The Express.
London, England, 1855-02-01 00:00:00

two or three bemired bones iters.
letters are received from head-quarters exprellistr
belief that by this time the horses are all " gone."
Officials here, after angiosedeliberation, cannot make
sp their minds whether " gone" refers to motion
towards Scutari, or motion towards the Crimea ;
*Mk that a person writing from Balaklava, and
wishing things to be sent there. should say "comet"
bat the syntax being nowhere alluded to in the ar-
ticle' of war, resolve to wait for fresh instructions.
A good while elapses before these instructions arrive ;
• longer still before the means of executing them
can be found. A want of attention on one side, a
want of will on the other, contagion everywhere, and
thus the winter puses ; but in the meantime the horses
die. 'the public funds expended in their purchase
and their maintenance during half a year are
wilfully thrown away. Bolditn die and starve in the
Crimea; drugs and hay rot and are lost at Balaklave,
and everybody is filled with mourning and dismay.
One filthy corner may introduce pestilence into a
whole town: a single screw loose derange gigantic
and complicated machinery ; bad management io a
single department, or a single spot, frustrate or em.
berms the most extensive and best laid plan of ope-
rations. I have no hesitation in saying that I ba-
you much of the misery now endured by our troops
in the Crimes is due to the horrible, neglected,
scavenger-like depot at Varna. Why it was left here
for a single week, it is hard to imagine ; what good
end it has served it would need a very acute
gentleman to point out ; how much mischief
and abomination this has caused is patent to
every one who has had the misfortune to
a single week in this horrible place.
kaha: orders for its removal should in the
beginning have been so peremptory, so precise, that
neither laziness, nor procrastination, nor love of ease
and shelter, should have found a loophole to creep out.
The town is become, not simplya " place of skulls,"
but a place of skeletons and carcases within, without,
and round about. One cannot walk or ride in any
direction without passing carcases of horses every five
yards in every stage of decomposition, and emitting
odours which taint the air on the rawest day and
under the coldest breeze. The bush is strewed with
them, the streets, the open places. There is a
slaughter house for sheep within three hundred yards
or less of the General Hospital, in which the entrails
and offal are left to rot, and around it, in an area of
thirty square yards, I counted this morning five dead
horses. The force of abomination can no further go.
Varna was bad in a sanitary point of view, goodness
knows, before the arrival of the allied armies; it
made no sensible progress in this respect daring their
stay, bat the English depot has turned it into a
knacker's yard. It has out-Torked the Turks. It is
unfortunate that the same bitterly cold weather
which saves us from a pestilence sweeps away every
night more of the wretched baggage horses, which
are generally found dead at their poets in the morn-
ing. The survivors are so thin that objects can
almost be discovered by the naked eye at moderate
distances through their bodies. They wave to and
fro before every blast, and their long hair bends
before the breeze like heads of barley in summer
time. They are the laughiog-etoek of the
French soldiery. An officer OT the Hussars desig-
nated them tome the other day as espcce d'onabree ;
and more than one have exp eased their strong sur-
prise that the English government could permit its
property to fall into such a deplorable condition.
They manage these things better. For two months
back all their baggage horses of every kind—and
they are very numerous—have been snugly housed
in long rows of wooden sheds erected along the town
wall, compactly and closely built, with fireplaces or
stoves. chimneys on the top, and glass windows, and
are well supplied with both straw and barley. They
have also a large party constantly employed in cut-
ting and carrying wood to a village on the southern
point of the bay, where it abounds, and from which
several transports are constantly engaged in carrying
it to the Crimea. I was astounded the other day on
riding out in that direction to find the shore for a
quarter of a mile covered with huge piles of it, boats
conveying it to the ships, and the little soldiers,
swarming like ants at their task, and jabbering and
laughing like so many children on a holiday, though
the weather was bitterly cold. I think such a thing
never entered the heads of the English. Our troops
here, during the intervals between the melancholy
meals of these moribund posits, mope listlessly in the
streets, with little else to do than imbibe brandy and
porter at numerous "Alliance and Union Coifs*
houses," with which Varna is filled. I cannot for the
life of me imagine why stores of firewood have net
been collected here. The whole country around is
covered with brushwood, easy to cut, easy to be got et,
and one hundred men in a single week might furnish
materials for roaring fires to the whole army et
Sebastopol for at least a month. To have thought de
anything of this kind would, however, have been sat.
ficient to throw a head of a department "into cow
valoiona." Each of these gentlemen seems to be
working pretty much on his own hook, and leave*
his neighbours to the good providence of God. How-
ever, the precious depot promises ere another weak
to be finally cleared our, horses and all, leaving
behind as many unsightly and malodorous relics as
any body of men ever left anywhere. Lord Region
will be somewhat surprised when he sees, if he ever
does see, the sole survivors of the 2,500 baggsge
horses which were mustered here at Varna last
August. Oae or two•should be stuffed as last seen
alive and deposited in the British Museum, as illus-
trations of extraordinary prolongation of animal life
under a combination of circumstances hostile in the

extreme to the vital principle.
The only things in Varna which seem changed for
the better since I was here before, now nearly six
months ago, are the doge. Instead of miserable, lank,
cowardly, whining brutes with bloodshot eyes and
lorg hair, they hare become fat and well-propor-
tioned, and stalk about with a haughty and insolent
air that seems at once to bid defiance to your enmity
and refuse your pity. They are no longer dependent
for subsistence upon the charity of the passers by or
the offal and refuse of the houses, and turn up
their noses at the imaum's bread. Like their betters,
in their prosperity they give themselves airs ; but I
fancy—l may be mistaken—that tkeir manners to-
wards Englishmen have become softened of late, and
that their fierce bearing towards the rest of the world
is laid aside when they meet a Briton ; as dark in-
stinct, more than ordinarily acute' seems to tell them
that for the last six months they have lived on carrion
purchased by the money of his countrymen. Wags
here go farther than this, and say that on
meeting one of the chiefs of the depot, either
in the commissariat or any other department,
they wag their tail., and make preparations for fawn-
ing upon their benefactors.