particular, received in his chest the upthrust of a bayonet delivered with such strength as to lift him from the ground. Taylor was killed, Henry, with twelve bayonet wounds in his body, survived; but the guns were lost for a brief space. They were recaptured a few minutes afterwards by a charge of some men of the 63rd and 21st, aided by a little body of sixty French Zouaves, who, of their own accord, and drawn by the mere lust of battle, had wandered down to the fighting line. A little farther along the ridge, however, the endless Russian battalions were forcing their eager way upward, and, as it happened, no tiniest thread of British infantry covered the gap through which they came. The fighting elsewhere was too fierce to allow of this particular irruption of the enemy to be, for a moment, so much as seen.

As it happened, a French battalion, the 7th Léger, had just moved into the gap, along which the Russians were coming. The Russian advance, as the red caps of the French gleamed through the

grey mist, paused, and the French moved forward a few paces. Then a curious tremor ran along their front, and a murmur rose in the ranks. The men, apparently, were protesting against an advance in line-one quite opposed to French traditions. A British staff officer galloped to the front of the line, and, with loud shouts, urged the mass forward. Slowly the onward movement was resumed, but the British officer, struck by a bullet, fell, and the French once more paused; the formation began to crumble, the line swayed backward. Lord Raglan and his staff were watching the scene, and it is said that at this moment alone, during the whole fight, Lord Raglan's face lost for an instant its cheerful calm. He had sent an aide-de-camp to Pennefather to ask how the fight was going on in the part of the line he commanded. That officer, in all the rapture of a desperate fight, sent back the cheerful message that everything was going on well, the enemy's infantry showed symptoms of retiring, and if a few more troops could be sent to him he would follow the enemy up and lick them to the d! The blast of that courageous message stirred the blood of the somewhat despondent staff like the note of a bugle; Canrobert in particular breaking out into exclamations, 'Ah! quel brave garçon, quel brave homme; quel bon général !'

At this moment some 200 men of the 77th, led by Colonel Egerton, came up by fours, and at the double. The men brushed roughly against the flank of the retiring French battalion. One of Egerton's captains remonstrated with a French officer, whom

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he found retreating, and aided his remonstrance by taking the French officer by the collar. Mais, monsieur,' said the unhappy Frenchman, pointing to the formidable Russian front, there are the Russians!' The French still continued to fall back, but Egerton's men, falling swiftly into line, opened a steady fire on the Russian front.

The decisive check to the Russian column, however, was given by a small body of the 55th, 100 strong, who took the column on its flank, poured a close fire into it at a distance so close that the flame of the muskets seemed to scorch the grey mass, and then tore their way into its entrails at the point of th: bayonet. The 7th Léger, too, had been rallied, thrown into the formation of column familiar to it, and came forward with great resolution, and the Russian attack on the western crest fell back shattered.

But meanwhile the great trunk column of the Russian attack, 2,000 strong, with a dense fringe of skirmishers running before it,

a was moving up from the Quarry Ravine, and to oppose it were some 250 men, the wrecks of several regiments—the 55th, 57th, and 77th-and less than 1,000 Frenchmen-the 7th Léger. The French troops were young, and of uncertain quality. In one mood they deployed across the front of the advancing Russians with a swift coolness altogether admirable, and maintained a fire so close and sure that the slaughter in the Russian ranks was dreadful. But in the interval between the volleys, when busy reloading, the young French soldiers were apparently seized by the thought that the Russian line, already so close, might deliver a bayonet charge, and the mass began to change its structure, to shrink back, and then to fall back! Their officers made gallant attempts to rally them. Pennefather, with his staff, galloped down to them, and in energetic British-French, punctuated, it is to be feared, by many oaths, exhorted them to stand. A French officer, his sword high in air, a mere youth, ran out several paces in the front, a British officer ran to his side, a third and a fourth joined the group. Some voice called out in French, ‘Drums to the front,' and drummers and buglers ran out, and sounded and screamed the pas de charge, and still the great battalion swayed to and fro, undecided between an heroic rush on the enemy or mere ignoble flight.

Here, again, as so often throughout the battle, the audacious and almost absurd daring of a cluster of British infantry changed the fortunes of the day. Colonel Daubeny found himself with

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thirty men of the 55th on the flank of the Russian column. The second Russian battalion was at quarter-distance in the rear of the leading battalion; it was in the act of deploying to its right, when Daubeny, with his thirty men, charged into the gap between the two battalions! The jam was fierce-so close, indeed, that shot or bayonet-thrust for a few seconds became impossible, and Daubeny was cool enough to exchange a half-laughing nod with a Russian officer close to him, and pinioned, like him, with the weight of the mass. But the British infantry, by sheer strengthsometimes with stroke of fist, sometimes with a murderous clutch at an enemy's throat-made space for themselves, and the heroic thirty actually fought their way through this body of 600 men, from flank to flank, half of them dying in the effort. And it was that heroic dash of thirty British soldiers through what may be called the spine of the great Russian column, which broke its strength, and froze into powerlessness the attack at its head. The 7th Léger by this time coming bravely on again, the great trunk column swung back, broken and demoralised.

