The Crimean War: A History

6 First Blood to the Turks

In March 1854 a young artillery officer by the name of Leo Tolstoy arrived at the headquarters of General Mikhail Gorchakov. He had joined the army in 1852, the year he had first come to the attention of the literary world with the publication of his memoir Childhood in the literary journal the Contemporary, the most important monthly periodical in Russia at that time. Dissatisfied with his frivolous way of life as an aristocrat in St Petersburg and Moscow, he had decided to make a fresh start by following his brother Nikolai to the Caucasus when he returned from leave to his army unit there. Tolstoy was attached to an artillery brigade in the Cossack village of Starogladskaya in the northern Caucasus. He took part in raids against Shamil’s Muslim army, narrowly escaping capture by the rebels on more than one occasion, but after the outbreak of the war against Turkey, he requested a transfer to the Danubian front. As he explained in a letter to his brother Sergei in November 1853, he wanted to take part in a real war: ‘For almost a year now I’ve been thinking only of how I might sheathe my sword, and I can’t do it. But since I’m compelled to fight somewhere or other, I would find it more agreeable to fight in Turkey than here.’¹

In January Tolstoy passed the officer’s examination for the rank of ensign, the lowest-ranking commissioned officer in the tsarist army, and departed for Wallachia, where he was attached to the 12th Artillery Brigade. He travelled sixteen days by sledge through the snows of southern Russia to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, arriving there on 2 February, and set off again on 3 March, travelling again by sledge, and then, when the snows turned to mud, by horse and cart through the Ukraine to Kishinev, reaching Bucharest on 12 March. Two days later, Tolstoy was received by Prince Gorchakov himself, who treated the young Count as one of the family. ‘He embraced me, made me promise to dine with him every day, and wants to put me on his staff,’ Tolstoy wrote to his aunt Toinette on 17 March.

Aristocratic connections went a long way in the Russian army staff. Tolstoy was quickly caught up in the social whirl of Bucharest, attending dinners at the Prince’s house, games of cards and musical soirées in drawing rooms, evenings at the Italian opera and French theatre – a world apart from the bloody battlefields of the Danubian front just a few miles away. ‘While you are imagining me exposed to all the dangers of war, I have not yet smelt Turkish powder, but am very quietly at Bucharest, strolling about, making music, and eating ice-creams,’ he wrote to his aunt at the start of May. ²

Tolstoy arrived in Bucharest in time for the start of the spring offensive on the Danube. The Tsar was determined to push south to Varna and the Black Sea coast as soon as possible, before the Western powers had time to land their troops and stop the Russian advance towards Constantinople. The key to this offensive was the capture of the Turkish fortress at Silistria. It would give the Russians a dominant stronghold in the Danube area, allowing them to convert the river into a supply line from the Black Sea into the interior of the Balkans, and giving them a base from which to recruit the Bulgarians to fight against the Turks. This was the plan that Paskevich had persuaded the Tsar to adopt in order not to alienate the Austrians, who might intervene against a Russian offensive through the Serb-dominated areas of the Danube further to the west, where Serbian uprisings in favour of the Russians might spread into Habsburg lands. ‘The English and the French cannot land their troops for at least another fortnight,’ Nicholas wrote to Gorchakov on 26 March, ‘and I suppose that they will land at Varna to rush towards Silistria…. We must take the fortress before they arrive… With Silistria in our hands, there will be time for volunteers to raise more troops from the Bulgarians, but we must not touch the Serbs, in case we alarm the Austrians.’³

The Tsar was hopeful of mobilizing troops from the Bulgarians and other Slavs. Although he was wary of inflaming Serb passions against the Austrians, he hoped that his offensive would trigger Christian uprisings, leading to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when a victorious Russia would impose a new religious settlement on the Balkans. ‘All the Christian parts of Turkey’, he wrote in the spring of 1854, ‘must necessarily become independent, they must become again what they previously were, principalities, Christian states, and as such rejoin the family of the Christian states of Europe.’ Such was his commitment to this religious cause that he was prepared to exploit revolutions against even Austria, should this be necessitated by the opposition of the Austrians to a Russian settlement of the Eastern Question. ‘It is highly likely that our victories will lead to Slav revolts in Hungary,’ he wrote to the Russian ambassador in Vienna. ‘We shall use them to threaten the heart of the Austrian Empire and force her government to accept our conditions.’ Indeed the Tsar was ready by now to abandon virtually all his legitimist principles in the interests of his holy war. Angered by the anti-Russian stance of the European powers, he talked of stirring up the revolutionary disturbances in Spain to divert French troops from the east, and even thought of forming an alliance with Mazzini’s liberation movement in Lombardy and Venice to undermine the Austrians. But in both cases the Tsar was dissuaded from supporting revolutionary democrats.⁴

The start of the spring offensive was hailed by Slavophiles as the dawning of a new religious era in the history of the world, the first step towards the resurrection of the Eastern Christian empire with its capital in Tsargrad, the name they gave to Constantinople. In ‘To Russia’ (1854), the poet Khomiakov greeted the beginning of the offensive with ‘A call to holy war’:

