Other regiments at stated intervals leave England to take their allotted share of foreign service, but, except upon special occasions, the Guards are always retained at home. They form, as it were, a very part of our domestic retinue, a constant feature in our daily London walk. " The Guards are going," people said; " that looks like work." The splendour of the scene was merged in the pain. Who could view unmoved the sobbing grief of mothers, wives, and sisters, and the more silent but not less touching sorrow of the Soldier, as he left, perhaps for ever, "all that made life dear"?
As I write, I still think I feel the firm grasp, and see the pale face of many a hero, whose hold is now for ever relaxed, and whose face is for ever paled! The steady advance at Alma, the furious m^lee at Inkermann, and the more stealthy but no less fatal hand of disease, have made sad havoc among those gallant men who united souls of iron to hearts of flesh.
This first detachment of troops was speedily followed by the departure of the Himalaya, conveying the Second Battalion of the Rifles, and the 93d regiment; the whole number of men embarked in her exceeded 1200, each of whom, it may be confidently asserted, enjoyed a degree of comfort and ease unknown and undreamed of by their brave predecessors in the Peninsular War, confided as they were to the " tender " mercies of crazy sailing transports.
Gradually the first instalment of the British expeditionary army, amounting to about 10,000 men, reached Malta; and, after several weeks of tedious inaction, Sir George Brown, who had just arrived from England, sailed with the Rifles for Gallipoli, where he was speedily joined by large numbers of French and English troops. War had now been officially declared; and on the 10th of April Lord Raglan, whose long and distinguished services both in the field and at the Horse Guards, no less than the high opinion entertained of him by the late Duke of Wellington, pointed him out as the fittest successor of that great man, took his departure for Constantinople by way of Paris, in order to assume the command of our Army in the East. Fresh delays occurred at Gallipoli, where large intrenched works were constructed, for the purpose, as was conjectured, of securing a pied a terre, in order to face every eventuality, but more probably for the sake of accustoming troops, fresh from the inactive routine of home service, to the severe and laborious exertions inseparable from extensive siege operations.
These the increasingly serious aspect of the War seemed to designate as inevitable, and, indeed, already public attention in England had begun steadily to turn in the direction of one little spot on the vast map of the Russian dominions, whose name a few months before had raised but very indeterminate geographical ideas in the minds even of well-informed men.
Whatever may be said as to the actual policy of the expedition to the Crimea, viewed in reference to that proportion of means to an end without which the most brilliant conception may generate the most lamentable failure, it cannot be denied that the popular instinct, which regarded Sebastopol as the symbol and the rallying point of the coming struggle, was sound and just. Whether the contest was for the defence of
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]