ets from his shoulders and threw them at
the feet of his superior. This officer, afterwards General Eardley
Wilmot, became one of his greatest friends. Later on, for another
offence, in which many were concerned, and of which it is doubtful if
Gordon really was guilty, he was deprived of half a year's seniority in
the army. This punishment really did him a good turn, for it enabled
him to secure a commission in the Royal Engineers instead of the Royal
Artillery, to which he would otherwise have been posted.

On the 23rd June 1852 Gordon was gazetted to the Engineers, and on the
29th November 1854 he was ordered to Corfu. As the Crimean War was
going on he was much disappointed at this order, and at first
attributed it to his mother's influence, who, he thought, wanted him to
be sent to a safe place. Through the influence of Sir John Burgoyne, an
old family friend, his destination was changed, and on the 4th of
December, during that bitterly cold winter, he writes, "I received my
orders for the Crimea, and was off the same day." This was not the only
time that he exhibited such promptitude in leaving his native land at
the call of his country. Thirty years afterwards he left England for
the Soudan the very day he received his orders.

He arrived in the Crimea on New Year's Day 1855, when all the
celebrated historical battles were over. His martial ardour had
doubtless been stirred by hearing how bravely our men swarmed up the
heights at Alma, charged the Russian gunners at Balaklava, and drove
back the sortie at Inkerman. When he arrived, the siege of Sebastopol
had commenced in earnest, and for some time it was an engineer's
campaign, in which the spade did more than the rifle, or, to speak more
correctly, the musket; for very few of our men had rifles then. Disease
and exhaustion from hardship slew far more than the bullet. Altogether,
it was rather a trying time for a young officer full of fire and
spirit, anxious to see service of that more dashing kind that appeals
to the imagination. The slow advance of the trenches must have tried
his somewhat impatient spirit, which, even in later years, when it
might have been modified by time, was always more ready for a rapid
march, a brilliant flank movement, or something of that kind. But
though the trench-work must have been wearisome and distasteful to a
degree, he threw himself heart and soul into it, meriting the following
praise from Colonel Chesney, an eminent enginee