“Catch a Tartar,” is an English proverb. It happens that not 
only the English, but the French and Austrians as well, have been 
caught by a Tartar." We may, perhaps, be pardoned for 
expressing a little satisfaction that The Tribune and those of its 
readers who carefully follow the course of the present campaign in 
the Crimea were not caught with the rest. 

When the extraordinary story of the capture of Sevastopol first 
reached us, we endeavored to show,” by an examination of the 
alleged channels of the intelligence, as well as on critical military 
grounds, that the victory of the Alma, however decisive it might 
have been, could scarcely have been followed in so close succession 
by the surrender of the object of the campaign. But we think we 
established, at the same time, the fact that no very decisive victory 
had been gained at all by the allies, the Russians having retired in 
good order with all their guns. Lastly, we took particular care to 
point out how the whole statement, in so far as it exceeded the 
limits of the official report on the battle of the Alma, rested 
exclusively on the verbal relation of a Tartar sent to Omer Pasha 
with sealed dispatches. Thus we were fully prepared for receiving 
the news that the tremendous “Fall of Sevastopol” was nothing 

but an imaginary exaggeration of the victory of the Alma, 
reported by a jocose Tartar at Bucharest, announced by the 
melodramatic Louis Napoleon at Boulogne, and implicitly believed 
by that excellent specimen of humanity, the English shopkeeper. 
The English press in general has proved a worthy representative 
of that class, and it would seem that the very name of Sevastopol 
need only be pronounced in England to put everybody in a fool’s 
paradise. Perhaps our readers will recollect that at the close of the 
Jast Parliamentary session the destruction of Sevastopol was 
announced by Lord John Russell to be in the plans of the English 
Government, which announcement, though in the same sitting 
duly recanted, kept the honorable members five hours in a fool’s 
paradise—to use the words of Mr. Disraeli, uttered on that 
occasion.” The London Times has now written no less than nine 
leaders, by actual count, all conceived, bona fide or mala fide,” in 
this identical fool’s paradise; all, as it would appear, only with a 
view to entrap Sir Charles Napier into a headlong attack upon 
Kronstadt or Sveaborg. Affecting to be drunk with glory and 
flushed with success, that journal even proceeded to bombard—in 
imagination of course—the Prussian coasts on the Baltic, as well as 
King Bomba at Naples, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany,° at 
Leghorn. In fact it was ready to make war on all the world, not 
omitting “the rest of mankind,”? of course. 

The actual state of the land fortifications of Sevastopol is too 
‘little known to admit of any positive prognostication as to how 
long that fortress may be able to hold out. The success on the 
Alma is an almost certain indication that the place will be taken, as 
it must have raised the courage and spirit of the allied troops, and 
will prove a powerful preventive against sickness—the most 
dangerous enemy they have to deal with in the Crimea, and one 
which is reported to be already at work. But it is foolish to expect 
that the allies should walk into Sevastopol as they would into a 
coffee-house. 

After the great mystification of the conquest of the place, with 
its 30,000 killed and wounded and 22,000 prisoners—a mystifica- 
tion whose like was never known in all the history of hoaxes—it 
would be natural to expect that the real official documents would 
at least possess the merit of affording clear and _ positive 

The Times, No. 21864, October 5, 1854, leader.— Ed. 

information as far as they go. Still the report published in London 
on the 5th of October in an extraordinary number of The Gazette, 
and copied in our columns this morning,””’ is, after all, not free 
from ambiguous expressions. Indeed, it is most open to criticism — 
a circumstance which must be ascribed to its proceeding from 
Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, one of the Palmerston school of 
diplomacy. This dispatch, in the first place, purports to have been 
sent to England from Bucharest on the 30th of September at 3'/, 
p-m., while Lord Redcliffe dates it from Constantinople on the 
30th at 9'/, p.m.; so that the dispatch purports to have been 
actually received at Bucharest six hours before it was sent off from 
Constantinople. In the second place, the dispatch omits all 
mention of what passed in the Crimea between the 20th and 28th 
of September, telling us that 

“the allied armies established their basis of operations at Balaklava on the 
morning of the 28th, and were preparing to march without delay to Sevastopol. 
The Agamemnon’ 

(with Admiral Lyons) 

“and other vessels of war were in the Bay of Balaklava. There were facilities 
there for disembarking the battering train.” 

