V.

brilliant assault and capture of the work on Can- CHAP. robert's Hill, and upon the fall of the other redoubts; could pass lightly over the conflicts which his cavalry hazarded with the Highlanders and with Scarlett's dragoons; could speak frankly of the wondrous pertinacity evinced by our Light Cavalry in its road to destruction; could state that, in the teeth of all the forces brought down by the Allies, he had persisted in holding the line of the captured redoubts; could show that he was thus pressing close upon the English camp at Balaclava; and could end by producing the captured guns and the captured standard as fit tokens of what had been achieved. Despatched from the camp of a relieving army to a beleaguered town, such a narrative as this, with the many and brilliant adornments which rumour would abundantly add, might well carry heart to the garrison; and we now know that the tidings and the trophies of the battle brought such joy and encouragement to the people defending Sebastopol as to aggravate, and aggravate heavily, the already hard task of the besiegers.

With each hour of the lapsing time from the night of the 20th of September, that store of moral power over the enemy which the Allies acquired by their victory had been almost ceaselessly dwindling; and although it be granted that, so far as concerned all those Russians who were assailed by our cavalry, or by D'Allonville's Chasseurs d'Afrique, the old spell was superbly renewed, it is yet, I think, true that with the rest of the enemy's forces, and especially in the

CHAP. lines of Sebastopol, our patience under the capture V. which deprived us of the Turkish redoubts and the

English guns which had armed them did much to destroy what was left of the ascendant obtained on the Alma.

SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.

LORD CARDIGAN.

In general, there is but little disposition on the part of the world to analyse any great feat of arms with the notion of seeing exactly how much was done by the troops, and how much by their leader. Under the ordinary and popular aspect of warlike conflicts, the actions of the chief and his soldiery are blended into one glowing picture; and since it is easier, and even more interesting to contemplate the prowess of one man than the compound deserts of a thousand, the result most commonly is that, without truly learning what guidance was given by the commander, mankind are content to assign him an enormously large share of the glory which he and his people have earned. In the instance of the Light Cavalry charge, this was the more especially likely to be the case, because the General in immediate command of the assailing troops was their actual, bodily leader. I imagine that if Lord Cardigan had remained silent, no painful scrutiny would have been ever applied to the actions of the man who rode the foremost of all between two flanking fires into the front of the twelve-gun battery, and the glory allotted to the chief would have been nearly

VOL. IV.

2 B

as free from question as the glory of his martyred brigade. But, as in the disposal of his daily life Lord Cardigan had separated himself from his troops by choosing to live in that home of comparative luxury which a well-supplied yacht could afford whilst not only his officers and men but even his immediate commander, lay always camped out in the plain, so also in the graver business of upholding his fair fame as a soldier by argument, assertion, and proof, he acted in such manner as to sever himself from that very brigade with which his renown had been blended.

Under stress of ill health, he returned to England. There, as may well be supposed, he was greeted with the wildest enthusiasm; and then began the long process by which he mismanaged his military reputation. By consenting to be made the too conspicuous and too solitary hero of public ovations; by giving to the world his own version of the famous Light Cavalry charge; by showing-he showed this quite truly— how well he had led the attack, but omitting-and there was the error of errors-to speak of that separation which I have called being 'thrown out;' by continuing in this course of action until he provoked hard attacks; by submitting to grave specified charges, or meeting them with mere personal abuse; by writing letters to newspapers; by sending complaints to the Horse Guards; by making himself the bitter antagonist of officers, nay, even of regiments, where claims for the least share of glory seemed clashing at all with his own; and finally by a process of tardy litigation exploding, after eight years of controversy, in one of the law courts at West

minster, he at length forced the world to distinguish between his brigade and himself. He forced men, if so one may speak, to decompose the whole story of the 'Light Cavalry Charge;' and one result is, that the narrator of that part of the combat which began when the chief went about, is driven against his will to an unaccustomed division of subjects, having first to go home with the leader, and then travel back to the fight. In such conditions, it is not possible to do real justice by merely saying what happened. would be cruel, and wrong to speak dryly of Lord Cardigan's retreat without giving his justification. Accordingly, at the very moment of narrating his retreat I began to show how he defended it; and I now think it right to impart the nature of his justification with more fulness than could well be allowed me whilst yet in the midst of the story.

It

So long as he moved down the valley under the guidance of what he understood to be an assigned duty, no danger seemed to appal him, and of a certainty none bent him aside from his course. That which afterwards baffled him was something more perturbing than mere danger to one whose experience had been military without being warlike. What he encountered was an emergency. Acting apparently with the full persuasion that the leadership of his first line was the one task before him, he all at once found that of that first line he could see nothing, except some horsemen in retreat, and already a good way up the valley.* It did not, it seems, appear to him that

* That the theory was no mere afterthought, and that Lord Cardigan really considered the leadership of the first line as the one task before