402 THE BATTLE OF INKEUMAN. CHAP. VI. Present effect of the reverse sustained by the Frencli. ing this, the French officer again pressed his warning, and again gave assurance of the hopeless condition to which the Allies were reduced. At last, upon finding Dickson still immovable, he resorted to that singular figure of speech which has so fastened itself into the language of the French camp, that for the purpose of expressing the complete ascendant of one power over another it seems to have become really essential.* When even against that utmost phrase Colonel Dickson stood proof, the French officer found no more to say, but at least he could ride oft' with the con- sciousness of having told the worst. In bringing about this reverse, the enemy had taken small part, and General Bosquet sustained 110 huge losses in killed or wounded ; but, if the blow he had received was in a sense self-inflict- ed, and but little destructive of his numerical strength, it fell, nevertheless, with great weight ; for, as we saw, it caused his troops to despair ; and to despair was to be, for the time, without power. Nor was it certain that the mischief could be speedily cured by appealing to the bare, simple truth ; for to tell a quick-witted, sus- picious, and highly critical soldiery that they had
- 1 could cite an instance of a French general officer who,
after an interview with the English commander, came out into the aide-de-camp's room, and there disburthened his soul of the indispensable phrase, doing this — not lightly at all, for he was in a distressing state of anxiety, but — on the expressed ground that his omission to venttire upon a coarse word in Lord Raglan's presenco had prevented him, he feared, from fully conveying his meaning.
