This photograph of a cannon was taken during the Crimean War by Frenchmen Jean-Charles Langlois (fl. 1860s) and Léon-Eugène Méhédin (1828-1905). France had persuaded Britain to side with the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) against Russia, playing on fears that the Russian Empire had designs on Europe and India. In truth Russia’s ambitions went no further than liberating fellow Orthodox Christians in the Balkans from Muslim rule, and the war was wound up in 1856 after over 750,000 people had died, the vast majority of them from disease or other causes not directly related to the fighting.
I SHOULD also tell you an instance of great sang-froid on the part of a hospital sergeant, I think of the 7th Fusiliers. It was towards the close of the battle, and Lord Raglan was returning from taking leave of poor General Strangways,* and was going up towards the ridge. A sergeant approached us carrying canteens of water to take up for the wounded, and, as Lord Raglan passed, he drew himself up to make the usual salute, when a round shot came bounding over the hill and knocked his forage cap off his head.*
The man calmly picked up his cap, dusted it on his knee, placed it carefully on his head, and then made the military salute, and all without moving a muscle of his countenance. Lord Raglan was delighted with the man’s coolness, and said to him, ‘A near thing that, my man.’ ‘Yes, my Lord,’ replied the sergeant, with another salute, ‘but a miss is as good as a mile.’
Brigadier General Thomas Fox-Strangways (1790-1854) died that day at the Battle of Inkerman on November 5th, 1854. He had fought at the Battle of Waterloo, where he was severely wounded, and gone on to a distinguished military career that culminated in his appointment as Brigadier General in overall command of the British artillery in the Crimea.
A round shot is a cannonball.
Précis
At the Battle of Inkerman in 1854, part of the Crimean War, an English sergeant was halfway through saluting Lord Raglan when a stray Russian cannonball whipped off his cap. Quite unruffled, the sergeant retrieved it and then completed his salute as if nothing had happened, observing only that ‘a miss is a good as a mile’. (56 / 60 words)
