At the same time there were arriving on our left 65o men of the Light Division, and a battery from the Fourth Division, raising Pennefather's force on the field to exactly 36oo men and eighteen field-guns.

About 400 of Buller's men (88th), which had at first passed over the crest, fell back before the Russian masses, and three guns of the battery which was following them fell into the enemy's hands. At the same time the Russian column in the ravine, after surprising a picket of the Light Division, was making its way to the plateau in rear of our line, and close to our camp, by a glen which led in that direction.

It was only just in time that Buller himself arrived with the remainder of his 650 men (77th), who were at once pushed into the fight. Part of them attacked the head of the turning co umn just emerging from the glen, while a company of the Guards, on picket on the other bank, fired on it from thence, and the column, which had so nearly attained to success that might have been decisive, was driven back, and appeared no more on the field, Soimonoff's right battalion, advancing on the plateau, was encountered by a wing of the 47th, spread out in skirmishing order on a wide front, which harassed it by so destructive a fire that it broke up and retreated, and two other battalions of the same regiment (the same which had just captured our guns) came to a halt, having before them the troops which had pursued the Russian battalions that first met us to the slope of Shell Hill, and had then fallen back.

Passing these on the right, Buller's companies (260 men of the 77th) entered the fight, met two Russian battalions, fired, charged, and drove them quite off the field. Seeing this discomfiture of their comrades going on so near, the other battalions just spoken of as halted on our left of these, followed them in their retreat, leaving the captured guns to be recovered by our men. It was about this time that Soimonoff was killed. On our side General Buller was disabled by a cannon shot which killed his horse.

Five of the twelve battalions, besides that other which attacked first, and the turning column in the ravine, were thus accounted for. Seven of Soimonoff's still remained. One of these diverged to the Russian left, where it joined part of Pauloff's forces, then arriving on the field.

The remaining six advanced by both sides of the post-road upon our centre, and were defeated like the rest, partly by the close fire of the battery on our left of the post-road (that on the right had been silenced by the fire from Shell Hill), partly by the charge and pursuit of some companies of the 49th, and the pickets which had halted here, and which held the ground beside the guns.

The part of Pauloff's corps, eight battalions, which preceded the rest had meanwhile crossed the head of the Quarry ravine, and, picking up the stray battalion of Soirnonoff, and raising the whole force employed by the two generals in the first attack to twenty battalions, numbering 15,000 men, made a simultaneous but distinct onset. They had formed opposite our right, their left on the Sandbag Battery, their right across the post, road where it enters the Quarry ravine.

The four battalions composing the regiment on the right had begun to approach the Barrier) when a wing of the 3oth, 200 strong, sprang over it, and charged with the bayonet the two leading battalions. A short and very serious conflict ensued-many of our men and officers were shot down ; but the charge proved decisive, and the leading battalions, hurrying back in disorder, carried the two others (of the same regiment) with them, and the whole were swept off the field, some towards Shell Hill, some down the Quarry ravine to the valley.

Finally, it remained to deal with the five battalions still left of the attacking force. Against these advanced the 41st regiment, under its brigadier, Adams, numbering 525 men. Approaching from the higher ground of the Fore Ridge, the regiment, in extended order, opened fire on the 4000 Russians before it, drove them over the declivities, and from the edge pursued them with its fire till they reached and descended the bank of the Tchernaya.

Thus, in open ground, affording to the defenders none of the defensive advantages, walls, hedges, or enclosures of any kind, which most battlefields have been found to offer, these 15,000 Russians had been repulsed by less than a fourth of their numbers. But, in truth, to say they were repulsed very inadequately expresses what happened to them in the encounter.

All the battalions which did not retreat without fighting left the field so shattered and disorganised, and with the loss of so many officers, that they were not again brought into the fight. This was in great measure owing to the density of the formations in which the Russians moved, and the audacity with which our slender bodies attacked them. Seeing the British come on so confidently, on a front of such extent as no other European troops would, at that time, have formed without very substantial forces behind them, the Russians inferred the existence of large numbers, and remained convinced that they had been forced from the field by masses to which their own were greatly inferior.

