Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 3.djvu/455

 APPENDIX. 420 to the English were already in full retreat, he ' cnnmiandcd word of the bloody struggle with infantry in which the French represent his troops to have been engaged. At first sight, it does not seem highly probable that, upon the very summit of a smooth hill-top, where there was nothing to offer cover for the body of even one man, a few battalions (already dispirited by the passive endurance of artillery- fire to which they had been condemned) should be ordered to make a stand against the 30,000 Frenchmen <ind Turks who wore converging upon that very ])int from the west as well as from the noctli ; and if Kiriakolf had resorted to such a measure, it is all but incredible that his careful and almost minute narrative of his operations should have omitted all mention of an exploit strange in itself, and, if only it were true, redounding very much to the glory of his troops. Not only, howevei', does Kiriakoff appear to have been ignorant of any such fight, but the whole tenor of the narrative in which he describes what he did is inconsistent with the notion that anything of the kind could have passed. According to his statement, he Avas a divisional general left without orders ; he saw his troops suffering under a cross-fire of artillery ; he knew (though apparently in an imperfect way) that overwhelm- ing masses of French troops were more or less near to the verge of the plateau, and being thus civeumstanced, and seeing, moreover, that the English had already carried the position, he thought it lime to withdraw his battalions from the line of the artillery-fire ; but from first to last he never was challenged or vexed by the near approach of any French infantry. Such is his account. But this is not all. Both Kiriakoff and the official French statement of the * Atlas de la Guerre d'Orient ' agree in representing that, after the check which it had given to Canrobert's Division, the great 'column of the eight battalions' had
 * the march towards the main road.' Tie does not say a