122

SEBASTOPOL.*

THE prospects of peace have come treading so quickly on the realities of war, that Sebastopol itself is threatened with oblivion. No sooner, thank Heaven, that the trenches no longer existed, than "Inside Sebastopol" was the focus of all interest—that inside is now made familiar to us; it is even mapped in the work before us—and then come proposals of peace, off-hand acceptance of terms, with a noble disregard of all inconvenient details, suspension of arms, and Sebastopol itself is a thing of bygone times. "We live too fast," said the Two Brothers, prophetically, "in this century to devote much time to the Past. The Present and Future engross all our attention."

Before, however, we, in company with the retiring heroes of an everglorious siege, bid farewell perhaps for ever to what was but a few days ago an all-engrossing theme, we must place on record some of the feelings and sensations experienced, and the objects seen by one or two competent observers on first visiting the long and bravely-defended precincts of the ever-renowned fortress. And first for the Brothers, who had arrived in time to witness the repulse of the Russians at Traktir, and the successive steps that led ultimately to the fall of the place. It may be imagined with what feelings they listened to explosion after explosion heralding the great fact that the Russians had abandoned, and were destroying, their once-formidable stronghold.

Perfectly unable to sleep, I was up and off at five. Not a Russian in Sevastopol! I rode with two officers down the Woronzow Ravine, directly to the top of the Southern Harbour. Strange were our sensations on reaching the chevauxde-frise thrown across the ravine. It had been our very foremost point of approach, a little in advance of the extreme parallels of both our left and right attacks, and of course joining the two. Twenty-four hours before, our appearance in front of this frise would have been hailed by a shower of Minié bullets. There to our left, was our foremost battery, planted ready to sweep any troops advancing up the ravine, but now idle and unguarded. Directly in our front, was the oblong Russian building, which formed their outpost up the ravine. On the top of the slope to our right, was the Redan, and the Curtain running from it towards the town, and connecting it with the Barrack battery. The latter battery lay between us and the town. The sight of all these guns, now so silent and deserted, combined with the idea that, except a few stragglers, we were the first Englishmen who had approached them so close, produced a feeling of awe in my mind, fully equal to what I had felt when, on different occasions of my visiting the trenches, the same guns had been engaged in pouring forth their contents against the poor fellows who surrounded me. I felt a wish to go up and examine each separate gun, which now looked so peacefully down upon us, as if unconscious of all the harm it had wrought. But my companions were eager for the town itself, and we hurried on down the ravine.

Scarcely, however, had they advanced fifty yards, when they came upon a fair specimen of Russian wile. A number of holes were dug as evenly as if by machinery, each hole being about four feet across and seven or eight feet deep, with intervening spaces of a foot or two. All

Sevastopol. Our Tent in the Crimea; and Wanderings in Sevastopol. By Two Brothers. London: Richard Bentley. 1856.

had been carefully covered with boughs, and these again spread with earth and soil, corresponding exactly with the beaten soil of all that part of the plain. They were absolutely impassable for cavalry; and even infantry charging must have been laid low by an agency far more effective than either shot or shell.

We had to go a long way round with our horses to escape these holes, and ultimately reached the corner of the Creek Battery. Here we dismounted, and tied our horses to a shrub. We in vain sought for a soldier to attend to them; no amount of bribe would stay the few that were visible from higher game; so, in default of anything better, we commended our steeds to the care of each other and the shrub, scrambled through the embrasure of a gun in the Creek Battery, and stood inside Sevastopol !

