Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 8.djvu/166

 134 THE APRIL BOMBARDMENT. chap, able of dreaming, like others, that the bombanl- VI ' ment about to begin would be followed up by the whowere French with any decisive attacks; but — effectually Efttw^ecret kept out of such secrets — the Allied armies gen- miision! erally, as also indeed their antagonists within the lines of Sebastopol, were agreed in believing that, whether for good or whether for evil, this vast and long promised exertion of artillery-power must be pregnant with desperate fights resulting in some mighty change ; and even Lord Raglan himself — a known enemy of overcharged language — did not differ at heart from the officer who spoke of the business in hand as being ' a grave affair.^ 1 ) When, however, Lord Eaglan thus judged, he had not discovered the secret which Time has now rudely laid open, and therefore took it for granted that the merely preparative blow then about to be struck by artillery was as matter of course to be followed by those ulterior measures which alone could make it conduce to the ruin and fall of Sebastopol. So believing, he lived, we now see, under what was not other or less than a practised deception ; for of course the genuine use of this long-designed cannonade was to open a way for assaults ; and the last brief chapter has taught us that from enterprises of that pithy kind the French Army would be firmly held back by the leading-strings of General Niel's 'mission.' The conditions, moreover, were such that no imaginable attempt to carry the Fortress could be made by our people alone ; so that, to forbid