This was a moral effect; but there was also a material cause conducing to the result. The Russian riflemen, as we soon had good reason to know, were armed with a weapon quite equal to our Minie; but the mass of the infantry still wielded a musket not superior to the old Brown Bess firelock, which the Minie had replaced, whereas our troops, except those of the Fourth Division, had the rifle.

Therefore, long before a Russian column had got near enough to make its fire tell, it began to suffer from a fire that was very destructive, not only because of the longer range and more effective aim, but because the bullets were propelled with a force capable of sending them through more than one man's body. But these reasons are merely palliative; nothing can veil the fact that, supported by an overwhelming artillery, which frequently reduced ours to silence, these great bodies, once launched on their career, ought by their mere impetus to have everywhere penetrated our line; and that had even a part been well led, and animated by such a spirit as all nations desire to attribute to their fighting men, they would never have suffered themselves to be stopped and turned by the imaginary enemies which the mist might hide, or which the intrepid, gallant, audacious bearing of our single line caused them to believe might be following in support of it.

New Stage of Action

It was half-past seven when this stage of the action was finished, and a new one commenced with the arrival on the scene of General Dannenberg. All Pauloffs battalions were now ranged on Mount Inkerman, and with those of Soimonoff which had previously been held in reserve, and were still untouched, raised the number of fresh troops with which he could recommence the battle to 19,000 infantry and 90 guns. Ten thousand of these were now launched against our position, but this time they were massed for the attack chiefly in and about the Quarry ravine, and, neglecting our left, bore against our centre and right, upon which also was now turned the weight of the cannonade. The reason for this, no doubt, was that closer co-operation might be maintained with Gortschakoff, whose troops had extended down the valley till their right was nearly opposite the right of our position, and who, in case of Dannenberg's success in that quarter, might at once lend a hand to him.

At the same time Pennefather also had received reinforcements. The Guards, turning out at the sounds of battle, had now reached the position; so had the batteries of the First Division ; and Cathcart was approaching with 2100 men of his Division, set free by the absence of any sign of attack upon the siege works.

The troops which had at first so successfully de. fended the Barrier had been compelled, by the large bodies moving round their flanks, to fall back, and the Russians held it for a time. But these were driven out. and the barrier was reoccupied by detachments of the 21st, 63d, and Rifles, when, from its position, closing the post road, it continued to be a point of great importance. The troops there, reinforced from time to time, held- it throughout the battle, repelling all direct attacks upon it; and it is a singular fact that the enemy's masses, in their subsequent onsets, passed it by, both in advancing and retreating, without making any attempt upon it from the rear.

The first attack was made on Adams, with five Russian battalions, numbering about 4000 against the 700 that opposed them, and took place on the slopes of the Fore Ridge, and about the Sandbag Battery. The Guards, already on the crest, were moved to the support of Adams.

Whether the troops of Pauloff were superior in quality, or better led, or whether the lifting of the fog revealed their own superiority in number, the spirit they displayed was incomparably fiercer and more resolute than had yet marked the attack. The conflicts of the first stage of the battle had been child's play compared with the bloody struggle of which the ground between the Fore Ridge and the edge of the cliffs east of it were now the scene.

Useless for defence on either side, the Sandbag Battery may be regarded as a sort of symbol of victory conventionally adopted by both, leading our troops to do battle on the edge of the steeps, and the enemy to choose the broken and difficult ground on which this arbitrary standard reared itself to view for a main field of combat. Although the disparity of numbers was now diminished, the Russians, instead of shrinking from difficulties which their own imaginations rendered insurmountable, or accepting a repulse as final, swarmed again and again to the encounter, engaging by groups and individuals in the closest and most obstinate combats, till between the hostile lines rose a rampart of the fallen men of both sides.

