Even when won this Sandbag Battery was a perilous prize: tempting the English leaders to adventure too far to the front and to leave a great gap in the general line of defence unoccupied and undefended.
Lord Raglan saw the error and would have skilfully averted the impending evil.
"That opening leaves the left of the Guards exposed," he said to Airey. "Tell Cathcart to fill it."
"You are to move to the left and support the Guards," was the message conveyed to Cathcart, "but not to descend or leave the plateau. Those are Lord Raglan's orders."
But Sir George chose to interpret them his own way, and already—with Torrens's brigade and a weak body at best—he had gone down the hill to join the Guards. In the sharp but misdirected encounter which followed, the general lost his life, and his force, with the Guards, were for a time cut off from their friends.
A Russian column had wedged in at the gap and for a time forbade retreat, but it was at length sheered off by the first of the French reinforcements; and the intercepted British, in greatly diminished numbers, by degrees won their way home.
This fighting around the Sandbag Battery had cost us very dear: Cathcart was killed, the Guards were decimated, and Wilders's brigade, now commanded by Colonel Blythe, had fallen back, spent and disorganised. So serious indeed were these losses that for the next hour the brigade possessed no coherent shape, and only by dint of the unwearied exertions of its officers was it rallied sufficiently to share in the later phases of the fight.
Meanwhile the centre of our line, where Pennefather stood posted on the Home Ridge, had been furiously assailed. Gathering their forces under shelter of a deep ravine, the Russian general sent up column after column, first against the left and then against the right of the Ridge. Gravely weakened by his early encounter, Pennefather had only a handful of his own men to meet this attack. They were now pressed back indeed, although their general was beginning to wield detachments from other commands. A portion of the Fourth Division had been put under his orders.
General Cathcart, just before his death, had come to him with a battalion of the Rifle Brigade.
"They can do anything," he had said. "Where are they wanted most?"