It has been our lot in life to live very much among soldiers, and we like to write and talk about them. We hope that our readers will not be averse from hearing something of a class in whom we have all a common interest. It is true that English boys are not quite so warlike in their tendencies as French; they neither worship _la gloire_ nor dress like manikin _soldats_. Swords and guns are not their only playthings, nor are feeble imitations of sanguinary contests their only pastimes. We here delight in all manly games and sports, for which French men and boys have little taste, and we thus acquire a muscular development and hardiness of frame which enable us to bear any amount of fatigue. It was a saying of the grand old Iron Duke that all his battles were won on the playground at Eton; by which we suppose he meant that his officers, most of whom were Eton boys, received there such a physical training as fitted them to be heroes in the strife. Still, it is one of those epigrammatic sayings in which truth is sacrificed for effect; for what could the duke, with all his officers, have done without the brave privates who composed his forces, and to whom he rendered justice on another occasion by saying that with such an army he could go anywhere and do anything? A chaplain belongs, of course, to the non-combatant class in the army. It is not his duty to appear in the field, or to take part in battles. He has to remain at the hospital, and to administer the consolations of religion to the wounded and the dying; but he is precluded by his profession from being present at, or taking part in, any battle. It is for this reason, perhaps, that we have always had a certain pleasure in listening to soldiers as they fought their battles over in hospital, and recounted their experience to one another. It was all strange and new to us, as, we dare say, it will be to most of those who read this book. The soldiers of whom we speak all took part in and survived the Crimean war. Their manly breasts are all adorned with the different medals awarded to them; two of them wear the Victoria Cross. One early object of our curiosity was to ascertain what are the sensations or feelings of a soldier on entering battle, or being exposed to fire for the first time. Now, the answer we invariably received will, perhaps, take some of our readers by surprise. They felt nothing of that warlike intoxication ascribed to the old Vikings on the eve of the combat; they had none of that strange joy ascribed by the patriarch to the war-horse at the sound of the trumpet, nor were they exactly afraid; but there was a certain uneasy sensation experienced by all as the bullet whizzed past the ear, and comrade after comrade dropped, sometimes with a sharp cry of pain, sometimes giving no sign.