SEBASTOPOL, THE "SICK" CITY.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume XIV, Issue 73, 8 December 1855, Page 3

SEBASTOPOL, THE "SICK" CITY.

[From Lloyd's NeiosJ] Despite of" our late repulse, the work goes on well. Sebastopol will be. after all, neither a Saragossa nor a Jerusalem. We, at first, too sanguinely hoped the place would prove a Jericho, and that its walls would fall flat at our feet at the first sound of our trumpets. But the age of miracles has passed. Lord Raglan was no Joshua, and the Tchernaya was much more difficult to pass over than the Red Sea. Finding it no Jericho, we, like all sanguine people, ran madly enough from black to white, and were sure it would be a Troy, aod began to think of advertising for a Homer, blind or purblind, or even with spectacles. Sebastopol may soon be ours, with not much greater loss of men than attended the storming of Badajoz or Cuidad Rodrigo; and Babylon the great is fallen— fallen. Already milennial prophets are preparing to prove that Nicholas was Apollyon, and Menschikoff Abaddon; that Gog and Magog are Russia and Prussia; and that the number of the Beast contains the letters of the word Sebastopol, if you drop the b and soften the t, elide the 1 and allow for the s. Already the bear's claws are clipped, his skin toru, and his paws a little bitten. Perhaps we tore his skin a little ton soon ; hut now bur scalping knifo is dangerously near bis throat. Hb will remember the two bull dogs that flew at him, and creep back sullen and sore — To his frozen den, To bully the Pole, and worry the Circassian. The lion and the leopard have left their bloody foot-prints on the snow, and those foot-prints will be an eternal barrier and a boundary line between liberty and despotism, slave and free, Turk and Tartar. " The elephant, with one leg m a morass," says a Hindoo proverb, " may be slain by the prowling jackal]." May we not apply this to the huge leviathan that, wallowing m the Baltic, has so long laughed and derided our stones, our arrows, and our darts? This huge colossus of snow and earth has fallen, like that of iron and clay, though it had the North Pole at its back, and many nations chained at its feet. Already the Russian flotilla has fled before onr gun boats like a flock of laiko before a hawk. We have burnt enough corn to have driven Mark-lane into a delirium : a whole sea has yielded to uh on ihe first reverberation of our cannon. Their fleet seems to lay it down as an axiom that no Russian vessel can resist an English. Circassia is all but liberated, Turkey is safe and invigorated, and India out of danger. Every safe blow we strike tends to keep Prussia quiet, and Austria at least neutral. "At home the war has not been without its advantages; it has rummaged out old abuses; it promises to be an epoch m the history of the British army. The man who does the work, who dares and buffers, seems actually likely at last to obtain some reward, and at least U hearing. In old times he was ijeneTall) looked upon by the most competent military authorities as a creature of clay, destined by certain discipline to be transmuted into an iron automaton, with a heart of stone, the better to resiht the action of lead and steel. The "dogs of war" was then no poetical image ; they were treated as beasts, lashed as beasts, and then sneered 8t because they sometimes also became as swine. The nine-tails were their twelve apostles, the drum-head their tribunal, the provost-marshal their gravel-blind justice. Not for them even a lying epitaph or a paltry line m one day's Gazette. General Fitznoodle had his name there misspelt. Poodle and his friend were satisfied with his short immortality; but Private Snobbs was included m the ''20,000 rank and file killed and missing." Grateful country ! Honourable thirßt for glory I This is- the way Wellingtons are manufactured; or rather, m spite of this, they contrive to appear.