Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 8.djvu/281

THE EMPEROR'S PLAN. 249 army was, as the Emperor expressed it, to be chap. either driven into Sebastopol, or otherwise into '. the sea.( 3 ) Such, we know was the dream. But men versed in real war understood that the plan sought to break up an army of 180,000 men into three fractions so far disparted as to be incapable of affording to one another any mutual support, and next, so contrived that, supposing the enemy to be at all fairly served by his emissaries, his spies, and his scouts, two at least of the fractions thus separated would be brought into desperate peril, whilst the third — the one under Lord Rag- lan — would perhaps for a while be intact, and possibly even victorious against its immediate adversaries, yet find itself in the crisis so placed as to be unable to come to the rescue of either of the two other ' armies ' in time to avert the ca- tastrophe.^) Whilst professing in terms to desire that his plan should be calmly weighed by Canrobert in concert with Lord Eaglan, the Emperor neverthe- less took pains to urge its adoption with almost vehement earnestness, and in doing so disclosed a strange confidence in his own untried powers as a strategist. ' Such is,' so he wrote, ' such is, ' my dear General, the plan I wished to execute ' at the head of the brave troops which you have ' hitherto commanded ; and it is with the deep- ' est and the most bitter grief that — forced by ' interests more weighty to remain in Europe — I ' am obliged to renounce a plan in the execution