A.D. 1855.] GENERAL EYRE'S COLUMN. 301 mined to see Pélissier himself. Reaching the Lancaster Battery shortly after seven o'clock, Lord Raglan found the French general ready to fall in with his views. But while they were discussing the details, General d'Autemarre, now senior officer in the French trenches, sent word that the French troops had lost so many men and were so discouraged, that he feared it would be impossible to assault again. It was, therefore, decided that no fresh assault should be made; the troops were withdrawn; and the batteries slackened fire. weakening the Redan. When the French quitted the Russian entrenchments, the Russian infantry followed. The French halted in a depression of the ground, and as part of their reinforcements had now come up, they turned with the bayonet upon their pursuers and forced them back into the work. Other battalions coming up, these men held fast, and General Pélissier, unwilling to throw a chance away, ordered up the Zouaves of the Guard, and had a momentary thought of making a fresh attack; but receiving unfavourable reports, he halted the Guard, and recalled all the troops. The attack was We have now to narrate a remarkable episode in the at an end. incidents of the morning. It will be remembered that But while he was thinking of renewing the assault, General Eyre was to make a demonstration in the South he sent General Rose with a message to Lord Raglan, saying that he hoped Lord Raglan would agree to a renewed onslaught. At the same time Lord Raglan, seeing how completely our fire had mastered that of the place, ordered Sir George Brown to bring up the supports, and prepare for a fresh assault. He then sent Commander Vico, the French officer at the British headquarters, to inform General Pélissier of the steps he had taken, and to propose that another attempt should be made after the bombardment had continued a few hours longer. Lord Raglan thought that in this way the enemy might be surprised, and the place be won. The two messengers met cach other in the trenches, and thus the messages crossed each other. Lord Raglan, therefore, deter 182-NEW SERIES. Ravine. A French force was to aid him by covering his left flank. He had with him about 2,000 men belonging to the 9th, 18th, 28th, 38th, and 44th Regiments; and arriving in the Ravine a little before three o'clock, he arrayed them for the work in hand. Some 400 volunteers under Major Fielden led the way, supported by the 44th and 38th on the right, and the 18th on the left; while the 9th and 28th formed a reserve. Their first object was to capture two rifle pits. The French took one, and our volunteers the other, with ease. Then the French halted, the officer in command having no warrant to go farther. General Eyre, however, exceeding, or rather straining his instructions, did go farther, and a handful of French breaking from restraint kept pace with him. In the ravine, just before it is joined by the Woronzoff Ravine on the right, there was a cemetery where the Russians had a post. This was carried by our troops, after a very slight resistance; and, not content with this success, they pushed still farther. There were clusters of houses under the cliffs on both sides of the broad basin formed by the juncture of the two ravines. Into these the cnemy retired, and General Eyre deeming it desirable to occupy as forward a position as possible, drove the Russians out of the houses, and held them as well as the Cemetery. The troops were now under the Garden Batteries on the one side, and the Barrack Batteries on the other; and before them was the battery at the head of the South Ravinc, called the Creek Battery. They were thus exposed to fire on three sides. Nevertheless they still made progress, driving the enemy out of the houses and up the sides of the ravine. Some of them ascended the steep, a few looked into the works in rear of the Flagstaff Bastion, others climbed the opposite side and got shelter at a point commanding the Creek Battery. Thus they were ready, if fortune favoured the assaults on the Redan and Malakoff, to sweep either into the town or make way through the Barrack Battery to the Redan. But the Russians had no sooner fled from the ravine into the place, than the batteries opened on our daring soldiers. The round shot and shell tore through the frail houses and broke the stones of the Cemetery in pieces, while the Russian infantry camo forth afresh and kept up a hot fire. But these were soon forced back by the accurate shooting of the British; and it is inferred that the enemy lost many gunners from the bullets sent into his embrasures. Happily some of the houses had bomb-proof storeys, and in these better shelter was obtained. To