The night of the 25th opened very mildly. Lieutenant De Vere was the officer of engineers on duty on the right attack. He had under him a sergeant and four sappers who superintended forty-eight Turks, as also forty men of the line during the first relief, and thirty the second. The former relief worked five hours; the latter four; the sappers and Turks were on duty the whole period. Sturdy attempts were made to improve some of the slopes in the second parallel, but with a return altogether incommensurate with the labour bestowed, for the frost had so firm a hold of the ground that the pickaxes flew from it as from a rock. Beyond bringing up some hurters for platforms and clearing the drains in the 21-gun battery and boyau leading to the work in advance, very little was effected. By degrees the night fell peculiarly dark, increasing in blackness, till, at one time, it was suffocatingly dense. A man could scarcely discern his uplifted hand. While this phenomenon brooded over the trenches, the cold was intense; it nipt deeply, and the feeling was quite as painful as if the skin were peeling from the face. Work was out of the question. It was as much as the men could do to save themselves from frostbite and numbness, by chafing the face and hands and briskly exercising the lower limbs. In this way the party continued until relieved at four o’clock in the morning, at which hour all were fatigued and worn by their exertions to keep the vital stream within them from curdling. Up to the 3rd February, the staple work in the trenches was the removal of snow, and then followed an interval during which the men were mid-leg in mud. To remove this obstruction the draining was improved and otherwise facilitated by making additional openings in the parapets to carry off the water and convey it by natural channels down the slopes of the hills into the ravines. These impediments, though they greatly interfered with the general progress, did not slacken the exertions of the sappers, who were everywhere seen building magazines, making traverses, blasting rock, and fulfilling the multifarious details essential to constitute the batteries and their field appurtenances, efficient and complete. So far it was found impracticable to do more than keep the current constructions in tolerable repair. To advance was out of the question. Some French officers of engineers who had observed, from the beginning, the firm and laborious activity of the sappers, spoke of them with admiration. “_Des braves soldats, et des bon sapeurs et travailleurs_,” was their constant commendation.[169]