The great variableness of the Crimean climate was its peculiarity. In the morning, you got up and found the water frozen in your tent, the ground covered with snow, the thermometer at 20°; put on mufflers, greatcoat, and mits; and went out for a walk, and before evening you returned perspiring under the weight of clothing which you carried at the end of your stick, unable to bear it any longer, the snow turned into slush, the thermometer at 45°. On the 16th the thermometer 10° noon. On the 22nd it stood at 50°--an alternation of 40° in five days; but the character of the weather exhibited a still greater difference. In the southern Crimea the wind riots in the exercise of its prescriptive right to be capricious. It plays about the tops of the cliffs and mountain ridges, lurks round corners in ravines, nearly whips you off your legs when you are expatiating on the calmness of the day, and suddenly yells in gusts at the moment the stillness had tempted you to take out a sketch-book for a memorandum of Sebastopol. [Sidenote: A GHASTLY PROCESSION.] Desertions to the enemy, from the French and from our own ranks, took place. The deserters generally belonged to the Foreign Legion, from the young draughts and from regiments just sent out. We received a few deserters in turn from the army in the rear, by scrambling along the cliffs, and one of them told us he was three days coming from Baidar by that route. These men stated that the part of the town built upon the slope to the sea was very little injured by our fire, as our shot and shells did not "top" the hill. To the south faced one steep slope covered with houses and batteries and ruined works and battered suburbs. The other descended to the sea, and was covered by public buildings, fine mansions, warehouses and government edifices. This part had suffered very little. The ships took refuge below this slope when pressed by our fire; the workmen and soldiers and sailors found snug quarters in the buildings. CHAPTER V. New Works--A Ghastly Procession--Reinforcements--Havoc amongst Horses--A Reconnaissance of Sebastopol--Russian Defences--Camps--Red Tape and Routine--Changes of Weather--Sickness--Sufferings of the French--Effect of the Author's Statements--Facts--Continual Drain of Men--Affair of Musketry between the Russians and the French--Sharp-shooting--State of our Batteries--Orders with reference to Flags of Truce--A Spy in the Trenches--Good Fellowship at the Outposts. We gradually relinquished ground to our allies, and the front, which it had cost so much strength and so much health to maintain, was gradually abandoned to the more numerous and less exhausted army. Some of our regiments were reduced below the strength of a company.