The Sun.
London, England, 1870-08-31 00:00:00

THE CRIMEA REVISITED.

A traveller who has within the past few days traversed
the battle-fields of the Crimean campaign writes in the
Morning Post as follows of Sebastopol and the Redan :—My
four days in the famous stronghold I will not attempt to
describe. In all Europe I have seen no grander nor
gloomier spectacle than this great battle-ground of the
nations in its sudden and hopeless decay. Ruins every-
where ! the ruins of the Greek Chersonesus, of the Tartar
Inkerman, of the Genoese Balaklava, of the Russian
Sebastopol ; streets without an inhabitant, ruined dock-
yards, half-destroyed churches, huge barracks gaping
shell-like• over heaps of shattered stone, walls hacked
through and through by countless cannon balls, rusty
guns half-buried in sand, and vast batteries crumbling
into undistinguishable heaps of dust. Still, along the vast
sweep of grassy upland that extends as far as Balaklava,
we can trace the lines of approach that once crept up,
foot by foot, to the borders of the doomed city; still
bristles on the crest of the Malakhoff Hill that shapeless
mound of earth which 5,000 Frenchmen died to win ; along
the valley of Balaklava, one may follow as on a map the
fatal charge of the Six Hundred ; on the heights of Inker-

man the peasant homesteads are still peopled with peasant
families as in the days of the great struggle but
the life, and the beauty, and the glory of Sebastopol
are gone for ever more. On a quiet Sunday afternoon,
when the slanting sun cast a glory over the green hill-sides
and long lines of shattered stone, I climbed the ridge once
surmounted bp the Redan, and sat down beside the little
pyramid of stone that crowns it. There is but little,
indeed, in the aspect of that quiet, sunny slope to recall

the terrible renown which it has attained. Man's ravage is
transient as himself. The terrible entrenchment has
crumbled into an undistinguishable heap of sandy earth,
and the lambs frolic over the velvet turf, and the grass-
hoppers chirp amid the mouldering stones, as if no sound
of war had disturbed the spot since the world began. Far
away in peaceful England, in some quiet woodland cot-
tage wreathed with honeysuckle, or some quaint old
farm-house with rook-haunted gable-ends, hangs the rudely

painted likeness of some English lad who lies herebeneath
our feet. When they last saw him, how gallantly he stood
up in all the pride of his new uniform and jauntily-slung
knapsack. And where is he now ? Look down and read
the inkeription on the monument :—"To the memory of

those who fell in the trenches and assaults upon the Redan
in 1855." So should the epitaphs of all brave men be writ-
ten. Many courtly phrases, many lines of sounding flat-
tery, have been inscribed upon the tombs of famous
soldiers, which have not one-half the poetry of these
few simgle words. Around this quiet hill-side,
where the sheep feed peacefully in the warmth
of the declining sunshine, thousands of our best
and bravest came cheerfully up to the long martyr_
dom which was only ended by death. In weariness and

painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst,- in
cold and nakedness, these stout English hearts endured
hardness, as good soldiers of the great cause which sent

them forth. " The greatest lesson of life," said Napoleon,
" is to know how t 3 die ;" and that lesson, at least, those
who lie here had learned as few men upon earth have ever
done.