The Press. — London, England, 1856-10-11 00:00:00

976 sort of materiel and missiles, the requisite quantity of those of a different, but useful description, was wanting. • The following, if not meant to be depre ciatory of our artillery, reads as if it were written with that intention : Although there are some complaints of deficiency in the engineering department, I have never hoard it said that our artillery, so long as the supplies of powder, shot, and guns lasted, were not ready to meet any enemy. It un• fortunately happens at this juncture that General Jones, who has always displayed great energy in directing the siege•works, is unwell. In fact, he cannot go out, on account of a severe attack of rheumatism, which almost cripples him. _ As the day wore on, the English batteries opened, and proved the unreasonableness of those desponding doubts which!Mr. Russell had indulged in. We have spoken of his descriptive talents. The following is a good specimen:— From twelve to five o'clock p.m. the firing was slack; the French then resumed their cannonade with the same astounding vigour as at dawn and at ten o'clock, and never ceased their volleys of shot and shell against the place till half past seven, when darkness set in, whereupon all the mortars and heavy guns, English as well as French, opened with shell against the whole line of defences. A description of this scene is impossible. There was not one instance in which the shells did not whistle through the air ; not a moment in which the sky was not seamed by their fiery curves or illuminated by their explosion. Our practice was beyond all praise. Every shell burst as it ought, and the lines of the Russian earthworks of the Redan, Malakoff, and of all their batteries were rendered plainly visible by the constant light of the innumerable explosions. The Russians scarcely attempted a reply. At five o'clock it was observed that a frigate in the second line, near the north side, was smoking, and as it grew darker flames were seen to issue from her sides. Men and officers rushed to the front, in the greatest delight and excitement, and as night came on, the whole vessel was enveloped in one grand blaze from stem to stern. The delight of the crowd on Catlicart's-hill was intense. " Well, this indeed is a sight ! to see one of those confounded ships touched at last !" The armament of our batteries was tremen dous : We threw 12,721 bombs into the town as compared with 2,743 in tho first bombardment; and wo fired 89,540 shct against the place as compared with 19, 8 79 on the same date. It was by this firo that Sebastopol was won, and the evacuation by Gortschakoff would probably not have been delayed, though the assault of the Bth of September had not been decided on. In homely phrase, the place had become too hot to hold him. Mr. Russell, in spite of his prejudices against aristocratic command, is compelled to do justice to the heroism of the officers concerned in the attack on the Redan. We find many such eapres• sions as—" The officers fell on all sides, " singled out as a mark for the enemy by their " courage The officers, with the " noblest devotion, aided Colonel Windham, " and became the special marks for the " enemy's riflemen." Yet some pages further on (p. 218) " the officers of the Guards " are as a body held up to obloquy because in certain cases leave of absence was granted on ac count of " urgent private affairs." The description of the three British generals on the day of the assault has become famous, and was seized by our lively neighbours across the Channel as an admirable subject for cari cature : It was, as I have said, a bitter cold day, and a stranger would have been astonished at the aspect of the British generals as they viewed the assault. The Commander-in- Chief, General Simpson, eat in the trench, with his nose and eyes just facing the cold and dust, and a great-coat drawn up about his head to protect him against both. General Jones wore a red nightcap, and reclined on a litter, muffled up in clothes, and Sir Richard Airev, the Quartermaster-General, had a white pocket-handkerchief tied over his cap and ears, and fastened under his neck, which detracted somewhat from a martial and belligerent aspect. The writer subsequently justified his descrip- tion by asserting that it was ridiculous to expect " Distinguished officers " to be always in fall uniform— in cocked hats, epaulettes, orders, and jackboots, shouting " Fallow me !" to their legions, or taking snuff d la Go mersall and Napoleon in extreme military arises in front of their battalions. But it is the animus of the description which is offensive. The design was evidently to expose the commanders to contempt, and to represent them as appropriate representatives of " foeeyisrn." The appointment of Genera l Simpson wa s un i versa ll y regar d e d in this country as a very improper one, but no ono ever doubted his personal courage, or thought it becoming that he should be coarsely carica tured. THE PRESS. When the capture of Sebastopol had proved the soundness of Lord Raglan's determination to persevere with the siege, not a word of com mendation is given to his sagacity and firm nest. We now, through the publication of the Baron do Bazancourt's " Memoir," know the difficulties with which he had to contend, and the amount of responsibility thrown upon him. But for his resolution, the siege would have been raised shortly previous to his death, and an entirely new plan of operations been de cided on. Even in the moment of success Mr. Russell can think of nothing but mis management : It is melancholy, amid all these sounds of rejoicing and victory, to think that an army has been all but lost and swallowed up in these narrow dykes, and that it was " done by mistake." He finally comes to the conclusion that " we " have been saved by the imbecility of our " leaders " : But, after all, we may have been saved by the very im becility of our leaders. When the conflict before Sebas topol assumed such gigantic proportions it became the war itself. The armies of Russia were absorbed into it, and perished in detail. Had we taken Sebastopol at the outset, we must have been prepared with our small army to meet those corps•d'armee which lost tens of thousands in their hasty march to relieve the place, but who, in the event of its capture, would have closed slowly round us; and the same incapacity which prevented our reaping the fruits of our coup-de-main, iu attempting the Crimean expedition, might have led to more serious evils in a protracted campaign in the open field against a nume rous and well-handled, if not a daring, enemy. Success has indeed been obtained, but ita cost has been great. This will hardly satisfy the most casual class of readers, " Imbecility" will not produce such great results. The invasion of the Crimea in the first instance was, we are inclined to think, a military error, considering the insufficiency of the