The Crimean War: A History

10 Cannon Fodder

News of the Tsar’s death arrived in Paris and London later on 2 March. Queen Victoria was among the first to hear. She reflected on his death in her journal:

The Tsar’s death was immediately announced in theatres, meeting places and other public spaces throughout the land. In Nottingham, the announcement came when the curtain fell on the first act of Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor. The audience cheered, the orchestra played the national anthem, and people poured into the streets to celebrate. Everyone assumed that the war was won, because Nicholas had brought about the war through his aggressive policies and, now that he was gone, Russia would at last come to its senses and sue for an early peace. The Times declared the death of Nicholas an act of divine intervention, God’s punishment of the man responsible for the outbreak of the war, and looked forward to a rapid victory for the allies. Shares rose steeply on the Paris Bourse and the London Stock Exchange.

The news took longer to reach the allied forces in the Crimea, and it came by unexpected means. On the evening of 4 March, several days before the announcement of the Tsar’s death arrived by telegram, a French trooper found a note attached to a stone that had been thrown from the Russian trenches outside the walls of Sevastopol. Written in French, the note claimed to represent the view of many Russian officers:

However much such Russians may have wanted peace, the new Tsar Alexander II was not about to give up on his father’s policies. He was 36 when he ascended to the throne, had been the heir apparent for thirty years, and remained firmly in the shadow of his father in the first year of his rule. He was more liberally inclined than Nicholas, having been exposed to the influence of the liberal poet Vasily Zhukovsky, his tutor at the court, and having travelled widely in Europe; to the disappointment of his father, he took no interest in military affairs, but he was a Russian nationalist with pronounced sympathies for the pan-Slav cause. On taking over from his father, Alexander quickly ruled out any talk of peace that he deemed humiliating for Russia (the only peace acceptable to the British) and pledged to go on fighting for his country’s ‘sacred cause’ and ‘glory in the world’. Through Nesselrode, however, he also made it clear that he was amenable to negotiations for a settlement in accordance with ‘the integrity and honour of Russia’. Alexander was aware of the growing opposition to the war in France. The main aim of this initiative was to draw the French away from British influence by offering them the prospect of an early end to the hostilities. ‘Between France and Russia the war is without hatred,’ wrote Nesselrode to his son-in-law, Baron von Seebach, the Saxon Minister in Paris, who read his letter to Napoleon: ‘Peace will be made when the Emperor Napoleon wants it.’³

Yet throughout these early months of 1855, Napoleon was under growing pressure from his British allies to commit to a more ambitious war against Russia. Palmerston, the new Prime Minister, had long been pushing for this – not just to destroy the naval base at Sevastopol but to roll back Russian power in the Black Sea region and the Caucasus, Poland, Finland and the Baltic by drawing in new allies and supporting liberation movements against tsarist rule. This assault on the Russian Empire went well beyond the Four Points agreed by the British and the French with the Austrians as the basis of the allied war plans against Russia in 1854 – plans that were carefully circumscribed by the coalition government of Aberdeen. Where Aberdeen had wanted a limited campaign to force the Russians to negotiate on these Four Points, Palmerston was determined to develop the campaign in the Crimea into a wide-ranging war against Russia in Europe and the Near East.

Almost a year earlier, in March 1854, Palmerston had outlined his ‘beau ideal of the result of the war’ in a letter to the British cabinet:

At that time Palmerston’s ambitious plans had been received with a good deal of scepticism in the British cabinet (as mentioned earlier, Aberdeen had objected that they would involve the Continent in a new ‘Thirty Years War’). But, now that Palmerston was the Prime Minister, Russia had been weakened and the hardships of the winter were coming to an end, the prospect of a larger war did not seem impossible at all.⁴

Behind the scenes of the British government there were powerful supporters of a broader European war against Russia. Sir Harry Verney, for example, the Liberal MP for Buckingham,[46] published a pamphlet, Our Quarrel with Russia, which circulated widely among diplomats and military leaders in the spring of 1855. It was sent by Stratford Canning, who was clearly sympathetic to its ideas, to Palmerston and Clarendon as well as to Sir William Codrington, the commander of the Light Division who was shortly to become the commander-in-chief of the eastern army, in whose papers it can still be found. Verney argued that Britain should work harder to involve the Germans in a war against Russia. Germany had a lot to fear from Russian aggression, Berlin being only a few days’ march from the borders of the Tsar’s empire; it was mainly Protestant, so had much in common with Britain; and strategically it was the ideal base for a war to liberate the Christian West from the ‘barbaric’ menace of Russia. In terms familiar to the standard discourse of European Russophobia, Verney argued that the Russians should be driven ‘eastwards beyond the Dnieper to the Asiatic steppe’.

Napoleon was generally sympathetic to Palmerston’s idea of using the war to redraw the map of Europe. But he was less interested in the anti-Russian campaign in the Caucasus, which mainly served British interests. Moreover, his fear of domestic opposition, which had risen to alarming levels after the army’s failure to achieve an early victory, made him wary of committing France to a long and open-ended war. Napoleon was torn. On a practical level, his instinct was to concentrate on the Crimea, to capture Sevastopol as a symbol of the satisfaction of French ‘honour’ and ‘prestige’ which he needed to strengthen his regime, and then bring the war to a quick and ‘glorious’ end. But the vision of a European war of liberation on the model of the great Napoleon was never far away from the Emperor’s thoughts. He flirted with the idea that the French might rediscover their enthusiasm for the war if it offered them that old revolutionary dream of a Europe reconstructed out of democratic nation states.

Napoleon wanted to return the Crimea to the Ottoman Empire. He was a strong supporter of Italian independence, believing that the war was an opportunity to impose this on the Austrians by giving them control of the Danubian principalities as compensation for the loss of Lombardy and Venetia. But above all he sympathized with the Polish cause, the most pressing foreign issue in French politics. He thought the Austrians and Prussians might agree to the restoration of an independent Poland as a buffer state between themselves and Russia, whose expansionism had been demonstrated by the war, and he tried to persuade Palmerston that the re-creation of a Polish kingdom should be made a condition of any peace negotations. But the British were afraid that the restoration of Poland would give new life to the Holy Alliance and even spark revolutionary wars in Italy and Germany; if that happened, Europe might become entangled in a new round of Napoleonic Wars.

All these factors contributed to the failure of the Vienna Conference, the diplomatic peace initiative sponsored by the Austrians, in the first months of 1855. Austria had joined the military alliance with the Western powers the previous December, but not in order to encourage a prolonged war against Russia which would only damage its own economy and unsettle its Slav minorities. Rather, the Austrians hoped to use their new alliance to pressure the British and the French to negotiate a peace with the Russians under their own patronage at Vienna.

January was a good moment to return to diplomacy. The military stalemate and hardships of the winter had increased public pressure on the Western governments to find a conclusion to the war. The French, in particular, were happy to explore the diplomatic possibilities. Senior ministers such as Drouyn and Thouvenal had begun to doubt that a military victory could be achieved. They feared that the longer the fighting continued – and the French were doing most of it – the more the public would react against a war which they already felt was being fought for mainly British interests. Such considerations helped to bring Napoleon round to the idea of a peace initiative – he hoped it might promote his ideals in Poland and Italy – even though he remained an ally of Palmerston, who did not believe in or desire peace. In the early weeks of 1855, however, when Palmerston was obliged to display a degree of moderation to form a cabinet with the peace-loving Peelites, even he was under pressure to consider (or give the appearance of considering) the Austrian initiatives.

On 7 January, Prince Alexander Gorchakov, the Tsar’s ambassador in Vienna,[47] announced Russia’s acceptance of the Four Points, including the controversial third point ending Russian domination of the Black Sea. In the last weeks of his life Nicholas was eager to get peace talks under way. With the entry of Austria into a military alliance with the Western powers, he had been haunted by the prospect of a general European war against Russia, and was prepared to look for an ‘honourable’ exit from the conflict in the Crimea. The British were mistrustful of the Russians’ intentions. On 9 January Queen Victoria informed Clarendon, the Foreign Minister, that in her view Russia’s acceptance of the Four Points was no more than a ‘diplomatic manoeuvre’ designed to stop the allies from capturing the Crimea. The Queen believed that the military campaign should not stop, that Sevastopol should be captured to ensure Russia’s acceptance of the Four Points. Palmerston agreed. He had no intention of allowing any peace initiative to hold back the military blows he planned to strike against the Russians in the spring campaigning season.⁶

The French ministers were more inclined to take the Russian offer at its face value and explore the possibilities of a negotiated settlement. Their willingness to do so was greatly strengthened during February, when Napoleon announced his firm intention – against the many warnings of his ministers and allies, who feared for his life – to go to the Crimea and take personal charge of the military operations there. Palmerston agreed with Clarendon that every effort must be made to stop the Emperor’s ‘insane’ idea, even if it meant beginning peace negotiations in Vienna. For the sake of the alliance, and to give his government the appearance of being serious about peace talks following the resignation of three senior Peelites (Gladstone, Graham and Herbert) who had doubted his sincerity after just a fortnight in office, Palmerston named Lord John Russell as Britain’s representative at the Vienna Conference.[48]

The appointment of Russell, a long-time member of the war party, seemed at first to be a way for Palmerston to kill off the peace talks. But Russell soon became converted to the Austrian initiative and even came to question the principles and motives of British policy in the Eastern Question and the Crimean War. In a brilliant memorandum which he wrote in March, Russell listed various ways for Britain to protect the Ottoman Empire against Russian aggression – by empowering the Sultan to summon the allied fleets into the Black Sea, for example, or by fortifying and garrisoning the Bosporus against surprise attacks – without a war whose main aim, he concluded, was to bring the Russians to their knees. Russell was also very critical of Britain’s doctrinaire approach to the liberal reform of Muslim-Christian relations in the Ottoman Empire – its tendency to impose a single reformed system based on British administrative principles rather than to work in a more conservative and pragmatic way with existing local institutions, religious networks and social practices to promote improvements on the ground. Such thinking was very Austrian and set alarm bells ringing in Whitehall. Palmerston was suddenly confronted with the prospect of being forced to sign up to a peace he did not want, under pressure from the French and from the growing number of supporters of the Austrian initiative, including Prince Albert. The Prince Consort had by early May come round to the view that a diplomatic alliance of the four great powers plus Germany was a better guarantee of security for Turkey and Europe than the continuation of the war against Russia.