Whither go first? The town lay before us, apparently all barren, and all deserted. Houses that had looked entire at a distance, were shattered and in ruins. Fragments of every conceivable thing lay around-all broken, and all worthless. Not a living being was in sight, except a few English and French soldiers, impelled, like ourselves, by curiosity-or, perhaps, by hopes of plunder -and just visible through the grey dawn. They were the first new occupants of the town, but they came unarmed, and without any military order. We were guided in our route by considerations of prudence and safety. The French, on their extreme left, were still violently bombarding the part of the town nearest to them. Shot, shell, and rocket were careering over the Bastion du Mât and the Garden Battery, and were falling in numbers in what was afterwards called the French part of the town. Many of these implements of death passed up the course of the Southern Harbour; and the shells bursting in their passage, rendered even the English side far from a secure position at that early hour. Still, it was clearly the less dangerous of the two, and explosions were not so likely to occur in it. Accordingly, we wended our way up to the right, following the road which lies with one side open to the Harbour, and were far too excited to attend to the many warnings we received in the shape of iron falling all around, and the crash and thunder that almost deafened us.

We were struck with wonder at the first sight that presented itself to us on ascending this hill. Between the base of the slope on which we stood, and the water of the Southern Harbour, were ranged, in long and close lines, a positively incredible number of new guns! There they were, without carriages, but lying in piles-some of large calibre, some of small-but_ranged up, one above another, in absolute masses, and in perfect order. Further on was an equal amount of new shot! One would have thought the place had been taken on the 21st of September, 1854. An Arabian genius, who had produced nightly all that was needed for the defence of the town, seemed the only explanation of such a superfluity of matériel. The strength of the Creek Battery and the Barrack Battery was immense. They contained very large guns, and the most regular and perfect embrasures. In the latter battery were found the sunken guns which had sent up the "campers."

Passing along to the rear of these, we continued the ascent of the slope by the same winding road, which, always keeping one side open to the Creek, reminded me of similar roads in English cities, for instance Bath and Cheltenham. In fact, Sevastopol had much the appearance of some parts of Cheltenham, and still more, of what some parts of Bath would be, if the latter city were built of equally white stone.

The English side, where we now were, was clearly not the fashionable quarter. It was the business side of the town. The small houses that were ranged on the right of the winding road, were evidently the huts either of artisans and mechanics, or of the poorer classes. From the circumstance of their being so directly under the hill, these houses appeared to have escaped much damage from our fire, but their interior and contents were completely demolished. Some, a little better than the rest, had small court-yards, and verandahs round the first

floor windows. None were more than two-few more than one story high. I went into several of these dwellings. They were the very acme of confusion, of dirt, disorder, and spoliation. The planks of the floors had been torn up, and, in many cases, removed; the walls were shattered, the fragments forming a heap of stone, brick, and plaster on the ground. The ceilings, and, in many cases, the roofs had been pulled down, so that the sky was visible: pot an article of furniture, save the legs of tables or chairs-the verandahs demolished and hanging in shreds-the very creepers that had entwined them, torn up by the rootsnot a pane of glass-not a window-frame-not a shutter, nor a door-not even a solitary plank preserved. The very objects and purposes of the separate rooms were totally undistinguishable. At the rear of some of these houses, we found excavations, caves in the live rock, now tenanted by lifeless forms, the bodies of poor fellows who had crawled there to die, and were lying in every posture of agony and death, many far advanced in decomposition. The foregoing is but an inadequate description of the majority of the smaller houses on the English side of the town. No one can imagine the effluvia that emanated from them; no mind can picture the sadness and desolation of the scene.

