The Crimean War: A History

8 Sevastopol in the Autumn

If Herbé could have visited Sevastopol, as Tolstoy was to do in November 1854, he would have found the town in a state of high alert and feverish activity. In the sweeping opening passage of his Sevastopol Sketches Tolstoy takes us there in the early morning, when the city was bursting into life:

Sevastopol was a military town. Its entire population of 40,000 people was connected in some way to the life of the naval base, whose garrison numbered about 18,000 men, and from that unity Sevastopol gained its military strength. There were sailors who had lived there with their families since Sevastopol’s foundation in the 1780s. Socially the city had a singularity: frock coats were rarely to be seen among the naval uniforms on its central boulevards. There were no great museums, galleries, concert halls or intellectual treasures in Sevastopol. The imposing neoclassical buildings of the city centre were all military in character: the admiralty, the naval school, the arsenal, the garrisons, the ship-repair workshops, the army stores and warehouses, the military hospital, and the officers’ library, one of the richest in Europe. Even the Assembly of Nobles (the ‘handsome building with Roman numerals’) turned into a hospital during the siege.

The town was divided into two distinct parts, a North and a South side, separated from each other by the sea harbour, and the only direct means of communication between the two was by boat. The North Side of the town was a world apart from the elegant neoclassical façades around the military harbour on the southern side. It had few built-up streets, and fishermen and sailors lived there in a semi-rural style, growing vegetables and keeping livestock in the gardens of their dachas. On the South Side there was another, less obvious, distinction between the administrative centre on the western side of the military harbour and the naval dockyards on the eastern side, where the sailors lived in garrisons or with their families in small wooden houses no more than a few yards from the defensive works. Women hung their washing on lines thrown between their houses and the fortress walls and bastions.²

Like Tolstoy, visitors to Sevastopol were always struck by the ‘strange intermingling of camp and town life, of handsome town and dirty bivouac’. Evgeny Ershov, a young artillery officer who arrived in Sevastopol that autumn, was impressed by the way the people of the city went about their ordinary everyday business amid all the chaos of the siege. ‘It was strange’, he wrote, ‘to see how people carried on with their normal lives – a young woman quietly out walking with her pram, traders buying and selling, children running round and playing in the streets, while all around them was a battlefield and they might be killed at any time.’³

People lived as if there was no tomorrow in the weeks prior to the invasion. There was non-stop revelry, heavy drinking and gambling, while the city’s many prostitutes worked overtime. The allied landings had a sobering effect, but confidence ran high among the junior officers, who all assumed that the Russian army would defeat the British and the French. They drank toasts to the memory of 1812. ‘The mood among us was one of high excitement,’ recalled Mikhail Botanov, a young sea cadet, ‘and we were not frightened of the enemy. The only one among us who did not share our confidence was the commander of a steamship who, unlike us, had often been abroad and liked to say the proverb, “In anger is not strength.” Events were to show that he was longer-sighted and better informed about the true state of affairs than we were.’⁴

The defeat of the Russian forces at the Alma created panic among the civilian population of Sevastopol. People were expecting the allies to invade from the north at any time; they were confused when they saw their fleets on the southern side, supposing wrongly that they had been surrounded. ‘I don’t know anyone who at that moment did not say a prayer,’ recalled one inhabitant. ‘We all thought the enemy about to break through.’ Captain Nikolai Lipkin, a battery commander in the Fourth Bastion, wrote to his brother in St Petersburg at the end of September:

Despite Lipkin’s confidence, the Russian commanders were seriously considering abandoning Sevastopol after the battle at the Alma. There were then eight steamers on the northern side waiting for the order to evacuate the troops and ten warships on the southern side to cover their escape. Many of the city’s residents made their own getaway as the enemy approached, though their path was blocked by Russian troops. Water supplies in the city were running dangerously low, the fountains having stopped and the whole population being dependent on the wells, which were always short of water at this time of year. Told by deserters that the city was supplied by water springs and pipes that ran down a ravine from the heights where they were camped, the British and the French had cut off this supply, leaving Sevastopol with just the aqueduct that supplied the naval dockyard.⁵

As the allies set up camp and prepared their bombardment of the town, the Russians worked around the clock to strengthen its defences on the southern side. With Menshikov nowhere to be seen, the main responsibility for the defence of Sevastopol passed into the hands of three commanders: Admiral Kornilov, chief of staff of the Black Sea Fleet; Totleben, the engineer; and Nakhimov, the hero of Sinope and commander of the port, who was popular among the sailors and seen as ‘one of them’. All three men were military professionals of a new type that contrasted strongly with the courtier Menshikov. Their energy was remarkable. Kornilov was everywhere, inspiring the people by his daily presence in every sector of the defensive works, and promising rewards to everyone, if they could only keep the town. Tolstoy, who was to join Lipkin as a battery commander in the Fourth Bastion, wrote a letter to his brother the day after he arrived in which he described Kornilov on his rounds. Instead of hailing the men with the customary greeting, ‘Health to you!’, the admiral called to them, ‘If you must die, lads, will you die?’ ‘And’, Tolstoy wrote, ‘the men shouted “We will die, Your Excellency, Hurrah!” And they do not say if for effect, for in every face I saw not jesting but earnestness.’⁶

Kornilov himself was far from certain that the city could be saved. On 27 September he wrote to his wife:

His uncertainty was increased when the sailors discovered a large supply of vodka on the wharf and went on a drunken rampage for three days. It was left to Kornilov to destroy the supplies of liquor and sober up his sailors for battle.⁷

The defensive preparations were frenzied and improvised. When the work began, it was discovered that there were no shovels in Sevastopol, so men were sent to procure as many as they could from Odessa. Three weeks later, they returned with 400 spades. Meanwhile, the people of the city worked in the main with wooden shovels they had made from torn-up planks of wood. The whole population of Sevastopol – sailors, soldiers, prisoners of war, working men and women (including prostitutes) – was involved in digging trenches, carting earth to the defences, building walls and barricades, and constructing batteries with earth, fascines and gabions,[33] while teams of sailors hauled up the heavy guns they had taken from their ships. Every means of carrying the earth was commandeered, and when there were no baskets, bags or buckets, the diggers carried it in their folded clothes. The expectation of an imminent attack added greater urgency to their work. Inspecting these defences a year later, the allies were amazed by the skill and ingenuity of the Russians.⁸

Informed of these heroic efforts by the people of Sevastopol, the Tsar wrote to General Gorchakov at the end of September, reminding him of the ‘special Russian spirit’ that had saved the country from Napoleon, and urging him to summon it again against the British and the French. ‘We shall pray to God, that you may call on them to save Sevastopol, the fleet and the Russian land. Do not bow to anyone,’ he underlined in his own hand. ‘Show the world that we are the same Russians who stood firm in 1812.’ The Tsar also wrote to Menshikov, at that time near the River Belbek, north-east of Sevastopol, with a message for the people of the town:

Meanwhile, the allies embarked on their lengthy preparations for the siege. Raglan had wanted an immediate assault. He had seen the weakness of the Russian defences, and was encouraged by the forthright and masterful Sir George Cathcart, in command of the 4th Division, whose troops had taken up positions on a hill from which he could see the whole town. It was from there that he wrote to Raglan:

Burgoyne, formerly an advocate of a quick assault, now disagreed. Concerned with loss of lives, the army’s chief engineer insisted on the need to subdue the enemy’s fire with siege guns before an assault by troops was launched. The French agreed with him. So the allies settled down to the slow process of landing siege artillery and hauling it up to the heights. There were endless problems with the British guns, many of which had to be dismantled before they could be unloaded from the ships. ‘The placing of our heavy ship guns in position has been most tedious,’ Captain William Cameron of the Grenadier Guards wrote to his father.

It was eighteen days before the guns were finally in place, days that gave the Russians crucial time to prepare their defences.

While the British were hauling up their guns, the French took the lead in digging trenches, moving slowly forward in a zigzag formation towards the defences of Sevastopol, as the Russians fired at them with artillery. The opening of the first trench was the most dangerous because there was little protection from the Russian guns. Armed with shovels and pickaxes, the first shift of 800 men crept forward under cover of the night, using rocks for shelter, until they reached a point within a kilometre of Sevastopol’s Flagstaff Bastion, and on lines marked out by their commanders began digging themselves into the ground, piling up the soil in gabions in front of them to protect themselves from the Russians. On that night, 9/10 October, the sky was clear and the moon was out, but a north-west wind took the sound of digging away from the town, and by dawn, when the sleepy Russians at last discovered them, the French had dug a protected trench 1,000 metres long. Under heavy bombardment, 3,000 French soldiers went on with the works, digging new entrenchments every night and repairing trenches damaged by the Russians the next day, while shells and mortar whistled past their heads. By 16 October the first five French batteries had been built with sacks of earth and wood for palisades, fortified breastworks and parapets, and more than fifty guns (cannon, mortars and howitzers) mounted on raised platforms on the ground.¹¹

Following the French, the British dug entrenchments and sited their first batteries on Green Hill (the Left Attack) and Vorontsov Hill (the Right Attack), the two positions separated by a deep ravine. Shifts of 500 men on each attack worked day and night while more than twice that number guarded them from the Russians, who launched sorties at night. ‘I am off duty this morning at 4 am after 24 hours in the trenches,’ Captain Radcliffe of the 20th Regiment wrote to his family.

