I can understand the sort of amazement of the Orientals at the scantiness of the retinue with which an Englishman passes the desert; for I was somewhat struck myself when I saw one of my countrymen making his way across the wilderness in this simple style. At first there was a mere moving speck in the horizon; my party, of course, became all alive with excitement, and there were many surmises: soon it appeared that three laden camels were approaching, and that two of them carried riders; in a little while we saw that one of the riders wore the European dress, and at last the travelers were pronounced to be an English gentleman and his servant; by their side there were a couple, I think, of Arabs on foot: and this was the whole party. You, you love sailing: in returning from a cruise to the English coast, you see often enough a fisherman's humble boat far away from all shores, with an ugly black sky above and an angry sea beneath; you watch the grisly old man at the helm, carrying his craft with strange skill through the turmoil of waters, and the boy, supple-limbed, yet weather-worn already, and with steady eyes that look through the blast,-you see him understanding commandments from the jerk of his father's white eyebrow, now belaying and now letting go, now scrunching himself down into mere ballast, or bailing out Death with a pipkin. Stale enough is the sight; and yet when I see it I always stare anew, and with a kind of Titanic exultation, because that a poor boat, with the brain of a man and the hands of a boy on board, can match herself so bravely against black Heaven and Ocean: well, so when you have traveled for days and days, over an Eastern desert, without meeting the likeness of a human being, and then at last see an English shooting-jacket and his servant come listlessly slouching along from out the forward horizon, you stare at the wide unproportion between this slender company and the boundless plains of sand through which they are keeping their way.

This Englishman, as I afterwards found, was a military man returning to his country from India, and crossing the desert at this part in order to go through Palestine. As for me, I had come pretty straight from England; and so here we met in the wilderness at about half-way from our respective starting-points. As we approached each other, it became with me a question whether we should speak. I thought it likely that the stranger would accost me; and in the event of his doing so, I was quite ready to

be as sociable and as chatty as I could be, according to my nature, but still I could not think of anything in particular that I had to say to him. Of course among civilized people the not having anything to say is no excuse at all for not speaking, but I was shy and indolent; and I felt no great wish to stop and talk like a morning visitor, in the midst of those broad solitudes. The traveler perhaps felt as I did; for except that we lifted our hands to our caps and waved our arms in courtesy, we passed each other as if we had passed in Bond Street. Our attendants, however, were not to be cheated of the delight that they felt in speaking to new listeners and hearing fresh voices once more. The masters, therefore, had no sooner passed each other than their respective servants quietly stopped and entered into conversation. As soon as my camel found that her companions were not following her, she caught the social feeling and refused to go on. I felt the absurdity of the situation, and determined to accost the stranger, if only to avoid the awkwardness of remaining stuck fast in the desert whilst our servants were amusing themselves. When with this intent I turned round my camel, I found that the gallant officer, who had passed me by about thirty or forty yards, was exactly in the same predicament as myself. I put my now willing camel in motion and rode up towards the stranger; who, seeing this, followed my example and came forward to meet me. He was the first to speak. He was much too courteous to address me as if he admitted of the possibility of my wishing to accost him from any feeling of mere sociability or civilian-like love of vain talk; on the contrary, he at once attributed my advances to a laudable wish of acquiring statistical information: and accordingly, when we got within speaking distance, he said, "I daresay you wish to know how the Plague is going on at Cairo ?» And then he went on to say he regretted that his information did not enable him to give me in numbers a perfectly accurate statement of the daily deaths. He afterwards talked pleasantly enough upon other and less ghastly subjects. I thought him manly and intelligent; a worthy one of the few thousand strong Englishmen to whom the Empire of India is committed.

AR

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE

From The Invasion of the Crimea ›

T FIRST, as was natural, the enemy's gunners and riflemen were so far taken by surprise as to be hardly in readiness to seize the opportunity which Lord Cardigan was presenting to them; and indeed for some time the very extravagance of the operation masked its character from the intelligence of the enemy, preventing him from seeing at once that it must result from some stupendous mistake. But the Russians at length perceived that the distance between our Heavy Brigade and Lord Cardigan's squadrons was every moment increasing, and that, whatever might be the true meaning of the enterprise in which our Light Cavalry had engaged, the red squadrons were not under orders to give it that kind of support which the Englishman calls "thorough-going." This once understood, the enemy had fair means of inferring that the phenomenon of ten beautiful squadrons moving down the North Valley in well-ordered lines, was not the commencement of anything like a general advance on the part of the Allies, and might prove after all to be hardly the result of design. Accordingly, with more or less readiness, the forces on the Causeway Heights, the forces on the Fedioukine Hills, and the twelve-gun battery which crossed the lower end of the valley, became all prepared to inflict upon our Light Cavalry the consequences of the fault which propelled it. It is true that the main body of the Russian cavalry, drawn up in rear of the confronting battery, had been cowed by the result of its encounter with Scarlett's dragoons; but when that has been acknowledged as a qualification of what is coming, it may be said that the three sides of the quadrangle in which our cavalry moved were not only lined with Russians, but with Russians. standing firm to their duty.

