" With steadiness, with discipline, with resource, the Sardinian army has long maintained and efficiently guarded the advanced position entrusted to it; and it bore its honourable share with the troops of France in the battle of the Tchernaya.
"In our intercourse there has neither been difficulty nor difference, and this good feeling between all the armies of the Alliance has had a very important influence in determining the peace of Europe.
"By order. C. A. Windham, Chief of the Staff."
As we were about to part, our anxiety to learn more of our late foes increased. The Russians surveyed our camps, we visited their hospitals, studied their commissariat, inquired into their militarysystem, and inspected their positions; our engineers minutely examined the works of our allies, with which they were necessarily but slightly acquainted during the progress of the attack.
The approaches to the place afforded no opportunity to our English engineers of developing the use of mines. We were never sufficiently near to the Redan, and our works were not assailable by the same agency for the same reason. The French system of mines in front of the Bastion du Mat presented a most astonishing display of labour and skill. To the Russians, however, belonged the credit of performing the most extensive operations. The enemy's mines consisted of two series of galleries and magazines, the first being twenty-seven feet below the surface, the second being forty feet below the first. The workmen were supplied with air by means of force-pumps. In one magazine at the end of one of the galleries there was found 8,500 lbs. of powder, all tamped in and ready for firing by electric wires. This magazine would have formed an etonnoir far in the rear of the French advance; and the explosion was intended to destroy not only the French parallels, but the works of the Bastion du Mat itself, so as to prevent the French turning the guns. The destruction of the docks wras effected by a smaller quantity of gunpowder. The Russians intended to fire some of these mines in case of an assault on the Bastion being repulsed under circumstances which gave them a chance of occupying the enemy's advanced saps; others would only have been fired in case of a retreat from the city, in order to destroy as many of the enemy as possible and to check pursuit. There were two or three mines inside the Redan, and there were some extensive galleries and mines in front of the Malakoff, but it was at the Bastion du Mat, or Flagstaff Battery, that the French and Russians put forth their strength in mine and countermine. The galleries were pushed for fifty yards oftentimes through the solid rock. These labours were of the most stupendous character, and must have proved very exhausting to the garrison. Many of the shafts sprang out of the counterscarp, there were numerous chambers cut into the ditch of the bastion, which were used as bombproofs. It was also discovered that the Russians had cut a subterranean gallery from inside the parapet, under the ditch, to an advanced work which they used as a place (Tarmes in making sorties, and the French, who had been puzzled to understand how the men used to collect in this work without being seen, now perceived the modus operandi.
494 THE BEIT1SH EXPEDITION TO THE CBIMEA,
The effect produced by the French mines could only be conceived by those who looked down the yawning craters of the etonnoirs, the wild chaos of rocks cast up all around by the explosion, as though Titans and Gods had met there in deadly combat. Some of these gulfs resembled the pits of volcanoes.
The British army, relieved from the pressure of military duties, and warned of their approaching departure, laboured, regiment by regiment, for many long weeks, to erect memorials to the comrades whose remains would be left behind. The works of this nature, which the hasty embarkation did not permit the army to complete, were undertaken by the few skilled soldier-labourers belonging to us. The Chersonese from Balaklava to the verge of the roadstead of Sebastopol was covered with isolated graves, with large burialgrounds, and detached cemeteries. Ravine and plain — hill and hollow — the roadside and secluded valley — for miles around, from the sea to the Tchernaya, presented those stark-white stones, singly or in groups, stuck upright in the arid soil, or just peering over the rank vegetation which sprang beneath.*
The French formed one large cemetery. The Sardinians erected a pedestal and obelisk of stone on the heights of Balaklava, close to their hospital, to the memory of General della Marmora and of their departed comrades; we erected similar monuments on the heights of Inkerman and on the plain of Balaklava to commemorate the 5th of November and the 25th of October.