Scarcely less dreadful than the cholera patients were the men suffering from frost-bite, who arrived in hundreds from the trenches before Sebastopol. Nothing enables one to realise their terrible condition like the narrative of one on the spot. Referring to her experience amongst the frost-bitten patients, Sister Aloysius says: “The men who came from the ‘Front,’ as they called it, had only thin linen suits--no other clothing to keep out the severe Crimean frost. When they were carried in on the stretchers, which conveyed so many to their last resting-place, their clothes had to be cut off. In most cases the flesh and clothes were frozen together; and, as for the feet, the boots had to be cut off bit by bit--the flesh coming off with them; many pieces of the flesh I have seen remain in the boot. Poultices were applied with some oil brushed over them. In the morning, when these were removed--can I ever forget it?--the sinews and bones were seen to be laid bare. We had surgical instruments; but in almost every case the doctors or staff-surgeons were at hand, and removed the diseased flesh as tenderly as they could. As for the toes, you could not recognise them as such.” One could multiply these ghastly descriptions if further evidence was needed to show the terrible sufferings endured by officers and men alike in the trenches before Sebastopol. Mention the famous siege to any of the old Crimean veterans as they sit beneath the trees in the grounds of Chelsea Hospital, and they will tell you stories of hardships endured which makes one regard their still living bodies with amazement. And they are not mere soldiers’ tales: the old heroes could scarcely invent greater horrors than history has recorded. The weary weeks were passed for the most part by the men sitting or lying in holes dug in the frozen ground deep enough to shelter their heads from the flying bullets and bursting bombs. If a poor fellow decided to stretch his numbed and cramped legs, he was more than likely to have his head blown off. Lord Wolseley bears to-day the marks of his experiences as a venturesome young subaltern in the trenches at Sebastopol, when, riddled with bullets and a part of his face blown away, he was laid on one side by the surgeons as a “dead un.” Fortunately he managed to prove that he was yet alive. The _Life of Captain Hedley Vicars_ reveals also the privations of the time. He himself lay in the open air on a bed of stones and leaves, having given up his tent to men who were sick. The cold was so intense that in a sudden skirmish the men were often unable to draw their triggers. A frost-bitten soldier lying ill at Balaclava, when he tried to turn in the night, found that his feet were frozen to those of another soldier lying opposite.