The Crimean War: A History

9 Generals January and February

Winter came in the second week of November. For three days and nights the freezing wind and rain swept across the heights above Sevastopol, blowing down the tents of the British and French troops, who huddled in the mud, soaked and shivering, with nothing but their blankets and coats to cover them. And then, in the early hours of 14 November, the shores of the Crimea were hit by a hurricane. Tents went flying like sheets of paper in the wind; boxes, barrels, trunks and wagons were thrown headlong; tent-poles, blankets, hats and coats, chairs and tables whirled around; frightened horses broke loose from their pickets and stampeded through the camps; trees were uprooted; windows smashed; and soldiers rushed around in all directions, chasing after their effects and clothes, or desperately looking for any sort of shelter in roofless barns and stables, behind the redoubts or in holes in the ground. ‘The scene was most ridiculous, the tents being all down and discovering everyone, some in bed, some like myself in… shirts… all being soaked through and bellowing loudly for their servants,’ Charles Cocks of the Coldstream Guards wrote to his brother on 17 November. ‘The wind was most awful and we could only keep our tents from going to Sevastopol by lying like spread eagles on top of them.’¹

All morning the storm raged, and then at two o’clock the wind died down, allowing the men to come out from their hiding places and retrieve their scattered possessions: soaked and dirty clothes and blankets, bits of broken furniture, pots and pans and other debris from the muddy ground. Towards evening the temperature dropped, and the rain changed to a heavy snow. The men tried to pitch their tents again, their fingers numb with the freezing cold, or spent the night in barns and sheds, huddled altogether against the walls in a hopeless search for warmth.

The devastation on the heights was nothing compared to that down in the harbour and on the open sea. Fanny Duberly, on board the Star of the South, looked out at a harbour seething with foam, the ships swinging terribly. ‘The spray, dashing over the cliffs many hundred feet, fell like heavy rain into the harbour. Ships were crushing and crowding together, all adrift, all breaking and grinding each other to pieces.’ Among those ships was the Retribution, on which the Duke of Cambridge was recuperating from the battle of Inkerman, which had terrified him. ‘It was a fearful gale,’ he wrote to Raglan the next day, ‘and we had a more dreadful 24 hours of it than we ever spent.’

It was worse outside the harbour, where the bulk of the supply ships were moored in case of a new attack on Balaklava by the Russians. Smashed against the rocks, more than twenty British ships were destroyed, with the loss of several hundred lives and precious winter stores. The biggest setback was the sinking of the steamship Prince, which went down with all but six of its 150 crew and 40,000 winter uniforms, closely followed by the destruction of the Resolute and its cargo of 10 million Minié rounds. At Kamiesh, the French war fleet lost the Henri Quatre line-of-battle ship and the steamer Pluton, and the merchant navy lost two ships with all their crews and supplies. Boxes of French food were washed ashore behind the Russian lines at Quarantine Bay and as far north as Evpatoria. Ivan Kondratov, an infantryman from the Kuban, wrote to his family from a bivouac on the River Belbek on 23 November:

The French recovered from the storm in a few days, but the British took much longer, and many of the problems they encountered in the winter months – the shortages of food and shelter and medical supplies – were a direct outcome of the hurricane as well as the failures of the supply system. The arrival of the winter had turned the war into a test of administrative efficiency – a test barely passed by the French and miserably failed by the British.

Confident of a quick victory, the allied commanders had made no plans for the troops to spend a winter on the heights above Sevastopol. They did not fully realize how cold it would become. The British were particularly negligent. They failed to provide proper winter clothing for the troops, who were sent to the Crimea in their parade uniforms, without even greatcoats, which arrived later on, after the first cargo of winter uniforms had gone with the steamship Prince. The French were better prepared. They issued their troops with sheepskins and eventually with fur-lined hooded cloaks, which became known as the criméennes, originally worn by officers alone. They also let the soldiers wear as many layers as they preferred, without anything remotely like that peculiar British military fetish for ‘gentlemanly’ dress and appearance. By the depths of winter the French troops had become so motley in their uniforms that they hardly looked like a regular army any more. But they were considerably warmer than their British counterparts. ‘Rest assured,’ wrote Frédéric Japy of the 3rd Zouave Regiment to his anxious mother in Beaucourt:

Louis Noir described how the Zouaves dressed to survive the cold:

Dressed in summer uniforms, the British envied the warm sheepskins and criméennes of the French. ‘They certainly are the proper clothing for out here,’ George Lawson, the army surgeon, wrote in a letter to his family:

The allied commanders had also given little thought to the shelter the men would need. The tents which they had brought with them were not insulated on the ground, and provided little real protection from the elements. Many were irreparably damaged by the storm – at least half those used by the regiment of Captain Tomkinson of the Light Brigade, who complained that the tents were unfit to live in: ‘They let in water to such an extent that in heavy rains the ground beneath them is flooded and the men are obliged to stand up round the pole during a whole night.’ Inspecting the camp at Kadikoi, Lord Lucan found a large number of tents unfit for habitation. They were ‘rotten, torn and not capable of sheltering the men’, who were ‘nearly all frozen to death’ and suffering terribly from diarrhoea.⁵

British officers were much better sheltered than their men. Most of them employed their servants to install a wooden floor or dig and line with stones a hole inside their tents to insulate them from the ground. Some had them build a dugout in the ground which they walled with stones and covered with a brushwood roof. On 22 November Captain William Radcliffe of the 20th Regiment wrote to his parents:

At the top end of the social scale, British officers availed themselves of privileges which, in view of the suffering of the ordinary troops, were outrageous. Lord Cardigan (who had medical problems) slept on board his private yacht, enjoyed French cuisine, and entertained a stream of visitors from Britain. Some officers were allowed to spend the winter in Constantinople or to find accommodation at their own expense in settlements. ‘As far as comfort is concerned,’ Lieutenant Charles Gordon (the future ‘Chinese Gordon’) wrote, ‘I assure you my dear – I could not be more comfortable in England.’ Count Vitzthum von Eckstadt, Saxon Minister to London, later recorded that ‘Several English officers, who went through that rigorous winter, have since told me with a smile that they first learned of the [army’s] suffering from the newspapers’.⁶

The comfortable conditions which senior British officers were allowed to enjoy contrasted starkly with the circumstances of French officers, who lived much more closely to their men. In a letter to his family on 20 November, Captain Herbé explained the consequences of the hurricane for his living conditions:

Generally, the French were better housed. Their tents were not only more spacious but most of them were protected from the wind by wooden palisades or walls of snow erected by the men. The French constructed various types of improvised accommodation: large huts which the soldiers called ‘molehills’ (taupinères) dug out from the ground about a metre deep, the floor lined with stone, with plaited branches for the walls and roof; ‘tent-shelters’ (tentes-abris) made up from the cloth of the soldiers’ knapsacks sewn together and fastened to sticks in the ground; and cone-shaped tents (tentes-coniques), large enough to accommodate sixteen men, made from canvas sewn together and attached to a central pole. In all these structures there were ovens for cooking and keeping the men warm. ‘Our soldiers knew how to make ovens that won the admiration and the envy of our English allies,’ recalled Noir.

Noir’s disdain for the English was commonplace among the French, who thought their allies lacked the ability to adapt to field conditions. ‘Ah! These English, they are men of undoubted courage but they know only how to get themselves killed,’ Herbé wrote to his family on 24 November.

