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Updated: June 10, 2025
Through Alma fight, from the high knoll to which happy audacity had carried him he rides the whirlwind and directs the storm. In the terrible crisis which sees the Russians breaking over the crest of Inkerman, in the ill-fated attack on the Great Redan where Lacy Yea is killed, his apparent freedom from anxiety infects all around him and achieves redemption from disaster.
There was nothing else to do, and so every body went to hunting relics. They have stocked the ship with them. They brought them from the Malakoff, from the Redan, Inkerman, Balaklava every where. They have brought cannon balls, broken ramrods, fragments of shell iron enough to freight a sloop.
After Inkerman, it had been plain to the generals in command that all idea of taking Sebastopol must be abandoned until the spring, and that at the utmost they could do no more than hold their position before it. This had been rendered still more difficult by the storm, in which enormous quantities of stores, warm clothing, and other necessaries had been lost.
In his "Inkerman," a stirring ballad, which every American boy of a former age knew by heart, there was an echo of the "Lays of Ancient Rome," of the "Lays" of Scott and Aytoun, while in the more ambitious "Christine" , there was the accent of the genuine poet, something that recalled the "Christabel" of Coleridge.
As an invading body, perhaps, one would have preferred the Germans; but only because experience had taught them already what it would teach in twelve months to the Berkshire or Cambridge 'clod. There, to us, was the true test of England's military qualities; her young men had come by tens of thousands, of their own free will, to be made soldiers of by her country gentlemen, and treated by them the while as men to be educated, not as things to be compelled; not driven like sheep to the slaughter, to be disciplined by men with whom they had no bond but the mere official one of military obedience; and 'What, we ask ourselves, 'does England lack to make her a second Rome? Her people have physical strength, animal courage, that self-dependence of freemen which enabled at Inkerman the privates to fight on literally without officers, every man for his own hand.
The next incident of the siege described by Gordon occurred about a week after his baptême de feu in the caves. While the French were somewhat deliberately making at Inkerman a battery for fifteen guns, the Russians, partly in a spirit of bravado, threw up in a single night a battery for nearly twenty guns immediately opposite, at a distance of not more than 600 yards from the French.
But the middle-aged majority, and the civilian juniors including a shooting parson could talk of nothing but the War. Some of us who are old enough will recall easily their own consciousness of the universal war-cloud at this time, when reminded that the details of Inkerman were only lately to hand, and that Florence Nightingale had not long begun to work in the hospital at Scutari.
If they had died to defend commercial establishments against the indigenous inhabitants of some distant country, or to repel the attacks of a neighbor, or to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, the world would have understood and honored them, as it did in regard to the combatants of Alma and Inkerman.
Then this prompt and judicious commander proceeded to line the Victoria ridge, which faced Mount Inkerman, with the troops he had thus impounded, and galloped off to put the rest of his brigade under arms. The firing reached and roused another energetic general officer, Pennefather, who now commanded the Second Division in place of De Lacy Evans. "Sound the assembly!" he cried.
The praise bestowed, upon the British and Germans for their valor, and for the loss that proved their valor, was well deserved; but there were over one hundred and twenty regiments, Union and Confederate, each of which, in some one battle of the Civil War, suffered a greater loss than any English regiment at Inkerman or at any other battle in the Crimea, a greater loss than was suffered by any German regiment at Gravelotte or at any other battle of the Franco-Prussian war.
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