The Press. — London, England, 1855-09-29 00:00:00

SEA. 29, 1855. he ;ea* eouldi anything with such supports as he could afford, and said he might take the Royals, who were then in the parallel. " Let the officers come out in front—let to advance in order, and if the men keep their formation the Redan is ours," was the colonel's reply; but he spoke too late—for at that very Moment our men were seen leap• fog down into the ditch, or running down the parapet of ie salient, and through the embrasures out of the work into the ditch, while the Russians followed them with the bayonet and With heavy musketry, and even threw stones and grape-shot at them as they lay in the ditch. The fact was that the Russians having accumulated several thousands of men behind the breastwork, and seeing our men all scattered up and confused behind the inner parapet of the traverse, crossed the breastwork, through which several field-pieces were now playing with grape on the inner face of the Redan, and charged our broken groups with the bayonet, at the same time that the rear ranks, getting on the breastwork, poured a heavy hail of bullets on them over the heads of the advancing column. The struggle that took place was short, desperate, and bloody. Our soldiers, taken at every disadvantage, met the enemy with the bayonet too, and isolated combats took place in which the brave fellows who stood their ground had to defend themselves against three or four adversaries at once. In this melee the officers, armed only with their swords, had little chance; nor had those who carried pistols much opportunity of using them in such a rapid contest. They fell like heroes, and many a gallant soldier with them. The bodies of English and Russians inside the Redan, locked in an embrace which death could not relax, but had rather cemented all the closer, lay next day inside the Redan as evidences of the terrible animosity of the struggle. But the solid weight of the advancing mass, urged on, and fed each moment from the rear by company after company and battalion after battalion, prevailed at last against the isolated and disjointed band, who had abandoned the protection of unanimity of courage and had lost the advantages of discipline and obedience. As though some giant rock had advanced into the sea and forced back the waters that buffeted it, so did the Russian columns press down against the spray of soldiery which fretted their edge with fire and steel and contended in vain against their weight. The struggling band was forced back by the enemy, who moved on crushing friend and foe beneath their solid tramp, and, bleeding, panting, and exhausted, our men lay in heaps in the ditch beneath the parapet, sheltered themselves behind atones and in bomb orateis in the slope of the work, or tried to pass back to our advanced parallel and sap, and had to run the gauntlet or a tremendous fire. Many of them lost their lives, or were seriously wounded in this attempt. The scene in the ditch was appalling, although some of the officers have assured me that they and the men were laughing at the precipitation with which many brave and gallant fellows did not hesitate from plunging headlong upon the mass of bayonets, muskets and sprawling soldiers—the ladder■ were all knocked down or broken, so that it was difficult for the men to get up at the other side, and the dead, the dying, the wounded, and the sound were all lying in heaps together. The Russians came out of the embrasures, plied them with stones, grape-shot, and the bayonet, but were soon forced to retire by the tire of our batteries and rifle men, and under cover of this fire many of our men es caped to the approaches. General Pelissier observed the failure of our attack from the rear of the Malakoff, and sent over to General Simpson to ask if he intended to at tack again. The English Commander-in-Chief is reported to have replied that he did not then feel in a condition to do so. All this time the Guards and Highlanders, the third and fourth divisions, and moat of the reserves were untouched. They could, indeed, have furnished materials for another assault, but the subsequent movements of the Russians render it doubtful whether the glory of carrying the Redan, and of redeeming the credit of our arms, would not have been dearly purchased by the effusion of more ♦aluable blood. _ _ As soon as we abandoned the assault the firing almost ceased along our front, but in the rear of the Malakoff there was a fierce contest going on between masses of Russians, now released from the Redan, or drawn from the town, and the French inside the work; and the fight for the Little Redan, on the proper left of the Malakoff, was raging furiously. Clouds of smoke and dust covered the scene, but the rattle of musketry was incessant, and betokened the severe nature of the struggle below. Through the breaks in the smoke there could be seen now and then a tricolour, surmounted by an eagle, fluttering bravely over the inner parapet of the Malakoff. The storm of battle rolled fiercely round it, and beat against it; but it was sustained by strong arms and stout hearts, and all the assaults of the enemy were directed in vain against it. We could see, too, oar noble allies swarming over into the Malakoff from their splendid approaches to it from the Mamelon, or rushing with swift steps towards the right, where the Russians, continually reinforced, sought in vain to beat back their foes and to regain the key of their posi tion. The struggle was full of interest to us all, but its issue was never doubted. It would be untrue to say that the result of our assault was not the source of deep grief and mortification to us, which all the glorious successes of our allies could not wholly alleviate.