Even the English were forced to recognize that the French were better organized than themselves. ‘Oh how far superior are the French to us in every way!’ noted Fanny Duberly on 27 November. ‘Where are our huts? Where are our stables? All lying at Constantinople. The French are hutting themselves in all directions while we lie in mud and horses and men alike die of an exposure which might oh so easily be prevented. It is all alike – the same utter neglect and mismanagement runs throughout.’⁹

Unlike the French, the British could not seem to work out a system for collecting firewood. They allowed the men a ration of charcoal for burning in their fires but, because of the shortage of forage for the draught animals, it proved too difficult to haul the charcoal up from Balaklava to the heights, so the soldiers went without, though officers of course could send their servants down on their own horses to collect the fuel for them. The men suffered terribly from the freezing temperatures of December and January, with thousands of reported cases of frostbite, especially among the new recruits, who were not acclimatized to the Crimean winter. Cholera and other diseases also took their toll among the weakened men. ‘I found sad misery among the men; they have next to no fuel, almost all the roots even of the brushwood being exhausted,’ noted Lieutenant Colonel Sterling of the Highland Brigade:

It was the food supply where the British really fell down compared to the French. ‘It is painful for me to compare the French and English alongside of each other in this camp,’ wrote General Simpson to Lord Panmure. ‘The equipage of our Allies is marvellous. I see continual strings of well-appointed carts and wagons… conveying stores, provisions, etc…. Everything an army ought to possess is in full working order with the French – even the daily baking of their bread – all under military control and discipline.’ Every French regiment had a corps of people responsible for the basic needs of the troops – food supply and preparation, the treatment of the wounded and so on. There was a baker and a team of cooks in every regiment, which also had its own vivandières and cantinières, female sutlers, dressed in a modified version of the regimental uniform, who sold respectively food and drink from their mobile field canteens. Food was prepared collectively – every regiment having its own kitchen and appointed chefs – whereas in the British camp each man received his individual ration and was left to cook it on his own. This difference helps to explain how the French were able to maintain their health surprisingly well, compared to the British, even though they received half the rations and one-third as much meat as their allies. It was only in December that the British army moved towards the French system of mass food preparation in canteens, and as soon as they did so their circumstances began to improve.¹¹

‘C’est la soupe qui fait le soldat,’ Napoleon once said. Soup was the mainstay of the French canteen in the Crimea. Even in the depths of winter, when fresh food supplies were at their lowest, the French could rely on an almost continuous supply of dried foodstuffs: preserved vegetables, which came in small hard cakes and needed only the adding of hot water, along with fresh or conserved meat, to make a wholesome soup; wheat biscuits, which kept for months and were more nutritious than ordinary bread because they contained less water and more fat; and plentiful supplies of coffee beans, without which the French soldier could not live. ‘Coffee, hot or cold, was all I drank,’ recalled Charles Mismer, a young dragoon. ‘Apart from its other virtues, coffee stimulates the nerves and sustains moral courage, it is the best defence against illness.’ There were many days when the French troops ‘lived on a kind of soup made from coffee and crushed biscuit’, Mismer wrote, though normally the rations ‘were composed of salted meat, lard and rice, and fresh meat from time to time, along with a supplement of wine, sugar and coffee; only bread was sometimes lacking, but instead we had biscuit, as hard as stone, which one had to crush or slice with an axe’.¹²

All these goods were readily available because the French had set up an efficient system of supply with well-organized wagon trains and paved roads between Kamiesh and the siege lines. The harbour at Kamiesh was far more suitable for landing supplies than Balaklava. Large warehouses, slaughterhouses, private shops and trading stalls soon sprang up around the broad horseshoe bay, where three hundred ships could unload their wares from around the world. There were bars and brothels, hotels and restaurants, including one where soldiers paid a fixed price for a three-day orgy of food, wine and women, all brought in from France. ‘I went to Kamiesh,’ Herbé wrote to his family; ‘it has become a proper town.’

Balaklava was a crowded and chaotic harbour in which the off-loading of government supplies had to compete with private traders from virtually every nationality in the Black Sea area – Greeks, Turks, Jews, Crimean Tatars, Romanians, Armenians, Bulgarians, even a handful of Russians, who were allowed to remain in the town. ‘If anybody should ever wish to erect a “Model Balaklava” in England,’ wrote Fanny Duberly in December, ‘I will tell him the ingredients necessary.’

Balaklava was only the beginning of the British problem. Supplies could not be taken from the port until they were released by the clerks of the commissariat through a complicated system of forms and authorizations, all filled out in triplicate. Boxes of food and bales of hay would lie around for weeks and eventully rot on the quayside before they were identified and cleared for dispatch by inefficient bureaucrats.[40] From Balaklava to their camps on the heights above Sevastopol the British had failed to build a proper road, so every box of bullets, every blanket and biscuit, had to be carted 10 or 11 kilometres up a steep and muddy track by horse or mule. In December and January most of these supplies had to be carried up by hand, in loads of 40 pounds a time, because there was no forage for the animals, which were rapidly dying off.

It was not just a question of poor organization. The British troops were not accustomed to foraging for food or fending for themselves. Recruited mainly from the landless and the urban poor, they had none of the peasant know-how or resourcefulness of the French soldiers, who could hunt for animals, fish in the rivers and the sea, and turn almost anything into food. ‘It has become the habit of the British soldier’, concluded Louis Noir, ‘that every meal should be served up to him, wherever he may find himself at war. With the stubbornness which is the foundation of their character, the English would prefer to die of hunger than change any of their ways.’ Unable to look after themselves, the British troops depended heavily on their regimental wives to procure and cook their food and do their laundry and any number of other menial chores that the French did for themselves – a factor that accounts for the relatively large number of women in the British army compared to the French (where there were no army wives but only cantinières). Marianne Young of the 28th Infantry Regiment complained that the English soldier was ‘half starved upon his rations, because he could not, with three stones and a tin pot, convert them into palatable food’, whereas there was ‘virtually nothing the French would turn their noses up at if it could be converted into food’. They caught frogs and tortoises, which ‘they cooked up to their own tastes’, dug up tortoise eggs, and made a delicacy out of eating rats. The surgeon George Lawson saw a soldier cutting off the legs of a frog alive and remonstrated with him for his cruelty, but the Frenchman ‘quietly smiled – I suppose at my ignorance – and patting his stomach said they were for the cuisine’.¹⁵

Compared to the French, the British ate badly, although – to begin with – there were plentiful supplies of meat and rum. ‘Dear wife,’ wrote Charles Branton, a semi-literate gunner in the 12th Battalion Royal Artillery on 21 October, ‘we have lost many lives through the Corora they are dying like rotten sheep but we have plenty to eat and drink. We have two Gills of rum a day plenty of salt por and a pound and a ½ of biskit and I can ashore you that if we had 4 Gills of rum it would be a godsend.’ As autumn gave way to winter, the supply system struggled to keep going on the muddy track from Balaklava to the British camp, and the rations steadily declined. By mid-December there was no fruit or vegetable in any form – only sometimes lemon or lime juice, which the men added to their tea and rum to prevent scurvy – although officers with private means could purchase cheese and hams, chocolates and cigars, wines, champagnes, in fact almost anything, including hampers by Fortnum & Mason, from the shops of Balaklava and Kadikoi. Thousands of soldiers became sick and died from illnesses, including cholera, which resurfaced with a vengeance. By January the British army could muster only 11,000 able-bodied men, less than half the number it had under arms two months before. Private John Pine of the Rifle Brigade had been suffering for several weeks from scurvy, dysentery and diarrhoea when he wrote to his father on 8 January:

Pine’s condition worsened and he was shipped to the military hospital at Kulali near Constantinople, where he died within a month. Such was the chaos of the administration that there was no record of his death, and it was a year before his family found out what had happened from one his comrades.¹⁶

It was not long before the British troops became thoroughly demoralized and began to criticize the military authorities. ‘Those out here are much in hope that peace will soon be proclaimed,’ Lieutenant Colonel Mundy of the 33rd Regiment wrote to his mother on 4 February. ‘It is all very fine for people at home talking of martial order and the like but everyone of us out here has had quite enough of hardship, of seeing our men dying by thousand from sheer neglect.’ Private Thomas Hagger, who arrived in late November with the reinforcements of the 23rd, wrote to his family:

Others wrote to the newspapers to expose the army’s poor treatment. Colonel George Bell of the 1st (Royal) Regiment drafted a letter to The Times on 28 November:

At the end of his letter, which he finished the next day, Bell added a private note to the paper’s editor, inviting him to publish it and ending with the words: ‘I fear to state the real state of things here.’ A watered-down version of the letter (dated 12 December) was published in The Times on the 29th, but even that, Bell later thought, had been enough to ruin his career.¹⁷

