—— iia ated ~ | ane No. Pee: Clase 2 This book can be retained............2-....... weeks. Fine for retaining over... Zin... SS Oe eee weeks, five cents per week. bute f | COMPENSATION _ must be made for all books lost or injured, except for ordinary wear, before others volumes can be drawn | In exchange’ liken _—, i Yea , YOM; YY, MY) ALEXANDER WILLIAM KINGLAKE. THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA: ITS ORIGIN, AN ACCOUNT OF ITS PROGRESS DOWN TO THE DEATH OF LORD RAGLAN. BY ALEXANDER WILLIAM KINGLAKE. VOLUME I. NEWS ¥ ORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE, 1875. Ob OE ED x x ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION. In this Edition many notes have been added. The spell- ing of the names of several English officers, and of one for- eigner, has been corrected. Nota word has been withdrawn from the text, and not a word has been added to it. Of the notes, there are some few which correct or quali- fy the words of the text. Fora book which chances to be a subject of controversy, this way of setting right all mis- takes is, I think, the fairest and best. Far from hiding the mended spot, it makes the newly-found truth more: con- spicuous than it would have been if it had been allowed to glide quietly into the text. For example: In one of the lists of wounded officers, I or my printers chanced to leave out the name of Colonel Smith. Upon the omission be- coming known to me, I attached to the passage a mark of reference, which seizes the eye of the reader and carries ~ him to the foot of the page, where instantly he sees it stated that Colonel Smith was one of the wounded. In this way the omitted fact is presented to the reader more effectually than it would have been if the word ‘Smith’ had been blended with the text, standing there with thirteen other names. But also, by this method, I acknowledge and publicly record against myself every single inaccuracy, however minute and trivial, which had struck me as requiring cor- rection when last I went through the book. Whether I could have been so venturesome as to do thus, if the emen- dations required had been many and important, E will not undertake to say. As itis, I am enabled to take this meth- 944 K53 v1 ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION. od of courting any criticism which Lge be founded upon my confessions of error. The plan, therefore, is a fair one; but it is also, I think, very needful to adopt it, and I will aay why. The book is anderpaiiy discussion ; and in order that the conflict it raises may be honestly waged, it seems right to take care that the subject of dispute shall not be a shift- ing thing—a thing shifting this way and that under stress of public scrutiny. Again, there is a charge now pending. Rightly or wrong- ly, the accusers say that in public journals—in journals’ still sold under honorable titles—the writers are now and ° then suffered to misstate the tenor of books; and it seems that the printed accounts which have been given of tliis work are put forward as some of the instances in which misdescription has occurred. I have not myself taken the pains which would warrant me in declaring a resemblance, or a want of resemblance, between the book and its like- nesses; but knowing that the charge has been brought, I see it to be right that all those who are called upon to judge the question should have before their eyes the very text of a book which is the subject of the alleged misde-’ scriptions—the very text with all its sins and wickedness- es, not having one single word added, nor one single word withdtd wh: But, besides his reasons far the course he is taking, a man may have his motive; and I acknowledge that, with me, a chief motive for déclining to alter the text is this — I wish to keep a check ‘upon those who might like to be able to say that I had materially altered the book. If any body shall try to say such a thing in defiance of the plan T have adopted, he will find himself painfully tethered ; for, the words of the text standing fast, he will be unable torange beyond the circle of those little matters—matters chiefly minute, and of detail—which are dealt with in a few cor- rective foot-notes. Hither he must say what is not true under circumstances which make his exposure a simple ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION. Vil task, or else he will have to browse upon such scant herb- age as is afforded by notes of this sort:—‘No [not a ‘squadron|; only one troop.’ ‘No [not sixty years old]; ‘only sixty-four.’ ‘Here the words ‘ Laurence and” ‘should be inserted.’ ‘Instead of “a wing,” read “the ‘“whole.”’ ‘The first of the commentators who found him- self checked in this way was thrown into so angry a state, that when I stood observing his struggles, I was glad to think of the prudence which had led me to keep him tied up. IT said just now that some of the writings which purport- ed to give the tenor of these volumes had been put forward as instances of unfaithful description. I have not enabled myself to assist this inquiry by comparing the accounts of things contained in the book with the book itself; and it ‘is not desirable for me to do so, because an author can hardly expect to be looked upon as a good judge of what is, or is not, an honest abridgment or statement of his words; but I may be allowed to adduce two curious in- stances of the errors into which men may be led by looking to the accounts which have been given of a book instead of to the book itself. On the 15th of February, a stranger, who had been pres- ent at the Battle of the Alma, addressed to me a letter from a distant foreign station, which began thus: ‘Sir,—It has ‘not been yet my good fortune to see a copy of your re- ‘cent . .. work, the “ Invasion of the Crimea,” but a critique ‘upon it in the’ (here the writer of the letter gives the name of his newspaper) ‘ of the 27th of January last, purporting ‘to give an outline of some parts of the narrative, contains ‘an assertion, made with reference to a description of the ‘Battle of the Alma—viz., that under the fire sustained by ‘Lord Raglan’s Head-Quarter Staff, “not a man of it re- ‘ ceived a scratch,’—which I take to be incorrect.’ The writer proceeds to state, with admirable clearness, the circumstances which enabled him to speak as an eye- witness of what went on with the Head-Quarter Staff, and then says:—‘I presume to detail these particulars, in Vill ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION, ‘order to show, Sir, that having thus, like yourself, taken ‘part in, and been an eye-witness of, the movements of the ‘Staff on the memorable day referred to, I may venture to ‘point out how far the statement as to the Staff having ‘come out of it scathless seems to be inaccurate ;’ and the writer then proceeds to prove to me, with great clearness and perspicuity, that on the two spots of ground which he rightly and carefully describes, two officers of the Head- Quarter Staff'were. wounded. Supposing that his newspaper was guiding him faith- fully, well indeed might this critic remonstrate with me for the inaccuracy of which he had been led to suppose me guilty, because the Staff, so far from coming off scathless, had been more than decimated. ° When my correspondent at that foreign station shall see the book itself, he will- know that I disclose this fully, giving the names of the two wounded officers ; and, indeed, it would have been strange if I had omitted to do so, for Leslie and Weare, the two Staff officers wounded, were both of them struck down on the part of the field where I was, and one of them fell with- in a few paces of me. Thus, then, it appears that even a careful and accurate man wie has to put up with his newspaper’s account of a book, at a time when he remains debarred from access to the book itself, is so misled by this method of seeking for the real purport of a volume that he thinks it is his duty to address the author with a view to correct a gross error— a gross error not existing in the book itself, but appearing to do so in the mind of one who receives his account of it from a newspaper. On the 18th of March last, another letter was written, which I doubt not to be also an instance of the effect pro- duced upona mind of fair intelligence by accounts purport- ing to give the tenor of a book. When Captain Mends thought it his duty to address his letter to the newspaper about the buoy, he introduced the subject by writing, and suffering to be printed and published, the following words: ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION. 1x ‘As I have been referred to by many as to the truth of ‘Mr. Kinglake’s statement in his “Invasion of the Cri- ‘* mea,” “that the landing of our army at Old Fort was ‘“ materially delayed by the willful displacement of a buoy ‘by the French,” I feel called upon in justice,’ ete. Now Captain Mends not only made that statement, but suffered it to be printed in the newspaper with inverted commas, ex- actly as given above. Well, those words are not in the book. Not only is there no such passage in the book— not only is there no assertion that ‘ material delay was oc- ‘casioned by the willful displacement of the buoy by the ‘French’—but the book actually makes light of the delay, saying that there was ‘much less delay, and much less ‘confusion, than might have been expected ;’ and, far from undertaking to assert that the displacement of the buoy was willful, it goes out of its way to suggest that one of: the hypotheses which would account for the displacement was ‘sheer mistake.’ I can not doubt that Captain Mends intended to quote accurately ; and I account for his mis: take by supposing that, instead of copying from the book itself he must have been induced to give what purported to be a quotation, by taking his words from one of those print- ed representations of the contents of the book which were current at the time when he wrote his letter to the news- paper. j I repeat that I have done nothing toward that collation of passages which is necessary for determining whether any given account of the tenor of the book is an account given in good faith; but it struck me that the above two instances of men who trusted to printed versions of the contents of the book, instead of to the book itself, might possibly help the inquiry, and could hardly fail to serve as wholesome examples. In the general controversy which the book has engen- dered I am not taking part,’ but having in my hands 1 And I haye no present intention of doing so; but when I giye my A2 x ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION, large means of proof and disproof, I ought, of course, to aid toward the attainment of right conclusions upon disputed matters of fact; and it is only with that view that Iam now going to speak—not of the nature and spirit, but—ofthe mere abundance of the scrutiny which the book has undergone. The book treated of such subjects, and of a time so little removed from the present, that there were great numbers of public men—ministers, diplomatists, and military and naval officers—who were not only likely to have strong motives for narrowly scrutinizing the accuracy of the nar- rative, but were able to speak upon some or one of the sub- jects it touches with the authority of partakers or eye-wit- nesses. ‘Thence, as was to be expected, there were ad- dressed to me a quantity of communications, some personal, and some by letter. In these communications, the speak- ers and writers pointed out what they deemed to be errors or omissions, In almost every instance they made their representations with great precision, and with a strikingly rigid adherence to the subject-matter.’ War besides the authoritative criticism of those numbers of men who had been actors in the scenes described, there was the criticism of the periodical press. This was applied to the book, both at home and abroad; and so diligently, that already the works of the commentators must be many times greater in bulk than the original book. Of the pub- lications which yielded these floods of comment, there were long-withheld Preface I shall say why I resolved to tell aloud ‘the transac- ‘tions which brought onthe war.’ The Preface, I think, will be of the same purport as the one I was preparing when I determined that I would let the book appear without covering it by any prefatory statement, except what was needed for showing ‘ the sources of the narrative,’ _ 1 T include in this category of communications from individuals some few which also appeared in print; as, for instance, one about the age of Sir George Brown, and the way he carried his plumes—another about the ex- act rank with which Colonel Codrington went out—and one or two more of a less important kind; but I do so rightly, because these communications had reached me before the time when they got published. I also include in this category the communication from Colonel Norcott, because, though his letter appeared in a newspaper, it was a letter addressed to me. ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION. xi some whose conductors trusted mainly to public sources for the information on which they rested, but there were other conductors of reviews and newspapers who placed themselves under the guidance of some public man—some minister, some soldier, some sailor—who had been what is called ‘an actor in the scene.’ The criticism resulting from this last method was of a composite sort, for it more or less covertly uttered the notions of some public man whose reputation was at stake, but expressed them in the name of the journal through whom he addressed the public. From causes to which I need not advert, the commentaries were delivered, not only with great animation and zeal, but with a persistency not often applied to the criticism of one mere book. Diligence of the most varied kinds was brought to bear; for since the book involved politics as well as his- tory, it fairly enough became the subject—not merely of reviews, but also—of what they call ‘articles ;’ and seeing that it touched things abroad, correspondents employed by the conductors of newspapers in foreign capitals were en- couraged or suffered to remit their daily toil of gathering ‘news,’ and take part for a time with their colleagues at home in finding something to say about this book.* Fi- nally, it was made to appear, that if an officer would sub- mit to the condition of writing to a newspaper, and would begin his letter with a criticism upon the book of a kind approved by the managers, he might append to his com- ments a narrative of his own achievements, with. the cer- tainty that his own account of his own deeds would be read in one day by thousands and thousands of people. It may be imagined that the immense body, both of au- thoritative and anonymous criticism, thus brought to bear upon one book, could hardly fail to show that mistakes had crept in here and there; but if any reader shall take the pains to separate from the bulk of the notes every sen- tence which puts right an-error, he will be able to judge and say whether the corrections are many and important, or whether they are scanty and slight. xi ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION. Be that as it may, I must state that, with the exceptions which I shall presently enumerate, I owe all these correc- tions to the public men and officers who have done me the honor to communicate with me either personally or by letter. For reasons of larger scope than those which only apply - to the questioned worth of a book, the public, I imagine, has an interest in knowing what impression has been made upon these volumes by the exertions of the periodical press. Certainly my own reading of the criticisms brought to bear on the book has been not only very imperfect, but has been conducted without method; and although I have taken other means besides my own scanty reading for learning what statements of mine upon matters of fact have been disputed in respectable publications, I can not be sure, nor even indeed imagine, that I have dealt with every contradiction upon matters of fact which has been taken in print to my statements. All I can say is, that when last I went through these volumes I did not know- ingly pass by any error; and it must be remembered that there is this safeguard—namely, that every public writer whose challenge upon a matter of fact I may have failed to notice, will not only. be able to exclaim against me for my neglect of his strictures, but will even be likely to do so, because it is according to nature that any critic who may have taken pains to give to a book this kind of antag- onistic assistance should be loth to see his industry wasted. Now, then, to speak of the corrections upon matters of fact which I owe to the periodical press. In writing a book of this kind, one naturally glances at many things which are not in strictness the subject of the History. Thus, before I came to the time when their actions brought them strictly within the range of this narrative, I glanced at the antecedent career of several public men, and in re- ferring to those ‘tidings from the Danube,’ which I spoke of as stirring the public mind in England, I suffered my- self to linger awhile on the ground whencé the tidings had ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION. xii come. Well, in the course of those retrospective glances, I treated Lord Stratford’s antecedent absence from Con- stantinople as lasting full double the number of months that it really did; I said that, in 1886, St. Arnaud entered for the third time into ‘the military profession,’ when I ought rather to have said that he entered for the third time ‘upon the career of an officer serving with troops;’ I spoke of Lieutenant Glyn and his seamen as coming up from the sea with some gunboats, whereas I ought to have said that the gunboats they used at Giurgevo were lying in the river beforehand; and finally, I spoke of General Airey as returning from Canada to England upon the death of his uncle, whereas I ought to have said that he came back some months before. These four mistakes were pointed out, the first three of them by respectable English journals, and the fourth by an American newspaper. So far as concerns my retrospective glances at things not falling within the strict limits of the History, these are, I think, all the corrections which I owe to the zeal of the press. Well, but what impression has public criticism made upon the rest of the book? What (properly) historical errors have owed their correction to the vigilance of the periodical press ? They are as follows:—‘Garan’ should be ‘Gagarin ;’ Captain ‘Schane’ should be Captain ‘ Schaw ;’ ‘ Luxmore’ should be ‘ Luxmoore ;’ ‘ Bisset’ should be ‘ Bissett ;’ ‘Wool- ‘combe’ should be ‘ Wollocombe ;’ ‘ Montagu’ should be ‘ Montague.” 1The press also suggested four perfectly just corrections in regard to the following matters:—The rank with which Colonel Codrington went out ; the wrongly-spelled name of ‘ Stacey ;’ the omission of Colonel Smith fibin the list of wounded; the misspelling which gave ‘Wardlow’ instead of ‘ Ward- ‘law ;’ and the error about Sir George Brown’s exact age, and the way he carried his plumes; but these corrections had been previously supplied to me by means of private communication, and it is for that reason that I do not place them in the above enumeration of the corrections which I owe to the periodical press. ; Xiv ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITLON.. For these corrections I am indebted to the conductors of) an eminent English newspaper.’ I will repeat that there may, and there must be, num- bers of printed challenges upon questions of fact with which I have not become acquainted; and there may be others which I have heard of and forgotten ; but the above, I believe, are the only corrections supplied ‘by the period- ical press which I have hitherto seen fit to adopt. What then did I do with all the rest of those charges of error in matter of fact which were brought against me by the press? Well, I looked through the book, and where I observed a statement which I knew at the time to have been denied, I did this: By a note at the foot of the page where a challenged assertion occurred, I supplied a suffic- ing portion of the proofs by which I support my state- ment. Of the soundness and cogency of the proofs thus produced, it will be for the publics to judge. They are all, or nearly all, documentary. But, besides the unnumbered strangers and friends who have addressed to me private communications on the con- tents of the book, and besides the whole host of those who speak to the public through the medium of the periodical press, there is one persistent scrutinizer who (so far as con- cerns all questions of dry fact) has hitherto proved more formidable than all. He alone has succeeded in proving that, here and there, there is a mistake—slight enough per- haps’ in itself, but-—occurring-4 in a place where, to point to it, is to fix upon the part of the narrative in which it ap- pears, a small, yet ugly blemish. For some years this cav- iler took an interest in the progress of the book, and it is believed that he still wishes well to it; but, in his deter- mination to insist upon strict accuracy without the least. regard for the flow of the narrative, he is steadfast and pit- ?The misspelling of the name of ‘Garan’ for ‘ Gagarin’ was pointed out by the correspondent of the newspaper acting at Const: antinople. The other misspellings of names were indicated in one of the many rev iews of the book which appeared in the same journal. ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION. ~ . Peay iless. What makes his scrutiny so formidable is, that without the least merit on his part—he has chanced to be- come possessed—nay, is every day becoming more and more possessed—of the knowledge, the constantly-accru- ing knowledge, which enables him to find fault with effect. This persistent, implacable critic is no other than the au- thor himself. ° Of the way in which I break in and find fault with the book wherever truth bids me do so, I can best speak by giving a single example. Guided by Sir Colin Campbell’s narrative of the operations of his brigade at the Alma, I narrated the advance of the 79th Highlanders against the flank of a Russian column then marching across its front, and—catching animation from that strangly kindling pow- er with which Lord Clyde used to speak of these seenes— I said that the 79th ‘sprang at the flank’ of the Russian column. I never knew of any body except myself who ever found fault with the accuracy of the sentence. But it happened that, long after the publication of the book, and for a purpose having nothing to do with the movement in question, Lord Clyde, one day, brought me a paper, writ- ten by an officer of the 79th, and containing more minute details of the advance of the regiment than had previously come to my knowledge. From these details I gathered that, although the 79th had advanced exactly in the direc- tion I described, and against the flank of the Russian bat- talions then marching across its front, it had advanced more deliberately than I had supposed. I no sooner read this than I felt that my expression, ‘sprang at the flank,’ indicated a greater swiftness of attack than was consistent with the bare truth, and therefore needed to be qualified. Lord Clyde did not agree with me; he thought the expres- sion sufficiently accurate, and deprecated the notion of my qualifying the words; but I was steadfast in my determi- nation to show what I myself judged to be the very truth, and therefore it is that, by a qualifying note, I willfully mar and deface the sentence to which I append it, This Xvi ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION. is only one example of the rigor with which the book is treated by its author.: And here I may say that, in order to substantiate dis- puted statements, I have not been always obliged to re- open the stores of information on which I founded my as- sertions. In many, and I think in most instances, I was saved the need of going back to papers long out of my sight, by the firm love of justice which brought men who had observed that I was wrongly contradicted to come for- ward of their own accord and lay before me the private letters and journals of eye-witnesses in support of the state- ments I had made. - Of the written documents on which’I based the narrative, I can say that, for the most part, I have hitherto kept them i in reserve. Until after the publication of the book, I think I was as much inclined as the generality of men to be doubtful of the possibility of getting very close to historical truth ; and I knew, of course, that the occurrences of a battle-field are especially hard to seize; but I must acknowledge that the supply of fresh, confirming proof by which I now find my- self supported, has done something toward lessening any tendency I had toward this kind of historical scepticism. When the first edition of the book was published, I had never seen the private journal and letters of Colonel Hood, the officer who commanded the Grenadier Guards at the Alma, nor the clear and straightforward narrative of Sir Charles Russell, of the same regiment. I was without that letter of Colonel Percy of the same regiment, to which (as will be gathered from the notes) I attach great worth. I had never seen that journal of Colonel Annesley of the Fusileer Guards, which tells me the story so naturally and — so well, that to glance through the written words is more like listening than reading. I had never seen the rough, life-like letters of Colonel Yea, nor the short telling letter of Colonel Aldworth. Yet, when all this authentic testi- mony of eye-witnesses 1s laid before me, I find it confirm- ing what I had asserted in print some mOnEHS before. See- ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION: XVil ‘ing this, I can not but think that—even in the battle-field —there is truth, after all, to be found. If I might be suffered to press this view for a moment more by giving a chosen instance of the way in which it applies to my own narrative, I would venture to speak of one only among those several pieces of testimony by which’ I now support my account of the operations of the Grena- dier Guards at the Alma. I support what I say of the bat- talion by giving extracts from the journal and private let- ters. of its honored chief, Colonel Hood. These extracts correspond so closely with the tenor of the narrative, that the reader would be likely to say—‘That journal and ‘those letters were evidently the authority on which the au- ‘thor based his account of the operations of the Grenadier ‘Guards.’ Itis, however, a fact, that I never saw the jour- nal, nor the letters, and never knew any thing of their tenor, until after the publication of the first and second editions of this book. It was then that Mrs. Grosvenor Hood (the widow of him whose achievement on the banks of the Alma had won so large a share of my attention) re- solved to give me fresh means of substantiating the narra- tive, by placing in my hands the treasured words which were written to her from the banks of the Alma.’ Now, when it is seen that I make a series of statements —of statements planted thick with particulars—in regard to the operations of a given battalion at the Alma, and that, after the publication, there comes to light a private record written on the field of the battle by the officer who commanded the battalion—a record confirming almost sen- ?This she did with the full approval of Lord Hood, the present head of the family. I may here say (though I think I have clearly explained it in the foot-note, vol. ii. p. 441) that the order with respect to which Colonel Hood wrote, ‘ Thank God I disobeyed !’ was not an order given by the Di- visional General H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge. Colonel Hood had been directed by General Bentinck to conform to any movements on his left, and it was only by being applied to the event which afterward happened—viz., the temporary retreat of the Fnsileer Guards—that General Bentinck’s order became in effect an order directing Colonel Hood to retreat. XVill ADVERTISEMENT TO FOURTH EDITION. tence by sentence the account I give in my narrative—it’ is plainly a sound deduction to say, that the coincidence between the two accounts must result from the accuracy of both. But I venture to think that an inference of wider scope than that may fairly be drawn; «for surely in the mind of any body who shall be seeking after truth with the aid of accustomed principles, the appearance of new and confirmatory proofs of this sort will not only establish the particular assertion to which he finds them appended, but will even tend to strengthen his trust in other parts of the book. Note.—The additional notes of the author in the second, third and fourth editions, will be found at the close of the volume, under the head of Norss to Fourts EpIrion. THE SOURCES OF THE NARRATIVE. BeErForE I had determined to write any account of the war, there were grounds from which many inferred that a task of this kind would be mine; and I may say that, from the hour of their landing on the enemy’s coast close down to the present time, men, acting under this conviction, have been giving me a good deal of their knowledge. In 1856 Lady Raglan placed in my hands the whole mass of the papers which Lord Raglan had with him at the time of his death. Having done this, she made it her request that I would cause to be published a letter which her hus- band addressed to her a few days before his death All else she left to me. ‘Time passed; and no history founded upon these papers was given to the world. Time still pass- ed away; and it chanced to me to hear that people who longed for the dispersion of what they believed to be false- hoods, were striving to impart to Lady Raglan the not un- natural impatience which all this delay had provoked. But; with a singleness of purpose and a strength of will which remind one of the great soldier who was her father’s broth- er, she answered that, the papers having once been placed under my control, she would not disturb me with expres: sions of impatience, nor suffer any one else to do so with her assent. I can not be too grateful to her for her gener- ous and resolute trustfulness. If these volumes are late, the whole blame rests with me. If they are reaching the light too soon, the fault is still mine. } Knowing Lord Raglan’s habits of business, knowing his ' ? J need hardly say that this letter will appear in its proper place, though not in this volume, ex THE SOURCES OF THE NARRATIVE. tendency to connect all public transactions with the labors of the desk, and finding in no part of the correspondence the least semblance of any thing like a chasm, I am led to believe that, of almost every thing concerning the business of the war which was known to Lord Raglan himself, there lies in the papers before me a clear and faithful record. In this mass. of papers there are—not only all the mili- tary Reports which were from time to time addressed to the Commander of the English army by the generals and other officers serving under him (including their holograph nar- ratives of the part they had been taking in the battles), but also Lord Raglan’s official and private correspondence with sovereigns and their ambassadors; with ministers, generals, and admirals; with the French, with the Turks, with the Sardinians; with public men, and official functionaries of all sorts and conditions; with adventurers, with men pro- pounding wild schemes, with dear and faithful friends.' Circumstances had previously made me acquainted with a good deal of the more important information thus laid be- fore me; but there is a completeness 1n this body of authen- tic records which enables me to tread with more confidence than would have been right or possible if I had had a less perfect survey of the knowledge which belonged to head- quarters. And, so methodical was Lord Raglan, and so well was he served by Colonel Steele, his military secretary, that all this mass of authentic matter lies ranged in perfect or- der. The strategic plans of the much-contriving Emperor —still carrying the odor of the Havanas which aid the in- genuity of the Tuileries—are ranged with all due care, and can be got at in a few moments; but, not less carefully ranged, and equally easy to find, is the rival scheme of the enthusiastic nosologist who advised that the Russians should 1 T have never looked at it since 1856, but it struck me then, that the let- ter which Mr. Sidney Herbert addressed to Lord Raglan in the winter of the first campaign was the very ideal of what, in such circumstances, might be written by an English statesman who dearly loved his friend, but who loved his country yet more. THE SOURCES OF THE NARRATIVE. xxi ‘ be destroyed by the action of malaria, and the elaborate pro- posal of the English general who submitted a plan for tak- ing Sebastopol with bows and arrows. Here and there, the neatness of the arranging hand is in strange contrast with the fiery contents of the papers arranged; for, along with reports and returns, and things precise, the most hurried scrawl of the commander who writes to his chief under stress of deep emotion lies flat, and hushed, and docketed. It would seem as though no paper addressed to the English Head-Quarters was ever destroyed or mislaid. With respect to my right to make public any of the pa- pers intrusted to me, I have this—and this only—to say : circumstances have enabled me to know who ought to be consulted before any State Paper or private letter hitherto kept secret is sent abroad into the world; and, having this knowledge, I have done what I judge to be right. The papers intrusted to me by Lady Raglan contain a part only of the knowledge which—without any energy on my part—lI was destined to have cast upon me; for, when it became known that the papers of the English Head-Quar- ters were in my hands, and that I was really engaged in the task which rumor had prematurely assigned to me, informa- tion of the highest value was poured in upon me from many quarters. Nor was this all. Great as was the quantity of information thus actually imparted to me, I found that the information which lay at my command was yet more abun- dant; for 1 do not recollect that to any one man in this country I have ever expressed any wish for the information which he might be able to give me, without receiving at once what I believe to be a full and honest disclosure of all he could tell on the subject. This facility embarrassed me; 1 In one of the Reviews for April, 1863, there appeared this :—‘ Indeed, we ‘believe that access [to the unpublished portion of the political correspond- ‘ence] was refused to him [Mr. Kinglake] by the Foreign Office.’ In the number of the same Review which was published in the following July, there appeared a Postscriptum or Note in reference to the above statement. After showing my ground of complaint in regard to another misstatement of fact which I had called upon the. editor of the Review to withdraw, the Postscriptum or Note says as follows:—‘ He [ Mr. Kinglake] also informs us, XXxil THE SOURCES OF THE NARRATIVE. for I never could find that there was any limit to my pow- er of getting at what was known in this country. I rarely asked a question without eliciting something which added, more or less, to my labor, and tended to cause delay. And now I have that to state which will not surprise my own countrymen, but which still, in the eyes of the for- eigner, will seem to be passing strange. For some years, our statesmen, our admirals, and our generals have known that the whole correspondence of the English Head-Quar- ters was in my hands, and very many of them haye from time to time conversed and corresponded with me on the business of the war. Yet I declare I do not remember that any one of these public men has ever said to me that there was any thing which, for the honor of our arms, or for the credit of the nation, it would be well to keep concealed. Every man has taken it for granted that what is best for the repute of England is the truth. I have received a most courteous, clear, and abundant answer to every inquiry which I have ventured to address to any French Commander; and indeed the willingness to communicate with me from that quarter was so strong, that an officer of great experience, and highly gifted with all the qualities which make an accomplished soldier, was dispatch- ed to this country with instructions to impart ample state- ments to me respecting some of the operations of the French army. I seize upon this occasion of acknowledging the advantage I derived from the admirably lucid statements which were furnished to me by this highly-instructed offi- cer; and I know that those friends of mine to whom I had the honor of presenting him will join with me in express- ing the gratification which we all derived from his society. I thought it right to apprise the authorities of the French War Department, that, if they desired it, the journals of ‘that access to the unpublished political correspondence, relating to the ‘causes of the war, was not refused to him by the Foreign Office (as we ‘had been led to believe), inasmuch as he made no application to obtain it. ‘ As Mr. Kinglake has expressed to us his desire that these two points should ‘be explained, we readily comply with his request.’ THE SOURCES OF THE NARRATIVE. xxi their divisions, and any other unpublished papers in their War-Office which they might be pleased to show, would be looked over by a gifted friend of mine, now a member of the House of Commons, who had kindly offered to under- take this task forme. The French authorities did not avail themselves of my offer; but any obscurity which might otherwise have resulted from this concealment has been ef- fectually dispersed by the information I afterward obtained from Russian sources. | Of all the materials on which I found my account of the battle of the Alma, hardly any have been more valuable to me than the narratives of the three Divisional Generals who there held command under Prince Mentschikoff. The gift- ed young Russian officer who obtained for me these deeply interesting narratives, and who kindly translated them from their Russian originals, has not only conferred upon me an important favor, but has also done that which will uplift the repute of the far-famed Russian infantry, by helping to show to Hurope the true character of the conflict which it sustained on the banks of the Alma. My knowledge respecting the battles of Balaclava and Inkerman, and the subsequent fights before Sebastopol, is still incomplete, and I.shall welcome any information re- specting these conflicts which men may be pleased to in- trust to me. From the Russians especially, I hope that I may receive communications of this kind. Their defense of Sebastopol ranges high in the annals of warfare, and I imagine that the more the truth is known, the more it will redound to the honor of the Russian arms. _ I do not in general appeal for proof to my personal ob- servation, but I have departed from this abstinence in two or three instances where it seemed to me that I might pre- vent a waste of controversial energy by saying at once that the thing told had been seen or heard by myself. With regard to the portion of the work which is founded upon unpublished documents and private information, I had intended at one time—not to give the documents nor the names of my informants, nor the words they have written XXIV THE SOURCES OF THE NARRATIVE. or spoken, but—to indicate the nature of the statements on which I rely; as, for instance, to say in notes at the foot of a page, ‘The Raglan Papers,’ ‘ Letter from an officer en- ‘gaged,’ ‘Oral statement made to me by one who was pres- ‘ent,’ and the hke. But, upon reflection, I judged that I could not venture to do this. When a published authority is referred to, any want of correspondence between the as- sertion and the proof can be detected by a reader who takes the trouble to ascend to the originals; but I do not like to assert that a document or a personal narrative withheld (for the present) from this wholesome scrutiny is the designated, yet hidden foundation of a statement which I make freely, in my own way, and in my own language. So although, when I found my statements upon a Parliamentary Paper or a published book, I commonly give my authority, yet, so far as concerns that part of the work which is based upon unpublished writings or private information—and this ap- plies to an important part of the first, and to nearly the whole of the second volume—lI in general make no refer- ence to the grounds on which I rely. Hereafter it may be otherwise; but, for the present, this portion of the book must rest upon what, after all, is the chief basis of.our his- torical knowledge—must rest upon the statement of one who had good means of knowing the truth. In the mean while, I shall keep and leave ready the clew by which in some later time, and without farther aid from me, my state- ments may be traced to their sources. For a period of now several years my knowledge of what I undertake to narrate has been growmg more and more complete. Far from gathering assurance at the sight of the progress thus made, I am rather led to infer that approach- es which continued so long might continue perhaps still longer; and it is not without a kind of reluctance that I pass from the tranquil state of one who is absorbing the truth, to that of a‘man who at last stands up and declares it. But the time has now come. A. W. KINGLAKE. 12 St. James’s Place, London, 1st January, 1863. ; CONTENTS. TRANSACTIONS WHICH BROUGHT ON THE WAR. CHAPTER I. The Crimea, 25; Ground for tracing the causes of the war, 27; Europe in 1850, 27; Standing armies, 27; Personal government, 27; Comparison between this system and that of governing through a council, 28; Per- sonal government in Russia, 29; In Austria, 29; In Prussia, 30 ; Admin- istration of foreign affairs under the Sultan, 30; ’ Constitutional system of England in its bearing upon the conduct of foreign affairs, 30; And of France down to the 2nd of December, 1851, 31; Power of Russia, 31; Turkey, 32. CHAPTER II. The Usage which tends to protect the weak against the strong, 36; Instance of a wrong to which the Usage did not apply, 37; Instance in which the Usage was applicable and was disobeyed, 37 ; Instances in which the Usage was faithfully obeyed, 38; By Austria, 38; By Russia, 38; By England, 39; The practical working of the Usage, 40; Aspect of Europe in refer- ence to the Turkish Empire, 42; Policy of Austria, 42; Of Prussia, 43; Of France, 43; Of England, 44; Of the lesser states of Europe, 45. CHAPTER III. Holy shrines, 46; Contest for the possession of the shrines, 48; Patronage of foreign Powers, 48; Comparison between the claims of Russia and of France, 48; Measures taken by the French President, 49; By the Russian Envoy, 50; Embarrassment of the Porte, 51; Mutual concessions, 51; The actual subject of dispute, 51; Increased violence of the French Govern- ment, 52; Afif Bey’s mission, 52; Deliverance of the key and the star, 53; Indignation of Russia, 54; Advance of Russian forces, 55. CHAPTER IV. Natural ambition of Russia, 55; Its irresolute nature, 58; The Emperor Nicholas, 59; His policy from 1829 to 1853, 64. . CHAPTER V. Troubles in Montenegro, 65; Count Leiningen’s mission, 65; The Czar’s plan of sending another mission to the Porte at the same time, 66; Plans of the Emperor Nicholas, 66. CHAPTER VI. Position of Austria in regard to Turkey at the beginning of 1853, 67; Of Prussia, 67; Of France, 68; Of England, 69; Seeming state of opinion there, 69 ; Sir Hamilton Seymour, 72; His Conversation with the Em- peror, 73; Reception of the Czar’s overtures by the English Government, 76; ‘Result of Count Leiningen’s mission, 77; Its effect upon the plans of the Czar, 77; He abandons the mse of going to war, 78. * XXV1 CONTENTS. CHAPTER VII. The pain of inaction, 78; The Czar’s new scheme of action, 79; His choice of an ambassador, 80; Prince Mentschikoff, 80; Mentschikoff at Constan- - tinople, 81; Panic in the Divan, 81; Colonel Rose, 82; The Czar seem- _ ingly tranquillized, 82; The French fleet suddenly ordered to Salamis, 83 ; The Emperor Nicholas, his concealments, 83 ; Mentschikoff’s demands, 84. CHAPTER VIII. Foreign ‘influence,’ 86 ; Grounds for foreign interference in Turkey, 86; Ri- valry between Nicholas and Sic Stratford Canning, 88; Sir Stratford Can- ning, 88; Instructed to return to Constantinople, 91; His instructions, 92. CHAPTER IX. Lord Stratford’s return, 94; His plan of resistance to Mentschikoff’s de- mands, 95; Commencement of the struggle between Prince Mentschikoff and Lord Stratford, 96. CHAPTER X. State of the dispute respecting the Holy Places, 100; Lord Stratford’s meas- ures for settling it,102; He settles it, 104; Terms on which it was set- tled, 104. CHAPTER XI. Peaceful aspect of the negotiation, 105; Angry dispatches from St. Peters- burg, 105; Cause of the change, 105; Inferred tenor of the fresh dispatch- es, 106; Mentschikoff’s demand for a protectorate of the Greek Church in Turkey, 107; Effect of conceding it, 107; The negotiations which followed the demand, 108; Rage of the Czar on finding himself encountered by Lord Stratford, 110; Its effect upon the negotiation, 111; Mentschikoff’s diffi- culty, 111; He is baffled by Lord Stratford, 112; He presses his demand in a new form, 112; Counsels of Lord Stratford, 113; His communica- tions with Prince Mentschikoff, 118; His advice to the Turkish ministers, 114; His audience of the Sultan, 116; The disclosure which he had re- served for the Sultan’s ear,117; Turkish answer to Mentschikoff’s de- mand, 117; Mentschikoff’s angry reply, 117; His private audience of the Sultan, 118; This causes a change of ministry at Constantinople, 118 ; But fails to shake the Sultan,118; Mentschikoff violently presses his de- mands, 119; The Great Council determine to resist, 119; Offers made by the Porte under the advice of Lord Stratford, 119; Mentschikoff replies by declaring his mission at an end, 120; The representatives of the four Powers assembled by Lord Stratford, 120; Policy involved in this step, 120; Unanimity of the four representatives, 121; Their measures, 121 ; Russia’s ultimatum, 121; Its rejection and final threats of Prince Ments- chikoff, 122; His departure, 123; Effect of the mission upon the credit of Nicholas, 123; Position in which Lord Stratford’s skill had placed the Porte, 125; Engagements contracted by England, 126; Obligations con- tracted by the act of giving advice, 127; England in concert with France becomes engaged to defend the Sultan’s dominions, 127; The process by which England became bound, 128; Slowness of the English Parliament, 128; Powers intrusted to Lord Stratford, 128. CHAPTER XII. Rage of the Czar, 129 ; The Danubian Principalities, 131; The Czar’s scheme for occupying them, 131; Efforts to effect an accommodation, 132; De- fective representation of France, Austria, and Prussia, at the Court of St. CONTENTS. see Petersburg, 132; The Czar’s reliance upon the acquiescence of England, 134; Orders for the occupation of the Principalities, 137; The Pruth passed, 137; Russian manifesto, 137; Course taken by the Sultan, 138 ; Religious character of the threatened war, 138. CHAPTER XIII. Effect of the Czar’s threat upon European Powers, 138; Upon Austria, 139; Upon Prussia, 139 ; Effect produced by the actual invasion of the Princi- palities, 140; In Austria, 140; In France and England, 140; In Prussia, 140; Attitude of Europe generally, 141; Concord of the four Powers, 141 ; Their means of repression, 141; Their joint measures, 141; Importance of maintaining close concert between the four Powers, 141. CHAPTER XIV. State of the French Republic in November, 1851, 142; Prince Louis Bona- parte, 143; His overtures to the gentlemen of France at the time when he was President, 153; He is rebuffed and falls into other hands, 153; Mo- tives which pressed him forward, 153; He declares for universal suffrage, 154; His solemn declarations of loyalty to the Republic, 154; Morny, 155; Fleury, 156; Fleury searches in Algeria and finds St. Arnaud, 157; St. Arnaud is suborned and made Minister of War,157; Maupas, 157; _ He is suborned and made Prefect. of Police, 158; Persigny, 158; Contriv- ance for paralyzing the National Guard, 159 ; The army and its indigna- tion at M. Baze’s proposal, 159; Selection of regiments and of officers for the army of Paris, 160; Magnan, 160; Meeting of twenty generals at Mag- nan’s house, 161; The army encouraged in its hatred of the people, 161; Assembly at the Elysée on Monday night, 161; Vieyra’s errand, 161; Be- fore midnight several of the confederates assemble in an inner room, 161 ; The President intrusts a packet to Colonel Beville, 162; Transaction at the State Printing-office, 162; Tenor of the Proclamations, 162; Letters dismissing Ministers not in the plot, 163; Hesitation of the plotters at the Elysée, 163; Fleury drags them on, 163; The order from the Minister of War is in the hands of Magnan, 163; Maupas’s arrangements for the in- tended arrests,163; Disposition of the troops, 164; The arrests of the principal generals and prominent statesmen, 164; Morny takes possession of the Home Office, 165; Newspapers seized and stopped, 165; Meeting of the Assembly, 165; It is dispersed by troops, 165; The President’s ride, 165; Seclusion and gloom of Prince Louis, 166; Measures for sheltering him from alarming messengers, 166; Meeting of the Assembly in another building, 167; Its decrees, 167; Troops ascend the stairs, but hesitate to use force, 167; Written orders from Magnan to clear the hall, 167; The Assembly refuses to yield except to force, 167; ‘The whole Assembly taken prisoners by the troops, and marched to the Quai d’Orsay, 168; The As- sembly imprisoned in the d’Orsay barrack, 169; The Members of the As- sembly carried cff to different prisons in felons’ vans, 169; The quality of the men imprisoned, 169; The quality of the men who imprisoned them, 169; Sitting of the Supreme Court, 169; The Judges driven from the bench, 170; Circumstances which rendered it imprudent to resort to in- surrection for the defense of the laws, 170; The Committee of Resistance, 171; Attempted rising in the Faubourg St. Antoine, 172 ; The barricade of the Rue St. Marguerite, 172 ; Barricades in Central Paris, 173 ; State of Paris at two o’clock on Dee. 4,173; Attitude of the troops, 173 ; Hesi- tation of Magnan, 173; Its probable grounds, 174; Apparent terror of the plotters, 174 ; Stratagem of forming the ‘Consultative Commission,’ 174 ; Magnan at length resolves to act, 175; Point of contact between the ground XXVIil CONTENTS. occupied by the troops and that occupied by the insurgents, 176; State of the Boulevard at three o’clock, 176 ; ‘The massacre of the Boulevard, 177; - Slaughter in Central Paris, 182; Slaughter of prisoners, 183; Mode of dealing with some of the prisoners at the Prefecture, 183; Gradations by which slayers of vanquished men may be distinguished, 184; Slaughter ranging under all those categories caused by the confederates, 185; In- quiry as to the alleged shooting of prisoners who were in the hands of the civil power, 185 ; Uncertainty as to the number of people killed, 188; To- tal loss of the army in killed, 188; Effect of the massacre upon the people of Paris, 189; Effect of the massacre in removing one of Louis Bona- parte’s personal disqualifications, 190; The fate of the provinces, 190; Mo- tives for the ferocity of the measures taken, 191; Terror, and afterward a hope of gaining support from men afraid of anarchy, 191; General dread of the Socialists, 192; The brethren of the Elysée take advantage of this, 192; They pretend to be engaged in a war against Socialism, 192; Sup- port thus obtained, 192; Commissaries sent into the provinces; 193 ; The Church, 193; France dismanned, 194; Twenty-six thousand five hundred men transported, 195; The Plebiscite, 196 ; Causes rendering free election impossible, 196; The election under martial law, 197; Violent measures taken for coercing the election, 197; Contrivance for coercing the election by the vote of the army, 198; France succumbs, 198; Prince Louis sole lawgiver of France,199; The laws he gave her, 199; Importance of the massacre on the Boulevard, 199; Inquiry into its cause, 199; The passion of terror, 200; State of Prince Louis Bonaparte during the period of dan- ger, 260; He gives all he has to the soldiers, 201 ; He even signed the de- cree of the 5th of December, 202; State of Jerome Bonaparte, 202; Nat- ural anxiety of Napoleon, son of Jerome, 203; Bodily state of Maupas, 203 ; Grounds for the anxiety of the plotters and of Magnan, etc., 203; Effect of anxious suspense upon French troops, 204; Surmised cause of the massacre, 205; Gratiiude due to Fleury, 206; The use the Elysée made of France, 206; The oath which the President had taken, 206; His added promise as a ‘man of honor,’ 206; The Te Deum, 207; The President becomes - Emperor of the French, 208; The inaction of great numbers of French- men, 208 ; Its cause, 208; The gentlemen of France resolve to stand aloof from the Government, 209; The constant peril in which the confederates were kept, 209; The foreign policy of France used to prop the new throne, 209. CHAPTER XV. Immediate effect of the Coup d’Etat upon the tranquillity of Europe, 210; The policy which it necessitated, 210; The French Government coerces the Sultan into measures offensive to Russia, 210; And then seeks an alli- ance with England, 211; Personal feelings of the new Emperor, 211; The French Emperor’s scheme for superseding the concord of the four Powers, 212; The nature of the understanding of Midsummer, 1853, between France and England,214; Announcement of it to Parliament, 218; Failure of Parliament to understand the real import of the disclosure, 218; The Queen’s Speech, August, 1853, 218; This marks where the roads to peace and war branch off, 218. CHAPTER XVI. Count Nesselrode, 219; State of the Czar after learning that the fleets of France and England were ordered to the mouth of the Dardanelles, 220 ; His complaints to Europe, 220; Their refutation, 220; The Vienna Con- ference, 221; ‘The effect upon England of becoming entangled in a sepa- CONTENTS. a rate understanding with France, 221; The French Emperor’s ambiguous scheme of action, 221; His diplomacy seems pacific, 222 ; He engages En- gland in naval movements tending to provoke war, 222; The Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, 223; The Sultan’s ancient right to control them, 223 : Policy of Russia in regard to the Straits, 223; The rights of the Sultan and the five Powers under the Treaty of 1841, 224; How these rights were affected by the Czar’s seizure of the Principalities, 224; Powerful means of coercing the Czar, 224; Importance of refraining from a prema- ture use of the power, 224; Naval movements in which the French Em- peror engages England, 224; Proofs of this, 225; Means well fitted for enforcing a just peace so used as to provoke war, 226. CHAPTER XVII. Lord Stratford’s scheme of pacification, 226; The ‘Vienna Note,’ 227; Agreed to by the four Powers and accepted by Russia, 227; The French Emperor does nothing to thwart the success of the Note, 227; Lord Strat- ford had not been consulted, 228 ; The ‘Vienna Note’ in the hands of Lord Stratford, 229; The Turkish Government determines to reject it unless al- tered, 230; They are firm, 230; Language used by Nesselrode, 231; The Protectorate of the Greek Church in Turkey still the thing in question, 231; The Porte declares war, 231; Warlike spirit of the belligerents, 231 : Warlike ardor of the people in the Ottoman Empire, 231; Moderation of the Turkish Government, 232; Its effect on the mind of the Czar, 232; The Czar’s proclamation, 232. CHAPTER XVIII. Announcement by the Czar, 233 ; The negotiations are continued, 233 ; Move- ment at Constantinople, 234; The use made of this by the Turkish Minis- ters, 234; They succeed in alarming the French ambassador, 235; Com- posure of Lord Stratford, 235; His wise and guarded measures, 235; The French Emperor. His means of putting a pressure upon the English Cab- inet, 236; Violent urgency of the French Emperor for an advance of the fleets to Constantinople, 237; Needlessness of the measure, 237; Its tend- ency to bring on war, 237; The English Government yields to the French Emperor, 238; Fleet ordered up to Constantinople, 238; Want of firm- ness and decision evinced in the adoption of the measure, 238; Baron Brunnow’s remonstrance, 239; Effect of the measure at St. Petersburg, 239 ; Count Nesselrode’s sorrow, 239; The Czar’s determination to retali- ate, 239; Error of the notions regarding the disaster at Sinope, 240; Os- tentatious pwhlicity of the Russian Operations in the Black Sea, 240; Tid- ings of an impending attack by the Russian Fleet, 240; Inaction of the Ambassadors and the Admirals, 241; The disaster of Sinope, 242. CHAPTER XIX. Chasm in the instructions to the Admirals of the Western Powers, 243; Tends to bring blame upon the Home Government, 244; Reception of the tidings of Sinope in France and England, 244; The anger of the English people diverted toward the Czar, 244; An unjust charge against him gains belief in England, 244; First decision of the English Cabinet in regard to Sinope, 245; Lord Palmerston resigns office, 245; Proposal of the French Emperor, 246; Danger of breaking down the old barriers between peace and war, 246; Ambiguous character of the proposal, 246; The French Emperor presses upon the English Cabinet, 247; Lord Aberdeen’s Cabinet yields, 247; Lord Palmerston withdraws his resignation, 248; Orders to execute the scheme and to announce it at St. Petersburg, 248. XXX ‘CONTENTS. CHAPTER XX. Terms of settlement agreed to by the four Powers and forced upon the Turks, 248; Grounds for expecting an amicable solution, 249; Friendly recep= tion by the Russian Government of the news of the first decision of the English Cabinet, 249; Announcement at St.Petersburg of the scheme finally adopted by the Western Powers, 250; The negotiations are ruined, 250; Rupture of the diplomatic relations, 250; The Czar prepares to in- vade Turkey, and fleets enter the Euxine, 250. CHAPTER XXII. Military error of the Czar in occupying Wallachia, 253; Of this Omar Pasha takes skillful advantage, 253; His autumn and winter campaigns, 253; Embarrassment and distress of the Czar, 254; He resorts for aid to Pas- kievitch, 255; Paskievitch’s counsels, 255; Movement of troops in the Russian Empire, 256. CHAPTER XXII? Sir John Burgoyne and Colonel Ardent dispatched to the Levant, 256; Troops sent to Malta, 257; Tendency of this measure, 257; Ministers de- termine to propose but a small increase of the army, 257; Continuance of Lord Aberdeen’s imprudent language, 258. CHAPTER XXIII. The French Emperor’s letter to the Czar, 259; Mission to St. Petersburg from the English Peace Party, 261. CHAPTER XXIV. Temper of the English an obstacle to the maintenance of peace, 262; Their desire for war, 262; Causes of the apparent change in their feeling, 262 ; State of feeling in the spring of 18%3, 264; Effect of the Czar’s aggression upon the public mind, 264; Still, in foreign affairs, the nation looks for guidance to public men, 265; Lord Aberdeen, 265; Mr. Gladstone, 266; Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone remain in office, 267; Effect of this on . the efforts of those who wished to prevent war, 267; The ruin of their cause not for want of grounds to stand upon, 268; Nor for want of oratorical power, 269; Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, 269; Reasons why they were able to make no stand, 270. CHAPTER XXV. Meeting of Parliament, 272; The Queen’s Speech, 272; The policy which it indicated, 273; The separate understanding with France, 2738; Unswery- ing resolve of Austria and Prussia to rid the Principalities of Russian troops, 273; Proofs of this from transactiéns anterior to the Queen’s Speech, 274; From transactions subsequent thereto, 276; The interests of Austria and Prussia begin to divide them from the Western Powers, 280; Austria and Prussia never swerve from their resolve, 280. CHAPTER XXVI-« Spirit of warlike adventure in England, 281; Its bearing upon the policy of the Government, 281; England’s engagements with the French Emperor, 282; Into this policy the bulk of the Cabinet drift, 283 ; The Minister who went his own way, 283; Lord Palmerston’s way of masking the tendency of the Government, 289; Debates upon the Address, 289; Parliament in the dark as to the real tendency of the Government, 289; Production of the papers, 290; Their effect, 290; Question on which the judgment of Parliament should have been rested, 291. CONTENTS. XXxi CHAPTER XXVII. Last step, which brought on the final rupture, 292; Austria’s proposition, 292; Importance of avoiding haste, 293 ; Pressure of the French Empe- ror, 293 ; EKagerness of the people in England, 293 ; The Government loses its composure, 293 ; The summons dispatched by England, 294; Instruc- tions to the messenger, 294; And to Lord Westmorland, 294; Austria not required to take part in the summons, 294; The counter-proposals of Rus- sia reach Vienna, 295; They are rejected by the Conference of the Four Powers, 295; Austria and Prussia support the summons without taking part in the step, 295; The French summons, 295; France and England brought into a state of war with Russia, 295; Message from the French Emperor to the Chambers, 296 ; Message from the Queen to Parliament, 296 ; Declaration of War, 296 ; Difficulty of framing it, 297 ; The Czar’s Declaration and War Manifesto, 297; His invasion of Turkey is com- menced, 298; Treaty between the Sultan and the Western Powers, 298 ; Treaty between France and England, 298. CHAPTER XXVIII. Recapitulation, 299; Standing causes of the disturbance, 299; Effect of per- sonal government by the Czar, 299; By the Emperor of Austria, 299; By the King of Prussia, 300; By the French Emperor, 300; Share of Russia in bringing about the War, 301; Share of Turkey in causing it, 303 ; Share which Austria had, 304; In other respects Austria discharged her duty, 305 ; Share which Prussia had, 305; In other respects Prussia dis- charged her duty, 306; As did also the German Confederation, 307; Share which the French Government had in causing the war, 307; Share which England had, 309 ; The volitions which governed events, 313. INVASION OF THE CRIMEA : CHAPTER XXIX. The commanders of the French and English armies, 315; Marshal St. Ar- naud, 315; Lord Raglan, 322; Marshal St. Arnaud and Lord Raglan brought together at the Tuileries, 327 ; Conference at the Tuileries, 330; Lord Raglan’s departure for the East, B32 s The French and English troops on the shores of the Dardanelles, 332; Cordial intercourse between the two armies, 332; St. Arnaud’s scheme for obtaining the command of the Turkish army, 332; St. Arnaud in the presence of Lord Stratford and Lord Raglan, 334; His scheme defeated, 335 ; His scheme for obtaining the command of English troops, 335; This also defeated, 336; Attempts of this kind checked by the French Emperor, 336 ; St. Arnaud suddenly declines to move his army toward the seat of War, 336; Lord Raglan’s disapproval of the proposed delay, 337 ; St. Arnaud’s sudden determination to take up a defensive position in rear of the Balkan, 338; Lord Raglan’s determined resistance to this plan, 338; Lord Raglan refuses to place any part of his army behind the Balkan, 340 ; ; St. Arnaud gives way and con- sents to move his army to Varna, 341; The armies move accordingly, 341; Bosquet’s overland march, 341 ; The way in which St. Arnaud’s schemes escaped publicity, 341. CHAPTER XXX. Tidings which kindled in England a zeal for the invasion of the Crimea, 342; Siege of Silistria, 343; The battle of Giurgevo, 347; Effect of the cam- paign of the Danube on the military ascendency of Russia, 850; ‘The agony of the Czar, 350; Lord Raglan’s dislike of undisciplined combatants, 351 ; Importance to England of native auxiliaries, 351. XXxil CONTENTS. CHAPTER XXXI. The events in the Danube removed the grounds of the war, 353; Helplessness of the French people, 353; Course taken by the French Emperor, 354 ; Desire of the English for an offensive war, 354; Sebastopol, 354 ; The longing of the English to attack it, 355; The Duke of Newcastle, 355 ; His zeal for the destruction of Sebastopol, 357; Commanding power of the people when of one mind, 358; Means of forming and declaring the opinion of the nation, 358; Effect of political writings in saving men from the trouble of thinking, 358; Want of proportion between the skill of the public writer and the judicial competence of his readers, 359; The task of ascertaining and declaring the opinion of the country falls into the hands of a company, 360; That opinion demands the destruction of Sebastopol, 365 ; Qualms of some members of the Government, 365: The Government vields, 367; No good stand made in Parliament against the invasion, 368 ; Preparation of the instructions addressed to Lord Raglan, 368; Instruc- tions sent to the French commander, 370. CHAPTER XXXII. The Allies at-Varna, 370; Their state of preparation in the middle of July, 370; Their command of the sea, 371, Information obtained by the For- eign Office as to the defenses of the Crimea, 371; No information obtained in the Levant, 372; Lord Raglan conceives that he is without trustworthy information, 372. CHAPTER XXXIII. The instructions for the invasion reach the Allied camp, 372; The men who had to determine upon the effect to be given to the instructions, 373 ; Mar- shal St. Arnaud, 373; Admiral Hamelin, Omar Pasha, and Admiral Dun- das, 374; Lord Raglan, 8375; The instructions addressed to him by the Home Government, 375; Their extreme stringency, 378; Considerations tending to justify this stringency, 379 ; The power of deciding practically invested in Lord Raglan, 380; His deliberations, 380; He requests the opinion of Sir George Brown, 380; His determination, and the grounds on which it rested, 381; His decision governs the counsels of the Allies, 384 ; He announces it to the Home Government, 384; The Duke of Newcastle’s reply, 385 ; The Queen’s expression of feeling, 385. CHAPTER XXXIV. Conference at the French Head-quarters, 385; Lord Raglan’s way of eluding objections, 386; Reconnaissance of the coast, 387; Sir Edmund Lyons, 387; Rumored change in the plans of the Czar, 388; Second conference, 389; The French urge the abandonment of the expedition, 389; Lord Raglan’s way of bending the French to the plans of the English Govern- ment, 389; Preparations, 390; Ineffectual attempts of the Allies to de- ecive the enemy, 390; Fire at Varna, 391; Cholera, 391 ;. Weakly con- dition of the English soldiery, 393. CHAPTER XXXV. Arrangements first made for the starting of the expedition, 393 ; The em- barkations, 394; Failure of the French calculations as to their steam power, 395. CHAPTER XXXVI. Excitement and impatience of St. Arnaud, 396; He is induced to set sail without the English, 396; The naval forces of the Allies, 396; Duty de- volying on the English fleet, 397; Arrangements in regard to the English CONTENTS. err convoy, 397; The forces and supplies now on board, 397; Troops and sup- plies left at "Varna, 398; Departure of the English armada and of the French steam vessels, 398. CHAPTER XXXVII. The Black Sea, 400; Marshal St. Arnaud at sea without the English, 400; His anxiety, 400; He sails back, 400; Lord Raglan’s reproof, 401; Its good effect, 401; Lord Raglan’s increasing ascendency, 401; The whole Allied Armada together at sea, 401; The fleets-again parted, 401; Step taken by French officers to stop the expedition, 401; Conference on board the ‘ Ville de Paris,’ 402; St. Arnaud disabled by illness, 402; Unsigned papers read to the Conference, 402; St. Arnaud leaves all to Lord Raglan, 403; Conference adjourned to the ‘ Caradoc,’ 403; Lord Raglan’s way of dealing with the French remonstrants, 405; His now complete ascendant, 405; The use he makes of his power, 405; The English fleet at the point of rendezvous, 405; Lord Raglan’s reconnaissance of the coast, 405; He chooses the landing- pla®, 406; The whole Armada converges on the coast of the Crimea, 407; St. Arnaud’s sudden recovery, 407; The progress made by Lord Raglan during the Marshal’s illness, 407. CHAPTER XXXVIII. Our ignorance of the country and of the enemy’s strength, 408; Gives to the expedition the character of an adventure, 409; Occupation of Eupatoria, 409; The whole Armada gathers toward the landing-place, 410. . CHAPTER XXXIX. The landing-place, 411; Step taken by the French in the night, 411; De- stroys the whole plan of the landing, 413; Sir Edmund Lyons, 413; His way of dealing with the emergency, 413; New landing-place found for the English at Kamishlu, 413; Position of the English flotilla adapted to the change, 414 ; The cause and nature of the change kept secret, 414; Posi- tion of the in-shore squadrons, 415; Of the main English fleet, 415; Plan of the landing, 415; General Airey, 415; The first day’s landing, 419; Zeal and energy of the sailors, 420; Wet night’s bivouac, 420; Continu- ance of the landing, 420; Its completion, 421; By the English, French, and Turks, 421. CHAPTER XL. Deputations from the Tartar villages to the English etal: -quarters, 422 ; Result of exploring expeditions, 423; The English army—its absolute freedom from crime, 423; Kindly intercourse between our soldiery and the villagers, 424; Outrages perpetrated by the Zouaves, 424; Airey’s quick perception of the need to get means of land transport, 425; His seizure of a convoy, 425; His continued exertions, and their result, 425 ; The Tartar drivers, 426. CHAPTER XLI. The forces now on shore, 426; The nature of the operations for the advance to Sebastopol, 427; Comparison between regular operations and the sys- tem of the ‘movable column,’ 427; The Allies to operate as a ‘movable ‘column,’ 430; Perilous character of the march.from Old Fort, 431; The fate of the Allied armies dependent upon the firmness of the left, 432 ; The French take the right, 482; Their trustfulness and good sense, 433; The advance begun, 433; The order of march, 433; The march, 435; Sick- ness and failing strength of many of the soldiers, 436; The stream of the Bulganak, 437. XXXIV CONTENTS. CHAPTER XLII. The affair of the Bulganak, 437. " CHAPTER XLIII. Apparently dangerous situation of the English army, 440; Lord Raglan causes it to bivouac in order of battle, 440. CHAPTER XLIV. J. Position on the Alma, 441. II. Mentschikoff’s plan for availing himself of the position, 448; His per- sonal position, 449 ; His plan of campaign, 449; His reliance on the nat- ural strength of the position, 449 ; The means he took for strengthening it, 450; Disposition of his troops, 450; Forces originally posted in the part of the position assailed by the French, 451; In the part of the position as- sailed by the English, 451; The numbers actually opposed to the French and English respectively, 454 ; Forces of the Allies, 454; The tasks under- taken by the French and the English respectively, 455. III. Conference between St. Arnaud and Lord Raglan, 456; The French plan, 456; The part taken by Lord Raglan at the conference, 4565; French plan for the operations of the English army, 457; St. Arnaud’s demeanor, 458 ; Result of the conference, 458. IV. March of the Allies, 459; Causes delaying the march of the English army, 459. V. The last halt of the Allies before the battle, 461. VI. Meeting between St. Arnaud and Lord Raglan, 463. VII. Bosquet’s advance, 464; He divides his force, 464 ; Disposition of the main body of the French army, 464; Ofthe English army, 465; The lead- ing Divisions of the English army deploy into line, 466; The Light Divi- sion not on its right ground, 466; The march continued, 467. VIII. Spectacle presented to the Russians by the advance of the Allies, 467 ; Notion entertained by the Russian soldiers of the English army, 468; Sur- prise at the sight of the English array, 468; Fire from the shipping, 468 ; Movement made without orders by the Taroutine and the ‘ Militia’ battal- ions, 468. IX. Half past one o’clock. Cannonade against the English line, 469; Men of our leading Divisions ordered to lie down, 469 ; The Ist Division de- ployed into line, 469; Sir Richard England ordered to support the Guards, 470; Fire undergone by our men whilst lying down, 471. X. Cannonade directed against Lord Raglan and his staff, 472. XI. The Allies could now measure their front with that of the enemy, 473 ; The bearing of this admeasurement upon the French plan, 473; The ground which each of the leading Divisions had to assail, 474; Village of Bourliouk set on fire by the enemy, 474; Effect of this in cramping the English line, 475. XII. General Bosquet, 475 ; His plan of operations, 476 ; Advance of Aute- marre under Bosquet in person, 476; Advance of the detached force under Bouat, 477; Farther advance of Autemarre’s brigade, 477 ; Guns brought out against him from Ulukul Akles, 477; Bosquet establishes himself on the cliff, 478; Measures taken by Kiriakoff, 478; Horsemen on the cliff, 479. XIII. The effect of Bosquet’s turning movement upon the mind of Prince Mentschikoff, 479 ; His measures for dealing with it and his flank march, 480; Mentschikoff on the cliff, 480; Cannonade between his and Bos- quet’s artillery, 480; Bosquet maintains himself, 481; Mentschikoff coun, termarching, 481; Position of Bosquet on the cliff, 481. CONTENTS. - XXXIV XIV. St. Arnaud orders the advance of Canrobert and Prince Napoleon, 482; ‘The order into which the Allies now fell, 482; Lord Raglan’s con- ception of the part he had to take, 482; Artillery contest between the Rus- sian and the French batteries, 483; Canrobert’s advance across the river, 483 ; His troops are sheltered from fire by the steepness of the hill-side, 484; Duty attaching upon the commander of the Ist French Division, 484; General Canrobert, 484; Unable to get up*his artillery, he is unwil- ling to advance without it, 485; He posts his battalions on the higher steeps of the Telegraph Height, 485 ; ‘The bulk of Prince Napoleon’s Division still on the north bank of the river, 486 ; Fire sustained by French troops, 486 ; Discouragement, 486; St. Arnaud pushes forward his reserves, 486; IIl effect of this measure upon the French troops, 486; Their complaint that they were being ‘massacred,’ 487; Anxiety on account of Bosquet, 487; State of the battle at this time, 487. XV. Opportunities offered to Mentschikoff, 488; The battle at this time lan- guished, 488; Causes which had occasioned the failure of the French op- erations, 489. XVI. A desponding account of Bosquet’s condition is brought to Lord Rag- lan, 490; Lord Raglan resolves to precipitate the advance of the English army, 490; Grounds tending to cause or justify the resolve, 491; Order for the advance of the English infantry, 491. XVII. Evans detaches Adams with two battalions, and advances on the bridge, 492; The conflict in which he became engaged, 493. XVIII. Advance of the Light Division, 495; The task before it, 495 ; Means for preparing a well-ordered assault open to the assailants, 497; The Divi- sion not covered by skirmishers, 497. XIX. The tenor of Sir G. Brown’s orders for the advance, 498 ; The advance through the vineyards, 498; And over the river, 499; The left bank lined with the enemy’s skirmishers, 500 ; Course taken by General Buller, 500 ; Nature of the duty attaching upon him, 500. XX. The 19th Regiment, 501; State of the five battalions along the left bank of the river, 501; Sir George Brown, 501; General Codrington, 504. XXI. Codrington resolves to storm the Great Redoubt, 506; His words to the men, 506; He gains the top of the bank, 506; Lacy Yea and his Fu- sileers, 507; The heaving of the crowd beneath the bank, 507; Effect of the converging tendency which had governed the troops, 508 ; Endeavors of the men to form line on the top of the bank, 508; The task before them, 508; The Right Kazan column advances, 509; Is defeated and retreats, 509; The Left Kazan column begins its fight, 510. XXIf. The storming of the Great Redoubt, 510; No supports yet coming up from the top of the river’s bank, 517. XXIII. The Duke of Cambridge, 517; Halt of the Ist Division before enter- ing the vineyards, 519; General Airey comes up, 519; His exposition of the order to advance in support, 520; The Ist Division resumes its ad- vance, 520; Again stopped for a time, 520; Step taken by Evans, 520; Want of free communication along a line passing through inclosures, 520; The Guards, 521; Suggestion that they should fall back in order to re- form, 523; Sir Colin Campbell, 523; His answer to the suggestion, 526 ; Advance of the Ist Division to the left bank of the river, 526; Time laps- ing, 527; No support brought by the two battalions which remained under Buller, 527; The cause of this, 527. XXIV. State of things in the Redoubt, 528 ; A battery on the higher slopes of the hill brought to bear on our men, 529; Our men lodge themselves outside the parapet, 529; The forces gathered against them, 530; Warlike indignation of the Russian infantry on the Kourgané Hill, 530; Movement XXXV1 . CONTENTS. of the Ouglitz column, 530; Advance of the Vladimir column, 531; As- pect of the column, 533; Confusing rumors amongst our soldiery, 533 ; Unauthentic orders and signals to the men, 5383; A bugler sounds the ‘retire,’ 535; The troops have a double motive for remaining where they are, 535; Conference of officers at the parapet and their fate, 535; The ‘retire’ again sounded, 536; Our soldiery retreat from the Redoubt, 536 ; Losses of the regiments which stormed the work, 537. XXV. Cause which paralyzed the Russians in the midst of their success, 538; Apparition of horsemen on a knoll in the midst of the Russian po- sition, 541; ‘The road which Lord Raglan took when he had ordered the advance of his infantry, 542; Lord Raglan’s position on the knoll, 545; Lord Raglan desires to have a couple of guns brought up to the top of the knoll, 547; Meantime he watches the progress of the battle, 547; A French aid-de-camp on the knoll, 548; His mission, 548 ;. Lord Raglan’s way with him, 548. XXVI. Causes of the depression which had come upon the French, 549; Operations on the Telegraph Height, 549; Backwardness of the 3rd French Division, 550; Prince Napoleon, 550; The mishaps which befell him, 551; The materials from which the bulk of the French army is taken, 551; Great difference between their choice regiments and the rest of their troops, 552; Each Division furnished with a Zouave or other choice regi- ment, 552; Prince Napoleon is abandoned by his Zouave regiment, 552; Also St.Arnaud, riding with this Division, and answerable for its place in the field, 553; D’Aurelle’s brigade thrusts itself forward in advance of Prince Napoleon, 553; But in an order which incapacitates it from any immediate combat, 553; Helplessness of the deep column formed by D’Aurelle’s brigade and Prince Napoleon’s Division, 554; Condition of Kiriakoff on the Telegraph Height, 554; The ‘column of the eight bat- ‘talions,’ 554; Kiriakoff invested with the charge of this column, 556; He marches across the front of D’Aurelle’s brigade, 556; And then advances upon the right centre of Canrobert’s Division, 557; The head of Canro- bert’s Division falls back, 557; State of the battle at this time, 557. XXVII. The two guns brought to the top of the knoll, 5593 Their fire causes the enemy to withdraw his guns, 559; It drives the enemy’s re- serves from the field, 560; The Ouglitz column stopped in its advance, 560; So also the Vladimir, 561. XXVIII. Progress hitherto made by Evans, 561; He hears the guns from the knoll and sees their effect, 561; He at once advances, 562; The ene- my does not farther resist this advance with his infantry, 563; Evans joined by Sir Richard England with thirty guns, 563; Sir Richard En- gland’s dispositions for bringing support to Evans, 568; Evans’s situation in the mean time, 564. XXIX. Protracted fight between the 7th Fusileers and the left Kazan col- umn, 564; Defeat of the column, 569; It is arranged that the defeated column is to be pressed by the Grenadier Guards, 570. XXX. State of the field in this part of the Russian position, 570; The Scots Fusileer Guards advance up the slope, 571; Disaster which befell its left companies, 571; Situation in which the remnant of the battalion stood, 572; It falls back in disorder, 572; The Grenadier Guards ascend to the top of the bank, 572; Their march up the slope, 572; Codrington rallies some of the men of the Light Division, 573; Proposes to place them in the chasm left by the centre battalion of the Guards, 573; His proposal rejected by the Grenadier Guards, 573; Continued advance of the Ist Di- vision, 573; Some men of the 95th Regiment and a rallied company of the Scots Fusilear Guards advance on the left of the Grenadiers, 573; CONTENTS. XXXVil The Coldstream, 574 ; The temper of English soldiery, 574; Advance of the Highland Brigade, 575; The nature of the fight now about to take place on the Kourgane Hill, 577. XXXI. Prince Gortschakoff’s advance with a column of the Vladimir cor ps, -578; Colonel Hood’s manceuvre, 580; Its effect, 581; The Coldstream, 581; The Grenadiers and the Coldstream engaged with six battalions in columns, 581. XXXII. The stress which a line puts upon the soldiery of a column, 582; And upon a general who has charge of columns, 582; Impressions as wrought upon the mind of Kvetzinski by the English array, 582; Kvet- zinski convinced that he must move, 584; The columns along the redoubt distressed by their fight with the Grenadiers and Coldstream, 584 ; Con- tinuance of the fight between the Grenadier Guards and the left Vladimir column, 585; Defeat of the left Vladimir column and of the left Kazan battalions, 587 ; Kvetzinski’s oblique movement of retreat, 588 ; The Duke -of Cambridge master of the Great Redoubt, 588 ; Kvetzinski wounded and disabled, 588. XXXIII. Sir Colin Campbell’s conception of the part he would take with his brigade, 589; The 42nd at his side, 589; Sir Colin Campbell] and the Highland Brigade, 589 ; Their engagement with several Russian columns, 590; Defeat of the four Russian columns, 598; Stand made by the Oug- litz battalions, 599; The enemy’s neglect of other measures for covering the retreat, 599; Slaughter of the retreating masses by artillery, 600; Losses sustained by the enemy on the Kourgané Hill, 600; By the Guards and Highlanders, 600. XXXIV. The scarlet arch on the knoll, 602; Retreat of the last Russian battalions, 603 ; Final operations of the artillery, 603; Their losses, 603. XXXV. Lord Raglan crossing the Causeway, 604; Prince Mentschikoff rid- ing toward him, 604; The part which he had been taking in the battle, 604; Prince Mentschikoff’s reappearanee in the English part of the field, 605 ; His meeting with Gortschakoff, 606; He does not. effect any opera- tion for covering the retreat, 606 ; Is carried along with the retreating masses, 606. XXXVI. The array of the English army on the ground they had won, 607 ; Operations of the English cavalry, 607. XXXVII. Progress of a French artillery train along the plateau, 608; Offi- cers riding with the train descry the ‘column of the eight battalions,’ 608 ; The column is torn by artillery fire, 609 ; Kiriakoff moves it, 609; Its de- meanor, 611; It is not followed by the French, 611; The part this great column had taken in the battle, 611. XXXVIII. A flanking fire from the French artillery is poured upon the troops on Telegraph Height, 612; Condition of things in that part of the field, 612; The result of what Kiriakoff had hitherto observed in the En- glish part of the field, 612 ; He now sees that in that part of the field the English have won the battle, 613; He conforms to the movement of the troops retreating before the English, 613; His retreat not molested by French infantry, 614. XXXIX. Great conflux of French troops toward the Telegraph, 614; Tur- moil and supposed fight at the Telegraph, 615 ; Marshal St. Ar naud, 616. XL. Opportunity of cutting off some of the enemy's retreating masses, 617 ; Vain endeavors of Lord Raglan and of Airey to cause the requisite ad- vance of French troops, 617; The extent to which St. Arnaud’s mind was brought to bear on the battle, 617. XLI. Situation of Forey with Lourmel’s brigade, 618; The rest of the French army arrayed upon the plateau, 618. . XXXVili CONTENTS. XLII. The position taken up by Kiriakoff, 618; The effect produced upon the Allies by his soldierly attitude, 618; He moves forward some cavalry, 619; Lord Raglan’s vexation, 619. XLIII. Question as to the way in which the retreat should be pressed, 619 ; Lord Raglan’s opinion, 620; His plan, 620; It is proposed to the French, 620; They decline to move, 620; Question whether a sterner method with the French might have answered better, 620. XLIV. The close of the battle, 621 ;. The cheers which greet Lord Raglan, 621; He rides back to Bourliouk and visits the wounded, 621; The Allies bivouac on the ground they have won, 622; Colonel Torrens’s force comes up in the evening, 622; Lord Raglan in his marquee, 622. XLV. Continuation of the Russian retreat, 622; It degenerates into a disor- derly flight, 622. XLVI. Losses of the French, 624; Of the English, 624; Of the Russians, 624; The trophies of victory scanty, 625. XLVII. Question whether the attack upon the position of the Alma could have been avoided, 625 ; The course actually taken, 626. XLVIIL. Summary of the battle, 627. XLIX. Question how far the Allies were entitled to take glory, 628. L. Cause of any shortcomings on the part of the French army, 630. LI. Effect of the battle upon the prospects of the campaign, 632. Notes to Fourts EpIrTIon, 633. ‘ APPENDIX. 5 I. Papers showing the difference which led to the rupture of Prince Ments- chikoff’s negotiation, 667. II. The ‘ Vienna Note,’ with the proposed Turkish modifications, 669. III. Papers showing the concord existing between the four Powers when France and England were engaging in a separate course of action, 670. IV. Note to page 200, 678. V. Lord Clarendon’s Dispatch demanding the evacuation of the Principal- ities, 679. VI. Note respecting the torpor of the English Cabinet on the evening of the 28th of June, 1854, 680. VII. Correspondence respecting the placing of the buoy by the French in the night between the 13th and 14th of September, 681. VIII. Note respecting the operations of the 7th Fusileers, 684. IX. Note respecting the operations of the Scots Fusileer Guards at the Bat-- tle of the Alma, 687. X. Note respecting the theory that it was Sir George Brown who caused the Grenadier Guards to enter the Great Redoubt at the Alma, 690. XI. Note respecting the statement in the text that ‘ the Duke of Cambridge, ‘riding up with the Coldstream, stood Master of the Great Redoubt,’ 695. XII. Note respecting the order of time in which certain events occurred at the Battle of the Alma, 697. XIII. Note respecting the truth of the accounts which represent thata great and terrible fight took place near the Telegraph on the day of the Alma, — 698. XIV. Note containing an extract from a letter addressed by Colonel Napier, the Historian of the Peninsular War, to Lord Fitzroy Somerset, 701. XV. Note respecting the following Plans of the Battle of the Alma, 702. CONTENTS. XXxix PLANS AND ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. I. I. Military Position of the Czar, 252. II. The Landing-place of the Allies, 412. III. Disposition of the English Army on the morning of the 20th, 442. IV. The ‘** Pass ” beyond the Alma, 445. V. Projet pour la Bataille de Alma, 458. VI. Section of the Ground beneath the Great Redoubt, 503. VII. The Storming of the Great Redoubt, 513. VIII. Positions of St. Arnaud, ete., 555. IX. Advance of the ‘ Column of Eight Battalions’ against Canrobert, 558. X. Second Fight on the Kourgané Hill, 579. XI. Continuation of the Fight on the Kourgané Hill, 594. XII. The ‘‘ Column of Eight Battalions” and the French Artillery, 610. XIII. Battle of the Alma, First Plan, XIV. Battle of the Alma, Second Plan, f at end of Voulme. ) A ee sr * a ee “ 4 i Ps ua, " mor © ‘ _ ro hi 4 - cc? “A > } yn Pp Ay (iH 2 ed - mon ~ - A - a ‘ 3 : y es tes 7 fi F bet o Pa. j 2 y . = — . . ny 5 git 1.49 We A . : nant holt 4 yet were le! | ee x . . 1 bs ‘ * . ; . a ~ ci 2 S) WP: oa 3 * é ’ - * ’ ty ‘ ie “i . - % “e i “ ° ] = FF be INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. CHAPTER I. In the middle of this century the peninsula which divides the Euxine from the Sea of Azoff was an almost for- gotten land, lying out of the chief paths of merchants and travelers, and far away from all the capital cities of Chris- tendom. Rarely any one went thither from Paris, or Vienna, or Berlin: to reach it from London was a harder task than to cross the Atlantic, and a man of office receiving in this distant province his orders dispatched from St. Petersburg was the servant of masters who governed him from a distance of a thou- sand miles. Along the course of the little rivers which seamed the ground, there were villages and narrow belts of tilled land, with gardens, and fruitful vineyards; but, for the most part, the Chersonese was a wilderness of steppe or of mountain range much clothed toward the west with tall stiff grasses, and the stems of a fragrant herb like southernwood.. The bulk of the people were of Tartar descent, but they were no longer in the days when nations trembled at the coming of the Golden Horde; and though they were of the Moslem faith, their re- ligion had lost its warlike fire. Blessed with a dispensation from military service, and far away from the accustomed bat- tle-fields of Europe and Asia, they lived in quiet, knowing little of war, except what tradition could faintly carry down from old times in low monotonous chants. In their husbandry they were more governed by the habits of their ancestors than by the nature of the land which had once fed the people of Athens, for they neglected tillage, and clung to pastoral life. Watch- ing flocks and herds, they used to remain on the knolls very, still for long hours together, and when they moved, they strode over the hills in their slow-flowing robes with something of the forlorn majesty of peasants descended from warriors. They wished for no change, and they excused their content in their, Vou. 1.—B The Crimea. 26 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. I, simple way by saying that for three generations their race had lived happy under the Czars.! But afterward, and for reasons unknown to the shepherds, the chief Powers of the earth began to break in upon these peaceful scenes. France, England, and ‘Turkey were the in- vaders, and these at a later day were re-enforced by Sardinia. With the whole might which she could put forth in a province far removed from her military centre, Russia stood her ground. The strife lasted a year and a half, and for twelve months it raged. ‘And with this invasion there came something more than what men saw upon the battle-fields of the contending armies. In one of the Allied States, the people, being free of speech and having power over the judgment of their rulers, were able to take upon themselves a great share of the business of the war. It was in vain that the whole breadth of Europe divided this people from the field of strife. By means unknown before, they gained fitful and vivid glimpses of the battle and the siege, of the sufferings of the camp and bivouac, and the last dismal scenes of the hospital tent; and being thus armed from day to day with fresh knowledge, and feeling conscious of a warlike strength exceeding by a thousand fold the strength expressed by the mere numbers of their ar my, they thronged in, and made their voice heard, and became partakers of the counsels of State. The scene of the conflict was mainly their choice. They enforced the invasion. They watched it hour by hour. Through good and evil days they sustained it, and when by the yielding of their adversary the strife was brought to an end, they seemed to pine for more fighting. Yet they had witnessed checkered scenes. They counted their army on the main land. They watched it over the sea. They saw it land. They followed its march. They saw it in action. They tasted of the joy of victory. Then came the time when they had to bear to see their army dying upon a bleak hill from cold and want. In their anguish this people strove to know their General. - They had seen him in the hour of battle, and their hearts had bounded with pride. They saw him now command- ing asmall force of wan, feeble, dying men, yet holding a strong enemy at bay, and comporting himself as though he were the | chief of a strong besieging army. They hardly knew at the time that for forty days the fate of two armies and the lasting ' The villagers of Eskel (on the Katcha) declared this to me on the 23d of September, 1854, and the date gives value to the acknowledgment, for these villagers had been witnessing the confusion and seeming ruin of the Czar’s army. Cuar. I.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. aay, fame and relative strength of great nations were hanging upon the quality of one man’s mind. Tormented with grief and anger for the cruel sufferings of their countrymen, they turned upon the Chief with questioning looks, and seeing him always holding his ground and always composed, they strove to break in upon the mystery of his calm. But there, their power fell short. Except by withstanding the enemy, he made them no sign, and when he was re-enforced and clothed once more with power, he stillseemed the same to them. At length they saw him die. Thenceforth they had to look upon the void which was left by his death. They grew more patient. They did not become less resolute. What they hoped and what they feared in all these trials, what they thought, what they felt, what they saw, what they heard, nay, even what they were planning against the enemy, they uttered aloud in the face of the world; and thence it happened that one of the chief fea- tures of the struggle was the demeanor of a free and impetu- ous people in time of war. ; Again, the invasion of the Crimea so tried the strength, so measured the enduring power of the nations engaged, that, when the conflict was over, their relative stations in Europe were changed, and they had to be classed afresh. Moreover, the strife yielded lessons in war and policy which are now of great worth. But this war was deadly. It brought, they say, to the grave Ground for full a million of workmen and soldiers. It consumed acing tine 2 pitiless share of the wealth which man’s labor war. had stored up as the means of life. More than this, it shattered the frame-work of the European system, and made it hard for any nation to be thenceforth safe except by its sheer strength. It seems right that the causes of a havoc which went to such proportions should be traced and remem- bered. . For thirty-five years there had been peace between the great Powers of Europe. . The outbreaks of 1848 had been put down. The wars which they kindled had been kept within bounds, and had soon been brought to an end. Kings, emperors, and statesmen declared their love of - Standing ar- peace. But always while they spoke, they went on mies. levying men. Russia, Germany, and France were laden with standing armies. This was one root of danger. There was another. Between Personal gov. # Sovereign who governs for himself, and one who ernment. reigns through a council of statesmen, there are C i bd e > . . . between this points of difference which make it more likely that Europe in 1850. 28 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. I, system and war will result from the will of the one man than peal gag from the blended judgments of several chosen ad- Council. visers. In these days the exigencies of an army are vast and devouring. Also, modern society growing more and more vulnerable by reason ‘of the very beauty and complexity of its arrangements is-made to tremble by the mere rumor of an appeal to arms; and upon the whole the evils inflicted by war are so cruel, and the benefit which a Power may hope to derive from a scheme of aggression is commonly so obscure, so remote, and so uncertain, that when the world is in a state of equilibrium and repose it is generally very hard to see how it can be really for the interest of any one State to go and do a wrong, clearly tending to provoke a rupture. Here then there is something like a security for the maintaining of peace. But this security rests upon the supposition that a State will faithfully pursue its own welfare, and therefore it ceases to hold good in a country where the government happens to be in such hands that the interests of the nation at large fail to coincide with the interests of its ruler. This history will not dissem- ble—it will broadly lay open—the truth that a people no less than a prince may be under the sway of a warlike passion, and may wring obedience to its fierce command from the gentlest ministers of state; but upon the whole, the interests, the pas- sions, and foibles which lead to war are more likely to ‘be found in one man than in the band of public servants which is called a ministry. A ministry indeed will share in any sentiments of just national anger, and it may even entertain a great scheme of state ambition, but it can sear cely be under the sway of fa- naticism, or vanity, or petulance, or bodily fear; for though any one ‘member of the Government may have some of these defects, the danger of them will always be neutralized in coun- cil. Then again, a man rightly called a ministér of state is not a mere favorite of his sovereign, but the actual transactor of public business.. He is in close intercourse with those labor- ers of high worth and ability who in all great States compose the permanent staff of the public office, and in this way, even though he be newly come to affairs, he is brought into acquaint- ance with the great traditions of the State, and comes to know and feel what the interests of his country are. Above all, a ministry really charged with affairs will be free from the per- sonal and family motives which deflect the state policy of a prince who is his own minister, and will refuse to merge the interests of their country in‘the mere hopes and fears of one man. On the other hand, a monarch governing for himself, and OdSSD/ Cuar.L] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 29 without responsible ministers, must always be under a set of motives which are laid upon him by his personal station as well as by his care for the people. Such a prince is either a hereditary sovereign or he is a man who has won the crown with his own hand. In the first case, the contingency of his turning out to be a man really qualified for the actual govern- ance of an empire is almost, though not quite, excluded by the bare law of chances; and on the other hand it may be expect- ed that a prince who has made his own way to the throne will not be wanting in such qualities of mind as fit a man for busi- ness of state. In some respects, perhaps, he will be abler than acouncil. He will be more daring, more resolute, more secret ; but these are qualities conducive to war and not to peace. Moreover, a prince who has won for himself a sovereignty claimed by others will almost always be under the pressure of motives very foreign to the real interests of the State. He knows that by many he is regarded as a mere usurper, and that his home enemies are carefully seeking the moment when they may depose him, and throw him into prison, and ill-use him, and take his life. He commands great armies, and has a crowd of hired courtiers at his side; but he knows that if his skill and his fortune should both chance to fail him in the same hour, he would become a prisoner or a corpse. He hears from behind, the stealthy foot of the assassin; and before him he sees the dismal gates of a jail, and the slow, hateful forms of death by the hand of the law. Of course he must and he will use all the powers of the State as a defense against these dangers, and if it chance to seem likely—as in such circumstances it often does—that war may give him safety or respite, then to war he will surely go; and although he knows that this rough expe- dient is one which must be hurtful to the State, he will hardly be kept. back by such a thought, for, being, as it were, a drown- ing man who sees a plank within his reach, he is forced by the law of nature to clutch it; and his country is then drawn into war, not because her interests require it, nor even because her interests are mistaken by her ruler, but because she has-suffer- ed herself to fall into the hands of a prince whose road to wel- fare is distinct from her own. The power of All the Russias was centred in the Emperor, Personal gov. 2nd it chanced that the qualities of Nicholas were emmentin of such a kind as to enable him to give a literal truth Braye to the theory that he, and he alone, was the State. In Austria the disasters of 1848 had broken the custom of government, and placed a kind of dictatorship in the hands of the youthful Emperor. And, although In Austria, 80 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. I before the summer of 1853 the traditions of the state had re- gained a great deal of their force, still for a time the recovery was not so plainly evident as to compel an unwilling man to see it; and the notion that the great empire of the Danube had merged in the mere wishes of Francis Joseph lingered always in the mind of the Czar and drew him on into danger. Even in Prussia, though the country seemed to enjoy a con- stitutional form of government, the policy of the State was always liable to be deranged by the trem- ulous hand of the King; and the anticipation of finding weak- ness in this quarter was one of the causes which led the Czar to defy the judgment of Europe. In the Ottoman dominions Abdul Medjid was accustomed Administra- to leave the administration of foreign affairs to re- tence r'82 sponsible ministers ; and it will be seen that this the Sultan. wholesome method of reigning gave the Turkish Government a great advantage over the diplomacy of other Continental States. In England there was no evil trace of that Oriental polity Constitutionar Which yields up the power of the state into the system of En- hands of one human being. Happy in the love of Patingunan the people who surrounded her throne, and free the conduct of from all motives clashing with the welfare of her Foreign Aft. yoalms, the Queen always intrusted the business of the monarchy to ministers of state enjoying the confidence of Parliament ; and upon the whole, the polity of the English state was such that no Government could draw the country into a needless war unless its error came to be shared by the bulk of the people. Indeed the power of the Crown in En- gland is so far from being a source of disturbance, that it is one of the safeguards of peace. There are circumstances in which an ancient reigning House gains a view of foreign affairs more tranquil and in some respects more commanding than any ob- tained by a Cabinet; and, although it is known that in these days ministerial responsibility can never be evaded by alleging the order of the Crown, the practice of the Constitution re- quires that the Foreign Secretary shall have the actual sane- tion of his Sovereign for every important step which he takes, and it requires also that, in order to the obtaining of this sanc- tion, the explanations tendered to the Crown by the ministry shall be complete and frank.! The duty of rendering these ex- planations, and of asking for the Royal sanction can scarcely be fulfilled without giving a minister the advantage of seeing In Prussia. 1 The existing practice of the Constitution in this respect is laid down in the debates which began the Session of 1852. - Cuap. I.} BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 31 a question from anew point of view. Therefore, although the responsible Secretary for Foreign Affairs can never find shel- ter by setting up the overr uling will of his Sovereign as the justification of his conduct, and although he must needs be supported by the advice or assent of Parli ament, still he is not — without means of guidance from sources of a less changeful kind; for whilst he has below him the tradition of the office, there is above him the tradition of the monarchy. By these means some steadfastness of purpose is generally, though not always, insured; and, except when it happens that the people are turned aside for a moment by some honest sentiment or moved by their innate desire to hear of instructions and bat- tles, the foreigner has good grounds for inferring that, what- ever the policy of England may be, it will not be altogether unstable. Certainly-the transactions of the East so drew Eng- land away from her landmarks as to bring her at last into war,. and this, too, ata time when the Queen was still blessed with the counsels of a husband, who was a wise and a gifted states- man; but it will be seen by-and-by how it came to happen that the forces of the Constitution were bafiled. France down to the winter of 1851 was under parliament- Andof France, ary government, and although, as will be seen, the down ta the ». President was able to take steps which tended to ber, 1851. generate troubles, the country was safe from the calamity of a wanton rupture with friendly States. The change wrought in the night of the 2nd of December, 1851, will be shown by-and-by, and its effects upon the peace of Europe will be traced, but the period now spoken of is the middle of the century, and at that time and so long as the Re- public maintained a real existence it was not possible in France, any more than in England, that a war should be undertaken by the Executive Government without the approval of Parlia- ment and of the nation at large. It was believed that the Emperor Nichotas numbered al- Power of Rus- Most a million of men under arms; and of these a sig, main part were brave, steady, obedient. soldiers. Gathering from time to time great bodies of troops upon his western frontier, he caused the minds of men in the neighbor- ing states to be weighed down with a sense of his strength. Mor eover, he was served by a diplomacy of the busy sort, al- Ways laboring to make the world hear of Russia and to ac- knowledge her might; and being united by family ties with some of the reigning Houses of Germany, he was able to have it believed that his favor might be of use to the courtiers and even sometimes to the statesmen of Central Europe. Down 32 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. I, to the giving of trinkets and ribbons, he was not forgetful. His power was great; and when the troubles of 1848 broke out, the broad foundation of his authority was more than ever manifested ;. fcr, surrounded by sixty millions of subjects whose loyalty was. hardly short of worship, he seemed to stand free and aloof from the panic which was overturning the thrones of the Western Continent, and to look down upon the terrors of his fellow-sovereigns, not deignipg to yield his cold patron- age to the cause of law and order. In the West, he said, and even in Central Europe, the storm might rage as it liked, but he warned and commanded that the waves should not so much as cast their spray upon the frontiers of‘ Holy Russia ;?! and when Hungary rose, he ordered his columns to pass the bor- der, and forced the insurgent army to lay down its arms. Then, proudly abstaining from conditions and recompense, he yielded up the kingdom to his Ally. That day Russia seemed to touch the pinnacle of her greatness; for men were forced to acknowledge that her power was vast, and that it was wielded in a spirit of austere virtue, ranging high above com- mon ambition. But toward the South, Russia was the neighbor of Turkey. The descendants of the Ottoman invaders still re- mained quartered in Roumelia and the adjoining provinces. They were a race living apart from the Christians who mainly peopled the land ; for the original scheme of the ‘Moslem invasions still kept its mark upon the country. When the Ottoman warriors were conquering a province, they used to follow the injunction of the Prophet, and call upon such of the nations as rejected the Koran, to choose between ‘ the trib- ute’ and the sword; but the destiny implied by the first branch of the alternative was very different from that of a people whose country is conquered by European invaders. Instead of being made subject to all the laws of their conquerors, the people of the Christian Churches were suffered to live apart, governing themselves in their own way, furnishing no recruits to the army, and having few legal relations with the State, ex- cept as payers of tribute. In cities, the people of the Christian Churches and of the Synagogue generaliy had their respective districts, apart from the Moslem quarter. They were not safe from lawless acts of tyranny; and there were usages which reminded them that they were a conquered people; but they were never interfered with, as the citizens of European States are, for the mere sake Turkey. 1 See the Manifesto issued by the Czar in 1848. Cuar. 1] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 33 of method or uniformity. They were free in the exercise of their religion; and most of the customs under which they lived were so completely their own, and so many of the laws which they obeyed were laws administered by themselves, that they might almost be said to form tributary republics in the midst of a military empire. Indeed this distinct existence was so fully recognized as a result of Mahometan conquest that the Turkish Government was accustomed to give the title of a ‘Nation’ to the members of any Christian Church or Syna- gogue established within the Ottoman realm. The subjects, or Rayahs,’ as they are called, thus held un- der Mussulman sway numbered perhaps fifteen millions; and although the Mussulmans of the whole Empire might be com- puted at twenty-one millions, the great bulk of these were scattered over remote provinces in Asia and Africa. There were hardly more than two million Turks in Europe. These» dominant Ottomans were in an earlier stage of civilization than most of the Christian States; and it had happened that their Government in straining to overtake and imitate the more cultivated nations, had broken down much of the strength which belongs to a warlike and simple people. Besides, amongst the Turks who clustered around the seat of govern- ment, a large proportion were men so spoilt by their contact with the metropolis of the Lower Empire, that, whilst the State suffered from the ignorance and simplicity of the goy- erning race, it Was suffering also in an opposite way under the evils which are bred by corruption. Yet, notwithstanding the canker of Byzantian vice, and al- though they knew that they were liable to be baftled by the methods of high organization and ingenious contrivance now brought to bear upon the structure of armies, the Ottoman people still upheld the warlike spirit which belongs to their race and to their faith. It is true that Russia, seizing a moment when the Sultan was without an ally,! and almost without an army,” had invaded Bulgaria in 1828, and, passing the Balkan in the following year, had brought the campaign to an issue which seemed like a triumph. Yet men versed in the affairs of Eastern Europe always knew that the Treaty of Adrianople had not been won by the real strength of the invaders, but rather by a daring stratagem in the nature of a surprise, and ‘1 The accustomed policy of England had been deranged by a sentiment in favor of Greece. Moreover, Lord Aberdeen was then at the Foreign Office. * The Sultan had destroved the Janissaries, and was beginning the forma- tion of an army upon the European plan. 7 Be 34 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. L by a skillful feat of diplomacy. Experience showed that the Turks could generally hold their ground with obstinacy, when the conditions of a fight were of such a kind that a man’s bravery could make up for the want of preparation and disci- pline. In truth they were a devoted soldiery, and fired with so high a spirit that when brought into the right frame of mind they could look upon the thought of death in action with a steadfast, lusty joy. They were temperate, enduring, and obedient to a degree unknown in other armies. They br ‘ought their wants within a very narrow compass, and, without much visible effort of commissariat skill or of tr ansport power, they were generally found to be provided with bread and cartridges and even with means of shelter. Their arms were always bright. Their faith tended to make them improvident, but a wise instinct taught them that if there was one thing which ought not to be left to fate or to the precepts of a deceased prophet, it was the Artillery. Their guns were well served. The Empire was wanting in the classes from which a large body of good officers and of able statesmen could be taken, and ‘therefore, with all their bravery, the Turks were liable to be brought to the verge of ruin by panic in the field, or by panic in the Divan; but where the men are of so warlike a quality as the Turks, the want of able officers can be remedied to an almost incredible degree by the presence of a foreigner, and indeed the Osmanlee is so strangely cheered and supported by the mere sight of an Englishman that aid rendered upon the spur of the moment by five or six of our countrymen has more than once changed despair into victory, and governed the course of events. Help of that sort, whatever our Govern: ment might do, was not again likely to be wanting to the Turks in a defensive war. Moreover, the vast and desolate tracts of country which lie between the Pruth and the Bosphorus can not easily be crossed by an army requiring large supplies, especially if it should be deprived of the sea communication. It is true that neither the warlike qualities of the Ottoman people nor the physical difficulties of the invasion were well understood in Europe, and it was commonly believed that Turkey, if left unsupported, would lie completely at the mercy of the Czar. This, however, was an error. Except in the pos- sible event of their being overwhelmed by some panic, the Turks were not liable to be speedily crushed by an army fore- ing the line of the Danube and ‘advancing through the passes of the Balkan. _ : But also, the conquest of European Turkey was obstructed by the very splendor of the prize. To have the dominion of G Cuar. I.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 35 the summer kiosks, and the steep shady gardens looking down on the straits between Europe and Asia is to have a com- mand which carries with it nothing less than an Empire: and, since the strength of every nation is relative, and is liable to be turned to naught by the aggrandizement of another Power, it was plain that no one among the nations of Europe could be seen going in quest of dominion on the Bosphorus without awakening alarm and resistance on the part of the other great Powers. Cer tainly the Turks trusted much in Heaven; but being also highly skilled in so much of the diplomatic art as was needed for them in this temporal world, they knew how to keep alive the watchfulness of every Power which was re- solved to exclude its rivals from the shores of the Bosphorus. Moreover, those descendants of the Ottoman conquerors still remained gifted with the almost inscrutable qualities which enable a chosen race to hold dominion over a people more nu- merous and more clever than their masters. There were a few English statesmen and several English travelers who had come to understand this; but the generality of men in the Christian .countries found it hard to make out that a people could be wise without being keenly intelligent, and could see little strength in a civilization much earlier and more rude than their own. So in the common judgment of the world it had long seemed natural that, as a result of the decay which was thought to have come upon the Ottoman Empire, its European provinces should revert to Christendom. By many, the conquest of them was thought to be an easy task: for the Turks were few and simple, and in peace-time very listless and improvident; and the bulk of the people held under their sway in Europe were Christians, who bore hatred against their Ottoman masters. _And, to Russia these same provinces seemed to be of a worth beyond all kind of measurement, for they lay toward the warm South, and, commanding the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, gave access to and fro between the Euxine and the Mediter- ranean. The Power which seemed to be abounding in might was divided from the land of temptation by a mere stream of water. No treaty stood in the way.! Was there in the polity of Europe any principle, custom, or law which could shelter the weak from the strong, and forbid the lord of eight hundred thousand soldiers from crossing the Pruth or the Danube? ' The preambles of the Treaties of 1840 and 1841 recognized the expedi- ency of maintaining the Sultan’s dominion, but there was nothing i in the ar- ticles of cither of those treaties which engaged the contracting parties to _defend the empire from foreign invasion. 36 TRANSACTIONS WHICH : [Cuap. II. CHAPTER II. Tuer supreme Law or Usage which forms the safeguard of The Usage Hurope is not ina state so perfect and symmetrical which tends to that the elucidation of it will bring any ease or com- Peale again fort to a mind accustomed to crave for well-defined the strong. rules of conduct. It is a rough and wild-grown system, and its observance can only be enforced by opinion, and by the belief that it truly coincides with the interests of every Power which is called upon to obey it; but practically, it has been made to achieve a fair portion of that security which sanguine men might hope to see resulting from the adoption of an international code. Perhaps under a system ideally formed for the safety of nations and for the peace of the world, a wrong done to one State would be instantly- treated as a wrong done to all. But im the actual state of the world there is no such bond between nations. It is true that the law of nations does not stint the right of executing justice, and that any Power may either remonstrate against a wrong done to another State great or small, or may endeavor, if so it chooses, to prevent or redress the wrong by force of arms; but the duties of States in this respect are very far from being coextensive with their rights. In Europe, all States except the five great Powers are exempt from the duty of watching over the general safety ; and even a State which is one of the five great Powers is not practically under an obligation to sus- tain the cause of justice unless its perception of the wrong is re-enforced by a sense of its own interests. Moreover, no State, unless it be combating for its very life, can be expected to engage in a war without a fair prospect of success. But when the three circumstances are present—when a wrong is being done against any State great or small, when that wrong in its present or ulterior consequences happens to be injurious to one of the five great Powers, and finally, when the great Power so injured is competent to wage war with fair hopes, then Europe is accustomed to expect that the great Power which is sustaining the hurt will be enlivened by the smart of the wound, and for its own sake, as well as for the public weal, will be ready to come forward in arms, or to labor for the for- mation of such leagues as may be needed for upholding the Cuar. II.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 34 cause of justice. Ifa Power fails in this duty to itself and to Europe it suddenly becomes lowered in the opinion of man- kind, and happily there is no historic lesson more true than that which teaches all rulers that a moral degradation of this sort is speedily followed by disasters of such a kind as to be capable of being expressed in arithmetic, and of being in that way made clear to even the narrowest understanding. . The principle on which the safeguard rests will not be acknowl- edged by all, but those who will disown it can be designated beforehand. There are many who can not make out how society can justly be harsh upon a man for being tame under insult or injury; and the same class of moralists will encounter a like difficulty in their endeavor to understand the cogency ' and the worth of this Usage. Perhaps the limit to which the Usage is subject may be best Instance ofa shown by first giving an example of circumstances mong to wae in which it fails to take practical effect. When the not apply. Republic of Cracow was abolished by an arrange- ment concerted between Russia and Austria a clear wrong . was done, and France and England protested against it, but it could hardly be said that their interests were grievously af- fected by the change, and therefore it was not the opinion of Hurope that the Western Powers had been guilty of a great dereliction of duty because on this account they declined to go to war. But, as an example of circumstances in which tame acquies- Instance in cence would be clearly a breach of the great Usage i pe phe es and a defection from the cause of nations, one may plicableand Cite the conduct of Prussia in 1805; for, when the was disobeyed. Hirst Napoleon suddenly came to a rupture with Austria, and broke up from his camp at Boulogne and poured his armies into Germany, advancing upon Ulm and finally upon Vienna itself, all men saw that it was not only for the interest of Europe at large, but also for the interest of Prussia herself that she should come forward to prevent the catastrophe. She hung back and stood still whilst Austria succumbed ; but act- ing thus, Prussia incurred the ill opinion of Europe, and the ruin which follows degradation did not at all lag, for in the very next year Bonaparte was issuing his decrees from Berlin, and the Prussians were yielding up their provinces and their strong places to France, and handing over their stores of gold and silver, and of food and clothing, to cruel French intend- ants, and French soldiery were quartered upon them at their hearths. A brave and warlike people had been brought down into this abyss because their rulers had shrunk from taking up 38 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. If, arms in obedience to the great Usage; and Europe set it down and remembered that Prussia’s dereliction of duty in 1805 was followed by shame and ruin in the autumn of 1806. But if the wars of 1805 and 1806 supplied a signal instance Instances in Of this kind of defection and of its speedy chastise- apich ae ment, they also furnished examples of loyal obedi- Isage was faithfully ence to the great Usage. From the rupture of the pbeyed. peace of Amiens to the summer of 1805, Bonaparte was at peace with the Continent and at war with this country. During that interval of more than two years he bent his whole energy, and devoted the vast resources at his command to the one object of invading and crushing England. It was against - the interest of Europe that England should be ruined, but more especially it was for the interest of Austria that this disaster should be averted, because the great em- pire of the Danube is so situate that its interests are more closely identical with the interests of England than with those of any other Power. Moreover the indignation of Austria was whetted by seeing Bonaparte crowning himself at Milan and seizing Genoa. Therefore when Pitt turned to the Court of Vienna, he did not turn in vain. Supported by Russia and Sweden, Austria came forward in arms, and though she was for the time broken down by the disaster of Ulm, and the de- feat of the Russian army at Austerlitz, her old ally was safe: nothing more was heard in those days of the invasion of En- gland; and the islanders relieved from the duty of mere literal self-defense were set free to enter upon a larger scheme of action.! Thenceforth they defended England by toiling for the deliverance of Europe. The coalition of 1805 was shat- tered, but before it perished it had helped to secure the pre- cious life-of the nation which was destined to be the first to carry war into the territory of the disturber. Again, in the same year it was perilous to central Europe that Bonaparte should be having dominion in Germany; but also it was against the interest of Russia that this should be, and the defection of Prussia threw upon the Czar the burden of having to be foremost in the defense of Austria. Therefore, in 1805, the Emperor Alexander came forward with his army to the rescue, and in the following year he refused to stand idle when Prussia was the victim, and again moved for- By Austria. sy Russia. ' Of course it was the destruction of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar, which prevented Bonaparte from resuming the idea of invading England, but that which caused him to abandon the enterprise which he had been planning for two years was the coalition. He broke up from the camp of Boulogne several weeks before the battle of Trafalgar. Cuar. II] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. gg ward his armies; and although he was worsted at Austerlitz in striving to defend Austria, and although after heroic strug- gles in defense of Prussia he at last was vanquished. at Fried- land and was obliged to make peace, still his faithful and val- orous efforts gained him so much of the respect of Europe and even of his victorious adversary, that, beaten as he was, he was able to go to Tilsit and to negotiate with the great Conqueror -of the day upon a footing which resembled equality. It has fallen to the lot of England also to have some share of the honor which Europe bestows upon resolute detenders of right, for when Bonaparte wished to make himself master of Spain and Portugal, it was the interest of England to prevent this result if she could, and to endeavor to thwart and humble the French Emperor in the midst of his triumphs; but it was also for the interest of Europe that En- gland should be able to do this. Nay, so crushing had been the disasters suffered by the Continental States that the glori- ous duty of standing foremost and alone in defense of the lib- erties of mankind was cast for a time upon England. The task might well seem a hard one, for all that the islanders could do was to send out in ships scanty bodies of troops, in order that the men, when they. landed, might encounter the armies of the hitherto victorious Emperor. But England did not shrink from the undertaking. For more than six years she carried on the struggle, and during some three years of that time she stood alone against Napoleon, for he had put down all the other nations which had sought to resist him, and dur- ing that evil time it seemed that the vanquished people of the Continent had no hope left except when they were telling one another in whispers that England remained mistress of the seas, and in the Peninsula was still fighting hard. Times grew better, and although Bonaparte still held the language of a great potentate, he had so mismanaged the resources of the heroic and warlike country which he ruled, that an English army with its Portuguese auxiliaries was able to invade and hold his territory, and whilst he still pretended to the Germans that he was a proud and powerful sovereign, Wellington un- masked the whole imposture of the “ French Empire” by es- tablishing his army and his foxhounds in the south of France, and quietly hunting the country in the livery of the Salisbury hunt.! The effort had begun when Sir Arthur Wellesley land- _1 Larpent’s ‘Private Journal’ at Head-Quarters, vol. ii., p.105. Welling- ton established himself in France in November, 1813. He sent back into the Peninsula his whole Spanish army, because it plundered. The invasion of France by the Continental Powers took place in the beginning of the follow. ing year. By England. 40 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. IT. ed upon the coast of Portugal in the year 1808, and it ended in 1814. In the spring of that last year, men of several nations were gathered together at the English head-quarters in Tou- louse; and it was put into the heart of a man whose name is unknown, but who spoke in the French tongue, to confer the loftiest title that ever was.tr uthfully given to man. In a mo- ment his words were seized as though they were words from on High, and the whole assembly with one voice saluted Wel- lington the “ Liberator of Europe.”! The loyal soldier shrank from the sound of a title not taken exact from the Gazette,? but the voice which had spoken was nothing less than the voice of grateful nations. If the fame of England had grown to this proportion, it was because she had faithfully obeyed the great Usage, and had come to be the main prop of the rights of oth- ers by firmly defending her own. The obligation imposed upon a great State by this Usage is The practical not a heavy yoke, for after all it does no more than working of the impel a Sovereign by fresh motives and by larger oe i sanctions to be watchful in the protection of ‘his - own interests. It quickens his sense of honor. It warns him that if he tamely stands witnessing a wrong which it is his in- terest and his duty to redress, he will not escape with the reck- oning which awaits him in his own dishonored country, but that he will also be held guilty of a great European defection, and that his delinquency will be punished by the reproach of nations, by their scorn and mistrust, and at last perhaps by their desertion of him in his hour of trial. But on the other hand, the Usage assures a Prince that if he will but be firm in com- ing forward to redress a public wrong which chances to be collaterally hurtful to his own State, his cause will be singu- larly ennobled and strengthened by the acknowledgment of the principle that, although he is fighting for his own people, he is fighting also for every nation in the world which is interested in putting down the wrong-doer. Of course, neither this nor any other human law or usage can have any real worth except in proportion to the respect and obedience with which it is regarded; but, since the Usage exacts nothing from any State except what is really for its own good as well as for the general weal, it is very much obeyed, and is always respected in Europe. Indeed, a virtual compli- ance with the Usage is much more general than it might seem to be at first sight, for the known or foreseen determination of 1 Larpent’s ‘ Private Journal,’ vol. ii. p. 267. * Sir George Larpent (who was present) says that Wellington ‘‘ bowed con- fused,” and abruptly put an end to the scene. Cuar. IL] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 4] a great State to resist the perpetration of a wrong is constant: ly tending with great force to the maintenance of peace, and, peace being much less remarkable than war, the very success with which the principle works prevents it from being conspic- uous. And, certainly, when the Usage is faithfully obeyed, it is a strong safeguard, for, the interests of different States be- ing much intertwined, it commonly happens that a wrong done to a lesser State is in some way hurtful or dishonoring to one | or other of the great Powers, and if the great Power which is thus aggrieved takes fire, as it ought to do, and determines to resist or avenge, it is generally able to embroil ‘other States, and the result is that the Prince who'is the wrong-doer finds himself in a war which—having a tendency to become greater and greater—can hardly be otherwise than formidable to him. It is the apprehension of this result which is the main safe- guard of peace. Any prince who might be inclined to do a wrong to another State casts his eyes abroad to see the con- dition of the great Powers. If he observes that they are all in a sound state and headed by firm, able rulers who are equal, if need be, to the duty of taking up arms, he knows that his contemplated outrage would produce a war of which he can not foresee the scope or limit, and, unless he be a madman or a desperado desiring war for war’s sake, he will be inclined to hold back. On the other hand, if he sees that any great na- tion which ought to be foremost to resist him is in a state of exceptional weakness or under the governance of unworthy or incapable rulers, or is distracted by some whim or sentiment interfering with her accustomed policy, then perhaps he allows himself to entertain a hope that she may not have the spirit or the wisdom to perform her duty. That is the hope, and it may ‘be said in these days it is the one only hope which would drive a sane prince to become the disturber of Europe. To frustrate this hope—in other words, to keep alive the dread of a just and avenging war—should be the care of every statesman who would faithfully labor to preserve the peace of Europe. It is a poor use of time to urge a king or an emperor to restrain his ambition and his covetousness, for these are passions eternal, always to be looked for, and always to be combated. For such a prince, the only good bridle is the fear of war. Of course it is right enough to appeal to this wholesome fear under the courteous title of “‘ deference to opinion,” though in truth it is not for the ambitious disturber, but rather for those Princes who are showing signs of weakness and failing spirit, that the discipline of opinion is really needed. Happily this discipline is not often wanting, for the feelings of nations in regard to the 42 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. II. toleration of a wrong coincide with the general weal, and if men can not always shame a prince from being guilty of an ignominious defection, they at least take care that the fruit of his delinquency shall be bitter. Europe is severe and slow of forgiveness toward any great Power which by shrinking from the defense of its own rights has suffered a harm to be done to another State. It will be seen by-and-by that, in defiance of the opinion of Europe and without any color of right, a great Power invaded the territory of a weaker neighbor; but any one who keeps in mind the principle of the gr eat Usage will have the means of seeing what resources Europe had for repressing this act of violence, and will hold a elew for finding out the quarter to which men had a right to look for the commencement of re- sistance. The Power most exposed to harm from Russian encroach- Aspect of Fu. Ments upon European Turkey was Austria; for it ee. ~—Was plain, that if her great neighbor of the North Turkish Em- were to extend his empire in the direction of Mol- Policy of Aus. Gavia, Wallachia, and Servia, and so come wind- tria. ing round her Southeastern fr ontier, she would be brought into grievous danger; and her motives for watchful- ness in this quarter were quickened by a knowledge of the dis- turbing elements which existed in the border provinces, where the people were drawn toward Russia by the ties of religion and race, and even of language. If the prospect of the Ozar’s carrying his dominion to the shores of the Bosphorus was gall- ing and offensive to the other Powers of Europe, the evil which such a change was calculated to bring upon Austria seemed hardly short of ruin. Moreover Austria, in her character as a representative of German interests, was charged to see that the’ Lower Danube, ordained by Nature to be the main ontlet for the products of Central Europe, should not hopelessly fall un- der the control of the Northern Power. Thus’ upon Austria, before all other Powers, there attached the care of guarding against encroachments on the European provinees of the Sul- tan, and the cogency of this duty toward herself, toward Ger- many, and toward Europe, Austria has always acknowledged. When Turkey was invaded in 1828, Prince Metternich was the one statesman in Europe who strove to form a league for the defense of the Sultan, and it will be seen that, although the events of 1849 had tended to embarrass the free action of the Emperor Francis Joseph, the last war against the Sultan dis- closed no change in Austrian policy. Over the councils of Prussia at this time the Court of St. Cuay. II.] BROUGHT ON 'THE WAR. 43 Petersburg had a dangerous ascendency; but by his actual station as a leading member of the Con- federation and by his hopes of attaining to a still higher au- thority in Germany, the King was forced into accord w vith Aus- tria upon all questions which touched the freedom of the Low- er Danube, and it was certain that he would do all that he safely could to discourage schemes for the disturbance of the German Empire. Still he lived in awe of the Emperor Nich- olas, and it was hard to say beforehand what course he would take if he should be called upon to choose between defection and war. Among the very foremost of the great Powers of Europe was France; and she was well entitled, if her rul- ers should so think fit, to use her strength against any potentate threatening to alter the great territorial arrange- ments of Europe; and especially it was her right to withstand any changes which she might regard as menacing to her pow- er in the Mediterranean. But French statesmen have gener- ally thought that, as the Mediterranean after all is only a part of the ocean, a new maritime power in the Levant might be rather a convenient ally against England, than a dangerous rival to France; and, upon the whole, it was difficult to make out, either from the nature of things or from the general course of her policy, that France had any deep interest in the integ- rity of the Sultan’s dominions. At all events, her interest was not of so cogent a sort as to oblige her to stand more forward than any of the other great Powers, or to bear in any greater proportion than they might do, the charge of keeping the Ot- toman Empire untouched. Indeed,it was hard at that time to infer from the past acts of France that she had any settled - - policy upon the Eastern Question. She had clung*with some steadiness to the idea of establishing French influence in Syria ; and from time to time during the last half century she had been inclined to entangle herself in Egypt; but upon the ques- tion whether the elements constituting the Ottoman Empire should be kept together, she had gener ally seemed to be unde- cided ; for, althouch she took part in the conservative arrange- ments of 1841, her conduct in the previous year, and at several other times of crisis, had disclosed no great reluctance on her part to see the empire dismembered. Upon the supposition, however, that she intended to pursue the policy which she aft- erward avowed, and to concur in the endeavor to maintain the Sultan’s dominions, her duty toward herself and to Europe re- quired that she should herself refrain from disturbing the quiet of the East; and that in the event of any wrongful aggression Of Prussia. Of France. t4 TRANSACTIONS WHICH | [Cuap. IT. by Russia upon the dominions of the Sultan, she should loyally range herself with such of the four great Powers as might be willing to check the encroachment by their authority, or, in last resort, by force of arms; but it was not at all incumbent upon France to place herself in the van; and it was not con- sistent with the welfare of her people that she should take upon herself a share of the European burden disproportionate to her interest in the state of Kastern Europe. Nor was there at this time any reason to imagine that the country could be brought into strife, or engaged in warlike enterprises without sufficient cause; for the institutions of France had not then shriveled up into a system which subordinated the vast interests of the State to the mere safety and welfare of its ruler. The legisla- tive power and the control of the supplies were in the hands of an Assembly freely elected; and both in the Chamber and in print, men enjoyed the right of free speech. Also the exee- utive power rested lawfully in the hands of ministers respon- sible to Parliament; and therefore, although the President, as will be seen, could do acts leading to mischief and danger, he could not bring France to a rupture with a foreign State un- less war were really demanded by the interests or by the hon- or, or at least by the passions of the country. And, the peo- ple being peacefully inclined, and the interests and the honor of the country being carefully respected by all foreign States, France was not at that time a source of disturbance to Europe. Next to Austria, England was of all the great Powers the one most accustomed to msist upon the mainte- nance of the Ottoman Empire. It might be a com- plex task to prove that the rule of the English in Hindostan is connected with the stability of the Sultan’s dominions in a far distant region of the world; but, whether the theory of this curious inter-dependence be sound or merely fanciful, it is cer- tain that the conquest of the shores of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles by one of the great Continental Powers would straiten the range of England’s authority in the world; and, even if it did not do her harm of a positive kind, would rela- tively lessen her strength. The effect, too, of Russia’s becom- ing a Mediterranean Power could not be so clearly foreseen and computed as not to be a fitting subject of care to English statesmen. The people at large were not accustomed to turn their minds in this direction; but the “ Eastern Question,” as it was called, had become consecrated by its descent through a great lineage of Statesmen; and the traditions of the Foreign Oftice were re-enforced by English travelers: for these men, going to Eastern countries in early life, and becoming charm- Of England. Citar. II.] BROUGHT ON ‘THE WAR. fe ae ed with their glimpse of the grand, simple, violent world that they had read of in their Bibles, used soon to grow interested in the diplomatic strife always going on at Constantinople ; and then coming home they brought back with their chi- bouques and their cimeters a zeal for the cause of Turkey which did not fail to find utterance in Parliament. In process of time the accumulated counsels of these travelers, coming in aid of diplomatists and statesmen, put straight the deflection which had been caused by a romantic sympathy with the Greek insurgents, and it may be said that after the year 1833 the Eastern policy of England was brought back into its ancient channel. Abroad, no one doubted that the maintenance of the Sultan’s authority at Constantinople was of high concern to England ; and indeed the bearing of the Eastern question upon English interests seemed even more clear and obvious to foreigners . than to the bulk of our countrymen at home. At this time — Lord John Russell was the Prime Minister ; and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs was Lord Palmerston. It is true that during the last Russian invasion of Turkey in 1828 Lord Palmerston, then out of office, had taken part with Russia; but - from the period of the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi in 1833 he had not swerved from the traditions of the Foreign Office; and upon the whole there was no fair ground for believing that under his counsels, and under the sanction of the then Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen’s acquiescent policy of 1829 would again be followed by England. It is true that strange doce- trines were afloat; but after 1833 the Government had no: forgotten that England was one of the great Powers of Eu- rope, and had never confessed by any unpardonable inaction that this height and standing in the world gave their country mere rank and celebrity without corresponding duties. Upon the whole, there was not at this time any sound reason for doubting that England would pursue her accustomed policy with due resolution. Thus Europe was in repose; for in gen- eral, when the world believes that England will be firm, there is peace ; it is the hope of her proving weak or irresolute which tends to breed war. , _. Of the lesser States of Europe, there were some which, in Fit the event of a war, might lean toward Russia; and he lesser : : Sue's States of Eu- more which would lean against her; and the divided et opinion of the minor Courts of Germany might be ‘reckoned upon by the Czar as tending to hamper the action of the leading States; but, upon the whole, the interests of the lesser Powers of Europe and the means of action at their com- 46 TRANSACTIONS WHICH ' [Cuap. IIT? mand were not of such a kind as to exert much weight in re- tarding or accelerating Russian schemes of encroachment upon Turkey. . This was the quiet aspect of Europe in relation to the Eastern question when an ancient quarrel between the monks of the - Greek and Latin Churches in Palestine began to extend to lay- men and politicians, and even at last to endanger the peace of the world. CHAPTER III. ‘Tue mystery of holy shrines lies deep in human nature. For, however the more spiritual minds may be able to rise and soar, the common man during his mortal career is tothered to the globe that is his appointed dwelling- place; and the more his affections are pure and holy, the more they seem to blend with the outward and visible world. Poets bringing the gifts of mind to bear upon human feelings have surrounded the image of love with myriads of their dazzling fancies, but it has been said that in every country, when a peasant speaks of his deep love, he always says the same thing. He always utters the dear name, and then only says that he “worships the ground she treads.” It seems that where she who holds the spell of his life once touched the earth—where the hills and the wooded glen and the pebbly banks of the stream have in them the enchanting quality that they were . seen by him and by her when they were together—there al- ways his memory will cling; and it is in vain that space inter- venes, for imagination transcendent and strong of flight can waft him from lands far away till he hghts upon the very path by the river’s bank which was blessed by her gracious step. Nay, distance will inflame his fancy; for if he be cut off from the sacred ground by the breadth of the ocean, or by vast end- less desolate tracts, he comes to know that deep in his bosom there lies a secret desire to journey and journey far, that he may touch with fond lips some mere ledge of rock where once he saw her foot resting. It seems that the impulse does not spring from any designed culture of sentiment, but from an honest earthly passion vouchsafed to the unlettered and the simple-hearted, and giving them strength to pass the mystic border which lies between love and worship. For men strong: ly moved by the Christian faith it was natural to yearn after the scenes of the Gospel narrative. In old times this feeling Holy shrines. Cuar. II1.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 417 had strength to impel the chivalry of Europe to undertake the conquest of a barren and distant land; and although in later days the aggregate faith of the nations grew chill, and Chris- tendom no longer claimed with the sword, still there were al- ways many who were willing to brave toil and danger for the sake of attaining to the actual and visible Sion. These ven- turesome men came to be called Pelerins or Pilgrims. At first, as it would seem, they were impelled by deep feeling acting upon bold and resolute natures. Holding close to the faith that the Son of God being also in mystic sense the great God himself had for our sakes and for our salvation become a babe, growing up to be an anxious and suffering man, and submit- ting to be cruelly tortured and killed by the hands of his own creatures, they longed to touch and to kiss the spots which were believed to be the silent witnesses of his life upon earth, and of his cross and passion. And, since also these men were of the Churches which sanctioned the adoration of the Vir- gin, they were taught alike, by their conception of duty and by nature’s low whispering voice, to touch and to kiss the holy ground where Mary, pure and young, was ordained to become the link between God and the race of fallen man. And, be- cause the rocky land abounded in recesses and caves yielding shelter against sun and rain, it was possible for the Churches to declare, and very easy for trustful men to believe, that a hollow in a rock at Bethlehem was the Manger which held the infant Redeemer, and that a Grotto at Nazareth was the very home of the blessed Virgin. Priests fastened upon this sentiment, and although in its be- ginning their design was not sordid, they found themselves driven by the course of events to convert the alluring mystery of the Holy Places into a source of revenue. The Mahometan invaders had become by conquest the lords of the ground; but, since their own creed laid great stress upon the virtue of pil- grimage to holy shrines, they willingly entered into the feeling of the Christians who came to kneel in Palestine. Moreover, they respected the self-denial of monks, and it was found that even in turbulent times a convent in Palestine surrounded by 4 good wall, and headed by a clever Superior, could generally hold its own. It was to establishments of this kind that the pilgrim looked for aid and hospitality, and in order to keep them up the priests imagined the plan of causing the votary to pay according to his means at every shrine which he em- braced. Upon the understanding that he fulfilled that condi- tion he was Jed to believe that he won for himself unspeakable privileges in the world to come, and thenceforth a pilgrimage 48 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. IIT, to the holy shrines ceased to be an expression of enthusiastic sentiment, and became a common act of devotion. But, since it happened that, because of the manner in which the toll was levied, every one of the Holy Places was a distinct source of revenue, the prerogative of the Turks as owners of the ground was necessarily brought into play, and it rested with them to determine which of the rival Churches should have the control and usufruct of every holy shrine. Here then Contest forthe WAS a subject of lasting strife. So long as the Ot- possession of toman Empire was in its full strength, the authori- the shrines. ties at Constantinople were governed in their de- cisions by the common appliances of intrigue, and most chiefly, no doubt, by gold; but when the power of the Sultans so waned as to make it needful for them to contract engagements with Christian sovereigns, the monks of one or other of the Churches found means to get their suit upheld by foreign inter- Ptvonage of Vention. In 1740, France obtained from the Sultan Foreign Pow- a grant which had the force of a treaty, and its Ar- wt ticles or “‘ Capitulations,” as they were sometimes called, purported to confirm and enlarge all the then existing privileges of the Latin Church in Palestine. But this success was not closely pursued, for in the course of the succeeding hundred years the Greeks keenly supported by Russia obtain- ed from the Turkish Government several firmans which grant- ed them advantages in derogation of the treaty with France ; and until the middle of this century France acquiesced. In the contest now about to be raised between France and 3 Russia, it would be wrong to suppose that, so far omparison : ° e . between the 8 Concerned strength of motive and sincerity of ciaims of Rus: purpose, there was any approach to an equality be- ' tween the contending Governments. In the Greek Church the right of pilgrimage is held to be of such deep im- port that if a family can command the means of journeying to Palestine even from the far distant provinces of Russia, they can scarcely remain in the sensation of being truly devout. without undertaking the holy enterprise; and to this end the fruits of parsimony and labor enduring through all the best years of manhood are joyfully devoted. The compassing of vast distances with the narrow means at the command of a peasant is not achieved without suffering so great as to de- stroy many lives. This danger does not deter the brave, pious people of the North. As the reward of their sacrifices; their priests, speaking boldly in the name of Heaven, promise them ineffable blessings. The advantages held out are not under- stood to be dependent upon the volition and motive of the pil- Cuapr. III.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 49 grim, for they hold good, as baptism does, for children of ten- der years. Of course every man who thus came from afar to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was the representative of many more who would do the like if they could. When the Emperor of Russia sought to gain or to keep for his Church the holy shrines of Palestine, he spoke on behalf of fifty mil- lions of brave, pious, devoted subjects, of whom thousands for the sake of the cause would joyfully risk their lives. From the serf in his hut even up to the great Czar himself, the faith professed was the faith really glowing in the heart, and vio- lently swaying the will. It was the part of wise statesmen to treat with much deference an honest and pious desire which was rooted thus deep in the bosom of the Russian people. On the other hand, the Latin Church seems not to have in- culcated pilgrimage so earnestly as its Eastern rival; and if it did, it obtained but slight compliance with its precept, for whilst the Greek pilgrim ships poured out upon the landing- place of Jaffa the multitudes of those who had survived the misery and the trials of the journey, the closest likeness of a pilgrim which the Latin Church could supply was often a mere French tourist, with a journal and a theory, and a plan of writing a book. It was true that the French Foreign Of- fice had from time to time followed up those claims to protect - the Latin Church in the East which had arisen in the times when the mistresses of the Most Christian kings were pious ; but it was understood that by the course of her studies in the eighteenth century France had obtained a tight control over her religious feelings. Whenever she put forward a claim in her character as ‘the eldest daughter of the Church,’ men treated her demand as political, and dealt with it accordingly ; but as to the religious pretension on which it was based, Eu- rope always met that with a smile. Yet it will presently be seen that a claim which tried the gravity of diplomatists might be used as a puissant engine of mischief. - There was repose in the empire of the Sultan, and even the Measurestaken YiVal Churches of Jerusalem were suffering each by the French other to rest, when the French President, in cold President. blood, and under no new motive for action, took up the forgotten cause of the Latin Church of Jerusalem, and began to apply it as a wedge for sundering the peace of the world. The French Ambassador at Constantinople was instructed to demand that the grants to the Latin Church which were contained in the treaty of 1740 should be strictly executed, and, since the firmans granted during the last century to the Vot. I—C 50 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. IIT: Greek Church were inconsistent with the capitulations of 1740, and had long been in actual operation, the effect of this demand on the part of the French President was to force the Sultan to disturb the existing state of repose, to annul the privileges which (with the acquiescence of France) the Greek Church had long been enjoying, to drive into frenzy the priesthood of the Greek Church, and to rouse to indignation the Sovereign of the great military empire of the North, with all those mil- lions of pious and devoted men who so far as regarded this question were heart and soul with their Czar. ‘The Ambas- ‘sador of France,’ said our Foreign Secretary, ‘ was the first to ‘disturb the status quo in which the matter rested. Not that ‘the disputes of the Latin and Greek Churches were not very ‘active, but that without some political action on the part of ‘France those quarrels would never have troubled the relations ‘of friendly Powers. If report is to be believed, the French ‘ Ambassador was the first to speak of having recourse to force, ‘and to threaten the intervention of a French fleet to enforce ‘the demands of his country. We should deeply regret any ‘dispute that might lead to conflict between two of the great ‘Powers of Europe; but when we reflect that the quarrel is ‘for exclusive privileges in a spot near which the heavenly ‘host proclaimed peace on earth and good-will toward men— ‘when we see rival Churches contending for mastery in the ‘very place where Christ died for mankind—the thought of ‘such a spectacle is melancholy indeed. .... . Both parties ‘ought to refrain from putting armies and fleets in motion for ‘the purpose of making the tomb of Christ a cause of quarrel ‘among Christians.”! Still, in a narrow and technical point of view, the claim of France might be upheld, because it was based upon a treaty between France and the Porte which could not be legally ab- rogated without the consent of the French Government, and the concessions to the Greek Church, though obtained at the instance of Russia, had not been put into the form of treaty engagements, and could always be revoked at the pleasure of. the Sultan. Accordingly M. de Lavalette continued to press for the strict fulfillment of the treaty, and being guided, as it would seem, by violent instructions, and being also zealous and unskilled, he soon carried his ur gency to the extremity of using offensive threats, and began to speak of what should be done By the Russian by the French fleet. The Russian Envoy, better Envoy. versed in affairs, used wiser but hardly less cogent’ * “Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 67. Cuap. IL] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. . 5y words, requiring that the firmans should remain in force; and, since no ingenuity could reconcile the engagements of the treaty with the grants contained in the firmans, the Porte, Embarrass. though having no interest of its own in the ques- mentofthe tion, Was tortured and alarmed by the contending eres negotiators. It seemed almost impossible to satis- fy France without afironting the Emperor Nicholas. The French, however, did not persist in claiming up to the Mutual conces- Very letter of the treaty of 1740, and, on the other edna. hand, there were some of the powers of exclusion granted by the firmans which the Greeks could be persuaded to forego; and thus the subject remaining in dispute was nar- rowed down until it seemed almost too slender tor the appre: hension of laymen. Stated in bare terms, the question was whether, for the pur; Theactual DPOSse Of passing through the building into their subject of dis- Grotto, the Latin monks should have the key of the BS: Bhkefdodicofe the’ Church:of Bethlehem, and also one of the keys of each of the two doors of the sacred man- ger, and whether they should be at liberty to place in the sanctuary of the Nativity a silver star adorned with the arms of France. The Latins also claimed a privilege of worshiping once a year at the shrine of the Blessed Mary in the Church of Gethsemane, and they went on to assert their right to have ‘a cupboard and a lamp in the tomb of the Virgin, > but in this last pretension they were not well supported by F rance,? and - virtually, it was their claim to have a key of the great door of the Church of Bethlehem instead of being put off with a key of the lesser door which long remained insoluble, and had to be decided by the advance of armies,? and the threatening movement of fleets. Diplomacy, somewhat startled at the nature of the question committed to its charge, but repressing the coarse emotion of surprise, ‘ventured,’ as it is said, *to inquire whether in this case ‘a key meant an instrument for opening a door, only uot to be ‘employed in closing that door against Glinstens of other ‘sects, or whether it was simply a key—an emblem ;* but Di- plomacy answered, that the key was really a key—a key for opening a door, and its evil quality was—not that it kept the Greeks out, but that it let the Latins come in. After the change which was wrought in the institutions of France in the night between the Ist and the 2nd of Decem- ber, 1851, increased violence seems to have been imparted to 1 ¢Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 84. ? Thid., p. 48. ° See-Count Nesselrode’s Dispatches, ibid., p. 61. ‘:Thid., p.'79 52 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. IIT: Increased vioe the instructions under which M. de Lavalette was sence of the acting, and his demand was so urgently pressed, that ernment. the Porte at length gave way, and acknowledged the validity of the Latin claims in a formal Note ;! but the pa- per had not been signed more than a few days, when the Rus- sian Minister, making hot remonstrance, caused the Porte to issue a firman,2 ratifying all the existing privileges of the Greeks, and virtually revoking the acknowledgment just given to the Latins. Thereupon, as was natural, the French Govern- ment became indignant, and to escape its anger the Porte promised to evade the public reading of the firman at Jerusa- lem ;3 but, the Russian Minister not relaxing his zeal, the Turk- ish Government secretly promised him that the Pasha of Jeru- salem should be instructed to try to avoid giving up the keys to the Latin monks. Then again, under further pressure by France, the Porte en- Afif Bey's Mis) gaged to evade this last evasion, and at length the pion. duty of affecting to carry out the conflicting en- gagements thus made by the Porte was intrusted to Afif | Bey. This calm Mahometan went to Jerusalem, and strove to tem- porize as well as he could betwixt the angry Churches. His great difficulty was to avert the rage which the Greeks would be likely to feel when they came to know that the firman was not to be read; and the nature of his little stratagem showed that, although he was a ere Moslem, he had some in- sight into the great ruling principle of ecclesiastical questions. His plan was to inflict a bitter disappointment upon the Latins in the presence of the Greek priesthood, for he imagined that in their delight at witnessing the mortification of their rivals, the Greeks might be made to overlook the great question of the public reading of the firman. So, as soon as the ceremoni- al visits had been. exchanged, Afif Bey, with a suite of the lo- cal Effendis, met the three Patriarchs , Greek, Latin, and Ar- menian, in ‘the Church of the Resurrection just in front of the Holy Sepulchre itself and under the great dome, and there he ‘made an oration upon the desire of his Majesty the Sultan to ‘ gratify all classes of his subjects,’ and when M. Basily and the Greek Patriarch and the Russian Archimandrite were becom- ing impatient for the public reading of the firman which was to give to their Church the whole of the Christian sanctuaries of Jer usalem, the Bey invited all the disputants to meet him in the Church of the Vir gin near Gethsemane. There he read Note of the 9th February, 1852 2 The firman of the mi-fevrier, 1852. * Col. Rose to Lord Malmesbury. ‘ Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 46. Cuap. IIT.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 53 an order of the Sultan for permitting the Latins to celebrate a mass once a year, but then to the great joy of the Greeks, and to the horror of their rivals, he went on to read words, com- manding that the altar and its ornaments should remain undis- turbed. ‘No sooner,’ says the official account, ‘were these ‘ words uttered, than the Latins, who had come to receive their ‘triumph over the Orientals, broke out into loud exclamations ‘of the impossibility of celebrating mass upon a schismatic ‘slab of marble with a covering of silk and gold, instead of ‘plain linen, among schismatic vases, and before a crucifix ‘which has the feet separated, instead of one nailed over the ‘other’ Under cover of the storm thus raised, Afif Bey per- haps thought for a moment that he had secured his escape, and for a while he seems to have actually disentangled him- self from the Churches, and to have succeeded in gaining his quarters. But when the delight of witnessing the discomfiture of the Latins had in some deer ee subsided, the Greeks perceived that, after all, the main promise had been evaded. The firman had not been read. M. Basily, the Russian Consul-General, called on Afif Bey, and required that the reading of the firman should take place. At first the Bey affected not to know what firman was meant, but afterward he said he had no copy of it; and at length, being then at the end of his stratagems, he acknowl- edged that he had no instructions to read it. Thereupon M. Basily sent off Prince Garari to Jaffa to convey these tidings to Constantinople in any Arab vessel that could be found, and then hurrying to the Pasha of Jerusalem, he demanded to have a special council assembled, with himself and the Greek Patr? arch in attendance, in order that Russia and the Orthodox Church might know once for all whether the firman had been sent or not; but when the meeting was gathered, Hafiz Pasha only ‘made a smooth speech on the well-known benevolence ‘of his Majesty toward all classes of his subjects, and that ‘was all that could be said.’! So the Greeks, thongh they had been soothed for a moment by the discomfiture of their Latin ad- versaries in the Church of the Virgin, could not any longer fail to see that their rivals were in the ascendant, and it soon turned out that the promise to evade the delivery of the keys was not to be faithfully kept. The pressure of France was applied with increasing force, Delivery of the and it produced its effect. In the month of Decem- key and the per, 1852, the silver star was brought with much ? Consul Finn to Earl of Malmesbury, Oct. 27, 1852. |‘ Correspondence,’ part i., p. 44. 54 ‘TRANSACTIONS WHICH’ (Cuap. IID pomp from the coast. Some of the Moslem Effendis went down to Jaffa to escort it, and others rode out a good way on the road that they might bring it into Jerusalem with triumph ; and on Wednesday, the 22nd of the same month, the Latin patriarch, with joy and with a great ceremony, replaced the glittering star in the sanctuary of Bethlehem, and at the same time the key of the great door of the church, together with the keys of the sacred manger, was handed over to the Latins.! For the Ozar and for the devout people of All the Russias Indignationof it was hard to bear this blow. ‘To the indignation,’ usu. Count. Nesselrode writes, ‘of the whole people fol- ‘lowing the Greek ritual, the key of the Church of Bethlehem ‘has been made over to the Latins, so as publicly to demon- ‘strate their religious supremacy in the East. The mischief ‘then is done, M.le Baron, and there is no longer any question ‘of preventing it. It is now necessary to remedy it. ‘The im- ‘munities of the Orthodox religion which have been injured, ‘the promise which the Sultan had solemnly given to the Em- ‘peror, and which has been violated, call for an act of repara- ‘tion, It is to obtain this that we must labor. If we took for ‘our example the imperious and violent proceedings which ‘have brought France to this result, if like her we were indif- ‘ferent to the dignity of the Porte, to the consequences which ‘an heroic remedy may have on a constitution already so shat- ‘tered as that of the Ottoman Empire, our course would be ‘already marked out for us, and we should not have long to reflect upon it. Menace, and a resort to force would be our ‘immediate means. The cannon has been called the last argn- ‘ment of kings, the French Government has made it its first.. ‘It is the argument with which at the outset it declared its ‘intention to commence its proceedings at Tripoli as well as at. ‘Constantinople. Notwithstanding our legitimate causes of, ‘complaint, and at the risk of waiting some time longer for, “redress, we shall take a less summary course... .. It may ‘happen that France, perceiving any hesitation on the part of. ‘the Porte, may again have recourse to menace, and press upon: ‘it so as to prevent it from listening to our just demands... .*. ‘The Emperor has therefore considered it necessary to adopt ‘in the outset some precautionary measures in order to support ‘our negotiations, to neutralize the effect of M. Lavalette’s ‘threats, : and to ouard himself in any contingency which may ‘occur against a Government accustomed to act by surprises.’ **Consul Finn to Earl of Malmesbury, Dec. 28,1852; but see Mr. Pisani’s note, p. 106. * Count Nesselrode to Baron Brunnow, 14th January, 1853. _Ibid., p. 61.- Cuar. IV.] BROUGHT ON 'THE WAR, 55 Nor were these empty words. The same authentic page! Advance of | Which tells of this triumph of Church over Church Russian forces. oes on to show how the Czar was preparing for vengeance. ‘ Orders,’ says Sir Hamilton Seymour, ‘have been ‘dispatched to the 5th corps d’armée to advance to the fron- ‘tiers of the Danubian provinces, without waiting tor their ‘reserves, and the 4th corps, under the command of General ‘Count Dannenberg, and now stationed in Volhynia, will be ‘ordered to hold itself in readiness to march if necessary. ‘General Luder’s corps ’armée, accordingly, being now 48,000 ‘strong, will receive a re-enforcement of 24,000 men soon after ‘its arrival at its destination, and, supposing the 4th corps to ‘ follow, the whole force will amount at least, according to offi- ‘cial returns, to 144,000 men.’ Is it true that for this cause great armies were gathering, and that for the sake of the key and the silver star the peace of the nations was brought into danger? Had the world grown young once more ? _ The strife of the Churches was no fable, but after all, though near and distinct, it was only the lesser truth. A crowd of monks with bare foreheads stood quarreling for a key at the sunny gates of a church in Palestine, but beyond and above, towering high in the misty North, men saw the ambition of the Czars. CHAPTER IV. Men dwelling amidst the snows. of Russia are driven by Natural ambi. Very nature to grow covetous when they hear of tion of Russia. the happier lands where all the year round there are roses and long sunny days. And since this people have a sea-board and ports on the Euxine, they are forced by an everlasting policy to desire the command of the straits which lead through the heart. of an empire into the midst of that world of which men kindle thoughts when they speak of the Atgean and of Greece, and the Ionian shores, and of Palestine and Egypt, and of Italy, and of France, and of Spain and the land of the Moors, and of the Atlantic beyond, and the path of ships on the Ocean. Gifted with the knowledge and the skill which are means of excellence in the diplomatic art, and excluded by their institutions from taking any but an oftigial part in | the home Government, the Russian nobles had long 1 ¢Bastern Papers,’ part i., p. 56. 56 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. LV. been accustomed to bend their minds to foreign policy, and the State, favoring this inclination, used to multiply the labors ‘of its diplomatic service. Almost every gifted and accom- plished Russian who might be traveling in foreign countries used to receive instructions of some kind from his Govern- ment, and was enabled to believe that, either by collecting in- formation or in some still more important way, he was per- forming a duty toward the State. Men thus intrusted became eager partakers of a policy rather more enterprising than the policy avowed by their Government, and the result was that the natural ambition of the country was always being nurtured and subserved by a great Aristocracy. But moreover the ambition of the Statesmen and the Nobles was re-enforced by the pious desire of the humbler classes. Some fifty millions of men in Russia held one creed; and they held it too with the earnestness of which Western Europe used to have experience in earlier times. In her wars Russia had always been engaged against nations which were not of her faith; and twice at least in the very agony of her national life, and when all other hope was gone, she had been rescued by _the warlike zeal of her priesthood. By these causes love of country and devotion to the Church had become so closely welded into one engrossing sentiment, that good Muscovites could not sever the one idea from the other;' and although they were by nature a kind and good-humored race of men, they were fierce in the matter of their religion. . They had heard of Infidels who had torn down the crosses from the Churches of Christ, and possessed themselves of the great city, the capital of the Orthodox Church; and, as far as they could judge, it would be a work of piety, with the permission of the Czar their father, to slaughter and extirpate the Turks. But this was not all. They knew that in the Turkish dominions there were ten or fourteen millions of men holding exactly the same faith as themselves, who were kept down in thraldom by the Moslems, and they had heard tales of the sufferings of these their brethren which seemed to call for vengeance. The very indulgence with which the Turks had allowed these Christians to have a distinct corporate existence in the Empire gave weight to their prayers; for, instead of being only a disorgan- ized multitude of sufferers, they seemed to be, as it were, a sup- pliant nation, ever kneeling before the great Czar, and implor- ing him to deliver them from their captivity. It was not pos- 1 T owe my perception of the causes which rendered the Russian Church so intensely national to Arthur Stanley’s most interesting work upon the Greek Church. Cuar. LV.] BROUGHT ON ‘THE WAR. 57 sible for the Russian people to conceive any enterprise more worthy of their nation and their Church than to raise high the banner of the Cross, drive the infidel Turks out of Europe, and cause the broad provinces in which their Christian brethren lived and suffered to be blended with ‘Holy Russia.’ It is true that the Muscovite peasants were not an enterprising race of men, and it might be hard perhaps to find a villager, who, if he could have his choice, would rather be a soldier of the Cross than remain at home in his hut; but the people knew that, whether there were peace or whether there were war, the exi- gency of their Czar’s military system would always go on con- suming their youth, and, since this engine of a vast standing army was destined to.be kept up and to be fed with their flesh and blood, they desired in their simple hearts that it should be used for a purpose which they believed to be holy and right- eous. To a cause having all these sanctions, the voice of prophecy could not be wanting. Seers foretold the destruc- tion of the Turks by the men of the yellow hair. Yet, vast as it was in its aggregate force, the heart’s desire of a whole nation would have been vague and dim of sight if it had not some famed city for its goal, or some outward and visible figure or sign to which the multitude could point as the symbol of its great intent. The people were not without their goal nor without their symbol, for the city whither they tend- ed was the imperial city of Constantine, once mistress of the world, and the Cross that the Emperor had seen in the heav- ens was still the sign in which the Church said they must con- quer. For such as were the politic few there was the Golden Horn with its command of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and all its fair promise of wealth and empire. In the horizon of the pious multitude there rose the dome of St.Sophia. Am- bition was sanctified by Religion. The most pious might righteously desire that the devotion of their militant Church should be aided by the wisdom of the serpent, and the most worldly-minded statesman could look with approval upon the scheme of a lucrative crusade. The Emperor Alexander the First, when he declared that for the time he was trying to with- stand the ambition of his people, acknowledged that he was ‘the only Russian who resisted the views of his subjects upon ©Turkey.’! - The Czar was the head of the Church. It was not without raising scruples in the minds of the pious that his predecessors had been able to attain ecclesiastical authority ; but this slad- 1 Quoted by Sir H. Seymour, ‘ Eastern Papers,’ part v., p. 11. C2 58 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuav. IV; ow of doubt upon the title of the lay Pontiff made it all the more needful for him to take care that his zeal should be above reproach. It is true that the great body of the Muscovite peo- ple were simple and docile, not partaking in cares of Goyern- ment, aud that even among the most powerful Nobles there were none who would be unwilling to leave the choice of time and of measures to the Chief of the State, but still the relig- ious mind of the vast empire would have been dangerously shocked if the priests had been forced to know that the Czar fniled to share the pious desire of his people; and the minds of men accustomed to bend their thoughts to the aggrandize- ment of the nation would be overclouded and chilled if they saw that the Emperor was growing forgetful of their favorite enuse. But the prospect of what would follow upon the re alization of this scheme of ambition was dim. The sovereignty of Eu- ropean Turkey could scarcely be added to the possessions of the Czar without tending to dislocate the system of his em- pire, for plainly it would be difficult to sway the vast North- ern territories of All the Russias by orders sent from the Bos- phorus, and yet, by force of its mere place in the world, Con- stantinople seemed destined to be the capital of a great State. Therefore, in the event of its falling into the hands of the Rom- anoffs, it may be thought more likely that the imperial city would draw dominion to itself, and so become the metropolis of some new assemblage of territories than that it would sink into the condition of a provincial sea-port. The statesmen of St. Petersburg have always understood the deep import of the change which the throne of Constantine would bring with it; and it may be imagined that considerations founded on this aspect of the enticing conquest have mingled with those sug- gested by the phy: sical difficulties of i invasion, the obstinate valor of the Turks, and the hostility of the great Powers of Hurope. Still, the prize was so unspeakably alluring to an aristocracy. fired with national ambition, and to a people glowing with pi- ety, that apparently it was necessary for the Czar to seem as though he were always doing something for furthering a scheme of conquest thus-endeared to the nation. He was liable to be deemed a failing champion of the faith when he was not labor- ing to restore the insulted Cross to the Church of Constantine ; he was ¢ hilling the healthy zeal of his ablest servants if he liv ed idle days m: king no approach to the Bosphorus. Upon the whole, it resulted from the various motives tend- Its irre olute Ing to govern the policy of the State that the am- Bare: bition of the Russian emperors in the direction of nar. IV-] BROUGHT ON THE WAR.’ 59 Constantinople was generally alive and watchful, and some- times active, but was always irresolute.. The First Napoleon said in the early years of this century! that the Czars were al- ways threatening Constantinople and never taking it; and what he said then had already been true for a lone time, and his words continued to be a true. description of the Russian policy for half a century afterward. Evidently it answered the purpose of the Czars to have it thought amongst their own people that they were steadily advancing toward the conquest, but they always suffered their reasons for delay to prevail. They had two minds upon the question. ‘They were willing, but they were also unwilling, and this clashing of motives caused them to falter. At home they naturally tried to make their ambition apparent. Abroad, as might be expected, they were more careful to display the inclinations forced upon them by prudence; but it would seem that tlis double face was not simply a deceptive contrivance, but resulted from imperfect volition. The project against Constantinople was a scheme of conquest continually to be delayed, but never discarded, and, happen what might, it was never to be endured that the pros- pect of Russia’s attaining some day to the Bosphorus should be shut out by the ambition of any other Power. Of course it followed that a great State ambition of this watchful but irresolute kind would be stimulated to an in- creased activity by the disappearance of any of the chief ob- stacles lying in the way of the enterprise ; and especially this would be the case whenever the course of affairs seemed to be unfavorable to an alliance against Russia between the other great Powers of Europe. The Emperor Nicholas held an absolute sway over his Em- The Emperor pire, and his power was not moderated by the sal- Nicholas, utary resistance of ministers who had strength enough to decline to take part in acts which they disapproved. The old restraints which used sometimes to fetter the power of the Russian monarchs had fallen away, and nothing had yet come in their stead. Holding the boundless authority of an Oriental Potentate, the Czar was armed besides with all the power which is supplied by high organizatign and the clever appliances of modern times. What he chose to do he actually did. He might be sitting alone and reading a dispatch, and if it happened that its contents made him angry, he could touch a bell and kindle a war without hearing counsel from any liv- ing man. In the room where he labored he could hear over- ’ ‘Ta Russic a trop menacé Constantinople sans le prendre.’ 60 TRANSACTIONS WHICH (Cuar. IV, head the clicking of machinery, and he liked the sound of the restless magnets, for they were giving instant effect to his will in regions far away. He was of a stern, unrelenting nature. He displayed, when he came to be tried, a sameness of ideas and of language and a want of resource which indicated pov- erty of intellect; but this dearth within was masked by the brillianecy of the qualities which adorned the surface, and he was so capable of business, and had such a vast activity, that he was able to arrogate to himself an immense share of the ae- tual governance of his subjects. Indeed by striving to extend his management beyond the proper compass of a single mind he disturbed the march of business, and so far superseded the responsibility of his servants, that he ended by lessening to a perilous extent the number of gifted men who in former times had taken part in the connsels of the State. Still, this widely- ranging activity kept alive the awe with which his subjects watched to see where next he would strike; and made the na- tion feel that, along with his vast stature and his commanding presence, he carried the actual power of the State. He had been merciless toward the Polish nation; but whilst this stern- ness made him an object of hatred to millions of diseomfited men, and to other millions of men who felt for them in their sorrows, it tended, perhaps, at the time to increase his ascend- ency, by making him an object of dread. - And it trebled the delight of being with him in his gentle mood. When he was friendly or chose to seem so, there was a glow and frankness in his manner which had an irresistible charm. He had dis- carded in some measure his predecessor’s system of governing Russia through the aid of foreigners; and took a pride in his own people, and understood their worth. In the great empire of the North religion is closely blended with the national sen- timent, and in this composite shape it had a strong hold upon the Czar. It did not much govern him in his daily life, and his way of joining in the service of the Church seemed to dis- close something like impatience and disdain, but no one doubt- ed that faith was deeply rooted in his mind. He had the air of a man raised above the level of common worshipers who im- agined that he was appointed to serve the cause of his Church by great imperial achievements, and not by humble feats of morality and devotion. It will be seen but too plainly that the - Emperor Nicholas could be guilty of saying one thing and do- ing another, and it may be supposed therefore that at once and in plain terms he ought to be charged with duplicity : yet there are circumstances which make one falter in coming to such a conclusion. He had reigned, and had personally governed for Cuap. IV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 61 some seven-and-twenty years, and although during that period he had done much to raise bitter hatred, the most sagacious ‘statesmen in Europe placed faith in his personal honor. It is certain that he had the love of truth. When he sought to speak of what he deemed fair and honorable, he traveled into our language for the word which spoke his meaning, and claim- ed to have the same standard of uprightness as an English ‘gentleman.’ It is known also that his ideal of human gran- deur was the character of the Duke of Wellington. No man could have made that choice without having truth in him. It would seem, however, that beneath the virtues which for more than a quarter of a century had enabled the Czar to stand before Europe as a man of honor and truth there lurked a set of opposite qualities; and that when he reached the period of life which has often been found a trying one to men of the Romanoff family, a deterioration began to take place which shook the ascendant of his better nature. After the beginning of 1853 there were strange alternations in his conduct. At one time he seemed to be so frank and straightforward that the most wary statesmen could not and would not believe him to be intending deceit. Then, and even within a few hours, he would steal off and be false. But the vice which he dis- closed in those weak intervals was not the profound deceit of statecraft, but rather the odd purposeless cunning of a gipsy or a savage, who shows by some sudden and harmless sign of his wild blood that even after years of conformity to European ways he has not been completely reclaimed. For the present, however, the Emperor Nicholas must be looked upon not merely as he was, but as he seemed to be; and what he seem- ed to be in the beginning of 1853 was a firm righteous man too brave and too proud to be capable of descending to falsehood. Nicholas had a violent will; but of course when he under- went the change which robbed him of his singleness of mind, his resolves, notwithstanding their native force, could not fail to lose their momentum. He was a man too military to be warlike; and was not only without the qualities for wielding an army in the field, but was mistaken also as to the way in which the best soldiers are made: under his sway Russia was so oppressively drilled that much of the fire and spirit of en- terprise which are needed for war was crushed out by military training. No man, however, could toil with more zeal than he did in that branch of industry which seeks to give uniformity and mechanic action to bodies of men. He was an unwearied inspector of troops. He kept close at hand great numbers of small wooden images clothed in various uniforms, and one of 62 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cirar. IV? the rooms in his favorite palace was filled with these military dolls. The Emperor Nicholas had not been long upon the throne when he showed that he was a partaker of the ambition of his people ; for in 1828 he had begun an invasion of Turkey, and was present with his army in some of the labors of the cam- paign: but his experience was of a painful kind. The mechan- ical organization in which he delighted broke down under stress of real war carried on upon an extended line of opera- tions. In the country of the Danube his soldiery perished fast from sickness and want; and although he had so well chosen his time that the Sultan was without an ally, and (having but lately put to death his own army) was in an ill condition for war, still he encountered so much of obstinate and troublesome resistance from the Turks, and was so ill able to cope with it, that at the instance, as it is said, of his own Generals, he re- tired from the scene of conflict, and went back to St. Peters- burg, with the galling knowledge that he was without the gifts which make an able commander in the field; he could not but see, too, that the military reputation of Russia was brought into great peril; and although in the following year he was rescued from the dangerous straits into which he had run by the brilliant audacity of Diebitsch, by the skill of his diplomacy, and above all by indulgent fortune, still he was so chastened by the anxiety of the time, and by the narrow- ness of his escape from a great humiliation, that he ceased to entertain any hope or intention of dismembering Turkey, ex- cept in the event of there occurring a chain of circumstances which should enable him to act with the concurrence of other great Powers. But the Emperor knew that the pride of his people would be deeply wounded if any great changes should take place in the Ottoman Empire without bringing gain to Russia and ae- celerating her march to Constantinople ; and therefore he be- lieved that, until he was prepared to take a part in dismem- bering the Empire, it was his interest to preserve it intact. For more than twenty years his actions. as well as his declared intentions were in accordance with this view; and it would be wrong to believe that the policy thus shown forth to the world was only a mask. Just as the love of killing game generates a sincere wish to preserve it, so the very fact that the Czar looked upon Turkey as eventual booty, made him anxions to protect it from every other kind of danger. In 1833, the Em- peror Nicholas saved the Sultan and his dynasty from destrue- tion; and, although he accompanied this measure with an act Cuar. IV-] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 68 offensive to the other maritime powers,' his conduct toward ‘Turkey was loyal. In 1840 he again acted faithfully toward the Sultan, and joined with England and the leading Powers ot Germany in preventing the disruption of the Ottoman Em- ire. In 1844 the Czar came to England, and anxiously strove to find out whether there were any of our leading statesmen who had grown weary of a conservative policy in Turkey. He talked confidentially with the Duke of Wellington and Lord Aberdeen, and also no doubt with Sir Robert Peel; but evi- dently meeting with no encouragement, he covered his retreat by giving in his adhesion to England’s accustomed policy, and, to do this with the better effect, he left in our Foreign Office a solemn declaration not only of his own policy, but likewise, strange to say, of the policy of Austria; and all this he blend- ed in a somewhat curious manner with words which might be read as importing that his views had obtained the sanction of — the English Government. It would seem that our Govern- ment agreed, as they naturally would, to that part of the Czar’s memorandum which was applicable to the existing state of things, and which, in fact, echoed the known opinion of Eng- land; and they also assented to the obvious proposition that the event of a breaking up of the Ottoman Empire would make it important for the great Powers to come to an under- standing amongst themselves ; but it must be certain that the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen re- frained, as it is the custom of our Statesmen to do, from all hypothetical engagements. ‘ Russia and England,’ said this Memorandum, ‘are mutually penetrated with the conviction, ‘that it is for their common interest that the Ottoman Porte ‘should maintain itself in the state of independence and of ter- ‘ritorial possession which at present constitutes that Empire. ‘ Being agreed on this principle, Russia and England have an ‘equal interest in uniting their efforts in order to keep up the ‘ existence of the Ottoman Empire, and to avert all the dangers * which can place in jeopardy its safety. With this object, the ‘ essential point is to suffer the Porte to live in repose, without ‘needlessly disturbing it by diplomatic bickerings, and with- ‘ out interfering, without absolute necessity, in its internal af- ‘fairs. Then, after showing that the tendency of the Turkish Government to evade treaties and ill-use its Christian subjects ought to be checked rather by the combined and friendly re- monstrance of all the Powers, than by the separate action of * The Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi. 64 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. IV. one, the Memorandum proceeded :—‘If all the great Powers eft ankly adopt this line of conduct, they will have a well-found- ‘ed expectation of preserving the existence of Turkey. How- ‘ever, they must not conceal from themselves how many ele- ‘ments of dissolution that Empire contains within itself. Un- ‘foreseen circumstances may hasten its fall. . . . In the uncer- ‘tainty which hovers over the future, a single fundamental ‘idea seems to admit of a really practical application: it is, ‘that the danger which may result from a catastrophe in Tur- ‘key will be much diminished if, in the event of its occurring, ‘Russia and England have come to an understanding as to the ‘course to be taken by them in common. That understanding ‘will be the more beneficial, inasmuch as it will have the full ‘assent of Austria. Between her and Russia there exists al- ‘ready an entire accord.’ Upon the whole, it would seem that from the peace of Adri- His policy from anople down to the beginning of 1853 the state of 1829 to 1853. the Ozar’s mind upon the Eastern Question was this :—He was always ready to come forward as an eager and almost ferocious defender of his Church, and he deemed this motive to be one of such cogency that views resting on mere policy and prudence were always in danger of being overborne by it; but, in the absence of events tending to bring this fiery principle into action, he was really unwilling to face the troubles which would arise from the dismemberment of ‘Turkey unless he could know beforehand that England would act with him. If he could have obtained any anterior assurance to that effect, he would have tried perhaps to accelerate the disruption of the Sultan’s Empire; but, as England always declined to found any engagements upon the hypothesis of a catastrophe which she wished to prevent, the Emperor had probably accustomed himself to believe that Providence did not design to allot to him the momentous labor of governing the fall of the Ottoman Empire. He therefore chose the other alter native, and not only spoke, but really did much for the preservation of an Em- pire which he was not yet ready to destroy. Still, whenever any subject of irritation occurred, the attractive force of the opposite policy was more or less felt, for it is not every man, who, having to choose between two lines of action, can resolve to hold to the one and frankly discard the other. In general, the principle governing such a conflict is found to be analo- gous to the law which determines the composition of mechan- ic forces, and the mental struggle does not result in a clear adoption of either of the alternatives, but in a mean betwixt the two. It was thus with the ¢ Emperor Nicholas whenever Cuar. V.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 65 it happened that he was irritated by questions connected with the action of the Turkish Government. At such times, his con- duct, swayed in one direction by the notion of dismembering the Empire, and in the other direction by the policy of main- taining it, resulted in an endeavor to establish what the English Ambassador called ‘a predominant influence over the counsels. ‘of the Porte, tending in the interest of absolute power to ex- ‘clude all other influences, and to secure the means, if not of ‘hastening the downfall of the Empire, at least of obstructing ‘its improvement and settling its future destinies to the profit ‘of Russia, whenever a propitious juncture should arrive.’! CHAPTER V. Ir happened that at a time? when the Emperor of Russia Troubles in Was wrought to anger by the triumph of the Latin Montenegro. over the Greek Church, there were troubles in one of the provinces bordering upon the Austrian territory, and Omar Pasha, at the head of a Turkish force, was operating against the Christians in Montenegro. The continuance of this strife on her frontier was, no doubt, alarming and vexa- tious to Austria; but with the Emperor Nicholas the tidings of a conflict going on between a Moslem soldiery and a Chris- tian people of the Greek faith could not fail to kindle his re- ligious zeal, and cause him to thirst for vengeance against the enemies of his Church. Of course the existence of this feeling on the part of the Czar was well understood at Vienna, and it was probably in order to anticipate his wishes and to remove his motives for interference that the Austrian Cabinet determ- ined to address a peremptory summons to the Porte calling upon the Sultan to withdraw his forces immediately from Montene- gro. The Czar secretly but studiously represented that upon this and every other matter touching his policy in Turkey he was in close accord with Austria.2 This, however, the Austrian Government denies. Truthful men declare that the Czar was not even informed beforehand of the demand which Austria had resolved to press upon the Porte. It is certain, however, that the Czar determined to act as though he were in close con- Count Lenin. Cert with Austria. Count Leiningen was to be the gen's mission. bearer of the Austrian summons, and simultaneously 1 ¢Rastern Papers,’ part i., p. 237. 2? The winter of 1852-3. 3 ¢Hastern Papers,’ part v., in several places. 66 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. V. with the Count’s departure from Vienna, the Emperor Nicholas resolved to dispatch to the Porte an Ambassador Extraordina- The Gare 2Y» Who was to declare that a refusal to withdraw plan ofsending Omar Pasha’s forces from Montenegro would be another mis regarded by the Czar as a ground of war between Porte at the him and the Sultan; and the Ambassador was also Samewme- to be charged with the duty of obtaining redress for the change which “had been made in the allotment of the Holy Sites to the contending Churches. It may seem strange that the Czar should propose to found a declaration of war upon a grievance which was put forward by the Cabinet of Vienna and not by himself, but he was always eager to stand forward as the protector of Christiana of his own Church who had taken up arms against their Moslem rulers; and when, as now, his conservative policy was disturbed by anger and re- ligious zeal, his ulterior views upon the Eastern Question be- came too vague, and also no doubt too alarming, to admit of their being made the subject of a treaty engagement with Austria. Apparently, then, the plan of the Emperor Nicholas was fans 20th this —he would make the rejection of Count Lein- Emperor ingen’s demand a ground of war against the Porte, pes ar and then acting under the blended motives fur- nished by the assigned cause of war and by his own separate grievance, he would avenge the wrong done to his Church by forcing the Sultan to submit to a foreion protectorate over all his provinces lying north of the Balkan. This, however, was only one view of the contemplated war. It might be applica- ble, if the occupation of the tributary provinces should evoke no element of trouble except the sheer resistance of the enemy; but the Czar, who did not well understand the Turkish Empire, was firmly convinced at this time that the approach of war would be followed by a rising of the Sultan’s Christian sub- jects. On the other hand he “feared, and with better reason, that if the angry Moslems should deem the Sultan remiss or faint-hearted in the defense of his territory, they might rise against their Government, and fall upon the Christian rayahs, whom they would regard as the abettors of the invasion. He could not fail to perceive that in the progress of the contem- plated operations he might be forced by events to give a vast extension to his views against the Sultan, and that, even against his will, and without being prepared for the crisis, he might find himself called upon to deal with the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in the midst of confusion and massacre. Cuar. VI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 67 CHAPTER VI. Now therefore it became needful for the Emperor Nicholas to endeavor to divine the temper in which the other great Powers of Europe would be inclined to regard his intended pressure upon the Sultan and the eventual catastrophe which, even if he should wish it, he might soon be unable to avert. It was of deep moment to him to know what help or acqui- escence he might reckon upon, and what hostility he might have to encounter, if he should be called upon to take part in regulating the collapse of the Turkish Empire, and controlling the arrangements which were to follow. . He looked around. The policy of one of the great States Position of | Of Kurope was bent out of its true course, and in Austria in re- others there were signs of weak purpose. The gardto Turkey 75 at the besin-. Power most deeply interested in preventing the ning of S23. dismemberment of European Turkey had already determined to press upon the Sultan an unjust and offensive demand, and although the statesmen of Vienna might have resolved in their own minds to stop short at some prescribed stage of the contemplated hostilities, it was plain that Austria, when once engaged in war against the Sultan, would lose the standing ground of a Power which undertakes to resist ch ange, and would become so e entangled by the mere progress of events, that it would be difficult for her to extricate herself, and revert to a conservative policy. Indeed the Emperor Nicholas might fairly expect that Austria, having committed the original mis- take of disturbing the peace, would afterward strive to cling to his friendship in the hope of being able to moderate his course of action, and avert or mitigate the downfall of the Turkish Empire. With respect to Prussia, the Emperor Nicholas was free from anxiety. “Ag long as the measures against the Sultan were carried on in alliance with Austri: 1, the States of Germany had little ground for fearing that the inter- est which they had in the freedom of the Lower Danube would be forgotten; and, this object being secured or regarded as secure, Prussia had less interest in “the fate of the Ottoman Empire than any of the other great Powers. There being therefore no reason of state obliging him to take a contr ary : 4 Of Prussia. 