Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol 6.djvu/250

 206 THE BATTLE OF INKERMAN. CHAP. VI. 2d Period. Continued advance of the column. The Colonel of the Scots Fusiliers : with a great alacrity, and amongst them it would have been hard to find discontent or impatience, except here and there in some man who might be raging for want of cartridges. What the real causes are which moderate the devastation inflicted by such steady shooting as this it may be hard to say ; but certainly fire- arms in battle are not so largely destructive as the processes of antecedent reasoning might com- pute them to be. The Eussians, it is true, at this time were falling in numbers ; but their column, after all, was retaining its massive dimensions, and still valiantly ascending in the face of the Scots Fusiliers, without returning their fire. Our rank and file liked a work in which each man, for once, could feel himself to be separately and distinctly effective ; but care pressed on the minds of their chiefs ; and indeed for any officer so high in command as to have to think of the issue, it was hard to judge how, if at all, when the last trying moment should come, this knotted string of men on the crest might withstand, or attem})t to withstand, the weight of the advanc- ing thousands. When H.R.H. the Duke of Cam- bridge, after his expedition in search of reinforce- ments, had returned to the neighbourhood of the Sandbag Battery, he remained, it seems, chiefly with the Grenadiers. General Bentinck, the next in authority, had been disabled by a wound in the arm ; and upon the north front, where our Scots Fusiliers awaited the heaviest onslaught, their Colonel was receiving no orders. He him-