II RUSSIAN INFLUENCE FOR GOOD 31 



destroying all this. Though the Czar may be a great despot, yet 

 I think, throughout this semi-barbarous country, Russian influence 

 is for good, and unless we can supply a better (which the Turkish 

 influence certainly is not) it is a pity to destroy it. ... I am 

 your very aff'ectionate son, William Henry Flower. 



Camp above Sebastopol, 

 December i, 1854. 



Dear Father — Your letter of October 29 arrived only the 

 day before yesterday. It was a very great pleasure to me to hear 

 from you. I know that you have so many other things to do that 

 you cannot often spare time to write, but the Mother is such an 

 excellent correspondent that her letters seem to come from you 

 both. I rejoice to hear of your being all well and of all you 

 say, except your constant anxiety about me ; the thought of that 

 amid all the hardships, I may say miseries, of this life, is the 

 only one that really troubles me ; I want to think of you always 

 happy and cheerful and comfortable, but then I know and 

 picture to myself the "all-absorbing anxiety" and alarm which 

 prevents this, and of which / alone am the cause, and I feel 

 myself a culprit. Strange that your trouble should be me out 

 here and mine be you at home ; but so I suppose it is with all 

 similarly circumstanced. I often think now of your backwoods 

 life and the roughs and privations you must have gone through, 

 to which, I daresay, these are trifles, but still there are hardish 

 times on the heights above Sebastopol, better to look back upon 

 than to have about one ; still I look steadily forward with perfect 

 confidence to scrambling out of them and lighting on my legs 

 safe and sound again, whatever may become of the rest, for we 

 seem to be in a precious mess somehow or other. 



War is not all such plain-sailing work as it seemed at the 

 outset ; at all events it is a game at which two can play, as the 

 Russians have shown. Our position here seems daily becoming 

 more critical, not that it seems probable that the enemy can 

 ever drive us out of it, as its natural and artificial strength seems 

 capable of resisting any attack, but the diificulty of keeping men 

 aUve and in working order when they are surrounded by every 