On 16 October it was finally decided to begin the bombardment of Sevastopol the following morning, even though the British works were not quite completed. There was a mood of optimistic expectation in the allied camp. ‘All artillery officers – French, English and naval – say [that] after a fire of 48 hours, little will be seen of Sevastopol but a heap of ruins,’ wrote Henry Clifford, a staff officer in the Light Division, to his family. According to Evelyn Wood, a midshipman who had watched the battle of the Alma from the topmast of his ship before being transferred to the land attack with the Naval Brigade,

At dawn on 17 October, as soon as the fog had cleared, the Russians saw that the embrasures of the enemy batteries had been opened. Without waiting for the enemy guns to open fire, the Russians began shelling them along the line, and soon afterwards the allied counter-bombardment began with 72 British and 53 French guns. Within a few minutes the gun battle was at its height. The booming of the guns, the roaring and the whistling of the shot, and the deafening explosions of the shell drowned out the calls of the bugles and the drums. Sevastopol was completely lost in a thick black pall of smoke, which hung over the whole darkened battlefield, making it impossible for the allied gunners to hit their target with any military precision. ‘We could only sit and guess and hope we were doing well,’ wrote Calthorpe, who watched the bombardment with Raglan from the Quarries on Vorontsov Hill.¹⁴

For thousands of civilians sheltering in the bombed-out ruins of their homes in Sevastopol, these were the most terrifying moments of their lives. ‘I never saw or heard of anything like it before,’ wrote one resident. ‘For twelve hours the wild howling of the bombs was unbroken, it was impossible to distinguish between them, and the ground shook beneath our feet…. A thick smoke filled the sky and blotted out the sun; it became as dark as night; even the rooms were filled with smoke.’¹⁵

As soon as the bombardment had begun, Kornilov had set off with his flag-lieutenant, Prince V. I. Bariatinsky, to make a tour of the defences. They went first to the Fourth Bastion, the most dangerous place in Sevastopol, which was being shelled by both the British and the French. ‘Inside the No. 4 Bastion,’ recalled Bariatinsky, ‘the scene was frightful and the destruction enormous, whole gun teams having been struck down by shellfire; the wounded and dead were being removed by stretcher-bearers, but they were still lying round in heaps.’ Kornilov went to every gun, encouraging the crews, and then moved on to the Fifth Bastion, under no less pressure from the enemy’s artillery, where he met Nakhimov, dressed as he always was in a frock coat with epaulettes. Nakhimov had been wounded in the face, though he did not seem to notice it, Bariatinsky thought, as blood ran down his neck, staining the white ribbon of his St George Cross, as he talked with Kornilov. While they were conversing there, Bariatinsky recognized an officer approaching, though ‘he had no eyes or face, for his features had completely disappeared underneath a mass of bloody flesh’, the remains of a sailor who had been blown up, which the officer proceeded to wipe from his face, while he asked Bariatinsky for a cigarette. Ignoring the advice of his staff, who said it was too dangerous to go on, Kornilov continued his tour at the Third Bastion, the Redan, which was then being pounded by the heavy British guns with a deadly concentration of power. When Kornilov arrived, the bastion was under the command of Captain Popandul, but he was soon killed, as were the five other commanders who succeeded him that day. Kornilov passed through the trench system, within close range of the British guns, crossed the ravine, and climbed up to the Malakhov Bastion, where he talked to the wounded troops. He was just starting down the hill to complete his tour in the Ushakov Ravine when he was hit by a shell that blew away the lower part of his body. Taken to the military hospital, he died shortly afterwards.¹⁶

Towards midday the allied fleet joined in the bombardment, directing their heavy guns towards Sevastopol from an arc around the entrance to the sea harbour some 800 to 1,500 metres from the coast (the blockade of the harbour by the sunken Russian ships stopped them getting any closer to their target). For six hours the city was shelled by an allied broadside of 1,240 guns; its coastal batteries had just 150 guns. ‘The sight was one of the most awful in the way of guns,’ Henry James, a merchant seamen, wrote in his diary after watching the bombardment from further out to sea. ‘Several of the liners kept up a heavy cannonade and it could be compared to the rolling of a huge drum… We could see showers of shot striking the water at the foot of the forts and flying up in heaps at the walls.’ The firing of the fleets created so much smoke that the Russian gunners could not even see the ships. Some of the gunners lost their nerve, but others showed extraordinary bravery, firing at the gun flashes of the invisible ships while shells crashed around their heads. One artillery officer on the Tenth Bastion, the main focus of the French attack, recalled seeing men who had been rewarded for their courage in previous engagements running off in panic when the firing began. ‘I was caught myself between two feelings,’ he recalled. ‘One half of me wanted to run home to save my family, but my sense of duty told me I should stay. My feelings as a man got the better of the soldier within me and I ran away to find my family.’¹⁷

In fact, for all their guns, the French and British ships received better than they gave. The wooden sailing vessels of the allied fleet were unable to get close enough to the stone forts of the coastal bastions to cause them much damage (the blockade had done its job in this respect) but they could be set alight by the Russian guns, which were not so numerous but (because they were based on the land) much more accurate than the allies’ long-range cannonade. After firing an estimated 50,000 rounds to little real effect on the coastal batteries, the allied fleet weighed anchor and sailed away to count its losses: five ships badly damaged, thirty sailors killed and more than 500 men wounded. Without steam-powered iron ships, the allied fleet was destined to play only a subsidiary role to the army during the siege of Sevastopol.

The first day’s outcome on the land was not much more encouraging for the allies. The French made little headway against Mount Rodolph before one of their main magazines was blown up and they ceased fire, and while the British caused considerable damage to the Third Bastion, accounting for most of the 1,100 Russian casualties, they had lacked the heavy mortars to make their superior firepower count. Their much-vaunted new weapon, the 68-pounder Lancaster gun, was unreliable firing shells and was ineffective at long range against Russian earthworks, which absorbed the light projectiles. ‘I fear the Lancaster is a failure,’ reported Captain Lushington to General Airey the next day. ‘Our guns do not go far enough out and we injure our own embrasures more than the enemy…. I have impressed on all the officers the necessity of slow and steady firing… but the distances are too great… and we might as well fire into a pudding as at these earthworks.’¹⁸

The failure of the first day’s bombardment was a rude awakening for the allies. ‘The town appears built of incombustible materials,’ wrote Fanny Duberly, who had come to the Crimea as a war tourist with her husband, Henry Duberly, paymaster of the 8th Hussars. ‘Although it was twice slightly on fire yesterday, the flames were almost immediately extinguished.’¹⁹

On the Russian side, the first day had destroyed the mystique of the allied armies established by their victory at the Alma. Suddenly, the enemy was no longer seen as invincible, and from that the Russians gained new hope and self-confidence. ‘We all thought it was impossible for our batteries to save us,’ a resident of Sevastopol wrote in a letter the next day. ‘So imagine our surprise when today we found all our batteries intact, and all the guns in place!… God has blessed Russia, and rewarded us for the insults we have suffered to our faith!’²⁰

Having survived the first day’s bombardment, the Russians now resolved to break the siege by attacking Balaklava and cutting off the British from their main base of supplies. After Alma, Menshikov had set out towards Bakhchiserai. Now, with the change in strategy, he amassed his troops in the Chernaia valley on Sevastopol’s eastern side, where they were joined by the first reinforcements to arrive from the Danubian front, the 12th Infantry Division under the command of Lieutenant General Pavel Liprandi. On the evening of 24 October, a field army of 60,000 troops, 34 squadrons of cavalry and 78 artillery pieces camped around the village of Chorgun on Fediukhin Heights for an attack on the British defences of Balaklava the following morning.

The objective was well chosen. As the British were themselves aware, they were seriously overstretched and there was not much to protect their supply base from a swift attack by a large force of men. The British had constructed a total of six small redoubts along part of the Causeway Heights – the ridge-line of the Vorontsov Road separating the northern half of the Balaklava valley between the Fediukhin Heights and the road from the southern half between the road and the port itself – and placed in each of the four completed redoubts a Turkish guard (consisting mainly of raw recruits) with two or three 12-pounder guns of position. Behind the redoubts, in the southern half of the valley, the British had positioned the 93rd Highland Infantry Brigade, under the command of Sir Colin Campbell, to whom the defence of the port was entrusted, while encamped on their flank was the cavalry division of Lord Lucan, and on the heights above the gorge descending to the port 1,000 Royal Marines with some field artillery. In the event of an attack by the Russians, Campbell could also rely on the support of the British infantry as well as two divisions of French troops under General Bosquet encamped on the heights above Sevastopol, but until they arrived the defence of Balaklava would depend on 5,000 troops.²¹

At daybreak on 25 October the Russians commenced their attack. Establishing a field battery close to the village of Kamara, they began a heavy bombardment of the No. 1 Redoubt on Canrobert’s Hill (named by the British in honour of the French commander). During the night Raglan had been warned of the imminent attack by a deserter from the Russian camp, but, having sent 1,000 men to Balaklava in response to a false alarm only three days previously, he decided not to act (yet another blunder to put against his name), though he did reach the Sapoune Heights in time to get a grandstand view of the fighting in the valley below him after messages were sent to his headquarters at the start of the attack.

