204 SUCCESS FOUND EMBARRASSING. chap, minded to abstain from attacking the Bastion; ' — yet how to excuse themselves for thus hanging dencyof back when at last after six months of toil their fuTexpioit 53 ' troops were now close to the goal, and when also canrobert 188 in that dire extremity which before we observed, the defence of the Bastion was collapsing under the fire of great guns ? * The two generals, it seems, would have liked to resume their subter- ranean warfare against the Flagstaff Bastion ; t and in such case of course their resolve to abstain from assaulting it instantly might have been palliated, or even defended by alleging a not empty reason ; but from that resource, it soon proved, they were altogether cut off by their own engineering exploit ; for the mighty explosions it wrought had blown away into mere chaos the useful stratum of clay which till then had always welcomed their miners, and — confronted now in- stead by hard rock — they could not hope tc make good any further advance underground.! Thus for not following up the creation of his 4th Parallel to its natural conclusions General Canrobert found himself left without any more valid ' reason ' than the one put forward by Niel of which we .shall afterwards hear.§ "When writing in 1870, General de Todleben had the ' reason ' before him, but apparently did not regard it as having been set up in earnest. Why — unless still intent upon mining — the
- See ante, p. 194. + Niel, p. 208. t Ibid.
§ Post, pp. 205, 206. See Niel, pp. 196, 197 ; and 6ee post, p. 212.
