On August 30th 1854 four or five hundred vessels in which the three Armies were embarked had steamed from Varna Bay towards Sebastopol.

Even when some sixty-four thousand men were put ashore on the Crimea, life in the fortress went on as before. The stage coaches still rattled into the town and the Russians watched the invaders, confident that they were inviolable.

On September 20th, the fashionable Society from Sebastopol were seated on Telegraph Hill on tiers of seats arranged as if for a race meeting.

Equipped with hampers, opera glasses and sunshades they were waiting to applaud the annihilation of the British Regiments under Lord Raglan’s command, who, with the French and Turks on their right, were trying to force the passage of the river Alma.

The battle was fierce and bloody, with terrible casualties on both sides, until the Russians ‘bolted with all haste’.

The following day the little town and garrison of Balaclava found that an enormous number of allied troops were encircling them by land and warships were closing in from the sea.

On the hills above Balaclava the allies had begun to set up the tents and marquees of their huge encampment, and through this Port the invading British and Turkish forces of fifty thousand men had to be supplied.

On either side of the harbour basin the ships were being moored with their sterns to the shore leaving a central strip of water between the two rows so narrow that, although a ship might sail down it, it was quite impossible to turn the vessel round.

It was only too late that the Commanders discovered that the water was so deep that the ships could scarcely find holding-ground for their anchors even close to the shore and, when there was an inshore wind, they were in danger of being driven upon the rocks.

But on that September day the sea was peaceful and Balaclava seemed a pleasant place to be in.

No one, least of all the inhabitants of the Crimea itself, guessed that the siege of Sebastopol would continue long after the first snows had arrived at the end of October and until the end of the following year.

It had been Hamid who first realised the danger when the advancing troops began to appear.

With two other faithful servants he placed Yamina’s father on a stretcher and carried him away from the house just before it was taken over by the Military to become the headquarters of a senior British Officer.

Creeping through the gardens, with Yamina walking beside her father, they hid in a fisherman’s hut.

Hamid had left them and gone to find out if there was any chance of escape for them, while Yamina felt despairingly that it was only a question of time before they were discovered and taken prisoner.