impossibility of for a moment losing sight of the respect which they owe her. She never ceases to be a queen, but is always the most charming, cheerful, obliging, unaffected queen in the world. The procession was very handsome, and the extraordinary embassadors produced some gorgeous equipages. This sort of procession is incomparably better than the old ceremonial which so much fuss was made about, for the banquet would only have benefited the privileged few and the rich, and for one person who would have witnessed the procession on the platform, five hundred enjoyed the sight of this. In fact, the thing best worth seeing was the town itself, and the countless multitudes through which the procession passed. The chancellor of the exchequer told me that he had been informed £200,000 had been paid for seats alone, and the number of people who have flocked into London has been estimated at five hundred thousand. It is said that a million have had sight of the show in one way or another. These numbers are possibly exaggerated, but they really were prodigious. From Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, by the way they took, which must be two or three miles in length, there was a dense mass of people; the seats and benches were all full, every window was occupied, the roofs of the houses were covered with spectators, for the most part well dressed, and, from the great space through which they were distributed, there was no extraordinary pressure, and consequently no room for violence or ill-humor. In the evening I met Prince Esterhazy, and asked him what the foreigners said. He replied that they admired it all very much: "Strogonoff and the others don't like you, but they feel it, and it makes a great impression on them; in fact, nothing can be seen like it in any other country." I went into the park, where the fair was going on; a vast multitude, but all of the lower orders; not very amusing. The great merit of this coronation is, that so much has been done for the people; to amuse and interest them seems to have been the principal object.

LXI.

BATTLE OF THE ALMA.-MCCARTHY.

[The peace of Victoria's reign was not seriously interrupted until the outbreak of the Crimean war, in 1854. The natural desire of Russia to extend her power to the Dardanelles, and to open a way for her commerce into the Mediterranean by encroaching upon the Turkish dominions, both in Europe and Asia, aroused the jealousy of the Western Powers, and led England and France to combine against her. The war was carried on principally around Sebastopol, a powerful fortress in the peninsula of the Crimea, in southern Russia, and the battle of the Alma was the first of a series of battles which were fought for the possession of that fortress.]

THE invasion of the Crimea, however, was not a soldier's project. It was not welcomed by the English or the French commander. It was undertaken by Lord Raglan out of deference to the recommendations of the government; and by Marshal St. Arnaud out of deference to the emperor of the French, and because Lord Raglan did not see his way to decline the responsibility of it. The allied forces were therefore conveyed to the south-western shore of the Crimea, and effected a landing in Kalamita Bay, a short distance north of the point at which the river Alma runs into the sea. Sebastopol itself lies about thirty miles to the south; and then more southward still, divided by the bulk of a jutting promontory from Sebastopol, is the harbor of Balaklava. The disembarkation began on the morning of September 14, 1854; it was completed on the fifth day; and there were then some 27,000 English, 30,000 French, and 7,000 Turks, landed on the shores of Catherine the Great's Crimea. The landing was effected without any opposition from the Russians. On September 19 the allies marched out of their encampments, and moved southward in the direction of Sebastopol. They had a skirmish or two with a reconnoitering force of Russian cavalry and Cossacks; but they had no business of genuine war until they reached the nearer bank of the Alma. The Russians, in great

strength, had taken up a splendid position on the heights that fringed the other side of the river. The allied forces reached