increase the pressure on our men and drive them out, ships came up the South Harbour and fired heavily into their lodgments; and at times they were the focus of an encircling fire. Nevertheless here they remained all day, offering to the French in the right of their left attack a splendid spectacle of hardihood. General Eyre was wounded early in the day; but he did not give up the command of his men until five in the afternoon. About nine in the morning he had heard of the failure of the grand assault. Requesting instructions from Lord Raglan, he was told that the French would send a force to relievo him, and hold part of the ground he had won; but that if at nightfall the French had not arrived then he was to evacuate the ravine. The French did not come; and this noble brigade, bringing with them nearly all their wounded, and these were many, regained the trenches at nightfall. The Cemetery, however, remained in our possession. Out of 2,000 men, nearly 600 were killed or wounded. The losses of both sides were very great. Of the English there were 22 officers killed and 78 wounded; 244 men killed and 1,209 wounded. The French lost 33 officers killed, 257 were wounded, and 21 were missing. They also lost 1,340 men killed, 1,520 wounded, and 390 missing. The wounded men thus exceeded the dead by 180 only-an unusual proportion. The totals stand-for the English, 1,553; for the French, 3,553 killed, wounded, and missing. The Russian loss, as usual, is difficult to ascertain. Prince Gortschakoff's published despatch fixes the losses during the 17th and 18th at 16 officers killed and 153 wounded; 781 men killed and 4,826 wounded; giving a total of 5,776 as the amount of the Russian loss from the bombardment and the combat. The allied losses on the 18th were 5,106. On the 17th, 37 men were killed or wounded in the British trenches. As the French placed more men in their batteries and parallels than we did, they may have lost 100. Adding 137 to the total of the allied loss in the two days, it still falls short of the loss of the enemy by 533 men. Prince Gortschakoff was very proud of his victory. Ho issued an exulting order of the day. He told his soldiers they had defeated an "enemy in despair;" "Thanks be to you for it, comrades!" He stimulated their courage by telling them that large reinforcements were marching from all parts of sacred Russia; and he called upon them to die rather than break their oaths to preserve Sebastopol. "The time is at hand," he exclaimed, "when the pride of the enemy - the imperious enemy-will be overthrown; when his armies will be swept from our territory like straw before the wind. Until then have faith in God, and fight for Emperor and country!" These were stirring words, and much the stout defenders of Sebastopol stood in need of them. There was anguish, there was chagrin, in the camps of the allies, but there was no despair. The generals were as resolute as fate, and the soldiers were burning to go in again. But there lay the dead and the wounded, thick as leaves, on those bloody slopes. It became needful to bury the first and succour the second; and Prince Gortschakoff's boast seemed for a moment realised when, on the 19th, a boat bearing a flag of truce was seen coming in from the fleet by those who manned the forts and watched the mouth of the harbour; for the bearers of that flag of truce were instructed to present a request from the allied generals that Prince Gortschakof would vouchsafe a short truce-the first and last request of that kind from the camp of the allies. The Commander-in-chief of Sebastopol must have felt a glow of pride when he received that message. Yet he could not have been loth to grant the request it conveyed, for a truce, were it never so short, was time gained, and time gained to repair damages and get guns into the batteries without molestation. Therefore, in the afternoon, one of those sad spectacles was seen, so full of strange contrasts-a burial truc». Bodies were thickly strewn near the abattis in front of the Redan. There lay the tall, manly form of Lacy Yea, a true soldier, beloved and feared by his men of the noble old 7th. There lay Sir John Campbell, a cheerful and gallant officer, as keen in fight as Yea. Both had been deprived of their boots, and Campbell's sword was gone; but this the enemy politely returned. Around them, mingled with the dead, were living men A.D. 1855.] REFLECTIONS ON THE CONDUCT OF THE ALLIES. suffering from wounds. They lay, some of them, in the holes made by shells; and it is said that as they writhed in their agony, the Russians fired on them; probably mistaking them for sharpshooters, for some of the English wounded said that the Russians had