Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 8.djvu/326

 294 THE PLAN SUBJECTED chap, to augment its power by assigning troops of other ' nations to act with it under the same commander. ' The British army,' writes Lord Raglan, ' is too ' small to be divided. It should act in one body/* rhe Em- A part of the havoc sustained by this ill-fated exposeYto 11 Han when it reached the Crimea can be shown in realities!' ' arithmetical figures. The Emperor's Palace-made reckoning had laid it down, as we saw, that, to guard the positions of the besiegers in front of Sebastopol, there were needed no more than 60,000 men, of whom one half might be French, and the other half Turks ; but enquiry at the seat of war soon made it appear that the army or armies entrusted with this momentous charge should have a strength of 90,000 — that is, a with what force exceeding the one which had seemed great enough to the planners in Buckingham Palace by no less than 30,000 men.t And again, the whole force which Omar Pasha now consented to leave in the south of the Crimea was less by 15,000 than the Palace computers had imagined or hoped it would be ; J so that, after making these two corrections, and then beginning to learn what forces might be actually assembled for cam- + A joint commission appointed by the three Commanders to i:i<[uire and report on this subject, recommended unanimously that the strength of the force remaining planted before Sebas- fcopol should be 90,000. X Omar Pasha was sending some troops to the Chersonese, but withdrawing others, and the upshot of his arrangements was as stated above. Lord Raglan to Secretary of State, May ]5, 1855.
 * To Lord Panmure, Private Letter, May 1, 1855.