Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 3.djvu/233

 BATTLE OF Till". ALMA. 207 men who coiniioscd it was still liiuli. 1'lic co- chap. liesion of the mass was not yet destroyed ; but it . was endangered, and had come to depend very much upon the personal exertions of officers. Lacy Yea observed that every now and then, when a part of the cohunn was becoming faulty, a certain man, always on foot, but of vast tower- ing stature, would stride quickly to the defec- tive spot, and exert so great an ascendancy, that steadiness and order seemed always to be restored by his presence. The grey over-coat common to all shrouded the rank of every Paissian officer ; and since this man was not on horseback, there was nothing to disclose his station in the corps except the power he seemed to wield. What its colonel was to the Eoyal Fusiliers, that the big man seemed to be to the Eussiau column ; and it was not, I think, without a kind of .sym- pathy with him — it was not, one would believe, without a manly reluctance — that Yea ordered his people to shoot the tall man. lie did, how- ever, so order ; and he was quickly obeyed. The tall man dropped dead, and when he had fallen there was no one who seemed to be the like of liim in power. The issue of this long fight of the Fusiliers was growing to be a thing of so great moment, or else the sight of it was become so beating, that Prince Gortscliakoff now resolved to take part in it bodily. So, deputing Colonel Issakoff, then act- ing as his Chief of the Staff, to represent hiui in his absence, he rode down to the column and