I felt sick at heart and crushed in spirit now. In the immediate foreground the moonlight glinted on the tossing dark plumes, the picturesque costume, and bright bayonets of the Highlanders in the trenches. In the distance was the town; its ports, arsenals, barracks, theatres, palaces, churches, and streets sheeted with roaring flames, that lighted up all the roadstead, where, one after the other, the Russian ships were disappearing beneath the waves, in that lurid glare which tipped with a fiery gleam the white walls and spiked cannon of the now abandoned forts. I began to creep back towards the camp, in search of surgical aid, and on the way came to a place where, with their uniforms off, their shirt-sleeves rolled up, their boxes of instruments open, lint and bandages ready, three officers of the medical staff were busy upon a group of wounded men, who sat or lay near, waiting their turn, some impatiently, some with passive endurance, but all, more or less, in pain, as their moans and sighs declared. "Don't bother about that Zouave, Gage," I heard one Æsculapius say, as I came near, "I have overhauled him already!" "Is his wound mortal?" "Yes--brain lacerated. By Jove! here is an officer of the 23rd!" "Well, he must wait a little." So I sighed, and seated myself on a stone, and clenched my teeth to control the agony I was enduring. The men who lay about us, with pale, woe-begone visages and lack-lustre eyes, belonged chiefly to the Light Division, but among them I saw, to my surprise, a Russian hussar lying dead, with the blood dry and crusted on his pale blue and yellow-braided dolman. How he came to be _there_, I had not the curiosity to inquire. A mere bundle of gory rags, he seemed; for a cannon-shot had doubled him up, and now his Tartar horse stood over him, eyeing him wildly, and sniffing as if in wonder about his bearded face and fallen jaw. The Zouave referred to was a noisy and loquacious fellow, notwithstanding his perilous predicament. He had strayed hither somehow from the Malakoff, and was mortally wounded, as the surgeon said, and dying. A tiny plaster image of the blessed Virgin lay before him; he was praying intently at times, but being fatuous, he wildly and oddly mingled with his orisons the name of a certain Mademoiselle Auréle, a _fleuriste_, with whom he imagined himself in the second gallery of the Théâtre Français, or supping at the Barrière de l'Etoile; anon he imagined they were on the Boulevardes, or in a café chantant; and then as his mind--or what remained of it--seemed to revert to the events of the day, he drew his "cabbage-cutter," as the French call their sword-bayonet, and brandished it, crying, "Cut and hew, strike, mes camarades--frappez vite et frappez forte! Vive la France! Vive l'Empéreur!"