68 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuare. VI course, it was to be expected that the King of Prussia would continue to live under the ascendency which his Imperial brother-in-law had long been accustomed to maintain. France having great military and naval forces, and a Medi- terranean sea-board, was well entitled to frame for herself any honest system of policy which she might deem to be the best guide for her conduct in Eastern affairs, but the time for her having a policy of her own had passed away; for she had fallen under the mere control of the Second Bonaparte, and in order to divine what France would do, it was necessary to make out what scheme of action her ruler would deem to be most conducive to his comfort and safety. Even the supposition that he would copy the First Napoleon gave no sufficing clew for saying what his Eastern policy ought to be, or what it was, or what it was likely to be in any future week. France as wielded by a Bonaparte had been known to the Sultan, sometimes as a friendly Power, sometimes as a Power pretending to be friendly to him, but seer etly bargain- ing for the dismemberment of his empire; sometimes as a mere predatory State seizing his provinces in time of peace and with- out the pretense of a quarrel,! and sometimes even as a rival Mahometan Power, for it is known that the First Bonaparte did not seruple to call himself in Egypt a true Mussulman ;? and although he now and then claimed to be ‘the eldest son of ‘the Catholic Chur ch,’ he first introduced himself in the Levant as the soldier of a nation which had ‘renounced the Messiah.’ Upon the whole, there seemed to be no reason why the new French Emperor should refuse to join with Russia in trying to bring about the dismemberment of the Turkish Empire, and to arrange the distribution of the spoil. Indeed, the great exten- sion which France had given of late to her navy render ed views of this kind less chimerical than they were at the time of the Secret Articles of Tilsit. But, on the other hand, it was the French Government which had provoked the religious excite- ment under which Nicholas was laboring, and although it is believed that when his troubles increased upon him the Ozar afterward made overtures to France, it would seem that in the beginning of 1853 he was too angry and too scornful toward the French Emperor to be able to harbor the thought of mak- ing him his ally. Of the danger lest France should suddenly adopt a conservative policy, and undertake to resist his art ‘angre- ments in the East of Europe, the Emperor Nicholas made light, Of France. 1 e.g. Bonaparte’s predatory invasion of Egypt in time of peace. 2 A falsified copy of the manifesto was sent to France. The one really issued represented Bonaparte as a Mahometan. ? Cuar. VL] BROUGHT ON 'THE WAR. 69 for he had resolved at this time not to place himself in conflict with England, and, the operations of any Western Power in Turkey being dependent upon sea communications, he did not think it to be within the wide compass of possible events that France, single-handed and without the alliance of her maritime neighbor, would or could obstruct him in the Levant. ‘He ‘cared,’ he said, ‘very little what line the French might think ‘proper to take in Eastern affairs, and he had apprised the ‘Sultan that if his assistance were required for resisting the ‘menaces of the French it was entirely at the service of the ‘Sultan.? ‘When we (Russia and England) are agreed, I am ‘quite without anxiety as to the West of Europe: it is imma- ‘terial what the others may think or do.’ There remained then only England, and upon the whole it Of England. had come to this: that the Emperor Nicholas would ame feel able to meet the emergency caused by the down- there. fall of the Sultan, and might perhaps be inclined to do a little toward bringing about the catastrophe, if beforehand he could come to an understanding with the English Govern- ment as to the way in which Europe should deal with the frag- ments of the Turkish Empire. But he had learned, as he said, that an alliance with England must depend upon the feeling of the country at large,’ and this he strove hard to understand. England had long been an enigma to the political students of the Continent, but after the summer of 1851 they began to imagine that they really at last understood her. They thought that she was falling from her place among nations; and indeed there were signs which might well lead a shallow observer te: fancy that her ancient spirit was failing her. An army is but the limb ofa nation, and it is no more given to a people to com- bine the possession of military strength with an unmeasured devotion to the arts of peace than it is for a man to be feeble and helpless in the general condition of his body, and yet to have at his command a strong right arm for the convenience of self-defense. The strength of the right arm is as the strength of the man: the prowess of an army is as the valor and war- like spirit of the nation which gives it her flesh and blood. England having suffered herself to grow forgetful of this truth, seemed in the eyes of foreigners to be declining. It was not the reduction of the military and establishments which was the, really evil sign: for—to say nothing of ancient times — the Swiss in Europe, and some of the States of the North Amer- ican continent, have shown the world that a people which al- _ 1 ¢‘Rastern Papers,’ part v., p. 10. * Tbid., p.1. 3 Tbid., part iii. 70 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [CuHap. VI most dispenses with a standing army, may yet be among the most resolute and warlike of nations; but there was in England a general decrying of arms. Well-meaning-men harangued and lectured in this spirit. What they sincerely desired was a continuance of peace; but instead of taking the thought and acquiring the knowledge which might have qualified them to warn their fellow-countrymen against steps tending to a need: less war, they squandered their indignation upon the deceased authors of former wars, and used language of such breadth that what they said was as applicable to one war as to anoth, er. At length they generated a sect called the ‘ Peace Party,’ which denounced war in strong indiscriminate terms. Moreover at this time extravagant veneration was avowed for mechanical contrivances, and the very words which grate- ful nations had wrought from out of their hearts in praise of tried chiefs and heroes were plundered, as it were, from the warlike professions, and given to those who for their own gain could make the best goods. It was no longer enough to say that an honest tradesman was a valuable member of society, or that a man who contrived a good machine was ingenious. More was expected from those who had the utterance of the public feeling, and it was announced that ‘ glory’ and ‘ honor’ —nay,to prevent all mistake, ‘true honor’ and ‘true glory’ were due to him who could produce the best articles of trade. At length in the summer of 1851 it was made to appear to for- eigners that this singular faith had demanded and obtained an outward sign of its acceptance, and a solemn recognition by Church and State. The foreigners were mistaken. The truth is, that the English in their exuberant strength and their care- lessness about the strict import of words are accustomed to indulge a certain extravagance in their demonstrations of pub- lic feeling, and this is the more bewildering to foreign minds because it goes along with practical moderation and wisdom. What the English really meant was to give people an oppor- tunity of seeing the new inventions and comparing all kinds of patterns, but above all to have a new kind of show and bring about an immense gathering of people. Perhaps too in the secret hearts of many who were weary of tame life there lurk- ed a hope of animating tumults. This was all the English really meant. But the political philosophers of the Continent were resolved to impute to the islanders a more profound in- tent. They saw in the festival a solemn renouncing of all such dominion as rests upon force. England, they thought, was closing her great career by a whimsical act of abdication, and it must be acknowledged that there was enough to confound Cuar. VI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. oO men accustomed to lay stress upon symbols. . For the glory of mechanic Arts, and in token of their conquest over nature, a cathedral of glass climbed high over the stately elms of Knightsbridge, inclosing them, as it were, in a casket the work of men’s hands, and it was not thought wrong nor impious to give the work the sanction of a religious ceremony. It was by the Archbishop of Canterbury that the money-changers were brought back into the temple. Few protested. One man indeed, abounding in Scripture, and inflamed with the sight of the glass Babel ascending to the skies, stood up, and denounced the work, and for etold “ wars” and ““judgments.”? . But he was a prophet speaking to the wrong generation, and no one heeded him. Indeed it seemed likely that the sound- ness of his mind would be questioned, and if he went on to foretell that within three years England would be engaged in a bloody war springing out of a dispute about a key and a sil- ver star, he was probably adjudged to be mad, for the whole country at the time felt sure of its peaceful temper. Certain- ly it was a hard task for the sagacity of a foreigner to pierce through these outward signs, and see that, notw ithstanding them all, the old familiar ‘ Kastern Question’ ‘might be so used as to make it rekindle the warlike ardor of Eneland. Even for Englishmen, until long after the beginning of 1853, it was difficult to foresee how the country would be w illing to act in regard to the defense of Turkey, and the representatives of foreign Powers accredited to St. James’s might be excused if they assured their Courts that England was deep in pursuits which would hinder her from all due assertion of her will as a great European Power. Thus foreigners came to believe that the English nature was changed, and that for the future the country would always be tame in Europe, and it chanced that in the beginning of the year 1853 they were strengthened in their faith by observing the structure of the Ministry then recently formed, for Lord Palmerston, whose name had become associated with the idea of a resolute and watchful policy, was banished to the Home Office, and the Prime Minister was Lord Aberdeen, the same statesman who had held the seals of the Foreign Office in for- mer years, when Austria was vainly entreating England to join with her in defending the Sultan. The Emperor Nicholas heard the tidings of Lord Aberdeen’s elevation to the premier- ship with a delight which he did not suppress. Yet this very event, as will be seen, was 4 main link in the chain of causes 1 This.I witnessed. "9 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. VI, which was destined to draw the Czar into war, and bring him in misery to the grave. | But if there was a phantasy in vogue which seemed likely to make England acquiesce in transactions adverse to her ac- customed policy in the East, there were other counsels afloat which, although they were based on very different views, seemed to tend in the same direction, for some of our country- men were beginning to perceive that the restoration of a Bo- napartist Empire in France would bring back with it the tra- ditions and the predatory schemes of the First Napoleon. These advisers were unwilling that the elements of the great alliance which thirty-eight years before had delivered Europe from its thraldom should now be cast asunder for the mere sake of giving a better effect to the policy which the Foreign Office was accustomed to follow upon the Eastern Qustion. And in truth, this same Eastern policy, though held by almost all responsible statesmen, was not so universally received in England as to go altogether unchallenged. The notion of En- gland’s standing still, and suffering the Turks to be driven from Europe, was not deemed so preposterous as to be unwor- thy of being put forward by men commanding great means of persuasion; and before the new year! was far advanced the Emperor Nicholas had means of knowing that the old English policy of averting the dismemberment of Turkey would be gravely questioned, and brought in an effective way to the test of printed discussion. Upon the whole, therefore, it seemed to the Czar that now, if ever, England might be willing to acqui- esce in his encroachments upon Turkey, and even perhaps to abet him in schemes for the actual dismemberment of the Em- pire. The Minister who represented the Queen at the Russian Sir Hamilton Court was Sir Hamilton Seymour. It is said that Seymour. before there was a prospect of his being accredited at St. Petersburg he had conceived a high admiration of the qualities of the Emperor Nicholas, and that this circumstance becoming known to the Czar, tended, at first, to make the En- elish Minister more than commonly welcome at the Imperial Court. Sir Hamilton was not so constituted as to be liable to the kind of awe which other diplomatists too often felt in the majestic presence of the Emperor; but his dispatches show that he was much interested and, so to speak, amused by the conversation of a prince who wielded with his own very hand the power of All the Russias. .Moreover, Sir Hamilton had + 1853. * Onar. VI] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. "3 the quickness and the presence of mind which enable a man to seize the true bearing and import of a sentence just uttered, and to meet it at the instant with the few and appropr iate words which convey the needful answer, and provoke a still farther disclosure. On the night of the 9th of January, 1853, the English Min: ister was at a party gathered in the palace of the Archduchess Helen, when the Emperor Nicholas approached him, and drew him into conversation. ~*You know my feelings,’ the Emperor said, ‘ with regard His conversa. tO England. What I have told you before I say tion with the ‘again: it was intended that the two countries Emperor. ¢should be upon terms of close amity; and I feel ‘sure that this will continue to be the case. . . . I repeat that ‘it is very essential that the two Governments—that is, that ‘the English Government and I, and I and the English Gov- ‘ernment—should be on the best terms; and the necessity was ‘never greater than at present. I beg you to convey these “words to Lord John Russell. When we are agreed, I am ‘quite without anxiety as to the West of Europe; it is imma- ‘terial what the others may think or do. As to Turkey, that is ‘another question: that country is in a critical state, and may ‘give us alla great deal of trouble. And now I will take my ‘leave of you.’ The Emperor then shook hands with Sir Ham- ilton Seymour, and believed that he had closed the conversa- tion, but the skilled diplomatist saw and grasped his opportu- nity, and, whilst his hand was still held by the Emperor, Sir Hamilton Seymour said, ‘Sir, with your gracious permission, I ‘would desire to take a gr eat liberty.’ ‘ Certainly,’ his Majes- ty replied; ‘what is it—let me hear.’ Sir Hamilton said, ‘I ‘should be particularly glad that your Majesty should adda ‘few words, which may tend to calm the anxiety with respect ‘to the affairs of Turkey which passing events are so calculated “s excite on the part of her Majesty’s Government; perhaps ‘you will be pleased to charge me with some additional assur- “ances of this kind.’ The Emperor’s words and manner, although still very kind, showed that he had no intention of speaking to Sir Hamilton of the demonstration which he was about to make in the South. He said, however, at first with a little hesitation, but, as he pro- ceeded, in an open and unhesitating manner: ‘The affairs of ‘Turkey are in a very disorganized condition; the country it- ‘self seems to be falling to pieces: the fall will be a great mis- ‘fortune, and it is very important that England and Russia ‘should come to a perfectly good understanding upon these Vor. 1—D 14 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. VL ‘affairs, and that neither should take any decisive step of which ‘the other is not apprised.’ The Envoy answered, that this was certainly his view of the way in which Turkish questions should be treated; but. the Emperor then said, as if proceed- ing with his remark, ‘Stay! we have on our hands a sick man ‘a very sick man; it will be,I tell you frankly, a great mis- fortune, if one of these days he should slip away from us, es- ‘pecially before all necessary arrangements were made. But, ‘however, this is not the time to speak to you on that matter. On the 22nd of January another interview took place be- tween the Emperor and the English Envoy. ‘I found his Maj- ‘esty, writes Sir Hamilton Seymour, ‘alone; he received me ‘with great kindness, saying that I had appeared desirous to “speak to him upon Eastern affairs ; ; that, on his side, there was ‘no indiposition to do so, but that he must begin at a remote ‘period. You know, his Majesty said, the dreams and plans in ‘which the Empress Catherine was in the habit of indulging; ‘these were handed down to our time; but while I inherited ‘immense territorial possessions, I did not inherit those visions, — ‘those intentions if you like to call them so. On the contrary, ‘my country is so vast, so happily circumstanced in every way, ‘that it would be unreasonable in me to desire more territor 7 ‘or more power than I possess ; on the contrary, I am the first ‘to tell you that our great, perhaps our only danger, is that ‘which would arise from an extension given to an Empire al- ~ ‘ready too large. ‘Close to us lies Turkey, and in our present condition noth- ‘ing better for our interests can be desired; the times have ‘gone by when we had any thing to fear from the fanatical ‘spirit or the military enterprise of the Turks, and yet the ‘country is strong enough, or has hitherto been strong enough, “to preserve its independence, and to insure respectful treat-— ‘ment from other countries. ‘ Well, in that Empire there are several millions of Christians .; whose interests I am called upon to watch over, while the Tight of doing so is secured to me by treaty. I may truly ‘say that I make a moderate and sparing use of my right, and ‘I will freely confess that it is one which is attended with ob- ‘ligations occasionally very inconvenient; but I can not recede ‘from the discharge of a distinct duty. Our religion, as estab- ‘lished in this country, came to us from the East, “and there are ‘feelings as well as obligations which never must be lost sight of. ‘Now Turkey, in the condition which I have described, has ‘by degrees fallen into such a state of decrepitude that, as I ‘told you the other night, eager as we all are for the prolonged Cuap. VIL] BROUGHT ON ‘THE WAR. "5 ‘existence of the man (and that Iam as desirous as you can be ‘for the continuance of his life I beg you to believe), he thay ‘suddenly die upon our hands: we can not resuscitate what is ‘dead ; if the Turkish Empire falls, it falls to rise no more; and ‘I put it to you, therefore, whether it is not better to be pro- ‘vided beforehand for a contingency, than to incur the chaos, ‘confusion, and the certainty of a European war, all of which ‘must attend the catastrophe if it should occur unexpectedly, ‘and before some ulterior system has been sketched. This is ‘the point to which I am desirous you should call the atten- ‘tion of your Government.’ Sir Hamilton Seymour adverted to the objection which the English Government habitually felt to the plan of taking en- gagements upon possible eventualities, and said that disincli- nation might be expected in England to the idea of disposing by anticipation of the succession of an old friend and ally. ‘The rule is a good one,’ the Emperor replied, ‘ good at all ‘times, especially in times of uncertainty and change like the ‘present; still it is of the greatest importance that we should ‘understand one another, and not allow events to take us by ‘surprise. Now I desire to speak to you as a friend and as ‘a “gentleman :” if England and I arrive at an understanding ‘in ‘this matter, as regards the rest it matters little to me; it ‘is indifferent to me what others do or think. Frankly then I ‘tell you plainly, that if England thinks of establishing herself ‘one of these days at Constantinople I will not allow it. I do ‘not attribute this intention to you, but it is better on these ‘occasions to speak plainly; for my part Iam equally disposed ‘to take the engagement not to establish myself there, as pro- ‘prietor that is to say, for as occupier I do not say: it might ‘happen that circumstances, ifno previous provision were made, ‘if every thing should be left to chance, might place me in the ‘position of occupying Constantinople.’ On the 20th of February the Emperor came up to Sir Ham- ilton Seymour at a party given by the Grand Duchess Heredi- tary, and in the most gracious manner took him apart, saying he desired to speak to him. ‘If your Government,’ said the Emperor, ‘has been led to believe that Turkey retains any ‘elements of existence, your Government must have received ‘incorrect information. I repeat to you that the sick man is “dying, and we can never allow such an event to take us by ‘surprise. We must come to some understanding.’ Then Sir Hamilton Seymour felt himself able to infer that the Czar had settled in his own mind that the hour for bringing about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire must be at hand. bG TRANSACTIONS WHICH ~ [Cuar. VIL The next day the Emperor again sent for Sir Hamilton Sey- mour, and after combating the determination of the English Government to persist in regarding Turkey as a Power which might, and which probably would remain as she was, he at length spoke out his long reserved words of temptation. He thought, he said, that in the event of the dissolution of the Ot- toman Empire, it might be less difficult to arrive at a satisfac- tory territorial arrangement than was commonly believed, and then he proceeded: ‘The principalities are, in fact, an inde- ‘pendent State under my protection: this might so continue. ‘Servia might receive the same form of government. So ‘agai with Bulgaria: there seems to be no reason why this ‘province should not form an independent State. As to ‘Egypt, I quite understand the importance to England of that ‘territory. I can then only say, that if, in the event of a dis- ‘tribution of the Ottoman succession upon the fall of the Em- ‘pire, you should take possession of Egypt, I shall have no ‘objection to offer. I would say the same thing of Candia: ‘that island might suit you, and I do not know why it should ‘not become an English possession.’ ‘As I did not wish,’ writes Sir Hamilton Seymour, ‘that the ‘Emperor should imagine that an English public servant was ‘caught by this sort of overture, I simply answered that I had ‘always understood that the English views upon Egypt did ‘not go beyond the point of securing a safe and ready com- ‘munication between British India and the mother country. ‘Well,’ said the Emperor, ‘induce your Government to write ‘again upon these subjects—to write more fully, and to do so ‘ without hesitation. I have confidence in the English Govern- ‘ment. It is not an engagement—a convention which I ask ‘of them; it is a free interchange of ideas, and in case of need ‘the word of a“ gentleman ;” that is enough between us.’} In answer to these overtures, the Government of the Queen Reception of disclaimed all notion of aiming at the possession of the Czar’s either Constantinople or any other of the Sultan’s overtures by 3 _ the English possessions, and accepted the assurances to the like Government. effect which were given by the Czar. It combated the opinion that the extinction of the Ottoman Empire was near at hand, and deprecated the discussions based on that supposition, as tending directly to produce the very result against which they were meant to provide. Finally, our Goy- ernment, with abundance of courtesy, but in terms very strin- gent and clear, peremptorily refused to enter into any kind of 1 «Eastern Papers,’ part v. Cuar. VI.]) BROUGHT ON THE WAR. ri secret engagement with Russia for the settlement of the East- ern Question. These communications of January and February, 1853, were carried on between the Emperor of Russia and the English Government upon the understanding that they were to be held strictly secret; and for more than a year this concealment was maintained. It will be for a later page to show the ground on which the engagement for secrecy was broken, and the effect - which the disclosure wrought upon the opinion of Europe and upon the feelings of the people in England. The Czar was baffled by the failure of his somewhat shallow plan for playing the tempter with the English Government ; and an event which occurred at this same time still farther conduced to the abandonment of his half-formed designs against the Sultan. When Nicholas came to the singular resolution of declaring war against the Sultan in the event of his rejecting Austria’s demand respecting Montenegro, he imagined perhaps that his counsels were kept strictly secret; but it seems probable that a knowledge or suspicion of the truth may have reached the Turkish Gover nment, and helped to govern its decision. What Rowllt at is certain is that the demand made by Austria was Count Leinin- carried by Count Leiningen to Constantinople, and gen’s mission. that, having been put forward in terms offensiv ely peremptory, it was suddenly acceded to by the sagacious ad- visers of the Sultan. . This contingency seems to have been unforeseen by the Its effect upon LMperor Nicholas; at first the tidings of it kindled the plansof in his mind strong feelings of joy, “for he looked the Czar. upon the deliverance of Montenegro as a triumph of his Church over the Moslem. But he soon perceived that this sudden attainment of the object to be sought would dis- concert his plans. He found himself all at once deprived of the basis on which his scheme of action had rested; and, ex- cept in respect of the question of the key and the silver star, there was nothing that he had to charge against the Sultan. On the other hand, he had failed in his “endeavor to win over England to his views. He therefore relapsed into the use of the conservative language which he had been accustomed to apply to the treatment of the Eastern Question; professed his willingness to labor with England to prolong the existence of the Turkish Empire; and even went so far as to join with our Government in declaring that the way to achieve this result was to abstain ‘from harassing the Porte by imperious de- ‘mands, put forward in a manner humiliating to its independ- 78 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cnap. VII. He abandons | Cn¢e and its dignity.1 He abandoned the inten- the idea of go- tion of going to war, and even deprived himself of ing fowar the means of taking such a step with effect; for immediately upon hearing the result of Count Leiningen’s ‘mis- sion, he stopped the purchase of horses required for enabling him to take the field. CHAPTER VIL. Bur'when a man’s mind has been once thrown forward to- ward action, it gains so great a momentum, that the ceasing of the motive which first disturbed his repose does not in- stantly bring him to a stand. The Czar had found himself The pain ofin- SUddenly deprived of his ground of war against ppg the Porte by the embarrassing success of Count Leiningen’s mission, and in the same week he was robbed of his last hope of the alliance which he most desired by the failure of his overtures to England. He gave up the idea of going to war, and policy commanded that for a while he should rest; but already he had so acted that rest was pain to him. He could not but be tortured with the thought that the fur- tive words which he had uttered to Sir Hamilton Seymour on the 21st of February were known to the Queen of England ~ and to several of her foremost statesmen. Moreover, in a thousand forms, the bitter fruits of the delivery of the key and the Star of Bethlehem, and the tidings of the triumph which the Latins had gained over his Church, and of the ag- ony which this discomfiture had inflicted upon pious zealots, were coming home upon him, and from time to time in a fit- ful way were tormenting him, and then giving him a little rest, and then once more rekindling his fury. So he began to turn this way and that, in order that by turmoil he might smother the past, win back the self-respect which he had lost, and gain some counter-victory for his Church. He had al- ready gathered heavy bodies of troops in the south of his em- pire; he had a powerful fleet in the Euxine; the Bosphorus was nigh. The Turks, trusting mainly to heav enly power, were ill prepared. No French or English fleets were in the Levant. Above all, that shady garden at Therapia, command- ing the entrance of the Euxine, and seeming to be the fit dwell- ing-place for a Statesman who watched against invasion from 1 ¢Kastern Papers,’ part y., p. 25. Cuar. VIL] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 79 the North was no longer paced by the English Ambassador. The great Eltchi was away. Many thought it was possible for the Czar to seize the imperial city, and treat with the an- ger of Europe from the Seraglio Point. But Nicholas, though he was capable of venturing a little way into wrong paths, and was often blinded to the difference | between right and wr ong by a sense of religious duty, was far from being a lawless prince. His conscience, warped by Faith, would easily reconcile him to an act of violence against a Ma- hometan Power; but he never questioned that “the fate of Turkey was a matter of concern to other Christian States as well as to his own; and he did not at this time intend to take any steps which England would regard as an outrage. The Tlie Gzar's Plan which he resorted to asa means of giving vent new scheme of to his anger, and satisfying that tendency to action aan which had been engendered by his preparations against the Sultan, was to go on with the scheme of sending an Extraordinary Embassy to Constantinople, to make up for the sudden loss of the Montenegro grievance by laying an in- creased stress upon the question of the Holy Places, and to force the Sultan to settle the dispute upon terms which, with- out wounding the Latins more than could be helped, should still do justice to the Greek Church. Any attempt at resist- ance which the Porte might make, by alleging the counter- pressure of France, was to be met by at once engaging that the Emperor of Russia, with all his forces, should defend the Sultan’s territory against every attack by a Western Power; and, well knowing that protective aid of such a kind was a burden and not a gift, the Emperor seems to have directed that this alliance should be not merely offered, but pressed. But the secret purpose of the mission was to make the past defaults of the Turkish government in regard to the Holy Places of Palestine a ground for extorting a treaty engage- ment by which the Greek Church throughout all Turkey would be brought under the protection of Russia. It seemed to the Ozar that his half-completed preparations for war would give to his demands exactly that kind of support which their of: fensive character required ; for the position of the troops gath- ered in Bessarabia, and the activity. of the last few months in Sebastopol would not fail to make the Turks see that force was at hand. The armaments in readiness were more than enough for the occupation of the Danubian Principalities ; and as soon as they should become swollen by the unfailing aid of rumors, they might easily grow to be thought a sufficing force for some great enterprise against Constantinople. 80 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. VII. For some time the Emperor Nicholas hesitated in the choice His choice of Of the person to whom this extraordinary mission an Ambassa- should be intrusted. He hesitated between Count a Orloff and Prince Mentschikoff. He did not hesi- tate because he was doubting which of the two men would be the fittest instrument of his policy, but rather because he had not determined what his policy should be. Count Orloff was a wise and moderate man, much associated with the Ozar, and accustomed to speak to him with becoming freedom. ‘T’o make choice of this trusty friend was to avoid any such out- rage as would lead to the isolation of Russia. To choose Prince Mentschikoff was to choose a man whose feelings and prejudices might cause him to embitter the Czar’s dispute with the Porte, and who, to say the least, could have no pre- tension to moderate the zeal of his master. It was for this very reason perhaps that he was preferred. In an evil hour Nicholas brought his doubts to an end, and made choice of Prince Mentschikoff. Mentschikoff was a Prince of the sort which Court alma- Prince Ments- Nacs describe as ‘Serene.’ He was a General, a ehisoit High Admiral, the Governor of a great province, and in short, so far as concerns official and titular rank, was one of the chief of the Czar’s subjects; but Russia has not disclosed the grounds on which it was thought fit to intrust to him, first the peace, and then the military renown of his country ; for, when Russians are asked about the qualities of mind which caused a man to be chosen for a momentous em- bassy, and for the command of an army defending his country from invasion, they only say that the Prince was famous for | the strange and quaint sallies of his wit. However,he was of the school of those who desired to govern the affairs of the State upon principles violently Russian, and without the aid and counsel of foreigners. It was understood that he held the Turks in contempt; and it was said also that he enter- tained a strong dislike of the English. He had not been schooled in diplomacy, but he was to be intrusted with the power of using a threatening tone, and: was to be supported by a fleet held in readiness and by bodies of troops impending upon the Turkish frontiers. The Emperor Nicholas seems to have thought that harsh words and a display of force might be made to supply want of skill. _ Great latitude was given to Prince Mentschikoff in regard to the means by which he was to attain the objects of his mis- sion; but it is certain that the general tenor of his instructions sontravened with singular exactness the honorable and gener- Cuap. VII.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 81 ous language in which the Emperor Nicholas loved to mark out the duty of the great Powers of Europe toward Turkey. In the last Secret Memorandum solemnly placed in the hands of our Envoy at St. Petersburg as a record of the Emperor's determination, Nicholas, as we have seen, had laid it down that it was the duty of great Powers not ‘to harass the Porte by ‘imperious demands put forward in a manner humiliating to ‘its independence and dignity ;? and yet these very words, which so well point out what the Czar said ought not to be done, are a close description of that which he ordered his Am- bassador to do. The approach of Prince Mentschikoff to Constantinople was Mentschikoft at heralded by the arrival of staff officers, who were Constantinople. ehareed to prepare the way, and cause men to feel the import of the coming embassy. For many days rumor was busy.. When for some time men’s minds had been kept on the rack, it became known that the expected vessel of war was nearing the gates of the Bosphorus, and at length, sur- rounded with pomp, and supported by the silent menace of fleets equipped, and battalions marching on the Danube, Prince Mentschikoff entered the palace of the Russian embassy. The next day another war-steamer came down, bringing the Vice- Admiral Korniloff, the commander of the Black Sea fleet, and the Chief of the Staff of the land-forces under General Rudiger, with several other officers. All this warlike following went to show that the. Ambassador had the control of the military and naval forces which were hovering upon the Turkish Empire. Then also came tidings that General Dannenburg, commanding the cavalry of the 5th corps d’armée, had pushed his advance- guard close up to the frontiers of Moldavia; that funds had been transmitted to merchants in Moldavia and Wallachia for the purchase of rations; and, finally, that. the fleet at Sebasto- pol was getting ready to sail at the shortest notice. In the midst of the alarm engendered by these tidings, Prince Mentschikoff began the duties of his mission; and he so acted as to make men see that he was charged to coerce, and not-to Panicinthe persuade. With his whole Embassy he went to the Ritey Grand Vizier’s apartment at the Porte, but refused to obey the custom which imperatively required that he should wait upon Fuad Effendi, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. With him, as it was understood, the Ambassador declined to hold intercourse. Fuad Effendi, the immediate object of the affront, was the ablest member of the Government. He in- stantly resigned his office. The Sultan accepted his resigna- tion. There was a panic. It was understood that Prince D 2 82 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. VIL, Mentschikoff was going to demand terms deeply humiliating and injurious to the Sultan, and that a refusal to give way would be followed by an instant attack. The Grand Vizier believed that the mission, far from being of a conciliatory char- acter, as pretended, was meant, on the contrary, ‘to win some ‘important right from Turkey, which would destroy her inde- ‘pendence,’ and that the Czar’s object was ‘to trample under ‘foot the rights of the Porte, and the independence of the ‘Sovereign. In short, the Divan was so taken by surprise, and so overwhelmed by alarm, as to be in danger of going to ruin by the path of concession for the sake of averting a sud- den blow. But there remained one hope—the English fleet was at Malta; and the Grand Vizier went to Colo: nel Rose, who was then in charge of our affairs at the Porte, and entreated that he wonld request our Admiral at Malta to come up to Vourla, in order to give the Turkish Government the support of an approaching fleet. Colonel Rose, being a firm, able man, with strength to bear a sudden load of responsibility, was not afraid to go beyond the range of common duty. He consented to do as he was asked; and although he was disavowed by the Government at home, and although his appeal to the English Admiral was rejected, it is not the less certain that his mere consent to call up the fleet allayed the panic which was endangering at that moment the very life of the Ottoman Empire. Happily, there was not a complete perfect communication by telegraph between London and Constantinople, and long before the disavowal reached the Bosphorus the Turkish statesmen had recovered their usual calm. On the other hand, the Russian Government was much soothed by the intelligence that the English Cabinet had de- clined to approve Colonel Rose’s request to the Admiral; and it might be said with truth that both the act of the Queen’s Representative and the disavowal of it by his Government at home were of advantage to the public service.? , It would seem that in the middle of the month of March the The Czar anger of the Emperor Nicholas had grown cool. ereaaty He had always felt the difficulty of basing a war * upon the question of the Holy Places alone, and the language of his Government at this time was moderate and -pacific.2 But unhappily there were distinct centres of action Colonel Rose, * ‘Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 88. ? Colonel Rose was the officer who afterward became illustrious for hie career of victory in India, but at that later time he was known to his grate- ful country as Sir Hugh Rose. * Lord Cowley’s account of Count Nesselrode’s Dispatch of the 15th March, ‘ Eastern Papers, part i., p.96 ; CaariVits| BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 83 in Paris, in London, in St. Petersburg, and in Constantinople, and it was constantly happening that when the fire seemed to be got down in three out of the four capitals, 1t would spring up with fresh strength in the fourth. Thus, at a moment when the panic of the Divan had entirely ceased, and when the Court of St. Petersburg, already inclining toward moderation, was about to be farther pacified by the welcome tidings which in- formed it of the disavowal of Colonel Rose by the Home Gov- ernment, the Emperor of the French suddenly determined to send a naval force into the Levant, and, notwithstanding the The French Opposition of our Government, the French fleet was © fleet suddenly ordered to Salamis, This was done without sound ainis. reason, for the panie which had mduced Colonel Rose to appeal to the English Admiral at Malta had long ago ceased. The step gave deep umbrage to Russia. When the Emperor Nicholas learned that the advance of the French fleet had been disapproved by England, his anger was followed by gladness, and the relations between the Govern- ments of St. Petersburg and London then seemed to be upon so friendly a footing as to exclude the fear of a disagreement. His conceal. Count Nesselrode assured Sir Hamilton Seymour pea that Russia was alleging no grievance against the Turkish Government except in regard to the question of the Holy Places, and even this one remaining subject of complaint he began to treat as a slighter matter than it had hitherto ap- peared to be. It is hard to have to believe that all this good humor of the Court of St. Petersburg was simulated, and yet the assurances of Count Nesselrode distinctly went to exclude the belief that Russia could ever do that which she was actu- ally doing. . Yielding it would seem to an instinct of wild cun- ning, the Czar failed to understand that the chance of carrying a point at Constantinople by a diplomatic surprise could never be of such worth as to deserve to be set against his old repu-- tation for truthfulness. If he thought at all, he would see that the difference between what he was saying and what he was doing would be laid bare in three weeks. Yet he gave way to the strange impulse which forced him to go and try to steal a trophy for his Church. He concealed from the French as well as from our Governmentsall knowledge of his intention to endeavor to extort from the Sultan an engagement giving to Russia the protectorate of the Greek Church in Turkey. The Cabinets of the Western Powers were suffered to gather the first tidings of this scheme from their Constantinople dis- patches, and the trust which the English Government had hith- erto placed in the honor and good faith of the Emperor Nicho- las was suddenly and forever destroyed. . 84 TRANSACTIONS WHICH . . [Cuar. VIE, Meanwhile Prince Mentschikoff brought: forward the claims Mentschikott's Of the Greek Church in regard to the Holy Places; emande. but he seemed disposed to be moderate in his de- mands respecting the shrines, if the Turkish Government should show any willingness to give way to him in regard to the other and more important object which he was to endeay- or to compass. Striving to take advantage of the alarm cre- ated by his Embassy, he proposed to wring from the Porte a treaty engagement, conceding to the Emperor of Russia a pro- tectorate over the Greek Church in Turkey. At first he spoke darkly, intimating that he had some great demand to press upon the Sultan, but not yet choosing to say what the demand might be. Then he began to say to the Turkish Ministers that if they would appease the anger of the Czar, and deliver their State from danger, it would be well for them at once to turn away from France and England, trust themselves wholly to the generosity of the Emperor of Russia, and begin by giving a solemn assurance that they would withhold from the repre- sentatives of the Western Powers all knowledge of the nego- tiation they were required to undertake. ‘We are aw are;’ said the Grand Vizier, ‘that the object of his (Prince Mentschi- ‘koff’s) mission is to make a secret treaty of alliance with us. ‘He bas not demanded it officially, but he has told some per- ‘sons in his confidence, who (he knows) are in communication ‘with us, that we do wrong to rely on the English and French ‘Governments, for experience should at length have proved to ‘us that we have lost much and gained nothing by following ‘their policy and advice. By this language he seeks to gain ‘their support and to insure their concurrence in the work of ‘the secret treaty which he is seeking to conclude. His policy ‘is most confused. At one time he would attract us to Russia ‘by mildness, spreading abroad a report that the intentions of ‘his Government are pacific. At another time he seeks to gain ‘us over by pointing out the disadvantages and inutility of our ‘reliance upon England and France, and how wrong we are in ‘following the advice of those two Powers, to whom we ought ‘not to be attached, especially if we consider that the nature ‘of their Constitution differs from that of ours, which, on the ‘contrary, resembles that of Russia and Austria. Prince Ments- ‘chikoff had a conference with Rifaat Pasha two days ago. ‘He told him that before communicating to the Sublime Porte ‘the nature of his mission, and the demands of his Government, ‘and before giving any explanation, he required from Rifaat ‘Pasha the formal promise of the Porte, that it would not com- ‘municate to the representative either of England or of France Cuap. VII.) BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 85 ‘any thing whatever as to what he demanded or proposed; ‘that it was his wish that it should be treated with the great- ‘est secrecy, otherwise he would not enter upon the subject.’! The Grand Vizier declared that the Turkish Government had at once refused to withhold from the Western Powers a knowledge of the impending negotiation, but it seems likely that some alarmed member of the Turkish Government may have been led to give the required promise of secrecy, for be- fore the end of March Prince Mentschikoff vouchsafed to dis- close the offers and the demands of his Sovereign. He ver- bally expressed the Emperor’s wish to enter into a secret treaty with Turkey, putting a fleet and 400,000 men at her disposal, if she ever needed aid against any Western Power. As ‘the ‘equivalent for this proffered aid,’ said the Grand Vizier, ‘ Rus- ‘sia farther secretly demanded an addition to the treaty of ‘Kainardji, whereby the Greek Church should be placed en- ‘tirely under Russian protection without reference to Turkey. ‘ Prince Mentschikoff had stated that the greatest. secrecy must ‘be maintained relative to this proposition, and that, should ‘Turkey allow it to be made known to England, he and his ‘mission would instantly quit Constantinople.’ This kind of pressure upon the Turkish Government was perhaps well fitted for the days of alarm which immediately followed Prince Mentschikoff’s arrival at Constantinople ; but it was now the end of March, and it was so long ago as the 6th . of the month that Colonel Rose, by requesting the English Ad- miral to come into the Levant, had been able to stop the panic. Rifaat Pasha, the Minister who had succeeded to Fuad Effendi in the Department of Foreign Affairs, was firm. ‘Iam nota ‘child,’ said he, in his message to Colonel Rose; ‘I am an old ‘Minister, very well acquainted with the treaties which unite ‘the Sublime Porte with the friendly Powers, and I understand, ‘God be praised, too well the importance of our good relations ‘with England and France, the full weight of the obligation to ‘maintain treaties, the whole extent of the evil which would ‘result to my Government if it departs from or infringes them, ‘to hesitate a single instant to inform their respective repre- ‘sentatives of every demand or proposal which Russia might ‘be desirous of enforcing upon us, and which might not be in ‘faccordance with the rights recorded in those treaties.’9 Finding himself thus encountered, and being unskilled in negotiation, Prince Mentschikoff had already begun to draw to himself the support of an army. The English Vice-Consul 1 * astern Papers,’ parti., p.111. ? Ibid.,p.112. * Ibid., p. 114. 86 TRANSACTIONS WHICH ; [Cuap. VIII. at Galatz reported that preparations had been made in Bessa- rabia for the passage of 120,000 men, and that battalions were marching to the South from all directions. Though the time of mere panic was past, there was ‘anxiety and alarm’ in the Divan.! But Prince Mentschikoff was destined soon to learn that there was a power in the world which could exert more goy- ernance over Turkish Statesmen than the march of the Czar’s battalions. Before the week was past he had to undergo the sensation of encountering a formidable mind. CHAPTER VIII. WHEN a great country is induced by virtue or by policy to Foreign ‘influ. refrain from using her physical strength against ae the Sovereign of a weaker State, she often solaces herself for this painful effort of moderation by showing her neighbor the error of his ways and giving him constant ad- vice; and if it happen that two or more great Powers are thus engaged in tendering their rival counsels to the same State, they will be prone to struggle with one another for the as- cendency, and to do this with a zeal scarcely intelligible to men who have never seen that kind of strife. The prize contended for is commonly known by the name of ‘influence ;’ and al- though this moral sovereignty over foreign States may be a privilege of small intrinsic worth, the Princes and Statesmen who have once begun combating for the prize, and even the merchants and the travelers who have happened to be on the spot and to witness with any attention the animating incidents of the conflict, have generally had their zeal kindled. Now Grounds for the Ottoman polity is of such a nature as almost to jovcisn inter- court this kind of interference. The practice of key. . suffering the Christian Churches to live and thrive separate and apart, without being subjected to any attempt at amalgamation, has given to these communities so many of the privileges of distinct national existence that they long to make their independence still more complete,.and to do this—not by attempting to lay their timid hands upon the government, but rather by becoming more and more separate, and at last drop- ping off from the Empire.» Therefore, instead of harboring 1 ¢Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 124. Cuap. VIIL.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 87 schemes for rising in arms against the Sultan, they have accus- tomed themselves to seek to form ties of a political and relig- ious kind with foreign States, and to appeal to them for pro- tection against their Ottoman rulers. Here then, of course, a gaping cleft was open to receive the wedge which diplomatists call a ‘ Protectorate.’ Russia claimed a moral right to pro- tect the ten or fourteen millions of Turkish subjects who con- stituted the Greek Church, and she availed herself of some loose words which had crept into the old treaty of Kainardji as a ground for maintaining that this moral claim was convert: ed into a distinct right by treaty engagement. Austria, arm- ed with treaties, was empowered to protect the Roman Cath- olic worship, but France had always been accustomed to busy herself in watching over that portion of the Latin Church which was connected with Palestine and Syria. It is true that the Armenian, the Coptic, and the Black Churches were with- out any recognized foreign patron, and flourished quite as well as their protected brethren, but the numbers composing these Churches were scanty in comparison with the worshipers fol- lowing the Greek ritual, and it may be said that the bulk of the Christian population of Turkey had contracted the habit of looking abroad for support. Again, the Turkish Government was always so sensible of the distinctness of the ‘nations’ held under its sway, and of the hardship of keeping Christians under the close subjection of the Moslem system, that even in the times when the Sultans were.in the pride of their strength, they generously allowed humble foreigners, though living in Turkey, to have the pro- tection of their country’s flag, and to enjoy immunities which (except in the case of Sovereigns and their embassies) the Gov- ernments of Christian countries have never been accustomed to give to any of their foreign guests. These privileges had been granted to the principal States of Europe by treaty en- gagements which went by the name of ‘capitulations,’ and they were so extensive that, except in regard to one or two specified descriptions of crime and outrage, a foreigner in Tur- key who was a native of any of the States to whom these ca- pitulations had been granted, was exempt from the laws of the country in which he dwelt. And these privileges were not even confined to foreigners, for Ambassadors at the Porte claimed and exercised a right of withdrawing a Turkish sub- ject from the laws of his country by taking him into their ‘service, or even by a mere written grant of protection; and the streets of Pera and Galata were filled with Orientals of various races who had contrived to be turned into ‘ Russians,’ 88. TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. VIII. or ‘Frenchmen,’ or ‘Englishmen.’ Thus it resulted that not only the great communities forming Churches or‘ nations,’ but also a great number of individuals, often clever, stirring, and unscrupulous men, were always laboring to attract the inter- ference of some great Power, furnishing it with ready grounds of dispute, and stimulating its desire for preponderance. But there was a broad difference between the protectorate of Rus- sia and that of the other States of Europe; for whilst the Ro- man Catholic States could only reckon a few hundred thou- sands of clients, and whilst the Protestant subjects of the Porte were too few to form a body in the State, the number of Greek Christians who looked to Russia for protection amounted to from ten to fourteen millions. This fact gave great strength and substance to the pretensions of Russia, but on the other hand it made her interference in a high degree dangerous, for it was clear that if the guardianship of so vast a number of the Rayahs or Turkish subjects were to be suffered to lapse into the hands of a foreign Sovereign, the empire of the Sultans would pass away. All the great Powers of Europe were ac- customed to press upon the Sultan the duty of conferring upon his people, and especially upon his Christian subjects, the bless- ing of good and equal government, but Russia urged these de- mands with the not unnatural desire to prepare for herself a firm standing-ground in the midst of her neighbor’s territory, whilst Austria and England, being interested in averting the dismemberment of the Sultan’s dominions, gave their counsel with a real view to make the Sultan do what they deemed to be for his own good. For ascendency on this the favorite arena of diplomacy two Rivalry be- men had long contended. They were altogether tween Nicholas unequal-in station, and yet were not ill matched. ford Canning. The first of the combatants was the Emperor Nich- Sir Stratford Olas: the other was Sir Stratford Canning. This Pane: kinsman of Mr. Canning the Minister had been bred from early life to the career of diplomacy, and whilst he was so young that he could still perhaps think in smooth Eton Al- caics more easily than in the diction of ‘ High Contracting Parties, it was given him to negotiate a treaty which helped to bring ruin upon the enemy of his country.! How to nego- tiate with a perfected skill never degenerating into craft, how to form such a scheme of policy that his country might be * The Treaty of. Bucharest in 1812. By enabling the Czar to with- draw from the South. the forces commanded by Tchitchagoff, this treaty did much to convert the discomfiture of Napoleon’s ‘ grand army’ into ab- solute ruin. Cuap. VIII. ] “BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 89 brought to adopt it without swerving, and how to pursue this always, promoting it steadily abroad, and gradually forcing the home Government to go all lengths in its support, this he knew; and he was moreover so gifted by nature that, whether men studied his dispatches, or whether they listened to his spoken words, or whether they were only by-standers caught and fas- cinated by the grace of his presence, they could scarcely help thinking that if the English nation was to be maintained in peace or drawn into war by the will of a single mortal, there was no man who looked so worthy to fix its destiny as Sir Stratford Canning. He had faults which made him an imper- fect Christian, for his temper was fierce, and his assertion of self was so closely involved in his conflicts that he followed up his opinions with his feelings and with the whole strength of his imperious nature. But his fierce temper, being always under control when purposes of State so required, was far from being an infirmity and was rather a weapon of exceeding sharp- ness, for it was so wielded by him as to have more tendency to cause dread and surrender than to generate resistance. Then, too, every judgment which he pronounced was enfolded in words so complete as to exclude the idea that it could ever be varied, and to convey therefore the idea of duration. As though yielding to fate itself, the Turkish mind used to bend and fall down before him. But the counsels which Sir Stratford Canning had been ac- customed to tender to the Sultan’s Ministers, however whole- some they might be, were often very irksome to hear, and very difficult to adopt. Indeed it might be questioned whether his Turkish policy could be made to consist with the principle on which the Ottoman system was based. He sought to make the Ottoman rule seem tolerable to Christendom by getting rid of the differences which separated the Christian subjects of the Porte from their Mahometan fellow-subjects, and _plac- ing the tributaries on a footing with their masters. But the theory of Mahometan government rests upon the mainte- nance of a clear separation from the unbelievers, and to pro- pose to a Mussulman of any piety that the Commander of the Faithful should obliterate the distinction between Mahomet- ans and Christians would be proposing to obliterate the dis- tinction between virtue and vice; the notion would seem to be not merely wrong and wicked, but a contradiction in terms. A virtuous Osmanlee would feel that if he were to consent to this leveling of the barriers between good and evil, he would lose the whole merit and comfort of being a Turk. Perhaps the opposite policy, namely, that of widening the separation of 90 TRANSACTIONS WHICH * {[Cuap. VIII, the Christians, and giving them (under a tenure less precarious than the present one) the character of tributary municipalities, would be more consonant with the scheme of a Mussulman Empire, and therefore more susceptible of complete execution. But, whether the reforms thus counseled were possible or not, it was hard to resist the imperious Ambassador to his face. If what he directed was inconsistent with the nature of things, then possibly the nature of things would be changed by the decree of Heaven, for there was no hope that the great Eltchi would relax his will. In the mean time, however, and by the blessing of God, the actual execution of the Ambassador’s pain- ful mandates might perhaps be suffered to encounter a little delay. So thought, so temporized the wise tranquil statesmen at the Porte. Of course this kind of ascendency was often very galling to the Sultan’s advisers. They knew that the English Am- bassador was counseling them for the good of their country; but they felt that he humbled them by making his dictation too plainly apparent, and they were often very conscious that the motive which made them succumb to him was dread. Yet, if the Ambassador was unrelenting, and even harsh in the ex- ercise of his dominion over the Turks, he was faithful to guard them against enemies from abroad. He chastened them him- self, but he was dangerous to any other man who came seek- ing to hurt his children. Now it happened that this was exactly the kind of ascend- ency over the Turks for which the Emperor Nicholas had long been craving. Some men imagine that the Emperor’s designs in regard to Turkey were steadily governed by sheer desire for his neighbor’s land; and they are not without specious materials for forming such an opinion; but perhaps a full knowledge of the truth would justify the belief that, from the Peace of Adrianople in 1829, down to the time of his death, the Czar would have pr eferred the ascendency which Sir Strat- ford Canning enjoyed at Constantinople to any scheme of con- quest. And, what is more, if Nicholas had succeeded in gain- ing this ascendency, he would have been inclined to use it as a means of enforcing counsels somewhat similar to those which were pressed upon the Sultan by the English Ambassador; for, though his first eare would have been always for his own Church, it would have suited his pride and his policy to extend his protection to all the Christian subjects of the Porte. But, just as similarity of doctrine often embitters the differences between contending sects, so the very resemblance between his and Sir Stratford Canning’s views with regard to the Chris- Cuap. VIII. ] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 91 tian subjects of the Porte, made it the more intolerable to him to see that he, the powerful neighbor of Turkey who was able to hover over her frontiers and her shores with great armies and fleets, could never make an effort to force his counsels on the Porte without finding himself baffled or forestalled by the stronger mind. Kyen in his very early life, it had been the fate of Sir Strat- ford Canning to have to resist and thwart the Russian Govern- ment; and during a great part of the years of his embassy at Constantinople he had been more or less in a posture of resist- ance to the Emperor Nicholas. Moreover, the feeling with which the Emperor carried on this long-standing conflict was quickened by personal animosity, and by a knowledge that diplomacy was watching the strife with interest and amuse- ment; for he had once gone the length of declining to receive Sir Stratford Canning as the English Ambassador at St. Peters- burg, and had thus marked him out before Europe as his rec- ognized antagonist. The struggle had lasted for a long time, and with varying success; for many a Turkish ministry owed its frail existence and its untimely end to the chances of the combat going on between the Czar and the English Ambassa- dor. The Turks could not help knowing that the counsels of the Ambassador were for their own good; and they had rea- son to surmise that the advice of the Emperor might spring from opposite motives; but there are times when the smooth speech and the wily promises of a political foe are more wel- come than the painful lectures of an honest friend; and again, though it was hard to bear up with mere words against the personal ascendant of the Ambassador, the Emperor had the power of throwing the sword into the scale at any moment. The strife, therefore, had not been altogether unequal; but, upon the ‘whole, Sir Stratford Canning “had kept the upper hand, and the Czar had been forced to endure the agony of being what his representative called ‘secondary,’ so long as Sir Stratford Canning was in the palace of the English em- bassy. For almost two years Sir Stratford Canning had been ab- Lord Stratford sent from Constantinople; but now, ‘at a timie when instructed to Europe had fastened its eyes upon the Czar, and stantinople. was watching to see how the Ambassador of All the Russias would impose his master’s will upon Turkey, the Emperor Nicholas was obliged to hear that his eternal foe, traveling by the ominous route of Paris and Vienna, was slowly returning to his embassy at the Porte. It was on the 25th of February, 1853, that Lord Stratford 99 TRANSACTIONS WHICH | [Cuap. VIIL Hisinstruc. Ge Redcliffe! was instructed to return to his former fore. post. The measure was not without significance. Read by foreigners, it imported that England clung to her ancient policy, and was proceeding to maintain it; and al- though the instructions addressed to Lord Stratford disclosed no knowledge of the spirit in which Prince Mentschikoff was about to conduct his embassy, or of the kind of proposals which he was about to press upon the Porte, they indicated that the Cabinet was alarmed for the fate of Turkey. The dispatch which supplied Lord Stratford with his instr ue- tions, announced to him that, in the then critical period of the fate of the Ottoman Empire, he was to return to his Embassy at Constantinople for a special purpose. Then, after recording once more the fact that the duty of maintaining the integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire was a principle sol- emnly declared and acknowledged by all the great Powers of Kurope, the dispatch informed ‘Lord Stratford that it was his mission to counsel prudence to the Porte, and forbearance to those Powers who were urging complhance with their de- mands. In Paris, he was to remind the French Government that the interests of France and England in the East were identical, and was to explain the fatal embarrassment to which the Sultan might be exposed if unduly pressed by France upon a question of such vital importance to the Power from which Turkey had most to apprehend. At Vienna, he was to give and elicit fresh declarations of the conservative views enter- tained by the two Governments.. Then proceeding to Con- stantinople, the Ambassador was to inform the Sultan that his Embassy was to be regarded as a mark of Her Majesty’s friendly feelings toward His Highness, but also as indicating the opinion which Her Majesty entertained of the gravity of the circumstances in which there was reason to fear the Otto- man Empire was placed. In regard to any part which he might be able to take in conducing to a settlement of the ques- tion of the Holy Places, the discretion of the Ambassador was left unfettered. The Ambassador was directed to warn the Porte that the Ottoman Empire was in ‘a position of peculiar ‘danger. The accumulated grievances of foreign nations,’ con- tinued Lord Clarendon, ‘ which the Porte is unable or unwill- ‘ing to redress; the mal-administration of its own affairs, and ‘the increasing weakness of executive power in Turkey, have ‘caused the allies of the Porte latterly to assume a tone alike ‘novel and alarming; and which, if persevered in, may lead to a 1 Sir Stratford Canning was created Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe in 1852. Cuar. VIII. BROUGHT ON THE WAR. | 93 ; ‘general revolt among the Christian subjects of the Porte, and eprone fatal to the independence and integrity of the Empire ‘a, catastrophe that would be deeply deplored by Her Maj- ‘esty’s Government, but which it is their duty to represent to ‘the Porte is considered probable and impending by some of ‘the great European Powers. Your Excellency will explain ‘to the Sultan that it is with the object of pointing out these ‘dangers, and with the hope of averting them, that Her Maj- “esty’s Government have now directed you to proceed to Con- ‘stantinople. You will endeavor to convince the Sultan and ‘his Ministers that the crisis is one which requires the utmost ‘prudence on their part, and confidence in the sincerity and ‘soundness of the advice they will receive from you, to resolve ‘it favorably for their future peace and independence.’ Then (and probably at the suggestion of Lord Stratford himself) the Ambassador was to press upon the Porte the adoption of the reforms which his intimate knowledge of the affairs of Tur- key enabled him to recommend ; and then—disclosing the ef- fect. already produced upon the mind of the Government by the challenge to which our accustomed policy in the East had just been subjected by the press—the dispatch went on: ‘ Nor ‘will you disguise from the Sultan and his Ministers, that per- “severance in his present course must end in alienating the ‘sympathies of the British nation, and making it impossible for ‘Her Majesty’s Government to shelter them from the impend- ‘ing danger, or to overlook the exigencies of Christendom, ex- ‘posed to the natural consequences of their unwise policy and ‘reckless mal-administration.’. Finally the Ambassador was told that, in the event of imminent danger to the existence of the Turkish Gover nment, he was to dispatch a messenger at once to Malta, requesting the Admiral to hold himself in read- iness ;. but Lord Stratford was not to direct him to approach the Dardanelles without positive instructions from the Govern- ment at home. Thus, so far as concerned the power of turning for aid to physical force, the Ambassador went out poorly ‘armed ; but he was destined to have an opportunity of showing that a ‘slen- der authority in the hands of a skilled diplomatist may be more formidable than the absolute control of great armaments in- trusted to a less able Statesman. Lord Stratford was licensed to do no. more than send a. message to an Admiral, advising him to be ready to go to sea; and, slight as this power was, he never exhausted.it; yet, as will be seen, he so wielded the instruction which intrusted it to him as to be able to establish a great calm in the Divan at a moment when Prince Ments- 94 . TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. IX.) chikoff was violently pressing upon its fears, with a fleet await- ing his orders, and an army of 140,000 men. CHAPTER IX. On the morning of the 5th of April, 1853, the Sultan and all Lord Strat- his Ministers learned that a vessel of war was com- ford’s return. jno@ up the Propontis, and they knew who it was that was on board. Long before noon the voyage and the turmoil of the reception were over, and, except that a frigate under the English flag lay at anchor in the Golden Horn, there was no seeming change in the outward world. Yet all was changed. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe had entered once more the palace of the English Embassy. The event spread a sense of safety, but also a sense of awe. It seemed to bring with it confusion to the enemies of Turkey, but austere reproof for past errors at home, and punishment where punishment was due, and an enforcement of hard toils and painful sacrifices of many kinds, and a long farewell to repose. It was the angry return of a king whose realm had been suffered to fall into danger. Before a day was over, the Grand Vizier and the Reis Effendi had begun to speak, and to tell a part of what they knew to the English Ambassador. They did not yet venture to tell all. Things which they had told to Colonel Rose they did not yet dare to tell to the great Eltchi. They did not perhaps mean to conceal from him, but they shrank from the terror of seeing his anger when he came to know of Prince Mentschikoff’s demands for a Protectorate of the Greek Church. If they were to confess that they had borne to hear such a proposal, the Eltchi might think that they had dared to listen to it. Lord Stratford, observing their fear, imagined that it was Prince Mentschikoff whe had disturbed their equa- nimity. ‘This combination,’ said he, ‘ of alarm, seeking for ad- ‘vice, and of reluctance to intrust me frankly with the whole ‘case, is attributable to the threatening language of Prince ‘ Mentschikoff, and to the character of his proposals.’ But his view of the cause of this tendency toward suppression is dis- placed by observing the frankness of the disclosures which the Turkish Ministers had long before made to Colonel Rose ;' the truth is, that Lord Stratford was unconscious of exercising the 1 «Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 107 et seq. Cuap. 1X. ] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 95 ascendency which he did, and, imagining that men gave way to him because he was in the right, he never came to under- stand the awe which he inspired. However, by degrees the Turkish Ministers went so far as to tell him that ‘since the ar- ‘rival of Prince Mentschikoff, the language held by the Rus- ‘sian Embassy to them had been a mixture of angry com- ‘plaints and friendly assurances, accompanied with positive ‘requisitions as to the Holy Places in Palestine, indications of ‘some ulterior views, and a general tone of insistance border- ‘ing at times on intimidation”! They declared that as to what the ulterior views were, ‘ there was still some uncertain- ‘ty in the language of Prince Mentschikoff. In the beginning ‘he had sounded the sentiments of the Porte as to a defensive ‘ alliance with Russia, but, receiving no encouragement, had de- ‘sisted from the overture. His intentions were now rather ‘directed to a remodeling of the Greek Patriarchate of Con- ‘stantinople, to a more clear and comprehensive definition of ‘Russian right under treaty to protect the Greek and Arme- ‘nian subjects of the Porte in ‘religious matters, and to the ‘conclusion of a formal agreement comprising those points.’ Then, eager to place themselves under Lord Stratford’s guid- ance, but still shrinking from a disclosure of the whole truth, the Turkish Ministers entreated the Ambassador to tell them how to meet the demands which, although they only spoke of them hypothetically, had been already made by Prince Ments- chikoff. Lord Stratford instantly saw that he must cause the ques- His plan of re- tion of the Holy Places to be kept clear of all the Mesnciikors Other subjects of discussion which Prince Mentschi- demands. koff might be intending to raise, for it was plain that the vacillation of the Porte in regard to the sanctuaries (though it had sprung from a desire to avoid giving offense to either of two great Powers) had.given Russia fair grounds of complaint on that subject; but the Czar had nothing else to complain of, and it was clear therefore that, if the one griev- ance which really existed could be settled, every hostile step which Russia might afterward take would place her more and more inthe wrong. ‘ Endeavor,’ said Lord Stratford, in charg- ing the Turkish Ministers, ‘to keep the affair of the Holy ‘Places separate from the ulterior proposals (whatever they ‘may be) of Russia. The course which you appear to have ‘taken under the former head was probably the best, and I am ‘ glad to find that there is a fair prospect of its success. When- 1 ¢Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 125. 96 TRANSACTIONS WHICH — [Cnap. IX, ‘ever Prince Mentschikoff comes forward with farther propo- ‘sitions, you are at perfect liberty to decline entering into ne- ‘ gotiation without a full statement of their nature, extent, and ‘reasons. Should they be found, on examination, to carry with ‘them that degree of influence over the Christian subjects of ‘the Porte in favor of a foreign Power which might eventual- ‘ly prove dangerous or seriously inconvenient to the exercise ‘of the Sultan’s legitimate authority, His Majesty’s Ministers ‘can not be doing wrong in declining them.’! But then add- ed the Ambassador—and his words portended some counsels hard to follow—this ‘ will not prevent the removal, by direct ‘sovereign authority, of any existing abuse.”! Gradually the Turkish Ministers told more, and on the 9th of April Lord Stratford knew that Russia was demanding a treaty engagement, giving her the protectorate of the Greek Church in Turkey; and being now in communication with Prince Mentschikoff, he succeeded, as he believed, in penetrat- ing the real object which Russia had in view. ‘That object,’ he said,‘ was to reinstate Russian influence in Turkey on an ‘exclusive basis, and in.a commanding and stringent form.’ In other words, Prince Mentschikoff, with horse, and foot, and artillery, and the whole Sebastopol fleet at his back, was come to depose the man whom they called in St. Petersburg ‘the English Sultan. On the other hand, Lord Stratford was not willing to be deposed. The struggle began. The severance of the question of the Holy Places from the Commence. ulterior demands of the Czar was not an object to ment of the be pursued for the sake of order and convenience struggle be- . A : tween Prince only. On the contrary, it bid fair to govern the re- er sult of the diplomatic conflict; for, the Montenegro Stratford. question having disappeared, and Russia having committed herself to the avowal that she had no complaints against the Sultan except in regard to the Holy Places, a set- tlement of that solitary grievance would leave the ulterior de- mand:so baseless that any attempt to enforce it by arms would be a naked outrage upon the opinion of Europe. If Prince Mentschikoff had been a man accustomed to negotiate, he would have taken care to preserve the question of the Holy Places, and keep it blended with the ulterior demand until he saw his way to a successful issue, for he was in the position of having to found two demands upon one grievance, and it was clear, therefore, that he would be stranded if he allowed his one grievance to be disposed of without having good reason for 1 «Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 125. Cuar. IX.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 97 knowing that his farther demand would be granted; but he | was vain and confident, and perhaps his sagacity was blunted by the thought that he was able to threaten an appeal to force. Moreover, Prince Mentschikoff was in the hands of a practiced adversary. Lord Stratford, knowing the full import of the decision to- ward which he was leading his opponent, did not fail to deal with him tenderly; and for several days the Prince had the satisfaction of imagining that the imperious and overbearing Englishman of w hom they were always talking at St. Peters. burg was become very gentle in his presence. The two Am- bassadors, without being yet in negotiation, began to talk with one another of the matters which were bringing the peace of the world into danger. They spoke of the Holy Places. Far from seeming to be hard or scornful in regard to that matter, Lord Stratford was full of deference to a cause which, whether it were founded on error or on truth, was still the honest heart’s desire of fifty millions of pious men. He showed by his lJan- guage that if by chance he should be called upon to use his good offices in this matter, or to mediate between Russia and France, he would form his judgment with gravity and with care. Where he could do so with justice, he admitted the fairness of the Russian claims. Prince Mentschikoff’s tone became ‘ considerably softened.”! Then the Ambassadors ventured upon the subject still more pregnant with danger, for Lord Stratford now disclosed his knowledge of Prince Mentschikoff’s ‘ ulterior propositions rela- ‘tive to the protectorate of the whole Greek Church and the ‘priesthood in Turkey, and his conviction that they would meet ‘with serious opposition from the Porte, and be regarded with ‘little favor by Powers even the most friendly to Russia.” Prince Mentschikoff tried to ‘attenuate the extent and effect’s of his demands; and, on the other hand, Lord Stratford drew a clear line of ‘ distinction between the confirmation of special ‘points already stipulated by treaty, and an extension of influ- ‘ence having the virtual force of a protectorate, to be exercised ‘exclusively by a single foreign Power, over the most agi ‘ant and numerous class of the Sultan’s tr ibutary subjects ;’ but, by common consent, the two Ambassadors ‘ avoided enter- ‘ing into a discussion which might have proved irritating upon ‘this question.’? Prince Mentschikoff, however, committed the diplomatic error of intimating ‘ that, notwithstanding the great ‘importance attached to it by his Government, there was no 1 ‘Wastern Papers,’ parti., p. 134. * Ibid., p. 151. * Ibid., p. 139. Vou.I—E. 98 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. IX. ‘danger of any hostile aggression as the result of its failure, “put i at most an estrangement between the two Courts, and ‘perhaps, though it was not so said, an interruption of diplo- ‘matic relations.”! That, in these circumstances, and until he had lec in separating the question of the Holy Places, it was right for the Enelish Ambassador to deal very temperately with the ulte- rior demands of the Czar, no diplomatist would doubt; and Lord Stratford acknowledges? that he carefully refrained ‘from discussing the subject in a way tending to irritate, but the Vussians imagine that he did more than abstain. ‘They say that having been supplied with a copy of Prince Mentschikoff’s dratt of the convention embodying his demands in respect to the Greek Church and clergy, Lord Stratford struck out as in- adinissible the clauses relating to the Greek Patriarch’s tenure of office, and, sending back the draft with that and with no other alteration, induced the Turkish Ministers (and through them induced the Russian Embassy) to suppose that he enter- tained no objection to the proposed convention except that which he had indicated by his erasure; and that Prince Ments- chikoff being in this belief, and being prepared to give way upon the question of the Greek Patriarch, had a right to ex- pect Lord Stratford’s acquiescence in that dangerous part of the Czar’s demand which sought to establish a Protectorate over the Greek Church in Turkey. Nothing is more likely than that, in the process of endeavoring to penetrate Lord Strat- ford’s intentions through the medium of the Turkish Ministers, Prince Mentschikoff may have received a wrong impression, and it is very likely that Lord Stratford, in reading the draft, may have at once struck out clauses which he regarded as to- tally inadmissible, reserving for separate discussion and for oral explanation the consideration of an ambiguous clause which, dangerous as it was, might easily be so altered as to become entirely harmless; but it 1s certain that there was never a mo- ment in which Lord Stratford was willing or even would have endured that any Protectorate over the Greek Church in Tur- key should be ceded to Russia,? and no one versed in the spirit of English diplomacy, or having a just conception of Lord Strat- ford’s nature, will be able to accept the belief that the Queen’s Ambassador intended to overreach his antagonist by any mis- leading contrivance. But, whatever may have been the clew which led him into the wrong path, Prince Mentschikoff failed to see the danger } ‘Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 139. * Tbid., p. 184. * See Lord Stratford’s Dispatches, ib., p.127 et seg. to p. 151. Cuap, TX.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. | 99 in which he would place the success of his negotiation if he* consented to let the question of the Holy Places be treated separately ; and the angry dispatches which now came in from St. Petersburg! did not tend to divert him from his error. On the contrary, they tended to place him in hostility with France more distinctly than before; and since the question of the Holy Places was the one in which France and Russia were face to face, the Czar’s Ambassador was not perhaps unwilling to en- ter upon a course which would place him for the time in dis-_ tinct antagonism with France, and with France alone. He agreed to allow the question of the Holy Places to be treated first and apart from his other demands. It must be acknowledged that so far as concerned the ques- tion of the Holy Places, the demands made by Russia were moderate. Notwithstanding all the heat of his sectarian zeal, the Emperor Nicholas had seen that to endeavor to enforce a withdrawal of the privileges which had been granted with public solemnity to the Latin Church would be to outrage Catholic Europe, and it may be believed too that his religious feeling made him unwilling to exclude the people of other creeds from those Holy Sites which, according to the teaching of his own Church, it was good for Christians to embrace. But, if the demands of the Russian Emperor in regard to the Holy Places were fair and moderate, he was resolved to be peremptory in enforcing them. And it seemed to him that in this matter he could not fail to have the ascendant, for his forces were near at hand. Also he had good right to suppose that France would be isolated, for it was not to be believed that England or any other Power would take a part or even acknowledge the slightest interest in a question between two sorts of monks. - On the other hand, the violent language of M. de Lavalette, his threats, the persistence of the French Government, and the advance of the Toulon fleet to the Bay of Salamis, all these signs seemed to exclude the expectation that the French Gov- ernment would easily give way. Here was an error. Zealous _ himself, the Russiam Ambassador imagined a zeal in the Gov- ernment and the Church to which he was opposing himself, and fancied that he saw in the French Ambassador’s ‘ resist- cance a proof of the encroaching spirit of that Church which opr oclaims itself universal, and looked for its real cause in the ‘unceasing desire of the same Church to extend the sphere of ‘its action.’ He failed to see that his French antagonist might ? 13th April. 2 ‘Eastern Papers,’ part 1., p.139. 100 _ TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. X. *suddenly smile and throw off the cause of the Latin Church, and so rob the Czar of the signal triumph on which he was reckoning by the process of mere concession. But whilst to the common judgment of men who watched this haughty Embassy it seemed that the Czar in all the pride of strength and firm purpose was descending on his prey, he was fulfilling the utmost hope of the patient enemy in the West, who had long pursued him with a stealthy joy, and was now keenly marking him down. CHAPTER X. MEANTIME the course of events affecting the question of the State ofthe Holy Places had shifted the grounds of dispute; eee tt for the solemn act performed at Bethlehem in the Holy Places. foregoing December had converted the claims of the Latins into established privileges, and the Emperor Nich- olas, notwithstanding his religious excitement, had still enough wisdom to see that, although he might have been able to pre- vent this result by a violent use of his power at an earlier period, he could not now undo what was done. Without out- raging Catholic Europe, and even, it may be believed, his own sense of religious propriety, he could not now wrench the key of the Bethlehem Church from the hands of the Latin monks, nor tear down the silver star from the Holy Stable of the Na- tivity. Therefore all that Prince Mentschikoff demanded in regard to the key and the star was a declaration by the Turk- ish Government that the delivery of the key implied no own- ership, over the principal altar of the Church, that no change should be made in the system of the religious ceremonies or the hours of service, that the guardianship of the Great Gate should always be intrusted to a Greek priest, and finally that the silver star should be deemed to be a gift coming from the mere generosity of the Sultan, and conferring no sort of new rights.! In regard to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin at Geth- semane, Prince Mentschikoff required that the Greeks should have precedence at her tomb. He also insisted that the gar- dens of the Church of Bethlehem should remain in the joint guardianship of the Greeks and the Latins, and in demanding that some buildings which overlooked the terraces of the 1 ‘astern Papers,’ part i., p. 129. Cuap. X.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 101 Church of the Holy Sepulchre should be pulled down, he re- quired that the site of these buildings should never become the property of any ‘nation,’ but be walled off and kept apart as neutral ground. This last demand is curious. The Russian Government felt that even at Jerusalem it would be well to set apart one small shred of ground and keep it free from the strife of the Churches. But the last of Prince Mentschikoff’s demands in regard to the Holy Places was the one most hard to solve. It has been said that in comparing the ways of men in the East with the ways of men in the West there are found many subjects on which their views are not merely different, but opposite. One of these is the business of repairing Churches. Whilst the English Churchmen were contending that they ought not to be laden with the whole burden of keeping their sacred build- ings in repair, the Christians in Palestine were willing to set the world in flames for the sake of maintaining their rival claims to the honor of repairing churches. The cupola of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem was out of order. The Greeks, supported by Russia, claimed the right to repair it. The Latins denied their right. The dispute raged. Then, as usual, the wise and decorous Turk stepped in between the combatants, and said he would repair the Church himself. This did not content the Greeks, and Prince Mentschikoff now demanded that the ancient rights of the Greeks to repair the great Cupola and Church at Jerusalem should be recognized and confirmed, and, although he did not reject the Sultan’s offer to supply the means for the repairs, he insisted that the work should be under the control of the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem.! Some of these demands were resisted by France; and, al- though M. de Lavalette had been long since recalled, M. de la Cour who succeeded him seemed inclined to be somewhat per- sistent, especially in regard to the question of the Cupola and the question of precedence at the tomb of the Blessed Virgin. It seems probable, however, that although M. de la Cour may have been sufticiently supplied with instructions touching the immediate question in hand, he had not perceived so clearly as his English colleague the dawn of the new French policy. From the communications of his own Government before he crossed the Channel, from his sojourn at Paris, and from the tenor of the dispatches from England, Lord Stratford had gath- ered means of inferring that France no longer intended to keep 1 ‘Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 129. 102 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap, X herself apart from England by persisting in her pressure upon the Sultan, and, supposing that she had made up her mind to enter upon this new policy, Lord Stratford might well enter- tain a hope that the question whether a Greek priest should be allowed to control the repair of a Cupola at Jerusalem, or whether the door-keeper of a Church should be a Greek or a Latin, would not be fought with undue obstinacy by the quick- witted countrymen of Voltaire. He spoke with M. de la Cour, and found that he was prepared for concession, if matters could be so arranged as to satisfy what Lord Stratford, in his haughty and almost zoological way, liked to call ‘French feelings of honor.” By means of his communications with the Turks, the English Lord Strat- | Ambassador easily ascertained the points on which fordsmea Prince Mentschikoff might be expected to be inex- tling it. orable. These were:—the repair of the Cupola, the question of precedence at the tomb of the Virgin, and the question about the Greek door-keeper in the Church of Beth- lehem. Furnished with this clew, Lord Stratford saw M. de la Cour, and dissuaded him from committing himself to a de- termined resistance on any of these three questions. He also gave his French colleague to understand that in his opinion the Greek pretension upon these three points stood on strong ground, and urged him to bear in mind the great European interests at stake, the declared moderation of the French Govy- ernment, and the triumph already achieved by France in regard to the key and the silver star. And then Lord Stratford gave M. de la Cour a pleasing glimpse of the discomfiture into which their Russian colleague would be thrown if only the question of the Holy Places could-be settled.2 The French Ambassa- dor soon began to enter into the spirit of these counsels. On the other hand, Prince Mentschikoff was also willing to dispose of this question of the Holy Places, for he had now seen enough to be aware that he would not encounter sufficient re- sistance upon this matter to give him either a signal triumph or a tenable ground of rupture, and the angry dispatches which he was receiving from St. Petersburg made him impatient to press forward his ulterior demand. The two contending ne- - gotiators being thus disposed, it was soon found that the hin- derances which prevented their coming to terms were very slender. But it often happens that the stress which a common man lays upon any subject of dispute is proportioned to the energy which he has spent in dealing with it rather than to the > ‘Eastern Papers,’ part i, p. 134, 2 Thid., p. 155. Cuar. X] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. - 108 real magnitude of the question itself; and when Prince Ments- chikoff and M. de la Cour seemed to be approaching to a settle- ment, they allowed their minds to become once again so much heated by the strenuous discussions of small matters that ‘ the ‘difficulty of settling the question of the Holy Places threat- ‘ened to increase. The French and Russian Ambassadors in- ‘sisted on their respective pretensions, while the Porte inclined ‘but hesitated to assume the responsibility of deciding between ‘them.’' Then at last the hour was ripe for the intervention of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. ‘I thought,’ said he, ‘it was ‘time for me to adopt a more prominent part in reconciling ‘the adverse parties.’ He was more than equal to the task. Being by nature so grave and stately as to be able to refrain from a smile without effort and even without design, he prevented the vain and pre- sumptuous Russian from seeing the minuteness and inanity of the things which he was gaining by his violent attempt at di- plomacy. For the Greek Patriarch to be authorized to watch the mending of a dilapidated roof, for the Greek votaries to have the first hour of the day at a tomb, and finally for the door-keeper of a Church to be always a Greek, though without any right of keeping out his opponents—these things might be tr ifles, but awarded to All the Russias through the stately mediation of the English Ambassador, they seemed to gain in size and majesty, and for the moment perhaps the sensations of the Prince were nearly the same as though he were receiv- ing the surrender of a province or the engagements of a great alliance. On the other hand, Lord Stratford was unfailing in his. deference to the motives of action which he had classed under the head of ‘ French feelings of honor,’ and if M. de la Cour was set on fire by the thought.that at the tomb of the Virgin, or any where else, the Greek priests were to perform their daily worship before the hour appointed for the services of the Church which looked to France for support, Lord Strat- ford was there to explain in his grand quiet way that the pri- ority proposed to be given to the Greeks was a priority result- ing from the habit of early prayer which obtained in Oriental Churches, and not from their claim to have precedence over the species. of monk which was protected by Frenchmen. At length he addressed the two Ambassadors ; he solemnly ex- pr essed his hope that they would come to an adjustment. His words brought calm. In obedience, as it were, to the order of Nature, the lesser minds gave way to the greater, and the 1 “Wastern Papers,’ part i., p. 157. 104 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. X. contention between the Churches for the shrines of Palestine was closed. The manner in which the Sultan should guarantee this apportionment of the shrines was still left open, but in all other respects the question of the Holy Places was settled.! According to the terms of the arrangement thus effected, a elt Se the key of the Church of Bethlehem, and the silver which it was star placed in the Grotto of the Nativity, were to SRS: remain where they were, but were to confer no new right on the Latins, and the door-keeper of the Church was to be a Greek priest as before, but was to have no right to ob- struct other nations in their right to enter the building. The question of precedence at the tomb of the Blessed Virgin was ingeniously cluded by the device before spoken of, for the pri- ority given to the Greeks was treated as though it resulted from a convenient arrangement of hours rather than from any intent to grant precedence, and it was accordingly arranged that the Greeks should worship in the Church every morning immediately after sunrise, and then the Armenians, and then the Latins, each nation having an hour and a half for the purpose. Perhaps it was in order to hinder the outgoing worshipers from coming into conflict with those who were about to begin their devotions, that the gentle Armenians were thus inter- posed between the two angry Churches. The gardens of the Convent of Bethlehem were to remain as before under the joint care of the Greeks and Latins. With regard to the cu- pola of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, it was arranged that it should be repaired by the Sultan in such a way as not to al- ter its form; and if in the course of the building any deviation from, this engage ement should appear to be thr eatened, the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem was to be authorized to remon- strate, with a view to guard against innovation. The build- ings overlooking the terraces of the Church of the Holy Sepul- chre were to have their windows walled up, but were not to be demolished, and therefore no effect could be given to the Xussian plan of setting apart a neutral ground to be kept free from the dominion of both the contending Churches. All these arrangements were to be embodied in firmans addressed by the Sultan to the Turkish authorities at Jerusalem.?. Thus, after having tasked the patience of Enropean diplo- macy for a period of nearly three years, the business of appor- tioning the holy shrines of Palestine between the Churches of the East and of the West was brought at last to a close. The ? April 22nd, 1853. ‘Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 157. ? “Eastern Papers,’ part i., p.'248. He settles it. Cuar. XI.] > BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 105 question was perhaps growing ripe for settlement when Lord Stratford reached Constantinople, but, whether it was so or not, he closed it in seventeen days. For the part which he had taken in helping to achieve this result he received the thanks of the Turkish Government, and of the Russian and the French Ambassadors. The Divan might well be grateful to him, and he deserved too the thanks of his French colleague; for, having more insight into the new policy of the French Government than M. de Ja Cour, he was able to place him in the path which turned out to be the right one. But when Lord Stratford re- ceived the thanks of Prince Mentschikoff he felt perhaps that the gravity which had served him well in these transactions was a gift which was still of some use. CHAPTER. XI. Wuixtst the question of the Holy Places was approaching the solution which was attained on the 22nd of April, Prince Mentschikoff went on with his demand for the protectorate of the Greek Church in Turkey, but the character of his mission was fitfully changed from time to time by the tenor of his in- Peaceful as. Structions from home. On the 12th of April, the pect of the ne- peaceful views which had prevailed at St. Peters- pouption: burg some weeks before were still governing the Russian embassy at Constantinople, and Lord Stratford was able to report that the altered tone and demeanor of Prince Mentschikoff corresponded with the conciliatory assurances which Count Nesselrode had been giving in the previous month to Sir Hamilton Seymour. But on the following day all was changed. Fresh dispatches came in from St. Petersburg. They Angry ais. | breathed anger and violent impatience, and of this Bees oH « anger and of this impatience the causes were visi- : ble. It was the measure adopted in Paris, several weeks before, which had rekindled the dying embers of the quarrel at St. Peter sburg, and the torch was now brought to Constantinople. It has been seen that, without reason, and without communication with the English Ministers! (though it professed to be acting in unison with them), the French Gov- Cause of the ernment had ordered the Toulon fleet to approach stance. the scene of controversy by advancing to Salamis ; 1 ‘Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 98. iy 106 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XL and it was whilst the indignation roused by this movement was still fresh in the mind of the Emperor Nicholas that the dispatches had been framed. Moreover, at the time of send- ing off the dispatches,-the Czar knew that by the day they reached the shores of the Bosphorus, the man of whom he never could think with temper or calmness would already be at Constantinople, and he of course understood that in the way of diplomatic strife his Lord High Admiral the Serene Prince Governor of Finland was unfit for an encounter with Lord Stratford. He seems therefore to have determined to extri- cate his Ambassador from the unequai conflict by putting an end to what there was of a diplomatic character in thé mission, and urging him into a course of sheer violence which would supersede the finer labors of negotiation. From the change which the dispatches wrought in Prince Mentschikoff’s course of action, from the steps which he after- ward took, and from the known bent and temper of the Czar’s mind, it may be inferred that the instructions now received by the Russian Ambassador were somewhat to this effect: “The Inferred tenor -rench fleet has been ordered to Salamis. The ofthe fresh = $ Kmperor is justly indignant. You must bring aepatehes: your mission to a close forthwith. Be peremptory ‘both with the French and the Turks. If the French Ambas- ‘sador is obstinate enough upon the question of the Holy Places ‘to give you a tenable ground on which you ean stand out, then ‘hasten at once to a rupture upon that business without farther ‘discussion about our ulterior demands. But if the French ‘ Ambassador throws no sufficing difficulties in the way of the ‘settlement of the question of the Holy Places, then press your ‘demand for the protectorate of the Greek Church. Press it ‘peremptorily. In carrying out these mstructions, you have ‘full discretion so far as concerns all forms and details, but in ‘regard to time the Emperor grants you no latitude. You ‘must force your mission to a close. By the time you receive ‘this dispatch Stratford Canning will be at Constantinople. He ‘has ever thwarted His Majesty the Emperor. The inseruta- ‘ble will of Providence has bestowed upon him great gifts of ‘mind which he has used for no other purpose than to baffle ‘and humiliate the Emperor, and keep down the Orthodox ‘Church. In negotiation or in contest for influence over the ‘Turks he would overcome you and crush you, but his instrue- ‘tions do not authorize him to be more than a mere peaceful ‘negotiator. You, on the contrary, are supported by force. ‘He can only persuade: you can threaten. Strike terror. Make ‘the Divan feel the weight of our preparations in Bessarabia Cnar. X1.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 107 ‘and at Sebastopol. Dannenburg’s horsemen are close upon ‘the Pruth. When the Emperor remembers the position of ‘the 4th and the 5th corps d’armée and the forwardness of his ‘naval preparations, he conceives he has a right to expect that ‘you should instantly be able to take the ascendant over a man ‘who, with all his hellish ability, is after all nothing more than ‘the representative of a country absorbed in the pursuit of ‘gain. The Emperor can not and will not endure that his Rep- ‘resentative, supported by the forces of the Empire, should re- ‘main secondary to the English Ambassador. Again the Em- ‘peror commands me to say you must strike terror. Use a ‘fierce insulting tone. Ifthe Turks remain calm, it will be be- ‘cause Stratford Canning supports them. Therefore demand ‘private audiences of the Sultan, and press upon his fears. If ‘your last demands, whatever they may be, are rejected, quit ‘Constantinople immediately with your whole suite, and carry ‘away with you the whole staft of our Legation.’ On the day after receiving his dispatches Prince Mentschi- Mentschikort’s KOf had a long interview with Rifaat Pasha, and cemand fora strove to wrench from him the assent of the Turkish protectorate of Government to the terms already submitted to the i ee Porte as the project for a secret treaty. And, al- i though it happened that in the course of the negoti- ations on this subject Russia submitted to accept many changes in the form or the wording of the engagement which she re- quired, it may be said with accuracy that from the first to the last she always required the Porte to give her an instrument which should have the force of a treaty engagement, and con- fer upon her the right to insist. that the Greek Church and Clergy in Turkey should continue in the enjoyment of all their existing privileges. It was clear, therefore, that if the Sultan should be induced to set his seal to any instrument of this kind, Effect which he would be chargeable with a breach of treaty en- Thee be ton. Gagements whenever a Greck bishop could satisfy ceding it. a Russian Emperor that there was some privilege formerly enjoyed by him or his Church which had been varied or withdrawn. It was plain that for the Sultan to yield thus much would be to make the Czar a partaker of his sovereign- ty. This seemed clear to men of all nations, except the Rus- sians themselves, but especially it seemed clear to those who happened to know something of the structure of the Ottoman Empire. The indolence or the wise instinct of the Mussulman rulers had given to the Christian ‘nations’ living within the Sultan’s dominions many of the blessings which we cherish under the name of ‘ self-government,’ and since the Greck Chris- 108 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XI. tians had exercised these privileges by deputing their bishops and their priests to administer the authority conceded to the ‘nation,’ it followed that the spiritual dominion of the priest- hood had become blended with a great share of temporal power. So many of the duties of pre efects, of magistrates, of assessors, of collectors, and of police were dischar eed by bishops, priests, and deacons, that a protectorate of these ecclesiastics might be so used by a powerfnl foreign Prince, as to carry with it a vir- tual sovereignty over ten or four teen millions of laymen. All this had been seen by Lord Stratford and by the Turk- The negotia- ish Ministers, and when Prince Mentschikoff press- fons which ed the treaty upon Rifaat Pasha he was startled, as demand. it would seem, by the calmness, and the full knowl- edge which he encountered. ‘The treaty,’ said Rifaat Pasha, ‘would be giving to Russia an exclusive protectorate over the ‘whole Greek population, their clergy, and their Churches.’! The Prince, it would seem, now began to know that he had to do with the English Ambassador, for he made the alteration before adverted to in the draft of his treaty, and on the 20th of April read it in its amended shape to Lord Stratford, and assured him that it was only an explanatory guarantee of exist- ing treaties, giving to the co-religionists of Russia what Austria already possessed with regard to hers. Lord Stratford on that day had approached to within forty-eight hours of the settle- ment of the question of the Holy Places, which he deemed it so vital to achieve, and it may be easily ‘imagined that in the remarks which he might make upon hearing the draft read he would abstain with great care from irritating discussion, and would not utter a word more than was necessary for the-pur- pose of fairly indicating that his postponement of discussion on the subject of the ulterior demands was not to be mistaken for acquiescence; but all that for that purpose was needed he fairly said, for he observed to Prince Mentschikoff ‘that the ‘Sultan’s promise to protect his Christian subjects in the free ‘exercise of their religion differed extremely from a right con- ‘ferred on any foreign Power to enforce that protection, and | ‘also that the same degree of interference might be dangerous ‘to the Porte, when exercised by so powerful an empire as ‘Russia on behalf of ten millions of Greeks, and innocent in ‘the case of Austria, whose influence derivable from religious ‘sympathy was confined to a small number of. Catholics, in- ‘cluding her own subjects. These remarks were surely not ambiguous, but it seems probable that Prince Mentschikoff, ' «Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 153. 2 Ibid., p. 156. Cuar. XL] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 109 misled by his previous impression as to what Lord Stratford really objected to, may have imagined that the proposed con- vention in its altered form would not be violently disapproved by the English Ambassador. At all events, he seems to have instructed his Government to that effect. On the 19th of April the Russian Ambassador addressed his remonstrances and his demands to the Turkish Minister for Foreign Affairs in the form of a diplomatic Note. In the first sentence of this singular document Prince Mentschikoff tells the Minister for Foreign Affairs that he must have ‘seen the ‘duplicity of his predecessor.’ In the next he tells him he must be ‘convinced of the extent to which the respect due to ‘the Emperor had been disregarded, and how great was his ‘magnanimity in offering to the Porte the means of escaping ‘from the embarrassments occasioned to it by the bad faith of ‘its Ministers ;? and then, after more objurgation in the same strain, and after dealing in a peremptory way with the question of the Holy Places, the Note goes on to declare that ‘in con- ‘sequence of the hostile tendencies manifested for some years ‘past in whatever related to Russia, she required in bebalf of ‘the religious communities of the orthodox Church an ex. ‘planatory and positive act of guarantee. Then the Note re- _ quested that the Ottoman Cabinet would ‘be pleased in its ‘wisdom to weigh the serious nature of the offense which it ‘had committed, and compare it with the moderation of the “demands made for reparation and guarantee, which a consid- ‘eration of legitimate defense might have put forward at great- ‘er length and-in more peremptory terms.’ Finally the Note stated that ‘the reply of the Minister for Foreign Affairs would ‘indicate to the Ambassador the ulterior duties which he would have to discharge,’ and intimated that those duties would be ‘consistent with the dignity of the Government which he rep ‘resented, and of the religion professed by his Sovereign.’} It might have been politic for Prince Mentschikoff to send such a Note as this in the midst of the panic which followed his landing in the early days of March, but it was vain to send itnow. The Turks had returned to their old allegiance. They could take their rest, for they knew that Lord Stratford watch- ed. Him they feared, him they trusted, him they obeyed. It was in vain now that the Prince sought to crush the will of the Sultan and of his Ministers. Whether he threatened, or wheth- er he tried to cajole; whether he sent his dragoman with angry messages to the Porte, or whether he went thither in person ; 1 ¢Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 158. 110 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XI. whether he urged the members of the Government in private interviews, or whether he obtained audience of the Sultan, he always encountered the same firmness, the same courteous def- -erence, and, above all, that same terrible moderation which day by day, and hour by hour, was. putting him more and more in the wrong. The voice which spoke to him might be the voice of the Grand Vizier, or the voice of the Reis Effendi, or the voice of the Sultan himself, but the mind which he was really encountering was always the mind of one man. : Far from quailing under the threatening tone of the Note, the Turkish Government now determined to enter into no con- vention with Russia, and to reject Prince Mentschikoff’s pro- posals respecting the protection of the Greek Church in Turkey. The Grand Vizier and the Reis Effendi calmly consulted Lord Stratford as to the manner in which they should give effect to the decision of the Cabinet, and Lord Stratford, now placed at ease by the settlement of the question of the Holy Places, con- tentedly prepared to encounter the next expected moves of Prince Mentschikoff.t In strife for ascendency like that which was now going on Rege ofthe between the Czar and Lord Stratford, the pain of Czar on find- yndergoing defeat is of such a kind that the pangs ing himself en- 5 5 countered by Of the sufferer accumulate; and far from being as- Lord Stratford. syaoed by time, they are every day less easy to bear than they were the day before. By the pomp and the declared significance of Prince Mentschikoff’s mission, the Emperor Nicholas had drawn upon himself the eyes of Europe, and the presence of the religious ingredient had brought him under the gaze of many millions of his own subjects who were not com- monly observers of the business of the state. And he who, in transactions thus watched by men, was preparing for him cruel discomfiture—he who kept him on the rack, and regulated his torments with cold unrelenting precision—was the old familiar enemy whom he had once refused to receive as-the English Ambassador at St. Petersburg. People who knew the springs of action in the Russian capital used to say at that time that the whole ‘ Eastern Question,’ as it was called, lay inclosed in one name—lay inclosed in the name of Lord Stratford. They acknowledged that the Emperor Nicholas could not bear the stress of our Ambassador’s authority with the Porte. _ And in truth, the Czar’s power of endurance was drawing to a close. He wavered and wavered again and again. He was versed in business of state, and it would seem that when 1 94th April. Ihid., p- 160. The settlement of the question of the Holy Places was on the 22nd. Cuap. XI.] _ BROUGHT ON THE WAR. : 11 his mind was turned to things temporal he truly meant to be politic and just. But in his more religious moments he was furious. Even for Nicholas the Czar it was all but im possible to endure the Ambassador’s political ascendency, but the bare thought of Lord Stratford’s protecting Christianity in Turkey was more than could be borne by Nicholas the Pontiff. Men not jesting approached him with stories that the Ambassador had determined to bring over the Sultan to the Church of En- gland. His brain was not strong enough to be safe against rumors like that. He almost came to feel that the Englishman who seemed to be endued with strange powers of compulsion always used for the support of Moslem dominion and for curb- ing the orthodox Russo-Greek Church was a being in his na- ture Satanic, and that resistance to him was as much a duty (and was a duty as thickly beset with practical difficulties) as resistance to the great enemy of mankind. Maddened at last by this singular kind of torment, the Czar broke loose from the restraints of policy, and was even so void of counsel, that, hav- ing determined to do violence to the Sultan, he did not take the common care of giving to his action any semblance of con- sistency with public law. The dispatches framed under the orders of a monarch in this Its effect upon Condition of mind reached Prince Mentschikoff in the negotiation. the beginning of May. Breathing fresh anger, and enjoining haste, they fiercely drove him on. They urged him to an almost instantaneous rupture, without giving him a stand- ing-ground for his quarrel. Yet at this time the condition of things was of such a kind that a good Cause, nay, even a spe- cious grievance, would have helped Prince Mentschikoff better than the advance of the 4th and 5th corps or the patrolling of Dannenburg’s cavalry. In truth, what now befell the Russian Ambassador was this: Mentschikoff's —-he found himself placed under the compulsion of dittentty.. violent instructions at a time when all ground for just resentment was wanting. He could obey his orders, and force on arupture, but he could no longer do this upon grounds which Europe would regard as having a semblance of fairness. When he had dispatched his note of the 19th of April, the question of the Holy Places was still unsettled, and he was then able to blend that grievance with other matters, and make it serve as a basis for his ulterior demands; but now that that question was disposed of, his standing-ground failed him, for he alleged against the Sultan no infraction of a treaty, and the only grievance of which he had to complain had been redressed on the 22nd of April; and yet, passing straight from this 112 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cudp. XI. ! smooth condition of things, he had to call upon the Sultan to sign a treaty which he disapproved, and to make his refusal to do so a ground for the immediate rupture of diplomatic re- lations. e The natural hope of a diplomatist placed in a stress of this He is baffledby Sort would have lain in the chance that the Govern- Lord Stratford. ment upon which he was pressing might be guilty of some imprudence, and it may be inferred that the Note of the 19th had been framed with a view of provoking the Turk- ish Ministers into a burst of anger. But every hope of this kind had been baffled. Turks were fanatical, Turks were fierce, Turks were quick to avenge, and, above all, Turks. were liable to panic; but some spell had come upon the race. The spell had come upon the Sultan, it had come upon the Turkish Min- isters, it had come upon the Great Council, it had come even upon the larger mass of the warlike people who bring their feelings to bear upon the policy of their Sultan. At every step of his negotiation Prince Mentschikoff encountered an adver- sary always courteous, always moderate, but cold, steadfast, wary, and seeming as though he looked to the day when per- haps he might wreak cruel vengeance. Who this was the Prince now knew, and he perhaps began to understand the nature of the torment inflicted upon his imperial Master by the bare utterance of the one hated name. Prince Mentschikoff found himself powerless as a negotiator, and it was clear that unless he could descend to the rude expedient of an ultimatum or athreat, he was a man annulled. Indeed, without some act of violence he could hardly deliver himself from ridicule. Therefore, on the 5th of May, Prince Mentschikoff forwarded He presses his tO the Minister for Foreign Affairs the draft of a demindina Sened or Convention, purporting to be made be- new form. _ tween the Sultan and the Emperor of Russia. This proposed Sened confirmed with the force of a treaty engage- ment the arrangements respecting the Holy Places which had been made in favor of the Greek Church, and it also introduced and applied to the rival Churches a provision similar in its wording to that which often appears in commercial treaties, and goes by the name of ‘the most favored nation clause.’ But the noxious feature of the Convention was detected in the Article which purported to secure for ever to the Orthodox Church and its clergy all the rights and immunities which they had already enjoyed, and those of which they were possessed from ancient times.!. Here, under a new form, was the old en- + ‘Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 167. - Cuap. XI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 113 deavor to obtain for Russia a protectorate of the Greek Church in Turkey. This draft of a Convention was annexed to a Note, in which Prince Mentschikoff pressed its immediate adoption, and urged the Sublime Porte, ‘laying aside all hesitation and all mistrust, ‘by which,’ he declared ‘the dignity and the generous senti- ‘ments of his august Master would be aggrieved,’! to delay its decision no longer. In conclusion, Prince Mentschikoff suf- fered himself to request that the Minister for Foreign Affairs would be good enough to let him have his answer by the fol- lowing Tuesday, and to add, that he could not ‘consider any ‘longer delay in any other light than as a want of respect ‘toward his Government, which would impose upon him the ‘most painful duty.’! Upon receiving this hostile communication, the Minister for Counsels of oreign Affairs appealed to Lord Stratford for coun- lord Strat-- sel. He advised the Turkish Government to be still at deferential, still courteous, still willing to go to the very edge of what might be safely conceded, but to stand firm. At this time Lord Stratford received a visit from Prince His communi- Mentschikoff, and ascertained from him that he did outions with . not mean to recede from his demands. The Prince chikoff. declared that he had run out the whole line of his moderation, and could go no farther, and that his Government would no longer submit to the state of inferiority in which he said Russia was held with reference to the co-religionists of the Emperor Nicholas. A few days later Lord Stratford addressed a letter to Prince Mentschikoff, in which, with all the diplomatic courtesy of which he was master, he strove to convey to the Prince some idea of the way in which he was derogating from that justice and moderation toward foreign sovereigns which had hitherto marked the reign of the Emperor Nicholas. The answer of Prince Mentschikoff announced that it was impossible for him to agree in the views pressed upon him by Lord Stratford, and (after a little more of the wasteful verbiage in which Russia used to assert that her exaction was good and wholesome for Turkey) the Prince claimed a right to freedom of action. He said that he was not conscious of having failed in the loyal as- surances given by his Government to the Cabinet of the Queen, declared that he had been perfectly sincere in his communica- tions with Lord Stratford, and owned that he had expected a 1 ¢Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 165. 114 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XI. frank co-operation on his part. But when he had written these common things the truth broke out. ‘The Emperor’s ‘legation,’ said he, ‘can not stay at Constantinople under the ‘circumstances in which it has been placed. Jt can not sub- ‘mit to the SEO uuare position to which it might be wished to ‘reduce it.’ Lord Sevsttfond it would_seem, had now little hope of ghes able to bring about an accommodation, and henceforth his great object was to take care that the Porte should stand fir m, but should so act that in the opinion of England and of Europe the Sultan should seem justified im exposing himself to the hazard of a rupture with Russia. Late at night Lord Stratford saw the Grand Vizier at his Mis advice to COUNtry-house, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs the Turkish and the Seraskier were present. During the day Ministers. there had been a little failing of heart, and when the Turkish Ministers were in the presence of M. de la Cour, they had seemed ‘disposed to shrink from encountering the ‘consequences of Prince Mentschikoff’s retiring in displeas- ‘ure,’ but either they had dissembled their fears in the pres- ence of the English Ambassador, or else, whilst Lord Stratford was in the same room with them, their fear of other Powers was suspended. They were unanimous in regarding the Con- vention as inadmissible. Lord Stratford’s determination was that the demand of Prince Mentschikoff should be resisted, but that at the same time there should be shown so much of court- esy and of forbearance, and so great a willingness to go to the utmost limit of safe concession, and to improve the condition of the Christian subjects of the Porte, that the Turks should appear before Europe in a character almost angelic. ‘I ad- ‘vised them,’ said he, ‘to open a door for negotiation in the ‘ Note to be prepared, and to withhold no concession compati- ‘ble with the real welfare and independence of the Empire. I ‘could not in conscience urge them to accept the Russian de- ‘mands, as now presented to them, but I reminded them of ‘the guarantee required by Prince Mentschikoff and strongly ‘recommended that if the guarantee he required was inadmis- ‘sible, a substitute for it should be found in a frank and com- ‘prehensive exercise of the Sultan’s authority in the promulga- Shion of a firman, securing both the spiritual and temporal ‘privileges of all the Porte’s tributary subjects, and by way of ‘farther security communicated officially to the five great Powers of Christendom.’ To all these counsels the Turkish Ministers listened with assenting mind. : 1 ‘Eastern Papers,’ part i., p.217. ? Ibid., p. 177. 3d. ibid. Cuar. XI] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 115 But it was now late in the night, and the Ambassador rose. Perhaps the hour and the Ambassador’s movement to depart cast a shadow of anxiety upon the minds of the Turkish Min- isters. Perhaps the ripple of the waters (for the conference was in a house on the edge of the Bosphorus) called to mind the thought of the English flag. At all events, the Grand Vizier, in that moment of weakness, suffered himself to cast a thought after the arm of the flesh, and to ask whether the Porte might expect the eventual approach of the English squadron in the Mediterranean. Lord Stratford rebuked him. ‘I replied,’ said he, ‘that { considered the position in its pres- ‘ent stage to be one of a moral character, and consequently ‘ that its difficulties or hazards, whatever they might be, should ‘be rather met by acts of a similar description than by demon- ‘strations calculated to increase alarm and provoke resent- ment.’ It was a new and a strange task for this Grand Vizier of a warlike Tartar nation to be called upon to defend a threat- ened empire by ‘acts of a moral character,’ but after all his re- liance was upon the man. It might be hard for him to under- stand how the mere advantage of being in the right could be used against the Sebastopol fleet, or the army that was hover- ing upon the Pruth; but if he jooked upon the close, angry, resolute lips of the Ambassador, and the grand overhanging of his brow, he saw that which more than all else in the world takes hold of the Oriental mind, for he saw strength held in re- serve. And this faith was of such a kind that, far from being weakened, it would gather new force from Lord Stratford’s refusal to speak of material help. The Turkish Ministry de- termined to reject Prince Mentschikoft’s proposals, and to do this in the way advised by the English Ambassador. All this while Lord Stratford was unconscious of exercising any as- cendency over his fellow-creatures, and it seemed to him that the Turks were determining this momentous question by means of their unbiased judgments.! Prince Mentschikoff was soon made aware of the refusal with which his demand was to be met, and finding that all his communications with the Turkish Ministers gave him nothing but the faithful echo of the counsels addressed to them by Lord Stratford, he seems to have imagined the plan of over- stepping the Turkish Ministers, and endeavoring to wring an assent to his demands from the Sultan himself. It seems prob- able that Lord Stratford had been apprized of this intention, and was willing to defeat it, for on the 9th he sought a private } ¢Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 213. 116 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XT, audience of the Sultan; he sought it, of course, through the le- gitimate channel. The Minister for Foreign Affairs went with Lord Stratford to the Sultan’s apartment, “and then withdrew. His audience ‘Che Ambassador spoke grav ely to the Sultan of the of the Sultan, (anger with which his Empire was threatened, and then of the grounds for confidence. He was happy, he said, to find that His Majesty’s servants, both. Ministers and Council, were not less inclined to gratify the Russian Ambassador with all that could be safely conceded to him, than determined to withhold their consent from every requisition calculated to in- flict a serious injury on the independence and dignity of their Sovereign. ‘I had waited,’ said Lord Stratford, ‘to know ‘their own unbiased impressions respecting the kind of guar- ‘antee demanded by Prince Mentschikoff, and I could not do ‘ otherwise than approve the decision which they appeared to ‘have adopted with unanimity. My own impression is, that ‘if your Majesty should sanction that decision, the Ambassa- ‘dor will break off his relations with the Porte and go away, ‘together perhaps with his whole embassy: nor is it quite im- ‘possible even that a temporary occupation, however unjust, ‘of the Danubian Principalities by Russia may take place 5 ‘but I feel certain that neither a declaration of war nor any ‘other act of open hostility is to be apprehended for the pres- ‘ent, as the Emperor Nicholas can not resort to such extremi- ‘ties on account of the pending differences without contradict- ‘ing his most solemn assurances, and exposing himself to the ‘indignant censure Of all Europe. I conceive that under such ‘circumstances the true position to be maintained by the Porte ‘is one of moral resistance to such demands as are really mad- ‘missible on just and essential grounds, and that the principle ‘should even be applied under protest to the occupation of the ‘ Principalities, not in weakness or despair, but in reliance on ‘a good cause, and on the sympathy of friendly and independ-. ‘ent Governments. A firm adherence to this line of conduct, ‘as long as it is possible to maintain it with honor, will, in my ‘judgment, offer the best chances of ultimate success with the ‘least practicable degree of provocation, and prevent disturb- ‘ance of commercial interests. This language,’ writes Lord Stratford, ‘appeared to interest the Sultan ‘deeply, and also to ‘coincide with His Majesty’s existing opinions. He said that ‘he was well aware of the dangers — to which I had alluded; ‘that he was perfectly prepared, in the exercise of his own free ‘will, to confirm and to render effective the protection prom- ‘ised to all classes of his tributary subjects in matters of relig- ‘ious worship, including the immunities and privileges granted CHar. XI] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 117 ‘to their respective clergy. He showed me the last communi- ‘cations in writing which had passed between his Ministers ‘and the Russian Kinbassy; he thanked me for having helped ‘to bring the question of the Holy Places to an arrangement; ‘he professed his reliance on the friendly support of Great ‘ Britain.’ But now Lord.Stratford apprized the Sultan that he had a The disclosure COMMuNication to make to him which he had hith- which he had erto withheld from his Ministers, reserving it for reserved for : : * a 5 the Sultan's the private ear of his Majesty. The pale Sultan = listened. ; Then the Ambassador announced that, in the event. of im- minent danger, he was instructed to request the Commander of Her Majesty’s forces in the Mediterranean to hold his squadron in readiness.! This order was of itself a slight thing, and it conferred but a narrow and stinted authority; but, imparted to the Sultan in private audience by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, it came with more weight than the promise of armed support from the lips of a common Statesman. Long withheld from the Turkish Ministers, and now disclosed to them through their Sovereign, it confirmed them in the faith that, whatever a man might know of the great Eltchi’s power, there was always more to be known. And when a man once comes to be thus thought of by Orientals, he is more their master than one who seeks to overpower their minds by making coarse pretenses of strength. On the 10th the Secretary for Foreign Affairs sent his an Turkish an- swer to Prince Mentschikoft’s demand: The let- Now ea. ter was full of courtesy and deference toward Rus-. mand. sia: it declared it to be the firm intention of the Porte to maintain unimpaired the rights of all the tributary subjects of the Empire, and it expressed a willingness to ne- gotiate with Russia concerning a church and a hospital at Je- rusalem, and also as to the privileges which should be con- ceded to Russian subjects, monks, and pilgrims; but the Note objected to entertain that portion of the Russian demands which went to give Russia a protectorate of the Greek Church in Turkey.? On the following day Prince Mentschikoff sent an angry Mentschikoft’s Teply to this Note, declining to accept it as an an- angry reply. swer to his demand. He stated that he was in- structed to negotiate for an engagement guaranteeing the priv- 1 ¢FKastern Papers,’ part i., p. 213. * May 10th. ‘Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 196. 118 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XL ileges of the Greek Church, as a mark of respect to the relig- ious convictions of the Emperor, and if the principles which formed the basis of this proposed mark of respect were to be rejected, and if the Porte by a systematic opposition was to persist in closing the very approaches to an intimate and di- rect understanding, then the Prince declared with pain that he must consider his mission at an end, must break off rela- tions with the Cabinet of the Sultan, and throw upon the re- sponsibility of his Ministers all the consequences which might ensue. The Prince ended his Note by requiring that it should be answered within three days.! On the second day after sending this Note, Prince Mentschi- koff was to have had an interview with the Grand Vizier at half past one o’clock; but before that hour came the Prince took a step which had the effect of breaking up the Ministry. His privateau. Without the concurrence, and apparently without dience of the the previous knowledge of the Ministers, he found aS means to obtain a private audience of the Sultan at 10 o’clock in the morning. The Sultan did wrongly when he submitted to receive a foreign Ambassador without the ad- vice or knowledge of his Ministers, and the Grand Vizier had » the spirit to resent the course thus taken by his Sovereign, for upon being sent for by the Sultan, immediately after the This causes a audience, he requested permission to stay at home, ehange of min- e “= istry at Jon. 20d at the same time gave up his seals of office. stantinopley The new Ministry, however, was formed of men who, as members of the Great Council, had declared opinions adverse to the extreme demands of Russia.2 Reshid Pasha became the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and this was not an appointment which disclosed any intention on the part of the Sultan to disengage himself from the counsels of the English Ambassador. f If the Sultan had erred in granting an audience without the assent of his Ministers, he had carried his weakness no farther. put failsto + Soon transpired that Prince Mentschikoff had shake the Sul- failed to wring from the Sultan any dangerous zs words. It seems that when the Prince came to press his demands upon the imperial ear, he found the monarch reposing in the calmness of mind which had been given him by the English Ambassador five days before, and in a few mo- ments he had the mortification of hearing that, for all answers to his demands, he was referred to the Ministers of State. In the judgment of Prince Mentschikoff, to be thus answered 1 May 11th. ‘Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 197. ? “Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 194. ° Tbid., p. 195. Cnap. XI] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 119 was to be remitted back to Lord Stratford. It was hard to bear. | 3 Prince Mentschikoff began his intercourse with the new For- Mentschikoff eign Secretary by insisting upon an immediate re- ioe tis ae. Ply to his Note of the 11th of May. Reshid Pasha mands. asked for the delay of a few days on the ground of the change of Ministry. This reasonable demand was met at first by a refusal, but afterward by a Note, which seems to have been rendered incoherent by the difficulty in which Prince Mentschikoff was placed ; for, on the one hand, a request for a delay of a few days, founded upon a change of Ministry, was a request too fair to be refused with decency, and, on the oth- er hand, the violent orders which had just come in from St. Petersburg enjoined the Prince to close the unequal strife with Lord Stratford, and to enforce instant compliance, or at once break off and depart. The Note began by announcing that Reshid Pasha’s communication imposed upon the Russian Ambassador the duty of breaking off from the then present time his official relations with the Sublime Porte; but it added that the Ambassador would suspend the last demand, which was to determine the attitude which Russia would thenceforth assume toward Turkey. The Note farther declared that a continuance of hesitation on the part of the Ottoman Govern- ment would be regarded as an indication of reserve and dis- trust offensive to the Russian Government, and that the de- parture of the Russian Ambassador, and also of the Imperial Legation, would be the inevitable and immediate consequence. By the voices of forty-two against three, the Great Council The Great Of the Porte determined to adhere to the decision Couneil deter- already taken; and ‘on the 18th Reshid Pasha called mune to resis upon Prince Mentschikoff, and orally imparted to him. the extreme length to which the Turkish Government was willing to go in the way of concession. The-honor of the Porte required, he said, that the exclusively spiritual privileges granted under the Sultan’s predecessors, and confirmed by His Majesty, should remain in full force, and he declared that the equitable system pursued by the Porte toward its subjects de- Offers madeby Manded that the Greek clergy should be on as good the Porte, footing as other Christian subjects of the Sultan. vice of Lord He added, that a firman was to issue, proclaiming Bratore this determination on the part of the Sultan. In regard to the shrine at Jerusalem, Reshid Pasha was willing to engage that there should be no change without communi- eating with the Russian and French Governments. Reshid Pasha also consented that a church and hospital for the Rus- — 120 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XI. sians should be built at Jerusalem; and in regard to all these Jast matters connected with the Holy Land, the Porte, he said, was willing to solemnize its promise by a formal convention. These overtures were made in exact accordance with a Paper of advice which Lord Stratford had placed in the hands of Reshid Pasha five days before.t. Virtually Reshid Pasha of- fered Prince Mentschikoff every thing which Russia had de- manded except the protectorate of the Greek Church in Tur- key.2. That he refused. Instantly, and without waiting for the written statement of the proposals orally conveyed to him by Reshid Pasha, Prince Mentschikoff determined to break off the negotiation. On the Mentschikoff Same day he addressed to the Porte an official replies by de- Note, which purported to be truly his last. In this claring his ° . . : mission atan he declared that, by rejecting with distrust the Ne wishes of the Emperor in favor of the orthodox Greco-Russian religion, the Sublime Porte had failed in what was due to an august and ancient ally. The refusal, he said, was a fresh injury. He declared his mission at an end; and after asserting that the Imperial Court could not, without prejudice to its dignity and without exposing itself to fresh insults, continue to maintain a mission at Constantinople, he announced that: he should not only quit Constantinople him- self, but should take with him the whole Staff of the Imperial Legation, except the Director of the Commercial Department. The Prince added, that the refusal of a guarantee for the ortho- dox Greco-Russian religion obliged the Imperial Government to seek in its own power that security which the Porte declined to give by way of treaty engagement; and he added, that any infringement of the existing state of the Eastern Church would be regarded as an act of hostility to Russia.3 Prince Mentschikoff’s departure did not immediately follow The represent- the dispatch of this Note, and on the morning of atives of the the 19th Lord Stratford took a step of great mo- our Powers aay: : : assembled by Ment to the tranquillity of Kurope, for it laid the pont Stat seed of a wholesome policy, which, until it was Policy involy- ruined, as will be seen hereafter, by the evil designs edin this ste. of some, and by the weakness of other men, prom- ised fair to enforce justice and to maintain truth without bring- - ing upon the world the calamity ofa war. Instead of putting himself in communication with one only of the other great Powers, and so preparing a road to hostilities, the English Ambassador assembled the representatives of Austria, France, ' “Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 196. ? Tbid., p. 205, and see p. 252. ° 18th May. Ibid., p. 206. ie Cnap. XI-] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 121 Unanimity o¢ 20d Prussia. It then appeared that there was no es- the four repre- sential difference of opinion between the represent- sentatives: _atives of the four great Powers. None of them questioned the soundness of the Porte’s views in resisting the extreme demands of Russia; all acknowledged. the spirit of conciliation displayed by the Sultan’s Ministers; all were agreed in desiring to prevent the rupture; all desired that the Emperor Nicholas should be enabled to recede without discredit from the wrong path which he had taken, and were willing to cover his retreat by every device which was consistent with the honor and welfare of other States.. This union of opinion, fol- lowed close by concerted action, was surely a right example of the way in which it was becoming for Europe to regard an Their approach to injustice by one of the great Powers. PIORSUTSS. It was arranged that the Austrian Envoy should call upon Prince Mentschikoff; should apprize him of the sor- _ row with which the representatives of the four Powers con- templated the rupture of his relations with the Porte; should express the lively gratification which a friendly solution, if that were still possible, would afford them; and, finally, should as- certain whether the Prince would receive through a private channel the Porte’s intended Note, and give it a calm consid- eration.! This appeal from the representatives of the four great Powers produced no effect on the mind of Prince Ments- chikoff,? and Lord Stratford scarcely expected that it would do so; but it commenced, or rather it marked and strengthened, that expression of grave disapproval.on the part of the four Powers, which was the true and the safe corrective of an out- rage threatened by one. After his official relations with the Porte had come to a close, Prince Mentschikoff received and rejected the Turkish Note? which embodied the concessions already described to him orally by Reshid Pasha; but on the evening of the 20th of May the Prince determined to make a concession in point of form, and to be content to have the engagement which he was demanding from the Porte in the form of a diplomatic Russia’s ulti- Note, instead of a Treaty or Convention. In fur- matyn, therance of this view, though his official capacity had ceased, he caused to be delivered to Reshid Pasha the draft of a Note to be given by the Porte. This draft pur- ported to involve the Porte in engagements exactly the same as those which it had refused to contract, and to give to Rus- * ‘Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 205. ? Tbid., p. 219. * This Note, being the last offer made by the Turkish Government to Prince Mentschikoff, is printed in the Appendix, No. I. Vor, L—F a 122 TRANSACTIONS WHICH ‘[Cuar. XL ‘sia (by means of a Note instead of a Convention) the protect- ‘crate of the Greek Church in Turkey.’ Reshid Pasha imme- diately sent the Note to Lord Stratford for communication to the three other representatives of the four Powers, with a re- quest that they would give an opinion as to the most advisable mode of proceeding. Early the next morning Lord Stratford ascertained that in the opinion of Reshid Pasha the altered form of the Russian demands left them as objectionable as ever.2. The Russians imagined that Reshid Pasha was willing to give way to them, and that he even entreated Lord Strat- ford to let him yield, but that the English Ambassador was inexorable. There was no truth in this notion.? Lord Strat- ford’s counsels had cut so deep into the mind of the Turkish Minister that he was well able to follow them without want- ing guidance from hour to hour. The English Ambassador assembled the representatives of the three Powers, and found that they unanimously agreed with him ‘in adopting an opin- ‘ion essentially identical with that of the Turkish Ministers.’! They all signed a memorandum, declaring that ‘upon a ques ‘tion which so closely touched the freedom of action and the ‘sovereignty of His Majesty the Sultan, his Highness Reshid ‘Pasha was the best judge of the course which it was fitting ‘to take, and that they did not consider themselves authorized ‘to pronounce an opinion.”> Prince Mentschikoff had caused it to be understood that this his last demand was only to be accepted by being accepted in full. It was rejected ; and on the 21st of May the Prince was preparing to depart, when he heard that the Porte intended to issue and proclaim a guarantee for the exercise of the spiritual rights possessed by the Greek Church in Turkey. It was hard for Russia to endure the re- sistance which she had encountered, but it was more difficult still to hear with any semblance of calmness that the Porte, of its own free will, was doing a main part of that which the Em- peror Nicholas had urged it to do. This was not tolerable. To Russian ears the least utterance about ‘the free will of the ‘Porte’ instantly conveyed the idea that all was to be ordered and governed at the will and pleasure of the English Ambas- sador. The thought that the protectorate of the Greek Church was not only refused to the Czar, but was now passing quietly into the hands of Lord Stratford, was so maddening that Prince Tts rejection. ' «Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 220. As this Draft was Prince Mentschi- Koff’ s real ultimatum, it is printed in the Appendix, No. I. * Thid., pp. 219, 220, 3 It is clearly disproved. Lbid., pp. 836-8 . Ibid., p. 220. Seal pid: iat 222, Cuap. XI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 123 Mentschikoff, forgetting or transcending the fact that he had formally announced the rupture of his relations with the Porte, Final threats OW suffered himself to address a solemn Note to of Prince the Minister for Foreign Affairs, in which (basing Mentsehiko®: ‘himself upon a theory that the mention of the spir- itual might be deemed to derogate from the temporal rights of the Church) he announced that any act having the effect which this theory attributed to the proposed guarantee, would be regarded as ‘ hostile to Russia and her religion.”! Having dispatched these last words of threat, he at length | went on board and departed. On tlie same day the arms of Russia were taken down from the palace of the Imperial Embassy. Thus ended the ill-omened mission of Prince Mentschikoff. Effect of the It had lasted eleven weeks. In that compass of time fheaeuter the Emperor Nicholas destroyed the whole repute Nicholas. which he had earned by wielding the power of Rus- sia for more than a quarter of a century with justice and mod- eration toward foreign States.2. But, moreover, in these same fatal days the Emperor Nicholas did much to bring his good faith into question. The tenor of his previous life makes it right to insist that any imputation upon his personal honor shall be tested with scrupulous care, but it is hard to escape the conviction that during several weeks in the spring of the year he was giving to the English Government a series of as- surances which misrepresented the instructions given by him to Prince Mentschikoff during that same period. Thus, almost at the very hour when Count Nesselrode was assuring Sir Hamilton Seymour that ‘the adjustment of the difficulties re- ‘specting the Holy Places would seitle all matters in dispute ‘between Russia and the Porte,’? Prince Mentschikoff was striving to wring from the Porte a secret treaty, depriving the Sultan of his control over the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and ceding to Russia a virtual protectorate of the Greek Church in Turkey, and was enjoining the Turkish Ministers to keep this negotiation concealed from the ‘ill-disposed Powers,’ for so he called England and France ;* and again, in the very week in which the Czar was joining with the English Government in a form more than usually solemn in denouncing the practice His departure. 1 ¢Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 253. * Computed from the Peace of Adrianople in 1829. The reign of Nicho- las commenced in 1825. * *Kastern Papers,’ part i., p.162. The slight qualification with which Count Nesselrode accompanied the assurance, tended to strengthen it by giv- ing it greater precision. 4 ¢ Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 108. 124 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XI. of ‘harassing the Porte by overbearing demands, put forward ‘in a manner humiliating to its independence and its dignity,”} he was shaping the angry dispatch which caused Prince Ments chikoff to insult the Porte by his peremptory Note of the 5th of May. But, notwithstanding all this variance between what the Czar said and what he did, it must be acknowledged that it would be hard to explain his words and his course of action by imputing to him a vulgar and rational duplicity, for it was plain that the secrecy at which he aimed would be terminated by the success of the negotiation; and supposing him to have been in possession of his reason, and to have been acting on grounds temporal, he could not have imagined that, for the sake of extorting a new promise from the Sultan, and giving a little more semblance of legality to pretensions which he al- ready maintained to be valid, it was politic for him to forfeit that reputation for honor which was a main element of his greatness and his strength. The dreams of territorial aggran- dizement which he imparted to Sir Hamilton Seymour in Jan- uary and February had all dissolved before the middle of March, and it is vain to say that after that time his actions were governed by any rational plan of conquest. Policy re- quired that for encroachments against Turkey he should choose a time when Europe, engaged in some other strife, might be likely to acquiesce; far from doing this, the Czar chose a time when the four Powers had nothing else to do than to watch and restrain the aggression of Russia. Again, policy required that presure upon the Sultan of a hostile kind should be justi- fied by narratives of the cruel treatment of the Christians by their Turkish masters; yet if any such causes existed for the anger of Christendom, the Emperor Nicholas never took the pains to make them known to Europe. From first to last his loose charges against the Turks for maltreatment of their Chris- tian subjects were not only left without proof, but were even unsupported by any thing like statements of fact. Still, the Czar was not laboring under any general derange- ment of mind. The truth seems to be that zeal for his Church had made greater inroads upon his moral and intellectual nature than was commonly known, and that when he was under the stress of religious or rather of ecclesiastic feelings he ceased to be politic, and even perhaps ceased to be honest. It was at such times that there came upon him that tendency to act in a * Memorandum by the Emperor Nicholas confidentially delivered to Sir Hamilton Seymour, and dated the 15th April, 1853. ‘ Eastern Papers,’ part V., p- 25. . Cnap. XI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 125 spirit of barbaric cunning which was really inconsistent with the general tenor of his life. But if it happened that whilst his mind was already under one of these spiritual visitations, it was farther inflamed by any tidings which roused his old antagonism to Sir Stratford Canning, then instantly it was wrought into such a state that one must be content to mark its fitful and violent impact upon human affairs without under- taking to deduce the result from any symmetrical scheme of action. But, whatever the cause, the fall was great. The polity of the Russian State was of such a kind that when the character of its monarch stood high, he exalted the empire, and when he descended, he drew the empire along with him. In the be- ginning of March, the Emperor Nicholas almost oppressed the continent of Europe with the weight of his vast power, con- joined with moderation and a spirit of austere justice toward foreign States. Before the end of May, he stood before the world shorn bare of all this moral strength, and having nothing left to him except what might be reckoned and set down upon paper by an inspector of troops or a surveyor of ships. In less than three months, the station of Russia amongst the Powers of Europe underwent a great change. The English Ambassador remained upon the field of the con- Positionin flict. Between the time of his return to Constan- whieh, Lord. tinople and the departure of Prince Mentschikoff Stratford’s skill : . P had placed the there had passed forty-five days. In this period ePrice Lord Stratford had brought to a settlement the question of the Holy Places, had bafiled all the efforts of the Emperor Nicholas to work an inroad upon the sovereign rights of the Sultan, and had enforced upon the Turks a firmness so indomitable, and a moderation so unwearied, that from the hour of his arrival at Constantinople they resisted every claim which was fraught with real danger; but always resisted with courtesy, and yielded to every demand, however unjust in prin- ciple, if it seemed that they could yield with honor and with safety. Knowing that, if he left room for doubt whether Rus- sia or the Porte were in the right, the controversy would run a danger of being decided in favor of the stronger, he provided with a keen foresight, and at the cost of having to put a hard restraint upon his anger, and even upon his sense of justice, that the concessions offered by the Turks should reach beyond their just liability: nay, should reach so far beyond it as to leave a broad margin between, and make it difficult even for any one who inclined toward the strong to deny that Russia was committing an outrage upon a weaker State, and was 126 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XI therefore offending against Europe. In truth, he placed the Moslem before the world in an attitude of Christian forbear- ance sustained by unfailing courage; and in proportion as men loved justice and were led by the gentle precepts of the Gos- pel, they inclined to the Mahometan Prince who seemed to represent their principles, and began to think how best they could help him to make a stand against the ferocious Chris- tianity of the Czar. In England especially this sentiment was kindled, and already it was beginning to gain a hold over the policy of the State. Less than three months before, the dis- memberment of the Turkish Empire had been thought a. fair subject to bring into question, and now the firmness and the strange moderation with which the Turks stood resisting the demands of their oppressor was drawing the English people day by day into a steadfast alliance with the Sultan. But if Lord Stratford had succeeded in gaining over to his cause the general opinion of Europe, or rather in adapting the policy of the Divan to what he knew would be approved by the people of the West, he did not neglect to use such means as he had for moving the Governments of the four Powers; and the concerted action to which he had succeeded in bring- ing them on the 21st of May was a beginning of the peaceful coercion with which it was fitting that Europe should with- Engazements Stand the encroachments of a wrong-doer. But contracted by this was not all that was effected by the Diplomatic aia transactions of the spring. It can not be concealed that, without the solemnity of a treaty, nay, without the knowl- edge of Parliament, and perhaps without the knowledge of her Prime Minister, England in the course of a few weeks had slided into all the responsibility of a defensive alliance with the Sul- tan against the Emperor of Russia. It may seem strange that this could be, but the truth is that the general scope of a length- ened official correspondence is not to be gathered by merely learning at intervals the import of each dispatch. Taken sin- gly, almost every dispatch composed by a skilled diplomatist will be likely to seem wise and moderate, and deserving of a complete approval; but if a Statesman goes on approving and approving one by one a long series of papers of this sort with- out rousing himself to the effort of taking a broader view of the transactions which he has separately examined, he may find himself entangled in a course of action which he never in- tended to adopt. Perhaps this view tends to explain the rea- sons which caused a minister whose love of peace was pas- sionate and almost fanatical to become gradually and imper- ceptibly responsible for a policy leading toward war. Lord -Cuar. XL] BROUGHT ON ‘THE WAR. 127 Aberdeen did not formally renounce his neutral policy of 1828, and he did not at this time advise the Queen to conclude any treaty for the defense of Turkey, nor ask the judgment of Par- liament upon the expediency of taking such a course; but day after day and week after week the cabinet-boxes came and went, and came and went again, and every day he passed: his anxious and inevitable hour and a half at the Foreign Office ; and at length it became apparent that the Government of which he was the chief had so acted that it could not with honor! recede from the duty of defending the home provinces of the Sultan against an unprovoked attack by Russia. The advice Obligations of a strong Power is highly valued, but it is valued theactetgie. for reasons which should make men chary of giving ingadvice. it. It is not commonly valued for the sake of its mere wisdom, but partly because it is more or less a disclosure of policy, and still more because it tends to draw the advising State into a line of action corresponding with its counsels. England by the voice of her Ambassador (approved from time to time by the home Government?) had been advising a weak Power to resist a strong one. Counsels of such a kind could not but have a grave import. The French Emperor had been more careful to keep him- self free from engagements with the Porte, but he had long ago resolved to seize the coming occasion of acting in concert Englandjin With England. And England now became bound. Tranee,be, Within three days from Prince Mentschikoff’s de- comes engaged parture, France and England were beginning to defend the concert resistance to Russia; on the 26th of May minions. the Sultan’s refusal of the Russian ultimatum was warmly applauded by the English Government, and before the end of the month the Foreign Secretary instructed the English Ambassador that it was ‘indispensable to take measures for ‘the protection of the Sultan, and to aid his Highness in revel- ‘ling any attack that might be made upon his territory ;’? and that ‘the use of force was to be resorted to as a last and una- ‘ voidable resource for the protection of Turkey against an un- ‘provoked attack and in defense of her independence, which ‘England,’ as Lord Clarendon declared, ‘was bound to main- ‘ tain.’4 , Lord Clarendon at the same time addressed a dispatch to St. Petersburg, setting forth with painful clearness the differ- ence between the words and the acts of the Czar, and indig- 1 So said by Lord Clarendon. ‘Eastern Papers,’ pari i. 2 ¢Rastern Papers,’ part i., p. 183. 3 24th May. Ibid., p. 182. Sripid. pr 197. 128 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XT, nantly requiring to know what was the object which Russia had ‘in view, and in what manner and to what extent the do- ‘minions of the Sultan and the tranquillity of Europe were ‘threatened.”! It was not by any one decisive act or promise, but by the The process by tenor of expressions scattered through a long series rich Eng- of Dispatches, and by words used from time ‘to time bound. in conversations, that England had taken upon her- self the Burden of defending the Sultan against the Czar. Slowness of atliament was sitting when this momentous en- the English gagement was being contracted, and it may be Parliament. thought that there was room for questioning wheth- er England in concert with France alone, and without first do- ing her utmost to obtain the concurrence of the other Power S, should good-humoredly take upon herself a duty which was rather European than English, and which tended to involve her in war. There were eloquent members of the Legislature who would have been willing to deprecate such a policy, and to moderate and confine its action, but apparently they did not understand how England was becoming entangled until about nine months afterward, and, either from want of knowledge or want of promptitude, they lost the occasion for aiding the Crown with their counsels. Indeed, from first to last, the back- wardness of the English Parliament in seizing upon the change- ful phases of the diplomatic strife was one of the main causes of the impending evil, and this was only one of the occasions in which it failed in the duty of opportune utterance. When the Dispatch of the 31st of May was once on the road to Con- stantinople, England stood bound, and all that might be after- ward said about it would be criticism rather than counsel. So ended one phase of the ancient strife between the Em- peror Nicholas and Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. Prince Ments- chikoff, landing at Odessa, hastened to dispatch to his master the best account he could give of the causes of his discomfi- ture, and of the evil skill of that Antichrist in stately English form whom Heaven was permitting for a while to triumph over the Czar and his Church. Lord Stratford reaped the fruit of his toil and of the long Powersin. ¢dured pain of encountering violence with moder- trusted toLord ation. All his acts were approved by the Govern- Stratford. ment, and, so far as they were known and under- - stood, by the bulk of his countrymen at home. And now, when he paced the shady gardens, where often he had put 1 ‘Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 200. Cuap. XII.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 129 upon his anger a difficult restraint, he could look with calm joy to the headland where the Straits opened out into the Euxine, for he knew that the Governments of the Western Powers, supporting his every word, and even overstepping his more sober policy, were coming forward to stand between Russia and her prey. The fleet at Malta was to be moved when and - whither he chose, and, even to the length of war, the Admiral was ordered to obey any requisitions made to him by the Am- bassador.! A few days later, the Governments of Paris and London, fearing the consequence of delay, ordered the fleets to move up at once to the neighborhood of the Dardanelles.2. The power to choose between peace and war went from out of the Courts of Paris and London and passed to Constantinople. Lord Stratford was worthy of this trust; for being firm, and supplied with full knowledge, and having power by his own mere ascendency to enforce moderation upon the Turks, and to forbid panic and even to keep down tumult, he was able to be very chary in the display of force, and to be more frugal than the Government at home in using or engaging the power of the English Queen. He remained on the ground. Still, as before, he kept down the home dangers which threatened the Ottoman State. Still, as before, he obliged the Turks to de- serve the good will of Europe; but now besides, with the arm of the flesh, and no longer with the mere fencing of words, he was there to defend their capital from the gathered rage of the Czar. In truth, at this time he bore much of the weight of empire. Intrusted with the chief prerogative of kings, and living all his time at Therapia, close over the gates of the Bos- phorus, he seemed to stand guard against the North and to answer for the safety of his charge. CHAPTER XII. Tue mere sensation of being at strife with the English Am- Rage ofthe’ bassador at Constantinople had kindled in the bo- weet som of the Emperor Nicholas a rage so fierce as to drive him beyond the bounds of policy; but when he came to know the details of the struggle, and to see how at every step his Ambassador had been encountered, and, finally, when he heard (for that was the maddening thought) that, by counsels 1 ¢Kastern Papers,’ part i., p.199. 2 Pp. 210, 225. os. 130 ‘TRANSACTIONS WHICH > [Cuar. XII. always obeyed, Lord Stratford was calmly exercising a pro- tectorate of all the Churches in Turkey, including the very Church of him the Czar, him the Father, him the Pontiff of Kastern Christendom, he was wrought into such a condition of mind that his fury broke away from the restraint of even the very pride which begot it. Pride counseled the calm use of force, an order to the Admiral at Sebastopol, the silent march of battalions. But the Czar had so lost the control of his an- ger, that every where, and to all who would look upon the sight, he showed the wounds inflicted upon him by his hated adversary. ‘He addressed,’ said Lord Clarendon, ‘to the dif- ‘ferent Courts of Europe unmeasured complaints of Lord Strat- ‘ford. To him and to him alone he attributed the failure of ‘Prince Mentschikoff’s mission.’! ‘An incurable mistrust, a ‘vehement activity,’ said Count Nesselrode,? ‘had character- ‘ized the whole of Lord Stratford’s conduct during the latter ‘part of the negotiation.’ 7 Even in formal dispatches the Czar caused his Minister to speak as though there were absolutely no government at Con- stantinople except the mere will of Lord. Stratford. ‘The En- ‘elish Ambassador,’ Count Nesselrode said, ‘ persisted in re- ‘fusing us any kind of guarantee ;? and then the Count went on to picture the Turkish Ministers as prostrate before the English Ambassador, and vainly entreating him to let them yield to Russia. ‘Reshid Pasha,’ said he, ‘struck with the ‘dangers which the departure of our Legation might entail ‘upon the Porte, earnestly conjured the British Ambassador ‘not to oppose the acceptance of the Note drawn up by Prince ‘Mentschikoff, but Lord Redcliffe prevented its acceptance by ‘declaring that the Note was equivalent to a treaty, and was ‘inadmissible.* This last story, it has been seen, was the work of mere fiction,? but in the Czar Nicholas, as well as in Prince Mentschikoff, there were remains of the Oriental na- ture which made him ready to believe in the boundless power of a mortal, and he seems to have received without question the fables with which the Eastern mind was portraying the unbending, implacable Eltchi. It was vain to show a mon- arch, thus wrought to anger, that the difference between him and the terrible Ambassador lay simply in the fact that the one was in the wrong and the other.in the right. The thought of this only made the discomfiture more bitter. In the eyes of the Czar, Lord Stratford’s way of keeping himself eternally in the right and eternally moderate was the mere contrivance, ' ¢Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 268. ? Tbid., p. 243. ° This is proved very clearly. Ibid., p. 336, et seq. Cuar. XII] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 131 the mere inverted Jesuitism of a man resolved to do good in order that evil might come; resolved to be forbearing and just for the sake of doing a harm to the Church, It was S plain that, to assuage the torment which the Czar was enduring, the remedy was action: yet, strange to say, this disturber of En- rope, who seemed to pass his life in preparing soldiery, was not at all ready for a war, even against the Sultan alone. His preparations had been stopped in the beginning of March, and the movements which his troops had been making in Bessara- bia were movements in the nature of threats. He wished to do some signal act of violence without plunging into war. The disposition of the Russian forces on the banks of the The Danubian Pruth had long been breeding rumors that the Principalities. Hmperor Nicholas meditated an occupation of the Principalities called Wallachia and Moldavia. These prov- inces formed a part of the Ottoman dominions in Europe, but they were held by the Sultan under arrangements which mod- ified their subjection to the Porte, and gave them the charac- ter of tributary States. Each of them was governed by a prince called a Hospodar, who received his investiture at Con- stantinople, but the Sultan was precluded by treaty from al- most all interference with the internal government of the prov- inces, and was even debarred the right ‘of sending any soldiery into their territories. Russia, on the other hand, had acquired over these provinces a species of protectorate, and, in the event of their being disturbed by internal anarchy, she had power to aid in repressing the disorder by military occupation. ‘This contingency had not occurred in either of the provinces; but the anomalous form of their political existence caused the Em: TheCzars Peror Nicholas to imagine that, by occupying them scheme for oc- With a military force ‘and professing to hold them eupying them. os a pledge, he could find for himself a middle course betwixt peace and war; and the thought was welcome to him, because, being angry and irresolute, he had been pain- fully driven to and fro, and was glad to compound with his passion. ___ On the 31st of May, Count Nesselrode addressed a letter to Reshid Pasha, urging the Porte to accept without variation the draught of the Note submitted to it by Prince Mentschi- koff; and announcing that, if the Porte should fail to do this within a period of eieht days, the Russian army within a few weeks would cross the frontier in order to obtain ‘by force ‘ but. without war’ that which the Porte should decline to give up of its own accord. It was afterward explained that this plan of resorting to violence without war was to be carried 182 TRANSACTIONS WHICH (Cuap. XII. into effect by occupying the Danubian Principalities and hold- ing them as a security for the Sultan’s compliance. But in the second week of June the Dispatch which brought to the Sultan a virtual alliance with England was already at Constantinople, and the English fleet was coming up from Mal- ta to the mouth of the Dardanelles, under orders to obey the word of the English Ambassador. Before the moment came for dispatching an answer to Count Nesselrode’s summons, both the French and the English fleets were at anchor close outside the Straits in waters called Besica Bay. Thus sup- ported, the Porte at once refused to give Russia the Note de- manded; but under Lord Stratford’s counsel it did this in terms of deferential courtesy, and in a way which left open a door to future negotiation. | In all the capitals of the five great Powers, as well as at Con- Efforts to of. Stantinople, great efforts were made to bring about fect an accom- an accommodation, and it is certain that at inter- modation. vals, if not continually, the Emperor Nicholas sought the means of retreating without ridicule from the ground on which his violence had placed him. It might seem that this was a condition of things in which diplomacy ought to have been able to act with effect; but it is hard for any one ac- quainted with the Dispatches to say that the Statesmen in- trusted with the duty of laboring for this end were wanting in energy or in skill. It was the Czar’s ancient hatred of Sir Stratford Canning which defied the healing art. What Nich- olas wanted was to be able to force upon the Porte some meas- ure which was keenly disapproved by Lord Stratford; and if it could have been shown that the English Ambassador had led the Turks into an untenable ground, there would have been an opportunity of giving the Czar this gratification ; but Lord Stratford’s moderation had been so firmly maintained, his sight had been always so clear and just, and his advice had gone so close to the edge of what could safely be conceded by the Turks, that (without doing a gross wrong to the Sultan) it was hardly possible to contrive any way of giving the Czar a sem- blance of triumph over the English Ambassador. From this time and thenceforth down to the final rupture Defective rep- between Russia and the Western Powers, there was resentation of “a cause of evil at work which was every day tend- tria,and Prus- ing to draw the Czar-on into danger. Austria, cin at the Prussia, and France were unfitly represented at St. Petersburg Petersburg. In order to understand the nature of this evil, it must be remembered that in the reign of Nicholas the socicty of the Russian capital was what in the last century Cuap. XII.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. ; 133 used to go by the name of a‘ Court.’ It was a mere group of men and women, gathered always around one centre, bending always their eyes on one man, and striving to divine his will. Moreover the worshipers were always watching to see who was in favor and who was in disgrace ;- and whoever was seen to be in favor with the Czar was brought into favor with all; and whoever was believed to have incurred the Czar’s dis- pleasure was immediately forced to perceive that he had be- come displeasing to the rest of his fellow-creatures. Strange to say, the members of the diplomatic body were not exempt from these vicissitudes: if a foreign envoy felt obliged to ofter resistance to the imperial will, his life was made cold and gloomy to him; and, on the other hand, he was sure to be well caressed if he chose to cringe to the Czar. This condition of society made it a matter of great moment for foreign States to be represented at St. Petersburg by men of high spirit, and en- dued with some strength of will. Unhappily for the peace of Europe, France was represented at St. Petersburg by M. Cas- telbajac, Austria by Count Mensdorf, and Prussia by Colonel Rochow; and at a time when the Governments which they professed to represent were laboring to repress the violence of Russia by a policy of almost hostile resistance, these three men had suffered themselves to become the mere courtiers of the Czar.} Sir Hamilton Seymour alone held language corresponding with the disapproval which the acts of the Czar were exciting in Central Europe, as well as in France and England. He alone represented at St. Petersburg the judgment of the four Powers. From the moment when the occupation of the Prin- cipalities was first threatened, he always treated it as an act perilous to the tranquillity of Europe, and always declined to give any measure of the extent to which it was likely to affect the relations between Russia and England. In using this wholesome language he was left without support from any of his colleagues. Of course, in a literal way, the representatives of Austria, Prussia, and France obeyed their orders, and remonstrated when they were directed to do so; but the Czar was so prone | to believe what he wished to be true, that diplomatists who were forced to make painful communications to his Govern- ment could easily do a great deal to blunt the edge of their in- structions. So, although in Europe the Czar was isolated, yet 1 It is conceived that the facts which will be hereafter stated in connec- tion with the names of these men are alone sufficient to justify the statement in the text. 134 TRANSACTIONS WHICH - [Cuap. XII. in Europe, as represented at St. Petersburg, the true order of. things was reversed. There it was Sir Hamilton Seymour who stood alone. More than this, it was believed at St. Petersburg that the delinquency of M. Castelbajac often went beyond mere inaction, and that when the Czar was pained and discouraged by the reserve or the warning language of the Queen’s repre- sentative, he was accustomed to turn for solace to the com- plaisant Frenchman, who was always ready to assure him that Sir Hamilton Seymour’s grave tone was the sheer whim of an obstinate Englishman. | The Emperor Nicholas had laid down for himself a rule which The Czar's re. Was always to guide his conduct upon the Eastern Hane ips (uestion, and it seems to be certain that, at this cence of En- time, even in his most angry moments, he intended gland. to cling to his resolve. What he had determined was, that no temptation should draw him into hostile conflict with England. _He did not know that already he was break- ing away from England, and rapidly going adrift. Persisting in the belief that the opposition which he had been encounter- ing at Constantinople was the work of the English Ambassa- dor, and of him alone, or at worst of the Foreign Office, he re- fused to accept the conviction that he was falling out with the English people, or even with the English Government. It was in vain that Lord Clarendon, in words as clear as day, disclosed the anger and the growing determination of the Cabinet. It was in vain that by ¢ grave words and by pregnant reserve Sir Hamilton Seymour strove to warn the Czar of the danger which he was bringing upon his relations with England. The Czar imagined that he knew better. ‘ My dear Sir ‘Hamilton, ’ Count Nesselrode seemed to s say, ‘you have lived away from your ‘country so long, that, forgive me, you do not know its condi- ‘tion and temper. We do. We have studied it. Your For- ‘eign Office speaks as if we did not know that England has ‘her weak point. My dear Sir Hamilton, we have mastered ‘the whole subject of the “School of Manchester.” Certainly ‘it cost us some trouble, but we have now made out the dif- ‘ference between a “ Meeting” on a Sunday morning and a ‘*¢ Meeting” on a Monday night. Nothing escapes us. We ‘comprehend the Society of Friends. Pardon me, Sir Hamil- ‘ton, for saying so, but your country is notor iously ‘engaged j in ‘ecommerce, With that we shall not interfere.’ In truth, the Czar’s theory was that the foreign policy of the English Government was dictated by the people, and that the people loved money, and for the sake of money loved peace. In other words, he thought that the English nation had under- Cuap. XII. | BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 185 gone what historians term ‘corruption.’ As far as he could make out, the vast expanse of men and women which present- ed itself to his imagination under the name of ‘ the people’ was the same sort of thing as the crowd which went to hear a fierce speech against princes, and statesmen, and parliaments, and ar- mies, and navies, and taxes. He also thought that the cheers which this crowd uttered at the end of sentences denouncing war were proof of a settled determination to prevent any Gov, ‘ ernment from ever again breaking the peace without stringent reasons. A deeper ‘knowledge would have taught him that what the crowd applauded was—not the mere doctrine, but— the pure racy strenuous English, and the animating ferocity of the speaker ; for, in speeches of this kind, praises of peace were always blended with rough attacks upon public men; and therefore, to a shallow observ er, the hearers might seem ‘to be lifting up their voices for peace and good- will among men, when in reality they were only acknowledging the pleasantness of the sensation which is produced by heari ing good invective. A prince of the Russian Emperor’s breed might have known that, even if it be given in praise or in joy, the ‘hurrah’ of a northern people has in it a sound of conflict. . What it nega- tives and forbids is peace and rest. His battalions were des- tined to hear it some day, to know its import, and to blend it long afterward with recollections of mist and slaughter, and the breaking strength of Russia. But to the mind of the Czar at this time the cheering which greeted the thin phantom of the ‘ Peace Party’ imported a determination of the English peo- ple to abdicate their place in Europe; and, in pr oportion as this belief fixed its hold upon his mind, the tranquillity of the world was brought into danger. Another unhappy circumstance tended to keep the Czar in his fatal error. Lord Aberdeen was the Prime Minister. He was a pure and upright statesman, and it can be said that the more closely he was known the more he was honored; for his friends always saw in him higher qualities than he was able to disclose to the general world by writing, or by speech, or by action. It was his lot to do much toward bringing upon his country a great calamity. He drew down war by suffering himself to have an undue horror of it. With good and tr uly peaceful intentions, he was every day breaking: down one of the surest of the safeguards which protected the peace of Eu- rope. This he did by the dangerous language which he suf- fered himself to hold almost down to. the time of Baron Brun- now’s departure from London. If judges were to declare their horror of justice, and make it appear that they would be likely 136 TRANSACTIONS WHICH —s[Ctar. XI. to shrink from the duty of passing sentence on one of their . erring fellow-creatures, they would invite the world to pillage and murder; but they would be committing a fault less grave than that of which Lord Aberdeen was guilty. He was chief of the Government, intrusted with the forces of the State. To be chary of the use of means so puissant for good and for evil is one of the most solemn charges that can be cast upon man ; but for a ruler to give out that the sword of the State will be in his hands a thing loathed and cast aside, is to be guilty of a dereliction of duty fraught with instant danger. To all who would listen, Lord Aberdeen used to say that he abhorred the very thought of war, and that he was sure it would not and could not occur. He caused men to believe that, except for weighty and solemn cause, no war would be undertaken with his concurrence. Relying on a Prime Minister’s words, the Emperor Nicholas felt certain that Lord Aberdeen would not carry England into a war for the sake of a difference between the wording of a Note demanded by Prince Mentschikoff, and the wording of a Note proposed by the Turks. It is true that Baron Brunnow had the sagacity to understand that imprudent and timid language, though coming from the lips of a Prime Minister, would not necessarily be binding upon the high-spir- ited people of England, and he, no doubt, warned his master accordingly, even at the time when he was conveying to him Lord Aberdeen’s words of peace; but it was so delightful to the Czar to remain under the impression produced by the language of the English Prime Minister, and, moreover, this language was so closely in harmony with the apparent feel- ings of the active little crowd which he had mistaken for ‘the ‘Knglish people,’ that he could not or would not forego his illusion. It is believed that the errors of Lord Aberdeen did not end here. In a conversation between Lord Clarendon and Baron Brunnow, our Foreign Secretary, they say, spoke a plain firm sentence, disclosing the dangers which the occupation of the Principalities would bring upon the relations between Russia and England. The wholesome words were flying to St. Peters- - burg. They would have destroyed the Czar’s illusion, and they therefore bid fair to preserve the peace of Europe; but when Lord Aberdeen came to know what had been uttered, he in- sisted, they say, and insisted with effect, that Baron Brunnow should be requested to consider Lord Clarendon’s words as unspoken. Of course, after a fatal revocation like this, it would be hard indeed to convince the Czar that his encroachment was provoking the grave resistance of England. Citar. XII] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 137 The Emperor Nicholas was alone in his accustomed writing- Orders for the 100m in the Palace of Czarskoe Selo, when he came a eT to the resolve which followed upon the discomfi- ties. ture of Prince Mentschikoff. He took no counsel. He rang a bell. Presently an officer of his staff stood before him. ‘To him he gave his orders for the occupation of the Principalities. Afterward he told Count Orloff what he had done. Count Orloff became grave and said,‘This is war” The Czar was surprised to hear that the Count took so gloomy a view. He was sure that no country would stir against him without the concurrence of England, and he was certain that because of her Peace Party, her traders and her Prime Minis- ter, it was impossible for England to move. It was thus that by rashness and want of moderation men truly attached to the cause of peace were encouraging the wrong-doer, and rapidly brmging upon Europe the calamity which they most abhorred. On the 2nd of July, the Emperor Nicholas caused his forces The Pruth to pass the Pruth, and laid hold of the two Princi- passed. ais : 7 , So ARS Russian Mani- Palities. On the following day a manifesto was festo. read in the churches of All the Russias.) ‘It is ‘known,’ said the Czar, ‘to all our faithful subjects, that the ‘defense of the orthodox religion was from time immemorial ‘the vow of our glorious forefathers. From the time that it ‘pleased Providence to intrust to us our hereditary throne, the ‘defense of these holy obligations inseparable from it was the ‘constant object of our solicitude and care; and these, based ‘on the glorious treaty of IKainardji, confirmed by other solemn -*treaties, were ever directed to insure the inviolability of the ‘orthodox Church. But to our great grief, recently in despite ‘of our efforts to defend the inviolability of the rights and ‘privileges of our orthodox Church, various arbitrary acts of ‘the Porte have infringed these rights, and threaten at last the ‘complete overthrow of the long-perpetuated order so dear to ‘orthodoxy. Having exhausted all persuasion, we have found ‘it needful to advance our armies into the Danubian Princi- ‘palities, in order to show the Ottoman Porte to what its ob- ‘stinacy may lead. But even now we have not the intention © ‘to commence war. By the occupation of the Principalities ‘we desire to have such a security as will insure us the resto- ‘ration of our rights. It is not conquest that we seek; Russia ‘needs it not; we seek satisfaction for a just right so clearly ‘infringed. We are ready even now to arrest the movement 1 ¢Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 357. 138 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XIII: ‘of our armies, if the Ottoman Porte will bind itself solemnly ‘to observe the inviolability of the orthodox Church. But if ‘blindness and obstinacy decide for the contrary, then, calling ‘God to our aid, we shall leave the decision of the struggle to ‘Him, and in full confidence in His omnipotent right hand, we ‘shall march forward for the orthodox Church.”! By declaring that his military occupation of these-provinces Course taken WaAS not an act of war, the Emperor Nicholas did by the Sultan. not escape from any part of the responsibility nat- urally attaching to the invasion of a neighbor’s territory, and vet, by making this announcement, he committed the error of enabling the Porte to choose its own time for the final rupture. The Sultan was advised by Lord Stratford, and afterward by the Home Governments of the Western Powers, that, although he was entitled, if he chose, to look upon the seizure of the tributary provinces as a clear invasion of his territory, he was not obliged to treat it as an act which placed him at war, and that for the moment it was wise for him to hold back. Upon this counsel the Sultan acted, and in truth the latitude which it gave him was highly convenient, because he was ill prepared for an immediate encounter. Therefore, without yet going toa rupture, the Turkish Government exerted itself to make ready for war. In States religiously constituted, the preparation for war is begun by preaching it, and now in Europe, in Asia, and Religions char. 22 Africa, wherever there were Turkish dominions, acter ofthe the Moslems were called to arms by a truculent threatened war. course of sermons. In the churches of Russia there was a like appeal to the piety of the multitude. Of course the members of the two disputing Governments were much under. the influence of temporal motives, but by the people of both Empires the war now believed to be impending was regarded as a war for Religion. CHAPTER XIII. Tuer Czar had no sooner uttered his threat to occupy the Fffe-s ofthe Principalities than he found himself met by the MaaN taopean UNANIMOUS disapproval of the other great Powers Powers. of Europe. Nor was this a barren expression of opinion. From the time of the accomplishment of Count Lein- ingen’s mission, Austria had never ceased to declare her adhe- } “astern Papers,’ part i., p. 823. Cuar. XULJ BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 139 sion to her accustomed policy, and the moment that she saw herself endangered by the Czar’s determination to send troops into Wallachia and Moldavia, she became, as it was her inter- est and her duty to be, a resolute opponent of Russia. And her resistance was of more value than that of any other Pow- er, because she was so placed in reference to the Principalities that at any moment and without any very hard effort she could make her will the law. Of course the Czar might resent Its effect upon the interference of Austria and declare war against ae her, but in such a case he would necessarily place the scene of hostilities upon another part of her frontier. It was not possible for him with common prudence to wind round the frontier of the Austrian Empire and attempt to keep troops in Wallachia if he were liable to attack from Transylvania and the Banat. Clearly then it rested with Austria to prevent or redress the | threatened outrage. Her resolution was never doubtful. Be-~ fore the end of May, Count Buol represented at St. Petersburg the danger of the proceedings adopted by Prince Mentschi- koff,! and on the 17th of June he declared that he considered himself as ‘ entirely united’ with England in her policy toward the Turkish Empire, that he regarded ‘the maintenance of its ‘independence and integrity as of the most essential import- ‘ance to the best interests of Austria,’ and that he would em- ploy all the ‘means in his power to effect that object.? He promised that he would take no engagement with Russia not to oppose her ‘ with arms,’ and he added that, ‘should he be ‘called upon to carry out an armed intervention on the fron- ‘tiers, it would be in support of the authority and independ- ‘ence of the Sultan.” The opinion of Prussia was scarcely less decided. On the 30th of May Lord Bloomfield was able to report that the impression made upon the Government of Berlin by the last reports from Turkey was ‘ most unfavorable ‘to the Russian Government,’ and Baron Manteuffel declared that Prince Mentschikoff had gone far beyond every thing that the Prussian Government had been given to expect, and he could hardly believe but that the Prince would be disavowed. Three days later the Prussian Government conveyed this im- pression to the Court of St. Petersburg,* and on the 7th Lord Clarendon expressed his satisfaction at the views taken and the course of the policy indicated both by the Court of Berlin and the Court of Vienna.® ! ¢Hastern Papers,’ part i., p. 224. * Thyid., p20 1; * Tbhid., p. 223. *Tbid., p. 227. ® Ibid., p. 230, Upon Prussia. 140 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XIIL This was the effect produced by the threat contained in Effect produced Count Nesselrode’s summons; but when the inva- Py the actuate Sion of the Principalities took place and came to be Principalities. Known in Europe, it quickly appeared that the un- easiness excited by the actual occurrence of the event was more than proportioned to that which sprang from the mere expectation of it. In Austria the uneasiness of the Government was so great that it dissolved the close relations of friendship lately subsisting between the Courts of Petersburg and Vienna; and within three days from the time when Russia crossed the Pruth, Count Buol, abandoning the notion of ‘acting singly,’ which had been entertained some days before,' began to lay the foundations of a league well fit- ted to repr ess the Czar’s encroachment without plunging Eu- rope in war. ‘The entry of the Russian troops into the Principalities,’ wrote Lord Westmoreland to the English Secretary of State, ‘is looked upon with the greatest possible regret, and Iam re- ‘quested by Count .Buol to state this to your ‘Lordship, as also ‘to announce to you his intention immediately to convey this ‘feeling to the Russian Cabinet, together with the expression ‘of the disappointment he has felt at the sudden adoption of ‘this measure while there still existed the hope of an arrange- ‘ment at Constantinople. Connt Buol expressed his entire ‘satisfaction with the language your Lordship had held to ‘ Count Colloredo, agreeing as he does with the policy you rec- ‘ommend, and with the necessity which would arise, in case ‘the invasion of the Principalities took place, of concerting ‘measures among the Powers parties to the treaties of 1841 ‘with the view of obtaining from the Russian Cabinet the most ‘distinct declarations as to the objects of that movement and ‘the term which would be fixed for its duration.”? On the other hand, the Governments of France and Eng- In France and land, with less cause for anxiety about countries so Hogiasd. remote as the provinces of the lower Danube, were angrily impatient of the Czar’s intrusion. Pr ussia, hitherto supposed to be hardly capable of differing with the Emperor Nicholas, did not fear to express her disapproval in decisive terms, and the Cabinet of Berlin instructed the King’s Envoy at Constantinople to ‘unite cordially’ with the representatives of Austria, France, and England.3 In short, the attitude of Europe toward the Russian Empe- In Austria. In Prussia. 1 ¢Kastern Papers,’ part i., p. 320. 2 Thid., p. 356. 3 Ibid., p. 355. Cnar. XU] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 141 Attitude of TOY Was exactly that which a lover of peace and of Europe gener- Order might desire to witness; for the wrong-doer any; was left without an ally in the world, and was re- sisted by the four great Powers with the assent of the other Concord of the States of Hurope. » It was plain, moreover, that this four Powers. yesistance would not evaporate in mere remon- strance or protest ; for, if Austria was the country most endan- gered by the seizure of the Principalities, she was also the Power which could most easily extirpate the evil, because, Their means Whenever she chose, she could fall upon the flank of repression. and rear of the Russian invaders by issuing through the passes of the Eastern Carpathian range, or the frontier which touched the Banat. Moreover, France and England, by bringing their fleets into the Levant, by causing them to approach the Dardanelles, by passing the Straits, by anchor- ing in the Golden Horn, by ascending the Bosphorus, by cruis- ing in the Euxine, and finally by interdicting the Russian flag from its waters, could always inflict a graduated torture upon the Czar, and (even without going to the*extremity of war) could make it impossible that the indignation of Europe should remain unheeded. The concord of the States opposing the Czar’s encroachment Their joint Was already so well perfected that, on the very day! — when the Russian advance-guard crossed the Pruth, the representatives of the four Powers, assembled in Confer- ence, determined to address to Russia a collective Note press- ing the Czar to put his claims against Turkey in conformity with the sovereign rights of the Sultan. Here was the very principle for which France and England had been contending ; Importance of 2nd it was obvious that if this concerted action of maintaining ~~ the four Powers should last, it would insure peace ; between the for, in the first place, any resistance to their united four Powers. will would be hopeless, and, on the other hand, a ' Prince whose spirit rebelled against the idea of yielding to States which he looked upon as adversaries might gracefully give way to the award of assembled Europe. In short, the four Powers could coerce without making war; and the busi- “ness of a statesman who sought to maintain the peace and good order of Europe was to keep them united, taking care that no mere shades of difference should part them, and that nothing short of a violent and irreconcilable change on the part of one or more of the Powers should dissolve a confeder- acy which promised to insure the continuance of peace and a speedy enforcement of justice. ‘ 2nd July, 1853. 