treated them kindly, and had brought them water. Between the sentries, posted by both sides, passed and repassed the fatigue parties bearing the dead and wounded; and in the midst of the scene were groups of officers-the Russians in white kid gloves and patent leather boots, and clean shirts. The talk was of the usual politely defiant kind, but there were exceptions. Colonel Calthorpe states that he found the Russians cold, reserved, and melancholy, but others found them hopeful and sportive. "One Russian cadet with whom I was talking," writes Colonel Calthorpe, "in reply to a remark of mine as to our losses, said, with great bitterness of manner, and a voice choked with emotion, Losses! you do not know what the word means. You should see our batteries; the dead lie there in heaps and heaps! Troops cannot live under such a fire of hell as you poured upon us!"" Very different was the tone of an officer whose remarks are recorded by Mr. Russell. "Another officer," he writes, "asked if we really thought, after our experience of the defence they could make, that we could take Sebastopol? 'We must; France and England are determined to take it.' 'Ah! well,' said the other, 'Russia is determined France and England shall not have it; and we'll see who has the strongest will, and can lose most men.' This was quite in the spirit of Prince Gortschakoff's triumphant order of the day. The French gathered up many wounded from the riven slopes of the Malakoff and the rough ground around the Careening Bay; and they were sad, and downcast, and thoughtful, as well they might be; but it was the sadness of genuine feeling for their comrades, and not the gloom of despair. In their camp, also, raged a fierce controversy, very bitter and prolonged. After a victory the faults of men are lost sight of in a halo of glory, but after a defeat men are prone to find fault, and each accuses another. General Pélissier was displeased, and he sent General Regnault de Saint Jean d'Angely back to his command of the Imperial Guards, and recalled the skilful Bosquet to his old post in the French right attacks. Bosquet was a real soldier, and owed his place in the army to his merit alone, and not to the influences at work in an Imperial court. The assault on the 18th suggests many reflections. It was a day of errors. The primary fault lay in that change of plan at the eleventh hour which dispensed with a preliminary bombardment. The Russian works, and the barracks and buildings in rear of them, were full of troops. According to their own statements they had 14,500 men, exclusive of the sailors at the guns in the line of entrenchments between the Barrack Battery and No. 1 Bastion, at the mouth of the Careening Bay. The bulk of this force was in the Redan and the Malakoff; and, beside these, they had 4,000 men and eighteen field-guns in reserve. All these were under arms at the 303 moment when the attack began. If, instead of columns of men, stumbling through the darkness, the allies had hurled shot and shell into the place, it would have mado dreadful havoc in these masses. Before the Mamelon was stormed, the heaps of projectiles falling within it made it look like a volcano in action. The excuse of the French that they could not conceal their men, does not weigh down the advantage to bo gained by a fierco bombardment from batteries far more powerful than they were on the 7th of June. In fact, the condition of the enemy, had the bombardment been continued as originally designed, would have been exactly the reverse of what it was. Instead of having not a gun dismounted, and hardly a man hurt, their artillery would have been silenced or withdrawn, and their ranks disordered and bleeding. Then the allies, having the advantage of light to see where they were going, might have broken in, and, it is possible, have carried the whole line. The next fault was the unhappy mistake of General Mayran, which deprived the attacks of that unity so essential to success in operations of this kind. The consequence was that the assaults were delivered one after the other, by such small bodies as could struggle up to the foot of the enemy's works. The Russians, fairly roused by the tumult on their left, were actually standing to their guns and watching for the columns they knew to be coming on. The attack on the Malakoff was thus deprived of all chance of success, and the onset against the Redan was a mere waste of life, so weak were the columns, so dreadful the fire of grapeshot. What might have been done by a simultaneous rush, was shown by the charge of D'Autemarre's leading battalions. These brave fellows, well led, did not stop to fire, but went straight at the earthworks, and won their way in at