This description is not in Kinglake's style, but in its soldierly curtness it may strike the reader as having the valuable attribute of greater directness and lucidity, and it was written by the man who not only controlled every movement on his own side of the fight on the left of the great redoubt, but also watched with cool, keen eyes every evolution of his adversaries. He had need to be on the alert, if ever man had; for he had to his hand but three battalions, and he had in his front no fewer than twelve Russian battalions each one of which was numerically stronger than any one of his three. Nor were his opponents raw militia or reserve battalions such as confronted Prince Napoleon's division. The Russian regiments on the British side of the great road, the Vladimir, Sousdal, Kazan, and Ouglitz, constituted the Sixteenth Division, the division _d'élite_ of the Tsar's troops of the line; that same division which three and twenty years later won for Skobeleff his electrical successes. It was twelve battalions of this historical division against whose massive columns Colin Campbell led his brigade in the old two-deep British line formation with the result he has told in his quiet sober manner. No wonder that Lord Raglan's "eyes filled and his lips and countenance quivered" as, too much moved to speak, he shook the hand of the commander of the Highland Brigade. "So ended my part in the fight of the 20th inst.," writes Sir Colin in the soldierly and modest narrative of his share in the victory which he sent home to his friend Eyre. That narrative, lucid though it is, is also almost provokingly curt. Fortunately, thanks chiefly to the industry of Kinglake, there exists the material for supplementing and amplifying it. According to that writer during the last of the halts on the march on the morning of the Alma, while the men were lying down in the sunshine, Sir Colin, the provident soldier of experience, quietly remarked to one of his officers, "This will be a good time for the men to get loose half of their cartridges;" and Kinglake adds that, "when the command travelled along the ranks of the Highlanders, it lit up the faces of the men one after another, assuring them that now at length, and after long experience, they indeed would go into action."