For a long time the part played by the defenders was strictly defensive ; with each repulse the victors halted on the edge of the steeps, preserving some continuity of front with which to meet the next assault, while the recoiling crowds, unmolested by pursuit, and secured from fire by the abruptness of the edge, paused at a short distance below to gather fresh coherence and impetus for a renewal of the struggle.

It was with the arrival of Cathcart, conducting part of the Fourth Division, that the combat assumed a new phase. Possessed with the idea of the decisive effect which an attack on their flank must exercise on troops that, however strong they might still be in numbers, had already suffered so many rebuffs, he descended the slope beyond the right of our line.

The greater part of his troops had already been cast piecemeal into the fight in other parts of the field where succour was most urgently needed, but about 4oo men remained to him with which to make the attempt. And at first it was eminently effective, insomuch that Cathcart congratulated his brigadier, Torrens, then lying wounded, on the success of this endeavour to take the offensive. But that success was now to be turned into disaster by an event which it was altogether beyond Cathcart's province or power to foresee.

While advancing in the belief that he was in full co-operation with our troops on the cliff, he was suddenly assailed by a body of the enemy from the heights he had just quitted, and which had either turned or broken through that part of our front which he was endeavouring to relieve from the stress of numbers. Thus taken in reverse, his troops, scattered on the rugged hillside, suffered heavily, only regaining the position in small, broken bodies, and with the loss of their commander, who was shot dead.

This effort of Cathcart's changed the restrained character of the defence, and was the first of numerous desultory onsets, which left the troops engaged in them far in advance, and broke the continuity of the line. For the downward movement had spread from right to left along the front; the heights of the Fore Ridge, left bare of the defenders, were occupied by Russians ascending the ravine beyond their left ; and our people, thus intercepted, had to edge past the enemy, or to cut their way through.

The right of our position seemed absolutely without defence; a body of Russian troops was moving unopposed along the Fore Ridge, apparently about to push through the vacant corner of the position, when, in order to enclose our fragments, it formed line to its left, facing the edge of the cliffs. It was while it stood thus that a French regiment, lately arrived, and thus far posted at the English end of the Fore Ridge, advanced, took the Russians in flank, and drove them back into the gorges from whence they had issued.

Next Attack

The next attack was made by the Russians with the same troops, diminished by their losses to 6000 men, while the Allies numbered 5000. The disparity in infantry for the actual encounter (for the Russian rcserve of 9000 was still held back) was thus rapidly diminishing, but the enemy preserved his great predominance in artillery. Again the hundred guns, which by this time they had in action, swept our crest throughout its extent.

The right of our position, from the head of the Quarry ravine to the Sandbag Battery, was now held by some of our rifles, and by a French battalion. Leaving these on their left, the enemy's columns issued from the Quarry ravine, and this time pushed along the post-road against our centre and left.

Two of their regiments (eight battalions) were extended in first line, in columns of companies; behind came the main column, composed of the four battalions of the remaining regiment. This advance was more thoroughly pushed home, and with greater success, than any other which they attempted throughout the day. They once more made their right the head of the attack, and with it penetrated our line on the side of the Careenage ravine, drove back the troops there, and took and spiked some of our guns.

The other parts of their front line, coming up successively to the crest, held it for a brief interval, while the main column, passing by our troops at the Barrier, moved on in support. But meanwhile, before it reached the crest, the regiments of the front line had been driven off by a simultaneous advance of French and English, and, after suffering great loss, the main column also retired. It was pressed by the Allied troops, part of whom reinforced those already at the head of the Quarry ravine, while the French regiment, which had defended the centre, moving to its right, took up, with the other already there, the defence of the ground where the Guards had fought. Here the French had yet another struggle to maintain, and with varying fortunes, for once they entirely lost the advanced ground they had held; but their last reinforcements arriving, they finally drove the Russians immediately opposed to them not only off that part of our front, but off the field.

It was now eleven o'clock, and the battle, though not ended, was already decided. For not only had the Allies, after deducting losses, 4700 English and 7000 French infantry on the field, against the broken battalions and the 9000 unused infantry of Dannenberg's reserve, but the balance of artillery power, for long so largely against us (the Allies had in action at the close only thirty-eight English and twenty-four French fieldguns) had now been for some time in our favour.

