recognised the service. Later on the men at home ignored and neglected the doer of it; and, while rewards were freely given to other and lesser men, Roberts was suffered to live without promotion till he died from the effects of exposure during the war, and disappointment at the ingratitude of his employers.1 Alma. The expedition reached the Crimea on the 13th of September. The five following days were occupied in landing troops and stores; and on the 19th the allies moved southwards from the spot on which they had disembarked towards Sebastopol. They found the Russian army strongly posted on the banks of the Alma, a little river which rises in the highlands in the east, and flows, after a westerly course, into the Euxine. The Russians, who were under the command of Menschikoff, the ambassador of the previous year, The battle and who numbered some 40,000 men, occupied a of the strong position which had been fortified with much care. St. Arnaud, who commanded the right of the allied army, proposed to turn the Russian left by crossing the Almal at a point which the enemy had neglected to occupy, while the English by a similar movement attacked their right wing. The idea which was thus formed was only partially carried out. The flanking movement of the French occupied time, and the troops who undertook it found themselves too far removed from the Russian columns to engage in any very serious fighting. The brunt of the battle fell on the left wing of the allies, or the English army. Fighting in line against the Russians massed in column, the English enveloped their enemies with their fire, and forced them, after obstinate resistance, to withdraw. Their retreat was quickened into a disordered flight by the presence of the French on their left flank, and the allied armies found themselves undisputed masters of the field. 1 See The Service and its Reward, p. 9; and cf. Kinglake's Crimea, vol. ii. p. 288 note. So strongly were Roberts' services felt by those who saw them, that Raglan told Admiral Lyons that "Roberts did more for us than anybody ;" and Lyons himself declared that "without Roberts' pontoons we could not have gone to the Crimea at all that season." Ibid., p. 19. VOL. VI. The battle reflected little credit on any of the commanders. Menschikoff, indeed, chose his position with prudence and strengthened it with judgment. But he displayed no tactical skill during the battle. He reduced the front of an army, too small for the ground which it held, by massing his men in needlessly heavy columns, and, like Napoleon on the day of Quatre Bras and Ligny, wasted whole regiments by marching and countermarching them to points which he had either neglected to occupy or which were exposed to an unusually heavy assault. His subordinates made no effort to repair the errors of their chief. Superior in cavalry, they omitted to employ it; and they never once attempted to deploy the regiments which were decimated by the English fire. To St. Arnaud a slightly higher praise may be given. His original conception of the battle was bold and skilful, but its execution was weak and tardy; and the French troops, brought too slowly into action, did not exert that influence which ought to have resulted from their numbers and their gallantry. The English attack, on the contrary, displayed no tactical skill, but it was carried out with extraordinary vigour. Raglan, indeed, thrust himself into the heart of the enemy's lines, and by doing so lost control over his own men. But his divisional commanders, left to themselves, did not shirk the responsibilities of their position, and though one of them, by neglecting to bring up the reserves, placed the result in jeopardy, the others, by the valour with which they took positions and by the tenacity with which they clung to them, secured a brilliant victory. Raglan proposed, but St. Arnaud refused, to follow up this success. If the allies had done so, they might have entered Sebastopol unopposed. Instead, however, of at once seizing the present opportunity, they remained three days on the battlefield, burying the slain and tending the wounded.1 At last, on the morning of the fourth day, the march was resumed. 1 At the end of three days, the Russian wounded remained "a grey mass on the plain." Russell, The War, p. 187, and cf. the account in Kinglake's Crimea, vol. iii. p. 329 et seq. People who talk lightly of war should read such accounts as these, and try to realise what they mean, But the interval had allowed the Russians time to strengthen their fortresses and to construct a new outwork. Alarmed at these preparations, St. Arnaud declined to risk the consequences of an assault, and Raglan, unable to act alone, and unwilling to refrain from action, suggested that the allied armies should move round Sebastopol from the north to the south, and attack the arsenal from the side where they were not expected. The flank march. It is due to the memory of a gallant soldier to add that St. Arnaud, when he declined to follow up the victory of the 20th, and when he refused to risk the chances of an assault on the 25th, was suffering painfully from a disease which clouded his intellect, and only four days later caused his death. He was succeeded in the command of the French army by Canrobert, during the crisis of the great flank march. To that march Raglan may have been forced by the refusal of the French to risk the chances of an