142 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap, XIV. How came it to happen that in the midst of all this harmony there supervened a policy which discarded the principle of a peaceful coercion applied by the whole of the remonstrant Powers, and raised up in its stead a threatening alliance which was powerful enough to wage a bloody and successful war, but was without that more wholesome measure of strength which can enforce justice without inflicting humiliation, and without resort to arms? How came it to happen that within six days from the date of the collective Note, and without the intervening occurrence of any new event, the concert of the four Powers was suddenly superseded and paralyzed by the announcement of a separate understanding between two of them ? It was not for reasons of State that by one of the high con- tracting parties this evil course was designed; and in order to see how it came to be possible that the vast interests of Eu- rope should be set aside in favor of mere personal objects, it will presently be necessary to contract the field of vision, and, going back to the winter of 1851, to glance at the operations of a small knot of middle-aged men who were pushing their fortunes in Paris. CHAPTER XIV. In the beginning of the winter of 1851 France was still a State ofthe republic; but the Constitution of 1848 had struck french Repub no root. There was a feeling that the country had ber, 1851, been surprised and coerced into the act of declaring itself a republic, and that a monarchical system of government was the only one adapted for France. The sense of instability which sprang from this belief was connected with an agonizing dread of insurrections like those which forty months before had filled the streets of Paris with scenes of bloodshed. More- over, to those who watched and feared, it seemed that the shad- ow on the dial was moving on with a terrible steadiness to the hour when a return to anarchy was, as it were, pre-ordained by law; for the Constitution required that a new President should be chosen in the spring of the following year, and the French, being by nature of a keen and anxious temperament, can not endure that lasting pressure upon the nerves which is inflicted by a long impending danger. Their impulse under such trials is to rush forward, or to run back, and what they -CuHap. XIV. ] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 143 are least inclined to do is to stand still and be calm, or make a steady move to the front. In general, France thought it best that, notwithstanding the Rule of the Constitution which stood in the way, the then Pres- ident should be quietly re-elected; and a large majority of the Assembly, faithfully representing this opinion, had come to a vote which sought to give it effect; but their desire was baf- fled by an unwise provision of the Republican Charter which had laid it down that no constitutional change should take place without the sanction of three fourths of the Assembly. By this clumsy bar the action of the State system was hamper- ed, and many whose minds generally inclined them to respect legality were forced to acknowledge that the Constitution wanted a wrench. Still, the republic had long been free from serious outbreak. The law was obeyed; and indeed the de- termination to maintain order at all sacrifices was so strong, that, even upon somewhat slight foundation, the President had been intrusted with power to place under martial law any dis- tricts in which disturbances seemed likely to occur. The strug- eles which went on in the Chamber, though they were unsight- ly in the eyes of military men and of those who Tove the de- -cisiveness and consistency of despotism, were rather signs of healthy political action than of danger to the State. It is not true, as was afterward pretended, that the Executive was wick- ‘edly or perversely thwarted either by the votes of the Assem- bly or by the speeches of its members; still less is it true that the representative body was engaged in hatching plots against the President; and although the army, remembering the hu- miliations of 1848, was in ill humor with the people, and was willing upon any fit occasion to act against them, there was no general officer of any repute who would consent to fire a shot without what French Commanders deemed to be the one Jawful warrant for action—an order from the Minister of War. But the President of the republic was Prince Charles Louis Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the statutory heir of the first Bonaparte. French Emperor.’ The election which made him the chief of the State had been conducted with perfect fair- ness, and since it happened that in former years he had twice engaged in enterprises which aimed at the throne of France, he had good right to infer that the millions of citizens who elected him into the Presidency were willing to use his ambi- tion as a means of restoring to France a monarchical form of government. + 4. e. by the Senatus-Consulte of 1804. 144 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuav. XIV. But if he had been open in disclosing the ambition which was almost cast upon him by the circumstances of his birth, he had been as successful as the first Brutus in passing for a man of a poor intellect. Both in France and in England at that time men in general imagined him to be dull. When he talked, the flow of his ideas was sluggish: his features were opaque ; and after years of dreary studies, the writings evolved by his thoughtful, long-pondering mind had not shed much light on the world. Even the strange ventures in which he had en- gaged had failed to win toward him the interest which com- monly attaches to enterprise. People in London who were fond of having gatherings of celebrated characters never used to present him to their friends as a serious pretender to a throne, but rather as though he were a balloon-man, who had twice had a fall from the skies, and was still in some measure alive. Yet the more men knew him in England, the more they liked him. He entered into English pursuits and rode fairly to hounds. He was friendly, social, good-humored, and willing enough to talk freely about his views upon the throne of France. The sayings he uttered about his ‘destiny’ were addressed (ap- parently as a matter of policy) to casual acquaintance, but to his intimate friends he used the language of a calculating and practical aspirant to Empire. The opinion which men had formed of his ability in the pe- riod of exile was not much altered by his return to France; for in the Assembly his apparent want of mental power caused the world to regard him as harmless, and in the chair of the President he commonly seemed to be torpid. But there were always a few who believed in his capacity, and observant men had latterly remarked that from time to time there appeared a State Paper, understood to be the work of the President, which teemed with thought, and which showed that the writer, stand- ing solitary and apart from the gregarious nation of which he was the chief, was able to contemplate it as something exter- nal to himself. His long, endless study of the mind of the first Napoleon had caused him to adopt and imitate the Emperor’s habit of looking down upon the French people and treating the mighty nation as a substance to be studied and controlled by a foreign brain. Indeed, during the periods of his imprison- ment and of his exile, the relations between him and the France of his studies were very like the relations between an anato- . mist and a corpse. He lectured upon it; he dissected its fibres ; he explained its functions; he showed how beautifully Nature in her infinite wisdom had adapted it to the service of the Bo- napartes; and how, without the fostering care of those same Cuar, XIV. ] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 145 Bonapartes, the creature was doomed to degenerate, and to perish out of the world. if his intellect was of a poorer quality than men supposed it to be at the time of the Anglo-French alliance, it was much above the low gauge which people used to assign to it in the earlier period which began in 1836 and ended at the close of 1851. That which had.so long veiled his cleverness from the knowledge of mankind was the repulsive nature of the science at which he labored. Many men before him had suffered themselves to bring craft into politics. Many more, toiling in humbler grades, had applied their cunning skill to the conflicts which engage courts of law; but no living man perhaps, ex- cept Prince Louis Bonaparte, had passed the hours ofa studi- - ous youth and the prime of a thoughtful manhood in contriv- ing how to apply stratagem to the science of jurisprudence.- It was not perhaps from natural baseness that his mind took this bent. The inclination to sit and sit planning for the at- tainment of some object of desire—this indeed was in his na- ture; but the inclination to labor at the task of making law an engine of deceit, this did not come perforce with his blood. Yet it came with his parentage. It is true he might have de- termined to reject the indication given him by the accident of his birth, and to remain a private citizen; but when once he resolved to become a pretender to the imperial throne, he of course had to try and see how it was possible—how it was possible in. the midst of this century—that the coarse Bona- parte yoke of 1804 could be made to sit kindly upon the neck of France; and, France being a European nation, and the yoke being in substance a yoke such as Tartars make for Chinese, it followed that the accommodation of the one to the other was only to be effected by guile. Therefore, by the sheer exigencies of his inheritance rather than by inborn wickedness, Prince Louis was driven to be a - contriver; and to expect him to be loyal to France, without giving up his pretensions altogether, would be as inconsistent as to say that the heir of the first Perkin might undertake to revive the fleeting glories of the House of Warbeck, and yet refrain from imposture. For years the Prince pursued his strange calling; and by the time his studies were over, he had become highly skilled. Long before the moment had come for bringing his crooked science into use, he had learned how to frame a Constitution ‘which should seem to enact one thing and really enact anoth- er. He knew how to put the word ‘jury’ in laws which rob- bed men of their freedom. He could set the snare which he Vou. L.—G . é 146 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XIV," cailed ‘universal suffrage.’ He knew howto strangle a nation in the night time with a thing he called a ‘Plebiscite.’ The Inwyer-like ingenuity “which had thus been evoked for purposes of Jurispr udence could, of course, be applied to the composition of State Papers and to political writings of all kinds; and the older Prince Louis grew, the more this odd ac- complishment of his was used to subserve his infirmities. It was his nature to remain long in suspense, not merely between similar, but even between opposite plans of action: this weak- ness grew upon him with his years; and, his conscience being used to stand neuter in these mental conflicts, he never could end his doubt by seeing that one course was honest, and the other not; so,in order to be able to linger safely in his sus- pense, he had to be always making resting-places upon which -for a time he might be able to stand undecided. Just as the indolent man becomes clever in framing excuses for his delays, so Prince Louis, because he was so often hesitating between the right and the left, became. highly skilled in contriving— not merely ambiguous phrases, but—ambiguous schemes of action. Partly from habits acquired in the secret societies of the Italian Carbonari, partly from long years passed in prison, and partly too, as he once said, from his intercourse with the calm, self-possessed men of the English turf, he had derived the power of keeping long silence; but he was not by nature a reserved nor a secret man. ‘Toward foreigners, and especial- ly toward the English, he was generally frank. He was re- served and wary with the French, but this was upon the prin- ciple which makes a sportsman reserved and wary with deer, and partridges, and trout. No doubt he was capable of dis- sembling, and continuing to dissemble through long periods of time, but 1t would seem that his faculty of keeping his in- tentions secret was very much aided by the fact that his judg- ment was often in real suspense, and that he had therefore no secret to tell. His love of masks and disguises sprang more perhaps from the odd vanity and the theatric mania which will be presently spoken of than from a base love of deceit, for it is certain that the mystery in which he loved to wrap himself up was often contrived with a view to a melo-dramatic sur- prise. It is believed that men do him wrong who speak of him as void of all idea of truth. He understood truth, and in conver- sation he habitually preferred it to falsehood, but his truthful- ness (though not perhaps contrived for such an end) sometimes became a means of deception, because after generating confi- Cuar. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 7 147 dence it would suddenly break down under the pressure of a strong motive. He could maintain friendly relations with a man, and speak frankly and truthfully to him for seven years, and then suddenly deceive him. Of course, men finding them- selves insnared by what had appeared to be honesty in his char- acter, were naturally inclined to believe that every semblance of a good quality was a mask; but it is more consistent with the principles of human nature to believe that a truthfulness con- tinuing for seven years was a genuine remnant of virtue, than that it was a mere preparation for falsehood. His doubting and undecided nature was a help to concealment; for men got so wearied by following the oscillations of his mind, that their suspicions in time went to rest; and then, perhaps, when he saw that they were quite tired of predicting that he would do a thing, he gently stole out and did it. He had boldness of the kind which is produced by reflection rather than that which is the result of temperament. In order to cope with the extraordinary perils into which he now and then thrust himself, and to cope with them decorously, there was wanted a fiery quality which nature had refused to the great bulk of mankind as well as to him. But it was only in emergencies of a really trying sort, and involving instant phys- ical danger, that his boldness fell short. He had all the courage which would have enabled him in a private station of life to pass through the common trials of the world with honor un- questioned ; but he had besides, now and then, a factitious kind of audacity produced by long dreamy meditation; and when he had wrought himself into this state, he was apt to expose his firmness to trials beyond his strength. The truth is, that his imagination had so great a sway over him as to make him love the idea of enterprises, but it had not strength enough to give him a foreknowledge of what his sensations would be in the hour of trial. So he was most venturesome in his schemes for action, and yet, when at last he stood face to face with the very danger which he had long been courting, he was liable to be scared by it, as though it were something new and strange. He loved to contrive and brood over plots, and he had a great skill in making the preparatory arrangements for bring- ing his schemes to ripeness; but his labors in this direction had a tendency to bring him into scenes for which by nature he was ill fitted, because, like most of the common herd of men, he was unable to command the presence of mind and the flush of animal spirits which are needed for the critical moments ofa daring adventure. In short, he was a thoughtful, literary man, deliberately tasking himself to venture into a desperate path, 148 | TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XIV. and going great lengths in that direction, but liable to find himself balked in the moment of trial by the sudden and chill- ing return of his good sense. ‘He was not by nature bloodthirsty nor cruel, and besides that in small matters he had kind and generous instincts, he , was really so willing to act fairly until the motive for foul play was strong, that for months and months together he was able to live amongst English sporting-men without incurring dis- grace; and if he was not so constituted nor so disciplined as to be able to refrain from any object of eager desire merely upon the theory that what he sought to do was wicked, there is ground for inferring that his perception of the difference between right and wrong had been dimmed (as it naturally would be) by the habit of seeking an ideal of manly worth in a personage like the first Bonapar te. It would seem that (as a study, or out of curiosity, if not with a notion of being guided by it) he must have accustomed himself to hear sometimes what conscience had to say, for it is certain that, with a pen in his hand and with sufficient time for preparation, he could imi- tate very neatly the scrupulous language of a man of honor.! What he always longed for was to be able to seize and draw upon himself the wondering attention of mankind; and the accident of his birth having marked out for him the throne of the First Napoleon as an object upon which he might fasten a hope, his craving for conspicuousness, though it had its true root in vanity, soon came to resemble ambition; but the men- tal isolation in which he was kept by the nature of his aims and his studies, the seeming poverty of his intellect, his blank wooden looks, and, above all, perhaps the supposed remoteness of his chances of success, these sources of discouragement, con- trasting with the grandeur of the object at which he aimed, caused his pretension to be looked upon as something mer ely comic and odd. Linked with this his passionate desire to at- tain to a height from which he might see the world gazing up at him, there was a strong and almost eccentric fondness for the artifices by which the framer of a melo-drama, the stage- manager, and the stage-hero combine to produce their effects ; and so, by the blended force of a passion and a fancy, he was 1 See inter alia his address to the Electors, 29th Nov., 1848; ‘his speech, read after taking the oath, 20th Dec., 1848; speech at Ham, 22nd July, 1849; ditto at Tours, Ist Aug., 1849; message to the Chambers, 3rd Dec., 1849; ditto 12th Nov., 1850. It will be seen (see post) that, according to my view, these declarations may have been composed at a time when he was really shrinking from treason; but if, as others suppose, they were intended to hoodwink the country, it must be owned that they counterfeited the senti- ments of an honest man with extraordinary skill. Cuar. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 149 impelled to be contriving scenic effects and surprises in which he himself was always to be the hero. This bent was so strong and dominant as to be, not a mere taste for theatric arrange- ments, but rather what men call a propensity. Standing alone, it would have done no more perhaps than govern the character of his amusements; but, since his birth had made him a pre- tender to the throne of France, his desire to imitate and repro- duce the Empire supplied a point of contact between his the- atric mania and what one may call his rational ambition, and the result was that, so long as he was in exile, he was always filled with a desire to mimic Napoleon’s return from Elba, and to do this in his own person and upon the stage of the actual world. In some of its features his attempts at Strasburg in 1836 was a graver business than is commonly supposed. At that time he was twenty-eight years old. He had gained over Vaudrey, the officer commanding a regiment of artillery which formed part of the garrison. Early in the morning of Sunday the 30th of October the movement began. By declaring that a revolu- tion had broken out in Paris, and that the king had been de- » posed, Vaudrey persuaded his gunners to recognize the prince as Napoleon II]. Vaudrey then caused detachments to march to the houses of the Prefect, and of General Voirol, the Gen- eral commanding the garrison, and made them both prisoners, placing sentries at their doors. All this he achieved without alarming any of the other regiments. Supposing that there really existed among the troops a deep attachment to the name and family of Bonaparte, little more seemed needed for winning over the whole garrison than that the heir of the great Emperor should have the personal quali- ties requisite for the success of the enterprise. Prince Louis was brought into the presence of the captive General, and tried to gain him over, but was repulsed. Afterward the Prince, surrounded with men personating an imperial staff, was con- ducted to the barrack of the 46th Regiment, and the men, taken entirely by surprise, were told that the person now in- troduced to them was their Emperor. What they saw was a young man with the bearing and countenance of a weaver—a weaver oppressed by long hours of monotonous in-door work, which makes the body stoop and keeps the eyes downeast ;_ but all the while—and yet it was broad daylight—this young man, from hat to boot, was standing dressed up in the historic cos- tume of the man of Austerlitz-and Marengo. It seems that this painful exhibition began to undo the success which Vau- drey had achieved; but strange things had happened in Paris 150 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XIV. before, and the soldiery could not, with certainty, know that the young man might not be what they: were told he was— Napoleon II., the new-made Emperor of the French. Their perplexity gave the Prince an opportunity of trying whether the sentiment for the Bonapartes were really existing or not, and, if it were, whether he was the man to kindle it. But by-and-by Talandier, the Colonel of the regiment, hay- ing been at length apprised of what was going on, came into the yard. He instantly ordered the gates to be closed, and then—fierce, angry, and scornful—went straight up to the spot where the proposed Emperor and his ‘Imperial Staff’? were standing. Of course this apparition—the apparition of the indignant Colonel whose barrack had been invaded—was ex- actly what was to be expected, exactly what was to be com- bated; but yet, as though it were something monstrous and undreamt of, it came upon the Prince with a crushing Power. To him, a literary man, standing in a barrack-yard, in the dress of the great conqueror, an angry Colonel, with authentic war- rant to command, was something real, and therefore, it seems, dreadful. In amoment Prince Louis succumbed to him. Some thought that, after what had been done that morning, the Prince owed it to the unfortunate Vaudrey (whom he had se- duced into the plot) to take care not to let the enterprise collapse without testing his fortune to the utmost by a stren- uous, not to say desperate resistance; but this view did not prevail. One of the ornaments which the Prince wore was a sword; yet without striking a blow he suffered himself to be publicly stripped of his grand cordon of the Legion of Honor and all his other decorations.’ According to one ac- count, the angry Colonel inflicted this dishonor with his own hands, and not only pulled the grand cordon from the Prince’s bosom, but tore off his epaulettes, and trampled both epau- Jettes and grand cordon under foot. When he had been thus stripped, the Prince was locked up. The decorated follow- ers, Who had been impersonating the Imperial Staff, under- went the same fate as their chief. Before judging the Prince for his conduct during these moments, it would be fair to as- sume that, the Colonel having once been suffered to enter the yard, and to exert the ascendency of his superior firmness, the danger of attempting resistance to him would have been great, ? Dispatch of General Voirol, Moniteur, 2nd November. After stating the arrival of Lt. Col. Talandier in the barrack-yard, the dispatch says, ‘ Dans ‘une minnté L. N. Bonaparte et les miserables qui avaient pris parti pour lui ‘ont été arretés, et les decorations dont ils etaient reyétus ont été arrachées ‘par Jes soldats du 46™¢,’ Cuap. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 151 would have been greater than any which the common herd of men are at all inclined to encounter. Besides, the mere fact that the Prince had willfully brought himself into such a pre- dicament, shows that, although it might fail him in very trying moments, he had extraordinary daring of a particular kind. It would be unjust to say, flatly, that a man so willing as he was to make approaches to dangers was timid. It would be fairer to say that his characteristic was a faltering boldness. He could not. alter his nature, and his nature was to be venture- some beforehand, but to be so violently awakened and shocked by the actual contact of danger as to be left without the spir- it, and seemingly without the wish or the motives, for going on any farther with the part of a desperado. The truth is that the sources of his boldness were his vanity and his theatric bent; and these passions, though they had power to bring him to the verge of danger, were not robust enough to hold good against man’s natural shrinking from the risk of being killed— being killed within the next minute. Conscious that in point of hat, and coat, and boots, he was the same as the Emperor Napoleon, he imagined that the great revoir of 1815, between the men and the man of a hundred fights, could be acted over again between modern French troops and himself; but it is plain that this belief had resulted from the undue mastery which he had allowed, for a time, to his ruling propensity, and not from any actual overthrow of the reason; for when checked, he did not, like a madman or a dare-devil, try to carry his ven- ture through; nor did he even, indeed, hold on long enough to try, and try fairly, whether the Bonapartist sentiment to which he wished to appeal were really existent or not: on the con- trary, the moment he encountered the shock of the real world, he stopped dead ; and becoming suddenly quiet, harmless, and obedient, surrendered himself (as he always has done) to the first man who touched him. The change was like that seem- ing miracle which is wrought when a hysteric girl, who seems to be carried headlong by strange hallucinations, and to be clothed with the terrible power of madness, is suddenly cured and silenced by a rebuke and a sharp angry threat. Accept- ing a small sum of money! from the Sovereign whom he had been trying to dethrone, Prince Louis was shipped off to Amer- ica by the good-natured King of the French. But if he was wanting in the quality which enables a man to go well through with a venture, his ruling propensity had strength enough to make him try the same thing over and over * £600. 152 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [C-ar. XIV. again. His want of the personal qualifications for enterprises of this sort being now known in the French Army, and ridicule having fastened upon his name, he could not afterward seduce into his schemes any officers of higher rank than a lieutenant. Yet he did not desist. Before long he was planning another ‘return from Elba,’ but this time with new dresses and decora- tions. So long as he was preparing counterfeit flags, and coun- terfeit generals, and counterfeit soldiers,’ and teaching a forlorn London bird to play the part of an omen, and guide the des- tiny of France, he was perfectly at home in that kind of states- manship.; and the framing of the plebiscites and proclamations which formed a large part of his cargo was a business of which he was master; but if his arrangements should take effect, then what he had to look for was, that, at an early hour on a sum- mer morning, he would find himself in a barrack-yard at Bou- logne surrounded by a band of armed followers, and supported by one of the officers of the garrison whom he had previously gained over; but also having to do with a number of soldiery of whom some would be for him, and some inclining against him, and others confused and perplexed. Now, this was ex- ‘actly what happened to him: his arrangements had been so skillful, and fortune had so far lured him on, that whither he meant to go, there he was at last, standing in the very circum- stances which he had brought about with long design afore- thought. But then his nature failed hin. Becoming agitated, and losing his presence of mind,? he could not govern “the re- sult of the struggle by the resources of his intellect ; and being also without the fire and the joyfulness which come to warlike men in moments of crisis and of danger, he was ill qualified to kindle the hearts of the bewildered soldiery. So, when at last a firm, angry officer? forced his way into the barrack-yard, he conquered the Prince almost instantly by the strength of a more resolute nature, and turned him out into the street, with all his fifty armed followers, with his flag and his eagle,‘ and his counterfeit head-quarters Staff, as though he were dealing with a mere troop of strolling players. 5 Yet only a few weeks afterward this same Prince Louis Napoleon was able to show ‘ The dresses were made to counterfeit the uniform of the 42nd, one of the regiments quartered at Boulogne; and buttons having on them the number of the regiment were forged for the purpose at Birmingham. * This is his own explanation of his state given before the Chamber of Peers. The flutter he was in*caused him, as he explained, to let his pistol go off without intending it, and to hit a soldier who was not taking part against him.—Moniteur for 1840, pp. 2031-2034. * Captain Col. Puygellier. “ The eagle here spoken of is the wooden one. ° Moniteur, ubi ante. Cuap. XIV. ] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 153 by his demeanor before the Chamber of Peers that, where the occasion gave him leisure for thought, and for the exercise of mental control, he knew how to comport himself with dignity, and with a generous care for the safety and welfare of his fol- lowers. | It was natural that a man thus constituted should be much inclined to linger in the early stages of a plot. But, since it chanced that by his birth and by his ambition Prince Louis Napoleon was put forward before the world as a pretender to the throne of France, he had always had around him a few keen adventurers who were willing to partake his fortunes; and if there were times when his personal wishes would have inclined him to choose repose or indefinite delay, he was too considerate in his feelings toward his little knot of followers to be capable of forgetting their needs. In 1851 motives of this kind, joined with feelings of disap- His overtures POintment and of personal humiliation, were driving to the gentlee the President forward. He had always wished to athe time bring about a change in the Constitution, but, orig- Poe inally, he had hoped to be able to do this with the resident. : ’ aid and approval of some at least of the statesmen and eminent generals of the country; and the fact of his de- siring such concurrence in his plans seems to show that he did not at first intend to trample upon France by subjecting her to a sheer Asiatic despotism, but rather to found such a mon- archy as might have the support of men of station and charac- ter. But, besides that few people believed him to be so able a man as he really was, there attached to him at this period a good deal of ridicule. So, although there were numbers in France who would have been heartily glad to see the Repub- lic crushed by some able dictator, there were hardly any public men who believed that in the President of the Republic they would find the man they wanted. Therefore his overtures to the gentlemen of France were always rejected. Every states- man to whom he applied refused to entertain his proposals. , Every general whom he urged always said that for whatever he did he must have ‘an order from the Minister of War.’ The President being thus rebuffed, his plan of changing the Isrebnfea £0r'm of government with the assent of some of the and falls into - leading statesmen and generals of the country de- Mate en generated into schemes of a very different kind ; pressed him and at length he fell into the hands of persons of : the quality of Persigny, Morny, and Fleury. With these men he ‘plotted, and strangely enough it happened that the character and the pressing wants of his associates gave G2 154 TRANSACTIONS WHICH | [Cuap. XIV. strength and purpose to designs which without this stimulus might have long remained mere dreams. The President was easy and generous in the use of money, and he gave his follow- _ers all he could, but the checks createdby the constitution of the Republic were so effective that, beyond the narrow limit allowed by law, he was without any command of the State re- — sources. In their inveterate love of strong government, the Republicans had placed within reach of the Chief of the State ample means for overthrowing their whole structure, and yet they allowed him to remain subject to the same kind of anxiety and to be driven to the same kind of expedients as an embar- rassed tradesman.’ This was the President’s actual plight, and if he looked to the future as designed for him by the Constitu- tion, he could see nothing but the prospect of having to step down on a day already fixed, and descend from a conspicuous station into poverty and darkness. He would have been con- tent perhaps to get what he needed by fair means. In the be- ginning of the year he had tried hard to induce the Chambers to increase the funds placed at his disposal. He failed. From that moment it was to be expected that, even if he himself should still wish to keep his hands from the purse of France, his associates, becoming more and more impatient and more and more practical in their views, would soon press their chief Into action. The President had been a promoter of the law of the 31st of ile declares Lay, restricting the franchise, but he now became for universal the champion of universal suffrage. To minds aga versed in politics this change might have sufticed to disclose the nature of the schemes upon which the Chief of the State was brooding ; but from first to last, words tending to allay suspicion had been used with great industry and skill. From the moment of his coming before thé public in February, 1848, the Prince laid hold of almost every occasion he could find for vowing, again and again, that he harbored no schemes against the Constitution. The speech which he addressed to the Assembly in 1850! may be taken as one instance, out of numbers, of these solemn and volunteered declarations.2 He His solemn _ ‘considered,’ he said, ‘as great criminals, those losalte tothe, © Who by personal ambition compromised the small Republic. ‘amount of stability secured by the Constitution ‘. .. that if the Constitution contained defects and dangers, ‘the Assembly was competent to expose them to the eyes of ‘the country ; but that he alone, bound by his oath, restrained 713th November. —? See an enumeration of a few of these given ante. - Cuar. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR.” 155 ‘himself within the strict limits traced by that act.’ He de- _ clared that ‘ the first duty of authorities was to inspire the peo- ‘ple with respect for the law by never deviating from it them- ’ ‘selves; and that his anxiety was not, he assured the Assem- ‘bly, to know who would govern France in 1852, but to em- ‘ploy the time at his disposal so that the transition, whatever ‘it might be, should be effected without agitation or disturb- ‘ance; for,’ said he, ‘the noblest object, and the most worthy ‘of an exalted mind, is not to seek when in power how to per- ‘petuate it, but to labor inseparably to fortify, for the benefit ‘ot all, those principles of authority and morality which defy ‘the passions of mankind and the instability of laws.’ It was thus that, in language well contrived for winning be- lief, he repudiated as wicked and preposterous the notion of his being the man who would or could act against the Consti- _ tution; and, supposing that when he voluntarily made these declarations he had resolved to do what he afterward did, he would have been guilty of deceit more than commonly black; but perhaps an appreciation of the room which he had in his mind for double and conflicting views, and a knowledge of his hesitating nature, and of the pressing wants of the associates by whom he was surrounded, may justify the more friendly view of those who imagine that, when he made all these sol- emn declarations, he was really shrinking from treason. Cer- tainly, his words were just such as may have pictured the real thoughts of a goaded man at times when he had determined to make a stand against hungry and resolute followers who were keenly driving him forward. It was natural that in looking at the operation which changed the Republic into an Empire, the attention of the observer shéuld be concentrated upon the person who, already the Chief of the State, was about to attain to the throne; and there seems to be no doubt that what may be called the literary part of the transaction was performed by the President in person. He was the lawyer of the confederacy. He no doubt wrote the Proclamations, the Plebiscites, and the Constitutions, and all such like things; but it seems that the propelling power which brought the plot to bear was mainly supplied by Count de Morny, and by a resolute Major named Fleury. M. Morny was a man of great daring, and gifted with more than common powers of fascination. He had been a member of the Chamber of Deputies in the time of the monarchy; but he was rather known in the world as a spec- ulator than as a politician. He was a buyer and seller of those fractional and volatile interests in trading adventures which Morny. 156 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XIV. go by the name of ‘shares,’ and since it has chanced that the nature of some of his transactions has been brought to light by the public tribunals, it is probable that the kind of repute in | which he is held may be owing in part to those disclosures.! He knew how to found a ‘company,’ and he now undertook to establish institutions which were destined to be more lucra- tive to him than any of his former adventures. M. Morny was a practical man. If Prince Louis Napoleon was going to be content with a visionary life, thinking fondly of the hour when grateful France would come of her own accord and salute him Emperor, M. Morny was not the sort of person who would con- sent to stand loitering with him in the hungry land of dreams. It seems, however, that the man who was the most able to make the President act, to drive him deep into his own plot, and fiercely carry him through it, was Major Fleury. Fleury was young, but his life had been check- ered. He was the son of a Paris tradesman, from whom at an early age he had inherited a pleasant sum of money. He plunged into the enjoyments of Paris with so much ardor that that phase of his career was soon cut short; but whilst his fa- ther’s friends were no doubt lamenting ten times a day that the boy had ‘ eaten his fortune,’ young Fleury was at the foot of a ladder which was destined to give him a control over the fate of a mighty nation. He enlisted in the army as a common soldier; but the officers of his corps were so well pleased with the young man, and so admired the high spirit with which he met his change of fortune, that their good-will soon caused him to be raised from the ranks. It was perhaps his knowl- edge about horses which first caused him to be attached to the Staff of the President. From his temperament and his experience of life, it resulted that Fleury cared a great deal for money or the fhings which money can buy, and was not at all disposed to stand still and go without it. He was daring and resolute, and his daring was of the kind which holds good in the moment of danger. If Prince Louis Bonaparte was bold and ingenious in design- ing, Fleury was the man to execute. The one was skillful in preparing the mine and laying the train; the other was the man standing by with a lighted match, and determined to touch the fuse. The support of such a comrade as Fleury in the barrack-yard at Strasbourg or at Boulogne might have Fleury. 1 The trials here referred to are the action for libel against M. Cabrol, Tribunal of the Seine, January 21, and June 30, 1853; and the suit insti- tuted by the shareholders of the ‘Constitutionnel’ against Veron, Mirés, and Morny. Cuap. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 1547 brought many lives into danger, but it would have prevented the enterprise from coming to a ridiculous end. Jn truth, the nature of the one man was the complement of the nature of the other; and between them they had a set of qualities so puissant for dealing a sudden blow, that, working together, and with all the appliances of the Executive Government at their command, they were a pair who might well be able to make a strange dream come true. It would seem that from the moment when Fleury became a partaker of momentous se- crets, the President ceased to be free. At all events, he would have found it costly to attempt to stand still. The language held by the generals who declared that they Fleury search- WOuld act under the authority of the Minister of olin, War and not without it, suggested the contrivance Arnaud. which was resorted to. Fleury determined to find a military man capable of command, capable of secrecy, and capable of a great venture. The person chosen was to be properly sounded, and if he seemed willing, was to be admit- ted into the plot. He was then to be made Minister of War, in order that through him the whole of the land forces should be at the disposal of the plotters... Fleury went to Algeria to find the instrument required, and he so well performed his task that he hit upon a general officer who was christened, it seems, Jacques Arnaud Le Roy, but was known at this time as Achille St. Arnaud. Of some of the adventures of this person it will be right to speak hereafter.) There was nothing in his past life, nor in his then plight, which made it at all dangerous St.Arnaudis for Fleury to approach him with the words of a Saini =Suborner. He readily entered into the plot. From ter-of-War. the moment that Prince Louis: Bonaparte and his associates had intrusted their secret to the man of Fleury’s se- - lection, it was perhaps hardly possible for them to flinch, for the exigencies of St. Arnaud, formerly Le Roy, were not likely to be on so modest a scale as to consist with the financial ar- rangements of a Republic governed by law, and the discontent of a person of his quality, with a secret like that in his charge, would plainly bring the rest of the brethren into danger. He was made Minister of War. This was on the 27th of October. At the same time M. Maupas, or de Maupas, was brought into the Ministry. In the previous July this per- son had been Prefect of the Department of the Upper Garonne. Of him, his friends say that he had proper- ty, and that he has never been used to obtain money dishon- Maupas. 1 In chapter XXIX. 158 TRANSACTIONS WHICH ~ [Cuap. XIV, estly. His zeal had led him to desire that thirty-two persons, including three members of the Council-General, should be seized and thrown into prison on a charge of conspiring against the Government. The legal authorities of the depart- ment refused to suffer this, because they said there was no ground for the charge. Then this Maupas, or de Maupas, pro- posed that the want of all ground for accusing the men should be supplied by a stratagem, and with that view he deliberately offered to arrange that incriminating papers, and arms, and grenades should be secretly placed in the houses of the men whom he wanted to have accused. Naturally the legal author- ‘ities of the department were horror-struck by the proposal, and they denounced the Prefect to the keeper of the seals. Mau- pas was ordered to Paris.!. From the indignant and scornful presence of M. Faucher he came away sobbing; and people who knew the truth supposed him to be for ever disgraced and ruined, but he went and told his sorrows to the President. Heis aubornea LHe President, of course, instantly saw that the and made Pre’ man could be suborned. He admitted him into the fect of Police. lot, and-on the 27th of October appointed him Prefect of Police. Persigny, properly Fialin, was in the plot. He was descend- ed on one side of an ancient family, and, disliking his father’s name, he seems to have called himself for many years after the name of his maternal grandfather.? He began life as a non-commissioned officer. As he himself . said, his instinct was‘ to serve; and at first he served the Le- gitimists, but chance brought him into contact with Louis Bo- naparte, and he very soon became the attached friend of the Prince, and his partner in all his plans and adventures.” If Morny was merely taking up the Bonaparte cause as one of many other money speculations, Persigny could truly say that he had made it for years his profession, and had even tried, as well as he could, to raise it to the dignity of a real political principle. But the part intrusted to Persigny on this occa- sion, though possibly an important one, was not of a conspicu- ous sort. It is said that, the firmness of the Prince Louis Bonaparte being distrusted by his comrades, Persigny, who Persigny. * See the ‘Bulletin Francais,’ pp. 98 et seq. This publication appeared under auspices which make it a safe authority. It is to be regretted that its statements extend to only a portion of the events connected with the 2nd of December. ’ This, I think, was the account which he gave upon his trial in 1840. Hé was tried by the description of Fialin dit Persigny. 3 Before the Chamber of Peers, 1840. Cuap. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 159 was of a sanguine, hopeful nature, was to remain constantly at the Elysée in order to receive the tidings which would be com- ing m during the period of danger, and prevent them from reaching the President in such a way as to shake him and cause despondency. At all events, it would seem that the hand of Persigny was not the hand employed to execute the meas- ures of the Elysée, and to this circumstance he owes it that he will not always have to stand in the same sentences with Morny, and Fleury, and Maupas, and St. Arnaud, formerly Le Roy. It was necessary to take measures for paralyzing the Na- Contrivance tional Guard, but the force was under the com-’ for paralyzing mand of General Perrot, a man whose honesty could Guard, not be tampered with. To dismiss him suddenly would be to excite suspicion. The following expedient was adopted: the President appointed as Chief of the Staff of the National Guard a person named Vieyra. The past life and the then repute of this person were of such a kind, that Gen- eral Perrot, it seems, conceived himself insulted by the nomi- nation, and instantly resigned. That was what the brethren of the Elysée wanted. On Sunday the 30th General Lawes- tine was appointed to the command.. He was a man who had fought in the great wars, but now in his gray hairs he was not too proud to accept the part designed for him. His function was—not to lead the force of which he took the command, but —to prevent it from acting. It was unnecessary to admit either Laweestine or Vieyra to a complete knowledge of the plot, because all that they were to do was to frustrate the as- sembly of the National Guard by withholding all orders and preventing the drums from beating to arms. Of course the engine on which the brethren of the Elysée rested their main hopes was the army, and it was known that the remembrance of humiliating con- flicts in the streets of Paris had long been embittering the temper in which the troops regarded the people of the capital. Moreover it happened that at this time the Legislative As- sembly had been agitated by a discussion which inflamed the troops with fresh anger against civilians in general, but more especially against the Parisians, against the representatives of the people, and against statesmen and politicians of all kinds. A portion of the Chambers, foreseeing that the army might be used against the freedom of the Legislative body, had desired that the Assembly should avail itself of a provision in the Con- stitution which empowered it not only to have an armed force for its protection, but .to have that force under the order of its The Army. 160 TRANSACTIONS WHICH ‘[Cuap. XIV. Itsindienation OWN nominee. This was a scheme which shocked at M.Baze's the mind of the army. In France, of late years, the Peepers Minister of War had always been a soldier, and an order from him (though it was im reality the order of a mem- ber of the civil Government) was habitually regarded by mil- itary men as the order of a general having supreme command. A proposal to change this system by giving to the Assembly a direct control over a portion of the land-forces could be easi- “ly*represented to the soldiery as a plan for withdrawing the French army from the control of its generals, and placing it under the command of men whom the soldiers called ‘law- ‘yers.’ Seen in this light, the project so exasperated the feel- ings of the troops, that, if it had been carried, they would pr ‘obably have been stirred up at once to effect by force a vio- lent change of the Constitution. The measure was rejected ; but anger is not always appeased by the removal of the kin- dling motive; and the soreness created by the mere agitation of the question had been so well kept up by the means em- ployed for the purpose, that the garrison of Paris now came to look upon the people with a well-defined feeling of spite. Care had been taken to bring into Paris and its neighbor- Selection of | hood the regiments most likely to serve the pur- regiments and pose of the Elysée, and to give the command to of officers for ° : ° the Army of generals who might be expected to act without ane scruples. The forces in Paris and its neighborhood Magnan. - were under the orders of General Magnan. At the time of Louis Napoleon’s descent upon the coast near Bou- logne, Magnan had had the misfortune to be singled out by the Prince as a person to whom it was fitting to offer a bribe of £4000. He had also had the misfortune to be detected in continuing his intercourse with the officer who had thought it safe to come with a proposal like that into the presence of a French general. Magnan did not conceal his willingness to go all lengths, and the brethren, it appears, wished to bring him completely into the plot,! but his panegyrist (not seeing, perhaps, the full import of his disclosure) causes it to be known that the General, though ready to act against Paris and against the Assembly, declined to risk his safety by avow- edly joining in the plot. ‘He expressly requested,’ says Gra- nier de Cassaignac, ‘not to be apprized until the moment for ‘taking the necessary dispositions and mounting-on horseback.”? In other words, though he was willing to use the forces under his command in destroying the Constitution, and in effecting ' This is inferred from what follows. * Granier de Cassaignac, vol. ii. Cuapr. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 161 such slaughter as might be needed for the purpose, he refused to dispense with the screen afforded by an order from the Minister of War. In the event of the enterprise failing, he would be able to say, ‘I refused to participate in any plot. ‘The duty ofa soldier is obedience. Here is the order which “I received from General St. Arnaud. I did no more than ‘obey my commanding officer.’ On the 27th of November, however, this Magnan assembled Meetingof twenty generals whom he had under his command, ‘eatin ©and gave them to understand that they might soon nan’s house. be called upon to act against Paris and against the Constitution. They promised a zealous and thorough-going obedience ; and although every one of them, from Magnan downward, was to have the pleasing shelter of an order from his superior officer, they all seem to have imagined that their determination was of the sort which. mankind eall heroic, for their panegyrist relates with pride that when Magnan and his twenty generals were entering into this league and covenant against the people of Paris, they solemnly embraced one an- other.! From time to time the common soldiery were gratified with presents of food and wine, as well as with an abundance of flat- The army en- tering words, and their exasperation against the ci- souragee na. Vilians was so well kept alive that men used to Afri- people. can warfare were brought into the humor for call- ing the Parisians ‘Bedouins.’. There was massacre in the very sound. The army of Paris was in the temper required. It was necessary for the plotters to have the concurrence of M.St. Georges, the director of the state printing-office. M.St. Georges was suborned. Then all was ready. On the Monday night between the 1st and the 2nd of Decem- Assembly at Per, the President had his usual assembly at the Ely- the Klyseeon sée. Ministers who were loyally ignorant of what Monday night. was going on were mingled with those who were in the plot. Vieyra was present. He was spoken to by the Pres- Vieyra’ser- ident, and he undertook that the National Guard rand. should not be beat to arms that night. He went away, and it is said that he fulfilled his humble task by causing the drums to be mutilated. At the usual hour the assembly began to disperse, and by eleven o’clock there were only three Peforemid- guests who remained. These were Morny (who nisht several had previously taken care to show himself at one cf the confed- erates assem- Of the theatres), Maupas, and St. Arnaud, formerly 1 Granier de Cassaignac, vol. ii. 162 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap, XIV. pean aninnas hid Roy. There was, besides, an orderly officer of the President, called Colonel Beville, who was initi- ated in the secret. Persigny, it seems, was not present. Morny, Maupas, and St. Arnaud went with the President into his cab- inet; Colonel Beville followed them.' Mocquard, the private secretary of the President, was in the secret, but it does not appear that he was in the room at this time. Fleury too, it seems, was away; he was probably on an errand which tended to put an end to the hesitation of his more elderly comrades and drive them to make the venture. They were to strike the blow that night. They deliberated, but in the absence of Fleury their council was incomplete; because at the very mo- ment when perhaps their doubts and fears were inclining them still to hold back, Fleury, impetuous and resolute, might be tak- ing a step which must needs push them forward. By-and-by they were apprized that an order which had been given for the movement of a battalion of gendarmerie had duly taken effect without exciting remark. It is probable that the exe- cution of this delicate movement was the very business which Fleury had gone to witness with his own eyes, and that it was he who br ought the intelligence of its complete success to the Elysée. Per haps also he showed that after the step which had just been taken, it would be dangerous to stop short, for the The President plotter s now passed into action. The President in- manne thcol! trusted a packet of manuscripts to Coionel Beville, onel Beville. and dispatched him to the state printing-office. It was in the streets which surround this building that the battalion of gendarmerie had been collected. When Paris was hushed in sleep, the battalion came quietly out, and folded Transaction at TOWN the state printing-office. From that moment the stateprint- until their work was done the printers were all close cual teeg captives, for no one of them was suffered to go out. For some time they were kept waiting. At length Colonel Beville came from the Elysée with his packet of manuscripts. These papers were the proclamations required for the early morning, and M. St.Georges the Director gave orders to put them into type. It is said that there was something like re- sistance, but in the end, if not at first, the printers obeyed. Each compositor stood whilst he worked between two police- men, and, the manuscript being cut into many pieces, no one could make out the sense of what he was printing. By these Tenor of the proclamations the President asserted that the As- Proclamations. sembly was a hot-bed of plots; declared it dis- ‘ Granier de Cassaignac, vol. ii. Cuap. XIV. ]} BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 163 solved; pronounced for universal suffrage; proposed a new Constitution; vowed anew that his duty was to maintain the Republic; and placed Paris and the twelve surrounding de- partments under martial law. In one of the proclamations he appealed to the army, and strove to whet its enmity against civilians, by reminding it of the defeats inflicted upon the troops in 1830 and 1848.! The President wrote letters dismissing the members of the Letters dis- Government who were not in the plot; but he did missing Mv, not cause these letters to be delivered until the fol- plot. lowing morning. He also signed a paper appoint- ing Morny to the Home Office. The night was advancing. Some important steps had been Hesitation at taken, but still, though highly dangerous, it was not the Elysee. absolutely impossible for the plotters to stop short. They could tear up the letters which purported to dismiss the Ministers, and although they could not hope to prevent the disclosures which the printers would make as soon as they were released from captivity, 1t was not too late to keep back the words, and even the general tenor of the Proclamations. But the next steps were of such a kind as to be irrevocable. It is said that at this part of the night the spirit of some of Fleury drags the brethren was cast down, and that there was one a of them who shrank from farther action; but Fleu- ry, they say, got into a room alone with the man who wanted to hang back, and then locking the door and drawing a pistol, stood and threatened his agitated friend with instant death if he still refused to go on.? What is certain is that, whether in hope or whether in fear, Atthreeo'clock the plotters went on with their midnight task. The ie sider "order from the Minister of War was probably sign- piereaen tee ed by half past two in the morning, for at three it nan, was in the hands of Magnan.? At the same hour Maupas (assigning for pretext the expect- Maupas's ar. ed arrival of foreign refugees) caused a number of tangements/r Commissaries to be summoned in all haste to the arrests, Prefecture of Police. At half past three in the morning these men were in attendance; Maupas received each ? Granier de Cassaignac, vol. ii. See also the Annuaire for1851. This last publication (which must be distinguished from the Annuaire des Deux Mondes) gives an account of the events of December, written in a spirit favorable to the Elysée; but the Appendix contains a full collection of official documents. * Thave thought it right to introduce this acconnt under a form indicating that it is based on mere rumor, but I entertain no doubt that the incident has been declared to be true by one of the two persons who stood face to face in that room. ’ Granier de Cassaignac, vol. ii. 164 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XIV. of them separately, and gave to each distinct instructions. It was then that, for the first time, the main secret of the confed- erates passed into the hands of a number of subordinate agents. During some hours of that night every one of those humble Commissaries had the destinies of France in his hands; for he might either obey the Minister, and so place his country in the power of the Elysée, or he might obey the law, denounce the plot, and bring its contrivers to trial. Maupas gave orders for the seizure at the same minute of the foremost Generals of France, and several of her leading Statesmen. Parties of the police, each under the orders of a Commissary, were to be at the doors of the persons to be arrested some time beforehand, but the seizures were not to take place until a quarter past six.! At six o’clock a brigade of infantry, under Forey, occupied Disposition of the Quai d’Orsay; another brigade, under Dulac, the troops. occupied the garden of the Tuileries; another bri- gade, under Cotte, occupied the Place de la Concorde; and an- othier brigade of infantry, under Canrobert, with a whole divi- sion of cavalry, under Korte, aud another brigade of cavalry, under Reybell, was posted in the neighborhood of the Elysée.2 It would seem that the main objects aimed at by those who thus placed the troops were—not at this moment to overawe the whole of Paris, but—rather to support the operations of Maupas, and to provide for the safety of the brethren at the Elyscée by keeping them close under the shicld of the army as long as they remained in Paris, and, if such a step should be- come necessary, by securing and covering their flight. Almost at the same time Maupas’s orders were carefully obeyed, for at the appointed minute, and whilst it was still dark, the designated houses were entered. The most famous The arrests of generals of France were seized. General Changar- the principal ier, General Bedeau, General Lamoriciére, General xenerals and . > : of prominent Cavaignac, and General Leflé were taken from their Statesmen. beds, and carried away through the sleeping city and thrown into prison.? In the same minute the like was done with some of the chief members and officers of the Assembly, and amongst others with Thiers, Miot, Baze, Colonel Charras, Roger du “Nor d, and several of the democratic leaders. Some men believed to be the chiefs of secret societies were also seized.*| The general object of these night arrests was that, when morning broke, the army should be without generals in- clined to observe the law, that the Assembly should be with- out the machinery for convoking it, and that all the political * Granier de Cassaignac, vol. ii. ® Ibid. 3 Thid. * Thid. Cuap. XIV.) BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 165 parties in the State should be paralyzed by the disappearance of their chiefs. The number of men thus seized in the dark was seventy-eight. Eighteen of these were members of the Assembly.' Whilst it was still dark, Morny, escorted by a body of in- pees fantry, took possession of the Home Office, and pre- possession of pared to touch the springs of that wondrous ma- fe dome OF chinery by which a clerk can dictate to a nation. gins to use its Alread y he began to tell forty thousand communes os of the enthusiasm with which the sleeping city had received the announcement of measures not hitherto disclosed. When the light of the morning dawned, people saw the Proclamations on the walls, and slowly came to hear that num- bers of the foremost men of France had been seized in the night time, and that every General to whom the friends of law and order could look for help was lying in one or other of the Newspapers Prisons. ‘The newspapers, to which a man might seizedand run in order to know, and know truly, what others SARE thought and intended, were all seized and stopped. The gates of the Assembly were closed and guarded, but the Meeting of the Deputies, who began to flock thither, found means Assembly. = to enter by passing through one of the official resi- dences which formed part of the building. They had assem- bled in the Chamber in Jarge numbers, and some of them hav- ing caught Dupin, their reluctant President, were forcing’ him to come and take the chair, when a body of infantry burst in It is dispersed aNd drove them out, striking some of them with the Ry: Pepont. butt-ends of their muskets. Almost at the same time a number of Deputies who had gathered about the side entrance of the Assembly were roughly handled and dispersed by a body of light infantry. Twelve Deputies were seized by the soldiers, and carried off prisoners.” In the course of the morning the President, accompanied by The Presi- his uncle Jerome Bonaparte and Count Flahault,? dent's ride. and attended by many general officers and a nu- merous staff, rode through some of the streets of Paris. It would seem that his theatric bent had Jed Prince Louis to ex- pect from this ride a kind of triumph upon which his fortunes would hinge, and certainly the unpopularity of the assembly, and the suddenness and perfection of the blow which he had struck in the night gave him fair grounds for his hope, but. he was hardly aware of the light in which his personal pretensions 1 Granier de Cassaignac, vol.ii. * La Verité, ‘ Recueil d’Actes Officielles.’ ° I imagine that, before the night of the 1st of December, Count Flahault had some knowledge of what was going to be done. 166 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XIV> were regarded by the keen laughing people of Paris. The mo- ment when they would cease to use laughter against him was very near, but it had not yet come. Moreover, he did not bring himself to incur the risk which was necessary for ‘obtain- ing an acclaim of the people, for he clung to the streets and the quays which were close under the dominion of the troops. Upon the whole, the reception he met with seems to have been neither friendly nor violently hostile, but chilling, and in a quiet way scornful. It seems that after meeting this check his spirit suffered col- lapse. Once again, though not so hopelessly as at Strasbourg and Boulogne, he had encountered the shock of the real world. And again, as before, the shock felled him. Nor was it strange that he should be abashed and desponding: obeying his old propensity, he had prepared and appointed for the Austerlitz day a great scenic greeting between himself on the one hand, and on the other a mighty nation. When, leaving the room. where all this had been contrived and rehearsed, he came out into the free air, and rode through street after street, it became every minute more certain that Paris was too busy, too grave, too scornful to think of hailing him Emperor; nay, strange to say, the people, being fastidious or careless, or imperfectly aware of what had been done, refused to give him even that wondering attention which seemed to be insured to him by the transactions of the foregoing night; and yet, there they were, the proffered Czesar and his long-prepared group of Captains sitting published on the backs of real horses with appropriate swords and dresses. Perhaps what a man in this plight might the most hate would be the sun—the cold December sun. Prince Louis rode home, and went in out of sight. Thenceforth, for the most part, he remained close shut up in Seclusionana the Elysée. There, in an inner room, still decked glomof in red trowsers, but with his back to the daylight, Prince Louis. they say he sat bent over a fireplace for hours and hours together, resting his elbows on his knees and burying his face in his hands. What is better known is that, in general, during this period Measures for of danger, tidings were not suffered to go to him from alarming Straight. It seems that, either in obedience to his messengers. Own dismal intellect, or else because his associates had determined to prevent him from ruining them by his gloom;he was kept sheltered from immediate cbntact with alarming messengers. It was thought more wholesome for him to hear what Persigny or the more resolute Fleury might think it safe to tell him, than to see with his own eyes an aid- Cuap. XIV. | BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 167 de-camp fresh come from St. Arnaud or Magnan, or a commis- sary full fraught with the sensations which were shaking the health of Maupas. Driven from their Chamber, the Deputies assembled at the Meeting of the Mavoralty of the 10th arrondissement. There, upon Asse ay. the motion of the illustrious Berryer, they resolved ing. that the act of Louis Bonaparte was a forfeiture of the Presidency ; and they directed the judges of the Supreme Court to meet and proceed to the judgment of the President Its decrees, and his accomplices. ‘These resolutions had just Troops ascend heen voted, when a battalion of the Chasseurs de the stairs, but : hesitate to use Vincennes entered the court-yard of the Mayoralty, rs . and began to ascend the stairs. One of the Vice- Presidents of the Assembly went out and summoned the sol- diers to stop, and leave the Chamber free. ‘The officer appeal- ed to felt the hatefulness or the danger of the duty intrusted to him, and declaring that he was only an instrument, he said he would refer for guidance to his chief.) Presently afterward, several battalions of the line, under the command of General Forey, came up and surrounded the May- oralty. The Chasseurs de Vincennes were ordered to load. By-and-by two Commissaries of Police came to the door, and, announcing that they had orders to clear the hall, entreated the Assembly to yield. The Assembly refused. A third Com- missary came, using more imperative language, but he also seems to have shrank back when he was made to see the law- lessness of the act which he was attempting. At length an Written orders aid-de-camp of General Magnan came with a writ- from Magnan ten order, directing the ofticer in command of the hall. _ battalion to clear the hall; to do this, if necessary, by force, and to carry off to the prison of Mazas any Deputies offering resistance. By his way of framing this order, Magnan showed how he crouched under his favorite shelter, for in it he declared that he acted ‘in consequence of the orders of the ‘Minister of War’? The number of Deputies present at this moment was two hundred and twenty. The whole Assembly a declared that they resisted, and would yield to noth- e Assembly. . : refuses to yield ing short of force. In the absence of Dupin, M. sxcept to foree- Benoist d’Azy had been presiding over the Assem- sembly taken bly, and both he and one of the Vice-Presidents Pe traps and Were now collared by officers of police and led out. marched tothe The whole Assembly followed, and, enfolded be- Quai D’Orsay. 2 ; . 4 tween files of soldiery, was marched through the 1 La Vérité, ‘ Recueil d’Actes Officielles.’ ? Tbid. 168 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XIV. streets. General Forey rode by the side of the column. The captive Assembly passed through the Rue de Grenelle, the Rue St. Guillaume, the Rue Neuve de l’Université, the Rue de Beaune, and finally into the Quai @Orsay. The spectacle of France thus marched prisoner through the streets seems to have pained the people who saw it, but the pain was that of men who, witnessing by chance some disagreeable outrage, feel sorry that some one else does not prevent it, and then pass on. The members of the Assembly, trusting too much to mere law and right, had neglected or failed to provide that there should be a great concourse of people in the neighbor- hood of the hall where they met. Those who saw this ending of free institutions were casual by-standers, and were gathered, it seems, in no great numbers. There was no storm of indig- nation. In an evil hour the Republicans had made it a law that the representatives of the people should be paid for their services, This provision, as was natural, had brought the As- sembly into discredit, for it destroyed the ennobling sentiment with which a free people is accustomed to regard its Parlia- ment. The Paris workman, brave and warlike, but shrewd and somewhat envious, compared the amount of his day’s earn- ing with the wages of the Deputies, and it did not seem to him that the right cause to stand up for was the cause of men who were hired to be patriots at the rate of twenty-five franes a day. Still, by his mere taste, and his high sense of the dif- ference between what is becoming and what is ignoble, he was inclined to feel hurt by the sight of what he witnessed. In this doubtful temper the Paris workman stood watching, and saw his country slide down from out of the rank of free States. The Assembly The gates of the d’Orsay barrack were opened, and edoneee, the Assembly was marched into the court. Then barrack. the gates closed upon them. It was now only two o’clock in the afternoon, but darkness was wanted to hide the thing which was next to be done, and the members of the Assembly were kept prisoners all the day in the barrack. At half past four, three Deputies who had been absent came to the barrack and caused themselves to be made prisoners with the two hundred and twenty already there; and at half past eight in the evening the twelve Depu- ties who had been seized by the troops at the house of the As- sembly were brought to the barrack, so that the number of Deputies there imprisoned was now raised to five hundred and thirty-two. 1 La Véritée, ‘Recueil d’ Actes Officielles.’ Cnap. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 169 At a quarter before ten o’clock at night a large number of the windowless vans which are used for the transport of felons were brought into the Court of the barrack, and into these the The members .-WO hundred and thirty-five members of the As- of the Assem- Sembly were thrust. They were carried off, some bly earried of to the Fort of Mount Valerian, some to the fortress prisons in fel- of Vincennes, and some to the prison of Mazas. Be- oneve™ fore the dawn of the 3rd of December all the emi- nent members of the Assembly, and all the foremost generals of France were lying in prison, for now (besides General Chan- garnier, and General Bedeau, General Lamoriciére, General Cavaignac, and General Leflé, and besides Thiers, and Colonel Charras, and Roger du Nord, and Miot, and Baze, and the oth- ers who had been seized the night before, and were still held fast in the jails) there were in prison two hundred and thirty- two of the representatives of the people, including amongst The quality of Others of wide renown, Berryer, Odillon Barrot, the men im- Barthélemy St. Hilaire, Gustave.de Beaumont, Be- prisoned. noist @’Azy, the Duc de Broglie, Admiral Cecile, Chambolle, De Courcelles, Dufaure, Duvergier de Hauranne, e Falloux, General Lauriston, Oscar Lafayette, Lanjuinais, Lasteyrie, the Duc de Luines, the Due de Montebello, General Radoult-Lafosse, General Oudinot, De Remusat, and the wise and gifted De Tocqueville. Amongst the men imprisoned there were twelve Statesmen who had been Cabinet Ministers, and nine of these had been chosen by the President himself. These were the sort of men who were within the walls of Quality ofthe the prisons. Those who threw them into prison men whoim- were Prince Louis Bonaparte, Morny, Maupas, and prisoned them. St, Arnaud, formerly Le Roy, all acting with the ad- vice and consent of Fialin de Persigny, and under the propul- sion of Fleury. It is true that the army was aiding, but it has been seen that Magnan, who commanded it, had taken care to screen himself under the orders of the Minister of War, and in the event of his being brought to trial he would no doubt la- bor to show that in doing as he did, and in effecting the mid- night seizure and imprisonment of his country’s greatest com- manders he was an instrument, and not a contriver. By the laws of the Republic, the duty of taking cognizance Sitting ofthe Of offenses against the Constitution was cast upon Supreme Court. the Supreme Court. The Court was sitting, when _> The facts mentioned in the above paragraph are not, I believe, contro- verted in any important point, but the most authoritative and succinct ac- count of what passed will be found in the well-known letter of M. de Tocque- ville. Vou. I.—H 170 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XLV, The Judzes 20 armed force entered the hall, and the Judges forcibly driven were driven from the bench, but not until they had from thebeneh- made a judicial order for the impeachment of the President. Before the Judges were thrust down they adjourn- ed the Court to a day ‘to be named hereafter,’ and they had the spirit to order a notice of the impeachment to be served upon the President at the Elysée.! If the process-server en- countered Colonel Fleury at the Elysée, he would soon find that Fleury was not the man who would suffer his gloomy master to be depressed by the sight of a man with an ugly summons from a Court of Law. The ancient courage of the Parisians had accustomed them Circumstances to the thought of encountering wrong by an armed od it ime, Tesistance 5 “put there were many causes which ren- dent to resort dered-it unwise for them at that moment to appeal to insurrection to force. The events of 1848, and the doctrines of ofthelaws. the sect called Socialists, had filled men’s minds with terror. People who had known what it was to be for months and months together in actual fear for their lives and’ for their goods, were brought down into a condition of mind which made them willing to side with any executive govern- ment however lawless, against any kind of insurrection howev- er righteous. Moreover, the feeling of contempt with which the President had been regarded was not immediately changed by the events of the 2nd of December. It was effectually changed, as will be seen, by the carnage of the 4th; but before the afternoon of that day, the very extravagance of ‘the outr age which had been perpetrated so reminded men of the invasion of Strasbourg and the grotesque descent upon Boulogne, that during the fifty-four hours which followed upon the dawn of the 2nd, the indignation of the public was weakened by its sense of the ridiculous. The contemptuous cry of ‘Soulouque!’ indicated that Paris was comparing Louis Napoleon to the ne- gro Emperor who had travestied the achievements of the First Bonaparte; and there were many to whom it seemed that his mimicry of the 18th Brumaire belonged to exactly the same class of enterprises as his mimicry of the return from Elba.. Plainly the difference was, that this time, instead of having only afew dresses and. counterfeit flags, he commanded the re- sources of the most powerful executive government in the world, but still there was a somewhat wide-spread belief that. the President was tumbling as fast as was necessary, and would soon be defeated and punished. Besides, by the contrivance * ‘Bulletin Francais.’ Cuap. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. t7T already described, the plotters had paralyzed the National Guard. Moreover, it would seem that the great body of the working men did not conceive themselves to be hurt by what had been done. Universal suffrage, and the immediate privi- lege of choosing a dictator for France, were offerings well fit- ted to win over many honest though credulous laborers, and _ the baser sort, whose vice is envy, were gratified by what had been done, for they loved to see the kind of inversion which _ was implied in the fact, that men like Lamoriciére, and Bedeau, and Cavaignae, like De Luines, like De Tocqueville, and the Due de Broglie, could be shut up in a jail or thrown into a fel- on’s van by persons like Morny, and Maupas, and St. Arnaud, formerly Le Roy. Thus there was no sufficing material for the immediate formation of insurgent forces in Paris. The rich and the middle classes were indignant, but they had a hor- ror of insurrection; and the poor had less dread of insurree- tion, but then they were not indignant. It is known moreover that for the moment there was no fighting power in Paris. Paris has generally abounded in warlike and daring men, who love fighting for fighting’s sake; but for the time, this portion of the French community had been crushed by the result of the great street-battle of June, 1848, and the seizures and ban- ishments which followed the defeat of the insurgents. The men of the barricades had been stripped of their arms, deprived of their leaders, and so thinned in numbers as to be unequal to any serious conflict, and their helplessness was completed by the sudden disappearance of the street captains and the chiets of secret societies, who had been seized in the night between the 1st and 2nd of December. Still, there was a remnant of the old insurrectionary forces The Commit. Which was willing to try the experiment of throw- tee of Resist- ing up a few barricades, and there was, besides, a ite small number of men who were impelled in the same direction by motives of a different and almost opposite. - kind. These last were men too brave, too proud, too faithful in their love of right and freedom to be capable of acquiescing- for even a week in the transactions of the December night. The foremost of these was the illustrious Victor Hugo. He and some of the other members of the Assembly who had es- eaped seizure, formed themselves into a Committee of Resist- ance, with a view to assert by arms the supremacy of the law. This step they took on the 2nd of December. Several members of the Assembly went into the Faubourg St. Antoine, and strove to raise the people. .These deputies were Schelcher, Baudin, Aubry, Duval, Chaix, Malardier, and 172 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar..XIV? Attempted de Flotte, and they were vigorously supported by rising in te? ~Cournet, whose residence became their head-quar- Antoine. ters, and by Xavier Durrieu, Kesler, Ruin, Lemaitre, Wabripon, Le Jeune, and other men connected with the dem- ocratic press. More, it would seem, by their personal energy than by the aid of the people, these men threw up a slight he barricade D2tVicade at the corner of the Rue St. Marguerite. of the Rue St. Against this there marched a battalion of the 19th Marguerite. Regiment; and then there occurred a scene which may make one smile for a moment, and may then almost force one to admire the touching pedantry of brave men, who imagined that, without policy or warlike means, they could be strong with the mere strength of the law. Laying aside their fire-arms, and throwing across their shoulders scarfs which marked them as Representatives of the People, the Deputies ranged themselves in front of the barricade, and one of them, Charles Baudin, held ready in his hand the book of the Con- stitution. When the head of the column was within a few yards of the barricade, it was halted. For some moments there was silence. Law and Force had met. On the one side was the Code democratic, which France had declared to be perpetual; on the other a battalion of the line. Charles Bau- din, pointing to his book, began to show what he held to be the clear duty of the battalion; but the whole basis of his ar- gument was an assumption that the law ought to be obeyed ; and it seems that the officer in command refused to concede what logicians call the ‘major premiss,’ for, instead of accept- ing its necessary consequence, he gave an impatient sign. Sud- denly the muskets of the front rank men came down, came up, came level; and in another instant their fire pelted straight into the group of the scarfed Deputies. Baudin fell dead, his: head being shattered by more than one ball. One other was killed by the volley, several more were wounded. The book of the Constitution had fallen to the ground, and the defenders of the law recurred to their fire-arms. They shot the officer who had caused the death of their comrade and questioned their major premiss. There was a fight of the Homeric sort for the body of Charles Baudin. The battalion won it. Four soldiers carried it off! Plainly this attempted insurrection in the Faubourg St. Antoine was without the support of the mul- titude. It died out. The Committee of Resistance now caused barricades to be thrown up in that mass of streets between the Hotel de Ville * Xavier Durrieu, pp. 23, 24. Cuap. XIV. ] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 178 Barricades in and the Boulevard, which is the accustomed centre central Paris. of an insurrection in Paris; but they were not strong enough to occupy the houses, and therefore the troops passed through the streets without danger, and easily took every barricade which they encountered. When the troops retired, the barricades again sprang up, but only to be again taken. ‘This state of things continued during part of the 3rd of December ; but afterward the efforts of the troops were re- Jlaxed, and during the night, and the whole forenoon of the next day, the formation of barricades in the centre of Paris was al- lowed to go on without encountering serious interruption.? At two o’clock in the afternoon of the 4th, the condition of State of Paris. 2TiS was this:—The mass of streets which lies be- at 2o’clock on tween the Boulevard and the neighborhood of the the 4th of Dee. FTotel de Ville was barricaded, and held without combating by the insurgents; but the rest of the city was free from grave disturbance. The army was impending. It was nearly forty-eight thousand strong,” and comprised a force of all arms, including cavalry, infantry, artillery, engineers, and Attitude ofthe gendarmes. Large bodies of infantry were so post- aR ed that brigades advancing from all the quarters of the compass could simultaneously converge upon the barricaded district. Besides that, by the means already shown, the troops had been wrought into a feeling of hatred against the people of Paris; they had clearly been made to understand that they -were to allow no consideration for by-standers to interfere with their fire, that they were to give no quarter, and that they were ‘to put to death not only the combatants whom they might see in arms against them, but those also who, without having been seen in the act, might nevertheless be deemed to have taken part against them. When it is remembered that the duty— the judicial duty—of bringing people within this last category was cast upon raging soldiers, it will be clear that the army of Paris was brought into the streets with instructions well fitted to bring about the events which marked the afternoon of the Ath of December.? For reasons which then remained un- known, the troops were abstaining from action, and there was a good distance between the heads of the columns and the out- posts of the insurgents. It is plain that, either because of his own hesitation, or be- Hesitation of Cause of the hesitation of the President, or M. St. Maeane. Arnaud, the General in command of the army was 1 Magnan’s Dispatch, Moniteur. 2 47,928. 3 My knowledge as to what the troops were made to understand is derived from a source highly favorable to the Elysée, 174 TRANSACTIONS WHICH! [CHap. XIV) hanging back ;} and in truth, though the mere physical task which he had to perform was a slight one, Magnan could not but see that politically he had got into danger. The mechan- ical arrangements of the night of the 2nd of December had met with a success which was wondrously complete; but in other respects the enterprise of the Elysian brethren seemed to be failing, for no one of mark and character had come forward to Its probable abet the President. There were many lovers of pxeaads. order and tranquillity who wished the President to succeed in overthrowing the Constitution, or giving it. the needful wrench, but they had assumed that he would not en- gage in any enterprise of this sort without the support of some at least of the Statesmen who were the known champions of the cause of order. Those whose views had lain in this direc- tion were shocked out of their hopes when, on the 2nd of De- cember, they came to find that all the honored defenders of Bt ar _ the cause of order had been thrown into prison, and pparent ter- ° : ror of the plot- that the persons who were sheltering the President ea ou’ by their concurrence and their moral sanction were tinued isola. Morny and Maupas or de Maupas, and St. Arnaud, ; formerly Le Roy. The list of the Ministry, which was published on the following day, contained no name held in honor; and the plotters of the Elysée, terrified, as it seems, at the state of isolation in which they were placed, resorted to a Stratagem of curious stratagem. They formed what they called fuming the a ‘Consultative Commission,’ and promulgated a de- Commission." gree which purported to appoint as members of the body, not only most of the plotters themselves, and others whose services they could command, but also some eighty other hen who were eminent for their character and station.? In so far as it represented these eighty men to be members of the Commission, the decree was a counterfeit. One after an- other the men with the honored names repudiated the notion that they had consented to go and ‘consult’ with Louis Bona- parte, and Morny, and Fleury, and Maupas, and St. Arnaud, formerly Le Roy. The Elysée derived great advantages from 1 Magnan, in his dispatch, accounts for his delay in words which tend to justify the conclusion of those who believe that the opportunity of inflicting slaughter on the people of Paris was deliberately sought for and prepared ; but I am not inclined to believe that for such an object a French General would throw away the first seven hours of a short December day, and there- fore, so far as concerns his motives, I reject Magnan’s statement. I consid- er that the disclosures made before the Chamber of Peers, in 1840, give me a right to use my own judgment in determining the weight which is due‘to this person’s assertions. * Annuaire, Appendix. 2 Their letters to this effect appeared from time to time in the Eng. journals; Cuar. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 175 this stratagem, because for many precious hours, and. even days, it kept the country from knowing what was the number and what was the quality of the persons who were really abet- ting the President; but Magnan of course knew the truth, and when he found, on the morning of the 4th ‘of December, that even the complete success of all the arrangements of the foregoing Tuesday had not been hitherto puissant enough to bring to the Elysée the support of men of weight and charac- ter, he had grounds for the alarm which seems to have been the cause of his inaction. For, regarded in connection with the state of isolation in which the plotters still remained, the insurrection, feeble as it was, became a source of grave danger to the General in com- mand of the troops. It would have been no new thing to have to act against insurgents in vindication of the law, and under the orders of what had been commonly called a ‘ Gov- ernment; but this time the law was on the side of the insur- gents, and the knot of men who had got the control of the of- fices of the State were not so circumstanced in point of repute as to be able to make up for the want of legal authority by the weight of their personal character. Therefore it was nat- ural for Magnan, notwithstanding his cherished order from the Minister of War, to think a good deal of what might hap- pen to him if perchance, at the very moment when he was taking upon his hands the blood of the Parisians, the plot of which he was the instrument should after all break down for want of support from men known and honored as Statesmen. ~ But at length perhaps it was effectually explained to Mag- Magran'at | 24N that he must stand or fall with those to whom length resolves he was now committed, and that, although he toract thought to keep himself ‘under the shelter of the ‘order of the Minister of War,’ the testimony of any one out of the twenty Generals who met him on the 27th of Novem- ber would suffice to bring him into nearly the same plight as: any of the avowed plotters. A judicious application of this kind of torture would make it unnecessary for Colonel Fleury to show even the hilt of his pistol. At all events, Magnan’ now at last consented to act against the insurrection. He: had thrown away the whole of the morning and the better part of the afternoon, and this on a short: December day; but at two o’clock the troops were ordered to advance, and by three all the heads of columns which were converging upon the insurrection from different points were almost close to the several barricades upon which they had marched. | The advance post of the insurgents, at its northwestern, ex- 176 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XIV: Point ofcon. t¥emity, was covered by a small barricade, which tact between crossed the Boulevard at a point close to the Gym- baaiihiod by nase Theatre. Some twenty men, with weapons the troops and and a drum taken in part from the ‘property room’ at occupied : : by theinsur- Of the theatre, were behind this rampart, and a seas small flag, which the insurgents chanced to find, was planted on the top of the barricade.! Facing this little barricade, at a distance of about a hundred State ofthe 204 fifty yards, was the head of the vast column of Boulevard at troops which now occupied the whole of the west- three o'clock. ern Boulevard, and a couple of field-pieces stood _ pointed toward the barricade. In the neutral space between the barricade and the head of the column the shops and almost all the windows were closed, but numbers of spectators, in- cluding many women, crowded the foot-pavement. These gazers were obviously incurring the risk of receiving stray shots. But westward of the point occupied by the head of the column the state of the Boulevards was different. From that point home to the Madeleine the whole carriage-way was occupied by troops; the infantry was drawn up in subdivisions at quarter distance. Along this part of the gay and glittering Boulevard the windows, the balconies, and the foot-pavements were crowded with men and women who were gazing at the military display. These gazers had no reason for supposing that they incurred any danger, for they could see no one with whom the army would have to contend. It is true that no- tices had been placed upon the walls recommending people not to encumber the streets, and warning them that they would be liable to be dispersed by the troops without bemg summoned ; but, of course, those who had chanced to see this announcement naturally imagined that it was a menace ad- dressed to riotous crowds which might be pressing upon the troops in a hostile way. Not one man could have read it as a sentence of sudden death against peaceful spectators. At three o’clock one of the field- -pieces ranged in front of: the column was fired at the little barricade near the Gymnase. The shot went high over the mark. The troops at the head of the column sent a few musket-shots in the direction of the’ barricade, and there was a slight attempt at reply, but no one on either side was wounded; and the engagement, if so it 1 The great barricade in this district was the one which crossed the Boule- vard diagonally near the Porte St. Denis. It is not noticed in the text, be- cause the object here is—not to describe in detail the preparations of the in- surgents—but merely to show the state of the Boulevard at the point where © their advanced post faced the troops. Cua. XIV.) BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 179 could be called, was so languid and harmless that even the gazers who stood on the foot- -pavement between the troops and the barricade were not deterred from remaining where they were. And, with regard to the spectators far ther w est, there was nothing that tended to cause them alar m, for they could see no one who was in antagonism with the troops. So, along the whole Boulevard, from the Madeleine to near the Rue du Sentier, the foot- _pavements, the windows, and the bal- conies still remained crowded with men, and women, and chil- dren; and from near the Rue du Sentier to the little barricade at the Gymnase, spectators still lined the foot-pavement, but in that last part of the Boulevard the windows were closed.} According to some, a shot was fired from a window or a The massacre HOUSe-top near the Rue du Sentier. This is denied of the Boule- by others, and one witness declares that the first a shot came from a soldier near the centre of one of the battalions, who fired straight up into the air; but what followed was this: the tr oops at the head of the column faced about to the south and opened fire. Some ofthe soldiery fired point-blank into the mass of spectators who stood gazing upon them from the foot-pavement, and the rest of the troops fired up at the gay crowded windows and balconies.’ The officers in general did not order the firing, but seemingly they were agitated j in the same way as the men of the rank and file, for such of them as could be seen from a balcony at the corner of the Rue Montmartre appeared to acquiesce in all that the sol- diery did.§ | The impulse which had thus come upon the soldiery near the head of the column was a motive akin to panic, for it was carried by swift contagion from man to man, till it ran west- ward from the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle into the Boulevard Poissoniére, and gained the Boulevard Montmartre, and ran swiftly through its whole length, and entered the Boulevard des Italiens. “Thus, by a movement in the nature of that which . tacticians describe as ‘conversion,’ a column of some sixteen thousand men facing eastward toward St. Denis was suddenly formed, as it were, into an order of battle fronting southward, and busily firing into the crowd which lined the foot: -pave- ment, and upon the men, women, and children who stood at the balconies and windows on that side of the Boulevard What made the fire at the houses the more deadly was that, 1 What I say as to the state of the Boulevard at this time is taken from many concurrent authorities, but Captain Jesse’s statement (see post) is the most clear and satisfactory so far as concerns what he saw. ~-? Captain Jesse, wha post. 3 Thid. 4 Tbid. 15 Dee, 178 ‘TRANSACTIONS WHICH: [Cuap. XIV: even after it had begun at the eastern part of the Boulevard Montmartre, people standing at the balconies and windows farther west could not see or believe that the troops were real- ly firing in at the windows with ball cartridge, and they re- mained in the front rooms, and even continued standing at the windows, until a volley came crashing in. At one of the win- dows there stood a young Russian noble with his sister at his side. Suddenly they received the fire of the soldiery, and both of them were wounded with musket-shots. An English sur- geon who had been gazing from another window in the same house had the fortune to stand unscathed ; and when he began to give his care to the wounded brother and sister, he was so tonched, he says, by their forgetfulness of: self, and the love they seemed to bear the one for the other, that more than ever before in all his life he prized his power of warding off death. ' Of the people on the foot-pavement who were not struck down at first, some rushed and strove to find a shelter, or even a half-shelter, at any spot within reach. Others tried to crawl away on their hands and knees; for they hoped that perhaps the balls might fly over them, ‘The impulse to shoot people had been sudden, but was not momentary. The soldiers load- ed and reloaded with a strange industry, and made haste to kill and kill, as though their lives depended upon the quantity of the slaughter they could get through in some given period of time. When there was no longer a crowd to fire into, the soldiers would aim carefully at any single fugitive who was trying to effect his escape, and if'a man tried to save himself by coming close up to the troops and asking for mercy, the soldiers would force or persuade the suppliant to keep off, and hasten away, and then if they could, they killed him running. This slaughter of unarmed men and women was continued for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. It chanced that amongst the persons. standing at the balconies, near the corner of the Rue Mont- martre, ‘there was an English officer ; and, because of the posi- tion in which he stood, the professional knowledge which guided his observation, the composure with which he was able. to see and to describe, and the more than common responsi- bility which attaches upon.a military narrator, it is probable that his testimony will be always appealed to by historians who shall seek to give a truthful account of the founding of the Second French “Empire. At the moment when the firing began, this officer was look- ing upon the military display with his wife at his side, and was so placed, that if he looked eastward, he could carry his Cuap. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 179 eye along the Boulevard for a distance of about 800 yards, and see as far.as the head of the column, and if he looked westward he could see to the point where the Boulevard Montmartre runs into the Boulevard des Italiens. This is what he writes: ‘I went to the balcony at which my wife was standing, and ‘remained there watching the troops. ‘The whole Boulevard; ‘as far as the eye could reach, was crowded with them, princi: ‘pally infantry in subdivisions at quarter distance, with heré ‘and there a batch of twelve-pounders and howitzers, some of ‘which occupied the rising ground of the Boulevard Poisson- ‘jere. The officers were smoking their cigars. The windows ‘were crowded with people, principally women, tradesmen; “servants, and children, or, like ourselves, the occupants of ‘apartments. Suddenly, as I was intently looking with my ‘glass at the troops in the distance eastward, a few musket: ‘shots were fired at the head of the column, which consisted ‘of about 3000 men. In a few moments it spread, and after ‘hanging a little came down the Boulevard in a waving sheet ‘of flame. So regular, however, was the fire, that at first I ‘thought it was a feu de joie for some barricade taken in ad- ‘vance, or to signal their position to some other division; and ‘it was not till it came within fifty yards of me that I recog- ‘nized the sharp ringing report of ball cartridge ; but even then £I could scarcely believe the evidence of my ears, for as to my ‘eyes I could not discover any enemy to fire at; and I contin- ‘ued looking at the men until the company below me were ‘actually raising their firelocks, and one vagabond sharper ‘than the rest —a mere lad without whisker or mustache — ‘had covered me. In an instant I dashed my wife, who had ‘just stepped back, against the pier between the windows; ‘when a shot struck the ceiling immediately over our heads, ‘and covered us with dust and broken plaster. In a second ‘after I placed her upon the floor, and in another, a volley ‘came against the whole front of the house, the balcony, and ‘windows; one shot broke the mirror over the chimney-piece, ‘another the shade of the clock; every pane of glass but one “was smashed, the curtains and window-frames cut; the room, ‘in short, was riddled. The iron balcony, though rather low, ‘was a great protection, still fire-balls entered the room, and ‘in the pause for reloading I drew my wite to the door, and ‘took refuge in the back rooms of the house. The rattle of ‘musketry was incessant for more than a quarter of an hour ‘after this; and in a very few minutes the guns were unlim- ‘bered and pointed at the ‘ Magasin” of M. Sallandrouze, five ‘houses on our right. What the object or meaning of all this 180 “TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XIV, ‘might be was a perfect enigma to every individual in the ‘house, French or foreigners. Some thought the troops had ‘turned round and joined the Reds; others suggested ‘that ‘they must have been fired upon somewhere, though they cer- ‘tainly had not from our house or any other on the Boulevard ‘Montmartre, or we must have seen it from the balcony. . . . ‘This wanton fusillade must have been the result of a panic, ‘lest the windows should have been lined with concealed en- ‘emies, and they wanted to secure their skins by the first fire, . ‘or else it was a sanguinary impulse. .. . The men, as I have ‘already stated, fired volley upon volley for more than a quar- ‘ter of an hour without any return; they shot down many of ‘the unhappy individuals who remained on the Boulevard and ‘could not obtain an entrance into any house; some persons ‘were killed close to our door.”! . The like of what was calmly seen by this English officer was seen with frenzied horror by thousands of French men and women. If the officers in general abstained from ordering the slaugh- ter, Colonel Rochefort did not follow their example. He was an officer in the Lancers, and he had already done execution with his horsemen amongst the chairs and the idlers in the neighborhood of Tortoni’s, but afterward imagining a shot to have been fired from a part of the Boulevard occupied by in- fantry, he put himself at the head of a detachment which made a charge upon the crowd; and the military historian of these events relates with triumph that about thirty corpses, almost all of them in the clothes of gentlemen, were the trophies of this exploit.2, Along a distance of a thousand yards, going east- ward from the Rue Richelieu, the dead bodies were strewed upon the foot-pavement of the Boulevard, but at several spots they lay in heaps. Some of the people mortally struck would be able to stagger blindly for a pace or two until they were tripped up by a corpse, and this perhaps is why a large pro- portion of the bodies lay heaped one on the other. Before one shop-front they counted thirty-three corpses. By the peace- ful little nook or court which is called the Cité Bergére they counted thirty-seven. The slayers were many thousands of armed soldiery: the slain were of a number that never will be reckoned; but amongst all these slayers and all these slain ' Letter from Captain Jesse, first printed in the ‘Times,’ 18th December, 1851, and given also in the ‘Annual Register.’ 2 This was in the Boulevard Poissoniére. Mauduit, p. 217, 218. Mauduit speaks of these thirty killed as armed men, but it is well proved that there were no armed men in the Boulevard Poissoniére, and I have therefore no difficulty in rejecting that part of his statement, . bi ‘Cuar. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 181 there was not one combatant.. There was no fight, no riot, no fray, no quarrel, no dispute.1 What happened was a slaughter of unarmed men, and women, and children. Where they lay, the dead bore witness. Corpses lying apart struck deeper into people’s memory than the dead who were lying in heaps. Some were haunted with the look of an old man with silver hair, whose only weapon was the umbrella which lay at his side. Some shuddered because of seeing the gay idler of the . _ Boulevard sitting dead against the wall of a house, and scarce parted from the cigar which lay on the ground near his hand. Some carried in their minds the sight of a printer’s boy lean- ing back against a shop-front, because, though the lad was killed, the proof-sheets which he was carrying had remained in his hands, and were red with his blood, and were fluttering in the wind.?, The military historian of these achievements per- mitted himself to speak with a kind of joy of the number of women who suffered. After accusing the gentler sex of the crime of sheltering men from the fire of the troops, the Colonel writes it down that ‘many an amazon of the Boulevard has ‘paid dearly for her imprudent collusion with that new sort of ‘barricade,’ and then he goes on to express a hope that women will profit by the example, and derive from it ‘a lesson for the ‘future.3 One woman who fell and died clasping her child, was suffered to keep her hold in death as in-life, for the child too was killed. Words which long had been used for making figures of speech recovered their ancient use, being wanted again in the world for the picturing of things real and phys- ical. Musket-shots do not shed much blood in proportion to the slaughter which they work, but still in so many places the foot-pavement was wet and red, that, except by care, no one could pass along it without gathering blood. Round each of the trees in the Boulevards a little space of earth is left unpaved in order to give room for the expansion of the trunk. The blood, collecting in pools upon the asphalte, drained down at last into these hollows, and there becoming coagulated, it re- mained for more than a day and was observed by many. » ‘Their ‘blood’—says the English officer before quoted—‘ their blood ‘lay in the hollows round the trees the next morning when we ‘passed at twelve o’clock. The Boulevards and the adjacent ' Ispeak here of the Boulevard from the Rue du Sentier to the western ex- tremity of the Boulevard Montmartre. : ? For.accounts of the state of the Boulevard after the massacre, see the written statement of eye-witnesses, supplied to Victor Hugo and printed in his narrative. It will be seen that I do not adopt M. Victor Hugo’s conclu- sions, but there is no reason for questioning the authenticity or the truth of the statements which he has collected. 3 Mauduit, p. 278. 182 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Ciap. XIV) ‘streets,’ he goes on to say,‘ were at some points a perfect ‘shambles. Incredible as it may seem, artillery was brought to bear upon some of the houses in the Boulevard. On its north side the houses were so battered that the foot-pavement beneath them was laden with plaster and such ruins as field guns can bring down. | The soldiers broke into many houses, and hunted the inmates from floor to floor, and caught them at last and slaughtered them. These things, no doubt, they did under a notion that ~ shots had been fired from the house which they entered, but it is certain that in almost all these instances, if not in every one of them, the impression was false. One or two soldiers would be seen rushing furiously at some particular door, and this sight, leading their comrades to imagine that a shot had been fired from the windows above, was enough to bring into the accused house a whole band of slaughterers.. The Sallandrouze carpet warehouse was thus entered. Fourteen helpless people shrank for safety behind some piles of carpets. The soldiers killed them crouching. | Whilst these things were being done upon the Boulevard; Slaughterin four brigades were converging upon the streets central Paris. where resistance, though of a rash and feeble kind, had been really attempted. One after another the barricades were battered by artillery, and then carried without a serious struggle; but things had been so ordered that, although there should be little or no fighting, there might still be slaughter, for the converging movement of the troops prevented escape, and forced the people sooner or later into a street barred by troops on either side, and then, whether they were combatants or other fugitives, they were shot down. It was the success of this contrivance for penning in the fugitive crowds which enabled Magnan to declare, without qualifying his words, that those who defended the barricades in the quartier Beaubourg were put to death,? and the same ground justified the Govern- ment in announcing that of the men who defended the barri- cade of the Porte St. Martin the troops had not spared one.? Some of the people thus killed were men combating or flying; but many more were defenseless prisoners in the hands of the soldiery who shot them. Whatever may have been the cause of the slaughter of the unoffending spectators.on the Boulevard,‘ it is certain that the shooting of the prisoners taken at the bar- 1 Mauduit, p. 278. * See his Dispatch dated, I think, the 9th December —Moniteur. 3 The Patrie, one of the official organs of the President, Dec. 6. * See the discussion on this subject toward the close of the chapter. Cuar. XIV. ] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 183 ricades was brought about by causing the troops to understand that they were to give no quarter. Over and over again, no doubt, the soldiers, listening to the dictates of humanity, gave quarter to vanquished combatants, but their clemency was looked upon as a fault, and the fault was repaired by shooting the prisoners they had taken. Sometimes, as was natural, a house was opened to the fugitives, but this shelter did not long hold good. For instance, when the barricade near the Slaughter of Porte St. Denis was taken, a hundred men were pusomers: caught behind it, and all these were shot, but their blood was not reckoned to be enough, for, by going into the houses where there were supposed to be fugitives, the soldiers got hold of thirty more men, and these also they killed.1. The way in which the soldiery dealt with the inmates of houses suspected of containing fugitives can be gathered by observing what passed in one little street. After describing the capture of a barricade in the Rue Montorgueil, the military historian of these events says that searches were immediately ordered to be made in the public houses. ‘A hundred prisoners,’ he says, ‘were made in them, the most of whom had their hands ‘still black with gunpowder, an evident proof of their partici- ‘pation in the contest. How then was it possible not to exe- ‘cute with regard to a good many of them the terrible pre- ‘scriptions of the state of siege ?? - This killing was done under orders so stringent, and yet in some instances with so much of deliberation, that many of the poor fellows put to death were allowed to dispose of their lit- tle treasures before they died. Thus, one man, when told that -he must die, entreated the officer in command to be allowed to send to his mother the fifteen franes which he carried in his pocket. The officer consenting, took down the address of the man’s mother, received from him the fifteen francs, and then killed him. Many times over the like of this was done. Great numbers of prisoners were brought into the Prefec- Mode of deal. ture of Police, but it appears to have been thought ing with some jnconvenient to allow the sound of the discharge of of the prison- : a ers at the Pre. Musketry to be heard coming from the precincts of. alee the building. For that reason, as it would seem, another mode of quieting men was adopted. It is hard to have to believe such things, but, according to the statement of a for- mer member of the Legislative Assembly, who declares that he saw them with his own eyes, each of the prisoners destined to undergo this fate was driven with his hands tied behind -7 An officer engaged in the operation made this statement—not as confes- sion of sins, but as a narrative of exploits. * Mauduit, p. 248. © 184 TRANSACTIONS WHICH. [Cuap. XIV. him, into one of the Courts of the Prefecture, and then one of. Maupas’s police-officers came and knocked him on the head with a loaded club, and felled him—felled him in the way that is used by a man when he has to slaughter a bullock.? Troops are sometimes obliged to ‘kill insurgents in actual Gradations by fight, and unar med people standing in the line of eran elarete fire often share the fate of the combatants ; what men may be that is the whole world understands. But also an distinguished. officer has sometimes caused people to be put to death—not because they were fighting against him, nor even. because they were hindering the actual operations of the troops, but because he has imagined that under some probable change of circumstance their continued presence might become a source of inconvenience or danger, and he has therefore thought it right to have them shot down by way of precaution; but gen- erally such an act as this has been preceded by the most earn- est entreaties to disperse, and by repeated warnings. ‘This may be called a precautionary slaughter of by-standers, who are foolhardy or perverse, or willfully obstructive to the troops. Again, it has happened that a slaughter of this last-mentioned sort has occurred, but without having been preceded by any such request or warning as would give the people time to dis- perse. This is a willful and malignant slaughter of by-stand- ers; but still it is a slaughter of “by: standers whose presence might become inconvenient to the tr oops, and therefore per- haps it is not simply wanton. Again, it has happened (as we have but too well seen) that soldiers not engaged in combat, and exposed to no real danger, have suddenly fired into the midst of crowds of men and women, who neither opposed nor obstructed them. This is ‘wanton massacre.’ Again, it has sometimes happened, even in modern times, that when men, defeated in fight, have thrown down their arms and surrender- ed themselves, asking for mercy, the soldiery to whom they ap- pealed have refused their prayers, and have instantly killed them. This is called ‘giving no quarter. Again, it has hap- pened that defeated combatants, having thrown down their arms and surrendered at discretion, and, not having been im- ! M. Xavier Durrieu, formerly a member of the Assembly, is one of those who states that he was an eye-witness of these deeds, having seen them from the window of his cell. He says, ‘Souvent quand la porte était renfermée ‘les sergens de ville se jetaient comme des tigres sur les prisonniers attachés ‘les mains derriere le dos. Ils les assommaient a coup de casse-téte. Is ‘les laissaient ralant sur la pierre ou plusieurs d’entre eux ont expiré. . . . ‘Il en est ainsi ni plus ni moins ; nous l’avons vu des fenétres de nos cellules ‘qui s’ouvraient sur la cour.’—Ze Coup d” Etat, par Xavier Durrieu, ancicn Representant du peuple, pp. 39 40. Cuar. X1V.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 185 mediately killed, have succeeded in constituting themselves the prisoners of the vanquishing soldiery, but presently afterward (as for instance within the time needed for taking the pleasure of an officer on horseback at only a few yards’ distance) they have been put to death. This is called ‘ killing. prisoners.’ Again, defeated combatants, who have succeeded in constitut- ing themselves prisoners, have been allowed to remain alive for a considerable time, and have afterward been put to death by their captors with circumstances indicating deliberation. This is called ‘ killing prisoners in cold blood.’ Again, soldiers after a fight in a city have rushed into houses where they believed that there were people who helped or favored their adversa- ries, and, yielding to their fury, have put to death men and women whom they had never seen in combat against them. This is massacre of non-combatants, but 1t is massacre commit- ted by men still hot from the fight. Again, it has happened that soldiery seizing unarmed people, whom they believed to be favorers of their adv ersaries, have nevertheless checked their fury, and, instead of killing them, have made them prisoners ; but afterward, upon the arrival of orders from men more cruel than the angry soldiery, these people have been put to death. This is called an ‘ execution of non-combatants in cold blood.’ Here then are acts of slaughter of no less than nine kinds, AHS Hing. and of nine kinds SO distinct that they do not mere- ing under all ly differ in their accidents, but are divided the one those cates - from the other by strong moral gradations. It is bystthesdonfed; certain that deeds ranging under all these nine cat- egories were done in Paris on the 4th of December, 1851, and it is not less certain that, although they were not alll of them specifically ordered, they were every one of them caused by the brethren of the Klyseé. Moreover, it must be remembered that this slaughtering of prisoners was the slaugh- tering of men against whom it was only to be charged that they 1 were in arms—not to violate, but to defend the ‘laws of their country. But there is yet another use to which, if it were not for the Inquiry asto honest. pride of its officers and men, it would be pos- ‘hocting of Sible for an army to be put. In the course of an prisoners who insurrection in such a city as Paris, numbers of pris- ate nfthe oners might be seized either by the immense police civilpower. force which would probably be hard at its work, or by troops who would shrink from the hatefulness of refusing quarter to men without arms in their hands, and the prisoners thus taken, being consigned to the ordinary jails, would be in =) ° the custody of the civil power. The Government, regretting 186 ‘TRANSACTIONS WHICH™ [Cuap. XIV) that many of the prisoners should have been taken alive, might perhaps desire to put them to death, but might be of opinion that it would be impolitic to kill them by the hand of the civil power. In this strait, if it were not for the obstacle likely to be interposed by the honor and just pride of a warlike profes- sion, platoons of foot-soldiers might be used—not to defend— not to attack—not to fight, but to relieve the civilians from one of the duties which they are accustomed to deem most vile, by performing for them the office of the executioner, and these platoons might even be ordered to help the Government to hide the deed by doing their work in the dead hours of the night. Ts it true that with the sanction of the Home Office and of the Prefecture of Police, and under the orders of Prince Louis Bonaparte, St. Arnaud, Magnan, Morny, and Maupas, a mid- night work of this last ‘kind was done by the army of Paris?» To men not. living in the French capital, it seems that there is a want of complete certainty about the fate of a great many out of those throngs of prisoners who were brought into the jails and other places of detention.on the 4th and 5th of De- cember. The people of Paris think otherwise. They seem to have no doubt. The grounds of their belief are partly of this sort: A family, anxious to know what had become of one of their relatives who was missing, appealed for help to a man in so high a station of life that they deemed him powerful enongh to he able to question official personages, and his 1s the testi- mony which records what passed. In order, if possible, to find a clew to the fate of the lost man, he made the acquaintance of one of the functionaries who held the office of a ‘Judge-Sub- “stitute” The moment the subject of inquiry was touched, the ‘ Judge-Substitute’ began to boil with anger at the mere thought of what he had witnessed, but it seems that his indig- nation was not altogether. unconnected-with offended pride and the agony of having had his jurisdiction invaded. He said that he had been ordered to go to some of the jails and examine the prisoners with a view to determine whether they should be detained or set free, and that, whilst he was engaged in this duty, a party of non-commissioned officers and soldiers came into the room and rudely announced that they themselves had orders to dispose of those prisoners whose fingers were black. - Then, without regard to the protesting of the ‘ Judge-Substi- ‘tute,’ they examined the hands of the prisoners whom he had before him, adjudged that the fingers of many of them were black, and at once carried off all those whom they so condemn- ed, with a view (as the ‘J udge-Substitute’ understood) to shoot Cnapr. XIV?] _ BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 187 them or have them shot. That they were so shot the ‘Judge- ‘ Substitute’ was certain, but it is plain that he had no personal knowledge of what was done to the prisoners after they were carried off by the soldiers. Again, during the night of the 4th and the night of the 5th, people listening in one of the undis- turbed quarters of Paris would suddenly hear the volley of a ‘single platoon—a sound not heard, they say, at such hours ei- ther before or since. The sound of this occasional platoon-fir- ing was heard coming chiefly, it seems, from the Champ de Mars, but also from other spots, and in particular from the gar- dens of the Luxembourg, and from the esplanade of the Inva- lides. People listening within hearing of this last spot de- clared, they say, that the sound of the-platoon-fire was follow- ed by shrieks and moans; and that once, in the midst of the other cries, they caught some piteous words, close followed by. a scream, and sounding as though they were the words of a lad imperfectly shot and dying hard. | Partly upon grounds of this sort, but more perhaps by the teaching of universal fame, Paris came to believe—and rightly or wrongly Paris still believes—that during the mght of the 4th, and again during the night of the 5th, prisoners were shot in batches and thrown into pits. On the other hand, the ad- herents of the French Emperor deny that the troops did duty as executioners.! Therefore the value of an Imperialist denial, with all such weight as may be thought to belong to it, is set against the imperfect proof on which Paris founds her belief; but men must remember why it is that any obscurity can hang upon a question like this. The question whether on the night of a given Thursday and a given Friday, whole batches of men living in Paris were taken out and shot by platoons in such places as the Champ de Mars or the Luxembourg gardens— this is a question which, from its. very nature, could not have remained in doubt for forty-eight hours, unless Paris at the time had lost her freedom of speech and her freedom of print- ing; and even now, after a lapse of years, if freedom were re- stored to France, the question would be quickly and righteous- ly determined. Now it happens that those who took away from Paris her freedom of speech and her freedom of printing are the very persons of whom it is said that during two De- cember nights they caused their fellow-countrymen to be shot by platoons and in batches. So it comes to this, that those who are charged have made away with the means by which the truth might be best established. In this stress, Justice is ? Granier de Cassaignac, vol. ii. 188 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cnap. XIV. not so dull and helpless as to submit to be baffled. Wisely de- viating in such a case from her common path, she listens for a moment to incomplete testimony against the concealer, and then, by requiring that he who hid away the truth shall restore it to light, or abide the consequence of his default, she shifts the duty of giving strict proof from the accuser to the accused. Because Prince Louis and his associates closed up the accus- tomed approaches to truth, therefore it is cast upon them el- ther to remain under the charge which Paris brings against them, or else to labor and show, as best they may, that they did not cause batches of French citizens to be shot by platoons of infantry in the night of the 4th and the night of the 5th of De- cember. The whole number of people killed by the troops during the Uncertaintyas forty hours which followed upon the commence- to the number ment of the massacre in the Boulevards will never of people killed. 44 known. The bur ying of the bodies was done for the most part at night. In sear ching for a proximate notion of the extent of the carnage, it is not safe to rely even upon the acknowledgments of the officers engaged in the work, for dur- ing some time they were under an impression that it was fa- vorable to a man’s advancement to be supposed to be much steeped in what was done. The colonel of one of the regi- — ments engaged in this slaughter spoke whilst the business was fresh in his mind. It would be unsafe to accept his state- ment as accurate or even as substantially true, hut as it 1s cer- tain that the man had taken part in the transaction of which he spoke, and that he really wished to gain credence for the words which he uttered, his testimony has a kind of value as representing (to say the least of it) his idea of what could be put forward as a creditable statement by one who had the means of knowing the truth. What he declared was that his regiment alone had killed two thousand four hundred men. Supposing that his statement was any thing like an approach to the truth, and that his corps was at all rivaled by others, a very high number would be wanted for recording the whole quantity of the slaughter.? TiAl ddiohherdtiai Ae army which did these things, the whole army in killed. number of killed was twenty-five.? Of all men dwelling in cities the people of Paris are perhaps ' The number of regiments operating against Paris was between thirty and forty, and of these about twenty belonged to the divisions which were actively employed in: the work. 2 Including all officers and soldiers killed from the 3rd to the 6th of De- cember. The official return, Moniteur, p. 3062. Cnap, XIV.3 BROUGHT ON THE WAR. — — 189: Effect of the the most warlike. Less almost than any other Eu- the people of TOpeans are they accustomed to overvalue the lives Paris. of themselves and their fellow-citizens. With them the joy of the fight has power to overcome fear and grief, and they had been used to great street battles; but they had not been used of late to witness the slaughter of people unarmed and helpless. At the sight of what was done on that 4th of December the great city was struck down as though by a plague. A keen-eyed Englishman, who chanced to come upon some of the people retreating from these scenes of slaughter, declared that their countenances were of a strange livid hue which he had never before seen. This was because he had never before seen the faces of men coming straight from the witnessing of a massacre. ‘They say that the shock of being within sight and hearing the shrieks broke down the nervous strength of many a brave though tender man, and caused him to burst into sobs as though he were a little child. ° _ Before the morning of the 5th the armed insurrection had ceased. From the first it had been feeble. On the other hand, the moral resistance which was opposed to the acts of the Pres- ident and his associates had been growing in strength, and when the massacre began on the afternoon of the 4th of De- cember, the power of this moral resistance was in the highest degree formidable. Yet it came to pass that, by reason of the strange prostration of mind which was wrought by the mas- sacre, the armed insurrection dragged down with it in its fall the whole policy of those who conceived that by the mere force of opinion and ridicule they would be enabled to send the plot- ters to Vincennes. The Cause of those who intended to rely. upon this scheme of moral resistance was in no way mixed up with the attempts of the men of the barricades, but still it was a Cause which depended upon the high spirit of the people, and it had happened that this spirit-—perplexed and baffled on the 2nd of December by a stratagem and a night attack—was now crushed out by sheer horror. For her beauty, for her grandeur, for her historic fame, for her warlike deeds, for her power to lead the will of a mighty nation, and to crown or discrown its monarchs, no city on earth 1s worthy to be the rival of Paris. Yet, because of the palsy that came upon her after the slaughter on the Boulevard, this Paris—this beauteous, heroic Paris—this queen of great re- nown, was delivered bound into the hands of Prince Louis Bo- naparte, and Morny,and Maupas or de Maupas, and St. Arnaud, formerly Le Roy. And, the benefit which Prince Louis de- rived from the inassacre was not transitory. It is a maxim of 190 TRANSACTIONS WHICH * [(Cuap. XIV2 French politics that, happen what may, a man seeking to be a ruler of France must not be ridiculous. From 1836 until 1848. Effect of the Prince Louis had never ceased to be obscure except site ene of PY bringing upon hinself the laughter of the world ; Louis Bona- and his election into the chair of the Presidency had miigquelifien, ODly served to bring upon him a more constant out- tions. pouring of the scorn n and sareasm which Paris knows. how to bestow.! . Even the suddenness and perfect suecess of the blow struck in the night between the Ist and the 2nd of December had failed to make Paris think of him with gravity. But it was otherwise after three o’clock on the 4th of Decem- ber; and it happcued that the most strenuous adversaries of this oddly fated Prince were those who, in one respect, best: served his cause, for the more they strove to show that he, and he alone, of his own design and malice had planned and order- ed the massacre,? the more completely they relieved him from. the disquaiification which had hitherto made it impossible for: him to become the supreme ruler of France. Before the night closed in on the 4th of December, he was sheltered safe from; ridicule by the ghastly heaps en the Boulevard. | The fate of the provinces resembled the fate of the capital. The fate of the Whilst it was still dark on the morning of the 2nd, provinees. = Morny, stealing into the Home Office, had intrusted his orders for instant and enthusiastic support to the zeal of . every prefect, and had ordered that every mayor, every juge. de paix, and every other public functionary who failed to give in his instant and written adhesion to the acts of the President should be dismissed. In France the engine of state is so con- . structed as to give to the Home Office an almost irresistible power over the provinces, and the means which the Office had of coercing France were re-enforced by an appeal to men’s fears of anarchy, and their dread of the sect called ‘Socialists.’ Forty. thousand communes were suddenly told that they must make. swift choice between socialism and anarchy and rapine on the one hand, and on the other a virtuous dictator and lawgiver - recommended and warranted by the authority of Monsieur de Morny. The gifted Montalembert himself was so effectually - caught in this springe that he publicly represented the dilem-. ma as giving no choice except between Louis Bonaparte and ‘A glance at the Charivari for ’49,°50, and the first eleven months of 51, would verify this statement. The stopping of the Charivari was one of the very first exertions of the supreme power which was seized in the night of the 2nd of December. % ? It will be seen (see pos?) that I question the truth of this charge against Cuar, XIV.] . BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 191 ‘the ruin of France.’ In the provinces, as in Paris, there were men whose love of right was stronger than their fears of the Executive Government, and stronger than their dread of the - Socialists; but the Department, being kept in utter darkness by the arrangements of the Home Office, was slower than - Paris in finding out that the blow of the 2nd of December had been struck by a small knot of associates, without the concur- rence of Statesmen who were the friends of law and order; and it would seem that although the proclamations were re- eeived at first with stupor and perplexity, they soon engen- dered a hope that the President (acting, as the country people imagined him to be, with the support of many eminent states- men), might effect a wholesome change in the Constitution, and restore to France some of the tranquillity and freedom which she had enjoyed under the government of her last king. There were risings, but every department which seemed likely to move was put under martial law. Then followed slaughter, banishment, imprisonment, sequestration; and all this at the mere pleasure of Generals raging with a cruel hatred of the people, and glowing with the glow of that motive—so hateful because so sordid—which in centralized states men call ‘zeal.’ Of these Generals there were some who, in their fury, went be- yond all the bounds of what could be dictated by any thing like policy, even though of the most ferocious kind. In the depart- ment of the Allier, for instance, it was decreed, not only that all who were ‘known’ to have taken up arms against the Govy- ernment should be tried by Court Martial, but that ‘those -“whose socialist opinions were notorious’ should be transported by the mere order of the Administration, and have their prop- erty sequestered. The bare mental act of holding a given opinion was thus put into the category of black crimes, and either the prisoner was to have no trial at all, or else he was to be tried, as it were, by the hangman. This decree was issued by a man called General Eynard, and was at once adopted and promulgated by the Executive Government.! ‘The violence with which the brethren of the Elysée were Motives forthe Taging took its origin, no doubt, from their terror, =| ak pee but now that they were able to draw breath, an- ken. Terror, Other motive began to govern them and to drive tests. them along the same road; for by this time they ing support, were able to give to their actions a color which tended to bring them the support and good will of afraid of anar- ; Z 5 : : chy. — whole multitudes—whole multitudes distracted with 1 Moniteur, 28th Dec. 192 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XIV. General dreaq 1¢°" Of the democrats, and only longing for safety. eneral dread : : of the Social- Hor more than three years people had lived in dread ag of the ‘ Socialists,’ and though the sect, taken alone, was never so formidable as to justify the alarm of a firm man, stillit was more or less allied with the fierce species of democrat which men called ‘Red,’ and, the institutions of the Republic be- ing new and weak, it was right for the nation to stand on its guard against anarchy ; though many have judged that the de- fenders of order, being upheld by the voice of the millions no less than by the forces of intellect and of property, might have kept their watch without fear. But, whether the thing from which the people ran flying was a danger or only a phantom, the ter- ror it spread brought numbers down into a state which was hardly other than abject. Of course people thus unmanned would look up piteously to the Executive Government as their natural protectors, and would be willing to offer their freedom in exchange for a little more safety. So now, if not before, The brethren the company of the Elysée saw the gain which tke ade, would accrue to them if they could have it believed age ofthis. that their enterprise was a war against Socialism. After the subjugation of Paris, the scanty gatherings of people who took up arms against the Government were composed, no doubt, partly of Socialists, but partly also of. men who had no motive for rising, except that they were of too high a spirit to be able to stand idle and see the law trampled down. But the brotherhood of the Elysée was master—sole master—of the power to speak in print, and by exaggerating the disturbances They pretend Going on in some parts of France, as well as by fasten- - to be engaged ing upon all who stood up against them the name of against Social- the hated sect, they caused it to be believed by thou- ane sands, and perhaps by millions, that they were en- gaged in a valorous and desperate struggle against Socialism. In proportion as this pretense came to be believed, it brought Support thus hosts of people to the support of the Executive obtained. Government; and there is reason to believe that, even among those of the upper classes who seemed to be stand- ing proudly aloof from the Elysée, there were many who secret- ly rejoiced to be delivered from their fear of the Democrats at the price of having to see France handled, for a time, by per- sons like Morny and Maupas. | ' The truth is, that in the success of this speculation of the Elysée many thought they saw how to escape from the vexa- tions of democracy in a safe and indolent way. When an Arab decides that the burnous which is his garment by day and by night has become unduly populous, he lays it upon an Cuap. X1V.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 193 ant-hill in order that the one kind of insect may be chased away by the other; and as soon as this has been done, he easi- ly brushes off the conquering genus with the stroke of a whip or a pipe-stick. In a lazy mood well-born men thought to do this with France, and the first part of the process was success- ful enough, for all the red sort were killed, or crushed, or hunt- ed away; but when that was done it began to appear that those whose hungry energies had been made use of to do the work were altogether unwilling to be brushed off. They clung. Even now, after the lapse of years,! they cling and feed. The army in the provinces closely imitated the ferocity of Commissaries the army of Paris, but it was to be apprehended sent into the that soldiery, however fierce, might deal only with prov the surface of discontent, and not strike deep enough into the heart of the country. They might kill people in streets, and roads, and fields; they might even send their musket - balls through windows into the houses, and shoot whole batches of prisoners; but they could not so well search out the indignant friends of law and order in their inner homes. Therefore Morny sent into the provinces men of dire repute, and armed them with terrible powers. These persons were called Commissaries. In every spot so visited the people shud- dered, for they- knew by their experience of 1848 that a man ‘thus set over them by the terrible Home Office might be a ruffian well known to the police for his crimes as well as for his services, and that from a potentate of that quality it might cost them dear to buy their safety. There have been times when the all but dying spark of a na- tion’s life has been kept alive by the priests of her faith; and when this has happened, there has sprung up so deep a love between people and Church that the lapse of ages has not had strength to put the two asunder.? In France, it is true, the Church no longer wielded the authority which had belonged to her of old, but besides that the virtues of her humble and laboring priesthood had gained for her more means of guiding men’s minds than Europe was accus- tomed to believe, she was a cohering and organized body. Therefore, at a moment when the whole temporal powers of the State had been seized by a small knot of men slyly acting in concert, and when the Parliamentary and judicial authority which might restrain their violence had been all at once over- thrown, the Church of France, surviving in the midst of ruined ? Written in September, 1861. - * See Arthur Stanley’s admirable account of the relations between Russia and her Church. Vor. I.—I The Church. 194 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XIV. institutions, became suddenly invested with a great power to do good or do evil. She might stand between the armed man and his victim; she might turn away wrath; she might make conditions for prostrate France. Or, taking a yet loftier stand, she might resolve to choose—and choose sternly—between right and wrong. She chose. The priesthood of France were upon the whole a zealous, unworldly, devoted body of men; but already the Church which they served had been gained over to the President by the arrangements which led to the siege and occupation of Rome. Therefore, although the priests perceived that Mau- pas, coming privily in the night time, had seized the generals and the statesmen of France, and had shut up the Parliament, and driven the judges from the judgment seat, still it seemed to them that, because of Rome, they ought to side with Mau- pas. So far as concerned her political action in this time -of trial, they suffered the Church of France to degenerate into a mere sub-department of the Home Office. In the rural dis- tricts, when the time for the Plebiscite came, they fastened tickets marked ‘Yes’ upon their people, and drove them in flocks to the poll. Every institution in the country being thus suborned, or en- slaved, or shattered, the brethren of the Elysée resolved to fol- low up their victory over France. In the sense which will France dis: | presently appear they resolved to disman her. It peenNCe had resulted from the political state of France dur- ing several years that great numbers of the most stirring men in the country had belonged to clubs, which the law called ‘secret societies.’ A net thrown over this class would gather into its folds whole myriads of honest men, and indeed it has been computed that the number of persons then alive who at one time or other had belonged to some kind of‘ secret socie- ty’ amounted to no less than two millions. If French eitizens at some period of their lives had belonged to societies forbid- — den by Statute, it was enough (and after a lapse of time much more than enough) that the penalties of the law which they had disobeyed should be enforced against them. But it was not this, nor the like of this that was done. Prince Louis Bonaparte and Morny, with the advice and consent of Maupas, issued a_retro-operative decree, by which all these hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen were made lia. ble to be instantly seized, and transported either to the penal Settlements in Africa, or to the torrid swamps of Cayenne.’ 1 Decree of 8th December inserted in the Moniteur of the 9th. Cuap. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 195 The decree was as comprehensive as a law would be in Eng- land, if it enacted that every man who had ever attended a po: litical meeting might be now suddenly transported; but it was a hundred times less merciful, for, in general, to be banished to Cayenne was to be put to a slow, cruel, horrible death. Mor- ny and Maupas pressed and pressed the execution of this al- most incredible decree with a ferocity which must have sprung in the first instance from terror, and was afterward kept alive for the sake of that hideous sort of popularity which was to be gained by calling men Socialists, and then fiercely hunting them down. None will ever know the number of men who at this period were either killed or imprisoned in France, or sent to die in Africa or Cayenne; but the panegyrist of Louis Bonaparte and his fellow-plotters acknowledges that the num- ber of people who were seized and transported within the few 26,590 men Weeks which followed the 2nd of December, amount- transported. ed to the enormous number of twenty-six thousand five hundred.? France perhaps could have borne the loss of many tens of thousands of ordinary soldiers and workmen without being visibly weakened; but no nation in the world—no, not even France herself—is so abounding in the men who will dare something for honor and liberty as to be able to bear to lose in one month between twenty and thirty thousand men seized from out of her most stirring and most courageous citizens. It could not be but that what remained of France when she had thus been stricken should for years seem to languish and to be of a poor spirit. This is why I have chosen to say that France was dismanned. But besides the men killed and the men transported, there were some thousands of Frenchmen who were made to under- go sufferings too horrible to be here told. I speak of those who were inclosed in the casemates of the fortresses and hud- dled down between the decks of the Canada and the Du- guesclin. These hapless beings were for the most part men attached to the cause of the Republic. It would seem that of the two thousand men whose sufferings are the most known, a great part were men whose lives had been engaged in liter- ary pursuits, for amongst them were authors of some repute; editors of newspapers, and political writers of many grades, besides lawyers, physicians, and others whose labors in the field of politics had been mainly labors of the intellectual sort. The torments inflicted upon these men lasted from two to 2 Granier de Cassaignac. 196 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XIV. three months. It was not till the second week in March that a great many of them came out into the light and the pure air of Heaven. Because of what they had suffered they were hideous and terrible to look upon. The hospitals received many. Itis right that the works which testify to these things should be indicated as authorities on which the narrator founds his passing words ;! but, unless a man be under some special motive for learning the detailed truth, it would be well for him to close his eyes against those horrible pages; for if once he looks and reads, the recollection of the things he reads of may haunt him and weigh upon his spirit till he longs and longs in vain to recover his ignorance of what, even in this his own time, has been done to living men. At length the time came for the operation of what was call- ed the Plebiscite. The arrangements of the plot- ters had been of such a kind as to allow France no hope of escape from anarchy and utter chaos, except by sub- mitting herself to the dictatorship of Louis Bonaparte; for, al- Causes render- though the President in his Proclamation had de- aia clared that ifthe country did not like his Presiden- ble. cy, they might choose some other in his place, no such alternative was really offered. The choice given to the elector sdid not even purport to be any thing but a choice be- tween Louis Bonaparte and nothing. According to the word- ing of the Plebiscite, a vote given for any candidate other than Louis Bonaparte would have been null. An elector was only permitted to vote ‘Yes,’ or vote ‘No;’ and it seems plain that the prospect of anarchy involved in the negative vote would alone have operated as a sufficing menace. Therefore, even if the collection of the suffrages had been carried on with perfect fairness, the mere stress of the question proposed would have made it impossible that there should be a free election: the same central power which nearly four years before had compelled the terrified nation to pretend that it loved a repub- lic, would have now forced the same helpless people to kneel, and say they chose for their one only lawgiver the man rec- ommended to them by Monsieur de Morny. | Having the army and the whole executive power in their hands, and having preordained the question to be put to the people, the brethren of the Elysée, it would seem, might have safely allowed the proceeding to go to its sure conclusion without farther coercing the vote; and if they had done thus, they would have given a color to the assertion that the result t ¢Te Coup d’Etat,’ par Xavier Durrieu, ancien Representant du Peuple. ‘Histoire de la Terreur Bonapartiste,’ par Hippolyte Magen. The Plebiscite. Cuap. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 197 of the Plebiscite was a national ratification of their act. But remembering what they had done, and having blood on their hands, they did not venture upon a free election. What they did was this: they placed thirty-two departments under mar- tial law; and, since they wanted nothing more than a sheet of paper and a pen and ink in order to place every other de- The election Partment in the same predicament, it can be said under martial Without straining a word that potentially, or act- is ually, the whole of France was under martial law. Therefore men voted under the sword. But martial law is Violent meas- Only one of the circumstances which constitute the tucrne the, difference between an honest election and a Plebis- election. cite of the Bonaparte sort. Of course, for all effect- ive action on the part of multitudes, some degree of concert is needful, and on the side of the plotters, using as they did the resistless engine of the executive government, the concert was perfect. ‘To the adversaries of the Elysée, all effective means of concerted action were forbidden by Morny and Maupas. Not only could they have no semblance of a public meeting, but they could not even venture upon the slightest approach to those lesser gatherings which are needed for men who want to act together. Of course, in these days, the chief engine for giving concerted and rational action to bodies of men is the Press. But, except for the uses of the Elysée, there was no Press. All journals hostile to the plot were silenced. Not a word could be printed which was unfavorable to Monsieur Morny’s candidate for the dictatorship. Even the printing and distributing of negative voting tickets was made penal; and during the ceremony which was called an ‘election’ sev- eral persons were actually arrested and charged with the of- fense of distributing negative voting tickets, or persuading others to vote against the President. . It was soon made clear that, so far as concerned his means of taking a real part in the election, every adversary of the Elysée was as helpless as a man deaf and dumb. In one department it was decreed that any one spreading re- ports or suggesting fears tending to disquiet the people should be instantly arrested and brought before a court-martial.! In another, every society, and, indeed, every kind of meeting, how- ever few the persons composing it might be, was in terms pro- hibited,? and it was announced that any man disobeying the order would be deemed to be a member of a secret society 1 Arrété du Général d’Alphonse, Commandant l’état de siege dans le Dee partement du Cher, Article 4. ? Arrété du Préfet de la Haute Garonne, Articles 1, 2, 3. 198 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XIV; within the meaning of the terrible decree of the 8th of Decem- ber, and liable to transportation.’ In the same department it was decreed that every one hawking or distributing printed tickets, or even manuscripts, unless authorized by the mayor or the juge de paix, should be prosecuted ; and the same pre- fect, in almost mad rage against freedom, proclaimed that any one who was caught in an endeavor to ‘ propagate an opinion’ should be deemed guilty of exciting to civil war, and instantly handed over to the judicial authority. In another depart- ment the sub-prefect announced that any one who threw a doubt on the loyalty of the acts of the Government should be arrested.? These are samples of the means which generals, and prefects, and sub-prefects adopted for insuring the result ; but it is hard- ly to be believed that all this base zeal was really needed, be- - cause from the very first the brethren of the Elysée had taken a step which, even if it had stood alone, would have been more than enough to coerce the vote. They fixed for the 20th and 21st of December the election to which civilians were invited ; but long before this the army had been ordered to vote (and to vote openly without ballot), within forty-eight hours from the receipt of a dispatch of the 3rd of December. So, all the fontrivance land forces of France had voted, as it were, by beat for coereing of drum, and the result of their voting had been the vote of the Made known to the whole country long before the amy: time fixed for the civilians to proceed to election. France, therefore, if she were to dare to vote against the Pres- ident, would be placing herself in instant and open conflict with the declared will of her own army, and this at a time when, to the extent already stated, she was under martial law. Surprised, perplexed, affrighted, and all unarmed and help- France suc- less, France was called upon either to strive to levy Swept: a war of despair against the mighty engine of the French executive government, and the vast army which stood over her, or else to succumb at once to Louis Bonaparte, and Morny, and Maupas, and Monsieur Le Roy St. Arnaud. She succumbed. The brethren of the Elysée had asked the coun- try to say ‘ Yes’ or‘ No? should Louis Bonaparte alone build a new Constitution for the governance of the mighty nation ? and when, in the way already told, they had obtained the ‘ Yes,’ from herds and flocks of men whom they ventured to number at nearly eight millions, it was made known to Paris that the person who had long been the favorite subject of her jests was 1 Arrété du Préfet de la Haute Garonne, Article 3, ® Tbid., Article 4. ® Arrété du Sous-préfet de Valenciennes. Guap. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 199 now become sole lawgiver for her and for France. In the mak- ing of such laws as he intended to give the country, Prince Prince Louis = 4OUIS was highly skilled, for he knew how to enfold solelawgiver the creation of a sheer Oriental autocr acy In @ NO- of France. —_- menclature taken from the polity of free European States. With the advice and consent of Morny, and no doubt The laws he . With the full approval of all the rest of the plotters, eave her. he virtually made it the law that he should com- mand, and that France should pay him tribute and obey. It has been seen that the success of the plot of the 2nd of Importance of December resulted from the massacre which took re eae place in the Boulevard on the following Thursday ; vard, and, since this strange event became the foundation of amomentous change in the polity of France, and even in the Inquiryinto destinies of Europe, it is right for men to know, if pecans. they can, how and why it came to pass. At three o’clock on the afternoon of the 4th of December, the ultimate success of the plot had seemed to become almost hopeless by reason of the isolation to which Prince Louis and his associates were reduced. But at that hour the massacre began, and be- fore the kodies were cleared away, the brethren of the Elysée had Paris and France at their mercy. It was natural that wronged and angry men, seeing this cause and this effect, should be capable of believing that the massacre was willfully planned as a means of achieving the result which it actually produced. Just as the Cambridge theologian maintained that - he who looked upon a watch must needs believe in a watch- maker, so men who had seen the massacre were led to infer a demon. They saw that the massacre brought wealth and bless- ings to the Elysée, and they thought it a safe induction to say that the man who gathered the harvest as though it were his own must have sown the seed in due season. Yet, so far as one knows, this argument from design is not very well re-en- forced by external proof; and perhaps it is more consistent with the principles of human nature to believe that the slaugh- ter of the Boulevard resulted from the mixed causes which are | known to have been in operation, than from a cold design on the part of the President to have a quantity of peaceful men and women killed in order that the mere horror of the sight might crush the spirit of Paris. Without resorting to this dreadful solution, the causes of the massacre may be reached by fair conjecture. The army, as we have seen, was burning with hatred of the civilians, and its ferocity had been car efully whetted by the President and by St. Arnaud. This feeling, apart from other 200 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XIV. motives of action, would not have induced the brave soldiery of France to fire point-blank into crowds of defenseless men and women; but a passion more cogent than anger was work- ing in the bosoms of the men at the Elysée and the Generals in command, and from them it descended to the troops. According to its nature, and the circumstances in which it The passion of 18 placed, a creature struck by terror may either lie terror trembling in a state of abject prostration, or else may be convulsed with hysteric energy ; and when terror seizes upon man or beast in this last way, it 1s the fiercest and most blind of all passions. The French unite the delicate, nervous organization of the south with much of the energy of the north, and they are keenly susceptible of the terror that makes a man kill people, and the terror that makes him lie down and beg. On that 4th of December Paris was visited with terror in either form. The army raged, and the people crouched; but army and people alike were governed by terror. It is very true, that in the Boulevard there were no physical dangers which could have struck the troops with this truculent sort of panic, for even if it is believed that two or three shots were fired from a window or a house-top, an occurrence of that kind,#n a quar- ter which was plainly prepared for sight-seeing, and not for strife, was too trivial of itself to be capable of disturbing prime troops. But the President and his associates, though they had succeeded in all their mechanical arrangements, had failed to obtain the support of men of character and eminence. For that reason they were obviously in peril; and if Morny and Fleury still remained in good heart, there is no reason for doubting that on the 4th of December the sensations of the President, of the two other Bonapartes, of Maupas, of St. Arnaud, and of Magnan, corresponded with the alarming circumstances in which they were placed. The state of the President seems to have been very like what State of Prince 1t had been in former times at Strasbourg and at Louis Bona- Boulogne, and what it was years afterward at Ma- parte during ° : . the period of genta and Solferino.!. He did not on any of these danger, five occasions so give way to fear as to prove that he had less self-control in moments of danger than the common run of peaceful citizens; but on all of them he showed that, though he had chosen to set himself heroic tasks, his tempera- ment was ill fitted for the hour of battle and for the crisis of an adventure. For, besides that (in common with the bulk of mankind) he was without resource and presence of mind when * See Note IV. in Appendix. = Cnap. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 201 he imagined that danger was really quite close upon him, his complexion and the dismal looks he wore in times of trial were always against him. From some defect perhaps in the struc- ture of the heart or the arterial system, his skin, when he was in a state of alarm, was liable to be suffused with a greenish hue. This discoloration might be a sign of high moral cour- age, because it would tend to show that the spirit was warring with the flesh ; but still it does not indicate that condition of body and soul which belongs to a true king of men in the hour of danger, and enables him to give heart and impulsion to those around him. It is obvious too that an appearance of this sort would be damping to the ardor of the by-standers. Several incidents show that between the 2nd and the 4th of December the President was irresolute, and keenly alive to his danger. The long-pondered plan of election which he had promulgated | on the 2nd of December he withdrew the next day, in obedi- ence to the supposed desire of the Parisian multitude. He took care to have always close to his side the immense force of cav- alry to which he looked as the means of protecting his flight, and it seems that during a great portion of the critical interval the carriages and horses required for his escape were kept ready for instant use in the stable-yard of the Elysée. More- over, it was at this time that he suffered himself to resort to the almost desperate resource of counterfeiting the names of men represented as belonging to the Consultative Commission. But perhaps his condition of mind eu be best inferred from the posture in which history catches him whilst he nestled un- der the wing of the army. When a peaceful citizen is in grievous peril, and depending He gave atthe £0F his life upon the whim of soldiers, his instinct had to the sol- 1s to take all his gold and go and offer it to the i armed men, and tell them he loves and admires them. What in such stress the endangered citizen would be impelled by his nature to do is exactly what Louis Bonaparte did. The transaction could not be concealed, and the imperial historian seems to have thought that upon the whole the best course was to give it an air of classic grandeur by describing the sol- diers as the ‘conquerors’ of a rugged Greek word, and by calling a French coin an ‘ obolus.’ ‘There remained,’ said he, ‘to the President out of all his personal fortune, out of all his ‘patrimony, a sum of fifty thousand franes. He knew that in ‘certain memorable circumstances the troops had faltered in ‘the presence of insurrection, more from being famished than ‘from being defeated; so he took all that remained to him, ‘even to his last crown-piece, and charged Colonel Fleury to I 2 202 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XIV. ‘go to the soldiers, conquerors of demagogy, and distribute to ‘them, brigade by brigade, and man by man, this his last obo- ‘lus.! The President had said, in one of his addresses to the army of Paris, that he would not bid them advance, but would himself go the foremost and ask them to follow him. Ifit was becoming to address empty play-actor’s words of that sort to real soldiers, it certainly was not the duty of the President to act upon them, for there could not well be any engagement in the streets of Paris as would make it right for a literary man (though he was also the chief of the state) to go and affect to put himself at the head of an army inured to war; but still there was a contrast between what was said and what was done, which makes a man smile as he passes. The President had vowed he would lead the soldiers against the foe, and in- stead, he sent them all his money. There is no reason to sup- pose that the change of plan was at all displeasing to the troops, and this bribing of the armed men is only adverted to here as a means of getting at the real state of the President’s mind, and thereby tracing up to its cause the massacre of the ’ 4th of December. Another clew, leading the same way, is to be found in the He even sign- Decree by which the President enacted that-com- Oreste bats with insurgents at home should count for the December. honor and profit of the troops in the same way as though they were fought against a foreign enemy.? It is true that this decree was not issued until the massacre of the 4th was over, but of course the temper in which a man encounters danger is to be gathered in part from his demeanor immedi- ately after the worst moment of trial; and when it is found that the chief of a proud and mighty nation was capable of putting his hand to a paper of this sort on the 5th of Decem- ber, some idea may be formed of what his sensations were on the noon of the day before, when the agony of being in fear had not as yet been succeeded by the indecorous excitement of escape. Whilst Prince Louis Bonaparte was hugging the knees of State of Je. the soldiers, his uncle, Jerome Bonaparte, fell into rome Bona- so painful a condition as to be unable to maintain apie his self-control, and he suffered hiniself to publish a letter in which he not only disclosed his alarm, but even show- ed that he was preparing to separate himself from his nephew ; for he made it appear (as he could do perhaps with strict truth) that although he had got into danger by showing hinx ' Granier de Cassaignac, vol. ii., p. 431. ? Decree of the 5th, inserted in the Moniteur of the 7th Dec. Cuap. XIV. ] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 203 self in public with the President on the 2nd of December, he was innocent of the plot, and a stranger to the counsels of the Natural anxie. E:lysée.! His son (now called Prince Napoleon) tyof Napoleon, was really, they say, a strong disapprover of the son of Jerome. Pyesident’s acts, and it was natural that he should be most unwilling to be put to death or otherwise ill treated upon the theory that he was the cousin, and therefore the ac- complice of Louis, for of that theory he wholly and utterly de- nied the truth. Any man, however firm, might well resolve that, happen what might to. him, he would struggle hard to avoid being executed. by mistake; and it seems unfair to cast blame on Prince Napoleon for trying to disconnect his person- al destiny from that of the endangered men at the Elysée, whose counsels he had not shared. Still, the sense of being cast loose by the other Bonapartes could not but be discour- aging to Prince Louis, and to those who had thrown in their lot with him. - Maupas, or de Maupas, was.a man of a fine large robust Bodily state of frame, and with florid healthy looks; but it some- as times happens that a spacious and strong-looking body of that sort is not so safe a tabernacle as it seems for man’s troubled spirit. It is said that the bodily strength of Maupas collapsed in the hour of danger, and that at a critical part of the time between the night of the 2nd of December and the massacre of the 4th he had the misfortune to fall ill. Finally, it must be repeated that on the 4th of December the army of Paris was kept in a state of inaction during all the precious hours which elapsed between the earliest dawn of the morning and two o’clock in the afternoon. These are signs that the brethren of the Elysée were aghast Grounds for 2+ What they had done, and aghast at what they the anxiety of had to do. And it is obvious that Magnan and the ae cEitaprasi twenty Generals who had embraced one another on and the gener- the 27th of November were now more involved in Cohen pea dite danger of the plot than at first they might have expected to be, for the isolation in which the President was left, for want of men of character and station who would con- sent to come and stand round him, must have made all these 1 The letter will be found in the ‘Annual Register.’ It seems to have been sent at 10 o’clock at night onthe 4th of December; but the writer evi- dently did not know that the insurrection at that time was so near its end as it really was, and his letter may therefore be taken as a fair indication of the state of his mind in the earlier part of the day. The advice and the mild remonstrance contained in the letter might have been given in private by a man who had not lost his calm, but the fact of allowing such a letter to be public discloses Jerome’s motives. 204 TRANSACTIONS WHICH —[Cuar. XIV. Generals feel that even the sovereign warrant of ‘an order ‘from the Minister of War’ was a covering which had become very thin. Now, by nature the French people are used to go in flocks, Effect of anx- and in their army there is not that social difference upon Fiench, between the officers and the common soldiers which troops. is the best contrivance hitherto discovered for in- tercepting the spread of a panic or any other bewildering im- pulse. With their troops, any impulse, whether of daring or fear, will often dart like lightning from man to man, and quick- ly involve the whole mass. Generally, perhaps, a panic in an army ascends from the ranks. On this day, the panic, it seems, went downward. For six hours the army had been kept waiting and waiting under arms within a few hundred yards of the barricades which it was to attack. The order to ad- vance did not come. Somewhere there was hesitation; and the Generals could not but know that even a little hesitation at such a time was both a sign and a cause of danger; but when they saw it continuing through all the morning hours of a short December day, they could hardly have failed to appre- hend that the plot of the Elysée was collapsing for want of support, and they could not but know that, if this dread were well founded, their fate was likely to be a hard one. The temperament of Frenchmen is better fitted for the hour of combat than for the endurance of this sort of protracted tension; and the anxiety of men of their race, when they are much perturbed and kept in long suspense, wall easily degen- erate into that kind of alarm which is apt to become ferocious. This was the kind of stress to which the troops were put on that 4th of December, and in the case of Magnan and the Gen- erals under him, the pangs of having to wait upon the brink of action for more than two thirds of a day were sharpened by a sense of political danger; for they felt that if, after all, the scheme of the Elysée should fail, their meeting of the 27th might cause them to be brought to trial. Any one knowing what those twenty-one Generals had on their minds, and being also somewhat used to the French army, will almost be able to hear the grinding of the teeth and the rumbling of the curses which mark the armed Frenchman, when he rages because he is anxious. Even without the utterance of any words, the countenances of men thus disturbed would be swiftly read in a body of French troops; and though the soldiery and the in- ferior officers would not be able to make out very well what it was that was troubling the minds of the Generals, the sense of not knowing all would only make them the more susceptible Cuap. XIV. ] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 205 of infection. On the other hand, it is certain that the instruc- tions given to the troops prescribed the ruthless slaughtering of all who resisted or obstructed them; and although it is of course true that these directions would not compel or sanction the slaughter of peaceful crowds not at all obstructing the troops, still they would so act upon the minds of the soldiery that any passion which might chance to seize them would be likely to take a fierce shape. . Upon the whole, then, it would seem that the natural and surmisea Well-grounded alarm which beset the President and cause of the some of his associates was turned to anxiety of the massa’ yaging sort when it came upon the military com- manders, and that from them it ran down, till at last it seized upon the troops with so maddening a power as to cause them to face round without word of command, and open fire upon a crowd of gazing men and women. If this solution were accepted, it would destroy the theory which ascribes to Prince Louis Bonaparte the malign design of contriving a slaughter on the Boulevard as a means of strik- ing terror and so crushing resistance, but it would still remain true that, although it was not specifically designed and ordered, the massacre was brought about by him, and by Morny, Mau- pas, and St. Arnaud, all acting with the concurrence and under *the encouragement of Fleury and Persigny. By them the deeds of the 2nd of December were contrived and done. By them, and in order to the support of those same deeds, the army was brought into the streets. By their industry the minds of the soldiery were whetted for the slaughter of the Parisians, and finally by their hesitation, or the hesitation of Magnan their instrument, the army, when it was almost face to face with the barricades, was still kept standing and expect- ant, until its Generals, catching and transmitting in an altered form the terror which had come upon them from the Elysée, brought the troops into that state of truculent panic which was the immediate cause of the slaughter. It must also be re- membered that the doubt which I have tried to solve extends only to the cause which brought about the massacre of the peaceful crowds on the Boulevard; for it remains unquestioned that the killing of the prisoners taken in the barricaded quar- ter was the result of design, and was enforced by stringent orders. Moreover, the persons who had the blood upon their hands were the persons who got the booty. St. Arnaud is no more; but Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Morny, Fleury, Maupas, Magnan, and Persigny—all these are yet alive, and in their pos- session the public treasures of France may still be abundant- ly found. 206 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XIV. It is known that the most practised gamesters grow weary sometimes of their long efforts to pry into the future which chance is preparing for them, and that in the midst of their anxiety and doubt they are now and then glad to accept guid- ance from the blind, confident guess of some one who is younger and less jaded than themselves; and when a hot-headed lad in- sists that he can govern fortune, when he ‘calls the main,’ as though it were a word of command, and shakes the dice-box with a lusty arm, the pale doubting elders will sometimes fol- low the lead of youth’s high animal spirits, and if they do this and win, their hearts are warm to the lad whose fire and will- fulness compelled them to run the venture. Whether it be Gratitude due true, as is said, that in the hour of trial any of the io Fleary, brethren of the Elysée were urged forward by Colo- nel Fleury’s threats, or whether, abstainmg from actual vio- lence, he was able to drive them on by the sheer ascendency of a more ardent and resolute nature, it is certain that he well earned their gratitude, if by any means, gentle or rough, he forced them to keep their stake on the table. For they won. The nse the bey won France. They used her hard. They took Hlysée made of her freedom. They laid open her purse, and were rich with her wealth. They went and sat in the seats of Kings and Statesmen, and handled the mighty nation as they willed in the face of Europe. Those who hated free- dom, and those also who bore ill will toward the French peo- ple, made merr y with what they saw. These are the things which Charles Louis Napoleon Bona- parte did. What he had sworn to do was set forth in the oath which he took on the 20th of December, 1848. On that day he stood before the National Assembly, and lifting his right The oath arm toward heaven thus swore :—‘In the presence Pests Hk: ROL ASO and before the French people represented taken. ‘by the National Assembly, I swear to remain faith- ‘ful to the democratic Republic one and indivisible, and to ful- ‘fill all the duties which the Constitution imposes upon me.’ What he had pledged his honor to do was set forth in the promise, which of his own free will he addressed to the Assem- bly. Reading from a paper which he had prepared, he uttered His added * these words :—‘* The votes of the nation, and the pnan ofhon. © oath which I have just taken, command my future or. ‘conduct. My duty is clear. I will fulfill it as a ‘man of honor. I shall regard as enemies of the country all ‘those who endeavor to change by illegal means that which all ‘France has established.’ In Europe at that time there were many men, and several Cuap. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 207 millions of women, who truly believed that the landmarks which divided good from evil were in charge of priests, and that what Religion blessed must needs be right. Now on the thirtieth day computed from the night of the 2nd of December, the rays of twelve thousand lamps pierced the thick wintry fog that clogged the morning air, and shed their difficult light through the nave of the historic pile which stands marking the lapse of ages and the strange checkered destiny of France. There waiting, there were the bishops, priests, and deacons of the Roman branch of the Church of Jesus Christ. These bishops, priests, and deacons stood thus expecting, because they claimed to be able to con- duct the relations between man and his Creator, and the swear- er of the oath of the 20th of December had designed to ap- prize them that again, with their good leave, he was coming into ‘the presence of God.’ And he came. Where the kings of France had knelt, there was now the persistent manager of the company that had played at Strasbourg and Boulogne, and with him, it may well be believed, there were Morny rejoicing in his gains, and Magnan soaring high above sums of four thousand pounds, and Maupas no longer in danger, and St. Ar- naud, formerly Le Roy, and Fialin, more often called ‘ Persig- ny, and Fleury the propeller of all, more esger perhaps to go and be swift to spend his winnings, than to sit in a cathedral and think how the fire of his temperament had given him a strange power over the fate of a nation. When the Church perceived that the swearer of the oath and all his associates were ready, she began her service. Having robes whereon all down the back there was embroidered the figure of a cross, and being, it would seem, without fear, the bishops and priests went up to the high altar, and scattered rich incense, and knelt and rose, and knelt and rose again. Then in the hearing of thousands there pealed through the aisles that hymn of praise which purports to waft info heaven the thanksgivings of a whole people for some new and signal mercy vouchsafed to them by Almighty God. It was because of what had been done to France-within the last thirty days that the Hosannas arose in Notre Dame. Moreover the priests lifted their voices and cried aloud, chanting and saying to the Most High, Dom- ine salvum fac Ludovicum Napoleonem—Oh Lord! save Louis Napoleon. What is good and what is evil? and who is he that deserves the prayers of a nation? If any man, being scrupulous and devout, was moved by the events of December to ask these questions of his Church, he was answered that day in the Ca- thedral of our Lady of Paris. The Te Deum. 208 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XIV. In the next December the form of the state system was ac- The President Commodated to the reality, and the President of peror ofthe the Republic became what men call a ‘ French Em-\ French, ‘peror.’ The style that Prince Louis thought fit to take was this: ‘ Napoleon the Third, by the Grace of God ‘and by the will of the people, Emperor of the French.’ Of course, when any one thinks of the events of December, The inaction 1851, the stress of his attention is apt to be brought Poe ct Preugn. LO bear upon those who were actors, and upon menatthe those who, desiring to act, were only hindered from thereountry Going so by falling into the pits which the trappers was falling. had dug for them; but no one will fail to see that one of the main phenomena of the time was the willful acqui- escence of great numbers of men. It may seem strange that during a time of danger the sin of inaction should be found in a once free and always brave people. The cause of this was the hatred which men had of democracy. A sheer democracy, it would seem, is so unfriendly to person- al liberty, and therefore so vexing or alarming, not only to its avowed political enemies, but to those also who in general are accustomed to stand aloof from public affairs, that it must needs close its frail existence as soon as there comes home a general renowned in arms, who chooses to make himself king. This was always laid down as a guiding principle by those who professed to be able to draw lessons from history, but even they used to think that, until some sort of hero could be found, democratic institutions might last. France showed mankind that the mere want of such a hero as will answer the purpose is a want which can be compensated by a little in- genuity. She taught the world that when a mighty nation is under a democracy, and is threatened with doctrines which challenge the ownership and enjoyment of property, any knot of men who can get trusted with a momentary hold of the en- gine of State (and somebody must be so trusted) may take one of their number, who never made a campaign except with counterfeit soldiers, and never fired a shot except when he fired by mistake, and may make him a dictator, a lawgiver, and an absolute monarch, with the acquiescence if not with the approval of a vast proportion of the people. Moreover France proved that the transition is not of necessity a slow one, and that, when the perils of a high centralization and a great standing army are added to the perils of a sheer democ- racy, then freedom, although it be hedged round and guarded by all the contrivances which clever, thoughtful, and honest republicans can devise, may be stolen and made away with Its cause. 5 Cnar. XIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 209 in one dark winter night, as though it were a purse or a trinket. Although France lost her freedom, it would be an error to The gentlemen IMagine that upon the ruins of the commonwealth of Francere- there was founded a monarchy like that, for in- solved to stand : . : aloof from the Stance, which governs the people of Russia. In Government. empires of that kind the Sovereign commands the services of all his subjects. In France, for the most part, the gentlemen of the country resolved to stand aloof from the Government, and not only declined to vouchsafe their society to the new occupant of the Tuileries, but even looked cold upon any stray person of their own station who suffered him- self to be tempted thither by money. They were determined to abide their time, and in the mean while to do nothing which would make it inconsistent for them, as soon as it suit- ed their policy, to take an opportunity of Jaying cruel hands on the new Emperor and his associates. It was obvious that The constant because of the instinct which makes creatures cling pe anwich to life, a monarch thus kept always standing on ates were kept. the very edge of a horrible fate, but still having for the time in his hands the engine of the State, would be driven by the very law of his being to make use of the forces of the nation as means of safety for himself and his comrades ; and that to that one end, not only the operations of the Home The foreign Government, but even the foreign policy of the policy of : P ; France was Country, would be steadily aimed. And so it hap- used to prop pened. After the 2nd December, in the year 1851, throne. . the foreign policy of France was used for a prop to prop the throne which Morny and his friends had built up. Therefore, although [have dwelt a while upon a singular pas- sage in the domestic history of France, I have not digressed. The origin of the war with Russia could not be traced without showing what was the foreign policy of France at the time when the mischief was done; and since it happened that the foreign policy of France was new to the world, and was gov- erned in all things by the personal exigencies of those who wielded it, no one could receive a true impression of-its aim and purpose without first gathering some idea of the events. by which the destinies of Europe were connected with the hopes and fears of Prince Louis, and Morny, and Fleury, of Magnan, and Persigny, and Maupas, and Monsieur Le Roy St. Arnaud, 210 TRANSACTIONS WHICH ~ [Cuar. XV. CHAPTER XV. A.mostT instantly the change which was wrought by these Immediateet. French transactions began to act upon Europe. fect of thecoup "The associates of the Elysee well understood that état upon the tranquillity of If they had been able to trample upon France and ERE her laws, their success had been made possible by the dread which the French people had of a return to tumult; and it was clear that, until they could do something more than merely head the police of the country, their new power would be hardly more stable than the passing terrors on which it rested. What they had to do was to distract France from thinking of her shame at home, by sending her attention abroad. For their very lives’ sake they had to make haste, The policy and to pile up events which might stand between which it neces- them and the past, and shelter them from the peril to ee which they were brought whenever men’s thoughts were turned to the night of the 2nd of December and the Thursday the day of blood. There could be no hesitating about this. Ambition had nothing to do with it. It was mat- ter of life and death. If Prince Louis, and Morny, and Fleury, if Maupas, St. Arnaud, and Magnan, were to continue quartered ~upon France instead of being thrown into prison and brought to trial, it was indispensable ‘that Eur ope should be disturbed. Without delay the needful steps were taken. It must have been within a week or two after the comple- tion of the arrangements. consequent on the night of the 2nd of December that the dispatches went from Paris which caused M. de Lavalette to wring from the Porte the Note of the 9th The French Of February,! and forced the Sultan into engage- Government — ments unfair and offensive to Russia. The French coerced the . 2 A A ms Sultan into. President steadily continued this plan of driving pectures of. /: the «Porte jinto-a quarrel with the Czar until at sia. length he succeeded in. bringing about the event,? which was followed by the advance of the Russian armies; but the moment the Czar was wrought up into a state of anger which sufficed to make him a disturber of Europe, Prince 11852. See ante. 2 The delivery of the key and the star to the Latin monks at Bethlehem in December, 1852. See ante. d Cap. XV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 211 Louis, now Emperor of the French, sagaciously perceived that it might be possible for him to take violent means of appeas- ing the very troubles which he himself had just raised ; and to do this by suddenly declaring for a conservative policy in Tur- key, and offering to put himself in concert with one of the great Andthen Settled States of Kurope.!. England, he knew, had sought an“ always clung to a conservative policy in the East. gland. § France, he also knew, of late years had generally done the reverse, but then France was-utterly in his power, and it seemed to him that, by offering to thrust France into an English policy, he might purchase for himself an alliance with the Queen, and win for his new throne a sanction of more lasting worth than Morny’s well warranted return of his eight millions of approving Frenchmen. Above all,if he could be united with England he might be able to enter upon that con- spicuous action in Europe which was needful for his safety at home, and might do this without bringing upon himself any war of a dangerous kind. Another motive of a narrower sort was urging him in the Personal fee. Same direction. Hating freedom, hating the French ings of thenew people, and delighting in an incident which he look- SPs ed upon as reducing the theory of Representative Government to the absurdum, Nicholas had approved and en- joyed the treatment inflicted upon France by throwing her into the felon’s van and sending her to jail; but he had object- ed to the notion of the second Napoleon being called ‘the ‘Third ;2 and in a spirit still more pedantic, he had refused to address the French sovereign in the accustomed form. He would call him his ‘ good friend,’ but no earthly power should make him add the word ‘brother.’ The taunting society of Petersburg amused itself with the amputated phrase, and loved to call the ruler of France their ‘ good friend.’ The new Em- peror chafed at this, for his vanity was hurt; but he abided his time. At length, nay so early as the 28th of January, 1853, the ? December, 1852. ? It is said, I know not with what truth, that the style of the new Emperor was the result of a clerical error. In the course of its preparations for con- stituting the Empire the Home Office wished te country to take up a word which should be intermediate between ‘ President’? and ‘Emperor,’ so the minister determined to order that France should suddenly burst into a ery of ‘Vive Napoleon,’ and he wrote, they say, the following order, ‘ Que le mot dordre soit Vive Napoleon!!!’ The clerk, they say, mistook the three notes of admiration for Roman numerals, and in a few hours the forty thousand communes of France had cried out so obediently for ‘Napoleon III.,’ that the Government was obliged to adopt the clerk’s blunder. 212 TRANSACTIONS WHICH (Cuap. XV, The French LYench Emperor perceived that his measures had Emperor's effectually roused the Czar’s hostility to the Sultan, vesetiue the and he instantly proposed to England that the two concord of the Powers should act together in extinguishing the druvies ix. flames which he himself had just kindled, and should gland into 2 endeavor to come to a joint understanding, with a separate alli- - 5 Aon ° ° ance with him- view to resist the ambition of Russia. Knowing tat beforehand what the policy of England was, he all at once adopted it, and proposed it to our Government in the very terms always used by English statesmen. He took, as it were, an ‘old copy’ of the first ‘English speech from the throne which came to his hand, and following its words, declared that the first object should be to ¢ preserve the integrity of the Otto- ‘man Empire! From that moment until the summer of 1855, and perhaps even down to a still later period, he did not once swerve from the great scheme of forming and maintaining an offensive alliance > with England against the Czar, and to that object he subordinated all other considerations. He had at that time the rare gift of being able to keep himself alive to the proportionate value of political objects. He knew how to give up the less for the sake of attaining and keeping the greater. Governed by this principle, he gradually began to draw closer and closer toward England; and when the angry Czar imagined that he was advancing i in the cause of his Church against a Y resolute champion of the “Latins, his wily adversary was smiling perhaps with Lord Cowley about the ‘key’ and the ‘ cupola,’ and preparing to form an alliance on strictly tem- poral grounds. It would have been well for Europe if the exigences of the persons then wielding the destinies of France would have per- mitted the State to rest content with that honest share of duty which fell to the lot of each of the four Powers when the in- tended occupation of the Principalities was announced. Nei- ther the interest nor the honor of France required that in the Eastern question she should stand more forward than any oth- er of the remonstrant States; but the personal interest of the new Emperor and his December friends did not at all coincide with the interest of France; for what he and his associates wanted, and what in truth they really needed, was to thrust France into a conflict, which might be either diplomatic or war- like, but which was at all events to be of a conspicuous sort, tending to ward off the peril of home politics, and give to the’ fabric of the 2nd of December something like station and ce- 1 “Eastern Papers,’ part i., page 68. Cuapr. XV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 213 lebrity in Europe. In order to achieve this, it clearly would not suffice for France to be merely one of a conference of four great Powers quietly and temperately engaged in repressing the encroachments of the Czar. Her part in such a business could not possibly be so prominent, nor so animating as to draw away the attention of the French from the persons who had got into their palaces and their offices of State. On the other hand, a close, separate, and significant alliance with En- gland, and with England alone, to the exclusion of the rest of the four Powers, would not only bring about the conflict which was needed for the safety and comfort of the Tuilerjes, but would seem in the eyes of the mistaken world to give the sane- tion of the Queen’s pure name to the acts of the December night and the Thursday the day of blood. The unspeakable value of this moral shelter to persons in the condition of the new French Monarch, and St. Arnaud, Morny, and Maupas, can never be understood except by those who look back and re- member how exalted the moral station of England was in the period which elapsed between the 10th of April, 1848, and the time when she suffered herself to become entangled in engage- ments with the French Emperor. It would have been right enough that France and England, as the two great maritime Powers, should have come to an understanding with each other in regard to the disposition of their fleets, but, even if they had been concerting for only that limited purpose, it would have been right that the general ten- or and object of their naval arrangements should have received . the antecedent approval of the two other Powers with whom they were in cordial agreement. The English Government, however, not only consented to engage in naval movements which affected—nay, actually governed—the question of peace or war, but fell into the error of concerting these movements with France alone, and doing this—not because of any differ- ence which had arisen between the four Powers, but—simply because France and England were provided with ships; so that in truth the Western Powers, merely because they were possessed of the implement which enabled them to put a press- ure upon the Czar, resolved to act as though they were the only judges of the question whether the pressure should be ap- plied or not; and this at a time when, as Lord Clarendon de- celared in Parliament, the four Powers were ‘all acting cordial- ‘ly together.’ Of course, this wanton segregation tended to supersede or dissolve the concord which bound the four Pow- ers, and, as a sure consequence, to endanger yet more than ever the cause of peace. Some strange blindness prevented 214 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [CHar. XV. Lord Aberdeen from seeing the path he trod, or rather pre- vented him from seeing it with a clearness conducive to action. But what the French Emperor wanted was even more than this, and what he wanted was done. It is true that neither admiration nor moral disapproval of the conduct of princes ought to have any exceeding sway over our relations with for-: eign States, and if we had had the misfortune to find that the Emperor of the French was the only potentate in Europe whose policy was in accord with our own, it might have been right that closer relations of alliance with France (however hu- miliating they might seem in the eyes of the moralist) should have followed our separation from the other States of Europe. But no such separation had occurred. What the French Em- peror ventured to attempt, and what he actually succeeded in achieving, was to draw England into a distinct and separate alliance with himself—not at a time when she was isolated, but —at a mo:ent when she was in close accord with the rest of the four Powers. Toward the close of the Parliamentary session of 1853, the determination on the part of Austria to rid the Principalities of their Russian invaders was growing in intensity. Prussia also was firm; and in principle the concord of the four Pow- ers was so exact, that it extended, as was afterward seen, not only to the terms on which the difference between Russia and Turkey should be settled, but to the ulterior arrangements which might be pressed upon Russia at the conclusion of the war which she was provoking. ‘The four great Powers,’ said Lord Aberdeen on the 12th of August, ‘are now acting in con- ‘cert.! ‘In all these transactions,’ said Lord Clarendon,?‘ Aus- ‘tria, England, Prussia, and France are all acting cordially to- ‘gether, in order to check designs which they consider incon- ‘sistent with the balance of power, and with those territorial ‘limits which have been established by various treaties.’ Yet it can not be doubted that in the midst of this perfect The nature of concord of the four Powers, the English Govern- the under ment was induced to enter into a separate under- standing of Midsummer, standing with the Emperor of the French.? This France and. WaS the fatal transaction which substituted a cruel England. _—_ war for the peaceful but irresistible pressure which was exerted by the four Powers. The purport of this arrange-. ment still lurks in private notes, and in recollections of private interviews, but it can be seen that (for reasons never yet ex- plained) France and England were engaging to move in ad- ~ 1129 Hansard, p.1650. * Ibid., p. 1423. . * Ibid., pp. 1424, 1768, 1826. CHAP? XV.) BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 215 vance of the other Powers. The four Powers, being all of one mind, were still to remain in concert, so far as concerned the discussion and adjudication of the questions pending between Russia and Turkey; but France and England were to volun- teer to enforce their judgment. The four Powers were to be judges, and two of them, namely, France and England, were to be the executioners. What made this arrangement the more preposterous was that the outrage of which Europe com- plained was the occupation of two provinces which abutted upon the Austrian dominions. Of all the great Powers, Aus- tria was the chief sufferer. Austria was upon the spot. Aus- tria was the one Power which instantly and in a summary way could force the Czar to quit his hold; and yet the charge of undertaking a duty which pressed upon her more than upon any other State in Europe, was voluntarily taken upon them- selves by two States whose dominions were vastly distant from the scene of the evil deed. It was much as though the forces of the United States and of Brazil were to come across the At- lantic to defend Antwerp from the French, whilst the English looked on and thanked their enterprising friends for relieving them of their duty. There was not perhaps more than one of the members of the English Cabinet who desired the formation of this singular al- liance on grounds like those which moved the French Empe- ror; and it is believed that Lord Aberdeen and several other members of the Government were much governed by a shal- low theory which had prevailed for some years amongst pub- lic men. The theory was that close union between France and England was a security for the peace of Europe. ‘Sure I am,’ said one confident man, who echoed the crude thought of many, ‘sure Lam that if the advisers of the Crown in this country act ‘in cordial concert with the government of the Emperor of the ‘French, and if the forces of the two countries in the Mediter- ‘ranean are to act in concert, then it will be almost impossible ‘that any war can disturb the peace of Europe.’ But of course, to men of more statesmanlike views, the main temptation was the prospect of seeing France dragged into the policy which England had always entertained upon the Eastern Question. Perhaps it will be thought that the practice of hiding away momentous engagements between States in the folds of private notes may now and then justify an endeavor to infer the na- ture of an agreement secretly made between two Governments from the tenor of their subsequent actions, and from a knowl- edge of surrounding facts. If this license were to be granted, and if also it were to be assumed that the English as well as 216 TRANSACTIONS WHICH __— [Car XV. the French Government was negotiating with open eyes, it might, perhaps, be laid down that the compact of Midsummer, 1853, was virtually of this sort :—‘ The Emperor of the French ‘shall set aside the old views of the French Foreign Office, and ‘shall oblige France with all her forces to uphold the Eastern ‘policy of England. In consideration of this sacrifice of French ‘interests by the French Emperor, England promises to give ‘her moral sanction (in the way hereinafter prescribed) to the ‘arrangements of December, 1851, and to take the following ‘means for strengthening the throne and endeavoring to es- ‘tablish the dynasty of the Emperor of the French :—1st. En- ‘oland shall give up the system of peaceful coercion which is ‘involved in the concerted action of the four Powers, and shall ‘adopt in lieu of it a separate understanding with France, of ‘such a kind as to place the two Powers conspicuously in ad- ‘vance of the others, and in a state of more immediate antag- ‘onism to Russia with a prospect of eventual war. 2nd. Even ‘before any treaty of alliance is agreed upon, the Queen of En- ‘eland shall declare before all Europe that the Emperor of the ‘French is united with Her Majesty in her endeavors to allay ‘the troubles now threatening Europe with war; and it shall ‘not be competent to the English Government to weaken the ‘effect of this announcement by advising Her Majesty to in- ‘clude any other Sovereigns in the same statement. If Her ‘Majesty should continue to be closely in accord with the rest ‘of the four Powers, she may be advised to speak of them in ‘general terms as her allies, but they are not to be named. 3rd. ‘If hostilities should become necessary, the two Governments ‘will determine upon the measures to be adopted in common, “and in that case also it is distinctly understood that the En- ‘olish Government will advise the Queen not to shrink from ‘the gratification of receiving the Emperor of the French as ‘her guest. It is, of course, to be understood (a va sans dire) ‘that the reception of His Majesty at the English Court is to “be in all respects the same as would be the reception of any ‘other great Sovereign in alliance with the Queen. Whenever ‘occasion requires it, the other actors in the operations of De- ‘cember, 1851, shall be received and treated by the English ‘authorities with the honors due to the trusted servants of a ‘friendly Power, and without objections founded on the trans- ‘actions of December, or any of the circumstances of their past ‘lives.’ These are only imaginary words, but they show what the French Emperor was seeking to achieve, and they repre- sent but too faithfully what the English Government did. —s_~ Every state is entitled to regard a foreign nation as repre- Cuap. XV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. ; 217 sented by its Government. The principle is a sound one; but it must be owned that by this alliance the theory was pushed to an ugly conclusion. What happened was the like of this :— i There came to us five men heavily laden with treasure, but looking hurried and anxious. They wanted to speak to us. Upon inguiring who they were, and comparing their answers with our other means of knowing the truth, we found that two of them bore names resulting in the usual way from marriages and baptisms,’ and that the other three had been going by names which they had chosen for the sake of euphony. They said that suddenly they had become so struck with the sound- ness of our old-fashioned opinions, that they asked nothing bet- ter than to be suffered to devote the immense resources which they could command to the attainment of the object which we had always desired. All they wanted in return was that, in pursuing our own object side by side with them, we would promise not to suffer ourselves to be clogged by our old scru- ples against breaches of the peace; that we would admit them to our intimacy, allowing ourselves to be much seen with them in public; and that, in order to make our favor the more signal, we would consent to turn aside a little from our old friends. That was all. With regard to the question of how they had come by their treasure, and all the vast resources they offered us, their story was that they had all these things with the ex- press consent of the former owner. There was something about them which made us fear that, if we repulsed them, they would carry their treasures to the very man who, at that mo- ment, was giving us trouble. In truth, it seemed that, either from us or from somebody else, they must and they would have shelter. Upon their hands there was a good deal of blood. We shrank a little, but we were tempted much. We yielded. We struck the bargain. What we did was not un- lawful, for those with whom we treated had for the time a real hold upon the people in whose great name they professed to come, and, by the custom of nations, we were entitled to say that we would know nothing of any France except the France that was brought to us by these five persons to be disposed of for the purposes of our ‘ Kastern Question ;’ but when we had done this thing, we had no wight to believe that, to Europe at large—still less to the gentlemen of France—the fair name of England would seem as it seemed before. But, whatever were the terms of the understanding between the two Governments, the result of it was that, the English ' These two were Prince Louis Bonaparte and Maupas. Won. 1K 218 ; TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XV,. Announce. Cabinet, disregarding the policy which only six days ment of itto before had united it in a concerted action with the Parhament. Powers represented at the Conference, now an- nounced through the lips of Lord Palmerston,? ‘that England ‘and France were agreed, that they continued to follow the ‘same policy, and that they had the most perfect confidence in Failure of Par. ‘each other.’ These words were enough to show liament to un- any one used to foreign affairs that England was real import of advancing with France into an adventurous policy, the disclosure. anqd-then (though even then they were dangerously late) Members of Parliament might have stood forward with some hope of being able to check their country in her smooth descent from peace to war. They lost the occasion. It did not recur. At the close of the session, the Queen’s Speech announced The Queen's tO Europe ‘that the Emperor of the French had Speech, Au- united with Her Majesty in earnest endeavors to gust, 1898 reconcile differences the continuance of which ‘might involve Europe in war, and She declared that, acting ‘in concert with her Allies, and relying on the exertions of the ‘Conference then assembled at Vienna, Her Majesty had good ‘reason to hope that an honorable arrangement would speedily “be accomplished.’? | It would seem at first sight that this language had been oc- casioned by some accidental displacement of words, and that it could not have been intended for the Queen of England to say that she was acting in concert with her Alles assembled at Vienna, and to declare in another limb of the same sentence that she was ‘ united’ with one of them. Unhappily, the error was not an error of words. The speech accurately described the strange policy which our Government had adopted; for it was strictly true that, in the midst of a perfect concord be- tween the four great Powers, the English Cabinet had been drawn into a separate union with France, and into a union of such a kind as to require the distinguishing phrase which dis- closed the new league to Europe. This speech from the throne may be regarded as marking This marks the point where the roads of policy branched off. mete the By the one road England, moving in company with ads to peace 3 : andtowar the rest of the four Powers, might insure a peaceful branched off. repression of the outrage which was disturbing Eu- rope. By the other, she might also, enforce the right, but, joined with the French Emperor, and parted from the rest of 1 8th July, 1853, in the House of Commons. ? 129 Hansard, p. 1826. ‘Cuar. XVI] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 219 the four Powers, she would reach it by passing through war. The Cabinet of Lord Aberdeen desired peace and not war; but seeing dimly, they took the adventurous path. They so little knew whither they were going, that they made no prep- aration for war.} CHAPTER XVI. Tue difference between a servant and a Minister of State Count Nessel- lies in this:—that the servant obeys the orders given Bie; him, without troubling himself concerning the ques- tion whether his master is right or wrong; whilst a Minister of State declines to be the instrument for giving effect to measures which he deems to be hurtful to his country. The Chancellor of the Russian Empire was sagacious and politic; and his experience in the business of the State, and in the councils of Europe, went back to the great days when Nessel- rode and Hardenburg, and Metternich and Wellington, set their seals to the same charter. That the Czar was wrong in these transactions against Turkey, no man in Europe knew better than Count Nesselrode; and at first he had the courage to speak to his master so frankly that Nicholas, when he had heard a remark which tended to wisdom and moderation, would cry out, ‘That is what the Chancellor is perpetually ‘telling me.’ But, unhappily for the Czar and for his empire, the Minister did not enjoy so commanding a station as to be able to put restraint upon his Sovereign, nor even perhaps to offer him counsel in his angry mood. He could advise with Nicholas the Czar; but there were reasons which made his counsels unwelcome to a heated defender of the Greek faith. He was a member of the Church of England, and the madden- ing rumors of the day made out that into the jaws of this very Church of England Lord Stratford was dragging the Sultan and all his Moslem subjects. Then, too, Count Nesselrode was worldly; but, after all, the quality most certain to make him irksome to a Prince in a high state of religious or ecclesiastic excitement was his good sense. It was dangerous for a wise, able sinner like him to go near holy Nicholas the Pontiff, the Head of God’s Orthodox Church upon earth, when he was hearing the voices from Heaven, when he was raging against the enemies of the Faith, and struggling to enforce his will '' See Lord Aberdeen’s evidence before the Sebastopol Committee. 220 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XVI’ upon mankind by utterances of the hated name of Canning,! and interjections, and gnashing of teeth. Far from being able to make a stand against this consuming fury, Nesselrode did not even decline to be the instrument for disclosing to all the world his master’s condition of mind. When the Czar knew that the fleets of the Western Powers State ofthe | Were coming up into the Levant, and that the sword zar ater at Of England was now in the hands of Lord Stratford, knowing that 3 c the fleets of — he was thrown into so fierce a state, that his notions ee of what was true and what was not true; of what ordered to the was plausible and what was ascertainably false ; Dardanelles. Of what was a cause and what was an effect; of what happened first and what happened last—nay, almost, it would seem, his notions of what was the Bosphorus and what was the Hellespont,? became as a heap of ruins. He was in the condition imagined by the Psalmist when he prayed the Lord that his enemy might be ‘confounded.’ Count Nessel- rode was forced to gather up his master’s shivered thoughts, and putting them as well as he could into the language of di- His complaints Plomacy, to address to all the Courts of Europe toEurope. = q wild remonstrance against the measures of the Western Powers. The approach of their fleets to an anchor- age in the A’gean outside the Straits of the Dardanelles was treated in this dispatch as though it were little less than a seizure of Constantinople; and it was represented that this was an act of violence which had entitled and compelled the Czar, in his own defense, to occupy the Principalities.2 Lord Clarendon seized this weak pretense and easily laid it bare, for he showed that Nicholas, in his anger, was transposing events ; and that the Czar’s resolve to cross the Pruth was anterior to Their refutae the occurrence which he now declared to have been. ot the motive of his action. Then,in language worthy of England, our Foreign Secretary went on to vindicate her right to send her fleets whither she chose, so long as they were on the high seas, or on the coasts of a Sovereign legitimately assenting to their presence. Nearly at the same time the writer of the French Foreign Office dispatches pursued the Czar through Europe with his bright, cutting, pitiless logic. | ‘ The Czar used to call Lord Stratford ‘Lord Canning.’ * The dispatch which gave utterance to this raving treated an anchorage: in the Aigean, outside the Dardanelles, as almost a virtual occupation of Constantinople. * ‘Eastern Papers,’ part i., p. 342. * These dispatches bear the signature of M. Drouyn de Lhuys, but it was commonly believed at the time that they were written by a man on the per- manent staff of the French Foreign Office. . Cuar. XVI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 221 _ Of course, the vivacity of France and England tended to place Austria at her ease, and to make her more backward than she would otherwise have been in sending her troops into the Banat; and moreover, the separate action of the Western Powers was well calculated, as will be seen by-and-by, to undo The Vienna the good which might be effected by the Confer- Conference. ence of the four Powers at Vienna. The Confer- ence, however, did not remit its labor. The mediating char- acter which belonged to it in its original constitution was grad- ually changed, until at length it represented what was nothing less than a confederacy of the four Powers against Russia. It is true that it was a confederacy which sought to exhaust per- suasion, and to use to the utmost the moral pressure of assem- bled Europe before it resorted to arms; and it is true also that it was willing to make the Czar’s retreat from his false moves as easy and as free.from shame as the nature of his late errors would allow: but these were views held by the English Cabi- net, as well as by the Conference; and it is certain that, if our Government had seen clear, and had been free from separate engagements, it would have stood fast upon the ground occu- pied by the four Powers, and would have refused to be drawn into measures which were destined to be continually undoing the pacific work of the diplomatists assembled at Vienna. But partnership with the midnight associates of the 2nd of The effect upon December was a heavy yoke. With all his heart Siiny Satan? and soul Lord Aberdeen desired the tranquillity of gled inasep- Hurope; but he had suffered his Cabinet to enter funding with into close friendly relations with one to whom the France. tranquillity of Europe portended jail, and ill usage, and death. The French Emperor had consented to engage France in an English policy; and he thought he had a right to insist that England should pay the price, and help to give him the means of such signal action in Europe as might drive away men’s thoughts from the hour when the parliament of France had been thrown into the felons’ van. The object at which the French Emperor was aiming stands The French Clear enough to the sight; but at this time the Batons acheine scheme of action by which he sought to attain his of action. ends was ambiguous. In general, men are prone to find out consistency in the acts of rulers, and to imagine that numberless acts, appearing to have different aspects, are the result of one steady design: but those who love truth better than symmetry will be able to believe that much of the con- duct of the French Emperor was rather the effect of clashing purposes than of duplicity. There are philosophers who im- 799 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XVI- agine that the human mind (corresponding in that respect with the brain) has a dual action, and that the singleness of purpose observed in a decided man is the result of a close accord be- tween the two engines of thought, and not of actual unity. Certainly it would appear that the Emperor Louis Napoleon, more than most other men, was accustomed to linger in doubt between two conflicting plans, and to delay his final adoption of the one, and his final rejection of the other, for as long a time as possible, in order to find out what might be best to be ultimately done by carrying on experiments for many months together with two rival schemes of action. But, whether this double method of action was the result of idiosyncrasy or of a profound policy, it was but too well fitted for the object of drawing England into a war. The aim of the French Emperor was to keep his understanding with England in full force, and yet to give the alliance a warlike direction. If he were to adopt a policy frankly warlike, he would repel Lord Aberdeen and endanger the alliance. If he were to be frankly pacific, there would be a danger of his restoring to En- rope that tranquility which could not fail to bring him and his December friends into jeopardy. In this strait he did not ex- actly take a middle course. By splitting his means of action, he managed to take two courses at the same time. There are people who can write at the same time with both hands. Po- litically, Louis Napoleon had this accomplishment. With his left hand he seemed to strive after peace; with his right he His diplomacy tried to stir up a war. The language of his diplo- . eee meres macy was pacific, and yet, at the very same time, he 7 contrived that the naval forces of France and En- time he en- gages Fagland gland should be used as the means of provoking a ments tending war. The part which he took in the negotiations to provokewar. going on at Vienna, and in the other capitals of the great Powers, was temperate, just, and moderate; and it is probable that the Dispatches which indicated this spirit long continued to mislead Lord Aberdeen, and to keep him under the impression that an Anglo-French alliance was really an en- gine of peace; but it will be seen that, as soon as the French Emperor had drawn England into an understanding with him, he was enabled to engage her im a series of dangerous naval movements, which he contrived to keep going on simultane- ously with the efforts of the negotiators, so as always to be de- feating their labors. In order to appreciate the exceeding force of the lever which was used for this purpose, aman ought to have in his mind the political geography of southeastern Europe and the configura- Cuap. XVI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 223 tion of the seas which flow with a ceaseless current into the waters of the Atgean. The Euxine is connected with the Mediterranean by the The Bosphorus StPaits of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora, and andthe Darda- the Straits of the Dardanelles. The Bosphorus is carte a current of the sea, seventeen miles in length, and, in some places, hardly more than half a mile broad; but so deep, even home to the shores on either side, that a ship of war can almost, as it were, find shade under the gardens of the European shore—can almost mix her spars with the cypresses which darken the coast of Asia. At its southern extremity the Bosphorus mingles with the waters of the great inlet or harbor which still often goes by the name of the Golden Horn ; and at length, after passing between Constantinople and its beautiful suburb of Scutari, the straits open out into the land- locked basin—now known as the Sea of Marmora—which used to be called the Propontis. At the foot of this inland sea the water is again contracted into a deep channel, no more, in one place, than three quarters of a mile in breadth, and is not set free till, after a course of some forty miles, it reaches the neigh- borhood of the Troad and spreads abroad into the Atgean. These last are the famous straits between Europe and Asia, which used to be called the Hellespont, and are now the Dar- danelles. The Bosphorus and the Dardanelles are both so narrow that even in the early times of artillery they could be commanded by guns on either side, and it followed that these The Sultan's waters had not the character of ‘high seas.’ And, ancient right since the land upon either side belonged to the Ot- them. toman Empire, the Sultans always claimed and al. ways enjoyed a right to keep out foreign ships of war from both the straits. Now on the Black Sea Russia had as much sea-board as Turkey, and, nevertheless, like every other Power, she was shut out from all right to send her armed navy into Policy of Rus. the Mediterranean through the Bosphorys and the siainregardto Dardanelles. There being no other outlet, her the straits. Black Sea fleet was pent up in an inland basin. Painful as this duress must needs be to a haughty State hav- ing a powerful fleet in the Euxine, it would seem that Russia has been more willing to submit to the restriction than to see the war flag of other States in the Dardanelles or the Bospho- rus. The presence of a force greater than her own, or even rivaling it, did not comport with the kind of ascendency which she was always seeking to establish at Constantinople and on the sea-board of the Euxine. Russia, therefore, had been a willing party to the treaty of 1841. By this treaty the five 224 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XVI The rights of great Powers acknowledged the right of the Sul- the Sultan and tan to exclude armed navies from both the straits; the five Pow- ° ers under the and, on the other hand, the Sultan engaged that in Treaty of 841. time of peace he would always exercise this right of exclusion. Moreover, the five Powers promised that they would all respect this engagement by the Sultan. The result, therefore, was that, whether with or without the consent of the Sultan, no foreign squadron, at a time when the Sultan was at peace, could lawfully appear in either of the straits.’ But How these When the Emperor Nicholas forcibly occupied the rights were af. Principalities, it was clear that this act was a just fected by the cause of war whenever the Sultan might think fit of the Princi- so. to treat it; and there was fair ground for saying aya a that, even before a declaration of war, the invasion of the Sultan’s dominions was such a violation of the state of peace contemplated by the treaty that the Sultan was morally released from his engagement, and might be justified in asking his allies to send their fleets up through the straits. On the other hand, the appearance of foreign navies in the Darda- nelles was regarded as so destructive to Russian ascendency that the bare prospect of it used to fill Russian statesmen with dismay; and the Emperor Nicholas held the idea in such horror that the mere approach of the French and English fleets to the Levant wrought him, as we have seen, to a state of mind which was only too faithfully portrayed by his Chancellor’s Circular. It is plain, therefore, that the power of advising the Sultan Pitcnd to call up the French and English fleets was an en- means of coer- gine of immense force in the hands of the Western ing the Czar. Powers, but it is also certain that this was a power ’ y which would put a much harder stress upon Russia whilst it was kept.suspended over her than it was likely to do when it came to be physically used. ‘To subject Nicholas to the fear Importance of Of having to see foreign war-flags in the straits was refraining =. to apply a pressure well fitted for coercing him ; om a prema- : ture use of the but actually to exert the power was to break its DOrTET; spell, and to change the Czar’s wholesome dread into a frenzy of anger hardly consistent with hopes of peace. The French Emperor had no sooner engaged the English The naval 0 @OVernment in a separate understanding than he movements in began to insist upon the necessity of using the na- French bmpe. Val power of France and England in the way which evenenges he proposed—a way bitterly offensive to Russia. aS Having at length succeeded in forcing this measure ' There were exceptions in favor of vessels having on board the Represent- - atives of foreign States. Cuarv. XVI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 225 upon England, he, after a while, pressed upon her another movement of the fleets still more hostile than the first, and again he succeeded in bringing the English Government to yield to him. Again, and still once again, he did the like, al- ways in the end bringing England to adopt his hostile meas- ures; and he never desisted from this course of action until at last it had effected a virtual rupture between the Czar and the Western Powers. t Not yet as part of this narrative, but by way of anticipation, Proofs of this 20d in order to gather into one page the grounds drawn (inan- of the statement just made, the following instances Ince eat of are given of the way in which the English Govern- the narrative) ment was from time to time driven to join with the from transac- : ‘ tions subse. French Emperor in making a quarrelsome use of quent ro ue the two fleets: — On the 13th of July, 1853, the Queen's French Emperor, through his Minister of Foreign ae . Affairs, declared to the English Government that if the occupation of the Principalities continued, the French fleet could not longer remain at Beshika Bay; on the 19th of Au- gust he declared it to be absolutely necessary that the com- bined fleets should enter the Dardanelles, and he pressed the English Government to adopt a resolution to this effect. On the 21st of September he insisted that the English Govern- ment, at the same moment as the French, should immediately order up the combined squadrons to Constantinople. On the 15th of December he pressed the English Government to agree that the Allied fleets should enter the Euxine, take pos- session of it, and interdict the passage of every Russian vessel. It will be seen that, with more or less reluctance, and after more or less delay, these demands were always acceded to by England; and the course thus taken by the Maritime Powers was fatal to the pending negotiations, for, besides that in the way already shown the OCzar’s wholesome fears were convert- ed into bursts of rage, the Turks, at the same time, were de- riving a dangerous encouragement from the sight of the French and English war-flags; and the result was, that the negotia- tors, with all their skill and all their patience, were riever able to frame a Note in the exact words which would allay the an- ger of Nicholas without encountering a steadfast resistance on the part of the Sultan. Some men will believe that a long series of acts all having a tendency in the same direction, and ending at length in war, were deliberately planned by the French Emperor as a means of bringing about the result which they effected, and that the temperate.and sometimes conciliatory negotiations which were > al K 2 226 TRANSACTIONS WHICH (Cuav. XVII. carried on during the same period were a mask to the real in- tent. It is perhaps more likely to be true that the French Emperor was all this time hesitating, and keeping his judg- ment in suspense. What he needed for his very life’s sake was to become so conspicuous, whether as a disturber or as a pacifactor of other nations, that Frenchmen might be brought to look at what he was doing to others instead of what he had done to them; and if he could have reached to this by seeming to take a great ascendant in the diplomacy of Europe, it is possible that for a while at least he might have been content to spare the world from graver troubles; but, Means well ° : fitted foren- Whether he acted from design or under the impulse forcing a just —— sot ’ 1t 4 494 peace weteso Of Varying and conflicting. wishes, it is certain that used as to pro- that command of naval power which was an engine Wye of excellent strength for enforcing the restoration of tranquillity, was so used by his orders and under his per- suasion as to become the means of provoking a war. CHAPTER XVII. Lorp STRATFORD, it would seem, was unconscious of his power over the mind of Nicholas, and did not understand that Tord Strat. 26 rested with him to determine whether the Czar ford's scheme should be politic or raging. He did not know of pacification. that as long as he was at Therapia, every deed, ev- ery word of the Divan was regarded as coming from the En- glish Ambassador, and that the bare thought of the Greek Church in Turkey being under the protection of ‘Canning,’ was the very one which would at any moment change the Czar from an able man of business to an almost irresponsible being. Taking the complaints of Russia according to their avowed meaning, the English Ambassador faithfully strove to remove every trace of the foundation on which they rested ; and having caused the Porte to issue firmans perpetuating all the accustomed privileges of the Greek Church, he proposed that copies of these firmans should be sent to the Court of St. Petersburg, together with a courteous Note from the Porte to Count Nesselrode, distinctly assuring the Chancellor that the firmans confirmed the privileges of the Greek Church in perpetuity, and virtually, therefore, engaging that the grants should never be revoked.!' This was doing exactly what Rus- 120th July, 1853. ‘Eastern Papers,’ part ii., p. 15. Cuap. XVII.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 227 sia ostensibly required; but it was also doing exactly that which the Czar most abhorred, for to his mind it indicated nothing less than that the Greek Church was passing under the gracious protection of Lord Stratford. The polished court- esy of the Note imparting this concession only made it the more hateful, by showing on its face whence it came. How- ever, Lord Stratford obtained for his plan the full approval of his French, Austrian, and Prussian colleagues, as well as of the Porte, and the Note, signed by Reshid Pacha, and inclos- ing copies of the new firmans, was dispatched to Vienna, with a view to its being thence transmitted to St. Petersburg. The packet which held these papers contained the very ingredients which were best fitted for disturbing the reason of the Czar. It happened, however, that at Vienna there were men who knew something of the psychological part of the Eastern Ques- tion, and they took upon themselves to arrest the maddening Note in its transit. And now the representatives of the four Powers conferring in the Austrian capital succeeded in framing a document which soon became known to Europe under the name of the ‘ Vienna The ‘Vienna ‘Note.’ This paper, framed originally in Paris, was apepte.: perfected and finally approved by all the four Pow- ers conferring at Vienna. It was a draught of a Note under- stood to be brought forward by Austria in her mediating ca- pacity, and proposed to be addressed by the Porte to the Rus- Agreed to by Sian Government. The parties to the Conference the four Pow- believed that the engagements purporting to be en made by the Note made on the part of the Sultan might satisfy the Czar without endangering the true interests of Turkey. Indeed, the Austrian Government, somewhat for- getting its duty as a faithful mediator, had used means of as- certaining that the Note would be acceptable to Russia,! but without taking a like step in favor of the other disputant. Accepted by Copies of the Note thus framed were sent for ap- Russia. proval to St. Petersburg and to Constantinople, and the acceptance of the arrangement was pressed upon the Govy- ernments of the two disputing States with all the moral weight which the four great Powers could give to their unanimous award. And here it ought to be marked, that at this moment the The French French Emperor did nothing to thwart the resto- Emperor does. yation of tranquillity. He perhaps believed that if nothing to 3 hey ° J thwart the suee a@ Note which had originated in Paris were to be- 1 ‘astern Papers,’ part ii., p. 27. 228 TRANSACTIONS WHICH (Cuap. XVII. cessofthe come the basis of a settlement, he might found on Fa this circumstance a claim to the glory of having pacified Europe, and in that wholesome way might achieve the sort of conspicuousness which he loved and needed. Per- haps he was only obeying that doubleness of mind which made him always prone to do acts clashing one with another. But, whatever may have been the cause which led him for a mo- ment to intermit his policy, it is just to acknowledge that he seems to have been faithfully willing to give effect to the means of pacification which were proffered by the ‘ Vienna ‘Note. It soon became known that the Note was agreed to by the Emperor Nicholas. Men believed that all was settled. It was true that the courier who was expected to be the bear- er of the assent of the Porte had not yet come in from Con- stantinople, but it was assumed that the representatives of the four Powers had taken the precaution of possessing them- selves of the real views of the Turkish Government, and be- sides, it was thought impossible that the Sultan should under- take to remain in antagonism to Russia, if the support which he had hitherto received from the four great Powers were to be transferred from him to the Czar. | Those who dwell far away from great cities can hardly per- haps believe that the touching signs of simplicity whieh they observe in rural life may be easily found now and then in the councils of assembled Europe. The Governments of all the Lord Stratfora fOur Powers, and their representatives assembled at had not been Vienna, fondiy imagined that they could settle the consulted. dispute and restore tranquillity to Europe without consulting Lord Stratford de Redclitfe. They framed and dis- patched the Note without learning what his opinion of it was, and it is probable that a knowledge of this singular omission may have conduced to make the Czar accept the award of the mediating Powers, by tempting him with the delight of seeing Lord Stratford overruled. But, on the other hand, the one man who was judge of what ought or ought not to be con- ceded by the Turks was Lord Stratford, and it is plain that. any statesmen who forgot him in their reckoning must have been imperfect in their notion of political dynamics. It would be wrong to suppose that a sound judgment by the four Pow- ers would be liable to be overturned by Lord Stratford from any mere feeling of neglect. He was too proud, as wellas too honest, to be capable of such a littleness. What was to be ap- prehended was that, until it was ratified by the English Am- bassador at the Porte, the decision of a number of men in Vi- enna, and Paris, and London, and Berlin, might turn out to be Cuap. XVII.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 229 really erroneous, or might seem to be so in the eyes of one who was profoundly versed in the subject; and no man had a right to make sure that, even at the instance of all Europe, this strong-willed Englishman would consent to use his vast per- - sonal ascendency as a means of forcing upon the Turks a sur- render which he held to be dangerous. Karly in August the Vienna Note reached Constantinople ; and the Turkish Government soon detected in it, not only a misrecital of history, but words of a dangerous sort, conveying, or seeming to convey to Russia, under a new form, that very protectorate of the Greek Church in Turkey which had br ought about the rupture of the negotiation conducted by Prince Mentschikoff. The four Powers, however, had determined to press the acceptance of the arrangement upon the Porte, and — on the 12th it became known at Constantinople that the Note © had been accepted by the Emperor Nicholas. On the same day the English Ambassador received instructions from Lon- don, which informed him that the English Government ‘ad- The‘Vienna ‘hered to the Vienna Note, and considered that it nage nthe ‘fully guarded the principle which had been con- Stratford, ‘tended for, and might therefore with perfect safety ‘be signed by the Porte,’ and Lord Clarendon went on to ex- press a hope that the Ambassador would have ‘found no diffi- ‘culty in procuring the assent of the Turkish Government to a ‘project which the allies of the Sultan unanimously concurred ‘in recommending for his adoption.”! It can not be doubted that Lord Stratford’s opinion as to the effect of the Vienna Note was opposed to that of his Gov- ernment,” but it was his duty to obey. He obeyed. He ‘scru- ‘pulously abstained from expressing any private opinion of his ‘fon the Note whilst it was under consideration at the Porte,’ -and he conveyed to the Turkish Government the desire of Eu- rope. ‘I called the attention of Reshid Pacha,’ said he, ‘to ‘the strong and earnest manner in which the Vienna Note was ‘recommended to the acceptance of the Porte, not only by Her ‘Majesty’s Government, but also by the Cabinets of Austria, ‘France, and Prussia. I reminded him of the intelligence which ‘had been received from St. Petersburg, purporting that the ‘Emperor of Russia had signified his readiness to accept the ‘same Note. I urged the importance of his engaging the Porte ‘to come to a decision with the least possible delay. [-repeat- ‘edly urged the importance of an immediate decision, and ‘the danger of declining, or only accepting with amendments, ' ‘Kastern Papers,’ part ii., p. 27. ? Ibid., pp. 72, 82. 230 TRANSACTIONS WHICH fCnar. XVI. ‘what the four friendly Powers so earnestly recommended, and ‘what the Cabinet of St. Petersburg had accepted in its actual “state.’! . These were dutiful words. But it is not to be betieved that, even if he strove to do so, Lord Stratford could hide his reai thoughts from the Turkish Ministers. There was that in his very presence which disclosed his volition; for if the thin dis- ciplined lips moved in obedience to constituted authorities, men who knew how to read the meaning of his brow, and the light which kindled beneath, would gather that the Ambassa- dor’s thought concerning the home Governments of the five great Powers of Europe was little else than an angry ‘ quos ‘ego! The sagacious Turks would look more to these great _ signs than to the tenor of formal advice sent out from London ; and if they saw that Lord Stratford was in his heart against the opinion of Europe, they would easily resolve to follow his known desire, and to disobey his mere words. The result was The Turkish that, without any signs of painful doubt, the Turk- Government ish Government determined to stand firm. They reject it unless Quietly introduced into the draft the modifications altoid which they deemed to be necessary for extracting its dangerous quality, and resolved that unless these changes were admitted they would altogether reject the Note. They were supported by the unanimous decision of the Great Coun- cil. It might seem that with Lord Stratford and the Turkish Lord Stratford Government on one side, and all the rest of Europe, ae ee ** including England herself, on the other, the pre- Europe. ponderance would be soon determined; and Lord Clarendon remonstrated against the obstinacy of the Turks in terms which approached to a disapproval of all that had lately been done at Constantinople ;2 but Europe was in the wrong, » and Lord Stratford and the Turks were in the right; and, happily for the world, a strong man and a good Cause make a formidable conjunction. Lord Stratford did not fail to show his Government that the objections of the Turks to the pro- posed Note were well founded ; and Europe was compelled to remember that the Russian demand still had in it the original vice of wrongfully seeking to extort a treaty in time of peace. On the 19th of August, the Porte declined to accept the Vi- enna Note without introducing into it the required They are firm. s : ° alterations. These alterations were rejected by * ¢Kastern Papers,’ part ii., p. 69. ® Thid., p. 91. 3 Ibid., p. 80. A copy of the ‘ Vienna Note,’ and of the alterations insist- ed upon by the Turks, is given in the Appendix, in order to show the exact Cuap XVII] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 231 Russia; and, for a moment, Europe was threatened with the mortification of seeing that the question of peace or war was to depend upon a mere verbal criticism, and a criticism, too, in which the English Government at first supposed that the Turks were wrong.! It happened, however, that, in the course Nesselrode Of the discussion, Count Nesselrode argued against which hows, the alterations proposed at Constantinople in lan- which shows the soundness guage which avowed that the meaning and intent Peau soecnen’ of Russia coincided with that very inter pretation to the Note. which had been fastened upon the Note by the sa- gacity of the Turks; and, the Governments of the four Pow- ers being then obliged to acknowledge that they were wrong, and that Lord Stratford and the Turks were right, the ques- tion which brought about the final rupture between Russia and the Porte was virtually the same as that which had caused The Protecto. tle departure of Prince Mentschikoff from Constan- rate ofthe tinople. What Russia still required, and what the in Turkey was Lorte still refused to grant, was the protectorate still the thing of the Greek Church in Turkey. ms At length, with the advice of a Great Council at- tended by a hundred and seventy-two of the foremost men of The Porte de. the Empire, the Porte determined upon war. A clares war. declaration was issued, which made the farther con- tinuance of peace dependent upon the evacuation of the Prin- cipalities; and the Russian General there commanding was summoned to withdraw his troops from the invaded provinces within fifteen days. He did not comply with the demand; and, on the 23rd of October, 1853, the Sultan was placed in a state of war with the Emper or of Russia. But meanwhile the preachers of the Grehtsdloe Church, and Warlike spirit the preachers of Islam, had not been idle. In Rus- cnte In fae. Sia, the piety and the spirit of the people had been Gast hed... dor estalled by the consuming evil of a vast standing een forestall- ed. army, and crushed down by police and by drill. The Government had already taken so much by sheer compul- sion, that the people, however brave and pious, had little more that it was willing to offer up in sacrifice. It was not thus in Warlike ardor the Ottoman Empire. Through the vast and scat- or the people of tered dominions of the Sultan, the holy war had not Empire. been preached in vain. There, religion, and love of country, and warlike ardor were blent into one ennobling sen- timent, which was strong enough, as was soon shown, to ‘make men arise of their own free will, and endure long toil ‘and cruel difference of words which brought about the final rupture between Russia and the Porte. ' *Kastern Papers,’ part ii., p. 91. 232 _ TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XVIT hardships, that they might attain to some battle-field or siege, and there-face death with joy. And, under the counsels and ascendency of Lord Stratford, this ardor was so well guided that it was kept from breaking out in vain tumult or outrage, and was brought to bear in all its might upon the defense of the State. ‘A spirit of self-devotion,’ wrote the Ambassador, ‘unaccompanied with fanatical demonstrations, and showing ‘itself amongst the highest functionaries of the State, bids ‘fair to give an extraordinary impulse to any military enter- ‘prise which may be undertaken against Russia by the Turk- ‘ish Government. The corps of Ulema are preparing to ad- ‘vance a considerable sum in support of the war. - The Grand ‘Vizier, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, and other leading ‘members of the Administration, have resigned a large pro- ‘portion of their horses for the service of the artillery. Re-en- ‘forcements continue to be directed toward the Danube and ‘the Georgian frontier. If hostilities commence, they will be ‘prosecuted in a manner to leave, on one side or on the other, ‘deep and durable traces of a truly national struggle.” But if the Turkish Empire was still the Caliphate; and if Moderation of Teligion still gave the watchword which brought the Turkish many races of men to crowd to the same standard, Government. yet the Porte, chastened by the adversity of the latter century, and disciplined by the English Ambassador, had become so wise and politic, that it governed the beating heart of the nation, and suffered no fanatic words to go out into Christendom. The duty of the Moslem now called to arms, for his Faith was preached with a fervor sufficing for all mili- tary purposes; but the Proclamation which announced that the Sultan was at war abstained from all fierce theology. Re- iterating the poignant truths which placed the Porte in the right and the Czar in the wrong, it kept to that tone of mod- eration which had hitherto marked all the State Papers of the Its effect on Lurkish Government. But this very moderation the mind of the seemed always to kindle fresh rage in the mind of ve the Emperor Nicholas, and to fetch out his religious zeal. The reason perhaps was, that in all wisdom, and all mod- eration evinced by the Divan, he persisted in seeing the evil The Czars hand of Lord Stratford. In his Proclamation, he Proclamation. ascended to ecstatic heights:—‘By the grace of ‘God, We, Nicholas I., Emperor and Autocrat of All the Rus- ‘sias, make known :—By our Manifesto of the 14th of June, ‘we acquainted our well-beloved and faithful subjects with the 1 ‘Kastern Papers,’ part il., p. 167. Cuap. XVIII. ] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 233 ‘motives which have compelled us to demand of the Ottoman ‘Porte inviolable guarantees in favor of the sacred rights of ‘the Orthodox Church . . . Russia is challenged to the fight; ‘nothing therefore farther remains for her but, in confident re- ‘liance upon God, to have recourse to arms, in order to compel ‘the Ottoman Government to respect treaties, and obtain from ‘it reparation for the offenses by which it has responded to our ‘most moderate demands, and to our legitimate solicitude for ‘the defense of the Orthodox faith in the East, which is equally ‘professed by the Russian people. We are firmly convinced ‘that our faithful subjects will join the fervent prayers which ‘we address to the Most High, that His hand may be pleased ‘to bless our arms in the holy and just cause which has ever ‘found ardent defenders in our pious ancestors. ‘In Thee, O ‘« Lord, have I trusted; let me not be confounded for ever!” ”} CHAPTER XVIII. Tur Emperor Nicholas still sought to prolong the ambi- The Czar an- guity of his relations with Turkey. On the 31st meee et 1 Of October, Count Nesselrode issued a Circular to be farther pro- the representatives of Russia at foreign Courts, in voked he will : . itl ahh be content to which he declared that, notwithstanding the decla- veel ‘ma- ration of war, and as long as his master’s dignity ‘tee’andre- and his interests would permit, Russia would ab- AERIS stain from taking the offensive, and content herself offensive. with holding her position in the Principalities until she succeeded in obtaining the satisfaction which she re- quired. This second endeavor to contrive a novel kind of standing-ground between real peace and avowed war was ; ; > . a5 2 destined, as will be seen, to cause fresh discord between Rus- sia and the Western Powers. The negotiations for a settlement were scarcely interrupted, The negotia. elther by the formal declaration of war or by the rons ar con- hostilities which were commenced on the banks of inued, and are ripening to- the Danube; and the Conference of the four Pow- ment, when, TS represented at Vienna had just agreed to the they are ruin- terms of a collective Note, which seemed to afford e ° . Western Pow. 2 basis for peace, when the English Government ers, - gave way to the strenuous urgency of the French 1 ¢Hastern Papers,’ part 1i., p. 228. 234 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XVII Emperor, and consented to a measure which ruined the pend- ing negotiations, and generated a series of events leading ptr raight to a war between Russia and the Western Powers. In the month of September, some weeks before the Sultan’s final rupture with the Czar, the pious and warlike ardor then kindled in the Turkish Empire had begun to show itself at Movementas ©OnStantinople. A placard, urging the Govern- Constantin ment to declare war, was pasted on one of the Pie. mosques. Then a petition for war was presented to the Council and to the Sultan himself, by certain muderris, or theological students. The paper was signed by thirty-five persons, of no individual distinction, but having the corporate. importance of belonging to the ‘Ulemah.’ Though free from menace, the petition, as Lord Stratford expressed it, was word- ed in ‘serious and impressive terms, implying a strong sense ‘of religious duty, and a very independent disregard of conse- ‘quences.’ The Ministers professed to be alarmed, and to be- lieve that this movement was the forerunner of revolution ; and Lord Stratford seems to have imagined that their alarm The use made Was genuine. It is perhaps more likely that they on this by the were skillfully making the most of these occur- isters. rences, with a view to embroil their maritime allies in the approaching war; for, when they went to the Ambas- sadors, and asked them to take part in measures for the main- tenance of public tranquillity, their meaning was that they wished to see,the fleets of France and England come up into the Bosphorus; and they well knew that if this naval move- ment could be brought to pass before the day of the final rup- ture between Russia and the Porte, it would be regarded by the Czar as a flagrant violation of treaty. A curious indication of the sagacity with which the Turk- ish Ministers were acting is to be found in the difference be- tween their language to the English Ambassador and their language to M. de la Cour. In speaking to Lord Stratford, they shadowed out dangers impending over the Eastern world, the upheaving of Islam, the overthrow of the Sultan’s authori- ty. Then they went str aight to M. de la Cour, and drew a small vivid picture of massacred Frenchmen. They did not, said M. de la Cour, conceal from him, ‘that the persons and ‘the interests of his countrymen would be exposed to grave idatigers, which they were sensible they were incapable of ‘pr eventing , by reason of the want of union in the Ministry ‘and the threats directed against themselves.’ This skillful 1 “astern Papers,’ part ii., p. 115. Cuar. XVIIL.J BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 235 discrimination on the part of the Turkish Ministers seems to show that they had not at all lost their composure. Hither by their real dread, or by their crafty simulation of They succeed it, the Turkish statesmen succeeded in infecting M. name = de la Cour with sincere alarm. He was easily Ambassador. brought to the conclusion that ‘the state of the ‘Turkish Government was getting worse and worse; and that ‘matters had got to such a state as to cause dread of a ca- ‘tastrophe, of which the inhabitants, Rayahs or Europeans, “would be the first victims, and which would even threaten ‘the Sultan’s throne.! He called upon the English Ambassa- dor to consult as to what was best to be done; and both he and the Austrian Internuncio expressed their readiness to join with him in adopting the needful measures. Lord Stratford does not seem to have suspected that the use Composure of Which the Turkish Ministers were making of their Lord Stratford. Divinity students was in the nature of a stratagem 3 but, assuming and believing their alarm to be genuine, he was still proof against the infection, and retained his calm. In- deed, he seems to have understood that a cry for war on the part of the religious authorities was a healthy sign for the Em- pire. He expressed to his colleagues his readiness to act in concert with them; but he said he was reluctant to take any step which was not clearly warranted by the necessities of the case, and that he desired to guard against mistake and exag- geration, by gaining a more precise knowledge of the grounds for alarm. He deprecated any joint interference with the Turkish Government; and was still less inclined to join in bringing up the squadrons to Constantinople, without more proofs of urgent peril than had been yet obtained; but he sug- Wis wise ana 2CSted, as an opinion of his own, that, the represent- guarded meas- atives of the maritime Powers should obtain from luring the their respective Admirals such an addition of steam peace ofthe force as would secure them from any immediate at- Spe tack, and enable them to assist the Government in case of an outbreak threatening its existence, without attract- ing any unusual attention, or assuming an air of intimidation.? This was done. eA) Vs olind's OAT cinde Asie at oft BSCE ~ Ne a “ F “hak Gives SAb ko & 9A) betes 1 kn ‘getoanety 49% % Abrgie tT Malar osn WHO 5 a7 pit pidbsrsal4 a a AYR yt 20d) MI ON ~ az) cs = :; : a ) hee - Waabigs A Ns “fs ren 9 ene Os ; by! yi mis eee ie Lan ge ~ Eo a bh : a tas ) fe sees —. \ 5 : A Aap fy bog Os b e | 7 ae {HOALA cs Se Oe — meme A ; GaaeU. 9 ct a Diagram indicating the nature of the straits in which the Czar placed himself by at- tempting to maintain a hostile occupation of the Danubian Principalities without the as- sent of Austria. The tapering of the lines which show the route of the Czar’s intruding forces is intended to remind the reader of the hourly decreasing strength of an invader who operates at a vast distance from his main resources. : ST PETERSBURG O rl f . H ‘WARSAW. &, | | (} mm Cuap. XXI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 253 CHAPTER XXI. In a military point of view, and upon the supposition of Military er- there being no understanding between Russia and in ccetpying” Austria, the seizure of the whole of Wallachia by Wallachia. a Russian army is a dangerous measure; for, after reaching Bucharest, the line of occupation has to bend at right angles, ascending the northern bank of the Danube between an enemy expectant and an enemy already declared, till at length it touches the frontier of the Banat at a distance from Moscow of not less than a thousand miles. To be in fitting strength at a point thus situate would imply the possession of resources beyond those which Russia could command. - The General at the head of the Turkish army was Omar Of this Omar Pasha; and it chanced that he was a man highly Paes, Skilled in the art of bringing political views to bear tage. upon the operations of an army in the field. He knew that, in protruding his forces into Lesser Wallachia, the Emperor Nicholas was committing a military fault; and he also inferred that political reasons and imperial vanity would make the Czar cling to his error. He also knew that, for the rest of that year, the Czar, being kept back by the engagements which he had taken, by his fear of breaking with the four Powers, and, above all, by the insufficiency of his means, would abstain from any farther invasion of Turkey, and would even be reluctant to alarm Europe by allowing the least glimpse of a Russian uniform to appear on the right bank of the Danube. Omar saw that the river had thus become a political barrier which protected the Turks from the Russians, without protect- ing the Russians from the Turks. He could therefore over- step the common rules of the art of war; and disporting him- self as he chose on the line of the Danube, could concentrate forces on his extreme left, without any fear for his centre or his right. ~ Therefore, in the early part of the autumn, a large portion Hisautumn Of the Turkish army was quietly drawn to Widdin, and winter a town on the right bank of the river, in the west- eumpasn®- — ernmost angle of Bulgaria; and, on the fifth day from the declaration of war, Omar Pasha was over the Danube, intrenching himself at Kalafat, and so established that, he faced 254 TRANSACTIONS WHICH (Car. XXL toward the east, and confronted the extreme flank of the in- truding army.? From that moment Nicholas ceased to be the . undisturbed holder of the territory which he had chosen to call his ‘material guarantee. His pride was touched. Tor- tured by the thought that his power to hold the pledge was challenged by a Turkish officer, he began to exhaust his strength in efforts to assemble a force at the westernmost point of his extended flank. This was the error which Omar Pasha wished him to commit. At the close of the year, the Czar had succeeded in pushing a heavy body of troops into Lesser Wallachia; and in the beginning of January the lines of Kalafat were attacked by General Aurep. The struggle lasted four days; but it ended in the retreat of the Russian forces ; and, considering the vast distance between the lines of Kalafat and the home of the Russian army, it may be inferred that this fruitless effort of imperial pride must have worked a deep cavity in the military strength of the Czar. Moreover, Omar Pasha took another, and a not less skillful advantage of the political considerations which prevented the Russians from passing the Danube; for, during the winter, he fleshed his troops by indulging them with enterprises against the enemy’s posts along the whole: line of the Lower Danube from Widdin to Rassova; and since these attacks were often attended with success, and could never be signally repressed . by an enemy who had precluded himself from the right of crossing the river, they gave the Turks that sense of strength in fight which is at the root of warlike prowess. Karly in the winter the Emperor Nicholas came to under- Embarrass- stand the fault which he had committed in pre- ment and dis- scribing the Danube as a boundary—a boundary Czar, to be observed by himself, without the least right for expecting that it would be observed by his adversary. So now he would do the contrary of what he had done. Because he had committed a military fault in forbidding himself from all enterprises against the slowly-assembling forces of the Porte in 1853, he would now in 1854 undertake an invasion which must bring him into conflict with the gathered strength of the Ottoman Empire; and that, too, when it had become certain that the armed support of France and England would not be wanting to the Sultan. But perhaps, after all, it was hardly tolerable for a haughty monarch to have to stand passive, un- der the insulting coercion which was now to be applied to him by the Western Powers; and the Czar having no means of 1 28th Stat ey E 1853. The declaration of war became absolute on the 23rd. Cuap. XXI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. + 25S hostile action against the territories or the ships of either France or England, could only strike at his greater foes by striking at the ally whom they had undertaken to befriend. Upon the whole, therefore, he could not so school himself as to be able to abstain from attempting an invasion of Turkey ; but the wholesome trials which he had now undergone had so far disciplined his spirit that at length, after bitter anguish, he felt and acknowledged to himself the want of a firm adviser. Russia owned a great General who had never sanctioned by He resorts for HIS counsel the errors of the previous year; and aid to Paskiee now—baftled—agitated—driven hither and thither ecg _by alternating impulses till his brain had become a guide more blind than chance—the Czar abated his personal claims to the conduct of a war, and came for help and counsel to the veteran Paskievitch. The evil was almost beyond the old man’s hope of cure; for how could Russia march upon Constantinople—nay, how, in strict prudence, could she march upon the Balkan whilst England and France were in full com- mand of the Euxine? But was the Czar then simply power- less against Turkey? Had his million of soldiers been torn from their homes in vain? Had he not busied himself all his days in organizing armies, and reviewing drilled men, and grinding down his people into the mere fractional components of an army, until the very faces of soldiers in the same battal- ion were brought to be similar and uniform ?—had his life been utter foolishness, and was the labor of his reign so barren that he could not now make a campaign against the simple Turks, who never took pains about any thing until the hour of battle? Had he not spoken in the councils of Europe as though he were a potentate so great that the Empire of the. Ottomans existed by force of his magnanimity ? And now— had it come to this—that at the mere bidding of the Western Powers, and without their firing a shot, he was to stand ar- rested in the presence of scoffing: Europe like a prisonef* who had delivered his sword ? Well, Paskievitch, in a painful, soldierly way, could tell him Paskievitch's What would be the least imprudent plan for attack- pope ing the inner dominions of the Sultan. The prin- ciples of the art of war have a great stability; and although there is an infinite variety in the methods of applying then, it results, that the invasion of one nation by another is repeated- ly undertaken upon the same accustomed route. By the route which Paskievitch recommended, the invader crossed the Danube in the neighborhood of its great bend to- ward the north; makes himself master of Silistria; encounters 256 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XXIL and overcomes the assembled strength of the Ottoman Em- pire in front of the great intrenched camp of Shoumla; then advancing, forces the difficult passes of the Balkan as best he mav; marches upon Adrianople; and thence on—thence on if he can and dares—to the shore of the Bosphorus. Erivanski! could hardly have believed that his master’s military power was equal to so great an undertaking as that; but if it sue- ceeded only in some of its early stages, diplomacy might come to the rescue of the Czar, as it had done in 1829; and the plan had this in its favor—that it placed a broad tract of. country between Austria and the right flank of the invading army; and another, though less extended, territory between its left flank and the fleets of the Western Powers. | But, in the counsels of a wise and faithful soldier there is a pitiless candor—a dreadful precision. He comes in his hard way to weights, and to numbers, and to measurements of space and of time. Without mercy to the vanity. of his suffering master, Paskievitch defaced the cherished form of the ‘ mate- ‘rial guarantee’ by insisting that the Czar should cease from trying to hold the Principalities entire, and that all his forces should be quickly withdrawn from the Lesser Wallachia. This done, he promised the Czar an invasion of the Ottoman Empire; but the carrying of the enterprise beyond the valley of the Danube was to be only upon condition that Silistria should fall, and should fall before the Ist of May.? So now, the streams of battalions rumored to be setting in Movement of upon the Lower Danube, from the confines of All troops in the the Russias, woke up the mind of Europe, and por- Russian em- . : pire. tended a great invasion. CHAPTER XXII. Ir has been seen that without treaty, and without the advice sir John Bur. OT knowledge of Parliament—nay, even, perhaps, goyne and Col- without a distinct conception of what it was doing dispatched to —the English Government had been gradually con- the Levant. tracting engagements which were almost equiva- 1 This was Paskievitch’s title. It denoted that he was the conqueror of Erivan, a prevince conquered from the Persians. 2 My knowledge of the counsels tendered to the Emperor by Paskievitch is derived from papers in the possession of the late Lord Raglan. Cuap. XXII.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 257 lent to adefensive alliance with the Sultan. France, by vir- tue of her new understanding with England, had come under the same obligations; and now that an invasion of the Otto- man Empire was threatened, it became necessary that the Western Powers should take measures for its defense. At first, however, their views were limited to the defense of the Sultan’s home territories, and especially those which gave the control of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. Two Engineer ofticers—Colonel Ardent on the part of France, and Sir John Burgoyne on the part of England—were dispatched to Tur- key, with instructions to report upon the best means of aiding the Sultan to defend his home dominions; and, almost at the same time, it was agreed between the two Western Powers, that each of them should prepare to send a small body of troops into the Levant. The English force was collected at Malta. Ofthe Ministers Troops sentto Who joined in adopting this measure, some foresaw Mele that the few battalions which they were dispatch- ing to the East were the nucleus ofan army which might have to operate in the field; but others looked upon them as a force Tendency of intended to support our negotiations. This ambi- thismeasure. onity of motive was a root of evil; for the collat- eral arrangements which are requisite for enabling an army to live, to move, and to fight, bear a vast proportion to the mere business of collecting the men; and there is always a danger that a body of troops, sent toward the scene of action with a diplomatic intent, will be unsupported by the measures which are requisite for actual war, and yet, upon the rupture of the negotiations, will be prematurely hurried into the field. On the other hand, the councilors of a great military State are so well accustomed to know the cost and the labor which must precede the advance of an army, that the mere protrusion of a body of well-equipped troops, unsupported by the collateral appliances of war, does not tell upon their minds as a proof of an intention to act. By dispatching a few battalions to Malta, without instructing Commissaries to go to the Levant and be- gin buying up the agricultural wealth of the country, we not only subjected our troops to the danger of their being brought into the field before supplies were ready, but also convinced the Russians that we could not be sincerely intending to en- Ministersde. gage in a war. Moreover, the slenderness of the termine to pro- addition which the Government proposed to make pose but a smallinerease tO our army tended to prolong the Czar’s fond con- ofthearmy. fidence in the weight and strength of the English Peace party ; and perhaps_this dangerous error was strength- 258 -TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap, XXII, ened if Baron Brunnow was able to tell him that in proposing to the Cabinet a material increase of our land forces the Duke of Newcastle stood almost alone. The Prime Minister’s continued persistency in the use of Continuance of hurtful language was another of the causes which hewrsimpru. still helped to keep the Czar blindfold. Lord Aber- dent language. deen abhorred the bare thought of war; and he would not have suffered his country to be overtaken by it, if the coming danger had been of such a kind that it could be warded off by hating it and shunning its aspect. But it is not by intemperate hatred of war, nor yet by shunning its aspect, that war is averted. Almost to the last, Lord Aberdeen mis- guided himself. His loathing of war took such a shape, that he could not and would not believe in it; and when at last the spectre was close upon him, he covered his eyes and refused tosee. Basing himself upon the thoughtless saying of a states- man, who had laid it down that there could be no war in Eu- rope when France and England were agreed, he seems to have imagined that although he was suffering himself to be drawn on and on into measures which were always becoming less and less short of war, still he could maintain peace by taking care to be always along with the French Emperor; and he so clung to the paradise created by a false maxim, that he could not be torn from it. He would not be roused from a dream which was sweeter than all waking thoughts; and even now, to any man to. whom he chanced to speak, he continued to say that there could not, there would not be war. Coming from a Prime Minister, such words as these did not fail to have a noxious weight with many who heard them. Baron Brunnow, we have seen, had looked deeper even at a much earlier period, and now again no doubt he took care to warn his master that Lord Aberdeen was under a passionate hatred of war which deprived him of his competence to speak in the name of his country; but by other channels the words of our Prime Minister were carried to the Emperor of Russia, and, being very welcome to him, and coinciding with his long cherished notions, they tend- ed to keep him in the perilous belief that Lord Aberdeen was speaking with knowledge, and that England, still clogged by her Peace Party, was unable to go to war. . Cuap. XXIII.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 259. CHAPTER XXIII. A NEW opportunity of making his way back to peace was The French 20W thrown away by the Czar. The exigencies of Emperor's let- a throne based upon the deeds of the 2nd of De- ter to the Czar, ‘is eember were always driving the French Emperor to endeavor to allay the remembrance of the past by creating a stir in Kurope and endeavoring to win celebrity. When Eu- vope was quiet, he was obliged for his life’s sake to become its -dlisturber; but when it was at war or threatened with war, he was willing, it seems, to take an exactly opposite method of attaining the required conspicuousness, for he was not a blood- thirsty nor even a very active-minded man; and there seems no good reason to doubt that, having brought Europe to the state in which it was at the close of January, he was sincere in the pacific step which he then took. At a moment when war was already kindled and seemed to be on the point of in- volving the great Powers, the odd vanity and the theatric bent which had so strangely governed his life, might easily make him wish to come upon the scene and bestow the blessing of peace upon the grateful, astonished nations. On the other hand, an English Minister would be careless of this kind of celebrity, and, so that peace could be restored to Europe, would be well pleased that the honor of the achievement should seem to belong to the French Emperor. ; There is no reason to doubt that the English Government assented to the somewhat startling plan under which the French Emperor conceived himself entitled to speak for the Queen of England as well as for himself, and certainly the li- cense, however strange it may appear, was in strict consist- ency with the spirit of the understanding which seems to have been established between the two Western Powers.! . On the 29th of January the French Emperor addressed an autograph letter to his ‘ good friend’ of All the Russjas. The letter in many parts of it was ably worded and moderate in its tone, but it was mainly remarkable for the language in which the French Emperor took upon himself to speak, and even to threaten war in the name of the Queen of England. After ? See the inferred purport of this understanding as stated ante, p. 216. 260 TRANSACTIONS WHICH (Cuar. XXII suggesting a scheme of pacification, he said to the Czar: ‘ Let ‘your Majesty adopt this plan, upon which the Queen of En- ‘gland and myself are perfectly agreed, and tranquillity will be ‘re-established and the world satisfied. There is nothing in ‘the plan which is unworthy of your Majesty—nothing which ‘can wound your honor; but if, from a motive difficult to un- ‘derstand, your Majesty should refuse this proposal, then ‘France as well as England will be compelled to leave to the ‘fate of arms and the chances of war that which might now be ‘decided by reason and justice.! The French Emperor per- mitted himself to write this at a time when, so far as is known, no threat like that which he chose to utter in the name of the Queen had been addressed by the English Cabinet to’ the Court of St. Petersburg. , With the feelings which might be expected from them, En- glish Ministers of State have generally been slow to use threat- ening words, and they have been chary, too, in putting for- ward the name of their Sovereign. Our Government could not have been willing that England should be thrust upon the attention of the world in a way which the too fastidious Court of St. Petersburg would be sure to regard as grotesque. No one can doubt the pain with which the members of Lord Aberdeen’s Cabinet must have seen the French Emperor come forward upon the stage of Europe, and publicly menace the Emperor of Russia in the name of their Queen. The process by which they were brought to suffer this is unknown to me. What seems probable is that a draft of the letter was submit- ted to them, accompanied with significant representations of the importance which the French Emperor attached to it, and that the Cabinet yielded to the pressure because it feared that resistance might chill the new alliance, and might. even per- haps cause it to be suddenly abandoned for an alliance between Russia and France. The letter proposed an armistice in order to leave open a free course for negotiation. It would seem that in a military point of view, an armistice for a limited period, commencing in the early days of February, could not have been inconvenient to a Sovereign whose main difficulty at that time lay in the immensegmarches which he had to effect within his own do- minions ; and, on the other hand, to any one acquainted with the French Emperor’s personal weakness, it was obvious that, by a little harmless play upon his vanity, Russia might hope to obtain a great diplomatic advantage, and to effect a decorous 1 * Annual Register,’ 1854. Cuapr. XXIII. | BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 261 escape from her troubles. But the Czar was not politic, and, instead of seizing the proffered occasion, he not only rejected the overture, but aggravated his refusal by an unwise allusion to the French disasters of 1812. In his quest after this sort of fame the French Emperor was Mission to st, NOt without rivals. We have'seen the share which Petersburg the English Peace Party had had in misleading the rom the En- . . : glish Peace | mperor of Russia, and tempting him to become a uika disturber by withdrawing the wholesome fear which deters a man from venturing upon outrage. Certain brethren of the Society of Friends, who had been prominent members of this Party, now thought it becoming or wise to proceed to St. Petersburg and request the Emperor of All the Russias to concur with them in preserving Europe from the calamity of war. A little later, and the Czar would have stamped in fury and driven from his sight any hapless aid-de-camp who had come to him with a story about a deputation from the English Peace Party, for the hour was at hand when his curses were about to fall heavy on the men who had led him on into all his troub- les by pretending that England was immersed in trade and re- solved to engage in no war.! But at this time his hope of seeing our Government held back by the Peace Party had not altogether vanished, and he resolved to give this strange mis- sion a genial welcome. Of course the political conversation between the booted Czar and the men of peace was sheer nothingness; but what fol- lowed shows the care with which Nicholas had studied the middle classes of England. When he thought that the first scene of the interlude had lasted long enough, he suddenly said to his prim visitors, ‘ By-the-by, do you know my wife?’ They . said they did not. The Czar presented them to the Empress. She charmed them with her kindly grace. They came away sorrowing to think that their wrong-headed countrymen in England should be seeking a quarrel with so good and well- meaning a man as friend Nicholas Romanoff, but perhaps what more than all else laid hold of their hearts was the thought that the Czar called his Empress so naturally by her dear home- ly title of wife. 5 ? 1 The scene of violence here prospectively alluded to will be mentioned hereafter,. It occurred in the autumn. 262 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XXIV: CHAPTER XXIV. WELCOME or unwelcome, the truth must be told. A huge Temper of the Obstacle to the maintenance of peace in Europe English an ob- was raised up by the temper of the English people. maintenance In public, men still used forms of expression imply- ef gece. ing that they would be content for England to lead a quiet life among the nations, and they still classed expecta- tions of peace amongst their hopes, and declared in joyous tones that the prospects of war were gloomy and painful; but these phrases were the time-honored canticles of a doctrine already discarded, and they who used them did not mean to deceive their neighbors, and did not deceive themselves. The English Their desire desired war; and perhaps it ought to be acknowl- for war. edged that there were many to whom war, for the sake of war, was no longer a hateful thought. Either the peo- ple had changed, or else there was hollowness in some of the professions which orators had made in their name. When by lapse of years the glory of the great war against Causes of the France had begun to fade from the daily thoughts akan of the people, they inclined to look more narrowly their feeling. than before into the origin of taxes, and were .not unwilling to hear that their burdens were the result of wars which might have been easily avoided. Moreover it chanced that from after Marlborough’s time downward, or at all events from after the period of Chatham’s ascendency, the wars in which England found herself engaged had been originated and . conducted for the most part under the auspices of the Tory party, and it followed naturally that the Whig or Liberal party, being in antagonism to the party which had long kept the country under arms, should charge itself with the duty of ex- pressing a just hatred of all wars which are needless or unjust. If speakers in the performance of this duty often used extray- agant or fanatical language, they did not perhaps mean to in- culcate much doctrine, but rather to display the vehemence of their hostility to the opposite faction. The applause which greeted these denunciations had the same meaning. On the other hand, the Tories declared that they did not yield to their adversaries in hatred of all needless wars; and thus for near forty years there was a chorus and an anti-chorus engaged in Cuar. XXIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 263 a continual chant, and denouncing wars in the abstract at times when no war seemed impending. ‘To men skimming the sur- face of English politics it was made to appear that the people had a rooted love of peace. These signs of a peaceful determination had increased in abundance after the great constitutional change which obliged the ruling classes to share their power with the people at large ; and thence it was inferred that the desire of England to remain at peace was not the mere whim of any administration or of any political party, but was based upon the solemn determina- tion of the whole people; and it has been seen that the Empe- ror Nicholas had deliberately founded his policy upon this be- lief. A deeper knowledge might have taught him that a fiery generous people is more quick to plunge into war than a cold, worldly, politic oligarchy, and that even if the policy of En- gland were as much under the control of the masses of the peo- ple as he believed it to be, there would be all the more likeli- hood of her being prone to take up arms, because in states which are much under the governance of the democratic prin- ciple a proposal to make war against the foreigner is often resorted to by one of the contending factions as a stratagem for baffling the others. But these truths lay below, and what _ appeared upon the surface of English politics was a sincere de- votion to the cause of peace. Over and over again it was laid down with the seeming concurrence of unanimous thousands, that war, if it were not for mere defense, was not only foolish, but was also in a high degree wicked. But the English can hardly ever be governed by a dogma; for although they are by nature wise in action, yet, being vehe- ment and careless in their way of applauding loud words, they encourage their orators and those also who address them in writing to be strenuous rather than wise; and the result is that these teachers, trying always to be more and more forcible, grow blind to logical dangers, and leap with headlong joy into the pit which reasoners call the Absurdum. Then, and not without joyous laughter, reaction begins. All England had been brought to the opinion that it was a wickedness to incur war without necessity or justice; but when the leading spirits of the Peace Party had the happiness of beholding this wholesome result, they were far from stop- ping short. They went on to make light of the very principles by which peace is best maintained; and although they were conscientious men, meaning to say and do what was right, yet, being unacquainted with the causes which bring about the fall of empires, they deliberately inculeated that habit of setting 264 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XXIV. comfort against honor, which historians call ‘corruption.’ They made it plain, as they imagined, that no war which was not engaged in for the actual defense of the country could ever be right ; but even there they took no rest, for they went on and on, and still on, until their foremost thinker reached the con- clusion that, in the event of an attack upon our shores, the in- vaders ought to be received with such an effusion of hospital- ity and brotherly love as could not fail to disarm them of their enmity, and convert the once dangerous Zouave into the valued friend of the family.!. Then, with great merriment, the whole English people turned round, and, although they might still be willing to go to the brink of other precipices, they refused to go farther toward that one. The doctrine had struck no root. It was ill suited to the race to whom it was addressed. The male cheered it, and forgot it until there came a time for test- ing it, and then discarded ‘it; and the woman, from the very first, with ler true and simple instinct, was quick to understand its value. She would subscr ibe, if her husband required it, to have the doctrine taught to charity children, but she would not suffer it to be taught to her own boy. So it proved barren. In truth, the English knew that they were a great and a free people, because their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers, and all the great ancestry of whom they come, had been men of war- like quality; and deeming it time to gainsay the teaching of the Peace Party, but not being skilled in dialectics and the use of words, they unconsciously came to think that it would be well to express a practical opinion of the doctrine by taking State offecling the first honest and fair opportunity of engaging in in the Spring war. Still, the conscience of the nation was sound, a ea and men were as well convinced as ever of the wick- edness of a war wrongly or wantonly incurred. They were in this mind: they would not go to war without believing that they had a good and a just cause, but it was certain that tid- ings importing the necessity of going to war for duty’s sake would be received with a welcome in England. Therefore, when the people gradually came to hear of the Effect of the fierce oppression attempted by Prince Mentscehi- pe imes Sig koff, and the wise, firm, moderate resistance of the pablic mind. ‘Turks, they believed that there might be coming in ' 1} Thave no copy of this curious pamphlet before me, but it has been quoted (1 believe by Lord Palmerston) in the House of Commons, and therefore the passage alluded to in the text might no doubt be found in Hansard. The writer, I remember, went. farther than is above stated. He argued that the French people would be so shamed by the.kindness shown to their troops that they would never rest until they had paid us a large pecuniary indemnity for any losses or inconvenience which the invasion may have caused. Cuar. XXIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 265 sight once more that very thing for which they longed in their hearts—namely, a just cause of war. And when at length the seemingly unequal conflict began, the bravery of the Turks on the Danube and the skill of their General quickly roused that sympathy which England hardly ever refuses to a valiant com- batant who is weaker than his foe; but when they came to know of the catastrophe of Sinope, and to hear of it as a slaugh- ter treacherously and stealthily committed upon their old ally by an enemy who had engaged to observe neutrality in the _Euxine,! they were inflamed with a desire to execute justice, and nothing was now wanting to fill the measure of their right- eous anger except a disclosure of the Czar’s cold scheme for the spoliation of the ‘ sick man’s’ house. But after all, and especially in questions of foreign policy, Still, in foreign the bulk ofa nation must lean for guidance upon affairs, the na public men; and unless it appear that there were guidance to Statesmen deserving the ear of the country who publiemen. —_ faithfully tried to make a stand against error and failed for want of public support, it is unfair to charge the fault . upon the people. There were two Statesmen high in office, and high in the confidence of the nation, who, more than most other men, were known to be attached to the cause of peace. To them every man looked who desired that his country should not be drawn into war without stringent need. The impression produced upon the Court of St. Petersburg by the heedless language of our Prime Minister has been al- ready described; but the effect which he wrought upon the public mind of England by remaining at the head of the Govern- Lord Aber. Mentis stillto be shown. Lord Aberdeen’s hatred Goat, of war was so honestly and piously entertained, and was, at the same time, so excessive and self-defeating, that in one point of view it had the character of a virtue, and in an- other it was more like disease. His feelings, no less than his opinions, turned him against all war; but against a war with Russia he was biased by the impressions of his early life, by the relation of mutual esteem which had long existed between the Emperor Nicholas and himself; and perhaps by a dim fore- sight of the perils which might be brought upon Europe by a forcible breaking up of the ties established by the Congress of Vienna and riveted by the Peace of Paris. In an early stage of the dispute, he resolved that he would not remain at the head of the Government unless he could maintain peace ; ' The erroneousness of this impression has been already shown. See ante. Wow. b— VM 266 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuav, XXIV: and he anxiously sought to choose a moment for making his stand against the farther progress toward war. Far from wishing to prolong his hold of power, he was always laboring to make out when, and on what ground, he could lay down the burden which oppressed him. Every day he passed his sure hour and a half in the Foreign Office, and came away more and more anxious perhaps, but without growing more clear-sight- ed. If he could ever have found the point where the road to peace diverged from the road to war, he would instantly have declared for peace; and, failing to carry the Government with him, would have joyfully resigned office, and for his deliverance would have offered up thanksgiving to Heaven. But his in- tellect, though not without high quality in it, was deficient in clearness and force. In troubled times it did not yield him light enough to walk by, and it had not the propelling power which was needed for pushing him into opportune action. In politics, though not in matters of faith, he wanted the sacred impulse which his Kirk is accustomed to call ‘the word of ‘quickening.’ Lord Clarendon’s polished dispatches so forced his approval, that he could never lay his hand upon one of them, and make it the subject of a ministerial crisis. Yet, day by day, without knowing it, the Prime Minister was assenting to a course of policy destined to end in a rupture. Lord Clar- endon’s pithy phrase was less applicable to the country at large than to the Prime Minister. It was strictly true that Lord Aberdeen drifted. He steadfastly faced toward peace, and was always being carried toward war. He remained at the head of the Government; and, the papers being withheld from Parliament, the country was led to imagine that all which it was possible to do or suffer for the sake of peace would be done and suffered by a Cabinet of which Lord Aberdeen was the chief. 7 But there was another member of the Cabinet who was supposed to hold war in deep abhorrence. Mr. Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and, since he was by virtue of his office the appointed guardian of the public purse, those pure and lofty principles which made him cling to peace were re-enforced by an official sense of the harm which war inflicts by its costliness. Now it happened that, if he was famous for the splendor of his eloquence, for his unaffected piety, and for his blameless life, he was celebrated far and wide for a more than common liveliness of conscience. He had once imagined it to be his duty to quit a Government, and to burst through strong ties of friendship and gratitude, by reason of a thin shade of difference on the subject of white Mr. Gladstone. Cuap. XXIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 267 or brown sugar. It was believed that, if he were to commit even a little sin, or to imagine an evil thought, he would in- stantly arraign himself before the dread tribunal which await- ed him in his own bosom; and that, his intellect being subtle and microscopic, and delighting in casuistry and exaggeration, he would be likely to give his soul a very harsh trial, and treat himself as a great criminal for faults too minute to be visible to the naked eyes of laymen. His friends lived in dread of his virtues as tending to make him whimsical and unstable, and the practical politicians, conceiving that he was not to be depended upon for party purposes, and was bent upon none but lofty objects, used to look upon him as dangerous — used to call him behind his back a good man—a good man in the worst sense of the term. In 1858, 1t seemed only too proba- _ ble that he might quit office upon an infinitely slight suspicion of the warlike tendency of the Government; but what appear- ed certain was, that if, upon the vital question of peace or war, the Government should depart by even a hair’s breadth from the right path, the Chancellor of the Exchequer would instant- ly refuse to be a partaker of their fault. He, and he before all other men, stood charged to give the alarm of danger; and there seemed to be no particle of ground for fearing that, like the Prime Minister, he would drift. The known watchfulness and alacrity of his conscience, and his power of detecting small germs of evil, led the world to think it impossible that he could be moving for months together in a wrong course without knowing it. Now, from the beginning of the negotiations until the final Lord Aberdeen rupture, Lord Aberdeen continued to be the Prime and Mr. Glad- "Minister, and Mr. Gladstone the Chancellor of the ed in office. Hxchequer. The result was that, during the ses- sion of 1853, and the autumn which followed it, the presence Effect ofthisin Of these two Ministers in the Cabinet was regarded paralyzing the as ‘a guarantee of the peaceful tendency of the Gov- efforts of those wer who wished to ernment; and when, after the catastrophe of Sinope, prevent a war. it became hardly possible to doubt that war was at hand, the continuing responsibility of these good men.seemed to dispense the most anxious lovers of peace from the duty of farther questioning; for if Lord Aberdeen continued to head the Ministry which was leading the country into war, people thought he must have attained the bitter certainty that war was needed; and, on the other hand, it was clear that Mr. Gladstone remaining in office, and taking it upon his conscience to prepare funds for the bloody strife, was giving to the pub- lic a sure guarantee that the enterprise in which he helped to 268 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XXIV. engage the country was blameless at the very least, and even perhaps pure and holy. It was thus that the conscience of the people got quieted. It was a hard task to have to argue that peace could be honestly and wisely maintained when Lord Aberdeen was levying war. None but a bold man could say that the war was needless or wicked whilst Mr. Gladstone was feeding it with his own hand. It was thus that, by the course which Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone had been taking, the efforts of those who loved peace were paralyzed. No doubt a cold retrospect, carried on with the light of the past, may enable a political critic to fix upon more than one occasion when, holding the opinions which they did, these two Ministers might have resolved to make a stand for peace; and it is believed that long before his death Lord Aberdeen saw this and grieved; but if any man will honestly recall the state of his own feelings and opinions in the year 1853, he will find perhaps that he himself at the time was carried down by the flood of events; and, when he has sub- mitted to this self-discipline, he will be better able to under- stand that others, though honest and able, might easily lose their footing. At all events, the errors of Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone, if errors they were, were only errors of judg- ment. The scrupulous purity of their motives has never been brought into question. But, if these were the causes which inclined the bulk of the The rnin of H0glish people to desire or to assent to the war, their cause — they hardly yield reasons sufficing to show why the bea eat lesser number of men, who honestly thought that grounds to peace ought to be maintained, should suffer them- Stand upon. selves to be overpowered, without making stand enough to prove that they clung to their old faith, and that England, however warlike, was, at all events, not of one mind. The hottest defenders of the war policy could hardly refuse to acknowledge that there was much semblance of reason on the side of their adversaries. No one could say that the interest which England had in the perfect independence of the Otto- man Empire was so obvious and so deep as to exclude all questioning ; and, even if a man were driven from that first ground, still, without being guilty of paradox, he might fairly dispute and say that the independence of the Sultan was not really bronght into peril by a form of words which, during some weeks, had received the approval of every one of the five great Powers. But, if these views were only plausible, there was another which was sound.. It could be fairly maintained that the in- Cuap. XXIV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 269 trusion of Russia into two provinces, lying far away on the southeastern frontiers of Austria, was no cause why England alone, nor why England and France together, should under- take to stand forward and perform, at their own charge and cost, a duty which attached upon Austria in the first place, and next upon Europe at large. Of course the actual and immediate success of any such Not for want Struggle for the maintenance of peace was griev- of oratorical ously embarrassed, in the way already shown, by ides the ‘course which had been taken by Lord Aber- deen and Mr. Gladstone; but it is not the custom of the En- glish to be utterly disheartened by political losses; and it hap- pened that outside the Government Offices the cause of peace was headed by two men who had been powerful in their time, and who retained the qualities of mind and body by which, in former years, they had gained a great sway. Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright were members of the House of Mr. Cobden COmmons. Both had the gift of a manly strenuous ooh eloquence, and their diction, being founded upon a English lore rather than upon shreds of weak Latin, went straight to the mind of their hearers.. Of these men the one could persuade, the other could attack; and, indeed, Mr. Bright’s oratory was singularly well qualified for preventing an erroneous acquiescence in the policy of the day ; for, besides that he was honest and fearless, besides that with a ringing voice he had all the clearness and force which resulted from his great natural gifts, as well as from his one-sided method of thinking, he had the advantage of being generally able to speak in a state of sincere anger. In former years, whilst - their minds were disciplined by the almost mathematical ex- actness of the reasonings on which they relied, and when they were acting in concert with the shrewd traders of the north who had a very plain object in view, these two orators. had shown with what a strength, with what a masterly skill, with what patience, with what a high courage they could carry a great scientific truth through the storms of politics. They had shown that they could arouse and govern the assenting thousands who listened to them with deli¢ht—that they could bend the House of Commons—that they could press their creed upon a Prime Minister, and put upon his mind so hard a stress that after a while he felt it to be a torture and a vio- lence to his reason to have to make stand against them. Nay, more. Each of these two gifted men had proved that he could go bravely into the midst of angry opponents, could show them their fallacies one by one, destroy their favorite theories be- 270 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar, XXIV. fore their very faces, and triumphantly argue them down. Now these two men were honestly devoted to the cause of peace. They honestly believed that the impending war with Russia was a needless war. There was no stain upon their names. How came it that they sank and were able to make no good stand for the cause they loved so well? The answer is simple. Upon the question of peace or war (the very question upon Reasons why Which more than any other, a man might well de- fhey were able sire to make his counsels tell) these two gifted men stand. had forfeited their hold upon the ear of the coun- try. They had forfeited it by their former want of modera- tion. It was not by any intemperate words upon the question of this war with Russia that they had shut themselves out from the counsels of the nation; but in former years they had adopted and put forward in their strenuous way some of the more extravagant doctrines of the Peace Party. In times when no war was in question, they had run down the practice of war in terms so broad and indiscriminate that they were understood to commit themselves toa disapproval of all wars not strictly defensive, and to decline to treat as defensive those wars which, although not waged against an actual invader of the Queen’s dominions, might still be undertaken by England in the performance of a European duty, or for the purpose of checking the undue ascendency of another Power. Of course the knowledge that they held doctrines of this wide sort dis- qualified them from arguing with any effect against the war then pending. A man can not have weight as an opponent of any particular war if he is one who is known to be against al- most all war. It is vain for him to offer to be moderate for the nonce, and to propose to argue the question in a way which his hearers will recognize. In vain he declares that for the sake of argument he will lay aside his own broad princi- ples and mimic the reasoning of his hearers. . Practical men know that his mind is under the sway of an antecedent de- termination which dispenses him from the more narrow but more important inquiry in which they are engaged. They will not give ear to one who is striving to lay down the con- clusions which ought, as he says, to follow from other men’s principles. He who altogether abjures the juice of the grape can not usefully criticize the vintage of any particular year ; and a man who is the steady adversary of wars in general upon broad and paramount grounds, will never be regarded as a sound judge of the question whether any particular war is wicked or righteous, nor whether it is foolish or wise. Cuar. XXIV] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. ont It must be added that there was another cause which tended to disqualify Mr. Bright from taking an effective part in the maintenance of peace. For one who would undertake a task of that kind at a time when warlike ardor is prevailing in the country, it is above all things necessary that he should be a statesman so truly attached to what men mean when they talk of their country, and so jealous of its honor, that no man could ascribe his efforts in the cause of peace to motives which a warlike and high-spirited people would repudiate. Mr. Bright sincerely desired the welfare of the traders and workmen in the United Kingdom; and if he desired the welfare of the other classes with less intensity, it may fairly be believed that to all he wished to see justice done; so, if this worthy dispo- sition of mind were equivalent to what a man calls his “love of his country,” no one could fairly say that Mr. Bright was without the passion. But, in another, and certainly the old — and the usual sense, a man’s love “of his country” is understood to represent something more than common benevolence toward the persons living within it. For if he be the citizen of an an- cient State blessed with freedom, renowned in arms, and hold- ing wide sway in the world, his love of his country means some- thing of attachment to the institutions which have made her what she is, means something of pride in the long suffering, and the battle, and the strife which have shed glory upon his countrymen in his own time, and upon their fathers in the time before him. It means that he feels his country’s honor to be a main term and element of his own content. It means that he is bent, upon the upholding of her dominion, and is so tem- pered as to become the sudden enemy of any man who, even though he be not an invader, still attempts to hack at her power. Now in this, the heathen but accustomed sense of the phrase, Mr. Bright would be the last to say that he was a lover of his country. He would rather, perhaps, acknowledge that, taking ‘his country’ in that sense, he hated it. Yet at a time when the spirit of the nation was up, no man could usefully strive to moderate or guide it unless his patriotism were be- lieved to be exactly of that heathen sort which Mr. Bright dis- approved. Thus by the nature of his patriotism, no less than by the immoderate width of his views on the lawfulness of wars, this powerful orator was so disabled as to be hindered from applying his strength toward the maintenance of peace. The country was impassioned, but it was not so mad as to be deaf to precious counsels; and a statesman who had shown by his past life that he loved his country in the ancient way, and that he knew how to contemplate the eventuality of war 249 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XXV. with a calm and equal mind, might have won attention for _ views which questioned the necessity of the war then threat- ened; and if in good time he had brought to bear upon his opinions a sufficing power and knowledge, he might have al- tered the policy of his country.!. But outside the Cabinet the real tenor of the negotiations of 1853 was still unknown, and, Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone consenting to remain mem- bers of a war-going Government, and Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright being disqualified for useful debate by the nature of their opinions, no stand could be made. By these steps, then, the English people passed from a seem- ing approval of the doctrines of the Peace Party to a state of warlike ardor; and it was plain that, if the Queen should send down to the Houses of Parliament a message importing war, the Royal appeal would be joyfully answered by an almost unanimous people. CHAPTER XXV. Wuen the English Parliament assembled on the 31st of Meeting of Par- January, there was still going on in Europe a sem- er blance of negotiation; but amongst men accustomed to the aspect of public affairs, there was hardly more than one who failed to see that France and England had gone too far to be able to recede, and that by the very weight of their power and its inherent duties, they were now at last drawn into war. The Queen's ‘This condition of things was fairly enough disclosed Speech. by the Queen’s Speech, and Parliament was asked. to provide for an increase of the military and naval forces with a view to give weight to the negotiations still pending. But the English Government was not suffered to forget its bond with the French Emperor, and the Prime Minister, whilst still indulging a hope of peace, consented to record and continue the error which had brought him to the verge of war. It _* This was in print before that curious and interesting confirmation of my statement—my statement of the relations between the Peace Party and their country—which Mr. Cobden has since given to the world. Mr. Cobden has said that at the time of the war, neither he nor Mr. Bright could win any at- tention to their views, and he added that he (Mr. Cobden) will never again try to withstand a warlike ardor once kindled, because, when a people are in- flamed in that way, they are no better than ‘mad dogs.’— Speech in the autumn of 1862. He sees no defect in the principles of a Peace Party which is to sus- pend its operations in times of warlike excitement. Cuap. XXV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 278 seems that for good reasons it was of some moment to the French Emperor to be signally named in the Queen’s Speech, and Lord Aberdeen again submitted to a form of words which carefully distinguished the posture of France and England from that of the four Powers. The Queen was advised to say: ‘I ‘have continued to act in cordial co-operation with the Em- ‘peror of the French, and my endeavors in conjunction with ‘my Allies to preserve and to restore peace between the con- ‘tending parties, although hitherto unsuccessful, have been un- ‘remitting.’ Like the similar paragraph which had marked the Royal The policy * >peech at the close of the preceding session, this which it indi- phrase, strange as it was, gave a true though some- arts what dim glimpse of the policy which was leading England astray. In principle, she was marching along with The separate all the rest of the four Powers; and yet, all the understanding : 5 : : with France While, she’ was engaged with the French Emperor Aeyidifferenee, 1. & Separate course of action. If the aims of Aus- of opinion be- tria and Prussia had been seriously at variance with er the Gan. those of the Western Powers, this difference might man Powers. have been a good reason for separate action on the part of France and England. But the contrary was true. So Unswerving eep was the interest of Austria in the cause, and resolve of Aus- so closely were her views approved by Prussia, tria (and Prus- sia supports that, although for several months France and En- her) to rid the gland had been pressing forward in a way which palities . of Russian seemed to endanger the coherence of the quadruple SEQOPEs union, still even this dangerous course had hitherto failed to destroy the unanimity of the four Powers. If the French Emperor sought to use his alliance with England as a means of strengthening his hold over France, and if England was beginning to love the thought of war for wav’s sake, Aus- tria, from’ motives of a higher and more cogent sort (for she saw her interests vitally touched, and her safety threatened) was eager and determined to take such steps as might be needed for delivering the Principalities. Prussia agreed with her. It was nothing but the impatience and forwardness of France and England which relieved Austria from the necessi- ty of taking the lead; for the wrong which had to be redress- ed was one from which she, of all the great Powers, was the most a sufferer, and she had the concurrence of Prussia, not only in regard to the existing state of things, but even as to the ulterior objects of the war which her resolve might bring upon Germany. The proofs of all this abound. By the repeated words of M 2 274 TRANSACTIONS WHICH (Cuap. XXV. Proofs of this. PCSponsible statesmen, by dispatches, by collective drawn from notes, by protocols, by solemn treaty of offensive - set icthe 2ud detensive alliance against Russia, by peremp- Rnesnts tory summons addressed to the Czar, and, finally Speech. heii ec (so far as concerns Austria), by the application of force, the German Powers disclosed and executed their poli- cy ; and the policy which they disclosed and executed was the same policy as had been avowed by the Western Powers. It has been seen that in that early period of the troubles, when the Czar was but beginning to cross the Pruth, Austria took upon herself to endeavor to form a league for forcing the Czar to relinquish the Principalities ; and, from that hour down to the time when Nicholas gave way and re-entered his own do- minions, her efforts to bring about this end were unceasing and restless. Of the spirit in which Austria was acting through all the early stages of the negotiations, many a proof has been already given. With time, her impatience of the Czar’s intrusion upon her southern frontier increased and increased. It is true that she did not desire war. She anxiously wished to avoid it. She wished, if it were possible, to achieve the end withont war, but to achieve it she was resolved; and, if a vestige of the me- diating character which had belonged to her in the summer of 1853, or her legitimate anxiety to spare the Czar’s personal feelings, was a motive which tended to soften her language, it did not deflect her policy. Count Buol declared that, although in treating with Russia, ‘more management of terms’! was re- quired from Austria than from the Western Powers, the ob- jects sought by all the four Powers were the same, and that they ought to be compassed by ‘a general concordance in the ‘way of putting them forward.’? But even the notion of us- ing a gentler form of expression than the one employed by the Western Powers was quickly abandoned, and Austria found no difficulty in adopting the exact words of the col- lective Note framed by Lord Clarendon in concert with the - French Government. So anxious was Austria to remain on the same ground with the rest of the four Powers, that she came into every term of the firm and wise scheme of action laid down by Lord Clarendon on the 16th of November,?® and ‘bitterly offended the Czar by agreeing, at Lord Clarendon’s instance, that the Porte should not be even asked to accept any condition which it had already rejected, and by affirming the determination of the four Powers to intervene in any set- tlement of the dispute between Russia and Turkey. ! «astern Papers,’ part vii., p.231. ° Ibid.,p.278. ° Ibid., pp. 238, 258. Cuar.XXV.] + BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 275 Prussia also gave her unreserved adhesion to the plan of action laid down by Lord Clarendon, and to the measures re- sulting from it.1. By the Protocol of the 5th of December, 1853,? both Austria and Prussia joined with the Western Pow- ers in declaring that the existence of Turkey in the limits as- signed to it by existing treaties was one of the necessary con- ditions of the European equilibrium. By the Protocol of the 13th of January, the four Powers re- corded their approval of the terms agreed to by the Turkish Government, and resolved to subinit them to the Court of St. Petersburg. At the very time when the English Government were framing the Speech from the throne, which ostentatious- ly separated France and England from the rest of the four Powers, the two great Courts of Germany were sending back Count Orloff and Baron Budberg to St. Petersburg, not only with a refusal on their part to give any engagement to stand neutral, but with a plain avowal that they intended to remain faithful to the principles which the four Powers had adopted in concert. Prussia told Baron Budberg that she should have to devise means without Russia for maintaining the equilibri- um of Europe. In significant words, the Emperor Francis Jo- seph told Count Orloff that he should have to be guided by the interests and the dignity of his Empire. It is said that by the tidings which forced him to know that he was alienated from the Austrian Emperor the Czar was wounded deep. He had conceived a strong affection for Fran- cis Joseph, and wherever he went he carried with him a small statuette which recalled to-his mind the features of the youth- ful Kaiser.. It would seem that his affection was of the kind which a loving and yet stern father bears his son, for it was joined with a sense of right to exact a great deference to his will. Nicholas had been strangely slow to believe that Fran- cis Joseph could harbor the thought of opposing him in arms, and when at last the truth was forced upon him, he desired that the marble should be taken from his sight. But he did not, they say, speak in anger. When he had spoken, he cover- ed his face with his hands and was wrung with grief. What we are showing just now is the complete union of opinion which was existing between England and the two great Courts of Germany on the 31st of January, 1854, and in order to thisewe have already referred to a variety of diplomat- ic transactions coming down to the time in question; but the policy of the courts of Vienna and Berlin at the close of the ? «Kastern Papers,’ part ii., p, 263. ? Thid., p. 296. 276 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [CHapr. XXV. month of January is to be inferred of course from the transac- tions which followed this date, as weil as from those which preceded it; and therefore it will be convenient to go forward a little in advance of the general progress of the narrative, in order to bring under one view the grounds which support our proposition. Day by day the joint pressure of the four Powers became Proofs drawn More cogent. By the Protocol of the 2nd of Feb- from transac- yyary the four Powers unanimously rejected the ons subse- Bate ° quent tothe | counter-propositions made by Russia. On the 14th Queen's Speech. of March both Austria and Prussia addressed cir- culars to the Courts of the German Confederation, in which they pointed out that the interests in question were essentially German interests, and that the active co-operation of Germany might be needed. On the 18th of March the King of Prussia asked his Chamber for an extraordinary credit of thirty mil- lion of thalers, and he at the same time declared that he would not swerve from the principles established by the Vienna Con- ference, and would faithfully protect every member of the Con- federation who, at an earlier moment than Prussia, might be called on to draw the sword for-the defense of German inter- ests. Nor were these bare words. Austria, it has been already said, was so placed that, whatever dangers she might draw upon her other frontiers, she could act with irresistible press- ure upon the invader of the Principalities. On the 6th and 22nd of February she re-enforced her army on the frontier of Wallachia by 50,000 men, and thus placed the Russian army of occupation completely at her mercy. On the day when she sent that last re-enforcement into the Banat, she had grown so impatient of the farther continuance of the Russians in the Principalities that she actually pressed France and England to summon Russia to quit the Principalities under pain of a dec- laration of war, and undertook to support their summons.} Prussia was approving, and on the 25th Baron Manteuffel wrote to Count Arnim at Vienna ‘on the subject of the more ‘decided policy which it was supposed the Austrian Govern- ‘ment was about to adopt in the affairs of the East, and ex- ‘pressed the satisfaction of the Prussian Government at the ‘interests of Germany on the Danube being likely to be so ‘svarmly espoused.’? On the 2nd of March the French Em- peror had so little doubt of the concurrence of Austria and Germany, that he announced it in his speech from the throne. 1 ¢Kastern Papers,’ part vii., p. 53. ? Thid., p. 64. Cuar. XXV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 20s ‘Germany,’ said he, ‘has recovered her independence, and has ‘looked freely to see whither her true interests led her. Aus- ‘tria especially, who can not see with indifference the events ‘ going on, will join our alliance, and will thus come to confirm ‘the morality and justice of the war which we undertake. We ‘go to Constantinople with Germany.’ On the 20th of March the four Powers were so well agreed that, when Greece sought to make a diversion in favor of Rus- sia, the representatives of Austria, Prussia, France, and En- gland all joined in a collective Note which called upon the Greek Government in terms approaching menace to give way _ to the demands of the Porte. On the very day which followed the English declaration of war, the Emperor of Austria ap- pointed the Archduke Albert to the command of the forces on the frontier of Wallachia, and at the same time the ‘Third ‘Army’ was put upon the war footing. A little later! the Em- peror of Austria ordered a new levy of 95,000 men for the de- fense of his frontiers. Later still, but within one day? of the time when France and England were making their alliance, Austria and Prussia joined with France and England in a Pro- tocol which not only recorded the fact that the hostile step then just taken by France and England was ‘supported by ‘ Austria and Prussia as being founded in right,’ but went on to declare that ‘at that solemn moment the Governments of “the four Powers remained united in their object of maintain- ‘ing the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, of which the fact of ‘the evacuation of the Danubian Principalities is and will re- ‘main one of the essential conditions,’ and that ‘ the territorial ‘integrity of the Ottoman Empire is and remains the sine qud ‘non condition of every transaction having for its object the ‘re-establishment of peace between the belligerent Powers.’ Finally, the Protocol stipulated that none of the ‘four Powers ‘should enter into any definitive arrangement with the Impe- ‘rial Court of Russia which should be at variance with the ‘principles declared by the Protocol without first deliberating ‘thereon in common.’* On the 20th of April Austria and Prussia contracted with each other an offensive and defensive alliance, by which they guaranteed to each other all their respective possessions, so that an attack upon the territory of one should be regarded by the other as an act of hostility against his own territory, and engaged to hold part of their forces in perfect readiness for war. By the Second Article they declared that they stood 1 May 15th. ? April 9th, 1854. 8 “Eastern Papers,’ part vili., p. 2. 278 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar, XXV., ‘engaged to defend the rights and interests of Germany against ‘all and every injury, and to consider themselves bound ac- ‘cordingly for the mutual repulse of every attack on any part ‘whatsoever of their territories; likewise also in the case ‘where one of the two may find himself in understanding with © ‘the others obliged to advance actively for the defense of Ger- ‘man interests.”! By the Additional Article they declared ‘that the indefinite ‘continuance of the occupation of the territories on the Lower ‘Danube under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Porte by im- ‘perial Russian troops would endanger the political, moral, and ‘material interests of the whole German Confederation, as also ‘of their own States, and the more so as Russia extends her ‘warlike operations on Turkish territory ;? and then went on to stipulate ‘that the Austrian Government should address a ‘communication to the Russian Court with the object of ob- ‘taining from the Emperor of Russia the necessary orders for ‘ putting an immediate stop to the farther advance of his armies ‘upon the Turkish territory, as also to request of His Imperial ‘Majesty sufficient guarantees for the prompt evacuation of ‘the Danubian Principalities, and that the Prussian Govern- ‘ment should again in the most energetic manner support ‘these communications.’ Finally, the high contracting parties agreed that, ‘if, contrary to expectation, the answer of the ‘Russian Court should not be of a nature to give them entire ‘satisfaction, the measures to be taken by one of the contract- ‘ing parties according to the terms of Article II. signed on ‘that day, would be on the understanding that every hostile ‘attack on the territory of one of the contracting parties should ‘be repelled with all the military forces at the disposal of the ‘ other.’2 Of the intent and the meaning of this treaty and the use which Austria and Prussia were about to make of it no doubt could exist. Failing the peremptory summons which was to be addressed to Russia, the forces of Austria alone were to execute the easy task of expelling the troops of the Czar from the Principalities, and, in order to withstand the vengeance which this step might provoke, Austria and Prussia together stood leagued. . By the Protocol of the 23rd of:May the four Powers de- clared the Anglo-French treaty and the Austro-Prussian treaty bound the parties in the relative situations to which they ap- plied to secure the same common object, namely, the evacua- ' ¢Kastern Papers,’ part ix., p. 3. ? Tbid., part x. Cuap. XXV.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 279 tion of the Principalities and the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.! Now the mind and the solemn determination of Austria and Prussia being such as are shown by the Protocol of the 9th and the treaty of the 20th April, where was there such a difference of opinion—where was there even such a shadow of a difference—as to justify the Western States in pushing forward and separating themselves from the rest of the four Powers? The avowed principles and objects of the four Pow- ers were exactly the same. If they had acted together, the very weight of their power would have given them an almost judicial authority, and would.have enabled them to. enforce the cause of right without wounding the pride of the disturb- er, and without inflicting war upon Europe. Was Austria backward? Was she so little prone to action that it was necessary for the Western Powers to move to the front and fight her battles for her? The reverse is the truth. The Western Powers indeed were more impatient than Ger- many was, to go through the forms which were necessary for bringing themselves legally into a state of war, but for action of a serious kind they were not yet ready. Whilst they were only preparing, Austria was applying force. On the 3rd of June, with the full support of Prussia, she summoned the Em- peror Nicholas to evacuate the Principalities. Her summons was the summons of a Power having an army on the edge of the province into which the Russian forces had been rashly extended. Such a summons was a mandate. The Czar could not disobey it. He could not stand in Wallachia when he was called upon to quit the province by a power which had assem- bled its forces upon his flank and rear. He sought indeed to make terms, but the German Powers were peremptory. On the 14th Austria entered into a conwention with the Porte, which not only legalized her determination to drive the Rus- sian forces from the Principalities, and to occupy them with her own troops, but which formally joined Austria in an alli- ance with the Porte against Russia; for, by the Ist Article of the convention, the Emperor of Austria ‘engages to exhaust ‘all the means of negotiation and all other means to obtain ‘the evacuation of the Danubian principalities by the foreign ‘army which occupies them, and even to employ, in case they ‘are required, the number of troops necessary to attain this ‘end.’? And, since Russia could not invade European Turkey by land without marching through the Principalities, this un- ' ‘Eastern Papers,’ part ix., p. 1. ? Tbid., part xii. 280 TRANSACTIONS WHICH. [Cuap. XXV.: dertaking by Austria involved an engagement to free the Sul- tan’s land frontiers in Europe from Russian invasion. Exact- ly at the same time,! Austria and Prussia addressed notes to the Powers represented at the Conference of Bamberg, in which the liberation of the commerce and navigation of the Danube was held out to Germany as the object to be attained. Austria was upon the brink of war with Russia, was pre- The time when paring to take forcible possession of the Principali- the inserests Of ties, and had dispatched an officer to the English Prussia began Hlead-Quarters with a view to concert a joint to divide them 78 = fromthe West. SCheme of military operations, when the Czar at ern Powers. Jength gave way, and abandoned the whole of the territory which, under the nauseous description of a‘ material ‘guarantee,’ had become the subject of war. Other causes, as will be seen, were conducing to this result, but none were so cogent as the forcible pressure which Austria had exerted, by first assembling forces in the Banat, and then summoning the Czar to withdraw from the invaded provinces.- | Of course, when the object which called forth the German Powers was attained, and when it transpired (as it did at the same time) that the Western Powers were resolved to aban- don the common field of action, and to undertake the invasion by sea of a distant Russian province, inaccessible to Austria and Prussia, then at last, and then for the first time, the Ger- man Powers found that their interests were parting them from the great maritime States of the West, for in one and the same week they were relieved from the grievance which was their motive for action, and deprived of all hope of support from the From firstto Western Powers; but it is certain that from the last Austria moment when the Czar first seized the Principali- and Prussia ° . . never swerved ties, to that in which he recrossed the Pruth, the from their re- determination of Austria to put an end to the in- the Czar'sre- trusion was never languid, and was always increas- vie pet ing in force. It is certain, also, that up to the time palities. when the relinquishment of the Principalities he- gan, there was no defection on the part of Prussia,” and that 1 14th and 16th of June. 2 Prussia began to hang back, it seems, on about the 21st of July, ‘ East~- ern Papers,’ part xi., p.1; and this was exactly the time when her interests counseled her to do so, for by that day she knew that the deliverance of the Principalities was secured and in process of execution, and had also no doubt learned of the determination of the Western Powers to move their forces to the Crimea, thereby uncovering Germany. Austria, with similar motives for separation, was less inclined to part from the Western Powers. See her Note of the 8th August, 1854, and the various diplomatic transactions in which she took part down to the close of the war. Cuar. XXVI.J BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 281 the minor States of Germany, fully alive to the importance of a struggle which promised to free the great outlet of the Dan- abe from Russian dominion, were resolved to support Austria and Prussia with the troops of the Confederation. As soon as the Principalities were relinquished by the Czar they were occupied by Austrian troops, in pursuance of the convention with the Porte; and thus the outrage, which during twelve months had disturbed the tranquillity of Europe, was then at last finally repressed. CHAPTER XXVI. For the sake of bringing under one view the course of ac- tion followed by the German powers, down to the moment when their object was achieved by the deliverance of the Prin- cipalities, it has been necessary, as we have said, to go forward in advance of the period reached by the main thread of the narrative. The subject thus quitted for a moment and now resumed, is the policy which was disclosed by the English Gov- ernment upon the opening of Parliament. Distinct from the martial ardor already kindled in England, spirit of war. there had sprung up amongst the people an almost like adventure romantic craving for war like adventure, and this in England. feeling was not ‘slow to reach the Cabinet. Now, without severance from the German Powers there could plainly be little prospect of adventure; for, besides that the German monarchs desired to free the Pr incipalities with as little resort to hostilities as might be compatible with the attainment of the end, it was almost certain that the policy of keeping up the perfect union and co-operation of the four Powers would pre- vent war by its overwhelming force. Like the power of the law, it would operate by coercion, and not by clangor of arms. This was a merit, but it was a merit fatal to its reception in England. The popularity of such a policy was nearly upon the The bearing of Same modest level as the popularity of virtue. All this spirit up- whose volitions were governed by the imagined on the policy of the Govern. Tupture of freeing Poland, or destroying Cronstadt, oa. and lording it with our fi ig in the Baltic; or taking 1 20th July, 1854. The relinquishment of the Principalities virtually be- gan on the 26th of June—the day when the siege of Silistria was raised, and before the end of July the Russian forces had quitted the capital of Walia- chia. On the 2nd of August they repassed the Pruth. 282 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XXVIL command of the Euxine, and sinking the Russian fleet under ~ the guns of Sebastopol; all who meant to raise Circassia and eut off the Muscovite from the glowing South by holding the Dariel Pass, and those also who dwelt in fancy upon deeds to be done on the shores of the Caspian ; all these and many more saw plainly enough that separation from the German Powers and alliance with the new Bonaparte was the only road to ad- . venture. Lord Aberdéen was not one of these; but it was his fate to act as though he were. He was not without a glim- mering perception that the firmly-maintained union of the four Powers meant peace ;! but he saw the truth dimly, and, there being a certain slowness in his high intellectual nature, he was not so touched by his belief as to be able to make it the guide of his action. He seems to have gone on imagining that, con- sistently with the maintenance of a perfect union of the four Powers, there might be a separate and still more perfect union between two of them, and that this kind of alliance within al- liance was a structure not fatal—nay, even perhaps conducive to— peace. And after all, England was not free. She was bound to the England was French Emperor. No treaty of alliance had been under engage- sjoned, but the understanding disclosed in the sum- ments with the - ° French Empe- Mer of the year before was still riveted upon the a i members of the English Government. .They had been drawn into a weighty engagement in 1853, and now they had to perform it. In the midst of perfect concord between her and her three allies, England had to stand forward with one of them in advance of the rest, and thus ruin that security for the maintenance of peace which depended upon the united action of the four great Powers. As the price of his consent- ing to join reluctant France in an alliance with Turkey, the French Emperor was justly entitled to insist on the other terms: of the bond, and not only to be signally coupled with England in a course of action which was to separate her from the great German States, but to have it blazoned out to the world be- forehand that, distinctly-from the concord of the four Rowers, the Queen of England and he were acting together. The Royal Speech of January, 1854, was as clear in this as the Speech of the previous August. Both disclosed a separate un- derstanding with the French Emperor. In both, as any one could see who was used to state writings, the mark was set upon England with the same branding-iron. To a man looking back upon the past, it seems strange that * 129 Hansard, p. 1650. Cuar. XXVI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 283 a Cabinet of English statesmen could have been led to adopt this singular policy. It would seem that with many of the Into thispolicy Cabinet the tendency of the measures which they the bulk of the : Clue : 4 Cabinet drift, Were sanctioning was ‘concealed from them by the ed. gentleness of the incline on which they moved ; and if there were some of them who had a clearer view of their motives, it must be inferred that they acted upon grounds not yet disclosed to the world. Of course, what the welfare of the State required was a ministry which shared and honored the public feeling without being so carried down by it as to lose the statesman’s power of understanding and controlling events. But this was not given. Of the bulk of the Cabinet, and pos- sibly of all of them except one, Lord Clarendon’s pithy phrase was the true one. They drifted. Wishing to control events, they were controlled by them. They aimed to go in one di- rection, but, lapsing under pressure of forces external and mis- understood, they always went in the other. The statesman who went his own way was one whose share The Minister 12 the governance of events was not much known. who went his He was supposed to be under a kind of ostracism. Boats He had not been banished from England nor even from the Cabinet; but, holding oftice under a Prime Minister whose views upon foreign policy were much opposed to his own, and relegated to duties connected with the peaceful ad- ministration of justice, it seemed to the eye of the common ob- server that for the time he was annulled; and the humorous stories which floated about Whitehall went to show that the deposed Lord of Foreign Affairs had consented to forget his former greatness and to accept his Home Office duties in a spirit of half-cynical, half-joyous disdain, but without the least discontent. And in truth he had no ground for ill humor. In politics he was without vanity. What he cared for was power, and power he had. Indeed, circumstanced as he then was, he must have known that one of the main conditions of his strength was the general belief that he had none. The light of the past makes it easy to see that the expedient of trying to tether him down in the Home Office would allevi- ate his responsibility and increase his real power. To those who know any thing of Lord Palmerston’s intellectual power, of his boldness, his vast and coneentrated energy, his instinct for understanding the collective mind of a body of men and of a whole nation, and, above all, his firm, robust will; nay, even to those who only know of his daring achievements—achieve- ments half peaceful, half warlike, half righteous, half violent in many lands and on many a sea—the notion of causing him to 284 ‘TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XXVI be subordinated to Lord Aberdeen in Foreign Affairs seems hardly more sound than a scheme providing that the greater shall be contained in the less. Statesmen on the Continent would easily understand this, for they had lived much under the weight of his strenuous nature; but at that time he had not been much called upon to apply his energies to the domes- tic affairs of England. Besides, he had been more seen in his own country than abroad, and for that very reason he was less known, because there was much upon the mere outside which tended to mask his real nature. His partly Celtic blood, and perhaps too in early life his boyish consciousness of power, had given him a certain elation of manner and bearing which kept him for a long time out of the good graces of the more fastidious. part of the English world. The defect was toned down by age, for it lay upon the surface only, and in his inner nature there was nothing vulgar nor unduly pretending. Still, the defect made people slow—made them take forty years—to recognize the full measure of his intellectual strength. More- over, the English had so imperfect a knowledge of the stress which he had long been putting upon foreign Governments, that the mere outward signs which he gave to his countrymen at home—his frank speech, his offhand manner, his ready ban- ter, his kind, joyous, beaming eyes—were enough to prevent them from accustoming themselves to look upon “him as a man of stern purpose. Upon the whole, notwithstanding his Eu- ropean fame, it was easy for him at this time to escape grave attention in England. He was not a man who would come to a subject with which he was dealing for the first time with any great store of pre- conceived opinions, but he wrote so strenuously—he always, they say, wrote standing—and was apt to be so much struck with the cogency of his own arguments, that by the mere process of framing dispatches, he wrought himself into strong convictions, or rather perhaps into strong resolves; and he clung to these with such a lasting tenacity, that, if he had been a solemn, austere personage, the world would have accused him of pedantry. Like most gifted men who evolve their thoughts with a pen, he was very clear, very accurate. Of every subject which he handled gravely he had a tight, iron grasp. With- out being inflexible, his will, it has been already said, was pow- erful, and it swung with a great momentum in one direction until, for some good and sound reason, it turned and swung in another. He pursued one object at a time without being dis- tracted by other game. All that was fanciful or for any reason unpractical, all that was the least bit too high for him, or the Cuar. XXVIL] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 285 least bit too deep for him, all that lay, though only by a little, beyond the immediate future with which he was dealing, he utterly drove from out of his mind; and his energies, con- densed for the time upon some object to which they could be applied with effect, were brought to bear upon it with all their full volume and power. So, during the whole period of his reign at the Foreign Office, Lord Palmerston’s method had been to be very strenuous in the pursuit of the object which might be needing care at any given time, without suffering himself to be embarrassed by what men call a‘ comprehensive’ view of our foreign policy; and, although it was no doubt his concentrative habit of mind and his stirrmg temperament which brought him into this course of action, he was much supported in it by the people at home; for, when no enterprise is on foot, the bulk of the English are prone to be careless of the friend- ship of foreign States, and are often much pleased when they | are told that by reason of the activity of their Foreign Secre- tary they are without an ally in Europe. Other statesmen had been accustomed to think that the prin- ciple which ought in general to determine the closeness of our relations with for eign States was ‘community of interests and that in proportion as this principle was departed from, under the varied impulses of philanthropy or other like mo- tives, disturbance, isolation, and danger would follow; but Lord Palmerston had never suffered this maxim to interfere with any special object which he might chance to have in hand at the moment, nor even with his desire to spread abroad the blessings of constitutional government. As long as Lord Gray was at the head of the Government the energy of the Foreign Office was kept down, and even aft- er the first five years of Lord Melbourne’s Administration the disruption toward which it was tending had made so little way, that when, in 1840, the Ottoman Empire was threatened with ruin by France and her Egyptian ally, Lord Palmerston, with a majority of only two or three in thé House of Commons , but having a bold heart and a firm, steady hand, had been able to gather up the elements of the great alliance of 1814, and to prevent a European war by the very might, and power, and swiftness with which he executed his policy; but at the end of eleven more years,! when his career at the Foreign Office 1 It is not forgotten that during a large portion of this last period Lord Aberdeen was at the Foreign Office, but he was of course much bound by what his predecessors had been doing before him, and, speaking roughly, it may be said that from the spring of 1835 until the close of 1841, our foreign policy bore the impress of Lord Palmerston’s mind. In the period between 286 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XXVI- was drawing to a close, his energy had cleared a space round him, and he seemed to be left standing alone. His system by that time had fairly disclosed its true worth. Pursued with great vigor and skill, it had brought results cor- responding with the numerous aims of its author, but corre- sponding also with his avowed disregard of a general guiding principle. Without breaking the general peace of Europe, it had produced a long series of diplomatic enterprises, pushed on in most instances to a successful issue; but, on the other hand, it had ended by making the Foreign Office an object of distrust, and in that way withdrawing England from her due place in the composition of the European system ; for the good old safe clew of ‘community of interests’ being visibly discard- ed, no Power, however closely bound to us by the nature of things, could venture to rely upon our friendship. States whose interests in great European questions were exactly the same as our own, States which had always looked to the wel- fare and strength of England as main conditions of their own safety, found no more favor with us than those who consumed much of their revenue in preparing implements for the slaugh- ter of Englishmen and the sinking of English ships. They were therefore obliged to shape their policy upon the suppo- sifion that any slight matter in which the Foreign Office might chance to be interesting itself at the moment—nay, even a dif- ference of opinion upon questions of internal government (and this, be it remembered, was an apple which could always be thrown) would be enough to make England repulse them. From this cause, perhaps, more than from any other, there had sprung up in Germany that semblance of close friendship with the Court of St. Petersburg which had helped to allure the Czar into dangerous paths. From the Emperor Nicholas Lord Palmerston was. cut off not only by differences arising out of questions on which the policy of Russia and of England might naturally clash, but also because he was looked upon as the promoter of doctrines which the Court of St. Petersburg was accustomed to treat as revolutionary. Even to Austria, although we were close bound to her by common interests, although there was no one nation- al interest which tended to divide us from her, he had in this way become antagonistic. He had too much lustiness of mind, too much simplicity of purpose to be capable of living on terms of close intelligence with the philosophical statesmen of Ber- lin. To the accustomed foreign policy of French statesmen— November 1830, and the autumn of 1834, it was much governed by the then Prime Minister, Lord Gray. Cuap. XXVI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 287 in other words, to the France that he had been used to encoun- ter in the Foreign Office—he was adverse by very habit. He spurned the whole invention of the French Republic. But his favorite hatred of all was his hatred of the House of Bourbon.! In short, by the Ist of December, 1851, though still at the For- eign Office, he had become isolated in Europe. But fortune smiles on bold men. ‘The next night Prince Louis Bonaparte and his fellow venturers destroyed the French republic, super- seded the Bourbons, and suppressed France. | Plainly this Prince and Lord Palmerston were men who could act togeth- er—could act together until the Prince should advise himself to deceive the English Minister. Not longer: not an hour be- yond the time when the momentous promise which was made —if I mistake not—before the events of December, should re- main unbroken. So, when the Czar began to encroach upon the Sultan, there was nothing that could so completely meet Lord Palmerston’s every wish as an alliance between the two Western Powers, which should toss France headlong into the English policy of upholding the Ottoman Empire; and the price of this was a price which—far from grudging—he would actually delight to pay; for, desiring to have the Governments of France and England actively united together for an English object, desir- ing to prevent a revival of the French republic, and, above all, to prevent a restoration of the House of Bourbon, he was only too glad to be able to strengthen the new Emperor’s hold upon France by exalting his personal station, and giving him the support of a close, separate, and published alliance with the Queen of England. And, in regard to the dislocation which such a new policy might work, he seems not to have set so high a value upon the existing framework of the European system as to believe that its destruction would be a portentous evil. If he thought it an evil at all, he thought it one which a strong man might repair. He yet lives, and now this very task is upon him. He meets it without suffering himself to be distracted by the remnant of any old illusion. He meets it, too, as becomes him, without shrinking or fear. A resolute people stand round him. Upon the issue of this, his last and mightiest labor, his fame, he well knows, will have to rest. Lord Palmerston had been at the head of the Foreign Office during so many years of his life, and he had brought to bear’ upon its duties an activity so restless, and (upon the whole) so much steadfastness of purpose, that the more recent foreign ' This feeling probably drew its origin from the business of the ‘Spanish Marriages.’ . ; 288 TRANSACTIONS WHICH ~ [CHap. XXVI. policy of England, whether it had been right or whether it had been wrong, was in him almost incarnate. It was obvious therefore that, whilst he was in the Cabinet, he would always be resorted to for counsel upon foreign affairs by any of his colleagues who were not divided from him by strong differ- ence of opinion, by political antagonism, or by personal dislike. Again, it was scarcely wise to believe that the relations which had subsisted between Lord Palmerston and the President of the French Republic would be closed by the fact that they had led to Lord Palmerston’s dismissal from the Secretaryship of Foreign Affairs. On the contrary, it was to be inferred that communications of a most friendly kind would continue to pass between the French Emperor and an English Minister who had suffered for his sake; and the very same manliness of dis- position which would prevent him from engaging in any thing like an underhand intrigue against his colleagues, would make him refuse to sit dumb when, in words brought him fresh from the Tuileries, an ambassador came to talk to him of the Kast- ern Question, came to tell him that the new Emperor had an unbounded confidence in his judgment, wished to be governed by his counsels, and, in short, would dispose of poor France as the English minister wished. Here, then, was the real bridge by which French overtures of the more secret and delicate sort would come from over the Channel. Here was the bridge by which England’s accept- ance or rejection of all such overtures would go back to France. Thus, from the ascendency of his strong nature, from his vast experience, and from his command of the motive-power which he could bring at any moment from Paris, Lord Palmerston, even so early as the spring of 1853, was the most puissant member of Lord Aberdeen’s Cabinet; and when, with all these sources of strength, he began to draw support from a people growing every day more and more warlike, he gained a com- plete dominion. If, after the catastrophe of Sinope, his col- leagues had persevered in their attempt to resist him, he would have been able to overthrow them with ease upon the meeting of Parliament. Therefore, in the transactions which brought on the war, Lord Palmerston was not drifting. He was joyfully laying his course. Whither he meant to go, thither he went; whith- er he chose that others should tend, thither they bent their re- luctant way. _If some Immortal were to offer the surviving members of Lord Aberdeen’s Government the privilege of re- tracing their steps with all the light of experience, every one of them perhaps, with only a single exception, would examine Cuap. XXVI.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 289 the official papers of 1853 in order to see where he could most wisely diverge from the course which the Cabinet took. Lord Palmerston would do nothing of the kind. What he had done before, he would do again. Lord Palmerston’s plan of masking the warlike tendency of Hisvay of the Government was an application to politics of ae the an ingenious contrivance which the Parisians used the Govern to employ in some of their street engagements with Tey the soldiery. The contrivance was called ‘a live ‘barricade.’ A body of the insurgents would seize the mayor of the arrondissement and a priest (if they could get one), and also one or two respectable bankers devoted to the cause of peace and order. .'These prisoners, each forced to walk arm- in-arm between able-bodied combatants, were marched in front of a body of insurgents, which boldly advanced toward a spot where a battalion of infantry might be drawn up in close col- umns of companies, but-when they got to within hailing dis- tance, one of the insurgents, gifted with a loud voice, would shout out to the troops: ‘Soldiers! respect the cause of order! ‘Don’t fire on Mr. Mayor! Respect property! Don’t level ‘your country’s muskets at one who is a man and a brother, “and also a respectable banker! Soldiers! for the love of God “don’t imbrue your hands in the blood of this holy priest! Confused by this appeal, and shrinking, as was natural, from the duty of killing peaceful citizens, the battalion would hesi- tate, and mean time the column of the insurgents, covered al- ways by its live barricade, would rapidly advance and crowd in upon the battalion, and break its structure and ruin it. It was thus that Lord Palmerston had the skill to protrude Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone, and keep them standing forward in the van of a Ministry which was bringing the country into war. No one could assail Lord Palmerston’s policy without striking at him through men whose conscientious attachment to the cause of peace was beyond the reach of cavil. In the debates which took place upon the Address, the Debates upon Speeches of the unoffieial members of Parliament in the Address. oth Houses disclosed a strange want of acquaint- ance with the character and spirit of the negotiations which had been going on for the last eight months. Confiding in the Parliament Peaceful tendency of a Government headed by Lord still in the Aberdeen, and having Mr. Gladstone for one of its maha foremost members, Mr. Bright, in the summer of of the Govern. 1853, had deprecated all discussion, and, under his encouragement, the Government, after some_hesi- tation, determined to withhold the production of the papers. Vor, L—N ; 290 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuapr. XXVIb With the lights which he then had, Mr. Bright was perhaps entitled to believe that the course he took was the right one, and the intention of the Government was not only honest, but in some degree self-sacrificing, for it can not be doubted that the disclosure of the able and high-spirited dispatches of Lord Clarendon would have raised the Government in public esteem. It is now certain, however, that the disclosure of the papers in the August of 1853 would have enabled the friends of peace to take up a strong ground, to give a new turn to opinion whilst yet there was time, and to save themselves from the utter discomfiture which they underwent in the interval be-. tween the prorogation and the meeting of Parliament. The Cabinet of Lord Aberdeen was not famous for its pow- er of preventing the leakage of state matters, but the common indiscretion by which simple facts are noised abroad does not suffice to disclose the general tenor and bearing of a long and intricate negotiation. Besides, in the-absence of means of au- thentic knowledge, there were circumstances which raised pre- sumptions opposite to the truth. Of course the chief of these: was the retention of office by two men whose attachment to the cause of peace was believed to be passionately strong; but: it chanced, moreover, that publicity had been given to a highly- spirited and able dispatch, the production of the French For- eign Office; and, since there had transpired no proof of a cor- responding energy on the part of England, it was wrongly in- ferred that Lord Aberdeen’s Government was hanging back. Accordingly, Ministers were taunted for this supposed fault by almost all the speakers in either house. What the Govern- ment were chargeable with was an undue forwardness in caus- ing England to join with France alone in the performance of a duty which was European in its nature, and devolving in the first instance upon Austria. What they were charged with was a want of readiness to do that which they had done. Therefore every one who spoke against the Ministry was com- mitting himself to opinions which (as soon as their real course of action should be disclosed) would involve him in an approval of their policy. | ~ But now at last, and within a day or two from the concelu- Production of Sion of the debate on the Address, some of the pa- _ the papers. pers relating to the negotiations of 1853 and the preceding years were laid upon the table of both Houses. As. soon as the more devoted friends of peace were able to read these documents, and in some degree to comprehend their scope and bearing, they began to see how their Their effect. > : : : > cause had fared under the official guardianship of. Cuap. XXVI.J) BROUGHT ON THE WAK. 291 Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone. They began to see that for near eight months the Government had been following a course of action which was gently leading toward war. They did not, however, make out the way in which the deflection began. They did not see that the way in which the Govern- ment had lapsed from the paths of peace was by quitting the common ground of the four Powers for the sake of a closer union with one, and by joining with the French Emperor in making a perverse use of the fleets. | Mr. Cobden fastened upon the ‘ Vienna Note,’ and, with his views, he was right in drawing attention to the apparent nar- rowness of the difference upon which the question of peace or war was made to depend; but he surely betrayed a want of. knowledge of the way in which the actions of mankind are governed when he asked that a country now glowing with warlike ardor should go back and try to obtain peace by re- suming a form of words which its Government had solemnly repudiated four months before. Of course this effort failed ; it could not be otherwise. Any one acquainted with the tenor of the negotiations, and with enough of the surrounding facts to make the papers intelligible, may be able to judge whether there were not better grounds than this for making a stand ‘against the war. The evil demanding redress was the intru- sion of the Russian forces into Wallachia and Moldavia, and it would seem that the judgment to be pronounced by Parlia- ment upon a Government which had led their country to the brink of war should have been made to depend upon this question : . Was it practicable for England to obtain the deliverance of The question the Principalities by means taken in common with costo the rest of the four Powers, and without resorting thou have, vo the expedient of a separate understanding with uld have been rested. the French Emperor? It may be that to this question the surviving members of Lord Aberdeen’s Administration can establish a negative an- swer, but in order to do this they will have to make use of knowledge not hitherto disclosed to Parliament. A belief, nay, even a suspicion that there was danger of a sudden alliance between the French Emperor and the Czar would gravely alter the conditions upon which Lord Aber- deen’s Cabinet was called upon to form its judgment; but, so far as the outer world knows, no fear of this kind was coercing the Government. Upon the papers as they stand, it seems clear that, by remaining upon the ground occupied by the four Powers, England would have obtained the deliverance of the Principalities without resorting to war. 292 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [CuHar. XXVIL CHAPTER XXVIL. Tuer last of the steps which brought on the final rupture be- tween Russia and the Western Powers was perhaps one of the most anomalous transactions which the annals of diplomacy have recorded. The outrage to be redressed was the occupa- tion by Russia of Wallachia and Moldavia, Of all the States of Europe, except Turkey itself, the one most aggrieved by this occupation was Austria. Now Austria was one of the great Powers of Europe. She was essentially a military State. She was the mistress of a vast and well-appointed army. She was the neighbor of Russia. Geographically, she was so placed that (whatever perils she might bring upon her other frontiers) her mere order to her officer commanding her army of observation would necessarily force the Czar to withdraw his troops. On the other hand, France and England, though justly offended by the outrage, and though called upon in their character as two of the great Powers to concur in fit measures for suppressing it, were far from being brought into any grievous stress by the occupation of the far distant Prin- cipalities, and moreover the evil, such as it was, was one which they could not dispel by any easy or simple application of force. It was in this condition of things that Austria suddenly con- Austria pro. Veyed to France, and through France to England, poses that the intimation of the 22nd of February. In con- sean versation with Baron de Bourqueny, Count Buol gland should ‘ : : pager said, ‘If England and France will fix a day for the the Principal ‘evacuation of the Principalities, the expiration of ties, and threat- ¢ which shall be the signal for hostilities, the Cabi- result of his re- ‘net of Vienna will support the summons. The we telegraph conveyed the tenor of this intimation to London on the same day. Naturally, it was to be expected that Austria would join in a summons which she invited other Powers to send, and to this hour it seems hardly possible to believe that the Emperor of Austria deliberately intended to ask France and England to fix a day for going to war without meaning to go to war himself at the same time. Lord Claren- 1 ‘Eastern Papers,’ part vii., p. 53. ~ Cuap. XXVII-J BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 293 don, however, asked the question. Apparently he was not an- swered in terms corresponding with his question, but he was again told that Austria would ‘support’ the summons. Then all at once, and without stipulating for the concurrence of the Power which was pressing them into action, the Governments of France and England prepared the instruments which were to bring them into a state of war with Russia. Austria at this period had plainly resolved to go to war, if the Principalities should not be relinquished by the Czar; but, Importance of before she could take the final step, it was necessary avoiding haste. foy her to come to an understanding with Prussia. This she succeeded in doing within twenty-four days from the period of the final rupture between Russia and the Western Powers; but France and England could not bear to wait. The French Emperor, rebuffed by the Czar in his endeavor to appear as the pacificator of Europe, was driven to the opposite method of diverting France from herself; and although the crisis was one in which a little delay, and a little calmness, would have substituted the coercive action of the four Powers foran adventurous war by the two, he once more goaded our Government on, and pressed it into instant action. M.Drouyn Pressure ofthe @¢ Lhuys declared that in his opinion the sending French Em- of the proposed summons was a business which ae ‘should be done immediately, and that the two ‘Governments should write to Count Nesselrode to demand ‘the immediate’ withdrawal of the Russian troops from the Principalities—‘the whole to be concluded by a given time, ‘say the end of March.”! It must be owned, however, that the Eagerness of English people were pressing their Government in the people in the same direction. Inflamed with a longing for im naval glory in the Baltic, they had become torment- ed with a fear lest their Admiral should be hindered from great achievements for want of the mere legal formality which was to constitute a state of war. The majority of the Cabinet, though numbering on their side several of the foremost states- The Govern. Men of the day, were collectively too weak to help ment loses its being driven by the French Emperor, too weak to see help being infected by the warlike eagerness of the people, too weak to resist the strong man who was amongst them without being of them. It is likely enough that states- men so gifted as some of them were must have had better grounds for their way of acting than have been hitherto dis- closed; but, to one who only judges from the materials com- ' ¢Hastern Papers,’ part vii., p. 53. 994 ‘TRANSACTIONS WHICH (Cuar. XXVIT municated to Parliament, it seems plain that at this time they had lost their composure. By the summons dispatched on the part of England Lord The summons ©/arendon informed Count Nesselrode that, unless dispatched by the Russian Government within six days from the meee delivery of the summons should send an answer en- gaging to withdraw all its troops from the Principalities by the 30th of April, its refusal or omission so to do would be re- garded by England as a declaration of war. This summons was in accordance with the suggestion of Austria, and what might have been expected was that the Western Powers, in acceding to her wish, should do so upon the understanding that she concurred in the measure which she herself proposed, and that they would consult her as to the day on which it would be convenient for her to enter into a state of war; in other words, that they would consult her as to the day on which a continued refusal to quit the Principalities should bring the Czar into a state of war with Austria, France, and England. Instead of taking this course, Lord Clarendon a warded the summons (not as a draught or project, but as document already signed and complete) to the Court of Vien. na, and it was dispatched by a messenger who (after remaining Instructions to for only a ‘few hours’ in the Austrian capital) was the messenger. to carry on the summons to St. Petersburg. There- fore Austria was made aware that, whether she was willing to defend her own interests or not, England was irrevocably com: mitted to defend them for her; and, instead of requiring that Austria should take part in the step which she herself had ad- Ana to tora Wi8ed, Lord W-estmorland was merely instructed to Westmorland. express a hope that the summons ‘ would meet with Mute ‘the approval of the Austrian Cabinet, and that part in the their opinion of it would be made known by Count which she had Buol to the Cabinet of St.Petersburg. Such a step herself sug- ag this on the part of Avstria was preposterously cate short of what the Western Powers would have had a right to expect from her, if they had been a little less eager. for hostilities, and had consulted her as to the time for coming to a rupture. Of course the impatience of France and England was ruin- ous to the principle of maintaining concert between the four Pow ers, and what made it the more lamentable was that it did not spring from any sound military views. It is true that the Western Powers were sending troops to the Levant and fit- ting out fleets for the Baltic; but there was nothing in the state of ‘heir preparations, nor in the position of the respective Cuap. XXVII.} BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 295 forces, which could justify their eagerness to accelerate the dec- laration of war. It chanced that simultaneously with the arrival of the En- The counter- glish messenger at Vienna, there came thither from Proposals oi, St. Petersburg the counter-propositions of Russia, Vienna at the Count Buol saw the importance of disposing of these the Engin before the summons went on to St. Petersburg; so, messenger. after persuading Lord Westmorland to detain the English messenger, he instantly assembled the Conference of Meurer (the four Powers. By this Conference the counter- accted by the propositions of Russia were unanimously rejected,! the four Pow- and the bearer of the summons carried this decision Mh of the four Powers to St. Petersburg, together with a dispatch from the Austrian Government instructing Count Esterhazy to support the summons, and throwing upon Russia the responsibility of the impending war.? The dispatch, how- ever, fell short of announcing that the refusal to quit the Prin- cipalities would place the Czar in a state of war with Austria as well as with the Western Powers. Prussia supported the summons in language corresponding with the language of the Vienna Cabinet. Baron Manteuffel’s dispatch to St. Peters- Austrinang DUrg ‘was drawn up in very pressing language. It Prussia ‘ sup- Curged the Russian Government to consider the LEU Reahey ‘dangers to which the peace of the world would out taking part * be exposed by a retusal, and declared that the re- inthe step. ¢ sponsibility of the war which might be the conse- S ‘quence of that refusal would rest with the Emperor.’? The summons addressed by France to the Russian Govern- The French Ment was in the same terms as the summons dis- eta patched by Lord Clarendon, and was forwarded at the same time. Atter receiving the summons of the two Governments, Count Franceand Nesselrode took the final orders of his master; and Englind then informed the Consuls of France and England brought intoa state of war that the Emperor did not think fit to send any an- with Russia. swer to their Notes. -A refusal to answer was one of the events which under the terms of the announcement con- tained in the summons was to be regarded by the Western Powers as a declaration of war. This refusal was uttered by Count Nesselrode on the 19th of March,1854. The peace be- tween the great Powers of Europe had lasted more than thirty- eight years, and now at length it was broken. 1 The Conference unanimously agreed that it was impossible to ‘ proceed ‘with those propositions.’—Protocol of Conference of March 5th. ‘ Eastern ‘Papers,’ part vii., p. 80. ? Ibid., p. 64. 3 Ibid., p. 72. 296 TRANSACTIONS. WHICH |Cuar. XXVIL - On the 27th of March a message from the Emperor of the Message from French informed his Senate and Legislative Assem- Emperorte the Dly that the last determination of the Cabinet of St. Chambers. —- Petersburg had placed France and Russia in a state of war. In his speech from the throne at the opening of the session! he had already declared that war was upon the point of commencing. ‘To avoid a conflict,’ he said, ‘I have gone ‘as far as honor allowed. Europe now knows that if France ‘draws the sword, it is because she is constrained to do so. ‘Kurope knows that France has no idea of aggrandizement. ‘She only wishes to resist dangerous encroachments. The ‘time of conquests has passed away, never to return. This ‘policy has had for its result a more intimate alliance between ‘England and France.’ It is curious to observe that only a few hours after the time when England became inextricably engaved with him in a joint war against Russia, and in the same speech in which he announced the fact, the French Em- peror acknowledged the value and the practicability of the wholesome policy which he had just then superseded by draw- ing the Cabinet of London into a separate alliance with him- self; but when he was declaring, in words already quoted, that ‘Germany had recovered her political independence, that Aus- ‘tria would enter into the alliance, and that the Western Pow- ‘ers would go to Constantinople along with Germany,’ he had the happiness of knowing that the baneful summons which was to bring France and England into aseparate course of action, and place them at last in a state of war, had been signed by the English Minister for Foreign Affairs, and was already on the way to St. Petersburg.’ On the same 27th of March a message from the Queen an- Message from NOunced to Parliament that the negotiations with the Queen to Russia were broken off, and that her Majesty, feel- Parliament. ing bound to give active aid to the Sultan, relied upon the efforts of her faithful subjects to aid her in protecting the states of the Sultan against the encroachments of*Russia. Declaration of On the following day the English declaration of war Wes was issued. The labor of putting into writing the grounds for a momentous course of action is a wholesome dis- cipline for statesmen; and it would be well for mankind if, at a time when the question were really in suspense, the friends of a policy leading toward war were obliged to come out of the mist of oral intercourse and private notes, and to put their 1 March 2nd. * The messenger had reached Berlin on the day of the French Emperor’s Speech from the throne. Cuap. XXVII.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 297 view into a firm piece of writing. It does not follow that’such a document ought necessarily to be disclosed, but it ought to ex- ist, and ought to be official. In the summer of 1853, the draft of a document fairly stating the grounds of that singular policy of alliance within alliance, which was shadowed out in the Royal Speech at the close of the session, would have been a good ex- cuse for the members of Lord Aber deen’s Cabinet, and would have protected them against that sensation of ‘drifting,’ which was afterward described by the Foreign Secretary. Itis known that when the English declaration announcing the rupture with Russia was about to be prepared, it was found less easy than might be supposed to assign reasons for the war. The neces- Difficulty of Silty of having to state the cause of the rupture in framing it. g solemn and. precise form disclosed the vice of the policy which the Government was following, for it could not be concealed that the grievance which was inducing France and England to take up arms was one of a European kind, which called for redress at the hands of the four Powers rather than for the armed championship of the two. Of course the difficulty was overcome. When the faith of the country was pledged, and fleets and armies already moving to the scene of the conflict, it was not possible that war would be stayed for want of mere words. The Queen was advised to declare that by the regard due to an ally, and to an empire whose integrity and independence were essential to the peace of Europe, by the sympathies of her people for the cause of right against injustice, and from a desire to save Europe from the preponderance of a Power which had violated the faith of treaties, she felt called upon to take up arms, in concert with the Emperor of the French, for the defense of the Sultan. On the 11th of April the ‘Emperor of Russia issued his dee- TheCzar'sdec- laration of war. He declared that the summons ad- (ration and — dressed to him by France and England took from festo. Russia all possibility of yielding with honor, and he threw the responsibility of the war upon the Western Pow- ers. It was for Central and Western Europe that Diplomacy shaped these phrases; but in the manifesto addressed to his own people the Czar used loftier words. ‘ Russia,’ said he, ‘fights not for the things of this world, but for the Faith.”! ‘England and France have ranged themselves by the side of ‘the enemies of Christianity against Russia fighting for the ‘orthodox faith. But Russia will not alter her divine mission, ‘and if enemies fall upon her frontier, we are ready to meet, 1 23rd April. N 2 *298 “TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XXVIL ‘them with the firmness which our ancestors have bequeathed ‘tous. Are we not now the same Russian nation of whose ‘deeds of valor the memorable events of 1812 bear witness ? ‘May the Almighty assist us to prove this by deeds! And ‘in this trust, taking up arms for our persecuted brethren pro- ‘fessing the Christian faith, we will exclaim with the whole of * Russia with one heart, ‘*O Lord our Savior, whom haye we **to fear.” . “ May God arise and his enemies be dispersed !” 7! On the fourth day after the delivery of the message which The Gzar'sin- placed Russia in a state of war with France and om.” England, Prince Gortschakoff passed the Lower menced. Danube at three points; and, entering into the deso- late region of the Dobrudja, began the invasion of Turkey.? Nearly at the same time, France and England entered into Treaty be. 9 treaty with the Sultan, by which they engaged tween the Sul- to defend Turkey with their arms until the conclu- Western Pow- Sion of a peace guaranteeing the independence of roy the Ottoman Empire and the rights of the Sultan, and upon the close of the war to withdraw all their forces from the Ottoman territory. The Sultan, on his part, under- took to make no separate peace or armistice with Russia.? On the 10th of April, 1854, there was signed that treaty of Treaty be. ‘Alliance between France and England which many tween france men had suffered themselves to look upon as a se- and England. curity for the peace of Europe. » The high contract- ing parties engaged to do what lay in their power for the re- establishment of a peace which should secure Europe against the return of the existing troubles, and,in order to set free the Sultan’s dominions, they promised to use all the land and sea forces required for the purpose. They engaged to receive no overture tending to the cessation of hostilities, and to enter into no engagement with the Russian Court without having deliberated in common. They renounced all aim at separate advantages, and they declared their readiness to receive into their alliance any of the other Powers of Europe. This great alliance did not carry with it so resistless a weight as to be able to execute justice by its own sheer force, and without the shedding of blood; but it was a mighty engine of war. ' 21st February. 2 24th March. By thus passing that part of the river which incloses the Dobrudja, a General does not effect much. He must cross it at and above Rassova before he can be said, in the military sense, to have ‘broken through ‘the line of the Danube.’ % 10th of March. Cuar. XXVIIL] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 299 ; CHAPTER XXVIIL. Tue train of causes which brought on the war has now been Recapitula. followed down to the end. Great armies kept on von. foot, and empires governed by princes without the counsel of statesmen, were spoken of in the outset as standing Sidoding elements of danger to the cause of peace, and their causes of dis- bearing upon the disputes of nations has been seen Ve anaae in all the phases of a strife which began in a quar- rel for a key and a trinket, and ended by embroiling Europe. Upon the destinies of Russia the effect of this system of mere Effect of per- personal government has been seen at every step. ore aie From head to foot a vast empire was made to throb Czar. with the passions which rent the bosom of the one man Nicholas. If for a few months he harbored ambition, the resources of the State were squandered in making ready for war. If his spirit flagged, the ambition of the State fell lame, and preparations ceased. If he labored under a fit of piety, or rather of ecclesiastical zeal, All the Russias were on the verge of a crusade. He chafed with rage at the thought of being foiled in diplomatic strife by the second Canning, and instantly, without hearing counsel from any living man, he caused his docile battalions to cross the frontier, and kindled a bloody war. Nor was the personal government of the Emperor Francis By the Empe- JOSeph without its share of mischief; for it seems ror of Austria. clear that this was’ the evil course by which Aus- tria was brought into measures offensive to the Sultan, but full of danger to herself. More than once, in the autumn of 1852; Nicholas and Francis J oseph came together ; ; and at these ill- omened meetings the youthful Kaiser , bending, i it would seem, under a weight of gratitude, over whelmed by the personal ascendency of the Czar, and touched, as he well might be, by the affection which Nicholas had conceived for him, was led, perhaps, to use language which never would have been sanc- tioned by a cabinet of Austrian statesmen; and, although it is understood that he abstained from actual promises, it is hard to avoid believing that the general tenor of the young Empe- ror’s conversations with Nicholas must have been the chief cause which led the Czar to imagine that he could enter upon 300 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XXVIII, a policy highly dangerous to Austria, and yet safely count upon her assent. The Czar never could have hoped that Aus- trian councilors of state would have willingly stood still and endured his seizure of the country of the Lower Danube from Orsova down to the Euxine; but he understood that Francis Joseph governed Austria, and he imagined that he could gov- ern Francis Joseph as though he were his own child. ‘He ‘could reckon,’ he said, ‘upon Austria.” Even in Prussia the policy of the State seemed to be always By the King upon the poit of being shaken by the fears of the of Prussia. § King; and, although up to the outbreak of the war she was guilty of no defection,” it 1s certain that the anticipa- tion of finding weakness in this quarter was one of the causes which led the Czar into danger. | In France, after the events of the 2nd of December, the sys- By the French tem of personal government so firmly obtained that Emperor. the narrator, dispensed from the labor of inquiring what interests she had in the question of peace and war, and what were the thoughts of her orators, her statesmen, and her once illustrious writers, wag content to see what scheme of ac- ~ tion would best conduce to the welfare and safety of a small knot of men then hanging together in Paris; and when it ap- peared that, upon the whole, these persons would gain in safe« ty and comfort from the disturbance of Europe, and from a close understanding with England, the subsequent progress of the story was singularly unembarrassed by any question about what might be the policy demanded by the interests or the sentiments of France. Therefore, the bearing of personal gov- ernment upon the maintenance of peace was better illustrated by the French Government than by the Emperor Nicholas; for in the Czar, after all, a vast people was incarnate, THis ambition, his piety, his anger were, in a sense, the passions of the devoted millions of men of whom he was, indeed, the true chief. The French Emperor, on the contrary, when he chose to carry France into a war against Russia, was in no respect the champion of a national policy, nor of a national sentiment, and he therefore gave a vivid example of the way in which sheer personal government comes to bear upon the peace of the world. Perhaps, if a man were to undertake to distribute the blame of the war, the first Power he would arraign might be Russia. ' Memorandum by the Emperor of Russia, delivered to the English Govy- ernment whi ante. 2Tt was more than three months after the outbreak of the war that Prus- sia halted. : Car. XXVIII] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 301 Share which fer ambition, her piety, and her Church zeal were On RE Sn ancient causes of strife, which were kindled into a the War. dangerous activity by the question of the Sanctua- ries, and by events which seemed for a moment to show that the time for her favorite enterprise against Constantinople might now at last be coming. Until the month of March, 1853, these causes were brought to bear directly against the tranquillity of Europe, and even after that time they were, in one sense, the parents of strife, because, though they ceased to have a direct action upon events, they had set other forces in motion. But it would be wrong to believe that, after the middle of March, 1853, Russia was acting in furtherance of any scheme of territorial aggrandizement, for it is plain that, by that time, the Czar’s vague ambition had dwindled down into a mere wish to wring from the Porte a protectorate of the Greek Church in Turkey. He had gathered his troops upon the Turkish frontier, and it seemed to him that he could use their presence there as a means of extorting an engagement which would soothe the pride of the Orthodox Church, and tighten the rein by which he was always seeking to make the Turks feel his power. The vain concealments and misrepre- sentations by which this effort of violent diplomacy was ac- companied were hardly worthy to be ranked as acts of state- craft, and were rather the discord produced by the clashing impulses of a mind in conflict with itself. Originally the Czar had no thought of going to war for the sake of obtaining this engagement, and least of all had he any thought of going to war with England. At first he thought to obtain it by surprise; and, when that attempt failed, he still hoped to obtain it by resolute pressure, because he reckoned that, if the great Powers would compare the slenderness of the required concession with the evils of a great war, there could be no question how they would choose. As soon as the diplomatic strife at Constantinople began to work, the Czar got heated by it; and when, at length, he found himself not only contending for his Church, but contending, too; with his ancient enemy, he so often lost all self-command, that what he did in his politic intervals was never enough to undo the evil which he wrought in his fits of pious zeal and of rage. And when, with a cruel grace, and before the eyes of all Europe, Lord Stratford disposed of Prince Mentschikoff, it must be owned that it was hard for a proud man in the place of the Czar to have to stand still and submit. There- fore, without taking counsel of any man,he resolved to occupy the Principalities; but he had no belief that even that grave 302 TRANSACTIONS WHICH ~~ [Cuap. XXVIII. step would involve him in war, for his dangerous faith in Lord Aberdeen, and in the power of the English Peace Party, was in full force, and grew to a joyful and ruinous certainty when he learned that the Queen’s Prime Minister had insisted upon revoking the grave words which had been uttered to Baron Brunnow by the Secretary of State. This illusory faith in the peacefulness of England long continued to be his guide; and, from time to time, he was confirmed in his choice of the wrong path by the bearing of the persons who represented France, Austria, and Prussia at the Court of St. Petersburg; for, al- though in Paris, iv London, in Vienna, in Berlin, and in Con- stantinople, the four great Powers seemed strictly united in their desire to restrain the encroachments of the Czar, this wholesome concord was so masked at St.Petersburg by the demeanor of Count Mensdorf, Colonel Rochow, and M. Castel- bajac, that Sir Hamilton Seymour, though uttering the known opinion of the other three Powers as well as of his own Govy- ernment, was left to stand alone. } After his acceptance of the Vienna Note, the Emperor Nich- olas enjoyed for a few days the bliss of seeing all Europe united with him against the Turks, and he believed perhaps that Heaven was favoring him once more, and that now at last ‘Canning’ was vanquished ; but in a little while the happy dream ceased, and he had the torment of hearing the four Powers confess that, if for a moment they-had differed from Lord Stratford, it was because of their erring nature. Then, fired by the Turkish declaration of war, and stung to fury by the hostile use of the Western fleets which the French Em- peror had forced upon the English Government, the Czar gave the fatal orders which brought about the disaster of Sinope. After his first exultation over the sinking of the ships and the slaughter, he apparently saw his error, and was become so moderate as to receive in a right spirit the announcement of the first decision that had been taken by the English Cabinet when the news of the catastrophe reached it. But only a few days later he had to hear of the grave and hostile change of view which had been forced upon Lord Aberdeen’s Govern- ment by the French Emperor, and to learn that, by resolving to drive the Russian flag from the Euxine, the maritime Pow- ers had brought their relations with his empire to a state barely short of war. After this rupture it was no longer pos- sible for him to extricate himself decorously, unless by exert- ing some skill and a steady command of temper. He was un- equal to the trial; and, although in politic and worldly mo- ments he must have been almost hopeless of a good result, he Cuar. XXVIII] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. : 303 could not bear to let go his hold of the occupied provinces un- der the compulsion of a public threat laid upon him by En- gland and France. | With the conduct of the Turkish Government little fault is Sharewhicn +0 be found. It is true that in the early stage of Turkey hadin the dispute about the Sanctuaries the violence of causing the French and the Russian Governments tormented the Porte into contradictory engagements, and that the anger kindled by these clashing promises was one of the provocatives of the war; but from the day of the delivery of the Bethlehem key and the replacement of the star, the Turkish Government was almost always moderate and politic. And, after the sec- ond week of March, 1853, it was firm, for.the panic struck by Prince Mentschikoff in the early days of his mission was allay- ed by the prudent boldness of Colonel Rose, and the Czar, with all his hovering forces, was never able to create a second alarm. ) It has been seen that by their tenacity of all those sovereign rights which were of real worth, by the wisdom with which they yielded wherever they could yield with honor and safety, by their invincible courtesy and deference toward their mighty assailant, and at last and above all by their warlike ardor and their prowess in the field, the Turks had become an example to Christendom, and had won the heart of England. And al- though it has been acknowledged that some of the more gen- tle of these Turkish virtues were contrived and enforced by the English Ambassador, still no one can fairly refuse to the Ottoman people the merit of appreciating and enduring this painful discipline. Besides, there was a period when it might be supposed that the immediate views of the Turkish Government and of the English Ambassador were not exactly the same; for, as soon as the Turkish statesmen became aware that their appeal to the people had kindled a spirit which was forcing them into war, it of course became their duty to endeavor to embroil the other Powers of Europe, and they labored in this direction with much sagacity and skill. They saw that if they could contrive to bring up the Admirals from Besika Bay, the West- ern Powers would soon get decoyed into war by their own fleets, and, in order to this, we saw Reshid Pasha striving to affect the lofty mind of Lord Stratford by shadowing out the ruin of the Ottoman dominion; then mounting his horse, going off to the French Ambassador, and so changing the ele- vation of his soul, whilst he rode from one Embassy to the other, that ia the presence of M. de la Cour he no longer spoke 304 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cusap. XXVIII, of a falling empire, but pictured to him a crowd of Frenchmen of all ranks cruelly massacred on account of their well-known Christianity by a host of fanatical Moslems. And, although the serenity of Lord Stratford defeated the sagacious Turk for the time, and disappointed him in his endeayor to bring up more than a couple of vessels from each fleet, still, in the end, the Turkish statesmanship prevailed, for M. de la Cour, dis- turbed by the bloody prospect held out to him, communi¢ated his excitement to the French Emperor, and the French Empe- ror, as we have seen, then put so hard a pressure upon Lord Aberdeen as to constrain him to jom in breaking through the treaty of 1841; and, since this resolve led straight into the se- ries of naval movements which followed, and so on to the out- break of war, the members of the Sultan’s Cabinet had some right to believe that, even without the counsels of the great Ambassador, they knew how to govern events. In so far as the origin of the war was connected with Count Share which Leiningen’s mission, Austria is answerable ; and al- Austria had. ~~ though it must needs be true (for so she firmly de- clares') that the Czar’s reiterated account of his close under: - standing with her in regard to Montenegro was purely fabu- lous, she still remains open to the grave charge of having sent Count Leiningen to Constantinople armed with a long string of questionable claims, yet debarred by his orders from all ne- gotiation, and instructed to receive no answer from the Turk- ish Government except an answer of simple consent or simple refusal. This offensive method of pressing upon an independ- ent Sovereign was constantly referred to by the Czar as justi- fying and almost compelling his determination to deal with the Sultan in a high-handed fashion, and in this way (even upon the supposition of there being no pernicious understanding be- tween the two Emperors) Count Leiningen’s mission had an ill effect upon the maintenance of peace. Again, Austria must bear the blame of employing servants who, notwithstanding the firm and right part which she took in the negotiations, were always causing her to appear before Europe as a Power subservient to the Czar; and: especially * T have a statement to this effect. To those who have not been called upon to test the relative worth of statements coming from different parts of Europe, it may seem that I am facile in accepting this one; and the more so when I acknowledge, as I do, that surrounding facts give an appearance of probability to the opposite assertion. The truth is that, like our own coun. trymen, the public men of Austria are much accustomed to subordinate theit zeal for the public service to their self-respect. 'To undertake to disbelieve a statesman af the Court of Vienna is the same thing as to undertake to dis believe an English gentleman. Cuap. XXVIII. BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 305 she ought to suffer in public repute for the baneful effect pro- duced at St. Petersburg by Count Mensdorf’s: shameful pres- ence at the thanksgivings which the Czar and his people of- fered up to the Almighty for the sinking of the ships and the slaughter of the Turks at Sinope. — There is also a fault of: omission for which it would seem that Austria is chargeable. The interests of Austria and En- gland, both present and remote, were so strictly the same, that for the welfare of both States there ought to have been going on between them a constant interchange of friendly counsels. Our statesmen are accustomed to profter advice without stint to foreign States, but it is remarkable that their frankness is not much reciprocated by words of friendly counsel from abroad. Yet there are times when such counsels might be wholesome. It would surely have been well if Austria had advised the English Government not to quit the safe, honest ground held by the four Powers for the sake of an adventure _with the new Bonaparte. There is no trace of any such warn- ings from Vienna; and indeed it would seem that Austria, tor- mented by the presence of the Russian forces on her southern frontier, was more prone to encourage than to restrain the im- prudence of her old ally. These were the faults with which Austria may fairly be In otherre- Charged. In other respects she was not forgetful ohare ier Of her duty toward herself and toward Europe ; duty. and it has been seen that from the day when the Czar crossed the Pruth down to the time when he was obliged to relinquish his hold, Austria persisted in taking the same view of the dispute as was taken by the Western Powers, and was never at all backward in her measures for the deliverance of the Principalities. In the nature and temperament of the King of Prussia there Share which Was So much of weakness that his Imperial brother- dauine tle in-law was accustomed to speak of him in terms of War. ruthless disdain; and it seems that this habit of looking down upon the King caused the Czar to shape his pol- icy simply as though Prussia were null. When he found his Royal brother-in-law engaged against him in an offensive and defensive alliance, he perhaps understood the error which he had committed in assuming that the policy of an enlightened and a high-spirited nation would be steadily subservient to the weakness of its Sovereign; but, until he was thus undeceived, or, at all events, until the failure of Baron Budberg’s mission in the beginning of 1854, he seems to have closed his eyes to all the long series of public acts in which Prussia had engagef, 306 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XXVIII. and to have cheated himself into the belief that she would nev- er take up such a ground as might enable Austria to act freely on her southern frontier, and so drive him out of the Principal- ities. And, although until after the outbreak of the war be- tween Russia and the Western Powers Prussia did not at all hang back,! it is nevertheless true-that the Czar’s policy was shaped upon a knowledge of the King’s weak nature. There- fore the temperament and mental quality of the Prussian mon- arch must be reckoned among the causes of the war. Prussia also, in the same degree as Austria, must bear the kind of repute that was entailed upon her by the conduct of her representative; and the name of Colonel Rochow and his thanksgiving for the slaughter of Sinope will long be remem- bered ag ainst her. Another fault attributable to Prussia was her invincible love of metaphysical, or rather mere verbal refinements. When this form of human error is brought into polities it chills all human sympathies, and tends to bring a country into contempt by giving to its policy the bitter taste of a theory or a doc- trine, and so causing it to be misunderstood. An instance of this vice was civen by the First Minister of the Prussian ~ Crown in a speech of great moment which he addressed to the Lower Chamber on the 18th of March, 1854. After an abun- dance of phrases of a pacific tendency, Baron Manteuffel said that Prussia was resolved ‘ faithfully to aid any member of the ‘Confederation who from his geographical position might feel ‘himself called upon sooner than Prussia to draw the sword in ‘defense of German interests.’ Now this, to the ear of any diplomatist, foreshadowed—or rather announced—an offensive and defensive alliance with Austria against the Czar for the delivery of the Principalities; and accordingly the alliance so announced was actually contracted by Prussia some four weeks afterward. But,in the minds of the common public, a disclo- sure couched in this diplomatic phraseology was smothered un- der the intolerable weight of the pacific verbiage which had gone before; and the result was, that a speech which an- nounced a measure of offense and hostility to Russia was look- ed upon as the disclosure of a halting, timid, and worthless policy. But, except upon the grounds here stated, there was no In other re- grave fault to find with the policy of Prussia down cnaiged hee to the outbreak of the war between the Czar and duty. the Western Powers. Distant as she was from ‘The state of war began on the 19th of March. Prussia first began to hang back about the 21st of July. See ante. Cuar. XXVIII] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 307 the scene of the Czar’s encroachment, she was nevertheless compelled, as she valued her hold upon the good will of Ger- many, to be steadfast in hindering Russia from establishing herself in provinces which would give her the full control of the Lower Danube; and, up to the time of the final rupture, she always so accommodated her policy to the views of the ‘Western Powers as to be able to-remain in firm accord with them, both as to the adjudication of the dispute between Rus- sia and Turkey, and as to the principles which should guide the belligerents in the event of their being forced into a war by the obstinacy of the Emperor Nicholas. Of course the Czar’s relinquishment of the Principalities took away from Prussia, as well as from Austria, her ground of complaint against the Czar, and with it her motive for action. Nor was this all; for, determining to quit the main land of Eu- rope and make a descent upon a remote maritime province of Russia, the Western Powers deprived themselves of all: right to expect that Austria and Prussia would favor a scheme of invasion which they did not and could not approve. Down to the time when the Czar determined to repass the Pruth, the policy followed by Prussia, as well as by Austria, was sound :nl loyal toward Europe. The German Confederation was brought into the same views As did also the #8 Austria and Prussia; and thus, so long as the German Gon- object in view was the deliverance of the Principal- federation. ities, the whole of central Europe was joined with the great Powers of the West in a determination to repress the Czar’s encroachments. I repeat that the papers laid be- fore the Parliament have not yet disclosed the ground on which the English Government became discontent with this vast union, and was led to contract those separate engage- ments with the Emperor of the French which ended by bring- ing on the war. The blame of beginning the dispute which led on to the war Share which Must rest with the French Government; for it is the French true, as our Foreign Secretary declared, that ‘the had in causing ‘ Ambassador of France at Constantinople was the Tene ‘first to disturb the status quo in which the matter ‘rested, and without political action on the part of France ‘the quarrels of the Churches would never have troubled the ‘relations of friendly Powers.’