It was through a report in The Times that the British public first became aware of the terrible conditions suffered by the wounded and the sick. On 12 October readers were startled by the news they took in over breakfast from The Times correspondent in Constantinople, Thomas Chenery, ‘that no sufficient medical preparations have been made for the proper care of the wounded’ who had been evacuated from the Crimea to the military hospital at Scutari, 500 kilometres away. ‘Not only are there not sufficient surgeons – that, it might be urged, was unavoidable – not only are there no dressers and nurses – that might be a defect of system for which no one is to blame – but what will be said when it is known that there is not even linen to make bandages for the wounded?’ An angry leader in The Times by John Delane, the paper’s editor, the next day sparked a rush of letters and donations, leading to the establishment of a Times Crimean Fund for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded by Sir Robert Peel, the son of the former Prime Minister. Many letters focused on the scandal that the army had no nurses in the Crimea – a shortcoming which various well-meaning women now proposed to remedy. Among them was Florence Nightingale, the unsalaried superintendent of the Hospital for Invalid Gentlewomen in Harley Street, a family friend of Sidney Herbert, Secretary at War. She wrote to Mrs Herbert offering to recruit a team of nurses for the East on the same day as her husband wrote to Nightingale asking her to do precisely that: the letters crossed each other in the post.

The British were far behind the French in their medical arrangements for the sick and wounded. Visitors to the French military hospitals in the Crimea and Constantinople were impressed by their cleanliness and good order. There were teams of nurses, mostly nuns recruited from the Order of St Vincent de Paul, operating under instructions from the doctors. ‘We found things here in far better condition than at Scutari,’ wrote one English visitor of the hospital in Constantinople:

Captain Herbé was evacuated to the hospital later in the year. He described its regime in a letter to his family:

French death rates from wounds and diseases were considerably lower than British rates during the first winter of the war (but not the second, when French losses from disease were horrendous). Apart from the cleanliness of the French hospitals, the key factor was having treatment centres near the front and medical auxiliaries in every regiment, soldiers with first-aid training (soldats panseurs) who could help their wounded comrades in the field. The great mistake of the British was to transport most of their sick and wounded from the Crimea to Scutari – a long and uncomfortable journey on overcrowded transport ships that seldom had more than a couple of medical officers on board. Raglan had decided on this policy on purely military grounds (‘not to have the wounded in the way’) and would not listen to protests that the wounded and the sick were in no state to make such a long journey and needed treatment as soon as possible. On one ship, Arthur the Great, 384 wounded were laid out on the decks, packed as close as possible, much as it was on the slave ships, the dead and dying lying side by side with the wounded and the sick, without bedding, pillows or blankets, water bowls or bedpans, food or medicines, except those in the ship’s chest, which the captain would not allow to be used. Fearing the spread of cholera, the navy’s principal agent of transports, Captain Peter Christie, ordered all the stricken men to be put on board a single ship, the Kangaroo, which was able to accommodate, at best, 250 men, but by the time it was ready to sail for Scutari, perhaps 500 were packed on board. ‘A frightful scene presented itself, with the dead and dying, the sick and convalescent lying all together on the deck piled higgledy-piggledy,’ in the words of Henry Sylvester, a 23-year-old assistant surgeon and one of just two medical officers on the ship. The captain refused to put to sea with such an overcrowded ship, but eventually the Kangaroo sailed with almost 800 patients on board, though without Sylvester, who sailed for Scutari aboard the Dunbar. The death toll on these ships was appalling: on the Kangaroo and Arthur the Great, there were forty-five deaths on board on each ship; on the Caduceus, one-third of the passengers died before they reached the hospitals of Scutari.¹⁹

The Russians, too, understood the need to treat the wounded as soon as possible, although conditions in their hospitals were far worse than anything that Florence Nightingale would find in Scutari. Indeed, it was a Russian, Nikolai Pirogov, who pioneered the system of field surgery that other nations came to only in the First World War. Although little known outside Russia, where he is considered a national hero, Pirogov’s contribution to battlefield medicine is as significant as anything achieved by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, if not more so.

Born in Moscow in 1810, Pirogov began his medical studies at Moscow University at the age of just 14, and became a professor at the German University of Dorpat at the age of 25, before taking up the appointment of Professor of Surgery at the Academy of Military Medicine in St Petersburg. In 1847 he was with the Russian army in the Caucasus, where he pioneered the use of ether, becoming the first surgeon to employ anaesthesia in a field operation. Pirogov reported on the benefits of ether in several Russian-language publications between 1847 and 1852, though few doctors outside Russia were aware of his articles. Apart from the relief of pain and shock through anaesthesia, Pirogov emphasized that giving ether to the wounded on arrival at the hospital kept them calm and stopped them from collapsing so that the surgeon could make a better choice in selecting between those cases requiring urgent operation and those that could wait. It was this system of triage pioneered by Pirogov during the Crimean War that marked his greatest achievement.

Pirogov arrived in the Crimea in December 1854. He was outraged by the chaos and inhuman treatment of the sick and wounded. Thousands of injured soldiers had been evacuated to Perekop on open carts in freezing temperatures, many of them arriving frozen to death or with limbs so frostbitten that they had to be cut off. Others were abandoned in dirty barns or left by the roadside for lack of transport. There were chronic shortages of medical supplies, not least because of corruption. Doctors sold off medicines and gave their patients cheaper surrogates, exacting bribes for proper treatment. The hospitals struggled to cope with the enormous numbers of wounded. At the time of the allied landings, the Russians had hospital places for 2,000 soldiers in the Crimea, but after Alma they were overwhelmed by 6,000 wounded men, and twice that number after Inkerman.²⁰

Conditions in the Sevastopol hospitals were truly appalling. Two weeks after the battle of the Alma, the surgeon from Chodasiewicz’s regiment visited the naval hospital:

Most of the surgeons in these hospitals were poorly trained, more like ‘village craftsmen’ than doctors, in the estimation of one Russian officer. Practising a rough-and-ready surgery with dirty butcher’s knives, they had little understanding of the need for hygiene or the perils of infection. Pirogov discovered amputees who had been lying in their blood for weeks.²¹

As soon as he arrived in Sevastopol, Pirogov began to impose order on the hospitals, gradually implementing his system of triage. In his memoirs he recounts how he came to it. When he took charge of the main hospital in the Assembly of Nobles, the situation was chaotic. After a heavy bombardment, the wounded were brought in without any order, those who were dying mixed with those who needed urgent treatment and those with light wounds. At first, Pirogov dealt with the most seriously wounded as they came in, telling the nurses to transport them to the operating table directly; but even as he concentrated on one case, more and more seriously wounded men would arrive; he could not keep up. Too many people were dying needlessly before they could be treated, while he was operating on those patients too seriously wounded to be saved. ‘I came to see that this was senseless and decided to be more decisive and rational,’ he recalled. ‘Simple organization at the dressing station was far more important than medical activity in saving lives.’ His solution was a simple form of triage which he first put into practice during the bombardment of Sevastopol on 20 January. Brought into the Great Hall of the Assembly, the wounded were first sorted into groups to determine the order and priority of emergency treatment. There were three main groups: the seriously wounded who needed help and could be saved were operated on in a separate room as soon as possible; the lightly wounded were given a number and told to wait in the nearby barracks until the surgeons could treat them; and those who could not be saved were taken to a resting home, where they were cared for by medical attendants, nurses and priests until they died.²²

In his sketch ‘Sevastopol in December’, Tolstoy takes his readers into the Great Hall:

The use of anaesthetics enabled Pirogov and his team of surgeons to work extremely quickly, completing over a hundred amputations in a seven-hour day by operating simultaneously on three tables (critics said he ran a ‘factory system’). He developed a new type of foot amputation at the ankle, leaving part of the heel bone to give added support to the leg bone, and generally, in his amputations, cut much lower than most other doctors to minimize the trauma and loss of blood, which he understood posed the greatest threat. Above all, Pirogov was aware of the dangers of infection (which he thought came from contaminated vapours) and made a point of separating post-operative patients with clean wounds from those whose wounds were discharging pus and showing signs of developing gangrene. Through all these pioneering measures, Pirogov achieved much higher rates of survival than the British or the French – up to 65 per cent for amputations of the arm. For thigh amputations, the most dangerous and common in the armies of the Crimean War, Pirogov had survival rates of around 25 per cent, whereas only one in ten survived the operation in British and French hospitals.²⁴

The British were much less enthusiastic about the use of anaesthetic than the Russians or the French. Shortly before the British army left Varna for the Crimea, the principal medical officer, Dr John Hall, issued a memorandum in which he cautioned the army’s surgeons ‘against the use of chloroform in the severe shock of serious gunshot wounds… for however barbarous it may appear, the smart of the knife is a powerful stimulant; and it is much better to hear a man bawl lustily than to see him sink silently into the grave’. British medical opinion was divided on the new science of anaesthesia. Some feared the use of chloroform would weaken the patient’s ability to rally, and others thought it was impractical to use it in battefield surgery because of the shortage of qualified doctors to administer it. Such attitudes were closely linked to ideas about withstanding pain that were perhaps peculiar to the British sense of manliness (keeping ‘a stiff upper lip’). The notion that the British soldier was immune to pain was commonplace. As one doctor wrote from the Crimea:

Like the French, Pirogov attached great importance to the role of nurses in his hospitals. Nurses helped to sort the wounded and brought comfort to the men. They dispensed medicines, brought them tea or wine, wrote letters to their families, and gave spiritual support to the dying. The affection of the nurses won the hearts of many men, who often likened them to their mothers. ‘It is astonishing’, wrote Pirogov to his wife, ‘how the presence of a woman, nicely dressed, among the helpers in a hospital alleviates the distress of the men and relieves their suffering.’ Pirogov encouraged the initiatives of Russian noblewomen to recruit teams of nurses for the Crimea. The Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, the Tsar’s German-born sister-in-law,[41] founded the Community of the Holy Cross shortly after news of the defeat at Inkerman. Its first group of thirty-four nurses followed Pirogov to the Crimea, arriving in Simferopol on 1 December after a long and difficult journey over a thousand kilometres of dirt roads from St Petersburg. Most of them were the daughters, wives or widows of military men, with some from families of merchants, priests and state officials of the minor nobility, though they themselves of course had no experience of the harsh conditions of a battle zone and many of them soon fell ill with typhus and the other epidemics that raged among the men. Pirogov divided the nurses into three groups: those who were to attend to the wounded and help in operations; those who dispensed medicines; and those in charge of the general housekeeping in the hospital. For Alexandra Stakhovich, who was assigned to the operating room, the first amputation was a personal trial, but she got through it, as she wrote to tell her family:

In the Crimea itself, women from various communities had organized themselves into teams of nurses and made their way to the dressing stations and field hospitals of the battlefields around Sevastopol. Among them was Dasha Sevastopolskaia, the girl who had cared for the wounded at the Alma, who worked with Pirogov in the operating theatre at the Assembly of Nobles. Another was Elizaveta Khlopotina, the wife of a battery commander wounded in the head at the Alma, who had followed her husband into battle and worked as a nurse in the dressing station at Kacha. Pirogov was full of admiration for the courage of these women, and battled hard against the objections of the military establishment, which was opposed to a female presence among the troops, for more teams of nurses to be organized. The influence of the Grand Duchess eventually told, and the Tsar agreed to recognize the work of the Community of the Holy Cross. Much of its early medical work in the Crimea was financed by the Grand Duchess, who had purchased medical supplies, including precious quinine, through family contacts in England and stored them in the basement of her home in the Mikhailovsky Palace in St Petersburg. But once it had the blessing of the Tsar, donations poured in from the Russian aristocracy, merchants, state officials and the Church. In January two more contingents of nurses organized by the Community arrived in Sevastopol, the second of them led by Ekaterina Bakunina, the daughter of the governor of St Petersburg and a cousin of the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (at that time imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in the Russian capital). Like many of the Russian upper class, she had spent her childhood summers in the Crimea, and was horrified by the invasion of her favourite holiday resort. ‘I could not imagine that this beautiful little corner of our great empire could be turned into a brutal theatre of war.’²⁷

Florence Nightingale had a similar administrative drive to the Grand Duchess. Born into a family of successful industrialists in Derbyshire, she was better educated than most of the men in the British government, among whom her family had a number of connections, though because of her sex she was forced to limit her activities to the field of philanthropy. Inspired by her Christian faith, she entered nursing at the age of 25, much against the will of her family, working first as a social reformer among the poor and then in a Lutheran religious community at Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein near Düsseldorf in Germany, where she observed Pastor Theodor Fliedner and his deaconnesses care for the sick. Graduating from Kaiserswerth in 1851, Nightingale brought back its principles of nursing to the hospital in Harley Street, where she took over as superintendent in August 1853. It was these principles – basic cleanliness and good housekeeping on the wards – that Nightingale would take to the Crimea. There was nothing new in her ideas. The British medical officers in the Crimea were well aware of the benefits of hygiene and good order in the hospital. Their main problem in turning these commonsense ideals into active policies was a lack of manpower and resources – a problem Nightingale would only partly overcome.

In his capacity of Secretary at War, Herbert appointed Nightingale as superintendent of the Female Nursing Establishment of the English General Hospitals in Turkey, though not in the Crimea, where she had no authority until the spring of 1856, when the war was almost at an end. Nightingale’s position was precarious: officially she was subordinated to the military hierarchy, but Herbert gave her instructions to report to him on the failures of the Army Medical Department, and her whole career would depend on fighting tooth and nail against its bureaucracy, which was basically opposed to female nurses at or near the front. Nightingale was domineering by nature but she needed to assume a dictatorial control over her nurses if she was to implement her organizational changes and gain the respect of the military establishment. There was no recognized body of professional nurses from which she could draw her team in Turkey, so with the help of Mrs Herbert she had to establish one herself. Her selection criteria were ruthlessly functional: she favoured younger women from the lower classes, who she thought would buckle down to the hard work and conditions that lay ahead; and she took a group of nuns with experience of nursing to supervise their work, regarding them as a practical concession to the Irish Catholics who made up one-third of the army’s rank and file; but she rejected hundreds of applications from well-meaning middle-class women, whose sensitivities she feared would make them ‘less manageable’.

Nightingale and her team of thirty-eight nurses arrived in Scutari on 4 November 1854, just in time for the mass transport of the wounded from the battle of Balaklava. The French had already taken over the best buildings for their hospitals, and those left for the British were badly overcrowded and in a dreadful state. The wounded and the dying were lying all together with the sick and the diseased on beds and mattresses crammed together on the filthy floor. With so many men suffering from diarrhoea, the only toilet facilities were large wooden tubs standing in the wards and corridors. There was almost no water, the old pipes having broken down, and the heating system did not work. Within days of Nightingale’s arrival, the situation became much worse, as hundreds more wounded men from the battle of Inkerman flooded the hospital. The condition of these men was ‘truly deplorable’, as Walter Bellew, an assistant surgeon at the Hyder Pasha Hospital near Scutari, noted in his diary: ‘Many were landed dead, several died on the way to the hospitals, and the rest were all in a most pitiable condition; their clothes were begrimed with filth and alvine evacuations [from the abdomen], their hands and faces blackened with gunpowder & mud &c and their bodies literally alive with vermin.’ The men were dying at a rate of fifty to sixty every day: as soon as one man breathed his last he was sewn into his blanket and buried in a mass grave by the hospital while another patient took his bed. The nurses worked around the clock to feed and wash the men, give them medicines, and bring them comfort as they died. Many of the nurses were unable to cope with the strain and began drinking heavily, some of them complaining about the bossy manner of Miss Nightingale and about their menial work. They were sent home by Nightingale.²⁸

