Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 5.djvu/269

 THE BATTLE 01 BALACLAVA, 247 dependent upon the adoption of any highly chap. spiritual or philosophic theory. I imagine that ___! the great body of our cavalry people, whether officers or men, were borne forward and sustained in their path of duty by moral forces of another kind — by sense of military obligation, by innate love of fighting and of danger — by the shame of disclosing weakness — by pride of nation and of race — by pride of regiment, of squadron, of troop — by personal pride ; not least, by the power of that wheel -going mechanism which assigns to each man his task, and inclines him to give but short audience to distracting, irrelevant thoughts. But, whatever might be the variety of the gov- erning motives which kept every man to his duty through all the long minutes of this trying ad- vance, there was no variety in the results ; for what it was his duty to do, that every man did ; and as often as a squadron was torn, so often the undisabled survivors made haste to repair it. The same words were ever recurring — ' Close in ! 1 Close in ! ' ' Close in to the centre ! ' ' Close in ! ' It was under this kind of stress — stress of powerful fire on each flank, and signs of dire havoc in front — that the three regiments (in echelon order, but with an always diminishing distance between the 11th Hussars and the 4th Light Dragoons) moved down to support the first line. Except that the pace of the 8th Hussars was more tightly restrained than that of the 11th Hussars or the 4th Light Dragoons, the conditions under which the three regiments respectively