destroy the counterscarp, and partly to give a signal for the opening of the cannonade. A moment after, all the way from the Dockyard Creek to the shore of the sea there was a burst of fire which seemed to run along as though a fuse had been fired. This stream of fire was fully three miles long; it ran from battery to battery, and was followed instantly by great clouds of white smoke. It resembled more than any thing else the white clouds rising from Vesuvius or Etna just previous to an eruption of those famous mountains. The smoke in the still morning air covered the whole lines of the French trenches as though a great cloud had fallen upon them, while the slight breeze of the morning whirled them in jets and bunches, much as you see a cloud on the summit of a mountain driven about in a thunder-storm. The wind was blowing from our direction, and consequently the sound of the tremendous explosions was much less than we had expected. For the reason that it was so slight in the British camp, it must have been correspondingly terrible in the city. On the Russian lines, toward which the storm of shot and shell was directed, there were jets and clouds of earth and dust arising from the faces of the earthworks, and from the parapets that in some instances seemed to be swept almost away, and also from the mass of ruined houses just behind the Russian batteries. The front distance covered by this shower of iron was nearly four miles in extent. It swept the entire length of the Russian lines, and reached into the very heart of the city. It is probable that few volleys so immensely powerful, and at the same time so suddenly discharged, were ever known before since artillery was invented.
The suddenness of the shock, together with its magnitude, seemed for a time to have paralyzed the defenders of Sebastopol. Their batteries were not sufficiently manned to enable them to reply with any vigor to such a tremendous fire, and the French prevented in great measure any movement to man the batteries by the energy and celerity with which they continued the iron hail which began so suddenly. They had more than two hundred pieces of artillery in position, all of heavy calibre, and worked with the greatest possible rapidity. The
