on the part of Britain the war of a highly
civilised country, in a pre-eminently mechanical, and, with all its
faults, singularly humane age,--in an age, too, remarkable for the
diffusion of its literature; and hence certain conspicuous traits
which belonged to none of the other wars in which our country had been
previously engaged. Never before did such completely equipped fleets
and armies quit our shores. The navies with which we covered the Black
Sea and the Baltic were not at all what they would have been had the
war lasted for one other campaign, but they mightily exceeded anything
of the kind that Britain or the world had ever seen before. The fleets
of Copenhagen, Trafalgar, and the Nile would have cut but a sorry
figure beside them, and there was more of the _materiel_ of war
concentrated on that one siege of Sebastopol than on any half-dozen
other sieges recorded in British history. In all that mechanical art
could accomplish, the late war with Russia was by far the most
considerable in which our country was ever engaged. It was, in respect
of _materiel_, a war of the world's pre-eminently mechanical people in
the world's pre-eminently mechanical age. With this strong leading
feature, however, there mingled another, equally marked, in which the
element was weakness, not strength. The men who beat all the world in
heading pins are unable often to do anything else; for usually, in
proportion as mechanical skill becomes intense, does it also become
narrow; and the history of the two campaigns before Sebastopol brought
out very strikingly a certain helplessness on the part of the British
army, part of which at least must be attributed to this cause. It is
surely a remarkable fact, that in an army never more than seven miles
removed from the base line of its operations, the distress suffered
was so great, that nearly _five_ times the number of men sank under it
that perished in battle. There was no want among them of pinheading
and pinheaded martinets. The errors of officers such as Lucan and
Cardigan are understood to be all on the side of severity; but in
heading their pin, they wholly exhaust their art; and under their
surveillance and direction a great army became a small one, with the
sea covered by a British fleet only a few miles away. So far as the
statistics of the British portion of this greatest of sieges have yet
been ascertained, rather more than _three_ thousand men perished in
battle by the shot or st