! For this offense against the tranquillity of Europe the President of the Republic was an- swerable in the first instance; but it must be remembered 1 Ubi ante, 308 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XXVIIL that, at the time, France was under a free Parliamentary Gov- ernment, and it is just therefore to acknowledge that the blame of sanctioning the disinterment of a forgotten treaty more than a hundred years old, and of violently using it as an instrument of disturbance, must be shared by an Assembly which had not enough of the statesmanlike quality to be able to denounce a wanton and noxious policy. It was the weakness of the gift- ed statesmen and orators who then adorned the Chambers that, like most, of their countrymen, they were too easily fas- cinated. by the pleasure of seeing France domineer. But at the close of the year 1851 the France known to Eu- rope and the world was bereaved of political life, and thence- forth her complex interests in the affairs of nations were so effectually overruled by the exigency of personal considera- tions, that in a little while she was made to adopt an Anglo- Turkish policy, and, as the price of this concession to the views of our Foreign Office, the venturers of the 2nd of December were brought under the sanctions of an alliance with the Queen of England. It has been seen that, by superseding that conjoint action of the four Powers which was the true safe- guard of peace and justice,the separate compact of the two became a main cause of the appeal to arms. Moreover it has been shown how, when once he had entangled Lord Aberdeen’s Government in this understanding, the French Emperor gain- ed so strong a hold over it that he became able to guide and overrule the counsels of England even in the -use to be made of her Mediterranean fleet; and how thenceforth, and from time to time, he so used the English navy as well as his’own, that at the moments when the negotiations seemed ripe for peace, they were always defeated by an order sent out to the Admirals. The real tendency of this perturbing and disloca- ting course of action was concealed by the moderation which characterized the French dispatches, and, in another and very different way, by the demeanor of the personage who repre- sented the French Government at St. Petersburg; so that, at the very times when Lord Aberdeen was brought to consent to a hostile and provoking use of our naval forces, he was able to derive fatal comfort from the language of the French diplomacy ; and, whenever the grave tone of Sir Hamilton Sey- mour was beginning to produce wholesome effect at St. Peters- burg, his efforts were quickly baffled by the prostrations of his French colleague. It was thus that, by generating the original dispute, by drawing England from the common ground of the four Pow- ers into a separate understanding with himself, by causing a Cuar. XXVIII] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 309 persistently hostile use to be made of the fleets, and, finally, by his ambiguous ways of acting and speaking, the French Em- peror came to have a chief share in the kindling of the war. + The stake which England holds in the world makes it of ae Sahat, deep moment to her to avert disorder among na- Englandhadin tions; and, on the other hand, her insular station in susing = Europe, joined with the possession of more than sufficing empire in other regions of the world, keeps her clear of all thought of territorial aggrandizement in this quarter of the globe. And, although it is the duty of all the rest of the great Powers as well as of England to endeavor toward the maintenance of peace and order, yet, inasmuch as there is no other great State without some sort of lurking ambition which may lead it into temptation, the fidelity of the Continental guardians of the peace can always be brought into question. Suspicions of this kind are often fanciful, but the fears from which they spring are too well founded in the nature of things to be safely regarded as frivolous, and the result is that the great island Power is the one which by the well informed statesmen of the Continent is looked to as the surest safeguard against wrong. Europe leans, Europe rests on this faith. So, the moment it is made to appear that for any reason England is disposed to abdicate, or to suspend for a while, the perform- ance of her European duties, that moment the wrong-doer sees his' opportunity and begins to stir. Those who dread him, missing the accustomed safeguard of England, turn whither they can for help, and, failing better plans of safety, they per- haps try hard to make terms with the spoiler. Monarchs find that to conspire for gain of.territory, or to have other princes conspiring against them, is the alternative presented to their choice. The system of Europe becomes decomposed, and war follows. Therefore, exactly in proportion as England values the peace of Europe, she ought to abstain from every word and from every sign which tends to give the wrong-doer a hope of her acquiescence. Unhappily,-this duty was not understood by the more ardent friends of peace, and they imagined that they would serve their cause by entreating England to abstain from every conflict which did not menace their own shores— nay, even by permitting themselves to vow and ‘declare that this was the policy truly loved by the English race. More- over, by blending their praises of peace with fierce invective against public men, they easily drew applause from assembled multitudes, and so caused the foreigner to believe that they really spoke the voice of a whole people, or, at all events, of great masses, and that England was no longer a Power which 310 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuap. XXVIIL. would interfere with spoliation in Europe. The fatal effect which this belief produced upon the peace of Europe has been. shown. But the evil produced by the excesses of the Peace Party did not end there. It is the nature of excesses to beget, excesses of strange complexion; and, just as a too rigid sanc-, tity has always been followed by a too scandalous profligacy, so, by the law of reaction, the doctrines of the Peace Party tended to bring into violent life that keen warlike spirit which: soon became one of the main obstacles to the restoration of tranquillity. Therefore England, it must be acknowledged, did much to bring on the war, first by the want of moderation: and prudence with which she seemed to declare her attach- ment to the cause of peace, and afterward by the exceeding: eagerness with which she coveted the strife. . We have seen the steps by which England was brought: from her seeming peacefulness into a temper impatiently war- like; but, considering the much-avowed attachment of England: to the maintenance of peace, the indirect, not to say remote way in which the Eastern dispute came to bear upon English: interests, and, on the other hand, the immense concurrence of : opinion which sanctioned, and at last almost compelled the ap-: peal to arms, it is hard at first sight to understand how it came to happen that the cause of peace was—not merely defeated,. ‘but—brought to ruin. The truth is, that in a free country the: fate of a cause must depend for the time on its leaders, and. if several of the foremost of these chance to stumble and fall disabled at nearly the same time, they leave their followers help- less. Now the more strenuous lovers of peace had placed their trust in four men; and it might seem, at first sight, that any political cause would at least be safe from ruin when under the, charge of Lord Aberdeen the Prime Minister, Mr. Gladstone: the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and, besides these, Mr. Cob-: den and Mr. Bright, two of the most gifted orators in the coun-) try with seats in the House of Commons. Loving peace, with a purity of motive and a devotedness of heart which no man has ever questioned, Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone had the misfortune to remain members of a Gov- ernment which went out of the safe paths of peace. They went wrong; and although it is true that they went wrong at a slow rate, still they so moved for a period of eight months, and at last, to their grief and dismay, they found that they had been leading the country into a cruel war. Deceived by the crude notion that France and England, acting together, could secure peace, they did not understand that the way to main- tain peace and order was ‘to hold to the alliance of the four, Cuar. XXVIII. ] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. 311 Powers, and to avoid impairing it by a separate understand- ing with one of them. For want of this guiding principle they. always failed to see the point at which they could make their stand, and they never could choose the day on which it would become them to retire from office. So they lingered on in a Cabinet which was becoming more and more warlike, and their presence there was in two ways hurtful to the cause of peace, for even the more earnest friends of peace were quieted by see- ing that the trusted champions of the cause were still members of the Government; and at last, when they could no longer help seeing that this same Government was going to a rupture with the Czar, the more rational of them thought that there must really be some great State necessity for a war in which Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone were reluctantly engaging their country. Moreover, there was a great and good portion of the community who, retaining their theoretic disapproval of a needless war, were nevertheless fired with a secret longing for the clash of arms, and these men were relieved from the pain of a conflict between duty and.inclination by finding that for the righteousness of the impending war Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone were their sponsors. It has been seen also that by their continuance in office these two statesmen kept. alive in the mind of the Emperor Nicholas that dangerous belief which has often been a source of Euro-- pean troubles—the belief that England would not go to war. The Czar’s belief on this subject was so sweet to him that per- haps nothing short of the resignation of the Prime Minister could have undeceived him. Still, to a common observer it would seem that some effort might have been made to disperse the error which Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone had graven into the mind of the Czar by consenting to remain in office, and that, as the danger was caused in great measure by the con- tinuance of old impressions upon the mind of the Emperor Nicholas, a special mission to St. Petersburg might have been usefully resorted to as a means of rousing the Czar to a sense: of the danger which was threatening his relations with En- gland. Nothing of this kind was done.- Nothing was done to break the fatal smoothness of the incline. But if the cause of peace was paralyzed by the friends whom it had in the Cabinet, it was brought to mere extinction by the disqualification inflicted upon ‘its popular leaders as the result of their former excesses. Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, as we have seen, had shut them- selves out from the counsels of the nation. They were power- less. By their indiscriminate denunciations of war in general 312 TRANSACTIONS WHICH [Cuar. XXVIII, they had destroyed the worth of any criticism which they might be able to bring to bear upon the pending dispute. Their ar- guments, however well pruned and shaped out to suit the oc- casion, were sure of being treated by an English audience as the offspring of their doctrines, and, their doctrines being re- pudiated, they could make no good use of their privilege of speech. It was impossible to consult with them upon the ques- tion whether the country was bound in honor to take up arms for the Sultan, because they had spent their lives in teaching that the country could never be bound in honor to take up arms for any body. Ifthey had not thus disqualified themselves for useful argument, they would surely have been able to make a becoming stand against what Count Nesselrode called ‘the ‘most unintelligible war’ ever known. But because they had been extravagant before, therefore now they were null; and because they were null, the cause intrusted to their hands was brought to destruction. The whole Cabinet of Lord Aberdeen must share the respon- sibility of that ill-fated policy which brought England to cast aside the blessings insured by the unanimity of the four Pow- ers, and to enter into a separate understanding with France. - It is true that, because this policy was novel and adventurous, it was highly approved by a people glowing with warlike ar- dor, and seeking for fields of enterprise; but, although for the time an Administration may be thus borne harmless, it would be wrong to allow that in questions of high policy the com- plicity of the public has power to absolve. A Minister who has fashioned out a new policy leading his country into a war ought to be able to show—not necessarily that the policy was a wise one’ (for man is of an erring nature), but—that at the time of its adoption there were better grounds than its mere popularity for believing it to be right. Thatsome such grounds exist may be fairly imagined by those who have heard of the ability and the varied experience of the members of Lord Aber- ‘deen’s Cabinet; but hitherto, so far as I know, these grounds have not been disclosed. . Again, blame attaches upon Lord Aberdeen’s Cabinet for yielding up its own better judgment under pressure from the French Government, and consenting to those hostile move- ments of the Allied fleets which baftled the patient labors of diplomacy, and twice rekindled the strife. When the warlike spirit in England had once arisen, the French Emperor knew that he could at any moment subject Lord Aberdeen’s Cabinet to an access of popular disfavor by causing or allowing it to appear in England that the Government of the Queen was less Cuap. XXVIII.] BROUGHT ON THE WAR. ; 313 eager than himself in the defense of the Sultan; and it is true therefore that, although the hand which touched the lever was foreign, the instrument of pressure was English. It is prob- ably true, also, that the pressure was never inflicted without the consent of at least one great English Statesman. Still, be- cause this facile yielding to the French Emperor in the use of naval forces was popular, or rather was a means of avoiding unpopularity, the propriety of it is not the less in question. It is possible, however, that the hitherto unknown grounds on which the separate understanding with France may come to be defended will extend to justify the plan of deferring in na- val transactions to the Emperor of the French, and consenting at his instance to make our fleet an instrument for the disturb- ance of the pending negotiations. In so far as concerns the general policy of the Government in these transactions, the merits of Lord Clarendon must be tried, of course, by the tests applicable to the whole body of the Cabinet; but it has been seen that personally he was not blind to the danger of allowing the Czar to continue in his be- lief of England’s insuperable peacefulness, and that his firm, wholesome words were flying, as they say, to St. Petersburg,! when unhappily they were revoked at the instance of Lord Aberdeen. Lord Clarendon’s dispatches were written with so much of grace and vigor, and in a tone so fair and manly, that any one who is familiar with them will understand something of the process by which Lord Aberdeen was from time to time forced into an approval of these able writings, and in that way hindered from finding the happy moment in which he could establish his divergence from the governing member of the Cabinet and effect his retreat from office. Looking back upon the troubles which ended in the out- The volitios Preak of war, one sees the nations at first swaying which govern- backward and forward like a throng so vast as to edevents- be helpless, but afterward falling slowly into war- like array. And when one begins to search for the man or the men whose volition was governing the crowd, the eye falls upon the towering form of the Emperor Nicholas. He was not single-minded, and therefore his will was unstable, but it had a huge force; and, since he was armed with the whole authority of his Empire, it seemed plain that it was this man—and only he—who was bringing danger from the North. And at first, ' T have avoided the obvious step by which this statement might be veri- fied or disproved, because it seemed to me that a question upon the subject would be hardly fair; and I have preferred, therefore, to. give it under cover of the w¢ gaowv. I do not, however, doubt that it is true. Vou. IL—O 314 TRANSACTIONS, ETC. [Cuap. XXVIII. too, it seemed that within his range of action there was none who could be his equal; but in a little while the looks of men were turned to the Bosphorus, for thither his ancient adversa- ry was slowly bending his way. ‘To fit him for the encounter, the Englishman was clothed with little authority except what he could draw from the resources of his own mind and from the strength of his own willful nature. Yet it was presently seen that those who were near him fell under his dominion, and did as he bid them, and that the circle of deference to his will was always increasing around him; and soon it appeared that, though he moved gently, he began to have mastery over a foe who was*consuming his strength in mere anger. When he had conquered, he stood, as it were, with folded arms, and seemed willing to desist from strife. But also in the West there had been seen a knot of men possessed for the time of the mighty engine of the French State, and striving so to use it as to be able to keep their hold, and to shelter themselves from a cruel fate. The volitions of these men were active enough, because they were toiling for their lives. Their efforts seemed to interest and to please the lustiest man of those days, for he watched them from over the Channel with approving smile, and began to declare, in his good-humored, boisterous way, that so long as they should be suffered to have the han- dling of France, so long as they would execute for him his pol- icy, so long as they would take care not to deceive him, they: ought to be encouraged, they ought to be made use of, they ought to have the shelter they wanted; and, the Frenchmen agreeing to his conditions, he was willing to level the barrier —he called it perhaps false pride—which divided the Govern- ment of the Queen from the venturers of the second of De- cember. In this thought, at the moment, he stood almost alone; but he abided his time. At length he saw the spring of 1853, bringing with it grave peril to the Ottoman State. Then, throwing aside with a laugh some papers which belong- ed to the Home Office, he gave his strong shoulder to the ley-. eling work. Under the weight of his touch the barrier fell. Thenceforth the hinderances that met him were but slight. As he from the first had willed it, so moved the two great na- tions of the West. Cuar. XXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 315 CHAPTER XXIX. WHEN it had been resolved that the French and the English Thecommana- forces already dispatched to the East should be ers ofthe | raised to a strength which might enable them to the English ar- be more than auxiliary to the defense of the Turk- mies. ish dominions, the French Emperor named an ofti- cer to the command of his army in the field, and the General who was to have charge of the Queen’s land forces had already been chosen. It seems right for me now to say something of these two commanders; and, the better to make each of them known, I am willing to speak of some of the transactions which brought them together between the time of their meeting in Paris, and the day when they received their instructions for the invasion of the Crimea. The officer intrusted with the command of the French army Marshal st. 10 the East was a Marshal of France, and was the ene: person before spoken of who had changed his name from Le Roy to ‘St. Arnaud,’ and from James to ‘ Achilles.’ He impersonated with singular exactness the idea which our forefathers had in their minds when they spoke of what they called ‘a Frenchman;’ for although (by cowing the rich, and by filling the poor with envy) the great French Revolution had thrown a lasting gloom on the national character, it left this one man untouched. He was bold, gay, reckless, and vain; but beneath the mere glitter of the surface there was a great capacity for administrative business, and a more than common willingness to take away human life. In Algerine wartare he had proved himself from the first an active, enterprising ofticer, and in later years a brisk commander. He was skilled in the duties of a military governor, knowing how to hold tight un- der martial law a conquered or a half-conquered province. The empire of his mind over his actions was so often interrupted by bodily pain and weakness, that it is hard to say whether, if he had been gifted with health, he would have been a firm, steadfast man; but he had violent energies, and a spirit so elas- tic, that when for any interval the pressure of misery or of bodily pain was lifted off, he seemed as strong and as joyous as though he had never been crushed. He: chose to subordi- nate the lives and the rights of other men to his own advance: 316 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuapr. XXTX. ment. Therefore he was ruthless; but not in any other sense cruel. No one, as he himself said, could be more good-na- tured. In the interval between the grave deeds that he did, he danced and sung. To men in authority no less than to women, he paid court with flattering stanzas and songs. He had extraordinary activity of body, and was highly skilled in the performance of gymnastic feats; he played the violin; and, as though he were resolved in all things to be the Frenchman of the old time, there was once at least in his life a time of de- pression, when (to the astonishment of the good priest, who fell on his knees and thanked God as for a miracle wrought) he knelt down and confessed himself, seeking comfort and ab- solution from his Church. He thrice went through a career in the army. First he en- tered it in 1816 as a sub-lieutenant of the Royal Guard. He soon plunged into a course of life which was of such a kind as to cause him to cease from being an officer. He kept away from France for many years, and became acquainted with several languages. For a long time he was in England, and he spoke our language very well; but in later years he was accustomed to be silent in regard to the time of his exile, and there is no need to lift the veil which he threw over this part of his life. When the Revolution of 1830 broke out, he returned to France, and being then thirty-three years of age, he again en- tered the French army as a sub-lieutenant. He wrote some stanzas to Meunier, and gained a step by it. ‘Tell me, after ‘that,’ said he, ‘that songs are good for nothing! His next enterprise was in prose.- It chanced that Bugeaud, then the General in command of the district, had printed a small mili- tary work on the camping of troops. St. Arnaud or Le Roy (for the time of the change of name is not certain) translated the book into several languages, and presented the fruit of his labor with, no doubt, an appropriate letter of dedication to the General. Bugeaud was pleased; and from that time until his death he never lost sight of the judicious translator. St. Ar- naud was immediately put upon the General’s staff, and soon became one of his aids-de-camp. When the Duchess of Berri fell a prisoner into the hands of the Government, M. St. Ar- naud, whose regiment was on duty at the place of her deten- tion, found means to make himself useful to the Government without incurring the dislike of his captive, and he seemed to be in a fair road to promotion. But again the clouds passed over him. In 1836, for the third and last time, being then near forty years of age, he entered the military profession. -He began Cuar.XXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 317 this his third career as a lieutenant in the ‘Foreign Legion,’ and joined the corps in Algeria. Every man of the corps, St. Arnaud said, had passed through a wild youth ;! but with com- rades of that quality a man might entertain better hopes of gaining renown than with a mere French regiment of the line; and St. Arnaud at this time made a strong resolve. He said, ‘{ will be remarkable, or die.’ And he remained so faithful to this his covenant with himself, that even by acute illness he could not be kept out of action. When he lay upon the sick- bed, if it chanced that the Arabs or the Kabyles were offering any prospect of a fight upon ground within reach of the hospi- tal, he almost always managed to drag his helpless, tortured body toward the scene of the conflict, and this he would do, not with an idea of being able to take an active part, but sim- ply in order that the dist of officers present might not fail to_ comprise his name. At the storming of Constantine, however, he really helped to govern the event; for when a great explo- sion took place, and many were blown into the air, the French soldiers ran back with a cry that all was ruined; but Bedeau . and Combes, withstanding the madness of the common terror, strove hard to rally the crowd, and St. Arnaud, having with him in his company of the legion some bold, reckless outcasts of the North, he bethought him of the shout, very strange to the ears of Frenchmen, which he had heard in other climes. Skilled in the art of imitation, he uttered the warlike cry. In- stantly from the Northmen around him, whether Germans or Swedes, or English, Scots, Irish, or Danes, there sprang their native ‘ Hurrah! and with it came the thronging of men who must and would go forward. It was mainly the torrent of this new onslaught by St. Arnaud and his men of the ‘ stormy youth’ which carried the breach, and brought about the fall of the city. Even if for the recruiting of his health he were passing a few weeks of holiday in France, he would still seek personal distinction with a singular strength of will. If, for instance, there chanced to be a fire at night, he would fly to the spot, would scale the ladders, mount the roof, and contrive to ap- pear aloft in seeming peril, displayed to a wondering crowd by the lurid glare of the flames. Then he would disappear, and then suddenly he would be seen again suspended in the air, and passing athwart the sky that divided one roof from anoth- er by the help of a rope or a pole. In the early part of his 1 «<< Jeunesse orageuse.” I translate this by the words ‘‘ wild youth ;” but I believe the phrase in the mouths of Frenchmen generally implies that the things done by the person spoken of are closely bordering upon crime. 318 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [CHap. XXIX, service in Algeria, his old patron, General Bugeaud, was in com- mand there, and was still a warm friend to him. Of course this circumstance helped to open a path for him, and the result was that, first by acts of bravery and vigor, and then by a dis- play of administrative ability, the all but desperate lieutenant of the foreign legion rose in eight years to be intrusted with a General’s command.! In 1845 he commanded in the valley of the Chelif, and he was so dire a scourge to the neighboring tribes that the force which obeyed his orders was called the ‘Infernal Column.’ When first I saw him in that year he was moving with his force to wreak vengeance on a revolted tribe, and he was to march five weeks deep into the desert. He spoke with lumin- ous force, and with a charming animation; and it seemed to me, as we rode along by the side of the heavy-laden soldiery, that the clear incisive words in which he described to me the mechanism of the ‘movable column’ were a model of military diction; but his keen, handsome, eager features so kindled with the mere stir and pomp of war, he seemed so to love the swift going and coming of his aids-de- -camp, and the rolling drums, “and the joyful appeal of the bugles; he was so content with the gleam of his epaulettes, half hidden and half revealed by the eraceful white cabaan ; so happy in the bounding pride of his Arab charger, that he did not seem like a man destined to be chosen from out of all others as the instrument of a scheme requiring grave care and secrecy. Yet of secrecy he was most capable ; and at that very time he had upon his mind,? and was concealing, not from me only (for that would be only natural), but from every officer and man around him, a deed of such a kind that few men perhaps have ever done the like of it in secret. We saw that, before the December of 1851, the enterprising and resolute Fleury was in Algeria, seeking out a fit African officer who would take the post of Minister of War, with a view of joining the President in his plans for the overthrow of the Republic. Monsieur St. Arnaud, formerly Le Roy, had not so lived as to occasion any difficulty in approaching him with dishonoring proposals; and there was ground for inferring that he might prove equal to the task which was to be set be- fore him. The able administrator of a great district in Algeria might be competent to head a department. The commander of the ‘Infernal Column’ was not likely to be wanting in the 1 But up to that time with the rank of Colonel only. 2 The act here alluded to is spoken of farther on, "It took place about six weeks before the time when I first saw Colonel St. Arnaud, Cuap, XXIX.] INVASION OF 'THE CRIMEA. 319 ruthlessness which was needed, and if his vanity made it seem doubtful whether he was a man who could keep a secret, there was a confidential paper in existence which might tend to al- lay the fear. St. Arnaud had warmly approved the destruction of life which had been effected in 1844 by filling with smoke the crowded caves of the Dahra; but he had sagaciously observed that the popularity of the measure in EKurope was not coex- tensive with the approbation which seems to have been be- stowed upon its author by the military authorities. These counter views guided M.St. Arnaud. In the summer of 1845 he received private information that a body of Arabs had taken refuge in the cave of Shelas. Thither he marched a body of troops. Eleven of the fugitives came out and surrendered ; but it was known to St. Ar naud, though not to any other Frenchman, that five hundred men ‘remained in the cave. All these men Colonel St. Arnaud determined to kill, and so far he perhaps felt that he was only an imitator of Pelissier,’ but the resolve which accompanied the formation of this scheme was original. He determined to keep the deed secret even from the troops engaged in the operation. Except his brother, and Marshal Bugeaud, whose approval was the prize he sought for, no one was to know what he did. He contrived to execute both his purposes. ‘Then,’ he writes to his brother, ‘I had ‘all the apertures hermetically sealed up. I made one vast ‘sepulchre. No one went into the caverns. No one but my- ‘self knew that under there there are five hundred brigands ‘who will never again slaughter Frenchmen. A confidential ‘report has told all to the Marshal without terrible poetry or ‘imagery. Brother, no one is so good as I am by taste and. ‘by nature. From the Sth to the 12th I have been ill, but my “conscience does not reproach me. I have done my duty as a ‘commander, and to-morrow [ would do the same over again ; ‘but I have taken a disgust to Africa.’? The officer who could cause French soldiery to be the un- conscious instruments for putting to death five hundred fugi- tive men, and could afterward keep concealed from the whole force all knowledge of what it had done, was likely to be the very person for whom Fleury was seeking. He was brought back to Paris, and made Minister of War with a view to the great plot of the 2nd of December. France knows how well, ’ It is believed, however, that Pelissier left open some of the entrances to the cave; and that he only resorted to the smoke as a means of compelling the fugitives to come out and surrender. * St. Arnaud’s letters published by his relatives after his death. 820 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXIX, sooner or later, he answered to Fleury’s best hopes. He kept his counsel close until the appointed night, and then (what- ever faltering there may have been between midnight and three in the morning) he was out in time for the deed, and be- fore the daylight came he had stabbed France through in her sleep. ee men who make a great capture, there will often spring up questions concerning the division of the spoil. When he helped to make prize of France, St. Arnaud, of course, got much, but his wants were vast, and he had earned a clear right to extort from his chief accomplice, and to go back again, and again, and yet again, with the terrible demand for ‘more! He was in such a condition of health as to be unfit to com- mand an army in the field; for, although during intervals he was free from pain and glowing with energy, he was from time to time utterly cast down by his recurring malady. It is pos- sible that, notwithstanding his bodily state, he may have sin- cerely longed to have the command of an army in a European campaign; but whether he thus longed or not, he unquestion- ably said that he did, and the French Emperor took him at his word, consenting, as was very natural, that his dangerous, in- satiate friend should have a command which would take him into the country of the lower Danube. Apparently it was not believed that in point of warlike skill M. St. Arnaud was well fitted to the command, for the French Emperor, as will be seen, resorted to the plan of surrounding him with men who were virtually empowered to guide him with their over- ruling counsels. To try to understand the relations between the allied. Gen- erals of France and England without knowing something of the repute in which Marshal St. Arnaud was held by his fellow- countrymen would be to go blindfold; and a narrator keeping silence on this subject would be hiding a fact which belongs to history, and a fact, too, which is one of deep moment, and fruitful of lessons. Paris, stripped of the weapons which kill the body, and robbed of her appeal to honest print, was more than ever pitiless with the tongue; and M. St. Arnaud being Jaid open by the tenor of the life that he had led, his reputa- tion fell a prey to cruel speech. The people of the capital knew of no crime too vile to be imputed to the new Marshal of France now intrusted with the command of her army in the field. Yet, so far as I know, they failed to make out that he had ever been convicted, or even arrested on a criminal charge ; and when I look at the affectionate correspondence which al- most through his life M.St. Arnaud seems to have maintained \- Cuap. XXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 321 with his near relatives, I am led to imagine that they at least —and they would have been likely to know something of the truth—could have hardly believed his worst errors to be er- rors of the more dishonoring sort. Therefore there is ground for surmising that the Marshal was a man slandered. But in these times the chief defense against slanders upon public men is to be found in the award that results from free printing, and the right of free printing in France Marshal St. Arnaud, with his own midnight hand, had stealthily helped to destr oy. Whether he was a man bitterly wronged by his fellow-coun- trymen, or whether what he suffer ed was ‘mere justice, the state of his repute in the spring of 1854 is a thing lying with- in the reach of historical certainty. He had an ill name. But state policy is a shameless leveler—is a leveler of even that difficult steep which seems to divide the man of high hon- or from those of mean repute. The plotters of the 2nd of De- cember had overturned the social structure of France. They had stifled men’s minds, and had made their eloquence mute. They had forced those who were of high estate by character, or by intellect, or by birth, or by honor rable wealth, to endure to see France handled at. will by persons of no accoynt, and to submit to be governed by them, and to pay taxes into their hands, and to maintain them in luxury, and in all so much of pomp as can be copied from the splendor of kings. The new Emperor could not but know that he was breaking down yet another of the world’s barriers, and was carrying “subversion across the Channel when he contrived that all Europe should see him presenting his fellow-venturer of the December night to the appointed commander of an English army. But when he knew who the English General was to be, he might well give the rein to his cynic joy. He could have been sure that the General, placed in command of our army, would be an officer of unsullied name; but he who had been chosen was one whose life was mixed. with history—the friend, the companion of Wellington. It is true this Englishman was known to be very simple, very careless of self, a man hardly capable of imagining that he could be humbled by obeying the orders of his sovereign; and it is true, also, that the mass of the English people, being eager in the war, and little used to lay stress, as the French do, on the impersonation of a princi- ple, were blind to the moral import of what their Government was doing; but the French Emperor understood England, and he remembered that his coming guest was one of a great and powerful body of nobles, who were proud on behalf of this fa- vorite member of their class, and fenced him round with hon- | O 2 322 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXIX. or. For the leveling of these heights, and for the bringing down of those in Europe who were tall with the pride which sustains man’s old strife between good and evil, no dreamer could dream of a solemnization more signal than the coming together of Marshal Le Roy St. Arnaud, and him whom old friends still called Lord Fitzroy Somerset. The French Em- peror knew that the mind of Germany and France would be swift to interpret this public contact, and would see in it the terms of a great surrender. I conceive that in these latter times the scale upon which we measure warlike prowess has been brought down too low by the custom of awarding wild, violent praise to the common performance of duty, and even now and then to actual misfeasance; so if I keep from this path, it is not because I think coldly of our army or our navy, but because I desire—as I am very sure our best officers do— that we should return to our ancient and more severe stand- ard of excellence. There is another reason which moves me in the same direction. Not only is the utterance of mere praise a lazy and futile method of attempting to do justice to worthy deeds, but it even intercepts the honest growth of a man’s renown by serving as a contrivance for avoiding that labor of narration upon which, for the most part, all lasting fame must rest. Too often the repute of a soldier who has done some heroic act is dealt with by a formal] report, declaring that he has been ‘brave,’ or ‘ gallant,’ or ‘has conducted himself to the perfect ‘satisfaction of his commanding officer” The cheap, sugared words are quickly forgotten, and nothing remains; whereas, if his countrymen were told—not of the mere conclusion that the man had done bravely, but—of the very deed from which the inference was drawn, the story, however simple, might dwell perhaps in their minds, and they might tell it to their children, and the soldier would have his fame. Now this his- tory will virtually embrace the whole of the short period in which Lord Raglan’s quality as a General was tried, and it seems to me, therefore, that if, in narrating what happened, I can reach to near the truth; if I give honest samples of what our General said and of what he wrote—of his manner of com- manding men, and his way of maintaining an alliance; if I show how he dealt with armies in the hour of battle, and how he comported himself in times of heavy trial, his true nature, with its strength and with its human failings, will be so far brought to light, that I may be dispensed from the need of striving to portray it; and, contenting myself with speaking Lord Raglan. Cuap. XXIX. | INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 323 of some of the mere outward and visible signs which showed upon the surface, may leave it to his countrymen to ascend by the knowledge of what he did to the knowledge of what he was. Where I think Lord Raglan’s measures were right, I suppose I shall allow my belief to appear, and where I think they were wrong, I shall be likely to speak with an equal free- dom; but it is not for me, who am no soldier, to undertake to compute the great account between the English people and a General who commanded their Queen’s army in the field. Still, it must be remembered that the less I take upon myself in this regard, the graver will be the task of those who read. When the countrymen of Lord Raglan shall believe that they have in their hands sufficing means of knowledge, they will pass judgment—not, as I should, with the slender authority of a single by-stander, but with the weight of an honest nation in time of calm, judging firmly, yet not ungenerously, the ca- reer of a publie servant. Lord Fitzroy Somerset, afterward Lord Raglan, was a young- er son of the fifth Duke of Beaufort and of a daughter of Ad- miral Boscawen. He was born in 1788. He entered the army in 1804. In 1807, Sir Arthur Wellesley, being about to depart for the expedition against Copenhagen, attached the young Lord Fitzroy Somerset to his staff, and during his ca- reer in the Peninsula he kept him closé to his side, first as his aid-de-camp, and then as military secretary. Between the time of the first restoration of the Bourbons in 1814 and the flight of Louis XVIII. in the spring of the following year, Lord Fitzroy Somerset was secretary of the embassy at Paris. It was during this interval of peace that he married Emily Wellesley, a daughter of the third Earl of Mornington and a niece of the Duke of Wellington. When the war was renew- ed he again became military secretary and aid-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington, and served with him in his last cam- paign. At Waterloo—he was riding at the time near the farm of La Haie Sainte—he lost his right arm from a shot. But he quickly gained a great facility of writing with his left hand; and, the war being ended, he resumed his function as secretary of embassy at Paris. There he remained until 1819. He then returned to England and became secretary to the Master-General of the Ordnance. In 1825 he went with the Duke of Wellington to St. Petersburg as secretary of em- bassy. In 1827 he was appointed military secretary to the Commander-in-Chief at the Horse-Guards, and there he re- mained until the death of the Duke of Wellington in 1852. After that event he was made Master-General of the Ordnance, 324 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXIX, was appointed a Privy Councilor, and raised to the peerage. In February, 1854, he became a full General. Thus from his very boyhood until the autumn of 1852, Lord Fitzroy Somerset had passed his life under the immediate guidance of the Duke of Wellington. The gain was not with- out its drawback; for in propor rtion as the great Duke’s com- prehensive grasp and prodigious power of work made him in- dependent and self-sufficing, his subordinates were of course relieved from the necessity, and even shut out from the oppor- tunity of thinking for themselves; but still, to have been in the close presence and intimacy of Wellington from the very rising of his fame in Europe—to have toiled at the desk where the immortal dispatches were penned—to have ridden at his side, and carried his orders in all the great campaigns—and then, when peace returned, to have engaged in the labors of diplomacy and military administration under the auspices of the same commanding mind—all this was to have a wealth of experience which common times can not give. But for more than thirty years of his life Lord Ragin had been administering the current business of military offices in peace time, and this is a kind of experience which, if it be very long protracted, is far from being a good preparative for the command of an army in the field ; because a militar y of- fice, in time of peace, ts impelled by its very constitution to aim at uniformity; and, on the other hand, the genius of war abhors uniformity, and tramples upon forms and regulations. An armed force is a‘means to an end. The end is victory over enemies, and this is to be achieved partly, indeed, by a due use of discipline and method, but partly, also, by keeping alive in those who may come to have command a knowledge and love of war, and by cherishing that unlabeled, undocketed state of mind which shall enable a man to encounter the un- known. In England, however, and in all the great states of Europe, except France, the end had been so much for gotten in pursuit of the means, and the industry exerted in the regu- lation of troops in peace time had become so foreign to the business of war, that the more a man was military, in the nar- rowed sense of the ter m, the less he was likely to be fitted for the perturbing exigencies of a campaign. In one country, this singular perver rsity of busy, ‘cold, formal man,’ had been carried so far that an army and a war had been actually treat- ed as things antagonistic the one to the other; for the late Grand Duke Constantine of Russia once declared that he dread- ed a war, because he was sure it would spoil the troops, which, with ceaseless care and labor, he had striven to bring to per- fection. * Cuap. XXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 325 It is to be observed also that, partly from the way in which our military system was framed and partly from political causes, the sympathy which England ought ever to have with her troops had been materially lessened after the first few years of the peace. The Duke of Wellington, dreading lest our forces should be dangerously reduced by the House of Commons, made it his policy to withdraw the army as much as possible from public observation. This method had tended still farther to dissociate the country from its armed defend- ers; but naturally the Duke of Wellington’s view was law, and it became the duty of those who were employed in the military administration—not to cause the country to practice itself heartily for the eventuality of another war, but—simply to maintain, as far as they could, a monotonous quiet in the army. For half a lifetime Lord Fitzroy Somerset was engaged in preventing and allaying discussion, and making the wheels of office run smooth. Against the baneful effect of this sort of experience, and against the habit of mind which it tended to generate, Lord Raglan had to combat with.all the fire and strength of his nature. When Lord Raglan was appointed to the command he was sixty-six years old. But, although there were intervals when a sudden relaxation of the muscles of the face used to show the impress of time, those moments were few ; and, in-general, his well-braced features, his wakeful attention, his uncommon swiftness of thought, his upright, manly carriage, and his easy seat on horseback, made him look the same as a man in the strong mid-season of life. He had one peculiarity which, although it went near to be- ing a foible, was likely to give smoothness to his relations with the French. Beyond and apart from a just contempt for mere display, he had a strange hatred of the outward signs and tokens of military energy. Versed of old in real war, he knew that the clatter of a General briskly galloping hither and thith- er with staff and orderlies did not of necessity imply any mo- -mentous resolve—that the aids-de-camp, swiftly shot off by a word like arrows from a bow, were no sure signs of dispatch or decisive action. And, because such outward signs might mean little, he shrank from them more than was right. He would have liked, if it had been possible, that he and his army | should have glided unnoticed from the banks of the Thames to their position in the battle-field. It was certain, therefore, that although a French General would be sure to find himself checked in any really hurtful attempt to encroach upon the just station of the British army, yet that if, as was not unnat- 326 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXIX. ural, he should evince a desire for personal prominence, he. would find no rival in Lord Raglan until he reached the ene- my’s presence. ‘He was gifted with a diction very apt for public faints and of a kind rarely found in Englishmen ; for, though it was so easy as to be just what men like in the intercour se of pri- vate friendship, it was still so constructed as to be fit for the ear of all the world; and whether he spoke or whether he wrote, whether he used the French tongue, or his own clear, graceful English, it seemed that there had come from him the very words which were the best, and no more. It was so nat- ural to him to be prudent in speech, that he avoided danger- ous utterance without seeming cautious or reserved. He had the subtle power ‘to draw men along with him. To say that he was persuasive might mean that he could ad- duce reasons which tended to bring men to his views. His was a power of another sort; for, without pressure of argu-* ment, his mind, by its mere impact, broke down resistance for the moment; ; and, although the easy graciousness of his man- ner quickly set people free from all awkward constraint, it did not so liberate men’s minds that, while they were still in his presence, they at all liked the duty of trying to uphold their OWN opinions against him. This dominion, however, was in a great degree dependent upon his actual personal presence ; for, with all the power and grace of his pen, he could not, at a distance, work effects proportioned to those which he wrought when he dealt with’ men face to face. It is plain that, in one respect, his empire over those who were in his presence was of a kind likely to become dangerous to him in the command of an army, because it prevented men from differing from him, and even made them shrink from con- veying to him an unwelcome truth. Indeed, after the death of the Duke of Wellington, the proudest Englishman, if only he had intellect and a little knowledge of his country’s latter history, had generally the grace to understand that, unless he, too, were a soldier who had taken his orders from the lips of Sir Arthur Wellesley, he could hardly be the equal of one whose mere presence was a record of England’s great days. Thence it followed that, without pretension on the one side or . servility on the other, men who were with him had a tendency to become courtiers. It was in vain that, so far as it had to do with their personal contentment, his manner placed men at their ease; there was some quality in him, or else some out- ward circumstance—it was partly, perhaps, the historic appeal of his maimed sword-arm—which was always enforcing re: membrance, and preventing his fusion with other men CuHap. XXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 327 In truth, Lord Raglan’s manner was of such a kind as to be —not simply ornament, but—a real engine of power. It sway- ed events. There was no mere gloss in it. By some gift of imagination he divined the feelings of all sorts and conditions of men; and whether he talked to a statesman or a schoolboy, his hearer went away captive. I knew a shy, thoughtful, sens- itive youth, just gazetted to a regiment of the Guards, who had to render his visit of thanks to the military secretary at the Horse-Guards. He went in trepidation. He came back radiant with joy and wholesome confidence. Lord Fitzroy, instead of receiving him in solemn form and ceremony, had walked forward to meet him, had put his hand kindly on the boy’s shoulder, and had said a few words so cheering, so inter- esting, and so free from the vice of being commonplace, that the impression clung to the lad, shaping his career for years, and helped to make him the man he was when he was out: with his battalion in the winter of the first campaign. From the same presence the foremost statesman of the time once came away saying that the man in England most fitted by na- ture to be at the head of the Government was Lord Fitzroy Somerset, and he who so judged was himself a Prime Minister. The enemies of the Imperial Government in France had long Marshal st, made it a reproach against the English that they Arnaud and Were joining in close alliance with the midnight de- Mouktic, _ Stroyers of law and freedom; but when Lor d Rag- gether atthe lan came to Paris, when he Ww ent to the Tuileries, Huileries. when he was presented by the Emperor to Marshal St. Arnaud, the notion that such things could be was a very torment to those of the Parisian malcontents who chanced to know something of the English General: ‘You English are a ‘robust, stirring people, and perhaps every man of you imag- ‘ines that he covers himself with dignity and grandeur by ‘trampling upon the feelings of the rest of mankind ; but sure- ‘ly those men wrong you who call you a proud people. Pride ‘causes men to stand aloof, as we do, from that which is base; ‘and if ever again we call you haughty islanders, you may si- ‘lence the calumny by reminding us of this 13th day of April, in the year of grace 1854. It was not enough that, for the ‘sake of this silly war, you should ally yourselves body and ‘soul to “* Monsieur de Mor ny’s Lawgiver,” and that you should ‘suffer him to drag you down into close intercourse with per- ‘sons whom the humblest of us here decline to know; but ‘now—as though you really wished that your dishonor should *be made signal in Kurope—you send hither your General to ‘be presented by this “ French Emperor,” as you call him, to 328 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. X XIX, ‘his henchman, Mr. Le Roy St. Arnaud, and the man whom you ‘choose out for this great public sacrifice is Fitzroy Somerset, ‘the friend and the companion in arms of your Wellington. ‘You say that Lord Raglan cares not with whom he associates, ‘so that he is under the orders of the Queen whom he serves, ‘and in the performance of a public duty; but because he in ‘the loyalty, in the high-bred simplicity of his nature, is care- ‘less and forgetful of self, is that a reason why you should fail ‘to be proud for him—why you should forget to be careful on ‘his behalf? Ifthe modesty of his nature hindered him from ‘seeing the momentous significance of his contact with the ‘people who have got into our palaces, ought you not to have ‘interposed to prevent him from incurring the scene of to-day ? ‘We imagined that you knew how to honor the memory of ‘your Wellington, and that after his death, when you looked ‘toward Fitzroy Somerset, or spoke to him, or listened to his ‘words, you looked, and spoke, and listened like men who re- ‘membered. Him, nevertheless, you now offer up. To have ‘brought you down to this is a great achievement, the realiza- ‘tion of what they call here a ‘“ Napoleonic idea!” ‘The pris- ‘oner of St. Helena is avenged at last. We are classic here, ‘and we strike commemorative medals. You will soon see the ‘honored image of your Fitzroy Somerset undergoing presen- ‘tation at the Tuileries. Already our artists have caught some ‘glimpses of him, and they declare it is the coloring, the glow ‘of the complexion which makes him look so English, and that ‘in bronze he will be grandly Roman. Those noble lineaments ‘of his, that upright manly form, nay, even the empty sleeve ‘which speaks to you of your day of glory, will worthily sig- -‘nify what England was; and then the effigy of our counter- ‘feit Caesar receiving the homage of a stainless Englishman, ‘and joining him hand to hand with Mr. Le Roy St. Arnaud, ‘this will show what England is. We hear that you are well ‘pleased with the prospect of all this, and that—far from shrink- ‘ing—your “ virtuous middle class,” as you call it, is going into ‘a state of coarse rapture. For shame!’ Lord Raglan, all unconscious of exciting this kind of sympa- thy in the heart of the angry Faubourg, had left England on the 10th of April, 1854, and on the following day both he and His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge were received in state at the Tuileries. The presence of a member of our Royal Family was welcome to the new Emperor. He understood its significance. The Parisians love to see a momentous idea so impersonated as to be visible to the eyes of the body, and when their monarch attained to be seen riding between the near Cuap. XXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 329 kinsman of the English Queen and the appointed commander of her army in the field; when, on a bright spring day, he ‘showed his guests some thirty thousand of his best troops in the Champ de Mars, and the scarlet of the ancient enemy sparkled gayly by the side of tlfe blue and the gold, the people seemed to accept the scene as a fitting picture of the great alliance of the West. Almost for the first time in the history of France the accustomed cheers given to the Head of the State were mingled with cheers for England. But now the time for concerted action had come; and though France and England were already allied by such bonds as are made with parchment and wax, it remained to be seen wheth- er the great rivals could act together in arms. The conjuncture, indeed, drew them toward each other; but it was certain that the coherence of the union would greatly depend on one man. It might seem that he who had first sworn to maintain the. French Republic, and had afterward destroyed it by stealth in the night time, would not be much trusted again by his fellow- creatures ; but the alliance rested upon ground more firm than the trust which one prince puts in another. It rested—not in- deed upon the common interests of France and England, for France, as we have seen, was suppressed, but—upon the pros- pect of personal advantage which was offered to thenew French Emperor by an armed and warlike alliance with England. It being clear that the alliance was for his good, and that, for the time, he had really the control of France, the only remaining question was whether he would pursue what was plainly for his own advantage with steadiness and good sense. Upon the whole it seemed likely that he would; for, though he was not a man to be stopped by scruples, he did not discard the use of loyalty and faithfulness where loyalty and faithfulness seemed likely to answer his purpose; and there was a persistency in his na- ture which gave ground for hoping that, unless he should be induced to change by some really cogent reason, his steadfast- ness would endure. Moreover, as we have seen, he had the faculty of keeping himself awake to the ‘distinction between the Greater and the Less; and he did not forget that for the time the alliance with England was the greater thing, and that most other objects belonged to the category of the Less. These qualities, supported by good humor and often by gener- ous impulses, went far to make him an ally with whom (so long as he might find it advantageous to remain in accord with us) it would be possible, nay, easy, and not unpleasant to act. — Lord Raglan submitted to the publicity and ceremonial visits forced upon him during the days of the 11th and 12th of April, 330 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuapr. XXTX, Conference at and at one o’clock on the 13th he had a private in- the Tuileries. terview with the French Emperor at the Tuileries, The Emperor and the English General were not strangers to one another. ‘They. had been frequently brought together in London, and indeed it was by Lord Fitzroy Sorekinte that the heir of the first Napoleon—deeply moved by the historic sig- nificance of the incident—had been brought to Apsley House and presented to the Duke of Wellington. The Emperor showed Lord Raglan the draught of the instructions which he proposed to address to Marshal St. Arnaud. It may be said that at this hour Lord Raglan began to have upon him the weight of that anxious charge which was never again to be thrown off so long as life and consciousness should endure. He had charge on behalf of England of the great al- liauce of the West; and since it happened that in this, the out- set of his undertaking, he followed a method which character- ized his relations with the French from first to last, there is a reason for now pointing it out. It seemed to him that in the intercourse of two proud and sensitive nations undertaking to act in concert, one of the chief dangers lay in that kind of men- tal activity which is generated in the process of arguing. He made it a rule to avoid and avert all needless discussion, and he regarded as needless—not only those discussions which spring out of abstract questions, but—many also of those which are generated by men’s anxiety to provide for hypothet- ical con} unctures. He was very English in this respect, and he was no less English in the simple contrivance by which he sought to ward ‘off the evil. Whenever there seemed to be impending a question which he regarded as avoidable, he pre- vented or obstructed its discussion by interposing for consid- eration some practical matter which was more or less impor- tant in its way, but not unsafe. And now, when there was perhaps some fear that questions of an embarrassing and deli- eate kind might be raised by the pondering Emperor, Lord Raglan kept them aloof by engaging attention to the choice of the camping-ground best suited for the two armies. He seems to have succeeded in confining all discussion to this one safe and practical subject. When the Emperor at length brought his guest biel into the outer room, there were there assembled Prince Jer ome, the Duke of Cambridge, Marshal Vaillant the Minister of War, Marshal St. Arnaud, and Lord De Ros. The vital business of making arrangements best fitted to prevent collision between the armies was anxiously weighed. Marshal Vaillant, labori- ous, weil instructed, precise, and rather, perhaps, fatiguing in Cuap. XXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. . 331 his tendency, to probe deep every question, strove hard to anticipate the eventualities likely to occasion difficulty in the relations of the two armies, and to force a clear understanding beforehand as to the way in which each question should be dealt with. This he endeavored to do by putting it to St. Ar- naud in a categorical way! to say what solution he proposed for each of the imagined problems; but St. Arnaud, it then ap- peared, was hardly more fond than Lord Raglan was of hypo- thetical questions, for after a little while his endurance of Vail- lant’s interrogatories came to an end; and he answered impa- tiently, and in a general way, that when the conjunctures arose, they would be met as best they might by the concer ted action of the Generals. The period of the great French Revolution has gathered so much of the mellowness of age from later events, that it seems like a disturbance of chronology to be bringing into the joint- council of France and England, in the year “1854, a brother of the first Napoleon. Yet Prince Jerome was one of the speak- ers, and he spoke with sound judgment upon the great prob- Jem of how France and England should act together in arms. He spoke, as might be expected, with less sagacity when the subject of ‘The Turks’ floated up into notice. The whole French people and many even of the people of this country imagine that the wisdom and power of man are tested by his proximity to the newest stage of civilization, and from those whose minds are in that state the true worth of the Osmanli, whether in policy or in arms, must always be hidden. If he sustains reverses, their minds are satisfied, because in that case the sum of their knowledge seems to have come right; but his success disturbs their most deep-set notions of logical sequence; and now, after all Omar Pasha’s achievements on the Danube, it seemed to be the impression of Prince Jerome and the French Marshals that the Turkish General would be a source of trou- ble and anxiety to the alliance. They looked upon the events which had been occurring as accidental and anomalous, and tending to produce a wrong conclusion. The Russians, as they well knew, had carried the industry of military preparation to the utmost verge of human endurance. The Turks had pro- vided themselves with a powerful field artillery, had kept their old yatagans bright, and had cherished their ancient love of war; but for the rest, they had trusted much in Heaven. Yet during some six or seven months these pious, improvident, warlike men had been getting the better of drilled masses. ! The French verb ‘ poser’ would describe Marshal Vaillant’s labors. The English verb active ‘to pose’ would describe the effect upon the patient. 332 . INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. (Cuap. XXIX, Their success seemed to carry a dangerous lesson; and the French Councilors thought it so important for the Turks to be broken in to the yoke of a newer civilization, that they even said it might be advantageous for Omar Pasha to undergo the discipline of a few wholesome reverses.! From all he observed in the course of these interviews, Lord Raglan was led to believe in the stability of the Emperor’s character, and the value he set upon the alliance. [ord Ragian’s _ ‘dfter a few days, the arrangements detaining departure for Lord Raglan in Paris were complete, and he took Mirae his departure for the East. : The joint occupation by French and English troops of the The French’ ground on the shore of the Dardanelles had yielded and the En- : e : : : glish troops on the first experience of the relations likely to subsist the shores of between the armies of the two nations when quar- nelles, tered near to each other. It quickly appeared that the troops of each force could be cordially good-humored in Cordial inter. their intercourse with those of the other. Canro- course between bert, Bosquet, and Sir George Brown, all destined to thetwoanmies. take prominent share in the coming events, made a kindly beginning of acquaintanceship amid the early difficulties and discomforts of Gallipoli; and upon the departure of Sir George Brown from the Dardanelles, there occurred one of those opportunities for the display of good feeling on which the French are accustomed to seize with a quickness, tact, and grace belonging to no other nation. Sir George Brown was to bring up with him to head-quarters two of the English regiments ; and the French—spontaneously as it appeared, and from a simple impulse of good-will—came down to aid in the embarkation. They set themselves to the work with all that briskness and gay energy by which the French soldiery con- vert an operation of mere Jabor and industry into a cheerful and animating scene. The incident in itself was a small one; but, viewed as a sign of things to come, it had greater propor- tions. It was accepted at the time by Lord Raglan as a hap- py omen—an omen which seemed to promise that the alliance of the West would hold good. But whilst the soldier was giving the best of sanctions to St.Amnaud’s the great Alliance, the Marshal of France was put- ae oh ting it in jeopardy. M.St. Arnaud had not been command of — long on the shores of the Bosphorus when he enter- the Turkish 7. petprn'? ed upon a tempting scheme of ambition. General 1 Some might imagine that this hope must have been expressed in jest, but that is not the case. Incredible as it may seem, it is nevertheless certain ‘that this view was gravely put forward. Cap. XXIX. | INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 333 Bosquet, dispatched to the head-quarters at Schumla, had brought back accounts, which the Marshal at first could hardly credit, of the good state and apparent effectiveness of the Turkish troops, and it was then perhaps that St. Arnaud first thought of the step which he afterward took. He con- ceived the idea of obtaining the command of the whole Turk- ish army. The effect which this united command would have upon the relations between the French and the English Gen- eral was obvious. The English General, with his force of some twenty-five thousand men, had always foreseen that he was likely to be somewhat embarrassed in having to claim due consideration for a force which was less, by one half, than the army sent out by the French; but if Marshal St. Arnaud should be at the head, not only of his fifty thousand French, but of the whole force of Turkey, it would obviously become very hard, nay, even unfitting, for the English General to maintain an equality in council with one who, in this case, would com- mand altogether nearly two hundred thousand men. Marshal St. Arnaud pressed his demand with the Ministers of the Porte at Constantinople, and he seems to have imagined that he had obtained their assent to his demand. If indeed they did real- ly give a seeming assent to the proposed encroachment, they could hardly have meant it to take effect. They perhaps put their trust then, where they had put their trust before. They knew that Lord Stratford was at Therapia, and they might well believe that he would make the elaborate world go back into chaos before he would suffer the armies of the Caliph to pass like the contingent of some mere petty Christian State under the orders of a French Commander. On the 11th of May Marshal St. Arnaud called upon Lord Raglan, and stated in the course of conversation that the Turk- ish Government had determined to place Omar Pasha’s army under his (the Marshal’s) command; and that he was then going to Reschid Pasha in order to have the matter finally settled. Lord Raglan merely said he believed the British Am- bassador was not aware of the arrangement. On the 13th Marshal St. Arnaud sent to propose that Lord Raglan would meet him at Lord Stratford’s, and intimated that he had an important communication to make. It was arranged that the English Ambassador should receive the Marshal alone, ‘in or- ‘der,’ as Lord Stratford almost cruelly expressed it, ‘in order ‘to make his acquaintance,’ and that afterward Lord Raglan should join them. It jars upon one’s love of fair strife to see Marshal St. Ar- naud brought in cold blood into the presence of the two men 334 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. X XIX, St. Arnaud in. Whom he ventured to encounter—into the presence the presence of of Lord Stratford, prepared and calmed by his fore- ord Stratford and Lord Rag- knowledge of the intrigue; and of Lord Raglan, an, roused by his sense of the danger which threatened the alliance. But the interview took place. The Marshal went to the English embassy, and the operation of ‘making his ac- ‘quaintance’ was carried into full effect. Imagination may see the process—may see the light, agile Frenchman coming gayly into the room, content with himself, content with all the world, and charmed at first with the sea-blue depth of the eyes that lightened upon him from under the shadow of the Canning brow; but presently beginning to understand the thin, tight, merciless lips of his host, and then finding himself cowed and pressed down by the majesty and the graciousness of the wel- come. For the welcome was such as the great Eltchi would be sure to give to one who (for imperative reasons of State) was to be treated as his honored guest, but who was also a vain mortal, pretending to the command of the Ottoman army, and daring to come with his plot avowed into the very pres- ence of an English ambassador. Afterward Lord Raglan came into the room, and then the Marshal began upon the business in hand. He said he had required, and the Turkish Govern- ment had consented, that Omar Pasha should be placed under his orders; that a brigade of Turkish infantry and a battery of artillery should be incorporated into each of the French divisions; that fifteen hundred Bashi-Bazouks should be dis- mounted, that their horses should be turned over. to the French troopers, and that the Bashi-Bazouks should be paid (it was not said by whom), and then be sent back to their homes. If this proposal had been then for the first time made known to Lord Stratford, his fiery nature would scarcely perhaps have suffered him to hear with temper; but he had been prepared by Lord Raglan for what was coming, and he seemed all calm and gentleness. After hearing the proposal with benign at- tention, he quietly asked the Marshal whether he had cogni- zance of the tripartite treaty ; and then turning to a copy of the treaty which happened—not at all by chance—to be lying within his reach, he read aloud the fourth article: an article which proceeds upon the assumption that the three armies would be under the orders of distinct commanders. The Mar- shal—ready perhaps to encounter the more obvious arguments against the expediency of the plan—was scarcely prepared for this quiet reference to the terms of the treaty. Lord Raglan then said that he thought a good deal of inconvenience might result from the adoption of the Marshal’s plan—that Omar Cuar. XXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 335 Pasha was the ablest of the Turkish generals, that his services had been recognized by the grant of the rank of Generalissimo, and the title of Highness, and that to deprive him of the supe- rior command, and to dismember his army at a moment when it was in presence of the enemy, would not only lower him in. the estimation of those who looked up to him with confidence, but would probably induce him to throw up his charge in dis- gust, and declare that he would not suffer himself to be de- graded. But both Lord Raglan and the English Ambassador were gifted with the power which is one of the most keen and grace- ful of all the accomplishments of the diplomatist—the power of affecting the hearer’ with an apprehension of what remains unsaid. It is a power which exerts great sway over human actions; for men are more cogently governed by what they are forced to imagine than by what they are allowed to know. - ‘The Marshal,’ Lord Raglan wrote, ‘saw that our opinions ‘were stronger than our expression of them.’ He gave way. He immediately declared that, far from wishing to diminish the consequence of Omar Pasha, he was anxious to add to it, to uphold him to the utmost, and to increase his importance ; and he added that he saw the propriety of deciding nothing until after a conference with Omar Pasha. By the time that St. Arnaud passed out of the Embassy gate, his enterprise was virtually abandoned. Some good, perhaps, resulted from the attempt to bring the His écheme de- Ottoman army under French command. Of all the spated. faults tending to impair the value of Lord Raglan’s advice to the home Government, there was none more grave than his want of power to appreciate warlike people belonging to an earlier state of civilization than that to which he had been accustomed in his latter years; and although nothing could ever soften his antipathy toward Turkish Irregulars of all kinds, and especially to the Bashi-Bazouks, he was by this incident drawn more than ever toward the Turkish Generalis- simo, and he always thenceforth did his best to defeat any plan which tended to narrow the sphere of the Pasha’s authority. So great was the elasticity of Marshal St. Arnaud’s mind, His scheme for that, far from remaining cast down under the dis- cpauaning ° ~comfiture which he had undergone, he very soon English troops. entered upon a scheme yet more ambitious than the frst. It seems he had become possessed with the idea that great achievements were within his reach, if only he could add to the powers which he already wielded the occasional com- mand. of English troops. He proposed that when French and % 336 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXIX, English troops were acting together, the senior officer, whether he chanced to be French or English, should take the command of the joint force; and although this proposal was so expressed that it might be regarded as applying only to the command of detachments, it was surmised that (M. St. Arnaud’s military rank being higher than that of Lord Raglan) the control of the whole British force was the object really in view. The experience of the conference at the British embassy had proved the good sedative effect of a dry document; and as the instructions addressed to the English General chanced to con- tain some words directing him to take no orders except from the Secretary of State,! the clause was happily put forward by Lord Raglan as an impediment to the proposed plan. Mar- This also de- Shal St. Arnaud gave way, and thenceforth desisted denied. from all farther prosecution of his scheme. So skillful was the resistance opposed to these enterprises of M.St. Arnaud, and the character of the Marshal was so free from all admixture of spite and bitterness, that their frustra- tion did not create ill feeling. It was plain, however, that re- Attemptsof currence to projects of this sort would be danger- this Kind ne OUS to the alliance; and when the French Emperor French Empe- knew that these schemes had been tried and defeat- be ed, he forbade all attempts to revive them. Hitherto, the cause which had been threatening the cohesion st.Arnua Of the alliance was M. St. Arnaud’s ambition. The suddenly de- next obstruction which Lord Raglan had to deal nye Care with was one of a very different kind. Checked, Mand the seatiyigs is supposed, by the authoritative counsels sent is out to him from Paris, Marshal St. Arnaud suddenly announced that, for some time to come, the French army could not be suffered to move toward the seat of the war. The measures for sending up the British forces to Varna were in progress; and the Light Division had been already dispatched, when, at eleven o’clock at night, Colonel Trochu presented himself at the British head-quarters, and requested an immediate interview with Lord Raglan. The name of Col- onel Trochu will recur in this narrative, for he was an officer of great weight in the councils of the French army. He had come from France so lately as the 10th of May, and, although his nominal office was simply that of first aid-de-camp to Mar- shal St. Arnaud, it was known that he came out fully charged with the notions and the wishes of the French Emperor. Col- ? The clause, I imagine, had been introduced in order to negative the sup- position that the Ambassador at Constantinople was to have the control of the military operations. Cuap. XXIX. ] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 337 onel 'T'rochu was a cautious, thinking man, well versed in strat- egic science, and it was surmised that it was part of his mis- sion to check any thing like wildness in the movements of the French Marshal.! He stated that he had been sent by Mar- shal St. Arnaud to request that Lord Raglan would postpone any farther movement toward Varna until the Marshal should have an opportunity of satisfying himself that any considerable portion of the French army was in a condition to take the field. Up to this moment, no doubt had been entertained of the forwardness of the French preparations; and Lord Raglan, much astonished, expressed strong objection to the proposed delay. ) Colonel Trochu replied that, upon his arrival in the Levant, he had gone to Gallipoli in order to see what degree of for- wardness the preparations of the French army had really at- tained; and he had come, he said, to the conclusion that the French army was not as yet so equipped and provided as to render it practicable, with any thing like common prudence, to attempt operations against the enemy. He went on to justify his conclusion by details, showing the deficiencies under which the French army labored; he said that he had communicated the result of his inspection, and the opinion which he had form- ed to Marshal St. Arnaud, and that Marshal St. Arnaud, en- tirely adopting that opinion, had sent him to the English head- quarters in order that he might prevail upon Lord Raglan to suspend the intended movement. _Lord Raglan observed that great inconvenience would re- Lord Raglan's sult from the proposed suspension of the move- disapproval of 5 ; : i the proposed Ment; that the movement was one ‘actually pro- delay. posed by the French and English commanders to Omar Pasha, and by him, as well as by the Turkish ministers, entirely approved ; and that thus the French and the English commanders stood pledged to Omar Pasha and to the Porte, at a moment too when much anxiety existed for the fate of Silistria. Colonel Trochu admitted all this; but he again urged the necessity for delay. The interview lasted till an hour after midnight, and Col- onel Trochu’s request was followed up on the ensuing day by written communications from the French Marshal. But the importance of these discussions was superseded by a farther and more perilous change in the French counsels. At seven o’clock in the morning of Sunday, the 4th of June, Marshal St. Arnaud called upon Lord Raglan, and announced 1 Modérer la fougue de M. le Marechal. Vote 338 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA™ [Cuar. XXIX. St.Amaud’s that he had determined upon an entirely new plan prio thts of operations for his army. Instead of moving his take upade- force to Varna, as had been agreed, he had resolved, way rear of he said, to send there only one division, and to place the Balkan. qj the rest of his army in position—not in advance, but in rear of the Balkan range. He was to have his right resting on the sea at Bourgas. His head-quarters were to be at Aidos, and he hoped, he said, to be able to establish himself there by the third week of June. He invited Lord Raglan to conform to this plan, and to take up a position at Bournabat, a part of the proposed position which was the most remote from the sea. . Thus, at a time when the eyes of all Europe were upon Silis- tria and the campaign on the Danube, it was proposed that the armies of the Western Powers should take up a mere defensive —a timidly defensive—position, placing all Bulgaria, a part of Roumelia, and the whole range of the Balkan between them and the scene of conflict! What made the matter still more grave was this: that Marshal St. Arnaud did not come to con- sult. He had already adopted this almost incredible plan, and his troops were then actually in march for the new position. It might now indeed seem that those were right who had Lord Raglan's deemed the great alliance of the West to be im- determined practicable. For all the purposes of the campaign plan. the proposed plan would have caused the armies of the two Western Powers to become simply null. Lord Rag- lan at once declared his entire disapproval of it. Tied perhaps to this singular plan by the counsels which Trochu had brought him, Marshal St. Arnaud, for the time, did not yield. But the English General, as I have already said, had a quality which made it difficult and painful for men to maintain a difference with him whilst they were in his pres- ence. St. Arnaud was under this stress; and, as though lie shrank from the ascendency of Lord Raglan, and sought a res- pite from the effort of having to oppose him in oral discussion, he imagined the idea of bending over a table and writing down what he had to say. This he did; and when the writing was finished, he left it with Lord Raglan. But the Marshal seems to have inwardly determined that Colonel Trochu, who had probably suggested this new plan of campaign, should himself be made to bear the pain of farther sustaining it; for he took. his leave, saying that the Colonel should be sent to Lord Rag- Jan-on the following day. agit In this curious paper, written by St. Arnaud in Lord Rag- lan’s presence, the Marshal said the great advantage of the Cuap. XXIX.] - INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 339 French and English having only one division each at Varna, would be that they would not get entangled prematurely in hostile operations, for with such a small force no one could taunt the Western Powers for not marching to relieve Silistria, or for not giving battle to the Russians; whereas, argued the Marshal, if the Allies were present in greater strength, it was to be feared that they might suffer themselves to be carried away by the Turks. ‘It is important,’ said the Marshal, ‘ not to ‘give battle to the Russians except with all possible chances | ‘of success, and the certainty of obtaining great results.’ Then, after describing the supposed advantages of his intended position in rear of the Balkan, the Marshal reverted to his dread of being carried forward by the warlike Turks. ‘We must ‘not,’ said he, ‘lose sight of this; that we are here to aid the ‘'Turks—to succor them, to save them; but not by following ‘their plans and their ideas, It is evident that Omar Pasha ‘has no other idea but that of drawing on the allied army to ‘give battle to the Russians and to relieve Silistria. The safe- ‘ty of Turkey is not in Silistria; and it is necessary to aid and ‘succor the Turks in our own way.’ No one perhaps will now defend a plan of campaign which was to place the allied armies of the Western Powers in a po- Sition some hundreds of miles from the scene of any conflict, and to withdraw them from the very proximity of the Turk be- cause of his warlike counsels. Still, such justice as is due must be rendered to the French strategists. France and England had sent to the East that portion of the two armies which con- sists of combatants; but neither of the Western Powers had hitherto constituted on the Dardanelles or the Bosphorus that vast accumulation of stores, of munitions of war, and means of transport which would enable it to live, to move freely, and to fight. Both of the two armies had the most of what for the moment they needed, but neither of them had hitherto any sufficing base of operations to rest upon. Both of the armies had means of subsistence for the next few days, and were so equipped as to be able to fight a battle on the beach; but nei- ther army had, nor could have for many months, those vast warehouses of stores, and those immense means of land-trans- port, which could alone sustain regular and extended opera- tions in the field. Therefore, if purely military rules were to govern, and if Russia were really the formidable invader of Turkey which the world had believed her to be, there would _ have been some rashness in pushing forward the combatants of the two armies toward the scene of conflict with a knowl- edge that for some time to come they would be unable to move freely in the field. 340 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [CHap. XXIX) The true ground for overruling the hesitation of the French strategists lay in the now obvious fact that (to say nothing of the armies of France and England assembled on the Bospho- rus with vast means of sea transport at their command) Rus- sia, ill prepared for a great war in the South, driven out of the Euxine, threatened by Austria, and fiercely encountered and hitherto repulsed by the Ottoman forces, was not so formida- ble an invader of European Turkey as to deserve that her de- spairing struggles in the country of the Lower Danube should be encountered with all the resources of strategic prudence. Besides, the question was not purely a military one. It was certain that the mere presence of the French and the English forces in the neighborhood of the conflict would have a moral weight more than proportioned to their actual readiness for offensive operations. Finally, the question had been settled. The allied Generals, in their conference with Omar Pasha, had engaged to move their troops to Varna, and the honor of France and England stood pledged. But if there was a semblance of military wisdom in the hesi- tation of the French to move up to Varna, there was none in their plan for the defensive line behind the Balkan at Aidos ; for, if the want of means of land-transpert threatened to ham- per the force even in the advanced position of Varna, it is ob- vious that the same cause would have reduced the French and English forces to sheer uselessness if they had taken up a po- Sition at so vast a distance as Aidos is from the scene of the conflict. Ifthe plan had been followed, no French nor. En- glish troops in that year would have seen the shape of a Rus- sian battalion. Yet Marshal St. Arnaud, so far as concerned France, had determined thus to forfeit all military significance in the pending campaign, and had done so, and had begun to carry the plan into execution without consulting his English colleague. How France was sav ‘ed from this humilhation, and how the great alliance was preserved, will now be seen. On the day following the interview with Marshal St. Ar- naud, Colonel Trochu came, as had been agreed, to Lord Rag- lan’s quarters. After repeating what Marshal St. Arnaud had stated the day before, namely, that Bosquet’s Division was al- ready in march for Adrianople, the Colonel. pressed the ad- vantages of the position which Marshal St. Arnaud had pro- posed to take up in rear of the Balkan. Wont Rovian Lord Raglan heard all, and then simply request- spinor toplaes ed Colonel Trochu to inform Marshal St. Arnaud army benind that he, Lord Raglan, objected to place any portion the Balkap- of Her Majesty’s army in Roumelia. Cuar. XXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 341 Lord Raglan added that the movement which seemed to him the best was to advance to the front with a view to join Omar Pasha in an effort to relieve Silistria; and he said that if the Marshal were not prepared for such a movement, he (Lord Raglan) would keep his divisions on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, and hold them ready to embark at any moment for Varna. Firmness conquered. On the morning of the 10th of June, St Amana COlonel Rose came to the English head-quarters gives way, and announced that Marshal St. Arnaud now con- abandons his sented to abandon his plan of taking up a defensive plan of a posi- » 3 - tion behindthe position behind the Balkan, and that, reverting to Cui the original determination of the Allies, he would move his army assemble his army at Varna. to Varna. 2 Thus the danger passed. Secrecy, it would ap- pear, had been well maintained, and the world did not know that for all purposes of concerted military operations, the alli- ance of the Western Powers had lain in abeyance for five days. Leaving small detachments at Gallipoli, the French and the Thearmies “nglish armies were now moved up to Varna. moved accord- General Bosquet’s Division, however, was made to EY feel the consequences of the resolution adopted by the French strategists ; for, this division having actually com- menced its march toward Adrianople in furtherance of the then intended plan of taking up a position behind the Balkan, Mar- shal St. Arnaud, it seems, did not like to issue a countermand which would have disclosed to a sagacious soldiery his double change of counsels-——nay, perhaps might have given them a glimpse of the almost ridiculous destiny from which they had Bosquet’sover- Deen saved by Lord Raglan. So, whilst all the Jand march. yest of the allied forces were gliding up to Varna by water, Bosquet’s Division continued to follaw the direction first given it, and was brought into Bulgaria by long, painful marches. If the warlike Zouaves, composing part of the di- vision, had known that their long, toilsome movement in the midst of the great summer heats was the result of a plan for placing the French army in position at a distance of several hundreds of miles from the enemy, they would have solaced the labors of the march by tearing the repute of the schemer who contrived it, and making him the butt for their wit. It is obvious that the premature disclosure either of Marshal the way'in St. Arnaud’s ambitious scheme, or of his faltering which St.Ar- counsels, would have been fraught with danger to sees. the alliance; and since it used to happen in those caped public: days that tidings freshly intrusted to the English ba Cabinet were often disclosed to the world, it seems 342 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. (Cuap. XXX, useful to show how it was that Lord Raglan was able to screen these transactions of Marshal St. Arnaud from the in- quiring eye of the public. Apparently he did this by being careful in the choice of the time for making disclosures.to the authorities at home. Except when there was a good reason for taking a contrary course, he liked to delay the communica- tion of affairs involving danger until the danger was past. Thus, for instance, he would describe the beginning of an in- trigue and also its final defeat at the same time; and the re- sult was, that the end of the dispatch not .only made the dis- closure of the earlier part of it comparatively harmless, but even destroyed its value as an article of ‘news ;’ for in propor- tion as people were greedy for fresh tidings, they were careless of things which ranged with the past, and the time was so stirring that the tale of an abandoned plan of campaign, or an intrigue already baffled and extinct, was hardly a rich enough gift for a Minister to carry to a newsman. Thus were averted the early dangers which threatened the alliance ; and thus, after resolving to take up a position some hundreds of miles distant from the nearest Russian outpost, the French Marshal gave way at last to Lord Raglan’s ascend- ant, and was soon pushed forward to a camping-ground within hearing of the enemy’s guns. 3 CHAPTER XXX. Tue closing events of the summer campaign in Bulgaria did Tidines which SO Much to kindle that zeal which forced on the in- kindled in En- vasion of the Crimea, that it seems right to speak eel of them here; not with any notion of putting into sion ofthe the set form of “ History” things which all Europe a knew at the time in the most authentic way, but rather for the purpose of showing how the armies at Varna, and the statesmen and the people in England, were touched, were stirred, nay, were governed by the tidings which came from the Danube. Prince Paskievitch stood charged to exe- cute with his own hand the plan of campaign which his Sover- eign had persuaded him to design,' and accordingly, in the summer of the year 1854, he found himself marching on the Danube at the head of the Russian army, then engaged in at- ' See ante, p. 255. - Cuap. XXX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 348 tempting an invasion of the Ottoman Empire. He had insist- ed, as we have seen, that as the needful condition of a prosper- Siege of Silis. OUS Campaign, Silistria must fall by the 1st of May.! iia. It was not before the middle of the month that he was able to appear before the place; but thenceforth he lost no time, and on the 19th he opened his first parallel. The new defenses of the fortress had been planned by Col- onel Grach, a Prussian officer in the service of the Porte. He had brought to the work a great deal of knowledge and judg- ment. He was still in the place, and he continued to lend the aid of his science to the garrison whenever he could do so without going out of his dwelling-house; but, adhering, it seems, to the bare terms on which he had engaged his services, he stiflly abstained from taking any other than a scientitic part in the struggle. Prince Paskievitch pressed the siege with a vehemence which seemed to disdain all economy of the lives of his soldiery, and, the place being weakly garrisoned, and seemingly abandoned to its fate, its ‘fall was supposed to be nigh. To uphold the Sultan’s cause three armies were at hand, “but no one of them was moved forward with a view to relieve the place. Omar Pasha, shrewd and wary, was gathering the strength of the Ottoman Empire at Schumla, and it did not enter into his plan of campaign to smooth the path of the Russian General by: going forward in strength to give him a meeting under the guns of the beleaguered fortress. On the other hand, France and England were rapidly assembling their forces in the neigh- borhood of Varna, but for want of sufficing means of land-trans- port they were not yet in a condition to take the field. Day. by day the two armies at Varna were moved by fitful tidings of a‘conflict in which, though it raged within ear-shot, they were suffered to take no part. At first, few men har- bored the thought that—without deliverance br ought by a re- lieving foree—a humble Turkish fortress would be able to hold ont against the collected strength of Russia and the most re- nowned of her Generals. Soon it was known that, of their own free will and humors, two young Englishmen, Captain Butler, of the Ceylon Rifles, and Lieutenant Nasmyth, of the East In- dia Company’s Service, had thrown themselves into the place, and were exercising a strange mastery over the garrison. On one of the hills overlooking the town there was a seam of earth which—as though it were a kind of low fence designed and thrown up by a peasant—passed along three sides of the slope * See ante, p. 256. 344 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXX. in a doubtful, meandering course. This was the earthwork which soon became famous in Europe. It was called the Arab Tabia. The work was one of a slight and rude sort; but the ground it stood on was judged to be needful to the besiegers, and, at almost any cost of life to his people, Prince Paskievitch resolved to seize it. By diligent fighting on the hill-side, by sapping close up to the ditch, by springing mines which more than once blew in the counterscarp and leveled the parapet, by storming it in the daytime, by storming it at night, the Russians strove hard to carry the work; but when they sprang amine, they ever found that behind the ruins the Turks stood intrenched; and whether they stormed it by day or by night, their masses of columns were always met fiercely, were always driven back with a cruel slaughter. Prince Paskievitch, the General commanding in chief, and General Schilders, who com- manded the siege works, were both struck down by shot and disabled. On the side of the Turks, Mussa Pasha, who com- manded the garrison, was killed; but Butler and Nasmyth, now obeyed with a touching affect:un and trustfulness by the Ottoman soldiery, were equal to the historic occasion which they had had the fortune and the spirit to seize. At one time they were laying down some new work of defense. At an- other, the two firm lads were governing the judgment of the Turkish commanders in a council of war. Sometimes, with ear pressed to the earth, they were listening for the dull blows of the enemy’s underground pickaxes. Now and then they were engaged in dragging to his place under fire some unworthy Turkish commander; and once, in their sportive and English way, they were busy in getting together a sweepstakes, to be won by him who should name the day when Silistria would be relieved; but always when danger gathered in the Arab Tabia, the grateful Turks looked and saw that their young English guests were amongst them, ever ready with counsel for the new emergency, forbidding all thought of surrender, and even, it seems, determined to lay rough hands on the, General who sought to withdraw with his troops from the famous earth- work.! It seemed that the presence of these youths was all that was needed for making of the Moslem hordes a faithful, heroic, and devoted soldiery. Upon ground known to be mined they stood as tranquilly as upon any other hill-side. ‘It was ‘impossible,’ said Nasmyth’s successor in the Arab Tabia— it 1 [ take it that this is what was meant by Nasmyth’s expression, ‘‘pecul- ‘iar inducement.” The man upon whom the ‘‘ peculiar inducement” was brought to bear was one whom Butler had dragged out bodily from his hid- ing-place. Cuar. XXX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 345 “was impossible not to admire the cool indifference of the Turks ‘to danger. Three men were shot in the space of five minutes ‘while throwing up earth for the new parapet, at which only ‘two men could work at a time so as to be at all protected ; ‘and they were succeeded by the nearest by-stander, who took ‘the spade from the dying man’s hands and set to work as ‘calmly as if he were going to cut a ditch by the roadside.’ Indeed, the childlike trust which these men were able to put in their young English leaders so freed them from all doubt and question concerning the wisdom of the orders given, that they joyfully abandoned themselves to the rapture of fighting for religion, and grew so enamored of death—so enamored of the very blackness of the grave, that sometimes in the pauses of the fight a pious Mussulman, intent on close fighting and blissful thoughts of Paradise, w ould come up with a pickaxe in hand, would speak some touching words of devotion and eratitude to Butler and Nasmyth, ‘and then proudly fall to work and dig for himself the last home, where he .charged his comrades to lay him as soon as he attained to die. Omar Pasha not choosing to march to the relief of Silistria, but being unwilling to leave its defenders to sheer despair, sent General Cannon! (Behram Pasha he was called in the Turkish army) with a brigade of irregular light infantry, and instructed him to occupy some of the wooded ground in the neighborhood of the place, with a view to trouble the enemy -and to encourage the garrison. General Cannon, however, learned on reaching the neighborhood of Silistria that the hopes of the garrison had already ebbed very low; and therefore, though without the warrant of orders, he resolved to throw himself into the place with his whole brigade. This, by means of a stratagem and a long, circuitous night-march, he was able to do. His achievement, as was natural, gave joy to the gar- rison; and turning to account the enthusiasm of the moment, he administer ed, as is said, a direful oath to the. Pasha in com- mand—an oath ‘whereby the Turk swore that, happen what might, he would never surrender the place. It was whilst General Cannon was in Silistria that Captain Butler received the wound of which he afterward died. The Russians had sapped up so close to the ditch that, if a man be- hind the parapet spoke much above a whisper, the sound of his voice used to draw the enemy’s fire toward the nearest loophole or embrasure. Captain Butler, it seems, with a view ' General Cannon was an officer of our Indian army who had served with distinction in India, and in the force (the British Legion) which operated in Spain under the or ders of General Evans. iP 346 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, [Cuar, XXX to throw up a new work of defense, was reconnoitring the en- emy’s approaches through an aperture made in the parapet, and in consulting about his plan with General Cannon, he spoke loud enough to be heard by a Russian marksman, for the sound of his voice brought a rifle ball in through the loophole and struck him the blow from which (being weakened by toil and privation) he died before the end of the siege. For some reason which he deemed to be imperative—strin- gent orders, perhaps, from Schumla—General Cannon marched out of the place with his brigade on the 17th of June, and at his request Nasmyth also went away for a time, in order to confer with Omar Pasha at the Turkish head-quarters; but meanwhile, Lieutenant Ballard, of the Indian army, coming thither of his own free will, had thrown himself into the be- sieged town, and whenever the enemy stirred, there was always at least one English lad in the Arab Tabia directing the coun- sels of the garrison, repressing the thought of Bupreuey and keeping the men in ‘good heart.! There was a part “of the allied camp where the French and English soldiery could hear in a quiet hour the distant guns of Silistria. Day after day they listened for the continuing of the sound, and they listened keenly, for they were expecting the end, and there was nothing but the booming of the cannon to assure them that the fortress held out. On the 22nd of June, and during a great part of the night which followed it, they heard the low thunder of the siege more continuously than ever before; but on the dawn of the following day they listen- ed, and listened in vain. The cannonade had ceased, and it was believed in camp that the place had been taken. The op- posite of this was the truth. The siege had been raised. The event was one upon which the course of history was destined to hinge; for this miscarriage at Silistria put an end at once to all schemes for the invasion of the Sultan’s dominions in Europe. Whilst Europe was still in wonder at the deliverance of Si- listria, the French and the English armies at Varna were greeted with tidings of yet another victory won by the Turks. 1 The narratives of the siege of Silistria which appeared in the Times were given, as is well known, by Nasmyth himself, and by the officer who sune- ceeded to him and to Butler in governing the counsels of the garrison and helping to defend the Arab Tabia. Therefore any other account of the siege which I might have founded upon the official materials in my possession would have been obviously inferior to the newspaper in point of authenticity. Accordingly, with the exception of two or three minor facts drawn from the correspondence which is in my possession, all I have said of the siege is ta- ‘kon from those journals of Nasmyth and his successor which were printed in the Times during the summer of 1854. : ¢ Cuap. XXX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 3447 Hassan Pasha was at Rustchuk, with a large body of Turk- ish troops; and at Giurgevo, on the opposite bank of the river, General Soimonoff commanded twelve battalions of Russian infantry, with several squadrons of horse, and some guns. Both The battle of the Russian and the Turkish commanders desired Giurgevo. that at this time there should be no conflict; and it might be thought that in this respect they would have their way; for, although the forces at Rustchuk and at Giurgevo were near to each other, the broad Danube rolled between them. But the Ottoman soldiery are of so warlike a nature that, when their enemy is at hand, they are oftentimes seized with a raging desire for the fight; and the one check which tends to keep down this passion is a sense of the ineoherency which results from the want of good officers. But so ready and so deep is their trust in any of our countrymen who will take the trouble to lead them, that, if Turkish soldiers be camped within reach of the enemy, the coming amongst them of a few English youths supplies the one thing needed, completes the electric circle, and in general brings on a fight. Now it hap- pened that besides General Cannon, who was on duty and in command of a Turkish brigade, seven young English officers had found their way to the camp of Hassan Pasha. Two of these, Captain Bent and Lieutenant Burke, were officers of the Royal Engineers; Meynell was a Lieutenant in the 75th Reg- iment; Hinde, Arnold, and Ballard (the last of them fresh come from Silistria) were officers of our Indian army ; Colonel Ogil- vy was General Cannon’s aid-de-camp, but he gave his servi- » ces freely, and, indeed, it may be said that, so far as concerns the part they took in the battle, every one of these seven young - Englishmen was there of his own mere will.! 3 On the morning of the 7th of July it was observed that the Russians had struck their tents, and they were so posted that _ their numbers could not be descried from the right bank of the river. It was believed in the Turkish camp that Soimonoff had withdrawn the main part of his force; and it seems that what Hassan Pasha really meant to do was to execute a re- connaissance, and assure himself of the enemy’s retreat. Be this:as it may, he ordered, or consented, that the river should be crossed at two points; and General Cannon, embarking in boats with 300 riflemen, and speedily followed by a battalion 1 The two engineer officers, Captain Bent and Lieutenant Burke, had been sent to the Turkish camp with instructions to advise and aid in the construc- tion of military works; but of course they had not been ordered to lead the Turks into battle, and therefore I include them with the rest of the seven as men taking part in the battle without professional sanction. 348 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [CHap. XXX. of infantry under Ferik Bekir Pasha, succeeded in reaching the left bank of the river without encountering resistance. As soon as they had landed, the Turks tried to gain a lodgment upon a strip of ground where their front was covered by a long narrow mere or pool of water. Soon, however, they were attacked on their left flank by a body of Russian infantry, which issued from an earthwork placed above the western ex- tremity of the mere. Cannon and Bent, with their riflemen, not only withstood this attack, but drove their assailants back into the fosse from which they had issued, and there, it seems, a good deal of slaughter took place. Afterward the riflemen were forced to give way, and fall back upon the main body of the troops which had effected their landing; but young Bal- lard led forward another body of skirmishers, and kept the enemy back. What was needed was, that the troops which had landed should intrench themselves; but they had come without gabions or sand-bags, and nothing as yet could be done toward gaining a firm lodgment. There was a good deal of confusion amongst the troops, and the enterprise seemed likely to fail, when Ali Pasha, who was a brave and an able officer, came over with fresh troops. He soon restored order, and the men began to throw up intrenchments. Meanwhile two battalions, led on by Ogilvy, Hinde, Arnold, Meynell, and Burke, had crossed the river higher up, in de- tached bodies, and, although these small bands were left from first to last without re-enforcements, although they had to move flank-wise close under the guns of a Russian battery, which killed very many, and although they were sharply at- tacked and at one time hard pressed by the enemy’s infantry, as well as by four squadrons of cavalry, the remnant of these venturesome men fought their way down along the river’s bank, and at last made good their junction with the main body, then intrenching itself behind the mere. But before they attained to this, they had lost a great proportion of their comrades, and of their five youthful leaders they had lost three, for Burke, Arnold, and Meynell were killed. Meanwhile fresh troops had been crossing the river at the point opposite to the landing-place first seized; and at length there was established, on the ground behind the mere, a force of some five thousand men. Upon either flank of this body the Russian infantry came down in strong columns. Four times the attack was made, and four times the Turks, commanded or led on by Ali Pasha and General Cannon, by Bent, Hinde, Ogilvy, and Ballard, drove back their assailants with great slanghter. With vious Cuap. XXX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 349 and warlike cries, the Turks sallied over their new-made par- apets, brought their bayonets down to the charge, forced mass after mass to give way, and fiercely pressed the retreat. At sunset the action ceased. All night the Turks were in- trenching themselves on the ground which they had gained, but, when the morning dawned, there was no sign that the enemy would hasten to renew the battle. To keep a safe hold of the ground which had been won, it was necessary for the Turks to advance in the direction of their left front, and occupy a ridge which went by the name of the Slobenzie Heights ; but Hassan Pasha dreaded the blame which might fall upon him if the movement should prove to be a wrong one. General Cannon pressed him hard. For some time in vain; but at length the Pasha yielded, upon con- dition that the English General would give him a written war- ranty certifying the wisdom of the step. On the third day after the battle, Prince Gortschakoff came up with a force which was said to number some sixty or sev- enty thousand men. He had been set free by the raising of the siege of Silistria, and he now appeared upon one of the ranges of hills looking down upon Giurgevo from the north- west. It seemed that he meant to cover over the stain of the defeat sustained at Giurgevo by driving the Turks back into the river; but before he camped for the night the British flag was already in the waters beneath him. Lieutenant Glyn and the young Prince Leiningen, both serv- ing on board the ‘ Britannia,’ had come up from the sea, with some gunboats and thirty seamen, together with a lke number of sappers. Glyn quickly carried his gunboats into the narrow loop-stream which escapes from the main of the river above Giurgevo, and meets it againlower down. By this movement Glyn thrust his gunboats into the interval which divided the Russian army from the Turks. Gortschakoff, perhaps, over- rated the force which had come with the British flag. At all events, he did not instantly move down to the attack, and, whilst he seemed to hesitate, the Turks and the English work- ed hard. Captain Bent and his sappers, with the aid of our seamen and the Turks, threw a bridge of boats across the main stream of the Danube. This done, it was plain that, if Gorts- chakoff were to attack, he would have to do not merely with the five thousand Turks already established on the left bank, but with the whole of the force which lay at Rustchuk. He resolved to avoid the encounter. Retreating upon Bucharest, he no longer disputed with the Turks for the mastery of the Lower Danube. 350 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [CHap. XXX) In this campaign on the Danube, those who fought for the cause of the Sultan were helped, it is true, by Fortune, by the anger and unskillfulness of the Czar, by the assured support of Austria, and by the impending power of England and France; but still there is one point of view in which their achievement was a great one. Military ascendency is so close- rect ofthe LY Connected with military reputation, that to be the campaign of first to bring down the warlike fame of a great em- the nile pire is to do a mighty work, and a work, too, which ened bey of hardly can fail to change the career of nations. By H the time that Prince Gortschakoff retreated upon Bucharest, people no longer thought of the Czar as they thought of him eight months before; and the glory of thus breaking down the military reputation of Russia is due of right, not to the Governments nor the armies of France or England, but to the warlike prowess of the Ottoman soldiery, and the ten or twelve resolute Englishmen who cheered, and helped, and led them. The failure of the attempted invasion was almost abana followed by the relinquishment of Moldavia and Wallachia. The Emperor Nicholas, as we saw, had been placed by Austria under the stress of a peremptory summons requiring him to withdraw from the Principalities, and, the demand being sup- ported by powerful bodies of troops which threatened the flank of the intruding army, the Czar was schooled at last, and com- pelled to see that he must surrender his hold of the provinces which he had chosen to call his ‘material guarantee.’ Thus, by the course of the events which followed it, the Czar’s last defeat on the Danube was made to appear more signal than it really was. Of course men versed in war and in politics knew that causes of a larger kind than a few hours’ fight at Giurgevo were bringing about the abandonment of the Principalities ; but people who drew their conclusions from the mere advance or retreat of armies, and from the issue of battles, were left to infer that the once dreaded Emperor of the Russias was chased from the country of the Danube by the sheer prowess of the victorious Turks. It is, therefore, very easy to believe that this discomfiture at The agony of Giurgevo was more bitter to the Czar than any of ps Czar the disasters which had hitherto tried his fortitude. People knew, or affected to know, what the troubled man ut- tered in torment, and the words they put in his mouth ran somewhat to this effect: ‘I can understand Oltenitza— I can even understand that ‘Omar Pasha should have been able to hold against me his Cuap. XXX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 351 ‘lines at Kalafat—I can partly account for the result of those ‘fights at Citate—I can understand Silistria—the strongest ‘may fail in a siege—and it chanced that both Paskievitch and ‘Schilders were struck down and disabled by shot—but—but ‘_but—that Turks—mere Turks—led on by a General of Se- ‘poys and six or seven English boys—that they should dare to ‘cross the Danube in the face of my troops—that, daring to at- ‘tempt this, they should do it, and hold fast their gr ound—that ‘my troops should give way pefore them, and that this—that ‘this should be the last act of the campaign which is ending ‘in the retreat of my whole army, and the abandonment of the ‘Principalities. Heaven lays upon me more than I can bear!’ Many men in the Anglo-French camp were -fretted by the tidings of this last Turkish victory ; for, besides that, with their natural and healthy impatience of delay, they were stung by the example of their Moslem ally, there was in the staff of the: French and the English armies a pedantic dislike of wild troops. In this respect Lord Raglan had no breadth of view. Lord Raglan’s Far from under standing that the hardy, the fierce, qialike of un- the devout, the temper ate Moslems of the Ottoman combatants. provinces were the rough yet sound material with which superb troops could be made, he always looked upon these brave men, but especially upon the genus which people called ‘ Bashi-Bazouks,’ with an almost superstitious horror. He was so constituted, or rather he was so schooled down by long years of flat oftice labor, that it shocked him to see a man bearing no uniform, yet warlike, and armed to the teeth. In- deed, from Bulgaria he once wrote and complained quite grave- ly that every Turk he saw had the appearance of being a ‘ ban- dit ; and the prejudice clung to him; for, long after the period now spoken of, and even in the very hour when the fatal storm of the 14th of November was roar ing through his port and his camp, he found time to sit at a desk and w rite down the Bashi- Bazouks. This hatred of undrilled warriors was the more perverse, since England, above all other nations, was rich in men (men like Hodson, for instance, or Jacob) who knew how to make themselves the adored chiefs of Asiatic soldiers. Besides, it must be borne in mind, that when an English Importance to Government undertakes to Ww: age war in a country eae,” beyond the seas without doing all it can to get ries. soldierly aid from the natives, it does not merely neglect a slight or collateral advantage. On the contrary, it throws S away its power of acting with ‘efficient numbers, and is in danger of frittering away the nation’s strength upon those 352 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXX. (often ill-fated) schemes which go by the name of ‘expedi- ‘tions.’ Without our Portuguese auxiliaries there would have been no great Peninsular War, no successful invasion of France. Without the native soldiery of Uindostan there would have been no British India. Without the German auxiliaries who served under Wellington in his last campaign, he could not have given battle to Napoleon in the Netherlands, and the course of English history would not have run as it did. The truth is, that (especially at the beginning of a war) any body of troops which England brings together at one time and one place is in general so costly, and of so high a quality, but also so scant in numbers, that to use it, and use it singly for all the work of the campaign, is to consume and squander the pre- cious essence of the nation’s strength without making it the means of attaining any worthy result. Therefore, whenever it is possible, a British force ser ving abroad and engaged i in an arduous campaign ought to have by its side—not mere allies, for that is but a doubtful, and often a poor support to have to lean upon, but auxiliaries obeying the English commander, and capable of being trusted with a large share of the duties required from an army in the field. Nor is this an advantage which commonly lies out of our reach; for in most of the countries of the Old World the cost of labor is much lower than in England, and it is one of the prerogatives of the English, as, indeed, of all conquering nations, to be able to lead other races of men, and to impart to them its warlike fire. By beginning its preparations at the right time, and by bringing under the orders of some of our Indian officers a fit- ting “number of the brave men who came flocking to the war from every province of the Ottoman Empire, our Government might have enabled their General to take the field with an army of great strength; with an army more fit for warlike en- terprises than two armies—French and English—instructed to work side by side, and baffled by divided command.! * The opinions which the Duke of Newcastle entertained on this subject were sound, and his efforts to give effect to them were vigorous; but he was thwarted by the curious antagonism which commonly shows itself at the be- ginning of a war—the antagonism between views really warlike and views which are only ‘military.’ Cnar. XXXI.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 353 CHAPTER XXXI. By their own prowess, with the aid only of a moral support The events on from their great allies and the actual presence of a the Danubere- few young English officers, the Ottoman soldiery grounds ofthe had repelled the invasion; and, the defense of Tur- King key being accomplished in a way very glorious to the Sultan, and the deliverance of the Principalities being secured, it suddenly became apparent that the objects for which the Western Powers undertook the war had been already attain- ed. And, since (by the mere act of declaring war against the Czar) the Porte had freed itself from the obnoxious treaties which heretofore entangled its freedom, the condition of affairs was such that a prudent statesman of France, or of England, or of the Ottoman empire might have well enough rested con- tent. And in that condition of affairs the Emperor of Russia must have acquiesced; for, having now learned that he could not maintain an invasion of European Turkey, and being driv- en from the seas, he was cut off from all means of waging an offensive war against the Sultan except upon the desolate front- iers of Armenia, and the pressure of the naval blockade en- forced against him by the Allies, together with the torture of seeing the Baltic and the Euxine plaeed under the dominion’ of their fleets, would have more than sufficed to make him sign a peace. If France had been mistress of herself, or if England had been free from passion and craving for adventure, the war would have been virtually at an end on the day when the Rus- sian army completed its retreat from the country of the Dan- ube, and re-entered the Czar’s dominions. How came it to happen that, rejecting the: peace which seemed to be thus prepared by the mere course of events, the Western Powers determined to undertake the invasion of a Russian province ? France was still lying under the men who had got her down Helplessness 00 the night of the 2nd of December; and it was ofthe French in vain that her people at that time chanced to love A peace better than war, for they had no longer a voice in state affairs. The French Emperor still wielded the whole strength of the nation, and, laboring to turn away men’s B54 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXXTI. thoughts from the origin of ae power, he was very willing to Gourse taken t'Y to earn for the restored Empire that kind of by the French station and title which the newest of dynasties may ae acquire by signal achievements in war. It was still of great moment to him to remain in close friendship with England, and to use the alliance as an engine of war; but he observed that there was a spirit on this side of the Channel which—springing from motives very unlike his own—was nevy- ertheless tending in the same direction, and therefore, to draw England in, he no longer needed to resort to those ingenious contrivances which he had employed against her in the fore- going year. All that he had to do was to encourage her de- sire to go on with the war, and, if necessary, to make his own plans yield to those of his ally. To do all this he was very able, for he had, as we have seen, at that time the power of keeping his mind alive to the difference between the greater . and the less, and after he had once resolved to engage in al- liance with England, he did not allow his main purpose to be baffled by differences on minor questions. Therefore now, when it became known that the Russian army was in full re- treat, he was so willing to defer to English counsels, that vir- tually, though not in terms, he left it to the Queen’s Govern- ment to determine what next step the Western Powers should take in the conduct of the war. | England had become so eager for conflict that the idea of, Desire of the Cesisting from the war merely because the war had English foran ceased to be necessary was not tolerable to the ofensive war’ Heople. In the Baltic their hopes had been bitter- ly disappointed, and, as soon as it became clear that the de- fense of Turkey was a thing already accomplished, men longed to try the prowess of our land and sea forces in some enter- prise against the Russian dominions. Already they had cast their eyes upon Sebastopol. With a view to the conquest of empire on the Bosphor us, the ambition of Russia had taken advantage of the spacious port on the southwest coast of the Crimea, had made there a great arsenal, and furnished it with an enor- mous supply of warlike stores. And, having been warned a quarter of a century ago! that if he thus gathered his strength Sebastopol. 1 Dispatch from Count Pozzo di Borgo, dated the 28th of November, 1828-9. ‘ Although,’ writes the Count, ‘it may not be probable that we ‘shall see an English fleet in the Black Sea, it will be prudent to make Se- ‘bastopol very secure against attacks from the sea. If ever England were ‘to come to a rupture with us, this is the point to which she would direct her ‘attacks, if only she believed them possible.’ >. Cuap. XXXI.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 355 in Sebastopol, he might have to count some day with the En- glish, the Czar Nicholas had caused the place to be defended toward the sea by forts of great power. In the harbor, barred The longing of PY these forts, his Black Sea fleet lay at anchor, the English to Plainly it would be a natural and’ fitting consum- ea mation of a war in defense of the Sultan to destroy those very resources which the labors of years had gathered together against him. Moreover, the English, who hate the mechanic contrivances which prevent fair, open fighting, could hardly now bear that the vast sea-forts of Sebastopol should continue to shelter the Russian fleet from the guns of our men- of-war. Those who thought more warily than the multitude foresaw that the enterprise might take time; but they also perceived that even this result would not be one of unmixed evil, for if Russia should commit herself to a lengthened con- flict in the neighborhood of Sebastopol, she would be put to a great trial, and would see her wealth and strength ruinously consumed by the mere stress of the distance between the military centre of the empire and the southwesternmost angle of the Crimea. | The more the English people thought of the enterprise, the more eager they became to attempt it; and it chanced that their feelings and opinions were shared and represented with ‘great exactness by the Minister of War. The Duke of Newcastle was a man of a sanguine, eager na- The Dukeof ture, very prone to action.’ He had a good, clear Newcastle. intellect, with more of strength than keenness, un- ‘wearied industry, and an astonishing facility of writing. In the assumption of responsibility he was generous and bold even to rashness. Indeed, he was so eager to see his views carried into effect, and so willing to take all the risk upon his own head, that there was danger of his. withdrawing from other men their wholesome share of discretion. He threw his whole heart into the project of the invasion; and if the Prime Minister and Mr, Gladstone were men driven forward by the feeling of the coun- try in spite of their opinions and their scruples, it was not so with the Duke of Neweastle. The character of his mind was such as to make him essentially one with the public. Far from being propelled by others against his will, he himself was one of the very foremost members of the warlike throng which was pressing upon the Cabinet, and craving for adventure and 1 T, of course, know that this view will not be assented to by those who found their opinion upon observation made in later years; but I am speak- ing of the summer of 1854, and I am very sure that the sentence to which this note has been appended is true. 856 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXXI. glory. He easily received new impressions, and had neverthe- less a quick good sense, which generally enabled him to distin- guish what was useful from what was worthless. He seemed to understand the great truth that, without being military, the Hueglish are a warlike people, and that it is one of the great prerogatives of a nation gifted with this higher quality to be able to command other races of men, and to impart to them the fire of martial virtue. He also knew that, when England undertakes war against a great European power, she must en- gage the energies of the “people at large, and must not pre- sume to rely altogether upon the merely professional exertions of her small Peace Establishment. It was not from his de- fault, but in spite of his endeavors, that, for several months, people lingered in the notion that our military system was an apparatus sufficing for war. But the Duke had not an authority proportioned to the merits which a reader of his dispatches and letters would be inclined to attribute to him. Perhaps the very zeal with which he seized and adopted the ideas of the cuter public was one of the causes which tended to lessen his weight; for he who comes into council with common and popular views, however likely it may be that he will get them assented to, can scarce- ly hope to kindle men’s minds with the fire that springs from a man’s own thought and from his own strong will. More- over, it was by a kind of chance rather than by intentional selection that the Duke of Newcastle had become intrusted with the momentous business of the war; and, seemingly, it was only from this circumstance that the propriety of his con- tinuing to hold the office was afterward brought into question by one of his principal colleagues.1 But, whatever may have been the cause, it seems clear that there was a languor, not to say hollowness, in the support which the Duke got from his 1 So Lord John Russell himself declared. What I have above called ‘a ‘kind of chance’ was brought about in this way :—According to the practice which was in force up to the summer of 1854, the Secretary of State for the Colonies was also the ‘Secretary of War.’ Before the war, however, the public hardly observed, and, in fact, hardly knew this; because, in peace- time (thanks to the labors of the ‘ Horse-Guards,’ the office of the Secretary at War, the Ordnance, and several other offices), the duties of the Colonial Secretary, i in his character as Secretary of War, were very slight ; and, there being no prospect of war when. Lord “Aberdeen’s ministry was formed, the Duke of Newcastle was of course selected with a view to his qualifications for the administration of the Colonies, and not with any consideration, either one way or the other, as to his aptitude for the business of the War Depart- ment. When the rupture with Russia occurred, it became apparent that, unless a change were made, the minister who happened to be the Colonial Secretary would stand charged with the business of the war. Cuap. XXNXI.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 357 colleagues. They did not perversely thwart him in the busi- ness of the war,! but, on the other -hand, they did not at all fasten themselves to his measures like men who would stand or fall with him. The Duke of Newcastle had not the gift of knowing how to surround himself with able assistants, and it was his misfortune to be without that precious aid which a Minister commonly finds in the permanent staff of his office. At the outbreak of hostilities, the little bevy of distinct public offices on which the military administration depended was in a condition unfit to meet the exigencies of war. The first Army Surgeon who applied for certain of the medical stores required on foreign service was met with no less than five of- ficial theories as to the functionary upon whom the demand should be made; and when, in the month of June, the scatter- ed departments connected with the land service were gathered at last into one, the office thus newly formed was, after all, so ill constituted as to be wanting in some of the simplest appli- ances required for the transaction of business. From the first, the Duke of Newcastle, resisting all proposals His zeal for for operating against Russia on the side of Poland, thn we Setys. had warmly shared the popular desire to invade the tion of Sebas- x Po topol. Crimea, and lay siege to Sebastopol. The Emperor of the French, steadily following his main policy, had long ago consented to look to this enterprise as next in importance to the defense of the Sultan’s territory, and, in the early part of April, instructions to this effect had been given to the French and the English Generals. It would seem, however, that at first the Duke of Newcastle was the only member of the Government who was fired with a great eagerness for the destruction of Sebastopol; and of himself he had not the ascendency which sometimes enables a Minister to bend other men to his purpose. Unless by the ‘help of a mighty force pressing from without, he could not haye brought the Cabinet of Lord Aberdeen to partake his zeal for the enterpr ise. But—impending over the counsels of all the ostensible rulers —there was an authority not deriving from the Queen or the Parliament, which was destined to have a great sway over 1 The rejection by the Cabinet of the Duke’s proposal to ask for a vote adding 25,000 men ta, the army does not, in reality, displace the above state- ment, becaus¢ the addition to which the Cabinet agreed, though falling short of the Duke’s demand, was large enough to warrant the reception of all the recruits who could be obtained in the course of the year, and therefore the proposed vote for a number larger than what could be really obtained was a measure of general policy not tending in any direct way to increase the strength of the army. 358 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, [Cuap. XXXT) events. It would be possible to elude the task, but it seems to me that a history would be wanting in fullness of truth if it failed to impart some conception of this other power. England was free; and although, whilst there was indiffer- Gentatding ence or divided opinion in the country, the Govern- ak hte of Ment had very full latitude of action, yet, whenever one mind. it chanced that the feelings of the people were roused, and that they were known to be nearly of one mind, they spoke with a voice so commanding, that no Administra- tion could safely try to withstand it. But, the will of the nation being thus puissant, who was charged to declare it? In former times almost every body who could was accus- Means of form- tomed to contribute in an active way to the forma- ing the opimien tion of opinion. Men evolved their own political’ of the nation. jdeas and drew forth the ideas of their friends. by: keen oral discussion, and, in later times, by long, elaborate let- ters. But gradually, and following somewhat slowly upon the: invention of printing, there came to be introduced a new divi- sion of labor. It was found that if a small number of compe- tent men would make it their calling to transact the business of thinking upon political questions, the work might be more handily performed by them than by the casual efforts of people who were commonly busied in other sorts of toil; and as soon’ as this change took effect, the weighing of state questions and the judging of public men lapsed away from the direct cog- nizance of the nation at large, and passed into the hands of: those who knew how to utter in print. What had been an in- tellectual exercise practised in a random way by thousands, was turned into a branch of industry, and pursued with great: skill by afew. People soon found out that an essay in print— an essay strong and terse, but above all opportune, seemed to clear their minds more effectually than the sayings which they heard in conversation, or the letters they received from their friends; and at length the principle of divided labor became so’ complete in its application to the forming of political opinions, that by glancing at a newspaper, and giving swift assent to its assertions and ar guments, many an Englishman was saved the labor of farther examining his political conscience, and dis- pensed from the necessity of having to work,his own way to a conclusion. But to spare a man from a healthy tou is not always an un. Effect of polit. Mixed good. To save a free-born citizen from the wine = trouble of thinking upon questions of State is to take from the trou- from him his share of dominion ; and, although it be: Cuap. XXXI_.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 859 ble of think- true that he who follows printed advice is under a et guidance more skillful and dexterous than any he could have got from his own untutored mind, he is less of a man, and, upon the whole, is less fair, less righteous than one who in a ruder fashion contrives to think for himself, Just as a man’s quality may in some respects be lowered by his habit- ual reliance on the policeman and the soldier who relieve him from the trouble and the anxiety of self-defense, so his intel- lectual strength and his means of knowing how to be just may easily become impaired if he suffers himself to walk’ too obe- diently under the leading of a political writer. But the ability of men engaged in political writing grew even Wakeofpro) more rapidly than the power to which they were portion be- attaining, and after a while they so gained upon the of the public OStensible statesmen that Parliament no longer stood Vidiial con, lone as the exponent of opinion, and was obliged petence ofhis to share its privilege with a number of gifted men Bee whose names it could hardly ever find out. Still, Parliament had valor and strength of its own, and, except in the matter of mere eclebrity, it was a gainer rather than a loser from the wholesome rivalry forced upon it by its new and mys- terious associate. It was the public which lagged. Men com- monly take a long time to adapt themselves to the successive advances of civilization ; and the people were backward in fit- ting themselves to deal with the increasing ability and the in- creasing knowledge of the public writer. They, indeed, hard- ly knew the true scope of the change which had been taking place; for, whilst the writer was a personage chosen for his skill, and acting with the force which belongs to discipline and organization, the readers were men straying loose; and for their means of acting in any thing like concert with one an- other, they were dependent in a great degree upon that very engine of publicity which was fast usurping their power. Moreover, these readers of public prints were slow to under- stand the new kind of duty which had come upon them. They were slow to see that it became them to look in a very critical spirit upon the writings of a stranger, unseen and unknown who was not only proposing to guide them, but even to speak in their name; and they did not yet understand that they ought to read print—not perhaps in a captious spirit, but, to say the least, with something of the measured confidence which their forefathers had been accustomed to place in the words of princes and statesmen. The blessing conferred by print will perhaps be complete when the diligence, the wariness, and, above all, the courageous justice of those who read, shall be 360 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Ciap. XXXI. brought into fair proportion with the skill and the power of those who address them in print. Already a wholesome change has been wrought; and if in these days a man goes chanting and chanting in servile response to a newspaper, he misses the voices of the tens of thousands of fellow-choristers who sang with him five years ago. But certainly at the time of the Rus- sian war the common discourse of an Englishman was too often a mere ‘ Amen” to something he had seen in print. For a long time there had remained to the general public a vestige of their old custom of thinking for themselves, because in last resort they were privileged to determine between the rival counsels pressed upon them by contending journalists ; but several years before the outbreak of the war there had come yet another change. The apparatus provided by the Constitution for collecting the opinions of the people was far from being complete; and, notwithstanding the indications af- forded by Parliament and by public writings, the direction which the nation’s opinion had taken was a matter which could often be called in question. Some could say that the people desired one thing, and some, with equal boldness, that the peo- ple desired the contrary. Thence it came that the task of find- ing out the will of the nation, and giving to it a full voice and expression, was undertaken by private citizens. Long before the outbreak of the war there were living in The task ofas- Some Of the English counties certain widows and fecatingtie, gentlemen, who were the depositaries of a power opinion of the destined to exercise a great sway over the conduct ftrtheienas of the war. Their ways were peaceful, and they ofacompany. were not perhaps more turned toward politics than other widows and country gentlemen, but by force of deeds and testaments, by force of births, deaths, and marriages, they had become the members of an ancient firm or Company which made it its business to collect and disseminate news. They had so much good sense of the worldly sort, that instead of struggling with one another for the control of their powerful engine, they remained quietly at their homes, and engaged some active and gifted men to manage the concern for them in Lon- don. The practice of the Company was to issue a paper daily; containing an account of what was going on in the world, to- gether with letters from men of all sorts and conditions who were seeking to bring their favorite subjects under the eye of the public, and also a few short essays upon the topics of the day. Likewise, upon paying the sum required by the Company, any person could cause whatever he chose to be inserted in the paper as an “advertisement,” and the sheet containing these Cuap.XXXI.J INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 361 four descriptions of matter was sold to the public at a low rate. Extraordinary enterprise was shown by the Company in the gathering of intelligence; and during the wars following the - French Revolution they caused their dispatches from the Con- tinent to reach them so early that they were able to forestall the Government of the day. In other countries the spectacle of a Government outdone in this way by private enterprise would have seemed a scandal; but the Englishman liked the thought that he could buy and bring to his own home as much knowledge as was in the hands of a Minister of State, and he enjoyed the success of his fellow-countrymen in their rivalry with the Government. From this time the paper gathered strength. It became the foremost journal of the world; and this was no sooner the case than the mere fact of its being thus foremost gave a great acceleration to its rise, for simply because it was recognized as the most public of prints it became the clew with which anxious man went seeking in the maze of the busy world for the lost, and the unknown, and all that was be- yond his own reach. The prince who was claiming a kingdom, the servant who wanted a place, the mother who had lost her boy, they all went thither. Thither Folly ran hurrying, and was brought to a wholesome parley with Wisdom. Thither went righteous anger. Thither also went hatred and malice. And not in vain was all this concourse; for either the troubled and angry men got the discipline of finding that the world would not listen to their cries, or else they gained a vent for their passions, and brought all their theories to a test by call- ing a whole nation—nay, by calling the civilized world—to hearken and be their witness. Over all this throng of appel- lants men unknown sat in judgment, and—violently, perhaps, but never corruptly—a rough sort of justice was done. The style which Oriental hyperbole used to give to the Sultan might be claimed with more color of truth by the journal. In a sense it was the ‘asylum of the world.’ Still, up to this point the Company occupied ground in com- mon with many other speculators, and if they had gone no far- ther, it would not have been my province to notice the result of their labors. But many years ago it had occurred to the managers of this Company that there was one important arti- cle of news which had not been effectually supplied. It seemed likely that, without moving from his fireside, an Englishman would be glad to know what the bulk of his fellow-countrymen thought upon the uppermost questions of the day. The letters received from correspondents furnished some means of acquir- Vor. I.—Q 362 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XXXI. ing this knowledge, and it seemed to the managers of the Com- pany that, at some pains and at a moderate cost, it would be possible to ascertain the opinions which were coming into vogue, and see the direction in which the current would flow. It is said that with this intent they many years ago employed » a shrewd, idle clergyman, who made it his duty to loiter about in places of common resort and find out what people thought upon the principal subjects of the time. He was not to listen very much to extreme foolishness, and still less was he to hearken to clever people. His duty was to wait and wait un- til he observed that some common and obvious thought was repeated in many places, and by numbers of men who had probably never seen one another. ‘That one common thought was the prize he sought for, and he carried it home to his em- ployers. He became so skilled in his peculiar calling that, as long as he served them, the Company was rarely misled; and although in later times they were frequently baffled in their pursuit of this kind of knowledge, they never neglected to do what they could to search the heart of the nation. When the managers had armed themselves with the knowl- edge thus gathered, they prepared to disseminate it, but they did not state baldly what they had ascertained to be the opin- ion of the country. Their method was as follows:—they em- ployed able writers to argue in support of the opimion which, as they believed, the country was already adopting, and, sup- posing that they had been well informed, their arguments of course fell upon willing ears. Those who had already formed a judgment saw their own notions stated and pressed with an - ability greater than they could themselves command; and those who had not yet come to an opinion were strongly moved to- do so when they saw the path taken by a Company which no- toriously strove to follow the changes of the public mind. The report which the paper gave of the opinion formed by the pub- lic was so closely blended with arguments in support of that same opinion, that he who looked at the paper merely to know what other people thought, was seized as he read by the co- gency of the reasoning; and, on the other hand, he who imag- ined that he was being governed by the force of sheer logic, was merely obeying a guide who, by telling him that the world was already agreed, made him go and flock along with his fel- lows; for, as the utterance of a prophecy is sometimes a main step toward its fulfillment, so a rumor asserting that multitudes have already adopted a given opinion will often generate that very concurrence of thought which was prematurely declared to exist. I‘rom the operation of this double process it result- Cuap. XXXI.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 363 ed of course that: the opinion of the English public was gener- ally in accord with the writings of the Company; and the more the paper came to be regarded as a true exponent of the na- tional mind, the more vast was the publicity which it obtained. Plainly, then, this printing Company wielded a great power ; and if I have written with sufficient clearness, I have made it apparent that this was a power of more vast dimensions than that which men describe when they speak of “the power of the Press.” It is one thing, for instance, to denounce a public man by printed arguments and invectives which are believed to utter nothing more than the opinion of the writers, and it is another and a graver thing to denounce him in writings which, though having the form of arguments, are (rightly or wrongly) regarded as manifestoes—as manifestoes declaring the judg- ment of the English people. In the one case the man is only accused, in the other he seems to stand already condemned. But though the Company held all this power, their tenure of it was of such a kind that they could not exercise it per- versely or whimsically without doing a great harm to their singular trade; for the whole scheme of their existence went to make them—not autocratic, but—representative in their character, and they were obliged by the law of their being to keep themselves as closely as they could in accord with the nation at large. This, then, was the great English journal; and, whether men spoke of the mere printed sheet which lay upon their table, or of the mysterious organization which produced it, they habitu- ally called either one or the other ‘The Times.’ Moreover, they often prefixed to the word such adjectives and participles as showed that they regarded the subject of their comments in the light of a-sentient, active being, having a life beyond the span of mortal men, gifted with reason, armed with a cruel strength, endued with some of the darkest of the human pas- sions, but clearly liable hereafter to the direst penalty of sin.! On the Sabbath England had rest, but in the early morning of all other days the irrevocable words were poured forth and scattered abroad to the corners of the earth, measuring out honor to some, and upon others bringing scorn and disgrace. ' The form of speech which thus impersonates a manufactory and its wares has now so obtained in our language that—discarding the forcible epithets— one may Venture to adopt it in writing, and to give The Times the same place in grammatical construction as though it were the-proper name of an angel or a hero, a devil or a saint, or a sinner already condemned. Custom makes it good English to say ‘The Times will protect him,’ ‘The Times is savage,’ ‘The Times is crushing him,’ ‘‘The blessed Times has put the thing right,’ ‘That d Times has done all the mischief.’ 864 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXXT; Where and with whom the real power lay, and what was its true source, and how it was to be propitiated—these were questions wrapped in more or less obscurity; for some had a theory that one man ruled, and some another, and some were sure that the Great Newspaper governed all England, and oth- ers that England governed the Newspaper. Philosophie poli- ticians traced events to what they called ‘Public opinion.’ With almost the same meaning, women and practical men sim- ply spoke of ‘The Times.’ But, whether the power of the great journal was a power all its own, or whether it was only the vast shadow of the public mind, it was almost equally to be dreaded and revered by worldly men; for plainly in that sum- mer of 1854 it was one with England. Its words might be wrong, but it was certain that to tens of thousands of men they would seem to be right. They might be the collected voice of all these isles, or the mere utterance of some one unknown man sitting pale by a midnight lamp—but there they were. They were the handwriting on the wall. Of the temper and spirit in which this strange power had been wielded, up to the time of the outbreak of the war, it is not very hard to speak. In general, ‘The Times’ had been more willing to lead the nation in its tendencies to improve- ment than to follow it in its errors; what it mainly sought was —not to be much better or wiser than the English people, but to be the very same as they were, to go along with them in all their adventures, whether prudent or rash, to be one with them in their hopes and their despair, in their joy and in their sor- row, in their gratitude and in their anger. So, although in general it was willing enough to repress the growth of any new popular error which seemed to be weakly rooted, still the whole scheme and purpose of the Company forbade it all thought of trying to make a stand against any great and gen- eral delusion. Upon the whole, the potentate dealt with En- gland in a bluff, kingly, Tudor-like way, but also with a Tudor- like policy; for, though he treated all adversaries as ‘ brute folk’ until they became formidable, he had always been careful to mark the growth ofa public sentiment or opinion, and, as soon as he was able to make out that a cause was waxing strong, he went up and offered to lead it, and so reigned. Thave said that partly by guiding, but more by ascertaining and following the current of men’s opinion, ‘The Times’ always sought to be one with the great body of the people; and since it happened that there was at this period a rare concurrence of feeling, and that the journal, after a good deal of experiment, ~ had now at length thoroughly seized and embodied the soul of Cuar. XXXI.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 865. the nation, its utterance came with increasing force; and in proportion as the growing concord of the people enabled it to »speak with more and more authority, power lapsed and contin- ued to lapse from out of the hands of the Government, until at length public opinion—no longer content to direct the general policy of the State—was preparing to undertake the almost scientific, the almost technical duty of planning a campaign. On the morning of the 15th of June, the great newspaper The opinion of declared and said that ‘The grand political and mili- Meinvan ty ike ‘tary objects of the war could not be attained as long Company de- ‘as Sebastopol and the Russian fleet were in exist- tinctionet ‘ence, but that if that central position of the Rus- Sebastopol. sian power in the south of the empire were anni- ‘hilated, the whole fabric, which it had cost the Czars of Russia ‘centuries to raise, must fall to the ground; and moreover it declared, ‘that the taking of Sebastopol and the occupation of ‘the Crimea were objects which would repay all the costs of ‘the war, and would permanently settle in our favor the prin- ‘cipal questions in dispute, and that it was equally clear that ‘those objects were to be accomplished by no other means, be- ‘cause a peace which should leave Russia in possession of the ‘same means of aggression would only enable her to re-com- ‘mence the war at her pleasure.’ It was natural that some of the members of the Government should have qualms. They knew that Austria (supported for defensive purposes by Prussia) was at that time on the point of joining her arms to those of the Western Powers; and they could not but know that if the French and English armies were to be withdrawn from the main land of Europe in order to in- vade the Crimea, the wholesome union of the Four Powers would of necessity be weakened. ‘The Prime Minister was he who loved peace so fondly that, though peace was no more, he had hardly yet been torn from her cold embrace ; and though he lived under a belief that the military strength of the Czar was beyond measure vast, yet of the twelve months which Russia gave him for preparation he had only used three.} Having the heaviness of these thoughts on his mind, he saw it declared aloud that the country of which he happened to be the Prime Minister could not well do otherwise than invade the Russian dominions. To a prudent man the measure might 1 Computing from the time when the Czar’s determination to seize the Principalities was known to our Government. If the computations are to be made from the time when the hostile character of Prince Mentschikoff’s mission became known, several months more would have to be added. See Lord Aberdeen’s evidence before the Sebastopol Committee. 366 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. (Cuap. XXXL seem to be rash. To a good man, impressed with horror of war, it might even seem to be very wicked, for it was a violent revival of a war which, unless this new torch were thrown, would expire of its own accord. But the print was clear; hke stern Anangkie it pressed upon feeble man’s volition, for it was not to be construed away; and if an anxious Minister went back and looked again to see whether by chance he could find some loop in the wording, and whether possibly he might be able to fulfill his duty without. besieging Sebastopol, he was met by the careful negation which taught him im four plain words that he could fulfill it ‘ by no other means.’ Before the seventh day from the manifesto of the 15th, the country had made loud answer to the appeal, and on the 22nd of June the great newspaper, informed with the.deep will of the people, and taking little account of the fears of the prudent and the scruples of the good, laid it down that ‘Sebastopol was ‘the keystone of the arch which spanned the Enxine, from the ‘mouths of the Danube to the confines of Mingrelia,’ and that ‘a successful enterprise against the place was the essential con. ‘dition of permanent peace.’ And although this appeal was fo mded in part upon a false belief—a belief that the siege of Siistria had been raised—it seemed as though all mankind were making haste to adjust the world to the newspaper, for within twenty hours from the publication of the 22nd of June, truth obeyed the voice of false rumors, and followed in the wake of ‘The Times.”? Of course there were those who saw great. obstacles in the way of the proposed invasion, and they said that since Russia was a first-rate military Power, it must be rash to invade her territory, and to-besiege her proudest fortress, without first gaining some safe knowledge of the enemy’s strength. But the narrative then coming home in fragments from the valley of the Danube was heating the minds of the people in En- land. | 4 When first England learned that the Turks were to be be- sieged in their fortress of Silistria by a great Russian army under the renowned Paskievitch, few believed that the issue was doubtful, or even that the contest could be long sustained. But as soon as it became known that day after day the mili- . tary strength of the Czar was exerted against the place with a violent energy, and that every attack was fiercely resisted, and always as yet with success, our people began to give their heart to the struggle; and their eagerness. rose. into zeal when 1 The siege, as we saw above, was raised early in the morning of the 23rd. 4 Cuap. XXXL.J INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 367 they heard that two young English travelers had thrown them- selves into the fortress, were heading the Turkish soldiery, and were maintaining the conflict by day and by night. The English were not of such a mettle as to be able to hear of tidings like these without growing more and more eager for warlike adventure. And im their hearts they liked the fact that the few young English travelers who helped to save Silistria and to turn away the war from the Danube were men who did these things of their own free will and pleasure, without the sanction of the public authorities; for our people are accustomed to think more highly of their fellow-countrymen individually than they do of our State machinery, and they can easily bear to see their Government in default, and can even smile at its awk- wardness, if all the shortcomings of office are effectually com- pensated by the vigor of private enterprise. Nasmyth has passed away from.us. I knew him in the Crimea. He was a man of quiet and gentle manners, and so free from vanity, so free from all idea of self-gratulation, that he always seemed as though he were unconscious of having stood as he did in the path of the Czar, and had really omitted to think of the share which he had had in changing the course of events; but it chanced that he had gone to the seat of war in the service of ‘The Times,’ and naturally the lustre of his achievement was in some degree shed upon the keen, watchful Company which had had the foresight to send him at the right moment into the midst of events on which the fate of Russia was hanging ; for, whilst the State armies of France and England were as yet only gathering their strength, ‘ The Times’ was able to say that its own officer had confronted the enemy upon the very ground he most needed to win, and helped to drive him back from the Danube in great discomfiture. Thus day after day, in that month of June, the authority of The Govern. the Newspaper kept gaining and gaining upon the ment yields. ()yeen’s Government, and if Lord Aberdeen had any remaining unwillingness to renew the war by undertaking an invasion of Russia, his power of controlling the course of. the Government seems to have come to its end in the interval between the 23rd and the 27th of June. He continued to be the Prime Minister. His personal honor stood so high that no man attributed his continuance in office to other than worthy and unselfish motives ; but, for those who lay stress upon the principle that office and power ought not to be put asunder, it was irksome to have to mark the difference between what the Prime Minister was believed to desir e, and what he was now consenting to do. 368 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXXL Parliament was sitting, and it might be imagined that there No good stand WaS Something to say against the plan for invading made in Par- a province of Russia at a moment when all the main lament : oy ake against the in- Causes of the dispute were vanishing; but the same if ea causes which I have spoken of as paralyzing all re- sistance to the beginning of the war now hindered every at- tempt to withstand its renewal, for the orators who were be- lieved to be tainted with the doctrines of the Peace Party were still lying under the ban which they had brought upon themselves by their former excesses of language. So now again in June, as before at the opening of the session, the counsels of these eloquent men were lost to the world. They became as powerless as the Prime Minister, and the cause which they represented was so utterly brought to ruin that the popular demand for an invasion, which carried with it the virtual renewal of an otherwise expiring war, had the sound of that voice with which a nation speaks when the people are of one mind. So now, in presenting to his colleagues this his favorite scheme of an enterprise against Sebastopol, the Duke of New- castle was upheld — nay, was urged and driven forward — by forces so overwhelming, that scruples, and objections, and fears were carried away as by a flood; and when it was proposed in the Cabinet to go and fetch, as it were, a new war by un- dertaking this bold adventure, there was not one Minister pres« ent who refused to give his consent. Forthwith the Duke of Newcastle announced the decision Preparation of Of the Government to the General commanding the the instruc- = English army in Bulgaria. He did this by a pri- ions addressed ° to Lord Rag- Vate letter written on the 28th of June,! and near- Be ly at the same time he prepared the draught of a Dispatch! which was to convey to the English head-quarters, in full detail and in official form, the deliberate instructions of the Queen’s Government. This paper was to be the instru- ment for meting out to the General in command the allowance of discretion with which he was to be intrusted. A Dispatch recommending the expedition, but leaving to the General in command the duty of determining whether it could be pru- dently undertaken, would not have been followed by any in- vasion of the Crimea; and that which brought about the event was — not the decision of the Cabinet already mentioned, but —the peculiar stringency of the language which was to convey it to the English head-quarters.?_ It therefore seems right to ! The contents.of this will be given in another chapter. * The truth of this statement will be shown, as I think, in a future chapter, Cuap. XXXI.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 369 speak of what passed when the terms of this cogent Dispatch were adopted by Lord Aberdeen’s Cabinet. The Duke of Newcastle so framed the draught as to make it the means of narrowing very closely the discretion left to Lord Raglan; and it was to be expected that the Duke might wish his Dispatch to stand in this shape, because he was eager for the undertaking, and very willing to bear upon his own shoulders a large share of the responsibility which it entailed ; but it is difficult to believe that all the other members of the Government could have intended to place the English General under that degree of compulsion which is implied by the tenor of the instructions. It is certain, however, that the paper was well fitted to elicit at once the objections of those who might be inclined to disapprove it on account of its cogency, for it confined the discretion to be left to the General with a preci- sion scarcely short of harshness. The Duke of Newcastle took the Dispatch to Richmond, for there was to be a meeting of the members of the Cabinet at Pembroke Lodge, and he intended to make this the occasion for submitting the proposed instructions to the judgment of his colleagues. It was evening, a summer evening, and all the members of the Cabinet were present when the Duke took out -the draught of his proposed dispatch and began ta read it. Then there occurred an incident, very trifling in itself, but yet sO momentous in its consequences that, if it had happened in old times, it would have been attributed to the direct intervention of the immortal Gods. In these days, perhaps the physiologist will speak of the condition into which the human brain is nat- _ urally brought when it rests after anxious labors, and the ana- lytical chemist may regret that he had not an opportunity of testing the food of which the Ministers had partaken, with a view to detect the presence of some narcotic poison; but no well-informed person will look upon the accident as character- istic of the men whom it befell, for the very faults, no less than the high qualities of the statesmen composing Lord Aber- deen’s Cabinet were of such a kind as to secure them against the imputation of being careless and torpid. However, it is very certain that, before the reading of the paper had long continued, all the members of the Cabinet except a small mi- nority were overcome with sleep.!. For a moment the noise of a tumbling chair disturbed the repose of the Government ; but presently the Duke of Newcastle resumed the reading of his draught, and then again the fated sleep descended upon and, indeed, it is well enough proved by the tenor of Lord Raglan’s reply to the dispatch, t 1 See Note in the Appendix. Qe 370 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, [Cuap. XXXII. the eyelids of Ministers. Later in the evening, and in another room, the Duke of Newcastle made another and a last effort to win attention to the contents of the draught, but agam a blissful rest (not, this time, actual sleep) interposed between Ministers and cares of State, and all, even those who from the first had remained awake, were in a quiet, assenting frame of mind. Upon the whole, the Dispatch, though it bristled with sentences tending to provoke objection, received from the Cab- inet the kind of approval which is often awarded to an unob- jectionable sermon. Not a letter of it was altered; and it will be seen by-and-by that that cogency in the wording of the Dispatch, which could hardly have failed to provoke ob- jection from an awakened Cabinet, was the very cause which governed events. The instructions addressed ‘from Paris to the French com- Instructions mander did not urge him to propose the invasion sent tthe of the Crimea, nor even to lend the weight of his mander, opinion to the proposed enterprise, but they for- bade. him from advancing toward the Danube. If it should be clear that the English were willing to undertake the expe dition to the Crimea, then the French Commander was not to be at liberty to hold back.’ * CHAPTER XXXII. At the time when the instructions from the Home Govern- The Allies at Ments reached the camp of the Allies, the generals Varna. Their were preparing for an active campaign in Bulgaria, state of prepa- ration inthe and Marshal ‘St. Arnaud had around him, in the middle ofJuly. neighborhood of Varna, or moving thither, four strong divisions of infantry, with cavalry and. field-artillery. He had no siege train. Lord Raglan had around him four divisions of infantry, the greater part of a division of cavalry, and of his field-artillery seven batteries. He had also on board ship off Varna the half of a battering train, and the other half was nearly ready to be dispatched from England. The French Marshal was receiving and expecting constant additions to his force, and Lord Raglan had been apprized that ' I deduce this conclusion in an inferential way, from the general tenor of the materials at my command, and not from any one document distinctly warranting the statement. Cuar. XXXII.]) INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, | 371k a reserve division of infantry under Sir George Cathcart would speedily reach the Bosphorus. So long as the French and English forces remained camped in the neighborhood of Varna, their command of the sea-com- munication insured to them the arrival of the supplies which were sent to them; but the means of land-transport were not yet within their reach. It was estimated that, in order to move effectively in the interior, the English army alone would require pack-horses or mules to the number of 14,000, To ob- tain these was difficult, but not impossible; and, at the time to which we point, about 5000 had been collected. By a contin- uance of these exertions in Bulgaria, and by due activity in for- warding munitions and stores from England, it is probable that the English force, after a farther interval of about six weeks or two months, might have been prepared to move as an army carrying on regular operations; but of course this would only be true upon the supposition that the army should always march through countries yielding sufficient forage. The preparations of the French were not, perhaps, quite so far advanced as our own; but it is probable that the two ar- mies would have been found ready at about the same time for an active campaign in Bulgaria. The ships of the Allied Powers were at hand, and their Theireom. eets had dominion over all the Kuxine home to mandofthe the Straits of Kertch. They had the command of 5 the Bosphorus, the Dardanelles, the Mediterranean, of the whole ocean; and of all the lesser seas, bays, gulfs, and straits, from the Gut of Gibraltar to within sight of St. Peters- burg. The Czar’s Black Sea fleet existed, but existed in close durance, shut up under the guns of Sebastopol. In the matter of gaining information respecting the enemy’s Information resources, our Foreign Office had not been idle; obtained by and a great deal of material, bearing upon this vital OMe nee ne business, had been carefully got together and col- Beciees of the lated. It resulted from these data, that, spread over vast space, Russia might nominally have un- der arms forces approaching to a million of men; but that the force in the Crim Chersonese, including the 17,000 men who formed the crews of the ships, did not at the highest estimate amount to more than 45,000; and that, although there were a few battalions which Russia might draw toward Sebastopol from her army of the Caucasus, she had no more speedy meth- od of largely re-enforcing the Crimea than by availing herself | of the troops then in retreat from the country of the Danube, and marching them round to Perekop by the northern shores of the Euxine. a» 372 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. ([Cwap. XXXIIT. Neither the ambassadors of France and England at Constan- Noinformation tinople, nor any of their generals or admirals, had obtainedinthe succeeded in obtaining for themselves any trust- oe worthy information upon this vitally momentous business. For their failure in this respect more blame attach- es upon the ambassadors than upon the military and naval commanders, because the ambassadors had been in the Levant during a period of many months, in which (since the war was impending, but not declared) they might have bought knowl- edge from Russian subjects without involving their informers in the perils of treason. The duty of gathering knowledge by clandestine means is one so repulsive to the feelings of an En- glish gentleman, that there is always a danger of his neglect- ing it or performing it ill. Perhaps no two men could be less fit for the business of employing spies than Lord Stratford and - Lord Raglan. More diligence might have been expected from the French, but they also had failed. Marshal St. Arnaud had heard a rumor that the force of the enemy in the Crimea was 70,000; and Vice-Admiral Dundas had even received a state- ment that it amounted to 120,000. But these accounts were fables. In point of fact, the information obtained by our For- eign Office approached to near the truth, and the Duke of. Newcastle had the firmness—it was a daring thing to do, but it turned out that he was right—he had the firmness to press Lord Raglan to rely upon it.. It was natural, however, that a general who was within a few hours’ sail of the country which Lord Raglan he was to invade, and was yet unable to obtain foncelved that from it any, even slight, glimmer of knowledge, lutely without Should distrust information which had traveled thy informa, Found to him (through the aid of the Home Goy- tion. ernment) along the circumference of a vast circle ; and Lord Raglan certainly considered that, in regard to the strength of the enemy in the Crimea and the land defenses of Sebastopol, he was simply without knowledge. CHAPTER XXXIII. On the evening of the 13th of July Marshal St. Arnaud re- The instruc. Celved a telegraphic dispatch from his Government. tions forthe The dispatch had been forwarded by way of Bel- ~ i j a tk ty ° ° i . Crimea reach, grade, and was in cipher. The message came in the Allied an imperfect state. Part of it was intelligible, but oa the rest was beyond all the power of the decipher- > . .: Crap. XXXIILJ INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 37S er. Yet the interpreted symbols showed plainly that the whole message, if only it could be read, would prove to be one of deep import. It forbade Marshal St. Arnaud from making any advance toward the Danube, and told him to look to the event of his army being conveyed from Varna by the fleet. This was all that could be deciphered. There were the mystic let- ters and figures which laid down, as was surmised, the destiny of the Allied armies, and no one could read. At night Colo- nel Trochu came to Lord Raglan’s quarters, and communi- cated all that could be gathered from the telegraphic dispatch. The English General had just received the Duke of Newcas- tle’s letter of the 28th, but had not yet broken the seal of it. Now, however, Lord Raglan opened the letter, and in a few moments he was able to give M. Trochu the means of inferring the matter contained in the illegible part of his dispatch. Ap- parently it was the desire of both the Home Governments that the Allied commanders should prepare to make a descent upon the Crimea, and lay siege to Sebastopol. On the 16th of July the dispatch of the 29th of June was received at the English head-quarters; and a dispatch for- warded from Paris at nearly the same time reached the hands of Marshal St Arnaud. ' Since the proposed expedition involved the employment of The men who POth land and sea forces, the duty of determining had to determ- upon the effect to be given to the instructions from ine upon the home devolyed upon those who had the command giventothe of the Anglo-French armies and fleets. ‘These were wnstructions- three: Marshal St. Arnaud (having Admiral Hame- lin under his orders), Lord Raglan, and Vice-Admiral Dundas. Marshal St. Arnaud had not weight proportioned to the Marshal st. Magnitude of his command. Reputed at first to be prasad daring even to the verge of rashness, we have seen him so cautioned and schooled into strategic prudence as to have determined to place hundreds of miles of territory, and even the great range of the Balkan, between the French and the Russians; and now, within the last week, he had been al- most’ reproved by his Government for want of enterprise. Colonel Trochu, admitted into consultation upon the most mo- mentous affairs, seemed to wield great authority. At Con- stantinople and at Varna, no less than in Paris, the Marshal had been made the victim of unsparing tongues. Indeed at this time two of his divisional generals openly indulged in merci- less invectives against their chief; and soldiers all know that general officer thus setting himself against the commander- —in-chief is never without a great following. Perhaps, as had 2 374 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, ([Cuapr, XXXUTD been at first supposed, it may have been true that boldness and craving for adventure were the true lines of the Marshal’s character; but, if that were so, his native ideas had been over- laid by much counsel and bent into unwonted shapes. After a while, as will be seen, his mind, fatigued by advice, and now and then broken down by bodily illness, began to lapse into a state which rendered him almost passive in very critical mo- — ments. Naturally, he had been cowed by the result of his en- deavors to have his own way against Lord Stratford and Lord Raglan. . He was without ascendency in the camp of the Al- lies. Colonel Trochu was a student of the principles applicable to formal inland warfare, and it was to be expected that the more the obstacles to the proposed undertaking were canvassed, the more likely it would be that he would throw the weight of his scientific advice into the negative scale. Upon the whole it resulted, from the composition of the va- rious forces acting upon the mind of M. St. Arnaud, that, what- ever opinion he might lean to, he was not strong enough to be able to act upon events. If the English should decide against the project, he would be well content, and perhaps much re- lieved. If, on the other hand, the English should press for its adoption, then the French Marshal would do his best to carry it to a good conclusion. The French fleet was commanded by Admiral Hamelin. It Admiral was understood that he disapproved the expedition, 5 sag pies but he was under the orders of the chief who com- manded the land forces. It. was not at that time a part of the project to move any very large proportion of the Turkish army to the coast of the Crimea, and therefore the opinion of Omar Pasha would hardly become a governing ingredient in the counsels of the Allies. It was known, however, that he deprecated the proposed invasion. The English fleet was commanded by Vice-Admiral Dundas. Admiral Dun» Most of the Vice-Admiral’s latter years had been des. passed in political and official life, and it was by force of politics that he had now become troubled with the business of war; for his seat at the Admiralty Board, and his subsequent appointment in peace-time to the command of the Mediterranean fleet, were things which stood in the relation of cause and effect. He had not sought to return to scenes of naval strife, but the war overtook him in his marine retire- ment, converting his expected repose into anxious toil. He was an able, a steadfast, a genial man, and his square Scottish Omar Pasha. Cuar. XXXIII.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 8475 head, and his rough, shrewd, good-humored eyebrows, had grown gray in the faithful service of a political party. By na- ture he was so stout-hearted that he could afford to give free, manly counsel without the least dread lest men should say he was too cautious. His habits as a working subordinate mem- ber of Government, and perhaps also his natural temperament, inclined him to take a homely view of questions, a view recom- mended by what men term ‘common sense. I am sure, though I never heard him say so, that he believed the war to be extremely foolish, and that the less there was of it, the bet- ter it would be for the Whigs and for all the rest of mankind. He spoke and went straightforward. He thoroughly disap- proved the project of invasion, and he said so in plain words. His opinion sprang—not from dread of peril to the forces which he himself commanded, but from anxiety —anxiety in every way honorable to him—for the safety of the English army. That that anxiety was altogether vain, or even that it was weakly founded, few men, speaking with the light of the past, will be ready to say. Still less will it be thought that the Vice-Admiral was wrong in giving bold expression to his views. Admiral Dundas’s command was of course independent of the general in command of the English army; but the feasibil- ity of the sea transit was not at “all in question,! and it was plain, therefore, that the decision would properly rest with those who were responsible for the direction of the land forces. “So, although he held stoutly to his own opinion, the Vice-Admiral did not fail to give assurance that, if the decision of the Generals should be in favor of undertaking the expedi- tion, they might rely upon the aid of the English ; fleet. There remained Lord Raglan: and now it is time to give the words of the instructions which had been ad- dressed to him, as we have already seen; by the Secretary of State. The private letter which was the forerunner of the detailed dispatch ran thus :— ‘Since I last wrote to you, events unknown to you at the Theinstruee ‘date of these letters have been brought to us by tis address- ‘the telegraph, and the raising the siege of Silis- edtohimby , the Home tria, and the retreat of the Russian army across Government. «the: Danube (preparatory probably to a retreat ‘across the Pruth), give an entirely new aspect to the war, and Lord Raglan. 1 Dundas, I think, said fairly and bluntly that he could undertake to land the army on the coast of the Crimea, but not to supply it, nor to bring it back. 376 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXXIII, ‘render it necessary at once to consider what shall be our next ‘move. ‘The Cabinet is unanimously of the opinion that, unless you ‘and Marshal St. Arnaud feel that you are mot sufficiently pre- ‘pared, you should lay siege to Sebastopol, as we are more than ‘ever convinced that, without the reduction of this fortress and ‘the capture of the Russian fleet, it will be impossible to con- ‘clude an honorable and safe peace. The Emperor of the ‘French has expressed his entire concurrence in this opinion, ‘and, Z believe, has written privately to the Marshal to that ef- ‘fect. Ishall submit to the Cabinet a dispatch to you on this ‘subject, and if it is approved you may expect it by the next ‘mail. In the mean time I[ hope you will be turning over in ‘your own mind, and considering with your French colleague, ‘what it will be safe and advisable to do.’! So far as it related to the expedition which the Allies under- took, the promised dispatch was in these words :— * Secret. ‘War Department, 29th June, 1854. ‘My Lorp,—In my dispatch of the 10th April, marked “ Se- ‘cret,” I directed your Lordship to make careful inquiry into ‘the amount and condition of the Russian force in the Crimea, ‘and the strength of the fortress of Sebastopol. ‘At the same time I pointed out to your Lordship that, ‘whilst it was your first duty to prevent, by every means in ‘your power, the advance of the Russian army on Constanti- ‘nople, supposing any such intention to exist, it might become ‘essential for the attainment of the objects of the war to un- ‘dertake operations of an offensive character, and that the ‘heaviest blow which could be struck at the southern extrem- ‘ities of the Russian empire would be the taking or destruction ‘of Sebastopol. The events which have recently occurred, and ‘which have become known to Her Majesty’s Government by ‘means of the telegraph from Belgrade—the gallant and suc- ‘cessful resistance of the Turkish army, the raising of the siege ‘of Silistria, the retreat of the Russian army across the Dan- ‘ube, and the anticipated evacuation of the Principalities— ‘have given a new character to the war, and will render it ‘necessary for you without delay to concert measures with ‘Marshal St. Arnaud, and with Admirals Dundas and Hamelin, ‘suited to the circumstances in which these events have placed ‘the Allied forces. ' Private letter from the Duke of Newcastle to Lord Raglan, dated 28th June, 1854. Cuar, XXXIIJ.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 307 ‘The safety of Constantinople from any invasion of the Rus- ‘sian army is now, for a time at least, secured, and the advance ‘of the English and French armies to Varna and Prayadi has ‘succeeded in its object, without their being called upon to “meet the enemy in action. ‘ Any farther advance of the Allied armies should on no ac- ‘count be contemplated. To occupy the Dobrutscha would ‘be productive of no beneficial results, and would be fatally ‘prejudicial to the health of the troops; and even if the Rus- ‘sian army should not recross the Pruth, but continue in the ‘occupation of the Principalities, it is the decided opinion of ‘Her Majesty’s Government that, for the present at least, no measures should be taken by you to dislodge them. ‘The circumstances anticipated in my dispatch before re- ‘ferred to have, therefore, now arrived ; and I have, on the part ‘of Her Majesty’s Government, to instruct your Lordship to ‘concert measures for the siege of Sebastopol, unless, with the ‘information in your possession, but at present unknown in this ‘country, you should be decidedly of opinion that it could not ‘be undertaken with a reasonable prospect of success. The ‘confidence with which Her Majesty placed under your com- ‘mand the gallant army now in Turkey is unabated; and if, ‘upon mature reflection, you should consider that the united ‘strength of the two armies is insufficient for this undertaking, ‘you are not to be precluded from the exercise of the discre- ‘tion originally vested in you, though Her Majesty’s Govern- ‘ment will learn with regret that an attack from which such ‘important consequences are anticipated must be any longer ‘delayed. ‘The difficulties of the siege of Sebastopol appear to Her ‘Majesty’s Government to be more likely to increase than di- ‘minish by delay; and as there is no prospect of a safe and ‘honorable peace until the fortress is reduced, and the fleet tak- ‘en or destroyed, it is, on all accounts, most important that ‘nothing but insuperable impediments—such as the want of ‘ample preparations by either army, or the possession by Rus- ‘sia of a force in the Crimea greatly outnumbering that which *can be brought against it—should be allowed to prevent the ‘early decision to undertake these operations. ‘This decision should be taken solely with reference to the ‘means at your disposal, as compared with the difficulties to ‘be overcome. ‘It is probable that a large part of the Russian army now ‘retreating from the 'Turkish territory may be poured into the ‘Crimea to re-enforce Sebastopol. If orders to this effect have 378 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXXIII, ‘not already been given, it is farther probable that such a ‘measure would be adopted as soon as it is known that the ‘ Allied armies are in motion to commence active hostilities. ‘ As all communications by sea are now in the hands of the ‘ Allied Powers, it becomes of importance to endeavor; to cut ‘off all communication by land between the Crimea and the ‘other parts oft the Russian dominions. oo * x * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ok ‘It is unnecessary to express any opinion, at this distance ‘from the scene, as to the mode in which these operations ‘should be conducted, or the place at which a disembarkation ‘should be effected ; and. as the latter will, of course, be de- ‘cided with the advice and assistance of the French and En- ‘olish Admirals, it is equally unnecessary to impress upon your ‘Lordship the importance of selecting favorable weather for ‘the purpose, and avoiding all risks of being obliged by storms ‘to withdraw from the shore the vessels of war and transports, ‘when only a pat tial landing of the tr oops has been effected. * # * * * * * * Bs * * * * * * * * * * i tite * * * * * ‘IT have only farther to express to you, on the part of Her * Majesty’ s Government, their entire reliance in your judgment, ‘zeal, and discretion ; and their conviction that, while you will ‘not expose the army under your command to unnecessary ‘risk, you will not forget that to the gallantry and conduct of ‘your troops their countrymen are now looking to secure, by ‘the blessing of Providence, the great object of a just war, the ‘vindication of national rights, and the future security of the ‘peace of Kurope. ‘T have the honor to be, my Lord, your Lordship’s obedient, ‘humble servant, NEWCaAsTLE. ‘General the Lord Raglan, G. C. B., &c,, &e., &e.’ In common circumstances, and especially where the whole Extremestrin. Of the troops to be engaged are under one com- gency ofthe mander, it can not be right for any sovereign or insumuctons. “any minister to address such instructions as these to a general on a distant shore; for the general who is to be intrusted with the sole command of a great expedition must be, of all mankind, the best able to judge of its military pru- Cuar. XXXIIT.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 879 dence; and to give him orders thus cogent is to dispense with his counsel. But in this war, the united forces of France and England Considerations Were under two commanders; and, besides, since eee aaa, the expedition was dependent upon naval co-opera- gency. tion, the admirals of the two fleets would necesari- ly be taken into council. It is true that the French admiral was under the orders of Marshal St. Arnaud, but there was no corresponding arrangement in regard to the English services, and our admiral’s command was independent of the general commanding the land forces. Thus, it seemed to the Home Government that the question, if left to be decided on the shores of the Black Sea, would have to be weighed, not by one commander, but by a council of at least four, and to be actually decided by a council of not less than three; and it would scarcely be expected that such a body, deliberating freely, would come to that vigorous decision which might easily, perhaps, be attained by any one of them singly. On the other hand, the two Governments were per- fectly agreed. Upon the whole, therefore, there was some ground for resolving to transmit to the camps at Varna the benefit of that concord which reigned between Paris and Lon- don, and to subject the generals and admirals to the overrul- ing judgment of the authorities at home. Again, the chief reason which makes it unwise to fetter the discretion of generals—namely, the superior knowledge which they are supposed to have of the enemy’s strength and of the field of operations—was, in this instance, wanting ; for the gen- erals in the camp at Varna had absolutely no trustworthy in- formation except what came to them from Paris or London; and, in their power of testing the statements which reached them in this way, they were below the Home Governments, for they did not so well know the sources from which the ac- counts were drawn. Justice requires that these considerations should have their weight, for they tend,in some measure, to explain the extreme stringency of the instructions. ‘The Minister who framed them had determined, with a boldness very rare in modern times, to take upon himself an immense weight of responsibility ; and, having brought himself to this strong resolve, he rightly and ‘generously did all he could to simplify the task of the general whom he ventured to direct, and to make the path of duty seem clear, But Lord Raglan had a station in the allied camp which made it- very difficult for the Home Government to take his 380 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXXIII The power of burden upon themselves by any mere bold form of seainctihe es, Words. He commanded the land forces, but he was pedition be- — Glothed with a power of older date than the Queen’s comes practic- 34 . . ally vestedin COMMission. He had been privy to the business Ford Keglan’ of the wars which England waged in the great eine days; and, if he had seen how Wellington ordered affairs in the field, he had witnessed, too, his endurance, and helped him in the patient, unapplauded toil by which he pre- pared the end. Men serving under Lord Raglan were none of them blind to-the distance which history herself interposed betwixt their general and themselves. There were none near the chief who would not feel bitter pain if they imagined that words or acts of theirs had thrown upon his face a shadow of displeasure. There were no men near him who would not fly with alacrity to execute his slightest wish. The ascendency of the English General over his own people could not but reach into the French camp. Upon the whole, Lord Raglan had so great an authority in the camp of the Allies, and amongst pub- lic men in England, that, if he had taken upon himself to resist the pressure of the Secretary of State, he would not have been left without support. On the other hand, if he should determ- ine to follow the will of the Home Government, he would car- ry the French Marshal with him. So, in effect, the power of deciding for or against the expedition had passed from Paris and from London, and was all concentred in the English Gen- eral. Of the general officers in the English camp there was one Lord Raglan's Whom Lord Raglan had always been anxious to deliberations. have near at hand. This was Sir George Brown. He was a Scotsman, 66 years old,-and had served with a great repute for his daring forwardness in some of the most bloody scenes of the Peninsular war. He was of an eager, fiery na- ture, and devoted to the calling of a soldier. After the peace of 1815 he began to hold office in the general staff of the army at_ the Horse-Guards, and in time he became adjutant-general. He now commanded the Light Division. His zeal, and his lengthened toils in the adjutant-general’s office, had drawn him too far in a narrow path, and he overplied the idea of disci- pline, but he abounded in energy, and he was in many respects an accomplished soldier. He wrote on military subjects with clearness, with grace, and seemingly with a good deal of ease. After receiving the Duke of Newcastle’s dispatch, Lord Rag- We requests the 140 sent for Sir George Brown, and expressed to opinion of Sir_ him a wish to have his opinion about it. He hand- George Brown. eq the paper to Sir George across the table, and Cuap. XXXJIL] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 381 then went on with his writing, leaving Sir George to consider its contents at his leisure. When he had read it, Lord Raglan asked him to give him his opinion. Before giving it, Sir George naturally inquired what information Lord Raglan had obtain- ed in regard to the strength of Sebastopol, and what force he expected might be opposed to him in the Crimea. Lord Raglan’s answer was that he had no information what- ever; that neither he nor Marshal St. Arnaud knew what amount of force the enemy had there; that they believed and hoped there might not be more than 70,000 men in the penin- sula; but that, in fact, it had not been blockaded, and that no means had been taken to procure information, and that there- fore they did not in reality know they might not be opposed by 100,000 men or even more. Then Sir George Brown said, ‘ You and I are accustomed, ‘when in any great difficulty, or when any important question ‘is proposed to us, to ask ourselves how the Great Duke would ‘have acted and decided under similar circumstances. Now, ‘I tell your Lordship that, without more certain information ‘than you appear to have obtained in regard to this matter, ‘that great man would not have accepted the responsibility of ‘undertaking such an enterprise as that which is now proposed ‘to you! But, notwithstanding that consideration, I am of ‘opinion that you had better accede to the proposal, and come ‘into the views of the Government, for this reason, that it is ‘clear to me, from the tenor of the Duke of Newcastle’s letter, ‘that they have made up their minds to it at home, and that, ‘if you decline to accept the responsibility, they will send some ‘one else out to command the army, who will be less scrupu- ‘lous and more ready to come into their plans.’ This suggestion did not at all govern Lord Raglan’s deci- Lord Raglan's sion. At the time he disclosed no opinion of his determination. gwn ; but he soon made up his mind. His decision was governed by views which must be explained. He believed that the enterprise was one of a very hazardous kind, and was not warranted by any safe information concerning the state of the enemy’s forces. Having that conviction, why did he not feel bound to assert it, notwithstanding the urgency of the The grounds Lome Government? Lord Raglan was, as might on which it be supposed, deeply imbued with reverence for the ah authority of the Duke of Wellington, and, rightly interpreted, that authority is surely the safest onide that an English general can follow. But there is a certain danger in the precepts of the Great Duke, unless when they are con- strued down to their right degree of significance by applying 382 - INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuav. XXXII. to them the splendid context of his deeds; for he was accus- tomed to use sayings founded on quaint and very literal read- ings of our English law, and the loyalty of his nature rose so high above the reach of all cavil, that the maxims which he ut- tered seemed to give a noble simplicity to the tenor of his pub- lic life, though in reality he rarely or never permitted them to derange his policy, still less to confuse him in the management of war. Naturally, therefore, men were in danger of being misled by a too narrow reading of his precepts. Now, one of the Duke’s theories was, that an officer commanding an army on foreign service owed obedience to the Secretary of State— obedience close akin to that which a military subordinate owes to his military chief. If this precept were to be narrowly con- strued, a Secretary of State who conveyed the wishes of the Government to a general commanding forces abroad would be in danger of finding that he had shut out from his counsels the one man in all the world who could best advise him, and the relations of the Austrian generals with the old Aulic Council at Vienna would have to be adopted as a guide, instead of be- ing valued as a warning. Against this doctrine, understood in its narrow sense, the Duke of Wellington’s whole military ca- reer in Europe was an almost unceasing rebellion; and it would be hard to find an instance in which he suffered his de- signs to be bent awry by the military opinions of the Home Government. During the Peninsular war he did not surely pass his time in obeying the Home Government, but rather in setting it right, and in educating it, if so one may speak, for the business of carrying on war.! It is known, however, that Lord Raglan accepted the Great Duke’s precept without much qualification, and, when he ap- plied it to the dispatch which had come to him from the Sec- retary of State, he saw, as he believed, where the path of duty lay. For now, in all its potency, the strange sleep which had ' The fierce, willful, and contemptuous way in which the Duke of Wel- lington dealt with a Secretary of State who ventured to think he might take him at his word, and make him obey his wish, must be familiar to every reader of the Dispatches; but I may refer to the specimen which will be found in Sir Arthur Wellesley’s letter to Lord Castlereagh of the 5th of Sep- tember, 1808. I mean the passage beginning, ‘In respect to your wish that ‘I should go into the Asturias, to examine the country and form a judgment ‘of its strength, I have to mention to you that I am not a draughtsman.’ It happened that just six days before, namely, on the 30th of August, Sir Ar- thur had addressed to the same Secretary of State his customary professions of obedience: ‘I shall do whatever the Government may wish ;’ but he never thought of suffering himself to be hindered from penning an angry refusal on the 5th of September merely because he had used a submissive phrase on the 30th of August. Cuar. XXXIII.