Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 9.djvu/109

OPERATIONS IN THE SEA OF AZOF. 7 they hear of the grandiose prayers and thanks- chap. givings which Moscow offers up to its idol. ' Much, in that respect, like other loyalty to other sovereigns, the ' worship ' of the Czar rests in part on the floating idea that its votaries are accustomed to form of his power — his genuine power on earth, and, not least, his power to defend them from enemies with whom he has quarrelled. In so far as the creed was thus based, it lay open of course to a shock, when young Lyons (with Captain S($daiges) began to touch the em- pire at home. The Miranda had broken a spell. Till she passed through the Straits with her following on the 25th of May, the Azof had been a real pro- vince — a sea-clad province of Eussia ; and, for men on its shores to be witnessing the severance of such a possession from the Czar's inner terri- tories, to be under a ban for the crime — the strangely new crime — of being his faithful sub- jects engaged in his actual service, to see how Russian commanders with infantry under their orders comported themselves in those hours when mass after mass of carefully harvested wealth was in course of being burnt to the ground because it belonged to their sovereign, but moreover to know that the Czar's lieutenants (including Prince Lo- banoff-Rostoffsky) were men who could act in the way we were painfully forced to observe, — all this, if at first only startling, may perhaps have begun before loner to disenchant some of the vot-