Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 3.djvu/247

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BATTLE OF THE ALMA.
221

CHAP. I

men coming down from the Great Redoubt. Then the battalion neatly opened its ranks for the pas- sage of the retreating soldiery, and afterwards formed up anew.[1] This done, it marched on.

Codrington rallying some men of the Light Division; Meanwhile, General Codrington had been la- bouring to bring together the remnant of his brigade. Sergeant O'Connor, despite his grievous wound, still bore the colour of the Royal Welsh, which he had been carrying with loving care throughout the worst stress of the fight. The missing colour of the Royal Fusiliers, now com- mitted to the honour of the Welsh regiment, was borne by Captain Pearson. Around these two standards General Codrington rallied such men as he could gather, and made them open out and form line two deep. {{right sidenote|and proposing to place them in the vacated interval between two battalions of the Guards.)) The body thus formed numbered about 300 men, and General Codrington wished to place it on the left of the Grenadiers, in order to fill a part of the chasm at that moment lying quite open in the centre of the Brigade of Guards.[2] But it occurred to him-for he was himself a Guardsman, and he knew the feelings of the corps-that to place soldiers of the line abreast of the Grenadiers, and in the room of the broken regiment, might give pain to a battalion of

  1. ↑ Our 6th and 7th companies opened out to let them pass, and closed up as coolly as if in Hyde Park.'-Colonel Hood, private letter.
  2. ↑ Of course it is not intended that these words chasm' and 'interval' (which occur in several places) should be taken as indicating that the Scots Fusilier Guards were far away, bat merely that, for the moment, the main body of the battalion had lost its formation, and was re-forming upon an alignment a little in rear of that on which the Grenadiers were standing.
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