my writing so seldom. This sheet has been given me as a precious gift which I now bestow on you. To-morrow we shall have been three weeks before Sebastopol, and to-day is the sixth day since our batteries have opened. I hope you will soon hear of our success, but it will be hard work to win the town, owing to the vast number of heavy guns the enemy have got in the town, and the rocky nature of the ground in front, which makes it extremely difficult for us to approach the town under cover by throwing up regular parallels; we have, however, considerably reduced the fire of the place, and our engineers report favourably of the progress we are making. You must not, however, be too sanguine as to a too speedy result of the siege. We have all been uncommonly hard worked during the last ten days, and shall continue to be so till the place is ours. In the meantime officers and men are in high spirits, and do their duty admirably. We have lost a few lives, but very few indeed, and with the exception of two or three officers, the casualties are most insignificant, which is the more surprising considering the heavy fire that has been almost incessantly kept up from the place since the army came before it. We have got a tolerable number of prisoners and deserters, and one of them, a Polish officer, who was examined this morning, gives a deplorable account of the town. He says that the Russians have lost 3000 men in killed and wounded, and that they are quite disheartened. Menschikov ''^ has left to take command of an army which threatens our rear; the Governor has been killed, and Nachinov, of Sinope 2' celebrity, is in command. We have been wonderfully lucky in the weather, which is of great importance; excepting two days of cold wind, we have had uninterrupted summer throughout.... — Ever your affectionate son,
Fredk. Stephenson.
P.S. — I never was better in my life.
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
To his Sister, Mrs. Melvil Wilson
Before Sebastopol, November 2, 1854.
My dearest Lou, — It would be worth fighting twenty battles to receive such another letter from you as the one that reached me yesterday. I cannot describe to you the pleasure it gave me to learn how much kind sympathy I had awakened in you all.... I pore over your letter again and again with undiminished pleasure; such proofs of affection are worth all the medals in the world, and I would a thousand times sooner possess (as I do) the conviction of your sincere affection than all the decorations under heaven. I am sorry I have written so seldom to you, but I could not oftener. We landed in the Crimea with no baggage of any description but what we carried on our backs, and, moreover, had to take in our haversacks three days* provisions. I had no portable blotting-book, and paper carried loose in the haversack would soon have been spoiled. The wounded officers were, of course, better off, and it was from one of them I borrowed a sheet of notepaper (most reluctantly parted with) on which I wrote to my mother the day after the battle. The following day I got another sheet of paper from the Commissariat, on which I wrote to William, and about a week after that I had another given me, on which I wrote to you from Balaclava.... We are still hammering away at Sebastopol, the capture of which is harder work than was at first supposed, but on Saturday or Monday next I beheve the place will be assaulted by the French and English conjointly. Our Division, however, together with the 2nd, and a strong body of French will, I believe, be used as a covering party against an army of twenty or twenty-five thousand of the enemy now threatening our rear, and whose movements I am supposed to be at this moment watching, being on outlying picket with my company, about a mile from their outposts, which have already disturbed me in my occupation once or twice by firing an occasional shot which obliges me to
1854] INKERMAN 107