In an earlier poem by the same title, written in 1839, Khomiakov had referred to Russia’s mission to bring the true Orthodox religion to the peoples of the world, but had warned Russia against pride. Now, in his poem of 1854, he called on Russia to engage in ‘bloody battles’ and ‘Smite with the sword – the sword of God’.⁵

The Russians advanced slowly, fighting against stubborn Turkish resistance at several points on the northern side of the Danube, before coming to a virtual halt. At Ibrail, 20,000 Russian grenadiers, supported by river gunboats and steamers, were unable to defeat the well-defended Turkish fortresses. At Maçin there were 60,000 Russian troops encamped in bivouacs outside the fortress town but unable to take it. Held up by the Turks, the Russians spent their time constructing rafts and pontoon bridges from pine masts in preparation for a surprise crossing of the Danube at Galaţi, which they completed unopposed at the end of March.⁶

Advancing south towards Silistria, the Russians got bogged down in the marshlands of the Danube delta, the place where so many of them had been struck down by cholera and typhus in 1828–9. These were sparsely populated lands without food supplies for the invading troops, who soon succumbed to the effects of hunger and disease. Of 210,000 Russian troops in the principalities, 90,000 were too sick for action by April. Soldiers were fed on rations of dry bread that were so devoid of nutrition that not even rats and dogs would eat them, according to a French officer, who saw these husks abandoned in the fortress town of Giurgevo after the retreat of the Russian forces in the summer of 1854. A German doctor in the tsarist army thought that ‘the bad quality of food habitually served to the Russian troops’ was one of the main reasons why they ‘dropped like flies’ once they were wounded or exposed to illnesses. ‘The Russian soldier has such a small nervous system that he sinks under the loss of a few ounces of blood and frequently dies of wounds such as would be sure to heal if inflicted on persons better constituted.’⁷

Soldiers wrote home to their families about the terrible conditions in the ranks, many begging them to send money. Some of these letters were intercepted and sent to Gorchakov by the police, who considered them politically dangerous, and they ended up in the archives. These simple letters give a unique insight into the world of the ordinary Russian troops. Grigory Zubianka, a foot soldier in the 8th Hussars Squadron, wrote to his wife Maria on 24 March:

Nikifor Burak, a soldier in the 2nd Battalion of the Tobol’sk Infantry Regiment, wrote to his parents, wife and children in the village of Sidorovka in Kiev Province:

As the Russian losses mounted, Paskevich became increasingly opposed to the offensive. Though he had previously advocated the march on Silistria, he was worried by the build-up of Austrian troops on the Serbian frontier. With the British and the French expected to land on the coast at any moment, with the Turks holding their line in the south, and the Austrians mobilizing in the west, the Russians were in serious danger of being surrounded by hostile armies in the principalities. Paskevich urged the Tsar to order a retreat. He delayed the offensive against Silistria, in defiance of the Tsar’s command to push ahead as fast as possible, for fear that an attack by the Austrians should find him without sufficient reserves.

Paskevich was right to be anxious about the Austrians, who were alarmed by the growing Russian threat to Serbia. They had mobilized their troops on the Serb frontier in readiness to put down any Serb uprisings in favour of the Russians and oppose Russian forces approaching Habsburg-controlled Serb lands from the east. Throughout the spring, the Austrians demanded a Russian withdrawal from the principalities, threatening to join the Western powers if the Tsar did not comply. The British were equally concerned by Russia’s influence on Serbia. According to their consul in Belgrade, the Serbs were being ‘taught to expect Russian troops in Serbia as soon as Silistria had fallen – and to join an expedition against the south-Slavonic provinces of Austria’. On Palmerston’s instructions, the consul warned the Serbs that Britain and France would oppose with military force any armament by Serbia in support of the Russians.⁹

Meanwhile, on 22 April, Easter Saturday in the Orthodox calendar, the Western fleets began their first direct attack on Russian soil by bombarding Odessa, the important Black Sea port. The British had received reports from captured merchant seamen that the Russians had collected 60,000 troops and large stockpiles of munitions at Odessa for transportation to the Danubian front (in fact the port had little military significance and only half a dozen batteries to defend itself against the allied fleets). They sent an ultimatum to the governor of the town, General Osten-Sacken, demanding the surrender of all his ships, and when there was no reply, began their bombardment with a fleet of nine steamers, six rocket boats and a frigate. The shelling continued for eleven hours, causing massive damage to the port, destroying several ships and killing dozens of civilians. It also hit Vorontsov’s neoclassical palace on the cliff top above the port, with one ball hitting the statue of the Duc de Richelieu, the first governor of Odessa, though ironically the building damaged most was the London Hotel on the Primorsky Boulevard.