the Alma about noon on September 20. They found that they had to cross the river in the face of the Russian batteries, armed with heavy guns on the highest point of the hills or bluffs, of scattered artillery, and of dense masses of infantry which covered the hills. The Russians were under the command of Prince Mentschikoff. It is certain that Prince Mentschikoff believed his position unassailable, and was convinced that his enemies were delivered into his hands when he saw the allies approach, and attempt to effect the crossing of the river. He had allowed them, of deliberate purpose, to approach thus far. He might have attacked them on their landing, or on their two days' march toward the river. But he did not choose to do any thing of the kind. He had carefully sought out a strong, and what he considered an impregnable, position. He had found it, as he believed, on the south bank of the Alma; and there he was simply biding his time. His idea was that he could hold his ground for some days against the allies with ease; that he would keep them there, play with them, until the great re-enforcements he was expecting could come to him; and then he would suddenly take the offensive and crush the enemy. He proposed to make of the Alma and its banks the grave of the invaders. But, with characteristic arrogance and lack of care, he had neglected some of the very precautions which were essentially necessary to secure any position, however strong. He had not taken the pains to make himself certain that every easy access to his position was closed against the attack of the enemy. The attack was made with desperate courage on the part of the allies, but without any great skill of leadership or tenacity of discipline. It was rather a pell-mell sort of fight, in which the headlong courage and the indomitable obstinacy of the English and French troops carried all before them at last. A study of the battle is of little profit to the ordinary

reader. It was an heroic scramble. There was little coherence of action between the allied forces. But there was, happily, an almost total absence of generalship on the part of the Russians. The soldiers of the Czar fought stoutly and stubbornly, as they always have done; but they could not stand up against the blended vehemence and obstinacy of the English and French. The river was crossed, the opposite heights were mounted, Prince Mentschikoff's great redoubt was carried, the Russians were driven from the field, the allies occupied their ground; the victory was to the Western powers. Indeed, it would not be unfair to say that the victory was to the English; owing to whatever cause, the French did not take that share in the heat of the battle which their strength and their military genius might have led men to expect. St. Arnaud, their commander-in-chief, was in wretched health, on the point of death, in fact; he was in no condition to guide the battle; a brilliant enterprise of General Bosquet was ill-supported, and had nearly proved a failure; and Prince Napoleon's division got hopelessly jammed up and confused. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that, in the confusion and scramble of the whole affair, we were more lucky than the French. If a number of men are rushing headlong, and in the dark, toward some distant point, one may run against an unthought-of obstacle, and fall down, and so lose his chance, while his comrade happens to meet with no such stumbling-block, and goes right on. Perhaps this illustration may not unfairly distribute the parts taken in the battle. It would be superfluous to say that the French fought splendidly where they had any real chance of fighting But the luck of the day was not with them. On all sides the battle was fought without generalship. On all sides the bravery of the officers and men was worthy of any general. Our men were the luckiest. They saw the heights; they saw the enemy there; they made for him; they got at him ; they would not go back; and so he had to give way. That

was the history of the day. The big scramble was all over in a few hours. The first field was fought, and we had won.

The Russians ought to have been pursued. They themselves fully expected a pursuit. They retreated in something like utter confusion, eager to put the Katcha river, which runs south of the Alma, and with a somewhat similar course, between them and the imaginary pursuers. Had they been followed to the Katcha they might have been all made prisoners or destroyed. But there was no pursuit. Lord Raglan was eager to follow up the victory; but the French had as yet hardly any cavalry, and Marshal St. Arnaud would not agree to any further enterprise that day. Lord Raglan believed that he ought not to persist; and nothing was done. The Russians were unable at first to believe in their good fortune. It seemed to them for a long time impossible that any commanders in the world could have failed, under conditions so tempting, to follow a flying and disordered enemy.

Except for the bravery of those who fought, the battle was not much to boast of. The allies altogether considerably outnumbered the Russians, although, from the causes we have mentioned, the Englishmen were left throughout the greater part of the day to encounter an enemy numerically superior, posted on difficult and commanding heights. But it was the first great battle which for nearly forty years our soldiers had fought with a civilized enemy. The military authorities and the country were well disposed to make the most of it. At this distance of time it is almost touching to read some of the heroic contemporaneous descriptions of the great scramble of the Alma. It might almost seem as if, in the imaginings of the enthusiastic historians, Englishmen had never mounted heights and defeated superior numbers before. The sublime triumphs against every adverse condition which had been won by a Marlborough or a Wellington could not have been celebrated in language of more exalted dithyrambic pomp.