Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol 7.djvu/273

 THE DEMEANOUE OF ENGLAND. 229 SO believing or not, they at least might arraign chap. a system which had failed to save our army from ^^' want, and mark out those public delinquents to whom any faults could be traced. The people were keenly desiring, nay, indeed, were almost insisting that some State offender should expiate the distress of our troops ; and the general sen- timent of the time was well enough indicated by the ironical title of a pamphlet which called itself To learn and say who was in fault whole multitudes were ready and eager, yet not for the moment well qualified ; because those who best knew the truth were engaged far away in Crim- Tartary ; and besides, the enquirers were bent upon a too narrow view of their subject. The dominant cause of the suffering endured by our soldiery was, after all, as we saw, that double or compound generalship which had not only brouglit criticism the Allies to abandon their territorial conquest from the from the Alma to the Mackenzie Heights, but to S^e^ff"^' make themselves prisoners for the winter on a bleak, barren promontory where their horses no less than their troops must live wholly, if they could live at all, by means fetched on shipboard from distant lands ; and it happened that that very strategy in all its ill-omened stages had received from the country at large so warm an approval as to be now exempted from criticism. Men who only a few weeks before had exultingly praised the 'Flank March,' and the counsels leading on to a siege now looked naturally in some other direction for the causes of what all
 * Whom shall we Hang ? '