Strange to tell, after the first hour the excitement of the troops seemed to vanish, and gave place to something like despondency. We had no longer enemies to contend with. The great crisis, to meet which our courage and determination had been wound up, had passed over, and the reaction, following on intense excitement, had succeeded. Now, too, we could estimate the price the victory had cost; and as from our position we looked down the slopes of the hills, the whole ground on to the Alma was thickly covered with dead and wounded men and horses, and all the débris of a hard-fought battle. French, English, and Russians, fully seven thousand men, lay on the field, in some instances so thickly strewed as to prevent the grass being seen for considerable spaces. The line of our advance had not left so many ghastly memorials as the other parts of the field of battle; but even here it was a horrible, sickening sight.

It is only doing justice to the French to say that every possible attention was paid to the wounded, many of whom had been carried to the rear even during the action. The greatest kindness and sympathy was shown by the men, and the medical officers were indefatigable.

It was with difficulty I conquered the morbid dislike I have at the sight of suffering in any living being, and especially in man; but I did my best, and, I hope, disinterestedly, though the thought did occur that during the campaign I might require the same assistance.

Our meal on these blood-stained heights was a melancholy one. It was to most of us the first experience of battle, and we felt a painful surprise at the reality, now stripped of the colouring with which our imagination had painted it. We were not yet habituated to the disappearance of familiar faces without the blank occasioning a gloom. The soldiers seemed impressed with the solemnity of the occasion, and there was little conversation among them. Death to all of us soldiers is a solemn thing at first, though, as the campaign goes on, the King of Terrors loses his power to frighten, until at last we regard our comrades in arms like men whom we meet in an inn, whose absence any morning from the public room requires no explanation and excites little regret. They have departed on their journey, and the time may soon come when we too must shift our quarters; happy if we be able to pay our bill, and leave landlords, and waiters, and travellers in no unkindly humour, for we will never meet again in hostel of this world.

September 21.

Day has barely dawned. The stars still glimmer faint and milky, and the rising sun as yet only indicates his position by a brighter glow on the horizon. All around me, in the French camp, the soldiers are sound asleep, except here and there a sentinel. Everything still, as on a Highland moor in early morn. What a contrast to yesterday at noon, when struggling up the hill amidst the storm of balls, and the shout of fighting, and the groans of dying, men! Ah, yesterday was one of those days in which man, whose limit of life is fourscore years, comes out of his place in the background of Nature, seeming for a time to claim an equal importance with her. But the crisis over, Nature reassumes her silent majesty, and hill and valley, and that sluggish Alma, and this canopy of

sky again appear, all unconscious, unconcerned, and eternal! Man has done his mightiest deed: all his passions have burst into a blaze; but the conflagration is over, and though the embers yet glimmer, and the ashes strew the soil, soon this débris will be covered, and the grass sprout even there, in the centre of the Russian position, where three thousand men were struck to the ground. Alas! why do we thus fight for the possession of that which is so utterly unsympathetic? Why shed our blood-why curtail our enjoyment of those years which is all our certainty, for a portion of that earth which has no feelings for us, which ultimately folds us in its torpid arms, burying us in its cold darkness, and, as if endowed only for that purpose with life, devouring and assimilating, until these goodly frames of ours become but a part of the universal materialism?

I wandered along by the banks of the Alma, surveying the spectacle of a field of battle the day after a victory. Along the French position the wounded men had been removed, and none but corpses lay on the ground. The scene was melancholy, but not horrible, for the calm of the eternal world was on every countenance, giving to the face of the common soldier an air of dignity. But as I proceeded on my walk, I regret to say another scene met my eyes. The wounded of the English had been left all night on the field of battle, and the surgeons were busy operating. I turned away in sickening horror, and rejoined the French

camp.

Here most of the soldiers were awake, conversing by their fires. The French gaiety was even already regaining its ascendancy, although full in their view lay about five hundred corpses, Frenchmen and Russians, and a fatigue party were digging a trench to bury them.

I joined my regiment, and was glad to find most of my temporary messmates gathered round their camp-kettle; but I missed my earliest friend, the sous-lieutenant. On inquiry, I ascertained he had been wounded, and as I really entertained a friendship for the frank and gallant young Frenchman, I immediately proceeded to the quarter where the wounded had been carried to. This was to our rear, and close to the shore, so as to facilitate their transfer to the ships.

