Staggering up, I looked around me. The moon was shining, and flakes of her silver light streamed through the now silent embrasures of the Redan, silent save for the groans of the dying within it. There and in the ditch the dead lay thick as sheaves in a harvest-field--thick as the Greeks, at Troy, lay under the arrows of Apollo. How many a man was lying there, mutilated almost out of the semblance of humanity, whose thoughts, when the death shot struck him down, or the sharp bayonet pierced him, had flashed _home_, quicker than the electric telegraph, yea, quicker than light, to his parents' hearth, to his lonely wife, to the little cots where their children lay abed--little ones, the memory of whose waxen faces and pink hands then filled his heart with tears; how many a resolution for prayer and repentance if spared by God; how many a pious invocation; how many a fierce resolution to meet the worst, and die like a man and a soldier, had gone up from that hell upon earth, the Redan--the fatal Redan, which we should never have attacked, but should have aided the French in the capture of the Malakoff, after which it must inevitably have fallen soon, if not at once. Many of our officers were afterwards found therein, each with a hand clutching a dead Russian's throat, or coat, or belt, their fingers stiffened in death--man grasping man in a fierce and last embrace. Among others, that stately and handsome fellow, Raymond Mostyn, of the Rifles, and an officer of the Vladimir regiment were thus locked together, the same grape-shot having killed them both. Some of our slain soldiers were yet actually clinging to the parapet and slope of the glacis, as if still alive, thus showing the reluctance with which they had retired--the desperation with which they died. In every imaginable position of agony, of distortion, and bloody mutilation they lay, heads crushed and faces battered, eyes starting from their sockets, and swollen tongues protruding; and on that terrible scene the pale moon, "sweet regent of the sky," the innocent queen of night, as another poet calls her, looked softly down in her glory, as the same moon in England, far away, was looking on the stubble-fields whence the golden grain had been gathered, on peaceful homesteads, old church steeples and quiet cottage roofs, on the ruddy furnaces of the Black country, on peace and plenty, and where war was unknown, save by name. She glinted on broken and abandoned weapons; she silvered the upturned faces of the dead--kissing them, as it were, for many a loving one who should see them no more; and gemming as if with diamonds the dewy grass and the autumnal wild-flowers; and there, too, amid that horrible débris, were the little birds--the goldfinch, the tit, and the sparrow--hopping and twittering about, too terrified to seek their nests, scared as they were by the uproar of the day that was past.