At half-past nine the two famous eighteen-pounders had appeared on the field. Forming part of the siege train, they had as yet been left in the depot near the First Division camp, and were now dragged on to the field by 150 artillerymen. Their projectile was not much larger than that of the heavy Russian pieces; but the long, weighty iron gun, with its heavy charge, was greatly more effective in aim and velocity. The two, though not without heavy losses in men, spread devastation among the position batteries on Shell Hill and the lighter batteries on its slopes; while two French batteries of horse-artillery, passing over the crest on the right of our guns, had established themselves on the bare slope fronting the enemy, and had there gallantly maintained themselves under a shattering fire.

For long this combat of artillery was maintained on both sides, though with manifestly declining power on the part of the enemy, while our skirmishers, pressing forward on the centre and left, made such way that they galled the Russian gunners with their bullets.

The menace of an attack by Gortschakoff on the heights held by Bosquet had not been without its effect. For an hour, while the real fight was taking place at Inkerman, the French troops were kept in their lines. At the end of that time Bosquet sent two battalions from Bourbaki's Brigade, and two troops of horseartillery, to the windmill on the road near the Guards' camp, and accompanied them himself. He was there met by Generals Brown and Cathcart, to whom he offered the aid of these troops, and expressed his readiness in case of need to bring up others.

The generals took the strange, almost unaccountable, course of telling him that his support was not needed, and asking him to send his battalions to watch the ground on the right of the Guards' camp left vacant by the withdrawal of the Guards to take part in the battle. Bosquet had thereupon returned to his own command; but receiving fresh and pressing communication from Lord Raglan victory, which could scarcely have been bought too dear. A real attack would undoubtedly have kept Bosquet from parting with his troops; Dannenberg, in their absence, would have penetrated our line, and opened the road to the valley, when Gortschakoff would have joined him on the Upland.

It was in expectation of such an effort on Gortschakoff's part that Dannenberg remained on the field long after he had abandoned the intention of resuming his independent attacks. He held his ground, though suffering heavy losses, trusting that the storming of the heights lately held by the French, but now comparatively bare of troops, would open a road for him, and straining his ear for the sound of his colleague's guns on the Upland.

At last the decline of the autumn day forced him to begin that retreat which the declivities in his rear rendered so tedious and so perilous, encumbered as he was by a numerous and disorganised artillery. Canrobert has been blamed for not attacking him with the Sooo troops he had assembled on the field, the greater part still unused ; and doubtless had the French general taken a bold offensive, the enemy's defeat would have become a signal disaster. But if Dannenberg was looking towards Gortschakoff, so, no doubt, was Canrobert.

He could not but remember that the 20,000 troops whom he had watched so anxiously in the morning were still close at hand in order of battle ; the policy he had declared at Balaklava of restricting himself to covering the siege, no matter what successes a bold aggression might promise, governed him now; and this seems, in the case of a gallant, quick. spirited man like Canrobert--one, too, whom we had often found so loyal an ally--a more plausible explanation of his almost passive attitude at the close of the battle, than either a defect of resolution or a disinclination to aid his colleague.

This extraordinary battle closed with no final charge nor victorious advance on the one side, no desperate stand nor tumultuous flight on the other. The Russians, when hopeless of success, seemed to melt from the lost field; the English were too few and too exhausted, the French too little confident in the advantage gained, to convert the repulse into rout. Nor was there among the victors the exaltation of spirit which usually follows the gain of a great battle, for the stress of the conflict had been too prolonged and heavy to allow of quick reaction.

The gloom of the November evening seemed to overspread with its influence not only the broken battalions which sought the shelter of the fortress, but the wearied occupants of the hardly-contested ground, and descended on a field so laden with carnage that no aspect of the sky could deepen its horrors. Especially on the slopes between the Fore Ridge and the cliffs had death been busy; men lay in swathes there, as if mown down, insomuch that it was often impossible to ride through the lines and mounds of the slain.

