KINGLAKE'S "CRIMEA."—VOLUMES VIL AND VIII.* [SECOND NOTICE.]
By the end of the seventh of Mr. Kinglake's volumes, the Court intrigue, and the consequent " impuissance" of the French Army, have come to an en& The form which the indictment against the French Emperor takes in the eighth volume is that of setting against the story of the impotence of Caurobert under the influence of the Tuileries, the record of P6lissier's triumph in carrying on the war exactly on the opposite principle to that designed by Louis Napoleon. The view of the Emperor, that the siege ought not to have been carried on without an invest- ment, and that, therefore, the sooner that error was corrected the better, is one so plausible that it is not surprising that he should have insisted on its being adopted and pat in execution. That, in the first instance, in order to take Sebastopol rapidly by siege, it was necessary to cut off the fortress from the resources of Russia, can hardly be disputed. But the time bad gone by when such an operation could be undertaken as preliminary to the attack. Todleben had become the assailant of the Allies, rather than the passive defender of Sebastopol. The fortress was daily growing, not diminishing in strength. No attempt could be made to march against Gortschakoff's army without placing at least 90,000 men in a defensive position to protect the works of the Allies, and their great stores of ammunition and food, from the attacks of the garrison. Moreover, the Allies had gradually accumulated the means for overwhelming the defences by artillery fire, so that to withdraw a great part of their army from the siege just when they were ready to bombard the place, would have been to throw away much work already done. Furthermore, the particular scheme on which the Emperor had set his heart, was wild and fantastic in the extreme. It would have involved launching the army into unknown and mountainous districts of which they had no maps, whore they would have been separated from the part of the army conducting the siege, which would have been exposed to the danger of a junction between Gortechakoff and the garrison, who could have together fallen upon the army left in the trenches long before assistance could have reached them. Furthermore, the Mackenzie Heights, to the north of Sebastopol, the seizure of which formed a part of the scheme, had now become a position most difficult for the Allies to secure. These heights had at one time been in their possession, during the famous flank march from Alma to the south of Sebastopol ; but it is easier to abandon ground than to recover it when its importance has come to be as well understood by the enemy as by the would-be possessor. For all these reasons, the joint decision of Pdliesier and Lord Raglan to master the southern forts of Sebastopol before they attempted any operations in the field, appears now to have been the best left open to them by the undoubted previous errors of the campaign.
At first, all went well. It is impossible not to feel the joy with which Mr. Kinglake pens such a sentence as the following: —" By the stroke of fate, thus oddly busied with its last impish freak of inversion, a metamorphosed 'Napoleon' was all at once left in the plight of that nnhonoured Directory of 1796 and the following year, which thought it could dictate in war or dictate at the least in State policy to the great Bnonaparte, and was answered from over the Alps with resistance, with scorn, and
• The invasion of the CTiMOP : 08 Origin, and an Account of its Progress dams to the Death of Lord Raglan. By A. W. Kinglake. Vol. V1I.—•'From the Morrow of Inkerman to the Fall of Canrobert." Vol. VIII.—“From the Opening of Pelissier's Command to the Death of Lord Raglan." Edinbargh and London William Blackwood and Bons. 1887.
with victory." Scarcely had P6liseier succeeded to the command, when be undertook the capture of the " Bay-head Counter- approach" and of the "Cimetiere Counter-approach," the latter to be distinguished from the " Cimetiere Lodgment] " which he had already captured during the period of Canrobert's reign over the Army. All of these alike were works that had been pushed out by Todleben against the French far in advance of the original lines of the fortress. All were successfully captured by the night of May 23rd, but not without severe losses.
