But the slaughter was terrific. In less than a minute the slope of the Redan was thickly covered with red coats. In the ditch itself matters were worse. Wounded and dead, bleeding and shapeless, screaming or silent, our men lay heaped in scores, and still the murderous fire poured down from every window and embrasure in the work. To add to the terrors of their position, our men were now met by overwhelming numbers, who streamed down the trenches from the abandoned Malakoff to the assistance of their comrades in the Redan, the scaling ladders were found to be too short, and after an hour and a half of a disastrous fight our men fell back upon their trenches, firing steadily, but, for the time being, worsted. The slaughter had been awful. Colonel Handcock of the Perthshire regiment, Captains Hammond, Preston, Corry and Lockhart, Colonel James Ewan of the 41st, and others too numerous to mention lay dead upon the slope or within the fatal Redan, where many of our men had penetrated in the first fierce rush, and scarcely a man was unwounded. After this set back, it was decided to attack again at five a.m.--this time with the Guards and Highlanders. “As the night wore on,” says one of them, “the Highland Brigade advanced and took up position in the advanced trench, and we kept up a sharp fire with our rifles. Sir Colin came along the trenches later, and came down to where we were (by this time) making a new trench. I heard him say: ‘That is your job in the morning,’ pointing to the Redan.” But the attack was not to be. While searching for wounded comrades, Corporal John Ross of the Sappers wandered far from our foremost lines, and suddenly becoming aware of the absence of the Russian outpost, he crept forward up the slope and entered the Redan! The place was empty! The Russians had deserted it earlier in the evening, and the retreat from Sebastopol was even then begun. Graphically Tolstoy has described it:-- “Along the whole line of the bastions no one was to be seen. All was dead, ghastly, terrible, but not silent; the destruction still went on. Everywhere on the ground, blasted and strewn around by fresh explosions, lay shattered gun-carriages, crushing the corpses of foes and Russians alike. Bombs and cannon-balls and more dead bodies, then holes and splintered beams, and again silent corpses in grey and blue and red uniforms.... The Sebastopol army, surging and spreading like the sea on a rough night, moved through the dense darkness, slowly swaying by the bridge (of boats) over the roadstead away from the place which it had held for eleven months, but which it was now commanded to abandon without a struggle.... On reaching the north side, almost every man took off his cap and crossed himself.”