He divided his sixty men into three groups, sent twenty under the command of a sergeant against either flank, and himself led another twenty on the battery front. The other two companies, in the meanwhile, were coming up fast, and the Russian gunners, after a few hasty discharges, wheeled round their guns and made off!

By one o'clock the fight was practically over, and the victory won; and there is no more astonishing victory in the history of war. Todleben afterwards explained the Russian defeat to Russell by saying, "You were hidden by the fog, and you had a thin front; but your fire into our dense masses was deadly. Then, again, our men fancied that they had all the siege guns playing on them. Every little obstacle appeared to be a fort or a battery," &c. The mist and the uncertainty of the fight, in a word, only hardened the courage of the British: they stirred with a ferment of alarmed uneasiness the imagination of the Russians.

The slaughter was great. On the three-quarters of a mile front, along which the battle raged, lay nearly 14,000 dead or wounded men. The British loss amounted to 3258 killed or wounded; the French lost less than 1000; the Russian killed and wounded, according to their own published figures, reached nearly 11,000. It is suspected to have been much greater. This huge slaughter amongst the Russians is explained by the fact that they were crowded together on a narrow neck of ground, they attacked in solid masses, the firing was close, and the hard-hitting Minié bullets often would pass through half-a-dozen men. The British losses, however, in proportion to their numbers, were of startling

severity. Thus, at the close of the day, no fewer than eight British generals were lying on the field, while of the Guards 594 men were killed and wounded out of 1098 in the space of a single hour!

It was a great and memorable victory; but what arithmetic can measure the price at which it was bought! Here is a pen picture of the scene the day after the fight:-"Parties of men busy at work. Groups along the hillside, forty or fifty yards apart. You find them around a yawning trench, 30 feet in length by 20 feet in breadth and 6 feet in depth. At the bottom lie, packed with exceeding art, some forty or fifty corpses. The gravediggers stand chatting, waiting for arrivals to complete the number. They speculate on the appearance of the body which is being borne towards them. 'It's Corporal, of the —th, I think,' says one. 'No; it's my rear-rank man. I can see his red hair plain enough,' and so on. They discuss the merits or demerits of dead sergeants or comrades. Well, he was a hard man. Many's the time I was belted through him!' or 'Poor Mick! he had fifteen years' service—a better fellow never stepped.' At last the number in the trench is completed. The bodies are packed as closely as possible. Some have still upraised arms, in the attitude of taking aim; their legs stick up through the mould; others are bent and twisted like fantoccini. Inch after inch the earth rises upon them, and they are left alone in their glory.' No, not alone; for the hope and affections of hundreds of human hearts lie buried with them."

FAMOUS CAVALRY CHARGES

N°

"Then down went helm and lance,
Down were the eagle-banners sent,

Down reeling steeds and riders went,
Corslets were pierced, and pennons rent;
And to augment the fray;

Wheel'd full against their staggering flanks,
The English horsemen's foaming ranks
Forced their resistless way."

-SCOTT.

rational man to-day cares to reflect much on that historical tra tragedy known as the Crimean War. In that war Great Britain expended the lives of 24,000 brave men, and added £41,000,000 to her national debt, with no other result than that of securing to "the unspeakable Turk" a new opportunity of misgoverning some of the fairest lands in the world-an opportunity which made possible the Armenian horrors. As a matter of fact, the Crimean War only secured a truce of some twenty-two years in the secular quarrel between Russia and Turkey, and it was scarcely worth while spending so much for so little.

But this war, begun for an inadequate end, was also one of the worst-managed wars known to history. It deserves to stand beside the famous Walcheren expedition as an example of colossal blundering. Lord Wolseley has described one particular incident in the

war-the assault on the Redan-as "crazy, ignorant, and childish," and those adjectives might be extended to the strategy and tactics of the whole campaign. The generalship was contemptible; the transport broke down; the commissariat fell into mere helpless bankruptcy; the state of the hospitals, at one stage, would have made a Turk blush. Great Britain was mistress of the seas, yet through the bitter winter of 1854 her brave soldiers, on the frozen upland above Sebastopol, died of mere hunger and cold, with a port crowded with British ships within eight miles. The camp was wasted with scurvy while an illimitable supply of fruits and vegetables lay within a day's sail. The feats of nonintelligence performed by the British commissariat would sound incredible even in a burlesque. Steevens in his "Crimean Campaign" relates how, while the camp hospitals had neither medicine nor candles, yet wooden legs at the rate of four per man were laboriously sent out from England! This may be a mere flight of camp humour, but it is historic that a large consignment of boots, on being opened, was found to consist exclusively of boots for the left foot! The troops were thoughtfully provided with coffee, but it was with green coffee-beans; and the fireless soldier who had to extract coffee from a combination of cold water and green coffee-beans naturally expended much theological language on the authorities who were amusing themselves at his expense. In January 1855, the sick cases in the British camp reached the appalling number of 23,076. For every man killed by bullet or sword in the Crimean campaign, eight died from sickness, cold, or hunger.

In the black sky of that mismanaged war there gleams only one star. History can show nothing to exceed, and not much to equal, the quenchless fortitude, the steadfast loyalty to the flag, the heroic daring of the men and officers who kept watch in the trenches round Sebastopol. The Crimean War created only one military reputation-that of Todleben, the great Russian engineer who defended Sebastopol—but it has enriched British military history with some deeds, the memory of which will endure as long as the race itself. Two of these are the great cavalry charges, which took place on the same day on the open plains just above Balaclava, and the story of "Scarlett's Three Hundred," and of the yet better known charge of the Light Brigade, are well worth telling afresh to a new generation.