It must have been a dreary residence. The floor and the entrance were littered a foot deep with reports, returns, and perhaps despatches assuring the Czar that the place had sustained no damage. The garrison were in these narrow chambers enjoying their siesta, which they invariably take at twelve o'clock, when the French burst in on them like a torrent, and, as it were, drowned them in their holes. The Malakhoif is a closed work; it is only open at the rear to the town, and the French having once got in, threw open a passage to their own rear, and closed up the front and the lateral communications with the curtains leading to the Great Redan and to the Little Redan. Thus they were enabled to pour in their supports, in order and without loss, in a continued stream, and to resist the efforts of the Russians, which were desperate and repeated, to retake the place.
They brought up their tield-guns at once, and swept the Russian reserves and supports, M'hile Strange's batteries from the Quarries carried death through their ranks in every quarter of the Karabelnaia. With the Malakhoff the enemy lost Sebastopol. The ditch outside, towards the north, was yet full of French and Russians piled over each other in horrid confusion. On the right, towards the Little Redan, the ground was literally strewn with bodies as thick as they could lie, and in the ditch they were piled over each other. Here the French, victorious in the Malakhoff, met with a heavy loss and a series of severe repulses. The Russians lay inside the work in heaps like carcases in a butcher's cai't, and the wounds, the blood — the sight, exceeded all I had hitherto witnessed.
Descending from the MalakholT, we come upon a suburb of ruined houses open to the sea — it is filled with dead. The Russians have crept away into holes and corners in every house, to die like poisoned rats; artillery horses, with their entrails torn open by shot, are»stretched all over the space at the back of the JMalakhoff, marking the place where the Russians moved up their last column to retake it under the cover of a heavy field battery. Every house, the church, some public buildings, soiitiy-boxes, all alike are broken and riddled by cannon and mortar. Turning to the left, we proceed by a very tall snow-white wall of great length to the dockyard gateway. This wall is pierced and broken through and through with cannon.
Inside are the docks, which, naval men say, are unequalled iu the world. Tlie steamer is blazing merrily in one of them. Gates and store sides are splintered and pierced by shot. There are the stately dockyard buildings on the right, which used to look so clean and white and spruce. Parts of them are knocked to atoms, and hang together in such shreds and patches that it is only wonderful they cohere. The soft white stone of which they and the walls are made is readily knocked to pieces by a cannon-shot. Fort Paul is untouched. There it stands, as if frowning defiance at its impending fate, right before us, and warning voices bid all people to retire, and even the most benevolent retreat from the hospital, which is in one of these buildings, where they are tending the miserable wounded.
I visited it next day. Of all the pictures of the horrors of war which have ever been presented to the world, the hospital of Sebastopol presents the most horrible, heart-rending, and revolting. It cannot be described, and the imagination of a Fuseli could not conceive anything at all like unto it. How the poor human body can be mutilated and yet hold its soul within it when every limb is shattered, and every vein and artery is pouring out the lifestream, one might study here at every step, and at the same time wonder how little will kill! The building used as an hospital is one of the noble piles inside the dockyard wall, and is situated iu the centre of the row at right angles to the line of the Eedan.
The whole row was peculiarly exposed to the action of shot and shell bounding over the Redan, and to the missiles directed at the Barrack Battery, and it bears in sides, roof, windows, and doors, frequent and distinctive proofs of the severity of the cannonade. Entering one of these doors, I beheld such a sight as few men, thank God, have ever witnessed! In a long low room, supported by square pillars, arched at the top, and dimly lighted through shattered and nnglazed window-frames, lay the wounded Russians, who had been abandoned to our mercies by their General. The wounded, did I say? No, but the dead — the rotten and festering corpses of the soldiers, Avho were left to die in their extreme agony, untended, uncared for, packed as close as they could be stowed. some on the floor, others on wretched trestles and bedsteads, or pallets of straw, sopped and saturated with blood, which oozed and trickled through upon the floor, mingling with the di'oppings oi" corruption.