For more than an hour, the 500 Turkish troops defending the No. 1 Redoubt put up a stubborn resistance, as they had done against the Russians at Silistria, losing more than one-third of their men. But then 1,200 Russian troops stormed the redoubt at the point of the bayonet, forcing the exhausted defenders to abandon it to them, along with three of the seven British cannon which had been lent to the Turks. ‘To our disgust,’ recalled Calthorpe, who was watching from the Sapoune Heights with Raglan’s staff, ‘we saw a little stream of men issue from the rear of the redoubt and run down the hill-side towards our lines.’ Seeing their countrymen in full retreat, the Turkish garrisons in the neighbouring three redoubts (2, 3 and 4) followed their example and withdrew towards the port, many of them carrying their blankets, pots and pans and crying ‘Ship! Ship!’ as they passed the British lines. Calthorpe watched as 1,000 Turkish troops streamed down the hill pursued by large parties of Cossacks. ‘The yells of these wild horsemen could be heard from where we were as they galloped after these unhappy Muslims, numbers of whom were killed by their lances.’

As they ran through the settlement of Kadikoi, the Turkish soldiers were jeered at by a group of British army wives, including one, a massive washerwoman with brawny arms and ‘hands as hard as horn’, who seized hold of a Turk and gave him a good kicking for trampling on the washing she had laid out in the sun to dry. When she realized that the Turks had deserted her own husband’s regiment, the 93rd, she scolded them: ‘Ye cowardly misbelievers, to leave the brave Christian Highlanders to fecht when ye ran awa!’ The Turks tried to placate her, and some called her ‘Kokana’,[34] prompting her to become even more enraged. ‘Kokana, indeed! I’ll Kokana ye!’ she cried, and, brandishing a stick, chased them down the hill. Tired and downcast, the Turkish soldiers continued their retreat, until they reached the ravine leading to the port. Throwing their belongings on the ground, they lay down beside them to get some rest. Some spread out their prayer mats on the ground and said a prayer towards Mecca.²²

The British accused the Turkish troops of cowardice, but this was unfair. According to John Blunt, Lord Lucan’s Turkish interpreter, most of the troops were Tunisians without proper training or experience of war. They had only just arrived in the Crimea and were in a famished state: none of them had received any rations they could eat as Muslims since they had left Varna several days before and on their arrival they had disgraced themselves by attacking civilians. Blunt rode after the retreating troops and relayed to an officer Lucan’s command for them to regroup behind the 93rd, but he was accosted by the soldiers ‘who appeared parched with thirst and exhausted’. They asked him why no British troops had come to their support, complained that they had been left in the redoubts for several days without food or water, and declared that the ammunition they were supplied with did not fit the guns in the redoubts. One of the soldiers, his head in a bandage and smoking a long pipe, said to Blunt in Turkish: ‘What can we do sir? It is God’s will.’²³

The Russian infantry took redoubts 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the Causeway Heights, abandoning the fourth after they had destroyed the gun carriages. The Russian cavalry, under General Ryzhov, moved up behind them along the North Valley and turned to attack the 93rd, the only infantry force that now prevented them from breaking through to Balaklava, since the British cavalry had been withdrawn to await the arrival of the infantry from the plateau above Sevastopol. Descending from the Causeway Heights, four squadrons of Ryzhov’s cavalry, some 400 men, charged towards the Highlanders.[35] Watching the scene from a vineyard near the camp of the Light Brigade, Fanny Duberly was horrified. Shots ‘began to fly’ and ‘Presently came the Russian cavalry charging over the hill-side and across the valley, right against the little line of Highlanders. Ah, what a moment! Charging and surging onward, what could that little wall of men do against such numbers and such speed? There they stood.’ Forming his men into a line just two deep instead of the usual square employed by infantry against the cavalry, Campbell placed his trust in the deadly rifle power of the Minié whose effects he had seen at the Alma. As the cavalry approached, he rode along the line, calling on his men to stand firm and ‘die there’, according to Lieutenant Colonel Sterling of the 93rd, who thought ‘he looked as if he meant it’. To Russell of The Times, watching from the heights, they looked like ‘a thin red streak tipped with a line of steel’ (later and forever misquoted as a ‘thin red line’). The appearance of a steady line of redcoats caused the Russian cavalry to hesitate, and, as they did so, at a range of about 1,000 metres, Campbell gave the order for the first volley. When the smoke had cleared, Sergeant Munro of the 93rd ‘saw that the cavalry were still advancing straight for the line. A second volley rang forth, and then we observed that there was a little confusion in the enemy’s ranks and that they were swerving to our right.’ A third volley at much closer range caught the Russians in the flank, causing them to bend sharply to their left and ride back to their own army.²⁴

Ryzhov’s first four squadrons had been repulsed but the main body of the Russian cavalry, 2,000 hussars flanked by Cossack outriders, now descended from the Causeway Heights for a second charge against the Highlanders. This time the infantry was rescued just in time by the intervention of the British cavalry, eight squadrons of the Heavy Brigade, some 700 men, who had been ordered to return to the South Valley to support the 93rd by Raglan, who from his position on the Sapoune Heights had seen the danger the Highlanders were in. Riding slowly up the hill towards the enemy, the Heavy moved across their column, dressed their lines and then, from 100 metres, charged right into them, slashing wildly at them with their swords. The advance riders of the British cavalry, the Scots Greys and Inniskillings (6th Dragoons), were completely enveloped by the Russians, who had briefly halted to extend their flanks just before the charge, but the red jackets of the 4th and 5th Dragoons soon piled in to the mêlée, cutting at the Russian flanks and rear. The opposing horsemen were so tightly packed together that there was no room for swordsmanship, they could barely raise their swords or swing their sabres, and all they could do was hit or cut at anything within their reach, as if they were in a brawl. Sergeant Major Henry Franks of the 5th Dragoons saw Private Harry Herbert attacked by three Cossacks at the same time.

Major William Forrest of the 4th Dragoons recalled his frenzied fight with a

There were surprisingly few casualties, no more than a dozen killed on either side, and 300 or so wounded, mostly on the Russian side, though the combat lasted less than ten minutes. The Russians’ heavy greatcoats and thick shakos protected them from most sabre cuts, while their own swords were just as ineffective against the longer reach of the British cavalrymen, who sat on taller and heavier mounts.²⁵

In this sort of fighting one side must eventually give way. It was the Russians who lost their nerve first. Shaken by the fighting, the hussars turned away and galloped back to the North Valley pursued by the British cavalry, until they withdrew under fire from the Russian batteries on the Causeway and Fediukhin Heights.

While the Russian cavalry withdrew, the British infantry descended from the heights of Sevastopol and marched across the South Valley to support the 93rd. The 1st Division arrived first, followed by the 4th, and then French reinforcements too – the 1st Division and two squadrons of Chasseurs d’Afrique. With the arrival of the allied infantry, it was not likely that the Russian cavalry would attack again. Balaklava had been saved.

As the Russians cut their losses and moved back to their base, Raglan and his staff on the Sapoune Heights noticed them removing the British guns from the redoubts. The Duke of Wellington had never lost a gun, or so it was believed by the keepers of his cult in the British military establishment. The prospect of these guns being paraded as trophies in Sevastopol was unbearable for Raglan, who at once sent an order to Lord Lucan, the commander of the Cavalry Division, to recover the Causeway Heights, assuring him of the support of the infantry that had just arrived. Lucan could not see the infantry, and could not believe that he was meant to act alone, with just the cavalry, against infantry and artillery, so for three-quarters of an hour he did nothing, while Raglan on the hill became more alarmed about the fate of the captured British guns. Eventually he dictated a second order to Lucan: ‘Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front – follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left. Immediate.’

The order was not just unclear, it was absurd, and Lucan was completely at a loss as to what to make of it. From where he was standing, at the western end of the Causeway Heights, he could see, to his right, the British guns in the redoubts captured by the Russians from the Turks; to his left, at the end of the North Valley, where he knew the bulk of the Russian forces were located, he could see a second set of guns; and further to the left, on the lower slopes of the Fediukhin Heights, he could see that the Russians also had a battery of artillery. If Raglan’s order had been clearer and specified that it was the British guns on the Causeway Heights that Lucan was to take, the Charge of the Light Brigade would have ended very differently, but as it was, the order left unclear which guns the cavalry was to recover.

