A drum, far on the right, was beating _the long roll!_ Hundreds of others repeated that inexorable summons all over the camp, while many a bugle was blown, as the whole army stood to their arms. It was the morning of the battle of Inkermann! CHAPTER XXXVI.--THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER. We had all long since forgotten the discomfort of early rising. In my case I had never been to bed, so to buckle on my sword and revolver was the work of one moment; in another I was threading my way among the streets of tents, from which our men, cold, damp, pale, and worn-looking, were pouring towards their various muster-places, many of them arranging their belts as they hurried forward. "What is the row? what is up?" were the inquiries of all. But no one knew, and on all hands the mounted officers were riding about and crying, "Fall in, 19th Regiment!" "Fall in, 23rd Fusileers!" and so on. "Stand to your arms; turn out the whole; uncase the colours, gentlemen!" "It is gunpowder-plot day," cried a laughing aide-de-camp, galloping past with such speed and recklessness that he nearly rode me down. It proved to be a sortie from Sebastopol, made chiefly by a new division of troops brought up by forced marches from Bessarabia and Wallachia, many of them in wagons, kabitkas, and conveyances of all kinds; and all these men, to the number of many thousands, left the beleaguered city inflamed by the sermon I have described, by harangues of a similar kind, by the money or martyrdom they hoped to win, and by a plentiful distribution of coarse and ardent raki; while to Osten-Sacken, Volhonski, and other officers of rank, one of the Grand Dukes held out threats of degradation and Siberia if we were not attacked and the siege raised! All our men, without breakfast or other food, got briskly under arms, by regiments, brigades, and divisions; they were in their gray greatcoats, hence some terrible mistakes occurred in the hurry and confusion; many of our officers, however, went into action in _scarlet_, with their epaulettes on--most fatally for themselves. All the bells in Sebastopol--and some of these were magnificent in size and tone--rang a tocsin, while the troops composing the sortie, at the early hour of three A.M., stole, under cloud of darkness and a thick mist, into the ravines near the Tchernaya, to menace the British right, our weakest point; and, unknown to our out-guards, and generally unheard by them--though more than one wary old soldier asserted that he heard "something like the rumble of artillery wheels"--in the gloom and obscurity several large pieces of cannon were got into position, so as completely to command the ground occupied by us. Cautiously and noiselessly the masses of Russian infantry had stolen on, the sound of their footsteps hidden by the jangle of the bells, till they, to the number of more than 50,000 men, were on the flank as well as in front of our line; and the first indication we had of their close vicinity was when our outlying