The signal for the French assault was given:  thirty thousand men, weary of long inactivity, and burning to add new lustre to the bright record of their country’s military glory,—­drums and trumpets meanwhile sounding the charge, and the air resounding with shouts of "Vive l’Empereur,"—­darted from their trenches, swarmed up the embankments, dashed over the parapet, swept the enemy like chaff before them; and the Malakhoff was won.  Hours of the fiercest fighting found the French still masters of the situation; at nightfall the Russian general sullenly drew off his defeated forces, and the victory was complete.

It is painful to turn from this brilliant picture to the sombre coloring and the dreary details of the attack on the Redan.  To three thousand doomed men was assigned the perilous undertaking.  Incredible as it may appear, in view of previous failure, there seems to have been no adequate preparation, no intelligible plan, no competent leader.  It was simply brute force assailing brute force.  The few men who actually entered the Redan neglected to spike the guns; no reinforcements came to their aid; everything was blind excitement, and headlong, undisciplined haste.  “The men of the different regiments became mingled together in inextricable confusion.  The Nineteenth men did not care for the officers of the Eighty-Eighth, nor did the soldiers of the Twenty-Third heed the command of an officer who did not belong to their regiment.  The officers could not find their men,—­the men lost sight of their officers.”  But why dwell on what soon became mere butchery?  The loss of the storming party, in killed, wounded, and missing, was 2447.

Considered as a military movement, it would seem to be conceded that no grosser blunder could have been made than the selection of so small a force for so desperate an undertaking.  There was no chance of success but by attacking simultaneously both flanks and the salient of the Redan.  The storming party was barely large enough for the assault of the salient, thus exposing the handful of men to a murderous and fatally destructive fire from the flanks.  This was bad enough, certainly, but worse remains behind.  English critics have most severely censured our generals for sometimes placing new recruits in posts of danger, requiring cool heads, steady nerves, and the habit of discipline.  Perhaps they have forgotten the following incident.  Among the picked men selected out of the entire British forces as this very storming party were raw recruits from the Ninety-Seventh Regiment, who were designated for this perilous service as a punishment for their cowardice in a recent skirmish!—­and to make this punishment still more severe, they were ordered to lead off in the assault!  An historian of the war says,—­“The inexperience of some of these recruits seems almost incredible.  One young fellow, who came to the field-hospital with a broken arm and a bullet in his shoulder, carried