Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 3.djvu/195

 BATTLE OF THE ALMA. 169 would have been scarcely pardonable — that a chap, general, charged with the care of an army, should ' be under the guidance of feelings akin to the im- pulses of the chase ; but what one has to speak of is not of what ought to have been, but what was. By the stir and joyous animation of the moment, Lord Eaglan was led on into a part of the field which he would not have sought to reach in cold blood. He would have regarded as nothing the mere difference between the risk of being struck by shot in one part of the field and the risk of being struck by shot in another ; but he knew that, in general, it is from a point more or less in rear of battalions actually engaged that a chief can exercise the most constant and the most extended control over his army; and cer- tainly an ideal commander would not suffer him- self to ride to so forward a spot as to run the risk of losing the government of his troops for many miimtes together in the critical period of an action : but the horseman who now rode his hunter across the valley of the Alma, and indul- gently gave him his head, was not an ideal person- age, but a man of flesh and blood, with many very English failings. ' Avant tout jc suis gentilhom/me Anglais' was the preface of the fierce message sent by the then foremost man of the world to the King of France;* and certainly in the nature of that ' gentilhomme Anglais ' the wilfulness is so firmly set that no true sample of the breed can after his second restoration.
 * To Louis the Eighteenth in the summer of 1815, shortly