In the early part of the siege, from the afflictions of a hard campaign, great difficulty was found in procuring a sufficiently strong party from the line for trench duty; and to make up for the deficiency a regiment of Turks, quartered at Balaklava, was appointed to the front. From their idle habits and indulgences, seldom could more than 400 men be brought together for work, which number was still further frittered away by disease and death to about 200. From the lack of land transport this force was usually absorbed in the carriage of stores to the batteries. To stimulate them to exertion, the sappers who superintended them were empowered to give such of their parties as deserved it, a ticket for pay, or even two, if their zeal were conspicuous; but to withhold the recognition, if from indolence they did but little to further the service. A sergeant of sappers—who was cashier and paymaster—always gave a day’s pay for every authorized ticket presented to him; and this system, acting like the prick of a spur on the sides of a sulky hack, moved them to the exercise of an amount of effort which it would have been next to impossible to have wrung from them by any other scheme. Reduced when hostilities commenced to the minimum of peace requirement, the sappers, whose duty it was to execute any description of work which war or the elements might originate, were unable to spare a man from the trenches for the pressing services of the rear. The troops of the line, decimated and exhausted, were utterly inadequate to meet any extra contingency; and thus arose a crisis in the affairs of the campaign which led to the gravest considerations and misgivings at home. So terrible had been the weather, so destructive the storms, so complete the disruption of the communication between Balaklava and the camp—in consequence of the road having become a swamp—that no resource was left to the War Minister but to seek for remedies by the employment of novel establishments. At his call a corps of hardy navvies sprung up in a day, and controlled by civil superintendents, untrammelled by the rigours and nice exactions of military discipline, the Balaklava railway was commenced and carried through with so much despatch, that no one regretted the temporary creation of a force which in its wonderful zeal relieved the overworked and perishing troops of one of the most appalling miseries of the campaign.