"Oh!" said the guardian of stoves, "you must make your requisition in due form, send it up to head-quarters, and get it signed properly, and returned, and then I will let you have the stoves." "But my men may die meantime." "I can't help that; I must have the requisition." "It is my firm belief that there are men now in a dangerous state whom another night's cold will certainly kill." "I really can do nothing; I must have a requisition properly signed before I can give one of these stoves away." "For God's sake, then, _lend_ me some; I'll be responsible for their safety." "I really can do nothing of the kind." "But, consider, this requisition will take time to be filled up and signed, and meantime these poor fellows will go." "I cannot help that." "I'll be responsible for anything you do." "Oh, no, that can't be done!" "Will a requisition signed by the P. M. O. of this place be of any use!" "No." "Will it answer, if he takes on himself the responsibility?" "Certainly not." The surgeon went off in sorrow and disgust. I appended another special fact for Dr. Smith, the head of the British Army Medical Department. A surgeon of a regiment stationed on the cliffs above Balaklava, who had forty sick out of two hundred, had been applying to the "authorities" in the town for three weeks for medicines, and could not get one of them. The list he sent in was returned with the observation, "We have none of these medicines in store." The surgeon came down with his last appeal:--"Do, I beg you, give me any medicine you have for diarrhoea." "_We haven't any._" "Have you any medicine for fever? Anything you can let me have, I'll take." "_We haven't any._" "I have a good many cases of rheumatism. Can you let me have any medicines?" "_We haven't any._" Thus, for diarrhoea, fever, and rheumatism there were no specifics. Dr. Smith could prove, no doubt, that there were granaries full of the finest and costliest drugs and medicines for fever, rheumatism, and diarrhoea at Scutari, but the knowledge that they were there little availed those dying for want of them at Balaklava. [Sidenote: EFFECTIVE STRENGTH OF OUR ARMY.] But with all this, the hand of the plague was _not_ stayed. Sickness clung to our troops, the soldiers who climbed the bloody steeps of the Alma in the splendour of manly strength, and who defended the heights over the Tchernaya exhausted, and "washed out" by constant fatigue, incessant wet, insufficient food, want of clothing and of cover from the weather, died away in their tents night after night. Doctors, and hospitals, and nurses, came too late, and they sank to rest unmurmuringly, and every week some freshly-formed lines of narrow mounds indicated the formation of a new burial-place.