assault. Its dangers may not have been greater than the risk of doing nothing. On no other principle is it possible to defend a movement which for twenty-four hours placed the allied armies at the mercy of their opponents. Had Menschikoff been a man of genius, had he even been a man of vigour, the allies would probably have been destroyed on the 25th of September. Menschikoff On that day, however, the Russian general, instead of watching the movements of his enemy, was absorbed in carrying out a movement of his own. Convinced that Sebastopol could not be defended against a resolute evacuates Sebastopol. assault, aware that defeat in such a position would cut off his communications with Russia and annihilate his army, he decided to defend the port against a possible attack from sea by sinking ships of war in the mouth of the harbour, to abandon the defence of the town to the crews of the ships and to his irregular soldiery, and, moving out of Sebastopol himself with his main army, to gain the road which passed through Simpheropol to Russia. Thence, with his communications secure, he fancied that he might be able to strike at the flank and rear of the allies and paralyse their attack. Thus, by a singular coincidence, while the allied army was moving round Sebastopol from the north to the south, the Russian army was moving out of Sebastopol on the south and seeking the north. The two lines of march intersected one another, and Raglan, moving at the head of his own reconnoitring columns, actually came upon the Russian rearguard. Yet, though the two armies were thus executing movements which brought them within striking distance, though portions of them actually met, neither Menschikoff nor Raglan had any notion of the designs of their opponents. With Raglan ignorance did little harm. His only chance of safety lay in secrecy. With Menschikoff ignorance was fatal. He lost an opportunity such as falls to the lot of few commanders of destroying his opponents. While Menschikoff was doing nothing, the men whom he had left behind in Sebastopol were doing much. On the afternoon of the 25th, whilst awaiting an attack, they observed from a high fort in the town the movements of the allies. Thenceforward they knew that the blow which they had awaited from the north was to be delivered from the south, and they had to reckon on the means which were left to them of meeting it. The circumstances might well have disheartened the bravest of mankind. If, on the north, the fortresses were indefensible, on the south the protecting works were much more slender. By a grave error, Menschikoff, in evacuating the town, had placed the north and south banks of the harbour Nachimoff, under independent commands, and had naturally assigned the best troops and the best men to the side where the danger seemed greatest. Nachimoff, who commanded on the south, had only 3000 troops under him, and concluded that he had no alternative but to sink his remaining ships and sell his life, and the lives of his men, as dearly as possible. Fortunately for the Russians, Korniloff, who commanded on the north side, at once left his own post and hurried to the spot where the danger was greatest. Still more fortunately for them, he had by his side an engineer officer, Colonel de Todleben, who had been despatched from Korniloff, and Todleben. the Principalities on a warning mission to Menschikoff, and who had remained as a volunteer to superintend the defence. At Nachimoff's request Korniloff assumed the command. At Korniloff's wish Todleben set himself to strengthen thé position. The history of the Crimean war is a history of blunders. The allies failed to produce a man of genius; the Russians were never under the supreme command of a man of vigour. But, in the dreary story of mistakes and sufferings, the names of two men shine in undimmed lustre. One of them, Korniloff, once the admiral of the fleet, part of which lay sunken at the mouth of the harbour, was an enthusiast with an unfaltering faith in his country, his cause, and his God. He had all the strength which, in an age of doubt, is given to those few men who can believe from the depth of their souls. The other, Todleben, was a practical engineer of consummate power and unlimited resource. It was his mission to teach the world the value of earthworks. These two men, one confident in his God and his cause, the other relying on pickaxe and spade worked by strong hands and guided by a clear brain, were drawn together in close friendship. Korniloff was struck down at the opening of the siege by a shot from the proud armies he had thwarted. Todleben survived to a good old age, and lived to see all the results of the cruel war in which he had borne so great a part obliterated. Heroes even like Korniloff and Todleben-"the soul and the mind" of the defence, as they have been finely calledcould not have stood the onslaught of the allies if it had been delivered on the 28th of September. Sir George Cathcart, who commanded one of the divisions of the British The attack army, declared that he could walk into the place postponed. with scarcely the loss of a man.2 The opinion thus formed by Cathcart was shared by the Russians. But the allies did 1 Kinglake's Crimea, vol. iv. p. 326. I need hardly add that, in this short summary of the operations in the Crimea, I have, in the main, depended on Mr. Kinglake's diffuse but brilliant narrative. 2 Ibid., p. 175. |