Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 5.djvu/408

 38G COMBAT OF THE 20TH OF OCTOBEB. its results: ■t» pitta : its effect upon the Holdiery of our 2d Division. char trying conclusions lay all within a few minutes. ' The losses acknowledged by the Russians were 270 either killed or wounded ; * and Evans's people alone took more than eighty prisoners, including two officers. Of the English, twelve were killed and seventy-seven wounded. They did not lose any prisoners. Told briefly, the combat was this : an advance of some five thousand Eussian infantry encoun- tered for a while by a chain of slowly receding pickets, and then crushed all at once by artillery. From the moment when the enemy had com- pleted his preliminary operations by establishing himself on Shell Hill, half an hour at the most proved enough to, determine the result of his effort ; and indeed the attack was so weak that it scarce gave our people fair warrant for indulging the language of triumph. Still, in Evans's way of repulsing his assailants, there was an easy and masterful grace which could not but give con- fidence to his troops, and the more so perhaps since the combat for once resembled a field-day at home. The General's plan of suffering the combat to approach his own chosen ground, and then end- ing it at once with artillery, proved apt for the occasion in hand ; but the immediate success of his tactics was not their only result. By refusing to engage out in front more than three or four hundred of his infantry, he gave to this small portion of his division — and through them to the rest of it — an hour of the most wholesome train- • Todleben, p. 406