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THE FIRST FIFTY VOLUMES

OF

BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.

In Octavo, pp. 588. Price 158.

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THE CRIMEAN REPORT AND CHELSEA INQUIRY.

THE breathless pause of expectation that followed the news of the fearful battle of Inkermann, was broken by accents of distress, faint at first, and uncertain as the foreboding sounds which were of old supposed to precede public calamity 'prophesying and accents terrible, new hatch'd to the woeful time,”but swelling and deepening into a chorus so full of woe, that England's listening attitude presently changed to one of grief and horror. Still out of the gloom of the distant East came the dismal sounds of suffering, and the nation knew that the army, endeared to it by victory, was perishing of want. Then it was that this generation, accustomed to decorous and regulated displays of interest, compassion, or disapprobation-public dinners, platform oratory, votes of censure, and the like-for the first time beheld the public agitated by one strong absorbing impulse, and exhibiting such unity of feeling as is seen in a mourning household, one of whose members is in deadly peril. The sympathy for the army was not only deep and universal, but enthusiastically active. Private subscriptions for the relief of the troops were collected in profusion; there was scarcely a house in the country whose inmates could spare any portion of time and labour, where some work was not in progress to relieve the

VOL LXXX.-NO. CCCCLXXXIX.

necessities and administer to the comforts of our soldiers. A fund, the administration of which was undertaken by the Times newspaper, amounted, in a few days after its creation, to ten thousand pounds. Rich and benevolent people shipped large cargoes of food and clothing for the Crimea, to be disposed of there at a price which should leave no profit, sending in advance, overland, intelligent and experienced agents to provide for the reception and distribution of these welcome supplies. The army itself, engrossed by its duties and its sufferings, had but a faint and inadequate idea of the monopoly it enjoyed of the thoughts, wishes, and tears of the nation. It was in the month of February 1855 that Mr Bright stated in the House his belief that scores of thousands in England only laid their heads on their pillows at night to dream of their brethren in the Crimea.

This extraordinary sympathy was neither superfluous nor misdirected. Now that our army has been maintained for so long in comfort, health, and plenty, that sympathy has declined. The inaction of the winter months has allowed the public interest, no longer constrained by struggles in the field or sufferings in the camp, to flow in other channels, and the very remembrance of those dark days of distress is beginning to fade. With

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that tendency to become oblivious of past wretchedness which the average mind happily possesses, those who came unscathed through the worst privations of that season have ceased to dwell on their calamities. But in the memory of every survivor there will ever remain a dark corner devoted to the squalid and spectral phantasmagoria of the wintry siege; and at the Open Sesame of the words Camp before Sebastopol," they will rise to his mental vision chill and ghastly, and full of fearful interest, even in remotest old age.

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First among them will unroll itself that which daily met his eye-a wilderness of mud overhung by a low sky, with the space between filled by a piercing northern blast, before which the rags of the tents flutter and the poles rattle in their earthy sockets. Before the icy breath of the wind drifts with uncertain steps a soldier, whom but for the buttons on his great-coat and the rusted musket, you might take for a famished mendicant. He stoops stiffly beneath the opening of his tent, and disappears for a moment; it is to exchange his musket for a pick-axe. He is weary, and longs for sleep; but he is numb with the long night's watching in the trenches, and longs, too, for some warm food and drink to send a ray of heat through his shivering frame before he creeps beneath his blanket. The food is there, scanty and raw, but not the fuel. The ground surrounding his camp is not only bare of twigs, but the roots have everywhere been sought with a scrutiny keener than that of the goldseeker, and he goes forth to search at a distance. As he plods on, everything around tells of famine and desolation -everything tells him to despair-the skeletons, the half-buried carcasses, the open graves. Snow, which fell last night, lying in the bottom of these graves, shows they were dug yesterday in certain anticipation of victims. What matter if he fill one himself, and so end the struggle and weariness?—what matter if cold and starvation soon do their work?-or, better still, if he meet to-night some friendly bullet in the trenches?

