After the living were mustered next morning, and burial parties detailed to inter the dead, Caradoc and one or two others dropped into my tent to share some tiffin and a cigar or two with me; for, as Digby Grand has it, "whatever people's feelings may be, they go to dine all the same."

Poor Phil looked as pale and weary, if not more so, than I did. He was on the sick-list also, and had his head tied up by a bloody bandage, necessitated by a pretty trenchant sword-cut, dealt, as we afterwards discovered on comparing notes, by Volhonski just before his recapture.

"I was first knocked over by Cathcart's riderless horse--"

"Poor old Cathcart--a Waterloo man!" said Gwynne, parenthetically. "Well, Phil?"

"It was wounded and mad with terror," continued Caradoc; "then the splinter of a shell struck me on the left leg. Still I limped to the front, keeping the men together and close to the colours, till that fellow you call Volhonski cut me across the head; even my bearskin failed to protect me from his sabre. Then, but not till then, when blood blinded me, I threw up the sponge and went to the rear."

"What news of our friends in the 19th?" I asked.

"O, the old story, many killed and wounded."

"Little Tom Clavell?"

"Untouched. Had the staff of the Queen's colours smashed in his hands by a grape shot. Tom is now a bigger man than ever," said Charley Gwynne. "By the way, he was talking of Miss Dora Lloyd last night in my bunk between the gabions, wondering what she and the girls in England think of all this sort of thing."

"Thank God, they know nothing about it!" said Caradoc, lighting a fresh cigar with a twisted cartridge paper; "the hearts of some of them would break, could they see but yonder valley."

"Poor Hugh Price!" observed Charley, with a sigh and a grimace, for he had a bayonet prod in the right arm; "he was fairly murdered in cold blood by one of those Kazan fellows--brained clean by the heel of a musket, ere our bandsmen could carry him off to the hospital tents; but I am thankful the assassin did not escape."

"How?"

"He too was finished the next moment by Evan Rhuddlan."

Other instances of assassination, especially by a Russian major, were mentioned, and execrations both loud and deep were muttered by us all at these atrocities, which ultimately caused Lord Raglan to send a firm remonstrance on the subject to Sebastopol.

"Is it true, Charley, that the Duke of Cambridge has gone on board ship, sick and exhausted?" asked I.

"I believe so."

"And that Marshal Canrobert was wounded yesterday?"

"Yes, and had his horse shot under him, too."

"The poor Coldstreamers were fearfully cut up in the redoubt!"

"I saw eight of their officers interred in one grave this morning, and three of the Grenadier Guards in another."

"Poor fellows!" sighed Caradoc; "so full of life but a few hours ago."

For a time the conversation, being of this nature, languished; it was the reverse of lively, so we smoked in silence. We were all in rather low spirits. This was simply caused by reaction after the fierce excitement of yesterday, and to regret for the friends who had fallen--the brave and true-hearted fellows we had lost for ever. Victorious though we were, we experienced but little exultation; and from my tent door, we saw the burial parties, British and French, hard at work in their shirt sleeves, interring the slain in great trenches, where they were flung over each other in rows, with all their gory clothing and accoutrements, just as they were found; and there they lay in ghastly ranks, their pallid faces turned to heaven, the hope of many a heart and household that were far away from that horrible valley; their joys, their sorrows, their histories, and their passing agonies all ended now, with no tears on their cheek save those with which the hand of God bedews the dead face of the poor soldier.

A ring or a watch, or it might be a lock of hair, taken, or perhaps hastily shorn by a friendly hand from the head of a dead officer as he was borne away to these pits--the head that some one loved so well, hanging earthward heavily and untended--shorn for a widowed wife or anxious mother, then at home in peaceful England, or some secluded Scottish glen; and there his obsequies were closed by the bearded and surpliced chaplain, who stood book in hand by the edge of the ghastly trench, burying the dead wholesale by the thousand; and amid the boom of the everlasting and unrelenting cannonade, now going on at the left attack, might be heard the solemn sentences attuned to brighter hopes elsewhere than on earth, where "Death seemed scoffed at and derided by the reckless bully Life."

"Here is an old swell, with no end of decorations," said a couple of our privates, as they trailed past the body of a Russian officer, one half of whose head had been shot away, and they threw him into a trench where the gray-coats lay in hundreds. The "old swell" proved to be the brave Pulkovnich Ochterlony of Guynde; he who had led his regiment so bravely at Bayazid on the mountain slopes of the Aghri Tagh in Armenia, when, in the preceding August, the Russians had defeated the Turks, and laid two thousand scarlet fezzes in the dust. The episode of meeting with Guilfoyle, his conduct after the action, and the character he had borne as a civilian, formed a topic of some interest for my friends, who were vehement in urging me to denounce this distinguished "cornet" of the wagon-corps to the commander-in-chief. And this I resolved to do so soon as I was sufficiently recovered to write, or to visit Lord Raglan in person.

But to take action in the matter soon proved impossible, as he was taken prisoner the next day by............