Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 9.djvu/133

 COMBATS ON THE INKEUMAN SPUB. 103 When the French, as we saw, had determined chap. that the Zabalkansky battery was too distant to be of service to them, and had therefore done deferent their best to destroy it, they were far from in- U1 tending that their outposts should be kept back in rear of the work they had thus discarded as useless, and took good care, on the contrary, to spread their patrols over ground several hundreds of yards more advanced — ground by which they well knew that the enemy might approach them from the Karabelnaya; whilst also, as was nat- ural, volunteer explorers and idlers moved ram- bling over the ground newly opened on that sum- mer evening to the eyes of the victors. The people thus scattered were, at one point, Fruitless L L advances ol pressed back by Colonel Prince Ouroussoii with a Russian r-i i i T7- troops; single battalion;* at another by Colonel Ivraiev- sky, despatched under Khrouleff's directions with no less than 800 men. In the course of the their re- ., . ported movement he made against troops thus receding aenieve- . ineuts. before him, Prince Ouroussoff entered the site of the discarded battery (which the French had taken, spoilt, and abandoned three hours before), and on that simple action built up — built up, I believe, in good faith — a theory that he with his men had victoriously 'retaken' the work. Though he added that he had retaken it with our old friend ' the bayonet,' one is not therefore forced to infer that he meant to deceive human beings, but rather — Sclave like — to put a kind of ' Hur- panied Ouroussuii's battalion, and was killed.
 * General Timovieff (on what ground 1 know not) accorn-