—Times Cor. In a later letter, the same writer more particularly notices the want of reinforcements : At the first rush, had Colonel Windham been able to get a handful of men together to charge at the breastwork, the few Russians theta must have been routed, and by the time their reinforcements came up our men would have been able to reverse the face of the breastwork, and to close the Redan to their assailants. The salient was held by our men one hour and fifty-six miuutes ! Colonel Eman, one of the very best officers in this army—a man of singular calmness and bravery, who was beloved by his regiment, his officers and men, and whose loss is lamented by all who knew him—was shot through the lungs as he was getting his men in order. Hia sword-arm was uplifted over his head at the time, and it was thought his lungs were unity THE PRESS. jured. The surgeon, when he was carried back, told him so, but he knew too well such hopes were vain. " I feel lam bleeding internally," he said, with a sad smile. He died that night. The 30th Regiment was formed in the fourth parallel left in front, on the right of the 55th, and when the storming party moved out of the fifth parallel the supports occupied it, and were immediately ordered to ad vance on the salient angle of the Redan by three companies at a time from the left. The distance from the place in which they were posted up to the salient considerably ex ceeded two hundred yards, and as the men had to cut across as quickly as they could in order to escape the raking fire of grape, and support the regiments in front, they were breathless when they arrived al the ditch. When they ar rived, all blown by their double, they found only two scaling ladders at the scarp, and two more at the other side to climb up to the parapet. They got over, however, and ascended the face of the Redan. fly the time the supports got up the Russians were pushing up their reserves in great force, and had already got some fiektpieces up to the breastwork, and the regiment, falling into the train of all around them instead of advancing, began to fire from the parapet and upper traverses till all their ammunition was exhausted, when they commenced pelting the Russians with stones. In this condition there were no attempt, being made to move the reserves whatever, while the Russians ac cumulated mass after mass upon them from the open ground in rear of the Redan, and deployed their columns on the breastwork, whence they delivered a severe fire upon us. The whole garrison of the Malakoff and their supporta also came down on the left flank of the Redan and added to oar assailants; and indeed there was reason to fight, for the possession of the Redan would have destroyed the enemy's chance of escape. In this gallant regiment there were sixteen o ffi cers, twentythree sergeants, etc., and 384 privates; on marching down to the trenches one officer was killed and ten were wounded, six sergeants were wounded, forty-one privates were killed and 101 privates were wounded, and two officers and six privates have since died of their wounds. The w.lnt of reserves at band is also distinctly in dicated by correspondents of the Daily News, as in the following paragraph : As usual the whole affair was wretchedly managed, and great many lives sacrificed uselessly. The reserves were too far back—in fact, nearly upon the camp, and nearly an hour's march from the scene of action. General Simpson was ill, and sat wrapped up in a capotc in an arm-chair in the Green-hill Battery. So was General Bernard. The as saulting column rushed bravely forward, were decimated by grape in going up the slope, crossed the ditch, mounted the parapet, and found inside a second ditch or covered way, and behind it another parapet armed with field-pieces vomiting grape, and then three lines of infantry—the first rank kneeling with the bayonet presented as if receiving cavalry, and the other two firing over their heads—were repulsed, but the supports, instead of riving them time to rally, rau up Loo soon, got mingled in the retreating crowd, and after that the whole was a scene of horrible confusion. For three mortal hours the men remained on the parapet, penetrated twice into the interior, to be massacred use lessly in detail, but no efforts of the officers could induce them to go forward and fling themselves on the enemy en masse, because the soldiers were not men, but mere boys just come out, without either physical strength or moral pluck, or discipline to make up for the want of them. In the same journal it is broadly stated that with adequate support the Redan would have been ours : inevitably repulsed as they were, our shattered com• panies were compelled to fall back on the trench which they had left ; and to regain this, they had to pass through the same terrible storm of fire as before. had they, indeed, been properly supported, this second ordeal would have been spared them ; and, in spite of all its grape and canister, the liedan would, without doubt, have been our own. To every at- tempt at repeating the attack the same formidable front was shown ; and, cut up as they had been in their first essay, it was not to be wondered at that our young troops, many of whom were under direct fire for the first time, shrank from a second exposure to the desolating storm. The weakness of the assaulting columns is also in sisted on in this correspondence : Granting the necessity of attacking the liedan, there were manifestly many mistakes in the way in which tt was attempted to be carried out. The assaulting columns were too weak, and on reaching the work, instead of trusting to the bayonet to drive all before them, they directed a musket fire from behind the parapets against the enemy, who had retired behind their intrenchmenta, as if it were an affair of the advanced parallels in the trenches. The supporta were brought up without method or order, and, on reaching the assaulting parties, crowded up to them in a mass, instead of waiting wherever they might be most safe from fire—in the ditch for example—until they were required to move for• ward. The consequence was, con fUsion became rampant, the different regiments were mixed together ; there was no head to order or direct, and much unnecessary slaughter was the result. A correspondent of the Morning Post tells the same tale:— On rushed the men, gallantly led by Captains Lewis, Maude, and Fyera ; they leaped into the ditch, olambered up into the embrasures, and, mounting the parapets, for a moment so astonished the Russians by the vehemence and ardour of their onset, that the place was their own. But they were not in sufficient force ; nor could they be brought to act in concert in the confusion that ensued. The inte rior of the Redan was in itself fortified ; the wall or breast. work that served to protect their artillerymen from the fragments of shells that might be thrown into the Redan, and burst there, now availed the Russian troops as defences. The English soldiers thought themselves trapped within these double walls, the sight of which was unexpected; and more than all—for they were, too many of them, young recruits—they dreaded the sudden explo. 