BATTLE OF THE ALMA. 165 to remove these guns was to abandon the key of chap. the position on the Alma. It is hard to imagine '. — that Kvetzinski could have brought himself to take such a step without trying resistance, unless he had been in some measure governed by an in- culcated dread of losing guns, and also by what he wrongly imagined to be the state of the battle on the other side of the Causeway. Be this as it may, it is certain that, within some fifteen minutes from the time when the horsemen were first seen on the knoll, the Great Redoubt was dismantled. The riders whose sudden appearance on the knoll thus scared or misled the enemy were a group of perhaps eighteen or twenty Englishmen. How came it that they were sitting unmolested in their saddles and contently adjusting their field-glasses in the heart of the Russian position ? At the time when Lord Raglan despatched to The road
- = '■ whifih Lord
his leading: divisions the final order to advance, Ragiantook " when he had he was riding between the French and the Eng- ordered tiie " _ ^ advance of lish armies, and was close to a road or track which i^s infantry led down towards a ford below the burning village. Impelled by his desire for a clear view of the coming struggle, and guided only by Fortune, or by the course of the track, he rode down briskly into the valley, followed close by his Staff, but leaving our troops in his rear. He soon reached, doubt, the only defeat which the Kazan corps had sustained was the one inflicted upon two of its battalions by the 19th Regiment and the left companies of the 23d : see ante. The defeat of the other two battalions — the battalions engaged with .acy Yea — had not then occurred.