Thflissier's next step was equally in disobedience to the orders of the Emperor, and far more brilliantly succesefuL He agreed to join us in the capture of Kertch, and of the batteries which closed the entrance to the Sea of Azof. That Sea giving approach to the vast stores which had been accumulated by the Czar for the support of his Crimean army at the mouth of the Don and at Eiek, Marionpol, Taganrog, and Ghenitehesk, had long been an object that our fleets were anxious to reach. Nothing had more tended to shake the cordiality of our alliance with the French than Canrobert's recall of the first expedition. Mr. Kinglake's description of the brilliant success of the second expedition is one of the moat vigorous pieces of writing in the volume. Without the loss of a man, all the ships of the Czar, nearly five hundred in all, that had taken refuge in this inland sea were destroyed. Rations for four months for one hundred thousand men, thousands of tons of coal, large numbers of heavy guns, were captured or destroyed. As an immediate consequence, the fortresses of Anapa and Soadjak-Ka16, in Circassia, were taken and dismantled. At an earlier date, such losses of stores might have exercised a decisive effect upon the siege ; but Russia had in the meantime supplied her army in the Crimea sufficiently for a year's campaign. Unfortanately, the expedition was marred by disorders on the part of some of our allies which, if we are to accept Mr. Kinglake's version as it stands, were certainly not suppressed as they ought to have been by Sir George Brown, who was in command of the expedition. As a general rule, we should be rather dis- posed to suspect Mr. Kinglake of undue partiality for any English commander rather than of the opposite tendency ; but Sir George Brown is an old enemy of Mr. Kinglake's. He fiercely resented some of Mr. Kinglake's statements in earlier volumes, and we cannot avoid an uncomfortable feeling that with Mr. Kinglake, such people are apt to have "to take the consequences." In any case, whatever excuses may be made for the difficulties of a commander in charge of a joint expedi- tion, the story is an ugly one. On the other hand, as an illus- tration of the enormous power of an English combined naval and military expedition, the incident is a moat striking one, and Mr. Kinglake presents it in the most telling form.
The third bombardment, the seizure of the two White Redoubts, and of the Kamchatka Lunette on the "Mamelou," the name by which it was familiarly known to no at home during the siege, and our own capture of " the Qaarries," cleared the way for the great bombardment of the fortress which was to precede the terrible 18th of June, the day of the attacks on the Redan and the Malakoff. Practically, these earlier opera- tions restored to the Allies the position of vantage in which they had stood immediately after Inkerman, and, except for the effects of the bombardment, they did little more. Caurobert had allowed Todleben to push forward, almost without opposi- tion, all the counter-approaches, which the Allies had now to recover at frightful sacrifice of life. The story of the resistance of the worn-oat English in the quarries, and especially of Colonel Campbell, of the 90th, and of Lord Wolseley, then a Captain in the 90th, and acting as an engineer, both of whom were so physically exhausted afterwards, that they had lost the power of speech, is one of the most dramatic that Mr. Kinglake gives us. It seems clear that a mere handful of men succeeded in the indistinct light of the morning, in so imposing upon great Russian columns of vast though uncertain numbers, that they saved the quarries from recapture when there was really no fighting power left to resist the enemy.
Mr. Kinglake makes it clear that the disastrous assaults of June 18th owed their failure to a sudden change of plan made by Pelissier, in breach of an agreement with Lord Raglan. It had been distinctly provided that two hours' bombardment at least should precede the attack of the infantry on the morning itself. A tremendous bombardment—the fourth—had occupied the previous days. Pelissier appears to have believed, from the failure at last of the Russian batteries to reply, that they were finally silenced, and that the place was ready to yield if only pressed by close assault. Under this impression, he launched his troops to the attack without waiting for the guns on the morn- ing of the 18th. As in all previous instances, Todlabel' had during the hours of the night repaired the injuries inflicted on his work. Confusion as to signals completed the disastrous failure of the French attack. Lord Raglan, fully conscious of the importance of preceding his own attack by a fresh bombard- ment, yet feared to leave the French infantry unsupported, or supported only by English guns. He therefore sent forward his infantry, only to be mowed down before they reached the parapets by the crossing fire of the batteries which Todleben had restored. The omission of the French to attack the Flag- staff Battery, which lay to the English left of the Redan, aggravated the difficulties of the operation. It is a gloomy period to have selected for the conclusion of his task, if the materials on which Mr. Kinglake has specially relied were not at an end. There seems something in itself unsatisfactory in the fact that these eight mighty volumes should not carry down the siege to its close. Lord Raglan's death, if it was not, in fact, due to the effect on his mind of June 18th, followed it so shortly afterwards that, so far as the armies are concerned, Mr. Kinglake's work ends with our failure against the Redan.
It seems almost unfair to find any fault with the very good and numerous maps with which the book is supplied; but in the name of all readers who have to study the book without knowing the geography beforehand, we must protest against the text calling a place Genitchi which the map calls Ghenitchesk, and similarly against the text calling a place Gheisk which the map calls Eisk. That want of connection between map and text represents a heresy so mischievous that it never can be lashed too freely. We have only chosen representative cases. Other- wise, the maps are excellent, and the whole get-up of the book, including the index, as good as could be wished.
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