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Eyre's brigade penetrated on the 18th of June, and the cemetery which they took is just a little to the left of them. Behind the three embrasures commanding the Woronzofif Road is a picture hung up by the Russians, which contains three figures, almost as large as life, executed in rather a primitive style of art upon boards nailed together; one of them represents a Russian soldier, and another a Zouave; the third it was difficult to make out, but it is understood to be an Englishman, and the meaning of the whole, that the Ruski could fight both of them.
PLATE XL VII.
BURNING OF THE GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS AT KERTCII,
9th June, 1855.
Could the mind be divested of the associations of ruin and desolation which inevitably attend such a scene as that here so vividly presented to us, there would be no spectacle so beautiful, as there is unquestionably none so terrible and sublime, as that of a vast conflagration seen by night.
The strange brilliant light invading the pure brightness of the heavens and paling the stars, revealing every feature of the landscape with startling distinctness, and yet clothing its most familiar forms with an unwonted aspect; the very water, whose cold surface yet mirrors back the all-pervading glow, and, like the hypocrite of passion, feigns the ardour which it cannot feel; the gorgeous colouring and graceful involutions of the lambent flame, as it gradually dies away into the fantastic, cloudlike masses of smoke which relieve and contrast it; all these united form a scene on which the gaze will love to linger. Nor do its sterner and more destructive characteristics fail to excite feelings, which, if of a different order, are perhaps deeper and stronger from finding a closer relation and a more intimate affinity with their material cause.
The resistless force, the devouring energy, the insatiable avidity of an element, which in consuming what it embraces exhausts itself — the fire which intensifies beauty only to reduce it to smouldering ashes, — awaken an admiration which, it may be, springs from the consciousness, that, in the fiercer passions of the human heart, exist the counterparts of these, and that in one of its most secret recesses may be latent a spark which might light a flame as unquenchable in its nature and as fatal in its effects.
Some feelings of regret were, perhaps, spared to those who gazed with awe and wonder on the burning of the Government buildings at Kertch, from their ignorance of the fact that, had a little more deliberation been used, they might have been saved. So, however, it was; and it is hardly possible to suppose that the sanction of the authorities would have been given to this wholesale destruction, had it been known that Kertch would be so long in the occupation of the Allies.
THE EAST.
The drawing was taken from the sea, whence the view must, indeed, have been magnificent. The whole length of the quay was covered with public buildings, not one of which escaped the flames. The house behind the clump of trees, burning with such fury, was the governor's; and other edifices of equal importance carry on the eye of the spectator to the extreme distance, the last building visible being a mill belonging to an Englishman named Plating.* The dark outline of Mount Mithridates, surmounted by the cold columns of the Museum and Stamkoffsky's tomb, forms the background of the picture.
PLATE XLVIII.
INTEEIOE OF LOED EAGLAN'S HEAD-QUAETEES. A Council of War.