Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 8.djvu/88

 66 KEPULSED BY THE TDEKS. chap, tlien beaten back by the fire of the place. Sooii, ' however, they rallied, and were advancing once more when — stricken again by the fire from the parapet — they again began to fall back. Rallied yet once again, and yet once again brought to move forward, the two Azoff bat- talions, this time, reached ground almost close to the ditch ; but — assailed as before by the Osmanli's withering fire — they yet again shrank from its blast; and, their movement of simple recoil lapsing now into final retreat, they made off — with no aid from 'supports' — to regain, if they could, their old shelter under the walls of the Jewish burial-ground. Yet, to do even this unmolested was more than their foes would allow them; for now — led out opportunely from the Perekop gate, and then facing half-about to its left — a Turkish battalion pressed forward with bayonets fixed, sprang intent on the beaten columns retreating across its front, and ap- parently so pushed them northwards as to pre- vent their yet reaching the shelter of even the nearest burial-ground. Nor was this the last blow they sustained ; for before their retrograde movement had brought them even so far as the wall of the Eussian burial-ground, a new dis- turber appeared on what — since they began to fall back — had become of course their right hand. With some two hundred horsemen who consti- tuted what was almost the whole of Omar's then landed cavalry, Iskender Bey trotted up on the flank of the beaten battalions, cut them off from