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 383 come upon the Cabinet on the 28th of June began to tell upon events. -But for this, or some like physical cause, it could hardly have chanced that fifteen men, all gifted with keen in- tellect, and all alike charged with a grave, nay, an almost sol- emn duty, would have knowingly assented to the draught of a long and momentous dispatch, without seeking to wedge into it some of those qualifying words which usually correct the imprudence and derange the grammatical structure of writings framed in Council. A few qualifying words of this sort would have enabled Lord Raglan to act upon his own opinion. But the tranquil mood of the Cabinet on the evening of the 28th of June had prevented the mutilation of the dispatch; and it retained so perfectly all that bold singleness of purpose which characterized the mind of the framer, that it virtually directed the English General to undertake the invasion, unless it should happen that he had obtained fresh knowledge of the enemy’s. strength—fresh knowledge of such a kind as would enable him to controvert the statements sent out to him by the Home Government, and say distinctly that the Russian forces in the Crimea were too numerous to be encountered with common prudence by the Allied armies. Now, Lord Raglan had not succeeded in obtaining any information at all on the subject, and, therefore, the one circumstance which might have relaxed the stringency of the dispatch was entirely wanting. In the state of things which actually existed, the Duke of Newcastle’s communication was little short of an absolute order from the Secretary of State. The English General determined to obey it. It was thus that Lord Raglan persuaded himself into the be- lief that he would be justified in foregoing his own opinion, and acceding to the will of the Home Government; but per- haps, though he knew it not, he was under the power of a mo- tive more heating than this bare process of the reason. There were sentences in the dispatch which seemed as though they were meant for the guidance of one not sufficiently prone to action. The writer seemed to have busied himself in closing the loops by which a general might seek to escape from the obligation of haying to make the venture. In reality, as we have seen, the dispatch had been framed with a view of giving unanimity to a council of generals and admirals, but 1t reached its destination at atime when (for the purpose of this decision) the whole power of the camp at Varna was centred in the En- glish General. Whether meant for the guidance of a council or not, the dispatch was addressed to one man; and that man was Lord Raglan. Some may deem it wrong, and may call it a plan of life too closely deriving from times of chivalry ; but 384 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. ([Cuar. XXXIII. it is still the habit of the English gentleman to think that his personal honor is no part of the property of the state; and that even for what may seem the public good he ought not to do a violence to his self-respect. He has his code formed in the time of his boyish conflicts or of his early manhood; and if there be fire and strength in his nature, he will not depart from it merely because he has become responsible and mature in years. Lord Raglan was of the bodily nature of those whose blood flushes hot to the face under the sting of an indignant thought; and if mortal eyes could have looked upon him when he revolved the contents of the dispatch, they would have seen him turn crimson in poising the question whether he ought to resist the pressure of the Queen’s Government, and to resist because of mere danger. What the Duke of Newcastle meant was to do all he reasonably could to enforce the invasion ; and, so intending, he did honestly in making his order as peremp- tory as possible; but if in any times to come it shall be intend- ed that an English General commanding on a foreign service is to exercise his judgment freely and without passion, the Sec- retary of State must not challenge him as Lord Raglan was challenged by the dispatch of the 29th of June. Lord Raglan’s decision governed the counsels of the Allied His decision camp; for, although the staff of the French army? Feed ye (including, as I believe, M. St. Arnaud himself) were Allies. adverse to the undertaking, the Marshal’s instruc- tions were so framed, that, if the English should be ready to go forward, he was virtually ordered to concur in the enter- prise ;? and we have seen that he had not such a weight in the French camp as would have enabled him to oppose any valid resistance to the wishes of his own Government and the de- termination of the English General. | In announcing his decision to the Home Government, Lord Raglan thus wrote to the Duke of Newcastle :— ‘It becomes my duty to acquaint you that it was more in He announces - &eference to the views of the British Government it to the Home ‘as conveyed to me in your Grace’s dispatch, and ' ‘to the known acquiescence of the Emperor Louis ‘ Napoleon in those views, than to any information in the pos- ‘session of the naval and military authorities, either as to the ‘extent of the enemy’s forces, or their state of preparation, that ‘the decision to make a descent upon the Crimea was adopted. ? This will be shown by the narrative in cap. 9, post. ? Lord Raglan had the advantage of knowing (by means of a communica- tion from Lord Cowley) that the ‘Emperor quite concurred in the views of ‘the British Cabinet.’ Cuap. XXXIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 385 ‘The fact must not be concealed that neither the English nor ‘the French Admirals have been able to obtain any intelligence ‘on which they can rely with respect to the army which the ‘Russians may destine for operations in the field, or to the ‘number of men allotted for the defense of Sebastopol; and ‘Marshal St. Arnaud and myself are equally deficient in infor- ‘mation upon these all-important questions, and there would ‘seem to be no chance of our acquiring it.’! The Duke of Newcastle’s reply to this dispatch was in full consistency with that fearless and unshrinking assumption of responsibility which had marked his instructions of the 29th of June. ‘I wish,’ he writes,? ‘ that circumstances which are engross- The Dake of | 12g my attention this afternoon permitted my ex- Neweastle's ‘pressing to you the feeling of intense anxiety and reply. ‘interest which your reply of the 19th of July to ‘mine of the 29th of June have created in my mind. I can ‘not help seeing, through the calm and noble tone of your an- ‘nouncement of the decision to attack Sebastopol, that it has ‘been taken in order to meet the views and desires of the Gov- “ernment, and not in entire accordance with your own opinions. ‘God grant that success may reward you, and justify us! ‘I wrote to the Queen the moment I received your dispatch, dhs boceat and in answer she said, “The very important news expression of ‘‘* which he conveyed to her in it of the decision Spline, ‘of the generals and admirals to attack Sevasto- “nol, have filled the Queen with mixed feelings of satisfaction ‘*¢and anxiety. May the Almighty protect her army and her ‘fleet, and bless this great undertaking with success !” ‘Let me add my humble aspirations and prayers to those ‘of our good Queen. The cause is a just one, if any war is ‘just, and I will not believe that in any case British arms can ‘fail. May honor, victory, and the thanks of a grateful world ‘attend your efforts! God bless you and those who fight un- ‘der you!’ CHAPTER XXXIV. On the 18th of July a conference took place at Marshal St. Conference at ‘Stnaud’s head-quarters. It was attended by the the French. Marshal, by Lord Raglan, and by Admiral Hamelin, Be Regeln by Admiral Bruat. (who was the second in com- 1 19th July. ~ ~? Private letter to Lord Raglan, 3rd August, 1854. Vor. L—R 386 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XXXIV.) mand of the French fleet), by Vice-Admiral Bundas, and by Rear-Admiral Sir Edmund Lyons, who was the second in com- mand of the English fleet. It lasted four hours. ; Perhaps most of the members of the conference imagined that they were met for the purpose of determining upon the expediency of undertaking the invasion; but Lord Raglan had already made up his mind, not merely to support the wish of his Government in the Allied camp, but to cause its actual adoption; and he was so constituted that he could bring the resources of his mind to bear upon the object in view with as much abundance and strength as if he had himself approved or even devised it. Clearly a discussion upon the expediency of undertaking the enterprise would have been fatal to it, for no member of the conference, except Lyons and (possibly) Bruat, could have conscientiously argued that the scheme was wise or even moderately prudent. How was it to be con- trived that a council of war disapproving the enterprise should be prevented from strangling it ? As almost always happened in conferences where Lord Rag- Lord Ragian's 122 had the ascendant, the grand question was quiet- way of eluding ly passed over, as though it were either decided or objections. conceded for the purpose of the discussion, and it was made to seem that the duty which remained to the coun- cil was that of determining the time and the means. The French had studied the means of disembarking in the face of a powerful enemy. Sir Ralph Abercrombie’s descent upon the coast of Egypt in the face of the Fiench aimy was an en- terprise too brilliant and too daring to allow of its being held a safe example, for he had simply landed his infantry upon the beach in boats, without attempting, in the first instance, to bring artillery into action. It seems that hardly any stress of circumstances will induce a French general to bring his in- fantry into action upon open ground without providing for it the support of artillery. Naturally, therefore, the French au- thorities at Varna were impressed with the necessity of being able to land their field-guns in such a way as to admit of their being brought into action simultaneously with the landing of their battalions; and, having anticipated some time before that a disembarkation in. the face of an enemy might be one of the operations of the war, they had already begun to make the boats required for the purpose. These were flat-bottomed lighters, somewhat in the form of punts, but of great size, and so constructed that they would receive the gun-carriages with the guns upon them, and allow of the guns being run out straight from the boat to the beach. It was understood that Cuarv. XXXIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 387 the building of these flat lighters would take about ten days, and it was determined that in the mean time a survey of the coast near Sebastopol should be made from on board ship, in order to determine the spot best suited for a descent. With a view to cover the reconnaissance and draw off the Reconmais. Chemy’s attention, the Allied admirals cruised with sance of the powerful fleets in front of the harbor of Sebastopol, Ya and meanwhile the officers chosen for the service went northward along the coast in the‘ Fury,’ seeking out the best place for alanding. The officers who performed this duty were, on the part of the French, General Canrobert and Colo- nel Trochu, with one engineer and one ar tillery officer; and, on the part of the English, Sir George Brown, Licut. -Colonel Lake, R.H.A., Captain Lovell, R.E., and Captain Wetherall, of the Quarter master General’s department. The ‘ Fury’ was steered by no common hand. In the moment when Lord Raglan determined to treat the instructions of the Government as imperative, and to put them in course for execution, he came to another determination (a determination which is not so mere a corollary from the first as men unversed in business may think): he resolved to carry the enterprise through. He knew that, though work of an ac- customed sort can be ably done by official persons acting un- der a bare sense of duty, yet that the engine for conquering obstacles of a kind not known beforehand, when they are many, and big, and unforeseen, must be nothing less than the strong, passionate will of a man. If every one were to per- form his mere duty, there would be no invasion of the Crimea, for a rank growth of hinderances springing up in the way of the undertaking would be sure to gather fast round it, and bring it in time to a stop. Amongst the English Generals there was no one who had Sir Edmund given his mind to the enigma which went by the Lyons. name of the ‘ Kastern Question ;’ ? but Sir Edmund Lyons had been for many years engaged in the animating di- plomacy of the Levant. In Greece, the activity of the Czar’s agents, or perhaps of his mere admirer s, had been so constant, and had generated so strong a spirit of antagonism in the minds of the few contentious Britons who chanced to observe it, that the institutions called ‘The Russian Party,’ and ‘The English Party,’ had long ago flourished at Athens ; and, since Sir Edmund Lyons had been aceredited there for several years as British Minister, he did not miss being drawn into the game of combating against. what was supposed to be the ever-im- pending danger of Russian encroachment. Long ago, there- 388 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, ([CuHar. XXXIV. fore, he had been whetted for this strife; and now that the ‘Eastern Question’ was to be brought to the issue of a war in which he had part, he was inflamed with a passionate zeal. Resuming at once the uniform and the bearing of his old pro- fession, he cast aside—if ever he had it—all semblance of dip- lomatic reserve and composure, and threw himself, with all his seaman’s heart, into the business of the war. Lord Raglan drew Sir Edmund Lyons into his intimate counsels. I know not whether this concord of theirs was ever put into words, but I imagine that at the least I can infer from their actions and from the tenor of their intercourse a silent understanding between them—an understanding that no luke- warmness of others, no shortcomings, no evasions, no tardy prudence, no overgrown respect for difficulty or peril, should hinder the landing of the Queen’s troops on the coast of the Crimea. From the time that Lord Raglan thus joined Lyons to the undertaking he gave it a great momentum. To those within the grasp of the Rear-Admiral’s energy it seemed that thenceforth, and until the troops should be landed on the ene- my’s shore, there could be no rest for man, no rest for engines. The ‘ Agamemnon’ was never still. In the painful, consuming passion with which Lyons toiled, and even, as some imagined, in the anxious, craving expression of his features, there was something which reminded men ofa greater name. This was the officer who steered the ‘Fury.’ He carried her in so close to the shore that the coast could be reconnoitred with great completeness. The officers came to the conclusion (a conclusion afterward overruled, as we shall see, by Lord Raglan) that the valley of the Katscha was the best spot for a landing. We saw that the Czar’s withdrawal from the Principalities Rumored would deprive the German Powers of their main he pr ground of quarrel with Russia, and that our plan Czar. of engaging in a great marine expedition against Crim Tartary would cause Austria and Prussia to despair of all effective support from the West, thus driving or tending to drive them into better relations with Nicholas. Before the 28th of July there were signs that this change was beginning to set Russia free from the straits in which she had been placed by the unanimity of the Four Great Powers; and ti- dings which reached the camp at Varna made it appear (though not with truth) that the Russian commander had not only sus- pended his retreat, but was commencing a fresh movement in advance. To deliberate upon this supposed change in the character of the war, a conference was-held at the French: Cuap. XXXIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 889 Second confer: head-quarters, and was attended by Marshal St. Ar- ence. naud, Lord Raglan, General Canrobert, Sir Edmund Lyons, General Martimprey, Sir George Brown, and Colonel Trochu. The French generals grasped this as an occasion for bringing about the relinquishment of an enterprise which they always had held to be rash. They submitted that the general instructions addressed to both of the Allied commanders made it their duty to provide in the first instance for the safety of the Ottoman territory, and that, until that object was secured, they were not warranted in attempting an invasion of a Rus- sian province far distant from the threatened frontier of Euro- pean Turkey ; that the order to invade the coast of the Crimea had been framed by the Home Governments and acceded to by the Allied Generals upon the assumption that the armed in- The French. terVention of Austria, then believed to be immi- ne Krencn é urge the aban- nent, or, at the very least, a continuance of her ctnelition ” Menacing attitude on the flank of the Russian army, against the would preclude any attempt by the Czar to resume hiya his war on the Danube; that that assumption now unfortunately turned out to be unfounded; and that the aban- donment by Austria of the common cause made it the bound- en duty of the Allied commanders to return to their defensive measures, because it was now plain that, if they quitted Bul- garia, Omar Pasha, without aid from any quarter, would have upon his hands the whole weight of the Russian army. Now then, supposing the premises to be conceded, the French coun- selors had made out good grounds for abandoning a resolu- tion which, only a week ago, had been adopted by the Allied commanders. Lord Raglan, however, was resolved that the enterprise Lord Ragian's Should go on. From the moment he knew that the way ofbending siege of Silistria had been raised, he never doubted ee blame. that, for that year at least, the invasion of European the English ‘T‘urkey was at an end. But he knew that clever Government. : Ae men who have taken the pains to build up a neat logical structure do not easily allow it to be treated as unsound merely because it rests upon a sliding foundation. Without, therefore, combating the French arguments, he quietly suggest- ed that the time which must needs elapse before the embarka- tion might throw new light on the probability of a renewed attack upon Turkey; and he proposed that, in the mean time, the preparations for the descent on the Crimea should be car- ried on with all speed. This opinion was adopted by every member of the conference. The preparations were carried on with increasing energy.; and the theory that it was the dntv 390 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXXIV. of the Allied commanders to abandon the enterprise was never put down by argument, but left to die away uncontested. Lord Raglan had been struck with the value of the French plan for landing artillery on flat lighters, and Sir Kdmund Lyons and Sir George Brown were dis- patched to Constantinople with instructions to do all they could toward supplying the British army with means which would answer the same purpose. They discovered that a platform resting upon two boats might be made to serve nearly as well as one of the French lighters. How they toiled the world will never know, for History can not pause to see them ransacking Constantinople and the villages of the Bosphorus in their search after carpenters and planks; but before the appointed time the whole work was done. This was not all. Sir Edmund Lyons and Sir George Brown propelled the arrangements for buying and chartering steamers, tr ampling down “with firmness, per- haps one might say with violence, all obstacles which stood in the way. Of those obstacles one of the most formidable was what was called in those days the ‘ official fear of incurring re- sponsibility.’ Lyons and Sir George Brown taught men that in emergencies of this sort they should be pursued with the fear of not doing enough rather than with the dread of doing too much. ‘I can not venture, ’ said a cautious official—‘ I can not venture to give the price. ‘Then I can,’ said Sir George Brown; ‘I buy itin my own name!’ It is thus that difficulties are con- quered. When the restless ‘ Agamemnon’ came back into the Bay of Varna with Lyons and Sir George Brown on board, Lord Raglan was at the head ofa truly British armament. He had the means, by steam power, and at one trip, to descend upon the enemy’s coast, with all his divisions of infantry, with his brigade of light cavalry, and with the whole of his field ar- tillery ; and he would be enabled, if he landed in face of an en- emy, to bring his guns into action, whilst his infantry formed upon the beach. When the Allied commanders determined to execute the or- Ineffectual at. Gers addressed to them, they saw the importance tempts of the of endeavoring to veil their project from the enemy. ceive the ene. With this view they tried to induce a belief that aah Odessa was to be the object of attack. But the measures which they took for this purpose were very slight and weak. To deceive the enemy by the mere spreading of a report, the first step for a General to take would be that of ut- tering the false word to some of his own people. That would be a difficult service for Lord Raglan to perform; and I do not believe that he ever could or ever did perform it. Preparations, Cuap. XXXIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 391 Another contrivance for diverting the enemy’s attention from the Crimea was that of endeavoring to alarm him for his Bessarabian frontier. Partly to attain this end, and partly, as was surmised, with the more ambitious object of striking a blow at some of the Czar’s retiring columns, Marshal St. Ar- naud moved no less than three divisions into the Dobrudja. But, in truth, all secrecy was forbidden to the Allies. The same power which dictated the expedition precluded its con- cealment. It was in a council of the whole people that En- gland had resolved upon the enterprise; and what advantage there is in knowledge of an enemy’s plans, that she freely gave to Russia. It might seem that for the Emperor of the French, who had shown that he was capable of the darkest secrecy in his own designs, it must have been trying to have to act with a Power which propounded her schemes in print. But, hap- ily, he understood England, and knew something of the con- ditions under which she moves into action. On the 10th of August a fire broke out in the British maga- zines at Varna, and a large quantity of military stores was consumed. But another and more dreadful enemy had now entered the camp of the Allies. From the period of its arrival in the Levant the French army had been suffering much from sickness. In the British army, on the contrary, though slight complaints were not unfrequent, the bodily con- dition of the men had been, upon the whole, very good; and so it continued up to the 19th of July. On that day, out of the whole Light Division, there were only 110 in hospital. But it seems that one of the omens which portend the visitation of a great epidemic is a more than common flush of health. With the French, the cholera first showed itself on board their troop- ships whilst passing from Marseilles to the Dardanelles. It then appeared among the French quartered at Gallipoli, and followed their battalions into Bulgaria. There, its ravages in- creased, and before the beginning of the last week in July it reached the British army. By the 19th of August our regi- ments in Bulgaria.had lost 532 men. But it was amongst the three French divisions marched into the Dobrudja, and espe- cially in General Canrobert’s Division, that the disease raged with the most deadly virulence. In the day’s march, and some- times within the space of only a few hours, hundreds of men dropped down in the sudden agonies of cholera; and out of one battalion alone it was said that, besides those already dead, no less than 500 sufferers were carried alive in the wagons. On the 8th of August it was computed, by an officer of their Fire at Varna. Cholera. 392 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXXIV. staff, that out of the three French divisions which marched into the Dobrudja, no less than 10,000 lay dead or struck down by sickness. If the cholera had been confined to the land forces, the Gen- erals would not, perhaps, have allowed it to delay their em- barkation; but it now reached the fleets. In a few days the crews were in such a state that all idea of attempting to em- bark the troops was, for the moment, quite out of the ques- tion; and on the 11th and 12th of August the Admirals put out from their anchorage, in the hope of driving away the dis- ease with the pure breezes of the sea. But they had scarcely done this when, on board some of the ships, the mysterious pest began to rage with a violence rare in Europe. The ‘Britannia’ alone lost 105 men. The number of those stricken, and of those attending upon them, was so great, that it was impracticable to carry on the common duties of the ship in the usual way; and if the disease had continued to rage with un- diminished violence for three days more, there would have been the spectacle of a majestic three-decker floating helpless upon the waves for want of hands to work her. This time of trial proved the quality of those who remained unstricken. ‘There was a waywardness in the course of the disease, on board British ships, for which it is difficult to account. It spared the officers. On board British ships of war the seaman is accustomed to look to those who command him with a strong affectionate reliance; and now the poor sufferers, in their child- like simplicity, were calling upon their officers for help and com- fort. An officer thus appealed to would go and lie down by the side of the sufferer, and soothe him as though he were an infant. And this trust and this devotion were not always in vain. Even against malignant cholera the officer seemed to be not altogether powerless; for partly by holding the tortured sufferer in his kind hands, partly by cheering words, and part- ly by wild remedies, invented in despair of all regular medical treatment, he was often enabled to fight the disease, or to make the men think that he did. Almost suddenly the pestilence ceased on board the British ships of war. The dead were overboard, and the survivors returned to their accustomed duties with an alacrity quickened by the delight of looking forward to active operations against the enemy. Instinctively, or else with wise design, both offi- cers and men dropped all mention of the tr agedy through which they had passed.! 1 I was for several days on board the ‘ Britannia’ without once, I think, " hearing the least allusion to the pestilence which just four weeks before had slain 105 of the ship’s crew. Cap. XXXV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 893 In a few days from the time when the cholera had been raging with its utmost fury the crews of the fleet were ready to undertake the great business of embarking the troops and landing them on the coast of the Crimea. In the camps of the Allied armies, at this time, the cholera Weakly conai. ad abated, but had not ceased. There were fevers, tion of the En- too, and other complaints. Grievous sickness fell ensh seldiery- ypyon that part of our camp which had been pitched in the midst of the beauteous scenery of the lake of Devna, but the whole English army at this time began to show signs of failing health. It appeared that, even of the men out of hospital and actually present under arms, hardly any were in the enjoyment of sound health; hardly any were capable of their usual amount of exertion. This weakly condition of the men was destined to act, with other causes, in bringing upon the army cruel sufferings; and it may be asked whether, with the soldiers in this condition of body, it was right to undertake an invasion. The answer would be this:—the medical authorities thought, and with ap- parently good reason, that, for troops sickening under the fierce summer heats of Bulgaria, the sea voyage, the descent upon another and more healthy shore, and, above all, the animating presence of the enemy, would work a good effect upon the health of the men; and, although these hopes proved vain, they seemed at the time to rest upon fair grounds. And, after all,itis hard to say what other disposition of the troops would have united the advantages of being better and possible. To remain in Bulgaria, or to attempt to operate in the neighbor- hood of the Danube, was to linger in the midst of those very atmospheric poisons which had brought the health of the army to its then state; and, on the other hand, our people at home would hardly have borne to see the army sent back to Malta, and forced to recede from the conflict, for the bare reason that some of the men were in hospital, and that the rest—without being ill—were said to be in a weakly condition. CHAPTER XXXV. Our admiral had at his command the means for conveying arrangements the British force to the enemy’s shore either in fhostarting ng steam vessels or in sailing ships towed by steam the expedition. power; and until the eve of the embarkation the R 2 7 ——— * 3 * . a pt “4 f ry * a id 394 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. = [Cuar. XXXV. French believed that their resources would enable them to achieve a like result. So, at a conference of the four admirals, held on the 20th of August, it was arranged that the whole of the French and English armament should move from the coast at the same time under steam power; and the 2nd of Septem- ber was looked forward to as the day when the armament might perhaps go to sea, but the exact time would of course depend upon weather and other circumstances beyoud the reach of exact calculation. On the 24th of August the huge operation of embarking the The embarka. armies had alr eady begun. The French embarked Sons 24,000 infantry and 70 pieces of field artillery; but since they were straitened in their means of sea-transport, the number of horses they allotted to each gun was reduced trom six to four. The French embarked no eavalry.' A large portion of the French troops were put on koard ships of war,? and other portions were distributed among a great number of sailing vessels. Some of these were very small craft. Attached to the French ar my, and placed under the orders of Marshal St. Arnaud, there was a force of between 5000 and 6000 Turkish infantry. These men were embarked mainly or entirely on board Turkish vessels of war. Sir Edmund Lyons was charged with the duty of embark- ing the English forces; and having first got on board our 60 pieces of field ar tillery, completely equipped, with the full com- plement of horses belonging to every gun, he proceeded with the embarkation of the 22,000 infantry and the full thousand of cavalry, which Lord Raglan intended to move from Bulga- ria to the coast of the Crimea. To put on board ship a body of foot soldiers is comparatively a simple process, but the shipping of horses involves so heavy a cost, so great an exer- tion of human energy, that he who undertakes such a task upon any thing like a large scale must needs be a man in earn- est. On the other hand, it was clear that for an invasion of the Crimea a body of cavalry was strictly needed. ‘Therefore, a sagacious interpreter of warlike signs, who saw that the En- 1 They took- with them from 80 to 100 horsemen to perform escort duty ; but of course I do not regard this as an exception to the statement that ° 10 cavalry was embarked.’ ? Our naval officers are strongly opposed to the practice of putting troops on board ships of war. They are not the men to set their personal con- venience against the exigencies of the public service, but they can not en- dure that the efficiency of a man-of-war should be for one moment suspend- ed. It is well ascertained, too, that the presence of a great number of sol- diers—men who for the time of the voyage are almost necessarily idlers—is injurious to the discipline of a ship. Cuap. XXXV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 395 glish General was embarking a thousand cavalry horses, and that the French were embarking none, would be led to conjec- ture that the English were resolved to make the descent, and that the French were not. It will be seen by-and-by that such a conjecture would have been sound. The time necessary for embarking a given number of foot soldiers is small in proportion to that required for getting on board an equal number of troopers with their chargers. Nor is this all. The embarkation of infantry is not necessarily stopped by a moderate swell. The embarkation of cavalry is rendered very slow and difficult by even a slight movement of the sea, and is stopped altogether by a little increase of surf. The business of embarking the British cavalry was checked during some days by a wind from the northeast and its consequent swell, but afterward the weather changed, and the whole force was got on board without the loss of a man.! Lord Raglan could not repress the feeling with which he looked upon the exertions of our naval officers and seamen. ‘The embarkation,’ he wrote on the 29th of August—‘the ‘embarkation is proceeding rapidly and successfully, thanks to ‘the able arrangement of Rear-Admiral Sir Edmund Lyons, ‘and the unceasing exertions of the officers and men under ‘his orders. It is impossible for me to express in adequate ‘terms my sense of the value of the assistance the army under ‘my command derives from the Royal Navy. The same feel- ‘ing prevails from the highest to the lowest—from Vice-Ad- ‘miral Dundas to the youngest sailor, an ardent desire to co- ‘operate by every possible means, is manifest throughout, and ‘I am proud of being associated with men who are animated ‘by such a spirit, and who are so entirely devoted to the serv- ‘ice of their country.’ ; Of course the French, unencumbered with cavalry, were on Arh iets board before the English embarkation was com- French caleu- plete; but the steam power at the command of the Bich by aneet French fell short, and the necessity of a variation erenead of from the plan determined upon by the four admirals ‘was now announced. On the 4th of September Admiral Hamelin and an officer on the staff of the French army informed Vice- Admiral Dundas that their resources would not, as they had expected, enable them to have their sailing transports towed by steamers. 1 The French were not so fortunate, for a painful accident occurred in the course of their embarkgtion. One of their steam vessels ran down a boat laden with Zonaves. The men, encumbered by their packs, could do little to save themselves, 2nd more than twenty were drowned. 396. INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. ([Cuarp. XXXVI. No explanation was given of the failure which had thus sud- denly crippled the French armament. The result was dis- tressing at the time, for it was seen that the whole flotilla would be clogged by the slowness of the sailing vessels in which the French troops were embarked, and the fate of the enterprise was rendered more than ever dependent upon the accidents of weather. Marshal St. Arnaud grew restless. CHAPTER XXXVI. We have seen that the 2nd of September had been looked forward to as the time for the departure of the united arma- Excitement Ments, and on that day, with military punctuality, and impatience Marshal St. Arnaud went to Baljik; but the wind of St. Arnaud. and the waves are still undisciplined forces, and the French embarkations were not destined to be completed until the evening of the 4th. The Marshal, therefore, was kept wait- ing at Baljik, and meanwhile sickness began to make havoc with his troops, for they were densely crowded on board the transports. The marshal was much tortured by the anxiety which he had had to bear during these three painful days, and (possibly to calm his mind) Vice-Admiral Dundas seems to have sug- gested to him that, his sailing vessels not being provided with steam power to tow them, he might as well cause them at once to weigh anchor. By these causes, joined to his irritation at what he thought the backwardness of the English embarka- Heisindueea tions, the Marshal was induced to determine—not tosetsail with- merely that he would act upon Dundas’s suggestion, ae but—that he himself would wait no longer, and with him all would put to sea on the 5th of September with his and the troops SAiling fleet; so when, on the same morning, Lord | onboard them. Raglan reached Baljik, he was surprised by the in- ‘telligence that the Marshal had already sailed out on board the ‘Ville de Paris.’ On the evening of the 6th the British armament was ready, and the arrangements for the voyage of the whole flotilla com- Thenaval plete. The French fleet, already at sea, consisted forces ofthe of fifteen sail-of-the-line, with ten or twelve war- eee steamers, and the Turkish fleet of eight sail-of-the- line, with three war-steamers; but the French and the Turkish vessels were doing service as transports, and were so encum- Cuap. XXXVI.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 397 bered with troops that they could not’ have been brought into action with common prudence. It was upon the English fleet, Duty devolv. therefore, that the duty of protecting the whole ing on the En- armada really devolved; and, supposing that the giish fleet. enemy were aware of the helpless state of the French and. Turkish vessels laden with troops, and of the enor- mous convoy of transports which had to be protected, he might be expected to judge that it was incumbent upon him to come out of the harbor and assail the vast flotilla of transports; for under the guns of Sebastopol the Russians had fifteen sailing ships-of-the-line,’ with some frigates and brigs, and also twelve war-steamers, though of these the ‘ Vladimir’ was the only powerful vessel.? To encounter this force, and to defend from its enterprises the rest of the armada, the English had ten sail- of-the-line (including two screw-steamers), two fifty-gun frig- ates, and thirteen lesser steamers of war heavily armed. | The anxious duty of disposing and guiding the convoy was Arrangements intrusted by Admiral Dundas to Sir Edmund Ly- he tie «© Ons, and, under Sir Edmund’s directions, Captain convoy. Mends of the ‘ Agamemnon’ framed the programme of the voyage. On the evening of the 6th the captains of transports were called by signal on board the ‘ Emperor,’ and there Mends read to them the instructions which he asked them to obey. The captains thus addressed were not in the Queen’s service, but they were English seamen, and their an- ' swer was characteristic. ‘They were not flighty men. They respectfully asked for an assurance that in the event of death their widows would be held entitled to pensions; and, as to the question whether of their own free will they would en- counter the chances of a naval action, they answered it with three cheers. It is not by the mere muster-roll of the army o1 the navy that England counts her forces. With his force of horse, foot, and artillery, Lord Raglan had “The forces ana 01 board the transports (now all collected at Bal- supplies now jik)3 the full number of ammunition-carts required ps for the first reserve of ammunition, the beasts re- quired for drawing them, and sixty other carts, also provided with draught power. But, in order to move so large a force at one trip, it was found necessary to dispense with the bat horses of the army, and the force was not provided with means of land transport either for the tents of the men or for the bag- ' Some say sixteen. ? Unless the ‘ Bessarabia’ be counted as a powerful steamer. * At the time here spoken of there were two artillery transports lagging, but they were up in sufficient time. 398 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [CHap. XXXVI. gage of the officers. ‘There were also on board large supplies of field ammunition, of food for the troops, and of ‘barley and hay for the horses. In some of the horse transports there was an insufticiency of the forage required for the voyage. With that grave exception, all the arrangements seem to have been good. Due means had been taken for insuring, so far as was possible, the simultaneous transit, not only of our ships of war, but of the whole force which Lord Raglan had embarked, to- gether with its vast appendage of warlike stores and provi- sions; for every sailing vessel, whether she were a ship of war or a tr ansport, was towed by a sufficiently powerful steamer. None of our ships of war carried troops on board: they were all, therefore, ready for action. In addition to the forces and the means of land transport Troops ant. Which were actually on board, Lord Raglan had in supplies left at readiness for embarkation the whole brigade of Reap. heavy cavalry, another division of infantry, a siege- .train,! and some five or six thousand pack-horses. The sick remained in Bulgaria; and such of the men out of hospital as seemed to be in a very weakly state were left at Varna and employed in garrison duty. Vice-Admiral Dundas, commanding the whole British fleet, had his flag on board the ‘ Britannia ;’? Lyons, in the ‘ Agamem- non,’ had charge of the convoy. Each vessel had assigned to her the place she was to take when the signal for moving should be given. Before night, the whole of the English flotilla, together with that part of the French and the Turkish flotilla which had the command of steam power, was assembled in Baljik Bay, and in readiness to sail on the morrow. Men remember the beauteous morning of the 7th of Sep- Departure of tember. The moonlight was still floating on the th English waters when men, looking from numberless decks Armada and : ofthe French toward the east, were able to hail the dawn. There steam vessel. Wag a summer breeze blowing fair from the land. At a quarter before five a gun from the ‘ Britannia’ gave the signal to weigh. The air was obscured by the busy smoke of the engines; and it was hard to see how and whence due or- der would come; but presently the ‘Agamemnon’ moved through, and with signals at all her masts, for Lyons was on board her, and was governing and ordering the convoy. The 1 The additional division of infantry (the 4th Division) was at Varna: the Scots Grays were on the Bosphorus; and the rest of the heavy cavalry in Bulgaria, where also the bat horses were left.. The siege-train was on board off Varna. Cuap. XXXVII.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 399 French steamers of war went out, with their transports in tow, and their great vessels formed line. The French went out more quickly than the English, and in better order. Many of their transports were vessels of very small size; and of neces- sity, therefore, they were a swarm. Our transports went out in five columns of only thirty each. Then—guard over all— the English war fleet, in single column, moved slowly out of the bay.! Here, then, and apart from the bodies of foot and artillery embarked by the French and the Turks, there was an arma- ment not unworthy of England. Without combat, and by the mere stress of its presence, our fleet drove the enemy’s flag from the seas which flowed upon his shores ;? and a small but superb land force, complete in all arms, was clothed with the power of a great army, by the ease with which it could be thrown upon any part of the enemy’s coast.? Lord Raglan had not suffered himself to be disconcerted by the departure of Monsieur St. Arnaud, and the consequent sev- erance of the Allied forces. No steamer was sent to re-knit his communications with the errant French Marshal. CHAPTER XXXVII. WE have seen that Marshal St. Arnaud, under feelings of some vexation, put to sea on the morning of the 5th of Sep- tember. He could not but know that, by his abrupt separa- tion from the British fleet and army, he had offended against the English General. Upon reflection, he could not but grieve that he had done this. But he had put to sea, and had since "I did not reach the fleet till some three days afterward, when it was an- chored at the rendezvous, and my impression of the scene in the Bay of Bal- jik is derived partly from some MSS. which have been furnished to me, but partly, also, from what struck me as a very good account of it, which I saw in a printed book, by Mr. Wood, a spectator. 2IT am justified i in speaking of the English fleet as the force which kept the enemy’s ships in duress; because, as we have seen. the French men-of- war were doing duty as transports, and were not, therefore, in a state for go- ing into action. 3], of course, speak here of the inherent power of such an armament, without reference to the fact that strictly-defined instructions had been ad- dressed to Lord Raglan, and that the purport of these had become known io the enemy. The fixedness of the plan of campaign, and the puklicity which it had obtained, reduced the power of the fores to the level of its actual num- bers and its intrinsic strength. 400 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [CuHapv. XXXVID heard no tidings from the shore. No swift steamer had fol. lowed him with entreaties to stay his course. He was left free to pursue his voyage; and the voyage was growing more and more dismal. ‘The Black Sea’ is a truer name than the ‘Euxine’. Now, as in old times (if the summer be hardly past), the voyager leaves a coast smiling bright beneath skies of blue and glow- ing with sunny splendor; yet, perhaps, and in less than an hour, the heavens above and the waters around him are dark with the gloom and threatening aspect belonging to the North- ern Ocean.!. Monsieur St. Arnaud encountered. this change. Marshal st. ‘The wind blew from its dark quarter. Every hour that ite Was carrying the Marshal farther and farther into English, the centre of the inhospitable sea, farther and far- ther from the English fleet, farther and farther from Lord Rag- lan. If he went on, there was no junction to look for except at an imaginary point marked with a pencil on the charts, but having no existence in the material world; and from the wind and the angry waves, no less than from his own fast cooling thoughts, he began to receive a dis- tressing sense of his isolation. The struggle in his mind was painful, but it came to an end. ‘Iam nearly twenty leagues,’ writes the Marshal, on the evening of the 6th, to Lord Rag- Jan—*1 am nearly twenty leagues northeast of Baljik, sepa- ‘rated from the English fleet, and from the part of my own ‘convoy which was to sail with the convoy of the English ‘fleet. Admiral Dundas’s last letter being worded condition- ‘ally, so far as concerns his sailing this morning, I am not sure ‘of not seeing increased, in great proportions, the distance ‘which separ ates me from you, and then there is reason to ‘fear circumstances of wind or sea which would render our ‘junction difficult, and might compromise every thing defini- ‘tively. In this painful situation I decide to invite Admiral ‘Hamelin (on his declaration that he can not wait ‘where he is) to return to meet the fleet and the ‘convoy.’ So the Marshal sailed back. Thus, happily, ceased the impulse which had threatened to sunder the fleets. Lord Raglan’s.answer was stern. He removed the grounds which the Marshal had assigned for his departure, and then pointed gr avely to the true line of duty for the future. ‘Thanks “be to God,’ he wrote, ‘ every thing now favors our enterprise. ‘Very soon we shall reach the appointed rendezvous, and then His anxiety. He sails back. 1 The contrast between the climate of the Black Sea and that of the coun- tries which snrround it is one of the enigmas to which scientific men have applied their minds, but whether as yet with success I can not say. Cuap. XXXVII:] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, 401 Lord Raglan's ‘We Shall have an opportunity of showing that our Teproof. ‘manner of acting together remains unaltered, and ‘that the sincerity of which you speak will continue, as at pres- ‘ent, to be our guide and our mutual satisfaction.’! Coming from Lord Raglan, this language was a reproof; but the result tends to show that it was happily adjusted to the object in view. Thenceforth there was no longer any tendency on the part of Marshal St. Arnaud to break away from his colleague. From the hour of the first conference at the Tuileries in the spring of the year, Lord Rag- Lord Raclan's 120’S authority in the Allied counsels had been al- inereasing as- Ways increasing; and now, as we shall presently cendency. see, it gained a complete ascendant. On the 8th the great flotilla, moving under steam, came up The whole Al- With the French and the Turkish sailing fleets which lied armada .r bad left Baljik on the 5th of September. The atsea, French fleet was in double column, and tacking to eastward across the bows of the steam flotilla, but, upon being approached, the French ships backed topsails and lay to. Ev- ery one of the French vessels had kept its position beautifully, and, the moment the signal to lie to was given, it was obeyed * with a quickness which was honestly admired by our seamen. The Turkish fleet also lay to; and, for a while, the whole ar- mada of the Allies was gathered together. But the English fleet, being moved by steam, kept on to windward; and pres- But the feets @Mtly the French and the Turks began to sail off on are again part- opposite tacks. Between the fleets thus disparting, of the English flotilla of transports passed through in five columns. , | The rendezvous was to be at a point forty miles due west of Cape Tarkan, and thither moved the three fleets with all their convoy. There were in the French army several officers holding high ( command, and being otherwise men of great weight, Step taken by : French officers Who had become very thoughtful on the subject of ‘onthe sep. the contemplated descent upon the enemy’s coast. dition against Personally, they were men quite as dauntless as Sebastopol. those who gave no care to the business in hand, but, being versed in the study, if not in the practice of the great art of war, they had become strongly impressed with the hazardous. character of the intended enterprise. It seems probable that up to this time they had relied upon the mature judgment ‘and the supposed discreetness of Lord Raglan to Its good effect. 1 Translated from the French, in which the letter was written. —ae 402 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXXVIL prevent what they regarded as a rash attempt. It might well seem natural to them that two Governments in the West of Europe, attempting to dictate an invasion of a Russian proy- ince at a distance of 3000 miles, would, sooner or later, be checked in their project by the generals commanding the forces; and, of course, they would have liked that the disfa- vor which unjustly attaches to military prudence should fall upon the English General rather than upon themselves or their own commander. But in the course of the 7th of September it became known to them that Lord Raglan was already at sea. They then knew, or rather they then recognized the fact, that the whole armada was really gliding on toward the en- emy’s coast, and the ferment their minds underwent now brought them to take a strange step. Lord Raglan was on board the ‘ Caradoc,’ and on the 8th of September, whilst the fleets lay near to one another, this vessel was boarded by Vice-Admiral Dundas. He came to say that a French steamer had conveyed to him the desire of the Mar- shal St. Arnaud to see Lord Raglan and the Vice-Admiral Dun- Conference on Cas, and to see them on board the ‘ Ville de Paris,’ Po par. Because the Marshal himself was too ill to be able is to move. It happened that the sea at this time was rough, and the naval men thought that it would be difficult for Lord Raglan, with his one arm, to get up the side of the three- decker in w hich the Marshal was sailing; Lord Raglan, there- fore, deputed his military secretary, Colonel Steele, to accom- pany Vice-Admiral Dundas on board the Ville de Paris. The Vice-Admiral and Colonel Steele found the Marshal sit- St. Amand ting up, but in a state of much suffering, and they disabled by ill- were informed that he was very ill. He however he sat at the conference, and the other persons present were Admiral Hamelin, Admiral Bruat, Admiral Count Buat Wiliaumez, Colonel Trochu, General Rose, Vice-Admiral Dun- das, and Colonel Steele. The Marshal took no part in the dis- cussion which ensued. It seems he could hardly speak. It was stated that the meeting had been summoned in order Unsigned pa. that a paper might be read to it. The document persreadto bore no signature, and Marshal St. Arnaud was no theconferenee. Harty to it; but it was stated that it emanated from General Canrobert, General Martimprey, and the principal offi- cers of the French artillery and engineers; and it was said too that General Rose! had furnished some of the materials from which it was composed. 1 Now Sir Hugh Rose, the officer spoken of as Colonel Rose in Chapter VII. He was at this time aceredited as British Commissioner at the French Cuar. XXXVII.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 403 The document took it for granted that there were three places for landing which merited discussion—the Katscha, the Yetsa, and Kaffa; and it then went on to show the advan- tages and the drawbacks which would attend an attempt to land at each of those three spots. The objections to the land- ing at the Katscha were stated with so much force as to show that the framers of the document entirely disapproved it, and, indeed, they urged that any landing north of Sebastopol would be surely followed by disastrous results. The document also— raised weighty objections to a descent upon the coast near the Yetsa. The only plan which was made to appear at all justi- fiable was that of a landing at Kaffa, and, although the difticul- ties attending even that operation were placed in a strong light, it was orally stated that the framers of the document considered that plan to be one nearly free from objection. Now Kaffa was a sea-port in the eastern part of the Crimean peninsula, and divided from Sebastopol by many long marches over mountain roads. The autumn had already come. The landing at Kaffa implied an abandonment for that year at least of all attempts against Sebastopol. It was to attack Sebasto- pol forthwith, and in the year 1854, that the great flotilla, with all its precious freight, had been gathered together, and now, whilst the vast armada was moving toward the enemy’s coast, there came from the men of weight and science in the French army this singular protest—for that is what it really was— against an enterprise already begun. Marshal St. Arnaud was in a painful strait. Being, as he St.Amaua knew, without ascendency in the French army, he leaves allto apparently thought that the weight attaching to Ford Raglan. the combined opinion of all the protesting officers was too great to warrant him in meeting their interposition with reproof or inattention; yet, suffering as he did at the time under bodily anguish, he was ill able to go into the discus- sions thus strangely forced on by the remonstrants. He found a solution. He desired Colonel Trochu to say that he would concur in any decision to which Lord Raglan might come. The conference, therefore, was adjourned to the ‘ Caradoe,’ Conference aa. #24 Lord Raglan and Sir Edmund Lyons were then joumned to the present at it, together with all those who had met Varadee." on board the ‘ Ville de Paris,’ except only Marshal St. Arnaud. Head-quarters. I have no reason for supposing that he intended to give any sanction to the step taken by the French Remonstrants; and I imagine that any materials which he may have put in their hands must have been con- fined to maps or statements showing the physical character of the country about to be invaded, ee eee 404 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar, XXXVIT. Thus, then, the ebullition of prudence which had broken out amongst the officers of the French army came under the arbit- rament of tle English General, and with him, and with him only, it rested to determine the movements of the whole Al lied force. The business of the conference was opened by Colonel Tro- chu. This officer, as we have already seen, was supposed to be better acquainted than any one else with the mind of the French Emperor, and his counsels, no longer bending in the direction of extreme caution, were now rather in favor: of en- terprise. The Colonel had possession of the document. He read it aloud, and, as he went on with the perusal, he com- mented upon every point; but he declared that he was no party to the contents of the paper, and that he did not share the anxieties! either of the army or the navy as to the disas- ters which might be expected to follow from a landing on the coast north of Sebastopol. Thereupon Admiral Bruat repudiated the supposition of his being a party to the apprehensions attributed to the admirals. Lyons also repudiated it. Neither he nor Vice-Admiral Dun- das had known before the conference that any such step as that of framing and presenting the remonstrance had been im- agined by the “French officer s, and, as might be expected, they were both very sure that nothing of the kind had sprung from the British navy. The inference which Lord Raglan drew from the document was, that it evinced ‘ an indisposition to the expedition amongst ‘the officers who are supposed to be looked up to and to exer- ‘cise influence in the French army,’ and, ‘in fact,’ said he, ‘ we ‘were told as much at the meeting here on Friday.’ These, then, were the ‘timid counsels’ of which the French Emperor afterward spoke when he ascribed the glory of over- ruling them to Marshal St. Arnaud. If it was right, as most men will think it was, that these counsels should be overruled, there was merit due to St. Arnaud, but his merit lay, not in any personal resistance which he was able to oppose to his counselors (for he was helpless, as we have seen, from bodily illness), but in the sagacity and good sense which had led him to intrust the decision to his Haglish colleague. ; Préoccupations.’ * «'Timides avis.” When this letter of the French Emperor first appeared, it was imagined that the imputation of giving ‘timid’ counsels was intended to be cast upon some of our Generals or Admirals; but the Duke of New- castle, with a becoming spirit, determined instantly that this should not be suffered to pass ; and the ‘ Moniteur’ was afterward made to explain official- ly that the ‘timides avis’ were attributed by the Emperor, not to any En- glishman, but to some unnamed officers in the French service. Cuar.XXXVII ] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 405 Lord Raglan’s method of dealing with the protest of the ° Lard agian's French authorities was char acteristic of himself and way of dealing of the English nature. He did not much combat with the French remon- the objections set down in the paper, but he passed mtrnat them by, and quietly lowered the debate from the | high region of strategy to a question of humbler sort—a ques- tion as to what four steamers could be most conveniently em- ployed for a reconnaissance on the enemy’s coast. So the conference which had been summoned to judge whether the enterprise against Sebastopol should not be brought to a stop, now found itself only deciding that the ves- sels sent on the reconnaissance should consist of one French steamer, together with the ‘ Agamemnon,’ the ‘ Caradoc,’ and the ‘Sampson.’ But in truth the powers of the conference had silently pass- ed into the hands of one man. Thenceforth the protest was dropped, for, if its framers had risen up against the notion of His now com. VEING drawn on into what they thought a rash ven- plete aseend- ture by the mere effect of M.St. Arnaud’s acquies- 7 cence, they were calmed when they came to know that the whole force at last had a leader. If still they held to their opinions, they did so in a spirit of cheerful deference which prevented them from throwing any farther obstacle in the way of the enterprise. The armada moved on. Again and again it has happened that mighty armaments, in- Theusehe cluding the forces of several states and people of makes of his. diverse races, have been gathered and drawn into a Vee scenes of conflict by the will of one man; but in general, when such things have been done, the compelling mind has been brought to its “resolve by the cogency of satisfied rea- son or by force of selfish desire. What was new in this enter- prise was, that he who inexorably forced it on did not of him- self desire it, nor deem it to be wise, nor even in a high degree prudent ; and the power which had strength to bend the whole armada to the purpose of the invasion was—not ambition in- flamed, nor reason convinced, but—the mere loyalty of an En- glish officer refusing to stint ‘the obedience which he owed to the: minister of his Queen. On the 9th the whole of the English fleet, with all its con- The English « Voy, was anchored in deep water at the appointed pane ct rati- rendezvous, a spot 40 miles west of Cape Tarkand. dezvous. Lord Raglan made haste to use the great powers Lord Raglan in with which he was now invested, and he determined person under- to/reconnoitre the coast with his own eyes. At hikanee gt four o’clock on the morning of the 10th General naissance of > the coast. Canrobert, and the other French officers who were 406 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XXXVIL- to attend the reconnaissance, came on board the ‘ Caradoc, Lord Raglan had with him Sir Edmund Lyons, Sir John Bur- goyne, and Sir George Brown. Not long after daybreak the ‘Caradoc’ neared Fort Constantine, and then approached the entrance of the harbor. It was a fair, bright morning, and the Sunday bells were ringing in the churches when Lord Raglan first saw the great forts, ‘and the ships, and the glittering, cu- pola’d town. ~ Afterward, the vessel being steered round off Cape Chersonesus, he could see two old Genoese forts, and ridges of hills dividing the great harbor from the southern coast of the peninsula. What he looked on was for him fated ground, for the Genoese forts marked the inlet of Balaclava, and the ridges he saw were the ‘heights before Sebastopol.’ But the future lay hidden from his gaze. -' The ‘Caradoc’ was now steered toward the north, and the officers on board her surveyed the mouths of the Belbek, the Katscha, the Alma, and the Bulganak, and the coast str etching thence to Kupatoria. Of the sites thus reconnoitred General Canrobert thought the Katscha the one best fitted for a land- ing. Lord Raglan entirely disapproved of the Katscha, and he did not at all like the ground at the mouths of the other rivers; but when, moving on in the ‘Caradoc,’ he was off the part of the coast which lies six miles north of the Bulganak, he observed an extended tract of beach, which seemed to him to be the ground for which the Allies were seeking. Without generating a debate upon the subject, he nevertheless elicited so much of the opinion of those around him as he deemed to He choosesthe be useful. Then he declared his resolve. He said landing-place. that the Allied armies should Jand at Old Fort. There are times when, to anxious, doubting mortals, no boon from Heaven is so welcome as the final resolve which is to govern their actions. It was so now. Debating ceased, and a happy alacrity came in its stead. That day, our fleet and the swarming convoy close gathered around had been still ly- ing anchored in deep water at the point of rendezvous. To many, those long, peaceful Sabbath hours seemed to token a wanton delay—or worse tha great purpose of the Allies; but at night, the ‘Caradoc’ came in, and soon, though few could tell whence came the change, nor what had been passing, there flew from deck to deck a joyful belief—a belief that in some way—in some way not yet understood, the enterprise had gathered new force. The French and Turkish fleets, less amply provided with steam power than the English, had fallen to leeward, but on the evening of the 11th they were anchored within thirty miles “OFF ee Cuap. XXXVII.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA: 407 of the British fleet, and the communication was, of course, kept up by steam vessels. During the whole of Tuesday the 12th, the French, Turkish, The whole Ar. 20d English fleets were slowly drawing together mada converg- and converging upon the enemy’s coast. Before eer tike sunset the armed navies were all near together, and Cinimes. from their decks men could make out with glasses the low cliff to the north of Eupatoria. The English fleet an- chored for the night. The French Admiral sent to intimate that he would not anchor, but go on all night, in the hope of being ready for the landing the next morning. Vice-Admiral Dundas saw that that hope was vain, because large portions of the French convoy were still so distant that there could be no landing on the following day. The French, it will be re- membered, were without steam power for their transports, and the breezes were light. So, although every hour saw fresh: clusters of vessels slowly closing with the fleet, the sea, toward the west, was always strewed with distant sails, and, before the hulls of those hove well in sight, the horizon got speckled again with sails more distant still. So the English Admiral anchored his fleet for the night. The next morning, the 13th, the ‘ Ville de Paris,’ under tow of the ‘ Napoleon’ steamer, had come up, and, although so late as noon, some of the French ships of war, and very many of their transports, were still distant, they were under such breezes as promised to enable them to close before long with the fleets. So, virtually, the momentous voyage was over. The weather and upon that, in such undertakings, the hopes of nations must rest—the weather had favored the enterprise. But the pest of modern armies had not relented. The cholera had followed the men into the transports. Many sickened on board the troop-ships whilst they were still off Varna or Baljik, and were carried back to die on shore. During the voyage many more fell ill, and many died. . ~ But Marshal St. Arnaud, whose illness scarce three days be- fore seemed bringing him fast to his end, was now St. Arnaud’s _sudden recov- almost suddenly restored, and, on the morning of | ery. ° the 13th, he was like a man in health. During the interval of five days in which the Marshal’s illness had invest- The progress CM his English colleague with a supreme control, made by Lord . [ord Raglan had used to the full the occasion which Raglan during se ° : the Marsha’'s' Fortune thus gave him. In that time he had re- eee pressed the efforts of the French Generals who strove to bring the enterprise to a stop; he had committed the Allies to a descent upon the enemy’s shores—on his shores to ~~ 408 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XXXVIIIL. the north of Sebastopol; he had reconnoitred the coast, he had chosen the place for a landing, and meanwhile he had drawn the fleets on, so that now when men looked from the decks, they could see the thin strip of beach where the soldiery of the Allies were to land. CHAPTER XXXVIII. ConcERNING the country which they were going to invade Ourignoranee the Allies were poorly informed. Of Sebastopol, of the country: the goal of the enterprise, they knew little, except my's strength. that it was a great military port and arsenal, and was deemed impregnable toward the sea. Respecting the province generally, it was known by means of books and maps that Crim Tartary, or ‘the Crimea,’ as people now called it, was a peninsula situate between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azof; and there was a theory—not perfectly coinciding with the truth —that the only dry communication with the main land was by the isthmus of Perekop. » It was understood that the north of the peninsula had the character of an elevated steppe, that to- ward the south it was rocky and mountainous, and that the undulating downs which connected the steppe with the mount- ainous region of the south were seamed with small rivers flow- ing westward from the summits of the highland district. It was believed that the main of the inhabitants were Tartars, men holding to the Moslem faith. Of the enemy’s forces in this country the Allies, in a sense, were ignorant; for, although the information which had come round to them by the aid of the Foreign Office was in reality well founded, they did not be- lieve at the time that they could at all rely upon it, and there- fore they were nearly as much at fault as if they had had no clew. They knew, however, that the peninsula was a province of Russia, that Russia was a great military power, that, so long . as three months ago, the invasion had been counseled in print, and that afterward the determination to undertake it had been given out aloud to the world. From these rudiments, and from what could be seen from the decks of the ships, they inferred that, either upon their landing, or on some part of the road be- tween the landing-ground and Sebastopol, they would find the enemy in strength. But beyond this little was known; and the imagination of - Coap. XXXVIII.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 409 This givesto men was left to range so free that, although they the expedition were in the midst of their ‘19th century,’ with all its the character : ; watts es of anadven- prim facts and statistics, the enterprise’ took some- be thing of the character of adventure belonging to earlier ages. Common, sensible, fanciless men, men wise with the cynic wisdom of London clubs, were now by force turned into venturers, intent as Argonauts of old in gazing upon the shores of a strange land, to which they were committing their lives. From many a crowded deck they strained their eyes to pierce the unknown.: ‘They could not see troops. They saw a road along the shore. | Now and then there appeared a peas- ant with a cart. Now and then a horseman riding at full speed. Neither peasant nor horseman seemed ever to pause in his duty that he might cast a glance of wonder at the countless armada which was gathering in upon his country. At the northern end of the bay there was a bright little town. Maps showed that this was Eupatoria. | At noon, on the 18th, the English fleet had drawn near to Occupation of this port of Eupatoria. There were no Russian Eupatoria. § forces there except a few convalescent soldiers; and, the place being defenseless, Colonel Trochu and Colonel Steele, accompanied by Mr. Calvert, the interpreter, were dis- patched to summon it. The governor or head man of the place was an official personage in a high state of discipline. He had before his eyes the armed navies of the Allies, with the count- less sails of their convoys; and to all that vast armament he had nothing to oppose except the forms of office. But to him the forms of office seemed all sufficing, and on these he still calmly relied; so, when the summons was delivered, he insisted upon fumigating it according to the health regulations of the little port. When he understood that the Western Powers intended to land, he said that decidedly they might do so, but he explained that it would be necessary for them to land at the Lazaretto, and consider themselves in strict quarantine. _ On the following day the place was occupied by a small body of English troops. The few Russian inhabitants of the place, being mainly or entirely official personages, had all gone away, but the Tartar inhabitants remained; and although these> men did not exhibit, as some might have expected, any eager or zealous affection for the allies of the Caliph, they seemed in- clined to be friendly. Thoughtful men cared deeply to know whether between these natives and the Allies the relation of buyer and seller could be established ; for it was of vital mo- ment to the success of the expedition that the Allies should be ae to obtain supplies of cattle and forage in the invaded ou. .—S 410 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XXXVUL country; and it was probable that much would turn upon the success of the first attempt to make purchases from the people of the country. The first experiment which was made in this direction elicited a curious proof of the difficulty which there is in causing mighty nations to act with the forethought of a single traveler. It was to be expected that, at the commence- ment of any attempted intercourse, the willingness of the na- tives to sell would depend upon their being tempted by the coins to which they were accustomed, because just at first they would not only be ignorant of the value of foreign money, but would also dread the consequence of being found im possession of coin plainly received from the invaders. Yet.the precaution of bringing Russian money had been forgotten by the public authorities; and when Mr. Hamilton, of the ‘ Britannia,’ was preparing to land, with a view of endeavoring to begin a buy- ing and selling intercourse with the natives, he had nothing to offer except English sovereigns. It chanced, however, that there were two or three English travelers on board the flag- ship, and that these men (foreseeing the likelihood of their hav- ing to buy horses or make other purchases from the natives of the invaded country) had supplied themselves with some of the gold Russian coins called ‘ half imperials,’ which were to be obtained without difficulty at Constantinople. The travelers —Sir Edward Colebrooke, I think, was one of them—advanced as many of these as they could spare to the public authorities ; and Mr. Hamilton being thus enabled to land with a small sup- ply of the magic half imperials, and being, besides, a good-tem- pered, humorous man, with a tendency to make cordial speeches in English to all his fellow-creatures alike, whether Russian, or Tartar, or Greek, he was able to make a merry beginning of that intercourse with the natives which was destined to be- come a fruitful source of strength to the Allied armies. The gains made by the first sellers soon drew fresh supplies into the place from the surrounding country ; the commissariat after- ward began its operations in the town, and in time a good, lasting market was opened to the invaders. After receiving the surrender of Eupatoria on the afternoon “he whole Ar. Of the 18th, the assembled armada moved down to- mada gathers ward the south. All day there were sailing vessels oward the P : : . chosen land- approaching from a distance, and closing at last with DE piace. the French fleet, but before night (with the excep- tion, it is believed, of two or three small lagging transports) the three fleets, and the host of vessels which they convoyed, were anchored near Old Fort in Kalamita Bay. The united armada extended in a line parallel with the coast, and in a dis Cuap. XXXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 411 rection, therefore, not far from north and south. The French and the Turkish fleets were on the south or right-hand side. The British fleet took the north, and formed the left of the Allied line. CHAPTER XXXIX. Tue ground chosen by Lord Raglan for the landing of all The landing. the Allied forces is five or six miles north of the eieke. Bulganak River. It gained its name of ‘Old Fort’ from an indication appearing on the maps, rather than from any slight traces of the structure then remaining. Along this part of the coast the cliffs rise to a height of from 60 to 100 feet, and for the most part they impend too closely over the sea to allow much room for the beach. Near ‘Old Fort,’ how- ever, the high grounds so recede that at first sight they appear to embrace a small bay or inlet of the sea, but upon a nearer approach it is perceived that the inner part of the seeming bay is a salt-water lake, and that this lake is divided from the sea by a low, narrow strip of beach. A little farther north the same disposition of land and water recurs, for there also an- other salt lake, called the Lake of Kamishlu,is divided from the sea by a low, narrow strip of beach a mile and a half in length. The first-mentioned strip of beach, namely, the strip opposite to Old Fort, was the one which Lord Raglan had chosen for the landing of all the Allied armies. It was arranged that a buoy should be placed off the centre of the chosen ground to mark the boundary between the French and the English flotilla. The French and the Turkish vessels were to be on the south of the buoy, the British on the north ; and in the evening and night of the 13th the ships and trans- ports of the three nations drew in as near as they could to their appointed landing-places. But in the night of the 13th there occurred a transaction Step taken by Which threatened to ruin the whole plan for the the French in landing, and even to bring the harmony between momen the French and the English forces into grievous jeopardy. During the darkness, the French placed the buoy opposite—not to the centre, but—to the extreme north, of the chosen landing-ground ; and when morning dawned, it appear- ed that the English ships and transports, though really i in their proper places, were on the wrong side of the ‘buoy, or, rather, ‘SAITTY FHL a0 SAOVId-O9NIGNVI GH, *Pepury Ystsuy oy} s10YA punoss sy, “7 “A ‘ong ayy paovd | qoue1ry oy} ‘yystu oy} Suranp ‘a1ayM yods oy, ‘qd Jo sovytd “aq 0} sum AON YY o1oyA Jods oy,T, *O “SOIULIV Pol[[B oy} SUIPUL] OY} TOF WasOyD punols oy, “q ‘VW e Cuap. XXXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. ' 418 that the buoy was on the wrong side of them. Whether the act which created this embarrassment was one resulting from sheer mistake on the part of our allies, or from their over- greediness for space, or from a scheme more profoundly de- signed, it plainly went straight toward the end desired by those French officers who had been laboring to bring the en- terprise to a stop. For what was to be done? Ifthe En- This destroys lish, disregarding the altered position of the buoy, the whole plan were to persist in keeping to their assigned landing- : “ground, their whole flotilla, their boats and their troops, when landed, would be hopelessly mixed up with the French, and what might be expected to follow would be ruin- ous confusion—nay, even perhaps angry and violent conflict between the forces of the Allies. To propose to move the buoy, or to get into controversy with the French at such a time, would be to delay and imperil the whole undertaking; and yet the boundary, as it stood, extruded the English from all share in the chosen Janding-ground. It might seem that the whole enterprise was again in danger of failure; but again a strong will interposed. From the moment when Lord Raglan consented to under- Sir Edmund take the invasion, he seems to have acted as though 1x908, he felt that the belief which he entertained of its hazardousness was a reason why he should be the more stead- fast in his determination to force it on. Nor was he without the very counsel that was needed for overcoming this last ob- stacle. Lyons, commanding the in-shore squadron of the Brit- ish fleet, was intrusted with the direction of our transports and the whole management of the landing. Moving long be- His way of | fore dawn in the sleepless ‘Agamemnon,’ he saw ie deter where the buoy had been placed by the French in cy. the night time, and gathered in an instant all the perilous import of the change. He was more than a mere per- former of duty, for he was a man driving under a passionate force of purpose. Without stopping to indulge his anger, he darted upon the means of dealing with the evil. He had ob- served that about a mile to the north of ‘Old Fort’ there was that strip of beach before spoken of, which divided the Lake of Kamishlu from the sea. There Lord Raglan and he now New landing, determined that the landing of the British forces Phe Rnelch at Should take place. It was true that this plan would Kamishlu. . sever the French from the British forces during the operation of landing, but the evil thus encountered was a hundred-fold less grave than the evil avoided; for, even in the face of an enemy, the separation of the French from the En-,; 414 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XXXIX. glish would have been better than dispute or confusion; and, moreover, the observations of the previous day had led the Allies to conjecture that the enemy did not intend to resist the landing. The morning showed that this conjecture was sound ; therefore, great as was the danger from which the Al- liance had been delivered, it turned out in the result that the immense advantage of having two extended landing-places in- stead of one was not counterbalanced by any evil resulting from the severance of the two armies. In point of security from molestation on the part of the ene- my, both of the two landing-places were happily chosen. Both of them were on shores which allowed the near approach of the fleets, and placed the whole operation under cover of their guns. Also, both landing-places were protected on the inland side by the salt lakes, which interposed a physical obstacle in the way of any front attack by the enemy; and the access to the flanks of the disembarking armies was by strips of land so narrow that they could be easily defended against any force of infantry or cavalry. It is true that the line of disembarka- tion of either army could have been enfiladed by artillery placed on the heights; but then those heights could be more or less searched by a fire from the ships, and the enemy had not attempted to prepare for himself any kind of defense on the high ground. The necessity of having to carry the English flotilla to a Position of the new landing-place occasioned of course a painful Moted ttre dislocation of the arrangements which had already change. been acted upon by the commanders of the trans- ports; but, after much less delay and much less confusion than might have been expected to result from a derangement so great and so sudden, the position of the English vessels was adapted to the change. Meanwhile few of the thousands on board understood the The cause and Change which had been effected, or even saw that che ae they were brought to a new landing-ground. They kept secret. imagined that it was.the better method or greater quickness of the French which was giving them the triumph of being the first to land. Both Lord Raglan and Lyons were too steadfast in the maintenance of the alliance to think of accounting for the seeming tardiness of the English by causing the truth to be known; and even to this day it is commonly believed that the English army effected its landing at Old Fort. . The bend of the coast-line at Kalamita Bay is of such a char- acter that a spectator on board a vessel close in-shore is bound- Cuar. XXXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 415 Position of the 4 in his view of the sea toward the south by the in-shore squad- headland near the Alma; but if he stands a little a way out to sea, the coast opens, and he then com- mands an unobstructed view home to the entrance of the Se- bastopol harbor. So, whilst the in-shore squadrons approach- ed the beach so closely as to be able to cover the landing, the bulk of the English fleet, commanded by Dundas in person, lay far enough out to be able to command the whole of the Ofthe main vast bay from Kupatoria to Sebastopol, keeping up English fleet. an unbroken chain of communication from cape to cape, and always held ready to engage the Russian fleet if by chance it should come out and give battle.!. Detached vessels reconnoitred the coast and practiced theit gunners upon every encampment or gathering of troops which seemed to be with- in range. As though in the arrogant, yet quiet assertion of an ascendant beyond dispute, one solitary English ship, watch- ing off the Sebastopol harbor, stood sentry over the enemy’s fleet. Men had heard of the dominion of the seas, now they saw it. The plan of the English disembarkation was imitated from Plan ofthe the one adopted by Sir Ralph Abercromby when mmedting. he made his famous descent upon the coast of Egypt; and it was based upon the principle of so ranging the transports and the boats as that the relative position of each company whilst it was being rowed toward the shore should correspond with that which it would have to take when form- ed upon the beach.? All the naval arrangements for the landing were undertaken by Sir Edmund Lyons; but, to dispose the troops on the beach—to gain a lodgment—to take up a position, and, if nec- essary, to intrench it--these were duties which specially de- volved upon the Quartermaster-General. The officer who held ___ this post was General Airey; and since it was his General Airey. f: ; i pit,'s any bos eee ate to take a grave part in the business of the war, and to share with Lord Raglan his closest counsels, it seems useful to speak here at once—not of the quality of his mind ‘(for that will best be judged by looking to what he did, and 1Tt has been already explained that the French men-of-war were doing duty as transports, and were not, therefore, in a condition to engage the ene- my. There were people who thoughtlessly blamed Dundas for not taking part with the in-shore squadron in the bustle of the landing. Of course his duty was to hold his off-shore squadron in readiness for an engagement with the Sebastopol fleet; and this he took care to do. * The plans and the papers of instructions for the landing will perhaps be given in the Appendix; but I abstain from giving a detailed account of the operation, because it was not resisted by the enemy. 476 ~ INVASION. OF THE CRIMEA. [Cnar. XXXIX, what he omitted to do), but rather—to speak of those circum- stances of his life, and those outer signs and marks of his na- ture which any by-stander in the camp would be likely to hear of or see. ti -A strictly military career in peace-time is a poor schooling for the business of war; and the rough change which had once broken in upon Airey’s professional life helped to make him more able in war than men who had passed all their lives in going round and round with the wheels. Airey was holding one of the offices at the Horse-Guards when he was suddenly called upon by his relative, Colonel Talbot, the then almost fa- mous recluse of Upper Canada, to choose whether he and his ‘young wife would accept a great territorial inheritance, with the condition of dwelling deep in the forest, far away from all cities and towns. Airey loved his profession, and what made it the more difficult for him to quit it was the favor with which he was looked upon by the Duke of Wellington. It chanced that he had once been called upon to lay before the Duke the maps and statements required for showing the progress of a campaign then going on against the Caffres, and the Duke was so delighted with the perfect clearness of the view which Ai- rey was able to impart to him, that he instantly formed a high opinion of an officer who could look with so keen a glance upon a distant campaign, and convey a lucid idea of it to his chief. Airey communicated to the Duke of Wellington Colo- nel Talbot’s proposal, and explained the dilemma in which he was placed. ‘You must go,’ said the Duke; ‘of course you ‘must go; it is your duty to go; but we will manage so that, ‘whenever you choose, you shall be able to come back to us.’ Airey went to Canada. It had been no part of Colonel Tal- bot’s plan to smooth the path of his chosen inheritor. He gave him a vast territory. He gave him no home. Isolated in the midst of the forest, and with no better shel- ter than a log hut half built, the staff officer, hitherto expert in the prim traditions of the Horse-Guards, now found him- self so circumstanced that the health, nay, the very life of those most dear to him was made to depend upon his power to be- come a good laborer. He dould not have hoped to keep his English servants a day if he had begun by sitting still himself and ordering them to do the rough work to which they were unaccustomed; so he worked with his own hands, in the faith that his example would make every kind of hard work seem honorable to his people; and, being endued with an almost violent love of bodily exertion, he was not only equal to this new life, but came to delight in it. Clad coarsely during the Cuar. XXXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA; 414} day, he was only to be distinguished from the other workmen by his greater activity and greater power of endurance. Many English gentlemen have done the like of this, but commonly they have ended by becoming altogether just that which they seemed in their working hours—by becoming, in short, mere husbandmen. It was not so with Airey. When his people came to speak to him in the evening, they always found him transformed. Partly by the subtle change which they were able to see in his manner, partly even by so outward a thing as the rigorous change in his dress, but most of all, perhaps, by his natural ascendant, they were prevented from forgetting that their fellow-laborer of the morning was their. master—a master to whom they were every day growing more and more attached, but still their master. He therefore maintained his station. He did more; he gained great authority over the eople about him; and when he bade farewell to the wilder- ness, he had become like a chief of old times—a man working hard with his own hands, yet ruling others with a firm com- mand. » : It was during a period of some years that Airey had: thus wrestled with the hardships of forest life. At the end of that ’ time Colonel Talbot died, and Airey, then coming home to England, resumed his military career. Those who know any thing of the real business of war will easily believe that this episode in the life: of General Airey was more likely to fit him for the exigencies of a. campaign and for the command of men than thrice the same length of time consumed in the revolving labors of a military department; nay, perhaps they will think that, next to a campaign, this manful struggle with the wil- derness was the very work which would be the most sure to set a mind free from the habits, the by-laws, and the petty reg: | ulations of office. . Before the expedition left England, Lord Raglan had asked Airey to be his Quartermaster-General. Airey, preferring field-duty with the divisions, had begged that some other might be appointed, and Lord Raglan acceded to his wish; but when, on the eve of the departure of the expedition from Varna, Lord De Ros returned to England, the Quartermaster-Gener- alship was again pressed upon Airey in terms which made it unbecoming for him to refuse the burden. His loyalty and affectionate devotion to Lord Raglan were without bounds, and he imagined that he was always acting with a strict def- erence to the wishes of his chief. But then Airey was a man of great ardor, of a strong will; and having, also, a rapid, de- cisive judgment, he certainly accustomed himself to put very S 2 418 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XXXIX swift constructions upon Lord Raglan’s words. No one ever used to see him in the pain of suspense between two opinions. Either he really knew with minuteness Lord Raglan’s views, or else he was so prone to take a great deal upon himself that, in his zeal for the public service, he might almost be called un- scrupulous. Men who were hesitating and trying to make out what was the path of their duty soon came to know that Airey was the officer who would thrust away their doubts for them, because, rightly or wrongly, whether with or without due authority, he used to speak in such a way as to untie or to cut every knot. He was himself, it would seem, uncon- scious of exercising so much power as he really did; but it is certain enough that those who complained of his ascendency were not very wrong in believing that he held a great sway; for though, being ouileless and single-hearted, he always liked to receive his first impulsions from the chief, yet, when once he was thus set moving, his strong will used to burst into ac- tion with all its own proper force, and very much, too, in its own direction. Notwithstanding this proneness to action, his manner had all the repose which is thought to be a sign of power. He did not in general speak at all until he could speak decisively; and he was more accustomed than most other Englishmen are to use that degree of precision and completeness of language which makes men content to act on it. Officers hesitating in the pain of suspense used to long to, hear the tramp of his coming — used to long to catch sight of his eager, swooping crest (it was always strained forward and intent)—his keen, salient, sharp-edged features —his firm, steady eye— for they knew that he was the man who would release them from their doubts. He was gifted by nature with the kind of eloquence that it is good for a soldier to have. His oral directions to those in authority under him were models of imperative dic- tion; but when he spoke of what he had seen, the vivid pic- tures he drew were marked with a sharpness of outline hardly consistent with a perfect freedom from exaggeration: they wanted the true English haze. He was too eager for action to be able to stand still weighing phrases; and Ti imagine that he did not even know how to try the exact str eneth and im- port of words in the way that a lettered man does. Upon the whole, his qualities were of such a kind as to make it impos- sible for him to be without great weight in the army. His friends would call him a man plainly fitted for high command ; his adversaries would say that power in his hands was likely to be used dangerously; but all would alike agree that, whether Cuap. XXXIX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 419 for good or whether for evil, he had from nature the means of impressing his own will on troops. The arrangements of the French were like those of the En- The first day's Qlish; and at half past eight o’clock on the morn- landing. ing of the 14th of September, 1854, their first boat touched the shore. The English had made such good haste to retrieve the time spent in moving to their new landing-place, that very soon afterward their disembarkation began. The morning was fine; the sea nearly smooth. The troops of the Light Division were in the boats, and the seamen were at their oars, expecting the signal. The signal was given, and instantly from along the whole of the first line of transports an array of boats freighted with troops—boats ranged upon a front of more than a mile—darted swiftly toward the shore. It was said that the boat commanded by Vesey of the ‘ Britan- nia’ was the first to touch the beach. He was an officer who would do all man could to be foremost. As soon as the boats had landed, the soldiers stepped ashore and began to form line upon the beach; but presently after- ward they piled arms. There were some Tartar peasants pass- ing along the coast-road with small bullock-wagons. The wag- oners showed little or no alarm, and, knowing that they could not move off quickly with bullocks, they did not attempt to get away. Apparently they were not struck with any sense of unfairness when they saw that the English took possession of the wagons; and yet it could scarcely have been explained to them at that moment (as it afterward would be) that every thing taken by the English from private owners would be paid for at a just price. One of the wagons was laden with small pears, and the soldiers amused themselves with the fruit whilst the natives stood and scanned their invaders. After a while, many of the battalions which had landed were ordered forward to occupy the hill on our right, and thence- forth, during all the day, the acclivity was sparkling with the bayonets of the columns successively ascending it. But what were those long strings of soldiery now beginning to come down from the hill-side and to wind their way back toward the beach ? and what were the long white burdens horizontally carried by the men? Already? Already, on this same day ? Yes. Sickness still clung to the army. Of those who only this morning ascended the hill with seeming alacrity, many now came down thus sadly borne by: their comrades. They were carried on ambulance stretchers, and a blanket was over them. Those whose faces remained uncovered were still alive. Those whose faces had been covered over by their blanket 420 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. ([Cuar. XXXIX, were dead. Near the foot of the hill the men began to dig graves. | But, meanwhile, the landing went merrily on. It might be Zealanden. COmMputed that, if every man in the navy had only ergy ofthe performed his strict duty, the landing would have ares taken some weeks. It was the supererogation, the zeal, the abounding zeal, which seemed to achieve the work. No sailor seemed to work like a man who was merely obeying—no officer stood looking on as if he were merely com- manding ; and, though all was concert and discipline, yet every man was laboring with the whole strength of his own separate will. And all this great toil went on with strange good-hu- mor, nay, even with thoughtful kmdness toward the soldiers. The seamen knew that it concerned the comfort and the health of the soldiers to be landed dry, so they lifted or handed the men ashore with an almost tender care. Yet not without mirth; nay, not without laughter far heard, when, as though they were giant maidens, the tall Highlanders of the 42nd placed their hands in the hands of the sailor, and sprang by his aid to the shore, their kilts floating out wide while they leaped. After midday the sea began to lose its calmness, and before sunset the surf was strong enough to make the disembarkation difficult, and in some degree hazardous. Yet, by the time the day closed, the French had landed their 1st, 2nd, and 8rd divi- sions of infantry, together with eighteen guns, and the English had got on shore all their infantry divisions, and some part of their field artillery. Some few of the English regiments remained on the beach, Wet night's but the rest of them had been marched up to the piyouss, high grounds toward the south, and they there biv- ouacked. At night there fell heavy rain, and it lasted many hours. The men were without their tents.1 Lying in wet pools or in mud, their blankets clinging heavy with water, our young soldiers began the campaign. The French soldiery were provided with what they called dog-tents—tents not a yard high, but easily carried, and yielding shelter to soldiers creeping into them. It was always a question in the French army whether these tents gave the men more health and com- fort than they could find in the open air. The next morning was fine, but the surf had so much in- Continuance creased that for several hours the landing was sus- ofthelanding. pended. After the middle of the day it became ’ This was because there were no sufficing means of land transport for conveying the camp equipage toward Sebastopol. After the 14th the tents were landed, but they were afterward reshipped. Cap. XXXTX.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 421 practicable, though still somewhat difficult, to go on with the work, and great efforts were made to land the English cavalry and the rest of the artillery, with the appertaining horses and equipages. | Unless a man has stood in the admiring crowd which gath- ers to see the process of landing one horse upon an open sea- shore; and unless, whilst he carries in his mind the labor and energy brought to bear upon this single object, he can imagine the same toil gone through again and again, and yet again, till it has been repeated many hundreds of times upon a mile and a half of beach, he will hardly know what work must be done before a general can report to his Government that he has landed upon an open coast with a thousand cavalry and sixty guns ready for the field. By labor never once intermitted - (except when darkness or the state of the sea forbade it), and continued from the morning of the 14th until the evening of the 18th, the whole of the English land force, which had been embarked at Varna (together now with Cathcart’s Division), was safely landed upon the enemy’s coast. The result then was, that under circumstances of weather Itscomplee Which were, upon the whole, favorable, and with Rion; the advantage of encountering no opposition from the enemy, an English force of some 26,000 infantry and artil- lerymen, with more than a thousand mounted cavalry, and six- ty guns, had been landed in the course of five September days ; _ and although the force thus put ashore was without those vast means of land transport which would be needed for regular operations in the interior, and was obliged to rely upon the attendant fleet for the continuance of its supplies, it was nev- by the En- ertheless so provided as to be able to move along a the coast carrying with it its first reserve of ammu- nition, and food enough for three days. The operation was conducted with an almost faultless skill, and (until a firm lodgment had been gained) it proceeded in the way that was thought to be the right one for landing in the face of the enemy. Though the surf was at times some- what heavy, not a man was lost. With the French, who had no cavalry and a scanty supply of artillery horses, the disembarkation was a com- paratively easy task; and if they had so desired it, the French might have been ready to march long before the English; but, knowing that their allies, having cavalry, would necessarily take a good deal of time, they were without a mo- tive for hurrying, and, during the whole of the five days which the English took for their disembarkation, a like work was seen going on at the French landing-place. * by the French 5 422 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XL. The Turks did the work of landing very well; and, indeed, they quickly showed that they had an advantage over the French and the English in their more fa- miliar acquaintance with the mode of life proper to warfare. They landed their camp equipage; for, with them, the carriage of tents is a very simple business. ‘T'wo soldiers, one at each end, bear the pole of a tent between them, and the canvas is carried by others in turns. So early as the 15th, the first day after that on which the landing began, the Turks were com- fortably encamped on the ground assigned to them; and whilst the young troops of France and England were still sitting wretched and chilled by the wet of their night’s bivouac, the warlike Osmanlies seemed to be in their natural home. Soli- man, who commanded them, was able to welcome and honor the guests who went to visit him in his tent as hospitably as though he were in the audience-hall of his own pashalic. He “had all his tents well pitched; and his men, one could see, were still a true Moslem soldiery—men with arms and accou- trements bright, yet not forgetful of prayer. He had a supply of biscuit and of cartridges, and a good stock of horses, some feeding, some saddled, and ready for instant use. He was not without coffee and tobacco. His whole camp gave signs of a race which gathers from a great tradition, going on from fa- ther to son, the duties and the simple arts of a pious and war- faring life. by the Turks. CHAPTER XL. WueEn the people of the neighboring district came to see Deputations the strength of the armies descending upon their from the Tar- goast, the head men of the villages began to pre- tar villages to ° the English sent themselves at the quarters of the Allies. The head-quarters. first of these deputations was received by Lord taglan in the open air. The men were going up to head- quarters when they passed near a group of officers on foot in blue frock coats, and they learned that the one whose maimed arm spoke of other wars was the English General. ‘They ap- proached him respectfully, but without submissiveness of an abject kind. Neither in manner, dress, appearance, nor lan- guage, would these men seem very strange to a traveler ac- quainted with Constantinople or any of the other cities of the Levant. They wore the pelisse or long robe, and, although s Cuap. XL. | INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 423 their head-gear was of black lamb-skin, it was much of the same shape as the Turkish fez. They spoke with truthfulness and dignity, allowing it to appear that the invasion was not distasteful to them, but abstaining from all affectation of enthu- siastic sympathy. They seemed to understand war and its exigencies; for they asked tlie interpreters to say that such of their possessions as might be wanted by the English army were at Lord Raglan’s disposal. Pleased with the demeanor of the men, as well as with the purport of their speech, Lord Raglan told them that he would avail himself of some of their possessions, more especially their wagons and draught animals, but that every thing taken for the use of the English army would be paid for at a proper rate. Much to Lord Raglan’s surprise (for he was not accustomed to the people of the East), the head man of the village resisted the idea of the people be- ing paid, and anxiously pressed the interpreter to say that their possessions were yielded up as free gifts. Pure ignorance of the invaded country gave charm to every Result ofex. “iscovery tending to throw light upon the charac- ploringexpe- ter and pursuits of the inhabitants; and if our sol- mahehs, diery had found in the villages high altars set up for human sacrifices, they would scarcely have been more sur- prised than they were when, prying into the mysteries of this obscure Crim Tartary, they came upon traces of modern refine- ment and cultivated taste. In some of the houses at Kentu- gan there were pianos; and in one of them a music-book, lying open and spread upon the frame, seemed to show that the owner had been hurried in her flight. But the owners of these dwellings must have been official personages. The mass of the country people were Tartars. In the villages there was abundance of agricultural wealth. The main want of the country was water; but Airey caused wells to be sunk. The English system of payment for supplies rapidly began to bear its usual fruit, and the districts from which the people came in to barter with us were every day extending. In their passage across the Euxine our battalions had not The English yet been followed by that evil horde who are ac- wade freciom customed to cling to an army, selling strong, nox- from crime. jous drinks to the men. ‘kherefore our army was without crime.! It was with something more than mercy, it was with kindness and gentle courtesy, that the people of the villages were treated by our soldiery, and the interpreters had 1 This statement, broad as it looks, is meant to be taken literally, and to be regarded as a statement taken from the right official source. 424. INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XL, to strain the resources of the English tongue in order to con- vey a faint apprehension of the figures of speech in which the women were expressing their gratitude. Their chief favorites, Kindly inter- 1 seems, were the men of the Ritle Brigade. Quar- sepess veresh tered for a day or two in one of the villages, these and the vi- Soldiers made up for the want of a common tongue tegere. by acts of kindness. They helped the women in their household work, and the women, pleased and proud, made signs to the stately ‘ Rifles’ to do this and do that, exult- ing in the obedience which they were able to win from men so grand and comely. When the interpreter came, and was asked to construe what the women were saying so fast and so eager- ly, it appeared that they were busy with similes and metaphors, and that the Rifles were made out to be heroes more strong than lions, more gentle than young lambs. A dreadful change came over that village. The Rifles were Outrages per. Withdrawn. ‘The Zouaves marched in. There fol- petrated by lowed spoliation, outrage, horrible cruelty. When the Zouaves. those tidings came to Lord Raglan, he was standing on the shore’with several of his people about him. He turned scarlet with shame and anger. The yoke of the alliance had wrung him. In general, it would fall within the duty of light horse to The duty of | Sweep the face of the invaded territory and bring coantrvfer in supplies; but the French were without cavalry ; supplies. and although the body of horse which we had land- ed was called ‘the Light Brigade,’ the Lancers, the Hussars, and the Light Dragoons of which it consisted were not of such a weight and quality, and were not so practiced in foraging, as to be all at once well fitted for this kind of service. Besides, it was plain that in advancing through the enemy’s country the power of the invaders would have to be measured by the arm in which they were weakest, and a material loss in our _ small, brilliant force of cavalry might bring ruin upon the whole expedition. There was the Commissariat. The officers of that department were gentlemen taken from a branch of the Treas- ury; and although they could make requisitions on the military authorities with more or less hope of a result, they had no force of their own with which to act. The regimental officers were of course busied with their respective corps. Yet it was cer- tain that the power of operating effectively with the English army would depend upon its obtaining a large addition to its existing means of land transport. In the result, it was the chief of one of the business departments of our Head-Quarter Staff who pressed forward into the gap, and succeeded in Cuap. XL.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 425 achieving the work upon which, in a great degree, the fate of the campaign seemed likely to hinge. From the first, General Airey had seen that the mere inert Airey's quice presence of armies in an invaded province is a thing perception of ~very short of conquest. Conquest, he knew, must 1e need to get ° ° - means ofland generally rest upon the success with which supplies Se can be drawn from the invaded province; and he never forgot that, unless the country could be made to yield means of land carriage, the Allies would have to creep timidly along the shore, tethered fast by the short string of carts with which they had come provided; therefore, even within a few minutes from the time when the landing began, he was already striving to gain—not the mere occupation of the soil—not the mere license of the troops to stand or lie down on the ground —but that hold, that military grasp of the country which would make it help to sustain the invasion. When only afew battalions of the Light Division had landed and were begin- ning to form on the beach, he rode up to the high ground on His seizure of OUT Tight, and there, at. some distance, he caught agonvey. sight of a long string of wagons escorted by a body of Cossacks. Instantly he rode back to the beach, got Colonel Lysons to give him two companies of the 23rd Fusileers, and with these advanced quickly in skirmishing order. The Cos- sacks. tried hard to save the convoy by using the points of their lances against the bullocks, and even against the drivers, but, the Fusileers advancing and beginning to open fire, the Cossacks at length retreated, leaving Airey in possession of just that kind of prize which the army most needed—a prize of some seventy or eighty wagons, with their oxen and drivers complete. Never ceasing to think it was vital to have more His continuea 2Nd more means of transport, Airey afterward dis- overs patched the officers of his department in all direc- tions to bring in supplies. Sending Captain Sankey to Tuzla and Sak, he thence got 105 wagons. Sending Captain Hamil- ton to Bujuk Aktash, to Beshi Aktash, to Tenish, and Sak, he got 67 camels, 253 horses, 45 cart-loads of poultry, barley, and other supplies, with more than a thousand head of cattle and sheep.! At a later date, and when the army was moving, he took 25 wagons from a village near the line of march. One day, moreover, it happened that Airey sent his aid-de-camp Nolan to explore for water, and, though he was without a cay- alry escort, Nolan boldly cut in upon a convoy of 80 govern- ment wagons laden with flour, and seized the whole of it. In - 1 In some, but not all of these expeditions, Sankey and Hamilton had cav- alry escorts. 426 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLI. all some 350 wagons were obtained, with all their teams and with their Tartar drivers. In general, the appropriation of the resources of the country is a business which ranges among mere commissariat annals; but in order to this invasion the seizing of means of land trans- port was a business hardly otherwise than vital. Even as’ it was, the army was brought to hard straits for want of suffi- cing draught power; and without the cattle and wagons which were seized whilst the troops were landing, the course of events must have been other than what it was. Those Tartar drivers of whom I have spoken were a wild people, little fit, as it seemed, for the obedience and patient toil exacted from camp-followers; but the descent of the Allies upon the coast was the first military operation that they had witnessed, and, before their amazedness ceased, they found themselves unaccountably marshaled and governed, and invol- untarily taking their humble part in the enterprise of the West- The Tartar ern Powers. Many of them wore the same expres- drivers. ~ sion of countenance as hares that are taken alive, and they looked as though they were watching after the right moment for escape; but they had fallen, as it were, into a great stream, and all they could do was to wonder, and yield, and flow on. There were few of those captured lads who had strength to withstand the sickness and the hardships of the campaign. For the most part they sank and died. Their result. CHAPTER XLI. THERE were now upon the coast of the Crimea some 37,000 The foreesnow French and Turks,! with sixty-eight pieces of artil- on shore, lery, all under the orders of Marshal St. Arnaud ; and we saw that 27,000 English, including a full thousand of cavalry, and together with sixty guns, had been landed by Lord Raglan. Altogether, then, the Allies numbered 63,000 men and 128 guns. These forces, partly by means of the draught ani- mals at their command, and partly by the aid of the soldier himself, could carry by land the ammunition necessary for per- haps two battles, and the means of subsistence for three days. Their provisions beyond those limits were to be replenished ' 30,204 Frenchmen and 7000 Turks, according to the French accounts. Lord Raglan, I believe, thought that the French force was less, and put it at 27,600. . Cuar. XLI.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, 427 The nature of fromthe ships. It was intended, therefore, that the Iv whick the fleets should follow the march of the armies, and Allies were to. that the invaders, without attempting to dart upon make Syodce the inland route which connected the enemy with to Sebastopol. St.Petersburg, should move straight upon the north side of Sebastopol by following the line of the coast. The whole body of-the Allied armies was to operate as a ‘movable column.’ Between an armed body engaged in regular operations, and Bl that description of force which the French call a parison 4 5 : : : zi between regu- ‘movable column,’ the difference is broad; and there rat Lae is need to mark it, because the way in which reg- ese ular operations are conducted is not even similar * to that in which a ‘movable column’ is wielded. It is, of course, from the history of continental wars that the principle of regular operations in the field is best deduced. A prince intending to invade his neighbor’s territory takes care to have near his own frontier, or in states already under his control, not only the army with which he intends to begin the ‘invasion, but also that sustained gathering of fresh troops, and that vast accumulation of stores, arms, and munitions, which will suffice, as he hopes, to feed the war. The territory on which these resources are spread is called the ‘base of opera- ‘tions.’ When the invading general has set out from this his strategic home to achieve the object he has in view, the neck of country by which he keeps up his communications with the base is called the ‘line of operations ;? and the maintenance of this line of operations is the one object which must never be absent from his mind. The farther he goes, the more he needs to keep up an incessant communication with his ‘ base ;’ and yet, since the line is lengthening as he advances, it is con- stantly becoming more and more liable to be cut. Such a dis- aster as that he looks upon as nearly equal to ruin, and there is hardly any thing that he will refuse to sacrifice for the defense of the dusty or mud-deep cart-roads, which give him his means of living and fighting. On the other hand, the commander of a ‘movable column’ begins his campaign by willfully placing himself in those very ' I make this endeavor to elucidate the true character of the operation for the purpose of causing the reader to understand the kind of hazard which was involved in the march along the coast, and also in order to lay the ground for explaining (in a future volume) the causes which afterward brought upon the army cruel sufferings and privations. * This is generally, but not invariably, the same line as the one by which he has advanced. 428 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLL circumstances which would bring ruin upon an army carrying on regular operations. He does not profess nor attempt to hold fast any ‘line of operations’ connecting him with his re- sources. He says to his enemy, ‘Surround me if you will; ‘gather upon my front; hover round me on flank and rear. ‘Do not affront me too closely, unless you want to see some: ‘thing of my cavalry and my horse-artillery; but, keeping at ‘a courteous distance, you may freely occupy the whole coun- ‘try through which I pass. I care nothing for the roads by ‘which Ihave come. What I need whilst my task is doing, I ‘carry along with me, I have an enterprise in hand. That ‘achieved, I shall march toward the resources which my coun- ‘trymen have prepared for me. Those resources I will reach ‘or else perish.’ If an army engaged in regular operations were likened to an engine drawing its supplies by means of long pipes from a river, the principle of the ‘movable column’ would be well enough tokened by that simple skinful of water which—carried on the back of a camel—ais the life of men pass- ing a desert. Each of the two systems has its advantages and its draw- backs. The advantages enjoyed by an army undertaking reg- ular operations are:—the lasting character of its power, and its comparative security against great disasters. The general conducting an army in regular operations is constantly replen- ishing his strength by drawing from his ‘ base’ fresh troops and supplies to compensate the havoc which time and the enemy— or even time alone—will always be working in his army; and if he meets with a check, he retires upon a line already occu- pied by portions of his force, already strewed with his maga- zines. He retires, in short, upon a road prepared for his recep- tion, and the farther he retreats, the nearer he is to his great resources. The drawbacks attending this system are the great quantity of means of land transport required for keeping up the communication, and the eternal necessity of having to be ready with a sufticient force to defend every mile of the ‘line of op- ‘erations’ against the enterprises of the enemy. The advantages of the ‘movable column’ are:—that its means of land transport may be comparatively small—may in fact be proportioned to the limited duration of the service which it undertakes; and that, not. being clogged with the duty of maintaining a ‘line of operations,’ it has, in truth, nothing to defend except itself. But grave drawbacks limit the power of a ‘movable column.’ In the first place, it 1s an instrument fitted only for temporary use, because, during the service in which it is engaged, it has no resources to rely upon, except Cuap, XLI.? INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 429 what it carries along with it. Another drawback is the hazard it incurs—not of mere defeat, but—of total extermination ; for it is a force which has left no dominion in its wake, and if it falls back, it falls into the midst of enemies having hold of the country around, and emboldened by seeing it retreat. Then, also, a movable column, even though it be never de- feated in any pitched battle, is liable to be brought to ruin by being well harassed; and very inferior troops, or even armed peasants, if they have spirit and enterprise, may put it in peril ; for, having the command of the country all round it, they can easily prepare their measures for vexing the column by day and by night. Again, the ‘movable column’ can not send its sick and wounded to the rear. It must either abandon the suf- ferers, or else find means of carrying them wherever it marches, and this, of course, is a task which is rendered more and more difficult by every succeeding combat. Again, if the ‘movable ‘column’ is brought to frequent halts by the necessity of self- defense, there is danger that the operation in which it is en- gaged will last to a time beyond the narrow limit of the sup- plies which it is able to carry along with it. In Algeria the French had brought the system of using small ‘movable columns’ to a high state of perfection ; and there one might see a force complete in all arms, carrying with it the bread and the cartridges, and driving betwixt its battalions the little herd of cattle, which would enable it to live and to fight; one might see it bidding farewell for perhaps several weeks to all its communications, and boldly venturing into the midst of a wilderness alive with angry foes; but the Arabs and Kabyles, though not without some of the warlike virtues, were, upon the whole, too unintelligent and too feeble to be able to put the system of the ‘movable column’ to a test suf- ficing to prove that the contrivance would hold good in Eu- rope. | 3 i the whole, it may be acknowledged that, for operating in a country where the enemy is looked upon as at all formi- dable, the employment of a ‘movable column’ is a measure which will be likely to win more favor from those who love an adventure than from those who are acquainted with the art of war. But, whichever of the two methods be chosen, it is of great moment to choose decisively, taking care that the operations are carried on in a way consistent with the principle of the system on which they proceed. A general conducting regu- lar operations must be wary, circumspect, and resolutely pa- tient. The leader of a ‘movable column’ must be swift, and, 430 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuae. XLI even for very safety’s sake, he may have to be venturesome, for what would be rashness in another may in him be rigid prudence. The two systems are so opposite, that to confuse the two, or to import into the practice of one of them the prac- tice applicable to the other, is to run into grave troubles and dangers. Yet this is what the Allies did. When the English Government committed to this enterprise a large proportion of their small, brilliant army, and appointed to the command of it a general mature in years and schooled by his long subor- dination to Wellington, they acted as though they meant that the army should engage with all due prudence in regular op- erations. When they ordered that this force should make a descent upon the Crimea without intending to prepare for it a base of operations at the landing-place, they caused it to act as a ‘movable column.’ It will be seen hereafter that from. this ambiguity of purpose, or rather from this dimness of sight, the events of the campaign took their shape. Again, it is right to see how far it be possible to change with the same force from one of the two systems to the other. Upon this, it can be said that an army engaged in regular op- erations may well enough be able to furnish forth a ‘movable ‘column ;’ but to hope that a‘ movable column’ will be able to gather to itself all at once the lasting strength of an army pre- pared for regular operations is to hope for what can not be. It is true, as we shall see hereafter, that by dint of great effort and the full command of the sea, the two mighty nations of the West were able in time-to convert the remains of their ‘moy- ‘able column’ into an army fitted for regular operations, but we shall have to remember that before the one system could be effectually replaced by the other, the soldiery underwent cruel sufferings. The 63,000 invaders now preparing to march toward the The Allies | South were the largest, and by far the best appoint- were to opeme ed force that the Powers of modern Europe had ‘column.’ ever ‘dared to engage in what (as distinguishing it from regular operations) may rightly be called an adventure. Their plan was to advance toward the north of Sebastopol, suffering the enemy to close round their rear, and intending to march every day to a new point of contact with the fleet. It was only at the mouths of the rivers that the cliffs between Old Fort and Sebastopol left room for any thing like a land- ing-place; and (except so far as concerned the mere inter- change of signals) the land forces, whilst marching from the banks of one river to the banks of another, could not expect to be in communication with the fleets. Moreover, the Allied Cuap. XLI. | INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 431 Generals were still in ignorance of the numerical strength of the enemy whom they were thus to defy. All they knew was that, so far as concerned his numbers of brave, steady, highly- drilled troops, the Czar was reported to be the foremost po- tentate of the world; and that the publicity of the Allied coun- sels had given him a good deal of time for re-enforcing the garrisons of the invaded province. It may be said that since the Allied armies were to be at- tended along the coast by their fleets, they were not in the strictest sense a ‘movable column.’ Each night, no doubt, they expected to be in communication with their ships, but, during each of the marches they were about to undertake, their dangers were to be in all respects the same as those which attend upon any other ‘movable column;’ for every morning they were to cast loose from the ties which connect- ed them with their resources, as well as with their means of retreat, and were to ground their hopes of recovering their communications upon their power. to force their way through a country held by the enemy. In short, the Allied armies were a‘ movable column ;’ but a movable column which could” hope to find means of succor, and, if necessary, of retreat, by fighting its way to a point of contact with the attendant fleets, and covering its withdrawal by a victory. There is the more need for showing this by dint of words, since it happened that the true nature of the expedition was obscured by the course of events. It passed for a measure more prudent than it real- ly was, because Prince Mentschikoff, being willful and unskill- ed, did not take the right means for exposing its rashness. The march now about to be undertaken by the invaders was Perilous char- Of such a kind that an enterprising enemy who un- acter of the derstood his calling might bring them to a halt Old Fort. whenever he chose; and, forcing them to try. to convert their flank into a front, might compel them to fight a battle with their back to the sea-cliff: to fight, in short, upon ground where defeat would be ruin. When, therefore, on the 19th of September, 1854, the Allied armies broke up from their bivouaes and marched toward the south, they were engaging in a venturesome enterprise. It seems that, although by human contrivance a whole peo- ple may be shut out from the knowledge of momentous events in which its armies are taking a part, there is yet a subtle es- sence of truth which will permeate into the mind of a nation thus kept in ignorance. To a degree which freemen can hard- ly imagine to be possible, the first Napoleon had succeeded in hiding the achievements of the English army from the sight 432 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIL of the French people; and since the French in after years were little tempted to gather up by aid of history the events which they had been hindered from learning in the form of ‘news,’ there was—not merely in the French army, but even in all France—a very scant knowledge of the way in which the two mighty nations of the West had encountered one another in the great war. Yet, now that the time had come for test- ing the faith which one army had in the prowess of the other, it suddenly appeared that a belief in the quality of the English soldier was seated as deep in the mind of the French army as though it were a belief founded upon historical knowledge. This will be understood by observing the relative place which the French commander was content to take in the order of march, and by looking at it in connection with what then promised to be the character of the impending campaign. When once the invaders had landed and seized the coast- road, the one line of communication which the Russians could trust to for linking the garrison of Sebastopol to the main land was by the great road which passes through Bakshi Serai and ‘Simpheropol. It was vital to the Russian commander to be able to hold this road, for by that his re-enforcements were to come. On the other hand, he had to try-to cover Sebastopol ; but such was the direction in which the Allies were preparing to march upon the place, that by manceuvring with his back toward the great road passing through Simpheropol he could cling to his line of communication, and yet be able to come down upon the flank of the invading armies whilst they were marching across his front. In this way he would cover Se- bastopol much more effectively than by risking his communi- cations in order to place his army like a mere inert block be- tween the invaders and their prey. Moreover he-was known The fate of the tO be relatively strong in cavalry, and the country whole Allied was of such a kind that the Allies advancing from bit eayety ~ Old Fort to the Belbec would have upon their left firmness of a fair undulating steppe such as horsemen exult to itwhichshould look upon. It was therefore to be expected that take the left. the whole stress of the task undertaken by the in- vaders would be thrown in the first instance upon that portion of the Allied force which might be chosen to form their left wing. In the armies of Kurope the right is the side of precedence, The French 2nd from the time that the Western Powers had take the right. beoun to.act together in Turkey, the French had always claimed, or rather had always taken, the right. Now it happened that both in Turkey and in the Crimea the side Cuar. XLI.] INVASION OF THE’ CRIMEA. 433 of precedence was the side nearest to the sea, whilst the left was the side nearest to the enemy. Lord Raglan had observed all this, but he had observed in silence; and, finding the right always seized by our Allies, he had quietly put up with the left. Yet he was not without humor; and now, when he saw that in this hazardous movement along the coast the French were still taking the right, there was something like archness in his way of remarking that, although the French were bent upon taking precedence of him, their courtesy still gave him the post of danger. This he well might say, for, so far as con- cerned the duty of covering the venturesome march which was about to be undertaken, the whole stress of the enterprise was thrown upon the English army. The French force was cov- ered on its right flank by the sea, on its front and rear by the fire from the steamers, and on its teft by the English army. On the other hand, the English army, though covered on its right flank by the French, was exposed in front, and in rear, and on its whole left flank, to the full brunt of the enemy’s at- tacks. If the Russian General should act in any thing like conformity to the principles of the art of war, the whole weight of his attacks would have to be met in the first instance by the English alone; and, although the French would have an op- portunity of acting as a reserve, they would do so under cir- cumstances rendering it very difficult for them to retrieve any check sustained by their allies. In short, the French could not but know that, if the enemy should direct his enterprises against the left flank of the invaders, the least weakness on the . part of the English might enable him to roll up the whole Al- lied force, involving French and English alike in one common Their trustful. Gisaster. Yet, so steadfast was the trust which the ness and good French reposed in the English, so unshaken the oped courage and good sense with which they commit- ted themselves to the prowess of their ancient foe, that they never for an instant sought to meddle with the duty*of cover- ing the march from an attack on the left flank. They planned that the English should be there. On the morning of the 19th of September the Allied armies The advance began their advance toward the south. On the begun. right and nearest the sea the French army marched in a formation adopted by Marshal Bugeaud at the battle of Isly. The outline of the ground covered by their troops took the shape of a lozenge—a lozenge whereof the foremost apex The order of | Was formed by the Ist Division, the angles on either ere flank by the 2nd and 8rd, and the rearmost point by the 4th Division. Within the mascle or hollow lozenge Vou. L—T 434 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLI. thus formed, there marched the Turkish battalions and those portions of the artillery and the convoy which were not spe- cially attached to one or other of the divisions. Each French division! marched in two columns, consisting each of one brig- ade, and the artillery and incumbrances belonging to each di- vision marched between the two brigades. Each brigade was in regimental column at sectional distance. ‘The Allied fleets, slowly gliding along the coast, covered the French army on its right flank, and carefully reconnoitred every seam and hollow of the ground. in front which could be reached by the eyes of men looking from the ships. Since the English army was to advance in a way which left it open to the enemy in front, in rear, and on its left flank, Lord Raglan, of course, deemed it likely that he would be at~ tacked in his march; and*that upon smooth, open ground, his army would be called upon to defend both itself and its trail- ing convoy against the assaults of an enemy who was strong in the cavalry arm. But this task was rendered less hard than it would otherwise be by the quality of the English soldier, and the peculiar order of battle in which he loves to fight. He fights in line; and therefore, with his moderate force of in. fantry and artillery, Lord Raglan was able to resolve that, from whatever quarter the onset might come, he would be ready to meet it with a front of bayonets and field artillery ex- tending along nearly two miles of ground. In order to be able at a few minutes’ notice to show a front of this extent either toward the south, the east, or the north, Lord Raglan kept each of his infantry divisions massed in close column, and he disposed his Ist, 2nd, 3rd, and light divisions in such a way that the whole body had both a front and a depth of two divisions. A body which moves in columns of this kind is said to be marching’‘in grand divisions. The distances between the divisions were so arranged that, with- out disloéation, they could form line either in front or toward the flank. The artillery attached to each division marched on the right or seaward flank of the force to which it belonged. 1 It was intended..and ordered that the 1st. and 4th French Divisions should affect a lozenge formation analogous to that which characterized the general order of march, but the direction was not practically attended to.. No one knows better than an African General the art of enfolding the help- less portions of a column in battalions of infantry; but the French force be- ing covered on all sides in the way already described, no elaborate precau- tions were needed. * There are four or five different terms which have been used by experi- enced Generals in-describing this disposition of troops, but the authority on which I place the most reliance sanctions the term ‘used in the text. Cuap. XLI.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 435 ~ The advance guard consisted of the 11th Hussars and the 13th Light Dragoons, under Lord Cardigan. In rear of the small infantry advanced guard, which followed the horsemen, there marehed a detachment of the Rifles, in extended order. Then, on the right, came the 2nd: Division, and, on the left, the Light Division: the 3rd Division marched in rear of the 2nd, and the Light Division was followed by the 1st Division: Of the 4th Division, the 63rd Regiment and two companies of the 46th had been’ left (with: a squadr on of the 4th Light Dra- goons) to clear the beach at Kamishlu;- but the remainder of the division, under Sir George Cathcart, marched in rear of the ist Division. Along the left flank of the adv ancing columns, and at a distance from'them of some 200 yards, were riflemen in skirmishing order, and a line of skirmishers ‘from the same force closed the rear of the infantry. On the left flank, and nearly in the same alignment as the leading infantry divisions, was the 8th Hussars, and on the ‘same flank, but in an align- ment less advanced than the rearmost of the infantry columns, there was the 17th Lancers. The cattle and ‘the baggage marched in rear of the 3rd Division, and so as to be covered, toward the left, by the 4th Division. Then followed the rear guard, and then’a line of Rifles disposed at intervals in extend- ed order.» Last ofall came the 4th Light Dragoons, under —_ George Paget. ‘Thus marched the: str aavige of the Western Powers. The ‘sun shone hotly as on a summer’s day in England ; but breezes, springing fresh from the’ sea, floated briskly along the hills. Th he ground: was an undulating: steppe, alluring to cavalry. It was rankly covered with a herb like southernwood ; and when thestems were crushed under foot by the advancing ‘columns, the whole air became laden: with bitter fragrance. ‘The aroma was new to some. ‘To men of the western counties of England’it was so familiar that it car- ried them back to childhood: andthe village church 5 they re- membered the nosegay of ‘ boy’s-love”’ that used to be’ set by the Prayer-Book of the Sunday maiden too demure for the vanity of flowers. : “In each of the cleo massed Golentin, whieh were foinded ny our four’ complete divisions, there were more! than 5000 foot soldiers. The colors ‘were flying; the: bands; at: first;*were playing; and once more'the time “had come round whenin all this armed pride there: was nothing ‘of false ‘majesty; for al- ready videttes could be seen on the hillocks,; and (except at the spots where our horsemen were mar ching): there was noth- ing’ but air ‘and sunshine; ‘and, at intervals; the dark form’ ofa The face 436 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLI. single riflemen, to divide our columns from the enemy. But more warlike than trumpet and drum was the grave quiet which followed the ceasing of the bands. The pain of weari- ness had begun. Few spoke. All toiled. Waves break upon the shore; and though. they are many, still distance will gath- er their numberless cadences into one. So, also, it was with one ceaseless, hissing sound that a wilderness of tall, crisping herbage bent under the tramp of the coming thousands. As each mighty column marched on, one hardly remembered, at first, the weary frames, the aching limbs which composed it ; for—instinct with its own proper soul and purpose, absorbing the volitions of thousands of men, and bearing no likeness to the mere sum of the human beings out of whom it was made —the column itself was the living thing—the slow, monstrous unit of strength which walks the modern earth where empire is brought into question. But alittle while, and then the sick- ness which had clung to the army began to make it seen that the columns, in all their pride, were things built with the bod- ies of suffering mortals. , . We saw that, before the embarkation, our troops had fallen Sickness and Into a weak state of health, and that, even of those a ear he who were free from serious illness, there were hard- soldiers, ly any who had been able to keep their accustomed strength. It had been hoped that the voyage would bring back health and strength; but the hope proved vain; and Lord Raglan, knowing the weakly state of the men, had or- dered that they should be allowed to enfold the few things they most needed in their blankets, and to land and march without their knapsacks. Yet now, before the first hour of march was over, the men began to fall out from their ranks. Some of these were in the agonies of cholera. Their faces had a dark, choked look; they threw themselves on the ground and writhed, but often without speaking and without a ery. Many more dropped out from mere weakness. These the of- ficers tried to inspirit, and sometimes they succeeded ; but more often the sufferer was left upon the ground. It was vain to tell him, though so it was believed at the time, that he would fall into the hands of the Cossacks. The tall, stately men of the Guards dropped from their ranks in great numbers. It was believed at the time that the men who fell out would be taken by the enemy; but the number of stragglers at length became very great, and, in the evening, a force was sent back to bring them in. During the march the foot soldiers of the Allied armies suf- fered thirst; but early in the afternoon the troops in advance Crap. XLII. ] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 437 The stream of Teached the long-desired stream of the Bulganak, the Bulganak. and, as soon as a division came in sight of the water, the men broke from their ranks, and ran forward that they might plunge their lips deep in the cool, turbid, grateful stream. In one brigade a stronger governance was maintained. Sir Colin Campbell would not allow that even the rage of thirst should loosen the discipline of his grand Highland regiments ; he halted them a little before they reached the stream, and so ordered it that, by being saved from the confusion that would have been wrought by their own wild haste, they gained in comfort, and knew that they were gainers. When men toil in organized masses, they owe what well-being they have to wise and firm commanders. It was on the banks of this stream of the Bulganak that the Allied armies were to bivouac for the night. CHAPTER XLII. Earty in the afternoon, Lord Raglan, riding in advance of The affair of the infantry divisions, had reached the banks of the the Bulganak yjver, and, observing a group of Cossacks on the brow of the hill toward the south, he ordered the squadrons which Lord Cardigan had with him! to move forward and re- connoitre the ground. Lord Lucan was present with this por- tion of his cavalry force. Where the post-road from Eupatoria to Sebastopol crosses the Bulganak, the ground on the south side of the river rises gradually for some hundreds of yards from the banks of the stream, then dips a little, then rises again, then dips rather deeply, and then again rises up to the: summit of' the ridge which bounds the view of an observer in the valley of the Bul- ganak. Our Pabititring squadrons went forward a great way into the lower dip, and when they were there it was s perceived that, confronting them from the hill above, there was'a body of cavalry 2000 strong. Our four squadrons halted and formed line. The Russian cavalry came forward a little, then halted, and, throwing out skirmishers, attempted some long, fruitless shots with their carbines. Our squadrons also threw out skir- mishers. But Lord Raglan, who had remained with his staff on the - !} Thellth Hussars and 13th Light Dragoons, 438 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, — [Cuar. XLII northern side of the hollow, had now discerned the formidable body of cavalry which was confronting our four squadrons; and Airey, being gifted with a keen, far-reaching sight, was able to make out that the glitter which ‘could be.seen between the sec- ond crest and the summit was: the play of the sun upon the points of bayonets, and that in the upper hollow there were several battalions: It was soon made plain that within a few hundred yards of our four squadrons the enemy was. present with all three arms, and in some force. . He had there, as. we now know, about 6000 men of his 17th Division, two batteries. of ar tillery, a brigade of regular cavalry, and. nine sotnias of, Cossacks. Lord Raglan, af army was ‘still on its march, saw that. he must take care to avoid: provoking an action ; but also he had to provide for the retreat of the four squadrons, which stood rooted in the centre of the lower hollow, so near to an overwhelming enemy’s force of all arms, and so far from their supports, that they were m-some*danger.~The problem was to extricate them, if possible, without getting into that sort of conflict which would be likely to- bring about a serious engage- ment. Lord Raglan saw that what made the Russians hesitate was the steadiness, and the exact, ceremonious formation of the little cavalry force of four squadrons which tranquilly confront- ed them; and that, if he were to withdraw it before he had made arrangements for ‘covering its retreat, it would be pur- sued and roughly handled by overwhelming numbers. . He was anxious ; ‘for, small as*was: this little body of horse, it was’a large proportion of his whole strength in the cavalry arm; but he saw that its safety would be best provided for by bringing up troops. to its support, and allowing it in the mean time to remain where it was, confusing the enemy by its obstinate presence and its car eful'ar ray. He ordered up in all haste the Light and the 2nd Divisions, the 8th Hussars, and 17th Lancers, and afterward the nine- pounder batteries attached to the Light Division. When our infantry divisions came up, they were formed in line, and the cavalry supports took a position in left rear of the advanced squadrons. All these operations the en- emy suffered to take place without resistance; and when they were completed his opportunity was gone. So, all being now in readiness, Lord Raglan wished that. the four squadrons should forthwith retire; and the more so as he was apprehensive lest these horsemen, in their evident longing for a combat, should be tempted to charge the body of cavalry in their immediate front. Still, he was unwilling to embarrass Lord Lucan (close as he then was to the enemy) by Cuarv. XLII] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. ; 439. an order too precise or imperative. In these circumstances, Airey galloped forward to give effect to Lord Raglan’s wishes. When Airey came up, he found that by communicating Lord Raglan’s. wishes without delivering a positive order he was supplying materials for a debate between Lord Lucan and his brigadier. Yet for a wordy debate the time and the place were ill fitted, for the four squadrons, as we have seen, were within but a little distance of overwhelming forces.. There is some little obscurity as to the exact way in which Airey brought his will to bear; but he saw what was wanted, and he said the force must retire immediately, and by alternate squadrons. Though he spoke in terms which might have meant that he was only giving his own opinion, yet perhaps the decisiveness of his speech and manner led to the impres- sion that he was delivering Lord Raglan’s orders. Be this as it may, the result was quickly attained... Lord Lucan under- stood that he was to go forthwith to Lord Raglan. Lord Cardigan understood that the force was to retire immediately, and by alternate lines.. The operation instantly commenced, and was conducted with excellent precision, for during the whole retreat there were always two squadrons out of the four which were showing a smooth front to the enemy. The moment the withdrawal. of our little cavalry force be- gan, the enemy’s artillery teams, unseen before, came bound- ing up from the hollow, and his guns, being quickly unlimber- ed, were soon in battery upon the ridge. With these he open- ed fire upon our retreating squadrons; but he saw that these horsemen, no longer isolated, were retiring upon ample sup- ports of all arms. He did not, therefore, venture to pursue with his cavalry... Two men in our cavalry force were wound- ed, and four or five horses killed. The six-pounder guns. at- tached to our cavalry replied to the enemy’s artillery without good effect; but when our nine-pounder guns were brought. into action, they caused the enemy’s artillery to limber up and retire.. They also, it seems, inflicted some loss upon the ene- my’s cavalry, for it was said that as many as thirty-five of his troopers were killed or wounded. The Russians were soon out of sight. Fi: The slight combat thus occurring on the Bulganak was the first approach to a passage of arms between Russia and the Western Powers. The pith of what had happened was this: The Russians had been making a reconnaissance in force at a time when Lord Raglan was making a reconnaissance with only four squadrons; and, as the nature of the ground con- cealed the enemy’s strength, our lesser foree was exposed for 440 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. — [Cuar. XLII, some minutes to a good deal of danger; but the enemy, being slow to take advantage of fortune, had given the English Gen- eral full time to extricate his squadrons by the use of the three arms. Lord Raglan was so well pleased with the success of this last operation, and with the steadiness shown by our cay- alry, that even on the night of the Alma (when it might have been supposed that the impressions produced by the battle would have superseded the recollection of the previous day) he spoke with complacency of this affair on the Bulganak. CHAPTER XLII. Wuen this affair was concluded, Lord Raglan biega to pre- Apparently pare for a contingency of graver import. The ene- dangerous i my, as it now appeared, had a force of all arms in English army. the immediate neighborhood, and it was known that he had his whole field army within a few hours’ march of the Bulganak. On the other hand, Lord Raglan was ex- posed to attack in front, left flank, and rear; and even on his right flank he was without immediate suppor t, for the course of the day’s march had thrown an interval of a mile between the French and the English armies. It was to be apprehend- ed that the enemy, issuing during the night from his intrench- ed position on the Alma, would place himself in such a position as to be able to fall upon our army in front and flank at dawn Lord Raglan Of day. Lord Raglan, therefore, determined that causes it to bi; the troops should bivouac in order of battle, and so of battle. as to be rapidly able to show a deployed front to the enemy either in front or flank. He placed the troops him- self, fixing their exact position with minute care. The first brigades of the 2nd and Light Divisions were drawn up in line parallel with the river, and some hundreds of yards in advance of it. The first brigades of the Ist and 3rd Divisions were placed in an oblique line, receding from the left. of the Light Division, and going back to the river’s bank. The troops, thus deployed, formed with the river a kind of three-sided inclosure, in which the principal part of the cay- alry and the incumbrances of the army were infolded. ‘The sec- ond brigade of each of the divisions already-named was form- ed in column in rear of the first or deployed brigade. The 4th Division and the 4th Light dragoons were placed in ob- servation on the northern side of the river. Finally, Colonel Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 441 Lagondie, one of the French Commissioners at our head-quar- ters, was requested to suggest to Prince Napoleon the expedi- ency of his drawing his division somewhat more near to the English right.} Our troops piled arms, and bivouacked in order of battle.? There was a post-house at the point where the road crossed the river, and there Lord Raglan passed the night. The situation of our army seemed to be critical; but when morning dawned it appeared that the enemy, attempting noth- ing, had drawn off to his intrenched position on the Alma. So the peril which the Allies had been encountering for the last twenty-four hours was now at an end; and the duty of carrying the position on the Alma might be regarded as easy, in comparison with that which would have devolved upon the invaders if our left flank had been briskly attacked on their march. It is common to attribute great results to careful de- sign; but the truth is that the Allies owed their prosperous landing and their tranquil march to the forbearance of tho Russian commander. CHAPTER XLIV. a For an army undertaking to withstand the march of invad- Position onthe E'S Who come along the shore from the north, the a position on the left bank of the Alma is happily formed by nature, and is capable of being made strong. The river springs from the mountain range in the southeast of the peninsula, and its tortuous channel, resulting at last in a west- erly course, brings it down to the sea near the headland called Cape Loukool. In that region the right or northern bank of the stream inclines with a very gentle slope to the water’s edge; but on the south or left bank the river presses close against a great range of hills, and the rocky ground which forms their base, being scarped by the action of the river in its swollen state, gives a measure of the loud, red torrent thrown down in flood-times from the sides of the Tchatir Dagh. Yet, so long as it flows in its summer bed, the pure gray stream of the Alma, though strong and rapid even then, can be crossed ' Colonel Lagondie fulfilled his mission; but on his return, being a near- sighted man, he rode into the midst of a Cossack picket, and was taken pris- ener. ~~ we ; i 2 See the plan on p. 442. dh i) ° £5 ort Ge T° ne aS Ss #8 > & -_ ss 2 gs & qa Oem o = 45 $a ww 2 g's: Ci) | mal AE “= mH English army when it bivouacked in order of battle on the Bulganak, and showing also how it wheeled into the line of march on the morning of the Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 448 in most places by a full-grown man without losing foot. There are, however, some deeps. which would force a man to swim a few strokes ;-and, on the other hand, the river is passed in sey- eral places by easy and frequented fords. Near the village of Bourliouk, at the time of the action, there was a good timber bridge. Along the course of the stream, on the north or right. bank, there is a broad. belt of gardens and vineyards, inclosed by low stone walls, and reaching down to the water; but on the left or south side there are few inclosures, for, in most places, the rock formation, which marks the left bank of the river, has its base so close down to the water’s edge as to leave but little soil deep enough for culture. » The smooth slopes by which the invader from the north ap- proaches the Alma are contrasted by the aspect of the country on the opposite bank of the river; for there the field is so bro- ken up into hills and valleys—into steep acclivities and narrow ravines—into jutting knolls and winding gullies—that, with the labor of a Russian army, and the resources. of Sebastopol at his command, a skilled engineer would have found it hard to ex- haust his contrivances for the defense of a ground having all this strength of feature. It is the high land nearest to the shore which falls most ab- ruptly ; for when a man turns his back to the sea, and rides up along the river’s bank, the summits of the hills on his right re- cede from him more and more—recede so far that, although they are higher than the hills near the shore, they are connect- ed with the banks of the stream by slopes more gently inclin- ing. The main features of the ground are these: first and nearest to the sea-shore there. is what may be called the ‘ West Cliff,’ for the ground there rises to a height of some 350 feet; and not only presents, looking west, a bluff buttress of rock to the sea, but also on its northern side hangs over the river so steep that a man going up along the bank of the stream has at first an almost sheer precipice on his right hand; and it is only when he all but reaches the village of Almatamack that he finds the cliff losing its severity. At that point the ground becomes so sloping and so broken as to be no longer difficult of ascent for a man on foot, nor even for country wagons. In rear—Russian rear—of the cliff there are the villages of Hadji- Boulat, Ulukul Tiouets, and Ulukul Akles. Higher up the river, but joined on to the West Cliff, there is a height, which was crowned at the time of the war by an un- finished turret intended for a telegraph. This is the Tele- 444 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. graph Height. At top, the West Cliff and the Telegraph Height form one connected plateau or table-land; but the sides of the Telegraph Height have not the abrupt character which marks the West Cliff. They are steep, but both toward the river and toward the east they are much broken up into knolls, ridges, hollows, and gullies. At all points they can be ascended by a man on foot, and at some by wagons. These steep sides of the Telegraph Height are divided from the river by a low and almost flat ledge, with a varying breadth of from two to six hundred yards. The ledge was a good deal wood- ed at the time of the war, and on some parts of it there were vineyards or orchards. To the east of the Telegraph Height the trending away of the hills leaves a hollow or recess, so formed and so placed that its surface might be likened to a huge vine-leaf; a vine- leaf placed on a gentle incline, with its lower edge on the riv- er, its stem at the bridge, and its main fibre following the course of the great road which bends up over the hill toward Sebastopol. This opening in the hills is the main Pass; and through it (as might be gathered from what has just been said), the Causeway or great post-road goes up from the bridge.} Across the mouth of the Pass, at a distance of a few yards from the bridge, there are small natural mounds or risings of ground, having their tops at a height of about sixty feet above the level of the river. These are so ranged as to form, one with the other, a low and uneven but almost continuous em- bankment, running from east to west, and parallel with the river. The natural rampart thus formed controls the entrance to the Pass from the north, for it not only overlooks the bridge, but also commands the ground far and wide on both sides of the river, and on both sides of the great road. Behind, the ground falls and then rises again, till 1t mingles with the slopes and the many knolls and hillocks which connect it with the re- ceding flanks of the Telegraph Height on the one side, and the Kourgané Hill-on the other. Still higher up the river, but receding from it in a south- easterly direction, the ground rises gradually to a commanding height, and terminates in a peak. This hill is the key of the position. It is called the Kourgané Hill. Around its slopes, at a distance of about 300 yards from the river, the ground so ‘swells out as to form a strong rib—a rib which bends round 1 In speaking of this opening as a ‘ Pass,’ I have followed the example of one whom I regard as a great master of the diction applicable to military subjects ; and it is not, of course, meant that there is any thing at all Alpine in the character of this range of low hills—hills less than 400 feet high. Plan indicating, in a general way, the form of the opening called ‘+ The Pass,” through which the Post-road, after crossing the Alma, bends up over the hills. Zn Ny NIN AX ’ SVN EN iS \ 446 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV. the front and the flanks of the bastion there built by nature, giving a command toward the southwest, the west, the north- west, and the northeast. ‘Toward the west this terrace, if so it may be called, is all but joined to those mounds which we spoke of as barring the mouth of the Pass. Behind all these natural ramparts there are hollows and dips in the ground, which give ample means for concealing and sheltering troops; but from the jutting rib down to the bank of the river the slope is gentle and smooth like the glacis. of a fortress. It was on this Kourgané Hill that Prmce Mentschikoff established his head-quarters. The immediate approach to the river from its right bank is every where gentle, but the ground on its south side is a good deal scarped by the action of the water; and all along that part of the river which flows opposite to the Kourgané Hill and the main Pass, the left bank rises almost vertically from the water’s edge to a height of from eight to fifteen feet. On the north bank of the river, and at a distance of about a mile from its mouth, there is the village of Almatamack. On the same bank, but more than a mile and a quarter higher up the stream, there stood at the time of the war a large white homestead. Yet a mile higher up the river, on the same bank, and nearly facing the mouth of the Pass, there stands the large straggling village of Bourliouk. The cottages and farm-build- ings which skirt this village on its eastern side extend far up the river. From Bourliouk to the easternmost part of the po- sition the distance is two miles. To ascend the position from the north there are several fre- quented ways: 1. Close to the sea and to the mouth of the river there is a singular fissure in the rock, and through this a narrow way leads round, and up to the top of the cliff. This road was not traversed by artillery on the day of the battle, but it is be- lieved that this was because the guns could not be brought across the river at the point where it flows into the sea. 2. From the ford at the village of Almatamack there is a wagon-road which leads up to the top of the plateau. It was practicable for artillery. 3. From the white homestead there is a road which crosses the river and goes up to the plateau; but, either because of the badness of the ford, or else the too rugged ascent beyond it, this road could not be used for artillery. The want of a road for their guns in this part of the field was the main cause which hampered the French army. 4, On the western side of the village of Bourliouk there is a Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, 4447 frequented ford across the river, and from that spot two wag- on-roads forking off at no great distance from one another lead up to. the Telegraph and the villages in its rear.. The western- most of these roads was found to be practicable for artillery. 5. Opposite to Bourliouk two almost parallel, wagon-roads lead up from the bank of the river.to the top of the plateau. 6. The Great Causeway, or post-road leading from Eupato- ria, goes through the eastern skirts of Bourliouk, crosses the bridge, enters the Pass, and ascends by a gentle incline to- ward the low chain of mounds running across its mouth. Aft- er piercing that natural rampart, it bends into the southerly course which leads it. to Sebastopol. 7. To the east of the main Pass there are other roads; but they. are not farther spoken of here, because all the hill-side in that part of the field is more or less accessible to artillery. Except at the West Cliff, every part of the position can be reached by men on foot. In the rear—Russian rear—of the hills which form this po- sition, the ground falls, and it rises again at a distance of two miles. Down to the edge of the vineyards, the whole of the field on the north or right bank of the river is ground tempting to cavalry; and although the south side of the stream is marked, as we saw, by stronger features, still the summits of the heights spread out broad, like the English “Downs.” Except the sheer sides of the cliff, and the steeps of the Telegraph Height, there is little on the higher ground to obstruct the manceuyres of horsemen. From the sea-shore to the easternmost spot occupied by Rus- sian troops, the distance for a man going straight was nearly five miles and a half; but if he were to go all the way on the Russian bank of the river, he would have to pass over more ground; for the Alma here makes a strong bend, and leaves open the chord of the arc to invaders who come from the north,} ‘Tam aware that in distances and in other material points this descrip tion of the position differs widely from the result of the hasty surveys which were made soon after the battle by English officers. The French Govern- ment plans bear such strong marks of having been made with great care and labor, that in general I have ventured to take them for my guide in prefer- ence to those of my own countrymen. 448 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV; II. Against any plan for occupying the whole of this range of hills by the forces of the Czar there were two cogent reasons : one was, that the summits of the West Cliff, and even of part of the Telegraph Height, were exposed to fire from the ships; the other, that the position was too wide for the numbers which were brought to defend it. But the whole of the naval and military resources of the Mentschikoff’s Crimea had been intrusted to the direction of Prince Pe himattot Mentschikoff. With him it rested to make head the position. against the invasion; and it seems he had been so forcibly struck with the great apparent steepness of the West Cliff and the heights connected with it, that he thought it must be wholly inaccessible to troops. He conceived, therefore, that he might safely omit to occupy it, and might be content to take up a narrowed position, beginning on the eastern slopes of the Kourgané Hill, and terminating on the west of the Telegraph Height, at a distance of more than two miles from the sea.! By this course, as he thought, he would elude both of the ob- stacles which interfered with his hold of the position; for his extreme left would be comparatively distant from the ship- ping, and the whole ground occupied would be so far contract- ed that the troops which he had at his command might suffice to hold it. Upon this plan he acted. So, although the posi- tion of the Alma, as formed by nature, had an extent of more than five miles, the troops which stood charged to hold it had a front of only one league. Prince Mentschikoff rested upon the assumption that the whole of the ground which he pro- posed to leave unoccupied was inaccessible to troops; but if he had walked his horse into the road which was within half a mile of his extreme left, he would have found that it led down to a ford opposite to the village of Almatamack, and was per- fectly practicable for artillery. His army had been on the ground for several days, yet, with a strange carelessness, he not only omitted to break up or to guard this road from Alma- tamack, but made all his dispositions exactly as though no such road existed. . . The forces brought forward to defend this position for the - His forces, © 22" Were 3400 cavalry, 33,000 infantry, and -2600 artillerymen, making altogether 39,000 men,? with 106 guns. ’ The Russian accounts estimate the distance at only two versts, but I ad. here, as before stated, to the French plans. _*. 39,017. See post, p. 450 et sey., where the details of the force are fully given. Cuar.XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 449 Prince Mentschikoff commanded in person. He was a way- His personal Ward, presumptuous man, and his bearing toward yeas. the generals under his command was of such a kind that he did not or could not strengthen himself by the coun- sels of men abler than himself.1 In times past he had been mutilated by a round shot from a Turkish gun. He bore ha- tred against the Ottoman race; he bore hatred against their faith. He had opened his mission at the Porte with insult ; he had closed it with threats. And now—a sequence rare in the lives of modern statesmen—he was out on a hill-side, with horse and foot, having warrant—full warrant this time, to ad- duce ‘ the last reason of kings.’ So far as regards the general scheme of the campaign, his His planof Conception, it seems, was this: he would suffer the campaign. Allies to land without molestation, because he de- sired that the defeat which he was preparing for them should be, not a mere repulse, but a crushing and signal disaster. He would not attack them on their line of march, because he liked better to husband his strength for the great position on the Alma. It seemed to him that there he could hold his ground against the invaders for three weeks, and his imagination was that, baffled for many days by the strength of his position, drawing their supplies from the ships with pain and uncertain- ty, and encumbered more and more every day with wounded men, the Allies would fall into evil days. In the mean time the troops, long since dispatched from Bessarabia, would begin to reach him by way of Perekop and Simpheropol; and, thus re- enforced, he would in due season take the offensive, inflicting upon the Western Powers a chastisement commensurate with their rashness. Prince Mentschikoff rested this structure of hope upon the His relianceon assumption that he could hold the position on the ‘irenath tthe Alma for at the least many days together, and position. against repeated assaults. Yet he took little pains to prepare the ground for a great defense.? On the jutting rib which goes round the front of the Kourgané Hill, at a dis- tance of about 300 yards from the river, he threw up a breast- work, a work of a very slight kind, presenting no physical ob- stacle to the advance of troops, but sufficiently extended to be ? I infer this from the fact that, the day before the action, General Kiria- koff, an officer of high reputation, was attempting indirect methods of calling Prince Mentschikoff’s attention to the defectiveness of his arrangements.— Kiriakoff’s Statement. 2 I say this in the teeth of the English dispatches, and, I fear, of many written and oral statements from officers; but I am sure that every engineer who saw the ground will support my assertion. 450 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, [Cuap. XLIV. capable of receiving the fourteen heavy guns. with which he The meanshe armed it.'. This work was. called the ‘Great Re- sfetitnénine ‘doubt.’?.. Prince Mentschikoff was delighted. with it. this earthwork. ‘Is not this a grand: thing?’ said he to General Kiriakoff the day before the action; ‘see, it will do mischief both ways.’ And he then pointed out how, whilst the face of the redoubt commanded the smooth slope beneath it, the guns at the shoulder of the work would throw their sie across the great.road on either side. of the bridge... On the same hill, but higher up and more to his right, the Prince threw up another slight breastwork, which he armed with a battery of field-guns. This was the Lesser Redoubt. The vineyards at some points were marked. and cléared.so as to give full effect to the action of the artillery ; but, except the two-redoubts, no field-works were constructed by the Rus- sian General. Willful and confident, he was content, to” rest mainly upon the natural strength of the ground, the valor of his troops, and the faith that he had in his own prowess as a commander. He even omitted, as we have seen, to break up or to guard the wagon-road which led up from Almatamack to the left of his position. The Prince did not. attempt to oc- cupy the West Cliff; but some days before the action a bat- talion? and half a battery had. been placed overlooking the sea in the village of Ulukul Akles, in order, as was said, to ‘ catch ‘marauders,’ or to prevent a descent from the sea in the rear of the Russian army; and the detachment. remained in that part of the field until the time when the battle began. On the ledge which divided the river from the steep, broken Disposition of Side of the Telegraph Height, Prince Mentschikoff his troops. = placed four Militia’ battalions, and supported them by three battalions of regular infantry,® placed only a hundred '‘ Twelve only, according to Prince Gortschakoff. The pieces were 32- pounders and 24-pound howitzers. * The work was formed by cutting a shallow trench, and throwing up the earth in front of it. I follow the military authorities in calling these works “‘redoubts,” because our people at home came to know of them under this description ; but the term is not accurate, for they were open toward the rear. 3 The No. 2 battalion of Minsk. * I adopt this inaccurate term as the best I can find to describe these semi- regular troops, because to call them, as the Russians do, ‘ reserve battalions,’ would tend to confuse, by suggesting the idea of ‘reserves’ in the ordinary sense. I thought at one time I might have called them ‘depot battalions,’ but upon the whole it seemed to me that the term ‘ militia’ would be less likely to convey a wrong notion than the term ‘depot.’ ‘They are troops regarded as very inferior in quality to troops of the line. The four battalions which I call ‘militia’ were the ‘reserve’ battalions of the 13th Division.—Anitchkoff, Chodasiewicz. ° Nos. 2,3, and 4 of the Taroutine corps.—Jdid. Guar. XLIV.} INVASION OF THE CRIMEA: 451 and fifty yards in their rear, and by a fourth battalion! drawn up in a neighboring rayine.?, Farther still im rear, he held in hand as a reserve for his left wing the four battalions of the ‘ Moseow corps,’ which had joined him that morning.? These, Forces origin. With two batteries of artillery,* were all the forces ally posted in Occupying that part of the position which was about raaitien ev '® to be assailed by the French.’ Including the bat- sailed by the talion and the half battery at Ulukul Akles, they rench, : : ; é . consisted of thirteen battalions of infantry with twenty guns, and numbered altogether rather more than 10,000 men.® They formed the left wing of the Russian army, and _were commanded by General Kiriakoff. The battalions were placed at intervals, checker-wise, and each battalion was massed in column of companies. A line of skirmishers was thrown out in front, but for want, as was said, of better ground to act upon, these skirmishers were kept within ten yards of the ‘ Militia’ battalions. The two batteries of artillery were not at first so placed as to be of any usas.. No part of this force on the Tele- graph Height was covered by intrenchments or by any kind of field-work. In the main Pass, facing the bridge, and destined to confront Foreesorigin. the 2nd Division of the English army, Prince Ments- ally posted in chikoff placed four battalions of light infantry,’ with pectin as.’ one battalion of rifles ;* and three out of those five Caan the battalions had orders to advance and skirmish in the vineyards. The other two battalions were kept massed in column. Near the bridge was posted a battalion of sappers and miners.’ Astride the great road, and disposed along the chain of hillocks which runs across the pass looking down on the bridge, the Prince placed two batteries of field artillery.1° These two batteries, acting together, and compris- 1 The No.1 battalion of the same corps.—Anitchkoff, Chodasiewicz. 2 Chodasiewicz. 3 The battalions of the Moscow corps.—Anitchkoff, Chodasiewicz. * Viz., the Nos. 8 and 5 batteries of the 17th brigade of artillery. 5 The four batteries of the Minsk corps, with several guns, were afterward moved into this part of the ground, as will be seen by-and-by. 6 Thirteen battalions Of 750 Cach........ccieteceeeeeeseeeceeeserecnes 9,750 One battery of position, 263 MEMN.......cccceeessereeseneeeeee eases 263 One light: battery... .....c...cc ls ccseceeeeceteneousesaeecscteeeceoseeees 210 Half of another light battery.............c.000e- grad deceete bi enulesene 105 10,328 Anitchkoff and Chodasiewicz, writing with opposite feelings and differing in many things, are strictly in accord as to the number of battalions posted in. this part of the field. ~ 1 The four battalions of the Borodino corps.—Anitchkoff, Chodasiewicz. ® The 6th battalion of Riflemen.—Jbid. ° Anitehkoff. 10 Light batteries Nos. 1 and 2 of the 16th Artillery brigade.—Jéid. 452 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. ing sixteen guns,' are here termed ‘the Causeway batteries.’ The force in this part of the field formed the centre of the line, and was under the command of Prince Gortschakoff.? The right wing of the Russian army was the force destined to confr ont, first our Light Division, and then the Guards and the Highlanders. It was posted on the slopes of the Kour- gane Hill. Here was the Great Redoubt, armed with its four- teen heavy guns ;° and Prince Mentschikoff was so keen to de- fend this part of the ground, that he gathered round the work, on the slopes of the hill, a force of no less than sixteen battal- ions of regular infantry,* besides the two battalions of sailors,° and four batteries of field artillery.6 The right of the forces on the Kourgané Hill rested on a slope to the east of the Less- er Redoubt, 7 and the left on the great road. Twelve of the battalions of regular infantry were disposed into battalion-col- umns posted at intervals and checker-wise on the flanks of the Great Redoubt. The other four battalions, drawn up in one massive column, were held as a reserve for ‘the right wing on the higher slope of the hill. Of the four ficld-batteries, one armed the Lesser Redoubt, another was on the high gr ound 1 Prince Gortschakoff says that these guns were eighteen in number. 2 The Borodino corps formed part of General Kiriakoff’s command ; but the nature of the ground and the course which the action took prevented him from having it in his actual control, and Gortschakoff, in the absence of the General commanding in chief, was the General to whom the corps would have to look for guidance. 3 Prince Gortschakoff puts the numbers of these guns at twelve. Choda- siewicz supposed that the redoubt was armed with the guns of the No. 2 bat- tery of the 16th Artillery brigade; but the calibre of the gun and the how- itzer now at Woolwich prove that the ordnance which armed the redoubt were not a part of the regular field artillery, but were brought from Sebas- topol. 4 The four battalions of the Kazan, or Prince Michael’s corps, the four bat- talions of the Vladimir corps, the four battalions of the Sousdal corps, and the four battalions of the Uglitz corps.—Anitchkoff, Chodasiewicz. ®° Chodasiewicz. Anitchkoff calls this force a half battalion only; but Chodasiewicz saw the two battalions in march with their four guns, and I ac- cept his statement. Anitchkoff says that these men were thrown forward as skirmishers in the vineyards. ° The No. 2 heavy battery of the 16th Artillery brigade, the No. 3 battery of position of the 17th brigade of Artillery, and the No. 3 battery of position, half of the No.3 light battery of the 14th Artillery brigade, and the half bat- tery belonging to the sailors.—Anitchkoff, or Chodasiewicz. The latter sup- poses that some of these batteries were posted more toward the centre with the reserve battalions. 7 It fired five guns only at the time when the Highlanders advanced ; but it is believed that the three additional guns requisite to complete the battery were in the work at the beginning of the action. It was probably the No. 2 battery of the 16th Artillery brigade referred to in the former note. Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 453 commanding and supporting the Great Redoubt, and the re- maining two were held in reserve.' General Kvetzinski com- manded the troops in this part of the field. On his extreme right, and posted at intervals along a curve drawn from his: right front to his centre rear, Prince Mentschikoff placed his cavalry—-a force Sones, 34002 lances, with three batteries of horse artiller Each of these bodies of hor se, when brought within sight of the Allies, was always massed in column. Thus, then, it was to bar the Pass and the great road, to de- fend the Kourgané Hill and to cover his right flank, that the Russian General gathered his main strength : ; and this was the part of the field destined to be assailed by our troops. That portion of the Russian force Which directly confronted the En- glish army consisted of 3400 cavalry, twenty-four battalions of infantry, and seven batteries of field-artillery, besides the four- teen heavy guns in the Great Redoubt, making together 23,400 men‘ and eighty-six guns. But besides this force, Prince Mentschikoff, at the com- mencement of the action, had posted across the great road leading down to the bridge a force of seven battalions of in- fantry,° with two batteries® of artillery. These troops he call- ed his ‘Great Reserve; and they were, in fact, his last. Yet he held them so closely in rear of the battalions facing the bridge that they might be regarded as forces actually opera- 1 Although I gather the numbers and descriptions of these forces from Rus- sian authorities, I draw much of my knowledge of the way in which they were disposed from the observation of our officers ; and it should be observed that the above statement applies to the state of the field at the time when the battle was going on, and not to the dispositions which Prince Mentschikoff may have made in the earlier part of the day. 2 The Russian official authorities confess to but 8000. The force consist- ed of the brigade of Hussars, 6th division of cavalry, and two regiments of Cossacks of the Don.— Chodasiewicz. * The No. 12 Light Horse battery, 6th brigade of Horse Artillery ( Choda- spice), and two batteries of the Cossacks of the Don.—Anitchheff: Twenty-four battalions at.750 each..............eceseeeees 18,000 Three heavy batteries at 263 each ........-..eceeceeeeeeers 789 Six light batteries at 210 artillerymen each............. 1,260. omega Sas ame = osnanie das ocipcenescennissereccente> 3,400 Men 23,449 Nine batteries at eight guns each .............ee scene eee 72 Heavy guns from Sebastopol in the Great Redoubt. a4 Guns 86 ° The four battalions of the Volhvnia corps, and three battalions, Nos. 1, 3, 4, of the Minsk corps. —Anitchkoff, Chodasiewicz. ®° The No. 4 and No. 5 light batteries of the 17th brigade of Artillery. Chodasiewicz and Anitchkoff differ. 454 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA: [Cuap. XLIV.: ting in support. Plainly, this disposition of his troops was gov- erned by a keen anxiety to defend the great road and the Kourgané Hill, for it was so ordered that, to sustain the strug- gle there, it would cost him but a few moments to bring his last reserves into action; and, in truth, he committed himself so deeply to this, his favorite part of the battle-field, that, when he afterward endeavored to shift a portion of his reserves to- ward his left, he was unable to make their strength tell. It will be seen, however, that in the course of the action the “ _ Prince took off to his left to use against the French 1e numbers : : : actually op. three of the battalions belonging to his great re- posed to the serve, and also moved in the same direction two the English re- light’ batteries, together with a few squadrons of spectively. —__ Hussars, which formed, as it seems, his. personal es- cort. So, omitting only from the calculation the change ef- fected by moving those horsemen,' it would follow that the whole force which, sooner or later, confronted the French, was | a force of 13,000 men? and thirty-six guns, and that the force which confronted the English was a force of 26,000 men,? with eighty-six guns, The forces with which the Allied commanders prepared to Forces of the assail this position were thus composed: There Halle. were some 30,000 Krench infantry and artillerymen,* with sixty-eight guns; and, added to this force, under the com- mand of Marshal St. Arnaud, was the division of 7000 Turkish infantry.6 With Lord Raglan, and present under arms, there was a force of fully 1000 cavalry, 25,000° infantry and artillery- 1 T omit these horsemen from the calculation because I do not know their number. Anitchkoff calls the body ‘‘a portion of the Hussar brigade.” The French official account says the force was one of eight squadrons. I imagine that an estimate putting it at 400 would not be far from the truth. ? Strictly, 12,998. This figure is attained by adding to the 10,328 before given, the three battalions taken from the Great Reserve (at 750 each), and the 420 artillerymen of the two light batteries which were moved during the action. * Strictly, 26,029. This figure is attained by adding to the 23,449 before detailed the four battalions of the Great Reserve which were dealt with by English alone, and by subtracting the 420 artillerymen referred to in the pre- ceding note. * Précis Historique, p. 101-102, which gives 30,204 as the total, but that is a computation of the foree embarked; and, since cholera was prevailing, . the deductions from strength between the 7th and the 20th of the month must have brought the numbers below 30,000. ‘ Jb. ° ‘The ‘‘ morning state” which I have before me is of the 18th September, and it gives as present under arms (without including the cavalry, of which there was no ‘‘state”)a total of 26,004 officers and men, and, deducting the 1600 men detached under Colonel Torrens, there remained 25,404 infantry and artillervmen. Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 455 men, and sixty pieces of field-artillery.! In all, the Allied ar- mies advancing upon the Alma comprised near 63,000 men and 128 guns. - St. Arnaud, with 37,000 men and sixty-eight guns, and effect- ually supported by the fire of nine war-steamers,? was destined to confront a Russian force of 13,000 men and thirty-six guns. The English, with 26,000 men and sixty guns, had to deal with a Russian force comprising, so to speak, the same number of men, but having with it eighty-six guns.? Therefore the French had to do with somewhat more than one third of the Russian force ; and the other two thirds of it—two thirds of it, speak- ing roughly—were left to the care of the English. St. Arnaud was to his adversaries in a proportion not very far short of three to one ;* Lord Raglan was, so to speak, equal in numbers to his adversaries, and was inferior to them in point of artillery by a difference of twenty-six guns. That part of the position which was attacked by the French The tasks un- PYesented some physical obstacles to the advance of dertaken by | the assailants, but was not very strong in a military the English Sense, and was defended by no field-works. The respectively. ground attacked by the English did not oppose ereat physical obstacles to the advance of the assailants, but it was intrenched, and, besides, was so formed by nature as to give great destructive power, and, by consequence, great strength to an enemy defending it with the resources of modern war- fare. The French were covered and supported on their right by the sea and the ships; on their left by the English army.° The English had the French on their right, but they marched with their left flank quite bare. The French advanced upon heights well surveyed from the sea. Except in an imperfect way from maps, the English knew nothing of the ground be- fore them.’ No spies or deserters had come in. 1 The official.‘‘ state” prepared for Lord Raglan gives two troops of horse artillery, and only seven batteries, but it omits the battery attached to the 4th Division. ? Official dispatch of Admiral Hamelin. * In these calculations, as in those preceding them, the change effected by moving the horsemen of the escort is left unnoticed. 4 Or, more strictly, 37 to 13. 5 This sentence, perhaps, may help to elucidate the one which goes before it by showing what is meant when soldiers speak of ‘‘ the strength of a posi- tion.” In these days mere inert physical obstacles are commonly overcome or eluded ; and the security of the defender depends not in general upon those geographical features which would make access difficult for travelers, but rather upon such a conformation of ground as will give him the means of doing harm to his assailants. 456 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. LT isa Late in the evening on the 19th, Marshal St. Arnaud, attend- ed by Colonel Trochu, rode up to the little post-house on the Bulganak in which Lord Raglan had established his quarters. He came to concert a plan of attack for the following day. From on board their ships, the French had long been busily pista : >. Conference the CUS#ged in surveying the enemy’s position, and by night before this time they had gathered a good deal of knowl- the battle be- edge of that part of the ground which lies near the naud and Lord sea-shore. They had ascertained, or found means of Beet inferring, that the stream was fordable at its mouth, and they moreover assured themselves that at the time of their last observations the West Cliff was not occupied in strength by the enemy. Upon these important discoveries Marshal St. The French Arnaud based his plan of attack. He proposed that Pian. the war-steamers, closing in as nearly as was prac- ticable, should move parallel with the land forces, and a little in advance; that under cover of their fire a portion of the French force should advance along the shore and seize the West Cliff; and that this movement should be followed up by a resolute, vigorous, and unremitting attack upon the enemy’s left flank and left front... M. St. Arnaud was at this time free The part taken from pain, and, knowing that now at last he had an ees. enemy in his front, and that a great conflict was ference. near at hand, he seemed to be fired with a more than healthy energy. Sometimes in English, sometimes in the rapid words of his own tongue, and always with vehement gesture, he labored to show how sure it was that the attack from his right centre would be fierce, unrelenting, decisive. Lord Raglan, cast in another mould, sat quiet, with governed features, restraining—or only, perhaps, postponing—his smiles, listening graciously, assenting, or not dissenting, putting for- ward no plan of his own, and, in short, eluding discussion. This method, perhaps, was instinctive with him; but, in his intercourse with the French, he followed it deliberately and upon system. He never forgot that to keep good our relations with the French was his great duty; and studying how best to avert the danger of misunderstandings, he had already made it his maxim that there was hardly any danger so great as the danger of controversy. Whether in any even small degree the English General had been brought to share the opinion ' The plan was like that of the great Frederick at Leuthen, but with the difference that the force advancing to turn the enemy’s left was to be covered and supported by fire from the shipping. Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF 'THE CRIMEA. 457 entertained of M. St. Arnaud in the French capital and in the French army, the world will never know. Of a certainty, Lord Raglan dealt as though he held it to be a clear gain to be able to avoid intrusting the Marshal with a knowledge of what our army would be likely to undertake; but my belief is. that this, hisseemingly guarded method, was not so much based upon any thing which may have come to his ears from Paris or from the French camp, but rather upon his desire to ward off controversy, and. upon his true native English dislike of all premature planning. He was so sure of his troops, and so con- scious of his own power to act swiftly when the occasion might come, that, although he was now within half a march of the enemy’s assembled forces, he did not at all long to ruffle his mind with projects—with projects for the attack of a position not hitherto reconnoitred. M. St. Arnaud’s plan for turning the enemy’s left was to be executed by the French army, with the aid of the shipping; and the part which the English land forces should take in the ‘action was a matter distinct. But for this, also, the French commander and his military counselors had carefully taken thought. To illustrate the operations which he proposed, M. St. Ar- French plan naud produced a rough map—a map slightly and for the opera- rapidly drawn, yet traced with that spirit and sig- English army. nificance which are characteristic of French military sketches. In this sketch Bosquet’s Division and the Turkish troops were represented as effecting the turning movement on the enemy’s left, and the Ist and 3rd French Divisions were shown to be-so deployed and so placed, that in the order of attack assigned to them by the sketch, they would confront al- most the whole face of the enemy’s position, leaving only one or two battalions to be dealt with in front by the English troops.!. So, to find some occupation for the English, the ‘sketch represented our army as filing away obliquely, in order to turn the enemy’s right flank. Of course this plan rested entirely upon the assumption that the enemy’s front would be fully occupied (as represented in the sketch) by the French attack. Lord Raglan’s experience, or instinct, told him that no such plan as this could go for much until the assailing forces should come to measure their line with that of the enemy. So, with- out either combating or accepting the suggestion addressed to him, he simply assured the Marshal that he might rely upon * See the fac-simile of this plan, taken from the ‘ Pieces Officielles’ publish- ed by the French Government. ~ Vou. 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XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 459 the vigorous co-operation of the British army. The French plan seems to have made little impression on Lord Raglan’s mind. He foresaw, perhaps, that the ingenuity of the even-: ing would be brought to nothingness by the teachings of the morrow. Whilst the French Marshal was striving, in his vehement St. Arnaud’s Way, to convey an idea of the vigor with which he demeanor. would conduct the attack, his appointed adviser, Colonel Trochu, whose mission it was to moderate the fire of his chief, thought it right to interpose with a question of a practical kind—a question as to the time and place for reliev- ing the French soldiers of their packs. Instantly, if so one may speak, St. Arnaud reared, for Trochu had touched him with the curb; and in the presence, too, of Lord Raglan. He angrily suppressed the question of the packs as one of mere detail. Yet, on the afternoon of the morrow, that question of the packs was destined to recur, and to govern the movements of the whole French army. Before the Marshal and Lord Raglan parted, it was agreed that Bosquet with his Division should advance at five o’clock in the morning, and that, two hours later, the rest of the Al- lied forces should begin their march upon the enemy’s position. This determination as to the time for marching was almost Result ofthe the only fruit which St. Arnaud drew from the in- conference. terview. He had thought to engage his colleague in the plan contrived for the guidance of the English at the French head-quarters ; but when he came to be in the presence of the English General, he unconsciously yielded, as other men commonly did, to the spell of his personal ascendency ; and al- though he showed the sketch, and may have uttered, perhaps, a few hurried words to explain its meaning, he did not effect- ually bring himself to proffer advice to Lord Raglan. Either he altogether omitted the intended counsel, or else he so slur- red it over as not to win for it any grave notice from even the most careful of listeners. ' When the conference ended, Lord Raglan came out with his guests to the door of the hut. M.St. Arnaud mounted his horse, and was elate. But he was elate, not with the knowl- edge of having achieved a purpose, but rather, it would seem, from the sense of that singular comfort which anxious men al- ways derived from the mere power of Lord Raglan’s presence. Perhaps, when the Marshal reached his quarters, he began to see that, after all, there was a gulf between him and the En- ‘glish General, and that, notwithstanding his energy and bold- ness, he had been unaccountably hindered from passing it. 460 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap, XLIV, Vii It had been determined that the troops should get under arms without bugle or drum. Silently, therefore, on the morning of the 20th of September, March of the 1854, the men of the Allied armies rose from their Allies. bivouac, and made ready for the march which was to bring them into the presence of the enemy. It was so early as half past five that Bosquet, with the 2nd French Division and the Turkish battalions, began his march along the coast ; and at seven o’clock the main body of the French army was under arms, and ready to march. But the position taken up by the English for the defense of the Allied armies on the Bulganak had imposed upon Lord Raglan the necessity of showing a front toward the east; and for the Divisions so em- Causes delay- ployed a long and toilsome evolution was needed ing the march in order to bring them into the general order of army. march.! At that time, too, there was a broad in- terval between our extreme right and Prince Napoleon’s Di- vision. Moreover, the line of the coast which the armies were to follow trended away toward the south west, forming an ob- tuse angle with the course of the stream (the Bulganak) on which the Allies had bivouacked ; and in the movement requi- site for adjusting the front of the Allied forces to the direction of the shore, the English marching upon the exterior are had to undergo more labor than those who moved near the pivot on which the variation of front was effected.? This was not all. The baggage-train accompanying our forces, though small in comparison with the incumbrances us- ually attending an army in the field, was large as compared with that of the French, and Lord Raglan (whose favorite anx- iety was concerning his reserve ammunition) refused to allow the convoy to be stripped of protection. The oblique move- ment of the troops toward their right was tending to leave the convoy uncovered ; and, in order that it should be again in- folded as in the previous day’s order of march, it was neces- sary to move it far toward our right. Lord Raglan insisted that this should be done; so on the morning of the long-ex- pected battle, and with the enemy in front, St. Arnaud and the 1 Those divisions had been posted nearly at right angles to the front line, and the segment in which the troops would have to wheel in order to get into the line of march would be nearly 90 degrees. ‘ 2 Several military Reports and documents explain this, but the plan pre- pared by the French Government shows with admirable clearness the nature of the evolution which the English army had to perform. See the plan. Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 461 whole French army, and the English army too, chafed bitterly at the delay they had to endure whilst strings of bullock-carts were slowly dragged westward into the true line of march. Besides, the enemy’s cavalry gave the English no leave to ex- amine the ground toward which they were marching; and whilst the French, being next to the sea, could make straight for the cliff already reconnoitred from the ships, the English army advanced without knowledge of that part of the position which it was to confront, and was twice compelled to make la- borious changes in the direction of its march. Therefore, for much of the delay which occurred there were good reasons ; but not for all. Sir George Brown had been directed on the night of the 19th to advance on the morrow at seven o’clock, and he imagined—it is strange if he, of all men, with his great knowledge of such things, was wrong upon a point of military usage—he imagined that the order would be repeated in the morning, and he waited accordingly. Also the English troops moved slowly. Time was growing to be of high worth, and, from causes which justified a good deal—though not quite all —of their delay, the English at this time were behindhand. In order that the operations of the day might be adjusted to the time which the English army required, orders were sent forward suspending for a while the advance of Bosquet’s col- umn; and at nine o’clock the main body of the French army came to a halt, and cooked their coffee. Whilst they rested, our troops, by moving obliquely toward their right, Were slow- ly overcoming the distance which divided them from the French left, and were, at the same time, working their way through the angle ‘which measured their divergence from the line of march. Of those composing an armed force there are few who un- derstand the -hinderances which block its progress; and natu- rally the French were vexed by the delay which seemed to be caused by the slowness of the English army. They, however, conformed with great care to the tardiness of our advance, and even allowed our army to gain upon them ; for, when the Allies reached the ground which sloped down toward the Alma, the heads of our leading columns were abreast of the French skirm- ishers.! Meanwhile the Allied steamers had been seeking opportuni- ties for bringing their guns to bear, and at 20 minutes past 10 they opened fire.?, One or two of their missiles, though at a ' Lord Raglan was amongst those who observed this fact, and he stated it in a letter which is before me. * Private MS. by Mr. Romaine, the Judge Advocate. J may here say gen- * 462 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA: = [Cmar. XLIV, very long range, reached some of those Russian battalions which stood posted in rear of the Telegraph. At half past 11 o’clock the English right had got into direct contact with the French left, and our Light and 2nd Divisions were marching in the same alignment as the 1st and 3rd Di- visions of our French Allies. Vv. Twice again there were protracted halts. The last of these The last halt took place at a distance of about a mile and a half Notes the rat. from the banks of the Alma. From the spot where tle. the forces were halted the ground sloped gently down to the river’s edge; and though some men lay prostrate under the burning sun, with little thought except of fatigue, there were others who keenly scanned the ground before them, well knowing that now at last the long-expected conflict would begin. They could make out the course of the river from the dark belt of gardens and vineyards which marked its banks, and men with good eyes could descry a slight seam running across a rising ground beyond the river, and could see, too, some dark squares or oblongs, encroaching like small patches of culture upon the broad downs. The seam was the Great Redoubt. The square-looking marks that stained the green sides of the hills were an army in order of battle. That 20th of September, on the Alma, was like some rcmem- bered day of June in England, for the sun was unclouded, and the soft breeze of the morning had lulled to a breath at noon- tide, and was creeping faintly along the hills. It was then that in the Allied armies there occurred a singular pause of sound —a pause so general as to have been observed and remember- ed by many in remote parts of the ground, and so marked that its interruption by the mere neighing of an angry horse seized the attention of thousands; and although this strange silence was the mere result of weariness and chance, it seemed to car- erally, to avoid repeated notes, that, whenever I speak of an event as hap- pening at a time stated with exactness, I do so on the authority of Romaine. He was a man so gifted with long sight, as well as with power of estimating numbers, and, though a civilian, was so thoroughly apt for-military business, that Lord Raglan used, at a later time, to call him ‘the eye of the army.’ During the action he rode an old hunter, steady enough to allow him to write without quitting his saddle; so, whenever he observed a change in the prog- ress of the action, he took out his watch and pocket-book and made at the minute the memoranda on which I rely. I am therefore very certain that the spaces of time intervening between any two events spoken of in this pre- cise way were exactly those which I give; but I have reason to think that the watches of men in the different camps had been differently set. e Cnap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA.’ 463 ry 4 meaning, for it was now that, after near forty years of peace, the great nations of Kurope were once more meeting for battle. Even after the sailing of the expedition the troops had been followed by reports that the war, after all, would be stayed; and the long, frequent halts, and the quiet of the armies on the sunny slope, seemed to harmonize with the idea of disbelief in the coming of the long-promised fight. But in the midst of this repose Sir Colin Campbell said to one of his officer s, ‘ This ‘will be a good time for the men to get loose half their car- ‘tridges ;! and when the command traveled on along the ranks of the Highlanders, it lit up the faces of the men one after an- other, assuring them that now at length, and after long ex- pectance, they indeed would go into action. They began obeying the order. And with beaming joy, for they came of a warlike race. Yet not without emotion of a graver kind. They were young soldiers, new to battle. VE Lord Raglan now crossed the front of Prince Napoleon’s Di- Meeting be- Vision in order to meet Marshal St. Arnaud, whose teen 7, ~— guidon was seen coming toward our lines. The Lord Raglan. two commanders rode forward together, inclining toward their left. No one was with them. They rode on till they came to one of those mounds or tumuli, of which there were many on the steppe. From that spot they scrutinized the enemy’s position with their field-glasses. ' At this interview no change was made in that portion of the plan which determined that the French should turn the enemy’s left; but the part to be taken by the English was still in question, and St. Arnaud threw out or reviv ed the idea of a flank movement by the English on the enemy’s right.? Lord Raglan, however, now gazed upon the real ground which the French counselors of the night before had striven to scan in their imaginations, and, having an eye for country, he must have begun to see the truth. He must have begun to see that the. French, hugging the sea-shore, and pouring two fifths of their whole force against the undefended part of the opposite heights, would not only fail to confront the whole Russian 1 The cartridges are delivered to each man in a packet, and, to avoid loss of time in presence of the enemy, a sufficient number should be ‘shaken ‘loose’ before the troops are brought into action. _. # They had met before at. about “half past nine, but the Russian cavalry had not then quitted the heights, and they were obliged to postpone their recon- naissance. 3 Inferred from what follows, 464 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. army in the way promised by the sketch, but would, in reality, contront only a small portion of it, leaving to the English the duty of facing the enemy along two thirds of their whole front. Of a certainty he did not entertain for a moment the idea of making a flank attack, but it was not according to his nature to explain to men their errors, and it seems he spoke so little that St. Arnaud did not yet know what the English General ‘would do ;! but presently a general officer rode up and joined the two chiefs. Then the Marshal, closing his telescope, turn- ed to Lord Raglan and asked him ‘ whether he would turn the ‘position or attack it in front ?? Lord Raglan’s answer was to the effect ‘that, with such a body of cavalry as the enemy ‘had in the plain, he would not attempt to turn the position.” Whilst the chiefs were still side by side, it being now one o’clock, the advance sounded along the lines, and the French and the English armies moved forward close abreast. The Marshal then rode off toward his centre. VII. The orders for the advance were sent forward to Bosquet, Bosquet's ad- and, as soon as they reached him, he threw out vance. skirmishers and moved forward in two columns. — He divides his His right column was the brigade commanded by force. General Bouat. The left column was Autemarre’s brigade. Each brigade, massed in column,’ was followed by its share of the artillery belonging to the Division; and Bouat’s brigade was followed by the whole of the Turkish Division ex- cept two battalions. Toward Bosquet’s left, but far in his rear, there moved forward the Ist Division under Canrobert, and the 3rd Division under Prince Napoleon. These two di- visions advanced in the same alignment. The 4th Division, under General Forey, marched in rear of the 1st and 38rd Di- visions, and two Turkish battalions escorted the baggage.* The formation of Canrobert’s and Prince Napoleon’s Divis- Disposition of 1ONS was upon two lines. The first brigade of each here division was in front and deployed,® and the second army. brigade of each division followed the first brigade, and was massed in column.® 1 Inferred from what follows. * This disposes of the notion which seems to have been really entertained by many of the French—the notion that Lord Raglan stood engaged to turn the enemy’s right. 3 Regiments in column at section distance. * Précis Historique mainly. ° Not deployed into ‘line,’ according to the, English plan, but merely brought into a formation, which, leaving each battalion massed, places them ail in the same alignment. ° Regiments in column at section distance. Guar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 465 The 4th French Division marched in the same order as the Ist and 8rd Divisions, except that its leading brigade was not deployed. The artillery of each division was infolded between its two brigades. On the immediate left of Prince Napoleon Sir De Lacy Of the English EXvans marched, with the troops of his Division anf massed in battalion columns,' and was followed by the 3rd Division in column. The batteries belonging to each of these divisions marched on its right or inner flank. Immediately on Sir De Lacy’s left the Light Division, pre- ceded by Norcott with a wing of the 2nd Rifle battalion in skirmishing order, moved forward, under Sir George Brown. The Division was massed in column,? and had the front and left flanks covered by rifiemen in extended order. It was sup- ported by the Ist Division, under. the Duke of Cambridge, and that, in turn, was followed by the 4th Division,’ under Sir George Cathcart. Sir George Cathcart, however, in accord- ance with a suggestion made by himself, was authorized to take ground to his left, and place his force in échelon to the Ist Division.! The three great infantry columns thus composing the left wing of our army were covered in front, left flank, and rear by riflemen, in extended order, and by the cavalry. The bat- tery belonging to each division marched on its right or inner flank. But soon Major Norcott with his riflemen got on so far in advance as to provoke a fire from the Russian skirmishers, then swarming in the vineyards below, and some rifle balls. shot from that quarter came dropping into the ground near the column formed by the Light Division. Almost at the same moment the artillerymen on the Russian heights began to try their range; and, although the air was so clear that our men could see and watch the flight of the cannon balls, thrown at so long a range, it seemed prudent for our leading divisions to go intoline. Those divisions, therefore, were halted, and their deployment immediately began. ‘In continuous battalion columns right in front at battalion distance. Sir De Lacy’s touched Prince Napoleon’s Division, and it was thought right to assimilate its order of march to that adopted by the Prince. 2 In double column of companies from the centre. 3 Minus the 63rd and two companies of the 46th, left, under the command . of General Torrens, at the place of disembarkation. The force actually with Sir George during the action consisted of the 20th, 21st, and 68th Regiments, the Ist battalion of Rifles, and Townsend’s battery. 4 Sir George Cathcart marched with the head of his column (at quarter distance right in front) in line with the rear companies of the Ist Division, U2 466 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV In deploying, Sir De Lacy Evans, being pressed upon by The leading Prince Napoleon’s Division on his right, was com- Divisions of —_ pelled to take ground to his left, and to encroach e English : army deploy upon a part of the space which Sir George Brown ape tine. had expected to occupy with his Division. The deployment of the Light Division was effected by each The Light Di- regiment with beautiful precision ;* but, unhappily, ie rizht the division was not on its right ground. ground. Sir George Brown was near-sighted, and had not accustomed himself to repair the defect, as some commanders have done, by a constant and well-practiced use of glasses ; and, on the other hand, the very fire and energy of his nature, ” and his almost violent sense of duty, prevented him from get- ting into the habit of trusting to the eyes of other men. For hours in the early morning the division had been wearied by having to incline toward its right. At half past eleven the effort was reversed, and the division then labored to take ground to its left. But, in that last direction, it had not taken ground enough. Lord Raglan, with his quick eye, had seen the fault, and sent an order? to have it corrected. Not con- tent with this, he soon after rode up to the Division, and, fail- ing to see Sir George Brown at the moment, told Codrington that the Division must take more ground to the left. Then, unhappily, when he had uttered the very words which would have thrown the British army into its true array, and averted much evil, Lord Raglan was checked by his ruling foible. He had already sent the order to the divisional general, and he could not bear to pain or embarrass him by pressing the exe- eution of it upon one of his brigadiers. So he recalled his wholesome words ;3 the Division failed to take ground enough to the left; and, when the deployment was complete, Sir George Brown had the grief of seeing his right regiment (the 7th Fusileers) overlapped by the left—nay, even by the centre —of Pennefather’s brigade. The fault was not retrieved. It was fruitful of confusion. The artillery attached to our two leading divisions was now also drawn up in line; and Sir George Brown reckoned that he alone showed a front extending to nearly a mile. " The deployment was upon the two centre companies of the division. Whilst the movement was proceeding, one man, a sergeant, was killed by a rifle ball. ‘This was probably the first death in our lines. * Colonel Lysons, I think, carried it. * I derive my knowledge from an officer who heard Lord Raglan’s words. ~ * When the deployment took place, the 7th Fusileers was in rear of the 95th Regiment, and it afterward, as will be seen, marched through it. Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA: 467 At the same time the Duke of Cambridge, at Sir George Brown’s request, altered the formation of his Division by disse tributing it into a line of columns.! These changes having been completed, the English army re- asc sumed its march ; and, the leading divisions coming continued. more closely within range, and being a little galled by the enemy’s fire, Sir George Brown halted, and tried the experiment of wheeling into open column. Afterward, how- ever, he returned to his line formation, and in that order march- ed forward.? VIUIl. So now the whole Allied armies, hiding nothing of their splendor and their strength, descended slowly into the valley ; and the ground on the right bank of the river is so even and so gentle in its slope, and, on the left bank, so commanding, that every man of the inv aders could be seen from the Oppo- site heights. The Russian officers had been accustomed all their days to Spectacle pre- Military inspections and vast reviews; but they sented to the. now saw before them that very thing for the con- - Russians by the advance of fronting of which their lives had been one long re- the Allies. hearsal. They saw a European army coming down in order of battle—an army arrayed in no spirit of mimicry, and not at all meant to aid their endless study of tactics, but honestly marching against them, with a mind to carry their heights and take their lives; and, gazing with keen and crit- ical eyes upon this array of strangers, whose homes were in lands far away, they looked upon a phenomenon which raised their curiosity and their wonder, and which promised, too, to throw some new light on a notion ‘they had lately been for ming. The whole anxiety of Prince Mentschikoff had been for his right. If he could hold the Main Pass, and scare the Allies from all endeavor to turn his right flank, he believed himself safe; and it had been clear long ago that his conflict in this part ‘of the field would be with the English... It was therefore the more useful to try to spread amongst the Russian.troops an idea that the English, all powerful at’ sea, were thoroughly worthless as soldiers. The working of this little cheat had been hitherto aided by 1¢ A line of contiguous quarter-distance columns.’ * My knowledge respecting the movements and evolutions of our infantry divisions is derived mainly from original MSS. in my possession, written by Sir George Brown, the Duke of Cambridge, Sir De Lacy Evans, and Sir George Cathcart. 468 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. Notion whicn Circumstance. With the force under Mentschikoff the Russian there were two battalions of Russian seamen; and roaiers hid jo these men, partly from their clumsiness in manceu- entertain of the vring, partly from their sailor-like whims, and part- Magiishammy. Jy no doubt, from the mere fact of their being a small and peculiar minority, had become a subject of merri- ment to the soldiery of the regular land forces. The Russian soldiery, therefore, were prepared to receive the impression that the red-coats now discernible in the distance were battal- ions of sailors, men of no more use in a land engagement than their own derided seamen. This idea had fastened so well upon the mind of the Russian army that, before the battle be- gan, 1t was shared by some of the more illiterate of the officers, and even, it was said, in one instance, by a general of division. But the sight now watched with keen eyes from the enemy’s Surprise atthe Heights was one which seemed to have some bear- sight ofthe ing upon the rumor that the English were power- ergish amy. Jess in a land engagement. The French and the Turks were in the deep, crowded masses which every soldier of the Czar had been accustomed to look upon as the forma- tions needed for battle, but, to the astonishment of the Russian officers, the leading divisious of the men in red were massed in no sort of column, and were clearly seen coming on in a slen- der line—a line only two deep, yet extending far from east to west. They could not believe that with so fine a thread as that the English General was really intending to confront their massive columns. Yet the English troops had no idea that their formation was so singular as to be strange in the eyes of military Europe. Wars long passed had taught them that they were gifted with the power of fighting in this order, and it was as a matter of course that, upon coming within range, they had gone at once into line. _ Meanwhile the war-steamers—eight French and one English Fire from the —-had pushed forward along the shore in single . shipping. file, moving somewhat in advance of the land forces ; and now, at twenty-five minutes past one o’clock, the leading vessels opened fire against the four guns at the village of Ulu- kul Akles, and again ‘tried the skill of their gunners upon the distant masses of infantry which occupied the Telegraph Height and the low flat ledge at its base. Convinced that his chief Movemnt had been guilty of a grievous error in placing the made without Taroutine and the militia battalions on this low, nar- ‘Taroutine and TOW ledge, General Kiriakoff, who commanded in 1 Chodasiewicz. Cuap.XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 469 the ‘Militia this part of the field, had tried by indirect means to battalions. procure a change of plan, but. had not ventured to say any thing on the subject to Prince Mentschikoff himself. It is plain, however, that Kiriakoff’s opinion getting abroad was adopted by the officers of these two corps; for first the militia battalions, and then the battalions of the Taroutine corps, Without orders, and without having been assailed or touched (except perhaps by a chance shot or two at very long range from the shipping), began a retrograde movement, and slowly ascended the steep hill till they gained a more come manding position at no great distance from the Telegraph. No effort was abe to check this seemingly spontaneous move- ment." IX. At half past one o’clock a round shot from the opposite Half past one heights came ripping the ground near Lord Rag- o'clock. Can- Jan, and it marked the opening of the battle be- nonade direct- 5 . ed against the tween the contending land forces, for in the next English line. instant the enemy began to direct.a steady cannon- ade against the English line. At first no one fell, but present- ently an artilleryman riding in front of his gun bent forward his head, handled the reins with a convulsive grasp, and then, uttering a loud, inarticulate sound, fell dead. The peace of Europe had been so long, that to many men the sight was a new one; and of the young soldiers who stood near, some im- agined that their comrade had fallen down in a sudden fit; for they hardly yet knew that for the most part in modern war fare death comes as though sent by blind chance, no one knows from whence or from whom. Since the enemy’s artillery fire had now become brisk, our Men ofour leading infantry divisions were halted, and the men leading divis: ordered to lie down. Soon afterward it was found ions ordered to ap ate pee aera’ that the Ist Division had also come within range, vision deploy- and it was then forthwith thrown into line. In edintoline. preparing for this manceuvre, the Duke of Cam- bridge took care that ground should not be wanting. Both on his right and on his left he took more ground than had been occupied by the division which marched in his front. Whilst the Light Division in his front was jammed in and en- tangled with the 2nd Division, the Duke had the happiness of seeing his Guards and Highlanders s well extended, and compe- ‘ General Kiriakoff’s statement, confirmed by Romaine, who observed and noted the movement. ‘The General thought the change of position requi- site, but he admits that a retrograde movement of this kind just before the commencement of the battle, was a grave evil. 470 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV, tent to act along the whole length of that superb line. The effect of this deployment was, that the extreme right of the Duke’s line became a force operating in support to the 2nd Division, and that a part of his Highland Brigade, reaching much farther eastward than the extreme left of the Light Di- vision, became in that part of the field the true front of the British line. When this mancuvre was completed, the men of the Ist Division lay down. Observing the extent of ground occupied by the 1st Divi- Sir Richara S101, Lord Raglan at once saw that the 3rd Division eee oe would not have room to manceuyre in the same port the alignment with the Duke of Cambridge. He there- ee fore ordered Sir Richard England to support the Guards. It was this or some other order sent nearly at the same time which, for some reason, good or fanciful, Lord Rag- Jan chose to have carried quietly. The directions had been given, and the aid-de-camp was whirling round his charger in order to take a swift flight with the message, when Lord Raglan stopped him and said, ‘Go quietly; don’t gallop.’ He seemed to like that whenever the enemy pointed a field-glass toward the English head-quarters, he should look upon a scene of tran- quillity and leisure. Our batteries tried their range, but without effect, and they ceased to fire, reserving their strength for the time when they would come to close quarters. The batteries on the Telegraph Height did not yet open fire upon the French columns. Lord Raglan conceived that the operation determined upon by the Fr ench ought to take full effect before he engaged the English army in an assault upon the enemy’s heights; and per- haps, if the whole body of the Allies had been one people, un- der the command of one general, their advance would have been effected in échelon, and the left would have been kept out of fire whilst the effort on the right was in progress; but the pride of nations must sometimes be suffered to deflect the course of armies; and although there was no military value in any of the ground north of the vineyards, Lord Raglan, it seems, did not like to withhold his mfantry whilst the French were executing their forward movement. Since our soldiers lay facing downwards upon the smooth slope which looked against the enemy’s batteries, they were seen, every man of them, from head to foot by the Russian artiller ymen, and they drew upon themselves a studious fire from thirty guns. Thus the first trial our men underwent in the action was a trial of passive, enduring courage. They had to lie down, with Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 471 Fireunder- no duty to perform, except the duty of being mo- eeuwhiktiy. tionless, and they made it their pastime to watch the ing down. play of the engines worked for their destruction— to watch the jet of smoke—the flash—the short, momentous interval—and then, happily and most often, the twang through the air above and the welcome sound of the shot at length im- bedded in earth. But sometimes, without knowing whence it came, a man would suddenly know the feel of a rushing blast sat a mighty shock, and would find himself bespattered with the brains of the comrade who had just been speaking to him. When this happened, two of the comrades of the man killed would get up and gently lift the quivering body, carry it afew - paces in rear of the line, then quietly return to their ranks, and again liedown.t This sort of trial is well borne by our troops. They are so framed by nature that, if only they knew clearly what they have to do, or to leave undone, they are pleased and animated, nay, even soothed by a little danger. For, besides that they love strife, they love the arbitr ament of chance, and a game where death is the forfeit has a str ange, gloomy charm for them. Among the guns ranged on the opposite heights to take his life, a man would single out his favorite, and make it feminine for the sake of endearment. There was hardly, per- haps, a gun in the Great Redoubt which failed to be called by some corrupt variation of ‘ Mary’ or ‘ Elizabeth.’ It was plain that our infantry could be in a kindly humor whilst lying down under fire. They did not, perhaps, like the duty so well as an animating charge with the bayonet; but if they were to be judged from their demeanor, they preferred it to a church pa- rade.. They were in their most gracious temper. Often, when an officer rode past them, they would give him the fruit of their steady and protracted view, and advise him to move a little on one side or the other to avoid a coming shot. And this the men would do, though they themselves, however well their quickened sioht might warn them of the coming shot, lay riv- eted to the earth by duty. X. The level posture of our infantry threw into strong promi- nence the figure of every mounted man who rode along their lines, but the group of horsemen composing or following the -head-quarter staff was so marked by the white flowing plumes of the officers, that at a distance of a mile and a half it was a conspicuous object to the naked eye; and a Russian artillery- ’ Casualties of this sort were going on here and there along our line, but the exact incident described in the text was observed in the 30th Regiment. 472 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV. man at the Causeway batteries could make out with a common field-glass that, of the two or three officers generally riding abreast at the head of the plumed cavalcade, there was one, in a dark blue frock, whose right arm hung ending in an empty Cannonade di- sleeve. In truth, Lord Raglan at this time was so Lariiacia Often standing still, or else was riding along the line and his staff. of our prostrate infantry at so leisurely a pace, that he and the group about him could not fail to become a mark for the Russian artillery. The enemy did not, as it seemed, be- gin this effort malignantly, and at first, per haps, he had no far- ther thought than that of subjecting the English head-quarters to an ordinary cannonade, and forcing them to choose a more retired ground for their surveys. Still, as might be expected, the Russian artillerymen could not easily brook the conclusion that, whilst the English Gen- eral chose to remain under their eyes, and within range, it was beyond the power of their skill to bend him from his path, or even, as it seemed, to break the thread of his conversation ; so at length, growing earnest, they opened fire upon the group from a great number of guns; but in vain, for none of the staff at this time were struck. Failing with round shot, the enemy tried shells—shells with the fuses so cut as to burst them in the air a little above the white plumes. This method was tried so industriously and with so much skill, that a few feet over the heads of Lord Raglan and those around him there was kept | up for a long time an almost constant bursting of shells. Some- times the missiles came singly, and sometimes in so -thick a flight that several would be exploding nearly at the same moment, or briskly one after the other, right and left, and all — around. The fragments of the shells, when they burst, tore their shrill way down from above, harshly sawing the air; and when the novice heard the rush of the shattered missile along his right ear, and then along his left, and imagined that he felt the wind of another fragment of shell come rasping the cloth on his shoulders almost at the same moment, it seemed to him hardly possible that the iron shower would leave one man of the group untouched. But the truth is that a fragment of shell rending the air with its jagged edges may sound much nearer than it is. None of the staff were wounded at this time. Some of the suite were half vexed and half angry, for they knew the value of their chief’s life, and they conceived that he was affronting great risk without due motive, and from mere inattention to danger. The storm of missiles generally fell. most thickly when Lord Raglan happened to be riding near Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 473 the great road; for the enemy, having got the range of that point, always labored to make the bursting of his shells coincide with the moment when our head-quarters were passing. This soon came to be understood, and thenceforth, when the head- quarter group were going to cross the Causeway, they rode at it briskly as at a leap, and spanned it with one or two strides, thus leaving the prepared storm of shells to burst a little be- hind them. This effort of the Russian artillery against Lord Raglan and the group surrounding him lasted a long time, and was carried on upon a scale better proportioned to the destruc- tion of a whole division than to the mere object of warning off a score of horsemen. If the fire thus expended had been brought to bear on Pennefather’s brigade, it might have maim- ed the English line in a vital part of the field. XI. ; The time was now come when the Allies could measure The Allies their front with the enemy’s position. It will be could now er Pemembered that the plan’ proposed to Lord Rag- front with that lan the night before by Marshal St. Arnaud rested ofthe enemy. pon the assumption that the whole of the enemy’s forces except two or three battalions would be confronted by the French army, and that therefore the only opportunity for important service which the English army could find would be that of making a great flank movement against the enemy’s right; but it had long become plain that only a portion of the Russian army would be met by the French, and that in pro- viding a front to show against the main body of the Russian The bearing army there remained to the English an ample field which thisad- of duty; and, now that the invading armies had hemes ~=come within cannon-shot range, it began to be seen had upon the : i plan which the that the entire front presented by the Ist and 3rd French had mage to Lie : ° “hes proposedtothe French Divisions, and by our 2nd and Light Divi- rage sions, would be only just commensurate with the length of the position which the Russian commander was oc: cupying. Russian Army. 7 was wea | | English Army. French Army. 1 See the fac-siimile. 474 ' INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [CHap. XLIV. Of course, therefore, if Lord Raglan had not already rejected the French plan of a flank attack by our forces, it would have now fallen to the ground. It had never made any impression on his mind.! The Allies were now so close to the enemy’s position that The groma the general of each of the five leading divisions which each of eould form a judgment as to the particular sphere the leading di- : ; 3 A visions had to. Of action which awaited him. To Bosquet the ad- wi vance against the West Cliff had long ago been as- signed. Canrobert faced toward the White Homestead and those spurs of the Telegraph Height which lie toward the west. Prince Napoleon confronted the centre and the eastern steeps of the Telegraph Height. Sir De Lacy Evans, with the 2nd Division, faced the village of Bourliouk; and it seemed at this time that his left would not reach farther up the river’s bank than the bridge, for Sir George Brown had been reckoning that his first or right brigade would be charged with the duty of attacking the enemy’s position across the great road, and that it would be his left, or Buller’s brigade, which would assail the Great Redoubt. | The generals of the five leading divisions were thus direct- ing their forces, and already the swarms of skirmishers thrown forward by the French, and the thinner chains of riflemen in advance of our divisions, were drawing close to the vineyards, and beginning their combats with the enemy’s sharpshooters ; but then, and with a suddenness so strange as to suggest the The village of idea of some pyrotechnic contrivance, the whole Ahie bebe village of Bourliouk, except the straggling houses enemy. which skirted it toward the east, became wrapped: in tall flames.2- No man could live in that conflagration; and 1 T infer this from the fact that those with whom Lord Raglan was thor- oughly confidential in such matters never heard him speak of it. Lord Rag- lan, as we saw, distinctly and finally rejected the plan at the close of his in- terview with St. Arnaud. It became a plan simply preposterous as soon Aas it was apparent that St. Arnaud would not confront any part of the Russian army except their left wing; for to make two flank movements, one against the enemy’s left, and the other against his right, and to do this without having any force wherewith to confront the enemy’s centre, would have been a plan requiring no comment to show its absurdity. The French accounts, whether official or quasi-official, have always persisted in saying that Lord Raglan had engaged, and afterward failed to make, a movement on the enemy’s right flank. ‘This is the only reason why the matter requires any thing like careful elucidation. ? The great number of haystacks, and the peculiar nature of the hay, were the causes which made the conflagration so instantaneously complete. The hay of that country is full of stiff, prickly stems, which resist compression, and so make ample room for air. Car. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA: 448 the result was that in one minute a third of the ground on which the English army had meant to operate was, as it were, blotted out of the field. . If this firing of the village took place under the orders of the Russian commander, it was the most sagacious of all the steps he took that day, for his gravest source of care was the want of troops suflicing for the whole extent of the position at which he grasped, and therefore an operation which took away a large part of the battle-field was SOULE of great advantage to him. Our infantry were im- which this - mediately thrown into trouble. The Light Division, apa tens as we saw, did not take ground enough on the left, the, Hatish and the firing of the village now cut short our front . on the right. Sir De Lacy Evans, thus robbed of space, was obliged to keep his second brigade in rear of the first, and even then he continued to overlap the right of the Light Division. The smoke from the burning village was depressed, and gently turned toward the bridge by the faint breeze which came from the sea. There, for hours, in a long fallen pillar of cloud, it lay singularly firm and compact, obscuring the view - of those who were near it, but not at all staining the air in any other part of the field. XII. The operations of the great column intrusted to General General Bos. Bosquet now began to take effect. Bosquet was a quet. man in the prime of life. Ten years of struggle and frequent. enterprise in Algeria had carried him from the rank of a lieutenant to the rank of a general officer;! and he was charged on this day not only with the command of his own— the 2nd—Division, but with the command of the troops which formed the Turkish Contingent. The whole column under his orders numbered about 14,000 men. The Arabs and Kabyles of Algeria, though men of a fierce and brave nature and prone to petty strife, are so wanting in the power of making war with effect, that, as far as concerns the art of fighting, they can scarcely be said to have given much schooling to the bold and skillful soldiery of France; but the deserts, the broad solitudes, and the great mountain range of Northern Atrica, have inured the French army to some of those military toils which are next im worth to the business of the actual combat; and for Bos- quet, the hero of many a struggle in the passes of the Middle and the Lesser Atlas, it was no new problem to have to cross 1 A brigadier; and now, at the time of the Crimean war, he was a generul of division. 476 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. — [Cnar. XLIV. a stream and carry a body of troops to the summit of a hill with a steep-looking face. In the morning he had ridden forward, escorted by a few Spahis, to reconnoitre the ground with his own eyes, and thus, and by the aid of the careful surveys effected by the naval men, he was able to assure himself, not only that the river could be passed at its bar, but that troops there crossing it would be likely to find the means of getting round and ascend- ing to the summit of the cliff from the southwest. Hxamining also the face of the cliff farther inland, he saw that the broken ground opposite to the village of Almatamack could be easily - ascended by foot soldiers; and he also, no doubt, perceived that the road leading up from the village (unless it should prove to have been effectually cut or guarded by the enemy), would give him a passage for his artillery. Upon these observations His plan of | Bosquet based his plan. He resolved.to march in operations. = person with Autemarre’s brigade upon the village of Almatamack, there to cross the river, and afterward en-. deavor to ascend the plateau at the point where the road from Almatamack goes up between the West Cliff and the Telegraph Height; but he ordered General Bouat, with his brigade, and with the Turkish Contingent, to incline far away toward his right, to try to pass the river at its bar, and then to find the best means he could for getting his troops up the cliff. The two bodies of troops under Bosquet’s command began Advance of their diverging movement at the same time; and dor Bauuet' before two o’clock the swarms of skirmishers which person. covered the front of the columns were pushing their way through the village of Almatamack, and the vineyards on either side of it. A few moments more, and they were firing with a briskness and vivacity which warmed the blood of the many thousands of hearers then new to war. One of our officers, kindling a little with the excitement thus roused, and impatient, perhaps, that the French should be in action be- fore our people, could not help drawing Lord Raglan’s atten- tion to the firing on our right. But the stir of French skirm- ishers through thick ground was no new music to Lord Fitz- roy Somerset. Rather, perhaps, it recalled him for a moment to old times in Estremadura and Castile, when, at the side of the great Wellesley, he learned the brisk ways of Napoleon’s infantry. So, when the young officer said,‘The French, my ‘Lord, are warmly engaged,’ Lord Raglan answered, ‘Are ‘they? I can not catch any return fire.’ His practiced ear had told him what we now know to be the truth. No troops were opposed to the advance of Bosquet’s columns in this part « under Bouat. Cuapv. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. | -A4% of the field; but it is the custom of French skirmishers, when they get into thick ground near an enemy, to be continually firing. They do this, partly to show the chiefs behind them what progress they are making, and partly, it would seem, in order to give life and spirit to the scene. When General Bouat reached the bank of the river, he found Advance ofthe that the bar of sand at its mouth made it possible detached foree for his men to keep good their footing against the waves flowing in from the sea; and in process of time, with all his infantry, including the Turkish battalions, he succeeded in gaining the left bank of the river. He could not, however, carry across his artillery, and he therefore sent it _ back, with orders to follow the march of Autemarre’s brigade. When he reached the left bank of the river, Bouat found an opening in the cliff before him which promised to give him means of ascent. Into this opening he threw some skirmish- ers, and these, encountering no enemy, were followed by the main body of the brigade, and by the Turkish battalions. Pur- suing the course thus opened to him, Bouat slowly crept for- ward with his column, and wound his way up and round to- ward the summit of the cliff But it was only by marching with a very narrow front that he was able to effect this move- ment, and it was not until a late period of the action that he was able to show himself in force upon the plateau. Even then he was without artillery. The troops under his command had not an opportunity of engaging in any combat with the ene- my, because they marched upon that part of the heights which the Russian General had determined to leave unoccupied. Meanwhile Bosquet, marching in person with Autemarre’s Farther ad- brigade, traversed the village of Almatamack, ford- aang ed the river at ten minutes past two o’clock, and ade. immediately began to ascend the road leading up to the plateau. The road, he found, was uninjured, and guard- ed by no troops. His artillery began the ascent, and mean- while the keen and active Zouaves, impatient of the winding road, climbed the heights by shorter and steeper paths, and so swiftly, that our sailors, looking from the ships (men accus- tomed to perpendicular racing), were loud in their praise of the briskness with which the Frenchmen rushed up and ‘ manned’ the cliff. As yet, however, Bosquet had encountered no en- emy. It has been seen that the position taken up by Prince Ments- Guns brought chikoff fell short of the sea-shore by a distance of out against = s more than two miles, and that he was not in milita- him from Ulu- ; kul Akles. = ry occupation of the cliff,now ascended by Bosquet 473° INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV, with Autemarre’s brigade; but also, it will be remembered, that at the village, in rear of the .cliff, called Ulukul Akies, there had been posted some days before one of the Minsk bat- talions of infantry, with four pieces of light artillery, and that the detachment had there remained. These four guns were now brought out of the village, and, after a time, were placed in battery at a spot near the village of Ulukul Tiouets, and within range of the point where the Zouaves were beginning to crown the summit of the cliff. The ‘Minsk’ battalion was — not brought into sight, but at some distance, on the cliff over- looking the beach, there could be seen some squadrons of horse. As soon as a whole battalion of Zouaves had gained the Bosquct, after SUMmit, they were drawn up and formed on ‘the amomentary plateau. No shot was as yet fired by the enemy; ih iane and General Bosquet, with his staff, ascended a tu- on the cliff — mulus, or mound, on the top of the cliff, i in order to reconnoitre the ground. Meanwhile, his artillery was coming up, and the first two of his guns had just reached the summit, when one of the car- riages broke down. ‘This accident embarrassed the rest of the column, and whilst the hinderance lasted the enemy opened fire from his four guns.1. The fire and the breaking down of the gun-carriage produced for the moment an ill effect upon the head of the French column, and one of its battalions fell back under the shelter of the acclivity. But this check did not last. The road blocked by the broken-down gun-carriage was quick- ly cleared, the guns were moved up rapidly, and swarms of skirmishers pr essed up in all directions. Then the troops which were already on the summit moved forward, and lodged themselves upon a part of the plateau a little in advance of the steep by which they had ascended.? As soon as he began to hear guns in the direction of the Measurestaken West Cliff, Kiriakoff took from his reserves two of by Kiriakoff — his ‘ Moscow’ battalions, and posted them, the one upon observing Bosquet's turn- low down, and the other higher up, on that part of ing movement. the hill which looked down upon the White Home- stead. He also drew from his reserve eight light pieces of ar- tillery, and placed them in battery facing toward the sea, so as to command, though at a long range, the part of the plateau which Bosquet crossed by the Hadji road. Kiriakoff did not 1 Half of the No. 4 battery of the 17th brigade of the Russian artillery. 2 Sir Edward Colebrooke saw this operation from the deck of one of our ships of war, and describes it very well in his memorial. He was a skillful and very accurate observer of military movements. Cuap. XLIV.} INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 479 take upon himself to make any other dispositions for dealing with the turning movement which threatened his left. Amongst the French who were gaining the summit of the Horsemen on plateau, no one seems to have divined the reason the gle why a little body of Russian horsemen should have made its appearance on the cliff overlooking the sea, nor why, without attempting hostile action, it had tenaciously clung to the ground. Those troopers were the attendants of a man in great trouble. They were the escort of Prince Mentschikoff. XIII. The enemy’s survey of the Allied armies had been so care- 8 lessly made, and had been so little directed toward e effect of Bosquet'sturn- the sea-shore, that Bosquet, it seems, had already tion the ming ZOb near to the river before his movement was per- of Prince ceived. Prince Mentschikoff, with Gortschakoff Mentschikof and Kvetzinski at his side, had been standing on the Kourgane Hill, watching the advance of the English army, and giving bold orders for its reception; but presently he was told that a French division was advancing toward the unoccu- pied cliff on his extreme left. At first he was so shocked by the dislocation which his ideas would have to undergo if his left flank were indeed to be turned, that he had no refuge for his confusion except in mere disbelief, and he angrily refused to give faith to the unwelcome tidings.'' For days he had been on the ground which he himself had ‘chosen for the great strug- gle; but he was so certain that he had effectually learned its character by glancing at its general features, that he had not, it seems, had the industry to ride over it, nor even to find out the roads by which the villagers were accustomed to ascend the heights with their wagons. He seemed to have imagined it to be impossible that ground so steep as the cliff had appeared to be could be ascended by troops at any point westward of the Telegraph Height; but when at length he was compelled to know that the French and the Turks were marching in force toward the mouth of the river, his mind under went. s0 great a revulsion, that, having hitherto taken no thought for his left, he now seemed to have no care for any other part of the position. In his place, a Gen- eral, calm, skillful, and conscious of knowing the ground, might have seen the tur ning movement of the Fr ench and the Turks with unspeakable joy; but, instead of tranquilly regarding the whole field of batile under the new aspect which was given to 1 Chodasiewicz. A80 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV. it by this manceuvre, he only labored to see how best he could imitate the mistake of his adversary—how best he could shift his strength to the distant, unoccupied cliff which was threat- ened by Bosquet’s advance. The nature of the ground en- abled him to make lateral movements in his line without much fear of disturbance from the Allies; and, as soon as he saw that His measures. the French were detaching two fifths of their army for dealing in order to turn his flank, he wildly determined to flank march. engage a portion of his scanty force in a march from his right hand to his left—in a march which would take him far to the westward of his chosen ground. For this pur- pose he snatched two light batteries from his centre and his right, gave orders that he was to be followed by the four ‘Moscow’ battalions which were the reserve of his left wing, and by the three ‘ Minsk’ battalions which formed part of his ‘Great Reserves,’ and then, with some squadrons of hussars, rode off toward the sea. It was certain that a long time would elapse before the Mentschikofe troops engaged in this vain journey could be ex- on the cliff. —_ pected to get into action with Bosquet; and mean- while the power of the whole force engaged in the flank move- ment was neutralized. But that was not all. Prince Ments- chikoff’s mind was so strangely subverted by the sensation of having his left turned, that, although it must needs be a long time before he could be in force on the West Cliff, he could. not endure to be personally absent from the ground to which — he now fastened his thoughts. So when, with his Staff and the horsemen of his escort, he had got to the ground overlook- ing the sea, near the village of Ulukul Tiouets, and had seen the first groups of the Zouaves peering up on the crest of the hill, he still remained where he was. Whilst he sat in his sad- dle, the appearance of his escort drew fire from the shipping, and four of his suite were struck down. But the Prince would not move. It is likely that the fire assuaged the pain of his thoughts. At this time, it would seem, he gave either no orders, or Hisbatteriesat None of a kind supplying real guidance for his gen- length coming grals, Lingering upon the ground, without troops sins 6 tarmon- at hand, he impotently watched the progress of pears Autemarre’s brigade. His light batteries soon artillery. came up; but neither these, nor the squadrons of hussars which formed his escort, were the best of implements for pushing back General Bosquet into the steep mountain road by which he had ascended; and, in the hands of Prince - Mentschikoff, they were simply powerless. However, his guns, Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 481 when they came up, were placed in battery, and, Bosquet’s guns being now on the plateau, there began a cannonade at long range between the twelve guns of the French and the whole of the light artillery which Prince Mentschikoff had hur- ried into this part of the field. At the same time the French artillery drew some shots from the distant guns which Kiria- koff had placed looking seaward on the Telegraph Height; Bosquet main- 2nd the annals of the French artillery record with tains himself’ pyide that the twelve pieces which Bosquet brought up with him engaged and overpowered no less than forty of the enemy’s guns. Nor is this statement altogether without something like a basis of truth, for the Russians had now thir- ty-six pieces of artillery on the West Cliff, or the Telegraph Height ; and, though most of them at this time were so placed that their gunners could attempt some shots at a more or less long range against Bosquet’s guns, the French artillerymen not only held their ground without having a gun disabled, but soon eee forward their batteries to a more commanding part of the plateau. By this time the seven battalions of infantry which Prince Mentschikoff had been moving flankwise were very near to the spot where their General had been eagerly awaiting them; but, just as he was about to have these troops in hand, the Prince seems to have come to the conclusion that, after all, he could do nothing in the part of the field to which he had drag- ged them. He was brought, perhaps, to this belief by seeing that the French and the Turks, who had been crossing the river at its mouth, were now beginning to show their strength toward the westernmost part of the cliff, for he may not have known.that this force, being without artillery, could be easily prevented from advancing’; against his batteries on the open Seeniaehitog Plateau. --At all events, Prince Mentschikoff now counter- thought it necessary to reverse his flank movement, marching. and to travel back toward his centre with all the forces which he had brought from thence to his left. Byt, when the Prince began this last counter-movement, he was already beginning to fall under the dominion of events in another part of the field. Bosquet now stood undisturbed on the part of the plateau Position of Which he had reached. But he was not without Boeauiston-the grounds for deep anxiety. It did not fall to his lot on that day to be engaged in any conflict except with the enemy’s artillery ; but, from the moment when he be- gan to establish himself on the plateau until toward the close of the action, he was in a dangerously isolated position ; for he Vou. L—X 482 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, [Cuar. XLIV. had no troops around him except Autemarre’s brigade, and, until the action was near its end, he got no effective support either from Bouat on his right or from Canrobert on his left. XIV. As soon as Marshal St. Arnaud perceived that Bosquet would be able to gain the summit of the cliff, he tried to give him the support toward his left which his position, when he got established on the cliff, would deeply need; and he de- termined that the time was come’ for the immediate advance St Arnaud or. Cf his Ist and 3rd Divisions. Addressing General A: é or- 1 . e fe dersthead- Canrobert and Prince Napoleon, and giving them vance of Can- the signal for the attack, he said, I am told, these Prince Napo- words: ‘With men such as you I have no orders eon ‘to give. I have but to point to the enemy!”! Hitherto these two French Divisions had been nearly in the same alignment as the leading divisions of the English army ; The order into DUt now that they were ordered forward, leaving whieh fe Ae: the English army still halted, the true character of * the movement to be undertaken by the Allies was for the first time developed. Their array was to be what strategists call ‘an order of battle in three échelons by the ‘right, the first échelon making a turning movement.” Russian Army. . ei RS Cab a ae + English Army. 3 P. Napoleon Canrobert This disposition for the attack was not tbe result of any agree- Lord Raglan’s’s Ment made in words between Marshal St. Arnaud conception of 4 5 ‘ theparthehaa 20d Lord Raglan. It resulted almost naturally, if to take. so one may speak, from Bosquet’s turning move-— ment, from the extent of the front which the enemy was now . seen to present, and from the character of the ground. Just 1 T have this from an officer who assures me that he heard the words. 2 “Un ordre de bataille a trois échelons par la droite, le premier échelon ‘attaquant par le flanc.’ These are the words in which a staff officer pres- ent in the action, and very high in the French service, has described to me the advance of the Allies. See the diagram, a much better guide than mere words. Cuap. XLIV. | INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 483 as the Marshal had kept back his 1st and 3rd Divisions till he saw that Bosquet could gain the height, so Lord Raglan, ac- cording to his conception at this time, had to see whether Canrobert and Prince Napoleon could establish themselves upon the Telegraph Height, before he endangered the conti- nuity of the order of battle by allowing the English army to advance. During the first forty minutes of the cannonade directed against the English infantry there had been no corresponding fire upon the French from the Telegraph Height ; because the Artillery con- GUNS in that part of the field had been placed at test between first so low down on the hill-side that no use could the Russian : andthe French be made of them, and the process of moving them batteries. ‘to higher ground. was tedious; but when Kiriakoff had at length established a couple of batteries upon the high ground near the Telegraph,! the fire of those guns, passing over the heads of the Taroutine and the militia battalions, be- gan to molest the divisions which were led by Canrobert and Prince Napoleon. On the other hand, the artillery belonging to the divisions of Canrobert and Prince Napoleon came down to a convenient ground above the edge of the vineyards, and opened fire upon the columns of the ‘militia’ battalions, now posted much far- ther up than before on the opposite height. And with effect: for although the range did not admit of great slaughter, some men were struck, and the rest, though they did not yet move, began to be displeased with the ground on which they stood.? The swarms of skirmishers which the French threw forward went briskly into the cover, forded the river, and then made themselves at home in the broken ground at the foot of the Telegraph Height. When the soldier is upon service of this kind, his natural character —neutralized in general by organi- zation—is often seen to reassert itself. One man, prying eager- ly forward, would labor to get shots at Russian sharpshooters still lingering near the river; another would sit down, take out his little store of food and drink, and be glad to engage with any one who passed him in something like cynical talk concerning the pastime of war. But, upon the whole, French skirmishers push on with great boldness and skill. When the foremost ranks of Canrobert’s massed battalions Canrobers ad entered the vineyards, each man got through advance across aS best he could, and rapidly crossed the river; and Aer: though during part of the advance the troops were 1 These were the batteries before spoken of as those from which shots at long range were attempted against Bosquet’s artillery. * Chodasiewicz. 484 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. under the fire of the guns on the Telegraph Height, yet the His troopsare Nature of the acclivity before them was of such a sheltered from Jind that the farther they advanced (provided the Bente of heads of the battalions did not show themselves on the hillside. the plateau above the broken ground) the better they were covered from fire. And, except some lingering skirmishers, they had no infantry opposed to them at this time; for the two ‘Moscow’ battalions which Kiriakoff had sent down toward the ford of the White Homestead were now, 1t seems, made to take part in the marches and counter- marches which Mentschikoff was directing in person, and there were then no other Russian columns in this part of the field.? So, when the head of Canrobert’s Division gained the broken ground on the Russian side of the river, it was for the mo- ment sheltered ; but if it had then ascended above the broken ground so as to peer up over the crest, and face the open pla- teau at the top, it would not only have come under the fire of artillery, but would have before it the four battalions of mili- tiamen, supported by the four Taroutine battalions. For an army advancing to the attack, a rim of sheltered ground on the verge of the enemy’s position is of infinite use, because it enables the assailants to make without hurry their final arrangements for the assault; but to troops which are not propelled by the decisive order of some resolute commander, such shelter as that is sometimes a snare, because it tempts Duty attach- men to hang back. In such a situation, the best ing upon the commander of troops will often abstain from going forward of te eo piv. thelr own accord, for it seems to officers and men sion. that if they are to quit good shelter and go out into storm, they ought, at least, to know that the movement is one really intended, and is needful to the purpose of the battle. The duty of pressing forward to terminate the isolation of Bosquet rested primarily with the general of the 1st Division. General Canrobert was a man of whom great hopes were General Gan- entertained. According to every test which could FOnSEe be applied by school and college examinations, he ’ There is some ground for supposing that the second ‘ Moscow’ battalion was for a while forgotten, and that, not receiving in due time the order to rejoin the other battalions of the corps, it was left alone in the ravine till it found itself opposed to Canrobert’s whole Division. If this is the case, and if there resulted any thing which could be called a combat between the Rus- sian battalion and the French Division, the statement that Canrobert was not met by any troops except skirmishers would have to be qualified. The statc- ment of Chodasiewicz on this point receives no support from Kiriakoff, and that is the reason why I have not adopted it. Chodasiewicz did not belong to the ‘Moscow’ corps. Cuap. XLIV. | INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 485 promised to be an accomplished general. To the military stud- ies of his youth he had added the experience of many cam- paigns in Africa; and even in the French army, where brave men abound, his personal valor had become a subject of re- mark. He was so deeply trusted by his Emperor that he had become the bearer of a then secret paper which was to put him at the head of the French army in the event of St. Ar- naud’s death. He had the misfortune to have upon his hands the blood of the Parisians slain by his brigade on the 4th of December; but it was said—to his honor—that he, more than all the other generals employed at that time, had loathed the work of having to abet the midnight seizure of his country’s foremost generals. His spirit, they say, had been broken by the pestilence which, some few weeks before, had come upon his Division in the country of the Danube; but the extremity of the grief to which he then gave way had so much to justify it in the appalling nature of the calamity which slew his troops, that it was not a conclusive proof of his being wanting in mili- tary composure. The most successful of respondents to school and college questions now had to undergo a new test. Com- manding a fine French division, he had the head of his column close under a height occupied by the enemy, and this at a time when the isolated condition of a French brigade on his right seemed to make it a business of great moment for him to be able to bring support to his comrades. But at the point where Canrobert faced the height, he found it impracticable to drag up artillery, and he was obliged to send his guns all the way down to the village of Almatamack, in order that they might there ford the river and ascend to the top of the plateau by the road which Bosquet had taken. This Unable to get Operation could not but take a long time; and what eetete a! Canrobert was now called upon to determine was, willing to ad- whether he would wait until his artillery had com- ic upon open pleted its circuitous and difficult journey, or at once ground. carry forward his infantry to the summit of the pla- teau, and engage the battalions there posted. He determined to wait. The maxims of the French army discourage the idea of bringing infantry into action upon open ground without the support of artillery; and Canrobert did not, it seems, conceive that the predicament in which Bosquet stood was a circum- stance which dispensed him from the observance of a general rule. So, whilst he was thus waiting for his artillery, he did not deem it right to push forward his battalions on the open He posts nis Plateau, but he brought the head of his Division to battalions on a point high up on the steep, broken side of the hill, 486 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cav. XLIV. thehigher 2nd extended it, in single and double battalion col- steeps of the ummns, on either side of the track by which he had Meee eibes ascended. He spread himself more toward his left under the pla- than toward his right, and did not move any of his battalions in such a way as to be able to give a hand to Bosquet. The bulk of Prince Napoleon’s Division hung back in the val- Hesinea Nope st ley, and the bulk of it at this time was still on the stilonthe | north bank of the river. the akof Although the head of Canrobert’s Division, being Fire sustained under the heights on the Russian side of the riv- ere eae er, was enjoying good shelter, the masses of troops aqarecnol ioe which stood more toward the rear, including some to have shelter Of Canrobert’s battalions and the great bulk of fam the hil- Prince Napoleon’s Division, were exposed to the Discourage. ‘fire of the guns on the Telegraph Height. They ment. suffered ; and a feeling of discouragement began to spread. Marshal St. Arnaud had understood the gravity of the dan- ger which would result from any delay in the advance of his centre; but, to meet it, he used an ill-chosen safeguard. The way to send help to Bosquet was to give Canrobert due war- rant to move up at once upon the plateau, whether with or without his artillery... What the Marshal did, however, was St.Ammana _ tO order up his reserves, sending one brigade of his vashige’ie watd 4th Division to follow the march of Bosquet, and ‘the other to support Canrobert. This last measure was actually a source of weakness rather than of strength, for, as far as numbers were concerned, Canrobert and Prince Na- poleon were already in more than ample strength. With two superb divisions, numbering some 15,000 men, and having Bos- quet and Bouat on their right with many thousands more, they were advancing upon a very narrow front; and the bringing The ill effect of up of fresh troops augmented the masses who came tothe "® under the fire of the guns without at all propelling French troops. the leading divisions. So the evil lasted and in- creased. Inaction in the midst of a battle is hateful to the brave, impetuous Frenchman, and inaction under fire is intol- erable to him. The troops toward the rear of the columns, not having the close presence of the enemy to animate them, | 1 Tf the objection to advancing on the plateau without artillery was, ac- cording to French ideas, insuperable, an effort, one would think, should have been made to push forward Prince Napoleon’s Division. Prince Napoleon had in his front two roads leading up to the Telegraph, and one of these at the least was practicable (and was afterward used) for artillery. CuAp. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 484 and being without that shelter from the Russian guns which was enjoyed by the leading battalions, became discontented Theircom- and uneasy. It was then that there sprang up Heywersbeing “Mong the French tr oops the ill-omened complaint ‘massacred.’ that they were being ‘ massacred.’ _ All this while, Bosquet was on the summit of the cliff with Anxiety on ac. Dis one brigade, and his isolation, as we shall pres- count of Bos- ently see, was becoming a source of great anx- quet. iety. Minute after minute aids-de-camp were coming to Lord Stite ofthe taglan with these gloomy tidings; and, in truth, battle at this the action was going on ill for the Allies. The ceist duty of crowning the West Cliff had been fulfilled with great spirit and dispatch by a small body of men; but the step had not been followed up. Bouat, filing slowly round near the sea with some 9000 men, but without guns, was, for the time, annulled. Bosquet, with one brigade, stood halted upon the heights which he had climbed; and, though happily he had not been assailed by infantry, his advanced and isolated position had become a source of weakness to the Allies. Of the two French divisions, charged with the duty of attacking the front and western flank of the Telegraph Hill, the one had its foremost battalions high up the steep, and on the verge of the open ground at its top, whilst the other was all down in the valley; but (although in different ways, and for different reasons) these divisions were both hanging back; and no French force had hitherto attacked any part of the ground held by the enemy’s formed battalions. Meanwhile the bat- teries still swept the smooth approach to the table-land where the Telegraph stood, and not only kept it free of all assailants, but, pouring their fire over the heads of their own soldiery, were able to throw plunging shots into the midst. of Prince ° Napoleon’s Division. All this while the Enelish army had been kept under the fire of the Russian artillery; and although the men had been ordered to lie down, the ground sloping toward the river yield- ed no shelter, and many had been killed and wounded. At first our batteries replied ; but, after a while, it had been ascertained that the advantage the enemy had in his command- ing ground was too great to be overcome, and the English ar- tillery had ceased to fire. Lord Raglan asked why this was: ‘I observe,’ said he, ‘the enemy’s six-pounders amongst us; ‘why can not we send our nine-pounders amongst them ?’ But he was told that our fire had proved to be ineffectual, and that it was, therefore, discontinued. He seemed struck. Per: 488 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. (Cuap. XLIV. haps the answer which he had received became one of the grounds on which, a few minutes later, he resolved to change the face of the batile. . XV. For some time the course of the action had been offering to Opportunities the Russian General an opportunity of striking a offered to great blow; and, circumstanced as he was, it would Mentsehikof. Tave been easier for him to gain a signal victory before three o’clock than to stand on the defensive and hold his ground till sunset. The English forces, confronting, as they did, a position of great natural strength, and having their left on ground as open as a race-course, would have been ham- pered in every attempt to storm the Great Redoubt if their flank had been assiduously threatened, and now and then charged by the enemy’s powerful cavalry. Therefore, if Mentschikoff, checking the English forces by a vigorous use of his horsemen, had undertaken, at this time, such an advance against Canrobert’s Division as was afterward successfully ex- ecuted by Kiriakoff, he would have found the French battal- ions quite soft to his touch, by reason of their want of artille- ry ;' and Canrobert’s retreat from the verge of the plateau would have occurred at a time when half the French army was so far from the true scene of conflict as to be unable to give the least help. Except by reckoning broadly upon the quality of the French and the British troops, or else upon the smiles of fortune, it is hard to see how the Allies could then have es- caped a disaster. But men move so blindly in the complex business of war that often, very often, it is the enemy himself who is the best repairer of their faults. It was so that day. During the precious hour in which the Russian forces might have wrought a way to great glory, their cavalry were suffered to remain in idleness, and the battalions which formed the instrument afterward used for striking the blow were marching in vain from east to west and from west to east. The torpor and the false moves of the enemy coun- tervailed the shortcomings of the Allies. No combat of any moment was going on at this time. It The battle, at iS true that Major Norcott, with the left wing of this time,lan- the 2nd battalion of the Rifle Brigade, had gone Sy iis into the vineyards in front of our Light Division, and by this time he had not only driven the enemy’s riflemen 'T should not have ventured upon this sentence if it were not that I am warranted in doing so by what actually occurred a little later. See post. Cuap. XLIV.] INVASIQN OF THE CRIMEA. 489 from the inclosures, but had even stolen over the river higher up, and was opening fire on the left bank. But every where else the battle flagged. The men of our infantry divisions, though they were under the fire of thirty guns, still lay pass- ive upon the ground. Our cavalry awaited orders. Our ar- tillery declined to fire without being able to strike. The Rus- sian and the French artillery continued engaged at long range. No French battalion advanced above the broken ground, though, covering their front and the left flank of their trailing columns, swarms of skirmishers were alive. Of these, some were firmg to show where they were, some dueling with the Russian riflemen who yet remained in the valley; others as- cended the knolls, and vexed any Russians they saw with long, careful shots; others, again, sat down, and contentedly took their rest. This languishing of the battle seemed to promise ill for the Allies. They had undertaken to assault the enemy’s left, and to that enterprise they stood committed, for they had drawn away from the real field of battle to the West Cliff some four- teen thousand men. Yet, since the moment when Bosquet began to ascend the cliff, more than forty minutes had elapsed, and nothing had yet been done to win a result from his move- ment, nor even to give him that support which he very griev- ously wanted. Both from Bouat on his right, and from Can- robert on his left, he was divided by a wide tract of ground. Hitherto, then, the operations planned and undertaken by the French had not only done nothing toward carrying the position, but had even brought the Allies into danger. The causes of the miscarriage were the physical obstructions Causes which Which hindered both Bounat and Canrobert from had oceasion- bringing up their guns with them, and the stiffness ed the failure : : . ofthe French Of the objection which prevents French generals operations. = from engaging their infantry on open ground with- out the support of artillery. According to the intended plan of operations, Bosquet, after gaining the cliff with his whole column of some 14,000 men, was to bring round. his right shoulder in order to fall upon the flank of the Russians, and simultaneously with his appearance on the plateau a vigorous and resolute onslaught was to be made by the rest of the French army upon the front of the enemy’s leit wing. But Bosquet, as we saw, though he was personally present on the part. of the plateau overhanging Almatamack, had only one ‘brigade there, and whether he looked to Bouat on his right or to Canrobert on his left, he looked in either case to a gen- eral who, though he had masses of infantry, was without artil- » 2 490 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. — [Cmar. XLIV, lery, and he therefore looked in vain. In such circumstances, - the utmost that Bosquet could be expected to do was to hold his ground, and this he did. XVI. For an hour and a half the Allies had lain under fire, without even beginning to assail the enemy’s formed battalions. The only ground gained was that occupied by Bosquet. But Bos- quet’s achievement not having been followed up, his very sue- cess now threatened to bring disaster upon the Allies. When a French soldier is one of a body placed in a false position, he knows it, and comments on the fact; and the very force and vivacity of his nature make it difficult to keep him long upon ground to which he feels a scientific objection. A French Adespondine 2d-de-camp came in haste to Lord Raglan, and sponding 4 account of | represented that unless something could be done to FreAnees o07 support or relieve Bosquet’s column it would be BEM iN Fit COLE omised.’ Gifted himself with the command 5 of graceful diction, Lord Raglan was not without fastidious prejudices against particular forms of expression, and it chanced that he bore a singular hatred against the French word which we translate into ‘compromised.’ So he archly resolved to have the meaning of the word fully ex- panded into plain French, and he asked the aid-de-camp what would be the actual effect upon the bapgade of its being ‘ com- ‘promised.’ The answer was, ‘It will retreat.’? Was it time for the English General to take the battle into his own hands ? So long as Bosquet, with Autemarre’s brigade, stood isola- ted upon the cliff, and Canrobert’s and Prince Napoleon’ s Divi- sions remained hanging back in the vineyards and the broken ground below the Telegraph Height, an advance of our forces would plainly distort the Allied line in a hazardous way, and Lord Raglan had watched for the moment when the develop- ment of the expected French attack on the Telegraph Height would warrant him in suffering our infantry to go forward. But he had hitherto watched in vain; and, not knowing how Lord Raglan long the causes of the French delay might continue tinitate thang, 0 operate, he resolved to depart from the scheme vance of the Of action which had hitherto governed him, and to "English army. precipitate the advance of the English forces. It is true that whilst Bosquet stood halted on the cliff, whilst 1“ Battra en retraite.” Cap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 491 Canrobert abstained from assailing the Telegraph Height, and whilst Prince Napoleon’s Division was still low down in the valley, the advance of the English forces against the Cause- way and the Kourgané Hill would ruin the symmetry of the plan which the French had contrived; and if Bosquet should be obliged to retreat at a time when the English were hotly engaged in an attack upon the enemy’s heights, the whole ar- ray of the Allies would be br ought into peril. But the timely incurring of dangers is proper to the business of war; and, Grounds tend- though the enemy had hitherto been torpid and in- aia ta dulgent, the cause of the Allies had fallen into such resolve. a plight that a remedy which involved heavy risks might nevertheless be the right one. And, so far as concerned his understanding with the French, Lord Raglan was freed from all care; for he had been already assured that Marshal St. Arnaud anxiously desired him to advance, and one aid-de- camp, as we have seen, had told him plainly that nothing less than a diversion by the English forces would prevent General Bosquet from retreating. A man may weigh reasons against reasons, but sometimes, after all, it is the power of the imagination, or else some manly passion, which comes to strike the balance and lead him on to action. The inotive of which Lord Raglan felt the most con- scious was the simple and natural longing to cease from being passive. He could no longer endure to see our soldiery lying down without resistance under the enemy’s fire.! He had’ been riding slowly upon the ground between the Orders for the Great Causeway and the left of the French army* ankin © but he now stopped his horse, and the cavalcade fantry. which had trailed in his wake whilst he moved then gathered more closely around him. There were altogether some twenty horsemen; and although with several of them Lord Raglan from time to time talked gayly, yet, so far as con cerned the duty of taking thought how best to conduct the ac tion, he was like a man riding in mere solitude, for it was not his custom to seek counsel, and the men around him so held their chief in honor that none of them would have liked to as- sail him with question or advice. Still, any one there could see that, besides Lord Raglan himself, there was one man of the Head- Quarter Staff whose mind was engaged in the busi- ness of the hour. We saw that Airey had already begun to wield great power in the English army. With the power was its burden. Whilst most of the other men on the Head-Quar- .' This is the motive for accelerating the advance of the British troops which Lord Raglan avowed to me on the evening of the action. 492 ‘ INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. ter Staff seemed to be merely spectators or messengers, there Was care, vexing care on the lean, eager, imperious features of the Quartermaster-General. He was not simply impatient of the delay ; he judged it to be a great evil. It was to him that Lord Raglan now.spoke some five words. Whatever it was that was said, it lit the face of the hearer, and turned his look of care into sunshine. The horsemen in the surrounding group rose taller in their saddles and handled their reins like men whose limbs are braced by the joy of passing from expectancy-to action. Every man, whether he had heard the words or not, saw in the gladness of his pe ilehas bor’s face that the moment long awaited was come. Our infantry was to advance. The order flew ; for it was Nolan—the impetuous Nolan—who carried it to the 2nd Di- vision. A few moments later, and the order had reached the Light Division. The whole of the foremost English line, from the 47th Regiment on our right to the extreme left of the Light Division, rose alert from the ground, dressed well their ranks, and then, having a front of two miles with a depth of only two men, marched grandly down the slope.' XVII. Sir De Lacy Evans, commanding the 2nd Division, had be- Rane detach, fore ‘him the blazing v illage. In that conflagr ation ait kt ro? ee could live, ‘and in order to make good his and with the’ advance on either side of the flames, he had split rest of his Di- his force by detaching General Adams to his right vision ad- vances toward With two regiments* and Turner’s battery. With the bridge. that foree Adams, driving before him some Russian skirmishers, marched down toward the ford which divided the French and English armies. Evans himself, with four battal- ions and Fitzmayer’s battery of field artillery, had to assail the defenses which Prince Mentschikoff had accumulated for the dominion of the Pass and the great road. Soon, however, Evans was a good deal strenghtened in the artillery arm; for an opportunity of rendering servicé in this part of the field was observed and seized by Captain Anderson with a battery belonging to the Light Division, and by Colonel Dacres with a. battery belonging to the Ist Division. By the time that the infantry? had got down to near the inclosures, eighteen English Computing from the right of the 47th Regiment, the English front was a little short of two miles, but computing it from the ground on which Adams vides advancing, the front was more than two miles in extent. 2 The 41st and 49th. 3 The Ist brigade, under Pennefather, “tt the 47th Regiment, belonging to Adams’s brigade. Cuar. XLIV. ] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 493 guns had begun to reply to the fire which the enemy was pour- ing upon Pennefather’s brigade. But Evans’s task was a hard one; for, having on his right an The conflict in LMpassable conflagration, and being cramped to- which he be- ward his left by our Light Division, he was forced came engaged. +4 move along the unsheltered line of the Great Causeway upon a narrow and crowded front, and this under a converging fire of ‘artillery; for with the sixteen guns of the Causeway batteries, and the flanking fire poured down from the left shoulder of the Great Redoubt, the enemy swept the main road and the bridge, and searched the fords both above and below it. And, whilst the enemy’s batteries thus dealt with thé more, open approaches to the bridge, his infantry was strong in that part of the ground which could not be searched by round shot, for, posted in the covert on either side of the Causeway, Prince Mentschikoff had six battalions,’ and besides these there was a great portion of the sixteen battal- ions posted on the slopes of the Kourgane Hill, which was near enough to be available for the defense of the Causeway as well as the Great Redoubt. Moreover, the enemy’s reserves were so disposed as to be in close and easy communication with this part of the field. The Russian skirmishers at this time were swarming in the thick ground which belts the river.” Confronting these defenses, Evans strove to work his way forward; but, although the walls and inclosures on the skirts of the village here and there formed islands of shelter, the rest of the ground which had to be traversed was so bare, that ev- ery man of the force, as long as he stood there, came under the eyes of the Russian gunners; and their fire being there- fore effective, Pennefather’s brigade, though always moving forward a little, could only gain ground by degrees. At times, when the balls were falling thickly, the men would shelter themselves as well as they could behind such little cov- er as the ground afforded ; and when there came a lull, they would spring forward and find shelter more in advance. There were some buildings which afforded good cover against grape ' Viz., the four battalions of Borodino, the 6th battalion of ‘ riflemen,’ and the battalion of sappers and miners. According to some accounts, there were only a few companies of the sappers and miners. ‘There is some ob- scurity as to the operations of the Borodino corps. They were so placed as to become severed from the actual control of their divisional general, and they were covered, it seems, by the conflagration; but all accounts agree in stat- ing that the Borodino corps was in the Pass and close to the great road. 2 No less than three out of the above six battalions were thrown out as. ~ skirmishers. 494 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, [Cuar. XLIV. and musketry, and some of the men, having gained this shelter by a swift rush across the open ground under very heavy fire, were slow to move out again into a storm of grape, canister, and musket balls. At a later time the enemy shattered the walls of these buildings with round shot, and some of our men were crushed or suffocated by the ruins. But those who died that poor death were men hanging back. This kind of struggle did not, of course, allow the troops to adhere to their order of formation; but whenever any number of men got together upon gr ound which enabled them to ex- tend, they quickly fell into line. And this they did notwith- standing that the groups thus instinctively hastening into their English. formation were sometimes men of different regimental Several times the men were ordered to lie down. The 47th Regiment, pushing in between the river and the burning village, and afterward fording the stream a good way below the bridge, was better sheltered from the fire of the Causeway batteries than the regiments of Pennefather’s brig- ade. Colonel Stacy, of the 30th, persistently worked his men through the gardens and inclosures till at length he was able to cross the river and establish his regiment under cover of the steep bank on the Russian side of the stream. Thence for some time he maintained a steady fire against the gunners of the Causeway batteries. The 95th, like the other regiments of the brigade, stole for- ward from one sheltering spot to another, and at one time three of its companies got divided from the rest of the corps, and united themselves in line with the 55th; but the whole regi- ment had been again got together when, the Light Division coming on, it appeared that its right regiment was overlapped by the 95th. Lacy Yea did not choose to stop, and, the 95th being halted at the time, he, with his 7th Fusileers, passed through it. But the ‘Derbies’ could not endure to be thus left behind, and soon the regiment rushed forward, bearing so strongly toward the left, that the fortunes of the corps thence- forth became connected with the exploits of Hodnneton brigade. The 55th Regiment, whilst advancing in line over open ground, came under so er ushing a fire that it staggered; and though the line did not fall back, it was broken. But Colonel Warren soon rallied his regiment, and carried it forward. Af- terward, when he reached a spot which yielded shelter to a man lying flat on the ground, he ordered his men to lie down, but he himself kept his saddle and remained steadfast in the centre Cuap. XLIV. ] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 495 of his regiment until the moment came when again he could lead it forward. The kind of struggle in which Evans was engaged could not be long maintained without involving heavy loss. Major Rose, and Captain Schane, and Lieutenant Luxmore, were killed. Evans himself received a severe contusion, and almost all his staff were struck; for Percy Herbert, his Assistant Quarter- master-General, was dangerously hit, and Captain Thompson, Ensign St. Clair, and Captain A. M. McDonald were sever ely wounded. Of the officers of the 30th, 55th, and 47th regiments, Major Rose, Captain Schane, and Lieutenant Luxmore were killed. Colonel Warren was wounded, and so were Paken- ham, Dickson, Conolly, Whimper, Walker, Coats, Bisset, Arm- strong, Lieutenants Warren, Woollcombe, Philips, and May- cock. Pennefather’s brigade alone lost in killed and wounded nearly one fourth of its str ength.! So long as the Causeway batteries swept the mouth of the Pass, Evans, with his three shattered battalions,? could do no more than maintain an obstinate and bloody combat in this part of the field, and gain ground by slow degrees. He was not yet able to push forward beyond the left bank of the river, and assail the enemy in the heart of his position across the great road. XVIII. On Evans’s left, but entangled with some of his regiments, Advance of the SIT Geor ge Brown moved forward with the Light Light Division. Division. He had before him the Great Redoubt, armed with fourteen guns of heavy calibre, and this strong- hold was. flanked on the one side by the Lesser Redoubt with its eight guns, and on the other by the artillery and the infan- try which guarded the Pass. Upon the slopes of the Kour- The taskit gane Hill, and so posted as to look down into the had before it. Great Redoubt, there was a battery of field artille- ry, and in rear of this a battery and a half, besides the four guns of the sailors, were held in reserve.? ‘Sixteen battalions of infantry* were posted upon the flanks or in the immediate rear of the Great Redoubt. Of this force, the four Kazan battalions, formed in two columns of attack, 1 This, as well as all other statements which I make of casualties in the English army, is taken from the official returns. 2 The 30th, 55th, and 47th Regiments. As to the 95th, see post. * The details of these forces have been given already. 4 The four Kazan, or Archduke Michael’s, battalions, the four Vladimir battalions, the four Sousdal battalions, and the four Ouglitz battalions. 496 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. — [Cuap. XLIV. stood in front near to either shoulder of the Great Redoubt, and these were supported by the four battalions of the Vladi- mir corps. On the right—proper right—of these troops, but somewhat refused, there were two of the Sousdal battalions: more in advance, and so placed as to form the extreme right of the Russian infantry line, there were the two remaining bat- talions of the same corps. Besides the masses thus pushed forward, General Kvetzinski held in hand the four battalions of the Ouglitz corps as an immediate reserve, and posted them upon the higher slopes of the Kourgané Hill. Farther toward » the rear (except, perhaps, whilst they were employed as skir- mishers) there were placed the two battalions of sailors. On the extreme right, and massed in columns at intervals upon the eastern and southeastern slopes of the Kourgané Hill, there were the bulk of the Russian cavalry.1 This force of horsemen was so placed that, whilst it covered the right and the right rear of the position, the Russian commander could, so to speak, swing it round, and hurl it against the flank of an enemy assail- ing his Great Redoubt. In few words, that Kourgané Hill, now about to be assailed by our Light Division, was defended by two redoubts, by forty-two guns, and by a force of some 17,000 men. Again, the troops which defended the Causeway could aid the defense of the Kourgané Hill, and, moreover, the troops which Prince Mentschikoff called his ‘ Great Reserve,’ were so placed that they might be regarded as operating in support of the troops in this part of the field. It rested with the four Kazan battalions to make the first attack upon the English troops. This was to be done whilst our soldiery, after struggling through the fords, were gaining the top of the bank. ‘The enemy’s massive columns were to throw our men back into the channel of the river before they could find time to form. The slope which led up from the top of the bank to the par- apet of the Great Redoubt was almost as even as the glacis of a fortress; and, except to one who knew beforehand how un- accountably life and limb are spared in a storm of artillery fire, it seemed hard to understand that upon that smooth ground men would be able to live for many moments under round shot, . grape, and canister from fourteen heavy guns. «Being on the extreme left of the Allied forces, Sir G. Brown had to stand prepared for an attack of cavalry on his flank. On our side of the river, home down to the edge of the vine- 1 The whole of it, except the squadrons which Prince Mentschikoff took with him when he rode toward the sea. Cnar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 497 yards, the broad and gently undulating downs, thickly clothed with elastic herbage, were all that horsemen could wish for, and even on the left bank, the ground in this part of the field was practicable for the evolutions of cavalry. Hardly ever in war did 3000 troopers sit still in their saddles under stronger provocation to enterprise, for they were upon fair ground, they were confronted by a body of horse which was in numbers but one third of their strength, and they gazed upon the naked flank of an infantry force advancing to the attack of a strong position. Therefore, the contingency which actually occurred—the con- tingency of the enemy’s withholding his cavalry arm instead of lifting it against the open flank of the Allies, could not have been looked for beforehand, and can only be accounted for now by ascribing it to the eccentric forbearance of the Russian com- mander.! . Rightly, therefore—though the apprehension was not after- ward justified by the event—the Light Division was carried into action with an idea that cavalry charges were to be ex- pected on the flank; and the duty of preparing against enter- prises of this sort pressed specially upon General Buller, be- cause he commanded the left brigade. To storm a position thus held in strength by forces of all arms, and to answer at the same time for the safety ofthe whole of the Allied army against a flank attack, was a task of great moment; but, on the other hand, Sir George Brown was not Means for pre- Without means for preparing a well-ordered assault, paring a well. for the enemy was making no attempt to hold the orderedassault _. : ° : were opento Vineyards in strength, and on the Russian side of theassailants. the river, the bank, though very steep, and from eight to fifteen feet in height, was yet so broken, that a skirm- isher seeking to bring his eye and his rifle to a level with the summit, would easily find a ledge for his foot. Here, then, was exactly the kind of cover which the assailants needed, for if this steep bank could be seized and lined for a few minutes by their skirmishers, it would enable their main body to recover its for- mation after passing through the inclosures and fording the river. But, in order to lay hold of the advantage thus offered by the nature of the ground, it was of necessity to take care that The Division the advance of the Light Division should be amply not covered by covered by skirmishers. This was not done. The skitmishers. _ yifles under Norcott had long before scoured the 1 Before the action there was a good deal of conversation amongst officers in the Light Division with respect to the way in which the expected charges of the Russian cavalry should be met, and it was then—then, perhaps, for the first time—that the idea of receiving the enemy’s horse in line was broached.. Oe oe Vw 498 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Crar. XLIV. vineyards; but they had swerved away toward their left, and, fording the river higher up, had left Codrington’s brigade with- out any skirmishers to cover its advance. No other light in- fantry men were thrown forward in their stead, and the whole body went stark on, with bare front, driving full at the ene- my’s stronghold. XIX. Sir George Brown’s right brigade, consisting ofthe 7th Fu- The tenor of sileers, the 33rd and the 23rd Regiments,! was un- Gahan te der General Codrigton. The left brigade, consist: advance. ing of the 19th, the 88th, and the 77th Regiments, was commanded by General Buller.. The orders which Gen: eral Codrington received from Sir George were simply to ad- vance with his brigade, and not to stop until he had crossed the river. A like order, it is believed, was given to General Buller. The Division still moved in line, and, after losing a few men from the fire of the enemy’s artillery, it reached the boundary of the vineyards and gardens which belt the course of the river. In their eagerness for the conflict, the regiments strove to The advance Advance quickly; but it was a laborious task to trav- through the erse the gardens and inclosures, and many of those vineyards, who had hitherto kept their knapsacks here laid them down. Inafew minutes the whole of the Light Division of infantry, drawing along with it in its impetuous course the 95th Regiment, had forced a way into the vineyards. There our young soldiers found themselves, as they imagined, in a thick storm of shot and cannon balls; but it seems that mis- siles of war fly crashing so audibly through foliage that they sound more dangerous than they are. The loss at this time was not great. Our men were in the belief that speed was required of them, and having before them no chain of skirmishers to feel the way and control the pace of the Division, they struggled forward with eager haste. In passing from one of the inclosures: to another, part of the line came to the top of a vertical bank, revetted with stone, and form- ing a kind of ‘sunk fence.’ Standing there, the men observed that a violent gust of shot was beating in against the stone work at their feet; and it seemed-to them that, the moment ’ When I speak of several regiments in the same limb of the sentence, I _ generally follow. the order in which they would be ranged, going from right to left. In a brigade consisting of three regiments, say e.g. of the Ist, 2nd, and 8rd Foot, the Ist would be posted at the right, the 2nd at the left, and the 3rd in the centre. Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 499 they sprang from the top of the fence to the lower vineyard, their legs would be shattered by a thousand missiles. For a moment they paused, as though for some guidance; but the guidance was such as is given by ‘ Forward! first company !’ ‘Second company, show them the way! The first who leaped down stood unscathed in the vineyard below; the rest fol- lowed. Dangers shrink before the advance of resolute men. There was not much loss in that lower vineyard. The troops pressed on. Amongst the vineyards there were here and there farm-cot- tages and homesteads; and since the obstructions which the men were encountering had destroyed their formation, it be- came possible for such as loved their safety more than their honor to linger in the shelter afforded by these buildings. Some few, they say, lingered. | The Division hurried forward with just such trace of its orig- andoverthe inal line formation as could remain to it after rap- er idly passing through difficult inclosures. The river, though flowing in a swift current, was fordable by a strong man in most places, but it was of very unequal depth. Gen- eral Codrington was seen riding quickly across at a point where the stream hardly flowed above his horse’s fetlocks, and yet, almost close to him, the taller charger of another officer went down and had to swim. The soldiers rapidly waded across. Some few perished in the stream, and it was never known whether they fell from shot or from not being able to keep their footing in the current. That part of Pennefather’s brigade which was overlapped by the 7th Fusileers! had become entangled with the Light Division, and, at the moment of Codrington’s advance, Hume of the 95th seized a color, and, dashing across the river, carried with him almost the whole of the regiment; but the men bore so much toward their left, that by the time they gained the foot of the bank on the Russian side of the river they had got blended—not (as might be supposed) with the right, but—with the left regiment of Codrington’s brigade. They were des- tined to share the glory and the carnage which awaited the 23rd Fusileers. At length the whole Light Division, together with the ad- ditional regiment which had strayed into its company, was upon the Russian side of the river; but as yet the troops only stood upon the narrow strip of dry ground at the water’s edge, and such of them as were in the centre or toward the right t 7.e., after the Fusileers had marched through the 95th. ar oe ee 500 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. were penned back by the rocky bank which rose steep and high over their heads. The soldiery were a crowd—a crowd shaped and twisted by the winding of the river’s bank, yet with some remains ‘of military coherence; for, although the in- closures and the fording of the river could not but destroy all formation, the men of every company had kept together as well as they were able. But a general who had omitted to line the bank with his Along the part OW skirmishers might well expect to see it fringed reached by ~~ with the enemy’s rifles; and the strong wall which odrington’s + : a 3 brigade the Nature had offered to the English as a cover for the rit pauk ise formation of their battalions, was now, of course, enemy's held by the enemy’s skirmishers. These light troops skimmishers. Were in greatest force along the bank which faced the centre and the right of the Light Division. They came to the edge of the bank, fired down into the crowd of the red- coats, and then drew back for a pace or two that they might load in peace and be ready to fire again. They could kill and wound men in the crowd below without laying) themselves open to fire. Toward the left of the Light Division the bank was less ab- Gate aan ieupt and also more free from the enemy’s skirmish- brethren LEN There, after passing the river, General Buller, who commanded the 2nd brigade, was able to form it at his leisure. He ordered the 77th Regiment to lie down under the cover afforded by the configuration of the ground, and, upon a slope somewhat shelter ed from the fire of the en- emy’s artillery, he placed the 88th Regiment. With these two regiments he remained long halted, not partaking im the subsequent advance of Codrington’s brigade. His reason was, that, a large body of cavalry and infantry appearing on the plain to threaten his left, he thought it right to keep two regi- ments in hand until he should find himself, supported by the near approach of the Highland brigade. He conceived that he ought to beware of outstripping the Ist Division by too great Nature of the 2 interval; and, in truth, the duty which attach- duty attach- ed upon General Buller at this moment was one of ing upon him. 9 orave kind; for if the enemy should seize the mo- ment of Sir George Brown’s assault upon the Great Redoubt as his time for making a resolute attack with horse, foot, and artillery, upon the flank of our advancing troops, the safety of the whole Allied army would be challenged, and would be found to rest upon such dispositions as General Buller might have made for covering our left. * As to the 19th Regiment, see post. Cuapr. XLIV. | INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 5Ol Sir George Brown’s order to Buller empowered him to ad- vance until he was over the stream; but, that duty having been executed, the brigadier now found himself on the bank of a river, without, so far as I know, having any fresh orders to guide him, yet charged by circumstance with the duty of cov- ering the flank of the whole Allied army at the moment of an assault upon the enemy’s strong-hold. The business was a vital one; and the caution which Buller used at this time was re- quired by the occasion.!. For, to push forward the two regi- ments which formed the extreme left of the whole Allied front, and to march them against the enemy’s strong-hold in a line, outflanked by the enemy’s horse, and even, it would seem, by a portion of his foot, would have been to lay open—not Buller’s brigade merely, but—the whole Allied army to the risk of a flank attack involving great disasters. In these circumstances it was Buller’s duty to take up such a position as would enable him to cover the advance of Codrington’s brigade and to sus- tain the shock of a flank attack. It was to that end that he kept in hand the 88th and the 77th Regiments. XX. Though forming part of Buller’s brigade, the 19th Regiment The 19th Regi- Was suffered, ere long, to associate itself with Gen- gu, eral Codrington’s advance. So, with this and the other stray regiment? which clung to it, Codrington’s brigade was swollen to a force of five battalions. These five battalions were extended in a broken chain at the ve foot of the bank on the Russian side of the river, State of the A aa : . five battalions and were falling—especially toward the right—un- standing one der the close fire of the skirmishers who crowned theleftbank thetop. In this strait some of our officers instinct- ofthe river. ively tried to clear the front by getting the men to mount part way up the bank and bring their rifles to a level with the summit. But, among the foremost, the general com- manding the Division had forded the river. Sir George Brown Sir George was an officer whose career had begun, and begun Brown: with glory, in the great days under Wellington ; but, whilst he was still in his early manhood, wars had ceased, and thenceforth for near forty years he had brought his strong _ energies to bear upon the kind of military business which used to be practiced by the English in peace-time. A long immer- ! The way in which the 88th and the 77th Regiments were handled at a later period of the action was not the necessary result of the dispositions made at this time, and is a fit subject for distinct comments. ?'The 95th. See ante. 002 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuapr, XLIV. sion in the Adjutant-General’s department had led him to go even beyond other men in laying stress upon the value of dis- cipline; but the practice of this sort of industry had not at all helped to school him for the command of a division in war- time; for in laboring after that mechanic perfection which, after all, is only one of many means toward an end, the end it- self had been much forgotten by those who controlled our mil- itary system, and the business of war (as, for instance, the art of carrying a brigade in line through inclosures and thick grounds) had-been little or never practiced in England! To a military system which omits to anticipate and to deal with the common obstacles to be expected in a battle-field, war is a rough disturber; and, unless the industry of the barrack-yard is supported by other and better resources, it is liable to be turned to nothingness by even a gentle contact with reality. A belt of garden ground, a winding, though fordable stream, and an enemy hitherto inert, had sufficed to make Sir George Brown despair of being able to present his troops to the ene- my in a state of formation. Great dislocation of military or- der was, of course, the necessary result of having to pass through inclosures and to ford a winding stream; so what the main body needed to have before it when it approached the left bank of the river was a swarm of skirmishers clearing its immediate front, and prepared to cover it during the process of forming anew. This cover, however, was wanting. Sir George Brown declared that to attempt any formation after the passage of the river would be impossible, and that he had “‘ determined to trust to the spirit and individual courage of the “troops.” Thus, on ground giving rare opportunity for the ' deliberate preparation of an attack, and under no great stress of battle, the Light Division—the ‘‘ Light Division,” whose very name carried with it a great inheritance of glory—was suffered to lapse into a mere throng of brave men. In this plight the five battalions had to advance under the guns of a powerful battery supported by heavy columns of foot. But an officer honored with the command of British troops can always hope that, when his skill fails him, his men may still — retrieve the day by sheer fighting; and to a commander frus- trated in his evolutions, the prospect of a rude conflict with the enemy may offer the best kind of solace, and, perhaps, even — a happy issue out of trouble. Of such comfort as was to be got from close fighting, there seemed to be fair promise in the Great Redoubt, and there Sir George Brown resolved to seek 1 Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Scinde, used to press the import- ance of practicing troops in this way, but withaut success. SECTION INTENDED TO CONVEY AN IDEA OF THE FORMATION OF THE GROUND BENEATH THE GREAT REDOUBT. the Gre oe Redoubt N.B.—This is not a-section made from survey, and ts not intended to be taken as a representation that such was the actual config- uration of the ground. It is only meant to help the reader toward understanding the description given in the teat. 504 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. (Cuap. XLIV. it. Eager to have, at the least, a forward place in the armed throng, he suffered agony lest the bank, very steep at the spot where he faced it, should be inaccessible to a mounted officer ; but he soon found a place where a break in the stitthhess of the acclivity left room for the two or three ledges which a horse- man must find before he can reach the top. Then he quickly gained the open ground above. The Russian skirmishers were there. Schooled in habits of deep reverence for military rank, these men may have been startled, perhaps, by the sudden ap- parition of the flowing plumes which bespoke a general officer, and, what was worse, a general officer in a state of displeasure. It seems, too, there is something in the bearmg of a fearless, near-sighted man which disturbs the reckonings of other peo- ple; for they see that his ways are not their ways, and they do not know but that he may be right in not fearing them, and that if they were not to be afraid of him, they themselves might be in the wrong. At all events, the enemy’s skirmish- ers, omitting or failing to bring down the English General, suffered him to remain unhurt on the top of the bank. There, flushed and angry—he was angry perhaps with himself, or an- gry with the gardens and walls, and the perverse winding of a stream which had broken the cherished structure of his battal- ions—he sat on his gray charger full under the guns of the Great Redoubt, and the dun oblong columns of the enemy’s infantry that flanked it on either side. However eagerly he might be longing to carry forward his Division, he was with- out the means of sending swift orders along his line. But toward the right of Sir George Brown a movement cor- General God- Tesponding with his determination had already be- nington, gun. ' General Codrington, ordered to advance in line, and not to stop till he had crossed the river, had obeyed very swiftly, and the men of his brigade (in common with the 95th Regiment), having moved with a converging tendency during their passage through the vineyards and the river, were now thickly clustered under the left bank in a chain which took its bends from the winding of the stream. Codrington was at this time between the 33rd Regiment and the 23rd Fu- sileers. He strove to do something toward restoring the form- ation of his troops; but the crowd, jammed together, twisted into fantastic shape by the bends of the river’s bank, and, standing helpless under the fire of the skirmishers shooting down into it from above, could hardly even try to perform an evolution requiring free space and time. And if for a moment it seemed possible that any approach to a formation under the bank could be effected, the hope was rudely destroyed ; for, Cnr. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 505 on ground lower down the river, a body of the enemy’s light troops found for themselves a spot yielding them shelter, yet so placed that it enabled them to pour a flanking fire along the strip or ledge which divided the stream from. the bank, and this at a part where the earth was alive with our devoted soldiery. To keep the men under this fire for many minutes, and to keep them, too, standing all the time in unresisting masses, would be to lose a brigade. The only order received by Gen- eral Codrington had been obeyed to the full. He had no time to seek guidance from his divisional general. Clearly there was come upon him one of those rare conjunctures in which a career is made to hinge upon the decision of a moment. Gen- eral Codrington a few weeks before had been only a traveler! on a visit to the army in Bulgaria. He now commanded a brigade. His father was that admiral whose achievement at Navarino had been a link in the chain of events which now brought the son in arms for the Sultan’s cause. And any one who loved our navy, even to jealousy of the land service, might persuade himself that the bright, ardent, straightforward glance, and the bold, decisive speech of the Coldstream officer, must have come by inheritance from a sailor. He had the close, tight lips bespeaking the obstinate man who lives a life undistracted by breadth and diversity of views. And much of what he seemed he was; a firm, plain soldier, not liable to be bent from the simple path by refined or complex views.? He could not see far without the help of the glass which he kept attached to his cap, but he was more alive to the world ~ around him than near-sighted men often are. He had never before been in action. He could not suffer his troops to re- main for another minute a helpless crowd under heavy fire. He knew not how he could withdraw them to any ground apt for manceuvring, and it was hardly possible for him to exert such a control over the crowd of soldiers hemmed in under the bank as would enable him to repair the evil by covering his brigade with skirmishers. XXI. Nelson, gliding into the Bay of Aboukir, told his assembled 1 With the rank of colonel, but unattached. 2 I of course know that an opinion attributing to General Codrington this manly simplicity of mind is liable to be challenged by those who remember the style of his dispatches. My answer is, that his dispatches do not indicate the man. His private letters do. They are written very simply, but with a good deal of power. Vorsit—-Y 506 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. captains that if any one of them in the coming battle should chance to be disturbed by doubts about what he ought to do, he might find a good way out of trouble by closing with an enemy’s ship. And it was a solution of this sort which Codrington sought ; Codrington re- for, with no authority except that which was cast ov eet Re upon him by the stress of the moment, he resolved doubt. to storm the Great Redoubt. And he resolved to do this instantly. His immediate power over the disordered masses around him was confined within the range of his voice, but, lifting himself a little in his stirrups, he spoke to the men His words to in his clear, ringing voice, and ordered them (all ‘here who could hear him) ‘to fix bayonets, get up the ‘bank, and advance to the attack.’ Then also Codrington imagined that the need of the mo- He gains the Ment was a ready leader rather than a cool and top of the placid general. Besides, this was his first battle; an and perhaps—our army, and not the world, will un- derstand him if so it was—he unconsciously felt that the fore- most place was peculiarly befitting a Guardsman who com- manded a brigade of the line. With the quickness of a man accustomed to hunting, he found a spot where the bank was practicable, and, facing it obliquely, his small white Arab, with two or three strides, carried him to the summit. From the spot which he thus reached the enemy’s skirmishers had with- drawn ;! and Codrington, with the few soldiers who had al- ready been able to gain the top, was alone upon this part of the hill-side. Looking up the smooth, gentle slope, he had be- fore him the Great Redoubt ;. but for the moment the mouths of the heavy guns which armed it remained black and silent. On his right front he saw a body of infantry massed in col- umn. The men, in their long, gray, sombre coats, stood form- ed with great precision and rigidly still; but right and left of the mass there was a chain of skirmishers so placed on the flanks of the column as to be abreast of its front rank. The troops close in rear of the body in front could hardly be seen, for they were almost hidden by the dip of the ground, but the crest was fringed with sparkling light, and the light was light playing upon the bayonet points of battalions massed in the hollow. Our troops were yearning to be commanded, and if the men, far and near, could have seen that the horseman on the small ‘ T imagine that they were withdrawn from this spot because it was under the guns—the guns of the Great Redoubt—from which the enemy was about to open fire on our troops. Cuar.XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 507 white Arab above them was a general officer, they would have looked to every wave of his arm for a guiding signal; but Cod- rington had come to the East a mere traveler, and his simple forage cap had not the significance of the hat and the flowing plumes, which would have shown men far from the spot that a general officer was on the top of the bank. There were sol- diers, however, who gained the top almost at the same moment as their leader. First one here and there, then knots, then bevies of men clambered up. Hitherto the knowledge that there was to be an advance be- yond the bank had been confined to the people who chanced to be near Sir George Brown or General Codrington; but those who heard the words or caught the meaning of the di- visional general and the brigadier hastened to give effect to the will of their chiefs by sending their words along the line. The 7th Fusileers, being on the extreme right of Codring- ton’s brigade, was beyond the reach of his personal guidance ; Lacy Yea ana but Lacy Yea,! who commanded the regiment, was his Pusileers. 9 man of an onward, fiery, violent nature, not likely to suffer his cherished regiment to stand helpless under muz- zles pointed down on him and his people by the skirmishers close overhead. The will of a horseman to move forward, no less than his power to elude or overcome all obstacles, is sin- gularly strengthened by the education of the hunting-field, and Lacy Yea had been used in early days to ride to hounds in one of the stiffest of all hunting counties. To him this left bank of the Alma crowned with ‘Russian troops was very like the wayside acclivity which often enough in his boyhood had threatened to wall him back and keep him down in the depths of a Somersetshire lane whilst the hounds were running high up in the field some tén or fifteen feet above. His practiced eye soon showed him a fit ‘ shord’ or break in the scarped face of the bank, and then shouting out to his people, ‘ Never mind ‘forming! Come on, men! Come on, anyhow!’ he put his cob to the task, and quickly gained the top. On either side of him, men of his regiment rapidly climbed up, and in such numbers that the Russian skirmishers who had been lining it fell back upon their battalions. And now, in the masses still crowded along the foot of the The heaving bank there rose up that murmur of prayer for closer Penne crowd fighting which, coming of a sudden from men of bank. Teuton blood, is the advent of a new and seemingly extrinsic power—the power ascribed in old times to the hand 1 Pronounced Yaw. . | et othe 2 eae Ge 508 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. — [Cuar. XLIV. of an Immortal. From the first company of the 7th Fusileers to the left of the 19th Regiment, the deep, angry, gathering sound was‘ Forward!’ ‘Forward! ‘Forward!’ The throng was heaved; and presently the whole Ist brigade of the Light Division, carr ying with it the 19th and the 95th Regiments, surged up, and in numberless waves broke over the bank. That tendency to converge of which we have already spoken hai forge aned contracted the front presented by the five regi- converging ments now on the crest of the bank to a fraction ehiea only. of the line which they would have formed if soeanpe the they had been deployed in due order. The opera- 3 tion of taking ground and opening out into line is hardly one to be undertaken by a crowd of soldiery on ground which may be called the glacis of the enemys fortress, and in the close presence of his formed battalions ; but the 7th Fusi- leers, being on the extreme right of the brigade, and not be- ing cramped at that time by any pressure from the regiments of the 2nd Division, was able to find space; and, though num- bers of the regiment were wanting, and though many belong- ing to other corps were mixed up with the Fusileers, Lacy Yea, using violent energy, was able in some degree to make the men Endeavors of Open out. But the silence which is the pride of the the men to English army could not at that moment be pre- the top of the served ; for numbers of men, separated from their bas companies and their regiments, yet eager to follow the path of duty, were anxiously seeking advice from officers, and trying, in fact, to place themselves under such command as time and circumstances would allow. In this condition of things, the utmost that could be done was to give to the mass the rudiments of a line formation. Colonel Blake, with the 33rd, was able to make his regiment open out and form line. In the other three regiments, too, the soldiers strove hard to put themselves in their English array; but on either flank space was wanting; and although these battalions, having now open ground before them, were no longer a helpless mass, their state was not such as to enable them to move at the will of a commander. ‘They were an armed and warlike crowd. The five regiments now gathered on the crest of the bank The task they Were the first body of Allied troops which moved had before up on that day to dispute with the enemy for po ground which he held in strength. Both their right and their extreme left confronted the Russian infantry massed in columns upon either flank of the Great Redoubt; but the centre and left centre of this part of our assailing force stood right under the face of the work. Cuap. XLIV. ] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 509 Although at this time there was in general no due forma- tion, still the knotted chain into which the men of the five reg- iments found themselves extended was much more than long enough to outflank the Great Redoubt on either side; and the troops which formed the extreme left and the extreme right of our line were less exposed than the centre regiments to fire from the face of the work. But in order that he might at once crush those portions of our clustered force, the enemy, as we have seen, had magsive columns of infantry posted on either flank of the redoubt.~ Two of these columns—columns formed of the Kazan corps—now moved down the hill. The column,! descending from the eastern flank of the work, The Right Ka. Marched against that part of our line which was xan column formed by the 19th Regiment and some of the left acuinstthe © companies of the 23rd. It had already come part 19th Regiment way down the slope before any great number of panies of the the English had clambered up to the top of the ey bank; and our soldiers, it would seem, at that time might have been forced back into the channel of the river by a continued and resolute advance of the column; but when one by one, and in knots and groups, our men gained the top of the bank—when they saw the ground above spreading The column is SMooth and open before them, and the huge gray, defeated, and square-built mass gliding down to where they were, a then, happily for England and for the freedom of Europe—for on ‘this, in no small measure, the common weal seems to rest—it came to be seen that now, after near forty years of peace, our soldiery were still gifted with the priceless quality which hinders them from feeling, in the way that for- eigners feel it, the weight of a column of infantry. In their English way, half sportive, half surly, our young soldiers seem ed to measure their task; and then—many of them still hold- ing betwixt their teeth the clusters of grapes which they had gathered in the vineyards below—they began shooting easy shots into the big, solid mass of infantry which was solemnly marching against them. The column was not unsteady, but it was perhaps an over-drilled body of men unskillfully or weakly handled. At all events, those who wielded it were unable to make its strength tell against clusters of English lads who stood facing it merrily, and teasing it with rifle balls. Soon the column was ordered or suffered to yield, and since it fell back 1 A double battalion column, I believe, containing 1500 men. This Kazan corps, of which we shall see a great deal, is more commonly called in Rus- sian accounts the ‘Grand-Duke Michael’s Regiment.’ It was a regiment of ‘Fusileers.’ ~ 510 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. to a spot where the ground was hollow, it lapsed nearly or quite out of sight. Then the 19th and the left companies of the 28rd, having thus ridded themselves of the infantry force in their front, began, as they advanced, to bend toward their right, and became a part of the force which was storming the Great Redoubt. | ° ‘But the other Kazan column!1—the column coming down The Left Ka. from the west flank of the redoubt—was a force of rte nent” High mettle ; and it now began that obstinate fight with the ith With the 7th Fusileers which was destined to last Fusileers. from the commencement of the infantry fight until almost the close of the battle. XXII. But between the two bodies of troops thus engaged on The storming Cither flank with the enemy’s infantry, the great of the Great ~— bulk of Codrington’s brigade, swollen by the acces- Redoubt. : : : | sion of the 95th Regiment, was already moving up under the guns of the Great Redoubt. Codrington, indeed, had not waited for the moment when his whole brigade reach- ed the top of the bank; for, having gathered some knots of men on either side of him, he rode forward gently a few paces, . then waited until he gained some increase in numbers, and then again moved on, thus canvassing, as it were, for followers, and gradually carrying forward with him more and more of the troops. At first he got on slowly, for thé bulk of our offi- cers, having had no order to dispense with formation, they judged, when they gained the top of the bank, that they ought to strive to form line before they advanced, and they were la- boring to that end; but when it came to be understood that an advance without formation was sanctioned by the generals or compelled by stress of events, the whole of the force, though clubbed and broken into clusters of men, began to move up the gentle slope of the hill. For a little while, every gun in the great battery above re- mained dark and silent. . Amongst the Russians who were plying their field-glasses from the parapet of the Great Redoubt there was a question meet for debate:—‘If the scarlet men of‘the sea were pre- ‘sumptuously bent upon storming the work, where was the ‘ereat column of attack, and where the great column of sup- ‘port, and where the great columns of reserve which would ‘have been formed for such an enterprise? Yet, if they had 1 A double battalion column, I believe, containing 1500 men. Cuap.XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 511 ‘no such purpose, why were so many men coming up under ‘the guns, within grape-shot range? And, unless those En- ‘lish were really attacking in force, why, in the name of the ‘Holy Virgin and our own blessed Sergius,! why, riding for- ‘ward even in front of the skirmishers, should there be that ‘superb-looking horseman on the gray charger, whose visible ‘rage, no less than his flowing plumes, clearly showed that he ‘held high command ?? Upon the whole, it seemed that the advance of the red-coat- ed soldiery was an irruption of skirmishers preparatory to an attack in force, but was an irruption so strong as to be worthy of all that artillery could do to crush it. So, the Russian sharpshooters having now, for the most part, fallen back, or moved aside out of the line of fire, the gunners in the Great Redoubt made ready to open fire upon our regiments with round shot, canister, and grape. First one gun, then another, then more. From east to west the parapet grew white, and henceforth it lay so enfolded in its bank of silver smoke that no gun could any longer be seen by our men, except at the’ moment when it was pouring its blaze through the cloud. On what one may call a glagis, at three hundred yards from the mouths of the guns, the light- ning, the thunder, and the bolt are not far apart. Death loves a crowd; and in some places our soldiery were pressing on so close together, that when a round shot cut its way into the midst of them, it dealt a sure havoc. There began a slaughter of our people. Some of the men struck down had got up a good way on the slope; others were so newly come to the top of the bank that they fell back ° dead and dying into the channel of the river; but all who were not struck down moved forward. Some of the clusters into which our men had gathered were eight or ten deep; and the round shot, tearing cruelly through and through, mowed down so many of our devoted soldiery that several times the crowd left standing was thinned. But only for a moment; because that singular tendency which had begun with the advance into the vineyards was now setting in more strongly. Moving to the attack without, being ordered to make toward any given spot, almost every officer and man (except those toward the flanks who were engaged with the enemy’s infantry) had instinctively proposed to him- self the same goal; and this goal was the Great Redoubt. 1 The troops in and near the redoubt-belonged to the 16th Division, and this Division carried with it a wooden image of the saint, solemnly intrusted to it by the Bishop of Moscow. . 512 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. Upon the Great Redoubt, therefore, the regiments kept always converging; and in less time than it took the Russian. artil- lerymen to sponge and load their guns, our people, inclining away from the flanks, and pressing in toward the centre, filled up every space cut clear by the shot; and this so constantly that, again, after a fall of many men, and again, and still again, there was always a flock ready for the slaughter. In the ‘Derbyshire,”! Captain Eddington was shot in the throat and killed; Polhill was torn and slain with grape. The colonel was wounded, and Champion took the command of the regi- ment. He was a man of great gentleness and piety; and if he was not highly endowed with intellectual gifts, he was able to - express the feelings of his heart with something of a poetic force. His mind was accustomed to dwell very much on the world that lies beyond the grave; and in the midst of this scene of carnage he gained, as it were, a seeming glimpse of the happy state ; for when the younger Eddington fell at his side, Champion paused to see what ailed him, and, looking upon his young friend’s pale face, he saw it suddenly clothed with a ‘most sweet expression.’ It was because death was on him that the blissful look had come. In the mind of Champion the sight had a deep import; for he was of the faith that God’s Providence is special, and to him the beautiful smile on the features of ‘the dead’ was the smile of an immortal man gen- tly carried away from earth by the very hand of his Maker. Yet this piety of his was of no unwarlike cast. Nay, ie was of so noble a sort that, though he had not willingly chosen the profession of arms, yet, w hen he prayed, he was accustom- ed to render thanks to his Creator for vouchsafing to make him a hardy soldier; and being, he said, very strong in the be- lief that he could die as piously on the battle-field as in ‘a ‘downy bed, he pressed on content with his ‘ Derbies’ to the face of the Great Redoubt.2 And now, whilst the assailing force was rent from front to rear with grape and canister poured down from the heavy guns above, another and a not less deadly arm was brought to bear against it; for the enemy marched a body of infantry into the rear of the breastwork, and his helmeted soldiers, kneeling behind the parapet at the intervals between the em- brasures, watched ready with their muskets on the earthwork till they thought our people were near enough, and then fired into the crowd. Moreover, the troops on either flank of the redoubt began to fire obliquely into the assailing mass. 1 The 95th. 2 Champion’s letters. Russian battery commanding df) the Great Redoubt. The Ouglitz battalions, ¢; (p> t THE STORMING OF THE GREAT REDOUBT. + Z the Vladimir The right Kazan colamav battalions 5 retiring Aza The Great Redoubt § AZ) #2.9 4 \ Thurteen heavy gnns 3§ * 1 Pippo Y, wits 2 ren cota. a992 2299 ‘wt / 358 Oma ole 4 & * es a3, isi The 7th Fusileers imperfect- Ha A of BPLe7e PEEL YIN Ne Boek Ie. ee \ ly formed and engaged with / / 7 ng Gm? beh eS \ the left Kazan column. ORY, a rot } ~ } rN Doe Gh of Ase Gh Crue Es a x2 514 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA [Cuap. XLIV. Then, for such of our men as were new to war, it became time to learn that the ear is a false guide in the computation of passing shot, and that amid notes sounding like a very tor- rent of balls, the greater part of even a crowded force may re- main unhurt. The storm of rifle and musket balls, of grape and canister, came in blasts; and though there were pauses, yet, whilst a blast was sweeping through, it seemed to any young soldier, guided by the sound of the rushing missiles, that nowhere betwixt them, however closely he might draw in his limbs, could there be room for him to stand unscathed. But no man shrank. Our soldiers, still panting with the violence of their labor in crossing the river and scaling the bank, scarcely fired a shot, and they did not speak; but they every one went forward. The truth i s, that the weak-hearted men had been left behind in the pardéte and buildings of the village; the dross was below, and the force on the hill-side was pure metal. It was so intent on its purpose, that no one, they say, at this time was seen to cast back a look toward the 1st Division. The assailants were nearing the breastwork, when, after a lull of a few moments, its ordnance all thundered at once, or, at least, so nearly at the same moment, that the pathway of their blast was a broad one; and there were many who fell; but the onset of our soldiery was becoming a rush. Codrington, riding in front of the men, gayly cheered them on; and all who were not struck down by shot pressed on toward the long bank of smoke which lay dimly infolding the redoubt. But already—though none of the soldiery engaged then knew who wrought the spell—a hard stress had been put upon the enemy. For a while, indeed, the white bank of smoke, lit through here and there with the slender flashes of musketry, stood fast in the front of the parapet, and still all but shroud- ed the helmets and the glittering bayonets within; but it grew more thin; it began to rise; and, rising, it disclosed a grave change in the counsels of the Russian Generals, Some Englishmen—or many perhaps at the same moment—looking keen thr ough the smoke, saw teams of artillery horses moving, and there was a sound of ordnance wheels. Our panting sol- diery broke from their silence. ‘ By all that is holy! he is lim- ‘bering up! ‘He is carrying offhis guns!’ ‘Stoleaway! Stole ‘away! Stole away.’ The glacis of the Great Redoubt had come to sound more joyous than the covert’s side in England. The embrasures were empty, and in rear of the work long artillery teams—eight-horse and ten-horse teams—were rapid- ly dragging off the guns. ol eS a ee ee ee Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 515 Then a small, childlike youth ran forward before the throng carrying a color. This was young Anstruther. He carried the Queen’s color of the Royal Welsh. Fresh from the games of English school life, he ran fast; for, heading all who strove to keep up with him, he gained the redoubt, and dug the butt end of the flag-staff into the parapet, and there for a moment he stood holding it tight and taking breath. Then he was shot dead; but his small hands, still clasping the flag-staff, drew it down along with him, and the crimson silk lay covering the boy with its folds; but only for a moment, because William Evans, a swift-footed soldier, ran forward, gathered up the flag, and, raising it proudly, made claim to the Great Redoubt on behalf of the ‘Royal Welsh.! The colors, floating high in the air, and seen by our people far and near, kindled in them a raging love for the ground where it stood. Breathless men found speech. Codrington, still in the front, uncovered his head, waved his cap for a sign to his people, and then riding straight at one of the embrasures, leaped his gray Arab into the breastwork. There were some eager and swift-footed soldiers who sprang the parapet nearly at the same moment; more followed. At the same instant Norcott’s riflemen came run- ning in from the east, and the swiftest of them bounded into the work at its right flank. The enemy’s still lingering skirm- ishers began to fall back, and descended—some of them slowly —into the dip where their battalions were massed. Our sol. diery were up; and in a minute they flooded in over the para- pet, hurrahing, jumping over, _hurrahing, a joyful English crowd. The cheer had not yet died away on the hillside when from the enemy’s battalions standing massed in the hollow there rose up—as though it had been wrung from the very hearts of brave men defeated—a long, sorrowful, wailing sound. This was the bitter and wholesome grief of a valiant soldiery not content to yield. For men who so grieve there is hope. The redoubt had been Bele by our people; it was not yet lost to the Czar. There was se one piece of ordnance remaining in the work. This-was a brass 24-pound howitzer. At the “sight of the piece (for our people were mainly of Anglo-Saxon blood), a characteristic desire to assert the claims of private ownership 1 Afterward, there being a punctilio which governs those matters in our service, William Evans delivered the color to his superior, Corporal Soulbey, and Corporal Soulbey delivered it to Sergeant Luke O’Connor. Sergeant Luke O’Connor, though he soon got badly wounded, would not part with the honor of carrying ‘the cherished standard, and he bore it all the rest of the day. 516 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV, began to seize upon the crowd; and more than one man, so they say, scratched his mark upon the piece, that he might make it the peculiar trophy of himself or his regiment. But there was a better prize than this within the reach of a nimble soldier ;! for of the guns moving off toward the rear, there was one which, dragged by only three horses, had scarce- ly yet gained the rear of the redoubt. Captain Bell, of the Royal Welsh, ran up, overtook it, and pointing his capless pis- tol at the head of the driver, ordered him, or rather signed to him, to stop instantly and dismount. The driver sprang from his saddle and fied. Bell seized the bridle of the near horse, and he had already turned the gun round, when Sir George Brown riding up angry, and ordering him to go to his compa- ny, he of course obeyed, yet not until he had effectually started the horses in the right direction; for they drew the gun down the hill, and the capture became complete.? Bell went back to his corps, and in truth his services there were soon about to be needed; for already Colonel Chester, commanding the regiment, had been killed, and Campbell, who then took the command, being afterwards struck down, the charge of the regiment devolved upon Bell. . Of the men of the five regiments which had moved forward from the top of the river’s bank, many now lay upon the hill- side dead or wounded; and the 7th Fusileers, with fragments of other regiments, was still engaged with the enemy’s infan- try; but the greatest portions of four battalions,? and a wing of another battalion,*-were now upon the ground which the enemy had made his strong-holl. Yet the tendency to converge toward the redoubt as their goal had so closely compressed the assailing mass, that its front now hardly outflanked the parapet; and all the assailants of the redoubt were either within the work or closely gathered round it. They were perhaps 2000 men, and their onset had for the moment so bewildered the enemy that, having close at hand 1 When troops obtain possession of a gun left by the enemy in a field- work, they are not said to have ‘taken a gun’ in the true and highest sense of the phrase. It is only by the observance of this distinction that the Duke of Wellington can be said to have ‘never lost a gun.’ He surely, for instance, abandoned guns at Burgos; but because they were left by him in the works, and not taken from him in the field, the acquisition of them by the enemy was not a capture. 2 The gun is now at Woolwich. The horses served for some time in our ‘Black Battery.’ 3 The 33rd, the ‘ Royal Welsh’ (or 23rd), the ‘ Derbies’ (95th), and the 19th. * 2nd battalion Rifle Brigade. q Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 517 great masses of infantry, unbroken and scarcely touched— masses numbering full 10,000 bayonets—he nevertheless hung back, and for a while did little to molest our people in their occupation of the work. Our soldiery were well inclined to rest and make themselves at home; and Codrington, alighting from his horse, began to show the men how best to establish themselves on the ground they had won by lying down outside the parapet, and resting their rifles upon its top. Thus the assaulting force had carried the great field-work which was the key of the enemy’s position on the Alma; and if at this time the supporting Division had been half way up the hill, or even if it had been beginning to crown the banks of the river on the Russian side, the toils and perils of the day would perhaps have been over. But our men were only a crowd; and they, all of them, wise and simple, now began to learn in the great school of action, that the most. brilliant achievement by a disordered mass of soldiery requires the speedy support of formed troops. Then—and then, as is said, for the first time—the men cast No supports back a look toward the quarter from which they yet coming up might hope to see supports advancing; but when . top of “ ° - the rivers | they carried their eyes down the slope strewn thick pent with the wounded and the dead, they saw that, from the ground where they stood down home to the top of _the river’s bank, there were no succors coming. XXIII. Where were the supports ? The Duke of Cambridge is the grandson of King George The Duke of JIIJ., and a cousin of the Queen. At the outbreak “Cambridge. — of the war he was 35 years of age. He had made the most of such experience as could be gained by following the vocation of a military life in the British Isles. He under- stood’the mechanism of our army system, and, so far as could be judged by the test of home service, he was a good and a diligent soldier. Nay, he had some qualifications for command which are not very common in England. He loved order, method, and organization. Long before the war it had been said that he was gifted with that faculty of moving troops which is one of the prime qualifications of a general officer ; and the skill with which his superb Division had been now de- ployed seemed to give safe ground for saying that the flatter- ing rumor was true. He was zealous and devoted to duty. He had the habit of exercising forethought. He was sagacious, and was more keenly alive than most other men of our land- 518 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. service to passing and coming events. He had a good milita- pyseyes aie was a great respecter of the public voice in England, and was even, perhaps, too ready to suffer himself to be swayed by light, transient breezes of ‘opinion.’ He had no dread of inno- vations, and the beard that clothed his frank, handsome, manly face was the symbol of his adhesion to a then new revolt against. custom. He was much loved, for he was of a genial temper ; and his rank was so well helped out by his hereditary faculty of remembering those with whom he had once conversed that far from chilling his intercourse with other men—it enabled him to give happy effect to the kindliness of his nature. But, after all, what a general has to do is to try to overcome the enemy by exposing his own soldiery to all needful risks. At any fit time he must be willing and eager to bring his own people to the slaughter for the sake of making havoc with the enemy; and it is right for him to be able to do this without at the time being seen to feel one pang. Nay, however certain it may be that his gentler nature will overcome him on the morrow, it is well for him to be able to pass through the blood- iest hours of battle with something of a ruthless joy. The Duke of Cambridge was wanting in this kind of truculence ; and, however careless of his own life (for he had the personal courage of his race), he was liable to be cruelly wrung by the weight of a command which charged him with the lives of other men. He was of an anxious temperament; and with him the danger was that, in moments when great stress might come to be put upon him, the very keenness of his desire to judge aright would become a cruel hinderance. Nor was hea man who who would be driven to burst his way though scru- ples and doubts by the impulse of any selfish ambition. Far from straining after occasions for acting on his own judgment, he would have liked, if he could, to receive a series of precise orders which would serve to guide him in every successive change. But a general of division must not expect to be long in a campaign without being thrown upon his own judgment. Lord Raglan had furnished the Duke with one order—an or- der ‘to support the Light Division in its forward movement’ 1 A few words which fell from Lord Raglan in October, 1854, have caused me, perhaps, to speak with more confidence on this subject than I might otherwise venture to show. In that month—I believe on the 15th—Lord Raglan spoke to me of the exceeding anxiety of the Duke of Cambridge about the Inkerman position, and he said that in consequence of this pressure measures had been taken. Exactly three weeks afterward the very ground about which the Duke had been so anxious was the scene of the mighty on- slaught which commenced the battle of Inkerman. Cuapr. XLIV.] - INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 519 —and the Duke of Cambridge had begun to obey it by follow- ing the advance of the Light Division, and bringing his force home down to the inclosures ;, but, having thus come to the end of the open ground, he felt the want of some new sanction before he carried his Division into the vineyards. He knew that, for a while at least, the superb array of his Guards and Highlanders would be shattered by passing through inclosures, and he wished for another order from head-quarters before he submitted to see his beautiful line broken up. The order ‘to ‘support the Light Division’ was becoming an imperfect guide, because that same Light Division had rushed headlong upon a task which was dissolving great part of it into a vast swarm of skirmishers. Were the Guards and Highlanders to do the like? Were they to do thus, although their efficacy as a force acting in support of the troops in advance was likely to depend Halt of the ists upon their being able to come up in good order ? eae The Ist Division was halted; yet the Light Divi- vineyards. = sion was moving rapidly forward. Why was there this failure of concert between the Light and the Ist Division? Why was there no man there who could link the one division to the other by a few decisive words ? Lord Raglan had already given his orders, and at this mo- ment, led forward by a golden chance, he was riding far away in another part of the field. Sir George Brown, already in the inclosures, and having no line of skirmishers to cover the ad- vance of his battalions, was unable to govern the movements of his Division in such a way as to prevent it from getting too far in advance of the Guards and Highlanders; and afterward, when Sir George went forward in person with that part of his Division which stormed the Redoubt, he seems to have found no means of communicating with the Duke of Cambridge and pressing for the immediate support of the Ist Division. Every moment was precious; for the men of the Light Di- vision were moving down at a run through the vineyards, or wading across the river. . At the time of this halt the battalion of the Grenadier Guards was across the great road.” Thither now from the west a horse- General Airey Man came galloping up. Of an- actual order Gen- cal eral Airey was not the bearer; but he was a man whose loyalty toward his chief made him always feel certain that what he himself saw clearly to be right was exactly what his chief desired to have done, and the result was that, in an emergency, he was able to speak with a weight which virtually brought to bear upon the matter in hand the whole power of i 520 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. ([Cuap. XLIV. Head-quarters. His keen eye had detected the halt of the 1st Division, and he saw also that the Light Division was pushing forward at a run. Another man would have gone round or sent to the commander of the forces for his opinion ; but every moment of the lapsing time was bringing danger. Airey rode straight up to General Bentinck,! and explained His exposition it to be Lord Raglan’s meaning that the 1st Divi- of the order to sion should instantly continue its advance in sup- support. port of the Light Division. ‘ Must we,’ asked Ben- tinck, ‘must we always keep within three hundred yards of the ‘Light Division?’ ‘No,’ said Airey, ‘not necessarily at any ‘fixed distance; that would not be possible. What his Royal ‘ Highness has to do is to support the Light Division by ad- ‘vancing in conformity with its movements.’ Then the Ist The et Divic Division moved forward, and, breaking into the in- sion resumes Closures, began to work its difficult way through Hs advance. the vineyards. Afterwards—but not, it seems, by any formal order to halt The Division the advance of the 1st Division was again stop- aeeinstipoed ped for a time: yet Codrington’s brigade had then ‘begun to rush forward. From the ground on which he was riding, Sir De Lacy Evans could see in profile the swift Step taken by Cisordered advance of Codrington’s brigade, and the Hans. stop to which the 1st Division had come. He un- derstood the danger; and, comprehending at once that the advance of Codrington’s brigade was a movement requiring instant support, he took upon himself to send a message con- veying his opinion to the Duke of Cambridge. But when a division of infantry extended in line is marched through gardens and walled inclosures, the power of the gen- eral commanding it must always be more or less thrown into Want of free abeyance, because the want of an unobstructed view communica. and of free lateral communication makes it impossi- line wacae Die for him to know what is going on along the through inclo- whole line, or to send swift orders to the more dis- ine tant companies. For a time his authority is neces- sarily dispersed among many; and if the force is moving de- liberately and in face of an enemy, numbers of little councils of war will of necessity be going on here and there, in order to judge how best to deal with what seems to be the state of the battle in each field, each garden, each vineyard. The right of the 1st Division was formed by the brigade of 1 Lord Raglan had made an order specially providing that the bearer of an order for a divisional general should deliver it to the first brigadier whom he happened to find, to be by him transmitted to the divisional chief. Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 521 ‘Guards.’ In its origin, the appellation given to the regiments called ‘the Guards’ imported that the personal safety of the sovereign was peculiarly committed to their charge. Princes have imagined that by specially as- cribing this duty to a particular portion of their armed forces, rather than to the whole, and by granting some privileges to troops specially distinguished as their chosen defenders, they secure to themselves good means of safety in time of trouble, and that still, upon the whole, they do more good than harm to their military system by establishing a healthy spirit of ri- valry between the favored body and the rest of the army. The danger is, that a corps thus set apart will come to be con- sidered as a great reserve of military strength, and that, for that very reason, any disaster which it may sustain will be looked upon as more ruinous than a disaster of equal propor- tions occurring to other regiments. With us, the cor ps of Guards numbers only seven battalions, distr ibuted into three regiments, called the Grenadier Guards, the Coldstream, and the. Scots Fusileer Guards; and each of The Guards. ’ these three regiments had sent one battalion to form the bri- gade of Guards now serving in the Ist Division. The officers of the corps enjoy some privileges tending to accelerate their advancement in the army. ‘They are, for the most part, men well born or well connected ; and, being aided by a singularly able body of sergeants and corporals, they are not so over- burdened in peace-time by their regimental duties as to have their minds in the condition which too often results from mo- notonous labor. They have deeply at heart the honor of the whole brigade as well as of their respective corps, and the feel- ing is quickened by a sense of the jealousy which their privi- leges breed, or rather, perhaps, by the tradition of that ancient rivalry which exists between the ‘ Guards’ and the ‘ Line.’ The men of the rank and file have some advantages over the Line in the way of allowances and accoutrements. They are all of fine stature. Without being over-drilled, they are well enough practiced in their duties; and whoever ‘loves war, sees grandeur in the movement of the stately forms and the tower- ing bearskins which mark a battalion of the Guards. It is true that these household troops are cut off from the experi- ence gained by Line regiments in India and the Colonies; but, whenever England is at war in Europe, or against people of European descent, it is the custom and the pride of the Guards to take their part. The force is deeply prized by the Queen, and the class from which it takes its officers connects it with many families of 522 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. high station in the country. Its officers have so many rela- tives and friends amongst those who generate conversation in London, that when ‘the Guards’ are sent upon active service, the war in which they engage becomes, as it were for their sake, a subject of interest in circles which commonly yield only a languid attention to events beyond the seas. Grief for the death of Line officers is dispersed among the counties of the three kingdoms ;. and when they fall in ‘battle, it is the once merry country-house, the vicarage, or the wayside cottage of some old Peninsular officer, that becomes the house of mourn- ing. But by the loss of officers of the household regiments the central body of English society is touched, is shocked, is almost angered ; and he. who has to sit in his saddle and see a heavy slave hter of the ‘ Guards,’ may be almost forced to think ruefully of” fathers, of mothers, of wives, of sisters, who are amongst his own friends. There was nothing in the history or tr aditions of the famous corps of ‘the Guards’ to justify the notion that they were to be more often kept out of the brunt of the battle than the troops of the line; and in this very war they were destined to encounter the hardest trials of soldiers, and to go on fighting and enduring until the glory of past achievements, the strange ascendency which those achievements had won, and a few score of wan men with hardly the garb of soldiers, should be all that remained of ‘the Guards.’ Still it is certain that the house- hold battalions were more or less regarded as a cherished body of troops, and that the loss of the brigade of Guards would be jooked upon as a loss more signal, and in that sense more dis- astrous than the loss of three other battalions of equal strength. Now the enemy, whilst he dealt with the tumultuous onset of Codrington’s brigade, had rightly enough given some of his care to the more ceremonious advance of the 1st Division; and, since the Guards confronted both the Causeway batteries and the Great Redoubt, they of course underwent for a time a fire of artillery, and some men were struck down.'! The Grenadiers and the Scots Fusileers suffered the most. This loss did not occur as‘a consequence of any mistake: it was in the order of things that it should be. But, when men are new to war, and so placed in the battle-field as to be for the moment cut off from all knowledge of what is going on elsewhere, they are prone to imagine that a force which they see undergoing slaugh- ter, yet having no immediate means of attack or resistance, 1 Even when the Great Redoubt had been dismantled, and the Causeway batteries withdrawn, there were some guns in battery at more remote spots, which seem to have been brought to bear on the Guards. Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 523 must needs be the victim of some piece of forgetfulness or er- ror; and when once this notion has got its lodgment in the brain of an officer, his next step probably is to try to avert what he fancies to be an impending disaster by venturing to disobey orders, or by counseling another to do so. ‘The brigade of Guards will be destroyed,’ said one adviser; Suggestion and he asked whether it ought not to fall back a . that the little in order to recover its formation ? Guards should = fallback in or. | ‘Lhese words were spoken by an officer not hold- der to reform. ing any high rank,! and they owe their whole im- portance to the answer which they elicited and the propulsion which thereupon followed. He who answered the question was a veteran soldier, and it was with a deference no less wise than graceful that the Duke of Cambridge loved to seek and to follow his» counsels. Whilst Ensign Campbell. was passing from boyhood to man’s Sir Colin estate, he was made partaker in the great transac- Campbell. tions which were then beginning to work out the liberation of Europe. Inthe May of 1808 he received his first commission—a commission in the 6th Foot—and a few weeks afterward—then too young to carry the colors—he was serv- ing with his regiment upon the heights of Vimieira. There the lad saw the turning of a tide in human affairs, saw the opening of the mighty strife between ‘Column’ and ‘ Line,’? saw France—long unmatched upon the Continent—retreating before British infantry, saw the first of Napoleon’s stumbles, and the fame of Sir Arthur Wellesley beginning to dawn over Europe. He was in Sir John Moore’s campaign, and at its closing 1 T foresee that what I here say as to the obscure rank of the officer who made this suggestion will be regarded by some as inaccurate; and, indeed, I am aware that the belief of those who hold the contrary of this to be true is based npon grounds apparently strong. I did not hear the words myself; and all I can say is, that my statement is founded upon authority which makes me feel certain that I do rightly in making it; though I also think I am right in saying that I did not myself hear the words. If my statement as to the obscure rank of the officer is true, it follows, I think, that I am right in not disclosing his name, because (upon that supposition) his words had no sort of importance beyond that attributed to them in the text. 2 In his most interesting and most valuable ‘ Life of the Duke of Welling- ton,’ Mr. Gleig repeats the description of Vimicira, which the Duke once gave in his presence at Strathfieldsaye. The Duke’s words are thus given by Mr. Gleig :—‘The French came on on that occasion with great boldness, ‘and seemed to feel their way less than I always found them to do after- ‘ward. They came on, as usual, in very heavy columns, and I received them ‘in line, which they were not accustomed to, and we repulsed them three ‘several times.’ 524 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV. scene—Corunna. He was with the Walcheren expedition; and afterward, returning to the Peninsula, he was at the battle of Barossa, the defense of Tarifa, the relhef of Taragona, and the combats at Malaga and Osma. He led a forlorn hope at the storming of St. Sebastian, and was there wounded twice. He was at Vittoria ; he was at the passage of the Bidassoa; he took part in the American war of 1814 ; he served in the West Indies; he served in the Chinese war of 1842. These occa- . sions he had so well used that his quality as a soldier was per- fectly well known. He had been praised, and praised again and again; but since he was not so connected as to be able to move the dispensers of military rank, he gained promotion slowly, and it was not until the second Sikh war that he had a command as a general: even then he had no rank in the army ~ above that of a colonel. At Chilianwalla he commanded a di- vision. Marching in person with one of his two brigades, he had gained the heights on the extreme right of the Sikh posi- tion, ‘and then bringing round the left shoulder, he had rolled up the enemy’s line and won the day; but since his other Dri- gade (being separated from him by a long distance) had want- ed his personal control, and fallen into trouble, the briliancy of the general result w hich he had achieved did not save him altogether from criticism. That day he was wounded for the fourth time. He commanded a division at the great battle of Gujerat; and, being charged to press the enemy’s retreat, he had so executed his task that 158 guns and the ruin of the foe were the fruit of the victory. In 1851 and the following year he commanded against the hill-tribes. It was he who forced the Kohat Pass. It was he who, with only a few horsemen and some guns, at Punj Pao, compelled the submission of the combined tribes then acting against him with a force of 8000 men. It was he who, at Ishakote, with a force of less than 3000 men, was able to end the strife; and when he had brought to submission all those beyond the Indus who were in arms against the Government, he instantly gave proof of the breadth and scope of his mind, as well as of the force of his character ; for he withstood the angry impatience of men in authority over him, and insisted that he must be suffered to deal with the conquered people in the spirit of a politic and merciful ruler. After serving with all this glory for some forty-four years, he .came back to England; but between the Queen and him there stood a dense crowd of families—men, women, and chil- dren—extending farther than the eye could "reach, and armed with strange precedents, which made it out to be right that Cuar. XLIV.7 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 525 people who had seen no service should be invested with high command, and that Sir Colin Campbell should be only a colo- nel. Yet he was of so fine a nature that, although he did not always avoid great bursts of anger, there was no ignoble bit- terness in his sense of wrong. He awaited the time when per- haps he might have high command, and be able to serve his country in a sphere proportioned to his strength. His friends, however, were angry for his sake; and, along with their strong devotion toward him, there was bred a fierce hatred of a sys- tem of military dispensation which could keep in the back- ground a man thus tried and thus known. Upon the breaking out of the war with Russia, Sir Colin was appointed—not to the command of a division, but of a brigade. It was not till the June of 1854 that his rank in the army became higher than that of a colonel. Campbell was not the slave, he was the master of his call- ing, and therefore it was that he had been able to save his in- tellect from the fate of being drowned in military details. He knew that, although a general must have a complete mastery of even the smallest of such things, still they were only a part —a minute though essential part—of the great science of war. He understood the precious material whereof our army is form- ed. He heartily loved our soldiery; for he was a soldier, and had fellow-feeling with soldiers, and they had fellow-feeling with him. Instinctively they knew that together they might do great things—he by their help, they by his. Knowing the worth of their devotion and their bodily strength, he cherished them with watchful care; and they, on their part, loved, hon- ored, and obeyed him with a faith that all he ordered was right. He set great store upon discipline, but it was never for discipline’s s sake that he did so (as if that were itself an end), but because he knew it to be one of the main sources of mili- tary ascendency. So, although the officers and soldiers serv- ing under him got no more rest than was good for them, they were never vexed wantonly; and, in proportion as they grew in knowledge of their calling, they came to understand why it was that their chief compelled them to toil. A bodily ardor for fighting may be more or less masked and hidden; but he to whom this great passion is wanting is with- out the quality of a general. For warfare is so anxious and complex a business that against every vigorous movement heaps of reasons can forever be found; and if a man is so cold a lover of battle as to have no str onger guide than the poor balance of the arguments and counter- arguments which he ad- dresses to his troubled spirit, his mind, driven first one way 526 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. and then another, will oscillate, or even revolve, turning miser- ably in its own axis and making no movement straight for- ward. Now it is a characteristic still marking the Scottish blood, that often —and not the less so when it flows in the veins of a gentle-hearted being—it is seen to fire strangely and suddenly at the prospect of a fight. Campbell loved warfare _ with a deep passion; and at the thought of battle his grand, rugged face used to kindle with uncontrollable joy. ‘The brigade of Guards will be destroyed; ought it not to ‘fall back ?? . When Sir Colin Campbell heard this saying, his blood rose so high that the answer he gave—impassioned and far-resounding—was of a quality to govern events. ‘It is better, sir, that every man of Her Majesty’s Guards Campbell’s an. ‘Should lie dead upon the field than that they swertothesug- “should now turn their backs upon the enemy.’ gestion thatthe : : aise Guards should Doubts and questionings ceased. The Division fee went forward. | Sir Colin Campbell rode off to his left. His brigade at this Advance ofthe time was not under a heavy fire, and he effected the re Division t© operation of passing the river very simply; for the left bank pera Pp 5 y Simply; tor, ofthe river. without attempting formal evolutions, each of his regiments, whilst it advanced, tried to keep up, as well as the nature of the ground would allow, the rudiments of its line formation, and when it gained the opposite bank its array was carefully restored. As soon as one of the regiments was duly formed on the Russian side of the river it was moved forward, and, since the ground presented more obstacles toward our left than toward our right, the brigade fell naturally, and with- out design, into direct échelon of regiments. The 42nd was in advance; on the left of that regiment there was the 93rd, somewhat refused; and on the left of the 93rd, but still far- ther refused, there came the 79th... Meanwhile the Guards descended toward the bank with so much of the line formation as was permitted by the obstacles they had to overcome. Upon gaining the river’s side, the Cold- stream broke into open column of sections, in order to make the most advantage of the ford; and when it reached the op- posite bank it preserved its column formation for a time, in order to march the more conveniently round an elbow there formed by the river. When this movement was complete, the color-sergeants went out to take ground, and the battalion opened out into line formation with all the precision and cer- emony of a birthday review. On the right of this battalion, and moving with less deliberation, the Scots Fusileer Guards got through the inclosures and the river. On the right of that Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, ~ ' 527 last corps there marched the battalion of the Grenadier Guards. The Grenadiers were a body of men so well instructed and so skillfully handled, that in working their way through the in- closures they were able to preserve all the essential elements of their line formation... When they came to the bank, they looked for no ford, but, treating the river as a brook—as a brook which a soldier must pass without picking his way?— the battalion marched through it in-line ;? and though there were some points where a passage was easy, others where the soldiers had to wade deep, and some few, so they say, where the men were put to their swimming, still each file kept its . place in the line with a near approach to exactness. At length —but after a painful lapse of time, for Codrington’s disordered battalions were clinging all this while to the parapet of the Great Redoubt—the brigade of Guards stood halted, and form- ing anew under cover of the bank on the Russian side of the river. Their people were sheltered; but the heads of their colors, protruding a little above the top of the bank, could be seen by men looking down from the redoubt. But already there was nearly an end of the precious mo- , Time was laps-- Ments in which it was possible for the 1st Division ing; to bring an effective support to the troops in the Great Redoubt. Nor did General Buller succeed in bringing his battalions fe to the rescue. We saw that the 19th regiment had o support 3 ° ae . ° brought bythe Slipped from his control, and joined with Codring- two battalions ton’s brigade in storming the redoubt. The two ed under Bul- battalions which remained in his power were the nit 88th and the 77th Regiments. He was in person with the 88th, some way above the bank of the river; and the 77th, under the orders of Colonel Egerton, was on the extreme left of the English infantry line. The 88th and the 77th were The cause of Not at this time under fire; but before them, at oe somewhat long distances, there were heavy col- umns of Russian infantry ; and the enemy’s horsemen, though not, it seems, visible at this moment, were known to be hover- ing on the left front of the English line. Buller, however, had not yet apprehended that the Russians were preparing any en- terprise against his left flank; and when he saw how matters ' No less than seven of the officers serving with this battalion had acted as adjutants of the regiment, and to this circumstance the skill with which it was carried through the inclosures is in some measure ascribed. ? For very good reasons, soldiers in marching are called upon to go straight through brooks and pools of water without picking their way. 3 With the exception of one (the 2nd) company, commanded by Prince Ed- ward of Saxe-Weimar, which, happening to be near the bridge, filed over it. 528 _ INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV. stood in the redoubt, he rightly determined to advance at once with the two battalions which remained under his control. He therefore sent an order to Colonel Egerton, directing him at once to move forward with the 77th, and he himself pre- pared to advance at the same moment with the 88th. Colonel Egerton was a firm, able man, and he felt the mo- mentous importance of the duties attaching upon an officer who had charge of the extreme left of our infantry line; for it was obvious that a successful flank attack upon the one bat- talion which he commanded would bring into grievous jeop- ardy the whole array, English and French. The dips and hol- lows which marked the hill-side toward his left made it hard for him to see what the enemy was intending to do, and he failed to infer that the Czar’s renowned forces were really ab- staining from the enterprise which seemed to be alntost forced upon them by the nakedness of our left wing, and by their strength in the cavalry arm. At the moment when Buller’s order was brought to him, Colonel Egerton was so deeply im- pressed with a sense of the danger which he had to withstand in this part of the field, that—deliberately, and with a firmness which might have won him great praise, if the actual course of events had brought him his justification—he took upon him- self a grave burden. He took upon himself to say that, in the circumstances in which he stood, he ought not to obey the or- der. This answer the aid-de-camp carried back to General Buller. Buller was a near-sighted man ;! and being, it would seem, distrustful of what had been his own impression of the enemy’s attitude, he acquiesced in Colonel Egerton’s decision, allowed the 77th to remain where it was, and not only refrain- ed from advancing with the 88th, but threw the regiment into square, as though it were ahout to be attacked by cavalry. XXIV. So when the men of. Codrington’s force looked back to State of things Whence they came, and when also they looked to inthe Redoubt. their left rear, they saw they were alone— still alone—upon the hill-side. Then such of them as had the in- stinct of war began to understand that the blood of their com- rades had been shed in vain. For they were only clusters of men without the strength of ' It has already been said that Sir George Brown, who commanded the Division, and Codrington, who commanded its Ist brigade, were both of them near-sighted. The Light Division was the force which had to feel and fight its way to the key of the position, and it was an error to allow it to be car- tied into action by three near-sighted generals. Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 529 order, and masses of infantry, in a perfect state of formation, were heavily impending over them. The columns which were the nearest to them were in the dip behind the redoubt, and Hizey so placed that, without any danger to them, a Rus- y on i : c thehigher Sian battery, which had been planted higher up on ere rouete to the side of the Kourgané Hill, could throw its fire bearonthe into the site of the redoubt. The guns of this bat- omer tery were soon brought to bear upon those of our soldiery who were within the redoubt; and this fire, after kili- ing and wounding several men, drove the rest to seek cover by betaking themselves to the outer side of the parapet. This movement, though it wanted the sanction of orders, was scarce- ly wrong or unsoldierly ; for, since the men were without for- mation, their duty became like the duty of skirmishers, and the parapet of the redoubt supplied that kind of shelter which the need of the moment demanded. Yet the movement looked like the beginning of a retreat, and Codrington strove to check it; for, being at the moment on the outside of the work, he for the second time put his horse at the parapet, and again en- tered the redoubt, with a hope that the men would follow him in once more. But this time his example was little observed ; for almost every man being driven, by want of formation, to rely upon his own means of making a stand, was busied with Our men lodge the work of settling himself down, as well as he themelves —_ could, for a stubborn defense; and it was plain (as parapet. Codrington himself had been showing the men some few minutes before) that the best ground for making a stand was the foot of the parapet, on its outer side. When good infantry soldiers, in the immediate presence of a powerful enemy, are disordered, but still undaunted, the slightest rudiment of a field-work is of infinite value to it, not simply nor chiefly on account of the shelter which it affords, but rather because it gives a base and nucleus for that coher- ence which is endangered by the want of formation. If our men, then lying or kneeling along the foot of the parapet, had been well covered at the flanks, it would have been their duty to hold the ground firmly against even a great body of infan- try attacking them in front. But on either flank, as well as in front of the lengthened crowd of English soldiery which lay clustering about the par- apet, the enemy’s masses were gathered. On their right rear there was the double battalion column of the Kazan corps, still engaged with the 7th Fusileers. On their left and left front there were the two remaining battalions of the Kazan corps, and the four battalions of the Scusdal corps; but in their im- Vou. L—Z 530 ' INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. — [Cuar. XLIV. The forees mediate front, and posted in the hollow behind gathered the redoubt, they had before them the four superb against them. attalions of the Vladimir Regiment. These forces were supported by the four battalions of the Ouglitz corps, which stood massed in one column on a higher slope of the Kourgané Hill. The two battalions of sailors also were in this part of the field; and, besides the battery which armed the lesser field-work, and the one which commanded the dismantled redoubt, there were two batteries of artillery held in reserve. Moreover, 3000 horsemen were close at hand on the enemy’s extreme right. Thus (omitting the Kazan column, which was occupied with the 7th Fusileers) there was impending over our 2000 men, then kneeling or lying down by the parapet of the redoubt, a force of some 14,000 cavalry and infantry in a state of perfect formation, and supported by powerful batteries. And by this time there had sprung up amongst the Russian Wantike indie. LOfantry on the slopes of the Kourgané Hilla senti- nation of the ment of warlike indignation. Any Russian officer ity on the Who had been standing on ground high enough to Kourgand command a view of the river, must have seen that ee from the moment of their first onset on the left bank, the troops which stormed the redoubt were an isolated, and for the most part a disordered force; and even for some minutes after seeing them carry the work, he would be unable to make out that any supports moved up from the river were coming as yet to their aid. Naturally he would be shamed to think that many thousands of the once famous Russian infantry had been yielding up the Great Redoubt to a body which might almost be called a mere flush of skirmishers. Besides, it was known by this time in some of the Russian battalions that, of the pieces which had armed the redoubt, two were wanting, and to recover these there arose a burning desire. Unless the stain was to be lasting, it seemed clear that the red- coats still clinging to the dismantled redoubt must be driven at once down the hill. Without, it seems, receiving any orders from head-quarters, ’ Movement of OF from the divisional commander, the great column the Ouglitz formed of the Ouglitz battalions, and posted on the ai high ground above the redoubt, began to come swiftly down the hill; and for a few moments it came on, hot with zeal or anger, for the men of the front ranks fired vain, passionate shots whilst they marched, and young soldiers in the centre of the column kept shooting wildly into the air above them. ‘Soon, however, this body was halted.! * No mention is made of this movement in the Russian accounts, and I ‘Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. - 533 But it was in the great. Vladimir column that there sprang Advance ofthe UP the warlike spirit which was destined to bring Vladimir col- the foot soldiery of Russia and of England into a oo closer strife. The column, as we have seen, was a mass composed of the four battalions of the Vladimir corps ; and although it stood near to the English soldiery lying clus- tered along the outer'side of the parapet, still, since it was in the dip behind the rear of the earth-work, it could not be per- | fectly seen even by such of our men as might be standing up, and could not be seen at all by those who were lying down or kneeling. For the honor of having led this high-mettled column against English infantry, two men contend. From the time when Prince Mentschikoff rode off toward the sea, Prince Gortscha- koff had been left in command of the whole of the forces op- posed to the English; and General Kvetzinski, who command- ed the Division to which the Vladimir battalions belonged, was under Prince Gortschakoff’s orders. Each of these gen- erals says that (without knowing of the presence of the other) he gave orders for the advance ‘of the colnmn, and led it on in person. Their statements may perhaps be reconciled, for it is possible that Gortschakoff and Kvetzinski—the one riding with the left, the other with the right of the column—may have, both of them, done what they said they did. In that view of the matter, the coincidence would be accounted for by suppos- ing that the resolve of each of the two Generals sprang from the same cause—sprang from the warlike anger which was heaving the mass. I am, however, inclined to believe that Prince Gortschakoff is mistaken in his statement ;! and that the impulse which he gave to the Vladimir columns was after the movement now spoken of. Be this as it may, it is certain enough that—either alone, or jointly with Prince Gortschakoff —Kvetzinski led on the column. These troops of the 16th Division had been touched with the warlike fire which a patriot priesthood can draw from Gospels, Epistles, and Psalms. With the baggage of the Di- vision there was carried an image of the blessed Sergius; and when these troops were ordered to the south, the Archbishop of Moscow had taken care to whet them for the strife. ‘ Chil- imagine that it was a spontaneous movement soon stopped bv orders from some one in authority. 'The movement was observed by English officers so placed as to command a view of this part of the field, and if I am guilty of any error, it is the error of ascribing the movement to the wrong corps. 1 I found this belief upon a comparison of Prince Gor tschakoff's state- ments with the.known facts. 532 - ' INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. = [Cuar. XLIV- “dren of the Czar”—so ran the Primate’s blessing—“ Children “of the Czar our father, and Russia Sur mother, my warrior “brethren! The Czar, your country, the Christian faith, call “vou to great deeds, and the prayers of the Church and coun- “try are with you. . . . Should it be the will of God that you ‘too face the foe, forget not that you are doing battle for the ‘*most pious Czar, for our beloved country, for holy Church, ‘‘against infidels, against persecutors of the Christian faith— ‘“‘persecutors of men united to. us by ties of religion and of *“‘ blood—insulters of those who bow before the Holy Places, ‘‘sanctified by the birth, passion, and ascension of Christ. ‘‘ Blessing and honor to him who conquers! Blessing and ‘‘happiness to him who, with faith in God, and love for his ‘*‘ Czar and country, offers up his life as a sacrifice! It is writ- “ten in the Scriptures, concerning those of olden times who “fought for their country, ‘ By faith were kingdoms conquer- “¢¢ ed’? (Heb. xi., 33). Now by faith you too shall be conquer- “ors. Our most holy father Sergius whilome blessed our vic- ‘‘torious war against the enemies of Russia. His image was “borne in your ranks in the days of the Emperor Alexis, of ‘¢ Peter the Great, and finally in the great war against twenty ‘nations in the reign of Alexander the First. That sacred ‘form journeys with you also as a token of his fervent and be- “‘seeching prayers to God on your behalf. Take unto your- ‘“‘selves, moreover, the triumphal war-cry of the Czar and ** prophet David, ‘In God is my salvation and glory ! 2 The Vladimir column came on. It moved slowly, as though it were held in by some kind of awe or doubt. Still it moved, and without firing a shot; for the orders were not to fire, but . to charge with the bayonet. Huge and gray, the mass crept gliding up the slope which divided it from our soldiery. | Our men, gathered round the parapet, were kneeling or ly- ing down; and, being thus low, they could not see into the dip which lay at a little distance before them. But mounted officers, of course, could see farther, and even men on foot (es- pecially those near to either flank of the redoubt), if they stood up for a moment to gain a wider view, could see a whole field of bayonet-points, ranged close as corn, and seeming to grow taller and taller. And though none of our men knew the strenoth of the column which was closing upon them, yet, sometimes from what he himself saw, but more commonly by hearsay, almost everyman came to know that, toward the part of the parapet where he lay, there was a mass of Russian sol- diery coming. 1 Psalm li., 8; Eastern Papers, Part vii., p. 50. 4 Crap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 533 Presently the head of the great Vladimir column approach- ed the crest; and our nen, whilst they lay with their rifles leveled across the parapet, and their eyes a little above its top, were face to face with the front rank of the mass. Before it confuses itself by hasty firing, a Russian column Aspect ofthe 1 good order is a solemn expression of warlike i ala strength. With the hard, upright outlines of a wall, it is, in its color, a dark cloud; and the lowly beings who compose it are so merged in the grand unity of the mass, that, in the hour of battle, the aspect of it weighs heavy upon the imagination of anxious men. More, a hundredfold more than it is it seems to portend; and now, when the Vladimir column, three thousand strong and withholding its fire, emerged in si- lence from the hollow, when it slowly grew over the crest and rose up, at last, stark and square between the eyes of our sol- diery and the light beyond, its power over the mind of a be- holder was less the power of a substance than of a shadow—a shadow approaching—the dim, mighty shadow that is thrown forward by a military empire when it comes in great earnest to the front. It is certain, however, that, whatever the cause be, some high quality of the soul, or only, after all, a certain hardness of temperament, our people in general are not impressed by the sight of massed infantry in the way that the nations of the Continent are; and, when our soldiers are formed in their En- glish array, they can make merry with a mere column as a thing that is foreign, a thing with vast pretensions to strength, but helpless as a flock of sheep against firm men standing in line. Even now, though our men lay in clusters without for- mation, they were ready enough to begin shooting into the col- umn; and those who first caught sight of the Russian helmets were going to deliver their fire, when suddenly they were checked by a voice which implored every man to stay his hand. When troops are about to be overpowered, confusing ru- Gonfusing rn. MOFS flit round them; and if it happen that these mors amongst rumors become the immediate causes of a default, oursoldiery- they do not for that reason excuse it, because the very spreading of such tales is not the cause, but the effect of the bewildered state into which the troops are lapsing. The Unauthentie Voice which had stayed the fire of our men was a orders and sig- voice crying out, ‘The column is French! the col- nalstothemen. «¢ mn jg French! Don’t fire, men! For God’s “sake, don’t fire!” The prohibition, repeated again and again, traveled fast along the line; and presently it was farther im- pressed, for a bugler of the 19th, under orders from a mount ed officer, began to sound the “ oe firing.” 534 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA’ [Cuar. XLIV» Our men, obeying the voice and the signal, withheld their fire and remained still. The belief that the column must be French was confirmed—and, indeed, it is likely- that it had been caused—by observing that it delivered no fire; and al- though, if Kvetzinski’s. statements be accurate, the fr ont rank men had their muskets brought down as though for a charge with the bayonet,! still the slow, formal movement of the ap- pr oaching mass was so little like what the English regard as a ‘charge,’ "that no one seems to have accounted for the silence of their firelocks by suggesting that the movement was intend- ed for an attack with the bayonet, It seems that the column now halted,? as if from a suspicion of some snare, or perhaps from a dread of the unknown, for the men of the column could not see the stature of our men, but they saw forage-caps and a crowd of English faces of a fresh-colored hue very strange to their eyes, and they saw the muzzles of rifles leveled thick- ly across the parapet. From mistake on one side, and mis- giving on the other, there had come to be a strange pause. Yet not along the whole line; for, either with a part of the Vladimir column, or else with some other body of troops, two or three of the companies of the 33rd -were exchanging, at this time, a sharp fire. Obeying the light, simple motive which sometimes governs the soldier when his mind is a blank, the men of the column took the fancy of pouring the main volume of their shot toward the ground where the colors of the 33rd were upraised. The colors were new; and, as though the mere richness of their crimson folds were enough to draw the eye and the aim of the Russian musketeer, they were riddled, in two or three minutes, with numbers of balls. Of those who stood near them, a large proportion were struck down.’ Codrington, seeing that the fruits of the exploit performed by his brigade were going to be lost for want of supports, had already sent his aid-de-camp, Campbell, to press the advance of the Scots Fusileer Guards, the battalion most directly in his 1 His expression, as rendered from the Russian into French, is ‘‘l’arme au ‘‘bras, prete a la baionette."" This, I suppose, must mean that the front rank men had their bayonets ‘‘ at the charge,” and’ not merely ‘‘at the trail.” * The Russian accounts do not speak of this halt. They represent the whole advance of the column as a bayonet charge, and it seems quite true that the column really withheld its fire, but it would be a mistake to suppose that the forward movement of this body was marked with any of the swift- ness or violence commonly associated with the idea of a “‘ charge.” 5 J do not see’ any thing in the Russian narratives which I can identify with the combat in which a part of the 33rd was engaged, and I have not been able to say which of the Russian corps it was with which the 38rd was at this time exchanging fire, Cuar. XLIV ] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 535 rear. But the very moments then passing were the moments charged with the result, and there were no other and later moments that could ever be used in their stead. It is said—but my faith in men’s impressions of what passed at this minute is wanting in strength—it is said that one of the heavy columns which the enemy had on his extreme right was now seen to be marching upon the left flank of the English soldiery who lay clustered along the parapet of the redoubt,! and it seems there are grounds for believing that the left of our line was the spot where a conviction of the necessity of retir- ing was first acted upon. According to testimony which seems to be trustworthy, a mounted officer? rode up to the bugler of the 19th Regiment, and ordered him to sound the “ retire.” das The man obeyed, and buglers along the whole line, sounde the ‘re- from left to right, took up and repeated the signal. But the instinct of self-preservation, no less than _ the natural courage and tenacity of the soldier, made almost every man of the force very unwilling to abandon the ground ; The troopshad for it happened that at this time a brisk shower of a double mo- missiles was passing over the heads of our men mainingwhere Without doing them harm, and hearing how thickly they were. —_ the balls were raining into the ground behind them, they knew that a retreat would not only be an abandonment of ground dearly won, but also would bring them at once un- der a heavy fire. So strong was their conviction of the expe- diency of holding fast to the ground where they lay, that the sounding of the “retire” was believed to have originated in some error; and in order that they might determine what should be done, the officers of several regiments, but more especially of the 23rd, gathered into a group and began to con- sult together. . Being firm, proud men, with a great self-re- spect, they did not, it seems, like to crouch for shelter under the parapet whilst they were exchanging counsel; so they Conference of conferred standing upright, but under so thick a officers at the flight of balls that several—nay, they say almost all parapet. ‘ Their fate. of them, were struck down and killed.2 However, 1 The Russian accounts do not confirm this belief. 2 Afterward the bugler described the officer in a way which might have enabled a court of inquiry to identify him. He was not an officer of the regiment to which the bugler belonged, and he was not a general officer ; and he did not deliver the order as coming from any one other than himself. The incident goes far to justify the opinion of officers who think that (unless it is strictly confined to the business of guiding skirmishers) the use of a bugle during an action is dangerous. 