OLIPHANT'S TRANSCAUCASIAN CA.MPAIGN. * IN point of essential knowledge this volume

adds little to what was known already respecting the brief and abortive campaign of Omar Pasha in the Transcaucasian provinces, The landing at Souchoum. Kale, the rapid reconnoissance of Omar Pasha in the woods, down even to the incident of the escaped slave, and the subsequent passage of the Ingour in the face of the Russian forces are told much as they were told by the Times correspond- ent, often, it strikes us, in nearly the same words. The subsequent advance on,the road to Kutais—the "object" of the campaign—is narrated in greater detail, varied by h•uent personal excursions of the author to observe and forage. The long delays on this march—upwards of a fortnight altogether on the road, at Sinakia, and an advance beyond it—are unexplained by Mr. Oliphant, and seem to puzzle him ; unless, as he appears to think, the want of provisions and transport may be the cause. However, at Sinakie the army remained nearly a fortnight, with Kutais before them, and, it seems, almost in their grasp. When they finally advanced towards their object, the fine weather suddenly changed ; rain came down in torrents, rendering the country impracticable from the swollen state of the streams and the order was given to retreat. It is probable that the fall of Kars, the news of which arrived the evening before the order was pro- mulgated, was the real cause of the retrograde movement. An advance, hazardous at any time was useless when the object to be attained by it was lost. The retreat, so long as Mr. Oli-

• The Tratucaucasian Campaign of the Turkic!' Army under Omer Pasha: a

Personal Narrative. By Laurence Oliphant, Author of "The Bucciau Shores of the iliack Secs," 4T, Published by Blackwood and Sons. pliant remained with the army, was conducted without pressure from the enemy, beyond some partisan attacks upon the rear; but the discomdrts from rain and mud were very great. As long as the fine weather lasted, war was pleasant enough,—risk now and then in action, a little hazard frequently in reconnoitering or foraging ; but these were only pleasurable excitement. The hard- ships and privations do not seem to have been much beyond roughing it on a fowl and a glass of grog, when something better was not to be had ; to counterbalance which, there was a beauti- ful country, the open air, and a free life " under the greenwood tree." But wet weather seems as fatal to the pleasures of a cam- paign as to a picnic, especially when it rains as in 1mm-ilia aiid Mmgrelia. "At last the long-expected rain did come, and the first thing it did was to carry away poor Skendees bridge ; the next, to weep down the bridge which had been constructed across the Ziewie, and to cut off all communica- tion between one half of the camp and the other. That placid river was now a seething torrent ; it rose about fourteen feet in one night, and the waterfall consequently disappeared. After that it continued to rise, until I thought the old ruin on the island would give way at last ; but it stopped, and gradually subsided. Not so the rain—that was incessant; and to our disgust we chscevered, that in the centre of our tent, which was pitched upon the aide of a hill, there was a spring ; so we were fairly flooded out, and had to move to another piece of sloppy ground higher up.

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"The incessant rains had by this time reduced our camp to a deplorable state. The level plain upon which it was pitched was absolutely under water, and no amount of trenching was sufficient to prevent the floors of the tents from being flooded. Our next neighbour, Omer Bey, Colonel Ballard's aide-de-camp, called me to witness a forcible illustration of our semi-drowned condition. He bad made prize of a duck in the course of a foraging expedition, which he had tethered inside his tent. It had got away from its string, and was now actually swimming by the bedside of its owner, gobbling up bits of floating biscuit. The condition of the unfortunate soldiers under these circumstances may easily be conceived. Crowded into their small tents, they lay literally packed in mud. My own bed was upon the ground, or rather in the water, and for the last two nights I had been suffering from fever and ague. To add to our miseries, we were running short of provisions. Our horses, which had been exposed to the ram without the slightest shelter, began to look careworn and miserable; nor was the appearance of the men more cheering. The Rifles had been incessantly at work. When not marching, they were employed in recon- noissances; and I do not believe that a more enduring body of men exist anywhere than these gallant fellows proved themselves to be. No doubt, a great deal was due to the care which their commanding-officer took to keep their commissariat well supplied. Had they fared as bad as many of the other regiments, they certainly could never have gone through their work. Some of their less fortunate comrades had already been out of provisions altogether, and came to buy from the Rifles biscuits at ten pares a piece.

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"The four days which I passed at Choloni were the most miserable lever experienced in my life excepting seven which I afterwards spent in Redoute lialeh. Menke to the kindness of Mr. Longworth, I was as well provided for as was possible under the circumstances ; but nothing could make such an existence tolerable. There was no inducement to go outside the tent, for you then found yourself in a pouring rain, standing up to your knees in water. It was equally wretched inside, to sit upon a rickety stool in wet clothes, with one's feet in a puddle, shiver: and gazing at vacancy—for our stock of books was exhausted, and we had not even a fire to comfort us, or to change the current of one's thoughts from the contem- plation of our own miseries to that of burning embers. Under these circumstances, I generally remained in bed the greater part of the day ; and, by tucking a waterproof sheet tightly round my damp blankets, kept in the steam, and under this sort of hydropathic treatment attained artificial warmth.

