averted the
impending evil.

"That opening leaves the left of the Guards exposed," he said to
Airey. "Tell Cathcart to fill it."

"You are to move to the left and support the Guards," was the message
conveyed to Cathcart, "but not to descend or leave the plateau. Those
are Lord Raglan's orders."

But Sir George chose to interpret them his own way, and already--with
Torrens's brigade and a weak body at best--he had gone down the hill
to join the Guards. In the sharp but misdirected encounter which
followed, the general lost his life, and his force, with the Guards,
were for a time cut off from their friends.

A Russian column had wedged in at the gap and for a time forbade
retreat, but it was at length sheered off by the first of the French
reinforcements; and the intercepted British, in greatly diminished
numbers, by degrees won their way home.

This fighting around the Sandbag Battery had cost us very dear:
Cathcart was killed, the Guards were decimated, and Wilders's brigade,
now commanded by Colonel Blythe, had fallen back, spent and
disorganised. So serious indeed were these losses that for the next
hour the brigade possessed no coherent shape, and only by dint of the
unwearied exertions of its officers was it rallied sufficiently to
share in the later phases of the fight.

Meanwhile the centre of our line, where Pennefather stood posted on
the Home Ridge, had been furiously assailed. Gathering their forces
under shelter of a deep ravine, the Russian general sent up column
after column, first against the left and then against the right of the
Ridge. Gravely weakened by his early encounter, Pennefather had only a
handful of his own men to meet this attack. They were now pressed back
indeed, although their general was beginning to wield detachments from
other commands. A portion of the Fourth Division had been put under
his orders.

General Cathcart, just before his death, had come to him with a
battalion of the Rifle Brigade.

"They can do anything," he had said. "Where are they wanted most?"

"Everywhere!" had been old Pennefather's reply.

But now, having at hand this splendid body of infantry, of whom their
leader had been so pardonably proud, he hurled them at the flank of a
column that was forcing back its own men.

The effect of the charge was instantaneous: the Russians could not
withstand it; and, the men of the Second Division again advancing, the
foe was pressed as far as the Barrier, where h