Assuming this dispatch to be exact, the English press has 
naturally concluded that the allied armies had passed the Belbek 
and Severnaya, forced the hights at the back of the Bay of 
Sevastopol, and penetrated in a straight line to the Bay of 
Balaklava. We have here to observe that, on military grounds, it is 
inconceivable that an army in possession of the hights command- 
ing Sevastopol should quietly descend from them on the other 
side, in order to march to a bay eleven miles distant, for no other 
purpose than to “establish a base of operations.”” On the other 
hand, it is quite conceivable that Admiral Lyons should go around 
Cape Chersonesus with a portion of the fleet for the purpose of 
securing a harbor of refuge, at once close to Sevastopol and 
adapted to the debarkation of the siege artillery, which, we have 
always contended,* had not before been landed. The guns, of 
course, would not be landed without a protecting force, which may 
have been either detached from the main body of the army after 
landing at Old Fort, or may consist of a portion of the reserve 
shipped from Constantinople and Varna. 

The new dispatch further states that 

“Prince Menchikoff was in the field at the head of 20,000 men, expecting 
reenforcements.”’ 

Hence the English papers conclude that the Russians must have 
lost 25,000 to 30,000 men in the combats between September 20 
and 28, assuming with Lord Raglan that they were from 45,000 to 
50,000 strong in the battle of the Alma. We have previously 
stated* our prima facie” disbelief in these numbers, and have never 
allowed more than about 25,000 men to Prince Menchikoff, 
disposable for field operations, and in this it turns out that we 
were within the mark of the Russian statements.‘ 

The dispatch next proceeds to state that 

“the fortified place of Anapa has been burned by the Russians. Its garrison was 
marching to the scene of action.” 

We cannot believe this news to be true. If Prince Menchikoff 
expects any reenforcements at all to reach him in time, they can 
do so much better from Perekop than from Anapa, which is 
nearly two hundred miles distant; if none could be expected by 
him from the former place, it would have been most foolish, by 
calling up the garrison of Anapa, on the other side of the Black 
Sea, to sacrifice in addition to Sevastopol the last stronghold upon 
the Caucasus. It will be seen, then, that with all the “information” 
of this official dispatch, we are still sent back to the battle of the 
Alma as the chief event whose authenticity must be admitted. Of 
this event, however, the details are also still wanting, and the Duke 
of Newcastle has now warned the British public that they must not 
expect to receive them before Monday, October 9. All that we 
have learned, in addition to the official report by telegraph from 
Lord Raglan, amounts to this: That the hero of the London 
pawnshop, Marshal St. Arnaud, was “indisposed” on the day of 
battlek—(who ever heard the like of other heroes?)—that Lord 
Raglan had the chief command, that the English loss was not 
1,400 but 2,000, including 96 officers, and that already six 
steamers with wounded had arrived at Constantinople. 

The movements of Omer Pasha’s army, which is directed from 
Bucharest and Wallachia, by way of Rustchuk, Silistria and 
Oltenitza, to the coast of the Black Sea, appear to confirm the 

The Times, No. 21864, October 5, 1854.— Ed. 

report that the allied commanders in the Crimea have asked for 
reenforcements. But this retreat of the Turks from Wallachia may 
also be attributed to Austria’s desire to keep them from every road 
in the direction of Bessarabia, except the impracticable one 
through the Dobrodja. 

In the enormous credulity of which the English public have 
given us such imposing proofs, it deserves to be noted that the 
London Exchange was very little caught by the general en- 
thusiasm, the rise in the funds having never exceeded °/, per cent. 
At Paris, however, the rentes rose immediately 1'/, per cent.,a rise 
which, after all, is insignificant when compared with the rise of 10 
per cent. after the defeat of Waterloo. Thus the hoax, if, as is 
possible, it was invented for commercial purposes, has altogether 
failed to realize the great results its authors must have counted on. 

Tribune, No. 4215, October 21, 1854 asa