Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 9.djvu/39

 THE PROBLEM IN HAND. i) lish combined.* Hugely changed by this exigency, C h a p, the problem no longer asked simply how best '. — to conquer Sebastopol, but how best to attempt this concurrently with the furnishing of 90,000 men for another imperative task. To answer the problem thus put, widely differ- ent solutions were offered. With the bulk of the 98,000 men that would still be left after furnishing the guard of 90,000, and also leaving a garrison at Eupatoria, it was possible to undertake field operations which might force the enemy to relax his hold of Se- bastopol ; but every such project involved a more or less widened severance of the Allied forces. It also was possible to avoid all such sever- ances by simply pressing the siege, and this plan had the evident merit of compressing, as it were, into one the heavy task of defence and the less heavy task of conquest; so that under a project thus ordered, the whole mass of the 188,000 men (saving only a garrison for Eupatoria) might be kept together in an assem- bled state. To accept that alternative, however, was to make a distressing choice, for it involved the continuance of a siege to be pressed at cruel sacrifice of life against the now immensely strong front of an uninvested fortress, with all liussia at its back ; and it sanctioned what, under one aspect, might pass for a huge waste of power, since, as long as the siege might endure, an enormous proportion of the 188,000 Allies,
 * See ante, vol. viii. p. 295.