The only man who could tell him what it meant was the aide-de-camp who delivered it, Captain Nolan of the King’s Hussars. Like many cavalrymen in the Light Brigade, Nolan had become increasingly frustrated by Lucan’s failure to employ the cavalry in the sort of bold attack for which it had earned its reputation as the greatest in the world. At the Bulganak and the Alma, the cavalry had been stopped from pursuing the Russians in retreat; on the Mackenzie Heights, during the march to Balaklava, Lucan had prevented an attack on the Russian army marching east across their path; and only that morning, when the Heavy Brigade was outnumbered by the Russian cavalry, only a few minutes’ ride away, Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade’s commander, declined to use them for a swift assault upon the routed enemy. The Light Brigade were made to watch while their comrades fought with the same Cossacks who had jeered at them at the Bulganak for refusing to fight. One of their officers had several times demanded of Lord Cardigan to send in the brigade, and, when Cardigan refused, slapped his saluting sword against his leg in a show of disrespect. There were signs of disobedience. Private John Doyle of the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars recalled:

So when Lucan asked Nolan what Raglan’s order meant, there was a threat of insubordination in the air. In the account he later gave in a letter to Raglan, Lucan asked the aide-de-camp where he should attack, and Nolan had replied ‘in a most disrespectful but significant manner’, pointing to the further end of the valley, ‘“There, my lord, is your enemy; there are your guns.”’ According to Lucan, Nolan had not pointed to the British guns on the Causeway Heights, but towards the battery of twelve Russian cannon and the main force of the Cossack cavalry at the far end of the North Valley, on either side of which, on the Causeway and Fediukhin Heights, the Russians had more cannon as well as riflemen. Lucan took the order to Cardigan, who pointed out the lunacy of charging down a valley against artillery and musket fire on three sides, but Lucan insisted that the order be obeyed. Cardigan and Lucan (who were brothers-in law) detested each other. This is usually the explanation given by historians as to why they failed to consult and find a way to circumvent the order they believed they had been given by Raglan (it would not be the first time that Raglan’s orders had been disobeyed). But there is also evidence that Lucan was afraid to disobey an order that was in fact welcomed by the men of the Light Brigade, eager for action against the Russian cavalry and in danger of losing discipline if they were prevented from attacking them. Lucan himself later wrote to Raglan that he had obeyed the order because not to do so would have ‘exposed me and the cavalry to aspersions against which we might have difficulty in defending ourselves’ – by which he surely meant aspersions from his men and the rest of the army.²⁷

The 661 men of the Light Brigade advanced at a walk down the gently sloping North Valley, the 13th Light Dragoons and 17th Lancers in the first line, led by Cardigan, the 11th Hussars immediately behind, followed by the 8th Hussars together with the 4th (Queen’s Own) Regiment of Light Dragoons. It was 2,000 metres to the enemy’s position at the end of the valley, and at regulation speeds it would take the Light Brigade about seven minutes to cover the distance – artillery and musket fire to the right of them, to the left of them and in front of them, along the way. As the first line broke into a trot, Nolan, who was riding with the 17th Lancers, galloped forward, waving his sword and, according to most versions, shouting to the men to hurry them along, although it has also been suggested that he realized the mistake and was attempting to redirect the Light Brigade towards the Causeway Heights and perhaps beyond to the South Valley, where they would be safe from the Russian guns. Either way, the first shell fired by the Russians exploded over Nolan and killed him. Whether it was Nolan’s example, their own eagerness, or because they wanted to get through the flanking fire as fast as possible, remains unclear, but the two regiments at the head of the charge broke into a gallop long before they were ordered to. ‘Come on,’ shouted one man from the 13th Light Dragoons, ‘don’t let those bastards [the 17th Lancers] get ahead of us.’²⁸

As they galloped through the crossfire from the hills, cannonballs tearing the earth up and musket fire raining in like hail, men were shot and horses fell. ‘The reports from the guns and the bursting of shells were deafening,’ recalled Sergeant Bond of the 11th Hussars.

Trooper Wightman of the 17th Lancers saw his sergeant hit: ‘He had his head clean carried off by a round shot, yet for about thirty yards further the headless body kept in the saddle, the lance at the charge, firmly gripped under the right arm.’ So many men and horses from the first line were shot down that the second line, 100 metres behind, had to swerve and slow down to avoid the wounded bodies on the ground and the bewildered, frightened horses that galloped without riders in every direction.²⁹

Within a few minutes, those that remained of the first line were in among the Russian gunners at the end of the valley. Cardigan, whose horse flinched from the guns’ last salvo at close range, was said to be the first man through. ‘The flame, the smoke, the roar were in our faces,’ recalled Corporal Thomas Morley of the 17th Lancers, who compared it to ‘riding into the mouth of a volcano’. Cutting down the gunners with their swords, the Light Brigade charged on with their sabres drawn to attack the Cossacks, who were ordered forward by Ryzhov to protect the guns, which some of the attackers were attempting to wheel away. Without time to form themselves before they were attacked, the Cossacks were ‘thrown into a panic by the disciplined order of the mass of cavalry bearing down on them’, recalled a Russian officer. They turned sharply to escape and, seeing that their way was blocked by the hussar regiments, began to fire their muskets point-blank at their own comrades, who fell back in panic, turned and charged into the other regiments behind. The whole of the Russian cavalry began a stampede towards Chorgun, some dragging the mounted guns behind them, while the advance riders of the Light Brigade, outnumbered five to one, pursued them all the way to the Chernaia river.

The panic flight of the Russian cavalry was watched from the heights above the river by Stepan Kozhukov, a junior artillery officer, who described the cavalry amassing in the area around the bridge, where the Ukrainsky Regiment and Kozhukov’s battery on the hill had been ordered to block off their retreat:

The Cossacks were the first to come to their senses, but they would not return to the battlefield. Instead they ‘set themselves to new tasks in hand – taking prisoners, killing the wounded as they lay on the ground, and rounding up the English horses to offer them for sale’.³⁰

As the Light Brigade rode back through the corridor of fire in the North Valley, Liprandi ordered the Polish Lancers on the Causeway Heights to cut off their retreat. But the Lancers had little stomach for a fight with the courageous Light Brigade, which they had just seen charge through the Russian guns and disperse the Cossacks in a panic flight, and the few attacks they made were against small groups of wounded men. Larger groups they left alone. When the retreating column of the 8th Hussars and 4th Regiment of Light Dragoons neared the Lancers, recalled Lord George Paget, the commander of the Light Dragoons, who had rallied them together before the retreat, ‘down [the Lancers] came upon us at a sort of trot’.

In fact, the English ladies were on the Sapoune Heights with all the other spectators who watched the remnants of the Light Brigade stagger back in ones and twos, many of them wounded, from the charge. Among them was Fanny Duberly, who not only watched the scene in horror but later on that afternoon rode out with her husband to get a closer look at the carnage on the battlefield:

Of the 661 men who set off on the charge, 113 were killed, 134 wounded, and 45 were taken prisoner; 362 horses were lost or killed. The casualties were not much higher than those suffered on the Russian side (180 killed and wounded – nearly all of them in the first two defensive lines) and far lower than the numbers reported in the British press. The Times reported that 800 cavalry had been engaged of whom only 200 had returned; the Illustrated London News that only 163 had returned safely from the charge. From such reports the story quickly spread of a tragic ‘blunder’ redeemed by heroic sacrifice – the myth set in stone by Alfred Tennyson’s famous poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, published only two months after the event.

But contrary to the myth of a ‘glorious disaster’, the charge was in some ways a success, despite the heavy casualties. The objective of a cavalry charge was to scatter the enemy’s lines and frighten him off the battlefield, and in this respect, as the Russians acknowledged, the Light Brigade had achieved its aim. The real blunder of the British at Balaklava was not so much the Charge of the Light Brigade as their failure to pursue the Russian cavalry once the Heavy Brigade had routed them and the Light Brigade had got them on the run and then finish off the rest of Liprandi’s army.³³

The British blamed the Turks for their defeat at Balaklava, accusing them of cowardice for abandoning the redoubts. They also later claimed that they had looted property, not only from the British cavalry, but also from nearby settlements, where they were said to have ‘committed some cold-blooded cruelties upon the unfortunate villagers around Balaklava, cutting the throats of the men and stripping their cabins of everything’. Lucan’s Turkish interpreter, John Blunt, thought the accusations were unfair and that if any looting did take place, it was by the ‘nondescript crowds of camp followers who prowled about… the battlefield’. The Turks were treated appallingly for the rest of the campaign. They were routinely beaten, cursed, spat upon and jeered at by the British troops, who sometimes even used them ‘to carry them with their bundles on their backs across the pools and quagmires on the Balaklava road’, according to Blunt. Seen by the British as little more than slaves, the Turkish troops were used for digging trenches or transporting heavy loads between Balaklava and the Sevastopol heights. Because their religion forbade them from eating most of the available British army rations, they never received enough food; in desperation some of them began to steal, for which they were flogged by their British masters well beyond the maximum of forty-five lashes allowed for the Queen’s own troops. Of the 4,000 Turkish soldiers who fought at Balaklava on 25 October, half would die from malnutrition by the end of 1854, and many of the rest would become too weak for active service. Yet the Turks behaved with dignity, and Blunt, for one, was ‘much struck by the forbearing manner in which they endured their bad treatment and long suffering’. Rustem Pasha, the Egyptian officer in charge of the Turkish troops at Balaklava, urged them to be ‘patient and resigned, and not to forget that the English troops were the guests of their Sultan and were fighting in defence of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire’.³⁴

The Russians celebrated Balaklava as a victory. The capture of the redoubts on the Causeway Heights was certainly a tactical success. The next day in Sevastopol it was marked by an Orthodox service as the British guns were paraded through the town. The Russians now had a commanding position from which to attack the British supply lines between Balaklava and the Sevastopol heights; the British were confined to their inner defence line on the hills around Kadikoi. Russian soldiers paraded through Sevastopol with trophies from the battlefield – British overcoats, swords, tunics, shakos, boots and cavalry horses. The morale of the Sevastopol garrison was immediately lifted by the victory. For the first time since the defeat at the Alma, the Russians sensed they were a match for the allied armies on the open battlefield.

