Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 5.djvu/338

 316 THE BATTLE OF BALACLAVA. chap, battles at home, would carry the pupil no further ; L and hardly any instance of this could well be more striking than the one we have just seen displayed by Jeropkine's Lancers. Long and pain- fully trained, those docile Muscovites had come all at once to the border which divides the things that are military from the things that are warlike. Whenever they charged at St Petersburg under the eyes of father Nicholas, the son of Paul they always, of course, stopped short without doing harm to those other troops of their Czar who might make-believe to oppose them. They had now done no less, but also no more. It might sound paradoxical to say that the remnants of these two English regiments owed their escape to the high state of discipline to which their adversaries had been wrought ; but certainly if this Eussian mass had consisted of an equal number of bold, angry ploughmen on horseback, with pitchforks in hand, the eighty or ninety disordered dragoons who might try to brush across the faces of their rough foes, would be in danger of incurring grave losses. As it was, our people found themselves saved yet again, as they had been saved before, by the bewilderment of troops who were too ' military ' to be warlike, continued It was something for our people to be no the U two° f longer encountered in their homeward course by regimen"! a barrier of hostile cavalry ; but at the first aspect of it, their plight was still desperate ; for being but few, and in disorder, and having a long extent of uphill ground which musl Ik; traversed