Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 8.djvu/45

 HIS AGGRESSIVE MKASURES. 13 to that end amongst many others he bent his chap. i. designs, never ceasing to provide for the Work, and for all the ground near its gorge such doubled, such trebled, such quadrupled means of resistance that the assailants on the day of the struggle must either recoil from the venture, or dearly buy their conquest with blood ; but he believed that with all his resources he could not defend the threatened Bastion against a deter- mined attack ; whilst, moreover, he judged that the loss of the Work would so split the Sebas- topol defences as to ensure the fall of the place.* It may seem at first sight that this twofold conclusion would warrant an approach towards despondency. V. But apart from what, narrowly speaking, may Todieben-s be called the ' defence ' of ' the Flagstaff Bastion,' for averting ° > attack. there might be measures well fitted to save it by averting, instead of resisting, the threatened at- tack ; and indeed, as we saw, it was to a policy of that sort, adopted on the 5th of November, that the Bastion then owed its immunity from what on the previous day seemed a closely impending assault. Colonel Todleben could not well ask that an- other battle of Inkerman should be hazarded for the Flagstaff Bastion, and apparently it may be taken for granted that he did not perseveringly counsel that measure of a ' sortie in strength and
 * See his words, quoted post, p. 197.