Of these, notwithstanding that the Allies, especially the English, had lost heavily in proportion to their numbers, an immense and almost unaccountable majority were Russians; so that of no battle in which our nation has been engaged since Agincourt could it be more truly said,

"When, without stratagem,
But in plain shock, and even play of battle,
Was ever known so great and little loss,
On one part and on th' other? Take it, God,
For it is only thine!"

The Russian losses in the battle were four times as great as the number of the troops with which the Second Division met the first attack. They lost 12,000, of which an immense proportion were left dead on the field, and 256 officers. The English lost 597, of whom thirty-nine officers, killed, and 1760, of whom ninetyone officers, wounded ; the French, thirteen officers and 130 men killed, and thirty-six officers and 750 men wounded.

The present writer does not doubt that Darmenberg's plan of attacking by both sides of the Careenage ravine was the right one. It is true that to have attacking troops divided by an obstacle is a great disadvantage. It is also true, as Kinglake says, that "the camps of the Allies were so placed on the Chersonese that, to meet perils threatening from the western side of the Careenage ravine, they could effect a rapid concentration."

But they could only effect it by robbing the eastern side of what was indispensable for its defence. If, instead of one part of the enemy's army attacking while the other was coming up in its rear, and therefore exercising no effect upon the battle, both had attacked simultaneously, it is hardly credible that one (and if one, both) would not have broken through. And if it is a disadvantage that the front of attack should be divided by an obstacle, it is a still greater evil to restrict the attack, especially against very inferior numbers, to too confined a space. By crowding on to the eastern slope only, in numbers amply sufficient to have attacked both, the Russians were choosing the ground which best suited our numbers and our circumstances, and which least suited their own.

It has been already remarked that as the mode of fighting the action by us differed radically from that of the 26th of October, so did the circumstances on the two days. On the 26th we had a great superiority in artillery, and plenty of room on the crest for the eighteen guns and the small force of infantry.

On the 5th November nearly half of our narrow position was occupied by the line of batteries. Where, then, were the infantry to be posted? Were they to be close in rear of the batteries ? Then the tremendous fire of the enemy would have swept the crest with double effect, ravaging both guns and infantry. If posted in front of the guns, the result would be the same, with the additional disadvantage that our guns would be firing over the heads of our infantry.

By pushing the troops down the slope, they met the enemy before their columns could issue from the ravines and deploy; and even on the extreme right we are by no means certain that to encounter them on the ledge near the Sandbag Battery (a mode of action which Mr Kinglake laments as false policy) was not the best way of dealing with the ground, for if we had withdrawn our line there to the main crest, and left the space between the cliff and the Fore Ridge unoccupied, the Russians, after ascending to the ledge, would have been able to take breath beneath its shelter before gaining the plateau, and when there they would have had the opportunity of solving what was one of their great difficulties throughout the day, namely, finding open space to deploy on at a certain distance from our front.

As it was, they came up rugged steeps, in disorder and under fire, to close with us still uphill, while yet breathless with the ascent, and here consequently occurred their severest losses. On the whole, therefore, the manner in which our troops fought the battle may be thought to have been very fortunately adapted to the topography of the field, and to the proportions of the contending forces.

It is natural that a Russian chronicler should seek to extenuate this defeat, and we will not greatly blame Todleben for increasing the strength of the English, in the first phase of the combat, to 11,585 (more than trebling their actual force), for laying great stress on the "fieldworks" which strengthened the position, and for claiming successes which, in some mysterious way that he does not elucidate, were turned into disasters.

In his visit to the field, in 1869, Mr Kinglake found the Sandbag Battery still there--very likely it is there now-- and his detailed account of it is sufficiently exact. But he and other chroniclers advert to it, when describing the combats of which the area around it was the scene, in terms which would convey to those who have never seen it an altogether exaggerated idea of its importance, and even of its size; and Todleben not only describes a Russian regiment 3000 strong as fighting desperately with our Coldstrearns for the possession of it, but as capturing nine pieces of artillery "as the prize of this brilliant feat of arms"; some of which, that imaginative chronicler tells us, were carried off by the victors, and the rest spiked.

