Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 5.djvu/153

THE BATTLE OF BALACLAVA. 131 In regard to the use men made of their voices, chap. there was a marked difference between our people and the Kussian horsemen. The islanders hurled out, whilst they fought, those blasts of maledic- tion, by which many of our people in the act of hard striving are accustomed to evoke their full strength ; whilst the Kussians in general fought without using articulate words. Nor, instead, did they utter any truculent, theological yells of the kind which, some few days later, were destined to be heard on the battle-field. They had not, as yet, been sanctified. It was not till the 4th of November that the army of the Czar underwent that fell act of consecration which whetted his people for the morrow, and prepared those strange shrieks of doctrinal hate which were heard on the ridges of Inkerman. But although abstaining from articulate speech and from fierce yells, the grey-mantled horseman in general was not there- fore mute. He sometimes evolved, whilst he fought, a deep, gurgling, long-drawn sound, close akin to an inchoate roar ; or else — and this last was the predominant utterance — a sustained and continuous ' zizz/ of the kind that is made with clenched teeth ; and to the ears of those who were themselves engaged in the fight, the aggre- gate of the sounds coming thus from the mouths of the Russians was like that of some factory in busy England, where numberless wheels hum and buzz. And meanwhile, from those masses of Eussian horsemen who stood ranged in such parts of the column as to be unable to engage in bodily i.