Count Tolstoy in his stirring pictures of “Sevastopol,” so admirably translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, has given us a vivid glimpse of affairs in this awful battery, “the Fourth Bastion,” as the Russians called it. “You want to get quickly to the Bastions,” says Tolstoy, showing an imaginary visitor through the beleagured town, “especially to that Fourth Bastion of which you have been told so many tales. When anyone says, ‘I am going to the Fourth Bastion,’ a slight agitation or a too marked indifference is always noticeable in him! When you meet someone carried on a stretcher, and ask, ‘Where from?’ the answer usually is, ‘From the Fourth Bastion.’ Passing a barricade, you go up a broad street. Beyond this the houses on both sides of the street are unoccupied, the doors are boarded up, the windows smashed, ... on the road you stumble over cannon-balls that lie about, and into holes full of water, made in the stony ground by bombs. Before you, up a steep hill, you see a black, untidy space cut up by ditches. This space is the Fourth Bastion. The whiz of cannon-ball or bomb near by impresses you unpleasantly as you ascend the hill, bullets begin to whiz past you right and left, and you will perhaps consider whether you had better not walk inside the trench which runs parallel to the road, full of yellow stinking mud more than knee-deep!” To reach the bastion proper, “you turn to the right, along that narrow trench where a foot soldier, stooping down, has just passed, and where you will see Cossacks changing their boots, eating, smoking their pipes and, in fact, living! Soon you come to a flat space with many holes and cannons on platforms and walled in with earthworks. This is the bastion. Here you see perhaps four or five soldiers playing cards under shelter of the breastwork, and a naval officer sitting on a cannon rolling a cigarette composedly. Suddenly a sentinel shouts ‘Mortar!’ There is a whistle, a fall, and an explosion, mingled with the groans of a man. You approach him as the stretchers are brought; part of his breast has been torn away; in a trembling voice he says, ‘Farewell, brothers.’ ‘That’s the way with seven or eight every day,’ says the officer, and he yawns as he lights another cigarette.” In the British trenches similar scenes were being enacted, the same coolness under fire, and resolute contempt of danger being displayed by all ranks and nationalities. “One day there was a cluster of us together,” wrote a Highland soldier to his parents, “when a shell fell close by. The fuse was not exhausted when John Bruce up with it in his arms and threw it over the trench.”