the point of the bayonet. Had all the French columns moved together, some of them might have succeeded. Another mistake was the refusal of the French to assault from their left attacks, for the slightest success on their part would have enabled Eyre to lead a conquering column into the rear of the Flagstaff Bastion. After all, it was Eyre's men who made the conquest of the day. They won the Cemetery in the South Ravine. But, on the morning of the 19th, this post was held only by a picket. When an engineer officer reported the fact to Lord Raglan, he ordered the picket to be reinforced; and, in the evening, a strong force of English and French went down, and began works there, connecting the place with the British and French attacks. The errors of the day, then, were the fatal change which dispensed with the bombardment; the refusal of the French to assault on the left; the mistake of Mayran, and the consequent failure in the unity of the assault. To these it may be added, that the British assaulting columns, except that led by Eyre, were all too weak, and would probably have failed against the Redan, even had the French succeeded against the Malakoff. And, reviewing the whole operation carefully, there is some ground for the inference, that, although a preliminary bombardment would have given a chance of success, yet, at this stage, it is pro bable that failure would have been equally the result, because the distance which the stormers and supporters had to traverse to reach the enemy was so great, and also because the spirit of that enemy was still too high, and his losses, immense though they were, not enough to warrant that profound discouragement which precodes the final efforts of a desperate cause. the work entrusted to them by their country with a thoroughness equal to his own. All these calamities falling upon him within a few days, broke even his firm mind. The last despatch he wrote to the Minister of War informed him of the death of the Adjutant-General. This was written on the 26th of June. On the 28th the Field Marshal himself had ceased to live He fell ill seriously on the 26th, but no one, not even the doctors, thought that he was sick unto death. He grew no better, but he slept well, watched over by his staff and Dr. Prendergast. On the 28th he seemed so much better to some of the medical men, that they were about to quiet the anxiety in England by sending a message to that effect by telegraph; but Dr. Prendergast was doubtful, and a dubious message was sent. In the afternoon the Field Marshal became visibly worse, but it was not supposed that death was so near him. At four o'clock the truth burst upon all-he was dying. His staff, his nephew, Colonel Somerset, General Simpson, General Airey, and Colonel Lord George Paget gathered round his bed, and the principal chaplain came, and read and prayed. Gradually, quietly, in a holy calm, that noble spirit ebbed away, so peacefully that it was scarcely possible to tell the moment when he ceased to be. At five-and-twenty minutes to nine in the evening of the 28th of June, an end had come to the earthly career of the British Commander-in-chief. He died in his bed, but he died, like a knight of old, with his harness on. And now a severe misfortune was impending over the British army. It was about to lose its beloved Commander-in-chief. On returning from his conference with General Pélissier, after the failure of the 18th of June, taking the hospitals on his way, Lord Raglan found at head-quarters his letters from England, and one of the first he opened announced the death of his sister, Lady Harriet Mitchell-a severe blow to one so affectionate as he was. This, coming on the heels of the disaster of the morning, affected him the more seriously, because he was about to lose the services of his old comrade, Sir Georgo Brown, whom ill health had driven from the Crimea. General Codrington went upon the sick list, and he, with General Pennefather, was ordered to take ship and seek repose. General Buller had gone away afflicted with fever. General Jones and General Eyre were in hospital wounded. But more than all, the Adjutant-General, Estcourt, an old friend of the Field Marshal, was lying ill of cholera. On the 23rd of June a tempest broke over the allied camps, and the rain fell in such vast quantities that the cavalry stables at Kadikoi were destroyed, and five men were carried away by torrents in the ravines and drowned. The army was astonished and afflicted when the news The huts, the batteries, and the railway were seriously flew from lip to lip that Lord Raglan lay dead in the damaged. General Estcourt, suffering from cholera, little house at the head of the South Ravine. Not only