The 4th of October found me with my regiment (my detachment "handed over," and responsibility, so far as it was concerned, past) before Sebastopol, which our army had now environed, on _one_ side at least. And now I was face to face with the Russians at last, and war had become a terrible reality. Tents had been landed, and all the troops were fairly under canvas. Our camp was strengthened by a chain of intrenchments dug all round it, and connected with those of the French, which extended to the sea on their left, while our right lay towards the valley of Inkermann, at the entrance of which, on a chalky cliff, 190 feet high at its greatest elevation, rose the city of Sebastopol, with all its lofty white mansions, that ran in parallel streets up the steep acclivity. In memory I can see it now, as I used to see it then, from the trenches, the advanced rifle-pits, or through the triangular door of my tent, with all its green-domed churches, its great round frowning batteries, forts Alexander and Constantine and others, perforated for cannon, tier above tier; and far inland apparently, for a distance after even the suburbs had ceased, were seen the tall slender masts of the numerous shipping that had taken shelter in the far recesses of the harbour, nearly to the mouth of the Tchernaya, from our fleets (which now commanded all the Black Sea). And a pretty sight they formed in a sunny day, when all their white canvas was hanging idly on the yards to dry. Nearer the mouth of the great harbour were the enormous dark hulls of the line-of-battle ships--the Three Godheads of 120 guns, the Silistria of 84, the Paris and Constantine, 120 each, and other vessels of that splendid fleet which was soon after sunk to bar our entrance. Daily the Russians threw shot and shell at us, while we worked hard to get under cover. The sound of those missiles was strange and exciting at first to the ears of the uninitiated; but after a time the terrible novelty of it passed away, or was heard with indifference; and with indifference, too, even those who had not been at Alma learned to look on the killed and wounded, who were daily and nightly borne from the trenches to the rear, the latter to be under the care of the toil-worn surgeons, and the former to lie for a time in the dead-tents. The siege-train was long in arriving. "War tries the strength of the military framework," says Napier. "It is in peace the framework itself must be formed, otherwise barbarians would be the leading soldiers of the world. _A perfect army can only be made by civil institutions_." Yet with us such was the state of the "framework," by the results of a beggarly system of political economy, that when war was declared--a war after forty years of peace--our arsenals had not a sufficient quantity of shells for the first battering-train, and the fuses issued had been in store rotting and decaying since the days of Toulouse and Waterloo. This was but one