Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 9.djvu/85

 THE RENEWED EXPEDITION TO KERTCH. 55 buildings.* From some houses the roofs were CHAP. torn off, and their timbers used for firing. The _ hospitals even were pillaged.! Sir George Brown had at one time agreed with General d'Autemarre to place a guard over the Museum in Kertch ; but he afterwards aban- doned the project, because convinced that, if small, the guard might not be secure ; and that one of sufficing strength could hardly be spared for the purpose.} The Museum thus left to its fate was gutted, was plundered ; and, unless General Tod- leben erred, or for once wrote in irony, the plundering of the institution was perpetrated by hunters after ' antiquities ' — men who also, he says, pushed their search down to even the tombs of the dead.§ By whom were these outrages perpetrated ? ^com^ They were perpetrated, it would seem, in the outrage. main by the native marauders called ' Tartars ' ; but in part by 'boats'-crews' from both fleets, and in part too by straggling soldiers — some French and some Turkish — who, despite the commands of their officers, had found their way into the town. The commander of the expedition proved hap- pily able to say that amongst all the ' stragglers ' engaged in these crimes and outrages not one English soldier, as far as he knew, had been seen. || X Sir George Brown to Lord Raglan, 10th June. § Todleben, vol. ii. p. 284.
 * Todleben, vol. ii. p. 284. t Ibid.
 * Sir George Brown to Lord Raglan, 10th June.