For the right attack the numbers detailed—about forty—were told off to their posts by sergeant Donald McFarlane. Captain Dawson of the engineers, the officer on duty, was killed early in the morning in the 21-gun battery. He was the captain of the ninth company and this was his maiden tour in the trenches. In little more than two hours after leaving the camp he was borne back dead, his head having been shattered by a round shot. Incessant repairs to the embrasures and parapets kept the sappers constantly exposed, and they toiled with all the ardour for which they had now become famous. Some men of the ninth company in the 21-gun battery were unequal to the hard work of the embrasures, and Captain Peel of the navy urged the necessity of sending some _old_ sappers—meaning men who had been at the siege from the commencement—to be allotted to the duty. Second-corporal George H. Collins and a brigade of eight men were at once sent to the front, and so incessant were their labours, they were never clear of the embrasures for five minutes during the ten hours they served in the battery. All day long the sun was hot and burning, the sky clear, and not a man that thrust himself into the shattered apertures could reckon for an instant on his safety. Not a shadow was thrown to conceal him from observation, and he trusted to his agility to escape, when the “look-out man” warning him of approaching shot or shell, gave him the chance of making a desperate leap from the opening. Most assiduous were the carpenters in strengthening the platforms, for the continued friction of the guns in their heavy and irresistible recoil injured not a few of them. A platform on the right of the 21-gun battery required in haste for an effective piece of ordnance was rapidly refitted; but before the mortar could be shifted on it, a 13-inch shell from a battery in rear of the Redan struck the flooring and broke it in pieces. In the afternoon, the strongest and most secure magazine on the right attack was blown up. It was on the left of the 8-gun battery. A shell plunged through the roof and bursting, all that remained of the magazine was a smoking ruin. Private John Heaton who was returning to his party after mending a platform at a distance, was killed by the explosion and not an atom of his remains was ever discovered. Privates George Wright and Stephen Gossage were wounded by fragments of the scattered timber. On hearing the report—ominous of loss both of material and life—the Russians jumped on their batteries and parapets, and, intimating their joy at the calamity by a fiendish yell, quickly disappeared behind their revetments.