By the end of December Nightingale had a second team of nurses at her disposal, and control of the Times Crimean Fund, enabling her to purchase stores and medicines for all the British hospitals in Scutari. She was able to act on her own initiative, without obstruction from the military authorities, who relied on her financial and administrative power to rescue them from the medical disaster they were in. Nightingale was an able administrator. Although her impact has been overestimated (and the contribution of the British medical officers, dressers and dispensers almost totally ignored) by those who later made her cult, there is no doubt that she got things moving in the main hospital at Scutari. She reorganized the kitchens, purchased new boilers, hired Turkish laundresses and supervised their work, oversaw the cleaning of the wards, and after working twenty hours every day, would make her nightly rounds, bringing words of Christian comfort to the men, for which she became known as the Lady with the Lamp. Yet despite all her efforts, the death rate continued to escalate alarmingly. In the month of January, 10 per cent of the entire British army in the East died from disease. In February, the death rate of patients at Scutari was 52 per cent, having risen from 8 per cent when Nightingale arrived in November. In all, that winter, in the four months following the hurricane, 4,000 soldiers died in the hospitals of Scutari, the vast majority of them unwounded. The British public was appalled by the loss of life. The readers of The Times demanded explanations, and in early March a government-appointed sanitary commission arrived in Scutari to investigate. It found that the main Barrack Hospital was built on top of a cesspool, that the sewers were leaking, with sewage spilling into the drinking water. Nightingale was unaware of the danger, for she believed that infection came from contaminated vapours, but the sanitation in the hospital was clearly inadequate. The soldiers in her care would have had a better chance of survival in any Turkish village than in her hospitals in Scutari.

In Britain, France and Russia, the public followed these developments with increasing interest and concern. Through daily reports in the newspapers, photographs and drawings in periodicals, people had immediate access to the latest news about the war, and a clearer grasp of its realities, than during any previous conflict. Their reactions to the news became a major factor in the calculations of the military authorities, which were exposed to a degree of public criticism never seen before during wartime. This was the first war in history in which public opinion played so crucial a role.

Britain led the way in terms of its appetite for news. Reports of the suffering of the troops and the plight of the wounded and the sick had created a state of national anxiety about the situation of the allied armies camped above Sevastopol. The severe frost in Britain that winter served only to intensify these feelings of concern for the men out in Russia. There was a huge response to the Times Crimean Fund, as well as to the Royal Patriotic Fund for the relief of the soldiers’ wives and families, with people from all walks of life donating money, sending food parcels, and knitting warm clothing (including the ‘Balaklava Helmets’ that were invented at this time). The Queen herself informed the Duke of Cambridge that ‘the whole female part’ of Windsor Castle, including herself, was ‘busily knitting for the army’.²⁹

More than any other country on the Continent, Britain enjoyed a free press, and that freedom now showed its face. The abolition of the newspaper stamp duty in 1855 enabled the growth of a cheaper press, afforded even by the working man. As well as many letters from officers and soldiers, the Crimean War saw the emergence of a new breed of ‘war correspondent’, who brought the events of the battlefield to the breakfast tables of the middle class. During previous wars, newspapers had relied on amateur ‘agents’ – usually diplomats or approved officers in the armed forces – to send in reports (a tradition that lasted until the end of the nineteenth century when a young Winston Churchill reported on the Sudan as a serving army officer). These reports were normally drawn from military communiqués, and they were subject to the censorship of the authorities; it was rare for an agent to include a first-hand account of events he had himself witnessed. Things began to change in the 1840s and early 1850s, as newspapers started to employ foreign correspondents in important areas, such as Thomas Chenery, the Times correspondent in Constantinople since March 1854, who broke the news of the appalling conditions in the hospitals of Scutari.³⁰

The advent of steamships and the telegraph enabled newspapers to send their own reporters into a war zone and print their stories within days. News travelled faster during the Crimean War as telegraphs were built in stages to link the battle zone with the European capitals. At the start of the campaign in the Crimea the fastest news could get to London in five days: two by steamship from Balaklava to Varna, and three by horseback to Bucharest, the nearest link by telegraph. By the winter of 1854, with the French construction of a telegraph to Varna, news could be communicated in two days; and by the end of April 1855, when the British laid an underwater cable between Balaklava and Varna, it could get to London in a few hours.[42]

It was not just the speed of news that was important but the frank and detailed nature of the press reports that the public could read in the papers every day. Free from censorship, the Crimean correspondents wrote at length for a readership whose hunger for news about the war fuelled a boom in newspapers and periodicals. Through their vivid descriptions of the fighting, of the terrible conditions and suffering of the men, they brought the war into every home and allowed the public to be actively involved in the debate about how it should be fought. Never had so many readers written to The Times and other newspapers as they did in the Crimean War – nearly all of them with observations and opinions about how to improve the campaign.[43] Never had so many of the British middle classes been so politically mobilized. Even remote country areas were suddenly exposed to world events. In his winning memoirs, the poet Edmund Gosse recalls the impact of the war on his family, reclusive members of a small Christian sect in the Devon countryside: ‘The declaration of war with Russia brought the first breath of outside life into our Calvinist cloister. My parents took in a daily newspaper, which they had never done before, and events in picturesque places, which my Father and I looked out on the map, were eagerly discussed.’³¹

The public appetite for vivid descriptions of the Crimean campaign was insatiable. War tourists like Fanny Duberly had a ready readership for their eyewitness narratives. But the greatest interest was reserved for visual images. Lithographs were quick and cheap enough to reproduce in periodicals like the Illustrated London News, which enjoyed a huge boom in its weekly sales during the Crimean War. Photographs aroused the interest of the public more than anything – they seemed to give a ‘realistic’ image of the war – and there was a substantial market for the photographic albums of James Robertson and Roger Fenton, who both made their names in the Crimea. Photography was just entering the scene – the British public had been wowed by its presentation at the Great Exhibition of 1851 – and this was the first war to be photographed and ‘seen’ by the public at the time of its fighting. There had been daguerreotypes of the Mexican-American War of 1846–8 and calotypes of the Burmese War of 1852–3, but these were primitive and hazy images compared to the photographs of the Crimean War, which appeared so ‘accurate’ and ‘immediate’, a ‘direct window onto the realities of war’, as one newspaper remarked at the time. In fact they were far from that. The limitations of the wetplate process (which required the glass plate to be exposed for up to twenty seconds) made it virtually impossible to photograph movement (though techniques improved to make this possible by the time of the American Civil War in the early 1860s). Most of Robertson’s and Fenton’s photographs are posed portraits and landscapes, images derived from genres of painting appealing to the tastes and sensibilities of their middle-class market. Although both men had seen a lot of death, neither showed it in their photographs – though Fenton referred to it symbolically in his most famous picture, Valley of the Shadow of Death, a desolate landscape strewn with cannonballs (which he clustered together to intensify the image) – because their pictures needed to be reconciled with Victorian society’s prevailing notions of it as a just and righteous war. The sanitized depiction of war in Robertson’s work had more to do with commercial pressures than with any censorship, but in the case of Fenton, a royal photographer who was sent to the Crimea partly to counteract the negative depiction of the campaign in The Times and other newspapers, there was certainly an element of propaganda. To reassure the public that the British soldiers were warmly dressed, for example, Fenton took a portrait of some soldiers dressed in good boots and heavy sheepskin coats recently dispatched by the government. But Fenton did not arrive in the Crimea until March 1855, and that portrait was not taken until mid-April, by which time many lives had been lost to the freezing temperatures and the need for such warm clothing had long passed. With April temperatures of 26 degrees, Fenton’s soldiers must have been sweltering in the heat.³²

