plain English speech long before; but now that he found it to be a
delusion, he did not recede from his demands upon the Porte: he
rather multiplied them. The upshot of all this was war, in spite of
protracted diplomatic endeavours to the contrary; and into that war
French and English went side by side. Once before they had done so,
when Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur de Lion united their forces to
wrest the Holy Places from the Saracens; that enterprise had been
disgraced by particularly ugly scandals from which this was free; but
in respect to glory of generalship, or permanent results secured, the
Crimean campaign has little pre-eminence over the Fourth Crusade.

Recent disclosures, which have shown that Lord Aberdeen's Ministry
was not rightly reproached with "drifting" idly and recklessly into
this disastrous contest, have also helped to clear the English
commander's memory from the slur of inefficiency so liberally flung
on him at the time, while it has been shown that his action was
seriously hampered by the French generals with whom he had to
co-operate. From whatever cause, such glory as was gained in the
Crimea belongs more to the rank and file of the allied armies than to
those highest in command. The first success won on the heights of the
Alma was not followed up; the Charge of the Six Hundred, which has
made memorable for ever the Russian repulse at Balaklava, was a
splendid mistake, valuable chiefly for the spirit-stirring example it
has bequeathed to future generations of English soldiers, for its
illustration of death-defying, disciplined courage; the great fight
at Inkerman was only converted from a calamitous surprise into a
victory by sheer obstinate valour, not by able strategy; and the
operations that after Lord Raglan's death brought the unreasonably
protracted siege of Sebastopol to a close did but evince afresh how
grand were the soldierly qualities of both French and English, and