d'Armee, who had distinguished himself as a lieutenant-colonel in Africa in General Bugeaud's expedition against the Arabs. It was under his command as colonel, during a skirmish against a tribe who maintained a persistent opposition by retreating to the numerous inaccessible caverns which their part of the country contained, that Pelissier incurred the blame of most of the civilized nations of Europe for exacting a terrible retribution on a small body of Arabs, who had massacred with great cruelty a messenger whom he had sent to them to propose a conference after they had fled to one of their strongholds. The French troops were ordered to construct a vast pile of wood and combustible materials at the mouth of the grotto or cavern where these people were concealed, and a second messenger was sent to warn them that if they did not yield themselves prisoners they would be put to death. Either not understanding what was said to them, or in a fit of furious desperation, they attacked the man who took the message, or his cries led those outside to believe that he was being slain, the pile was fired, and in a short time the flames were roaring in the cavern, which was soon converted into a furnace in which every soul perished, though the shrieks of the women were so piteous that many of the French soldiers rushed in at last, at the risk of their own lives, for the purpose of rescuing the unhappy creatures. Nine hundred charred corpses were found stretched in heaps along the ground, nearly two hundred poor wretches survived for a few hours, but all died in the course of the day. The deed produced a profound sensation, and several of the more influential French newspapers demanded the dismissal of the colonel. The Chamber of Peers took up the matter, and on the 12th of July, 1845, the Prince of Moskowa, seconded by Count Montalembert, called on the minister of war, Marshal Soult, to express his disapproval of the proceeding. This he did, but Marshal Bugeaud defended his lieutenant and pleaded with success the inexorable necessities of war. The government acknowledged the force of his arguments:—in the following year Pelissier was made maréchal de camp. Having been again promoted to be a general of division by Louis Napoleon when he was made President of the French Republic in 1851, he was in a position to take the command of the 1st Division of the Army of the Crimea, from which he was elevated to the chief command on the retirement of Canrobert. Pelissier was doubtless an energetic, and he was said to be an able general. At any rate on his accession to the command he succeeded in giving a fresh impetus to the operations before Sebastopol, especially as he had "discovered the means of stirring up Lord Raglan," to whom it was reported that he simply said, "I have given such and such an order. I have indicated a certain part to your troops; if you are not decided let me know without any delay, and I shall lose no time in providing for the necessity." The same report goes on to say: "Lord Raglan, who is naturally desirous that his army should bear a part in all the important actions with the French, yields to the desire of the general-in-chief. When General Canrobert used to communicate a plan to Lord Raglan the latter invariably replied, 'I shall give you my answer in writing in three days."" This was the current representation at the time, but men did not themselves realize what were the difficulties and responsibilities of the English commander in the Crimea. Not till Lord Raglan, suffering from long sickness, disappointed, and perhaps too sensitive to the adverse comments on his proceedings which reached him from England, lay dead in the camp, did people here begin to speak again of his high qualities. He had borne the brunt of starvation and mismanagement which he was unable to avert, and appeared to be incapable of alleviating by making more complete preparations at the camp itself, and after lying ill for several days, seemed to be somewhat recovering, when the disease terminated fatally, and the command devolved on General Simpson. But it is time to take a short survey of the situation outside the circle comprised by the allied armies and the fortress before which RUSSELL'S INTERFERENCE ON BEHALF OF PALMERSTON. 137 they had at last been able to sit down in | certainly preferred the Duke of Newcastle; more regular order. The government, with more embarrassments than it could surmount, had been still further hampered by the singular attitude assumed by Lord John Russell. He had, by some peculiar process of reasoning, come to the conclusion that it was his duty to urge the prime minister to get rid of the Duke of Newcastle and to give the seals of the war department to Lord Palmerston. That such an alteration would have been popular there was no doubt, for amid a very widely-spread mistrust of the administration, or that part of it which had control of the war department, there appeared to be an especial doubt of the efficiency of the war secretary. There appear to have been few grounds for thus singling him out, and much of the ill-feeling with which he was regarded, proceeded from false insinuations or from actual ignorance. He had the most arduous duties to fulfil, at a time when there were few either to co-operate with or to advise him. It was afterwards well known that even during the vacation, when other cabinet ministers were taking