As I came nearer I could hear the shrieks of those on whom the surgeons were operating proceeding from nine or ten tents, and again my courage nearly failed me; but I persevered, and after witnessing an amount of suffering, the recollection even of which is painful, I found out my friend. A ball had gone through his shoulder-blade, and his case was critical.

CONTINENTAL COMPLICATIONS.

THE present state of affairs on the Continent is so disquieting, while there is such slight prospect of a peaceable issue to all the questions now agitating European diplomacy, that we consider it will not be superfluous on our part to give a comprehensive view of the situation, and the conclusions to which it necessarily compels us to arrive. The temper of the British nation has been so irritated during the last few weeks that it behoves every man to do all in his power to remove any misunderstandings which might serve to precipitate events.

How, then, do matters stand between England and France? We have sundry causes of aggrievance against his imperial majesty: First, his support of the Spaniards in their unjust attack on Morocco; next, his sudden appreciation of the Isthmus of Suez Canal, and his apparent determination to carry the scheme through, coûte que coûte; lastly, the permission he has too long granted his publicists to shower abuse on England and her institutions. More remote causes of grievance are the efforts he is making to cope with our fleet, and the pertinacity with which he has founded naval and military establishments in the vicinity of our most flourishing colonies. All these causes combined are calculated to excite alarm among the English, as they evidence some foregone conclusion; and the cry of invasion, which has been raised through the length and breadth of the country, is our indignant protest.

On the other hand, the French, with some show of plausibility, allege that we are offering an insult to their fidelity by raising rifle volunteer corps; the great body of the French nation is horrified at the thought of a war with England, and notices with deep anxiety the provocations offered by English journals. The advocates of peace among our allies, therefore, have generally spread a report that England is preparing to invade France; for, in no other way, can they account for the energy we are displaying in our armaments. With such misunderstandings existing on either side the Channel, it is not surprising that an uneasy feeling should have been aroused, which the Emperor of the French alone has it in his power to allay; but which, for some inscrutable purposes of his own, he appears desirous to fan into a flame. Not that the blame exclusively attaches to him; we have, unfortunately, among ourselves reckless prompters to war, whose counsels have already produced most deleterious effects, and who sedulously comment on any suspicious movement in France, as confirming their own previsions of an impending invasion of England.

But in one matter we throw undivided blame on the Emperor of the French, in that he commenced that ill-omened war with Austria, which is the final cause of the present agitation. Not only did he alienate the friends of his past policy in England, by declaring a war on untenable grounds, but no sooner had the nation at large begun to be conciliated by his successes, and to hope that the liberation of Italy was really the object of the war, than he frustrated those hopes by patching up the peace of Villafranca. It was at once found that the pretexts put forward for the war, the boasted enfranchisement of Italy from the Alps to the

Adriatic, were futilised, and that the emperor sought, by a series of victories, to recover his waning popularity. We are well aware of the difficulties that beset an emperor who stands at the head of six hundred thousand men, all panting for war, as a chance for promotion; but we cannot hide from ourselves the fact, that the same causes which brought on the Italian war may yet be applicable to ourselves. We feel intuitively that a standing army of such enormous dimensions must ever be a menace to the tranquillity of Europe, and, consequently, all the measures we take in self-defence are quite justifiable.

Under these circumstances it is deeply to be regretted that the Emperor Napoleon, throwing overboard his past frank and honest behaviour towards England, is striving to keep up the irritation in various quarters. Not the least dangerous of these is the support, more or less veiled, which he has given to Spain, in her preposterous claims on the government of Morocco. Were it that Spain merely desired to put down the Riff pirates, such a measure would be hailed with delight by the whole civilised world; but there is too good reason for belief that she designs to build on the African shore a first-class fortress, intended to hold Gibraltar in check. The dignified protest the Moorish government have handed in to the representatives of foreign powers residing at Tangiers shows in a strong light the frivolous pretences a nation can employ when determined on committing wrong. The provocation Spain received was the demolition of the posts of limitation between the territory of the two countries by a semi-independent tribe of Arabs. Owing to the death of the Sultan of Morocco, his government were for the moment powerless to offer reparation; but so soon as tranquillity was restored, they did all in their power to heal the breach, and by a fatal weakness conceded the first demand made by the Spanish chargé d'affaires, that public buildings might be erected in the camp of Ceuta. It is only the first step that costs anything, and hence it is not surprising to find the Spaniards increasing their demands, and requiring possession of the heights necessary for the defence of Ceuta. Even when this demand was acceded to, another pretension was brought forward-the possession of a vast territory, which the Moorish government would not surrender. From this moment all relations ceased between the two countries, and war was declared by Spain.