The Tsar learned about the claimed victory in his palace at Gatchina on 31 October, when the morning courier arrived from Sevastopol. Anna Tiutcheva, who was with the Empress in the Arsenal Halls listening to a Beethoven recital, wrote in her diary later on that day:

Encouraged by their success at Balaklava, the next day the Russians launched an attack on the right flank of the British army on Cossack Mountain, a V-shaped ridge of undulating uplands, 2.5 kilometres in length, running north to south between the eastern sector of Sevastopol and the Chernaia estuary, known to the British as Mount Inkerman. On 26 October, 5,000 Russian troops under Colonel Fedorov marched east out of Sevastopol, turned right to climb Cossack Mountain, and descended on the unsuspecting soldiers of de Lacy Evans’s 2nd Division, encamped at the southern end of the high plateau, at a place called Home Ridge, where the heights sloped steeply down onto the Balaklava plain. Evans had only 2,600 troops at his disposal, the rest of his division being elsewhere on trench duty, but the outlying pickets at Shell Hill held off the Russians with their Minié rifles, while Evans brought up more artillery, installing eighteen guns in positions out of sight. Drawing the enemy onto their artillery, the British dispersed them with a devastating fire that left several hundred Russians dead and wounded on the scrubland before Home Ridge.³⁶

More were taken prisoner, many of them giving themselves up or deserting to the British side. They brought dreadful tales of the conditions in Sevastopol, where there was a shortage of water and the hospitals were overrun with victims of the bombing as well as cholera. A German officer who was serving with the Russians told the British ‘that they were obliged to come out of Sevastopol on account of the disgraceful smell that was in the town, and his opinion was that the town would soon fall into the hands of the British as the killed and wounded was laying in the streets’. According to Godfrey Mosley, paymaster of the 20th Regiment,

In truth, the attack by the Russians was really a reconnaissance in force for a major new assault against the British forces on the heights of Inkerman. The initiative for the assault came from the Tsar, who had learned of Napoleon’s intention to send more troops to the Crimea and believed that Menshikov should use his numerical superiority to break the siege as soon as possible, before the French reinforcements arrived, or at least to impose a delay on the allies until winter came to the rescue of the Russians (‘I have two generals who will not fail me: Generals January and February,’ Nicholas said, adopting the old cliché of 1812). By 4 November the Russians had been reinforced by the arrival of two infantry divisions of the 4th Corps from Bessarabia, the 10th Division under Lieutenant General Soimonov and the 11th under Lieutenant General Pavlov, bringing the total force at Menshikov’s disposal to 107,000 men, not including the sailors. At first Menshikov had been opposed to the idea of a new offensive (he was still inclined to abandon Sevastopol to the enemy), but the Tsar was adamant and even sent his sons, the Grand Dukes Mikhail and Nikolai, to encourage the troops and to enforce his will. Under pressure, Menshikov agreed to attack, believing that the British were a less formidable opponent than the French. If the Russians could establish themselves with artillery batteries on Mount Inkerman, the allied siege lines on the right would find themselves under fire from behind, and, unless they recaptured the heights, the allies would be forced to abandon the siege.³⁸

For all the Russians’ losses, their sortie of 26 October had revealed the weakness of the British defences on Mount Inkerman. Raglan had been warned on a number of occasions by de Lacy Evans and Burgoyne that these crucial heights were vulnerable and needed to be occupied in strength and fortified; Bosquet, the commander of an infantry division on the Sapoune Heights to the south of Inkerman, had been adding his own warnings in almost daily letters to the British commander; while Canrobert had even offered immediate help. But Raglan had done nothing to strengthen the defences, even after the sortie by the Russians, when the French commander was amazed to learn that ‘so important and so exposed a position’ had been left ‘totally unprotected by fortifications’.³⁹

It was not just negligence that lay behind Raglan’s failure but a calculated risk: the British were too few in number to protect all their positions, they were seriously overstretched, and would have been incapable of repulsing a general attack if one had been launched at several points along their line. By the first week of November, the British infantry were exhausted. They had scarcely had a rest since their landing in the Crimea, as Private Henry Smith recalled in a letter to his parents in February 1855:

Menshikov’s plan was a more ambitious version of the sortie on 26 October (‘Little Inkerman’ as that dress rehearsal later became known). On the afternoon of 4 November, only a few hours after the arrival of the 4th Corps from Bessarabia, he ordered the offensive to begin at six o’clock the next morning. Soimonov was to lead a force of 19,000 men and 38 guns along the same route taken on 26 October. Capturing Shell Hill, they were to be joined there by Pavlov’s force (16,000 men and 96 guns), which was to cross the Chernaia river and ascend the heights from the Inkerman Bridge. Under General Dannenberg, who was to take over the command at this point, the combined force was to drive the British off Mount Inkerman, while Liprandi’s army distracted Bosquet’s corps on the Sapoune Heights.

The plan called for a high degree of coordination between the attacking units, which was too much to expect from any army in an age before the radio, let alone from the Russians, who lacked detailed maps.[36] It also called for a change of commander in the middle of the battle – a recipe for disaster, especially since Dannenberg, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, had a record of defeat and indecisiveness that was hardly likely to inspire men. But the biggest flaw of all was the whole idea that a force of 35,000 men and 134 guns could even be deployed on the narrow ridge that was Shell Hill, a rocky piece of scrubland barely 300 metres wide. Realizing its impracticality, Dannenberg began to change the battle plan at the last minute. Late at night on 4 November he ordered Soimonov’s men not to climb Mount Inkerman from the northern side, as had been planned, but to march east as far as the Inkerman Bridge to cover Pavlov’s crossing of the river. From the bridge, the attacking forces were to climb the heights in three different directions and round on the British from the flanks. The sudden change was confusing; but even more confusion was to come. At three o’clock in the morning, Soimonov’s column was moving east from Sevastopol towards Mount Inkerman when he received another message from Dannenberg, ordering him to march in the opposite direction and attack from the west. Thinking that another change of plan would endanger the whole operation, Soimonov ignored the order, but instead of meeting Pavlov at the bridge, he now went back to his own preferred plan of attacking from the north. The three commanders thus went into the battle of Inkerman with entirely different plans.⁴¹

By five o’clock in the morning, Soimonov’s advance guard had climbed the heights in silence from the northern side with 22 field guns. There had been heavy rain for the past three days, the steep slopes were slippery with mud; men and horses struggled with the heavy guns. The rain had stopped that night and there was now a heavy fog that shrouded their ascent from the enemy outposts. ‘The fog covered us,’ recalled Captain Andrianov. ‘We could see no further than a few feet ahead of us. The dampness chilled our bones.’⁴²

The dense fog was to play a crucial role in the fighting that lay ahead. Soldiers could not see their senior commanders, whose orders became virtually irrelevant. They relied instead on their own company officers, and when these disappeared they had to take the lead themselves, fighting on their own or alongside those comrades they could see through the fog, in a largely improvised fashion. This was to be a ‘soldiers’ battle’ – the ultimate test of a modern army. Everything depended on the cohesion of the small unit, and every man became his own general.

In the opening hours, the fog played into the hands of the Russians. It covered their approach and brought them to within close range of the British positions, eliminating the disadvantage of their muskets and artillery against the longer range of the Minié rifles. The British pickets on Shell Hill were unaware of the Russians approaching: they had taken shelter from the bad weather by moving to the bottom of the hill, from which they could see nothing. The warning sounds of an army on the march that had been heard earlier in the night failed to trigger the appropriate alarms. Private Bloomfield was on picket duty on Mount Inkerman that night, and could hear the sounds of Sevastopol stirring for something (the bells of the churches had been ringing intermittently throughout the night) but he could not see a thing. ‘There was a great fog, so much that we could not see a man 10 yards away from us, and nearly all the night there was a drizzly rain,’ Bloomfield recalled. ‘All went well until about midnight, when some of our sentries reported wheels and noise like the unloading of shot and shell, but the Field officer on duty took no further notice of it. All the night from about 9 o’clock in the evening the bells were ringing, and the bands were playing and a great noise was all over the town.’

