Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 9.djvu/151

 C ATTAIN WOLSELEY. 121 world knows) had a life of warlike -lory before chap. him. Though seeming much younger, he was really twenty-one years of age. Twenty-one years of age, yet already distinguished for the number and the brilliancy of his warlike services, Captain captain, — then Lieutenant — Wolseley had come out to viscount the Crimea in the midst of the terrible winter, g.c.b. Within a few days from the time of his landing, he had courted hardship and work by volunteer- ing to serve as an engineer in the trenches; and it is still as an acting engineer that we first see him busied in this evening of the 7th of June. From a work — discontinued soon afterwards — on a part of the ground further east he was sum- moned to replace an engineer officer who had been killed at the Quarries; and thenceforth till the morning hour which found him exchanging all other toil for the toil of a desperate fight, he shared in the strenuous efforts by which our people were striving to connect the works newly captured with Egerton's Pit, and to form, before break of day, what, however imperfect, might prove to be a tenable lodgment. The loss of blood caused by a wound received at an earlier hour did not slacken his powerful energies ; and, although he was destined to touch — was destined even to pass — the actual physical limit, of what angry Nature allows in the way of bodily effort, we shall not see him robbed of his strength by either the work or the righting he chose to go through till the object of his toil had been reached and the dillicult victory won.