On the 18th, Pelissier and our own forces made a terrible assault upon the Malakoff and Redan. It is not, dear reader, because we were defeated in this attempt (which, had not the French general been so headstrong, would never have been undertaken) that I do not here give any detailed account of the fighting and the slaughter—for one should never be ashamed to own one's faults and defeats—but because the facts are all too well known to the veriest school-boy.
I may add, however, that after these failures I should not have cared to stand in Pelissier's shoes, seeing that he was acting entirely contrary to his emperor's plans.
But Pelissier persisted—he could not very well withdraw now—and so the siege went on, but more methodically and prudently.
Pelissier was a kind-hearted man in the main, as well as a resolute, daring, and determined. The soft or gentle side of his character is well seen at the death-bed of poor Lord Raglan. The general's health had no doubt been weakened by chagrin and grief at the reverses he had met with. In such a condition as this one is more apt to fall a victim to disease, and Raglan was attacked by cholera, and quietly passed away on the twenty-eighth of June. And Pelissier, we are told, stood by the bedside for upwards of an hour crying like a child.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE RUSSIAN BEAR AT BAY—THE LAST ACT OF THE
TRAGIC WAR.
Nearer and nearer to the great fortress crept now the works of the allied armies. The grip of death was tightening on the brave defenders of Sebastopol.
Brave? ah yes; give them their due. Their sufferings at this time were greater even than our own, and under our fire at least two hundred of them fell every day.
Around and in the ruined heaps of their batteries the unburied dead still lay in heaps, and sickness, too, was rife.
But now the great and final tug of war must shortly come.