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of war, a fact Damien had long grown used to but still bitterly resented. He himself had no permanent ties to either France or England, but most of the men had wives and families for which this campaign would bring nothing but grief and hardship.
    “Lord Cross!” One of the sailors shouted for Damien’s attention, hands cupped to his mouth from the crow’s nest. “Brady is looking for you.”
    Nodding his understanding, Damien hastened through the bustle above deck to Admiral Brady’s side, where the Irishman was squinting through a spyglass at the massive sea walls surrounding Sevastopol.
    “Where should we point our cannon? It all looks a lost cause to me.”
    Damien scanned the seemingly impenetrable walls, now swarming with men firing haphazardly out at the Constant Star , though she was still out of range.
    “Come round to the left; I recall there’s old damage from previous wars that has yet to be repaired.”
    Admiral Brady did as advised and soon they could make out faint chinks in the stone where a hasty patch had been made.
    “Bless ye, my lord,” Brady cried, “we’ll take her yet.” The admiral hollered orders at his men again, and black smoke belched from the ship’s belly. Damien soberly watched several distant soldiers on the walls of Sevastopol hurtle to their deaths.
    In his excitement, Brady’s voice took on a stronger, more pronounced accent. “We’ll hit again in the same spot and rub them right sore. See if that bloody czar doesn’t wet his trews to be staring down our cannon now.”
    Damien made no comment, but privately he thought that if Czar Nicholas bothered to be on the front with his men, which was unlikely, he would surely not gamble his life peering out over the walls at one ship among many.
    “They’ll curse us now,” Brady shouted, his ruddy face taking on a sheen of pure devilish glee as the guns roared again. But during the fighting they had drifted closer in, and were near enough to the city now that the Russians were finally able to hurl back fire of their own.
    Just to Damien’s left a soldier took a ball in his chest and fell screaming to the deck. As he ducked and crawled to the man, he heard more shot whistling overhead, and the curses and cries of other men randomly struck.
    “Renault, can you hear me?” Damien shouted over the fracas as he looked down into the agonized face of a fellow French officer who had served with him in Algeria.
    “Must you shout at a dying man? Sweet Jesu, I had enough of that in Constantine.” Though he weakly joked, blood bubbled from Jacques Renault’s lips, and Damien ground his own teeth in mute despair.
    “I’ll find the ship’s surgeon. You must hold on, man!”
    But in the next few minutes as Damien’s eyes desperately sought the bloodied decks for any sign of the physician Lindley, he also knew with gut-wrenching certainty that it was too late for his friend. In his growing delirium, Jacques lapsed into French and muttered longingly of Paris and her pleasures. Damien could only murmur in commiseration with the dying man until at last Renault was silent and still.
    Damien bowed his head to the deck and mourned for a friend who had joined him eagerly in this latest campaign. Like all the others aboard ship, he was to stare Lord Death in the face many more times that day, but it never got any easier, and he only grew more hardened as the Black Sea quickly turned to red.
     
    W HAT BEGAN AS A straightforward intervention to check Russia’s ambitions in the Mediterranean soon deteriorated into a vicious, bloody battle that saw thousands of unnecessary deaths on each side.
    Getting supplies overland was all but impossible, and when Damien and the other men were at last able to go ashore, they found fellow ground forces already covered with chilblains and frostbite, their boots literally worn off their feet, but no replacements to be found. Unused to the brutality of a Crimean winter, many European soldiers were losing limbs