All through the day the Russians had an overpowering superiority in artillery fire, and the roar of their 100 guns never ceased. To this the British replied with the fire of 38 guns, mostly of lighter calibre than the Russian guns; but at this stage Lord Raglan drew two 18-pounder guns into the fight. The guns were dragged into a commanding position, and opened fire on the Russian batteries. The answering fire was fierce and cruel, and, of the men working the guns, one in ten was struck down within the first few minutes. But the two great guns, laid with cool and deadly accuracy, and worked with almost incredible speed, wrought great mischief, and in less than half an hour obtained a complete ascendency over the Russian batteries on Shell Hill.

At most points of the battle-line, the exhausted British could only stand where they had fought; but at some points there was still energy enough to assume the offensive. Thus Lieutenant Acton, in command of some sixty men of the 77th, was ordered to gather under his command two other tiny British companies close at hand, and attack the most western Russian battery on Shell Hill

By one o'clock the fight was practically over, and the victory won; and there is no more astonishing victory in the history of war. Todleben afterwards explained the Russian defeat to Russell by saying, “You were hidden by the fog, and you had a thin front; but your fire into our dense masses was deadly. Then, again, our

a

men fancied that they had all the siege guns playing on them. Every little obstacle appeared to be a fort or a battery,' &c. The mist and the uncertainty of the fight, in a word, only hardened the courage of the British: they stirred with a ferment of alarmed uneasiness the imagination of the Russians.

The slaughter was great. On the three-quarters of a mile front, along which the battle raged, lay nearly 14,000 dead or wounded men. The British loss amounted to 3,258 killed or wounded; the French lost less than 1,000; the Russian killed and wounded, according to their own published figures, reached nearly 11,000. It is suspected to have been much greater. This huge slaughter amongst the Russians is explained by the fact that they were crowded together on a narrow neck of ground, they attacked in solid masses, the firing was close, and the hard-hitting Minié bullets often would pass through half-a-dozen men. The British losses, however, in proportion to their numbers, were of startling severity. Thus, of the Guards 594 men were killed and wounded out of 1,098 in the space of a single hour!

It was a great and memorable victory ; but what arithmetic can measure the price at which it was bought! Here is a pen picture of the scene the day after the fight, when a stretch of soil, a mile and a half in length, by half a mile in depth, was seamed with huge trenches in which the dead were being buried :'Parties of men busy at work. Groups along the hillside, forty or fifty yards apart. You find them around a yawning trench, 30 feet in length by 20 feet in breadth and 6 feet in depth. At the bottom lie, packed with exceeding art, some forty or fifty corpses. The gravediggers stand chatting, waiting for arrivals to complete the number. They speculate on the appearance of the body which is being borne towards them. “It's Corporal , of the —th, I think,” says one.

"

“No; it's my rear-rank man. I can see his red hair plain enough,” and so on. They discuss the merits or demerits of dead sergeants or comrades. Well, he was a hard man. Many's the time I was belted through him!” or “Poor Mick! He had fifteen years' service—a better fellow never stepped.” At last the number in the trench is completed. The bodies are packed as closely as possible. Some have still upraised arms, in the attitude of taking aim; their legs stick up through the mould; others are bent and twisted like fantoccini. Inch after inch the

h rises upon them, and they are left “alone in their glory." not alone; for the hope and affections of hundreds of human ts lie buried with them.'

THE SIEGE OF BOMARSUND AS SEEN FROM

THE DECK OF THE 'FOAM,'1

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BY THE MARQUIS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA.

In the summer of 1854, having become the happy possessor of a small schooner-yacht of eighty tons called the Foam, I set sail for the Baltic, in the hope of seeing something of the naval warfare between ourselves and the Russians, of which it was about to become the theatre. My companion was the late Lord Arthur Russell, a very kind and dear friend, and one of the most accomplished, deeply read, and lofty minded men of his day.

Having learned that an attack was about to be made on Bomarsund, a large Russian fortress on one of the Aland Islands, by the British fleet under Admiral Sir Charles Napier and a French force under General Baraguay d'Hilliers, we made the best of our way towards the Gulf of Bothnia. On August 2 we had got as far north as the neighbourhood of Stockholm, and, as we were still uncertain where the English fleet might be, it was a great relief sighting a man-of-war's topmasts about five o'clock the same afternoon. She turned out to be the Penelope, Captain Caffin—a ship with which I was subsequently to make nearer acquaintance under unexpected circumstances. Her commander told me that Bomarsund was to be immediately attacked. The next morning we anchored in Ledsund, at the southern extremity of the Aland Islands, where all the English battleships were lying, including the Duke of Wellington, carrying Sir Charles Napier's flag, with Admiral Sir Michael Seymour as Commander of the Fleet. The other vessels were the Princess Royal, Lord Clarence Paget; the Cumberland, George Seymour; the Jean d'Acre, Harry Keppel; the St. Vincent, Captain Mansell; the James Watt, Captain George Eliot; the Hannibal, Commodore Grey; and the Algiers, Commodore Talbot.

After breakfast we went on board the Admiral's ship, where we found all the captains assembled, who received us with open arms, as did also the Admiral, with whom I was already acquainted.

Copyright, 1898, by Perry Mason & Co., in the United States of America.