was agitated by the storm, and sank and died the next the British generals went up to gaze upon his counteday. Lord Raglan had been ailing for some days.nance, which still retained that expression of serenity On the 23rd, Colonel Calthorpe from head-quarters and firmness they had seen alike in the heat of battle wrote to his friends in England, that every one was more or less out of spirits. "Lord Raglan is, perhaps, the most cheerful of any one, considering how much he has had lately to worry and annoy him. But at the same time, I fear that it [the failure of the 18th] has affected his health. He looks far from well, and has grown very much aged latterly." And well he might. Forty years before he had lost an arm in the climax of the greatest victory of the century, and it must have been painful, even to a mind so well disciplined as that of the Field Marshal, to fail on the anniversary of Waterloo. He felt more bitterly the death of his sister, and now of General Estcourt, one of the bravest and most amiable of men. Indeed, he felt his loss so keenly, that he was not able to be present at the old soldier's funeral. In the afternoon he mastered his great grief, and visited his comrade's grave in the vineyard, where his body lay. He must have remembered that little church at Waterloo, whose walls are covered with the names of the glorious dead, and his thoughts must have traversed the dark past, and alighted on many spots in Spain and Portugal, the resting-places of gallant friends who had fallen in battle. Nor was he alone in sorrow. Sir Edmund Lyons had lost his noble boy, and Lord Raglan could feel for the dauntless Admiral who had put his hand to and in the calm intercourse of every-day life; the French generals also, the Turkish commander, the leader of the Italian army, and the admirals, arrived to look upon that image of a noble man. "It was a touching sight," writes one present at those scenes, "to see these old warriors, who had so often looked death in the face unmoved, shedding tears over the body of our late beloved commander. General Pélissier stood by the bedside for upwards of an hour, crying like a child. General Canrobert also testified the most profound grief on seeing the remains of him for whom he entertains a sincere affection." Canrobert remembered that Lord Raglan had visited him at his hut on the Tchernaya, when, from being commander-in-chief of a French army, he had become again the leader of a division. 'Ah! milord," said the gallant Frenchman on that occasion, "you are very good to me, for you visit me in adversity, and treat me in the same manner as when I was in prosperity; that is not the case with most men." Pélissier, too, had found in him a colleague with a daring and decision of character equal to his own, resting on a basis of courtesy and gentleness which, though they formed no part of the French general's nature, yet excited in him profound esteem and admiration. 46 It was determined to send home the remains of Lord A.D. 1855.] DEATH OF LORD RAGLAN. 305 had fought beside him under the Great Duke more than half a century before, the remains of Lord Raglan found their last resting-place. Queen heard of Lord Raglan's death with the deepest sorrow, and deplored with the troops the great misfortune which had befallen her and them. The French commander-in-chief issued a general order," expressed with striking felicity, and stamped with sincerity. 'Death," it said, "has suddenly taken away, while in full exercise of his command, Field Marshal Lord Raglan, and has plunged the British in mourning. We all share the regret of our brave allies. Those who knew Lord Raglan, who know the history of his life-so noble, so pure, so replete with service rendered to his country-those who witnessed his fearless demeanour at Alma and Inkermann, who recall the calm and stoic greatness of his character throughout this rude and memorable campaign-every generous heart, indeed, will deplore the loss of such a man. The sentiments here expressed by the General-in-Chief are those of the whole army. He has himself been cruelly struck by this unlooked-for blow. The public grief only increases his sorrow at being for ever separated from a companion in arms whose genial spirit he loved, whose virtues he admired, and from whom he has always received the most loyal and hearty co-operation." General La Marmora, in his order, did not fail to note among other things, "the exemplary constancy with which, together with his army, Lord Raglan endured the hard trials and privations of a winter campaign." Some day, no doubt, the fact will be recognised, that this sturdy constancy of the British chief and of the British troops was, after the battle