ON Easter Monday, April 9, the allied batteries simultaneously opened fire. The English works were armed with twenty 13-inch mortars, sixteen 10-inch mortars, twenty 24-pounders, forty-two 32-pounders, fifteen 8-inch guns, four 10-inch guns, and six 68-pounders. Late on the 8th, hearing that there was nothing likely to take place on Monday, I left the front, and returned to Balaklava; but in the evening I received an intimation that fire would open at daybreak the following morning. It was then black as Erebus, and raining and blowing with violence; yet there was no choice for it but to take to the saddle and try to make for the front. No one who has not tried it can fancy what work it is to find one's way through widely-spread camps in a pitch-dark night. Each camp is so much like its fellow that it is impossible to discriminate between one and the other; and landmarks, familiar in the day-time, are lost in one dead level of blackness. So my two companions and myself, after stumbling into Turkish and French lines, into holes and out of them, found ourselves, after three hours' ride, very far indeed from our destination in the front, and glad to stop till dawn, wet and tired, at the head-quarters' camp.
At four o'clock A.M. we left for the front. The horses could scarcely get through the sticky black mud into which the hard dry soil had been turned by one night's rain. Although it was early dawn, it was not possible to see a man twenty yards off. A profound silence reigned. Suddenly three guns were heard on the left towards the French lines, and then the whole line of batteries opened. The Garden and Redan Batteries came into play soon after we opened fire, but some time elapsed before the Round Tower or the Mamelon answered. The enemy were taken completely by surprise, and for half an hour their guns were weakly handled.
The Inkerman and Careening Bay Batteries were almost silent for three-quarters of an hour before they replied to the French batteries on our right.
A driving rain and a Black Sea fog whirled over the whole camp, which resumed the miserable aspect so well known to us during the winter. Tents were blown down, and the ground, as far as it was visible, looked like a black lake, studded with innumerable pools of dun-coloured water. It was not easy, so murky was the sky and so strong the wind, to see the flashes or hear the report of the Russian guns or of the French cannon on either flank, though the spot from which I watched was within a couple of hundred yards of the enemy's range; but we could tell that our batteries in front were thundering away continuously in irregular bursts, firing some twenty-five or thirty shots per minute. Early in the morning they were firing from seventy to eighty shots per minute, but they reduced the rate of fire. The sound was not so great as that of the 17th of October. Just as the cannonade opened, the sailors came over the hills from the batteries, where they had been relieved, and a few men of the Third Division turned out of the huts to the front, evidently very much astonished at the sudden opening of the fire. On the extreme left the French batteries were firing with energy on the loopholed wall, and on the Flagstaff and Garden Batteries, which were replying very feebly. Our left attack (Greenhill or Chapman's Batteries), directed its fire principally against the Redan, which only answered by five or six guns. Our right attack (Gordon's) aided by the advanced battery and by the French redoubts, had silenced the Mamelon and fired three or four shots for every one from the Round Tower. The Russian batteries to the right of the Mamelon were voiceless. So much could be seen, when rain and mist set in once more, and shut out all, save one faint blear of yellowish haze to the west. The storm was so heavy that scarcely a soul stirred out all day. It was dark as night. Lord Raglan stationed himself at his favourite place. On Cathcart's Hill only Sir John Campbell and an aide-de-camp were visible in front of the General's tent. Colonel Dacres was the only officer in front of Cathcart's Hill when I went up, with the exception of Sir John Campbell. The rain descended in torrents, there was nothing to be seen, heard, or learnt, every one withdrew to shelter after a long and hopeless struggle with the weather. The firing slackened considerably after twelve o'clock.