ground was everywhere smooth, firm, grassy, and quite unenclosed. In rear of the divisions moved the cattle, sheep, the close array of arabas, and the pack-mules with the reserve ammunition, while the cavalry regiment in rear kept all in motion. In this order the Bulganak, an insignificant sluggish stream, was reached early in the afternoon. It was while our divisions were crossing its bridge that they first saw the enemy. A force of the three arms, about 2000 cavalry, 6000 infantry, and two batteries of artillery, was drawn up among the hills, at some distance beyond the stream ; insufficient for a battle, but capable of an action with an advanced guard. It appeared to have been brought there only to effect an armed reconnaissance, for after a short and distant exchange of shots with our foremost batteries, with some trifling loss on either side, it retired without any noteworthy collision of foot or horse. The army thereupon bivouacked on the stream (for the sake of water), with its front some hundred yards on the further bank ; the British right wing parallel to the stream, and the left thrown back to the rivulet, in case of an attack on that side. But it passed the night unmolested.
Next morning, the 2Oth, the troops were under arms early, but did not move for some time. Marshal St Arnaud, returning from a visit to Lord Raglan, passed along our front ; a tall, thin, sharp-visaged man, reduced by illness, but alert and soldier-like, and manifestly much pleased as he saluted our ranks in return for the cheers with which they greeted him. In less than ten days he was a dead man.
The Valley of the Alma. 47
Between nine and ten o'clock the army moved forward, surmounting a succession of grassy ridges. It was well known that we were to try conclusions with the Russians that day. About noon a steamer, coasting along on our flank, began to fire towards the land, just where a sharp, steep cliff ended the shore, and where, in fact, was the mouth of the Alma. When the British surmounted the next ridge, they looked down on the arena of battle.
The valley of the Alma lay before them, at the foot of a smooth, sloping plain. The river, as it flows at the foot of this plain, makes somewhat of an angle, enclosing the Allies ; and the apex just marks the junction of the French left with the English right. Just within the apex is the village of Bourliouk, and noting that as the place where the two Allied armies touched, the share of each in the battle becomes clear.
The ground on the Russian bank was, as befitted a defensive position, much more difficult and commanding than on the other. Beginning at the sea, for more than a mile and a half thence up the stream, there rises close to it a perpendicular rocky wall, as if the sea-cliff were bent backward. Then comes another mile where the cliffs have receded somewhat, and subsided into hills, still steep and difficult, though not forbidding ascent. Near the mouth of the Alma the stream was fordable, and from thence a path led up the cliff.
Three-quarters of a mile up the stream from its mouth there is on the Allies' bank the village of Alma Tamack ; and opposite this a cleft in the cliff allows of a road
48 The Russian Bank.
practicable for guns, which ascends the heights. A mile further up is a farm, opposite which the cliff has subsided and receded, and here is another road. Finally, at another half mile up the stream, a few hundred yards to the right of the village of Bourliouk, where, on the Russian side, the hills have still receded and become more practicable, another road crosses, ascending the heights to a telegraph tower. Everywhere, the hills, whether standing up in cliffs, as near the sea, or receding from the stream, were the buttresses which supported on their tops a high plain stretching away towards the next river that crossed our line of march on Sebastopol.
The part of the stream thus described marks the front of the French and Turks, who may be said to have faced south-south-west.