During a second bombardment, on 12 May, one of the British ships, a steamer called the Tiger, ran hard aground in dense fog and was heavily shelled from the shore. Her crew was captured by a small platoon of Cossacks commanded by a young ensign called Shchegolov. The British attempted to burn their ship, while Odessa ladies with their parasols watched the action from the embankment, where bits of shipwreck, including boxes of English rum, were later washed ashore. The Cossacks marched off the British crew (24 officers and 201 men) and imprisoned them in the town, where they were subjected to humiliating taunts from Russian sailors and civilians, whose sense of outrage at the timing of the attack over the Easter period had been encouraged by their priests, though the captain of the ship, Henry Wells Giffard, who had been injured by shellfire and died of gangrene on 1 June, was given a full military burial in Odessa and, in an act of chivalry from a bygone age, a lock of his hair was sent to his widow in England. The cannon of the Tiger were displayed in Odessa as war trophies.[17]

Priests declared the capture of the British steamer a symbol of divine revenge for the attack on Holy Saturday, which they pronounced had begun a religious war. The washed-up liquor was soon consumed by the Russian sailors and workers at the docks. There were drunken brawls, and several men were killed. Parts of the ship were later sold as souvenirs. The Cossack ensign Shchegolov became a popular hero overnight. He was commemorated almost as a saint. Bracelets and medallions were made with his image and sold as far away as Moscow and St Petersburg. There was even a new brand of cigarettes manufactured in Shchegolov’s name with his picture on the box.¹⁰

The bombardment of Odessa announced the arrival of the Western powers near the Danubian front. Now the question was how soon the British and the French would come to the aid of the Turks against the Russians at Silistria. Fearful that a continuation of the offensive towards Constantinople would end badly for Russia, Paskevich wanted to retreat. On 23 April he wrote to Menshikov, the newly appointed commander-in-chief of Russian forces in the Crimea:

Throughout the spring, Paskevich dragged his heels over the Tsar’s orders to lay siege to Silistria. By mid-April, 50,000 troops had occupied the Danubian islands opposite the town, but Paskevich delayed the commencement of the siege. Nicholas was furious with the lack of vigour his commander showed. Although he himself admitted that Austria might join Russia’s foes, Nicholas sent an angry note to Paskevich, urging him to begin the assault. ‘If the Austrians treacherously atttack us,’ he wrote on 29 April, ‘you have to engage them with 4 Corps and the dragoons; that will be quite enough for them! Not one word more, I have nothing more to add!’

It was only on 16 May, after three weeks of skirmishing had given them control of the high ground to the south-west of Silistria, that the Russians at last began their bombardment of the town, and even then Paskevich focused his attack on its outer defences, a semicircle of stone forts and earthworks several kilometres from the fortress of Silistria itself. Paskevich hoped to wear down the opposition of the Turks and allow his troops to assault the town without major losses. But the officers in charge of the siege operations knew this was to hope in vain. The Turks had used the months since the Porte’s declaration of war against Russia to build up their defences. The Turkish forts had been greatly strengthened by the Prussian Colonel Grach, an expert on entrenchments and mining, and they were relatively little damaged by the Russian guns, although the key redoubt, the earthworks known as the Arab Tabia, was so battered by the Russian shells and mines that it had to be rebuilt by the Turks several times during the siege. There were 18,000 troops in the Turkish forts, most of them Egyptians and Albanians, and they fought with a spirit of defiance that took the Russians by surprise. In the Arab Tabia the Ottoman forces were led by two experienced British artillery officers, Captain James Butler of the Ceylon Rifles and Lieutenant Charles Nasmyth of the Bombay Artillery. ‘It was impossible not to admire the cool indifference of the Turks to danger,’ Butler thought.

Realizing that the Russians needed to get closer to cause any damage to the forts, Paskevich ordered General Shil’der to begin elaborate engineering work, digging trenches to allow artillery to be brought up to the walls. The siege soon settled into a monotonous routine of dawn-to-dusk bombardment by the Russian batteries, supported by the guns of a river fleet. There had never been a time in the history of warfare when soldiers were subjected to so much constant danger for so long. But there was no sign of a breakthrough.¹¹

Butler kept a diary of the siege. He thought the power of the heavy Russian guns had ‘been much exaggerated’ and that the lighter Turkish artillery were more than a match for them, although everything was conducted by the Turks ‘in a slovenly manner’. Religion played an important role on the Turkish side, according to Butler. Every day, at morning prayers by the Stamboul Gate, the garrison commander Musa Pasha would call upon his soldiers to defend Silistria ‘as becomes the descendants of the Prophet’, to which ‘the men would reply with cries of “Praise Allah!”’[18] There were no safe buildings in the town but the inhabitants had built caves where they took shelter during the day’s bombardment. The town ‘appeared deserted with only dogs and soldiers to be seen’. At sunset Butler watched the closing round of Russian shots come in from the fortress walls: ‘I saw several little urchins, about 9 or 10 years old, actually chasing the round shot as they ricocheted, as coolly as if they had been cricket balls; they were racing to see who would get them first, a reward of 20 peras being given by the Pasha for every cannon ball brought in.’ After dark, he could hear the Russians singing in their trenches, and ‘when they made a night of it, they even had a band playing polkas and waltzes’.

