nd was sent to Chatham for two years. In spite of the
mice and the crossbows and the earthworks and many other things, he had
gained several good conduct badges, for he had worked hard, and was
noted for being clever both at fortifications and at surveying.
Mathematics he never could learn. So Charles said good-bye to his
father, who was thankful to see him put to man's work--for during the
four years his son had passed at Woolwich he had, as he expressed it,
'felt himself sitting on a powder barrel'--and set out on the career in
which he was to earn a name for justice and truth throughout three
continents.

It was while Gordon was learning in Pembroke Dock something of what
fortifications really were that the Crimean war broke out, and in
December he was ordered to Balaclava, in charge of the materials for
erecting wooden huts for the troops. He went down to Portsmouth and put
the planks and fittings on board some collier boats, but not wishing to
share their voyage, he started for Marseilles, and there took a steamer
to Constantinople. He arrived in the harbour of Balaclava on January 1,
1855, and heard the guns of Sebastopol booming six miles away. The cold
was bitter, men were daily frozen to death in the trenches, food was
very scarce, and the streets of Balaclava were full of 'swell English
cavalry and horse-artillery carrying rations, and officers in every
conceivable costume foraging for eatables.'

Soon the young engineer was sent down to the trenches before Sebastopol,
where he and his comrades were always under fire and scarcely ever off
duty. It was here that his friendship began with a young captain in the
90th Foot, now lord Wolseley, who has many stories to tell of what life
in the trenches was like. Notwithstanding all the suffering and sadness
around them, these young men, full of fun and high spirits, managed to
laugh in the midst of their work. At Christmas-time captain Wolseley and
two of his friends determined to have a plum-pudding, so that they might
feel as if they were eating their Christmas dinner in England. It is
true that they only had dim ideas how a plum-pudding was to be made, and
nothing whatever to make it with, but when one is young that makes no
difference at all. One of the three consulted a sergeant, who told him
he thought it would need some flour and some raisins, as well as some
suet; but as none of these things could be got, they used instead butter
which had gone bad, dry bisc