Our attack lasted about an hour and three-quarters, and in that time we lost more men than at Inkerman, where the fighting lasted for seven hours. At 1.48 P.M., which was about the time we retired, there was an explosion either of a tumbrel or of a fougasse between the Mamelon and the Malakoff, to the right, which seemed to blow up several Frenchmen, and soon afterwards the artillery of the Imperial Guard swept across from the rear towards the Little Redan, and gave us indication that our Allies had gained a position from which they could operate against the enemy with their field-pieces. From the opening of the attack the French batteries over Careening Bay had not ceased to thunder against the Russian fleet, which lay silently at anchor below; and a lively cannonade was kept up between them and the Inkerman batteries till the evening, which was interrupted every now and then by the intervention of the English redoubt, and the late Selinghinsk and Volhynia redoubts, which engaged the Russian batteries at the extremity of the harbour. At one o'clock wounded men began to crawl up from the batteries to the camp; they could tell us little or nothing. "Are we in the Redan?" "Oh, yes; but a lot of us is killed, and the Russians are mighty strong." Some were cheerful, others desponding; all seemed proud of their wounds. Half an hour more, and the number of wounded increased; they came up by twos and threes, and — what I had observed before as a bad sign — the number of stragglers accompanying them, under the pretence of rendering assistance, became greater also. Then the ambu{356}lances and the cacolets (or mule litters) came in sight along the Woronzoff Road filled with wounded. Every ten minutes added to their numbers, and we could see that every effort was made to hurry them down to the front as soon as they were ready for a fresh load. The litter-bearers now added to the length of the melancholy train. We heard that the temporary hospitals in front were full, and that the surgeons were beginning to get anxious about the extent of their accommodation for the wounded.
Another bad sign was, that the enemy never ceased throwing up shell to the front, many of which burst high in the air, over our heads, while the pieces flew with a most unpleasant whir around us. These shells were intended for our reserves; and, although the fusees did not burn long enough for such a range, and they all burst at a considerable elevation, they caused some little injury and annoyance to the troops in the rear, and hit some of our men. The rapidly increasing swarms of wounded men, some of whom had left their arms behind them, at last gave rise to suspicions of the truth; but their answers to many eager questioners were not very decisive or intelligible, and some of them did not even know what they had been attacking. One poor young fellow, who was stumping stiffly up with a broken arm and a ball through his shoulder, carried off his firelock with him, but he made a naïve confession that he had "never fired it off, for he could not." The piece turned out to be in excellent order. It struck one that such men as these, however brave, were scarcely a fit match for the well-drilled soldiers of Russia; and yet we were trusting the honour, reputation, and glory of Great Britain to undisciplined lads from the plough, or the lanes of our towns and villages! As one example of the sort of recruits we received, I may mention that there was a considerable number of men in draughts, which came out to regiments in the Fourth Division, who had only been enlisted a few days, and who had never fired a rifle in their lives!
As I wrote at the time — "It must not be imagined that such rawness can be corrected and turned into military efficiency out here; for the fact is, that this siege has been about the worst possible school for developing the courage and manly self-reliance of a soldier; neither does it teach him the value of discipline and of united action. When he goes into the trenches he learns to dodge behind gabions, and to take pot shots from behind stones and parapets, and at the same time he has no opportunity of testing the value of his comrades, or of proving himself against the enemy in the open field. The natural result follows. Nor can it be considered as aught but ominous of evil that there have been two Courts of Inquiry recently held concerning two most distinguished regiments — one, indeed, belonging to the highest rank of our infantry; and the other a well-tried and gallant regiment, which was engaged in this very attack — in consequence of the alleged misconduct of their young soldiers during night affairs in the trenches."