men stood generally ankle deep, sometimes knee deep, in snow and liquid mud ; except near the cliffs, and at a great distance from the camps, the supply of fuel, in the form of brushwood, which the plains afforded, had long since been exhausted, and even the roots of the vines had been grubbed up for cooking. And this want had become a hindrance to the siege in another way. "It is very unusual," says the Engineer Journal \ "to see smoke from fires in trenches, yet this took place daily." The cause of this was the want of fuel in the camps. The coffee issued to the men was in the berry, which is the best form of it when means for roasting are at hand, for wet does not injure it, and it has, of course, far more flavour when freshly ground. But when there was no fuel in camp, the men took the green coffee with them to the trenches, ground it with fragments of the enemy's shells, roasted it on their mess tins, and boiled it in them, with fuel taken from the gabions and fascines forming part of the works, and the parapets, of course, suffered seriously from these depredations. The troops, driven to these shifts, had become so few that the French could only afford about 400 by day and 200 by night for employment on the works, and the English a much smaller number, while, according to the Engineer Journal \ the trenches of our three attacks, the Right, the Left, and that on Mount Inkerman, were at this time guarded only by 350 men, and on one day in January by only 290 men, being about one-twentieth of the number of the part of the garrison opposed to them, and which might have attacked them.
1 94 Fortress increasing in Strength.
On the other hand, the Russians having after Inkerman abandoned the idea of using the field army for attacking the Allied position, had begun to withdraw troops from it to strengthen the garrison, and readjusted the supply between them. They poured reinforcements into the place, till they had not only made good the losses of the first weeks of winter, but enabled its commander to employ on the works a force varying, according to need, from 6000 to 10,000 men. The guns, lying in the arsenal in thousands, and the ammunition were easily brought to. the batteries along the paved streets. Thus the fortress was immensely augmenting its power of resistance just when we found the greatest difficulty in holding our ground. Therefore, readers who have been accustomed to hear the chiefs in Sebastopol and their troops lauded as maintaining a struggle against unheard-of difficulties, and as exhibiting extraordinary energy and powers of resistance, may ask themselves how it was that an enemy who possessed such enormously superior forces in men and material, and who could at any time, during a period of months, have directed on some selected point of the siege works thousands of troops, that would have found only hundreds to meet them, did not muster the courage for such an enterprise when it promised deliverance to the fortress, and ruin to their foes. Yet they might perhaps have given the reason which Canrobert had already pleaded for restraining enterprise, that they were unwilling to set the great stake on a single cast, and preferred to let delay and all its evils fight for them.
New System of Rifle-pits. 195