ates, to give my readers some idea of my life in the
Crimea. I am fully aware that I have jumbled up events strangely,
talking in the same page, and even sentence, of events which occurred
at different times; but I have three excuses to offer for my
unhistorical inexactness. In the first place, my memory is far from
trustworthy, and I kept no written diary; in the second place, the
reader must have had more than enough of journals and chronicles of
Crimean life, and I am only the historian of Spring Hill; and in the
third place, unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my
own way, I cannot tell it at all.

I shall now endeavour to describe my out-of-door life as much as
possible, and write of those great events in the field of which I was
a humble witness. But I shall continue to speak from my own experience
simply; and if the reader should be surprised at my leaving any
memorable action of the army unnoticed, he may be sure that it is
because I was mixing medicines or making good things in the kitchen of
the British Hotel, and first heard the particulars of it, perhaps,
from the newspapers which came from home. My readers must know, too,
that they were much more familiar with the history of the camp at
their own firesides, than we who lived in it. Just as a spectator
seeing one of the battles from a hill, as I did the Tchernaya, knows
more about it than the combatant in the valley below, who only thinks
of the enemy whom it is his immediate duty to repel; so you, through
the valuable aid of the cleverest man in the whole camp, read in the
_Times'_ columns the details of that great campaign, while we, the
actors in it, had enough to do to discharge our own duties well, and
rarely concerned ourselves in what seemed of such importance to you.
And so very often a desperate skirmish or hard-fought action, the news
of which created so much sensation in England, was but little regarded
at Spring Hill.

My first experience of battle was pleasant enough. Before we had been
long at Spring Hill, Omar Pasha got something for his Turks to do, and
one fine morning they were marched away towards the Russian outposts
on the road to Baidar. I accompanied them on horseback, and enjoyed
the sight amazingly. English and French cavalry preceded the Turkish
infantry over the plain yet full of memorials of the terrible Light
Cavalry charge a few months before; and while one detachment of the
Turks made a reconnaissance to the ri