repose or recreation, he and his chief (Lord Aberdeen) remained in London working day and night to endeavour to remedy the blunders and misapprehensions which had been caused by the need for organization and the control of an experienced and powerful hand. Lord John gave it as his opinion that the secretary of state for the war department should be in the House of Commons, aud by inference that the two offices, secretary of war and secretary for the war department, should be combined in one person-a man who, from experience of military details, from inherent vigour of mind, and from weight with the House of Commons, could be expected to guide the great operations of war with authority and success. There was, he said, only one person belonging to the government who combined these advantages, and his conclusion was that before parliament met in December (1854) Lord Palmerston should be placed in the office. Lord Aberdeen, like most other people, had been under the impression that of the two men Russell had but in any case it was evident that to make such a change, would at once be disloyal to a colleague and damaging to the reputation of the ministry, and the premier declined to act on the suggestion or to recommend it to the queen. In this resolve he was supported by Palmerston himself, who frankly declared that to combine the two offices held by Mr. Sidney Herbert and the Duke of Newcastle would be impracticable, as it would be impossible for one man to do the work. Lord Aberdeen justly represented that whoever might have been the fitter to fulfil the office originally, it was a very different thing to displace a man who had discharged his duties honourably and ably, merely in the belief that another might be found more efficient. The Duke of Newcastle himself was willing to relinquish his office at once if it were thought that the ministry and the country could be best served by his making way for Lord Palmerston or any one else; but the cabinet was against it, and Lord John, finding his advice was disregarded, resorted to his former method of retort by threatening to resign. His resignation at that time might seriously have damaged, and would, perhaps, have overthrown the ministry; so he thought better of it after a conversation with Lord Panmure, and consented to remain, or rather announced that he had changed his intention. Palmerston seemed in no way anxious to undertake the duty which Russell endeavoured to force upon him. He and Lady Palmerston had been over to Paris chiefly for the purpose of paying a visit to the emperor. It was perhaps on this occasion that Napoleon III. first hinted at his notion of himself taking the command in the Crimea. Palmerston, in a letter to his brother, says in his characteristic manner: "Yesterday Emily and I dined at St. Cloud. The dinner was very handsome and our hosts very agreeable. The empress was full of life, animation, and talk, and the more one looks at her the prettier one thinks her. I have found the emperor and Drouyn de Lhuys in very good opinion on the subject of the war, and acting towards us with perfect fairness, openness, and good faith." When the proposal some time afterwards took more definite form that Palmerston should supersede the Duke of Newcastle in office, he admitted that somehow or other the public had a notion that he could manage the war department better than anybody else, but at the same time, protested that as for himself, he did not expect to do it half so well as the Duke of Newcastle. At all events he deprecated any change at the time of Lord John Russell's recommendation, as it would inevitably weaken the position of the ministry; and he equally deprecated the threatened resignation of the noble lord, to whom the Earl of Aberdeen would have been ready to relinquish the premiership if there had been any probability of his being able to form a ministry that could successfully carry on the war, or could count on the support of a majority. No such ministry could have been formed by Lord John, and he withdrew his resignation, but only to take another and the very first opportunity of again embarrassing his colleagues by adopting a similar course, and leaving them in the lurch during a crisis which particularly demanded that they should act in unison and without any symptom of division in their ranks. Our relations with Austria had assumed a better position, and there was already some expectation on the part of those who desired peace rather than war, that a basis for concluding a treaty with Russia might after all | be adopted. A treaty between England, France, and Austria was concluded, by which the latter power obtained assurances of protection, and at the same time gave in her complete adhesion to the cause of England and France against Russia. She was to receive assistance in case of hostilities breaking out between her and Russia, and neither of the three powers was to entertain any overtures regarding the cessation of hostilities without a general understanding among all the contracting parties. It must be understood that the conditions on which a peace might be concluded were already under consideration; indeed they had theoretically never ceased to be under consideration, notwithstanding the misinterpretation on which Russia had insisted, and the consequent commencement of hosti lities. The "four points" of the agreement which were to be the basis of any conference for the purpose of obtaining peace had still to be defined, and their exact meaning agreed upon. Prussia-acting the part of the man who, preferring to be friendly with both sides, watches the fight from round the corner, that he may be ready to take an apparently virtuous part in the final adjustment, and a share in whatever may be going-was invited to join in the alliance with the three other powers, but professed to be satisfied with their intentions, and required a new interpretation of the four points. The four points were:-1. Russian protectorate over the principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Servia to cease; the privileges granted by the sultan to these provinces to be placed under a collective guarantee of the powers. 