Ruined Pompeii is in good condition compared to Sebastopol.  Here, you may look in whatsoever direction you please, and your eye encounters scarcely any thing but ruin, ruin, ruin!—­fragments of houses, crumbled walls, torn and ragged hills, devastation every where!  It is as if a mighty earthquake had spent all its terrible forces upon this one little spot.  For eighteen long months the storms of war beat upon the helpless town, and left it at last the saddest wreck that ever the sun has looked upon.  Not one solitary house escaped unscathed—­not one remained habitable, even.  Such utter and complete ruin one could hardly conceive of.  The houses had all been solid, dressed stone structures; most of them were ploughed through and through by cannon balls—­unroofed and sliced down from eaves to foundation—­and now a row of them, half a mile long, looks merely like an endless procession of battered chimneys.  No semblance of a house remains in such as these.  Some of the larger buildings had corners knocked off; pillars cut in two; cornices smashed; holes driven straight through the walls.  Many of these holes are as round and as cleanly cut as if they had been made with an auger.  Others are half pierced through, and the clean impression is there in the rock, as smooth and as shapely as if it were done in putty.  Here and there a ball still sticks in a wall, and from it iron tears trickle down and discolor the stone.

The battle-fields were pretty close together.  The Malakoff tower is on a hill which is right in the edge of the town.  The Redan was within rifle-shot of the Malakoff; Inkerman was a mile away; and Balaklava removed but an hour’s ride.  The French trenches, by which they approached and invested the Malakoff were carried so close under its sloping sides that one might have stood by the Russian guns and tossed a stone into them.  Repeatedly, during three terrible days, they swarmed up the little Malakoff hill, and were beaten back with terrible slaughter.  Finally, they captured the place, and drove the Russians out, who then tried to retreat into the town, but the English had taken the Redan, and shut them off with a wall of flame; there was nothing for them to do but go back and retake the Malakoff or die under its guns.  They did go back; they took the Malakoff and retook it two or three times, but their desperate valor could not avail, and they had to give up at last.

These fearful fields, where such tempests of death used to rage, are peaceful enough now; no sound is heard, hardly a living thing moves about them, they are lonely and silent—­their desolation is complete.