Before they knew it, the pickets at Shell Hill were overrun by Soimonov’s skirmishers, and then fast upon them, emerging from the fog, were the advance columns of his infantry, 6,000 men from the Kolyvansky, Ekaterinburg and Tomsky regiments. The Russians established their guns on Shell Hill and began to push the British back. ‘When we retired the Russians came on with the most fiendish yells you can imagine,’ recalled Captain Hugh Rowlands, in charge of the picket, who withdrew his men to the next high ground and ordered them to open fire, only to discover that their rifles would not work because their charges had been soaked by rain.⁴³

The sound of firing at last sounded the alarm in the camp of the 2nd Division, where soldiers rushed about in their underwear, getting dressed and folding up their tents before grabbing their rifles and falling into line. ‘There was a good deal of hurry and confusion,’ recalled George Carmichael of the Derbyshire Regiment. ‘A number of loose baggage animals frightened by the firing came galloping through the camp, and the men who had been away on different duties came running in to join the ranks.’⁴⁴

The command was taken up by General Pennefather, second-in-command to de Lacy Evans, who had earlier been injured falling from his horse but was present in an advisory capacity. Pennefather chose a different tactic to the one employed by Evans on 26 October. Instead of falling back to draw the enemy onto the guns behind Home Ridge, he continued feeding the picket line with riflemen to keep the Russians as far back as possible, until reinforcements could arrive. Pennefather did not know that the division was outnumbered by the Russians by more than six to one, but his tactic rested on the hope that the thick fog would conceal his lack of numbers from the enemy.

Pennefather’s men bravely held off the Russians. Fighting forward in small groups, separated from each other by fog and smoke, they were too far ahead to be seen by Pennefather, let alone controlled by him, or to be supported with any precision by the two field batteries at Home Ridge, which fired blindly in the vague direction of the enemy. Sheltering with his regiment behind the British guns, Carmichael watched the gunners do their best to keep up with the vastly superior firepower of the Russian batteries:

The main thing at this stage was to keep the noise of the barrage up to make the Russians think that the British had more guns than they actually had, pass the ammunition and wait for reinforcements to arrive.

If Soimonov had known the weakness of the British defences, he would have ordered Home Ridge to be stormed, but he could see nothing in the fog, and the heavy firing of the enemy, whose Minié rifles were deadly accurate at the short range from which the British fired, persuaded him to wait for Pavlov’s men to join him on Shell Hill before launching an assault. Within minutes Soimonov himself was killed by a British rifleman. The command was taken up by Colonel Pristovoitov, who was shot a few minutes later; and then by Colonel Uvazhnov-Aleksandrov, who was also killed. After that, it was not clear who would take up the command, nobody was keen to step up to the mark, and Captain Andrianov was sent off on his horse to consult with various generals on the matter, which wasted valuable time.⁴⁶

Meanwhile, at 5 a.m., Pavlov’s men had arrived at the Inkerman Bridge, only to discover that the naval detachment had not prepared it for their crossing, as they had been ordered to by Dannenberg. They had to wait until seven o’clock before the bridge was ready and they could cross the Chernaia. From there, they fanned out and climbed the heights in three different directions: the Okhotsky, Yakutsky and Selenginsky regiments and most of the artillery branching to the right to reach the top by the Sapper Road and join Soimonov’s men, the Borodinsky ascending by the centre route along the Volovia Ravine, while the Tarutinsky Regiment climbed the steep and rocky slopes of the Quarry Ravine towards the Sandbag Battery under cover of Soimonov’s guns.⁴⁷

There were fierce gun battles across the heights – small groups of fighters dashing everywhere, using the thick bushes to conceal themselves and fire at each other like skirmishers – but the most intense was on the British right flank around the Sandbag Battery. Twenty minutes after they had crossed the bridge, the advance battalions of the Tarutinsky Regiment overpowered the small picket in the battery, but then came under a series of attacks from a combined British force of 700 men under the command of Brigadier Adams. In frenzied hand-to-hand fighting, the Sandbag Battery changed sides several times. By eight o’clock Adams’s men were outnumbered by the Russians ten to one, but because of the narrow ridge on which the fighting for the battery took place, the Russians could not make their numbers tell in one assault. Once the British had regained the battery, the Russians came at them again in a series of attacks. Private Edward Hyde was in the battery with Adams’s men:

Eventually, the Russians could no longer be held back – they swarmed into the battery – and Adams and his men were forced to retreat towards Home Ridge. But reinforcements soon arrived, the Duke of Cambridge with the Grenadiers, and a new assault was launched against the Russians grouped around the Sandbag Battery, which by this stage had assumed a symbolic status far beyond its military significance to either side. The Grenadiers charged the Russians with their bayonets, Cambridge shouting at his men to keep to the high ground and not become dispersed by following the Russians down the hill, but few men could hear the Duke or see him in the fog. Among the Grenadiers was George Higginson, who witnessed the charge ‘down the rugged slope, full upon the advancing host’.

The fighting became increasingly frenzied and chaotic, as one side charged the other down the hill, only to be counter-attacked by another group of men from further up the hill. The soldiers on both sides lost all discipline and became disordered mobs, uncontrolled by any officers and driven on by rage and fear (reinforced by the fact that they could not see each other in the fog). They charged and counter-charged, yelling and screaming, firing their guns, slashing out in all directions with their swords, and when they had no ammunition left they began throwing rocks at one another, striking out with their rifle butts, even kicking and biting.⁴⁹

In this sort of fighting the cohesion of the small combat unit was decisive. Everything came down to whether groups of men and their line commanders could keep their discipline and unity – whether they could organize themselves and stick together through the fight without losing nerve or running away out of fear. The soldiers of the Tarutinsky Regiment failed this crucial test.

Chodasiewicz was one of the company officers in the 4th Battalion of the Tarutinsky Regiment. Their task was to take the eastern side of Mount Inkerman, providing cover for Pavlov’s other troops to bring up gabions and fascines for a trench work against the British positions. The unit lost its way in the thick fog, veered towards the left, and became mixed with disgruntled soldiers from the Ekaterinburg Regiment, among Soimonov’s troops already on the heights, who led them back down into the Quarry. By this stage, Chodasiewicz had lost control of his men, who were totally dispersed among the Ekaterinburg Regiment. Undirected by the officers, some of the Tarutinsky men began to climb the hill again. Ahead of them they could make out some of their comrades ‘standing before a small battery shouting “Hurrah!” and waving their caps for us to come on’, recalled Chodasiewicz; ‘the buglers continually played the advance, and several of my men broke from the ranks at a run!’ At the Sandbag Battery, Chodasiewicz found his men in total disorder. Various regiments were all mixed up so that their command structures entirely broke down. He ordered his men to charge with bayonets, and they overran the British in the battery, but then they failed to push them down the hill, remaining instead inside the battery, where ‘they forgot their duty and wandered about in search of booty’, recalled another officer, who thought ‘all this occurred because of a lack of officers and leadership’.

With all the fog and mixing-up of men, there were many instances of friendly fire on the Russian side. Soimonov’s troops, in particular the Ekaterinburg Regiment, began firing at the men inside the Sandbag Battery, some thinking they were firing on the enemy, others on the orders of an officer who feared the insubordination of his men and tried to discipline them by having others shoot at them. ‘The chaos was something extraordinary,’ recalled Chodasiewicz: ‘some of the men were grumbling at the Ekaterinburg Regiment, others were shouting for artillery to come up, the buglers constantly played the signal to advance, and drummers beat to the attack, but nobody thought of moving; there they stood like a flock of sheep.’ A bugle call to manoeuvre left caused a sudden panic among the Tarutinsky men, who thought that they could hear the distant noise of the French drums. ‘There were shouts on all sides of “Where is the reserve?”,’ recalled an officer. Fearing they had no support, the troops began to stampede down the hill. According to Chodasiewicz, ‘Officers shouted to the men to halt, but to no avail, for none of them thought of stopping, but each followed the direction prompted by his fancy or his fears.’ No officer, however senior, was able to reverse the panic retreat of the men, who ran down to the bottom of the Quarry Ravine and crowded around the Sevastopol aqueduct, which alone stopped their flight. When Lieutenant General Kiriakov, the commander of the 17th Infantry Division who had gone absent at the Alma, appeared at the aqueduct and rode among the men on his white charger, slashing at them with his whip and shouting at them to climb back up the hill, the soldiers paid him little attention, and then shouted back at him, ‘Go up there yourself!’ Chodasiewicz was ordered to collect his company, but he had only 45 men left out of a company of 120.⁵⁰

The Tarutinsky men had not been wrong when they thought they could hear the sound of the French drums. Raglan had sent an urgent call for help to Bosquet on the Sapoune Heights at 7 a.m., after he had arrived to inspect the battle at Home Ridge (he had also sent an order for two heavy 18-pounder cannon to be brought up from the siege batteries to counter the Russian cannonade but the order had gone astray). Bosquet’s men had already sensed that the British were in danger when they heard the early firing. The Zouaves had even heard the Russians on the march the night before – their African experience having taught them how to listen to the ground – and they were ready for the order to attack before it came. Nothing suited their type of fighting better than the foggy conditions and bushy scrubland of the hills: they were used to mountain warfare from Algeria and were at their best when fighting in small groups and ambushing the enemy. The Zouaves and Chasseurs were eager to advance, but Bosquet held them back, fearful of Liprandi’s army, 22,000 soldiers and 88 field guns in the South Valley under the command of Gorchakov, which had begun a distant cannonade against the Sapoune Heights. ‘Forward! Let’s march! It’s time to finish them!’ the Zouaves cried impatiently when Bosquet appeared among their ranks. They were angry when the general walked before them. ‘A revolt was imminent,’ recalled Louis Noir, who was in the first column of Zouaves.

