BEFORE SEBASTOPOL.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 29 May 1914, Page 7

BEFORE SEBASTOPOL.

"For th!ree weeks we were practically on duty all the time — eighteen hours a day in the trenches and six out—and we should have been better off if we'd been in the trenches all the time," said the Crimean veteran, Sergt. t James Gilleland, of tfre Royal Artillery, in a talk with the "Merthyr Express" of his life during the war with Russia 50 odd years ago. He 'listed in th)e 'forties, and was sent with his regiment to the West Indies, 1 where he had his first baptism of fire in a little insurrection that broke out at Trinidad. He fell ill about this time and the doctor only gave him three months to live. He is living to-day at 93, although he's been on the point of death "many a time since then." The battles of Alma, Inkerman, and Balaclava had been fought before Sergt. Gilleland went out to the Crimea, but he took part in the siege of Sebastopol, and graphically recalls the fighting that took place before the storming of that place. The privations the soldiers suffered, he says, were terrible. They had no fires to cook what food they did manage to get—and he was taken ill the night before thfe general attack. He'd taken a dose of poison in mistake for medicine ; but he wanted to be in at the death, so to speak, and he asV.ed that his name should be struck- off the sick list. The doctor wouldn't hear of it, hut Gilleland managed to prevail on an orderly, who put his own name i down instead. I "We marched out at one in the morning," the old man said . . "the French were on the right, the British on the left. . . . Then —the forlorn hope. . . . Once my officer caught me ducking to escape a cannon ball, and he said he'd make a prisoner of me if I did it again." He completed his twenty-one years' service in 1863. Then for nearly 20 years he was attached to the Royal Carmarthen Artillery Militia—his record standing in all at forty years, nine months, eleven flays. He possesses four medals and two clasps.