" The brigade of Guards, under his Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge and Major-General Bentinck, proceeded likewise to the front, and took up most important ground to the extreme right, on the alignement of the Second Division, but separated from it by a deep and precipitous ravine, and posting its guns with those of the Second Division.
" The Fourth Division, under Lieutenant-General Sir George Cathcart, having been brought from their encampment, advanced to the front and right of the attack; the first brigade, under Brigadier - General Goldie, proceeded to the left of the Inkermann Road; the second brigade, under BrigadierGeneral Torrens, to the right of it, and on the ridge overhanging the valley of the Tchernaya.
" The Third Division, under Lieutenant - General Sir Richard England, occupied, in part, the ground vacated by the Fourth Division, and supported the Light Division by two regiments under BrigadierGeneral Sir John Campbell, while Brigadier-General Eyre held the command of the troops in the trenches."
The Russian columns now pressed forward in masses of formidable dimensions, protected by a most awful artillery fire from their batteries in position, and from ships moored so as to command the field. As the other divisions came up they gradually came within the range of this fire, which was murderous and deadly in the extreme, and to which our OAvn light field-pieces were utterly unable to reply; and it was not until Colonel Gambier succeeded in bringing up two eighteen-pounder
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siege guns that anything approaching an equality of fire was established. The first sounds of musketry had roused the Guards, and as at this time men and officers all slept in their clothes, a few moments sufficed for the three regiments to fall in, and they were speedily moving in the direction of the fight.
Passing through the camp of the Second Division they reached the Woronzoff road, along which the round-shot was already ploughing its way. Here the Duke of Cambridge received a message which led him to order the Brigade to take ground to the right, and, inquiring in which direction the enemy appeared to be in greatest force, he conducted his men towards the right of the Second Division, where in effi^ct the fray was then the thickest. Advancing steadily under a hail of musket-balls, the Guards reserved their fire until close upon the dense masses who were resolutely coming to meet them, when they opened a destructive fire, in spite of many of their pieces, which had been exposed to the rain of the preceding night, missing. An old sand-bag battery, which had been constructed for two guns, but had not been armed, now became an object of peculiar contest. The enemy had scrambled up it, and evidently considered its possession of great importance, but the Guards charged them with the same resistless impetuosity as had carried everything before them at Alma, and the Russians, who outnumbered them in the proportion of five to one, were driven out with great loss. The new tenants now made the most desperate effiDrts to retain their acquisition, to which they clung with unparalleled tenacity, numbers of them falling at every moment. Here poor Butler, the brother of the hero of Silistria, met his fate, adding another memory of glory and of sorrow to a name already imperishably connected with the history of the war.
At last, attacked by overwhelming numbers, the Guards found themselves outflanked, and with great difficulty effecting an orderly retreat, the battery again fell to the Russians. Reinforced however by the 20th regiment, they again dashed cheering towards the battery, Colonel Percy, who had been severely wounded at Alma, rushing gallantly to the front, and setting an example which those around him were not slow to emulate. Ammunition now began to fail, but the undaunted assailants found a ready resource in some large fragments of stone with which the ground was strewed; arming themselves with these, they flung them into the masses of Russians, who caught the idea, and for some minutes the air was thick with huge stones flying in all directions. It was with some of these eccentric missiles, we believe, that Colonel Percy was now again wounded. The primitive but deadly contest was waged for a time with equal vigour on both sides, but the determined pluck of the British again turned the scale, and once more a melee of Grenadiers, Coldstreams, and Fusiliers held the battery their own, and from it, on the solid masses of Russians, still poured as good a fire as their ammunition would permit.