The longer the Vienna talks continued, the more determined Palmerston became to break them up and resume the fighting on a larger scale. But the ultimate decision over war or peace rested with the vacillating Emperor of the French. In the end, it came down to whether he would listen to the counsel of Drouyn, his Foreign Minister, who recommended a peace plan based on the Austrian proposals to limit Russian naval power in the Black Sea, or whether he would listen to Lord Cowley, the British ambassador, who tried to convince him that any such proposal was no substitute for the destruction of the Russian fleet and that it would be a national humiliation to sign any peace before that goal had been achieved. The crucial meeting took place in Paris on 4 May, when Marshal Vaillant, the Minister of War, joined with Cowley in emphasizing the disgrace of accepting peace without a military victory and the dangerous impact that such a peace might have on the army and the political stability of the Second Empire. The peace plans were rejected, and Drouyn soon resigned, as Napoleon grudgingly committed to the British alliance and the idea of an enlarged war against Russia.⁷

There was no shortage of new allies for such a war. On 26 January a military convention had been signed by France and Britain with the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, the one Italian state that had broken free of Austrian political control, by which 15,000 troops under the command of the Italian General Alfonso La Marmora were sent to join the British in the Crimea, where they arrived on 8 May. For Camillo Cavour, the Piedmontese Prime Minister, the sending of this expeditionary force was an opportunity to forge an alliance with the Western powers so as to promote the cause of Italian unification under Piedmont’s leadership. Cavour supported the idea of a general war against Russia and the Holy Alliance to redraw the map of Europe on liberal national lines. The commitment of Italian troops was a risky strategy, though, without any formal promises of help from the British or the French, who could not afford to alienate the Austrians (on 22 December the French had even signed a secret treaty with the Austrians agreeing to maintain the status quo in Italy as long as they were allies in the war against Russia). But the Piedmontese would have no real leverage on the international scene until they proved their usefulness to the Western powers, and, since it seemed unlikely that the Austrians would join the war as combatants, this was a chance for the Piedmontese to prove that they were more valuable than the Austrians. Certainly, the allied commanders thought that the Sardinians were ‘smart fine-looking fellows’ and first-rate troops. One French general, who watched them disembark at Balaklava, thought they all seemed ‘well looked after and turned out, organized and disciplined, and all fresh in their new and shiny dark blue uniforms’. ⁸ They behaved well and bravely in the Crimea.

The Poles too supported the idea of a general European war against Russia. With the encouragement of Adam Czartoryski and the Hôtel Lambert group, the French and British sponsored the creation of a Polish legion under the command of Zamoyski. Made up of 1,500 Polish exiles, prisoners of war and deserters from the tsarist army, the legion was equipped by the Western powers but disguised with the name of the ‘Sultan’s Cossacks’ to fight against the Russians in the Crimea and the Caucasus.[49] According to a Russian officer, who had been imprisoned by the allies at Kinburn, most of the 500 Poles who had been recruited by the allies from his prison had been given money to join the Polish Legion, and those who had refused had been beaten.⁹ The legion did not come into active operation until the autumn of 1855, but the project had been endlessly discussed from the spring. It became entangled in the thorny issue of whether the Western powers would recognize the legion as a national force, which would therefore mean giving their support to the Polish cause as an objective of the war, an issue that was never really explored or clarified.

Eager to enlist more troops for a larger war against Russia, Palmerston called for the recruitment of mercenaries from around the world. He talked of raising 40,000 troops. ‘Let us get as many Germans and Swiss as we can,’ he declared in the spring; ‘let us get men from Halifax, let us enlist Italians, and let us increase our bounty without raising the standard. The thing must be done. We must have troops.’ Without a system of conscription to build up trained reserves, the British army was historically dependent on foreign mercenaries, but the heavy losses of the winter months made it more than usually reliant on the enlistment of a foreign legion. British troops were outnumbered by the French by at least two to one, which meant the French had the upper hand in deciding allied aims and strategy. During December a Foreign Enlistment Bill was rushed through Parliament. There was considerable public opposition, mainly based on mistrust of the foreigner, which forced the Bill to be amended so that no more than 10,000 troops were to be recruited from abroad. The largest group of mercenaries came from Germany, some 9,300 men, mostly artisans and agricultural labourers, about half of whom had military training or experience, followed by the Swiss, who numbered about 3,000 men. They arrived in Britain in April, each man receiving a bounty of £10. Trained at Aldershot, a combined force of 7,000 Swiss and German soldiers was sent off to Scutari in November 1855. As it turned out, they were too late to join the fighting in the Crimea.¹⁰

The question facing the British and the French was not just how to enlist new allies and recruits for a broader war against Russia, but where to focus that attack. By the spring of 1855 Russia’s forces had become extremely thinly spread and there were many weak points in the empire’s defences, so it made good sense to broaden the campaign with new assaults in these places. The only problem was deciding where. Of the 1.2 million Russian soldiers in the field, 260,000 were guarding the Baltic coast, 293,000 were in Poland and western Ukraine, 121,000 were in Bessarabia and along the Black Sea coast, while 183,000 were stationed in the Caucasus.¹¹

So stretched were the Russians’ defences, and so frightened were they that the allies would break through, that plans were made for a partisan war on the lines of 1812. A secret memorandum (‘On National Resistance in the Event of the Enemy’s Invasion of Russia’) was drawn up by General Gorchakov in February. Gorchakov was worried by the build-up of the allied European armies for a new offensive in the spring, and feared that Russia would not have enough forces to defend all its borders against them. Like Paskevich and Tsar Nicholas, he was most afraid of an Austrian invasion through Poland and Ukraine, where the largest Russian forces were deployed, because of the ethnic and religious composition of these borderlands: if the Austrians broke through, they were likely to be joined, not only by the Poles, but by the Catholic Ruthenians in Volhynia and Podolia. Gorchakov proposed that Russia’s line of partisan defence should be drawn up on religious lines in areas behind these borderlands, in Kiev and Kherson provinces, where the population was Orthodox and might be persuaded by their priests to join partisan brigades. Under the command of the Southern Army, the brigades would destroy bridges, crops and cattle, following the scorched-earth policies of 1812, and then take to the forests, from which they would ambush the invading troops. Approved by Alexander, Gorchakov’s proposals were put into operation during March. Priests were sent to the Ukraine. Armed with copies of a manifesto written by the Tsar on his deathbed, they called on the Orthodox peasants to wage a ‘holy war’ against the invaders. This initiative was not a success. Bands of peasants did appear in the Kiev area, some of them with as many as 700 men, but most were under the impression that they would be fighting for their liberation from serfdom, not against a foreign enemy. They marched with their pitchforks and hunting guns against the local manors, where they had to be dispersed by soldiers from the garrisons.¹²

Meanwhile the allies discussed where to direct new offensives in the spring. Many British leaders pinned their hopes on a campaign in the Caucasus, where the Muslim rebel tribes under the command of the Imam Shamil had already linked up with the Turkish army to attack the Russians in Georgia and Circassia. In July 1854, Shamil had launched a large-scale assault on the Russian positions in Georgia. With 15,000 cavalry and troops, he had advanced to within 60 kilometres of Tbilisi, at that time defended by only 2,000 Russian troops. But the Turks had failed to move their forces up from Kars to join in his attack on the tsarist military headquarters, so he had retreated into Daghestan. Some of Shamil’s forces under the command of his son Gazi Muhammed attacked the summer house of the Georgian Prince Chavchavadze in Tsinandali, taking off as prisoners the Prince’s wife and her sister (granddaughters of the last Georgian king) with their children and their French governess. Shamil had hoped to exchange them for his son Jemaleddin, a prisoner in St Petersburg, but news of their capture caused an international sensation, and French and British representatives demanded their unconditional release. But by the time their letters reached Shamil, in March 1855, the Imam had in fact successfully exchanged the women and their children for Jemaleddin and 40,000 silver roubles from the Russian court.¹³

The British had been running guns and ammunition to the rebel Muslim tribes since 1853, but so far they had been reluctant to commit wholeheartedly to Shamil’s army or indeed to the Turks in the Caucasus, both of whom they looked on with colonial contempt. The capture of the princesses did not win Shamil any friends in London. But in the spring of 1855, prompted by the hunt for new ways to bring Russia to its knees, the British and the French began to explore the possibility of developing relations with the Caucasian tribes. In April the British government sent a special agent, John Longworth, its former consul in Monastir and a close associate of David Urquhart, the Turcophile supporter of the Circassians, on a secret mission to make contact with Shamil and encourage him to unite the Muslim tribes in a ‘holy war’ against Russia by promising British military support. The French government sent its own agent, Charles Champoiseau, its viceconsul in Redutkale, on a separate mission to the Circassian tribes around Sukhumi in Georgia.¹⁴

The British pledged to arm Shamil’s army and expel the Russians from Circassia. On 11 June Stratford Canning reported to the Foreign Office that he had got the Porte ‘to issue a firman on Circassian independence in the event of the expulsion of Russia from their country’ (a dubious concept in this complex tribal area). By this time Longworth himself had arrived in Circassia, and had reported that the mountain tribes were well armed with Minié rifles and hunting guns. The British agent thought the Turks could lead the Circassian tribes on the Kuban plain in a war against Russia. Mustafa Pasha, the commander-in-chief of the Turkish forces in Batumi, had met with the Circassian tribal leaders and had ‘virtually become the governor-general of Circassia’, Longworth reported. There were rumours of Mustafa raising a large Circassian army, up to 60,000 strong, to raid southern Russia from the Caucasus. But Longworth was afraid that the Ottomans were using the situation to reassert their power in the Caucasus, and he warned the British to oppose them. The local pashas were taking advantage of their renewed links with the Porte to rule despotically, and this had alienated many tribes from the British and the French as the allies of the Turks. Longworth also rejected the idea of supporting Shamil’s movement on the grounds that it had been infiltrated by Islamic fundamentalists, most notably by Shamil’s emissary (Naib) in Circassia, Muhammed Emin, who had pledged to expel all the Christians from the Caucasus and had forbidden Shamil’s followers from having any contact with the non-Muslims. According to Longworth, the Naib planned to build ‘a feudal empire based upon the principles of Islamic fanaticism’. Longworth’s reservations about supporting Shamil were shared by many Eastern experts at the Foreign Office in London. They warned against the use of Muslim forces (especially the Turks) against the Russians in Georgia and Armenia on the grounds that only a European army could have any real authority among the Christian population there.¹⁵

Unwilling to send in their own forces to the Caucasus, and frightened of depending upon Muslim troops, the British and the French delayed making a decision on what sort of policy they should develop in this crucial area. With an effective force in the Caucasus, the allies might have dealt a much swifter and more devastating blow to Russia than they achieved by laying siege to Sevastopol for eleven months. But they were too wary to exploit this potential.

The allies also had high hopes for the naval campaign in the Baltic, which was renewed in the spring. With a new fleet of steamships and floating batteries, and a new commander, Rear Admiral Sir Richard Dundas, in place of Napier, who had been widely blamed for the perceived failure of the campaign in 1854, there was optimistic talk of taking Kronstadt and Sveaborg, the Russian fortresses that Napier had failed to attack, and then of threatening St Petersburg itself. The naval surveyor and hydrographer who was placed in charge of planning the campaign was Captain Bartholomew Sulivan, who had accompanied Charles Darwin on the Beagle expedition. From his preliminary researches, Sulivan concluded that the fortresses could be captured by ships alone, without the need of land troops. When Clarendon went to Paris at the beginning of March to try to dissuade Napoleon from carrying out his threat to go to the Crimea, he took Sulivan’s report with him. It was warmly received by the Emperor, who thought that the decision not to attack Kronstadt in 1854 had been a disgrace. Like the British, Napoleon believed that Kronstadt’s capture would encourage Sweden to join the alliance against Russia.

The first British warships left Spithead on 20 March, with more following a fortnight later; the French fleet under Admiral Pénaud arrived in the Baltic on 1 June. In a vain attempt to reinforce the allied blockade of Russian trade – a blockade that was circumvented by trade through Germany – the British fleet attacked and destroyed various Russian coastal stations. But their main targets remained Kronstadt and Sveaborg. From his ship, 8 kilometres from Kronstadt, Prince Ernest of Leiningen wrote to his cousin Queen Victoria on 3 June:

While they waited for the French to arrive, Sulivan carried out a careful reconnaissance of the Baltic’s shallow waters, including the coastline of Estonia, where he was invited to a surreal dinner by an Anglophile noble family at their country house. ‘It really all seemed like a dream,’ he wrote:

In early June Sulivan submitted his report. He was now pessimistic about the possibility of overcoming the powerful defences at Kronstadt, as Napier had been in 1854. During the past year the Russians had reinforced their fleet (Sulivan counted thirty-four gunboats) and strengthened the seaward defences with electrical and chemical underwater mines (described as ‘infernal machines’) and a barrier made up of timber frames secured to the seabed and filled with rocks. It would be difficult to remove it without suffering severe losses from the heavy guns of the fortress. The planned attack on Kronstadt was abandoned – and with it went the hopes of a decisive allied breakthrough in the Baltic.¹⁷

Meanwhile the allies also thought of ways to broaden their campaign in the Crimea. The military stalemate of the winter months led many to conclude that continuing to bombard Sevastopol from the south would not produce results, as long as the Russians were able to bring in supplies and reinforcements from the mainland via Perekop and the Sea of Azov. For the siege to work, Sevastopol had to be encircled on its northern side. That had been the rationale of the original allied plan in the summer of 1854 – a plan which had been overturned by Raglan, who feared that his men would suffer in the heat if they occupied the Crimean plain to cut the Russians off from Perekop. By the end of the year the foolishness of Raglan’s strategy had become clear for all to see, and military leaders were calling for a broader strategy. In a memorandum of December, for example, Sir John Burgoyne, Raglan’s chief engineer, urged the creation of an allied force of 30,000 men on the River Belbek, ‘with a view to further operations against Bakhchiserai and Simferopol’ which would cut off Sevastopol from one of its two main routes of supply (the other being via Kerch in the eastern Crimea).¹⁸

The Russian attack on Evpatoria in February prompted more plans for a stronger allied presence to interrupt the Russian supply lines from Perekop. Allied troops were sent to Evpatoria to reinforce the Turkish force during March. They found an appalling situation there – a real humanitarian crisis – with up to 40,000 Tatar peasants living in the streets, without food or shelter, having fled their villages out of fear of the Russians. The crisis encouraged the allied commanders to think about committing further troops to the north-west Crimean plain, if only to protect and mobilize the Tatar population against the Russians.¹⁹

But it was in April that the allies really got down to the serious business of rethinking their military strategy in the Crimea. On 18 April, Palmerston, Napoleon, Prince Albert, Clarendon, Lord Panmure (the new Secretary of State for War), Vaillant, Burgoyne and Count Walewski (Drouyn’s successor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris) met in a council of war at Windsor Castle. Palmerston and Napoleon were decidedly in favour of a change in strategy, running down the bombardment of Sevastopol in order to concentrate on the conquest of the Crimea as a whole, which both men saw as the beginning of a larger war against Russia. The new plan would have the advantage of involving the Crimean Tatars on the allied side. Above all, it would represent a return to the sort of fighting in the open field in which the allied armies had proved themselves technically superior to the Russians at Alma and Inkerman. It was in the skill and rifle power of their infantry that the allies had their greatest superiority over the Russians – advantages that counted for very little in the siege warfare of Sevastopol. In engineering and artillery, the Russians were at least the equal of the British and the French.

Napoleon was the most enthusiastic about a change of strategy. Though the occupation of Sevastopol was central to his aims, he was convinced that the town would not fall until it was fully encircled, but, when it was, it would fall without a fight. He proposed that instead of bombarding the city from the south, the allies should land an army at Alushta, 70 kilometres to the east, and march from there towards Simferopol, through which most of the Russian army’s supplies were transported. The British agreed with the broad outlines of Napoleon’s strategy, although as part of the bargain they managed to dissuade him from his daring idea of going to the Crimea to take command of the military operations himself. The ‘Emperor’s plan’ (as the Alushta expedition became known in French circles) was included as one of three options for a diversionary attack on the Crimean interior, the others being an offensive by allied troops based at Sevastopol against Bakhchiserai, and the landing of a force at Evpatoria which would march across the plain to Simferopol. The two war ministers signed a memorandum of the agreed plan, which Panmure sent to Raglan on the authority of the British cabinet. Panmure’s instructions left it up to Raglan to choose between the three alternatives, but made it clear that he was being ordered to embark on one of them. The trenches at Sevastopol were to be left in the hands of 60,000 men (30,000 Turks and 30,000 French), whose new task would be to maintain a barrage to prevent the Russians from breaking out of the city rather than continue with any intention of taking the offensive.

Raglan was sceptical of the new plan. He wanted to continue with the bombardment, which he was convinced was on the point of a breakthrough, and believed that a field offensive would not leave enough troops to defend the allied positions before Sevastopol. In an act of open defiance, if not mutiny, against his political superiors, Raglan convened a council of war in the Crimea at which he told his allied commanders, Canrobert and Omer Pasha, that Panmure’s memorandum was only a ‘suggestion’ and that he (Raglan) could proceed with it or not as he thought fit. Raglan dragged his heels over the new plan, coming up with various excuses not to take men away from the siege, until Canrobert, who was in favour of the field campaign and had several times offered to place his troops under Raglan’s command if only he would start it, exploded in frustration. ‘The field plan worked out by Your Majesty’, Canrobert informed Napoleon, ‘has been rendered practically impossible by the non-cooperation of the Commander in Chief of the English Army.’²⁰

For many years the French would blame the British for the failure of the plan to march on Simferopol and conquer the rest of the Crimea. They had good reason to be enraged by Raglan, who could have been removed by Palmerston for insubordination, if not incompetence, after his refusal to implement the order for an attack on the Crimean interior. With their superior rifle power, and the support of the Tatar population on the plain, there was good reason to suppose that a field campaign would have captured Simferopol and cut off the Russians’ main route of supply through the peninsula. This was exactly the scenario the Russians had feared most, which was why the Tsar had ordered the attack on Evpatoria in February. The Russians knew how vulnerable they were to an attack on their supply lines, and had always seen the route from Evpatoria as the most likely one for an allied offensive towards Simferopol or Perekop. As they later admitted, they were amazed that the British and the French had never tried to launch such an attack.²¹

The one serious effort the allies made to cut off Sevastopol from its bases of supply was their raid on the port of Kerch, which controlled the supply lines across the Sea of Azov, although it took two attempts to accomplish it. Plans for an attack had been advanced at the start of the campaign, but the first order for the action was not made until 26 March, when Panmure wrote to Raglan instructing him to organize a ‘combined operation by sea and land’ to ‘reduce the defences of Kerch’. It was an attractive proposal, not least because it would involve the Royal Navy, which had hardly been used so far, at a time when the British contribution to the allied effort was being seriously questioned by the French. Canrobert was initially doubtful about the operation, but on 29 April he gave his agreement for a squadron of French warships under the command of Admiral Bruat and 8,500 soldiers to join the expedition, which would be led by Lieutenant General Brown, the veteran commander of the Light Division. The allied fleet set off on 3 May, sailing north-west towards Odessa to disguise its intentions from the Russians before doubling back towards Kerch. But just before it reached its destination, a fast boat caught up with the fleet and delivered an order from Canrobert for the French ships to return. Shortly after the fleet had left, the new telegram line to Paris had brought an order from Napoleon for Canrobert, instructing him to bring up the reserves from Constantinople: since Bruat’s ships would be required, Canrobert reluctantly decided to withdraw from the Kerch attack. The Royal Navy was forced to turn back, and Canrobert was disgraced in British (and many French) eyes.²²

The recall of the expedition antagonized the already worsening relations between the British and the French. It played a major part in Canrobert’s decision to resign his command on 16 May. He felt that his position had been undermined, that he had let the British down, and hence had no authority to compel Raglan to carry out the plans for a field campaign. The new French commander-in-chief, General Pélissier, a short, stocky man with a rough-and-ready manner, was far more decisive, more a man of action, than Canrobert, who had long been nicknamed ‘Robert Can’t’ by the British. Pélissier’s appointment was greeted with enthusiasm in the British camp. Colonel Rose, the British commissioner at the headquarters of the French army, who had been close to Canrobert, wrote to Clarendon that the time had come for a more ‘can-do’ approach to the war and that Pélissier was the man to deliver it:

Eager to repair relations with the British, Pélissier agreed to revive the operation against Kerch, although he concurred with Raglan that the main target of the allied operations should remain the Sevastopol defences. On 24 May sixty ships of the allied fleet set off with a combined force of 7,000 French, 5,000 Turks and 3,000 British troops under Brown’s command. Seeing the approach of the armada, most of the Russian inhabitants of Kerch fled to the countryside. After a brief bombardment, the allied troops were able to come ashore without opposition. Brown was met by a deputation of the Russian civilians who were left. They told him they were frightened of attacks by the local Tatar population and begged him to protect them. Brown ignored their pleas. Ordering the destruction of the arsenal in Kerch, Brown left a small force of mainly French and Turkish toops in the town and marched with the remainder of his troops to the important fort at Yenikale, further along the coast, where the looting of Russian property continued under Brown’s supervision. Meanwhile, the allied warships entered the Sea of Azov, sailed towards the Russian coastline, destroyed Russian shipping, and laid waste to the ports of Mariupol and Taganrog.[50]

The attacks on Russian property in Kerch and Yenikale soon descended into a drunken rampage, and some terrible atrocities by the allied troops. The worst took place in Kerch, where the local Tatar population took advantage of the allied occupation to carry out a violent revenge against the Russians of the town. Aided by the Turkish troops, the Tatars looted shops and houses, raped Russian women, and killed and mutilated hundreds of Russians, including even children and babies. Among the excesses was the destruction of the town’s museum, with its rich and magnificent collection of Hellenic art, an outrage reported by Russell in The Times on 28 May:

For several days Brown did nothing to stop the atrocities, even though he had received reports that a contingent of French and British troops had taken part in the looting. Brown saw the Tatars as allies, taking the view that they were engaged in a ‘legitimate rebellion’ against Russian rule. Eventually, having been informed of the worst atrocities, Brown dispatched a tiny force (just twenty British cavalrymen) to restore order. They were far too few in number to have any real effect, though they did shoot some British troops whom they had caught committing rape.²⁴

According to Russian witnesses, it was not just the allied soldiers who had taken part in the looting, the violence and rape; it was also officers. ‘I saw several English officers carrying to their ship furniture and sculptures, and all sorts of other items they had plundered from our homes,’ recalled one resident of Kerch. Several women claimed they had been raped by British officers.²⁵

The development of all these broader plans was held back because, with the coming of the spring, the British and French troops got bogged down once again in the siege of Sevastopol, which still held first place in the allied strategy. Despite the recognition that a change of plan was needed for the siege to work, the allies remained wedded to the idea that one last surge would bring the walls of Sevastopol tumbling down and force Russia to accept a humiliating peace.

In terms of actual fighting, the siege had gone through a quiet period in the winter months, as both sides concentrated on the strengthening of their defensive works. The French did most of the trench digging on the allied side, mainly because the British-held ground was very rocky. According to Herbé, they dug 66 kilometres of trenches, and the British just 15, during the eleven months of the siege. It was slow, exhausting, dangerous work, cutting into the hard ground in freezing temperatures, dynamiting the rock that lay underneath, under constant fire from the enemy. ‘Every metre of our trenches was literally at the cost of one man’s life and often two,’ recalled Noir.²⁶

The Russians were particularly active in their defensive works. Under the direction of their engineering genius Totleben, they developed their earthworks and trenches on a more sophisticated level than ever before seen in the history of siege warfare. In the early stages of the siege the Russian fortifications were little more than hastily improvised earthworks reinforced with wickerwork, fascines and gabions; but new and more formidable defences were added in the winter months. The bastions were reinforced by the addition of casemates – fortified gun emplacements dug several metres underground and covered with thick ship-timbers and earthworks that made them proof to the heaviest bombardment. Inside the most heavily fortified bastions, the Malakhov and the Redan (the Third), there was a maze of bunkers and apartments, including one, in the Redan, with a billiard table and ottomans, and in each there was a small chapel and a hospital.²⁷

To protect these crucial bastions the Russians built new works outside the city walls: the Mamelon (the Kamchatka Lunette) to defend the Malakhov, and the Quarry Pits in front of the Redan. The Mamelon was constructed by the soldiers of the Kamchatka Regiment (from which it derived its Russian name) under almost constant fire from the French during most of February and early March. So many men were killed in building it that not all of them could be evacuated, even under cover of the night, and many dead were left in the earthworks. The Mamelon was itself a complex fortress system protected by the twin redoubts of the White Works on its left flank (so named because of the white clay soil exposed by the excavation of the defences). Henri Loizillon, a French engineer, described the surprise of his fellow-soldiers at what else they found inside the Mamelon when they captured it in early June:

Amid all this frenzied building there was little major fighting. But the Russians launched sporadic raids at night against the trenches of the British and the French. Some of the most daring were led by a seaman called Pyotr Koshka, whose exploits were so famous that he became a national hero in Russia. It was not entirely clear to the allied troops what the purpose of these sorties was. They seldom caused any lasting damage to their defensive works, and the losses they inflicted on the men were trifling, usually less than the Russians lost themselves. Herbé thought their aim was to add to the allies’ fatigue because the constant threat of an attack at night made it impossible for them to sleep in the trenches (that was in fact the Russians’ intention). According to Major Whitworth Porter of the Royal Engineers, the first intimation of an imminent attack would be ‘the discovery of several dusky forms creeping over the parapet’.

The allies also launched surprise attacks against the Russian outworks – their aim being not to capture these positions but to weaken the morale of the Russian troops. The Zouaves were the ideal soldiers to carry out these raids: in hand-to-hand fighting they were the most effective in the world. On the night of 23/4 February, their celebrated 2nd Regiment stormed and briefly occupied the newly constructed White Works, just to show the Russians that they could capture them at will, before retreating with 203 wounded men, and 62 officers and soldiers dead, whom they carried back, under heavy fire, rather than abandon them to the Russians.³⁰

In contrast to the sorties of the allies, some of the attacks by the Russians were large enough to suggest that their intention was to drive the allies from their positions, though in reality they were never powerful enough for that. On the night of 22/3 March, the Russians launched a sortie of some 5,000 men against the French positions opposite the Mamelon. It was their largest sortie yet. The brunt of the assault was taken by the 3rd Zouaves, who held off their attackers in fierce hand-to-hand fighting in the dark, illuminated only by the flashes of the rifles and muskets. The Russians spread out in a flanking movement and quickly captured the weakly defended British trenches on their right, from which they aimed their fire into the French side, but the Zouaves continued to hold firm, until at last British reinforcements arrived, enabling the Zouaves to push the Russians back towards the Mamelon. The sortie cost the Russians a great deal: 1,100 men were wounded, and more than 500 killed, nearly all of them in or near the trenches of the Zouaves. After the fighting was over, the two sides agreed to a six-hour armistice to collect the dead and wounded who were clogging up the battlefield. Men who had been at war only a few moments previously began to fraternize, speaking to each other with hand signals and the odd word in each other’s language, though nearly all the Russian officers could speak French well, the adopted language of the Russian aristocracy. Captain Nathaniel Steevens of the 88th Regiment of Foot witnessed the scene:

Apart from these sorties, the troops stayed on their respective sides in the early months of 1855. ‘The siege is now only nominal,’ Henry Clifford wrote to his family on 31 March. ‘We fire a few shots during the day, but all seems at a standstill.’ It was a strange situation, since there was plenty of artillery sitting idle, implying almost a loss of belief in the siege. In these months there was far more digging than shooting to be done – a fact that did not please many of the troops. According to Whitworth Porter of the Royal Engineers, the British soldier did not like ‘spade-work’, thinking it not soldier-like. He quotes an Irishman in the infantry:

As the siege settled into a monotonous routine of exchanging fire with the enemy, the soldiers in the trenches became accustomed to living under constant bombardment. To an outsider, they seemed almost nonchalant about the dangers that surrounded them. On his first visit to the trenches, Charles Mismer, a 22-year-old dragoon in the French cavalry, was amazed to see the soldiers playing cards or sleeping in the trenches while bombs and shells fell around them. The troops came to recognize the various bombs and shells from their different sounds, which told them what evasive action they should take: the round shot, ‘rushing through the air with a sharp, shrill shriek, very startling to the nerves of the young soldier’, as Porter recalled it; the volley of grape, ‘buzzing along with a sound not unlike that of a covey of birds very strong on the wing’; the ‘bouquet’, a shower of small shells enclosed in a bomb, ‘each one leaving a long curved trail of light in its track and, as they reach their destination, lighting up the atmosphere with short, fitful flashes, as they burst in succession’; and the larger mortar shell, ‘rising proudly and grandly in the air, easily to be discerned in the night by the fiery train of its burning fuse, tracing a majestic curve high in mid-air, until, having attained its extreme altitude, it commences to descend, falling faster and faster, till down it swoops… making a sound in its passage through the air like the chirping of a pee-wit’. It was impossible to tell where the mortar shell would land, or where its splinters would explode, so ‘all one could do when one heard the birdlike noise was to lie face down against the earth and hope’.³³

Gradually, as the siege dragged on without any gains by either side, the exchange of fire assumed a symbolic character. In quiet periods, when the men grew bored, they turned it into sport. François Luguez, a captain in the Zouaves, recalled how his men would play shooting games with the Russians: one side would raise on the end of their bayonet a piece of cloth for the other side to shoot – each shot being greeted with a cheer and laughter if it hit, and jeering if it missed.³⁴

With less and less to fear, the sentries in the picquets began to venture into no man’s land to entertain themselves or warm themselves at night. From time to time there was some fraternization with the Russians, whose own outposts were no further than a football-pitch length away. Calthorpe recorded one such incident, when a group of unarmed Russian soldiers approached the British picquets:

To while away the time the soldiers developed a wide variety of pursuits and games. In the bastions of Sevastopol, noted Ershov, ‘card games of all sorts were played around the clock’. Officers played chess and read voraciously. In the casemate of the Sixth Bastion there was even a grand piano, and concerts were arranged with musicians from the other bastions. ‘To begin with,’ writes Ershov, ‘the concerts were dignified and ceremonious with proper attention to the rules of listening to classical music, but gradually, as our mood changed, there was a corresponding tendency towards national melodies or folk songs and dances. Once a masked ball was arranged, and one cadet appeared in a woman’s dress to sing folk songs.’³⁶

Theatrical amusements were very popular in the French camp, where the Zouaves had their own theatre troupe, a transvestite vaudeville, that entertained huge crowds of noisy soldiers in a wooden shed. ‘Imagine a Zouave dressed up as a shepherdess and flirting with the men (faisant la coquette)!’ recalled André Damas, a chaplain in the French army. ‘And then another Zouave dressed up as a young lady of society, and playing hard to get (jouant la précieuse)! I have never seen anything as funny or as talented as these gentlemen. They were hilarious.’³⁷

Horse racing was also popular, especially among the British, whose cavalry was almost totally unoccupied. But it was not only the cavalry horses that took part in these races. Whitworth Porter attended a meeting organized by the 3rd Division on the downs. ‘The Day was bitterly cold,’ he noted in his diary on 18 March,

There was a lot of drinking in these relatively idle months. In all the armies it resulted in a growing general problem of indiscipline, swearing, insolence, drunken brawls and violence, as well as acts of insubordination by the men, all of which suggested that morale among the troops was becoming dangerously low. In the British army (and there is no reason to suppose that it was worse affected than the Russian or the French) a staggering 5,546 men (roughly one in eight of the entire army in the field) behaved so badly that they were court-martialled for various acts of drunkenness during the Crimean War. Most soldiers drank a good-sized tumbler of alcohol with their breakfast – vodka for the Russians, rum for the British and wine for the French – and another with dinner. Many also drank during the day – and some were never sober throughout the entire siege. Drinking was the primary recreation of soldiers in all the armies, including the Turks, who liked the sweet Crimean wine. Henry Clifford recalled the drinking culture in the allied camps:

The sudden arrival of warm spring weather raised the morale of the allied troops. ‘Today it is spring,’ Herbé wrote on 6 April; ‘the sun has not left us for three weeks, and eveything has changed in appearance.’ The French soldiers planted gardens near their tents. Many, like Herbé, shaved their winter beards, washed their linen, and generally spruced up their appearance, so that ‘if the ladies of Sevastopol should give a ball and invite the French officers, our uniforms would still shine brightly among their elegant costumes’. After such a cruel winter, when all was hidden under mud and snow, the Crimea appeared to be suddenly transformed into a place of great beauty, with a profusion of colourful spring flowers on the heathlands, fields of rye grass a metre or so high, and birdsong everywhere. ‘We have had a few warm days only,’ wrote Russell of The Times on 17 March,

In the British camp, the spirit of the troops was lifted by improvements in the supply of foodstuffs and other basic goods, mainly as a result of the private enterprise that took advantage of the opportunities offered by the failure of the government to provide for the troops in the Crimea. By the spring of 1855 a vast array of private traders and sutlers had set up stalls and shops in Kadikoi. Although prices were extortionate, anything could be purchased there, from potted meats and pickles, bottled beer and Greek raki to roasted coffee, tins of Albert biscuits, chocolate, cigars, toiletries, paper, pens and ink, and the best champage from Oppenheim’s or Fortnum & Mason, which both had outlets in the main bazaar. There were saddlers, cobblers, tailors, bakers and hoteliers, including the famous Mary Seacole, a Jamaican woman who provided hearty meals and hospitality, herbal remedies and medicines at the ‘British Hotel’ she set up at a place she named Spring Hill near Kadikoi.

Born in Kingston in 1805 to a Scottish father and Creole mother, this extraordinary woman had worked as a nurse in the British military stations in Jamaica and had married an Englishman called Seacole, who died within a year. She had later run a hotel and general store with her brother in Panama, where she had coped with outbreaks of disease. At the start of the Crimean War she travelled to England and attempted to get herself recruited as a nurse with Florence Nightingale, but she was rejected several times, no doubt partly because of the colour of her skin. Determined to make money and to help the war effort as a sutler and hotelier, she teamed up with Thomas Day, one of her husband’s distant relatives, to set up a company, ‘Seacole and Day’. Setting sail from Gravesend on 15 February, they collected stores in Constantinople, where they also recruited a young Greek Jew (whom she would call ‘Jew Johnny’). Although rather grandly named, the ‘British Hotel’ was really just a restaurant and general store in what Russell described as ‘an iron storehouse with wooden sheds’, but it was much loved by British officers, its main clientele, for whom it was a sort of club, where they could indulge themselves and enjoy comfort food that reminded them of home.⁴¹

For the ordinary troops, Mary Seacole and the private stores of Kadikoi had less significance in improving food provisioning than the celebrated chef Alexis Soyer, who also arrived in the Crimea during the spring. Born in France in 1810, Soyer was the head chef at the Reform Club in London, where he came to the attention of the leaders of the Whig and Liberal governments. He was well known for his Shilling Cookery Book (1854), found in every home of the self-improving middle class. In February 1855 he wrote a letter to The Times in response to an article about the poor condition of the hospital kitchens in Scutari. Volunteering to advise the army on cooking, Soyer travelled to Scutari, but soon left with Nightingale for the Crimea, where she visited the hospitals at Balaklava and fell dangerously ill herself, forcing her to return to Scutari. Soyer took over the running of the kitchens at the Balaklava Hospital, cooking daily for more than a thousand men with his team of French and Italian chefs. Soyer’s main significance was his introduction of collective food provisioning to the British army through mobile field canteens – a system practised in the French army since the Napoleonic Wars. He designed his own field stove, the Soyer Stove, which remained in British military service until the second half of the twentieth century, and he had 400 stoves shipped in from Britain, enough to feed the whole army in the Crimea. He set up army bakeries and developed a type of flat bread that could keep for months. He trained in every regiment a soldier-cook, who would follow his simple but nutritious recipes. Soyer’s genius was his ability to convert army rations into palatable food. He specialized in soups, like this one for fifty men:

The construction of a railway from Balaklava to the British camp above Sevastopol was the key to the improvement of supply. The idea for the Crimean railway – the first in the history of warfare – went back to the previous November, when news of the terrible conditions of the British army first broke in The Times, and it became apparent that one of the main problems was the need to transport all supplies along the muddy track from Balaklava to the heights. These reports were read by Samuel Peto, a railwayman who had made his mark as a successful London building contractor[51] before moving into railways in the 1840s. With a grant of £100,000 from the Aberdeen government, Peto assembled the materials for the railway and recruited a huge team of mainly Irish and very unruly navvies. They started to arrive in the Crimea at the end of January. The navvies worked at a furious pace, laying up to as much as half a kilometre of track a day, and by the end of March the entire railway line of 10 kilometres connecting Balaklava with the loading bays near the British camp had been completed. It was just in time to help with the transport of the newly arrived heavy guns and mortar shells that Raglan had instructed to be taken up from Balaklava to the heights in preparation for a second bombardment of Sevastopol which the allies had agreed to begin on Easter Monday, 9 April.⁴³

The plan was to overwhelm Sevastopol with ten days of continual bombardment, followed by an assault on the town. With five hundred French and British guns firing round the clock, almost twice as many as in the first bombardment of October, this now became not only the heaviest bombardment of the siege, but the heaviest in history until that time. Among the allied troops, desperate for an ending of the war, there were high expectations for the attack, making them impatient for it to begin. ‘The works are continuing, as always, and we are hardly advancing!’ Herbé wrote to his family on 6 April. ‘The impatience of the officers and soldiers has created a certain discontent, everybody blames each other for the mistakes of the past, and one senses that an energetic breakthrough is now needed to reimpose order… Things cannot go on like this much longer.’⁴⁴

The Russians knew about the preparations for a bombardment. Deserters from the allied camp had warned them about it, and they could see with their own eyes the intense activity in the enemy’s redoubts, where new guns appeared every day.⁴⁵ On the night of Easter Sunday, a few hours before the shelling was due to begin, prayers had been held in churches throughout the town. There were also prayers in all the bastions. Priests processed along the Russian defences with icons, including the holy icon of St Sergius which had been sent by the Troitsky Monastery in Sergiev Posad on the orders of the Tsar. It had accompanied the early Romanovs on their campaigns and had been with the Moscow militia in 1812. Everybody felt the immense significance of these holy rituals. There was a general sense that the city’s destiny was about to be decided by divine providence, a feeling reinforced by the fact that both sides were celebrating Easter, which that year fell on the same day in the Orthodox and Latin calendars. ‘We prayed with fervency,’ wrote a Russian nurse. ‘We prayed with all our might for the city and ourselves.’

At the midnight Mass at the main church, so brightly lit with candles that it could be seen from the enemy’s trenches, a vast crowd spilled onto the streets and stood in silent prayer. Every person held a candle, bowing periodically to cross themselves, many people kneeling on the ground, while priests processed with icons and the choir sang. In the middle of the night there was a violent storm and the rain came pouring down. But no one moved: they thought the storm was an act of God. The worshippers remained out in the rain until first light, when the bombardment started and they dispersed, still dressed in their finest Easter clothes, to help in the defence of the bastions.⁴⁶

A storm picked up that morning, so intense that the booms of the first guns were ‘almost overpowered by the howling of the wind, and the dull monotonous plashing of the rain, which continued to descend with unabated violence’, according to Whitworth Porter, who watched the bombardment from the heights. Sevastopol was completely shrouded in black gunsmoke and the morning fog. Inside the town, people could not tell where the bombs and shells were coming from. ‘We knew that there was an enormous allied fleet at the harbour entrance just in front of us but we could not see it through the smoke and fog, the driving wind and pouring rain,’ recalled Ershov. Confused and frightened crowds of screaming people ran about the streets in search of cover, many of them heading towards Fort Nicholas, the one remaining place of relative safety, which now began to function like a sort of bustling ghetto within Sevastopol. In the centre of the town, there were bombed-out houses everywhere. The streets were filled with building debris, broken glass and cannonballs, which ‘rolled around like rubber balls’. Ershov noticed little human dramas everywhere:

In the Assembly of Nobles, the main hospital, nurses struggled to cope with the wounded, who arrived by the thousand. In the operating room, Pirogov and his fellow-surgeons went on amputating limbs while a wall collapsed from a direct hit. There was no attempt by the allies to avoid the bombing of the city’s hospitals. Their firing was indiscriminate, and among the wounded there were many women and children.⁴⁷

Inside the Fourth Bastion, the most dangerous place throughout the siege, the soldiers ‘hardly ever slept’, according to Captain Lipkin, one of the battery commanders in the bastion, who wrote to his brother on 21 April. ‘The most we could allow ourselves was a few minutes’ sleep dressed in our full uniforms and boots.’ The bombardment from the allied guns, only a couple of hundred metres away, was incessant and deafening. The bombs and shells came in so quickly that the defenders had no sense of their danger until they landed. One wrong move could get them killed. Living under constant fire bred a new mentality. Ershov, who visited the bastion during the bombardment, felt ‘like an inexperienced tourist entering a different world’, although he himself was a seasoned artilleryman. ‘Everybody rushed about, there seemed to be confusion everywhere; I could not understand or make out anything.’⁴⁸

Tolstoy returned to Sevastopol in the middle of the bombardment. He had heard the bombs from the River Belbek, 12 kilometres away, where he had spent the winter in the Russian camp attached to the 11th Artillery Brigade. Having decided that he could best serve the army with his pen, and wanting time to write, he had applied to join the staff of General Gorchakov as an aide-de-camp. But instead, much to his annoyance, he had been transferred with his battery to the Fourth Bastion, right in the thick of the battle. ‘I’m irritated,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘especially now when I am ill [he had caught a cold], by the fact that it doesn’t occur to anybody that I’m good for anything except chair à canon [cannon fodder], and the most useless kind at that.’

In fact, once he had got over his cold, Tolstoy’s spirits rose, and he started to enjoy himself. He was on quartermaster duty at the bastion four days out of eight. Off duty, he stayed in Sevastopol in a modest but clean dwelling on the boulevard, where he could hear the military band playing. But when he was on duty he slept in the casemate in a small cell furnished with a campbed, a table littered with papers, the manuscript of his memoir Youth, a clock and an icon with its vigil light. A fir post held up the ceiling, from which was suspended a tarpaulin sheet to catch falling rubble. Throughout his stay in Sevastopol, Tolstoy was accompanied by a serf called Alexei, who had been with him since he had gone to university (he figures in more than one of Tolstoy’s works as ‘Alyosha’). When Tolstoy was on duty at the bastion, his rations from the city were carried out to him by Alexei, a duty involving considerable danger.⁴⁹

The cannonade was incessant. Every day, 2,000 shells landed on the bastion. Tolstoy was afraid, but he quickly got the better of his fear, and discovered a new courage in himself. Two days after grumbling at being treated as cannon fodder, he confided to his diary: ‘The constant charm of danger and my observations of the soldiers I’m living with, the sailors and the very methods of war are so pleasant that I don’t want to leave here.’ He began to feel a close attachment to his fellow-soldiers in the bastion, one of whom would later remember him as a ‘fine comrade’ whose stories ‘had captured the spirit of us all in the heat of the battle’. As Tolstoy wrote to his brother, expressing an idea that would lie at the heart of War and Peace, he ‘liked the experience of living under fire’ with these ‘simple and kind men, whose goodness is apparent during a real war’.⁵⁰

For ten days the bombing never stopped. At the end of the bombardment the Russians counted 160,000 shells and mortars that hit Sevastopol, destroying hundreds of buildings, and wounding or killing 4,712 soldiers and civilians. The allies did not have it all their own way. The Russians counter-attacked with 409 guns and 57 mortars, firing 88,751 cannonballs and shells during the ten days. But it soon became apparent that the Russians lacked the ammunition to maintain their resistance. Orders had been given to the battery commanders to fire once for every two shots fired by the enemy. Captain Edward Gage of the Royal Artillery wrote home on the evening of 13 April:

The reduction of the Russian fire handed the initiative to the allies, whose barrage steadily increased. The Mamelon and the Fifth Bastion were almost entirely destroyed. Expecting an assault, the Russians frantically reinforced their garrisons, and put most of their defenders into the bunkers underground, ready to ambush the storming parties. But the assault never came. Perhaps the allied commanders were put off by the stubborn and courageous resistance of the Russians, who rebuilt their battered bastions under heavy bombardment. But the allies were also divided among themselves. It was during this period that Canrobert began openly to express his frustrations. He supported the new allied strategy, which entailed running down the bombardment of Sevastopol to concentrate on the conquest of the Crimea as a whole, and was reluctant to commit his troops to an assault which he understood would cost a lot of lives when they might be better used for this new plan. He was further discouraged from an attack by his chief engineer, General Adolphe Niel, who had received secret instructions from Paris to delay a move against Sevastopol until the Emperor Napoleon – then still considering a journey to the Crimea – arrived to take command of the assault himself.

Unwilling to act alone, the British confined themselves to a sortie on the night of 19 April against the Russians’ rifle pits on the eastern edge of the Vorontsov Ravine which prevented them from developing their works towards the Redan. The pits were captured by the 77th Regiment after heavy fighting with the Russians, but the victory came at a price, in the loss of its commander, Colonel Thomas Egerton, a giant of a man at over 2 metres, and his second-in-command, the 23-year-old Captain Audley Lemprière, who stood less than 1.5 metres tall, as Nathaniel Steevens, a witness to the fighting, described in a letter to his family on 23 April:

For the moment, without the French, this was as much as the British could achieve. On 24 April Raglan wrote to Lord Panmure: ‘We must prevail upon Gen. Canrobert to take the Mamelon, otherwise we cannot move forward with any prospect of success or safety.’ It was vital for the French to clear the Russians out of the Mamelon before they could mount an assault on the Malakhov, just as it was crucial for the British to occupy the Quarry Pits before they could attack the Redan. Under Canrobert the action was delayed. But once he handed over his command to Pélissier on 16 May, who was as determined as Raglan to take Sevastopol by an assault, the French committed to a combined attack on the Mamelon and the Quarries.

The operation began on 6 June with a bombardment of the outworks which lasted until six o’clock the following evening, when the allied assault was scheduled to begin. The signal for the start of the attack was to be given by Raglan and Pélissier, who were to meet on the field of action. But at the agreed hour the French commander was fast asleep, having thought to take a nap before the beginning of the fighting, and no one dared to wake the fiery general. Pélissier arrived an hour late for his rendezvous with Raglan, by which time the battle had begun – the French troops rushing forward first, followed by the British, who had heard their cheers.[52] The order for attack had been given by General Bosquet, in whose entourage was Fanny Duberly:

Led by the Zouaves, the French rushed forward, without any order, towards the Mamelon, from which a tremendous volley of artillery fire forced them back. Many of the troops began to scatter in panic and had to be regrouped by their officers before they were ready to attack again. This time the attackers, running through a storm of musket fire, reached the ditch at the bottom of the Mamelon’s defensive walls, which they climbed, while the Russians fired down on them or (without time to reload their muskets) threw down the stones of the parapet. ‘The wall was four metres high,’ recalled Octave Cullet, who was in the first line of attack; ‘it was difficult to climb, and we had no ladders, but our spirit was irrepressible’:

The Zouaves did not stop in the Mamelon but continued to rush on towards the Malakhov – a spontaneous action by soldiers caught up in the fury of the fight – only to be mowed down in their hundreds by the Russian guns. Lieutenant Colonel St George of the Royal Artillery, who watched the dreadful scene, described it in a letter on 9 June:

Meanwhile the British attacked the Quarries. The Russians had left only a small force in the Quarry Pits, relying on their ability to retake them with reinforcements from the Redan should they be stormed. The British took the Quarries easily but soon found that they had not enough men to hold them, as wave after wave of Russians attacked them from the Redan. For several hours, the two sides were engaged in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, as one side expelled the other from the rifle pits, only to be forced back yet again by reinforcements from the other side. By five o’clock in the morning, when the last Russian attack was finally repulsed, there were heaps of dead and wounded on the ground.

At midday on 9 June a white flag was raised from the Malakhov, and another appeared on the Mamelon, now in the hands of the French, signalling a truce to collect the bodies from the battlefield. The French had made enormous sacrifices to capture the crucial Mamelon and White Works, losing almost 7,500 dead and wounded men. Herbé went out into no man’s land with General Failly to agree the arrangements with the Russian General Polussky. After the exchange of a few formalities, ‘the conversation took a friendly turn – Paris, St Petersburg, the hardships of the previous winter’, Herbé noted in a letter to his family that evening, and while the dead were cleared away, ‘cigars were exchanged’ between the officers. ‘One might have thought we were friends meeting for a smoke in the middle of a hunt,’ Herbé wrote. After a while some officers appeared with a magnum of champagne, and General Failly, who had ordered them to fetch it, proposed a ‘toast to peace’ that was heartily accepted by the Russian officers. Six hours later, when several thousand bodies had been cleared away, it was time to end the truce. After each side had been given time to check that none of their own men had been left in no man’s land, the white flags were taken down and, as Polussky had suggested, a blank shot was fired from the Malakhov to signal the resumption of hostilities.⁵⁶

With the capture of the Mamelon and the Quarry Pits, everything was ready for an assault on the Malakhov and the Redan. The date set for the attack was 18 June – the 40th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. It was hoped that an allied victory would heal the old divisions between the British and the French and give them something new to celebrate together on that day.

Victory was bound to cost a lot of lives. To storm the Russian forts, the attackers would have to carry ladders and run uphill across several hundred metres of open ground, traversing ditches and abbatis[53] under heavy fire from the Russian guns on the Malakhov and the Redan, as well as flanking fire from the Flagstaff Bastion. When they reached the forts, they would have to use their ladders to get into the ditch and climb the walls, under point-blank fire from the enemy above, before overcoming the defenders on the parapets and fighting off the Russians, amassed behind more barricades inside the forts, until reinforcements could arrive.

It was agreed by the allies that the French would attack the Malakhov first, and then, as soon as they had silenced the Russian guns, the British infantry would begin their storming of the Redan. On Pélissier’s insistence, the assault would be limited to the Malakhov and the Redan rather than a broad attack against the town. The assault on the Redan was probably superfluous because the Russians were almost certain to abandon it once the French were able to bring their artillery to bear against it from the Malakhov. But Raglan thought that it was essential for the British to storm something, even at the cost of unnecessary losses, if this battle was to achieve its symbolic aim as a joint operation on the anniversary of Waterloo. The French had been consistently critical of Britain’s failure to match their own troop commitments in the Crimea.

Heavy casualties were expected. The French were told that half the stormers would be killed before even reaching the Malakhov. Those in the first line of attack had to be offered money or promotion before they could be persuaded to take part. In the British camp, the stormers were known as the Forlorn Hope, derived from the Dutch, Verloren hoop, which actually meant ‘lost troops’, but the English mistranslation was appropriate.⁵⁷

The night before the assault on the Malakhov, the French soldiers settled down in their bivouacs, each man trying to prepare himself for the events of the next day. Some tried to get some sleep, others cleaned their guns, or talked among themselves, and still others found a quiet place to say a prayer. There was a general sense of foreboding. Many soldiers wrote their name and home address on a ticket which they hung around their neck so that anyone who found them if they died would be able to inform their family. Others wrote a farewell letter to their loved ones, giving it to the army chaplain to send off in case they died. André Damas had a large postbag. The chaplain was impressed by the calmness of the men in these final moments before battle. Few, it seemed to him, were animated by a hatred of the enemy or by the desire for revenge stirred up by the rivalry between nations. One soldier wrote:

Not all the allied preparations went to plan. During the evening there were desertions from the French and British camps – not only by soldiers but by officers who had no stomach for the imminent assault and crossed over to the enemy. The Russians were warned of the assault by a French corporal who had deserted from the General Staff and carried to the Russians a detailed plan of the French attack. ‘The Russians knew, in precise detail, the position and strength of all our battalions,’ wrote Herbé, who was later told this by a senior Russian officer. They had also received warnings from British deserters, including one from the 28th (North Gloucestershire) Regiment. But even without these warnings, the Russians were alerted by the noisy preparations of the British on the evening of the 17th. Lieutenant Colonel James Alexander of the 14th Regiment recalled that ‘the men, being excited, did not go to sleep but remained up till we were directed to fall in at midnight. Our camp looked like a fair, lighted up, with a buzz of voices everywhere. The Russians must have remarked on this.’⁵⁹

They certainly did. Prokofii Podpalov, an orderly to General Golev in the Redan, recalled noticing the steady build-up of activity in the Quarries in the evening – the ‘sound of voices, of footsteps in the trenches, and the rumbling of the wheels of the gun carriages being moved towards us’, which ‘made it obvious that the allies were preparing to give the signal for an assault’. At that moment the Russians had been withdrawing their forces from the Redan. Men were going back into town for the night. But noticing these signs of an imminent attack, Golev ordered all his troops to return to the Redan, where they mounted the cannon and took up their positions on the parapets. Podpalov recalled the ‘extraordinary silence’ of the men as they waited for the assault to begin. ‘That grave-like silence contained within it something sinister: everybody felt that something terrible was approaching, something powerful and threatening, with which we would fight for life and death.’⁶⁰

The French attack had been scheduled to begin well before first light, at three o’clock, with three hours of bombardment, followed by the storming of the Malakhov at 6 a.m., an hour after sunrise. During the evening of the 17th, however, Pélissier made a sudden change of plan. He had decided that in those first minutes of daylight the Russians could not fail to see the French preparing to attack, and they would bring up infantry reserves to defend the Malakhov. Late that evening he issued a new order for the stormers to attack the Malakhov directly at 3 a.m., when the rocket signal to begin would be fired from the Victoria Redoubt, behind the French lines near the Mamelon. This was not the only sudden change that evening. In a fit of temper, and seeking to claim the expected success, Pélissier also removed General Bosquet, who had questioned his decision to begin the assault without a bombardment. Bosquet had a detailed knowledge of the Russian positions, and he had the confidence of the soldiers; he was replaced by a general who had neither. The French troops were unsettled by the sudden changes – none more so than General Mayran, the man chosen to lead the assault with the 97th Regiment, who was personally insulted by the fiery Pélissier in another argument, prompting Mayran to storm off to his post saying, ‘Il n’y a plus qu’à se faire tuer’ (‘There’s nothing left to do but get killed’).⁶¹

It was Mayran, in his eagerness, who made a fatal blunder, when he mistook a shell trailing light from its fuse as the rocket signal to attack, and ordered the 97th to begin the assault fifteen minutes too early, when the rest of the French troops were not ready. According to Herbé, who was with the 95th Regiment in the second column just behind Mayran, the general had been provoked by an incident shortly after two o’clock in the morning, when two Russian officers had crept up to the French trenches and called out in the dark,

The 97th rushed forward – only to be met by a deadly barrage of artillery and musket fire by the Russians, who were well armed and ready on every parapet. ‘Suddenly the enemy was coming towards us in a huge wave,’ recalled Podpalov, who watched the scene from the Redan.

Mayran was among those who were hit in the first wave. Helped to his feet by Herbé, he was badly wounded in the arm, but refused to retreat. ‘Forward the 95th!’ he called back to the second line. The reinforcements moved forward, but they too were shot down in huge numbers by the Russians guns. This was not a battle but a massacre. Following their instincts, the attackers lay down on the ground, ignoring Mayran’s orders to advance, and engaged the Russians in a gun battle. After twenty minutes, by which time the battlefield was littered with their dead, the French troops saw a rocket in the sky: it was the real signal to attack.⁶²

Pélissier had ordered the rocket to be fired in a desperate attempt to coordinate the French assault. But if Mayran had advanced too early, his other generals were not ready: expecting a later start, they had not managed to prepare in time. The troops from the reserve lines were rushed forward to join in the attack, but the sudden order to advance unsettled them, and many of the men ‘refused to leave the trenches, even when their officers threatened them with the harshest punishments’, according to Lieutenant Colonel Dessaint, the head of the army’s political department, who concluded that the soldiers ‘had an intuition of the disaster that awaited them’.⁶³

Watching from the Vorontsov Ridge, Raglan could see that the disjointed French assault was a bloody fiasco. One French column, to the left of the Malakhov, had broken through, but its supports were being devastated by the Russian guns on the Malakhov and the Redan. Raglan might have helped the French by bombarding the Redan, as agreed in the original allied plan, before launching an assault; but he felt bound by a sense of duty and honour to support the French by storming the Redan immediately, without a preliminary bombardment, even though he must have known, if only from the events of the previous hour, that such a policy was bound to end in disaster and the needless sacrifice of many men. ‘I always guarded myself from being tied down to attack at the same moment as the French, and I felt that I ought to have some hope of their success before I committed our troops,’ Raglan wrote to Panmure on 19 June, ‘but when I saw how stoutly they were opposed, I considered it was my duty to assist them by attacking myself… Of this I am quite certain, that, if the troops had remained in our trenches, the French would have attributed their non-success to our refusal to participate in the operation.’⁶⁴

The British assault began at 5.30 a.m. The attacking troops ran forward from the Quarries and the trenches on either side, followed by the supporting parties carrying ladders to scale the walls of the Redan. It soon became apparent that it was a hopeless task. ‘The troops no sooner began to show themselves beyond the parapet of the trenches, than they were assailed by the most murderous fire of grape that ever was witnessed,’ reported Sir George Brown, who had been given the command of the assault. The first Russian volley took out one-third of the attackers. From the trenches on the left, Codrington observed the devastating effect of the barrage on the troops attempting to run across 200 metres of open ground towards the Redan:

Overwhelmed by the torrent of grape-shot, the troops began to waver; some lost their nerve and ran away, despite the efforts of their officers to regroup the men by shouting threats. Eventually, the first line of attackers and the leading ladder-men reached the abbatis, about 30 metres from the ditch of the Redan. While they struggled to squeeze through the gaps of the abbatis, the Russians ‘mounted the parapets of the Redan and delivered volley after volley into us’, recalled Timothy Gowing:

The storming party dwindled to the last hundred men, who started to retreat, in defiance of their officers, whose threats to shoot them were ignored. According to one officer, who had urged a group of men to continue the attack, ‘they became impressed with the conviction that another step forward and they would be blown into the air; they would fight any number of men, they said, but they would not step forward to be blown up’.⁶⁶ It had been widely rumoured that the Redan was mined.

Meanwhile, 2,000 men from the 3rd Division under the command of Major-General Eyre on the left flank broke through into the suburbs of Sevastopol itself. They had been instructed to occupy some Russian rifle pits and, if the attack on the Redan allowed it, to advance further down the Picquet House Ravine. But Eyre had exceeded his orders and had pushed on his brigade, defeating the Russians in the Cemetery, before coming under heavy fire in Sevastopol’s streets. They found themselves in a ‘cul-de-sac’, recalled Captain Scott of the 9th Regiment: ‘we could neither advance nor retire, and had to hold our ground from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m., 17 hours under a tremendous fire of shot, shell, grape, canister, and hundreds of their sharpshooters, our only cover being the houses which crumbled about us at every discharge.’ According to Lieutenant Colonel Alexander of the 14th Regiment, the storming of the city became something of an escapade, as some of the Irish soldiers ‘rushed on into part of Sevastopol, got among houses with women in them, pictures, mahogany, furniture and pianos; they got also among strong wine… Some of the Irish boys dressed themselves up as women and so fought; some of them brought back looking glasses, tables and a gooseberry bush with the berries on it!’ But for the rest of the troops, sheltering in bombed-out and crumbling buildings from the enemy’s fire, the day passed with no such amusements. It was only under cover of darkness that they were able to retreat, carrying hundreds of wounded men with them.⁶⁷

The next morning a truce was called to clear the killed and wounded from the battlefield. The casualties were enormous. The British lost about 1,000 men, killed and wounded; the French perhaps six times that number, though the precise figure was suppressed. A Zouave captain who was part of the team sent out into no man’s land to collect the dead described what he saw in a letter home on 25 June:

Among the dead was General Mayran, who was blamed for the defeat in Pélissier’s account to Napoleon, although, if truth be told, Pélissier himself was at least as responsible for his last-minute changes to the plan. Raglan certainly believed that Pélissier was principally at fault, not just for the changes of plan but for his decision to limit the attack to the Malakhov and the Redan rather than commit to a broader assault on the town which might have had the effect of scattering the Russian defenders – a decision he believed Pélissier had made from worries that the French troops might ‘run riot’ in the town, as he explained in his letter to Panmure.

But Raglan’s criticisms were no doubt coloured by his own sense of guilt for the needless sacrifice of so many British troops. According to one of his physicians, Raglan fell into a deep depression following the failure of the assault, and when he was on his deathbed, on 26 June, it was not from cholera that he was suffering, as had been rumoured, but ‘a case of acute mental anguish, producing first great depression, and subsequently complete exhaustion of the heart’s action’.⁶⁹ He died on 28 June.