It is true that some hours later in the day one French gun was carried off from this part of the field, and was afterwards recovered in a ravine, so the Russian historian could at least plead that his version is not in this case, as it is in some others, absolutely without foundation. But all this gives to the battery an importance quite fictitious.

It was simply a wall of earth, several feet thick and twelve paces long, with two embrasures cut in it, the parapet, elsewhere considerably taller than a man's head, sloping rapidly for a few feet at each end. Behind it might have stood, in two ranks, thirty-six men in all, of whom twenty, ten of each rank, might have been able to fire through the embrasures and over the ends, while the other sixteen would have been better employed elsewhere.

It was conspicuous from its height and position, and the enemy, seeing it from below, might easily have imagined it more formidable than it was; but how could 3000 men be employed in attacking, or a battalion such as the Coldstreams in defending it ? Sixty men would have been an ample number wherewith to assail it. As for the intrenchments on each side of the road, a common bank and ditch, such as those which generally border our fields, would have been incomparably stronger for defence. Yet Todleben speaks of this useless mound, and these insignificant banks, as " the enemy's works," and another Russian writer says, " in spite of the accumulated forces of the enemy, our columns succeeded in occupying his batteries and fortifications.*

(* It is just possible that these writers may have supposed that some of the works placed on that ground long afterwards, were there at the time of the battle.)

The truth is that few battlefields have been so devoid of obstacles of this kind as that of Inkerman. The difficulties of the attack lay in the hindrance which the coppice and crags opposed to regulated advances and deployments, though, on the other hand, these objects afforded to the enemy the not inconsiderable advantage of sheltering his skirmishers.

Ardent Interest on the Home Front

Those who were children at the time of the Crimean War can scarcely realise how ardent, how anxious, how absorbing was the interest which the nation felt for the actors in that distant field, insomuch that Mr Bright, theoretically a man of peace, publicly said he believed there were thousands in England who only laid their heads on their pillows at night to dream of their brethren in the Crimea.

This feeling reached its climax with the news of Inkerman, and it was not, nor indeed could it be, in excess of the magnitude of the stake which depended on the issue of that battle. The defeat of that slender Division on its ridge would have carried with it consequences absolutely tremendous. The Russians, arriving on the Upland, where the ground was bare, and the slopes no longer against them, would have interposed an army in order of battle between our trenches and Bosquet's corps.

As they moved on, disposing by their mere impetus of any disjointed attempts to oppose thern, they would have reached a hand to Gortschakoff on the one side, to the garrison of Sebastopol on the other, till the reunited Russian Army, extended across the Chersonese, would have found on those wide plains a fair field for its great masses of cavalry and artillery.

To the Allies, having behind them only the sea- cliffs, or the declivities leading to their narrow harbours, defeat would have been absolute and ruinous; and behind such defeat lay national degradation. On the other hand, when the long crisis of the day was past, the fate of Sebastopol was already decided.

It is true that our misfortunes grew darker and darker, that six weeks afterwards most of the horses that charged at Balaklava. were rotting in a sea of mud, most of the men who fought at Inkerman filling hospitals at Scutari, or graves on the plain. Any history of the war would be incomplete that failed to record, as a main and characteristic feature of it, the extraordinary misery which the besieging armies endured. Nevertheless, when Inkerman had proved that the Russians could not beat us in battle, we were sure to win, because it was impossible for us to embark in presence of the enemy.

We could do nothing else but keep our hold; and, keeping it, it was matter of demonstration that the Powers which held command of the sea must prevail over the Power whose theatre of war was separated from its resources by roadless deserts. Such were the consequences which hung in the balance each time that the Russian columns came crowding on, while their long lines of artillery swept the ridge; and it is not amiss that the nation, which sometimes gives its praise so cheaply, should be reminded how much it owed that day to the steadfast men of Inkerman.

Chapter VIII: The Hurricane and the Winter