It was the fire of this artillery that relieved the Royal Picts of their most serious apprehensions.  It tided them over the last critical phase of the hotly-contested action, and completed the discomfiture of the enemy on this side.

Matters had gone no less prosperously on the left.  The renewed attack of the Light Division, supported by the Guards, had ended in the capture of the great redoubt; while Sir Colin Campbell, a veteran warrior, at the head of his “bare-legged savages,” as they were christened by their affrighted foe, had made himself master of the Kourgane Hill.

CHAPTER XI.

AFTER THE BATTLE.

The Battle of the Alma was won!  Three short hours had sufficed to finish it, and by four o’clock the enemy was in full retreat.  It was a flight rather than a retreat—­a headlong, ignominious stampede, in which the fugitives cast aside their arms, accoutrements, knapsacks, everything that could hinder them as they ran.  Pursuit, if promptly and vigorously carried out, would assuredly have cost them dear.  But the allies were short of cavalry; the British, greatly weakened by their losses in this hard-fought field, could spare no fresh troops to follow; the French, although they had scarcely suffered, and had a large force available, would do nothing more; St. Arnaud declared pursuit impossible, and this, the first fatal error in the campaign, allowed the beaten general to draw off his shattered battalions.

But, if the allied leaders rejected the more abiding and substantial fruits of victory, they did not disdain the intoxicating but empty glories of an ovation from their troops.  The generals were everywhere received with loud acclaims.

Deafening cheers greeted Lord Raglan as he rode slowly down the line.  The cry was taken up by battalion after battalion, and went echoing along—­the splendid, hearty applause of men who were glorifying their own achievements as well.

There was joy on the face of every man who had come out of the fight unscathed—­the keen satisfaction of success, gloriously but hardly earned.  Warm greetings were interchanged by all who met and talked together.  Thus Lord Raglan and Sir Colin Campbell, both Peninsular veterans, shook hands in memory of comradeship on earlier fields.  Few indeed had thus fought together before; but none were less cordial in their expressions of thankfulness and cordial good-will.  They told each other of their adventures in the day—­its episodes, perils, narrow, hair-breadth escapes! they inquired eagerly for friends; and then, as they learnt gradually the whole terrible truth, the awful price at which victory had been secured, moments that had been radiant grew overcast, and short-lived gladness fled.