Under growing pressure from the Tsar to seize Silistria, Paskevich ordered more than twenty infantry assaults between 20 May and 5 June, but still the breakthrough did not come. ‘The Turks fight like devils,’ reported one artillery captain on 30 May. Small groups of men would scale the ramparts of the forts, only to be repulsed by the defenders in hand-to-hand fighting. On 9 June there was a major battle outside the main fortress walls, after a large-scale Russian assault had been beaten back and the Turkish forces followed up with a sortie against the Russian positions. By the end of the fighting there were 2,000 Russians lying dead on the battlefield. The next day, Butler noted,

The unburied Russians lay on the ground for several days, until the townspeople had stripped them of everything. Albanian irregulars also took part in the mutilation and looting of the dead. Butler saw them a few days later. It was ‘a disgusting sight’, he wrote. ‘The smell was already becoming very offensive. Those who were in the ditch had all been stripped and were lying in various attitudes, some headless trunks, others with throats half out, arms extended in the air or pointing upwards as they fell.’¹²

Tolstoy arrived at Silistria on the day of this battle. He had been transferred there as an ordnance officer with the staff of General Serzhputovsky, which set up its headquarters in the gardens of Musa Pasha’s hilltop residence. Tolstoy enjoyed the spectacle of battle from this safe vantage point. He described it in a letter to his aunt:

Paskevich claimed that he had been hit by a shell fragment during the fighting on 10 June (in fact he was unwounded) and gave up the command to General Gorchakov. Relieved no longer to be burdened with responsibility for an offensive he had come to oppose, he rode off in his carriage back across the Danube to Iaşi.

On 14 June the Tsar received news that Austria was mobilizing its army and might join the war against Russia by July. He also had to contend with the possibility that at any moment the British and the French might arrive to relieve Silistria. He knew that time was running out but ordered one last assault on the fortress town, which Gorchakov prepared for the early hours of 22 June.¹⁴

By this time the British and the French were assembling their armies in the Varna area. They had begun to land their forces at Gallipoli at the beginning of April, their intention being to protect Constantinople from possible attack by the Russians. But it soon became apparent that the area was unable to support such a large army, so after a few weeks of foraging for scarce supplies, the allied troops moved on to set up other camps in the vicinity of the Turkish capital, before relocating well to the north at the port of Varna, where they could be supplied by the French and British fleets.

The two armies set up adjacent camps on the plains above the old fortified port – and eyed each other warily. They were uneasy allies. There was so much in their recent history to make them suspicious. Famously, Lord Raglan, the near-geriatric commander-in-chief of the British army, who had served as the Duke of Wellington’s military secretary during the Peninsular War of 1808–14 and had lost an arm at Waterloo,[19] would on occasion refer to the French rather than the Russians as the enemy.

From the start there had been disputes over strategy – the British favouring the landing at Gallipoli followed by a cautious advance into the interior, whereas the French had wanted a landing at Varna to forestall the Russian advance towards Constantinople. The French had also sensibly suggested that the British should control the sea campaign, where they were superior, while they should take command of the land campaign, where they could apply the lessons of their war of conquest in Algeria. But the British had shuddered at the thought of taking orders from the French. They mistrusted Marshal Saint-Arnaud, the Bonapartist commander of the French forces, whose notorious speculations on the Bourse had led many in Britain’s ruling circles to suppose that he would put his own selfish interests before the allied cause (Prince Albert thought that he was even capable of accepting bribes from the Russians). Such ideas filtered down to the officers and men. ‘I hate the French,’ wrote Captain Nigel Kingscote, who like most of Raglan’s aides-de-camp was also one of his nephews. ‘All Saint-Arnaud’s staff, with one or two exceptions, are just like monkeys, girthed up as tight as they can be and sticking out above and below like balloons.’¹⁵

The French took a dim view of their British allies. ‘Visiting the English camp makes me proud to be a Frenchman,’ wrote Captain Jean-Jules Herbé to his parents from Varna.

Louis Noir, a soldier in the first battalion of Zouaves, the élite infantry established during the Algerian War,[20] recalled his miserable impression of the British troops at Varna. He was particularly shocked by the floggings that were often given by their officers for indiscipline and drunkenness – both common problems among the British troops – which reminded him of the old feudal system that had disappeared in France:

The French army was superior to the British in many ways. Its schools for officers had produced a whole new class of military professionals, who were technically more advanced, tactically superior and socially far closer to their men than the aristocratic officers of the British army. Armed with the advanced Minié rifle, which could fire rapidly with lethal accuracy up to 1,600 metres, the French infantry was celebrated for its attacking élan. The Zouaves, in particular, were masters of the fast attack and tactical retreat, a type of fighting they had developed in Algeria, and their courage was an inspiration to the rest of the French infantry, who invariably followed them into battle. The Zouaves were seasoned campaigners, experienced in fighting in the most difficult and mountainous terrain, and united by strong bonds of comradeship, formed through years of fighting together in Algeria (and in many cases on the revolutionary barricades of Paris in 1848). Paul de Molènes, an officer in one of the Spahi cavalry regiments recruited by Saint-Arnaud in Algeria, thought the Zouaves exerted a ‘special power of seduction’ over the young men of Paris, who flocked to join their ranks in 1854. ‘The Zouaves’ poetic uniforms, their free and daring appearance, their legendary fame – all this gave them an image of popular chivalry unseen since the days of Napoleon.’ ¹⁸

