Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 5.djvu/336

 314 THE BATTLE OF BALACLAVA. chap, found themselves so close to the enemy's lances L__ as to have to fend them off with the sabre ; but the number of attacks which any one man had to encounter whilst passing along the front of two squadrons, was not, it seems, so great as might be imagined ; and Lord George Paget, whose position exposed him more than most others, has said that the number of lances which he had to ward off with his sword did not exceed three or four. It was well for our horsemen that the foe was on their right flank, where the sword-arm could work with advantage.* Along the main part of the Eussian front, each collision, if so it can be called, which occurred, between lancer and swordsman, was a collision of barely one moment ; because the assailant, in each instance, was not an unfettered man, but the mere component of a mass which had come to a halt ; whilst every rider assailed was a rider in movement — a rider driving past the fixed column as swiftly as his tired beast could go, and rasped only, if so one may speak, by a thicket of lances in passing : but in that part of the enemy's right flank where his squadrons curled round in front of our people, the struggle which proved to be necessary for forcing a passage was somewhat less momentary ; and Lieutenant Eoger Palmer, for one, became engaged at that point in what exercise of our cavalry has been so altered, under the sugges- tion, I believe, of Major Miller (late of the Scots Greys) as to provide better guards than before on the side of the bridle-arm.
 * Since the period spoken of in the text, the hroadsword