921 lion of the many mines with which the battery in particu lar had the character of being honeycombed.. They preferred either to remain on the parapet, where they could see their foes and fire upon them, or to dodge behind the traverses, and play the same game of rifle shooting as they had become used to in the trenches. In vain their officers called upon them to advance—they would not ; in vain the Russians tried to force them back—neither would they go back, but fought desperately, in hand-to-hand com bats, still maintaining their ground. THE ENGLISH RETREAT. Our attack lasted about an hour and three-quarters, as well as I could make out, and in that time we lost more men than at Inkermann, where the fighting lasted for seven hours. At one o'clock wounded men began to crawl up from the batteries to the camp ; they could tell us little or nothing. " Were we in the Redan ?" " Oh, yes ; but a lot of them was killed, and the Russians were mighty strong." The rapidly-increasingnumbers of wounded men, some of whom had left their arms behind them, gave rise to suspicions of the truth ; but their answers to many eager questioners were not very decisive or intelligible, and some of them did not even know what they had been attacking. One poor young fellow who was marching stiffly up. with a broken arm and a ball through his shoulder, carried off his firelock with him, but he made the naive confession that he had " never fired it off, for he could not." The piece turned out to be in excellent order. It struck one that such men as these, however brave, were scarcely a tit match for the well-drilled soldiers of Russia ; and yet we were trusting the honour, reputation, and glory of Great Bri tain to undisciplined lads from the plough, or the lanes of our towns and villages ! As one example of the sort of recruits we have received here recently I may mention that there was a considerable number of men in daughts which came out last week to regiments in the fourth divi sion who had only been enlisted a few days, and who had neverfired a rifle in their lives ! It must not be imagined that such rawness can be corrected and turned into mili tary efficiency out here, for the fact is that this siege has been about the worst possible school for developing the courage and manly self-reliance of a soldier ; neither does it teach him the value of discipline and of united action. When he goes into the trenches he learns to dodge behind gabions and to take pot-shots from behind atones and pat a pets, and at the same time he has no opportunity of testing the value of his comrades, or of proving himself against the enemy on the open field. The natural result follows. The old soldiers behaved admirably, and stood by their officers to the last ; nor was there any lack of courage among the lads just joined, but they were wanting in discipline and in confidence in their officer-ft.—Timed Cur. THE ENGLISH LOSS. From the following statement of the loss in the light division it will be seen that this gallant body, which be haved so well at the Alma, and maintained its reputation at Inkermann, suffered as severely as it did in gaining the former great victory. In the light division there are 73 officers and 964 men wounded—total, 1,097. The hiss of this division was 1,001 in killed and wounded at the Alma. The number of officers killed amounts to 19; of men killed to 94—total 107. The loss of officers in Windham's brigade, and in the portion of Warren's brigade which moved to his support, is equally severe. The loss in the two brigades of this division is not lees than 790 men. The whole loss cannot be estimated at less than 2,200 or 2,300 men. This Itedan has cost us more lives than the capture of Badejoz, not to speak of those who have fallen in the trenches and ap proaches to it ; and although the enemy evacuated it, we can scarcely claim the credit of having caused them such loss that they retired owing to their dread of a renewed assault. On the contrary, we must in fairness admit that the Russians maintained their grip of the place till the French were fairly established in the Malakoff, and the key of the position was torn from their grasp.—lb. THE RUSSIAN RETREAT. Sunday, Sept 0. At eight o'clock last night the Russians began quietly to withdraw from the town, in the principal houses of which they had previously stored up combustibles in order to render Sebastopol a second Moscow. With great art the General kept up a fire of musketry from his advanced posts as though he intended to renew the attempts to regain the Malakoff. Ere two o'clock this morning the fleet had been scuttled sad sunk, with the exception of the steamers. About 12.30 the men of the second division on duty in the trenches observed a preternatural silence in the Redan, and some volunteers crept up into it. Nothing could they hear but the heavy breathing and groans of the wounded and ding, who, with the dead, were the sole occupants of the place. As the Redan was known to be mined, the men were withdrawn, and soon afterwards the Russian tactics began to develop themselves. Abouttwo o'clock flames were observed to break out in different parts of the town. They spread gradually all over the principal buildings. At four o'clock a stupendous explosion behind the Redan shook the whole camp ; it was followed by four other explosions equally startling. The city was enveloped in fire and smoke, end torn asunder with the tremendous shocks of those volcanoes. At 4.15 the Flagstaff and Garden bat teries blew up. At 5.30 two of the southern forts went up into the air, and the effect of these explosions was im mensely increased by the rush of a great number of live shell into the air, which exploded in all directions. All this time a steady current of infantry was passing in un• broken masses to the north side over the bridge, and at 6.45 the last battalions passed over, and the hillsides opposite were alive with their masses. Several small ex plosions took place inside the town at 7.10. Columns of black smoke began to rise from the neighbourhood of Fort Paul at 7.12. At 7.15 the connection of the floating bridge with the south aide was severed. At 7.16 dames begat, to aseend from Fort Nicholas. At 8.7 the bridge was floated off in portions to the north side. At nine o'clock several