The experience of fighting in Algeria was a decisive advantage for the French over the British army, which had not fought in a major battle since Waterloo, and in many ways remained half a century behind the times. At one point a third of the French army’s 350,000 men had been deployed in Algeria. From that experience, the French had learned the crucial importance of the small collective unit for maintaining discipline and order on the battlefield – a commonplace of twentieth-century military theorists that was first advanced by Ardant du Picq, a graduate of the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr, the élite army school at Fontainebleau near Paris, who served as a captain in the Varna expedition and developed his ideas from observations of the French soldiers during the Crimean War. The French had also learned how to supply an army on the march efficiently – an area of expertise where their superiority over the British became apparent from the moment the two armies landed at Gallipoli. For two and a half days, the British troops were not allowed to disembark, ‘because nothing was ready for them’, reported William Russell of The Times, the pioneering correspondent who had joined the expedition to the East, whereas the French were admirably prepared with a huge flotilla of supply ships: ‘Hospitals for the sick, bread and biscuit bakeries, wagon trains for carrying stores and baggage – every necessary and every comfort, indeed, at hand, the moment their ship came in. On our side not a British pendant was afloat in the harbour! Our great naval state was represented by a single steamer belonging to a private company.’¹⁹

The outbreak of the Crimean War had caught the British army by surprise. The military budget had been in decline for many years, and it was only in the early weeks of 1852, following Napoleon’s coup d’état and the eruption of the French war scare in Britain, that the Russell government was able to obtain parliamentary approval for a modest increase in expenditure. Of the 153,000 enlisted men, two-thirds were serving overseas in various distant quarters of the Empire in the spring of 1854, so troops for the Black Sea expedition had to be recruited in a rush. Without the conscription system of the French, the British army relied entirely on the recruitment of volunteers with the inducement of a bounty. During the 1840s the pool of able-bodied men had been severely drained by great industrial building projects and by emigration to the United States and Canada, leaving the army to draw upon the unemployed and poorest sections of society, like the victims of the Irish famine, who took the bounty in a desperate attempt to clear their debts and save their families from the poorhouse. The main recruiting grounds for the British army were pubs and fairs and races, where the poor got drunk and fell into debt.²⁰

If the British trooper came from the poorest classes of society, the officer corps was drawn mostly from the aristocracy – a condition almost guaranteed by the purchasing of commissions. The senior command was dominated by old gentlemen with good connections to the court but little military experience or expertise; it was a world apart from the professionalism of the French army. Lord Raglan was 65; Sir John Burgoyne, the army’s chief engineer, 72. Five of the senior commanders at Raglan’s headquarters were relatives. The youngest, the Duke of Cambridge, was a cousin to the Queen. This was an army, rather like the Russian, whose military thinking and culture remained rooted in the eighteenth century.

Raglan insisted on sending British soldiers into battle in tight-fitting tunics and tall shakos that might have made them look spectacular when marched in strict formation on the parade ground but which in a battle were quite impractical. When Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War, wrote to him in May suggesting that the dress code ought to be relaxed and that perhaps the men might be excused from shaving every day, Raglan replied:

The sanction against beards did not last beyond the July heat, but the British soldier was still ridiculously overdressed compared to the light and simple uniforms of the Russians and the French, as Lieutenant Colonel George Bell of the 1st (Royal) Regiment complained:

Encamped on the plains around Varna, with nothing much to do but wait for news from the fighting at Silistria, the British and French troops sought out entertainments in the drinking-places and brothels of the town. The hot weather and warnings not to drink the local water resulted in a monstrous drinking binge, especially of the local raki, which was very cheap and strong. ‘Thousands of Englishmen and Frenchmen thronged together in the improvised taverns,’ wrote Paul de Molènes, ‘where all the wines and liquors of our countries poured out into noisy drunkenness… The Turks stood outside their doors and watched without emotion or surprise these strange defenders that Providence had sent to them.’ Drunken fighting between the men was a daily problem in the town. Hugh Fitzhardinge Drummond, an adjutant of the Scots Fusilier Guards, wrote to his father from Varna:

Complaints from the residents of Varna multiplied. The town was populated mainly by Bulgarians, but there was a sizeable Turkish minority. They were irritated by soldiers demanding alcohol from Muslim-owned cafés and becoming violent when they were told that it was not sold. They might have been excused for wondering whether their defenders were a greater danger to them than the menace of Russia, as British naval officer Adolphus Slade observed from his vantage point in Constantinople:

The British quickly formed an ill opinion of the Turkish soldiers, who set up camp beside them on the plains around Varna. ‘The little I have seen of the Turks makes me think they are very poor allies,’ Raglan’s aide-de-camp Kingscote wrote to his father. ‘I am certain they are the greatest liars on the face of the earth. If they say they have 150,000 men you will find that on enquiry there are only 30,000. Everything in the same proportion, and from all I hear, I cannot make out why the Russians have not walked over them.’ The French also did not think much of the Turkish troops, although the Zouaves, who contained a large contingent of Algerians, established good relations with the Turks. Louis Noir thought the British soldiers had a racist and imperial attitude towards the Turks that made them widely hated by the Sultan’s troops.

