But a strange thing had happened.  For a thousand years Europe had been trying to drive Mohammedanism out of the continent.  No sacrifice had been considered too great if it would help to rid Christendom of that great iniquity.  Now the Turkish Empire,—­the spiritual heir and center of this old enemy,—­no less vicious—­no less an offense to the instincts of Christendom than before, was on the brink of extermination.  It would have been a surprise to Richard the lion-hearted, and to Louis IX. the saint, if they could have foreseen what England and France would do eight hundred years later when such a crisis arrived!  While the Sultan in the name of the Prophet was appealing to all the passions of a mad fanaticism to arise and “drive out the foreign infidels who were assailing their holy faith”—­there was in England an enthusiasm for his defense as splendid as if the cause were a righteous one.

It is not a simple thing to carry a bark deeply loaded with treasure safely through swift and tortuous currents.  England was loaded to the water’s edge with treasure.  Her hope was in that sunken wreck of an empire which fate had moored at the gateway leading to her Eastern dominions, and what she most feared in this world was its removal.  As a matter of state policy, she may have followed the only course which was open to her; but viewed from a loftier standpoint, it was a compromise with unrighteousness when she joined Hands with the “Great Assassin” and poured out the blood of her sons to keep him unharmed.  For fifty years that compromise has embarrassed her policy, and still continues to soil her fair name.  In the War of the Crimea, England, no less than Russia, was fighting, not for the avowed, but unavowed object.  But frankness is not one of the virtues required by diplomacy, so perhaps of that we have no right to complain.

On the 4th of January, 1854, the allied fleets entered the Black Sea.  The Emperor Nicholas, from his palace in St. Petersburg, watched the progress of events.  He saw Menschikof vainly measuring swords with Lord Raglan at Odessa (April 22); then the overwhelming defeat at the Alma (September 20); then the sinking of the Russian fleet to protect Sebastopol, about which the battle was to rage until the end of the war.  He saw the invincible courage of his foe in that immortal act of valor, the cavalry charge at Balaklava (November 5), in obedience to an order wise when it was given, but useless and fatal when it was received—­of which someone made the oft-repeated criticism—­“C’est magnifique—­mais ce n’est pas la guerre.”  And then he saw the power to endure during that awful winter, when the elements and official mismanagement were fighting for him, and when more English troops were perishing from cold and neglect than had been killed by Russian shot and shell.