Owing to the burning village of Bourliouk, Sir de Lacy Evans, commanding the 2nd Division, had to cut his force into two parts, one passing on the right and the other on the left of the conflagration. The Russian fire from the Causeway batteries was heavy. Evans himself was struck, and nearly all his staff wounded, and some indeed killed. On the left moved forward the Light Division under Sir George Brown, opposed to whom were the Great Redoubt and no fewer than eighteen battalions of infantry, including the famous Kayan battalion. Straight down through the vineyards and across the river, somehow or other, moved the Light Division. The orders were not to halt until the river had been crossed. It has been reported that some few men, fearing the hail of bullets, which, by reason of their sound among the foliage, seemed in the vineyards to be nearly doubled, took refuge in the farmhouses which stood here and there. But such men were very few, and soon the whole division, under Generals Buller and Codrington, stood on the Russian side of the Alma, sheltered for a moment by the steep river bank. Here Buller, on the extreme left, halted and reformed his men, holding back the 88th and 77th regiments to protect the allied army from a flank attack. The remaining five battalions of the Light Brigade pressed forward up the bank, and Sir George Brown himself it was, on horseback, flushed and breathless, who first gained the summit, a mark for the entire Russian artillery. That he remained unshot was a miracle. Simultaneously, Codrington and the Royal Fusiliers, under Lacy Yea, gained the summit of the river bank, and the five battalions pressed on up the hill. Facing them, on their right and left, were the Kayan infantry columns; in the centre was the Great Redoubt. The Kayan columns on the British left were soon put to flight by the Riflemen, the 19th, and the Royal Welsh, who had joined the centre for the attack upon the Great Redoubt, but the Kayan column on the right engaged the Royal Fusiliers in a stubborn fight.