The Sun.
London, England, 1855-11-20 00:00:00

THE BRITISH ARMY.

( From the Times Special Correspondent.)
CA MP BEFORE SEBA STOPOL, Nov. 3.—1 was
obliged to omit in my last despatch some particu-
lars with respect to the Kinbourn expedition, which
may prove interesting even now.
When the fleet was off Odessa the advice of the
highest person in France on the project of bom-
barding the town was sought by the French Ad-
miral, and it is believed that his reply implied a
" radical opposition" to any such 'proceeding, nor
, was our Admiral authorised by the home authori-
ties to attack Odessa unless he was certain of suc-
cess. Sir E. Lyons and Admiral Bruat have acted
all along in the most perfect accord, but there has
been this difficulty in their mutual relations, that
Admiral Lyons is not under the orders of the Bri-
tish Commander-in-Chief of the army, while Ad-
miral Bruat is directly under the control of Mar-
shal Pelissier, and it is known that the latter is
opposed to any operations which would require
large detachments from the French army. It was
proposed at one time to send in a flag of truce to
Odessa with some such proposition as this to the
Governor—" Are you the Governor of a commer-
cial town or of a military station ? If you say Odessa
is purely a commercial town, destroy your forts,
abandon your efforts to fortify it, deliver up your
gun-boats, if any, and we promise to respect the
place. If you say Odessa is a military station, you
must expect to see it treated as such by the Allied
fleets." However, in case of the Russians refusing
to give up their guns, Ste., and setting us at
defiance, it would have been necessary for us to
attack the town route qui coute and there were
many reasons why at that particular time such
a course would not have been desirable. It
may be doubted—indeed, it is, I believe doubted
—by the English Admiral that we could de-
stroy Odessa from the sea by such means as we
at present possess. It is a town of stone, of
wide streets, of places, and squares, offering little
combustible matter, and placed at such a distance
behind the batteries as to be accessible only to
mortar vessels and horizontal fire at a very long
and, therefore, at a very uncertain, range. The
houses are roofed with iron, and, in many cases,
there is no woodwork in the flooring or ceiling of
the different storeys, but iron girders and tiles and
slabs of stone are used instead of planks and rafters.
Many of the houses are detached, and stand like so
many palazzi in their own grounds. Under these
circumstances a general fire would be almost out
of the question, and the damage caused by a bom-
bardment would not be very decisive or extensive.
With all the efforts of friends and foes to destroy
it, how much of Sebastopol still remains ? The
Russians, by the agency of powder, of piles of
wood, of tar, of turpentine, and of all sorts of com-
bustibles, tried to get into a blaze, but they failed,
notwithstanding a favourable breeze ; and we
rained shells on it for months, and never succeeded
in creating any conflagration of importance. Well,
Sebastopol contained much more wood than
Odessa, and was much more accessible to our fire.
The inference is, that we could not, by any bom-
bardment the fleet could inflict on Odessa set the
town in a blaze, or inflict damage which would
compensate the Allies for the expenditure of all
their shell. It is evident that, at some period or
another, our fire would cease from exhaustion of
means. Even a line-of-battle-ship's powder maga-
zines and shot and shell rooms are not illimitable.
It is equally clear that a line-ef-battle steam-ship
could not try to come in close enough to the forts
to develope her fire, without running the greatest
risk of being disabled before she could get into
our
bomb-vesselsT he m o ma
and gun-boats
en t would c
aenedv ehnetauvayl 1
steam-
frigates would be compelled to cease firing, and that
probably before much injury was done to a large
distant stone-built town like Odessa ; and then, if
wllen
the Russians could fire even one gun as we re-
treated, they would claim, and with some colouring
—which would seem very bright and decided in
some circles in England and in many cities and
towns of despotic Germany and of free America—
the
credit of having beaten off the Allied fleets 1
If Odessa is to be destroyed, it can only be done,
first, either by great numbers of floating batteries
to reduce the forts and enable the liners to ap-
proach within broadside distance ; secondly, by a
sustained fire, constantly renewed for several days,
of a flotilla of gun-boats, bomb-ketobes, and mor-
tar-vessels, fed by continuous supplies of ammuni-
tion, and even of new guns and mortars; thirdly,
by the disembarkation on the coast below the city
of a force sufficiently strong to defeat the garrison
and the outlying army defending the place, in