If Fenton’s camera lied, the same could not be said of William Russell’s reports in The Times, which did more than anything to inform the British public of the true conditions of the war. Russell was the most important and widely read reporter from the Crimea. Born in 1820 into an Anglo-Irish family near Dublin, Russell began working for The Times in 1841, during the general election in Ireland. He had covered only one small border war between Prussian and Danish troops in 1850, when he was sent by John Delane, the paper’s editor, with the Guards Brigade to Malta in February 1854. Delane promised the army’s commander-in-chief that Russell would return before Easter, but the journalist spent the next two years with the British army, reporting on an almost daily basis on the latest news from the Crimea, and exposing many of the failures of the military authorities. Russell’s Anglo-Irish background gave his writing a critical detachment from the English military establishment, whose incompetence he never hesitated to condemn. His sympathies were clearly with the ordinary troops, some one-third of them Irish, with whom he had a relaxed manner that encouraged them to talk. Henry Clifford described him as

The military establishment despised Russell. Raglan advised his officers not to speak to the reporter, claiming that he was a danger to security. He was particularly angered by the publication of letters in The Times by officers and soldiers highlighting the deplorable conditions of the troops. It was rumoured that the press was paying for such letters, some of which had not been meant for publication but had been passed on to the newspapers by relatives. The military authorities, who put more store on loyalty and obedience than on the welfare of the troops, were outraged by letter-writers who had broken ranks. ‘Officers write more absurd and rascally letters than ever or else The Times concocts them for them, anyhow it is very bad and unsoldier-like of them,’ fumed Major Kingscote of the Scots Guards and headquarters staff. ‘I still maintain that the soldier is very cheerful and they always seem in good spirit. The officers I do not see much, but I observe one thing, and that is that the more aristocratic blood there is in the veins the less they grumble, in spite of the assertions of The Times.’

Raglan went on the attack. On 13 November he wrote to the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for War, claiming that The Times had published information that could be useful to the enemy. There were certainly reports that the Russians had received a morale boost from Russell’s articles about supply shortages and the poor condition of the troops (the Tsar himself had read them in St Petersburg). In response to Raglan’s letter, the Deputy Judge Advocate William Romaine issued a warning to British reporters in the Crimea, while Newcastle wrote to their newspaper editors. But Delane resisted these attempts to curb the freedom of the press. Believing Raglan to be incompetent, he saw it as a matter of national interest to expose the poor administration of the army, and would not listen to the arguments about national security. On 23 December an editorial in The Times accused the high command of incompetence, official lethargy and, perhaps most damaging of all in a conflict that was fast becoming embroiled in a broader political struggle between the professional ideal of meritocracy and the old world of aristocratic privilege, obvious nepotism in the appointment of Raglan’s personal staff (no less than five of his ADCs were his nephews).

Raglan’s patience at last broke, and on 4 January he wrote again to Newcastle, effectively accusing Russell of treason:

Newcastle was not impressed. By this time, he was already feeling the political pressure created by the Times campaign. The scandal surrounding the condition of the army was threatening the government. Adding his own voice to the mounting criticisms of the military administration, Newcastle urged Raglan to dimiss generals Airey and Estcourt, the Quartermaster and Adjutant Generals of the army respectively, hoping this would satisfy the public demand for heads to roll. Raglan would not give them up – he did not seem to think that anybody in the high command was to blame for the army’s difficulties – though he happily accepted the recall of Lord Lucan, whom he blamed (most unjustly) for the sacrifice of the Light Brigade.

By the time Lucan received his recall on 12 February, the power of the press and public criticism had brought down the government. On 29 January two-thirds of the House of Commons had voted for a motion by the Radical MP John Roebuck calling for the appointment of a select committee to investigate the condition of the army and the conduct of the government departments responsible for it – in effect, a vote of no-confidence in the government’s leadership of the war campaign. Roebuck had not wanted to bring down the government – his main aim had been to make a stand for parliamentary accountability – but the pressures working on the government were no longer contained inside Parliament: they were coming from the public and the press. The next day Aberdeen resigned, and a week later, on 6 February, the Queen called on Palmerston, her least favourite politician, now aged 70, to form his first government. Palmerston was the popular choice of the patriotic middle classes – through his cultivation of the press he had captured the imagination of the British public with his aggressive foreign policy which they had come to see as the embodiment of their own national character and popular ideals – and they now looked to him to save the war campaign from the incompetent generals.

‘At the stage of civilization in which we are,’ the French Emperor announced in 1855, ‘the success of armies, however brilliant they may be, is only transitory. In reality it is public opinion that wins the last victory.’ Louis-Napoleon was well aware of the power of the press and public opinion – his rise to power had relied on them – and for that reason the French press was censored and controlled by his government during the Crimean War. Editorials were usually ‘paid for’ by supporters of the government and politically were often to the right of the viewpoint held by most readers of the newspaper. Napoleon saw the war as a way of winning popular support for his regime, and he pursued it with one eye on the public reaction. He instructed Canrobert (renowned for his indecision) not to order an assault ‘unless perfectly certain of the result being in our favour, but also not to attempt it if the sacrifice of life should be great’.³⁵

Sensitive to public criticism, Napoleon ordered his police to collect information on what people were saying about the war. Informers listened to private conversations, priests’ sermons and speeches by orators, and what they heard was recorded in reports by local procurators and prefects. According to these reports, the French had never been in favour of the war, and, with the army’s failure to achieve an early victory, they were becoming increasingly impatient and critical about its continuation. Much of their frustration was focused on the leadership of Canrobert and the ‘cowardice’ of Prince Napoleon, who had left the Crimea after Inkerman and returned to France in January, where (courting opposition views against the war) he then made well known his view that Sevastopol was ‘impregnable’ and that the siege should be raised. By this time, the prefects were reporting on the possibility of war-weariness becoming opposition to the government. Henri Loizillon, an engineer in the French trenches before Sevastopol, heard the soldiers talking of a revolution being planned, with strikes and demonstrations against the mobilization of further troops in France. ‘The most alarming rumours circulate,’ he wrote to his family. ‘All the talk is of revolution: Paris, Lyon, all the major cities will be in a state of siege; in Marseille the people will rise up against the embarkation of the troops; everybody wants peace, and it seems they are ready to pay almost any price for it.’ In Paris an impatient Emperor of the French was justly terrified of revolutionary violence – it was only six and a half years since crowds had taken to the barricades to bring down the July Monarchy – and made detailed plans to deal with any more disturbances in the capital. Buildings were constructed in the centre of Paris ‘with the view of being capable of holding a number of troops in case of any rising’, he informed Queen Victoria, and macadam was ‘laid down in almost all the streets to prevent the populace from taking up the paving stones as hitherto, “pour en faire des barricades”’. To stop public criticism of the war he concluded that the time had come to take a firmer control of the high command and go to the Crimea himself to accelerate the capture of Sevastopol and restore glory to the name of Napoleon.³⁶

In Russia there was very little public information about the war. There was only one Russian newspaper, the Odessa Bulletin (Odesskii Vestnik), for the whole Black Sea area, but it did not have a corrrespondent in the Crimea, and it published only the most basic news about the war, usually two or three weeks late. Strict censorship limited what could be printed in the press. Reports of the battle on the Alma, for example, appeared in the Odessa Bulletin only on 12 October, a full twenty-two days after the event, when the defeat was described as a ‘tactical withdrawal under threat from much larger numbers of the enemy on both flanks and from the sea’. When this laconic and mendacious bulletin failed to satisfy the reading public, which had heard rumours of the fall of Sevastopol and the destruction of the Black Sea Fleet, the newspaper printed a more detailed report on 8 November, forty-nine days after the battle, in which it admitted a defeat but failed to mention the panic flight of the Russian troops or the superiority of the enemy’s riflemen whose firepower had overwhelmed the outdated muskets of the Tsar’s infantry. The public simply could not be told that the Russian army had been poorly led or that it was technically behind the armies of Europe.³⁷

Without official information they could trust, the educated public listened to rumours. An Englishwoman living in St Petersburg noted some ‘ridiculous ideas’ about the war among the upper classes, who were ‘kept entirely in the dark by all the government accounts’. It was rumoured, for example, that Britain was attempting to raise Poland against Russia, that India was about to fall to the Russians, and that the Americans would come to Russia’s aid in the Crimea. Many were convinced that a military treaty had been signed with the United States.[44] ‘They appeared to regard the President of the United States with as much respect as a sailor does his sheet-anchor in a storm,’ wrote the anonymous Englishwoman. Americans in Russia were fêted and showered with honours, ‘and seemed rather pleased than otherwise’, she added.