Soon the fated advance of the Light Brigade had proceeded so far as to begin to disclose its strange purpose: the purpose of making straight for the far distant battery which crossed the foot of the valley, by passing for a mile between two Russian forces; and this at such ugly distance from each as to allow of our squadrons going down under a doubly flanking fire of round shot, grape, and rifle-balls, without the opportunity of yet doing any manner of harm to their assailants. Then from the slopes

of the Causeway Heights on the one side and the Fedioukine Hills on the other, the Russian artillery brought its power to bear right and left, with an efficiency every moment increasing; and large numbers of riflemen on the slopes of the Causeway Heights, who had been placed where they were in order to cover the retreat of the Russian battalions, found means to take their part in the work of destroying our horsemen. Whilst Lord Cardigan and his squadrons rode thus under heavy cross-fire, the visible object they had straight before them was the white bank of smoke, from time to time pierced by issues of flame, which marks the site of a battery in action: for in truth the very goal that had been chosen for our devoted squadrons-a goal rarely before assigned to cavalry-was the front of a battery; the front of that twelve-gun battery, with the main body of the Russian cavalry in rear of it, which crossed the lower end of the valley: and so faithful, so resolute, was Lord Cardigan in executing this part of what he understood to be his appointed task, that he chose out one of the guns which he judged to be about the centre of the battery, rode straight at its fire, and made this from first to last his sole guiding star.

Pressing always deeper and deeper into this pen of fire, the devoted brigade, with Lord Cardigan still at its head, continued to move down the valley. The fire the brigade was incurring had not yet come to be of that crushing sort which mows down half a troop in one instant, and for some time a steady pace was maintained. As often as a horse was killed or disabled or deprived of the rider, his fall or his plunge or his ungoverned pressure had commonly the effect of enforcing upon the neighboring chargers more or less of lateral movement, and in this way there was occasioned a slight distension of the rank in which the casualty had occurred; but in the next instant, when the troopers had ridden clear of the disturbing cause, they closed up, and rode on in a line as even as before, though reduced by the loss just sustained. The movement occasioned by each casualty was so constantly recurring, and so constantly followed by the same process, the process of re-closing the ranks,- that to distant observers the alternate distension and contraction of the line seemed to have the precision and sameness which belong to mechanic contrivance. Of these distant observers there was one-and that too a soldier-who so felt to the heart the true import of what he saw, that in a paroxysm of admiration and grief he burst into

tears.

In well-maintained order, but growing less every instant, our squadrons still moved down the valley.

Their pace for some time was firmly governed. When horsemen, too valorous to be thinking of flight, are brought into straits of this kind, their tendency is to be galloping swiftly forward, each man at the greatest pace he can exact from his own charger, thus destroying of course the formation of the line: but Lord Cardigan's love of strict uniform order was a propensity having all the force of a passion; and as long as it seemed possible to exert authority by voice or by gesture, the leader of this singular onset was firm in repressing the fault.

Thus when Captain White, of the 17th Lancers (who commanded the squadron of direction), became "anxious," as he frankly expressed it, "to get out of such a murderous fire, and into the guns," as being "the best of the two evils," and, endeavoring with that view to "force the pace," pressed forward so much as to be almost alongside of the chief's bridle-arm, Lord Cardigan checked this impatience by laying his sword across the captain's breast, telling him at the same time not to try to force the pace, and not to be riding before the leader of the brigade. Otherwise than for this, Lord Cardigan, from the first to the last of the onset, did not speak nor make sign. Riding straight and erect, he never once turned in his saddle with the object of getting a glance at the state of the squadrons which followed him; and to this rigid abstinence-giving proof as such abstinence did of an unbending resolve—it was apparently owing that the brigade never fell into doubt concerning its true path of duty, never wavered (as the best squadrons will, if the leader, for even an instant, appears to be uncertain of purpose), and was guiltless of even inclining to any default except that of failing to keep down the pace.

So far as concerned the first line, this task was now becoming more and more difficult. When the 13th Light Dragoons and the 17th Lancers had passed so far down the valley as to be under effective fire from the guns in their front, as well as from the flanks right and left, their lines were so torn, so cruelly reduced in numbers, as to be hardly any longer capable of retaining the corporate life or entity of the regiment, the squadron, the troop; and these aggregates began to resolve themselves into their component elements—that is, into brave, eager horsemen, growing fiercely impatient of a trial which had thus long denied them their vengeance, and longing to close with all speed upon the