The Press. — London, England, 1855-09-08 00:00:00

862 growled a few words which, ominous for himself, sounded like ill-temper. No retort ; but a moment later the quiet one, with a sudden jerk of his leg, and a twist of the body to the left. threw the other off his balance, and down went the bear, his shoulder indenting the turf. A burst of ac clamation followed, interrupted by denials from the discom fited ; but " a fair fall!"—" a fair fall!" was the cry all round the ring ; whereupon the vanquished gave up his jacket—equivalent to striking the Sag—and acknowledged himself beaten. Cornwall is a land of mines and speculation. Every man, rich and poor, all alike, " go in for " the good thing," and find to their cost that mining is about as uncertain as horseracing, and that the inevitable good thing as inevitably fails. The author is no geologist, but well describes some natural features of the coast. It is curious to read an account of the evident inroads of the sea upon parts of the southern shore. Within the memory of man the sea has covered much that in their youth was good fallow land, and the tradition in Cornwall is that a vast champagne county spread out and reached to the Scilly Islands in early times : " Where is the Cornish champaign which conjoined the coast and Scilly?" is a question often askedby antiquaries, and speculated on by geologists. Here, so runs the fable, lay far outspread a region of unwonted beauty and fertility, strewn with villages, and hallowed by one hundred and fortychurches, known to the Cornish as Lethowsow, or Lyouesse. And romances of the olden time tell us of great and gallant deeds wrought in that fair land, the me mory of which had been kept alive for ages by wandering minstrels. Here fell the monarch whose fame made British hearts beat quick for ages, as sings the poet:— So all day long the noise of battle roll'd Among the mountains by the winter sea; Until King Arthur's table, man by man, Had tarn in I,yonness about their lord. The chroniclers, however, tell us that Arthur's last battle was fought near Camelford. But shaken by some mighty convulsion, the lovely region sank down into the depths, the sea rushed in and com pleted the destruction, leaving no trace of what had been, except the Seven Stones, the Wolf Rock, and a grim like ness between the cliffs of the Land's End, and of St. Martin's Head, the nearest of the isles. The Seven Stones are still called " The City," and among them, it is said, the fishermen once hooked some small broken casements and pieces of stone mouldings, and no other vestiges of the Lyounesso have ever been discovered. The Trevilian family bear a white horse as crest, to commemorate the escape of one of their ancestors by swimming to the main land on horseback at the time of the flood. In Mounts Bay the encroachments of the sea are so marked that in heavy gales it has now become quite an expected event, sooner or later, that the sea will break through to St. Ives Bay on the opposite side, and cut off the Land's End as it has done Scilly. The oscil lations of the sea in Mounts Bay are remark able ; frequently and without warning a heavy ground swell will roll in on the beach sweep ing everything before it ; and ten timee in the present century has the sea suddenly come roaring in with sudden and terrific force, shaking the very cliffs to their foundations. This singular phenomenon is supposed to be caused by the volcanic action of tho earth going on under the bottom of the Atlantic, and upheaving some portions of the bed. The "Londoner's Walk" is entirely without pretence ; a plain narrative which almost any one might write of ajourney any one may make, and of things which every one may see. It shows how much pleasure may be derived from an ordinary pedestrian tour, and how rich our southern coast is in pleasant land. stapes and magnificent sea views. Scott, in one of his novels, says that a young man never feels more free and buoyant, more full of elastic vigour, than when indepen• dently walking through a country, relying on himself, and proud that he can exclaim, with the poet of old, " Mecum mea sunt juncta." How bravely do his heroes get over the ground on foot ! Frank Osbaldestone making for bed and supper at Aberfoil, with " his " pulse of existence beating higher as he felt " confidence in his own strength, courage and " resources ;" and Brown stepping freely through the wilds of Cumberland, exhilarated by the frosty air, to visit the old Roman wall. In these days of railroads one must almost perforce pedestrianise to see anything of the country, and we hope Mr. White's book may have the good effect of bringing this manly mode of pleasure-travel once more into fashion. We can by experience answer for it, that such journeys arc remembered with pleasure far in