The police struggled to contain the spread of rumours, although their informers were said to be everywhere. The Englishwoman told of two women summoned to the offices of Count Orlov, the head of the Third Section, the secret police, after they had been heard in a coffee shop voicing doubts about what was printed in the Russian press about the war. ‘I was informed that they received a severe reprimand, and were ordered to believe all that was written under the government sanction.’³⁸

The war generated varied responses throughout Russian society. The invasion of the Crimea caused outrage in educated circles, which rallied round the patriotic memory of 1812. Ironically, however, most of the public anger seemed to be focused on the English rather than the French, who, as a result of the Russian victory against Napoleon, were treated ‘as a people too insignificant and helpless to merit any other sentiment but that of the most profound pity and compassion’, according to our unknown Englishwoman in St Petersburg. Anglophobia had a long tradition in Russia. ‘Perfidious Albion’ was blamed for everything in some circles of high society. ‘To hear them talk one would imagine that all the evils existing in the world are to be ascribed to British influence,’ the Englishwoman wrote. In the salons of St Petersburg it was a commonplace that England had been the aggressor responsible for the war, and that English money was at the root of the trouble. Some said the English had made war to gain possession of the Russian gold mines in Siberia; others that they wanted to expand their empire to the Caucasus and the Crimea. They all saw Palmerston as the prime mover of British policy and as the author of their misfortunes. Over much of the European continent, Palmerston was hated as a symbol of the bullying and dishonest British, who preached free trade and liberty as a means of advancing their own economic and imperial interests in the world. But the Russians had a special reason to despise the statesman who had spearheaded Europe’s anti-Russian policy. According to the Englishwoman in St Petersburg, the names of Palmerston and Napier, the admiral in charge of the campaign in the Baltic, ‘inspired the lower classes with so great a terror’ that women would frighten their children off to bed by saying ‘that the English Admiral was coming!’

A poem widely circulated among Russian officers caught the patriotic mood:

The pan-Slavs and Slavophiles were the most enthusiastic supporters of the war. They had hailed the Russian invasion of the Balkans as the start of a religious war for the liberation of the Slavs, and were disappointed when the Tsar had ordered the retreat from the Danube, many of them urging him to go to war against the whole of Europe on his own. Pogodin, the editor of the Moscow journal Moskvitianin, became even more extreme in his pan-Slav views as a result of the retreat, calling on the Tsar to throw all caution to the wind and launch a revolutionary war against the Austrians as well as the Ottomans for the liberation of the Slavs. The allied invasion of Russia turned their calls for a European war into a reality, and their bellicose ideas were carried on a wave of patriotic sentiment that swept through society. Pogodin received the blessing of the Tsar, which gave him access to the court and the chance to write to him with opinions on foreign policy. How much influence Pogodin had on Nicholas remains unclear, but his presence at the court gave a green light to the aristocracy to subscribe openly to his ideas. According to the Englishwoman in St Petersburg: ‘How much soever the Tsar might have sought to disguise his intentions concerning Turkey and Constantinople, his nobles did not attempt to do so, and that even two years ago, long ere this war was certain. “Quant à Constantinople, nous l’aurons, soyez tranquille,”[45] said a nobleman one evening.’⁴⁰

Among the more liberal and pro-Western circles of society, however, there was less support for the war, and those with access to the foreign press were likely to be critical of it. Many did not see the need for Russia to become involved in the Eastern Question, let alone to become entangled in a potentially disastrous war against the Western powers. ‘All sorts of dirty tricks are performed in the name of Holy Rus′,’ wrote Prince Viazemsky, a veteran of the war against the French in 1812, a critic and a poet of liberal persuasions, who served for twenty years in the Ministry of Finance before becoming chief of censorship in 1856. ‘How will it all end? In my modest view… we have no chance of victory. The English allied to the French will always be stronger than us.’ According to the reports of the Third Section in 1854, many people in the educated classes were basically hostile to the war and wanted the government to continue with negotiations to avoid it.⁴¹

The opinion of the lower classes is harder to discern. Merchants were afraid of losing trade and tended to be hostile to the war. In St Petersburg, the unnamed Englishwoman noted, ‘not only every street but every house gave some intimation of the struggle in which they are engaged; trade was almost at a standstill; scarcely any of the shops had customers in them; everybody seemed to be economizing their money lest poverty should come’. The serf peasants suffered most, losing young and able-bodied men from their family farms to the military drafts and at the same time shouldering most of the increased burden of taxation that resulted from the war. The peasant population declined dramatically – in some areas by as much as 6 per cent – during the Crimean War. There were crop failures, partly because of bad weather but also due to shortages of labour and draught animals that had been conscripted by the army, and around 300 serf uprisings or serious disturbances with physical attacks on landowners and the burning of their property. Among the upper classes, there was a fear of revolution, wrote the Englishwoman: ‘It was the opinion of many when I left St Petersburg that the 80,000 soldiers (as the Russian said) who were bivouacked in the streets and billeted on the houses were a great deal more for the purpose of ensuring peace within the barriers of the town than for that of repelling a foreign invader.’⁴²

Yet there were peasants who viewed the war as an opportunity. During the spring of 1854 a rumour spread through the countryside that freedom had been promised to any peasant serf who volunteered for the army or navy. The rumour had its roots in the decision of the government to create a fleet of galleys in the Baltic by recruiting peasant volunteers: they would be released by their landowners for the period of service provided they agreed to return to their estates afterwards. The result was a massive rush of peasants to the northern ports. Police blocked the roads, and thousands of peasants were locked up in jails, until they could be marched home in chained convoys. Once these rumours of emancipation spread, subsequent troop levies were interpreted in the same way. Priests, peasant scribes and agitators helped to spread the wrong idea. In Riazan’, for example, a deacon told the serfs that if they joined the army they would be given eight silver roubles every month and that after three years of military service they and their families would be liberated from serfdom.

Everywhere the story was the same. The peasants were convinced that the Tsar Batiushka had issued a decree promising them freedom if they volunteered, and, when told that this was not true, they assumed the decree had been hidden or replaced by his evil officials. It is hard to tell how far their belief was innocent, and how far deliberate, an expression of their hopes for liberation from serfdom. In many places the rumours were confused with older peasant notions of a ‘Golden Manifesto’ in which the Tsar would liberate the peasants and give them all the land. One group of peasants, for example, turned up at a recuiting station, having heard that the Tsar was sitting in a ‘golden chamber’ on top of a mountain in the Crimea: ‘he gives freedom to all who come to him, but those who do not come or are too late will remain serfs to their masters as before.’ In other areas the rumours were replaced by stories that the English and the French would liberate the serfs who volunteered to join them in the Crimea, stories which began a flight of peasants to the south. In the peasant mind the south was linked to the idea of land and liberty: since medieval times it was to the steppelands of the south that the serfs had run away from their masters. The traditions of the free Cossacks remained strong among the peasantry of the southern provinces, where the volunteer movement assumed an almost revolutionary character. Bands of peasants marched to the local garrisons, demanding to be enlisted in the army and refusing to work any longer for their landowners. Armed with pikes, knives and clubs, the peasants clashed with soldiers and police.⁴³

With no shortage of volunteers, and all the resources of their empire to draw from, the Russians had an ideal opportunity in these winter months to attack and destroy the weakened allied armies on the frozen heights above Sevastopol. But there was no initiative. The Russian high command had lost authority and self-confidence since the defeat at Inkerman. Without faith in his commanders, the Tsar had become increasingly gloomy and despondent, believing that the war could not be won and perhaps regretting that he had caused it in the first place. Courtiers described him as a broken man, physically ill, exhausted and depressed, who had aged ten years since the beginning of the war.

