On the following day the Russians made a sortie in force upon the English position at Inkermann, and although they were repulsed by Sir de Lacy Evans's division, there can be no possible doubt that the Allied Forces at this period were in imminent peril of a terrible disaster. Five days before the cavalry action of Balaklava, Raglan had informed the War Office that his army was reduced to 16,000, and that he doubted if he could maintain it in the field during the winter, even if Sebastopol should be taken first. Week after week the condition of the troops was painted in gloomier colours by the war correspondents. The transport system had broken down; supplies of all sorts were running short; the hospital arrangements were miserably inadequate for the numerous wounded and the still more numerous sick. The Turkish troops--men of the same race who had fought so well under English officers at Silistria--proved useless--worse than useless, for they had to be fed--under their own pashas in the trenches before Sebastopol. [Illustration: _R. Caton Woodville._} {_By permission of the Artist, and of Messrs. Graves, Pall Mall, Publishers of the Photogravure._ THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE AT BALAKLAVA.] The French Emperor took alarm. Hitherto nearly all the fighting had fallen to the share of the British, and England had very few troops ready to send as reinforcements. Louis Napoleon proposed to send 20,000 French troops if England would supply the necessary transports. This was undertaken at once; huts, warm clothing, blankets, tinned meat, and other stores were sent out in ample quantities, but very few of the cargoes reached their destination. Winter had burst upon the Black Sea with almost unexampled fury; the transports and cargo ships were scattered. Two French men-of-war and twenty-four British transports went to the bottom in the hurricane; the elements seemed to combine with man's mismanagement for the annihilation of the Allied Forces. What our soldiers had to bear, half clothed, half starved, in those bitter trenches, may be read in Kinglake's narrative. [Sidenote: Battle of Inkermann.]