It was in this interval, between the sortie of the 26th October and the battle of the 5th November, that a work was thrown up by us on the field which, useless as a defence, became the object of bloody conflict. It was observed that the Russians were constructing a work on the other side of the valley to hold two guns (probably to support the coming attack), the embrasures being already formed, and the gabions placed in them. On this being shown to General Evans, he had two eighteen-pounders brought from the depot of the siege train, not far off, and a high parapet with two embra-
I 28 Preparation for an Assault.
sures, made solid with sandbags, was thrown up on the edge of the cliff to hold them. It was placed about 1400 yards from the enemy's intended battery. In a few rounds the Russian work was knocked to pieces, and our guns, as being too far from our lines to be guarded, were then removed from what became afterwards a point, in the history of the battle, known as "the Sandbag Battery."
On the 4th of November the French infantry in the Crimea numbered 31,000; the British, 16,000; the Turks, who were not permitted to develop their value, 11,000. They must have been very different from the Turkish soldiery of the present day if they were not equal in fighting quality to any troops in the Crimea, and superior to all in patience, temperance, and endurance. But it was a tendency of the time to disparage them, partly from their abandonment of the outposts at Balaklava, the valorous defence made by a great part of them being, from some accident, unknown at the time ; and they were employed in ways which gave them no opportunity of helping us in battle.
On both the Allied and the Russian side it was known that a crisis was now rapidly approaching ; but only the Russians knew that it was a race between them for delivering the attack. The French siege corps, comparatively strong, close to its base, and protected on both flanks, on one by the sea, on the other by the English, was now retrieving its disaster of the i/th October, by diligently pushing its approaches in regular form upon the Flagstaff Bastion. We were strengthening our batteries and replenishing our magazines ; as has been said,
Assembly of Russian Forces. 129
the Russian daily loss in the fortress far exceeded ours in the trenches. We were ready to support a French attack which would now be made over a very short space of open ground. On the 4th November the Allied commanders had appointed a meeting on the 5th for definitely arranging the cannonade and assault which, they hoped, would at length lay the fortress open to us. The Russians were, of course, alive to the peril. But, on the 4th they had completed the assembly of their forces for attack. For long the corps tfarmee stationed about Odessa had been in motion for the Crimea. It had repeatedly sent important reinforcements to the fortress, and the whole of those, which had reached the heights beyond the Tchernaya by the 4th November, raised the total of Menschikoff's forces in and around Sebastopol, according to Todleben, to 100,000 men, without -counting the seamen, so that not less than no to 115,000 men were confronting the 65,000 which, counting seamen and marines, the aggregate of the Allied forces amounted to.
Of the Russian troops which took actual part in the battle of Inkerman, 19,000 infantry, under General Soimonoff, were within the fortifications of Sebastopol; 16,000, under General Pauloff, were on the heights beyond the Tchernaya. These were to combine for the attack, accompanied by fifty-four guns of position and eighty-one field-guns. On their left was the force which had been Liprandi's, now commanded by Prince Gortschakoff, stretching from the captured hills outside Balaklava, across the Fedioukine heights, into the lower valley
130 Arrival of the Russian Grand Ditkes.