Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 8.djvu/198

 166 THE APKIL BOMBARDMENT. ijhap. struck down, and it seemed for a while that he _ ' had received his death.* In the battery, destruction was rife. Shells from time to time dropped down and burst upon the tops of the magazines, blowing up in one in- stance a number of powder-boxes ; in another, tearing bodily off, and carrying away with its blast so much of the all-precious roof as to be choking an embrasure, and silencing its over- whelmed gun under the weight of the ruins. Gunners seeing such incidents might well think perhaps for a moment of the one least beloved form of danger ; but happily from the first to the last, there was no magazine that wholly gave way under either the blows of the round-shot, or the bursting of shells on its top. Elsewhere, however, the havoc had been in- creasing from minute to minute during a period of several hours ; and at length a time came when nearly the whole of the parapet had been torn in- to ruins. The battery, wrote Mr De Vine,t was ' almost demolished.' ' My poor little battery/ wrote Oldershaw, 'was literally swept away.' J The men, I believe, would have judged it, as through Graham's greatcoat, and caused it to strike at his heart. It smashed a watch which was in his waistcoat-pocket. f With respect to whom, see ante, p. 163, and Note ( 9 ) in the Appendix. t And, hear the Engineers who looked at the havoc scien- tifically, and had to repair it: 'The embrasures and magazine, ' and the battery generally, are much cut up by the enemy's ' shot and shell.' — Journal Royal Engineers, vol. ii. p. 138, April 13th. 'It' [the No. VII. on 13th April] 'was moreover
 * The mass of stone was hurled with a force which drove it