life's day, that they are equally conducive THE PRESS. to health and reflection, and furnish truer knowledge of life and nature than can be gained by any other mode of journeying. The War in the East, from 1853 to July, 1855. A Sketch of the Campaigns on the Danube, in Asia, and in the Crimea. By General George Klapka. London : Chapman and Hall. AMONG the piles of books and pamphlets upon the war passing through our hands, it is sin gular how few have been written by military men, who are the best qualified, one would suppose, to judge correctly of the events of a campaign. Every day we have am bitious tradesmen writing to the Times for the guidance of our engineer officers, laying down rules upon parabolas and the flight of projectiles, deduced from their Cockney practice of bow and arrow at the straw man in the Rosherville-gardens ; or we have learned divines, whose business one would think it was to preach peace and " good " will to all men," propounding plans for the advance of " corps,' the firing of the enemy's towns and stores, and the annihilation of his armies ; in a word, we have men of all classes, ranks, and denominations, criticising, praising, complaining, and proposing, as much upon practical and professional points as upon general views of the war. But a book like General Klapka's demands more attention than the ephemeral trash which crowds the columns of the daily newspapers or loads the table of the reviewer. General Klapka is a soldier of no little repu tation ; he is one of that cluster of emi nent soldiers evoked by the Hungarian war of '4B and scattered by the treachery of '49. His heroic defence of Komorn placed him at once in the leading rank of able generals ; and, after a period of comparative obscurity, the war in the East appears once more to have roused him. He first offered his services to the Sultan, who declined to employ them, and then set himself to observe the conduct of the war, upon which in this volume he freely ex presses his opinion. The book is divided into four chapters, each treating of the following subjects :—The cam paigns on the Danube, in Asia, in the Crimea, and the question of the war in its full extent. At the present crisis the earlier operations of the war possess little interest for us. At this moment the world is turned with one mind upon Sebastopol—so great, so terrible will be the renewal of the struggle upon the earth works of that redoubtable intrenchment, that Oltenitza, Kalafat, Turtukai, and even Sinope, have lost alike their interest and their horror. We may observe, however, that throughout the whole of the early part of the war General Klapka considers that the meddling interference of the Western Powers—who thought their time had not then arrived—was fatal to the success of the Turks. Austria, who was rather afraid of the war approaching her frontiers too closely, in 1853 successfully impressed upon the Western Powers the danger to the peace of Europe of allowing the Turks, after their rapid and brilliant advance upon Bucharest, to follow up their successes, and deal blows right and left against the isolated corps of the Russians ; and the Sultan yielding to their• representa tions, Omer Pacha was ordered into winter quarters, and thus lost the opportunity of the campaign. That of '54 was in the same manner a repetition of '53. At the moment of the re treat of the Russians, after the attempt on Si listria, Austria obtained the protection of the Principalities, liberated the Russian army for ulterior service in the Crimea, and effectually stopped all further advance of the Turks. The operations of these campaigns, as well as those in Asia, are fully criticised, while details are avoided. But the opinion of the General upon the allied expedition is the one we wish to arrive at, and it coincides generally with that held by military men. It was a huge blunder ; and in delivering this opinion Klapka disputes with considerable success the most prominent points in the famous Moniteur letter upon the war. The prime error he considers to have been a want of unity in command : Unity in the supreme command and in the direction of operations is an acknowledged as well as an indisputable SATURDAY, fact. Unity, as the expression of a single will, can alone insure singleness of purpose, quick decision, and as quick an execution thereof. Yet at the seat of war we find three commanders-in-chief and as many admirals, all following their own course of action. The commanders-in•chiof were instructed by their Governments to deliberate con- jointly upon every undertaking ; and, if we bear in mind that the advicea fiom London and Paris had also their weight in the balance of their respective decisions, we have a fair estimate as to the results of such pro ceedings. The next error was the inexcusable