"Fortunately, I was too ill to eat anything, as, with the exception of a little rice and biscuit, there was nothing to eat. "At last, upon the morning of the 16th of December, Mr. Lon•worth and I determined to leave the camp, and to try and effect our escape altogether by Redoute Kaleh. Bidding adieu to the few of our countrymen still left with the army, we turned our faces to the storm, and commenced a painful and laborious journey. The first object that met our view was not encouraging : it was that of a man who, just picked out of a ditch, where he had almost perished from cold and starvation, was being laid upon a horse to be carried to camp ; but, alas ! it was too late. His glassy eyes were fixed in their hollow sockets, and except from a slight convulsive twitching of the fingers, it would have been impossible to know that life WM not extinct. It was quite evident that his restoration was beyond all human skill."

As we anticipated, the campaign of Omar Pasha occupies less space than Mr. Oliphant's own adventures. These are not of a striking kind ; consisting of steam-trips to and fro along the coast from Anapa to Trebizond, and occasional excursions by land, including one with the Duke of Newcastle on a visit to a native grandee. They contain a few small adventures, with more de- scriptions of scenery than of manners but do not greatly differ from those of similar accounts by travellers in Asia Minor. The conclusions to be drawn from Mr. Oliphant's pages are' that our allies the Turks did all they could to misrepresent the Europeans and render them unpopular among the Circassian and other tribes ;

• while in many places, if not everywhere, the Turks were more dreaded than the Russians. This last was not much to be wonder- ed at, considering that the Albanian irregulars and some of the Transcaucasian supernumeraries used to kidnap children, besides committing little mistakes touching meum and tnum.

Of the Turkish people Mr. Oliphant speaks well ; and, like other observers he highly estimates their capacity as soldiers when they are well observers, and well commanded,. The ruling classes he paints in the same colours as Dr. Sandvrith and the Kars blue- book. Almost all the officers in the Turkish army that are worth anything are foreigners. Mr. Oliphant first ascertained their great numbers at Ingour, where men in the excitement of action speak the language with which they are most familiar. Of the Government, as far as its proceedings came before him, one story will suffice.

"The arrangements of the Commander-in-chief were a good deal , disconcerted by the deplorable condition in which he found the army of Mustapha Pasha, which had been quartered here [Batonm.] These troops, Which had numbered twelve thousand strong, now only mustered three hundred effective bayonets. Mustapha Pasha had been despatched by Omer to Constantinople to answer for his misdeeds. As soon as these had been clearly and indisputably proved against him, he was sent back by his Go- vernment to his old post, and placed at the head of an even larger force than that which he had originally commanded, for the purpose of co- operating with Omer Pasha upon the left bank of the Rhien ; which he did by marching ten miles into Gouriel and back again, having been two months engaged in effecting the important operation."

Mr. Oliphant introduces his narrative by a discussion on the vexed question of the fall of Kars, grounded on his own obser- vation and the official correspondence. He comes to the conclu- sion, that the disastrous result was remotely owing to the refusal of the Allied Generals to allow Omar Pasha to remove the " Turk-

ish " army from the Crimea in July.. The more immediate cause

he is inclined to attribute to Marshal Pelisaier's final refusal, when the Emperor of the French left the decision to him, on the appli- cation of Lord Clarendon for the Imperial sanction of the plan.

"Whatever may have been the neglect of the Turkish Government in the first instance, with regard to the commissariat of the garrison—how distressing soever the apathy and corruption of the Ottoman officials may then have been—there can be no doubt that, in spite of all these evil and disastrous influences, had the French Government entertained the proposi- tion of Omer Pasha when it was first pressed upon them by Lord Clarendon, instead of leaving it to the Generals in the Crimea, Kars would never have been taken. There is, indeed, a very fair probability that, even at the eleventh hour, when Sebastopol had fallen, and General Simpson stated that he had no further need for the presence of the Turkish army, if General Pelissier had then authorized its departure, instead of three weeks later, that unfortunate garrison would have been saved. But whether this was so or not, it is certain that, in that ease, the Turkish army would have been at this moment in possession of the pass of Suramm ; from whence the fertile valley of the Kur, and the cities of Gori and Tiflis, lying at its feet, would offer an inviting field of operations for a spring campaign ; while those four populous provinces Imentia, Ming. relia, Gouriel, and Abkhasia, wrested from the dominion of Russia, would have furnished Lord Clarendon with the power of demanding from that empire more than an equivalent for her recent success."