Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 8.djvu/148

 116 SECRET TEKMS OF NIEL'S MISSION. CHAPTER V. TITE SECRET TERMS OF THE MISSION ENTRUSTED TO GENERAL NIEL. CHAP. V. Those who now have sufficiently seen General Canrobert yielding and yielding to the series of affronts put upon him by an audacious garrison, will be in the mood for enquiring whether this long-continued submissiveness was all his own, or might partly be traced to misguidance imposed by the hand of authority. The French Emperor be ginning in secret to interfere with the <iiege. The engagements of the 1st of January were still only new, when the Emperor Louis Napoleon began to counterplot them, and — concealing his design from our people — to frame an ill-omened scheme which tended to put in abeyance the enterprise of Canrobert's army, and keep it for nearly three months in what might well seem to observers a faltering, half-hearted state, though its real condition, as now we are able to see, was one of another kind. It was an army — not stricken with palsy from any defect in itself, but