Tam event to which the mass of the week's correspondence
from the Crimea relates is that storm which raged over the Black Sea
and its coasts on the 14th November. It tore down the veil of winter, and suddenly exposed to sight what our camps and navies might have to endure throughout the inclement season. However it may be practicable, ultimately, to reduce the Czar of Rus sia, it is not safe to slight the powers of nature ; and the loss that we have sustained, with sufferings inflicted upon our sailors and soldiers, is the retribution for any neglect of which we may have been guilty. The scene must have been terrible. With some hundred ships or more, many of them vessels of the largest size and power for war, lying off the indented promontory of the Crimea, the storm suddenly swept from the opposite side of the sea ; and its fiercest violence, though not unpreceded by angry signs, broke upon them in the middle of the night. Soon they were straining upon their anchors, driving upon a lee-shore, stranded, or jostling each other in mutual wreck. Officers and men in teo ,many cases vainly used every art and ex ertion of Pie maHnektglisar up against the power of the elements. The tumult and anxiety Of that night can well be imagined by all who have known what it is to confront the storm, when the voice of the commander is driven down his throat by the salt wind, and the triumph of naval architecture drifts like a log upon the water, as helpless as the smallest craft. Dawn exposed the fury of the tempest, in the destruction that it had already consummated; and then the shipwrecked sailors and soldiers found a new enemy,—the Russians flocked to the shore, first enticing the men to go into captivity, and then, that having failed, firing upon the helpless as they clung to the wrecks ! Although of course less powerful on shore, the storm inflicted real suffering upon the camp. Tents were overthrown, in some cases swept away, in a climate where the cold has already had its victims. Shelter was torn from the men, and the camp was next day "a sea of mud "—the sea itself a field of wreck, beneath which lay the comforts intended for the soldiers in their winter sojourn. A million of money, it is calculated, France and England have each lost, besides scores of ships, cargoes of winter clothing, provisions, ammunition, and many valuable lives. The disaster, however, is endured as an inevitable visitation of Providence ; and it has not interrupted the progress of the siege or its works. These have continued, notwithstanding the in creased difficulties brought on by the season, notwithstanding the report of the telegraph that they had been suspended. Russian advices down to the 27th acknowledge that the trenches make perceptible progress ; the bombardment is maintained ; and a sortie of the Russians,—sorties being now rare and comparatively languid,—resulted in the capture of a nine-gun battery, or of two seven-gun batteries, that must have been among their advanced works. Fighting, therefore, against discomfort and loss, and new forms of death in the inclemency of the season, our men are still sustained by their own noble spirit, and by the sense that they are not forgotten at home. Reinforcements continue to arrive constant ly, already to the extent, it has been calculated, of 15,000 on our
aide within the past month, and on the French side still more largely; while reinforcements scarcely less welcome continue to
be landed in the form of artillery and ammunition. Thus it may be said, that the weakest point of time for our forces was the day when they won the battle of Inkerman.
