a main field of combat. Although the disparity of numbers was now diminished, the Russians, instead of shrinking from difficulties which their own imaginations rendered insurmountable, or accepting a repulse as final, swarmed again and again to the encounter, engaging by groups and individuals in the closest and most obstinate combats, till between the hostile lines rose a rampart of the fallen men of both sides. For a long time the part played by the defenders was strictly defensive ; with each repulse the victors halted on the edge of the steeps, preserving some continuity of front with which to meet the next assault, while the recoiling crowds, unmolested by pursuit, and secured from fire by the abruptness of the edge, paused at a short distance below to gather fresh coherence and impetus for a renewal of the struggle. It was with the arrival of Cathcart, conducting part of the Fourth Division, that the combat assumed a new phase. Possessed with the idea of the decisive effect which an attack on their flank must exercise on troops that, however strong they might still be in numbers, had already suffered so many rebuffs, he descended the slope beyond the right of our line. The greater part of his troops had already been cast piecemeal into the fight in other parts of the field where succour was most urgently needed, but about 400 men remained to him with which to make the attempt. And at first it was eminently effective, insomuch that Cathcart congratulated his brigadier, Torrens, then lying wounded, on the success of this endeavour to take the offensive. But that success was now to be turned into
I 50 The French drive back the Russians.
disaster by an event which it was altogether beyond Cathcart's province or power to foresee. While advancing in the belief that he was in full co-operation with our troops on the cliff, he was suddenly assailed by a body of the enemy from the heights he had just quitted, and which had either turned or broken through that part of our front which he was endeavouring to relieve from the stress of numbers. Thus taken in reverse, his troops, scattered on the rugged hillside, suffered heavily, only regaining the position in small, broken bodies, and with the loss of their commander, who was shot dead. This effort of Cathcart's changed the restrained character of the defence, and was the first of numerous desultory onsets, which left the troops engaged in them far in advance, and broke the continuity of the line. For the downward movement had spread from right to left along the front ; the heights of the Fore Ridge, left bare of the defenders, were occupied by Russians ascending the ravine beyond their left ; and our people, thus intercepted, had to edge past the enemy, or to cut their way through. The right of our position seemed absolutely without defence ; a body of Russian troops was moving unopposed along the Fore Ridge, apparently about to push through the vacant corner of the position, when, in order to enclose our fragments, it formed line to its left, facing the edge of the cliffs. It was while it stood thus that a French regiment, lately arrived, and thus far posted at the English end of the Fore Ridge, advanced, took the Russians in flank, and drove them back into the gorges from whence they had issued.