Some may regard the work as of a very mixed character, nevertheless I am in hopes that it will both interest and entertain thousands. And here I must beg my readers to remember that the book is submitted to their judgment as a record of facts, and not as an attempt at fine writing. I took part in some of the most desperate scenes in those arduous campaigns of the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny, and Afghanistan. At the Alma I was one of those who led the way up the fatal heights; at Inkermann I was in the thick of the fight, and was wounded. I was beside that Christian hero, Captain Hedley Vicars, when he fell in his country's cause, with the words on his lips--"For England's home and glory--follow me." It would be well if thousands of the fast young men of the present day took a lesson from the life of that exemplary soldier. I was also engaged in those memorable struggles that were carried on, night after night and day after day, before Sebastopol; and was wounded a second time in that bloody attack on the Redan, in which a Norfolk man--the late General (then Colonel) Windham--gained an immortal name. In giving my experiences during that campaign I may in some respects seem to be repeating an "oft-told tale," yet, as a personal narrative, it will, I think, be new to many, and will afford information not elsewhere to be found. The letters to my parents from the seat of war in the Crimea and India, from 1857 to 1876, I have ventured to publish, trusting they will prove of more than passing interest, and set more than one thinking, "Where is my boy to-night?" Many of them were written under great difficulty in a bleak tent or hut, with the thermometer far below freezing point, with my wet rags frozen on my back; often my overcoat stiff with frost. Others from some of the hottest stations in India, with the sweat rolling off one like rain; the only covering would be a mosquito shirt and drawers, made of the finest muslin, with the thermometer indicating 125 or 130 degrees of heat in your room. The descriptions of the different fights, both by day and night, particularly the storming of Sebastopol, and the aspect of the interior of those blood-stained walls after the siege, will help to depict in their true colours the horrors of war. "A Peep Behind the Scenes" will, I trust, also prove interesting to thousands. The list of killed and wounded of the various regiments is authentic, as is likewise the number of officers, non-commissioned officers, and men who died of disease and hardships that neither pen nor tongue can describe. The records of the Royal Fusiliers, the Connaught Rangers, and the Old Forty-Twa's, or Black Watch, together with incidents of other regiments, I feel confident will interest many. In the chapters on the Indian Mutiny I have narrated some of the most atrocious deeds that were perpetrated, and shown how vengeance was most surely meted out to the miscreants who were guilty of them.