The French commanders were not hampered by the muzzled Paris Press, which had long since ceased to utter any but dictated sentiments;they suffered even more disastrously from the imperious interference of the Tuileries. Canrobert's inaction, mutability, sudden alarms, flagrant breaches of faith, were inexplicable until long afterwards, when the fall of the Empire disclosed the secret instructions - disloyal to his allies and ruinous to the campaign -by which Louis Napoleon shackled his unhappy General. In Canrobert's successor, Pelissier, he met his match. For the first time a strong man headed the French army. Short of stature, bull-necked and massive in build, with grey hair, long dark moustache, keen fiery eyes, his coarse rough speech masking tested brain power and high intellectual culture, he brought new life to the benumbed French army, new hope to Lord Raglan. The duel between the resolute general and the enraged Emperor is narrated with a touch comedy. All that Lord Raglan desired, all that the Emperor forbade, Pelissier was stubbornly determined to accomplish; the siege should be pressed at once, the city taken at any cost, the expedition to Kertch resumed. Once only, under torment of the Emperor's reproaches and the Minister at War's remonstrances, his resolution and his nerve gave way; eight days of failing judgment issued in the Karabelnaya defeat, the severest repulse which the two armies had sustained; but the paralysis passed away, he showed himself once more eager to act in concert with the English general;- when the long-borne strain of disappointment and anxiety sapped at last Lord Raglan's vital forces, and the hard fierce Frenchman stood for upwards of an hour beside his dead colleague's bedside, "crying like a child."The lieutenants of Lord Raglan in the Crimea have long since passed away, but in artistic epical presentment they retain their place around him. Airey, his right hand from the first disembarkation at Kalamita Bay, strong-willed, decisive, ardent, thrusting away suspense and doubt, untying every knot, is vindicated by his Chief against the Duke of Newcastle's wordy inculpation in the severest despatch perhaps ever penned to his official superior by a soldier in the field. Colin Campbell, with glowing face, grey kindling eye, light, stubborn, crisping hair, leads his Highland brigade tip the hill against the Vladimir columns, till "with the sorrowful wail which bursts from the brave Russian infantry when they have to suffer loss," eight battalions of the enemy fall back in retreat.
Lord Lucan, tall, lithe, slender, his face glittering and panther-like in moments of strenuous action, wins our hearts as he won Kinglake's, in spite of the mis-aimed cleverness and presumptuous self-confidence which always criticised and sometimes disobeyed the orders of his Chief. General Pennefather, "the grand old boy," his exulting radiant face flashing everywhere through the smoke, his resonant innocuous oaths roaring cheerily down the line, sustains all day the handful of our troops against the tenfold masses of the enemy. Generous and eloquent are the notices of Korniloff and Todleben, the great sailor and the great engineer, the soul and the brain of the Sebastopol defence. The first fell in the siege, the second lived to write its history, to become a valued friend of Kinglake, to explore and interpret in his company long afterwards the scenes of struggle; his book and his personal guidance gave to the historian what would otherwise have been unattainable, a clear knowledge of the conflict as viewed from within the town.
The pitched battlefields of the campaign were three, Alma, Balaclava, Inkerman. The Alma chapter is the most graphic, for there the fight was concentrated, offering to a spectator by Lord Raglan's side a COUP D'OEIL of the entire action. The French were by bad generalship virtually wiped out; for Bosquet crossed the river too far to the right, Canrobert was afraid to move without artillery, Prince Napoleon and St. Arnaud's reserves were jammed together in the bottom of the valley. We see, as though on the spot, the advance, irregular and unsupported, of Codrington's brigade, their dash into the Great Redoubt and subsequent disorderly retreat; the enemy checked by the two guns from Lord Raglan's knoll and by the steadiness of the Royal Fusiliers; the repulse of the Scots Fusiliers and the peril which hung over the event; then the superb advance of Guards and Highlanders up the hill, thin red line against massive columns, which determined finally the action.
