THE COUNSELS OF THE ALLIES. 171 name of the English General. There is, there- chap. ^ . vn. fore, some ground for surmising that the germ of what Lyons proposed may have sprung from his intimate conversations with the Commander of our land forces, and that when he submitted this counsel he was echoing the thought and fulfil- ling the wish of Lord Eaglan. Be this as it may, the recorded fact is that, having made himself acquainted in a general way with the state of the defences which covered the land front of Sebas- topol, and concluding them to be imperfect and weak, Lyons urged at the English Headquarters the expediency of an immediate assault.* Lord Eaglan was of the same mind ; but he found him self met by the counter-opinion of Sir John Bur- goyne, who remonstrated against the notion of an assault without first getting down the fire of the place by means of heavy artillery.*}- It is the
- The MS,, of which an extract is given in the Appendix,
Note L The time assigned in the MS. as that at which this counsel was given by Lyons to the military authorities is, ' immediately after their arrival at Balaclava ' — and this coincides very satisfactorily with the words, ' the day after our ' arrival here,' which are quoted in a note, post, p. 173, from a different source, both records tending to show that the 27th of September was the day. I am disposed, however, to assign the afternoon or evening as the time of the conversation ; because Lyons's advice proceeds upon a knowledge of the state of the defences, which he could hardly, I think, have acquired until after the reconnaissance eflected on that day. + Ibid. It must not be necessarily understood that the dis- cussion was carried on between Lyons and Burgoyne personally. What I rather imagine is, that, in eliciting Burgoyne's opinion. Lord Raglan did not say what he himself and Sir Ednmnd Lyons thought of the question. See Memorandum by Burgoyne, 20th November 1854, and his 'Military Opinions,' pp. 1S9, 202.
