Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 9.djvu/253

 THE POWER TIE HAD EXERTED. 223 day meet for Thanksgivings awaited the garrison ; chap. i vm nor less is it true that, when no longer met by his presence amongst the defenders, rash counsels ^yjn^ ks " began to prevail. The Czar's army, wildly at- Kf£ tempting to dispute with the French and Sardin- sians; ians for the banks of the lower Teh era ay a, was tmtap- i i • i preaching soon to receive at their hands a calamitous de- defeat in the field. feat m the field.* The more narrow-minded men of the Czar's The position Army, and even, whilst Nicholas lived, the con- in sebasto- fused Czar himself, would have thought they sufficiently described the real defender of Sebas- topol by calling him an ' Engineer Officer/ with perhaps superadded some epithet such as ' ex- ' cellent,' or ' able,' or ' good ' ; and it is true that his skill in that ' branch ' of the service enabled the great volunteer to bring his power to bear at a critical time ; but it would be a wild mistake to imagine that, because fraught with knowledge and skill on one special subject, his mind was a mind at all prone to run in accustomed, set grooves. He was by nature a man great in war, and richly gifted with power, not only to provide in good time for the dimly expected conditions which it more or less slowly unfolds, but to meet its most sudden emergencies. When, for instance, we saw him at Inkerman in a critical moment, he, in theory, was only a spectator on horseback ; exert from his bed of suffering ou the Belbec, the wounded General opposed the rash counsels which led to the battle of Hie Tchernaya.
 * With all such — of course lesseued — power as he couid