The 21st and 22d of September were employed by the troops in attending Qn and embarking our own wounded, and in burying the dead on both sides, in which melancholy offices they received the most material assistance from both the officers and men of the fleet, who displayed an indefatigable zeal and a warmth of sympathy beyond all praise. The Russians, who had been entirely abandoned by their own people, having had their wounds bound and dressed, were left under the care of Dr. Thompson of the 44th, who heroically devoted himself to this arduous and trying task, and who, soon after rejoining the head-quarters of the British Army, fell a victim to cholera; the result, it is scarcely possible to doubt, of his philanthropic exertions in behalf of the enemy. At daybreak on the 23d the British Army was under arms, and soon after the Allies moved from those heights to which so many memories of sorrow and of glory are attached, and marched in the direction of the river Katcha, on the banks of which they arrived about three o'clock in the afternoon,
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without having come upon a trace of the enemy. After having crossed the river, however, they beheld the most indisputable evidences of a precipitate flight, amounting to panic, on the part of the Russian Army. The road was covered with arms, accoutrements, and cartridges, which had been hastily abandoned to facilitate the rapidity of their retreat, and the account given by some Tartars who came into the British lines, confirmed the obvious deductions from data so clear. The Russians, it appears, had reached the Katcha on the night of the battle, and an alarm having spread that the English and French were in pursuit, dreading a fresh encounter with foes flushed with victory and confident of success, they had manifested the better part of valour, and decamped.
This circumstance renders the want of cavalry at Alma, and the inevitable delays subsequent to the battle, the more to be deplored, since it can scarcely be doubted that, had the false alarm been a founded one, the Russian presentiments would have been verified in the issue, and it is difficult to limit the advantages which might have accrued from such a result.