Page:Decisive Battles Since Waterloo.djvu/80

50 On the 21st of July General Roth, commanding the sixth corps, arrived before the Danubian fortress of Silistria and immediately invested it. Once before (in 1810) it had been entirely demolished, but had been restored by the Turks. The town of Silistria is built in the form of a half circle, the diameter two thousand yards long, being turned to face the Danube. A fortification with ten fronts, each five hundred and fifty yards in length surrounds it. There are only a few fragments of permanent outworks, except two narrow redans looking towards the river. The glacis was built from two to four feet in height, and the ditch was not more than eight to ten feet deep. Rising above the interior slope of the ditch was a scarp twenty feet broad and eight feet high, the lower side of which was defended by palisades. The exterior slope of the bastions was planted with wattles and was very steep; the slopes of the curtain were banked with sods of earth. On the bastions were placed ten guns, four on each front, leaving only one on each flank; and the lines of the ditch, which were very short, were poorly defended. There were four gates, two opening on the land and two on the river. There existed no way of filling the ditch with water, as its bed was higher than the level of the Danube, and there was no water running into it. Around the front facing the land, a lunette about nine feet deep, but quite dry, had been dug in the ditch as a safeguard against Russian mines. General Roth found himself besieging Silistria with an insufficient force and almost no artillery; only one battering train having been provided for carrying on a campaign in which four sieges had to be undertaken. The Turks were defeated in several sharp fights in which they engaged the Russians when the latter were approaching Silistria. General Roth's first position was strictly defensive, his soldiers being posted on the high ground in front of the fortress and beyond the range of its guns.