430 THE CANNONADE OF CHAP, of the besiegers was all at ouce overcast; and, indeed, his words on that (Uiy may be regarded as marking the time when that which had seemed at the English Headquarters to be a near prosjiect of the storming and capture of Sebastopol, dis- solved into hopes faint and vague. Certainly in the mind of Lord Kaglau this quick change was wrought. Before the explosion in the French lines, he had been apparently confident that Se- bastopol would be carried ; * and his anticipation was that, in the course of the evening, he and Canrobert would be able to make their arrange- ments for the assault. f After hearing General Rose's account of the discouragement suffered by the French, and of the time that would be needed for the resumption of their cannonade, he at once
- I found this statement partly though not entirely upon tlu3
tenor of Lord Raglan's communications to the naval authorities. + Speaking to me during the progress of the cannonade, and I think at about one o'clock P.M., Lord Raglan said that, but for the disasters which had befallen the French, he believed ' he should have been able to come to an arrangement with 'Canrobert that evening;' and (by the way in which those words bore upon the immediately pi'eceding part of the conver- sation) I knew that the ' arrangment ' to which Lord Raglan had looked forward was an arrangement for the assault of Se- bastopol. I do not, however, undertake to say whether he meant an arrangement for an assault that evening, or an arrangement that evening for an assault on the morrow. Originally, no doubt, the first day of the cannonade was looked to as the day for assaulting ; and the detailed instinictions issued to the troops were so framed as to be in accordance with that sujtposition ; but some of those instructions were cancelled on the eve of the 17th ; and the change was such as to dis- place the inference which miglit have been drawn from the p»iper in its original state.