Colonial prejudice limited the use the Western powers were prepared to make of the Turkish troops. Napoleon III thought the Turks were lazy and corrupt while Lord Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris, advised Raglan that ‘no Turk was to be trusted’ with any military responsibility essential to national security. The Anglo-French commanders thought the Turks were only good at fighting behind fortifications. They were ready to use them for auxiliary tasks such as digging trenches, but assumed they lacked the discipline or courage to fight alongside European troops on the open battlefield.²⁵ The success of the Turks in holding off the Russians at Silistria (which was largely put down to the British officers) did not change these racist attitudes, which would become even more pronounced when the campaign shifted to the Crimea.

As it was, the Turks were doing more than hold their own against the Russians, who launched one last assault against Silistria on 22 June. On the morning of the 21st, Gorchakov went with his staff to inspect the trenches before the Arab Tabia, where the attack would begin. Tolstoy was impressed by Gorchakov (he would later draw on him for his portrait of General Kutuzov in War and Peace). ‘I saw him under fire for the first time that morning,’ he wrote to his brother Nikolai. ‘You can see he’s so engrossed in the general course of events that he simply doesn’t notice the bullets and cannon-balls.’ Throughout that day, to weaken the resistance of the Turks, 500 Russian guns bombarded their fortifications; the firing continued late into the night. The assault was set for three in the morning. ‘There we all were,’ Tolstoy wrote, and, ‘as always on the eve of a battle, we were all pretending not to think of the following day as anything more than an ordinary day, while all of us, I’m quite sure, at the bottom of our hearts felt a slight pang (and not even slight, but pronounced) at the thought of the assault’.

What he feared most happened. At two o’clock in the morning, an aide-de-camp brought Gorchakov a message, ordering him to raise the siege. ‘I can say without fear of error’, Tolstoy told his brother,

What Tolstoy did not know, or refused to take into account, was that by this stage there were 30,000 French, 20,000 British and 20,000 Turkish troops ready to reinforce the defence of Silistria, and that Austria, which had massed 100,000 troops along the Serbian frontier, had served an ultimatum to the Tsar to withdraw from the Danubian principalities. Austria had effectively adopted a policy of armed neutrality in favour of the allies, mobilizing Habsburg troops to force the Russians to withdraw from the Danube. Fearful of uprisings among their own Slavs, the Austrians were worried by the Russian presence in the principalities, which looked more like annexation every day. If the Austrians attacked the Russians from the west, there was a real possibility that they would cut them off from their lines of supply on the Danube and block their main path of retreat, leaving them exposed to the allied armies attacking from the south. The Tsar had no choice but to retreat before his army was destroyed.

Nicholas felt a deep sense of betrayal by the Austrians, whose empire he had saved from the Hungarians in 1849. He had developed a paternal affection for the Emperor Franz Joseph, more than thirty years his junior, and felt that he deserved his gratitude. Visibly saddened and shaken by the news of the ultimatum, he turned Franz Joseph’s portrait to the wall and wrote on the back of it in his own hand: ‘Du Undankbarer!’ (You ungrateful man!) He told the Austrian envoy Count Esterhazy in July that Franz Joseph had completely forgotten what he had done for him and that ‘because the confidence which had existed until now between the two sovereigns for the happiness of their empires was destroyed, the same intimate relations could not exist between them any more’.²⁷

The Tsar wrote to Gorchakov to explain his reasons for calling off the siege. It was an unusually personal letter that revealed a lot about his thinking:

The Russians retreated from the Danube, fighting off the Turks, who pursued them, smelling blood. The Russian troops were tired and demoralized, many of the soldiers had not eaten for days, and there were so many sick and wounded that they could not all be taken back by cart. Thousands were abandoned to the Turks. At the fortress town of Giurgevo, on 7 July, the Russians lost 3,000 men in a battle with the Turkish forces (some of them commanded by British officers) who crossed the river from Rusçuk and attacked the Russians with the support of a British gunboat. Gorchakov arrived with reinforcements from the abandoned siege of Silistria, but was soon forced to order a retreat. The Union Jack was planted on the fortress of Giurgevo, where the Turks then took savage revenge on the Russians, killing more than 1,400 wounded men, cutting off their heads and mutilating their bodies, while Omer Pasha and the British officers looked on.²⁹

The Turkish reprisals had a clear religious character. As soon as the town was cleared of Russians troops, the Turkish troops (Bashi Bazouks and Albanians) ransacked the homes and churches of its Christian population, most of them Bulgarians. The entire Christian population left Giurgevo with the Russian infantry, hurriedly packing their belongings onto carts and heading north with their columns. A French officer described the scene he found in Giurgevo a few weeks after its abandonment:

In every town and village the Russian troops passed through, they were joined by other refugees afraid of Turkish reprisals. There were scenes of chaos and panic on the roads, as thousands of Bulgarian peasants left their villages with their livestock and joined the ever-growing columns of humanity in flight. The roads became so badly blocked with peasant carts that the Russian retreat was slowed down, and Gorchakov considered using troops to hold back the refugees. But he was talked out it by his senior officers, and in the end some 7,000 Bulgarian families were evacuated to Russia. Tolstoy described the scene in one village in a letter to his aunt which he wrote on reaching Bucharest on 19 July:

In Bucharest, there were similar scenes of confusion. Many of the disaffected Russian troops took the opportunity to desert from their units and went into hiding in the city, prompting the military authorities to issue dire threats to the population to give up any deserters or risk punishment. The Wallachian volunteers, who had joined the Russian troops on their occupation of the principality, now melted away, many of them fleeing south to join the allies. Evacuating the city, the Russians issued a dark warning to the ‘treacherous Wallachians’ in a manifesto from the Tsar:

On 26 July the proclamation was read out to the assembled boyars in Bucharest by Gorchakov, who added his own parting words: ‘Gentlemen, we are leaving Bucharest for the moment, but I hope to return soon – remember 1812.’³²

News of the withdrawal was a huge shock to the Slavophiles in Moscow and St Petersburg who had seen the Russian advance into the Balkans as a war of liberation for the Slavs. They now became despondent at what they saw as the abandonment of their ideals. Konstantin Aksakov had dreamed of a Slavic federation under Russian leadership. He thought the war would end with the planting of a cross on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. But the retreat from the Danube filled him ‘with feelings of disgust and shame’, as he wrote to his brother Ivan to explain:

Like many Slavophiles, the Aksakovs blamed the decision to retreat on Nesselrode, the ‘German’ Foreign Minister, who was now denounced in nationalist circles as a traitor to Russia and an ‘Austrian agent’. With the pan-Slav leader Pogodin, they mounted a campaign in the salons of St Petersburg and Moscow to persuade the Tsar to reverse the retreat and fight alone against the Austrians and the Western powers. They rejoiced in the fact that Russia would be fighting on its own against Europe, believing that a holy war for the Slavs’ liberation from Western influence would be the fulfilment of Russia’s messianic role.³³

As the Russians withdrew from Wallachia, the Austrians moved in to restore order in the principality. An Austrian contingent of 12,000 troops under General Coronini pushed on as far as Bucharest, where they clashed with the Turks, who had already occupied the city following the retreat of the Russians. Omer Pasha, who had pronounced himself the ‘Governor of the Reoccupied Principalities’, refused to relinquish Bucharest to the Austrian commander. As a former Austrian subject who had joined the Turks, he could hardly be expected to hand over his hard-earned conquests to a courtier such as Coronini, who had been the personal tutor of the Emperor and stood for everything in the Habsburg world that Omer Pasha had rejected when he crossed over to the Ottomans. The Turkish commander was supported by the British and the French. Having spent so long attempting to involve the Austrians in the principalities, the allies now regarded the Austrian intervention as something of a mixed blessing. They were pleased that the Austrians had helped to liberate the principalities from Russian control, but they also suspected them of intending a long-term occupation of the principalities, either in the hope of substituting their own rule for the political vacuum left by the departure of the Russian troops, or in the belief that they might impose their own solution to the Russo-Turkish conflict at the expense of the West. Their suspicions were increased when the Austrians prevented Omer Pasha’s forces from pursuing the Russians into Bessarabia (the preferred tactics of Napoleon III); and even further when they reinstalled in power the Russian-nominated hospodars in a move evidently intended to smooth the ruffled feathers of the Tsar. To the British and the French, it seemed obvious that the Austrians had come to the rescue of the Danubian principalities, not as gendarmes of the European Concert, nor as champions of Turkish sovereignty, but with political motives of their own.³⁴

It was partly to counteract the Austrian threat, and partly to secure the Black Sea coastline for an attack on southern Russia and the Crimea, that the French sent an expeditionary force into the Dobrudja region of the Danube delta in late July. The force was made up of Bashi Bazouk irregulars (called the Spahis d’Orient by the French) under the command of General Yusuf as well as infantry from the 1st (General Canrobert’s), 2nd (General Bosquet’s) and 3rd (Prince Napoleon’s) Divisions. Captured as the 6-year-old Giuseppe Vantini in Elba in 1815 by the Barbary corsairs and brought up in the palace of the Bey of Tunis, Yusuf was the founder and commander of the Spahi cavalry employed by the French in their conquest of Algeria. His success there made him the ideal candidate to organize the Bashi Bazouks under French command. By 22 July he had assembled at Varna a cavalry brigade of 4,000 Bashi Bazouks given to the French by the Ottomans, along with various other detachments of irregulars, including a Kurdish band of horsemen commanded by Fatima Khanum. Known as the Virgin of Kurdistan, the 70-year-old Khanum led her tribal followers, armed with swords and knives and pistols, under the green banner of a Muslim war. Yusuf too appealed to the idea of a jihad to motivate his men against the Russians and give them something to fight for other than the prospect of plunder, their traditional incentive, which the French were determined to stamp out. ‘We have come to save the Sultan, our caliph,’ a group of Bashi Bazouks told Louis Noir, whose Zouave brigade joined Yusuf’s force on its march north from Varna; ‘if we die fighting for him without payment, we will go directly to heaven; if we were paid to fight, none of us would have a right to paradise, for we would have received our recompense on earth.’³⁵

