rge of the Light Brigade"--splendid in itself, but
brought about because "some one had blundered." It was to produce a
Florence Nightingale--but also the hideous sufferings which she helped
to assuage.

For England was unprepared. Her years of idleness had broken down her
military organization. Splendid fighting men she still had, but the
fighting machine itself was rusty.

Young Gordon, perhaps through his father's influence, obtained a
transfer from Corfu to the Crimea. The father did not much like his
new billet. He may have sensed something of what was coming. But he
did not fear for his son.

"Get him into real action, _I_ say," he would remark. "That will show
whether there's any stuff in him. I guess there is," he added grimly,
thinking of Charles's troubles in college. "All the time he was in the
Academy, I felt like I was sitting on a powder barrel."

In mid-December, of 1854, Gordon set sail from England, on his first
real job as a soldier. He was going with the task of building some
wooden huts for the soldiers, and lumber was being shipped at the same
time. But the soldiers for whom these shelters were intended were even
then dying from exposure on the plains of Sebastopol. It was the first
lesson of unpreparedness.

Of this, however, the young engineer was then ignorant. He was in high
spirits over the prospect of action and seeing the world. He arrived
at Marseilles "very tired," as he writes to his mother, but not too
tired to give her a detailed description of what he has seen thus
far--"the pretty towns and villages, vineyards and rivers, with
glimpses of snowy mountains beyond."

On New Year's Day he reached his destination, Balaklava. It was the
depth of winter, and disaster stared the British in the face. The
Russians were having the best of it. They were out-generalling the
enemy at every turn. The British could do little more than dig in and
hang on, with the bull-dog stubbornness which has always marked them.

At first, the young lieutenant heard little of this. His duties as
construction engineer kept him busy six miles back of the battle line.

"I have not yet seen Sebastopol," he writes on January 3, "and do not
hear anything of the siege. We hear a gun now and then. No one seems
to interest himself about the siege, but all appear to be engaged in
foraging for grub." Two days later he writes: "We have only put up two
huts as yet, but hope to do better soon."

Th