Proceeding upwards, the first large building was the main hospital, and immediately beyond this were two immense piles of stone, originally barracks. All three had once been splendid buildings; the former enclosed a large open space laid out in gardens and walks, and evidently at one time rich in flowers. A fountain had adorned the middle of the court. The whole of this building had been much exposed to the fire of the Allies, and its state of utter demolition was probably owing to that circumstance. The two immense ranges of barrack buildings were still standing at right angles to each other, with an extensive and open square about them. The exterior of both had suffered dreadfully from our shot; but the interior seemed to have escaped well enough. The one which stood in an oblong direction, as seen from the Malakoff, was divided into three stories, with a staircase of stone, now nearly destroyed. The upper stories were bare, and entirely desolate. The ground floor, extending the whole length of the building, seemed to have served as a receptacle, up to the last moment, for the clothes, muskets, and accoutrements of the soldiers-probably of those who, for the time being, performed the service of the Redan. There was a long table down the middle, and large bins were ranged along the walls on each side. The table and floor were covered, and the bins were full of the commonest articles and implements of war. But even here the principle of destruction had been carried out. The clothes were in shreds; the muskets, and swords, and scabbards broken in two; the helmets smashed; the ornaments torn from them-the whole a shapeless mass of cloth, wood, leather, and brass, mixed up with a great abundance of the omnipresent black and oily bread. In this room we found all those who had preceded us into the English part of the town. Some twelve or fifteen soldiers were tossing the things about one over another, and making confusion worse confounded. The dust and closeness of the room were almost unbearable. The value and nature of the plunder were evidenced by a soldier who met us at the door, and showed us what he had rescued after an hour's diligent search, consisting of three-quarters of a musket, half a helmet, a sword, a brass ornament, three buttons, a charm worth about a farthing, a leather tobacco-pouch, half a dozen leaves of a Russian book, a leaden spoon, and a large piece of bread. There was plunder, on the taking of a town by assault!

The general hospital, within whose walls no fewer than two thousand bodies were found, the greater number dying or dead, was not, strange to say, discovered till a short time before twelve o'clock on the Sunday. Our author much regretted that he should have been in the dry docks on Sunday morning at seven o'clock, within a stone's throw of this charnelhouse, and yet not have chanced to hit it.

It is possible that, if, on Sunday morning, that hospital had been known to be

in existence, many lives might have been saved. An English officer in the 90th Regiment, as well as two others, who had been wounded and left in the Redan during our assault, were found there. So severely wounded were they, that they could not move. Poor fellows! how they must have suffered! The officer in the 90th was almost sinking from loss of blood, and want of nourishment. His state allowed of his removal to our camp, but he lingered there for only a day or two, and his death was caused chiefly by the fact of the hospital not having been discovered earlier. It would be painful to dwell upon the sickening sights that were visible in this large building. The Russians sent over a flag of truce, to ask for their own wounded. The entire building had to be ransacked for those wounded men. In many cases, men were found alive, lying helpless under a heap of dead bodies. Dragged from these masses of decaying human flesh, they were handed over to the Russian soldiers, who, so far as I could judge, seemed to be gentle in the handling and treatment of their wounded. The great majority of the dead were buried by the Allies. Probably, this charnel-house represented as great an amount of suffering, and comprised within its walls as large an extent of misery, as was ever seen in a single view. It was the climax of the horrors of the bombardment—the caput mortuum of the crucible of human woe. It formed a fitting background to the spectacle of the blood-stained ruins, which the Russian general vauntingly bequeathed to us, and was a worthy close to all the suffering, misery, and destruction of that fearful siege.

We wish we could extract, as a relief to this most appalling record of the whole siege, a little romantic episode of love and romance, in which the actors were an English colonel and a French vivandière, and the climax of which was the Frenchwoman throwing herself into the gallant colonel's arms in the face of his entire brigade, and, what was more, in the face of the whole French regiment ! But we must content ourselves with a graphic pencilling of the feelings of two observers on the occasion of the disastrous attack on the Redan, the more especially as we shall have to return to the subject afterwards. It must be premised that the two observers are one of the brothers and a Frenchman, whom, after parting with Mr. Russell in the Woronzof Ravine, he finds seated behind a heap of stones on Stony Hill:

The wind was perfectly blinding; and, unprotected as my face was (for I had no spectacles, as many had), it was absolutely painful; but I imitated the Frenchman, and crouched down during the severe bursts, only raising my head at the intervals of cessation. From this point I could see much better; but the want of a continuous view was very disheartening. The Frenchman told me that he had seen our gallant fellows get into the Redan, but he said he had only seen one attacking party enter, and that they had suffered most severely in the approach.. 66 But you are sure they are inside ?" I asked.