Of all the dreary scenes, that which the soldier turns to with least repug

nance is the Trenches-the scene of his fame as well as his sufferings, where he earned a claim, not only to his country's sympathy, but to her applause. In the advanced trench he has, through his loophole of sandbags, exchanged shots all day with the opposing riflemen, and the excitement of combat has prevented him from feeling the full evils of cold and wet; but night has put an end to the desultory duel of musketry, and he is laid under the parapet, seeking, with his back against the cold wet earth, some shelter from the wind that issues as from caverns of ice out of the bleak north. His last look over the parapet at nightfall showed the Redan rising before him a black silent mound; on his right lies the Malakoff, black and silent too; yet in a moment they may become, as they often suddenly become, volcanoes darting flame. But to-night they are quiet; only an occasional gun on the left throws a shot across the French lines;-to-night he will yield to soft drowsy thoughts of his warm home. What a paradise it seems !-never did he half appreciate its charms till now. Is it possible there are in the world people so fortunate as to possess warm clothing, cheerful firesides, neatspread tables, plentiful food-are there really such things as home faces? On such pleasant themes he tries to think steadily,-and could succeed, but for the rain on his face distracting his thoughts. Presently, as he dozes, the images become more real, the faces come without effort, the scene is furnished with forgotten details, the fireside glows-strange that it does not warm him!-is the fuel frozen-is the flame but a glitter? He tells the friends of his dream how he had been lately almost despairing of ever seeing them again-how he has suffered since they parted-but now they will be merry!

-A sound as of thunder wakes him;-as, still half dreaming, he looks up, the comrade at his side, whose hand touched his but now, starts to his feet, stands straight, with outspread arms, and falls back dead. A shell has burst close by, and the splinter which has struck his comrade to the heart passed across his own breast. No great interest is dis

played by those who presently throng round-the event is too common to excite them; their faces, as they stoop to examine the wound, look dull and dreary in the light of the lantern, and their eyelids are stiff with cold, or heavy with watching or with recent sleep; the only remark they make is that he is dead. They bear the slain man over the parapet to the spot where they will dig his grave; the ground is stony; but here, here is a soft place where the earth will be easily turned-no, not there, that is itself a grave where those who fell in the last sortie were laid. Close by they scoop the narrow and shallow sepulchre and lay him in it; the enemy has heard the jarring of the spades, and opened from the guns that looked towards the sound; the shells whistle and explode, the grape comes rustling like birds on the wing; quickly they fill in the earth and return to the trench, again to shiver and doze till the cold dawn shall once more usher in the Weary day, and bring the relief which is scarcely even a variety of misery. At the word "Balaklava" the scene shifts to where, as you look towards the town from the top of the last eminence, the harbour gleams, like a plate of steel, in its rocky basin, while heavy clouds, charged with sleet and rain, are rent into rags as the wind drives them against the edge of the mountain. Slowly move the trains of men and horses that traverse the melancholy valley slowly come those which ascend the hill towards you. This line of grisly men in ragged red coats, whose thick beards mingle with their fur-caps and cover the woollen scarfs wound round their necks, have been sent down from the front for provisions for themselves and their comrades, and those pieces of pork which dangle in strings from their hands are the rations, on which they will break their fast for the first time to-day the first time, though, through yonder break in the black cloud, comes a lurid glimmer of the setting sun. That pack-horse, which has sunk under its burden by the roadside, will never rise again; ah, you may cease, good fellow, those efforts to raise him! to-morrow there will be one

more carcass cumbering the road. Room for the sick! and turning, you see a dismal troop. He who rides first is, as you see by his helmet, a dragoon, from whose stooping shoulders, as he leans forward to clutch the mane, flows a blanket covering the hollow flanks of his gaunt horse; his lips are parted, his eyes closed, his cheeks livid-he is little other than a mounted corpse. The next moans as he goes propping himself with both hands painfully on the pommel of his saddle. “Will this journey never end?"-so you read in his face; "this desert of mud which I seem to have been traversing for months and years, shall we ever be through it ?-were it not better to relax these faint hands, to cease to cling with these weary knees, and to bury all my troubles in the mire beneath!" The next glares at you for a moment with wide eyes, void of speculation; he is feverstricken; and if he saw you at all in that hurried insane glance, you exist in his brain only as another of the phantoms or fiends that haunt his delirium. Bound for the great hospital of Scutari, though some of them will never see it, the ghostly train sweeps on, wading and slipping past the dying horses, past the dead and half-buried bullocks, past skeletons and carcasses in various stages of decay, past the wrecks of arabas and waggons, past the men with bundles who have been down for the clothing they have needed for weeks, past the waggon-load of dead Turks going to that yawning pit beside the road which is to be their sepulchre, past the artillery-waggons returning now at dusk with the forage they set out at daybreak to fetch-and on, always through deep mire, to the place of embarkation.

