Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 9.djvu/278

 248 GENERAL PELISSIER. chap, mands in letters and messages from the "West to __!_. the East of Europe. Whatever alarm might he raised by the pros- pect of a Louis Napoleon appearing in the Crimea, there seemed to he fair ground for hope that his contact with realities, the influence exercised over him by his surrounding generals, and his natural awe of Lord Raglan, would so far awaken him as to check his pursuit of dreams. And again, when abandoning his project of coiner out to the Crimea, he resorted to the plan of conducting the war by letters, the French army, as we know, was in some sort protected from its sovereign by intervening distance ; since lapse of time passing between the writing and the arrival of his missives allowed room for such change of circumstances as might warrant or ex- cuse disobedience to imperial mandates. But when in the beginning of May electricity overcame distance, and thenceforth the unfortu- nate Canrobert on the Chersonese began to get pelted with orders despatched the same day by his master, the peril became acute, and was fol- lowed at once — not indeed by an actual and disastrous defeat in the field, but — by that recall of the expedition to Kertch (when already near the end of the voyage) which brought what the French call ' a Ridicule ' on France, and through her, on the Great Alliance. The cup was then full ; and, General Canrobert, in confusion and misery, withdrawing from the eommand, his successor (Pelissier) entered on that