Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 9.djvu/294

. 264 CHANGE OBSERVED IN LORD RAGLAN. CHAP. X. Yet this only one epoch in a glorious life. The belief that '-arc ll.'lli ll'Tll his vital strength. member the course of events brought back, as it were, by the sound — the once familiar sound — of mere loosely strung words such as these, is to have some idea, though a faint one, of the strain undergone by Lord Eaglan within the last year. Yet, this campaign — brilliant and troubled — was, after all, only one epoch in a glorious life that, during the eight closing years of our war against France and Napoleon, the then youthful Lord Fitzroy Somerset had passed at the side of Wellington — a life that ' bore on its colours ' (as soldiers say of a regiment) the names of Eolica, Vimieira, Talavera, Busaco, Fuentes d'Onoro, Ciudad Bodrigo, Badajos, Salamanca, Vittoria, Pyrenees, Nivelle, Nive, Orthez, Toulouse, and Waterloo. There is therefore in known, outward circum- stances some part at the least of a basis on which one might rest a belief that, long before Lord Eaglan encountered the disappointment and losses sustained by Pelissier and himself in assaulting the works of the Karabelnaya, care — the care of the war — had been sapping his vital strength. True, one does not at first very easily learn to believe that he who ever had seemed to be meet- ing the trials of war with a nobly buoyant spirit, he who only a few hours before had — almost blameably — chosen to plant himself — at first with one other, and then all alone — within the scope of that torrent of grape-shut and balls which Colonel Yea's column was meeting, should all the while have been one on whom care had