These rifle-pits, connected with each other and with the two bastions, thus formed a vast place d^armes, from whence the enemy might impede the advance of the French works, make powerful sorties, and even take in flank the French left attack. Their possession became therefore absolutely essential to our Allies, and Pelissier determined to capture them at whatever cost. On the night of the 22d May accordingly he collected in the trenches on the left a force amounting to 1200 men; and at nine o'clock terrible and sustained artillery fire, mixed with incessant volleys of musketry, announced that the struggle had commenced. The Russians, who were quite prepared, had assembled an imposing force to resist the attack, and through the long hours of all that night, and by the uncertain light of a moon paled by the continuous and vivid fire from rifle and from cannon, the doubtful contest ebbed and flowed in waves of human blood. Five times were the ambuscades carried and retaken; but when the first gray of dawn shed its spectral light on the horrors of the scene, the Cemetery, filled with the bodies of those who had fallen on either side, and two of the rifle-pits beyond it, were in the hands of the French. During the day the Russians hoisted a flag of truce, with a view to the burial of the dead; but as a fresh attack was in contemplation for that evening the French refused to respond to it.
An enormous force, stated to have amounted to the almost incredible number of 30,000 men, was concentrated at dusk in the French trenches for the renewal of the attack, and four field-pieces, 12-pounders, were got into a position which commanded the spot on which the enemy's reserves were ascertained to have been posted the night before.
The French again advanced at the same hour as on the preceding evening, but the resistance of the enemy, though obstinate, was not protracted; overawed by the determination of their assailants, borne down by superior numbers, and their heavy columns torn and shattered by the plunging fire of the four field-pieces, the Russians after an hour's fighting retired, abandoning the Cemetery and the rifle-pits, which were immediately connected with the French approaches, and occupied as an advanced line. On the 24th there was a burial truce for six hours. In these two aflfairs the loss of the Fi*ench amounted to 1600 killed and wounded, and that of the Russians to the appalling number of 6000.
The interval whichnow elapsed before the opening of the third bombardment has been devoted by the greater number of the writers on the war to recording the results of the expedition which on the 22nd May sailed for the Sea of Azoif, with a like object, but a far different event, to that which so ingloriously returned on the 8th.
The precedent thus established will be followed here, and we shall now proceed to trace out one of the most important episodes of the war, from the departure of the expedition to its return, and sacrifice strict chronological sequence, so far as may be necessary, to the completion of a narrative which forms as it were a chapter by itself. On the evening of the 22nd and morning of the 23rd May, the expedition, consisting of 15,000 men of
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all arms, of whom about one-half were French, 5000 English, and 3000 Turks, under the commands respectively of General D'Autemarre, Lieutenant-General Sir George Brown, and Redschid Pasha, conveyed principally in English and French men-of-war, and accompanied by a powerful flotilla of smaller.steamers, sailed for Kertch.