The fires went on all day, and there were still some prowling Russians in the town, so that it was not safe to enter it. When the allied forces did go in, they found many dreadful sights. For a whole day and night 3000 wounded men had been untended, and a fourth of them were dead. The town was strewn with shot and shell; buildings were wrecked, or burned down. "As to plunder," wrote Gordon, "there is nothing but rubbish and fleas, the Russians having carried off everything else." For some time after the fall of Sebastopol, Gordon and his men were kept busy clearing roads, burning rubbish, counting captured guns, and trying to make the town less unhealthy. He then went with the troops that attacked Kinburn, a town many miles from Sebastopol, but also on the shores of the Black Sea. When it was taken, he returned to Sebastopol. For four months he was there, destroying forts, quays, storehouses, barracks, and dockyards; sometimes being fired on by the Russians from across the harbour; never idle, always putting his whole soul into all that he did. His work was finished in February 1856, and in March peace was declared between Russia and Britain. The name of Lieutenant Gordon was included by his general in a list of officers who had done gallant service in the war. By the French Government he was decorated with the Legion of Honour, a reward not often given to so young a man. A little more than a year of hard training in war had turned Charlie Gordon the boy into Gordon the soldier. In May 1856 Gordon was sent to Bessarabia, to help to arrange new frontiers for Russia, Turkey, and Roumania. In 1857 he was sent to do the same work in Armenia. The end of 1858 saw him on his way home to England, a seasoned soldier, and a few months later he was made a captain. CHAPTER III "CHINESE GORDON" For a year after his return from Armenia Gordon was at Chatham, as Field-Work Instructor and Adjutant, teaching the future officers of Engineers what he himself had learned in the trenches. While he was there, a war that had been going on for some years between Britain and China grew very serious. Gordon volunteered for service, but when he reached China, in September 1860, the war was nearly at an end. "I am rather late for the amusement, which won't vex mother," he wrote. He found, however, that a number of Englishmen, some of them friends of his, were being kept as prisoners in Pekin by the Chinese. The English and their allies at once marched to Pekin, and demanded that the prisoners should be given up. The Chinese, scared at the sight of the armies and their big guns, opened the gates. But in the case of many of the prisoners, help had come too late. The Chinese had treated them most brutally, and many had died under torture. Nothing was left for the allied armies to do but to punish the Chinese for their cruelty, and especially to punish the Emperor for having allowed such vile things to go on in his own great city.