Perhaps the Tsar was still counting on his trusted ‘Generals January and February’ to defeat the British and the French. As long as they were losing men from cold, disease and hunger on the open heights, he was happy for his commanders to limit their attacks to small nightly sorties against the allies’ forward positions. These sorties caused little damage but added to their exhaustion. ‘Our Tsar won’t let them eat or sleep,’ wrote a Cossack to his family from Sevastopol on 12 January. ‘It’s only a shame they don’t all die so we don’t have to fight them.’⁴⁴

The Russians had supply problems that prevented them developing a more ambitious strategy. With the allied fleets in control of the sea, the Russians had to bring in all their supplies by horse or oxen-driven peasant carts on snow-bound and muddy roads from south Russia. There were no railways. By the time of the hurricane, the whole of the Crimea was suffering from shortages of hay; the draft animals began to die at an alarming rate. Pirogov saw ‘the swollen bodies of dead oxen at every step along the road’ from Perekop to Sevastopol in the first week of December. By January the Russian army in the Crimea had just 2,000 carts to bring in supplies, one-third the number it had deployed at the start of November. In Sevastopol, rations were drastically reduced. The only meat available was rotten salted beef from the dead oxen. Transferred to Esky-Ord near Simferopol in December, Tolstoy found the soldiers there had no winter coats but plentiful supplies of vodka which they had been given to keep warm. In Sevastopol, the defenders of the bastions were just as cold and hungry as the British and the French in the trenches. Every day through these winter months at least a dozen Russians ran away.⁴⁵

But the main reason why the Tsar would not commit to a major new offensive in the Crimea was his growing fear of an Austrian invasion of Russia. The cautious Paskevich, the only one of his senior commanders in whom he really trusted after Inkerman, had long been warning of the Austrian threat to Russian Poland, which he thought was far more serious than the danger to the Crimea. In a letter to the Tsar on 20 December, Paskevich persuaded him to keep a large corps of infantry in the Dubno, Kamenets and Galicia border regions in case of an attack by the Austrians rather than send them to the Crimea. The Austrian threat had been underlined two weeks before, when the Austrians had entered a military alliance with France and Britain promising to defend the Danubian principalities against the Russians in exchange for the allies’ pledge to defend them against the Russians and guarantee their possessions in Italy for the duration of the war. In reality, the Austrians were far more concerned to use their new alliance to force the Western powers to negotiate a peace with the Russians under their own influence at Vienna than they were to go to war against Russia. But the Tsar still felt the betrayal of the Austrians, who had mobilized their troops to force the Russians out of the Danubian principalities only the previous summer, and he was afraid of them. Between 7 January and 12 February the Tsar wrote long notes in his own hand in which he planned the measures he would take if Russia faced a war against the Austrians, the Prussians and the other German states. In each memorandum he became more convinced that such a war was imminent. It was perhaps a symptom of the growing desperation that took hold of the Tsar in his final days. He was haunted by the possibility that the whole Russian Empire would collapse – that all the territorial gains of his ancestors would be lost in this foolish ‘holy war’ – with Britain and the Swedes attacking Russia through the Baltic, Austria and Prussia attacking through Poland and the Ukraine, and the Western powers attacking in the Black Sea and the Caucasus. Realizing that it was impossible to defend all sectors simultaneously, he agonized over where to place his defences, and concluded that in the last resort it would be better to lose the Ukraine to the Austrians than to weaken the defences of the centre and ‘the heart of Russia’.⁴⁶

At last, in early February, fearing that the Western powers were about to land a new invasion force to cut off the Crimea from the Russian mainland at Perekop, the Tsar ordered an offensive to recapture their likely landing base at the port of Evpatoria, which was then held by a Turkish force of around 20,000 troops under the command of Omer Pasha, supported by the guns of part of the allied fleets. The port’s defensive works, which included 34 pieces of heavy artillery, were formidable, so much so that Lieutenant General Baron Wrangel, the commander of the Russian cavalry in the Evpatoria area, thought that its capture was impossible, and would not take responsibility for an offensive. But Nicholas insisted that the attack should go ahead, giving the command to Wrangel’s deputy, Lieutenant General Khrulev, an artilleryman who was once described by Gorchakov as having ‘not much in the head, but very brave and active, who will do exactly what you tell him’. Asked by Menshikov whether it was possible to capture Evpatoria, Khrulev was confident of success. His force of 19,000 men (with 24 squadrons of cavalry and 108 guns) set off at daylight on 17 February, by which time the Tsar was having second thoughts about the wisdom of the expedition, thinking that it might be better to let the allies land their troops and attack them on their flank as they moved to Perekop. But it was too late to stop Khrulev. The offensive lasted three hours. The Russian troops were easily repulsed, with the loss of 1,500 men, and retreated across the open country towards Simferopol. Without shelter, many of them died from exhaustion and the cold, their frozen bodies abandoned on the steppe.

By the time the news of the defeat reached the Tsar in St Petersburg on 24 February, he was already gravely ill. The Tsar had come down with influenza on 8 February, but he continued with the daily tasks of government. On the 16th, feeling slightly better and ignoring the advice of his doctors, he went out without a winter coat in a frost of 23 degrees below zero to review the troops in St Petersburg. The next day he went out again. From that evening his health began to deteriorate terminally.

He caught pneumonia. Doctors could hear liquid in his lungs, a sign that finally persuaded his personal physician, Dr Mandt, that there was no hope of a recovery. Badly shaken by the defeat at Evpatoria, on the advice of Mandt, Nicholas handed over government to his son, the Tsarevich Alexander. He asked his son to dismiss Khrulev and replace Menshikov (who was then sick himself) with Gorchakov as the commander-in-chief. But everybody knew that Nicholas had himself to blame for having ordered the attack, and he was filled with shame. According to Mandt, who was with him when he died, the Tsar’s ‘spiritual suffering broke him more than his physical illness’, and news of the reverses at Evpatoria ‘struck the final blow’ to his already failing health.⁴⁷

Nicholas died on 2 March. The public had known nothing of the Tsar’s illness (he had forbidden any bulletins on his health to be published) and the announcement of his sudden death immediately gave rise to rumours that he had committed suicide. It was said that the Tsar had been distraught about Evpatoria and had asked Mandt to give him poison. A crowd assembled outside the Winter Palace, where the black flag was raised, and angry voices called for the death of the doctor with the German name. Fearing for his life, Mandt was whisked away in a carriage from the palace, and left Russia shortly afterwards.⁴⁸

Various other rumours began to circulate: that Mandt had killed the Tsar (a version advanced by certain figures at the court to counteract the idea that Nicholas had killed himself); that Mandt was rewarded for his loyalty with a portrait of the Tsar in a diamond-studded frame; and that a doctor by the name of Gruber had been imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for showing too much interest in the Tsar’s death. Rumours of the Tsar’s suicide were readily believed by those who were opposed to his authoritarian rule: that he should have taken his own life seemed to them a tacit recognition of his sins. The rumours were given credence by distinguished scholars in the final decades before 1917, including Nikolai Shil’der, the author of a four-volume biography of Nicholas, whose father, Karl Shil’der, had been at his court; and they were widely cited by historians in the Soviet period. They are still believed by some historians today.⁴⁹

In her intimate diary of life at court, Anna Tiutcheva presents enough details of the Tsar’s final hours to rule out the serious possibility of suicide. But she also makes it clear that Nicholas was broken morally, that he was so filled with remorse for his mistakes, for the disastrous war that he had brought to Russia through his impulsive foreign policies, that he welcomed death. Perhaps he thought that he no longer had God on his side. Before he died, the Tsar called his son to him and asked him to tell the army and in particular the defenders of Sevastopol that ‘I have always tried to do my best for them, and, where I failed, it was not for lack of good will, but from lack of knowledge and intelligence. I ask them to forgive me.’⁵⁰

Dressed in military uniform, Nicholas was buried in the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the burial place of all Russia’s rulers since Peter the Great. Just before the lid of his coffin was closed, the Empress laid upon the heart of Nicholas a silver cross with a depiction of the Church of St Sophia in Constantinople, ‘so that in Heaven he would not forget to pray for his brothers in the East’.⁵¹