Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 5.djvu/30

 8 THE BATTLE OF BALACLAVA. CHAP, criticism almost always ended in his coming to ^ a strong disapproval of his chief's directions, he of course lost that comfort of mind which is en- joyed by an officer who takes it for granted that his chief must be right, and had to be constantly executing orders with the full persuasion that they were wrongly conceived. Plainly, that was a state of mind which might grievously impair a man's powers of action in the field, not only by chilling him with the wretched sensation of dis- approving what he had to do, but also by con- fusing him in his endeavours to put right inter- pretations upon the orders he received. It was never from dulness or sloth, but rather through a misaiming cleverness, that Lord Lucan used to fall into error. With a mind almost always apparently in a confident and positive state, he brought it to bear in a way which so often proved infelicitous, that his command in the Crimea was made on the whole to appear like that of a wrong-headed man ; but I imagine that this result was in no small measure produced by the circumstance of his being almost always in an attitude of oppugnancy ; and there is room for believing that under other conditions, and espe- cially if detached, and acting for the time inde- pendently, he might have evinced a much higher capacity for the business of war than he found means to show in the Crimea. There, at all events, he was not at all happily circumstanced ; for besides being wholly unarmed with the autho- rity which is conferred by former services in the