Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol 7.djvu/130

86 THE WINTER TROUBLES. yet awaited the anxious providers ; for in No- vember, when bleak winds and chill rains were already sweeping over the Chersonese, it was determined that, where the armies were, there they must be prepared to lie for months, and that the French Intendance and the English Commissariat must meet as best they might the hu<^e accession of wants that would needs be created l)y striving to keep troops alive on the top of the Chersonese Heights throughout a Crim-Tartary winter. This last exigency, so far as we know, re- mained long unforeseen, remained even unim- agined beforehand by any of the thousands and thousands who were straining their gaze to descry what the future might have in store.(^) The general I)lan of the arrange- ments by which France and ICiigland at lirst under- took to sup- ply their armies in the East. II. For the purpose of ministering to their armies in the East, France and England alike chose substantially the same general plan. Trusting mainly to their own stores at home, not only for articles of equipment and nil implements and munitions of war, but also for flour, for corn, for biscuit, for coffee, wine, spirits, salt meat, they sent out all these things by sea to the shores of the Bosphorus, there established magazines and hospitals, and thus constituted for their armies a secondary base of operations less remote from the theatre of war tlian the south coasts of France and England. For the means of land - transport, for fresh