2. Navigation of the Danube at its mouths to be freed from all obstacle, and submitted to the application of the principles established by the Congress of Vienna. 3. The treaty of the 13th of July, 1841, to be revised in concert by all the high contracting parties in the interest of the balance of power in Europe, and so as to put an end to the preponderance of Russia in the Black Sea. 4. Russia to give up her claim to an official protectorate over the subjects of the Sublime Porte, to whatever rite they may belong; and France, Austria, Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia to assist mutually in obtaining from the Ottoman government the confirmation and the observance of the religious privileges of the different Christian communities, and to turn to account, in the common interests of their co-religionists, the generous intentions manifested by the sultan, at the same time avoiding any aggression on his dignity and the independence of his crown. The meeting of parliament in December, 1854, that by a short session before Christmas measures might be taken for prosecuting the war with the utmost vigour and effect,-gave an opportunity to the opponents of the government to charge it with the neglect of which it had been previously accused not only in parliament but by the newspapers, and especially by the Times, whose articles, describing the MR. LAYARD-MR. DISRAELI ON THE CAMPAIGN. In the House of Commons the indictment of the government was upheld at considerable length by Mr. Layard. 139 condition of affairs in the Crimea and de- | fully without raising the insuperable opposinouncing the ministry for supineness and in- tion of the people inhabiting the country. capacity, had aroused public indignation. In The Layard Collection now in the British the Upper House Lord Derby, after paying Museum are, as any one may see, of such size an eloquent tribute to the courage and devo- and weight that it was only with considerable tion of the troops in the Crimea, condemned difficulty they could be conveyed to their des the manner in which the war itself had been tination. They were, in fact, floated down the carried on. The fatal words, "too late," were, Tigris on rafts supported in the water by he said, applicable to the whole conduct of the inflated skins. The attainments as well as government in the course of the war, while the the special knowledge and experience of Mr. number of troops sent out had been quite in- Layard had peculiarly fitted him for the posisufficient to overthrow the power of Russia. tion of attaché to the British embassy at ConThe Duke of Newcastle combated this asser- stantinople, and in 1848 he occupied that tion, and without attempting to defend every- position, when he had an opportunity of again thing that had been done from the commence- visiting the site of the city of Nineveh. In ment, announced that the ministry were pre1851 he had for a short time acted as underpared to prosecute the war with unflinching secretary for foreign affairs, and in 1852 had firmness. entered the House of Commons as member for Aylesbury. Mr. Layard, whose knowledge and experience on oriental questions had given him some weight in the house and in the country, had visited the allied camps in the Crimea, and it was therefore felt that his criticisms of the government were worthy of attention. No member of that government rose to reply to them, however, though Mr. Disraeli keenly said that they were bound to answer the speech of a supporter of their own and a man of genius, who would be remembered when a great portion of the existing cabinet was forgotten. It may easily be imagined that he did not neglect such an opportunity for launching well-directed sarcasms at the heads of the government, who had, he declared, at first treated the war not as a great but as a very little affair. In reviewing the subsequent occurrences he referred to the Baltic fleet "greater than any armada that ever figured in the history of our times," which had gone out "with the blessings and the benison of our most experienced statesman, and had the advantage of being commanded by a true reformer." This had destroyed the half-finished fortifications of Bomarsund. Then, with regard to the attack on Sebastopol, he said, "You attack with a force of 20,000 or 30,000 men a fortress probably as strong as Gibraltar, and better provisioned. And under what The name of Austin Henry Layard is even more closely associated with remarkable discoveries of the remains and monuments of ancient Nineveh and Babylon than with the inquiry into the conduct of the Crimean war, in which he bore a conspicuous part, or with his