d the camp fires at
night, when the fight is over and the English are in possession of the
field, the men learn the reason of the cry. Sir Colin Campbell has sent
round the word that the men are to break their cartridge packets, and
lay the cartridges loose in their pouches, and this is the first word of
real business. Now at one o'clock, or near it, the note passes along
the line from east to west, and the men are afoot again, and marching
forward two deep against those solid masses of grey human masonry, and
that gash upon the hill-side which is by and by to burst like a volcano
into flame. There goes the first boom of cannon from the Russian side,
and a round shot sends the earth spluttering amidst the staff as it
canters by once more, plumes waving, and epaulets, and scabbards, and
gold lace, and all the fine tinsel of war, as yet unsoiled, glittering
in the sunshine.

This is no day for a cavalryman to win honour. Here we sit on the
hill-side with a downward slope before us, and an upward slope beyond,
and the unmounted men are working their way onward and upward, whilst we
are held inactive. And now the war begins in earnest. The tartan fellows
are lounging along, half of them with the stem of a grape bunch between
their teeth, loading and firing as they go, scarcely a man of them
having stood fire before, and walking towards their baptism of death and
blood with an astounding cheerfulness, and the long waving broken line
converges as if by instinct, and, as the historians of the battle tell
us, without definite order from any quarter, towards that grim gash
on the hillside, until it grows to be something of a mob, so thickly
clustered that the Russian batteries cleave lines through it. It wavers,
it pauses, it rushes forward, it takes shelter beneath the forehead of
the hill on which the great Redoubt stands, and then declines, a mere
swarm of ants to look at from this distance, towards the belching roar
and smoke and flame. And on a sudden the batteries are silent, and far
and far there goes up a cheer. And then there is silence again, and a
long waiting, and the grave massive oblongs and cubes of masonry come
down on this side and on that, and the watchers in the valley wait in
a tense and terrible strain. Where are the reinforcements? Where is the
Duke of Cambridge, with the Guards? Hidden away there in a wrinkle of
the hill they are waiting for some unknown reason, and the conquerors
of the great Redoubt seem