and in considerate boast of St. Arnaud to his army— " that they would capture Sebastopol'—a month before the expedition sailed. Klapka might have added, that a similar boast was made by the Times at a still earlier period. Speaking on this point his remarks carry weight : One of the very first conditions of success in such cases is the strictest secrecy ; in this instance, particularly, it was doubly necessary, as by giving too rapid publicity to the plan the enemy had time to provide fur his defence, and thus frustrate the enterprise. Had one of the marshal's staff committed such a piece of indiscretion, he would have been summoned before a court-martial and punished as a spy and traitor. The bravados of St. Arnaud, how- ever, fared better ; they were quietly set down to the ori• ginality of his character. the Russians, thus forewarned, despatched reinforcements to their menaced province, and immediately set to work fortifying Sebastopol on the land side. After the expedition had embarked and landed, he remarks that the great mistake of the allied generals was in not landing a small corps at Kertch and Yenikale, to cut off the communications of the Russians with Cir. cassia and the Sea of Azoff. This was an error no doubt, but the probability is that the allied generals and admirals knew so little of the coast and country, that neither liked to be far away from the other. The battle of the Alma is criticised, and full justice done to the dispositions of Lord Raglan, but. Boa. quet's flank movement General Klapka holds should have been supported by three di visions instead of one; and a simultaneous assault upon the whole line would have cut off Menschikoffs retreat upon Sebastopol, and, if followed up, would have utterly destroyed him, or driven him into the mountains. Of the advantages of the flank march, and of the possible success of an assault, he admits that— The flank march of the allies succeeded marvellously. Had they but taken advantage of the surprise of the enemy, and attempted atilmilibdiate assault upon the city, which at that moment was weakly garrisoned, they might possibly have succeeded in carrying both the town and the arsenal ere the Russians had time to erect regular works of defence. But, instead of this, they took to protracted reconnoitrings, in this case overdoing what had been utterly disregarded on the Alma. where a more accurate reconnaissance would have assisted them in a better ar rangement of the plan of battle. Here, on the contrary, protracted reconnoitrings led to perpetual indecision and preparation, and finally to a formal siege, which had never entered the calculation of the allies in the original plan of the expedition. One daring and rapid blow, even at a heavy sacrifice, might still in the present state of affairs have led to a favorable issue, and if the Allies had not had determination enough at once to have recourse to such an extreme expedient, they ought immediately to have re turned to their vessels. Pelissier, the present French commander-in-chief, would in all probability have been the very man for such a contingency ; both Canrobert and Lord Raglan were wanting in energy. They thought such an act of daring did not tally with their conscience and the responsibility devolving upon them. How incomparably more victims has the winter campaign cost the allies than a bold assault under the protection of some easily constructed batteries at the end of September ! At length, after having given the enemy sufficient time to recover from its surprise and strengthen its position, it was decided to lay siege to the town and to begin with the trenches. The same mistake which led to the repulse of the Russians at Silistria was here committed by the allies, only in an aggravated form. They commenced the siege cperationa without completely investing the place, which frustrated their efforts to reduce the strength and courage of the garrison, and imparted to the struggle the character of a cannonade between two armies, in which the adver sary had no difficulty in concentrating on the most ex posed points such defences as continually counteracted the strenuous exertions of the assailants. This is hard criticism upon the generals. Though a soldier, General Klapka should re member that generals depend upon their home Governments for support and for sup plies, as well for the efficiency and sufficiency of force which should enable them to success fully carry out their designs. How far the generals in this case were supported by the Governments time will show ; at present we can speak only and but partially of the trials, dangers, difficulties, anti mea gre home support which Lord Raglan knew too well surrounded him. After reviewing the progress of the siege and its first failure Or' Klapka arrives at the hi..