Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 8.djvu/235

 GROUND FOR EXULTATION. 203 in one place, but forming elsewhere what, if chap. VII. shaped by the hand of nature, might almost have ' been called a ' ravine.'* This artificial opening of the ground close in and there front of the Flagstaff Bastion became for the 4th Parallel. French a beginning of their 4th Parallel, and — though not until after hard struggles — they were ultimately able to establish themselves in the hollow, taking care of course also to connect it with their 3d Parallel — full 100 yards less in advance — by covered lines of way.t Unaware of the secret resolves which were too surely baffling its efforts, the French Army taken at large might have well felt a right to exult, when two - thirds of the distance which had separated their foremost Parallel from the Flag- staff Bastion were thus all at once overleapt by the art of the miner, and their people— with cover to shelter them — were planted at last within stone's-throw of that very counterscarp which they had hopefully begun to • approach on the earliest night of the siege. But that same French Army comprised in its thousands two men who must needs have been gravely embarrassed by seeing — on the day of his death — this completion of Bizot's design ; for, in faithful obedience to the ' Mission,' both Canrobert and Niel had been the afterwards ascertained fact that in part of the mine some charges had failed to explode. t In anticipation of the explosions destined, as we saw, to take effect on the 15th, the formation of these covered lines of way was begun on the night of the 11th. — Niel, p. 201.
 * The incompleteness of the hollow at one spot resulted from