Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 4.djvu/116

 86 Tin; rojjcv of sinking thk ships. CH A p. little sliuit (jf a inadman in his luve uf tliiiiu^ uiii- IV', ^ ! form, the Emperor Nicholas for years had been lowering and lowering the liussian soldiery in the scale of humanity, with the intent of bringing his army to a base mechanic perfection ; and this policy had been carried to such baneful extremes that the most illustrious of Eussia's living generals has assigned it as one of the causes which exposed the Czar's troops to defeat.* But in the fleets of the empire the perverse energy of Nicholas had i'ailed to complete the mischief it tended to work ; and although more or less he tormented his sea- men with drill, and marched them, and wheeled them, and put them in barracks, and divided them into bodies of the size of battalions, with a number belonging to each,-f' he could not altogether ex- tirpate from the sailors the true sailor's spirit. There was a strength in the nature of things which withstood him ; for happily — and this is a main source of the glory attachirg to the sea ser- vice — the ever- changeful exigencies which the winds and the waves create must be met by the individual energies of the very men M'ho encounter them, and not by mere codes of regulation sent down from an office. The sailor of the Black Sea iinsouinlncss of the polic'y in this respect of the Emjjeror Nicho- las is fully recognised by the present Government of Russia. f Tiiese bodies were numbered and called 'ci'ews,'— a some- what misleading term, because the numbeied 'crew,' though composed of men belonging to the ships' companies, was not a body identical with that which formed the crew of any par- ticular ship. The numbered 'crew' consisted of about a thousand men belonging to different sliips.
 * Todlebeii, vol. i. p. 204. I have rea.son to know that the