and went from there to France.

At Marseilles he got a ship to Constantinople, and just as fearlessly
and as happily as he had ever gone on one of his mischievous
expeditions as a little boy, Charlie Gordon went off to face hardships,
and dangers, and death in the Crimea, and to learn his first lessons in
war.

CHAPTER II

GORDON'S FIRST BATTLES

The Crimean War had been going on for several months when, on New
Year's Day 1855, Gordon reached Balaclava.

The months had been dreary ones for the English soldiers, for, through
bad management in England, they had had to face a bitter Russian
winter, and go through much hard fighting, without proper food, without
warm clothing, and with no proper shelter.

Night after night, and day after day, in pitilessly falling snow, or in
drenching rain, clad in uniforms that had become mere rags, cold and
hungry, tired and wet, the English soldiers had to line the trenches
before Sebastopol.

These trenches were deep ditches, with the earth thrown up to protect
the men who fired from them, and in them the men often had to stand
hour after hour, knee deep in mud, and in cold that froze the blood in
their veins.

Illness broke out in the camp, and many men died from cholera. Many
had no better bed than leaves spread on stones in the open could give
them.

Some of those who had tents, and used little charcoal fires to warm
them, were killed by the fumes of charcoal.

A "Black Winter" it was called, and the Black Winter was not over when
Gordon arrived. He had been sent out in charge of 320 huts, which had
followed him in the collier from Portsmouth, so that now, at least,
some of the men were better sheltered than they had been before. But
they were still half-starved, and in very low spirits. Officers and
men had constantly to go foraging for food, or else to go hungry, and
men died every day of the bitter cold. And all the time the guns of
the Russians were never idle.

It was not a very gay beginning for a young officer's active service,
but Gordon, like his mother, had a way of making the best of things.
Even when, as he wrote, the ink was frozen, and he broke the nib of his
pen as he dipped it, "There are really no hardships for the officers,"
he wrote home; "the men are the sufferers."

Before he had been a month out, Gordon was put on duty in the trenches
before Sebastopol, a great fortified town by the sea.

On the night of 14th February, with eight m