3 I shall presently give the names of the officers who were killed in the 23rd, and the other regiments which stormed the redoubt; but I can not un- 536 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV. those who survived continued to say that the sounding of the “retire” must have been a mistake, and that the force ought to hold its ground. ‘ But then again, and from the same quarter as before, a bugle The ‘retire ‘Sounded the “retire ;” and again, as before, the sig- againsounded. yal was taken up along the line. The repetition of the signal seemed to make it almost certain that the order ~ must be authentic, but the troops were yet slow to persuade themselves that this was the case, and they still lingered at the parapet. Then a sergeant of the 23rd, standing upright in or- der to make himself better heard, told the men that they had twice heard the “retire” sounded, and that they must do their duty and obey. Whilst he spoke he was shot down and killed. Our soldiery But it was now judged by officers and men that a retreat from signal twice made, and twice carried on along the the Redoubt. Tine from regiment to regiment, was not to be neg- lected. The retreat began; and the men, quitting the shelter of the breastwork, fell back into open ground, and incurred the fire which was pelting into the slope beneath. As the advance had been; so also the retreat was for the most part without order, but for the most part also it was not hurried. Our soldiers, in their retreat, took care to ply the en- emy with fire; and they picked up and carried off with them those of our wounded officers and men whom they found lying wounded on the slope. Except in one place, the retreat was like the movement of skirmishers when they find themselves recalled to their battalions by sound of bugle. But a part of the retreating force, consisting mainly of the 23rd and the 95th, got heaped together in an unwieldy crowd, and became, as will be presently seen, the cause of a fresh disaster. The enemy might have inflicted heavy loss upon the clusters of our soldiery then retreating down the slope, but there was some spell which bound him; for when the Vladimir column had moved forward as far as the parapet of the breastwork, it used a strange abstinence and halted, attempting no movement in pursuit. Of the two missing pieces of ordnance which the’ enemy had yearned to. recover, one, they found, had disap- peared,’ and the other (the howitzer) was lying on the ground dertake to say which of them fell at this time. In general it seems to be. almost beyond the power of human testimony to fix the time and the spot at which an officer falls when he is killed in battle. The difficulty is occasion- ed—not by the dearth, but by the vast abundance of testimony—testimony all seeming to be perfectly trustworthy, yet strangely contradictory. It will be seen, however, that the number of officers killed in the 23rd was very great, and there is an impression that no small proportion of them met their death in the way above stated. ’ This was the gun taken by Captain Bell. Cuar.XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 537 dismounted, and was so unwieldy that Kvetzinski says his Vladimir men were unable to drag it away. It remained in the redoubt. At the moment when this retreat began, the 1st Division had not yet emerged from the cover afforded by the river’s bank ; but General Codrington’s message hurried thesforward move- ment of the Scots Fusileer Guards. The battalion climbed to the summit of the bank, formed line, and advanced. But whilst this battalion moved forward, the remnant of the men who had stormed the redoubt were coming down the hill, and some of them were huddled in a throng, and bearing to- ward the left companies of the Scots Fusileer Guards. There- fore the Scots Fusileer Guards received in their advance much of the fire directed against our retreating soldiery, and many were struck down; still the onward movement was maintained, and the Grenadiers on the right, and the Coldstreams on the left of this battalion were now also moving up. But at last the advancing line of the Scots Fusileers and the crowd de- scending from the redoubt came into bodily contact, and this so roughly, that the retreating crowd, by its sheer weight, broke through the left companies ofthe Scots Fusileers and destroyed their formation. The weight ofthe retreating throng at that one spot was so great and so unwieldy, that a soldier of the Scots Fusileers was thrown, it is said, to the ground, and got his ribs fractured. The left companies of the Scots Fusil- _ eer Guards, being thrust out of line by physical pressure, fell back in disorder. At a later moment, some of the men who were retreating, but retreating in less heavy clusters, came down upon the Grenadier Guards. The Grenadiers neatly opened their ranks for the discomfited soldiery, and afterward formed up again, soon recovering their perfect array. During this conflict, the four regiments which stormed the Losses of the redoubt had undergone cruel slaughter. In the SS pail 23rd Regiment, besides Colonel Chester, Wynn, which stormed the work. Evans, Conolly, Radcliffe, Young, Anstruther, and Butler, and 3 sergeants, were killed; and Campbell, Hopton, Bathurst, Sayer,! and Applethwaite, and 9 sergeants, were wounded. Of the rank and _ file, 40 were killed and 139 wounded. In the 33rd, Lieutenant Montague and 3 sergeants were killed; and Colonel Blake, Major Gough, Captain Fitzgerald, Wallis, Worthington, Siree, and Greenwood, and 16 sergeants * Sayer was one of those struck down by that salvo-like discharge which preceded the dismantling of the redoubt. Z 2 538 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. — [Cuap. XLIV. were wounded.' Of the rank and file, 52 were killed and 172 were wounded. In the 95th, Dowdall, Eddington, the* younger Eddington, Polhill, Kingsley, Braybrooke, and 3 sergeants, were killed ; and Hume, Reyland, Wing, Sargent, Macdonald, Gerard, Bray- brooke, Brooke, Boothby, Bazalgette, Gordon, and 12 sergeants, were wounded. Of the rank and file, 42 were killed and 116 wounded. In the 19th, Stockwell and Wardlow were killed ; and Car- dew, Saunders, M‘Gee, Warden, and Currie, and 4 sergeants, wounded. Of the rank and file, 839 were killed and 170 wounded, In the Rifles there were 11 killed and 38 wounded, and most of those casualties occurred in the left wing. So, of the four line battalions and the four companies of Rifles which had stormed the redoubt, there was a loss, in killed and wounded, of about 100 officers and sergeants, and 800 men. XXV. But what was the spell which bound the Ozar’s command- Cause which eS? and why did they throw back the gifts which paralyzed the seemed to be brought them by the fortune of bat- uss1ans 1n the’midst of tle ? Ba When our storming force under Codrington was ascending the glacis in a crowd—in a crowd torn through and through by grape and canister—how came it that the enemy could “suddenly make up his mind to stop the Tae OE and dismantle his Great Redoubt? When the remnant of our storming force was flocking back down the hill, why did the enemy spare from destroying it, and bring to a halt his triumphant Vladimir column ? Having several thousands of troops between the Causeway and the Kourgané Hill, why did the Russian Generals suffer Lacy Yea still to keep his stand on open ground with one dis- ordered battalion ? We saw that when Mentschikoff, disturbed by the report of Bosquet’s flank movement, rode off in great haste toward the sea, Prince Gortschakoff was left in command of all that part of the Russian army which confronted the English.” Kvetzinski, 1 Colonel Blake would not report his wound, lest the account should alarm his wife and family. °. His horse was struck in three places. Siree, though badly wounded, insisted upon remaining out on the hill-side all night, in or- der that men in a worse condition should be first attended to. Wallis was badly wounded, but he tied a handkerchief round the place, and remained with his regiment to the close of the battle. Worthington died from the am- putation which was necessitated by the wound he received. | Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 539 the brave and able general who commanded the division on the Kourgané Hill, was nnder the orders of Prince Gortschakoff, and as long as the absence of the commander-in-chief was pro- tracted, Gortschakoff was the officer who had to answer for the defense of the Pass and of the Whole position thence ex- tending to the extreme right of the Russian army. Every part of the ground thus committed to Prince Gortschakoff’s care was precious, but the Kourgané Hill was the key of the whole position on the Alma. There, and there only, the ground had been intrenched. There, and there only, heavy guns had been planted. That barren hill had become the very gage for which the Great Powers of the West and the Czar of All the Russias were to join in a strife computed to last many days. . Prince Mentschikoff himself had so judged it. Establishing his head- quarters on the slope overlooking the Great Redoubt, and so disposing his troops that, whilst standing there, he could exer- cise an immediate personal control over more than two thirds of his whole force, he had intended that every movement of this part of the field should be under his own eyes. It might well be deemed certain that any one of Prince Mentschikoff’s lieutenants, intrusted during the absence of his general with this great charge, would be tenacious of the ground. As a general in high command, he would act upon the knowledge that the hill was vital to the whole position. As an officer. commanding troops placed in a fortified work, he would be taught by the punctilio of his profession to hold his intrench- ments, even at great sacrifice, until the weight of his charge should be taken from him by an order from the commander of. the forces. But there was a whim of the Emperor Nicholas which tend- ed to weaken and disperse the authority of any man in com- mand of his army. Longing always to make Wellington an example for his generals, but mistaking o the gist of the saying that “the Duke never lost a gun,’ > Nicholas gave his com- manders to understand that the loss of a piece of ordnance would be likely to bring them into disgrace.!| The result of such an intimation was just what a more sagacious prince would have easily foreseen. The commander “who received ‘ The sense in which it can be said that Wellington ‘‘never lost a gun,” has been referred to in a former note. ‘The fact of the Duke never having lost a gun in action is a superb and summary proof that his career was un- checker ed by the loss of a battle; but his avoidance of the loss of guns was not the cause, but the effect and the proof of his ascendency in war. The Duke would have scorned the notion of risking the loss of a battle for the sake of keeping his guns safe. 540 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. the warning took good care to hand it down—to hand it all down the steps of the military hierarchy; and every general of division, every brigadier, nay, every artillery officer who com- manded a battery, was evidently made to understand that, happen what might, he must not lose a gun. In other words, every such officer, rather than run the risk of losing a gun, was empowered to resolve upon the abandonment of a fortified position, and even to Gommence a retreat, which might carry with it the retreat of the whole army. It was, therefore, very natural that the anxiety which had seized upon the mind of Prince Mentschikoff should not only extend to Prince Gortschakoff and to General Kvetzinski, but also to the artillery officers who commanded the Causeway batteries and the guns in the Great Redoubt. Now, from the moment when Prince Mentschikoff rode off toward the sea, he had never reappeared in the Pass or on the Kourgané Hill, he had sent no good tidings, and apparently had dispatched no orders or directions of any kind.! With every moment the just grounds for alarm were increasing, and when the fore- most division of the British army sprang to their feet and rap- idly advanced along their whole line, the Russian generals and commanders of batteries had to cast in their minds and see how far their desire to hold fast a position very precious to the army and to the honor of the empire could be made to consist with the absolute safety of a few pieces of ordnance. They were about to be assailed by the English army. But this was not all they had to look for. The continued deten- tion of Prince Mentschikoff in that part of the position which confronted the French gave ground for the fear that an evil crisis must there be passing. The fear would be that Bos- quet’s turning movement against the Russian left was produc- ing its full effect, and that the tide of war, rolling up along the line of the Russian position, had set in from west to east. If men were filled with this dread—a dread well justified by inference fairly drawn at the time, though not by actual facts —it would be to the Telegraph Height that they would bend their inquiring eyes, and there they would gaze with minds prepared to learn that the French, marching eastward, had doubled up the Russian left wing, and were coming to ground from which they would look down triumphantly into the flank of the Causeway batteries. Suddenly, to men thus expectant 'T think I might have almost ventured to leave out the ‘‘ apparently ;” for, althongh the narratives of Gortschakoff and Kvetzinski do not in terms declare that they received no orders, the tenor of their statements is all but equivalent to actual assertion. . Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 541 of a dreaded calamity, there was presented a sight well fitted to confirm their worst fears—nay, even to make them imagine that the whole tenor of their duty was changed. For one of the high knolls jutting up from the eastern slopes of the Tele- graph Height, and closely overlooking the Russian reserves, became crowded all at once with a gay-looking group of horse- _ men, whose hats and white plumes showed that pparition of 2 : horsemen ona they were staff officers. What made the appari- knoll inthe tion seem the more fatal was that it was deep in Russian posi- the very heart of the Russian lines, and even some- Sis what near to the ground where Prince Mentschikoff had posted his reserves. It could be seen that the horsemen wore coats of dark blue. They were exactly on the ground where the van of the French army might hope to be if it had achieved a signal victory over the left wing of the Russian army. It was hardly to be imagined possible that the Allies could have a numerous staff in that part of the field without being there in great strength. Even a tranquil and cautious observer of the apparition could hardly have failed to infer that the French, carrying all before them, had marched through and through from west to east, and made good their way into the centre—nay, almost into the rear of the Russian position. Oppressed by this belief, Russian officers would be led to think that if they stood bound to provide against the possibility of losing their guns, the time they had for saving them was be- ginning to run very short. The divisional general who was in command on the Kour- gané Hill does not allege that he had any authority from Prince Gortschakoff or from the commander of the forces to remove the guns which armed the Great Redoubt. What he says is that the defeat of the Kazan battalions by the English troops left the battery exposed, and necessitated its withdraw- al.1 General Kvetzinski, however, was the master of sixteen prime battalions, of which twelve were at this time untouched. ' This is what Kvetzinski says :—‘ During this time masses of English ‘troops were directing their steps toward the regiment of the Grand-Duke ‘Michael (the ‘‘ Kazan” regiment). The batteries of our-first lines began ‘firing violently. Shells and missiles worked their bloody way through the ‘lines of the enemies, but they immediately re-formed their lines, and under ‘cover of a strong line of bayonets, and their battery then standing behind ‘the smoking ruins of Bourliouk, they hastened to force their way over the ‘ford in order to reach the breastwork. The ‘‘ Kazan” regiment bravely met ‘them, but, tormented by the destroying fire of the enemy, and having lost a ‘frightful amount of men, was obliged to give way under the superior num- ‘bers of the enemy. The battery, being thus left exposed, was obliged to ‘move.’ 542 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. . [Cuap. XLIV At the time when the order must have been given for the re- moval of the guns, the defeat which one of his ‘ Kazan’ col- umns had sustained was nothing which, in the eyes of a man so firm as he was, would seem to justify despair! Yet to re- move these guns was to abandon the key of the. position on the Alma. It is hard to imagine that Kvetzinski could have brought himself to take such a step without trying resistance, unless he had been in some measure governed by an inculcated dread of losing guns, and also by what he wrongly imagined to be the state of the battle on the other side of the Causeway. Be this as it may, it is certain that within some fifteen minutes from the time when the horsemen were first seen on the knoll the Great Redoubt was dismantled. The riders whose sudden appearance on the knoll thus scared and misled the enemy were a group of perhaps eight- een or twenty Englishmen. How came it that they were sit- ting unmolested in their saddles, and contentedly adjusting their field-glasses in the heart of the Russian position ? At the time when Lord Raglan dispatched to his leading di- inns visions the final order to advance, he was riding be- which Lord | tween the French and the English armies, and was Raglan toot. close to a road or track which led down toward a edthe advance ford below the burning village. Impelled by his ofhisinfantty: desire for a clear view of the coming struggle, and guided only by Fortune or by the course of the track, he rode down briskly into the valley, followed close by his staff, but leaving our troops in his rear. He soon reached, soon passed through the vineyards, and gained the bank of the river. The stream at this spot flowed rapidly, breaking against a mass of rock, which so far dammed it back as to form on the upper side of it a pool about four feet deep. One of the staff rode into the stream at that point, and his horse nearly lost his footing. Lord Raglan, almost at the same moment, took the river on the right or lower side of the rock, and crossed it without any trouble. Though he was parted at this time from his own troops, there were several French soldiers near him. They were a part of the chain of skirmishers which covered the left flank and left front of Prince Napoleon’s Division. They seemed to be engaged with some of the enemy’s sharp- shooters, whom they were able to discern through the foliage ; 1 Up to the time when Kvetzinski dismantled the Redoubt, the only defeat which the “Kazan corps had sustained was the one inflicted upon two of its battalions by the 19th Regiment and the left companies of the 23rd. See ante. The defeat of the other two battalions—the battalions engaged with Lacy Yea—had not then occurred. Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 543 for they were sheltering themselves behind vineyard walls, watching moments for firing, and receding in order to load, or cautiously peering forward. They looked surprised when Lord Raglan, with the group which followed him, rode down and passed them. More than one of them, sagacious and curious, paused in his loading, and stood.gazing, with ramrod half down, as though he were trying to make out how it accorded with the great science of war that the English Generel and his staff should be riding through the skirmishers, and enter- ing, without his battalions, into the midst of the enemy’s do- minions. . Though they were unseen by our officers, the Russian sharp- shooters, who had been exchanging shots with the French ri- flemen, were not far away. Of this they gave proof. Leslie dropped out of his saddle and fell to the ground. His startled horse making a move much as though he were blundering: at a grip, the fall seemed at first sight like a fall in hunting; but a rifle ball had entered Leslie’s shoulder. Nearly at the same time Weare, another of the staff, was struck down. There was not a heavy fire, but the Russian sharpshooters had been pa- tiently dueling with the French skirmishers, and, of course, when they saw Lord Raglan and his plumed followers, they seized the occasion for easier shooting, and tried to bring down two or three of the gay cavalcade. After gaining the left bank of the river, Lord Raglan at first got parted from most of those who had followed him, for he took a track into a kind of gulley toward his right, and there for a moment he had no one very near him except one man, who had crossed the stream next after him; for the rest of the , horsemen, when they reached the dry ground, had borne rath- er toward their left. Some one, however, from that quarter cried out, “‘ This seems a better way, my lord,” and Lord Rag- lan, then turning, rejoined the rest of the staff, and took the path recommended. I do not know who the officer was who advised this road. He has possibly forgotten the counsel which he gave; but if he remembers it, and sees how the issue was governed by taking the path which he chose, he may suffer himself to trace the gain of a battle, with all its progeny of events, to his few hurried words. The brown bay Lord Raglan rode was of course well broken to fire, and he had been quiet enough during the earlier part of the action; but now, suddenly, his blood rose, and for all the rest of the day he was so eager that he would hardly suffer his rider to use a field-glass from the saddle. The truth is, that in other times he had been ridden to hounds in England, 5A4 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. —[(Cuap. XLIV. and, although he had long stood careless of all that was done by the Causeway batteries, yet when he and his rider and the horsemen around him cantered down into the valley—when they plunged into the river—when they briskly dashed through it, and began to gallop up the steep, broken ground on the Rus- sian side, the old hunter seemed to think of the chase and great days in the Gloucestershire country. But it was not “Shadrach”? alone who felt the onward im- pulse. They say that there lurks in the men of these isles a vestige of Man the Hunter and Man the Savage, and that this, after all, is the subtle leaven which, in spite of the dangerous inroads of luxury, still keeps alive the warlike spirit of the peo- ple, and the freedom which goes along with it. It was not right—nay, if it were not that success brings justification, it would have been scarcely pardonable—that a general, charged with the care of an army, should be under the guidance of feelings akin to the impulses of the chase; but what one has to speak of is not of what ought to have been, but what was. By the stir and joyous animation of the moment Lord Raglan was led on into a part of the field which he would not have sought to reach in cold blood. He would have regarded as nothing the mere difference between the risk of being struck by shot in one part of the field and the risk of being struck by shot in another; but he knew that in general it is from a point more or less in rear of battalions actually engaged that a chief can exercise the most constant and the most extended control over his army; and an ideal commander would not suffer him- self to ride to so forward a spot as to run the risk of losing -the government of his troops for many minutes together in the critical period of an action; but the horseman who now rode his hunter across the valley of the Alma and indulgently gave him his head was not an ideal personage, but a man of flesh and blood, with many very English failings. ‘Avant tout je suis gentilhomme Anglais,” was the preface of the fierce mes- sage sent by the then foremost man of the world to the king of France,’ and certainly in the nature of that “ gentilhomme Anglais” the willfulness is so firmly set that no true sample of the breed can be altered, and altered down to suit a pattern. The state must dispense with his services or take him as he is, Body and soul, Lord Raglan was so.made by nature that, though he knew how to be prudent enough in the orders he gave to officers at a distance, yet, when he was in the saddle, 1 The name of the horse. ? To Louis the XVIIIth in the summer of 1815, shortly after his second restoration. — Cuap. XLIV.]. INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 545 directing affairs in person, and there came to be a question be- tween holding back and going forward, his blood always used to get heated, and, like his great master, he had so often been happy in his choice of time for running a venture, that his spirit had never been cowed. Having once begun to ride forward, he did not restrain himself. And surely there was a great fas- cination to draw him on. The ground was of such a kind that with every stride of his charger a fresh view was opened to him. For months and months he had failed to tear off the veil which hid from him the strength of the army he under- took to assail; and now, suddenly in the midst of a battle, he found himself suffered to pass forward between the enemy’s ceutre and his left wing. As at Badajoz, in old times, he had galloped alone to the drawbridge and obtained the surrender of St. Christoval, so now, driven on by the same hot blood, he joyously rode without troops into the heart of the enemy’s position; and Fortune, still enamored of his boldness, was awaiting him with her radiant smile. For the path he took led winding up—by a way rather steep and rough here and there, but easy enough for saddle-horses—and presently in the front, but some way off toward the left, he saw before him a high, commanding knoll, and, strange to say, there seemed to be no Russians near it. Instantly, and before he reached the high ground, he saw the prize and divined its worth. He was swift to seize it. Without stopping—nay, even, one almost may say, without breaking the stride of his horse, he turned to Ai- rey, who rodé close at his side, and ordered him to bring up Adams’s brigade with all possible speed. Then, still pressing on and on, the foremost rider of the allied armies, he gained the summit of the knoll. I know of no battle in which, whilst the forces of his adver- Lord Raglan’s Sy were still upon their ground, and still unbroken, position on the a general has had the fortune to stand upon a spot Kg SO ~ commanding as that which Lord Raglan now found on the summit of the knoll. The truth is, that the Rus- sian commander had not troops enough to occupy the whole position, and the part which he neglected was, happily, that very one into which Lord Raglan had ridden. Duri ing the earlier part of the day a battalion had been posted in the ravine. close under the knoll; but, in an evil hour for the Czar, the battalion had been removed,'! and the enemy having no other troops in the immediate neighbor hood, and having no guns in battery which commanded the summit of the knoll, the English 1 The No. 1 Taroutine battalion, Chodasiewicz. 546" INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. — [Cuap. XLIV.. General, though as yet he had no troops with him, stood un- molested in the heart of the enemy’s position—stood between that wing of the Russian army which confronted the French, and that much larger portion of it which confronted the En- glish, but so far in advance as to be actually in the close neigh- borhood of the Russian reserves. The knoll was not, indeed, so situated as to command a distant view toward our right, and the view toward the front was obstructed by the features of the ground ; but, looking to his left, or, in other words, look- ing eastward and up the valley of the river, Lord Raglan com- manded nearly the whole ground destined to be the scene of the English attack.! ° But more; he looked upon that part of the Russian army which confronted ours; he saw it in profile; he saw down into the flank of the Causeway batteries which barred the mouth of the Pass; and beyond, he saw into the shoulder of the Great Redoubt, then about to be stormed by Codrington’s brigade.” Above all, he saw, drawn up: with splendid precision, the bodies of infantry which the enemy held in reserve. They were massed in two columns.? The formation of each mass looked close and perfect as though it had been made of marble, and cut by rule and plumb-line.. These troops, being in reserve, were of course some way in rear of the enemy’s batteries and his foremost. battalions; but they were only 900 yards from the eye of the English General; for it was Lord Raglan’s strange and happy destiny to have ridden almost into the rear of the position, and to be almost as near to the enemy’s re- serves as he was to the front of their array. ae a Russian reserves. th og J i) 3 Causeway (= 8 s % as batteries. gre a 0 x teres aaa | © Bulk of Russian Army. | 0 English Army. French Army. All this—now told with labor of words—Lord Raglan saw at a glance, and at the same moment he divined the fatal per- turbation which would be inflicted upon the enemy by the 7. e., that attack the first stages of which have been already described. ® As already narrated. It will be remembered that Codrington’s brigade was joined in the storming by the 19th and 95th Regiments. ° See former note as to the probable number of the troops in these col- umns, and the corps to which they belonged. Cuap. XLIV:} INVASION OF THE CRIMEA; 547 mere appearance of our Head-Quarter staff in this part of the field. The knoll, though much lower than the summit of the Telegraph Height, stood out bold and plain above the Pass. It was clear that even from afar the enemy would make out that it was crowned by a group of plumed officers; and Lord Raglan’s imagination being so true and so swift as to gift him with the faculty of knowing how in given circumstances other men must needs be thinking and feeling, it hardly cost him a moment to infer that this apparition of a few horsemen on the spur of a hill was likely to govern the enemy’s fate. It would not, he thought, occur to any Russian general that fifteen or twenty staff officers, whether French or English, could have reached the knoll without having thousands of troops close at hand. The enemy’s generals w ould therefore infer that a lar ge proportion of the Allied force had won its way into the heart of the Russian position. This was the view which Lord Rag-— Jan’s mind had seized when, at the very moment of crowning the knoll, he looked round and said,‘ Our presence here will ‘have the best effect.’ Then, glancing down as he spoke into the flank of the Causeway batteri ies, and carrying his eye round Lord Rastan 10 the enemy’s infantry reserves, Lord Raglan said, glan desiresto have ‘ Now, if we had a couple of guns here !! AS ee His wish was instantly seized by Colonel Dick- up tothetop son? and one or two other officers. They rode off ofthe Knoll. in all haste. The rest of the group which had followed Lord Raglan re- mained with him upon the summit of the knoll, and every one, facing eastward and taking out his glass, began to scan the ground destined to be assailed by the English troops. The Light Division had not then begun to emerge from the thick ground and the channel of the river; but presently some small groups, and afterward larger gatherings of the red-coats appeared upon the top of the river’s bank on the Russian side, and at length—seen in profile by Lord Raglan—there began the tumultuous onset of Codrington’s brigade against the Great Redoubt.? Lord Raglan knew that the distance between him and the Meantimehe scene of the struggle at the redoubt was too great vices ofthe tO allow of his then tampering with it; for any or- battle. der that he might send would lose its worth in the journey, and tend to breed confusion. And it was not in his : ' T heard him say so, and say so immediately upon crowning the knoll. * Colonel Dickson of the Artillery. It was the happy accident of his be- ing with Lord Raglan as chief of the staff of interpreters which gave him the opportunity of rendering the services narrated in the text. 3 See ante. 548 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. — [Cnar. XEIV. way to assuage his impatience by making impotent efforts. Nor would he even give vent to his feeling by words or looks disclosing vexation. He had so great a power of preventing his animal spirits from drooping that no one could see in his glowing countenance the faintest reflection of the sight which his eyes took in. His manner all the time was the manner of a man enlivened by the progress of a great undertaking with- out being robbed of his leisure. He spoke to me, I remember, about his horse. He seemed like a man who had a clew of his own, and knew his way through the battle. Watching the onslaught of Codrington’s brigade, Lord Rag- lan had seen the men ascend the slope and rush up over the parapet of the Great Redoubt. Then moments, then whole minutes—precious minutes—elapsed, and he had to bear the anguish of finding that the ground where he longed to see the supports marching up was still left bare. Then—a too snre- result of that default—he had to see our soldiery relinquishing their capture and retreating in clusters down the hill. Moreover, at that moment affairs were going ill with the French. The appearance of our head-quarters on the knoll had been marked by our Allies as well as by the enemy; for AFrenchaia. OW & French aid-de-camp, in great haste, came de-ceamponthe Climbing up the knoll to seek Lord Raglan. He mp seemed to be in a state of grievous excitement; but perhaps it was the violence of his bodily exertion which gave him this appearance, for he had quitted his horse in order the better to mount the steep, and he rushed up bareheaded to Lord Raglan, but so breathless from his exertions that for a moment. he could hardly articulate; and when he spoke, he spoke panting. He persisted in remaining uncovered. What he came to ask was that Lord Raglan would give some support to the French; and as a ground for the demand, he urged that the French were hardly pressed by the enemy. ‘My Lord,’ he said, ‘my Lord, my Lord, we have before us eight battalions!" One ‘could see, or imagine that one saw, what was passing in Lord Raglan’s mind. He was pained by thinking that, either from mental excitement or from the violence of his bodily exertion, the officer should seem discomposed ; but what tormented him most was the sight of the young man standing bareheaded, for to tell him to be coy- ered would be to assume that the bared head was an obeisance Lord Raglan's Meant to be rendered to himself. Bending in his way with him. saddle, Lord Raglan turned kindly round toward _ |! ¢Milord, milord, nous avons devant nous huit bataillons.’ I heard him say those words. His mission. Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 549 his right—toward the side of his maimed arm—and his expres- sion was that of one intent to assuage another’s pain, but the sunshine of the last two days had tanned him so crimson, that it masked the generous flush which used to come to his face in such moments. He did not look at all like an anxious and vexed commander who had to listen to a desponding message in the midst of a battle. He was rather the courteous, lively host entertaining a shy, youthful visitor, and trying to place him at his ease. In his comforting, cheerful way, he said, ‘I ‘can spare you a battalion.) But it was something of more worth than the promise of a battalion that the aid-de-camp carried back with him. He carried back tidings of the spirit in which Lord Raglan was conducting the battle. At a time when the French were cast down, it was of some moment to them to learn that the English head-quarters, strangely placed as they were in the midst of the Russian position, were a scene of robust animation, and that Lord Raglan looked and spoke like a man who had the foe in his power. XXVI. It is now time to speak of the events which had been bring- Causes of the Ing the French army into a state of increased de-- depression = pression. We saw that General Kiriakoff, com- which had : : : come upon the Manding the Russian left wing, had charge of the athe Telegraph Height, and confronted the Divisions of Prince Napoleon and Canrobert, having also on his left and left front, though at greater distances, the two separated bri- gades of Bosquet’s Division and the five battalions of Turks. The infantry force remaining under Kiriakoff’s orders had Operations on been reduced by Prince Mentschikoff’s abstraction the Telegraph of the ‘Moscow’ troops to a force of only nine bat- st ta talions; and afterward, when the second ‘ Moscow’ battalion rejoined the rest of the corps, the infantry force re- maining under Kiriakoff consisted only of the four ‘'Taroutine’ and the four ‘ Militia’ battalions. The part which these ‘'Ta- routine’ and ‘ Militia’ battalions had been taking in the battle may be told in a summary way. They did not attack the French, and no French infantry attacked them; but, since they were kept massed in battalion columns upon slopes which faced ' ¢Je pnis vous donner un bataillon.’ I heard Lord Raglan make that answer. Lord Raglan, I imagine, meant to fulfill the promise by detaching one of the two battalions about to arrive under Adams; but by the time that force came up the course of events rendered it unnecessary to send the promised aid. However, Sir Richard England afterward moved into the close neighborhood of Prince Napoleon’s Division. 550 ) INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, [Cuar. XLIV? toward the French, they were exposed to a good deal of artil- lery fire at long range, and were from time to time forced to shift their ground. The ‘ Militia’ battalions were troops of in- ferior “quality ; and, finding at last that wherever they stood they were more or less called by artillery, they dissolved. So, although he was supported by Prince Mentschikoff in per- son, with ‘the column of the eight battalions’ of which we shall presently speak, yet, in his own hands, Kiriakoff had only four battalions of sound infantry with which to show a coun- tenance to thirty thousand Frenchmen and Turks. But both of Bosquet’s brigades were distant. Canrobert indeed was on the verge of the plateau, and had so spread out his battalions as to have them in readiness for an encounter. Nay, seeing that he had no enemy before him except on his left front, he had somewhat brought round his right shoulder, and was fr ont- ing toward the Telegr aph, but he was still without his artil- lery, and was therefore hanging back cautionsly on the steep ground close below the smooth cap of the hill. Prince Napoleon’s Division at this time was in the bottom Backwardness Of the valley, close to the river; and, indeed, of the rene ivi. Whole foree which the Prince at ‘this time had sion. around him, there were only two battalions which had hitherto forded the stream.?, To the hopes which the French army had of being able to take a great part in the ac- tion, this backwardness of one of their finest divisions was al- most ruinous; ; and it is natural enough that a divisional gen- eral, whose rank gave him shelter from the ordeal of a fair mil- itary investigation, should, for that very reason, be made to suf- fer the more bitterly from the stings which men robbed of their freedom are accustomed to plant with the tongue. Resembling the first French Emperor in outward looks, Prince Napole. Prince Napoleon was also very like his uncle, not a apparently in his main objects, but in the character of his intellect; for he had that rare and exceeding clearness of view which man is able to command when he can separate things essential from things of circumstance, and keep the two sets of thoughts so clean asunder as to be able to go to the solution of his main problem with a mind unclouded by details —unclouded by even those details which it is vital for him to master and provide for, though he refuses to let them mix with ' Chodasiewicz. * The battalion of the 19th Chasseurs, and one of the battalions of the Ma- rine Corps. The 2nd Zouave Regiment had also crossed, but this, it wili pr esently be seen, was not a part of the force which Prince Napoleon poe ‘around him.’ ' CuHap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 551 the elements from which he fetches out his conclusion. And although one can not help knowing that the most cruel of all the imputations which can be brought against a soldier has long been kept fastened upon Prince Napoleon, I may sa'y that such knowledge as I have hitherto chanced to gain of his ca- reer has not yet enabled me to infer that he is a man of lower grade than his uncle in the matter of personal courage. Before the delinquency of the 3rd French Division on the The mishaps 4y of the Alma is accepted as one of the grounds | on which entitle the world to ratify its harsh judgment against Prince Napoleon, men ought, in all fairness, to know the mishap which befell the Division, and to under- stand the considerations which rendered this same mishap a much more grave evil than it might seem to be at first sight. The French are so military a people that, when a great na- tional sentiment is once aroused, the very children are ready to seize their little muskets and fall into columns of companies ; The materials Dut, in the mean time, and until the mighty nation fromwhich the is challenged, the great. bulk of the French peasant- French army Ty are perhaps more homely, more rustic, more un- enighon, adventurous than most of the people of Europe. From these quiet millions of people many tens of thousands of small, sad, harmless-looking young men are every year torn by. the conscription, and immense energy—energy informed with the traditions of an ancient and ever warlike nation—is brought to bear upon the object of turning these forlorn young cap- tives into able soldiers. All that instruction can achieve is carefully done; but the enforced change from rural life to the life of barracks and camps seems not to be favorable to the an- imal spirits of the men; for although, when seen in masses or groups working hard at their military duties, they always ap- pear to be brisk, and almost merry, their seeming animation is the result of smart orders—the animation of a horse when the rowels on either side are lightly touching his flanks; and dur- ing the hours whilst they are left to themselves, the French soldiers of the line engaged in campaigning are commonly de- pressed and spiritless.! Of course, this want of lustiness in the French army is superbly masked by all the resources of military pomp and all the outward signs which seem to show the presence of vigor, dispatch, and warlike ardor; but the ma- terial of which the line regiments are composed must always keep a good deal of its original nature, and whoever glances at the rising steps of French officers successful in Africa will 1 T rest this upon what I have secn of the French army in Africa, in the Crimea, and on board ship. 552 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, [Cuar. XLIV. - find that they have climbed to eminence, not by leading troops of the line, but by obtaining, in the critical part of their career, the command of choice French regiments, or, failing that, the command of troops of foreign race.’. These choice French The great dif- regiments are not composed of materials at all like ference be- ‘those which supply the line. On the contrary, they tween their : : choice rezi- number in their ranks many thousands of bold, ad- rat sttheir Venturous men, who take service in the army of troops. their own accord, and it is in these choice regi- ments that France sees the true expression of her warlike na- ture. Of all these choice regiments, the ‘Zouaves’ are the Fach Division, Most famous ; and each of the three foremost Divi- therefore, is — sions of the French army on the Alma had in it a a veneer’ regiment—a regiment with its two war battalions other choice belonging to the corps of the Zouaves. What regiment. : . ry . the spear-head is to a spear, that its Zouave Regi- ment was to each of these three Divisions.” Prince Napoleon’s Division comprised 9000 men, and of Prince Napole- these some 2000 were men of the 2nd Regiment Cd by he Zou, Of Zouaves. Whether this regiment was impatient ave regiment. of the supposed slowness with which Prince Napo- leon had hitherto advanced, whether it was governed by its contempt of line regiments, and a fierce resolve to have no neighborship with any other than Zouave comrades, or wheth- er there were other causes which shaped its movements, I have not learned; but what happened was this:—The regiment, after fording the river, broke away from the unfortunate Divi- sion to which it belonged, marched off toward its right front, began to climb the height, and never stopped until it had cool- ly ranged itself close alongside of the Ist Zouave Regiment— a regiment which formed the left of Canrobert’s array. With Canrobert’s Division, instead of with Prince Napoleon’s, the regiment continued to act until the close of the battle. Be- fore men are hard upon a divisional general for his seeming backwardness in an action, they ought to allow for the misfor- tune which left him, indeed, the master of some 7000 men, but robbed him of the warlike corps on which he must have relied as the element for giving life and fire to his masses. For, if one might recur to the image already used, one would say that the spear-head had flown off, and that what remained in the 1 7.e., of the Foreign Legion, or of the native African levies. * I have borrowed this expressive image from one of our veteran command- ers, who used it once in conversation as a means of illustrating the kind of power which even a large body of our native Indian troops is accustomed to derive from the presence of one or two English battalions. Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 553 hands of Prince Napoleon was only the wooden shaft. Just- ice, in this regard, is the more needful, since it would plainly be unfitting and impolitic for Prince Napoleon to say in his defense that, with 7000 French troops around him, he was stiil reduced to helplessness by the want of his Zouave Regiment. There is another consideration which alone would seem to Also st,Ar. free Prince Napoleon from almost all the blame a wasrid- founded upon the backwardness of his Division. Division, and In the midst of that very Division Marshal St. Ar- he therefore _ naud was all this time riding; and it is obvious blefor its place that, by being thus present with a force which was in the field. hanging back out of its place, the ofticer who com- manded the whole French army brought full upon his own shoulders the weight of the blame which might otherwise be thrown upon the divisional general. But the eloping of his Zouave Regiment was not the only p’Aurelie'e ™IShap which befell Prince Napoleon. We saw brigadethrusts that D’Aurelle’s brigade—a brigade forming part itself forward of the 4th or Reserve Division—had been ordered Prince Napole- to support Canrobert. Of the motives which gov- th erned the leader of this brigade I know nothing. Perhaps, whilst he was low down in the bottom of the valley, he lost his conception of the distance (the lateral distance from east to west) which separated him from the Division he was ordered to support. At all events, what he did was this :— Having his whole brigade in a close, deep, narrow column, he pushed forward and jammed it into a steep road exactly in front of Prince Napoleon’s foremost battalion. He thus made it impossible for Prince Napoleon to get into action by that road,! and put him in the plight of a man left behind—in the plight of a general who commands one of the Divisions intend- ed to be foremost, and yet 1s left planted with his force in the rear of troops meant to act as reserves. Nor did D’Aurelle’s brigade do any the least good by thus thrusting itself into the road in advance of Prince Napoleon ; for, either because of the nature of the ground or from some other cause, the brigade never spread itself out so as to be capable of fighting. Al- putin anorder Ways in deep column with narrow front, it hung which ineapac- back, clinging fast to the steep part of the hill, and itates it from ets rails Ei any immediate remaining unseen by Kiriakoff, who moved freely combat. "_ across its front, as though there were no such force on the hill-side. Upon the whole, the result was, that, taken together, D’ Aurelle’s brigade and Prince Napoleon’s mutilated ‘ There was another road by which the Prince could, and by which, at a later period, he did ascend. . Vou. L—A a 554 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. Division were a column of near 12,000 men which might be said to be in mere order of march during all the critical period of the battle; for, with a depth of nearly a mile, the column had a front of only a few yards. Thus disposed, the 12,000 Helplessness Men who formed the column were not, of course, of the deepcol- in a state which allowed of their attempting to en- Bares gage an enemy inclined to make a stand against by Draurel’s them; and they were, it would seem, very helpless Prince Napole- for purposes of mere self-defense.! Indeed, it is on's Division. hard to see how they could have escaped a ‘great disaster, if a bold Russian officer who knew the ground had come down with a few score of light infantry men upon the flank of D’Aurelle’s brigade. Apparently Kiriakoff’s absti- nence from all enterprises of this sort, and the quiet confidence with which he afterward manceuvred on the plateau, were both owing to the steepness of ground which hindered him from perceiving the small, slender head of D’ Aurelle’s column. Upon the whole, then, Kiriakoff, though handling no forces Condition of except his two batteries, his four Taroutine bat- see teak talions, and his fast dissolving militiamen, was not Height. at this time out of heart. His artillery, sweeping down the smooth cap of the Telegraph Height, both on its northern and northwestern sides, commanded the only ground by which Canrobert could advance ; and, firing over the heads of the Taroutine battalions, effectually kept him down. More- over, it still tormented all those masses of French infantry which, though approaching the Telegraph Height, were yet so low down as not to have come in for the shelter which the steepness of the hill-side afforded. . And now we shall see the cause of the stress which had been The‘column PUt upon the French army by that incubus of the ‘of the eight ‘eight battalions’ of which the aid-de-camp spoke. “battalions.” We left Prince Mentschikoff countermarching from west to east with the seven battalions which he had under his. personal orders. The detached battalion of the ‘ Moscow’ corps had been afterward called in, and its junction brought up the whole body to eight battalions. With this force cathered i in mass, and standing halted on the right rear of the Telegraph, Prince Mentschikoff was preparing to make an onslaught upon the head of Canrobert’s Division ; but just as he was going to move, he abandoned the idea of leading the column in person. The cause of this change is obvious. Evidently Prince Ments- 1 See the plan showing the way in which Prince Napoleon’s Division and D’Aurelle’s brigade were disposed. It is taken from the official French plan of the ‘ Atlas de la Guerre d’Orient. Plan (taken from the French official Atlas) showing what (at the time of the advance of the Column of the eight battalions against Canrobert) were the respective positions of Marshal St. Arnaud, of 1)’Aurelle’s brigade, of Prince Napoleon’s Zouaves, and of the rest of the Prince Napoleon’s division which remained with him when his Zouave battalions had gone off. ; Canrobert’s tvOops.. vc. i veces Vecscdacecvevees AA Prince Napoleon’s .......+..0006 best eadd yes» ‘ D'Aurelle's brigade (a brigade belonging to Forey’s division Marshal St. Arnaud and his escort.......... Ke Py S Z SS The remainder of Canroberts Divistou 556 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. chikoff was called off to another part of the field by tidings of what the English were doing. — Kiriakoff had had a horse shot under him, and was standing Kiriakoff isin. On foot near one of his ‘'Taroutine’ battalions when the charge of rince Mentschikoff rode up, and (appar ently sup- this column. pressing the tidings which forced him to quit, this part of the field) gave Kiriakoff the charge of the great ‘ col- ‘umn of the eight “battalions? which had been amassed for the purpose of an attack upon Canrobert’s Division. The Prince then rode off, and was not again seen or heard of in this part of the field. Of course it’ follows that he went as straight as he could toward that part of his position which was undergo- ing the assault of the English.} Kiriakoff instantly took a fresh horse, and rode to the ground He marches it —- ground on the right rear of the Telegraph — across the front where the ‘column of the eight battalions’ awaited brigade. him. This vast column he disposed in a solid body, with a front of two and a depth of four massed battalions. When all was ready he began to move it flankwise from east to west. Plainly hindered by the ground from seeing the head of the column which was formed by D’Aurelle’s brigade and Prince Napoleon’s Division, he dealt with the French as though they had no such force near; for with that heavy column of his which trailed, as we have seen, to a depth of four battalions, he marched straight across the front of D’Aurelle’s brigade. He marched in peace. Nay, so far were the French from looking upon his hazardous movement in the light of a gift offered them by Fortune, that it was the dread apparition of this vast Rus-. sian column which had sent the panting aid-de-camp to the side of Lord Raglan’s stirrup. Bending afterward more toward the north, Kiriakoff ad- 1 T say ‘it follows,’ because Prince Mentschikoff was a brave man, inca- pable of quitting one of the two scenes of battle except for the purpose of go- ing to the other. In the mention which they make of Prince Mentschikoff’s presence in different parts of the field, the narratives of the Russian divisional generals leave a chasm of several important minutes. This chasm, as will be seen at a later page, I try to fill up by conjecture. Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. B57 And then aa. Vanced upon the right centre of the ground on which vances upon Canrobert had spread his battalions. Canrobert’s the rigttcen- troops did not long stand their ground; for when bert’s Divi. _Kiriakoff, advancing and still advancing, was nearly aan at last within musket-shot of his foe, the French no longer bore up under the weight that is laid upon the heart of a Continental soldier by the approach of a great column of infantry. Kiriakoff conceives that he inflicted a sheer defeat upon his foe. ‘Canrobert’s Division,’ he writes, ‘could not ‘resist our charge. Hastily taking off their batteries, they be- ‘gan to descend the hilly bank.’! On the other hand, the French say nothing of this reverse. Perhaps the truth lies in-. termediately between the broad assertion of Kiriakoff and the unfaithful silence of the French; for what seems the most like- ly is, that Canrobert, being still without his artillery, was for the moment resolved to decline the combat, and that with that view, and of his own free will, without waiting to be put un- der stress of actual fight, he drew his troops down to a steeper The head of part of the hill-side. Be this as it may, it is certain Deen; that, under the pressure of Kiriakoff’s great col- back. umn, the head of Canrobert’s Division fell back.? Along almost their whole array at this time it seemed to State ofthe fae ill with the Allies. Still close to the sea-shore, battle at this Bouat, with one French brigade and 5000 Turks, bo aie was without artillery, and was therefore holding back from the plateau, far away from any scene of strife. Fol- lowing the same barren track, General Forey, with Lourmel’s brigade, was marching.to the sea-shore, and was annulled. Bosquet, with his one brigade on the plateau, had long been isolated, and was not so near to any Russian battalion as to be able to engage it with his infantry. Canrobert was undergo- ing the check which we have just seen. The unwieldy column formed by D’Aurelle’s brigade and by Prince Napoleon’s Di- vision —a column with a front of only a few yards, and the depth of a mile, was in an order adapted for the march, but not for fighting, and, its small slender crest being kept close down out of sight, had failed to exert that pressure which— i Kiriakoff’s narrative. It will be observed that his statement clashes with the passage in which I say that Canrobert was without his guns. I have re- lied upon the detailed statements supplied to me from French sources, and if I am right in doing so, it follows that Kiriakoff must have been mistaken in supposing that he saw the French carrying off their guns. i 2 Upon this point Kiriakoff’s narrative is confirmed by Romaine, Writ- ing from his saddle, and at the very minute of witnessing the event, he re- corded it in these words :-—‘ French centre falling back.’ Romaine’s saddle- notes. Plan (taken fromthe French official Atlas) showing the advance of the ** Column of the eight Battalions” against Canrobert’s Division. a on@Gre. ~s Sheu: cows << eee. ee. 8 Oe ae ere, | Li aoe j ih an \\ \N “\ \V, = Zz) AN "a i YVAN yi | Y af | SN SS \\ oe A L727 ¥.B.—Those parts of the above plan which show the position of the ‘* Column of eight Battalions” and of the French troops are believed to be nearly accurate, but the other parts of the plan are not to be relied upon. Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 559 even without firing a shot—may be inflicted by the known presence of a great body of troops. And the forces thus pal- sied were nothing less than the whole French army, including even their reserves. Much, of course, might always be hoped from the bravery and the swift invention of the warlike French; but apart from that vast though undefined resource, and apart from what fortune might do for him, Marshal St. Arnaud was without the means which would enable him to bear up against any grave disaster, and hinder it from becom- ing sheer ruin. The fortunes of the English had been checkered, and it might be said that at. this moment their prospects were a good deal overcast. Evans, still repressed by the commanding fire of the Causeway batteries, and having but three battalions to fight with, was sustaining a hard conflict. Codrington’s peo- ple had been forced to relinquish their hold of the Great Re- doubt; and the shattered remains of the battalions which stormed the work were descending the slope of the hill, and breaking down by their bodily weight the left wing of a bat- talion of Guards. Finally, General Buller, on our extreme left, was in an attitude of mere defense. It is true that the Great Redoubt had been dismantled, that (with the exception of the centre battalion of the Guards) our supports had not yet tried their prowess, and that the bare apparition of our Head-Quarter Staff on the knoll was putting a heavy stress on the enemy. It is true, also, that there was one English regi- ment still fighting with a Russian column. All else had of late gone ill. XXVII. This was the condition of things when, having been hurried down to the ford, and dragged through the river, and up over steep, rugged cround, the two guns, for which Lord Raglan had prayed, were brought up at leneth to the summit of the knoll. They were guns belonging to Turner’s battery, and they were already crossing the river when Dickson came. upon Toe them. The two pieces were soon unlimbered ; and guns 4 which Lord one of them—for the artillerymen had not all been Raglan had able to keep pace—was worked by Dickson with his brought tothe Own hands. The guns were pointed upon the flank Pee of the Causeway batteries. Every one watched Their freenfi- keenly for the result of the first shot. The first Causeway bat- Shot failed. Some one said: ‘ Allow a little more teres ad ne. ‘for the wind; and the words were not spoken as mytowith- though they were a quotation from ‘Ivanhoe,’ but draw hisguns. yather in a way showing that the speaker knew 560 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. something of artillery practice. The next shot, or the next shot but one, took effect upon the Causeway batteries. It struck, they say, a tumbril which stood just in rear of the guns. It presently became a joyful certainty that the Causeway batteries, exposing their flank to this fire from the knoll, could not hold their ground; and in a few moments a keen-eyed of- ficer, who was one of the group around Lord Raglan, cried out with great joy, ‘ He is carrying off his guns! And this was true. The field-pieces which formed the Causeway bat- teries were rapidly limbered up, and dragged to another ground far up in the rear.! With the two great columns of infantry, which constituted eae the enemy’s reserves, it fared no better. After not through the more than two failures, the gunner got their range, cree nq ~~ and our nine-pounders plowed through the serried drives them | masses of the two Russian columns, cutting lanes ’ through and through them. Yet for some minutes the columns stood firm. And even when the still incréasing havoc at length overruled the punctilio of those brave men, it seemed to be in obedience to orders, and not under the stress of any confusing terror, that the two great columns gave way. They retreated in good order. _ Our gunners then tried their pieces upon the Vladimir bat- talions, and although the range was too great to allow of their striking the column, they impressed Kvetzinski with a contrary belief. He was sure that these troops were reached by the guns on the knoll; and it will be seen by-and-by that this his belief was one of the causes which helped to govern his move- ments. This was the time when the great column. of the Ouglitz corps, being fired, as it seemed, with a vehement spirit, was still marching down from the higher slopes of the Kourgané Hill with a mind to support the Vladimir battalions, and enable them to press the retreat of our soldiery then coming down in clusters from the Great Redoubt; but the disasters which Lord Raglan had that moment inflicted upon the enemy by the aid of the two guns on the knoll made it natural for the Russian The Ouglitz Generals, who saw what was done, to stop short column was, in any forward movement. The Ouglitz column, as stopped in its . : - advance. we before saw, was stopped in the midst of its eager 1 Kiriakoff says that these guns were dragged off by the men of the Boro- dino corps. I do not think that there. were any observers on the knoll who saw guns dragged from the field by infantry; but there were features in the ground which prevented their seeing into the line of retreat as effectually as they had seen into the batteries. ; Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 561 Soalsowas advance; and, for want of the support which these the Vladimir. troops had been going to lend, the triumphant Vlad- imir column was brought to a halt on the site of the Great Redoubt. So, here was the spell which now for several minutes had been governing the battle. The apparition of a score of plumed horsemen on this knoll may have had more or less to do with the resolve which led Kvetzinski to dismantle the Great Re- doubt; but, at all events, this apparition, and the fire of Lord Raglan’s two guns, had enforced the withdrawal of the Causeway batteries; had laid open the entrance of the Pass ; had shattered the enemy’s reserves; had stopped the onward march of the Ouglitz battalions; and had chained up the high- mettled Vladimir in the midst of its triumphant advance. XXVIII. On and near the great road leading down to the bridge, Progress hithe VANS had been continuing his difficult struggle. ertomade by He still shared with the flames the possession of Piatt the village ; still held the vineyards below it; and a part of his small force had succeeded, as already shown, in crossing the river, and establishing itself under the bank on the Russian side; but beyond the ground thus gained Evans had not yet been able to push; for the Causeway batteries were so well placed and so diligently served that they closed the . mouth of the Pass. The force around Evans was scant, but in other times he had commanded an army, and whilst he watched the efforts of the only three battalions: remaining near him, he was alive to the progress of the action in other parts of the field. He had just He hears the Witnessed the onset of Codrington’s brigade ;. and guns from the he was sitting in his saddle, tormented with the knoli, and : F J presently sees gYlef of observing that, for want of supports, the tion the _-« Storming of the Great Redoubt was likely to be all Causeway bat- In vain, when suddenly he heard the report of a ina nine-pounder gun sounding from a very new quar- ter—sounding from somewhere among the knolls and broken ground on his right front, and in the heart of the Russian po- sition. The fire was repeated. Evans keenly watched the Causeway batteries in his front. And not in vain, for again the nine-pounder was heard, and there followed that sort of change in the Russian batteries which seemed to show that 'The 47th, the 30th, and the 55th. The 95th, as we saw, was earried forward in the rush of Codrington’s brigade, and Evans's second brigade (with the exception of the 47th regiment) was in another part of the field. AA? 562 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, [Cuar. XLIV. they were under fire—under fire: coming flankwise from the west. Again and again the fire of the nine-pounder was re- peated. The sound came from a quarter to which it was to be expected that the French might have reached ; but some, they say, fancied and said, ‘That is an English gun!’ A busy change began to stir in the Russian batteries. Presently, though the smoke of the burning village lay heavy in this part of the field, our people could make out what the change was. It was one of great moment to the Allies; for the enemy was limbering up, and beginning to carry off the sixteen guns which up to this minute had barred the mouth of the Pass. The great road lay open. ? Evans understood the battle. He acted instantly. He saw He at once ad- that, though he was weak, yet the moment had “hah come for the advance of his three battalions. The 47th Regiment had to-ford the river below the bridge, and at a part where the water was deep. It encountered a good deal of difficulty in crossing. Some men were drowned, but the rest gained the bank on the Russian side of the stream, and moved forward. Evans rode across the stream at a point between the 47th and Pennefather’s brigade. Pennefather pressed forward. Colonel Stacy needed no or- der to advance. Understanding the business of war, he had already gained a lodgment for his battalion! under the farther bank of the river, and he was plying the Russian artillerymen with rifle fire when he observed that the enemy’s batteries suddenly slackened their fire. He inferred the change that was coming, and at once caused his men to spring up the bank, formed them carefully on the top, and then, having his battalion in a beautiful line, marched straight up toward the site of the Causeway batteries. Colonel Warren moved up his battalion? in the same direction. The enemy had partly destroyed the bridge. From first to last, the enemy, so far as I know, had done but little with the two formed battalions of his Borodino corps which had been posted in this part of the field ;4 and he now began to draw in the multitude of skirmishers which had hith- 2 The 30th Regiment. 2 The 55th Regiment. * He imagined that his battalion of sappers and miners had destroyed it, but this was an error, Except to the parapet, which was removed, not much harm was done to the bridge. * General Kiriakoff says, as we have already mentioned, that the Borodino battalions dragged away the guns of the Causeway batteries, but I can not find any other distinct statement of things done by the regiment in the course of the battle. - Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 563 Theenemy €rto swarmed in the valley... He did not engage does not fu- his infantry in farther endeavors to bar the mouth ther resist this ° : 3 advance with Of the Pass, nor even show one of his battalions in his infantry, this part of the great road; but upon the hillocks, a good way in rear ‘of the ground just abandoned by the Causeway batteries, he again established his guns; and from this new position, though not with great effect, he opened fire upon our advancing troops. To this fire Evans was now able to reply with a strong force Evans joined of artillery, for Sir Richard England rode up, pro- England in posed to accompany him in the advance, and offer- person, who ed to place both his batteries at Evans’s disposal. h i Ee him thirty $0 the two divisional generals rode forward togeth- guns. er, having with them altogether some thirty pieces of field artillery.? Moreover, the Division of Sir Richard England was follow- ing him into the Pass, and would soon bring a welcome sup- port to Evans’s three battalions.? But some minutes elapsed before these supports could come Sir Richara Up, and, by reason of the disasters wlnch had be- England's dis- fallen our soldiery at the Great Redoubt, the three positions for - : — R . bringing sup- battalions which Evans had with him were for some port to Evans. time almost alone upon the enemy’s ground. Yet not utterly; for on the western slope of the Kourgané Hill one English battalion—Lacy Yea, with his 7th Fusileers—was still holding its ground, still engaged with a mass of the ene- my’s infantry. That stand that Lacy Yea had been making was a hinge on which a good deal might turn. If he should ‘ Three battalions, it seems, viz., two out of the four Borodino battalions, and the No. 6 rifle battalion, were employed as skirmishers. * 7.e., With the three batteries belonging respectively to the Ist, the 2nd, and the Light Divisions. 3 Apparently Sir Richard England did not know of the disaster which be- fell the Scots Fusileer Guards in time to be able to adapt his measures to that event. Of course, if he had known it in time, he would have been anx- ious to put a literal interpretation upon the order ‘to support the Guards,’ and would have moved a part of his force toward the chasm which had been wrought in the centre of the Household brigade. I took pains to make out the exact movements of the 3rd Division, but in vain; for those who would be the most likely to know, differ broadly the one from the other. By far- ther trouble I might have dispelled this obscurity; but the Division was not engaged to an extent greater than might be inferred from its losses (one killed and seventeen wounded), and therefore I have desisted from farther endeavors. It may be safely said, however, that after receiving the order to support the Guards, Sir Richard England held his Division in hand, sending portions of it to give support where he deemed it to be needed; and that when Pennefather’s brigade crossed the river, it was followed by the whole or by the bulk of the 3rd Division. 564 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuapr. XLIV. hold his ground a few minutes more, he would cover from the enemy’s masses the left flank and left front of Evans’s three battalions, and at the end of that time the supports would be Evans's situa. UP» Evans was an old commander, who knew how tion inthe to read the signs of a battle, and he was able to see meantime. and understand that the enemy, almost in the very moment of his success at the Great Redoubt, was palsied by the guns still sounding from the knoll, and was losing his free- dom of action. He resolved to stand firm in the Pass; and he established his thirty guns near the site of the batteries which had just been withdrawn by the Russians. For some minutes his position was rather critical; and he had to trust much to the hope that Lacy Yea and his Fusileers would be able to hold their ground. XXIX. It was between the Great Causeway and the slopes of the Protractea - WOurgané Hill that Lacy Yea, with his 7th Fusil- fight beiween eers, had long been maintaining an obstinate con- the th Fusil- flict. Long ago, as we saw, he had crossed the riv- left Kazan col- er, had brought his men to the top of the bank, and ales « was trying to form them, when there came down marching upon him a strong Russian column—a column of two battalions, and numbering 1500 men. These battalions be- longed to the corps which was sometimes called the Regiment of the Grand-Duke Michael, and more often the Regiment of Kazan. Like the English corps to which they stood opposed, these battalions were ‘ Fusileers.’, Soon the column was halted. It was then that for the first time in that war the soldiery of the Western Powers were brought so near to a body of Russian troops as to be able to scrutinize its material. The men of the column were of high stature and strictly upright, with broad, plain, whitish faces, all seemingly cast in a com- mon mould, and very similar the one to the other. The long gray overcoat, worn alike by all the officers and men of the Russian forces, and reaching down to the ankles, gave no clew to distinguish this mass from any other of the Czar’s battal- ions ; but spiked helmets, glittering with burnished plates of brass, led some of the English to imagine that the column formed part of the Emperor’s guard.!. The body was formed ' The notion was ill founded, there being none of the Imperial Guard in the Crimea. I supposed at one time that the helmet imported the presence of heavy infantry, and that the flat round forage-cap with which Crimea men are so familiar, denoted a light infantry regiment. This, however, is,not, it seems, the case. The regiment of Kazan was a light infantry regiment. Cap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 565 with great precision in close column with a front of only one company; but a chain of skirmishers, thrown out on either flank in prolongation of the front rank, sought to combine with the solid formation of the column some of the advantages of an array in line.!. The steady men were in the front and on the flanks of the column; and the.constant firing in the air which went on in the, interior of the solid battalions showed that that was the place assigned to the young soldiers. The column stood halted at a distance of, perhaps, some fifty yards from the knotted chain of soldiery which represented the 7th Fusileers. _ Lacy Yea was so rough an enforcer of discipline that he had never been much liked in peace-time by those who had to obey him; but when once the 7th Fusileers were in campaign, and still more when they came to be engaged with the enemy, they found that their chief was a man who could and. would seize for his regiment all such chances of welfare and glory as might come with the fortune of war. Before many months were over, they learned that although other regiments might be dy- ing of want, yet by force of their Colonel’s strong will there was food and warmth to be got for the 7th Fusileers; and still sooner, they came to know that the fiery nature of their chief was the quality which would help them to have dominion over-the enemy. Thenceforth the strong man was a king be- loved by his people. Lacy Yea had not time to put his Fusileers in their wonted array, for the enemy’s column was so near, that forthwith, and at the instant, it was necessary to ply it with fire; but what man could do, he did. His very shoulders so labored and strove with the might of his desire to form line, that the curt red shell-jacket he wore was as though it were a world too scant for the strength of the man and the passion that raged within him; but when he turned, his dark eyes yielded fire, and all the while from his deep-chiseled, merciless lips, there -pealed the thunder of imprecation and command. Wherever the men had got clustered together, there—fiercely coming— he wedged his cob into the thick of the crowd—the ‘ rooge,’ he would call it in his old Eton idiom of speech—and by dint of will tore it asunder. Though he could not form an even ar- ray, yet he disentangled the thickest clusters of the soldiery, ' The advantages of this hybrid formation were strongly urged about the middle of the last century by General Lloyd, an Englishman. General _ Lloyd was an officer in the service of Russia, and it seems probable that the formation of which he was a vehement advocate may have been adopted in the Russian service in consequence of his advice. 566 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV. and forced the men to open out into a lengthened chain ap- proaching to line formation. Numbers of the Fusileers were wanting, and on the other hand there were mingled with the battalion many of the soldiery of other regiments. With a force in this state, Yea was not in a condition to attempt a charge or any other combined movement. All he could hope to be able to do was to keep his people firm on their ground, to hinder them from contracting their front or gathering into heavy clusters, and then leave every man to make the best use he could of his rifle. - Continental generals would not easily believe that upon fair open ground there could be a doubtful conflict between, on the one side, a body of fifteen hundred brave, steady, disci- plined soldiers, superbly massed in close column, and, on the other, a loose knotted chain of six or seven hundred light in- fantry men without formation. Yet the fight was not so une- qual as it seemed. A close column of infantry has only small means of offense, and is itself a thing so easy to hurt that every volley it receives from steady troops must load it with corpses and wounded men. Tested strictly in that way—tested strictly by its small means of hurting people, and the ease with which it can be hurt—the close column is a weak thing to fight with ; and yet it has power over the troops of most nations, because its grandeur well fits it for weighing upon the imaginations of men, But Lacy Yea and his islanders were not so fashioned by nature, nor so tamed down by much learning, as to be liable to be easily coerced in any subtle, metaphysical way; and although the shots of individual soldiers and small knots of men had not, of course, the crushing power which would have been exerted by the fire of the 7th Fusileers when formed and drawn up in line, still, the well-handled rifles of our men soon began to car- ry havoc into the dark gray oblong mass of living beings which served them for their easy target. And though seemingly the front rank of the compact mass yearned to move forward, there was always occurring in the interior some sudden death or some trouble with a wounded man, which seemed not only to breed difficulty in the way of an advance, but also to make the column here and there begin to look spotted and faulty. The distance was such as to allow of a good deal of shooting at particular men. -Once, Yea himself found that he was sin- gled out to be killed, and was covered by a musket or rifle; but the marksman was so fastidious about his aim, that before . he touched the trigger a quick-eyed English corporal found time to intervene, and save his colonel’s life by shooting the careful Russian in the midst of his studies. ‘Thank you, my Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 567 ‘man,’ said Lacy Yea; ‘if I live through this, you shall be a ser- ‘geant to-night.’ Whilst this long fight went on, it sometimes happened that the fire and impatience of one or other of the Fusileers would carry a man into closer quarters with the column. Of those who were spurred by sudden impulses of this kind, Monck was one. He sprang forward, they say, from his place on the left of the Fusileers, and saying, ‘Come on, 8th company !’ rushed up to the enemy’s massed battalions, ran his sword through a man in the front rank, and struck another with his fist. He was then shot dead by a musket fired from the second rank of the column. Personal enterprises of this kind were incidents varying the tenor of the fight; but it was by musket or rifle ball, at a distance of some fifty yards, that the real strife be- tween the two corps was waged. It was not always against the enemy that Lacy Yea was la- boring. He came to know or imagine that some of his Fusil- eers had remained behind in the valley finding base shelter. That this should be, and that even for a few minutes this should pass, was to him not tolerable; and in the fiercest heat of his strife with the column, one of his best officers was sent back, that he might turn the drove out of their sheds, and force them to come instantly into the presence of the enemy—ainto the presence—more terrible still—of their raging colonel. The fight lasted. When Codrington’s people were scarce beginning their rush toward the face of the Great Redoubt, the 7th Fusileers—rudely and hastily gathered, but contriving to hold together—were beginning this battle of their own. When the storming battalions came down, the regiment was fighting still. When the despondency of the French army was at its worst; when the head of Canrobert’s Division was pushed back down the hill by the ‘column of the eight battalions ;’ when along the whole line of the Allies there was no other regi- ment fighting, Lacy Yea and his people were still at their work. When Evans, having crossed the river, was leading his three battalions to the site of the Causeway batteries, it was the 7th Fusileers that stood fighting alone on his left; and nearly at the very time when disaster befell the centre of the brigade of Guards, Lacy Yea and his Fusileers were gathering at last the reward of their soldierly virtue. | For by this time death and wounds, making cavities and compelling small changes in the great living mass, had injured the symmetry of the spruce Russian column. As a piece of mechanism, it was no longer what it had been when the fight began; but the spirit of the brave and obedient men who com- 568 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV. posed it was still high. The cohesion of the mass was not yet destroyed; but it was endangered, and had come to depend very much upon the personal exertions of officers. Lacy Yea observed that every now and then, when a part of the column was becoming faulty, a certain man always on foot, but of vast towering stature, would stride quickly to the detective spot, and exert so great an ascendency, that steadi- ness and order seemed always to be restored by his presence. The gray overcoat common to all shrouded the rank of every Russian officer, and since this man was not on horseback, there was nothing to disclose his station in the corps save the power which he seemed to wield. What its colonel was to the 7th Fusileers, that the big man seemed to be to the Russian col- umn; and it was not, I think, without a kind of sympathy with him ; it was not, one would believe, without a manly reluctance that Yea ordered his people to shoot the tall man. He did, however, so order, and he was quickly obeyed. The tall man ~ dropped dead, and when he had fallen there was no one who | seemed to be the like of him in power. The issue of this long fight of the Fusileers was growing to be a thing of so great moment, or else the sight of it was be- come so heating, that Prince Gortschakoff now resolved to take part in it bodily. So, deputing Colonel Issakoff, then acting as his Chief of the Staff, to represent him in his absence, he rode down to the column, and strove to lead it on to a charge with the bayonet. But he could do nothing; for, because of the disorder already beginning, and the loss of great numbers of its officers, the heart was nearly out of the column. So, giv- ing orders for the battalions to keep up their fire, he rode away to his right, and left the column still engaged with Yea and his Fusileers.! . Portions of the column—mainly those in the centre and in the rear—became discomposed and unsettled. Numbers of men moved a little one way or another, and of these, some looked as though they stepped a pace backward ; but no man as yet turned round to face the rear. However, though the movement of each soldier, taken singly, was trifling and insig- nificant, yet even that little displacement of many men at the same time was shaking the structure. Plainly, the men must ? What Prince Gortschakoff says was this :—‘TI first rode toward the Fu- ‘sileers, who were standing firm under a very heavy fire, although losing a ‘large amount of men. I first tried to lead them on (& la baionette), but, ‘ finding that they could not re-form immediately for a charge, and had lost ‘nearly all their officers, I left them with orders to continue their feu de ‘ bataillons.’ Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 569 be ceasing to feel that the column they stood in was solid. The ranks, which had been straight as arrows, became bent and wavy. . The Russian officers well understood these signs. With drawn swords, moving hither and thither as actively as they could in their long, gray, melancholy coats, they seemed to become loud and vehement with their orders, their entreaties, their threats. Presently their gestures grew violent, and more than one officer was seen to go and seize a wavering soldier by the throat. But in vain; for, seemingly by some law of its own nature rather than under any new stress of external force, the column began to dissolve. The hard mass became fluid. It still cohered; but what had been, as it were, the outlines of a wall, were becoming like the outlines: of a cloud. First Defeat of the Some, then more, then all turned round. Moving column, — slowly, and as though discontent with its fate, the column began to fall back. The 7th Fusileers bought this triumph with blood. In killed and wounded it lost twelve officers, and more than two hund- red men. Monck, we before saw, was killed; and Hare, Wat- son, Fitzgerald, Persse, Appleyard, Coney, Crofton, Carpenter, and Jones, were wounded. For some time one of the colors of the regiment was anissing, but it did not at any time fall into the hands of the enemy. It was safe in the charge of some soldiers belonging to the Royal Welsh.! A regimental officer engaged in a general action can not oft- en at the time compute the relative importance of the duty. which he is performing; but on the morrow of the battle, or even perhaps much later, he may learn that the fortune of the day was hinging upon the conduct of his single regiment. Lacy Yea was a simple-hearted, straight-going man, with a wholesome ardor for fighting, and a great care for the honor and welfare of his regiment, but not looking far beyond it. Around him the battle had been flowing and ebbing. With the watching of those changes he did not much vex his mind. He hardly, perhaps, remarked them. He was too busy with the fight to be able to contemplate the battle. Except when he yearned to unearth the people whom he believed to be skulking, and to have them dragged before him, he thought of nothing but that the corps he commanded should stand fight- ing and fighting till it got the victory. He went through with his resolve, and hardly knew at the time the full worth of his ’ The color, I believe, was found lying upon the ground, but how that came to happen I do not know, and I have not thought it necessary to find out, because the color was never for a moment ‘ lost.” 570 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV, constancy. He hardly knew that, whilst he fought, the whole of the English front line—first on his left hand, and then on his right—had been getting the support it grievously needed from the tenacity of his 7th Fusileers.! It was plainly right that the defeated column should be pressed in its retreat by troops in a state of formation; and Yea, looking back, perceived that the Guards were now at Itis arrancea Hand. Troubridge went to the Grenadiers; saw that thede- one of its officers; told him of the defeat of the feated coum Russian column, and of the condition of the 7th Fu- biskhe (iransy sileers ; and asked whether it would not be well that the Grenadier Guards should come up and clinch’ the defeat of the retiring column. Colonel Hood was referred to, and he at once consented to do as was proposed. 3 Sir George Brown—his gray so wounded that men saw the blood from afar—now chanced to ride to the part of the hill- side where Troubridge was passing. After telling him of the defeat of the Russian column, and of the state of the 7th Fu- sileers, Troubridge asked him whether the Fusileers should go on, or allow the Guards to pass them.? Sir George said, ‘ Let the Guards go on. Collect your men, ‘and afterward resume the advance.’ When it was nearly abreast of the Great Redoubt, the col- State ofthe umn just defeated by Lacy Yea’s Fusileers was able field in this to rally, and again show a front to the English ;3 part of the 4 3 tiers Russian posi: for it had on its right the great Viadimir column, pe which still stood halted near the parapet of the Great Redoubt. On the right rear of the Vladimir men there was a double-battalion column, formed out of the Kazan corps.* On the right of that last column, but still farther held back, 1 See plan. When Codrington’s people were storming the redoubt, they were covered on their right by the fight which Yea was there maintaining. When they had to fall back, it was still that stand of the Fusilcers which covered their flank. When Evans advanced with his three battalions, there was nothing but the 7th Fusileers to cover his left. * At this time, and whilst he was still speaking with Sir George Brown, Troubridge observed the sight, which will be referred to in a future page, as fixing the order in which events followed one another in different parts of the field. 3 After their defeat, the two battelane which composed the column seem to have parted from one another. The two bodies into which it resolved it- self remained bravely linger ing on the hill-side, though, having lost most of their officers, they were in a helpless condition. The column defeated by the 19th Regiment, and by some of the men of the 23rd. Cnap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 571 there was another double-battalion column, formed of the Sous- dal corps; and next to these, but much more in advance, and standing on the extreme right of the whole of the Russian in- fantry, there were posted the two remaining battalions of the Sousdal corps. Somewhere in this part of the field, but oper- ating, it would seem, as skirmishers, and not perhaps bringing any very material accession of strength, there were the “two battalions of sailors. As an immediate reser ve, or rather as a support for all these forces, the four Ouglitz battalions were kept in hand on the higher slopes of the Kourgané Hill, and were still, as before, massed in column. At some.distance on the extreme right of the Russian position, the enemy’s cavalry stood posted as before, confronting from afar, but never pro- voking, the horsemen of our Light Brigade. After allowing for casualties, and especially for the heavy losses sustained by the column which engaged our 7th Fusileers, it may be con- jectured that these Russian forces on the Kourgané Hill amounted to some 15,000 men. Except the Kazan battalions, none of these troops had been hitherto engaged in hard fight- ing, for the triumphant Vladimir column had not yet encoun- tered formed troops. Nearly all the Russian artillery had been taken away from the front, and, except that there were five pieces of ordnance not yet withdrawn from the Lesser Redoubt, the enemy had no guns now remaining in battery. The impending struggle was a fight —a sheer fight — of in- fantry. The advance of the Guards had an ill beginning. We saw The Scots Fu- that whilst the Grenadiers and the Coldstream etic ane were still forming under the bank or completing slope. their passage of the river, the centre battalion of the brigade—the battalion called the ‘Scots Fusileer Guards’ Disaster whicn —— had been hurried forward by the appeal from befell its left the troops then still cling ng to the redoubt, had in- Companie®- curred the fire of the Viadimir column, and had aft- erward encountered a heap of our men retreating, which broke the formation of its left companies by sheer bodily force, and compelled them to fall back in disorder. The remnant of the battalion thus maimed was at the moment without support; for directly in its rear there were no formed troops coming up, and of the two battalions on its right hand and on its left, neither one nor the other had hitherto come up abreast of it. On the other hand, the force to which the remnant of this En- glish battalion stood opposed was that majestic Vladimir col- umn which had just been driving our Light Infantry men from the parapet of the redoubt. Numbering perhaps some four or - 572 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cnar. XLIV. five hundred men, these remains of what had been the centre Situation in battalion of the Guards stood drawn up in line whieh therem- upon a smooth, open slope, and were met by a hith- battalionstood. erto victorious column, which was nearly three thousand strong. Still, for some time the maimed battalion pushed forward, and, when afterward it came to a halt, a hard effort was made to hold the ground. But in vain. Either the overwhelming weight. of the column in its front, or the mishap encountered by the left companies of the English bat- talion, or some other cause of evil had destroyed its principle It falls back in Of cohesion; for this right wing now followed the Alspnder. fate of the left one, got into disorder, and fell back. For a time, the whole battalion of the Scots Fusileer Guards was in confusion near the bank of the river. This disaster, and the hard struggle maintained by those who sought to avert it, inflicted loss upon the Scots Fusileer Guards. Lord Chewton and 3 sergeants were killed. Colo- nel Dalrymple, Colonel Berkeley, Colonel Hepburn, Colonel Haygarth, Astley, Bulwer, Buckley, Gipps, Lord Ennismore, and Hugh Annesley,' and 13 sergeants, were wounded; and of the rank and file, 17 were killed and 137 wounded. When Colonel Hood consented to move forward his battal- TheGrenadier lon against the column just defeated by Lacy Yea, Guards ascend fe at once caused his men to ascend the bank which to the top of the bank, and had hitherto sheltered it; and, as soon as the bat- ere ares talion was on the top, its left wing began to incur a der fire: good deal of the fire of the Vladimir column. Bur- goyne, carrying one of the colors, was wounded; and the charge of the colors then devolving on Lieutenant Robert Hamilton, he also, in the next minute, was struck down by shot; but he quickly rose from the ground, recover ed his hold of the standard, and was able to carry it to the end of the battle. Their march Under this fire the battalion dressed its ranks with up fhe slope. precision, and marched forward in beautiful order. This it kept till its left wing encountered some of the clusters of men coming down fiom the Great Redoubt. Then, as we saw before, the battalion opened its ranks for the passage of the retr eating soldiery, and afterward formed up anew. This done, it marched on. ' It happened to me afterward to see and wonder at the high courage and composure with which Annesley bore his dreadful wound. A musket-shot had entered his jaw, and passed, tearing its way through the mouth. The wound was of such a kind that it seemed as though nothing but death could be of use to him. Yet he was not only uncomplaining, but able to think and act for others, Cuap.XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 573 Meanwhile, General Codrington had been laboring to bring together the remnant of his brigade. Sergeant O’Connor, of the 23rd, still bore the color which he had been carrying with loving care through the worst stress of the fight. The miss- ing color of the 7th Fusileers, now committed to the honor of Codrington the 23rd, was borne by Captain Pearson. Around rallies sonte *f these two standards Codrington rallied such men LightDivision, aS he could gather, and made them open out and Bagh cite form line two deep. The body thus formed num- pe sbecbetes bered about 300 men, and Codrington was going eft by the cen- Peay : ° > tre battalion of tO Move it forward and place it on the left of the the Guards. Grenadier Guards, in order to fill up a part of the chasm which had been wrought in the Household Brigade by the discomfiture of its centre battalion. But it occurred to him—for he was himself a Guardsman, and he knew the feel- ings of the corps—that to place soldiers of the Line abreast of the Grenadiers, and in the room of the broken regiment, might give pain to a battalion of the Guards; so he sent to the Grenadiers to know if they would like troops to come up to fillthe empty space. The answer wasa proud one. It was also, perhaps, a rash answer ;? for the Vladimir column——vast His proposal and strong, with a sense of the power it had just tis Grengtier PUt forth—was impending over the left front of the Guards. Grenadiers, and confronting the interval which the defeat of the centre battalion left empty. However, the an- Contimea aa. SWeT was ‘No! and the Grenadiers, with their left vance ofthe flank stark open, but in beautiful order, contentedly ist Division. marched up the slope. A little later, and at a moment when the Grenadiers were halted on the slope, with the Vladimir column impending over Afterwara their left flank, Major Home of the 95th, and an en- some menof sign of the same corps, came bearing the colors of eaten 6their regiment, and having with them eight men. ment, and a : : pies crane; Home, accosting Colonel Hamilton, who command- of the sec . . ° Fasileer ed the left wing of the Grenadiers, said that the Guards, come ejoht men then following the colors of the ‘ Derby- andadvanceon JO , = the left of the Shire’ were all that remained together, and that he Grenadiers. — wished to take part with the Grenadiers in continu- ing the fight. Colonel Hamilton, assenting, told Home to fall in on the left of the Grenadiers. Afterward, other men of the ‘Derbyshire’ came up and joined their colors. A few moments " The Scots Fusileer Guards. See ante, p. 572. 2 It would be so, if the emergency was one in which three or four hundred men, hastily gathered from several broken regiments, were likely to do good. Upon the contrary supposition, the answer, of course, was a wise one. 574 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar, XLIV. later, Colonel Berkeley came up, bringing with him a company of the Scots Fusileer Guards, which he had been able to rally, and he also was requested to place himself on the left of the Grenadiers. , On the left of the Grenadiers there was that chasm which had been wrought in the brigade of Guards by the defeat of its centre battalion; and on the left of the chasm there stood the ‘Coldstream.’ This battalion of the Guards confronted the centre and right of the great Vladimir column, and was drawn up in line with beautiful precision. Because of the po- sition of the ground on which it advanced, it had been much The Cold- less exposed to fire and mishaps than either of the ae other battalions of the brigade, and it had not been pressed forward, as each of the two other battalions had been, to meet any special emergency occurring on its front. There- fore it was that it fell to the lot of the Coldstream to become an almost prim sample of what our Guards can be in the mo- ment which precedes a close fight. What the best of battal- ions is when, in some Royal Park at home, it manceuvres be- fore a great princess, that the Coldstream was now on the banks of the Alma, when it came to show its graces to the enemy. And it was no ignoble pride which caused the bat- talion to maintain all thig ceremonious exactness; for though it be true that the precision of a line in peace-time is only a success in mechanics, the precision of a line on a hill-side, with the enemy close in front, is the result and the proof of a warlike composure. And it ought to be remembered—though our knowledge of the final result makes it hard to go back into the dark, trying dimly to measure the worth of deeds done in the hour of trial—it ought to be remembered that the under- taking of the troops in this part of the field was not an under- taking to swell the tide of victory, but to retrieve a disaster. Happily it is then, just then, after the discomfiture of troops The temper of 12 front, that English soldiery advaneing in support ce eee attain their highest glory. For by nature they are t SO constituted that the misfortune of their com- ing in support : y : aftera check yades carries no alarm into their ranks. It only sustained by 2 ° ° : theircom- heats their blood, rousing, as it seems, a sentiment imag akin to anger; and when they have thus been wrought upon, they are sterner men for a foe to have to do with than they are when all has gone well. The Duke of Cambridge was with this battalion, for its left was nearly in the centre of the troops over which his command extended. With it also there was a visitor whose presence showed the strength of the tie between the officer and his reg- Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 575 iment. Colonel Steele had broken loose from his duty at Head-quarters, and was riding with his own beloved ‘ Cold- ‘stream.’! Farther to the left, and in tlie same formation, Danio the three battalions ef the Highland brigade were brigade, extended. But the 42nd had found less difficulty 42nd. 93rd. | Bee Revs 2a A EB 79th. than the 93rd in getting through the thick ground and the river, and, again, the 93rd had found less difficulty than the 79th; so, as each regiment had been formed, and moved for- ward with all the speed it could command, the brigade fell naturally into direct échelon of regiments, the 42nd in front. And although this order was occasioned by the nature of the ground traversed and not by design, it was so well suited to the work in hand that Sir Colin Campbell did not for a mo- ment seek to change it. These young soldiers, distinguished to the vulgar eye by their tall stature, their tartan uniforms, and the plumes of their Highland bonnets, were yet more marked in the eyes of those who know what soldiers are by the warlike carriage of the men, and their strong, lithesome, resolute step. And Sir Col- in Campbell was known to be so proud of them, that already, like the Guards, they had a kind of prominence in the army, which was sure to make their bearing in action a broad mark for blame or for praise. From the time when General Buller had judged it right to abstain from bringing his force to the support of his comrades in the Great Redoubt, the two battalions which remained un- der his control had stood halted near the bank of the river, and one of them —the 88th—vwas still formed in a hollow square, as though expecting a charge of cavalry. Sir Colin Campbell conceived that this attitude of the 88th was unsuited to the time and the place, and not knowing that General Bul- ler in person was directing the regiment, Sir Colin, in some anger, took upon himself to request, nay, almost to command, that the hollow square should be instantly changed into line formation. When the ranks of the Highlanders came up to 1 He was military secretary to Lord Raglan. 576 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuap. XLIV, this part of the ground, and still went on continuing their ad- vance, a man of one of the halted regiments—a man speaking —perhaps in a coarse, cynic spirit, perhaps in the deep, honest bitterness of his heart — cried out, ‘Let the Scotchmen go ‘on! they'll do the work! Then the Highlanders marched through, leaving General Buller and his two battalions in their rrear. It was upon Sir Colin Campbell now, as on General Buller a short time before, that there devolved the anxious duty of securing the Allied armies from any flank attack which might be undertaken against them at a moment when our troops were engaging the enemy in front; and Sir Colin at one mo- ment judged that with the battalion which formed his extreme left he ought to stand ready to show a front in any direction. He therefore sent Sterling to direct that the 79th should go into column.! But, seen in the dim field of battle, an enemy’s force bears marked on its front faint, delicate, momentous signs, analogous to those which, in speaking of a man or a woman, are called ‘expressions of countenance;’ and it is given to men who know and love the business of war to be able to read those signs. Sir Colin Campbell well understood that the enemy ought to assail his left flank with a storm of horse, foot, and artillery ; and, to deal with any such onslaught, he at first took care to stand ready; but when he came to ride forward and gain higher eround, the old soldier was able to divine that with all their three thousand Jancers, and all their columns of infantry, the Russians would venture nothing against his flank. He therefore recalled his order to the 79th, and allowed it to go forward in line. Including the chasm which divided the Grenadier Guards from the Coldstream, the whole line in which the Duke of Cambridge now moved forward to the attack of the Kourgané _ Hill was more than a mile and a halfin Jength.? It was only ' It is from a body of troops massed in column that the greatest variety of manceuvres can be quickly and safely evolved. When a battalion extended in line is called upon to change ‘ts front, the radius of the segment in which it must wheel is of course very long. * The Ist Division was upon a greater front than had been covered by the 47th Regiment, Pennefather’s brigade, and the Light Division; yet it did not cover a foot more of ground than was right. We before saw the effect produced by trying to put ten battalions upon ground which was now found to be not more than enough for six. It is hardly necessary to say that a knowledge of the quantity of ground covered by a single battalion in a bar- rack-yard would not give a sufficient clew for getting at the extent of ground which was covered by six battalions drawn up in line upon a field of battle. Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 577 two deep; but its right regiment was supported by a part of Sir Richard England’s Division ; and Sir George Cathcart was on its left rear with the part of his Division then on the field. On the extreme left and left rear of the whole force, there was the cavalry under Lord Lucan. | These troops were going to take part in the first approach The nature of tO Close strife which men had yet seen on that day the fight now between bodies of troops in a state of formation about to take : = : piaceonthe deliberately marshaled against each other.1 The Kourgane Hill. slender red line which began near the bridge, and vanished from the straining sight on the eastern slopes of the Kourgané Hill, was a thread which in any one part of it had the strength of only two men. But along the whole line from east to west these files of two men each were strong in the exercise of their country’s great prerogative. They were in English array. _They were fighting in line against column. _ After the rupture of the peace of Amiens, Sir Arthur Wel- lesley, being then in India, became singularly changed, grow- ing every day more and more emaciated, and seemingly more and more sad. He pined; and was like a man dying without any known bodily illness, the prey of some consuming thought. _ At length he suddenly annotinéed to Lord Wellesley his re- solve to go back to England; and when he was asked why, he said, ‘I observe that in Europe the French are fighting in ‘column, and carrying every thing before them, and I am sure ‘that I ought to go home directly, because I know that our ‘men can fight in line’ From that simple yet mighty faith he never swerved; for, always encountering the massive col- umns of infantry, he always was ready to meet them with his slender line of two deep. With what result the world knows.? Sir Colin Campbell was free to take ground to his left, and he took it am- ply, contriving to outflank, or almost to outflank, the enemy’s infantry array. ‘The French had not been engaged in any conflicts of this sort; for, though the head of Canrobert’s Division confronted formed troops for a mo- ment at a distance of a few hundred yards, it dropped back, as we saw, with. out fighting. Evans's struggle had been in thick ground, not allowing regular array. Codrington’s people (including Lacy Yea’s Fusileers as well as the stormers of the redoubt) had had hard fighting, and against troops in perfect order, but they had gone through their struggles without the advantage of being themselves in a state of formation. * An account of Sir Arthur Wellesley’s pining sickness, his ‘‘ wasting away,” as he himself described it, is given in published accounts of men who remarked it (in Malcolm’s book, I think, or Monro’s), and his disclosure of the motive which caused him to return to Europe was preserved and handed down by Lord Wellesley. What U have ventured to do is to seem to connect the pining sickness with the mighty resolve which was destined to change the fate of the world. VoLud.—B5 B . 578 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV, Long years had passed since the close of those great wars, and now, once more in Europe there was going to be waged yet again the old strife of line against column. Looking down a smooth, gentle, green slope, checkered red with the slaughtered soldiery who had stormed the redoubt, the front-rank men of the great Vladimir column were free to gaze upon two battalions of the English Guards, far apart the one from the other, but each carefully drawn up in line; and now that they saw more closely, and without the distractions of artillery, they had more than ever grounds for their wonder at the kind of array in which the English soldiery were under- taking to assail them. ‘ We were all astonished,’ says Choda- siewicz— yet he wrote of what he saw when the English line was much less close to the foe than the Guards now were— ‘We were all astonished at the extraordinary firmness with ‘which the red-jackets, having crossed the river, opened a ‘heavy fire in line upon the redoubt. This was the most ex- ‘traordinary thing to us, as we had never before seen troops ‘fight in lines of two deep, nor did we think it possible for ‘men to be found with sufficient firmness of morale to be able ‘to attack, in this apparently weak formation, our massive col- umns.’ But soon the men of the column began to see that though the scarlet line was slender, it was very rigid and ex- act. Presently, too, they saw that even when the Grenadiers or the Coldstreams began to move, the long line of the black bearskins still kept a good deal of its straightness, and that here on the bloody slope, no less than in the barrack-yard at home, the same moment was made to serve for the tramp of a thousand feet. XXXI. Beginning on our right hand with the Grenadier Guards, and going thence leftward to the Coldstream, and, lastly, to the Highland brigade, we shall now see what manner of strife it was when at length, after many a hinderance, five British bat- talions, each grandly formed in line, marched up to the enemy’s columns. Advancing upon the immediate left of the ground already won by Pennefather’s brigade, the Grenadiers were covered on their right, but their left was bare; and it was in that di- rection—in the direction of their left front—that the Vladimir battalions stood impending. The Grenadiers were marching against the defeated, but now rallied column, which had fought . = with the 7th Fusileers, when Prince Gortschakoff, * rince Gorts- 3 - 5 ; chakoff’s ad- having just ridden up to the two left battalions of The Ouglitz N N Daivations N N SECOND FIGHT ON THE KoURGANE HILL, The Guards engaged. keght Sousdut Coliumiv a > Rusileers reformung Gdrington 7 ng, some of the pide ant hes Lage ee ee f thik ~ Sp 99% 4 St Ba diad hasta te broken BSE GSE IF hag Portions. of the ch 4d ca etaded 4 sd 5 pod wih bycee® 580 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV. vance witha the Vladimir, undertook to lead them forward. column of the ° : : : Vladimir First sending his only unwounded aid-de-camp to BU ge press the advance of any troops he could find, the Prince put himself at the head of the two left Vladimir bat- talions, and ordered them to charge with the bayonet.! The Prince then rode forward a good deal in advance of his troops, and his order for a bayonet charge was so far obeyed, that the column, without firing a shot, moved boldly down toward the chasm which had been left in the centre of our brigade of Guards. The northwest angle of this strong and hitherto vic- torious column was coming down nearer and nearer to the file—the file composed of only two men—which formed the extreme left of the Grenadiers. Then, and by as fair a test as war could apply, there was Colonel Hooa’s tried the strength of the line formation, the quality maneuvre. of the English officer, the quality of the English soldier. Colonel Hood first halted, and then caused the left subdivision of thé left company to wheel—to wheel back in such a way as to form, with the rest of the battalion, an obtuse angle. The manceuvre was executed by Colonel Percy (he was wounded just at this time) under the directions of Colonel Hamilton, the officer in command of the left wing. In this 1 T must acknowledge that I do not gather from the Russian accounts any distinct mention of this separation of the great Vladimir column into two columns of two battalions each. Prince Gortschakoif’s narrative speaks of the column with which he moved as ‘the battalions of the Vladimir regiment ‘standing on the left of the epaulement’ (the breastwork), and this is an ex- pression which might either apply to two battalions which had been sepa- rated from the other two, or it might apply to all the four battalions of the corps. I have, however, found it so impracticable to reconcile this last in- terpretation with known facts, that I have adopted the former one. Upon this point I am not in terms helped by Kvetzinski’s narrative; but as he him- self was clearly with some of the Vladimir battalions all this time, and as he had no knowledge of the fact that Gortschakoff had made a charge with battalions of the same corps, it seems to follow as a necessary consequence that at this time the four battalions had been divided into two columns. A — concurrence of circumstances leads me to infer that this was the case, and that one of the columns, as I have stated, was toward the right and the other toward the left of the redoubt. At first sight it may seem odd that Kvetzin- ski, the divisional general, should not know what was being done with two of his battalions posted at only a small distance from the column with which he rode; but the truth is that Gortschakoff, having for the time the supreme command: in this part of the field, and being (as is evident from his own ac- count) in a high state of excitement, rode up to the Vladimir battalions, which he found near the (Russian) left of the earthwork, and, so to speak, snatched them without saying a word to the general commanding the Divi- sion. After all, the movement which he made in advance was only a slight one; and for that reason, perhaps, it was hardly looked upon as severing the troops taking part in it from those which remained with Kvetzinski. Cuap. XLIV. ] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 581 way, whilst he still faced the column which he had originally undertaken to attack, Colonel Hood showed another front, a small, but smooth, comely front, to the mass which was coming upon his flank. His manceuvre instantly brought the Vladimir to a halt; and to those who—without being near enough to Russian Column, Grenadier Guards. hear the giving and the repeating of the orders—still were able to see Colonel Hood thus changing a part of his front and stopping a mighty column by making a bend in his line, it seemed that he was handling his fine, slender English blade with a singular grace; with the gentleness and grace of the skilled swordsman, when, smiling all the while, he parries an angry thrust. In the midst of its pride and vast strength of numbers, the Vladimir found itself checked; nay, found itself gravely engaged with half a compa- ny of our Guardsmen; and the minds of these two score of islanders were so little inclined to bend under the weight of the column, that they kept their perfect array. Their fire was deadly, for it was poured into a close mass of living men. It was at the work of “file firing” that the whole battalion now labored. | On the left of the interval wrought by the displacement of The Cold- the centre battalion of the Guards, the Coldstream, ategam, drawn up in superb array, began to open its smart, crashing fire upon the more distant battalions which formed the right wing of the Vladimir force. We shall see the share which other Russian and other Brit- ish troops were destined to have in governing the result of the struggle; but if, for a moment, we limit our reckoning to the troops which stood fighting at this time, it appears that the whole of the four Vladimir battalions and the lessened mass of the left Kazan column were engaged with the Grenadiers The Grena. 2d the Coldstream. In other words, two English diers and the battalions, each ranged in line,.but divided the one cheneelaitn from the other by a very broad chasm, were con- six battalions tending with six battalions in column. And, al- mak teak though of these six battalions standing in column there were two which had cruelly suffered, the remaining four Its effect. 582 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuarp. XLIV, had hitherto had no hard fighting, and were flushed with the thought that they stood on ground which they themselves had reconquered. But, after all, if only the firmness of the slender English line ive Siess should chance to endure, there was nothing except which aline the almost chimerical event of a thorough charge puts upon the : > lone 5 soldiery ofa home with the bayonet which could give to the col- pela. umns the ascendency due to their vast weight and numbers; for the fire from a straitened, narrow front could comparatively do little harm, whilst the fire of the battalion in line was carrying havoc into the living masses. Still, neither column nor line gave way. On the other hand, neither column nor line moved forward. Fast rooted as yet to the ground, the groaning masses of the Russians and the two scarlet strings of Guardsmen stood receiving and delivering their fire. But meanwhile, on the part of the English, another mind, as we shall see by-and-by, was bringing its strength to bear upon this part of the battle. If the English method of array puts a grievous stress upon Andupona the soldiery of Continental masses, its pressure is te eile not less hard upon the mind of a general who has columns. the suffering columns in his charge. It not only shocks him by the sight of a great slaughter of his people oc- curring in small spaces of ground ; it not only forces upon him a sense of being outflanked, but sometimes, it even seems, op- presses him with a belief that he is overwhelmed by mighty numbers. General Kvetzinski was with the right Vladimir column. He was a brave, able man, and we have already seen something of what the relative numbers were with which the Russians ang the English were fighting ; but it seems that the Impressions as SPeCtacle of the immense front presented by the wrought upon Knglish army broke down the General’s sense of ieretmtnaia by his own comparative strength, and put upon him the English ar- the belief that he was cruelly outnumbered. Even * Cuar. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 629 of the Allied army a part of the glory which History must re- fuse to the aggregate host. | At three o’clock, as we saw, the battle had been suffered to lapse into such a condition that there was then bitter need of a general, and of troops so placed in the field, and so inclined toward the practice of close fighting, as to be able to restore— to restore, as it were, by sheer foree—the waning fortune of the day. How the occasion was met, this History has shown. I narrate, and soldiers will comment. They must judge, and say whether for simplicity’s sake it be better to pile up a heap of praise, and distribute it, like a cargo of medals, amongst all the French, English, and Turks who heard the sound of the guns; or, in a harsher and more careful spirit, to part off the troops which fought hard from the troops which scarce fought at all, and to show by whose ordering it was that the course of the battle was governed. I have been eager to acknowledge the valor and the steadi- ness of the Russian infantry. If I had caused it to appear that, upon the whole, Marshal St. Arnaud and the troops he com- manded had done marvels on the day of the Alma, I should have been helping to prolong a belief in that which I know to be false, and should be even running counter to what, with good reason, I hold to be the opinion of the French army ;! but I have tried to do careful justice to those who were then our allies by marking and commending the warlike quality which was displayed by their artillerymen, as well as by their keen, bold, active skirmishers. Ofmy own countrymen I have hardly once suffered myself to speak in words of praise. Ihave only told what they did. L. Those three sunny hours of the 20th of September were the time, and the only time, when a French and an English army stood abreast in an open pitched battle ;? and therefore it is 1 I speak in great measure from knowledge acquired long subsequently to the battle, but the conviction of which I speak was not long to show itself in the French army. Writing three days after the battle, and speaking of the conviction which was produced upon the English army by the fact that Mar- shal St. Arnaud had not ‘kept moving on after he had turned the enemy’s ‘left,’ Lord Raglan says: ‘I have reason to believe that the same feeling is ‘prevalent amongst the officers of the French army.’ For any one who was not in the Crimea during the month which followed the battle of the Alma, it would be difficult to form a conception of the state into which the repute of the French army had fallen. Later events (and the first of these was the brilliant charge of two squadrons of the Chasseurs d’ Afrique at Balaclava) showed that the warlike spirit of France was not extinct in her army. * The English at Inkerman were valiantly aided by a body of French troops; 630 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV. that, when many generations shall have passed away, mankind will still gaze and gaze upon a barren hill-side in Crim Tartary, comparing the demeanor of the two great rivals of the West whilst they fought side by side on the Alma. Yet, if people shall end this comparison without making honest allowance for the ban I am going to speak of, they will do a wrong to the warlike repute of France. It would be unjust to look upon the action between Marshal Cause ofany St. Arnaud and the Russian left wing as a fair sam- shortcomings ple of what a French army can do. That glance at on the part of - : the French the things done in Paris which helped us to under- APT. stand the origin of the Anglo-French alliance, will now serve to teach us the cause of any shortcomings which may be attributed to the army commanded by Marshal St. Arnaud.} We saw something of a strange decree, which en- acted that services rendered by military men in their opera- tions against Frenchmen should hold good as titles to advance- ment in the same way as though they were deeds done in war against the foreigner.? Incredible as it may seem, that decree was long observed to the full;3 and the shameful principle which it involved was made to weigh heavily upon France during several of the months which followed the landing at Old Fort. Indeed, the principle, though partly waived for a time in 1855, was found to be still in dire operation long after the close of the Russian war. Just as in a later year the French Emperor intrusted to a scared and bewildered literary man the command of a whole French army in Italy, so now he committed the honor of the flag—committed it almost exclu- sively—to men who had shared with him in the adventure which put France under his feet. His reckoning was that, whether it were led by honorable and skilled commanders, or were tossed and flung into action by him and his December friends, a French army engaged in a short, brisk war against a Continental state would always be likely to push its way to more or less of success; and that if it should chance to do this under the leadership, or apparent leadership, of him and his friends, he and they would become similar to heroes. If they could attain to be thus thought of for a time, they might hope that for a still longer period they would enjoy the immunity and the thousand rewards which nations are accustomed to lavish upon victorious commanders but that great fight was not one of which it could be said that a ‘ French ra an English army stood abreast in an open pitched battle.’ 1 Ante, cap. 14. > [hid., Decree of 5th December, 1851. 3 It was carried to the length of making Magnan and St. Arnaud Marshals of France. Cuap. XLIV.] INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 631 This was the principle which governed the choice of the man to whose charge, on the day of the Alma, the honor of the French arms was left. He who commanded the army was St. Arnaud, formerly Le Roy, the person suborned by Fleury. Under him, in the Crimea, there were four Divisions of French infantry. He who commanded the Ist of these Divisions was Canrobert. This officer, as I have said, was not without hon- est titles to military distinction; but, whilst he had a profes- sional repute which would have earned him the approval of even the most loyal of monarchs, he had also the qualification which entitled him to the favor of the French Emperor.. He had commanded one of the brigades which operated against the gay boulevards on the 4th of December. The 2nd Divi- sion was commanded by Bosquet. Bosquet was a man with- out a stain; but he was the only French General of Division at the Alma who could say that he did not owe his command to the December plot; and, since it happened that he was left isolated with only one brigade during the whole time when the issue of the battle was pending, his presence at the Alma was only an imperfect exception to what was, as it were, the general rule. He who commanded the large detached force of some 9000 men! which first crossed the river at its mouth was General Bouat; and Bouat, it seems, was an officer who earned his command by exploits against Parisians in the bou- levard, the rue St. Denis, or the neighborhood of the Nouvelle France.2,- He who commanded the 3rd Division was Prince Napoleon. He who commanded the 4th Division was Forey ; and no man could come within the principle of selection more clearly than he did, for it was he of whom I spoke when I said that he had suffered himself to be used as the assailant and the jailer of an unarmed Legislature. There were, besides, the Lourmels, the Espinasses, and numbers of others, no doubt, whose names could be easily found in their Emperor’s list of worthies. Therefore it is that the part which was taken by Marshal St. Arnaud and his troops in the battle of the Alma was no fair sample of what could be done by a French army. It was only a sample of what a French army could manage to do when it labored under the weight of a destiny which or- dained that all its chiefs should be men chosen for their com- plicity in a midnight plot, or else for acts of street slaughter.? Because they had perpetrated an extensive massacre of their 1 One of Bosquet’s brigades, and the whole of the Turkish Contingent ex- cept the two battalions left to guard the baggage. ' With the 33rd Regiment. “ Prine? Napoleon’s complicity was only, as I am inclined to believe, a 632 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. [Cuar. XLIV. unarmed fellow-countrymen, there was no certainty, perhaps, that they might not be men firm and able in honest war against the foreigner; but also there was no such close similarity be- tween what these men had done in Paris, and what they were meant to do in the Crimea, as to warrant the notion of intrust- ing to them almost exclusively the honor of the French flag. There was a salient point of difference between the boulevards and the hill-sides of the Alma. The Russians were armed. No! The Power which fought that day by the side of En- gland was not, after all, mighty France—brave, warlike, im- petuous France. It was only that intermittent thing which to-day is, and to-morrow is not. It was what people call‘The ‘French Empire.’ LI. The Battle of the Alma seemed to clear the prospects of the Effect ofthe campaign, and even of the war. It confirmed to prone ot the Allies that military ascendency over Russia the campaign. which had been more than half gained already by the valor of the Ottoman soldiery. It lent the current sanc- tion of a victory to the hazardous enterprise of the invasion. It ended the perils of the march from Kamishlu, and made smooth the whole way to the Belbec. It established the Al- lies as invaders in a province of Russia. It did more. Upon condition that they would lay instant hands on the prize; it gave them Sebastopol. eomplicity after the fact; but it is, of course, clear enough that he owed his command entirely to the Coup d’ Etat. NOTES TO FOURTH EDITION. Page 40. In note 2, Sir George Larpent should be Mr. Larpent. Page 49. ‘should be strictly executed.’—June, 1850.—‘ Eastern Papers,’ art i, p. 2. 3 Page 50. ‘said our Foreign Secretary.’—In his dispatch of the 28th of January, 1853. Page 53. ‘ Prince Garart.’—So spelled in the official dispatches; but it has been suggested, and probably with truth, that the person meant was Prince Gagarin, one of the secretaries or attachés of the Russian Legation at Constantinople. Page 91. ‘ For almost two years Sir Stratford Canning had been absent from * Constantinople.’—No; not nearly so long. It was not till June, 1852, that his absence from Constantinople began. Page 127.—Instead of note 1, the author gives the following :—‘ Even if ‘the Governments of France and England were not zz honor bound to pro- ‘tect the Sultan,’ ete.—Lord Clarendon to Lord Cowley. ‘Eastern Papers,’ part ii. p. 321. Page 133. Instead of note 1, the following :—Count Mensdorf, I believe, was an honest soldier, too high-spirited to be capable of shrinking from what he understood to be his duty; but he had had little of the training needed for a diplomatist, and (as is often the case with the representatives of Austria at foreign Courts) he was not kept well informed of the policy which his Government was pursuing. It was not in deference to his own tastes or wishes that he accepted the mission to St. Petersburg. An illus- tration of the courtier-like attitude assumed by the French Envoy will be found in the note to p. 496. Page 157.. ‘he hit upon a general officer who was christened, it seems, Jacques Arnaud Le Roy.’—Giving in a formal way its list of the new. Ministry of the 27th of October, the ‘ Annuaire,’ an authority favorable to the Elysée, has these words: ‘A la guerre, Jacques Arnaud le Roy de St. Arnaud,’ p. 352. Page 161. ‘ they might soon be called upon to act against Paris and against the ‘ Constitution.’—Granier de Cassaignac, p. 392. There, the 26th is the day of the month which the historian mentions, but he gives Thursday (which fell on the 27th) as the day of the week when the meeting took place. Page 161. Instead of note 1, the following :—‘ All the generals embraced ‘each other, and from that moment it might be said with certainty that ‘France was going to come out of the abyss.’—Ibid. p. 392. The names of the twenty-one generals will be found ibid. p. 393. Dp 2 a 634 NOTES TO FOURTH EDITION. Page 163. ‘vowed anew that his duty was to maintain the Republic.— ‘My duty is to baffle their perfidious projects, to maintain the Republic, and ‘to save the country,’ etc.—‘ Annuaire,’ App. p. 60. Page 163. Instead of note 1, the following:—The proclamation to the army contained this passage: ‘In 1830, as in 1848, they treated you as ‘conquered men. After having spurned your heroic disinterestedness, they ‘disdained to consult your sympathies and your wishes, and yet you are the ‘élite of the nation. ‘To-day, in this solemn moment, I desire that the ‘army may make its voice heard.’—Granier de Cassaignac, vol. ii. p. 404. A copy of the proclamation will also be found in the ‘ Annuaire’ for 1851. This last publication (which must be distinguished from the ‘ Annuaire ‘des Deux Mondes’) gives an account of the events of December, written in a spirit favorable to the Elysée; but the Appendix contains a full collection of official documents. Page 165. ‘the announcement of measures not hitherto disclosed.’—‘The ‘Assembly,’ he wrote, ‘has been dissolved amid the applause of the whole ‘population of Paris..—Circular to the Prefects. Page 165. ‘striking some of them with the butt-ends of their muskets.’— The names of nine of these are given in the ‘ Recueil,’ p. 64, ; and besides these, the seizure of MM. Daru and De Blois is stated.—Ibid. pp. 6, 7. Page 165. ‘rode through some of the streets of Paris.’—Fleury rode in front of the cortége, waving his sword and trying to get the people in the streets to cheer. Page 167. ‘assembled at the Mayoralty of the 10th arrondissement.’—‘ Re- ‘cueil d’Actes Officielles,’ p. 60. In that and in pp. 61-3, the names of 220 Deputies are given. Page 167. ‘ President and his accomplices.’—‘ Recueil d’ Actes Officielles,’ pp. 37, 45. The report of the proceedings of the Assembly is from the short- hand-writer’s notes.—See ibid. p. 35. Page 167. ‘ One of the Vice-Presidents.’-—Namely, M. Vitet. Through all those last moments of the struggle between law and force, M. Vitet’s de- meanor was admirable for its firmness and dignity. Of this I am assured by one of the most eminent of the many statesmen who were there present. Page 167. ‘any Deputies offering resistance.’ —It was in the second of the two written orders produced that the prison of Mazas was designated. It is given, ‘ Recueil d’ Actes Officielles,’ p. 57. Page 167. Instead of note 2, the following :—The order rendered int English was in these words: ‘Commandant! Jn consequence of the orders ‘of the Minister of War, cause to be immediately occupied the Mayoralty ‘of the 10th arrondissement, and cause to be arrested, if necessary, such of ‘the representatives as shall not instantly obey the order to disperse. ‘(Signed) The General-in-Chief Magnan.’—Ibid. p. 57. Page 167. ‘collared by officers of police and led out.’—Ibid. p. 60. ™M. Benoist d’Azy was one of the Vice-Presidents, and the other Vice-President collared by the soldiery was M. Vitet. Page 168. ‘Jt was now only two o'clock in the afternoon.’—Ibid. p. 12; but the procés-verbal makes it later—viz., twenty minutes past three o’clock. Ibid. p. 60. - Page 168. ‘raised to two hundred and _ thirty-five.’—According to the ‘Recneil’ the number was 232.—La Vérité, ‘ Recueil d’Actes Officielles,’ p. 64. The diff-rence is occasioned by including, or not including, M. Daru, and M. de Blois, and one other. Page 169. ‘ Into these the two hundred and thirty-five members of the Assem- ‘ bly were thrust.’—Not all in one batch, but in three. The last batch was so large a one, that the prison-vans had to be reinforced by some omnibuses ; NOTES TO FOURTH EDITION: 635 and some few of the Deputies were left behind for a time in the barrack — Ibid. p. 15. Page 169. ‘ Benowst d’Azy.’—One of the Vice-Presidents of the Assem- bly. Among the Deputies thrown into the prison there was also M. Vitet, another of the Vice-Presidents. Page 169. Instead of note 1, the following :—The facts mentioned in the above paragraph are not, I believe, controverted in any important point. A full account of what passed will be found in the well-known letter of M. de Tocqueville (now printed in the collection of his letters), and in the ‘ Re- ‘cueil’ above quoted, pp. 13, 14, 60 et seq. Page 170. ‘the Judyes were driven from the bench.’—The ‘ Annuaire’ says triumphantly that two Commissaries of Police ‘interrupted this fresh ‘attempt at legal resistance,’ p. 373. Page 170. Instead of note 1, the following :—It seems that in his mission to the Elysée the process-server was accompanied by the President of the Court.—Ibid. ‘ Bulletin Frangais,’ p. 27. Page 174. Instead of note 3, the following :—Several of their letters to this effect appeared from time to time in the English journals; but M. Léon Faucher (who had been a few weeks before a member of the Cabinet) ad- dressed his indignant protest str aight to the President :— ‘MonsIEUR LE PRESIDENT,—It is with a painful surprise that I see my ‘name figuring among those of the members of a Consultative Commis- ston which you have just been instituting. I did not think I had given -you any right to offer me this insult [de me faire cette injure}. The serv- ‘ices I have rendered to you in the belief that they were services rendered ‘to the country, entitled me perhaps to expect from you a very different ‘treatment. At all events my character deserved more respect.’—‘ Re- ‘cueil,’ p. 24. Page 180. ‘calmly seen by this English officer.’-—Another English officer, who was in that part of the Boulevards which is at the corner of the Rue de Grammont, writes to me thus:—‘ Having been in Paris during the coup ‘détat, and having been a spectator and nearly a victim when the French ‘troops fired against harmless people on the Boulevards, and having been “standing, until forced to leave it, on the balcony of my club at the corner ‘of the Rue de Grammont—which club was struck thirty-seven times, six ‘balls entering the drawing-room—I can vouch for the correctness of your ‘description of it.’—Letter dated 9th March, 1868. Page 184. To note 1, the author adds :—In the ‘ Quarterly Review’ of April, 1863, p. 527, it is stated that M. Xavier Durrieu says ‘he saw some- ‘thing of the kind from his prison window,’ but that his ‘ words, as given by ‘Mr. Kinglake in a note, do not quite bear out the somewhat exaggerated ‘statement in the text.’ Since a statement like this has been ventured upon by a respectable publication, it seems right to give a translation of the above passage: ‘Several times, when the gate was shut, the sergeants of police ‘threw themselves like tigers on the prisoners, w hose hands were fastened ‘behind their backs. They knocked them down with loaded clubs. ‘They ‘left them with their throats gurgling upon the flag-stone, where several of ‘them expired. . . . It was so—neither more nor less ; we saw it from the ‘windows of our cells, which looked out on the court.’ The writer adds :— ‘A chaque prison son genre de supplice et de mort: on fusillait & Mazas, an ‘Champ de Mars, et dans les divers postes de la ville. A la Préfecture de ‘Police, on tuait a coup de casse-téte.’ ‘ At each prison there was its own ‘kind of punishment and of death: they shot people at Mazas, on the ‘Champ de Mars, and at the different posts (military posts) of the town, ‘At the Prefecture of Police they killed people with loaded clubs.’ 636 NOTES TO FOURTH EDITION: Page 188. ‘French citizens to be shot by platoons of infantry in the night of ‘the 4th and the night of the 5th of December,.’—I find that what I, in my cau- tion, thus speak of as a ‘ question’ has been recorded as a proved fact in the ‘ Edinburgh Review.’ The article referred to is known to have been written by a gentleman who was in Paris at the time of the coup d’état, who was gifted more than most men with the power of seeking for truth in an impar- tial spirit, and who enjoyed great opportunities of informing himself concern- ing the events which had been passing in the French capital. The article asserts, in plain, unqualified terms, that ‘hundreds’ were ‘ put to death in ‘the court-yards of the barracks, or in the subterraneous passages of the ‘Tuileries.’-—‘ Edinburgh Review’ for April, 1852. Still, the writer did not see the prisoners shot with his own eyes, and I persist in my inclination to treat it as a ‘ question,’ whether these alleged executions did or did not take place in the nights of the 4th and 5th of December. Page 190. ‘should be dismissed.’—‘ You will immediately dismiss the ‘juges de paix, the mayors, and the other functionaries, whose concurrence ‘may not be assured, and appoint other men in their stead. To this end, ‘you will call upon all the public functionaries to give you in writing their ‘adhesion to the great measure which the Government has just adopted.’ Morny’s Circular to the Prefects.. ‘ Annuaire,’ Appendix, p. 67. Page 194. Instead of note 1, the following :—Decree of 8th December, inserted in the Moniteur of the 9th, It is also in the ‘ Annuaire,’ pp. 75, 76. The transportation was to be to a penal colony in Algeria or Cayenne, and was to be for a period of five years at the least, and ten years at the most (Articles 1 and 2). The order for transportation was to be an act of administration. . In other words, every body whom the police authorities chose to designate as having belonged to a secret society was made liable to be transported without trial. This decree was superscribed Liberty, Equal- ity, Fraternity. I observed that, within forty-eight hours from the time when they thus got France down—viz., on the 10th of December—the brethren of the Elysée began their ‘concessions’ to railways and other companies. Thenceforth, as might be expected, ‘concessions’ went on at a merry rate. See whole lists of them in the Appendices to the ‘ Annuaire.’ Those who know how vast have been the sums expended by our public companics in obtaining ‘ Private Acts of Parliament,’ may form some idea of the impor- tance of the patronage in this direction which the brethren got into their hands. Page 195. Instead of note 2, the following :—Granier de Cassaignac, vol. ii. p. 438. To meet the cost of these wholesale transportations an extraor- dinary credit was opened on the 28th of January. It is only the title of the decree, and not the sum fixed, which is given in the ‘ Annuaire,’ Appendix, p- 95. Page 196. ‘has been done to living men.’—I have not ventured to speak of the number of these hapless sufferers farther than to use the phrase, * the ‘two thousand men whose sufferings are the best known ;’ but the conduct. . ors of the ‘ Edinburgh Review,’ who were armed with a great deal of trust- worthy information on the subject, conceived themselves warranted in vent- uring upon the following words :—‘ All that is known, is that about three ‘thousand two hundred have since disappeared from Paris’; they may have ‘been killed in the Boulevards, and thrown into the large pits in which those ‘who fell on that day were promiscuously interred ; they may have been ‘among the hundreds who were put to death in the court-yards of the bar- ‘racks, or in the subterraneous passages of the Tuileries ; they may be in the ‘casements of Fort Bicétre, or in. the bagnes of Rochefort, or they may be at ‘sea on their way to Cayenne. . . . We have already stated that the NOTES TO FOURTH EDITION. 637 “number of persons undergoing or sentenced by these cruelties is believed ‘to exceed ten thousand. A hundred thousand more are supposed to be in the ‘vaults and casemates which the French dignify with the name of prisons, ‘often piled, crammed, and wedged together so closely that they can scarce- “ly change their positions.’—‘ Edinburgh Review,’ vol. xev. p. 319. Page 198. ‘within forty- eight hours from the receipt of a dispatch of the 3rd of December.’—‘ Annuaire,’ Appendix, p. 67. M. St. Arnaud’s circular to the Generals of Division ordered that the vote of the soldiers be taken within forty-eight hours, and also said, ‘The President reckons on the sup- ‘port of the nation and of the army; and, so far as concerns your Division, ‘on the energy of your attitude, the prompt and severe repression of the ‘slightest attempt at disturbance.’—Ibid. Page 198. ‘nearly eight millions.’—7,439,216, against 640,737 noes.— ‘ Annuaire,’ Appendix, p. 95. Page 199. * should pay him tribute and obey.’—The free way in which the purse of France was laid open by the success of the coup d’état may be in some measure gathered from the long catalogue of decrees opening supple- mentary and extraordinary credits, which is given in the Appendix to the * Annuaire,’ pp. 95 et seg. As was mentioned in a former note (ante, p. 297), the ‘concessions’ to railway and other companies began so early as the 10th of December. See the Appendix to the ‘ Annuaire.’ Page 202. Instead of note 2, the following :—Decree of the 5th, inserted in the Moniteur of the 7th December: ‘Lorsq’une troupe organisée aura ‘contribuée par des combats a rétablir l’ordre sur un point quelconque du ‘territoire, ce service sera compté comme service de campagne.’—Article 1, ‘ Annuaire,’ Appendix, p. 70. Page 206. ‘made merry with what they saw.’—It was not in this spirit that the Press of free Enyland dealt with France. In the journal which most carefully made it its study to give utterance to English opinion, the leading article said, ‘Speaking within the limits of historical truth, and ‘upon the evidence of many eye-witnesses of these events, we affirm that ‘the bloody and treacherous deeds of the 4th of December will be remem- , bered with horror in the annals even of that city which witnessed the mas- sacre of St. Bartholomew and the Reign of Terror. ’— Times, Dec. 8, 1851. Page 207. ‘in the Cathedral of our Lady of Paris.’—I have thought fit to speak of the deeds which are the subject of this chapter, without, in gen- eral, undertaking to judge and formally say whether they were pardonable, or wicked, or good; for it seemed to me that there was a native expressive- ness in the facts which would enable them, as it were, to speak for them- selves without the interpreter’s help. But at a time when these things were fresh in men’s minds, no such cold abstinence as: mine was to be expected from the periodical press of a free country. After the events of the 2nd of December, it became the peculiar duty of the conductors of those journals which are published at intervals giving time for full investigation and for the formation of a deliberate judgment, not only to make a careful gather- ing of the facts-which had been happening on the other side of the Channel, but also to pronounce upon the men who had just been stifling France the judgment of a nation still blessed with the power of free speech. It was in no doubtful, balancing words that this duty was fulfilled. Of the knowl- ‘edge with which the ‘ Edinburgh Review’ was soon able to arm itself, and of the unshrinking firmness with which it delivered its judgment, some sam- ples have been given in foregoing notes. ‘The ‘ Quarterly Review’ summed up its account of the things done to France in these words :—‘ All the in- ‘stitutions of the country overthrown—all constitutional authority dissolved ‘all legality abrogated—the streets of Paris a human slaughter-house— 638 NOTES TO FOURTH EDITION. ‘innocent strollers and spectators on public walks and from drawing-room ‘windows wantonly massacred—hundreds of the most honorable and emi- ‘nent men of the nation imprisoned like felons, some of them handcutfed— ‘thirty-three departments in a state of siege—and, as the Bonapartist advo- ‘cates are forward to admit, half the surface cf the country reeking with ‘blood and fire! . . . All the mischief, whatever it may be, is chargeable ‘to no other cause but Louis Napoleon’s perjury to the Constitution, and ‘his treason to the State.’—‘ Quarterly Review’ for December, 1851. Page 231. ‘the Sultan was placed in a state of war with the Emperor of * Russia.’—A writer in the ‘ Edinburgh Review’ imagined that the state of war began on the 4th of October—the date of the Declaration (‘ Edinburgh ‘Review,’ No. 240, p. 328); but that is a mistake. It was Lord Stratford who devised the plan of a contingent declaration of war (‘ Eastern Papers,’ part ii. p. 198); and he, of all men living, would be the least likely to be wrong as to the time when the state of war began. Reporting to the Home Government the effect of the decision of the Great Council as conveyed to him by Reshid Pasha, Lord Stratford writes, that ‘Omar Pasha will be ‘instructed to re-summon Prince Gortschakoff by letter to evacuate the ‘Principalities within fifteen days from the receipt of his letter; that the ‘ Prince’s refusal will be considered as tantamount to a declaration of war on the ‘part of Russia; that hostilities will be declared thereupon by the Porte; that ‘all persons now here in the employment of Russia will then be requested ‘to withdraw ; and, finally, that all merchant vessels under Russian colors ‘will also be required to leave the port of Constantinople.’-—(‘ Eastern ‘ Papers,’ part ii. p. 151.) After the 4th of October, and at a time when the Edinburgh Reviewer supposed the state of war to have begun, the ‘Turk- ish Government was sending to Prince Gortschakoff the summons devised by Lord Stratford—a summons which the Sublime Porte described as ‘the ‘last expression of its pacific sentiments.’—(Ibid. p. 154.) The Edinburgh Reviewer was kept in his error by a notion that the postponement of hostili- ties applied only to ‘hostilities on the Danube ;’ but if he had glanced at Lord Stratford’s dispatch of the 21st of October, he would have seen that— not only on the Danube, but—on the Asiatic frontiers the attack was to be ‘immediately after the expiration of the fifteen days. —(Ibid. p. 198.) At one time the Turkish Ministers set up a theory that, as Prince Gortscha- koff’s answer (dated the 10th of October) was virtually a refusal, the term offered by the summons was brought to a close on that day—the 10th (ibid. p- 198); but the very fact that they were discussing with Lord Stratford this question about the state of war beginning on the 10th, shows conclusively that neither they nor Lord Stratford had any notion of its having begun, as the Edinburgh Reviewer supposed, on the 4th of October. Page 238. Instead of note 1, the following :—‘ Eastern Papers,’ part ii. p- 114. In the opinion of Lord Stratford, this violent and inevitably per- turbing measure was unnecessary. After saying that he had been content with the plan of calling up three steamers from each of the squadrons, he writes :—‘ I am still of opinion that assistance thus limited would have an- ‘swered every purpose, unless, indeed, the Ottoman squadron had taken ‘part against the Sultan, which was a very extreme case to suppose. J ‘wished to save Her Majesty’s Government from any embarrassments likely to ‘accrue from a premature passage of the Dardanelles by Admiral Dundas’s . ‘squadron, and at the same time to take precautions adequate to the ap- ‘pearance of danger. I did not form my opinion in this respect without ‘taking the opinion of Her Majesty’s senior officer in command in the ‘Bosphorus.’—Ibid. p. 188. Page 245. ‘ He resigned his office..—This statement was formally denied NOTES TO FOURTIL EDITION. 639 by a respectable journal; but it may be verified by any one who has an op- portunity either of addressing a question to some surviving member of Lord Aberdeen’s Cabinet, or of consulting Hansard’s debates. After speaking of the resignation of Lord Palmerston, and calling it ‘the resignation of my ‘noble friend the Secretary of the Home Department,’ Lord Aberdeen, the then Prime Minister, went on to say, ‘I myself informed Her Majesty ‘of the resignation at Osborne.’—‘ Hansard,’ vol. cxcvi. pp. 93, 94. Page 248. To note 2 the author adds:—That which, in the above note, I treated as a fair inference from the dates, is now a proved truth; for the evidences which establish it have been brought to light and given to the pub- lic by a writer in the ‘ North British Review’ of April, 1863. At the time in question, the Morning Post was Lord Palmerston’s known organ. Com- bating the assertion that Lord Palmerston’s dislike to a large measure of Reform was the cause of his resignation, his journal said:—‘ We are ‘convinced that Lord Palmerston has not approved of the sluggish policy ‘pursued in the Eastern question.” — Morning Post, 19th December, 1853. On announcing his resumption of office, the same journal said :— ‘The present Ministerial crisis is therefore at an end. ‘The vacillating ‘policy pursued in the East is abandoned.’—Ibid., 26th December, 1853. The truth stands thus:—Before the time when Lord Aberdeen’s Govern- ment was called upon to deal with the state of things brought about by the disaster of Sinope, the discussions in the Cabinet on the subject of a new Reform Bill had elicited so strong a difference of opinion between Lord Palmerston and the majority of the Cabinet, that, whenever the time might come for decisive action upon that subject, or even for a formal and final decision, Lord Palmerston’s resignation was to be expected; but, as Lord Aberdeen said, the ‘ provisions of the measure had not been finally settled,’ and therefore the moment which might necessitate Lord Palmerston’s resig- nation had not yet come, when, on Monday the 12th of December, the news of Sinope reached London. Of course a Cabinet was forthwith summoned. It met on Wednesday the 14th of December, but rose from its sitting without having agreed to meet the disaster of Sinope by the adoption of any new and hostile measure. Lord Palmerston instantly resigned ; but knowing, of course, that it would be inconvenient to disclose to Europe prematurely a difference of opinion between public men on what was hardly less than a question of Peace or War, he took up the heretofore suspended question of Reform, and put forward his difference of opinion on that subject as the ground of his resignation. There was nothing in this which he would be likely to think wrong, for his difference of opinion on Reform was a real one, acknowledged to be broad enough to warrant his resignation; and, as the moment when he might choose to give full effect to this difference of opinion had remained undefined, there was nothing to prevent him from fixing upon Wednesday evening the 14th of December as well as any other time ; but as he had then just come from the Cabinet which had been de- liberating upon the news from Sinope, withont consenting to adopt in con- sequence any fresh measure of hostility to Russia, no one having any knowl- edge about Lord Palmerston would doubt that the inert way in which the Cabinet of the 14th sought to deal with the disaster of Sinope, and the instant resignation which followed, were in the relation of cause and effect. It does not follow that, in any unworthy sense, ‘Reform’ was a mere pre- text: it was a ground—an apparently sufficing ground for resignation at any convenient time; but the reason why Lord Palmerston’s resignation went in on that particular Wednesday evening, or on the following morning, was the way in which the Cabinet had just been dealing with the disaster of Sinope, 640 NOTES TO FOURTH EDITION. Perhaps a statement of the facts and the dates in a tabular form will make their significance yet more clear :— Monday ‘the 12ths. 20. oc. tee snes ote putea ea pie 5 Wednesday afternoon, the 14th...... mieiebs The evening of the same Wednes- day, or on the following morning Thursday the 15th........ HEAR sane an dirt Priday the: L6thic.. dis -eisve sis ss ay vlee 8s clalete's Bavurday Woe iite.s sacle vice cs snice ees ae ote Supaday, Thaw Sth .%cias boicaue vowels Siaisieleisias Tuesday the 20th... ....cccrccoses eeeeeersoseeeesseetseces Thursday the 22nd... PAtuEdsy, the ZAUN sca .toe 5 otis ciestismmotsies Pame Gays... tele u tases Seu wis Seca 6 Sasa ta toe BE ee 19 No. 8 Ce RG OY ars a feretat et Mtrcahevara alas Ome dae wrens es "ated ee stalGre 6 tIt would seem as though this were meant to be denied by the journal which follows Sir George Brown's impressions; for the Quarterly Review has these words :—‘ The Fusileer ‘Guards rushed forward to take the Redan, but failed. Some of them got up to the parapet ‘and clung to it, but not a man entered the work, while the great body, retreating, got in- ‘termixed with the 23rd Regiment, along with whom they lay down behind the broken ‘bank, from which it was found impossible for a considerable space of time to move them.’ And also: ‘The Coldstreams took their plac on the left of the Grenadiers’ [the place prop- - erly belonging to the Scots Fusileers], ‘and shared in the battle. But the battle was already dying out.’—No, 226, p.567. I can hardly imagine that the statement really intended to be made is such as the words seem to import; and until it is repeated in plainer terms, and supported by the testimony of some officer present at the time, I need not, I think, do more than say that, according to the Report of H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge, the Scots Fusileer Guards re-formed ‘ with the greatest alacrity’ (Holograph Report by H.R.H., now lying he- fore me); and that, according to the Report of General Henry Bentinck (Holograph Report, also before me), the battalion, after having ‘ retired for a short time, re-formed, and returne ¢ed to its post.’ 690 APPENDIX. [X. iG Note respecting the theory that it was Sir George Brown who caused the Gren- adier Guards to enter the Great Redoubt at the Alma. It would be perverse to disturb the wholesome privilege of anonymous publication by saying in print, and on the faith of common rumor, or even of sound external evidence, that such or such a paper was written by such or such aman. But, in order to the enjoyment of the privilege, the writing must not be so worded as to force the reader to perceive its source. It must not show by its tenor that it comes from any given man. ‘The mo- ment it does so, it speaks with all the weight of the informant whose guid- ance it discloses, and then, of course, the shield being dropped, people may either bend under the authority of the personage thus thrust upon the pub- lic attention, or else take leave to deal with him as though he were the avowed author of assertions which are nominally, not really, anonymous. Now the Quarterly Review has given so minute an account of where Sir George Brown was riding on the day of the Alma, and of what he saw, and of how he reasoned, and of how he conferred, and how he advised, that an uninspired writer could hardly have learned so much unless he derived his knowledge with more or less directness from Sir George Brown himself. Either, therefore, such an account must be a fiction, or else it must be based upon instructions directly or indirectly obtained from Sir George Brown; and, the notion of treating it as a fiction being forbidden by the respecta- ble character of the publication, it follows that the Quarterly’s account of Sir George Brown’s actions comes upon the world with all the weight and authority of Sir George Brown himself. Again, and still without listening to a word of rumor, I can produce a clew which shall very soon trace to Sir George Brown one of the most strik- ing of the assertions put forward by the Quarterly Review. In flat con- tradiction to the written narratives of’Lord Raglan, of General Evans, and of General Pennefather, and setting at naught the belief which I conceive to be unquestioned in the whole English army by any number greater than one, the Quarterly Review has undertaken to say that Sir George Brown, with Codrington’s brigade, ‘ filled the whole mouth of the Pass extending ‘on both sides of the Eupatoria road,’—in other words, that it filled the whole of that very ground on which the world believed that—not Brown, but—- - Evans, with Pennefather’s brigade, had fought a hard fight. Now perhaps we might get at the authority which supported the Re- viewers in making this strange assertion, if only we could find out the name of the man in the English army who sincerely believed it to be true. I can help the search. It so happens that that very notion of Sir George Brown’s having filled the whole mouth of the Pass with his Ist brigade was entertained by Sir George Brown himself. It was one of the most curicus and interesting parts of the dream that was dreamed by Sir George on the day of the Alma. That he did truly believe this (incredible as it may seem) I know from his own official, but hitherto unpublished, Report now lying before me, in his own handwriting, and dated the 23rd of Sep- tember, 1854. The very belief so strangely entertained by Sir George Brown in September, 1854, is not only adopted in its entirety by the writer of April, 1863, but is repeated in almost the same words. ‘The two state- ments shall stand side by side :-~ [X. | APPENDIX. - 691 Sm GEORGE Brown. Tne ‘ QUARTERLY REVIEW.’ *My first brigade itself [Codrington’s bri- ‘General Codrington’s brigade (the right gade] ‘completely filled the whole mouth of ‘ brigade of the Light Division) filled the whole ‘the gorge or valley through which the road ‘mouth of the Pass, extending on both sides ‘runs,’—MS8. unpublished Report of 23rd Sep- ‘ofthe Eupatoria road.’—‘ Quarterly Review,’ tember, 1854, in the handwriting of Sir George No, 226, p. 550. Brown. ; Even if that curious statement by Sir George Brown had chanced to be one that can be assented to by mankind in general, the recurrence of it in words so closely similar to his would have warranted a surmise that the two sentences may have had a common origin; but supposing it to appear that the statement first made and afterward recurring was a sheer mistake, sur- mise would change into proof. If an author were to state in his book that the Allies at Waterloo were commanded by the Duke of Wellington, ‘io one would be able to detect in such an assertion the guidance of another man’s mind, because tlic similarity of the statement to any older one of the same import is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that both are true; but if we were to find an old number of the Quarterly Review asserting, and assert- ing in earnest, that the Allies at Waterloo were commanded by the Prince Regent of England in person, we should instantly see that, whoever might be the nominal propounder of such a statement, its real and virtual author was the late King George the Fourth—the one man who believed it to be true. So, when it is remembered that this statement of Sir George Brown’s is very wide of what other people believe, the adoption of the belief in a later writing gives proof, irresistibly cogent, that both statements were the off- spring of the same honest, erring mind. I must add, that even if Sir George Brown had been able to say that he never made any direct communication to any body at all connected with the Quarterly Review, his assertion, though carrying, of course, the most per- fect conviction of its truth, would still fall short of what is needed for dis- entangling him; because it so happens that, before the publication of the Review, Sir George Brown thought it right to circulate a MS. (authenti- cated by his initials) in which he gave his version of the part he sincerely believed he had taken in the Battle of the Alma. Sir George can not know, nor even, perhaps, believe, that the MS. thus circulating did not fall into the hands of an admirer, who saw in it a treasure of historic proof, took it straight to the managers of the Quarterly Review, and caused them to fancy it must be accurate by showing that it was really genuine. 3 Thus, then, I am obliged to connect Sir George Brown with the account which is given of his actions in the Quarterly Review. For some little time, indeed, after the appearance of the Reviewers’ narrative, it seemed possible that something might be written or said which would relieve me from the necessity of treating Sir George Brown as the person to be refuted. Sir George, one imagined, might perhaps take some means of declaring that the Reviewers had made an inaccurate use of their instructions. But time has rolled on; and at length it can be said (in defense of the Review, though in aggravation of the responsibility which is attaching upon Sir George Brown), that Sir George has allowed three months to pass away without publicly repudiating the curious statement which his organ lately gave to the world. Of course, a man is not in general to be held answera- ble for acquiescing in the accounts which strangers, deriving no information from himself, may choose to give of his actions ; but I have shown, I think, that Sir George and the Quarterly can not stand thus clear asunder; and when we find, first, that Sir George Brown has circulated a MS. containing an account of what he imagines he saw, and what he imagines he did, at 692 APPENDIX. (x. the Battle of the Alma; next, that one of the mistaken statements adopted by the Revzew was addressed by Sir George Brown in his own handwrit- ing to the English head-quarters; next, that the Aeview (a publication of unimpeached respectability) is so worded as to all but disclose its informant ; next, that having thus displayed its title to be deemed authentic, the Re- view proceeds to attribute to Sir George Brown a series of striking achieve- ments; and that, finally, after an interval of three months, Sir George Brown allows a fresh number of the Review to appear without a word of disavowal or modest remonstrance,* then, I think, we can hardly fail to see that the narrative given by the Review acquires the kind of interest which belongs to autobiography. We recur to the pages ; and whenever we can find the name of ‘Sir George Brown,’ we put in: before it the significant ‘Ego,’ which gives an interesting, nay, an almost humorous, authenticity to the whole story. Whether the story be true or not, that is another ques- tion; and, to solve it, one may be obliged to°compare Sir George Brown’s impressions (as indeed shall be presently done) with the impressions of other people; but until Sir George Brown shall come forward and impute to the journal which reproduces his ideas an erroneous use of the information sup- plied to it, one is warranted in attributing the kind of authenticity above pointed out to every thing concerning Sir George which the Quarterly Re- view has narrated. Add to this great merit of ‘authenticity’ the well- known fact that Sir George Brown’s honor and truthful intent are above the reach of all cavil, and then we come to understand the kind of interest which attaches to the Reviewers’ story. Then, as we light upon each shin- ing deed ascribed to Sir George Brown, we are able to say,—‘ This is in ‘deed curious. True or not, here is a story which is really believed to be ‘true by the very officer—a General of Division—who is represented to have ‘been the principal actor—nay, rather, to have been the almost sole actor— ‘in these stirring scenes. No doubt this is all very new. No doubt there “are many who think that Lord Raglan, the Commander of the Forces, had ‘something to do with governing the issue of the battle. Perhaps, also, ‘General Evans may still persist in maintaining that he existed on the day ‘of the Alma; nay, that he fought a hard fight on that day, and lost the ‘fourth of a brigade upon ground which Sir George Brown declares to have ‘been wholly occupied by himself.t Again, the 7th Fusileers may main- ‘tain that, almost at the moment when, according to the recipient of Sir ‘George Brown’s ideas, they neglected to “ attend to’’ Sir George, t and, on ‘the contrary, ‘turned round and moved back,”’§ they (the 7th Fusileers) ‘were not only standing fast, but were in the very act of defeating a Rus- ‘sian column. Again, those who knew the worth of Colonel Hood may im- ‘agine that, in the crisis of the fight, he and his Grenadier Guards must “have known how to find the redoubt without the guidance or ‘ request” || * This circumstance leads me to infer that the Reviewers may have followed Sir George's instructions with a more confiding exactness than I ventured to believe probable when I wrote the foot-note at p. 588 (See Notes to Fourth Edition). +‘ My Ist brigade itself completely filled the whole mouth of the gorge or valley through ‘which the road runs.’—(Holograph Report, now before me, by Sir George Brown.) The ground thus deseribed as * completely filled’ by Sir George’s troops was exactly that on which Evans was operating with Pennefather’s brigade. In this Holograph Report of the 22nd of September, 1854, Evans says that he operated with four of his regiments and one of his batteries ‘ to the left of the conflagration, to endeavor to force by that direction the ‘passage of the river and the bridge ;? and Lord Raglan, in his published Report, spoke of Pennefather’s brigade as ‘ connected with the viaht of the Light Division, an expression which exactly confirms Evans's statement. General Pennefather writes to the same effect, So does General Warren. I never heard the name of any man except Sir George Brown who imagined that his, Sir George's, right brigade ‘ filled the whole mouth of the gorge.’ — t Qu uv terly Review, No. 2-6, p. 566. § Ibid. i Ibid. p. 567, X.] | APPENDIX. 693 ‘of Sir George Brown. Yet again, the friends of the Duke of Cambridge ‘may continue to think that His Royal Highness brought up the Cold- ‘stream from the river’s bank a good bit before the ** dying out’ of the ‘battle,* and that he did this without waiting to be “briefly conferred ‘¢with’+ by Sir George Brown. Yet again, the Scots Fusileer Guards ‘may deny that ‘*‘ they lay down behind the broken bank, from which it ‘ ‘¢ was found impossible, for a considerable space of time, to remove them,” ‘and may maintain that, even if Sir George Brown did really assume the ‘ syactical command of the Guards by ‘‘ requesting’ and “‘ briefly confer- ‘ - ring,’ he could not have placed the Coldstream in the interval ‘‘ on the ‘+-left of the Grenadiers,’’t because (after the temporary check which they ‘had undergone) they, the Scots Fusileer Guards, were swift to resume their ‘place in the centre of the brigade. Finally, the men of the Highland ‘ Brigade may maintain that, instead of coming up only ‘‘just in time” to ‘see the Russians ‘‘in full flight,”§ they did really engage in that ‘‘ stub- ‘* born” contest with the enemy’s columns, which their chief, Sir Colin ‘Campbell, described and officially reported the second day after the battle.|| ‘People may say all these things. They may labor to maintain that Sir ‘George Brown must have been mistaken, and that he could not have really ‘performed the achievements which his admiring Quarterly attributes to ‘him; but whether Sir George performed them or not, there remains this ‘curious and interesting fact—he sincerely believes that he did.’ Such being the kind of interest, if not actual importance, which attaches to the account of the battle as given in the Quarterly Review, it would seem that, at worst, I am erring on the safe side when I not only treat it as serious; but quote, and refute its statements. But now for the passage which is to be the special subject of comment in this Note. After having stated (in a passage before quoted, Appendix, Note VIII.) that two of the regiments of Sir George Brown’s Division persisted in retreating, notwithstanding Sir George’s efforts to prevent them, also that they would not ‘attend to him,’ and that they ‘turned round and: moved ‘back’**—the Review gocs on:—‘ Having opened to let the 7th and 38rd ‘pass, the Grenadiers re-formed line, and advanced against the Russian “columns in their immediate front. Sir George Brown went with the Gren- ‘adier Guards ; and when they arrived abreast of Redan, he requested the * commander of the battalion to detach a party from his left and to reoccupy that ‘work.’ Now, Sir George Brown commanded the Light Division—the Division which, under his guidance, had bad the misfortune to be defeated ;ft and he had no authority over the Grenadiers, or any other of the regiments belong- ing to the Ist Division. Yet the theory is, that -Sir George abandoned his troops—troops said to be in such a state that they ‘would not attend to ‘him’—and that, joining himself to a regiment with which he had nothing to do, and imagining his judgment to be more sound or. more swift than that of Colonel Hood (Colonel Hood was one of the very ablest of the offi- cers then serving with the English army), he took upon himself to ‘request’ the Colonel to reoccupy the redoubt. ‘This story, of course, supposes that, * Quarterly Review, No. 226, p. 567. t Ibid.; and see the next Note (VI.) of this Appendix. t Quarterly Review, No. 226, p. 567. § Ibid. || MS. Report now before me, signed ‘ C. Campbell.’ : ** Quarterly Review, No. 226, p. 566. tt The only regiment of Sir George Brown’s which did not undergo defeat was the Tth Fusileers, and Sir George had so little to do with the victorious. fight which rendered the fate of that regiment an exception to the fate of the Division, that until this summer he did not even believe in it; and but for me, I imagine, he would har dly have known it now. 694 APPENDIX. X.] taken as a body, the battalion of the Grenadier Guards moved up in a direc- tion which’brought it clear of the redoubt, and that it continued its advance without marching through the work ; for, otherwise, it could not have been said that the recapture of the redoubt was effected by a request ‘to detach a ‘party’ forthe purpose. So, if I show that the advancing battalion marched up right through the redonbt, there at once is an end of the story which seeks to mutilate my account of Colonel Hood’s achievement by ascribing the recapture of the work to Sir George Brown. Now, as it happens, I can not only prove that the advancing line of the Grenadier Guards marched bodily through the redoubt, but am even en- abled to show the exact point in the line of the battalion which impinged upon the howitzer then remaining within the work. Writing on another question, and before this theory about Sir George Brown and the redoubt had been propounded to the world, Colonel Percy (who commanded at the Alma the left-flank company of the Grenadier Guards) addressed to me a letter, of which the following is an extract :— ‘With regard to the gun in the redoubt, the right of the 8th company and ‘ the left of the 7th company, in advancing, were exactly opposite to the gun. I ‘halted my men about five paces off the rampart for fear of there being ‘some mine, [and] clambered over, aiding myself by the gun. Colonel ‘Pakenham, since killed, clambered over at the same moment, and scratch- ‘ed the number of the company (No. 7) on the carriage with his sword, say- ‘ing to me afterward (almost directly) ‘‘that he had done so that the gun ‘**might not be claimed by others.” I replied, ‘‘I wished I had thought ‘ “of doing so too.”” As the Russians had left the gun after the repulse of | ‘the first line, the gun was clearly the prize of the Grenadier Guards.’ Again, Sir Charles Russell was another of the officers of the Grenadier Guards who was with the left-flank company of the battalion; and I find that, in the admirably clear private journal which he has been so kind as to intrust to me, there is contained this passage:—‘ The gallant Light Di- ‘vision, quite cut up, were falling back upon us, and impeding our fire, ‘but still we moved steadily toward the battery. The Fusileers on our left ‘received a partial check, and (the colors and a few men of the 95th having ‘formed on our left) we entered the battery close to the brass gun, and poor * Pakenham made a mark on it as he passed.* We still pushed on, and it was ‘not till the hurried retreat of the enemy put them beyond the reach of our ‘ Miniés, that we halted. ‘Too much can not be said of Colonel Hood’s gal- ‘lantry ; and by his admirable coolness and unerring judgment he took his ‘ regiment through action as few have done.’ These narratives of Colonel Percy and Sir Charles Russell are sebounts —not of what happened te any detached ‘ party.’ but—of the advance of that superb and unbroken line of the Grenadier Guards, whereof their com- pany formed the left ;+ and unless these two officers were under some de- lusion,—some delusion strangely common to both—nay, common, I am sure, to every survivor of the battalion,—the notion of Sir George Brown’s having recaptured the redoubt, by causing Colonel Hood to ‘detach a party’ for the purpose, must be looked upon, either as the mistake of Reviewers straying loose from Sir George’s guidance, though their words all but purport to fol- low it, or else as the genuine production of a mind much confused, which refracted the lights it received, and connected its impressions of what went on at the Alma with wrong people, wrong times, and wrong places. * Pakenham, as we before saw, was with the 7th Company. t Sir Charles Russell has been so good as to assure me once again, both orally and in writing, that at the Alma the line of the Grenadier Guards ‘was never broken, either by * detaching companies or otherwise.’ [XI. APPENDIX. 695 I will add (though, after the proofs I have given, it is hardly worth while to do so), that neither in Colonel Hood’s private journal, nor in any of his letters known to his family, is there any, the least, mention either of his hav- ing received any ‘ request’ or other communication from Sir George Brown, or of his having recaptured the redoubt by detaching ‘a party’ for the pur- pose. Of course, when one sees a man of Sir George Brown’s unquestioned honor and truthfulness submitting to have it said of him—and that by what would seem to be his own chosen organ of publicity—that it was he who taught Colonel Hood and his Grenadier Guards the way to retake the re- doubt, one strains after some counter-theory that will account for an honest mistake. ‘The very best counter-theory I can frame for the purpose has the fault of being weak and far-fetched ; but, weak and far-fetched as it is, I offer it to the attention of Sir George Brown. Long after the recapture of the redoubt, and when the Grenadier Guards were far in advance of the work, it occurred to some officers in the regiment’ (who were anxious that their corps should not lose its fairly-won trophy) to send back a man—not a ‘ party’—with directions to stand sentry over the brass howitzer then remaining within the redoubt. After a moment’s hes- itation, Colonel Hood acceded to the suggestion, and a man—he volunteer- ed for the service—went back and stood sentry over the howitzer. Now, supposing that Sir George Brown imagined the redoubt to be before him instead of behind him; that, being unacquainted with the actual state of the battle, he believed the already recaptured redoubt to be still awaiting recapture ; and, finally, that he was anxious to put Colonel Hood in the way of effecting an operation which had been performed some minutes be- fore—then the fact of a man having been really sent back to look after the howitzer, and so, in a sense, to ‘reoccupy’ the empty redoubt, would be enough to supply that small element of truth which is conducive—nay, al- most necessary—to the growth of a modern fable. . Be this as it may, I must persist in asking my countrymen to believe that the recapture of the Great Redoubt was effected—not by a ‘ party’ detached from Colonel Hood’s regiment at the ‘ request’ of Sir George Brown, but— by a self-sufficing chief and an undivided battalion—by Colonel Hood, ad- vancing in person at the head of his Grenadier Guards. XI. Note respecting the statement in the text that ‘ the Duke of Cambridge, riding ‘up with the Coldstream, stood Master of the Great Redoubt.’ - I conceived that the above sentence was a fair and not untruthful use of language, partly because H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge commanded the Division to which the Grenadier Guards belonged, but partly also because I believed that the ‘ Coldstream’ (with which His Royal Highness was person- ally present) had marched‘ up to the redoubt—not quite simultaneously with the Grenadiers, yet—so soon after them that the advance of these two bat- talions of the Guards might: be fairly regarded as one movement. But armed, as they would make it appear, with information which must needs come from Sir George Brown, and unchecked as yet by any public com- plaints against their accuracy on the part of Sir George, the conductors of the Quarterly Review are still leaving unretracted the narrative which. 696 APPENDIX. | XL they gave to the world more than three months ago. In it there is this paragraph :— ‘Having opened to let the 7th and 33rd pass, the Grenadiers re-formed ‘line and advanced against the Russian columns in their immediate front. ‘Sir George Brown went with the Grenadier Guards ; and when they ar- ‘rived abreast of the Redan, he requested the commander of the battalion ‘to detach a party from his left and to reoccupy that work. There was no ‘risk in this; neither could the flank of the Grenadiers be said at this ‘juncture to be exposed, because the men of the Light Division, who had ‘been driven out of the Redan, were lying in an irregular line with the ‘Fusileer Guards under the bank, and kept up such a heavy fire on the ‘space between themselves and the work as compelled the enemy’s masses, ‘which had occupied the work, to halt, and finally to withdraw. Protected ‘on the left by this fire, the Grenadiers moved forward, till, having crossed ‘the swell of ground from which Codrington’s brigade had retreated, they ‘found themselves confronted by the Russian columns. Upon these they “opened such an effective and well-sustained fire as soon told. The enemy ‘wavered and gave ground; but in proportion as the Grenadiers pressed ‘upon them, their own flank became exposed, and they were in danger of ‘ getting involved in a contest single-handed with a very superior force of ‘the enemy. Seeing this, Sir George Brown rode back across the front of ‘the Redan, and, rounding the corner of the hill, came upon the Coldstream ‘ Guards in line and under the steep ground, and with their right somewhat ‘thrown forward. He conferred briefly with the Duke of Cambridge and ‘General Bentinck, both of whom were beside the Coldstreams, and the whole “immediately advanced. The Coldstreams took their place on the left of the ‘Grenadiers and shared in the battle. But the battle was already dying out. ‘The Grenadiers had carried all before them; the Redan was empty; and, ‘ stealing away in a direction to their own right, the Russian columns were tn full ‘ retreat.’ _ Now, if it were really to be proved to me that, after the time when the Grenadier Guards were abreast of the redoubt, the Duke of Cambridge, with the Coldstream, was still down below, under the steep ground near the river, and that there he and the Coldstream remained until a general offi- cer, who had already been up with the Grenadiers abreast of the redoubt (and who had already provided for the reoccupying of the ‘ work’ by a de- tached party), was able to ride back, to pass ‘across the front of the Redan,’ to ‘round the corner of the hill,’ to come at last to the Coldstream as they stood ranged ‘under the steep ground,’ and there to confer ‘ briefly’ with H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge and General Henry Bentinck ; finally, if it were to be proved to me that the advance of the Duke of Cambridge and the Coldstream was the result of the ‘ brief’ conference thus held, and that, by that time, the battle was already ‘dying out,’ the redoubt ‘ empty,’ and the Russian columns ‘ stealing away’ ‘in full retreat,’—then indeed I should be forced to qualify the words by which I ventured to connect the Cold- stream and the name of His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge with those moments of actual strife and glory which preceded the time of mere triumph. ce happily I conceive that I am not yet brought to this; and I will say why In the first place, the Quarterly’s narrative of what Sir George Brown did at the Alma has not been expressly adopted by Sir George; and al- though, I fear, I must grant, both that Sir George Brown was the founder of the singular creed which inspired a part of the narrative, and that, after an interval of more than three months, he has not yet publicly disavowed XII. APPENDIX. 697 the achievements which it attributes to him, still it is yet possible that when Sir George shall see all the bearings of the account which describes his ac- tions, he will hold it his duty to come forward and correct the story. - But, in the next place, I have to say that, even if Sir George Brown shall do the reverse of this, and shall actually ‘undertake to ratify all that ethe Review has said of him, he will be ratifying a narrative which I have shown to be wild as a dream i in five of its chief‘assertions, and which there- fore is likely enough to prove equally wild in this one. For the present, however, I do not undertake to refute this curious ac- count of the spot where Sir George Brown (on his return from the recap- ture of the redoubt) is represented to have found the Duke of Cambridge, General Henry Bentinck, and the Coldstream Guards. I leave this story to be dealt with by those who can speak from their personal knowledge of the state to which the battle had got when Sir George Brown is stated to have ridden back from abreast of the redoubt, and to have held the brief conference which was followed by the advance of the Coldstream. To what may be addressed to me, whether for or against the story, I shall listen, I hope, with due care; but in the mean time, and until the account shall be confirmed, I must decline to cut down the words by which I assign to the Duke of Cambridge and the Coldstream—not a mere share in a battle ‘al- * ready dying out,’ but—a real and timely participation in the ‘ brilliant ad- ‘vance’ of the Guards.* _ This is the last of the Notes elicited by the narrative of the Alma con- tained in the Quarterly Review. If Sir George Brown shall say that he has made no written nor oral communication about the Alma to any body connected as a contributor or otherwise with the Quarterly Review, and that he has never circulated a MS. which could have furnished ingredients for the publication, then I will gladly unsay every word which tends to connect him with the narrative contained in the Review. In the mean time, however, the narrative given in the Review is speaking, as it were; with what seems to be the transparent authority of Sir George Brown ; and, this being so, I must for the present permit myself to regard Sir George as an officer who has connected himself (in the way I have indicated) with the periodical press. Sir George Brown has taken part in gainsaying my ac- count of the Alma, and is now in turn doing me the henor to sit and un- dergo a few comments. XII. Note respecting the order of time in which certain events occurred at the Battle of the Alma. It may be remembered that when Sir Thomas Troubridge had just deliv- ered the message which was followed by the immediate advance of the Gren- adier Guards, he met Sir George Brown, and from him received his direc- tions as to the course to be taken by the 7th Fusileers. Now it happened that, while Troubridge was still in conversation with Sir George Brown, he observed that a movement was taking effect on the Telegraph Height ; ‘and, drawing out his field-glass, he presently saw the left of the French army moving fairly up toward the Telegraph. The fact of his seeing this at * In his published dispatch, Lord Raglan calls the movement ‘a brilliant advance of the * brigade of Foot-Guards under Major-General Bentinck.’ Vou. L—G « 698 APPENDIX. (XIII. the time of his interview with Sir George Brown has happily fixed the ex- act point which had been reached by the progress of events in the English part of the field at the moment when the French army made good its ad- vance from the cover of the steep hill-sides to the smooth plateau above. © It has shown in a summary way-—and the conclusion exactly agrees with in- ferences deducible from other grounds—it has shown that the advance of, the French to the smooth platean leading up to the Telegraph was after the storming and the dismantling of the Great Redoubt; was after the with- drawal of the Causeway batteries; was after the retreat of the enemy’s re- serves; was after the overthrow ofthe column long engaged with Lacy Yea’s Fusileers ; and was exactly simultaneous with the movement which brought our Grenadier Guards into their final engagement with the enemy’s columns. XII. Note respecting the truth of the accounts which represent that a great and ter- rible fight took place near the Telegraph on the day of the Alma. In the beginning of the year 1855 the Baron de Bazancourt was sent to ~ the theatre of war by the French ‘ Minister of Public Instruction,’ and the ‘Mission’ with which the Baron went charged was that of writing a history of the Crimean expedition. He was accredited to the then French Com- mander-in-chief by the Minister of War, and he seems to have been freely supplied with all such materials for getting at the truth as could be found in the military journals of the French army, and in the statements voluntarily made to the historian elect by officers who had themselves directed the oper- ations which they undertook to describe.* Closely translated, the Baron’s account of the supposed fight at the Telegraph runs thus. After speaking of the point where the building of the Telegraph stands, he says :—‘ It is ‘there that the battle is; it is there that there are the efforts of attack and ‘defense. On all sides we crown the plateau ; but the considerable Russian ‘forces massed behind-the Telegraph, the sharp-shooters sheltered in this ‘partly-built tower, and the batteries placed right. and left, decimate our ‘troops. Already the Ist Zouave Regiment and the Ist battalion of the ‘Chasseurs of the Ist Division, and on their left the 2nd Zouaves of the 3rd ‘Division, shelter themselves behind the undulations of the plateau, and ‘were keeping up a sustained fire against the Russians, when two batteries ‘of the reserve, led by Commandant La Boussiniére, came to oppose artillery ‘to artillery. The battery of Captain Toussaint quitted the road in order ‘to arrive. more rapidly by a movement toward its left, just in front of the ‘Telegraph ; the Zouaves themselves help to drag the guns up the last ac- ‘clivities. They are soon placed, and open their fire, to which the Zouaves ‘of the two divisions and the foot Chasseurs add a redoubling of fire. Four ‘Russian guns quickly limber--up and withdraw. But the fire of the enemy’s ‘masses and that of the artillery placed in the rear of the Telegraph cause us ‘serious losses... This position of expectancy could not long be maintained ; ‘an impetuous charge of the Russian cavalry on this point was imminent. ‘Colonel Cler, who knows the war-tried and resolute troops which he com- ‘mands, comprehends that he can not save them from utter destruction but ‘ by one of those sacrifices which snatch victory. For an instant he hesitates ‘between a charge with the bayonet against the great front of the Russian * See his Preface, p. vi. [XTII. ‘. ~XPPENDEX. 699 ‘square, and an attack on the tower of the Telegraph, the centre and cul- ‘minating point of the enemy’s line. It is upon this last plan that he de- ‘cides ; and, going forward in advance of the angle formed by the regi- ‘ments, and putting his horse into a gallop, he cries out, ‘‘To me, my Zou- ‘aves! ‘To the tower! to the tower !” ‘ All precipitate themselves at the same time—that is, the 2nd Zouaves, ‘the Ist Zouaves with Colonel Bourbaki at their head, the foot Chasseurs, ‘the 39th Regiment, which comes up with Colonel Beuret and General ‘d’Aurelle. ‘It is a human torrent which nothing stops. Colonel Cler comes the first ‘to the tower; all have followed him; ail arrive ardent, impetuous, irresist- ‘ible. The struggle was short, but it was one of those bloody, terrible strug- ‘gles in which man fights body to body with his enemy, in which the looks ‘devour each other [out les regards se dévorent, whatever that may mean], ‘in which the hands grapple each other, in which arms dashed against arms ‘are made to yield sparks of fire.* Dead and dying are heaped together, ‘and the combatants trample upon them and smother them. ‘ The Russians received this formidable shock on the points of their bay- ‘onets ; they ask each other if these are indeed but men [si ce sont des hom- -*mes] who thus dare to rush upon death; they fight, but soon they stagger, ‘and these formidable masses, menaced on all sides by the two divisions, ‘which advance in close columns, become broken, and operate their retreat. ‘Colonel Cler seized the eagle of his regiment, which he plants on the ‘tower to the cry of, ‘‘ May the Emperor live!” Sergeant-major Fleury, ‘of the Ist Zouaves, rushes upon the upper scaffolding of this partly-built _ building and balances the flag, which sinks with the intrepid non-com- ‘missioned officer, struck in the forehead by a ball. The flag of the Ist *Zouaves also floats on this glorious trophy, which a fragment of shell ‘breaks at the staff [flotte aussi sur ce glorieux trophée qu’un éclat d’obus ‘ brise a la hampe]; Lieutenant Poitevin, ensign-bearer of the 39th, precipi- ‘tates himself in his turn outside his battalion, and comes in the midst of a ‘rain of projectiles to plant on the tower of the Telegraph the eagle of his ‘regiment; a bullet strikes him full in the breast, and stretches him lifeless. ‘Every one among all these intrepids seemed to have in himself the enthu- *siasm of death.’ That is the account which M. de Bazancourt gives, and he does not seem to have found himself cramped by the officially admitted fact that in the whole battle the French only lost three officers killed. One of these, Lieu- tenant Poitevin, was struck, as we saw, after the Telegraph was carried, and when the Russians were operating their retreat; but in the actual fight, terrific and murderous as M. de Bazancourt represents it to have been, it does not appear that any French officer was either killed, wounded, or hurt. It would seem that in 1856 the feeling of the French army respecting the story of the supposed fight at the Telegraph was not in such a state as to favor any thing like a repetition of M. de Bazancourt’s description, for in that year. M. du Casse published his Pregis Historique; and, although he describes some portions of the battle at considerable length, he disposes of the capture of the Telegraph in terms which do not necessarily denote any kind of infantry fight, and in only eight words.t ‘The Telegraph, the key “of the position, is carried.’ ‘Le Télégraphe clef de la position est enlevé.’ If the accounts given by the French had ended there, it might have been *T have observed this phenomenon in fights upon the stage. t+ He adds an account of the planting of the flags on the Telegraph; but his narrative of the taking of the Telegraph is, as I have said, in eight words. 700 - APPENDIX. XII] inferred that they wished quietly to repudiate the bloody narrative of M. de Bazancourt, and to drop the notion of saying that there was really a great fight at the Telegraph ; but the official Atlas of the French Government re- news the story; for, in the plan which illustrates this period of the battle, it places the Taroutine and the ‘ Militia’ battalions close in front of the Telegraph and around it; and the letter-press narrative accompanying the plans has these words :—‘ Le Général Canrobert lance sa division sur les dé- “fenseurs du Télégraphe; apres un combat opiniatre, auquel prend part le ‘39° de ligne de le brigade d’Aurelle de la 4¢ division, les Russes sont *chassés de leur position, et les drapeaux des 1¢t et 2° de Zouaves et du 39° “de ligne flottent successivement sur le Télégraphe.’ That the three flags were hoisted on the Telegraph no one doubts; but. the question is whether those triumphant demonstrations were preceded by any thing like a serious fight. The difficulty of believing this is occasioned ‘by the tenor of the Russian accounts. General Kiriakoff was naturally anx- jous to show that he had made an obstinate stand; and it may be imag- ined that if the heroic struggle described by M. de Bazancourt had really occurred, General Kiriakoff’s narrative would have put it in full relief. He, however, says not a word of any such struggle. In one part of his narra- tive he speaks of the Taroutine and the ‘ Militia’ battalions as being. so far in advance, and so low down, that the batteries near the Telegraph fired over their heads; and at a later period of his narrative, without having said a word about any intermediate operation, he says that these battalions were under a cross-fire of artillery, and that, for that reason, and because the troops opposed to the English were already in full retreat, he ‘ commanded ‘the march toward the main road.’ He does not say a word of the bloody struggle with infantry in which the French represent his troops to have been engaged. At first sight, it does not seem highly probable that upon the very summit of a smooth hill-top, where there was nothing to offer cover for the body of even one man, a few battalions (already dispirited by the passive endurance of artillery fire to which they had been condemned) should be ordered to _ make a stand against the 30,000 Frenchmen and Turks who were converg- ing upon that very point from the west, as well as from the north; and if Kiriakoff had resorted to such a measure, it is all but incredible that his careful and almost minute narrative of his operations should have omitted all mention of an exploit strange in itself, and, if only it were true, redound- ing very much to the glory of his troops. Not only, however, does Kiriakoff appear to have been ignorant of any such fight, but the whole tenor of the narrative in which he describes what he did is inconsistent with the notion that any thing of the kind could have passed. According to his statement, he was a divisional general left without orders; he saw his troops suffering under a cross-fire of artillery ; he knew (though apparently in an imperfect way) that overwhelming masses of French troops were more or less near to ‘the verge of the plateau; and being thus circumstanced, and seeing, more- ‘over, that the English had already carried the position, he thought it time to ‘withdraw his battalions from the line of the artillery fire ; but, from first to last, he never was challenged or vexed by the near approach of any French ‘infantry. Such ishisaccount. Butthis is not all. Both Kiriakoff and the ‘official French statement of the Atlas de la Guerre d’ Orient agree in rep- resenting that, after the check which it had given to Canrobert’s Division, the great ‘column of the eight battalions’ had been kept together and moved a good way in the rear of the Telegraph, without ever engaging in any kind of struggle with infantry. Now, except the troops composing that column, the only battalions of Russian infantry which were at any time in this part ¥ C XIV:] APPENDIX. 701 of the field were the Taroutine and the ‘ Militia’ battalions ; and accordingly these are the troops which the French official At/as places in array at the ¥iegraph. Now the ‘ Militia’ battalions, we saw were inferior troops, and ‘aad dissolved. There remained the Taroutine battalions; and if any stand had been really made at the Telegraph, these must have been the troops which made it. It happens, however, that an intelligent and highly instruct- ed field-officer of that corps has written an apparently complete account of every part of the battle of which he was competent to speak ; and if any of Kiriakoff’s forces, but still more if any of the Taroutine battalions had made _the stand alleged, it is quite incredible either that Major Chodasiewicz, who was present with the Taroutine corps, should have remained ignorant of the fact, or that, knowing it, he should have omitted to state the truth. If any of the Taroutine battalions had been engaged in a fight of this sort, it would have been for them the grand, the all-absorbing event of the day ; for it cer- tainly was not their fate to be brought into conflict with French infantry in any other part of the field, and they would not have failed to remember an obstinate and bloody fight of the kind described by the French. But Cho- dasiewicz, though he minutely describes the way in which the Taroutine bat- talions were galled in their retreat by the fire of artillery, does not say a word of any kind of fight at the Telegraph between French and Russian infantry. Yet his was the very regiment which, if the French story were true, must have borne the brunt of the alleged fight. Upon the whole, I have conceived that these authentic and trustworthy narratives of General Kiriakoff and Major Chodasiewicz* forbid me to admit into my text any statement similar to the account given by M. de Bazan- court, or even to that contained in the At/as de la Guerre d’ Orient; but those who are so constituted as to wish to incline the ear to a teacher duly prepared for them by the French Emperor’s ‘ Minister of Public Instruction,’ will find in the above quotation from M. de Bazancourt the sort of guidance they like. XIV. Note containing an Extract from a Letter addressed by Colonel Napier, the Historian of the Peninsular War, to Lord Fitzroy Somerset. Tf the foregoing volume has begun to disclose to its readers the entireness of Lord Raglan’s devotion to the public service, his more than common swiftness of action, his subtle understanding of the feelings of other men, and his tenderness for their honest pride, it may be interesting to hear, that some thirty years before the time I write of, these very qualities had been ascribed to Lord Fitzory Somerset by the Historian of the Peninsular War. In a letter of October, 1824, which is now before me (but which I never saw until long after the publication of this book), Napier wrote :— ‘My Dear Lorp Firzroy,—The rapidity with which you have fulfilled ——’s desires would be extraordinary, coming from any other quarter, but ‘your accurate knowledge of every thing that does or has belonged to the ‘army enables you to do before others can think. You are well aware, from ‘the long acquaintance you have had with my opinions, that I am no flat- ‘terer, and that I am not disposed to express sentiments which I do not ¢ * Anitchkoff was an officer of the staff, whose narrative is based on accounts taken from various Russian sources, and he says not a word of any fight at the Telegraph, or of any other combat which could have been confounded with it. 702 * APPENDIX. — [XV. ‘feel. I would certainly rather have my feelings judged of by my actions ‘than by my words; but I should be wanting both to you and myself if I ‘failed to express my admiration of the unabated warmth with which you ‘ assist real merit, uninfluenced by any consideration but the services of the ‘individual. Neither has the delicacy with which you have upon several ‘occasions kept back all appearance of personal protection been unobserved ‘by myself, or those numerous claimants who have at different times found ‘a sure friend in you when they could find none elsewhere.’ When I see Napier writing that Lord Fitzroy Somerset could do before others could think, I am reminded of a singular instance of the uncommon swiftness with which his mind worked. One day in the Peninsula, and at atime when the Head-quarter’s Staff were moving along the road, there was brought an intercepted dispatch, but it was in cipher—in a cipher un- known. Lord Fitzroy Somerset took up the paper, and, still riding on with the rest of the Staff, began to bend his mind to the letters and signs. Be- fore he quitted his saddle he had pierced the secret, had found out the key, and had read the dispatch. . XV. Note respecting the following Plans of the Battle of the Alma. The plan of the country, as shown by these Maps, is taken from the French official Atlas Historique, but with some slight changes, exaggerating in some degree the natural features of the ground, in order to make some of the slopes and hollows more easily apparent. The signs purporting to indi- cate the positions of the troops have been made by myself ; but it is not in- tended that any thing seen in the Plans should be regarded as varying, or in any way qualifying, the description contained in the foregoing chapters ; and it must not be understood that the positions of the troops are asserted to have been at any two moments such as they are represented to be in these two Plans. The object of the Plans is not to assert any one of the facts there- by appearing to be indicated, but merely to aid the reader in his endeavors to follow the statements contained in the text. 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