In fact, the size of Liprandi’s army was not as large as Bosquet had feared, since Gorchakov had foolishly decided to position half of them behind the Chernaia river in reserve, and had dispersed the rest between the lower slopes of the Sapoune Heights and the Sandbag Battery. But the Zouaves did not know this; they could not see their enemy in the thick fog, and attacked with fearsome energy to overcome what they believed to be their disadvantage in numbers. Charging forward in small groups, and using the brushwood for cover while they fired at the Russian columns, their tactic was to scare the Russians off by any means they could. They yelled and screamed and fired in the air as they ran forward. Their bugles sounded and their drummers beat as loud as they could. Jean Cler, a colonel of the 2nd Zouave Regiment, even told his men as they prepared to go into the battle: ‘Spread out your pants as wide as they will go, and make as big a show of yourselves as you can.’⁵²

The Russians were overwhelmed by the attacking force of the Zouaves, whose Minié rifles took out hundreds of men within the first few seconds of their charge. Racing up the hill-bend round Home Ridge, the Zouaves drove the Russians from the Sandbag Battery and chased them down to the bottom of St Clement’s Ravine. Their momentum took them around the curving spur into Quarry Ravine, already heaving with the soldiers of the Tarutinsky Regiment, who began to panic in the crush and fired back at the new arrivals, killing mainly their own men, before the Zouaves backed out of the crossfire and climbed towards Home Ridge.

There they found the British in desperate battle with the forces on the right wing of Pavlov’s pincer movement: the Okhotsky, Yakutsky and Selenginsky regiments, who had joined the remnants of Soimonov’s troops and, under the command of Dannenberg, began to attack the Sandbag Battery again. The fighting was brutal, wave after wave of Russians charged with their bayonets only to be shot down by the British or tussle with them ‘hand-to-hand, foot to foot, muzzle to muzzle, butt-end to butt-end’, recalled Captain Wilson of the Coldstream Guards.⁵³ The Guards were vastly outnumbered by the Russians, and in urgent need of reinforcements when they were at last joined by six companies of Cathcart’s 4th Division under the command of General Torrens. The new men were spoiling for a fight (they had missed out on the action at Balaklava and the Alma) and, ordered to attack the Russians on the ridge by the Sandbag Battery, they charged down the valley after them, losing all discipline and coming under heavy close-range fire by the Yakutsky and Selenginsky regiments from the heights above. Among those killed in the hail of bullets was Cathcart, the spot where he was buried becoming known as ‘Cathcart’s Hill’.

By this stage Cambridge and the Guards were down to their last 100 men in the Sandbag Battery. There were 2,000 Russians against them. They had no ammunition left. The Duke proposed to make a stand for the Sandbag Battery – an idiotic sacrifice for this relatively minor landmark on the battlefield – but his staff officers dissuaded him: it would be disastrous for the Queen’s cousin and the colours of her Guards to be brought before the Tsar. Among those officers was Higginson, who led the retreat to Home Ridge. ‘Clustered round the Colours,’ he recalled,

It was at this moment that Bosquet’s men appeared on the ridge. Never had the sight of Frenchmen been so welcome to the English. The Guards cheered them as they arrived and cried, ‘Vivent les Français!’ and the French replied, ‘Vivent les Anglais!’⁵⁴

Stunned by the arrival of the French, the Russians withdrew to Shell Hill and attempted to consolidate. But the morale of their troops had dropped, they did not fancy their chances against the British and the French, and many of them now began to run away, using the cover of the fog to escape the attentions of their officers. For a while Dannenberg believed that he could win with his artillery: he had nearly a hundred guns, including 12-pound field guns and howitzers, more than the British at Home Ridge. But at half past nine the two heavy 18-pounders ordered up by Raglan finally arrived and opened fire on Shell Hill, their monstrous charges blasting through the Russian batteries, and forcing their artillery to withdraw from the field. The Russians were not finished. They had 6,000 men still to be used on the heights, and twice that number in reserve on the other side of the river. Some of them continued to attack, but their advancing columns were ripped apart by the heavy British guns.

Finally, Dannenberg decided to call off the action and retreat. He had to overcome the angry protests of Menshikov and the Grand Dukes, who had watched the slaughter from a safe position 500 metres behind Shell Hill and called on Dannenberg to reverse the withdrawal. Dannenberg told Menshikov, ‘Highness, to stop the troops here would be to let them be destroyed to the last man. If your Highness thinks otherwise, have the goodness to give the orders yourself, and take the command from me.’ The exchange was the beginning of a long and bitter argument between the two men, who could not stand each other, as each man tried to blame the other for the defeat at Inkerman – a battle where the Russians had vastly outnumbered the enemy. Menshikov blamed Dannenberg, and Dannenberg blamed Soimonov, who was dead, and everybody blamed the ordinary soldiers for their indiscipline and cowardice. But ultimately the disorder came from the absence of command, and there the blame must rest with Menshikov, the commander-in-chief, who lost his nerve completely and took no part in the action. The Grand Duke Nikolai, who saw through Menshikov, wrote to his older brother Alexander, soon to become Tsar:

Ordered to withdraw, the Russians fled in panic from the battle-field, their officers powerless to stop the human avalanche, while the British and French artillery fired at their backs. ‘They were petrified,’ recalled a French officer; ‘it was no longer a battle but a massacre.’ The Russians were mowed down in their hundreds, others trampled underfoot, as they ran down the hill towards the bridge and struggled to cross it, or swam across the river to the other side.⁵⁶

Some of the French chased after them, and a dozen men or so from the Lourmel Brigade even entered Sevastopol. They were carried away by the chase and unaware that they were on their own, the rest of the French having turned back long before. The streets of Sevastopol were virtually empty, for the whole population was on the battlefield or standing guard at the bastions. The Frenchmen walked around the town, looting houses, and made their way down to the quay, where their sudden appearance caused civilians to flee in panic, thinking that the enemy had broken through. The French soldiers were equally afraid. Hoping to escape by sea, they rowed off in the first boat they could find, but just as they were rounding Fort Alexander into the open sea, their boat was sunk by a direct hit from the Quarantine Battery. The story of the Lourmel soldiers became an inspiration to the French army during the long siege, giving rise to the belief that Sevastopol could be taken with a single bold attack. Many thought their story showed that the allied armies could and should have used the moment when the Russians were in flight from the heights of Inkerman to pursue them and march into the town as those audacious men had done.⁵⁷

The Russians lost about 12,000 men on the battlefield of Inkerman. The British listed 2,610 casualties, the French 1,726. It was an appalling number killed in just four hours of fighting – a rate of loss almost on a par with the battle of the Somme. The dead and wounded were piled on top of each others bits of bodies, torn apart by shells, lying everywhere. The war correspondent Nicholas Woods observed:

Louis Noir thought the Russian dead, who were mostly killed by bayonets, had a ‘look of furious hatred’ captured at the moment of their death. Jean Cler also walked among the wounded and the dead.

Underneath the dead there were men alive, wounded and then buried under bodies struck down later on. ‘Sometimes, from the bottom of a heap,’ wrote André Damas, a French army chaplain, ‘one could hear men breathing still; but they lacked the strength to lift the weight of flesh and bones that pressed them down; if their faint moans were heard, long hours passed before they could be cleared.’⁵⁸

Major-General Codrington of the Light Division was horrified by the scavengers who robbed the dead. ‘The most disgusting thing to feel is that the horrid plunderers, the prowlers of a battle-field, have been there, pockets turned inside out, things cut to look for money, everything valuable systematically searched for – officers particularly stripped for their better clothes, with just something thrown over them,’ he wrote on 9 November.⁵⁹

It took the allies several days to bury all their dead and evacuate the wounded to field hospitals. The Russians took much longer. Menshikov had refused the allied offer of a truce to clear the battlefield for fear that his troops would become demoralized and might even mutiny at the sight of so many dead and wounded on their side compared to the losses of the enemy. So the Russian dead and wounded lay there for several days and even weeks. Cler found four Russian wounded men alive at the bottom of the Quarry Ravine twelve days after the battle.