of Inkermann, the most solid and noble service rendered by both in the Crimea. In the British Parliament, on the very day when the Caradoc received his remains, members of both Houses and all parties, save the Peace party, concurred in speaking his eulogy; and the House of Commons agreed to resolutions conferring £1,000 a year upon Lady Raglan, and £2,000 a year upon Richard Henry Somerset, who succeeded to the titleresolutions which subsequently were embodied in an Act of Parliament. The first Lord Raglan had served his country for half a century, yet he died poor. Raglan, that his ashes might rest with his fathers. The body was placed in coffins of lead and iron, and these were enclosed in a wooden shell. The 3rd of July was fixed on for the embarkation of the corpse on board the In the language of Lord Panmure to General Simpson, Caradoc; and the scene then presented was one of the the country had been deprived of a brave and accommost splendid as well as most touching. In the after-plished soldier, and a true and devoted patriot. The noon of that day there stood, extending from the British head-quarters to Kazatch, a double line of infantry. Every British regiment in the Crimea sent fifty men and three officers, and the red-coats extended a mile over the plateau. At the French head-quarters the French troops took up the line. They were men of the Imperial Guard and the 1st Corps, and they stretched away to Kazatch Bay. Before Lord Raglan's house stood a nine-pounder gun, drawn by eight bay horses, and bearing a platform for the coffin. The Grenadier Guards, forming the guard of honour, were drawn up in the court-yard, which was crowded with officers of the four armies, in full uniform. When the body was brought out the Grenadiers saluted, and as the procession began to move, and the gun bearing the dead soldier left the garden and wheeled into the plateau, two batteries of artillery fired a salute of nineteen guns, and the united bands of three regiments played the "Dead March" from Saul. Escorted by cavalry from each army, and by French and English artillery, between the ranks of British soldiers, botween brilliant Zouaves and solemn-looking Imperial Guardsmen, and the less striking regiments of the French line, drawing forth at intervals salutes from French fieldguns, and waking up here and there strains of pathetic music, the sad procession wound over the dusty plains. At the wheels of the gun-carriage and limber rode General Simpson, General Pélissier, General La Marmora, and Omer Pasha. Over the coffin was the British flag, and on the flag a wreath of immortelles, placed there by the French general. Behind the coffin was led the favourite charger of the departed warrior; then came the relatives and personal staff of the Field Marshal, and after these hundreds of officers from all the allied armies. "When at sunset we reached Kazatch," writes Colonel Hamley, "the water of the harbour was almost hidden by the number of boats thronged with seamen in their white frocks, whose uplifted oars looked like a grove." Admiral Bruat and Admiral Houston Stewart (grief kept away Sir Edmund Lyons) received charge of the coffin. "At the end of one of the wooden piers a crane had been erected, under which the gun-carriage was drawn; bareheaded sailors slung the coffin to the crane, hoisted it, and lowered it into the launch of the Royal Albert, destined to take it to the Caradoc, the steamer in which Lord Raglan had come from England, and which was now to take home his remains. A parting salute was fired as the boat left the pier, and we had seen the last of our kind and gallant old chief." The Caradoc then steamed away, with the touching signal “Farewell!" flying at her masthead. She arrived at Bristol on the 24th of July, and landed her sad burden, which was conveyed through a town in mourning to Badminton; and there, on the 26th, in a quiet village church, surrounded by a group of living comrades, who Lord Raglan was a happy specimen of the finer kind of British officers. Born in 1788, he entered the army in 1804, and served for some time with the 4th Dragoons. Thence he exchanged into the 43rd Foot, a regiment afterwards destined to win so many laurels in the Old Light Division. It was the good fortune of Lord Raglan, then Lord Fitzroy Somerset, to be appointed to the staff of Sir Arthur Wellesley, when he was selected for a command in the Peninsula. It was the further good fortune of Lord Fitzroy never to quit his great master from that time forward. Wellesley was nineteen years older than his youthful secretary, but he saw in the young man those qualities which make up a firm friend and a good soldier, and he kept him near him always thence |