IX.— WINTER BEFORE SEBASTOPOL.
The daily harass, and the fight delayed.
The long privation of the hoped supply,
The tentless rest beneath the humid sky.
The stubborn wall, that mocks the leaguer's art,
And palls the patience of his baffled heart:
Of these they had not deemed. The battle day,
They could encounter as a veteran may;
But more preferred the fury of the strife
And present death to hourly suffering life."
The miseries of the winter before Sebastopol have passed into history. It is not needful here to describe the suffering of our country in the persons of her bravest sons, or to recall the unforgotten story of her dearly-bought victories. Battles won, against overwhelming numbers, on the cold soil of the Crimea, by weary men, worn down by hunger, bore terrible witness to the quenchless nature of British courage. The men who stormed the heights of Alma — who, in the dreadful fight of Inkermann, conquered again amidst fogs and darkness—who at Balaklava, "charged a whole army, while all the world wondered;"—such men had proved their steel. Yet there is a limit to human endurance; and when men of this mould have been seen to weep[1] as on night after night, succeeding days of starvation and toil, they were ordered to their work in the freezing trenches, who can estimate the exhausting misery they had first endured?
- ↑ Crimean Correspondence.
