Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 3.djvu/432

 40G APPENDIX. written under his auspices should be upon an extended scale ; that it should be enriched by the statements of num- berless officers who had fought side by side with the hero commanded to frame the record ; and, finally, that it should be prepared with much expenditure of labour. Accord- ingly, that account was supported by figures purporting to give the exact strength of each Eussian regiment engaged ; and upon the whole, I felt that reposing, as I did, the most implicit confidence in the personal honour of General de Todleben, I might venture to accept the figures he appeared to have sanctioned, or, at all events, might do so as a rule, making only those little corrections which the occurrence of some trivial errors appeared to render necessary. I acted accordingly, and have seen no reason to regret my decision. Eut the narrative of the battle of the Alma contained in the ' Defense de Sebastopol ' is far from fulfilling the con- ditions which were observed in the account of ' Inkerman.' General de Todleben was not present at the battle of the Alma, and appears to have been unsuccessful in obtaining the information necessary for giving a good account of the action ; but (for the purpose at present on hand) the main defect of the record is that it does not (as was done in tho case of Inkerman) give the strength of each regiment sepa- rately, but simply mentions a total in what one may call a loose cursory way, saying that the troops concentrated by Prince Mentschikofi" on the Alma were ' nearly 33,600,' ' pr^s de 33,600 ; ' and by any one turning to the Appen- dix, no further account of the numerical strength is found, but only a repetition of the figures ' 33,600,' without the qualification of the word ' nearly ' (' pr6s de '), and the in- quirer is left to guess whether the number of artillery- men who served the 96 guns is meant or not meant to be included in the ' total' 33,600. The difficulty of accepting the loosely given ' total ' thus furnished is increased by another circumstance. In an