political career during the years in which he several times held office. Both his name and his reputation are now inseparable from those discoveries, previous to which, as he said, all that remained of Nineveh and of Babylon might have been carried in a little hand-box. The greater part of his youth had been spent in Florence, and like many other young men of ardent temper and considerable culture in literature and art, he had abandoned the idea with which he first came to London,. and instead of devoting himself to the study of the law set out on a journey to the East, where he not only learned the Turkish and Arabic languages, but adopted the dress and mode of living of the natives. He afterwards continued his journey to Persia for the purpose of exploration amidst the remains of Susa, and there he discovered the tomb of Daniel. In 1844 he commenced his examination of the ruins of Nimroud, a task which his command of the language and his appearance enabled him to prosecute success 1 Mr. Layard's books on Nineveh and Babylon give an interesting account of his explorations and their results. circumstances did you undertake this enterprise? The secretary of war tells you that their object is to strike at the heart of Russia in the south, and therefore they attack Sebastopol. . . . But why attack the place at the wrong time, and with ineffective means? It may be a question that there should be a campaign in the Crimea; none that there should not be a winter campaign. But you have chosen a winter campaign, and what have been your preparations for it? In November you gave orders to build huts. You have not yet sent out that winter clothing which is adapted to the climate. . . . You have commenced a winter campaign in a country which most of all should be avoided. You have commenced such a campaign—a great blunder, without providing for it—the next great blunder. The huts will arrive in January, and the furs probably will meet the sun in May. These are your preparations." Mr. Disraeli continued "I believe that this cabinet of coalition flattered themselves, and were credulous in their flattery, that the tremendous issues which they have had to encounter, and which must make their days and nights anxiouswhich have been part of their lives-would not have occurred. They could never dream, for instance, that it would be the termination of the career of a noble lord to carry on war with Russia, of which that noble lord had been the cherished and spoiled child. ... It has been clearly shown that two of you are never of the same opinion. You were candid enough to declare this, and it is probable that no three of you ever supposed the result would be what it has been found to be." He concluded by declaring against an Austrian alliance, against the four points, and against secret articles. "England and France together should," he said, "solve this great question, and establish and secure a tranquillization of Europe." Lord John Russell replied in a speech which was wanting neither in force nor in dignity. The object of the last speaker, he said, was to destroy confidence in ministers, and to weaken our alliance with France. He then proceeded to justify the course taken by the government, and the treaty with Austria. The bringing up of the report on the address gave Mr. Gladstone an opportunity of explaining the details relating to our forces in the Crimea, and he also pointed out some of the unfounded charges brought against the government. It soon became evident, however, that the attacks made upon the ministry were echoed by the expression of opinion outside. When the foreign enlistment bill was introduced immediately afterwards it was violently opposed in both houses. Mr. Disraeli expressed great dislike to it on the ground that the foreigners whose services might probably be obtained, were hardly likely to be valuable as soldiers, and because Englishmen had a strong antipathy to mere mercenaries. They could fight side by side with foreigners of every race if they fought as allies; but they did not like the condottieri of modern Europe. He also objected to the scheme because it would convey the impression abroad that the resources of England for recruiting were exhausted. The object of the bill was to raise a force of 15,000 foreigners who were to be drilled in this country. Lord Ellenborough in the House of Lords censured the proposal in severe terms; but the Earl of Aberdeen utterly denied the insinuation that foreign recruits were to be used as substitutes for militia, or to be employed here at all. Some amendments were made; the number was reduced to 10,000, and the bill passed; but its results were costly and comparatively worthless, especially as they aroused a certain amount of jealousy and suspicion in other countries. On the whole the short session which terminated on the 23d of December had shown pretty plainly what was the temper of the country, and though, as was afterwards proved, the chief opponents of the government could not actually supersede it, parliament had only just reassembled on the 23d of January after the Christmas recess when the sound of defeat began to be heard. It was expected that an attack would again be made on the ministry, and probably a good many people outside the house knew the form that the attack would take, if not who would initiate it. They had not long to wait. Immediately on the reassembling of parliament |