The last two who arrived at General Simpson's were a Pole and a Russian, and both were in such a condition as to excite the liveliest compassion among our soldiers. Their clothes were in rags, and the fragments of their boots scarcely clung to their feet. They came from the army near Baidar, and they stated that all the men were in the same state; that all they had to eat was bread or biscuit and barley, and that they get no meat, and had only occasional issues of quarter rations of vodka, or spirits. Their otficers told the troops that the allies were starving, and had no forage for their horses; and these two men were observed to laugh and throw up their hands in surprise as they passed the great piles of provisions accumulated at our depot on the Col.
They said tliey were laughing at the lies which had been told to them. They were in sucli a forlorn state tliat Colonel Blane, the kind and feeling commandant of the head-quarters' camp, sent down an active and intelligent non-comniissioned officer, Sergeant Gillespie, of the Provost Marshal's department, under whose immediate control all prisoners are placed, to the Russian stores at Sebastopol to get them great-coats and clothing, but he could not find any boots, and it was observed that no boots were in store when the place was taken, and that the prisoners were very badly shod. This is very unusual with Russian troops, and shows the straits to which their army must be reduced. Wlien the place was evacuated the English took sixty-two prisoners, many of whom were drunk and asleep amid the ruins of the houses, and they were all badly dressed and ill provided with shoes or boots.
The wounded men taken in recent affairs of outposts by the Sardinians are in the same sad state, and the fact appears evident that the Russians are rapidly declining in condition and in external efficiency. The men state that they get 31b. of bread or l^lb. of biscuit a-day, and a little tarley, which they bod into a kind of soup; this constitutes their rations. Now and then, as I said before, they receive a small allowance of wheat or barley brandy. They are kept alive by assurances that the allies must soon go, and then they will have (poor deluded creatures!) the spoils of the English camp, which is rich in everything but food. Most of these men are exceedingly tractable, and they are found to make excellent servants at head-quarters, so long as they are not allowed to have rum.
They are obedient, hard-working, and easily contented, and their masters all speak highly of them. Since the war began we have had nearly 1000 of them at headquarters, and very few of them have belied that character. One of them, a Polish non-commissioned officer, was of great use as a spy, but he was seized with an unconquerable desire to join the Polish Legion at Varna, and had got as far as Odessa, when he was recognised and shot as a deserter. There are many races in the Russian army, but none seem willing to desert except the Poles, and the number of these disafiected soldiers who have come over to us is very small indeed. In reference to a paragraph which you published from a contemporary, classifying the regiments engaged in the attack on the Redan into English, Irish, and Scotch, in accordance with the names each of them bears, I can assure you nothing can be more fallacious than any deductions fi'om such data.
It is not by any means true that each regiment consists in most part of natives of the province or county from which it derives its name, or that it is even raised in tliat part. For instance, a large proportion of the 41st Welsh are Irish, and that regiment till lately has been recruited in Ireland, but now orders have been issued to raise men in Wales, where the character and reputation of the regiment may at present exercise greater influence in procuring recruits. The 77th, which is called the East Middlesex Ilegiment, is composed almost exclusively of Irishmen; the 30th, or Cambridgeshire, also contains a very great number of Irishmen; and the 9()th, or Perthshire Volunteers, has quite as many men from Tipperary as from the shire it is named after.