allied forces ; but that error was not converted into glorious success by imbecility, but by heroic fortitude, and a clear perception of the great end to be attained on the part of commanders, officers, and men of the allied army, almost without a parallel in the history of war. To talk of the imbecility which won Sebastopol, is really too absurd to be swallowed by even the most fanatic of those haters of " Horseguardism " whom Mr. Russell delights to tickle. He calls the movement decided on after Alma, by which it was determined to make the heights of Balaklava a base of operations, " a chance march," and he supposes that " fate," not the sagacity which foresaw the im portance of that position. made the issue of the campaign " so successful and prosperous." Mismanagement and cowardice are the cries of Mr. Russell, when the allied armies made no grand movement after the fall of Sebas topol. Our success, he says, was not foreseen, and therefore we " lose the fruits of our " labour." Just three weeks after the assault of' the Bth of September, he sympathises with the " people at home " on the disappointment of their expectations : It is quite evident that the expectations of the people at home have not been gratified to the full extent, and that we are not in undisputed possession of maritime Sebas topol, that the Russians are not utterly defeated, and that the campaign will have to be renewed next year by doing what might have been done three weeks ago. Even the French Marshal is not spared an imputation of timidity Even Pelissier seems inclined to rest upon his baton for the time. His gaze is fixed, no doubt, upon the Mackenzie plateau, but his courage fails him; nor does he care to repeat his little proverb, which was in his mouth when slaughter and bloodshed were spoken of in his pre• sence in reference to oar grand assaults—" On ne pent pas faire der omelettes sans easier des cenfs." The mar• shat appears to have given up the manufacture of omelettes for the present; he has plenty of eggs if he likes to break them. Ought not Mr. Russell to have been a little more distrustful of his own conclusions, and a little more guarded in his language ? He might reasonably have supposed that there were reasons against that rapid advance which he recommended, though he did not happen to be cognisant of them. The gallant General Brown is frequently the object of his censures (vide pages 222, 223, and 236). The charge that he might have carried off the stores of wheat destroyed at Kertch merely shows the perverse in genuity of the writer in suggesting tories of blame. Mr. Russell is often singularly incon sistent in his fault-finding. At page 236 there is a groan at the want of rum : SATURDAY, Our stock of rum is exhausted. The rum ships have not come in, and at present the whole army is drawing its supplies from tho commissariat stores of the fourth divi• lion. At page 317 a directly contrary complaint is made : We are a little too free and easy. Ruin is too plentiful and money to abundant. In one small regimental can. teen, on the sth of November, the anniversary of Inker mann, not less than 1401. was received in ready money for articles of consumption, mostly of a liquid nature, and about 501. more was debited to good customers. Four pages further on we read that money was unjustly withheld from the men to their great discontent : If the men grumbled, it would not be surprising, for they are not paid for their labour. Each man was promised eightpence a day for his work, and by the rules of the service the British soldier is always paid when doing duty of the kind, bat he has not yet received a penny. The italics are the author's own. At the end of his long grumble on account of tho men not having been promptly paid, though before he had grumbled that " money was too abundant," we read that " by a general order, " the men will be paid out of the commissariat " chest." Mr. Russell seems to have conceived that it was his peculiar mission to roam about the camp, and find out pretexts for clamour against every one in authority. It is this disposition which makes his letters wholly untrustworthy, and to a great extent spoils the pleasure wo should otherwise tako in his lively descrip tions. He has shown himself an active effi cient newspaper correspondent, but he cer tainly has not proved himself a candid and discriminating commentator on the events of the war. Its true history must be sought in other and very different pages from those of the vivacious Mr. Russell. Tender and True. A Colonial Tale. By tho Author of " Clara Morrison." Two Vols. London : Smith and Elder. Is the short preface to this tale we are told that the subject is married life, and that an attempt has been made to depict faithfully some of the lights and shades of that state. This is only partly true. The main interest of the story does not depend on married life, but on the wooing of the sisters Mary and Rose, and particularly on that of the latter, who is the heroine of the story, and with whose happy marriage it naturally closes. Nor, though the fiction is called a " Colonial Tale," is there much in it having special re ference to Adelaide, where the scene chiefly lies. The characters and action would with very little change suit England as well as Australia ; but the novelty is agreeable, and the authoress, from experience of domestic life in Australia, is well qualified to describe its social habitudes and peculiarities. Her sketches give us, on the whole, a favorable idea of it. Her tints are sober, but they show that materials for the novelist are not wanting in our colonies, and that life in them is not too purely industrial to exclude that play of the affections, with all their hopes and fears, which so largely enters into the composition of social romance. The opening chapters of the tale, laid in England, remind us of the style of Mrs. Gaskell. Robert North is one of her heroes, a Radical in politics, and Independent in re ligion,—a broad-shouldered, hard-faced young fellow, cut out by nature for a successful manufacturer, and only prevented from making a fortune in England by a paper-mill through his unfortunate speculation with the Banner of Liberty. He wooes Mary Lancaster, a quiet, pure, deephearted girl, who after mar riage is long tried by his coldness, and at length, in a moment of irrepressible indigna tion, reproaches him for his want of affection, and tells him that he is neither Tender nor True. This takes place some years after they have been settled in Australia, when North is a successful merchant. Most persons will think that Mary had sufficient provocation for her anger. North, though meant to be the hero of the book, is a very unloveable sort of person ; and it strikes us that the frenzied feeling he is made to exhibit at times is out of keeping with his character. His wooing of Mary (vol. i. 90-1) is very unreal ; and the same may be said of his sudden departure