Some of the dead were not found until three months later. They were at the bottom of Spring Ravine, where they were frozen stiff, looking much like ‘dried-up mummies’, according to Cler. The Frenchman was struck by the contrast he had noted between the Russian dead at the Alma, who had ‘an appearance of health – their clothing, underclothing, and shoes were clean and in good condition’, and the dead at Inkerman, who ‘wore a look of suffering and fatigue’.⁶⁰

As at the Alma, there were claims that the Russians had engaged in atrocities against the British and the French. It was said that they had robbed and killed the wounded on the ground,[38] sometimes even mutilating their bodies. British and French soldiers put these actions down to the ‘savagery’ of the Russian troops, who they said had been well primed with vodka. ‘They give no quarter,’ wrote Hugh Drummond of the Scots Guards to his father on 8 November, ‘and this should be represented, as it is a scandal to the world that Russia, professing to be a civilized power, should disgrace herself by such acts of barbarity.’ Describing the ‘dastardly conduct’ of the Russian troops in his anonymous memoir, another British soldier wrote:

But in fact these actions had more to do with a sense of religious outrage. When Raglan and Canrobert wrote to Menshikov on 7 November to protest against the atrocities, the Russian commander-in-chief replied that the killings had been caused by the destruction of the Church of St Vladimir at Khersonesos – the church built to consecrate the spot where the Grand Prince Vladimir had been baptized, converting Kievan Rus’ to Christianity – which had been pillaged and then used by the French troops as part of their siege works. The ‘deep religious feeling of our troops’ had been wounded by the desecration of St Vladimir, argued Menshikov in a letter approved by the Tsar, adding for good measure that the Russians had themselves been ‘victims’ of a series of ‘bloody retributions’ by the English troops on the battlefield of Inkerman. Some of these facts were admitted by César de Bazancourt, the official French historian of the expedition to the Crimea, in his account of 1856:

But if the Russians had been driven to atrocities by deep religious feelings, it was certainly the case that they had been encouraged by their priests. The night before the battle, at services in churches in Sevastopol, the Russian troops were told that the British and the French were fighting for the Devil, and priests had called on them to kill them without mercy to avenge the destruction of St Vladimir.⁶²

Inkerman was a pyrrhic victory for the British and the French. They had managed to resist the largest Russian effort yet to dislodge them from the heights around Sevastopol. But the casualties were very high, at a level that the public would find hard to tolerate, especially after they learned about the poor treatment of the dying and the wounded by the medical services. Serious questions would be asked about the wisdom of the whole campaign when the news reached home. With such heavy losses, it was no longer feasible for the allied armies to mount a fresh assault against Sevastopol’s defences until fresh troops arrived.

At a joint planning conference at Raglan’s headquarters on 7 November, the French took over from the British on Mount Inkerman, a tacit recognition that they had become the senior partner in the military alliance, leaving the British, now down to just 16,000 effectives, to occupy no more than a quarter of the trenches around Sevastopol. At the same meeting, Canrobert insisted on shelving any plans for an assault against Sevastopol until the following spring, when the allies would have enough reinforcements to overcome the Russian defences, which had not only withstood the first allied bombardment but had been greatly strengthened since. The French commander argued that the Russians had brought in a large number of fresh troops, increasing their numbers in Sevastopol to 100,000 men (in fact, they had barely half that number after Inkerman). He feared that they would be able to go on reinforcing their defences ‘as long as the attitude of Austria with respect to the Eastern Question allows Russia to send any number of troops she pleases from Bessarabia and Southern Russia to the Crimea’. Until the French and British had a military alliance with the Austrians and had brought in ‘very numerous reinforcements’ to the Crimea, there was no point losing more lives in the siege. Raglan and his staff agreed with Canrobert. The question now was how to make provision for the allied troops to spend the winter on the heights above Sevastopol, for all they had brought with them were lightweight tents suitable only for summer campaigning. Canrobert believed, and the British shared his view, that ‘by means of a simple stone substructure under tents, the troops might pass the winter here’. Rose agreed. ‘The climate is healthy,’ he explained to Clarendon, ‘and with the exception of cold northerly winds, the cold in winter is not vigorous.’⁶³

The prospect of spending the winter in Russia filled many with a sense of dark foreboding: they thought about Napoleon in 1812. De Lacy Evans urged Raglan to abandon the siege of Sevastopol and evacuate the British troops. The Duke of Cambridge proposed withdrawing the troops to Balaklava, where they could be more easily supplied and sheltered from the cold than on the heights above Sevastopol. Raglan rejected their proposals, and resolved to keep the army on the heights throughout the winter months, a criminal decision prompting the resignation of Evans and Cambridge, who returned to England, sick and disillusioned, before winter came. Their departure began a steady homeward trail of British officers. In the two months after Inkerman, 225 of the 1,540 officers in the Crimea departed for warmer climes; only 60 of them would return.⁶⁴

Among the rank and file, the realization that there would be no quick victory was even more demoralizing. ‘Why did we not make a bold attack after being flushed with victory at Alma?’ asked Lieutenant Colonel Mundy of the 33rd Regiment of Foot. He summed up the general mood in a letter to his mother on 7 November:

Rates of desertion from the allied trenches increased sharply as the winter cold arrived in the weeks after Inkerman, with hundreds of British and French soldiers giving themselves up to the Russian side.⁶⁵

For the Russians, the defeat at Inkerman was a devastating blow. Menshikov became convinced that the fall of Sevastopol was unavoidable. In a letter to the Minister of War, Prince Dolgorukov, on 9 November, he recommended its abandonment so that Russian forces could be concentrated on the defence of the rest of the Crimea. The Tsar was enraged by such defeatism from his commander-in-chief. ‘For what was the heroism of our troops, and such heavy losses, if we accept defeat?’ he wrote to Menshikov on 13 November. ‘Surely our enemies have also suffered heavily? I cannot agree with your opinion. Do not submit, I say, and do not enourage others to do so…. We have God on our side.’ Despite such words of defiance, the Tsar was thrown into a deep depression by the news of Inkerman, and his despondent mood was clear for all at court to see. In the past Nicholas had tried to hide his feelings from his courtiers, but after Inkerman there was no more concealing it. ‘The palace at Gatchina is gloomy and silent,’ Tiutcheva noted in her diary: ‘everywhere there is depression, people hardly daring to speak to each other. The sight of the sovereign is enough to break one’s heart. Recently he has become more and more morose; his face is careworn and his look is lifeless.’ Shocked by the defeat, Nicholas lost faith in the commanders who had led him to believe that the war in the Crimea could be won. He began to regret his decision to go to war against the Western powers in the first place, and turned for comfort to those advisers, such as Paskevich, who had always been against the war.⁶⁶

‘It was a treacherous, revolting business,’ Tolstoy wrote of the defeat in his diary on 14 November.

Since the retreat of the Russian army from Silistria, Tolstoy had led a comfortable existence in Kishinev, where Gorchakov had set up his headquarters, but he soon grew bored of attending balls and playing cards, at which he lost heavily, and dreamed of seeing action once again. ‘Now that I have every comfort, good accommodation, a piano, good food, regular occupations and a fine circle of friends, I have begun to yearn for camp life again and envy the men out there,’ Tolstoy wrote to his aunt Toinette on 29 October.⁶⁸

Inspired by the wish to do something for his fellow-men, Tolstoy and a group of fellow-officers thought of setting up a periodical. The ‘Military Gazette’, as they called their journal, was intended to educate the soldiers, bolster their morale, and reveal their patriotism and humanity to the rest of Russian society. ‘This venture of mine pleases me very much,’ Tolstoy wrote to his brother Sergei. ‘The journal will publish descriptions of battles – not such dull and untruthful ones as in other journals – deeds of bravery, biographies and obituaries of worthy people, especially the little known; war stories, soldiers’ songs, popular articles about the skills of the engineers, etc.’ To finance the ‘Gazette’, which was to be cheap enough for the troops themselves to buy, Tolstoy diverted money from the sale of the family house at Yasnaya Polyana, which he had been forced to sell that autumn to cover his losses at cards. Tolstoy wrote some of his first stories for the periodical: ‘How Russian Soldiers Die’ and ‘Uncle Zhdanov and the Horseman Chernov’, in the second of which he exposed the brutality of an army officer beating a soldier, not for something that he has done wrong, but ‘because he was a soldier and soldiers must be beaten’. Realizing that this would not pass the censor, Tolstoy omitted these two stories before submitting the idea for the periodical to Gorchakov, who sent it on to the War Ministry, but even so publication was rejected by the Tsar, who did not want an unofficial soldiers’ paper to challenge Russian Invalid, the government’s own army newspaper. ⁶⁹

The defeat of Inkerman made up Tolstoy’s mind to go to the Crimea. One of his closest comrades, Komstadius, with whom he had been planning to edit the ‘Gazette’, was killed at Inkerman. ‘More than anything, it was his death that drove me to ask for a transfer to Sevastopol,’ he wrote in his diary on 14 November. ‘He made me feel somehow ashamed.’ Tolstoy later explained to his brother that his request had been ‘mostly out of patriotism – a sentiment which, I confess, is gaining an increasingly strong hold on me’.⁷⁰ But perhaps just as important to his decision to go to the Crimea was his sense of destiny as a writer. Tolstoy wanted to see and write about the war: to reveal to the public the whole truth – both the patriotic sacrifice of the ordinary people and the failures of the military leadership – and thereby start the process of political and social reform to which he believed the war must lead.

Tolstoy arrived in Sevastopol on 19 November, almost three weeks after setting out from Kishinev. Promoted to the rank of second lieutenant, he was attached to the 3rd Light Battery of the 14th Artillery Brigade and, to his annoyance, was quartered in the town itself, a long way from the city’s defences. Tolstoy stayed only nine days in Sevastopol that autumn, but he saw enough to inspire much of the patriotic pride and hope in the common Russian people that filled the pages of ‘Sevastopol in December’, the first of his Sevastopol Sketches, which was to make his literary name. ‘The spirit of the army is beyond all description,’ he wrote to Sergei on 20 November: