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their way to the war, some amateurs of the English or Anglo-Indian army desirous of seeing the nature of the service which afforded a theme of interest for all Europe. The conversation at the table d'hôte consisted entirely of criticisms on the conduct of the war, anecdotes from the camp, and debates on the chances of peace; and, occasionally, some of us had the advantage of hearing portions of the actions we had been engaged in, or the manœuvres we had witnessed, placed in an entirely novel light, by critics who had been distant some thousand miles from the scene of action.

The Golden Horn contained almost a fleet of French and English menof-war undergoing repair, and was thronged with transports lying off the arsenal, or between the bridges which connect Pera with Stamboul. Whenever a ship moved out, a portion of the bridge was swung back to leave the passage open, and the tide of passengers pressing across suddenly found a yawning gulf between them and their goal. The operation of opening and reclosing the bridge being conducted with all the deliberation which characterises Turkish proceedings, the throng of passengers on foot, on horseback, and in carriages, sometimes increased till it filled the bridge and threatened to overflow into the space between, where caïques were hovering to convey across the more impatient. The bridge itself, flooded in the level portion with some inches of water, and having holes broken through at the sides in many places, through which the unwary might well slip, reminded me of that which Mirza saw in his vision in Addison's tale.

The first day I tried to cross the strait to Scutari, it blew so hard that the caïque was obliged to put back; but on the following day the water was comparatively calm. The barrack occupied by the English in the spring -a large, quadrangular, white building, with a tower at each corner, standing on the edge of the bankwas now the principal English hospital. A boat was alongside the wooden pier, with sick and wounded men just landing from a ship, the Shooting Star, which had been detained by some accident from rough weather in the

Black Sea for a great many days. These men, laid on stretchers, each borne by four Turks, were carried up the steep hill to the hospital, moaning as they went, and received within the portal where rest and comfort awaited them.

There are several stories in this huge building; and on the inside, looking into the square, a corridor opening from the rooms, paved with stone, and four or five yards wide, goes quite round the whole extent. All the corridors, as well as the rooms, were filled with patients, and the visitor walked between a double row of beds. At the points where the stairs connected the different flights, wooden partitions were erected to repel the cutting draughts, and stoves kept the temperature pleasant; and thus the corridors were as habitable as the wards.

There was one room in which I took peculiar interest-for, having my leg broken in June by the kick of a horse, I lay there, fixed to one particular spot, for six long weeks before I rejoined the army at Varna

and this was the first I visited. It was occupied by three officers, all strangers to me, and I therefore took but a hasty glance-but that included each well-remembered crack and crevice in the wall and nail in the woodwork, and the large cupboard-door which, laid on two arm-chests to raise me to the level of the window, had, with a mattress on it, served me as a bed. On the level of that window, just opposite, at a hundred yards' distance, rose a tall white minaret, with a low arch opening into its balcony, from which I had seen the muezzin emerge at regular intervals each day to call aloud to the faithful, till I was intimately acquainted with his appearance and the inflections of his voice, in the sweet, sad tones of which he used, after nightfall, to chaunt a monotonous prayer. While I had lain there, the army was in Bulgaria, preparing, as was supposed, for an active campaign on the Danube, and each friend who bid me good-by expressed by looks, if not by words, that he thought me shut out from all chance of participating in the adventurous future opening for him. Some of those who went forth so buoyantly are now laid for ever beneath the soil

of the Crimea, in spots where the hopes of others, as well as their own, are buried. Many such recollections arose during that hasty glance round the well-known chamber. These revisitings of a marked spot sometimes round off and include a phase of existence. I had seen much of stirring life since I quitted that room on crutches.

Entering any of the corridors or wards, the same scene presented itself. The occupants of some of the beds sat strongly up, eating heartily their soup and meat-others, emaciated to skeletons, more like corpses than living beings, except for the large, hollow, anxious eyes, lay back on their pillows, or tried with difficulty to swallow the spoonfuls of arrow-root or sago offered to them by the attendants. There seemed no doubtful class -all were broadly marked either for life or death. The patients appeared comfortable-had good beds and plenty of bed-clothes-and the temperature of the chambers was, as before said, regulated to a very pleasant warmth. At some beds, a woman, the wife of the patient, sat chatting with him; beside others stood the somewhat ghostly appearance of a Catholic sister of charity, upright, rigid, veiled, and draped in black; the veil projecting far beyond her face, threw it, as well as the white linen folded across her bosom, into deep shadow. The thinness of some of the forms propped up against their pillows, their chests exposed by the open shirts, was absolutely frightful; the bony hands wandered vaguely about the hair and sunken temples, and the eyes were fixed on vacancy. Some lay already in the shadow of death, their eyes reverted, showing only the whites beneath the drooping lids; and others had passed this last stage, and waited only for the grave.

At the end of a corridor in a tower are quarters once held by General Sir George Brown, but now occupied by gentler tenants. There dwelt the sisterhood that had come from England to tend the sick-the Rebeccas to the Ivanhoes of the Crimea. That quarter of the building threw a softening and romantic tinge over the rest; -in its neighbourhood pain and misery seemed less forlorn. The corridor opened on a kitchen where some

good sisters were preparing soup, sago and wine, and other comforting compounds. Doorways opening from the kitchen were screened by long folds of black cloth or tapestry, behind which dwelt the lady sisters; and high up the wall of the kitchen were windows, across which flitted nun-like forms, heard presently to descend the stair to our level. It was while one of two or three who accompanied me, a man of sedate and respectable aspect, such as might without presumption engage the attention of a sister of charity, extracted from a motherly benevolent lady some statistical details of the sisterhood, that the chief of them herself, Miss Nightingale, lifting the piece of tapestry before her door for a parting visitor, stood for a moment revealed. During that short interval the statistics of the motherly lady were unheeded-we steadily regarded the chief as she bid her visitor adieuthen the tapestry fell and she vanished.

There were eight Protestant ladies, and a rather larger number of Catholic sisters: in all, with their attendants who officiated as nurses, there were about forty in the sisterhood.

In the great kitchen, close by their quarter, rice-pudding, manufactured on a grand scale, was transferred, smoking, by an enormous ladle to the destined platters; beef-tea and mutton broth were being cooked in huge cauldrons, such as the witches danced around; and flocks of poultry were simmering into boiled fowls or chicken broth.

There are three English hospitals besides this. One at a little distance, a large red-brick building, was originally built and used for the purpose by the Turks it is the most comfortable and best suited to its object of all. Another is known as the Kiosk, or Palace Hospital; and the third is at Coolali, a place some miles up the Bosphorus, on the Scutari side, where there is a large barrack which was occupied by the English cavalry and artillery before the army left for Varna. All these buildings were clean, cheerful, airy, and comfortable. They contained in all, at the time of my first visit, 4700 sick, increased to 5000 at the end of January; and from first to last 10,000 men had passed

through some back to the Crimea, where in many cases they had relapsed into sickness and died-some to England-and some to their final resting-place.

On the edge of the bank of the Sea of Marmora, a few hundred yards to the left of the mouth of the Bosphorus, is a level space of greensward, used by the English, from the time of their arrival in Turkey, as a buryingground. The placid sea, the distant isles, the cape of Broussa on the left, and Seraglio Point on the right, make up a lovely view from the melancholy spot. At the southern extremity of the ground are single graves, neatly defined and turfed, where those who died while the army halted here in the spring are laid. But the press of mortality no longer admitted of such decent burial. To those accustomed to see the departed treated with reverence, and attended solemnly to their last habitation, there was something horribly repulsive in a wholesale interment, where the dead far outnumbered those who stood round the grave. A pit, about ten feet deep and fourteen square, received every afternoon those who had died during the last twenty-four hours. A rickety araba, or country cart, drawn by two oxen, was the hearse which conveyed them from the neighbouring hospital to the place of sepulture. In the yard of the hospital is a small dismal house, without windows; for its tenants no longer need the light. Thither those who have died in this and the neighbouring hospitals are brought on stretchers, and packed like sacks in a granary till the araba comes for them. Sewed, each in a blanket, with sufficient tightness to leave a caricature, mummy-like resemblance of humanity, a score of bodies are laid on the vehicle, and travel slowly, dangling and jostling as they go, to the mouth of the yawning pit, where the party who dug it await the coming of the cart. There is no time for ceremony; each poor corpse is hastily lifted off, and, doubled-up limply in cases of recent death, or stiff and stake-like where it has been longer cold, is handed down, nameless, unknown, and void of all the dignity of death, to its appointed station in the crowd. One row being laid, the next covers it, and the feet of those who

deposit them necessarily trample on the forms below, leaving muddy footprints on the blanket-shrouds. Sixtyone (about the daily average number at the time) were buried together on the day I visited the spot. Noticing one corpse in which the lower part of the outline seemed unusually thin, I remarked to the corporal in charge that the deceased must have been long ill, to be so wasted; but he pointed out to me that one limb had been amputated. A clergyman waited till all were deposited to read the funeral service; close by, another pit was being dug for the requirements of next day, and we had seen in the hospital many of those unmistakably destined to fill it. Altogether the scene reminded one of Defoe's account of the burials about London in the time of the Great Plague.

I have mentioned elsewhere the trenches dug on a battle-field to contain rows of dead. But there they lie like soldiers, with an awe and glory on their blood-stained uniforms and upturned faces, which no pall nor coffin could bestow. In the pits of Scutari, Death is deprived of his sanctity, majesty, and mystery, and retains only those elements which constitute the grotesque.

Officers are buried singly in graves close to the edge of the bank, where cross-headed slips of wood, like those which mark the plants in a greenhouse, and not much larger, are labelled, sometimes with the name of the occupant below, sometimes less specifically-as "A Woman," "A Russian Officer."

Wishing to see the French hospital in Pera, I applied to M. Lévy, the Inspector-General, who very kindly gave me a note to M. Morgue, the principal medical officer, in which he prayed him to receive some other Englishmen and myself "avec la courtoisie que meritent si bien nos dignes alliés."

The building, standing on a high point of ground above the new palace of the Sultan, and conspicuous from the Bosphorus, was originally intended as a school of medicine. It is very large, newer and fresher, and the wards and apartments loftier than those of our hospitals. At the door was a covered cart, with a cross in front, filled with coffins, and drawn by oxen.

In the first room we entered, besides some French officers, there were a Russian captain and two subalterns, wounded at Inkermann, playing at some game like draughts. In the next room, a very spacious one, with a painted ceiling, and windows opening to the floor, looking on the Bosphorus, were five or six French officers, apparently very comfortable. The corridors, like those of our hospitals, were filled with patients; in the wards, the beds on each side were raised on a platform above the floor-there was a very thick paillasse under each man; across the rail at the head of the bed was a shelf with his medicine-bottles; and on a card at the foot was a description of his case. The surgeon who accompanied us round pointed out a remarkable case, that of a man who had received a bullet in the head, which entering on one side had gone out near the opposite ear, passing close to the lobe of the brain; he was sensible, apparently suffering but little pain, and would, the surgeon thought, live. Opposite him was another with his skull fractured by a sabre-cut from a Russian officer; the surgeon, removing the dressing with tweezers, tapped them audibly, without paining the man, on the bare skull-bone, which was cleft for about an inch, and surrounded by a gaping wound in the scalp. The poor fellow whined dolefully as the instrumentcase was unfolded; but the surgeon reassured him, saying he was only going to move the dressing; he told us afterwards, he thought it would be necessary to trepan him. Sisters of charity, with the freshest of complexions and the snowiest of caps, moved to and fro among the beds; one of them was an Irish woman from Meath, who had left Ireland, as she told us, five years before to join the sisterhood. One corridor was filled with convalescent Russians in their uniforms of grey or blue, surmounted, in many instances, by a French cap; they stood up respectfully and grinned approval when the good doctor patronised them by a tap on the back or a pull of the ear. The chief distinction between this hospital and ours seemed to be that here the patients

e classified according to the nature eir ailments; one ward was filled

with cases of frost-bites, another of wounds, another of fever-a plan tried at first in our hospitals, but broken in upon by the throng of sick arriving. It is probable that the worst cases are kept apart in the French hospitals, as none of the men we saw seemed in extremity; and it is certain that nos dignes alliés like to exhibit, on all occasions, the best side of their management. The doctor said the deaths averaged seven or eight a-day out of fourteen hundred-about half the proportion of those in our hospitals; a variation somewhat puzzling, since there seems nothing in the difference of accommodation, care, nourishment, or treatment sufficient to account for it.

Our hospitals, with their staff and orderlies, are under the commandant of Scutari, Brigadier - General Lord W. Poulet. The duties of the staff are extremely, almost hopelessly perplexing, from the confusion of the accounts of pay, necessaries, stoppages, &c., of such a number of men of different regiments. To the commandant, all officers halting on their way to and from the Crimea report themselves, and he applies for a passage for them, and also for the patients rejoining the army, or invalided to England, to the admiral, who has control over all the transports and men-of-war. two form, with the chief commissary, a trio supposed to work in unity-as Mrs Malaprop says, like Cerberus, three gentlemen in one." It is most necessary they should act in concert, for many services to be performed here demand a combined exertion of the authority of the three, as absolutely as a bill requires the consent of the Three Estates to become law.

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The dealings of the commissariat are very various and extensive, comprising contracts for all the supplies of provisions, clothing, and forage for the army, besides what come from England. The constantly-varying rate of exchange must greatly increase the complication of their duties. Several large steamers are appropriated exclusively to the commissariat as cattle-ships, which, at certain points of the coast, embark bullocks, already collected by their agents in the surrounding district, and convey them straight to Balaklava.

THE MINISTERIAL CHANGES.

Ir must be acknowledged that the political movements of the last month have not been of such a nature as to improve the prestige of Great Britain in the eyes of Europe. On the very first day when Parliament reassembled after the Christmas vacation, Mr Roebuck, the member for Sheffield, a strong Liberal, and generally a supporter of the Coalition Government, of which Lord Aberdeen was the head, gave notice of a motion for a Committee of Inquiry into the conduct of the war. That motion, if carried, would not be construed otherwise than as a direct vote of censure upon the Government, and it was so felt and acknowledged. The success of a motion such as that, implies a conviction, on the part of the Legislature, that the executive Government has failed in the discharge of its duty-that it can no longer be safely intrusted with absolute control of public affairs-and that it does not possess that amount of confidence without which a Ministry is powerless. Up to the time when Mr Rocbuck gave notice of his motion, there had been no distinct intimation of disunion among the members of the Cabinet. Those, however, who were accustomed to scan political movements with a watchful eye, had observed, in the course of the debates which occurred during the short sitting in December last, various discrepancies, both of statement and opinion, in the language held by different Ministers. The apologetic tone of the Duke of Newcastle, who was War Secretary, contrasted strangely with the almost arrogant confidence of Mr Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War; and it was further remarked that Lord John Russell took occasion, in rather a pointed manner, to express a very different opinion as to the nature and probable results of the Austrian alliance from that which some of his colleagues professed to entertain. Still there was no rupture. No Minister felt so dissatisfied with the conduct of his colleagues, as to free himself from that responsibility which attaches to every member of

the Cabinet for every act of the body, by the tender of his resignation to her Majesty. The month of Januaryone which will be long remembered by the people of this country, from the almost daily arrival of new testimony of the most agonising kind regarding the sufferings of our brave army in the Crimea-rolled on. In spite of earnest entreaty, and of obvious propriety, the Ministry, in December, had committed the unseemly error of proroguing Parliament for a period which, even under ordinary circumstances, would have been too long, but which, in a crisis like this, was regarded almost as an insult to the excited feelings of the country. As a mere political arrangement, this lengthened prorogation was decidedly injurious to themselves, as it increased instead of allaying the general ferment, and strengthened the impression, already very general, that the Ministry could no longer depend upon the support of a majority in the House of Commons. On the 23d, the day of meeting, Mr Roebuck gave notice of his motion for the 25th. On the 25th, it was intimated to the House of Commons that Lord John Russell had resigned.

Such a step, taken by the recognised leader of the Whig party at the moment when the business of the Session was about to open, gave rise to general astonishment throughout the country, and imperatively required an explanation, which accordingly the noble Lord volunteered on the following evening. He commenced by stating that he found it impossible to resist the motion for inquiring into the state of the army before Sebastopol, and into the conduct of the military departments at home. He admitted in the fullest and most unreserved manner the deplorable condition to which the army had been reduced, and stated that he was unable honestly to defend the conduct of the war department. He stated further, that, in November last, he had entered into a correspondence with the Premier, Lord Aberdeen, suggesting a consolidation of the war offices, and the

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