A remarkable incident occurred at this time. In the trenches on the furthest point of our Left Attack, on the verge of the ravine, two batteries had been constructed, but not armed. On the night of the nth guns were conveyed to one of them, across the open ground, and these on the following day were placed on their platforms. These batteries were on much lower ground than the Redan and the Barrack Battery on the one side, and the Garden Batteries and Flagstaff Bastion on the other. Nevertheless, this battery of four guns opened fire on the I3th on its formidable opponents. From their commanding heights, they very soon concentrated on it the overwhelming fire of about twenty heavy guns. The contest was hopeless, but it was maintained. For five hours the English guns, gradually reduced to one that remained in a condition to fire, replied, not without effect. Then, this last gun disabled, nearly all
2 1 2 Two well-fought Batteries.
the gunners struck down, the parapets swept away, the remnant of men were at length withdrawn. Out of forty-seven men, forty-four had been killed or wounded.
In the night the damage was repaired, and the four guns were put once more in fighting condition. And the battery no longer fought singly in the front line ; its neighbour was armed with six guns. On the I4th they opened and brought on themselves a terrible stress of fire. All day (with one relief), and even into the night, they maintained the fight, when, with many guns disabled, many men killed and wounded, and the parapets once more knocked into shapeless heaps, they were withdrawn from the works, which were not again manned. This episode, while it did little (that little, perhaps, in the way of attracting shot from the enemy which would otherwise have been directed on other points) towards a general result, enabled Todleben to score a substantial and indisputable success in the midst of his calamities elsewhere. Yet these English gunners had not fought quite in vain ; they are still remembered as having set a rare example of valorous devotion.
Ten days did the terrific storm of iron hail endure; ten days did the Russian reliefs, holding themselves ready to repel attack, meet wounds and death with a constancy which was of necessity altogether passive. On the 1 9th they saw the fire of the Allies decline, and settle into its more ordinary rate ; they saw, too, that the sappers were again at work with their approaches, and reading in this the signs of a resumption of the siege,
Carnage in Sebastopol. 213
and the abandonment of the policy of assault, they once more withdrew their sorely harassed infantry to places of shelter and repose. Then they began to reckon their losses, which amounted for the ten days, in killed and wounded, to more than 6000 men. The French lost, in killed and disabled, 1585 men; the English, 265.
During these days and nights the great ballroom of the assembly rooms in Sebastopol was crowded with the wounded incessantly arriving on stretchers. The floor was half-an-inch deep in coagulated blood. In an adjoining room, set apart for operations, the blood ran from three tables where the wounded were laid, and the severed limbs lay heaped in tubs. Outside, fresh arrivals thronged the square, on their blood-steeped stretchers, their cries and lamentations mingling with the roar of shells bursting close by. Many more were borne to the cellars of the sea-forts ; and those capable of removal to the north side were conveyed thither to permanent hospitals. In a church near the harbour the mournful chaunt of the office for the dead resounded continually through the open doors of the building. It was there that the funeral service was celebrated of officers dead on the field of honour. Such is the picture drawn by eye-witnesses of what was seen of the results of the conflict in the more remote parts of the city. Nor was the change to the country outside the fortress much for the better. A Russian, passing from thence to St Petersburgh, there testified that the route from Sebastopol to Simpheropol was so encumbered with dead bodies
2 1 4 Impatience for an Assault.