"Oh! certain," he said; "and at the first pause of the wind, you will see the musketry fire in the Redan."

The roll of musketry pealed incessantly. It was like one continuous firecaused by machinery. When, after a few minutes, I caught a sight of the Redan, I distinctly observed that there were two fires opposed to each other inside the work; and, as far as I could judge, ours was most stoutly maintained.

At the same time, though the corpses lay thick about the abattis and ditch,. and I could occasionally distinguish some of our men on the parapet, or in small and straggling numbers in the open, the space between the abattis and the Redan was perfectly bare of moving masses, and the Frenchman got into a violent passion.

"My God!" said he, "where are your supports? Where are your reserves ? Do they expect that handful of men whom I saw enter to maintain that place? Why look-look," he said, "they are only in a narrow space round the anglethey have not advanced into the interior. Poor devils! how can they do it ?"

VOL. XXXIX.

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I tried to assure him that supporting parties had entered during the intervals when we could not see; but he far too well understood the business, and silenced me by every remark he made.

"If any large numbers had supported," he said, "you would see their fire advance. It is, even now, only at the point where it was at first. Depend on it you will lose the day, unless reserves are sent up-and that quickly."

The poor fellow muttered his imprecations in the most audible, and, to me, the most painful manner. The scene-the thought of all that was taking place-the glimpses which showed that our blood was being spilt like water-worked a marvellous effect upon the mind, and my excitement rose to a pitch that was almost unbearable. I refused to believe that, once inside the Redan, our troops would be allowed to vacate it again, and we both directed earnest, searching looks towards the open space for the faintest sign of advancing troops. We saw that space perfectly ploughed with living shot. They swept across it in one continuous stream, sufficient, as I thought, to daunt any soldiers other than French or English from advancing through such a raining fire; but at every moment we fondly hoped to see masses of men emerge from the trenches and advance to the help of their brethren in distress.

"If we look for them so anxiously," said the Frenchman, "what must those poor fellows in the Redan do ?"

But they come not-and they never came!

The author of "Inside Sebastopol" professes to tell the true story of the repulse at the Redan on the 8th of September. It is known, he says, to every one, except the ordinary English public. It is especially well known to the French, and the Sardinians, and the Germans, and even to the Turks. There can be no use in dressing up the event in the trappings of fiction. It is better to recognise a disagreeable reality than to exhibit ourselves as living in a fool's paradise, obstinately ignorant of what every passer-by knows to be true. If that shrewd and fortunate man, Napoleon III., should succeed in making peace without another act of warfare-if the 8th of September is to be the date of the last conflict of this war-then the Emperor of the French has added another to his many surprising achievements-he has revenged Waterloo!

Such a flourish of trumpets will arouse the most lively impatience for the promised revelation. For our own part, we have heard of so many revenges having been taken since the present Emperor assumed the bee-spangled purple, that we fear there is no universal faith in any one of them. First, there was the revenge obtained by an alliance cemented over the tomb of the Hero; then there was the revenge obtained by throwing the Wellington monument over Waterloo-bridge; now we have a third revenge propounded in face of the Redan. Our author, it must be premised, is visiting the fatal spot with a little bevy of attendant Crimean heroes, who, in indulgence of a curiosity natural to a civilian, did not refuse to talk upon subjects rather rococo to them. They have arrived at the last point from whence the British emerged from the trenches to advance to the assault, when an anonymous military cicerone expounds the progress of events as follows:

"Here was where we had to unearth and run forward to the assault. See what a deuce of a way it is; all swept by those guns. It was here the rascals of the stood still and wouldn't come on, though the Ninety-seventh were crying out to them, 'Come along, you cowards, there's nobody here.' Though

* Inside Sebastopol, and Experiences in Camp. London: Chapman and Hall.

1856.