It would be no pleasant task to retrace at length the sorrowful story of the siege. British army organisation had broken down hopelessly, and people in England were maddened by the descriptions in the Press, perhaps in some instances exaggerated, how their brothers and sons were dying in the trenches, not by steel and shell, but from the starvation, disease, exposure, vermin, to which the culpable incapacity of British officials, as it was believed, had exposed them. |Fall of the Coalition Cabinet.| It was the system, rather than its agents, which was to blame; but shoulders had to be found to bear the blame, and Parliament took the only means in its power, by passing a vote of censure on Ministers, who were defeated on a motion by Mr. Roebuck by the crushing majority of 157. The Coalition Government had collapsed.
Chevalier L. W. Desanges.] [In the Victoria Cross
Gallery, Crystal Palace.
LIEUT.-COLONEL SIR CHARLES RUSSELL, BART., V.C.
At the Battle of Inkermann, ammunition failing, both British and Russians hurled stones at each other. In the midst of the mêlée, Lieut.-Colonel Russell, of the Grenadier Guards, led a party into the midst of the enemy, and dislodged them from the Sand-bag Battery. He was nearly bayonetted; his life was saved by a private in the Grenadiers named Palmer.
After an ineffective attempt by Lord Derby to form a Cabinet, Lord Palmerston—the only possible man in the existing state of public opinion—became Prime Minister. Things had begun already to go better with the Allies before Sebastopol. |Victory of the Turks at Eupatoria.| Omar Pasha, with his despised Turks, defeated an army of 40,000 Russians under General Liprandi at Eupatoria on February 18, being supported by an effective fire from the Allied Fleet.
The news reached Czar Nicholas on March 1; he was suffering at the time from the effects of influenza, but his health was not the subject of any alarm to his Court. Nevertheless he died on March 2; peace negotiations were immediately opened at Vienna, and the new Czar consented to send a representative to the Conference “in a sincere spirit of concord.”
Great Britain was represented by Lord John Russell and France by M. Drouyn de Lhuys, but the proceedings were rendered abortive by the refusal of Russia to consent to the neutralisation of the Black Sea.
Sir F. Grant, P.R.A.] [By permission
of Messrs Graves.