Peel loved danger for danger’s sake. There was no risk that daunted him. At the attack on the impregnable Shah Nujeef, at Lucknow, in the Indian Mutiny, two years later, he led his gun detachment right up to the loopholed walls, which were crowded with rebel sharpshooters. He behaved, said Sir Colin Campbell, “very much as if he had been laying the _Shannon_ alongside an enemy’s frigate.” It was Peel who first demonstrated the practicability of fighting with big guns in the skirmishing line. “It is a truth, and not a jest,” he once wrote home, “that in battle we are with the skirmishers.” The way in which the sailors handled their great ship’s cannon, 8-inch guns, 24-pounders, and the like, was marvellous. A military officer, in a letter that was written at the front, gives an interesting reminiscence of the Naval Brigade. “Sometimes in these early days of October 1854,” he says, “whilst our soldiery were lying upon the ground, weary, languid, and silent, there used to be heard a strange uproar of men coming nearer and nearer. Soon the comers would prove to be Peel of the _Diamond_ with a number of his sailors, all busy in dragging up to the front one of the ship’s heavy guns.” In a future chapter we shall meet again this intrepid son of Sir Robert Peel, the great statesman, winning glory and renown under Campbell and Havelock. For the present I must confine myself to his career in the Crimea. The most notable of the three acts, the dates of which are inscribed on his Cross, was performed in October 1854, at the Diamond Battery which some of the Naval Brigade were holding. The battery needing fresh ammunition, this had to be brought in by volunteers, for the horses of the waggons refused to approach the earthworks owing to the heavy Russian fire. Case by case it was carried in and stacked in its place, and right into the midst of it all, like a bolt from the blue, dropped a shell. Peel jumped for it like a flash. One heave of his shoulders and away went the “whistle-neck” to burst in impotent fury several yards off--outside the battery’s parapet. The second date on his Cross notes the affair at the Sandbag Battery, where he joined the Grenadier officers and helped to save the colours from capture. On the third occasion when his bravery was commended for recognition he headed a ladder-party in that assault on the Redan in which Graham and Perie won such distinction. In this attack the gallant captain was badly wounded in the head and arm, a misfortune which was the means of gaining the V.C. for another brave young sailor. From the beginning of the war Midshipman Edward St. John Daniels had attached himself to Captain Peel, acting as the latter’s aide-de-camp at Inkerman. During the battle he was a conspicuous figure, as, mounted on a pony, he accompanied his leader about the field.