176 THE COUNSELS OF THE ALLIES. CHAP, assault.* He gave it as his judgment that the • place might best be wrested from the enemy's grasp by pouring in battalion after battalion, until the end should be accomplished.i' Renewed And at tliis time once more Sir Edmund Lyons froiuLyons. gave couusel.i^ He did not disguise from himself
- I know of no written record of this second suggestion of
Cathcart's ; but the memory of the officer wlio heard it made is fortified — diplomatists are the people who best know the value of a clue of that kind — by the quaint and homely simile with which his proposal was met. The simile, liowever, is not one worth repeating. t With a view to disprove the fact of Cathcart's having ad- vised an assault, or to show that, at all events, any such advice, if ever given, could not have been adhered to, the following extract of a letter from Cathcart has been printed ( ' Olficial Journal of the Royal Engineers,' p. 18), date assigned being the 8th of October : ' To attempt an assault without mounting our ' heavy guns, would not be certain of success, but liable to a 'great loss of men.' It seems to me, however, that in that letter, Cathcart's disapprobation of an immediate assault belongs to the time when he was writing — i.e., to the 8th of October — and does not at all prove that he may not have approved an assault at an earlier day. My view of his meaning is sup- ported by a letter which he wrote to Lady Georgiana Cathcart six days before — i.e., on the 2d of October; for there, after describing the part he had taken in the flank march, he pro- ceeds to say : ' I then came on and secured an important post ' within fire of Sebastopol, and have held it for three days, with ' my division quite unsupported. If they had all been up we ' might have taken the place. Kow, we have given them time ' to prepare and land tlieir ship-guns, and we must have a long ' regular siege.' It seems that Cathcart's proposals, whether for 'stealing into' the place or assaulting it, were never made known to Sir John Burgoyne. — 'Military Opinions,' pp. 199, 202.
- J: The day Sir when Ednuind Lyons tendered this advice for
the second time, was on or before the 29th of September. It is stated by him to have been given ' a day or two after ' the time when he. Sir Ednuind, first proposed the assault of the South
