What a scene it was! The officers of the escort were crouching over some embers; along the walls were packed, some thirty or forty horses and ponies, shivering with cold, and kicking and biting with spite and bad humour. The Hussars, in their long cloaks, stood looking on the flakes of snow, which drifted in at the doorway or through the extensive apertures in the shingle roof. Soldiers of different regiments crowded about the warm corners, and Frenchmen of all arms, and a few Turks, joined in the brotherhood of misery, lighted their pipes at the scanty fire, and sat close for mutual comfort. The wind blew savagely through the roof, and through chinks in the mud walls and window-holes. The building was a mere shell, as dark as pitch, and smelt as it ought to do — an honest, unmistakeable stable — improved by a dense pack of moist and mouldy soldiers. And yet it seemed to us a palace! Life and joy were inside, though melancholy Frenchmen would insist on being pathetic over their own miseries — and, indeed, they were many and great — and after a time the eye made out the figures of men huddled up in blankets, lying along the wall. They were the sick, who had been in the hospital marquee, and who now lay moaning and sighing in the cold; but our men were kind to them, as they are always to the distressed, and not a pang of pain did they feel which care or consideration could dissipate.
A staff officer, Colonel Wetherall, dripping with rain, came in to sec if he could get any shelter for draughts of the 33rd and 41st Regiments, which had just been landed at Kamiesch, but he soon ascertained the hopelessness of his mission so far as our quarters were concerned. The men were packed into another shed, "like herrings in a barrel." Having told us, " There is terrible news from Balaklava — seven vessels lost, and a number on shore at the Katcha," and thus made us more gloomy than ever, the officer went on his way, as well as he ^ould, to look after his draughts. In the course of an hour an orderly was sent off to Balaklava with dispatches from head-quarters; but, after being absent for threequarters of an hour, the man returned, fatigued and beaten, to say he could not get his horse to face the storm. In fact, it would have been all but impossible for man or beast to have made headway through the hurricane.
We sat in the dark till night set in — not a soul could stir out. Nothing could be heard but the howling of the wind, the yelping of wild dogs driven into the enclosures, and the shrill neighings of terrified horses. At length a candle-end was stuck into a horn
CRIMEA.
lantern, to keep it from the wind — a bit of ration pork and some rashers of ham, done over the wood fire, furnished an excellent dinner, which was followed by a glass or horn of hot water and rum — then a pipe, and as it was cold and comfortless, we got to bed — a heap of hay on the stable floor, covered with our clothes, and thrown close to the heels of a playful grey mare, who had strong antipathies to her neighbours, a mule and an Arab horse, and spent the night iu attempting to kick in their ribs. Amid smells, and with incidents impossible to describe or allude to more nearly, we went to sleep in spite of a dispute between an Irish sergeant of Hussars and a Yorkshire corporal of Dragoons as to the comparative merits of light and heavy cavalry, with digressions respecting the capacity of English and Irish horseflesh, which, by the last we heard of them, seemed likely to be decided by a trial of physical strength on the part of the disputants.
Throughout the day there had been very little firing from the Russian batteries — towards evening all was silent except the storm. In the middle of the night, however, we were all awoke by one of the most tremendous cannonades we had ever heard, and, after a time, the report of a rolling fire of musketry was borne upon the wind. Looking eagerly in the direction of the sound, we saw the flashes of the cannon through the chinks in the roof, each distinct by itself, just as a flash of lightning is seen in all its length and breadth through a crevice in a window shutter. It was a sortie on the French lines. The cannonade lasted for half-an-hour, and gradually waxed fainter. In the morning we heard that the Russians had been received with an energy which quickly made them fly to the cover of their guns.