THE MAIN FIGHT. 153 SO far as concerned those troops, an absolute and chap. final defeat, which removed theni from the field of ' battle, and ended their part in the day's fighting.* ^*' ^'^*<^ Nor can this strange result be ascribed to any sudden panic afflicting the Russians, nor indeed, speaking generally, to any want of devotion on the part of their soldiery. The disasters to which the enemy exposed his dense, crowded masses might be soberly called ' overwhelming,' and in some of his hapless columns, the havoc was actual ruin. The Catheriuburg regiment suffered not only a terrible slaughter of its rank and file, but lost all its battalion commanders, besides two- thirds of its other officers ; and two of the Koli- vansk battalions, which had gone into action with a strength of more than fourteen hundred men, came out, after less than an hour, in charge of a captain, with only, as he has reported, some ten score of men between them.t All this carnage had been incurred by attempting to overwhelm a few steady, resolute soldiery with the weight of gross columns; but the combatants stood shrouded in mist, and it seems that the great bulk of the Russian officers never knew the conditions under which they fought. They imagined that their
- ' De tons les bataillons qui devoient attaqiier la position
' des Anglais, vingt avaient dejk quUU le champ de hataille ' — Todleben, p. 465 ; and the assertion is confirmed by the elabor- ate plans accompanying the General's work, which are careful to represent that after their early morning's fight all the twenty battalions were finally withdrawn from the conflict. t Kronsikoff s statement, Czarevitch's Collection. The writer ^as a captain in the 1st Kolivansk battalion.
