" It certainly was an extraordinary scene. Everything was at once so warlike and yet so peaceful. Grim batteries were frowning down upon the spot from every side, yet the white flag was floating, and the parapets and embrasures were quite hidden with people eagerly gazing upon the spectacle below. The different troops soon met — the privates grinning and offering each other pipes, the officers bowing to one another as if all were on the most friendly terms, and as if in the course of a couple of hours they would not be doing their very utmost to murder and destroy the very men on both sides to whom now both sides were so polite. Across from our trenches, in the direction of the Malakoff Tower, a man with a white flag was leading a large fatigue party, carrying many of the enemy's dead. Russian fatigue parties were also busy round and inside the French trench, engaged in the same melancholy duty; while the idlers, of whom there were considerable numbers spotted about, were picking their way among masses of stone, pieces of shell, piles of round shot, dead Russians in every attitude of agony, torn sand-bags, gabions, fascines, bayonets, broken firelocks, thousands of flattened bullets, unused cartridges, and all the litter of a scene of combat. The Russian officers were well and neatly dressed in long fine great coats, white cross-belts, and swords. Two or three had quite a profusion of handsome rings on their fingers. All seemed to speak French well; some were very friendly and chatty, offering our own and the French officers cigars; while others were polite, but very grave and reserved, bowing to the Allied officers when they passed, but never entering into conversation, or appearing to pay the least attention to anything but the duties in which they were immediately engaged.
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" The Russian soldiers were both dirty and ragged, but beyond this defect in their appearance were well enough. They were very line young men, and all in robust health, with round ruddy faces, on which was a perpetual grin at everything our men did or said. Their uniform was a short thick great coat of grey frieze, with waist belts of the same material, round flat caps, and light leather boots, in fact, just the uniform of the men we fought at Inkermann; none had the helmet or other equipments of the Imperial Guard. The stretchers which they bi'ought to carry away their dead had evidently been much used for such work, as the canvass was perfectly black and stiff with blood. One or two were properly made; the rest were strips of canvass, clumsily tied to rough poles of wood. The bodies of nearly all the slain were those of very fine young men."
Soon after three o'clock the armistice terminated, and the white emblems of a peace transitory and fallacious, and which served only to place in stronger relief the stern realities which for so brief a space it had interrupted, were hauled down from trench and battery; and, even as the last flutter of their snowy folds vanished from the gaze, the iron messengers of death once more flew fast from side to side on their ill-omened errand.
This was the longest burial-truce which took place during the siege, and was for this reason selected for special description by the several authors from whom we have quoted; nor will the space thus devoted to an event which had no direct influence on the course of the war be grudged by the reader, to whom one of the most striking peculiarities of modern civilised warfare is thus forcibly brought home.
But for these and similar amenities which the progress of enlightenment has grafted on the sterner and more ruthless practice of older times, war, even now the most fearful of the scourges which desolate the earth, would become once more the reproach of humanity and the jubilee of fiends. Terrible are the smoking ruins of great cities, the abandoned homestead and the desecrated hearth — mournful the necessity which changes to a barren waste the plain once teeming with fertility and smiling with nature's beauty — which bids man, God's image, deface and mar God's image man — which blights manhood in its prime and promise, cuts off the flower of a nation, and fills a land with wailing; horrible, with a horror which no language however eloquent can depict, the spectacle presented by a field of battle; yet such, alas! are the ordinary and inevitable accidents of war; but who can conceive what war would be, were the wantonness of destruction permitted to reach its furthest limits, and the fiercest passions of our fallen nature left unchecked save by their own exhaustion?
Nothing perhaps has a gentler or more humanizing influence, nothing more tends to soften the rancour and awaken the better feelings of belligerents,
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]