For their assistance in this hurried duty, one or two of the linesmen were made corporals and decorated with medals; and Trimble, though his rewards were deferred, was promoted to be second-corporal, and honoured with a special gratuity of ten pounds and medal for gallant conduct. From the stern grandeur of the battle, it was not improbable the attack would be repeated, when, in some degree, the Russians had recovered from the shock. To render an approach less likely to succeed, Lieutenant Ravenhill and a party of sappers repaired to the heights to destroy the road winding from the head of Sebastopol harbour up the ravine to Inkermann. This was simply as a first defensive resource, to be followed by regularly planned works. The hill-top and its slopes were covered with killed and wounded, among whom perhaps the sappers might have performed any amount of duty without accident; but possessing a settled distrust of the honour of the Russians, they first collected all the arms they could see within sixty yards of their work, and broke them in pieces. Thus relieved from a temptation to which the vanquished in their hatred have been known treacherously to yield, the sappers moved to the site of their work, and in eight hours dug a trench across the road eight feet deep and twelve broad. A few nights later, privates Charles Harris and Nicholas Garrett revetted an embrasure in the 21-gun battery, which had been torn to pieces in the early part of the morning. Shot and shell frequently fell into the work, but the sappers swerved not from the peril it seemed impossible to escape. Lieutenant Murray stood himself in the aperture to relieve the men of the necessity for watching, and warned the two gallant fellows when projectiles were approaching. In such instances, to lessen the chances of risk, all three threw themselves on the sole of the work, and, when the danger passed, resumed the revetment, quitting it only when the embrasure was finished. When the Russians learnt that a descent was to be made on the Crimean coast, they sank several of their large war vessels and blocked up the passage into the harbour of Sebastopol. Since nautical skill and manœuvring were confessedly unequal to master the difficulty, submarine blasting was proposed as the readiest and most effectual method, and four sapper divers, selected from volunteers at Chatham, accompanied by the necessary apparatus and stores, sailed in the ‘Prince’ on the 27th October, and arrived in the harbour of Balaklava on the 7th November. Several other sappers, then before Sebastopol, who had been practically trained in the art by actual service in the demolition of the wreck of the ‘Royal George,’ were to have been engaged in the perilous duty.