This was the general result of the great expedition which would end the insurrection in two weeks. Nothing had been gained, an army wasted; and when, on October 3, the remnant of Egyptian troops left, there was no Turkish force out of gunshot of the fortresses except a small garrison at Dibaki, under the guns of the fleet. With the practical and complete failure of Omar Pasha to subdue the island, all hope of military success seemed to fail the Turkish authorities. Omar returned from Sphakia with his army by sea, save a body left in Selinos, who made an expedition on Omalos, and, after penetrating with slight resistance to the plain, found themselves unable to keep up their communications with the coast, and abruptly evacuated it again, suffering considerable loss in forcing the passes outwardly. The elastic system of resistance adopted by the Cretans, and finally acceded to by the Greek chiefs, wore out the Turkish forces without giving them the prestige of tangible victory. There were no fortresses to capture, no accumulation of stores to destroy, and the very poverty and want of military coherence made a strength for the insurgents in face of the wretched strategy of the Turks. CHAPTER XIII. Another step of the _moral_ intervention which the Russian Government had been so long and so skilfully engineering came at this juncture to make the cause of the Porte more hopeless. The negotiations with France had resulted in a kind of _entente_ on the Eastern question, by which the French emperor had agreed, under certain contingencies, to unite with the Russians in deporting the families of the Christian combatants. The new French agent, Tricou, had from the beginning shown a tendency to criticise Omar Pasha unfavorably, which the latter had increased by his contemptuous treatment of the new consul. Tricou had, consequently, set his agents to find out all the instances of Turkish barbarity obtainable--a ghastly roll, obtained from easily read records. It happened during the operations against Sphakia, which Omar nominally directed from on board the flag-ship of the squadron off the coast, that news came in of his having blockaded a number of families in a cave on the sea-side and having attempted unsuccessfully to stifle them out (or in), and the active Murray went at once to make his Highness a visit, and ascertain if the catastrophe were avertible. He obtained from the Generalissimo a promise that the prisoners should not be attacked by any inhuman appliances, and should be guaranteed honorable treatment on surrendering.[J] In the course of the conversation, Omar animadverted on Tricou in terms which Murray, in narrating his visit to me, declined to repeat, and which, in all their vagueness and possible malignity, I at once applied as a caustic to Tricou's already wounded pride, in accordance with a systematic policy to make all the bad blood possible between the Pasha and my colleagues.