During this time the British government had taken the alarm, and urged Spain formally to promise that she would not permanently occupy any point the possession of which might obtain for Spain a power dangerous to the free navigation of the Mediterranean. The diplomatic correspondence between the two countries has been published, and only serves to render the darkness more obscure. Spain is trying every shift to escape giving such a pledge, while Lord John Russell is apparently so proud of his diplomatic skill, that his letters are as difficult to understand as a page of hieroglyphics-only the initiated can decipher their involved meaning. Still there is sufficient evidence that Spain is assured of powerful support in some quarter, else she would not dare to play fast and loose with England. The simultaneous attack of French troops on the other side of Morocco also leads to the supposition of a prearranged plan of operations between the two powers.

Equally unsatisfactory are the relations existing between the English

and French governments as to the final solution of the Italian difficulty. During the last two months intrigues have been going on (the true history of which will never be known) that put to the blush the far-famed diplomacy of a Nesselrode. Practical solutions have been offered several times, but the Emperor of the French has compelled them all to be declinedwith what purpose time alone can prove. Still we cannot help thinking that all these obstacles are purposely raised in order to force on the Italians a French prince as their regent. The election of Prince Carignan was a practical and sensible step, but he was forced to decline it, and even when he proposed Buoncompagni as his substitute, such a measure did not please the French emperor. The retirement of Garibaldi from the command of the national army is a masterpiece of strategy, for it now throws the onus of any excesses on the Emperor of the French, for he has doggedly resisted all attempts at compromise, and has disheartened all the popular leaders. How much the Italian cause has gained in the eyes of the nation will be seen from the fact that the most Conservative of our peers has openly espoused the cause of the patriot chief. Perhaps, however, this may have been done as much for the sake of annoying Louis Napoleon as in any belief that the Italian cause can eventually triumph.

The Emperor of the French still adheres to his favourite notion of an Italian Confederation, which we have on several occasions proved, we trust conclusively, to be an impossibility. Possessing no cohesiveness, such a measure would pave the way for internal dissensions, and, perhaps, a permanent occupation of Italy by foreign troops. Nor can we implicitly accept the excuse the emperor put forward for blighting the hopes of the Italians, at a moment when they seemed ripe for fruition. We give the Emperor of the French credit for far too much good sense not to have foreseen that his interference would arouse a flame throughout Germany, and that the people on whom the memory of his uncle's invasions lay like a nightmare would at once take up arms in self-defence on the suspicion that the nephew of his uncle was about to march along the same hollow path of glory. We must, therefore, seek other motives for his conduct, and while not leaving out of sight the necessity he felt for occupying his army, we must attribute his invasion of Italy to some other motive than the one alleged. We cannot refrain from the conclusion that he designed to perpetuate French influence in Central Italy by a member of his house being appointed to the vacant throne. Foiled in his expectations, he has striven to render the Italians discontented, and hoped that popular excesses would justify his interference. How nearly this scheme succeeded may be seen in the deplorable outbreak at Parma, which was, however, at once checked by the energy of the dictator Farini. But all was not lost, so long as Garibaldi remained with his army on the Romagnolese frontier, for a collision might easily occur with the Papal troops. But this last hope has now faded away by the voluntary retirement of Garibaldi; and the national army, deprived of its head, must perforce remain in tranquillity. The Emperor of the French has played a very intricate game of chess, and his adversary has mated him by the sacrifice of a piece.

In one way, we apprehend, the Italian question could be most satisfactorily solved, and that would be by leaving them to work out their own redemption. But they have just reason for exclaiming, "Save us