XXXIV. European Turkey was at an end. But he knew that CHAP. clever men who have taken the pains to build up a lish Govneat logical structure, do not easily allow it to be ernment. treated as unsound merely because it rests upon a sliding foundation. Without, therefore, combating the French arguments, he quietly suggested that the time which must needs elapse before the embarkation might throw new light on the probability of a renewed attack upon Turkey; and he proposed that, in the mean time, the preparations for the descent on the Crimea should be carried on with all speed. This opinion was adopted by every member of the conference. The preparations were carried on with increasing energy; and the theory that it was the duty of the Allied commanders to abandon the enterprise was never put down by argument, but left to die away uncontested. tions. Lord Raglan had been struck with the value of Preparathe French plan for landing artillery on flat lighters, and Sir Edmund Lyons and Sir George Brown were despatched to Constantinople, with instructions to do all they could towards supplying the British army with means which would answer the same purpose. They had the good fortune to be aided in their labours by Lieutenant Roberts, a man of great resource and energy, who discovered that a platform resting upon two boats might be made to serve nearly as well as one of the French lighters. How these * * Roberts had been a Master in the Navy. See the forcible exposition XXXIV. CHAP. men toiled, the world will never know, for History cannot pause to see them ransacking Constantinople and the villages of the Bosphorus in their search after carpenters and planks; but before the appointed time the whole work was done. This was not all. Sir Edmund Lyons and Sir George Brown propelled the arrangements for buying and chartering steamers, trampling down with firmness, perhaps one might say with violence, all obstacles which stood in the way. Of those obstacles one of the most formidable was what was called in those days the "official fear of "incurring responsibility." Lyons and Sir George Brown taught men that, in emergencies of this sort, they should be pursued with the fear of not doing enough, rather than with the dread of doing too much. "I cannot venture," said a cautious official "I cannot venture to give the 'price." "Then I "can," said Sir George Brown; "I buy it in my own "name!" It is thus that difficulties are conquered. When the restless Agamemnon came back into the Bay of Varna with Lyons and Sir George Brown on board, Lord Raglan was at the head of a truly British armament. He had the means, by steam-power, and at one trip, to descend upon the enemy's coast, with all his divisions of infantry, with his brigade of light cavalry, and with the whole of his field-artillery; and he would be enabled, if he landed in face of an of his services, and of his cruelly frustrated hopes, in the little work called "The Service and the Reward," by Mr Cayley. XXXIV. enemy, to bring his guns into action whilst his in- CHAP. fantry formed upon the beach. Ineffectual at the Allies the enemy. When the Allied commanders determined to execute the orders addressed to them, they saw the tempts of importance of endeavouring to veil their project from to deceive the enemy. With this view they tried to induce a belief that Odessa was to be the object of attack; but the measures which they took for this purpose were very slight and weak. To deceive the enemy by the mere spreading of a report, the first step for a general to take would be that of uttering the false word to some of his own people. That would be a difficult service for Lord Raglan to perform; and I do not believe that he ever could or ever did perform it. Another contrivance for diverting the enemy's attention from the Crimea was that of endeavouring to alarm him for his Bessarabian frontier. Partly to attain this end, and partly, as was surmised, with the more ambitious object of striking a blow at some of the Czar's retiring columns, Marshal St Arnaud moved no less than three divisions into the Dobrudja. But, in truth, all secrecy was forbidden to the Allies. The same power which dictated the expedition precluded its concealment. It was in a council of the whole people that England had resolved upon the enterprise; and what advantage there is in knowledge of an enemy's plans, that she freely gave to Russia. It might seem that for the Emperor of the French, who had shown that he was capable of the darkest CHAP. XXXIV. Fire at Cholera. secrecy in his own designs, it must have been trying to have to act with a Power which propounded her schemes in print. But, happily, he understood England, and knew something of the conditions under which she moves into action. On the 10th of August a fire broke out in the British magazines at Varna, and a large quantity of military stores was consumed. But another and more dreadful enemy had now entered the camp of the Allies. From the period of its arrival in the Levant, the French army had been suffering much from sickness. In the British army, on the contrary, though slight complaints were not unfrequent, the bodily condition of the men had been, upon the whole, very good; and so it continued up to the 19th of July. On that day, out of the whole Light Division, there were only 110 in hospital. But it seems that one of the omens which portend the visitation of a great epidemic is a more than common flush of health. With the French, the cholera first showed itself on board their troop-ships whilst passing from Marseilles to the Dardanelles. It then appeared among the French quartered at Gallipoli, and followed their battalions into Bulgaria. There its ravages increased, and before the beginning of the last week in July it reached the British army. By the 19th of August our regiments in Bulgaria had lost 532 men. But it was amongst the three French divisions marched into the Dobrudja, and especially in General Canrobert's Division, that the XXXIV. disease raged with the most deadly virulence. In CHAP. the day's march, and sometimes within the space of only a few hours, hundreds of men dropped down in the sudden agonies of cholera; and out of one. battalion alone it was said that, besides those already dead, no less than 500 sufferers were carried alive On the 8th of August it was com in the waggons. puted, by an officer of their Staff, that out of the three French divisions which marched into the Dobrudja, no less than 10,000 lay dead or struck down by sickness. If the cholera had been confined to the landforces, the Generals would not, perhaps, have allowed it to delay their embarkation; but it now reached the fleets. In a few days the crews were in such a state that all idea of attempting to embark the troops was, for the moment, quite out of the question; and on the 11th and 12th of August the Admirals put out from their anchorage, in the hope of driving away the disease with the pure breezes of But they had scarcely done this when, on board some of the ships, the mysterious pest began to rage with a violence rare in Europe. The Britannia alone lost 105 men. The number of those stricken, and of those attending upon them, was so great, that it was impracticable to carry on the common duties of the ship in the usual way; and if the disease had continued to rage with undiminished violence for three days more, there would have been the spectacle of a majestic three-decker floating help the sea. |