Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 3.djvu/276

 250 BATTLE OF THE ALMA. CHAP, with the tumult of men killed or wounded. And • though it was but a few of the men planted cIosg in the massive columns who could thus from time to time look upon the dim forms of the soldiery who dealt the slaughter, yet the anxiousness of those who could gain no glimpse of the Bearskins was not for that reason the less. Nay, it was the greater; for he who knows of a present danger through his reading of other men's countenances, or by seeing his neighbours fall wounded or killed around him, is commonly more disturbed than he who, standing in the front, looks straight into the eye of the storm. Still, up to this time it was only from the ex- ti'eme left of the Grenadiers' line that fire was poured into the column. A harder trial was awaitinsr the Vladimir men. Colonel Hood had hitherto wielded his line as though he judged it right to deal carefully with the left Kazan bat- talions still lingering on his front; and, up to the last, he did not think himself warranted in disdaining their presence, for he could not know that their loss in officers had made them so helpless as they were ; but he now saw enough to assure him that his real foe was the left Vladimir column on his flank. Thither, therefore (though he would not altogether avert his line from the defeated troops in his front), he now determined to bend the eyes and the rifles of a great portion of his battalion. So he wheeled forward his battalion upon its left — or in other, and perhaps the more expressive, form of uiili-