Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 5.djvu/443

 APPENDIX. 421 keen and sure glance of Sir Colin Campbell, appeared to comprise just 400 men. The presumption would be that the leader of those 400 men, after wheeling aside from the fire of the 93<l, must have felt it his duty to bring them back to the main body from which they had been detached, on a sort of exploring errand ; but, even supposing that he failed to do so, the mode of computation which I have been suggesting would still give 3000 as the strength of the mass which moved down to try an encounter with General Scarlett's dragoons. With respect to the computations made roughly by those of our people who were present in the action, I may say that Colonel Hamley (an accomplished artillery officer who would be necessarily well skilled in estimating distances, and, as a not improbable consequence, in inferring the numerical strength of a column) was of opinion that the force with which General Ryjoff descended to encounter Scarlett, must have numbered no less than 6000 ; and it is not within my knowledge that any observer who sur- veyed the column in action with his own eyes has be- lieved it to be of a strength less than that which Lord Lucan assigned it — that is, 3500. So, upon the whole, I now think that in the absence of 'states,' and in the absence, moreover, of all special infor- mation accounting for large ' deductions from strength,' there can hardly be any great error in saying that the body of horse attacked by Scarlett must have numbered about 3000.