attack, and the rear of the redoubtable Tower of Malakoff. The first thing that struck one was the enormous preparations on the north side, extending from the sea behind Fort Constantine far away to the right behind Inkerman towards the Belbek. The trenches, batteries, earthworks, and redoubts all about the citadel (the North Fort) were on an astonishing scale, and indicated an intention on the part of the Russians to fall back on the north side, in case of our occupying the south side of the place.[16]
About three o'clock three strong bodies of cavalry came down towards the fort, as if they had been in the direction of the Alma or the Katcha. They halted for a time, and then resumed their march to the camp over Inkerman. In this direction also the enemy were busily working, and their cantonments were easily perceptible, with the men moving about in them. At the rear of the Round Tower, however, the greatest energy was displayed, and a strong party of men were at work on new batteries between it and the ruined suburb on the commanding hill on which the Malakoff stood.
Our own men in the left attack seemed snug enough, and well covered by their works; in front of them, on the slopes, were men, French and English, scattered all over the hill side, grubbing for roots for fuel; and further on, in front, little puffs of smoke marked the pits of the Riflemen on both sides, from which the ceaseless crack of the Minié and Liège smote the ear; but the great guns were all silent, and scarcely one was fired on the right during the day; even Inkerman and its spiteful batteries being voiceless for a wonder. As one of the officers began to rub his nose and ears with snow, and to swear they were frostbitten, and as we all felt very cold, we discontinued our reconnaissance, and returned to camp. The wind blew keenly, and at night the thermometer was at 16°. There were few cases of illness in the trenches; but sickness kept on increasing. Typhus fever, thank God! nearly disappeared.
Major-General Jones declared the position was not so strong as he expected to find it from the accounts he had heard, but it was only to the eye of a practised engineer that any signs of weakness presented themselves. The heights over the sea bristled with low batteries, with the guns couchant and just peering over the face of the cliffs. Vast as these works were, the Russians were busy at strengthening them. Not less than 3,000 men could have been employed on the day in question on the ground about the citadel. One could see the staff-officers riding about and directing the labours of the men, or forming into groups, and warming themselves round the camp fires.
I was woke up shortly after two o'clock on the morning of the 24th of February by the commencement of one of the most furious cannonades since the siege began. The whole line of the Russian batteries from our left opened with inconceivable force and noise, and the Inkerman batteries began playing on our right; the weight of this most terrible fire, which shook the very earth, and lighted up the skies with incessant lightning flashes for an hour and a half, was directed against the French.