French.
At the height of the siege, it became "a war of sorties" on the part of
the Russians, and Todleben says,--"_Apropos_ of those sorties, it is
indispensable to make the remark here, that the French guarded their
trenches with much more vigilance, and defended them with incomparably
more tenacity, than the English. It frequently happened that our
volunteers approached the English trenches without being perceived, and
without even firing a single shot, and found the soldiers of the guard
sitting in the trench in the most perfect security, far from their
firelocks, which were stacked in piles. With the French, matters were
quite different. They were always on the _qui vive_, so that it rarely
happened we were able to get near them without having been remarked, and
without having to receive beforehand a sharp fire of musketry."

This, however, as Russell remarks, was when the English army was at its
lowest condition of neglect; but that simply transfers the indictment to
another count. And it is interesting to observe, that Russell's claim
for the English army and Todleben's claim for the Russian army come at
last to about the same point, namely, that the individual soldier is in
each case tough and resolute to the last degree. But this is only the
beginning of the merits of the French array, which to individual courage
superadds all that organization can attain.

As to the poor Turks, they are dismissed with much the same epitaph
which might long since have been written for our colored troops, if some
of our Department commanders had been suffered to have their way:--"As
to the Turks, the Allies despised them, and the English used them as
beasts of burden; in short, they lost three hundred men a day, till they
almost perished out, and the remains of their army were sent away."

In view of the grander issues of our own pending contest, with its
vaster scale of munitions and of men, one cannot always feel the due
interest in successive pages about battles like "Little Inkermann,"
where the total of Russian killed and wounded comprised twenty-five
officers and two hundred and forty-five men. But it is not numbers which
make a contest memorable. Even the mere contemplation of the Crimean War
had an appreciable influence on the military training of the American
people; and the clear narratives of Todleben, written "in his usual
elaborate engineering way, in which every word is used like a gabion,"
form a good sequel to