Embarkation! To how many will that word bring the most fearful recollections of all. Lying amid a thousand other sick and wounded on the bare planks in torture, lassitude, or lethargy-without proper food, medicine, or attendance-they are launched on the stormy sea. It is

bitter cold, and their covering is scanty; the roll and plunge of the ship are agony to the fevered and the maimed; in place of the hush, the

cleanliness, the quiet, the stealthy step that should be round the sick, the sounds are such as poets have feigned for the regions of the damned groans, screams, entreaties, complaints, curses, the straining of the timbers, the trampling of the crew, the moaning of the wind, the weltering of the waves. But courage! the voyage is short-to-morrow night will see them in the Bosphorus! So at least it should be; but even that hope fails. The machinery of the overladen ship breaks down, and, all their evils aggravated tenfold by delay, they lie for days tossing a hell upon the waters, longing for death or Scutari.

Scutari, the longed-for haven, was for weeks the very climax and headquarters of suffering crammed with misery, overflowing with despair. In those large chambers and long corridors lay thousands of the bravest and most miserable of men. One standing at the end of any of the galleries that traversed the four sides of the extensive building, looked along a deep perspective, a longdiminishing vista of woe. Ranged in two rows lay the patients, feet to feet; the tenant of each bed saw his pains reflected in the face of his suffering vis-à-vis; fronting each was another victim of war or cold, starvation or pestilence. Or frequently the sick man read in the face opposite, not the progress of fever, nor the leaden weight of exhaustion, but the tokens of the final rest to which he was himself hastening. With each round of the sun nearly a hundred gallant soldiers raved or languished out their lives; as the jaws of the grave closed on the prey of to-day, they reopened as widely for that of to-morrow. It might be though, that, at this rate, the grave, so greedy, so improvident, would exhaust its victims that some day it would gape in vain ; but no fear of that-the sick flocked in faster than the dead were carried out, and still the dismal stream augmented till the hospitals overflowed, while still faster poured the misery-laden ships down the Black Sea, feeding, as they came, the fishes with their dead.

Had Dante witnessed these scenes, he might have deepened the horrors

of his Inferno. Told with more or less exactness, but with a graphic skill that suffered none of the pathos to be lost, they shook the nation with a universal tremor of anger and grief. It could not bear to think that the men of whom it had suddenly grown so proud-the men who were to revive the ancient glories of the Peninsula-should be perishing of want, while wealth and plenty reigned at home. In compliance with the loudly expressed feeling of the public, the Ministry resolved to send a Commission to the Crimea, to seek a clue to the causes of the sufferings of the army. Lord Panmure, looking about for a suitable person to conduct an investigation so important and so delicate, fixed on Sir John M'Neill, for many years envoy to Persia, a man excellently qualified by sagacity, temper, knowledge of official and diplomatic proceedings, and acquaintance with the East, for the task imposed on him. With him was associated Colonel Tulloch, an officer who had served in India, and who had for many years superintended the organisation and equipment of the pensioners, to the satisfaction of the Government; and to them, on the 19th February, his Lordship addressed the following letter:

"GENTLEMEN,

"I have the honour to acquaint you that I have selected you to proceed to the Crimea on Thursday next, vid Marseilles.

"I have the honour to inform you that it will be your duty to inquire into the whole arrangement and management of the Commissariat Department.

"You will acquaint yourselves with the mode by which the supplies of forand should any better mode suggest itage, and any other articles, are obtained; self to you for the execution of this duty, you will transmit to Lord Raglan such suggestion, and also furnish me with a

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