which case the city would be open to the conque-
rors, and all the defences taken in reverse; or,
fourthly, by some unknown operation of war,
locked up the Admiralty key in Lord Dundonald's
bosom. Of these plans the third alone seems to
insure the certainty of destroying Odessa. The
wear and tear of materiel in a protracted bombard-
ment is incredible. Even in our affair at Kinbourn
numerous guns were disabled—as an example, I
may state that both of the Arrow's heavy Lancas-
ter guns burst after a few rounds, so that the gun-
boat was rendered quite useless. (It should be
added by parenthesis that these guns were not fur-
nished by Mr. Lancaster, but were ordinary heavy
guns bored out in conformity with his principle.)
The mortar-beds also underwent heavy strains on
the occasion, although those suspended on Julius
Robert's principle were found to answer very well,
and to give less shock to the vessel than those
mounted on the old plan. Although Sir Howard
Douglas declares that a 13-inch mortar ought to
hit a large object such as a fort at the distance of
4,000 yards, I know that many of our bombs
missed Kinbourn from a distance of less than 3,000
and 3,600 yards. The whole of the glacis and of
the ground before the fort for some hun-
dred yards was burrowed up and pitted by
the craters of bombs which made prodigi-
ous holes in the soft sand on which they ex-
pended their force. For one shell which would fall
through the roof of a house in Odessa three or four
would fall in the public streets, squares, and yards,
where they would be comparatively harmless.
These large missiles take up great space, and the
fleet could not hold enough to lay Odessa in ruins.'
ton,at present of one Even had the Admirals been provided with all the
appliances for destroying Odessa, the project would
not have
had
thethew concurrence Go-
vernment, at all events ; and so the fleets, after
approaching
lay quietly before it. They
might have caused great damage to property and
loss of life by firing on the place during their stay,
for, though complete destruction is often difficult
where damage and loss are easily to be effected,
there can be no doubt that a vigorous fire would
have occasioned the enemy a considerable amount
of both. The French Admiral, indeed, suggested
that a certain number of gun-boats and mortar-
vessels should go in every night and throw shell
into the town ; but Sir Edmund Lyons was of
opinion probably—and if he was, there can be but
little question in English minds that he was right
—that such a petty measure of warfare was un-
worthy of us ; that we ought to destroy Odessa,
and at all events assail it with all our strength, or
refrain from a partial attack, which, on its cessa-
tion, the Russians would say, and not without
pretence, was repulsed.
The soldiers and sailors who are doomed to stay
at or off Kinbourn for the winter will have a
dreary time of it. The sea on both sides of the
spit is frozen to some distance from the shore, but
Major-General Kokonovitch, the late Russian Go-
vernor, who was there for four years, said he had
never known the sea to be frozen right across to
Oczakoff. By the by, it is believed General Lu-
ders was in Kinbourn just before our arrival, and
that he only crossed to Oczakoff in a small beat
the night we arrived off the spit, leaving behind
him assurances of relief to the garrison, and in-
forming the Governor he ought to hold out
at least for a fortnight. The Glatton is at Ka-
miesh,' and will not, I believe, take part in the
defence. As to the blockade of the Boug and the
Dnieper, it will, I presume, be raised by the first
frost, and the gun-boats engaged in that service
will drop down and join the flotilla at Kinbourn.
The only thing to look forward to is a liberal en-
joyment of shooting, if the Cossacks will permit it,
as the whole of the shores abound with multitudes
of wild fowl. Before the expedition started nearly
all the smaller gun-boats were despatched to rein-
force Captain Sherard Osborne's flotilla in the Sea
of Azoff, where that active and energetic officer is
harrying the Russians as a hawk perturbs a field
of larks. The Fancy, Lieutenant Grylls, was still
with the fleet ; indeed she is so badly built that
she is scarcly fit for the short hacking waves in

* The impression in the Crimea, which no doubt our
correspondent faithfully echoes, seems to be that Odessa
should have been destroyed, whereas we believe that an
attack on Odessa would have been considered throughout
Europe as a barbarous outrage, which the aggressors would
have been heartily ashamed of after the heat of conflict had
passed away. If Odessa were really a military station, the
stern laws of war would no doubt, justify its destruction ;
but an attack on a great commercial city, on the pretext
that its stores supplied provisions to the Russian army,
could only be classed in history with the burning of
WaphiDaton.