Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 4.djvu/348

 318 THE CANNONADE OF CHAP, fire; and altlioiigh the great Engineer had been XIII 1_ baffled for a time by the eagerness or the obsti- nacy of the sailors who manned his batteries, the higlier skill of his dispositions was already begin- ning to give him the mastery, when the gradual and rightful solution of the problem he so longed to work out was all at once intercepted by what, Explosion of in a sense, may be called an accident. The earth St French magazine, shook. A volumc of llaine s])rang up from the ground. There was a roll of sound, not harsh nor deafening, yet such as to out-thunder great guns ; and from the spot whence the flame had issued there was reared up on high a black, steadfast column of smoke. A shell from one of the Rus- sian batteries had blown up a French magazine. The explosion, although so great a one as to be seen and heard from afar by the English us well as the French, was less widely apparent to the Eussians, who were wrapped in a dense cloud of smoke. Some indeed of the garrison perceived what had happened, and they greeted the sight with exulting ' Hurrahs ! ' but it was only by slow and imperfect process that even the chiel's in Sebastopol attained to learn much of the truth; and down to the last, it would seem, they re- garded the explosion as merely an incident of siege warfare, when, in truth, it almost had pro- portions great enough to decide the campaign. I'liysicai By this explosion no utterly ruinous harm was explosion."'^ douc to the works or the armament of the battery in which the disaster occurred, and the number of men whom it stretched on the ground killed w