But not even the promise of paradise could ensure the discipline of Yusuf’s cavalry. As soon as they were ordered to set off from Varna, the Bashi Bazouks began to desert, claiming they would not fight for foreign officers (Yusuf spoke a Tunisian Arabic which the Syrians, Turks and Kurds under his command could not understand). An advance squadron of cavalry ran away en masse on their first sighting of the Cossacks near Tulcea, leaving the French officers to fight them on their own (they were all killed). On the 28th, Yusuf’s troops beat the Cossacks and forced them to retreat, but then they lost all discipline, plundering the villages, killing Christians and bringing their heads back to General Yusuf, in the hope of a reward (the Turkish army customarily paid a bounty for the heads of infidels, including civilians, defeated in a holy war). Some men even murdered Christian women and children, cutting their bodies into pieces also in exchange for a reward.³⁶

The next day, the first of Yusuf’s troops succumbed to cholera. The marshes and lakes of the Danube delta were infested with disease. The death toll was alarming. Dehydrated by the disease and by days of marching in the scorching heat, men fell down and died beside the road. Yusuf’s force disintegrated rapidly, as soldiers fled to escape the cholera or lay down in the shelter of a tree to die. Yusuf ordered a retreat to Varna, and the remnants of his force, some 1,500 men, arrived there on 7 August.

They found cholera at Varna, too. They would have found it anywhere, for the whole of south-east Europe was struck by cholera in the summer of 1854. The French camp was infected first, followed shortly after by the British. A hot wind blew in from the land, covering the campsites with a white limestone powder and a blanket of dead flies. Men began to suffer from nausea and diarrhoea, and then lay down in their tents to die. Ignorant of the causes, soldiers went on drinking water in the summer heat, though some, like the Zouaves, who had come across the disease in Algeria, knew to stick to wine or to boil the water for coffee (of which the French drank enormous quantities). Cholera epidemics were a regular occurrence in London and other British cities in the 1830s and 1840s, but it was not until the 1880s that the link to sanitation was really understood. A London doctor by the name of John Snow had discovered that boiling drinking water could prevent cholera, but his findings were generally ignored. Instead, the disease was put down to miasmas from the lakes around Varna, excessive drinking, or the consumption of soft fruit. The elementary rules of sanitation were disregarded by the military authorities: latrines were allowed to overflow; carcasses were left to putrefy in the sun. The sick were carted off to a rat-infested barrack in Varna, where they were cared for by exhausted orderlies, who were joined in August by a small group of French nuns. The dead were wrapped in blankets and buried in mass graves (which were later dug up by the Turks to steal the blankets). By the second week of August, 500 British troops had died of the disease, and deaths among the French were spiralling to a rate of more than sixty every day.³⁷

Then came the fire at Varna. It began in the evening of 10 August in the old trading quarters of the town and spread quickly to the neighbouring port, where the supplies of the allied armies were waiting to be loaded onto ships. The fire had almost certainly been started by Greek and Bulgarian arsonists sympathetic to the Russian cause (several men were apprehended with lucifer matches in the area where the fire had begun). Half the town was engulfed in flames by the time the French and British troops arrived with water pumps. Shops and wharfs loaded up with crates of rum and wine exploded in the flames, and alcoholic rivers ran through the streets, where firefighters gorged themselves from the gutters. By the time the fire was contained, the supply base of the allied armies was severely damaged. ‘Varna housed all the munitions, all the supplies and provisions needed by an army on campaign,’ Herbé wrote to his parents on 16 August. ‘The powder magazines of the French, the English and the Turks were at the centre of the conflagration. Much of the town disappeared, and with it the hopes of the soldiers encamped on the plain.’³⁸

After the fire, there were only enough supplies in the town to feed the allied armies for eight days. It was clear that the soldiers needed to get out of the Varna area before they were totally destroyed by cholera and starvation.

With the Russians forced to retreat from the Danube, the British and the French could have gone home, claiming victory against Russia. It would have been feasible to end the war at this stage. The Austrians and the Turks could have occupied the principalities as a peacekeeping force (by mid-August they had drawn up separate zones of occupation and agreed to share control of Bucharest), while the Western powers could have used the threat of intervention to make the Russians promise not to invade Turkish soil again. So why did the allies not pursue a peace once the Russians had left the principalities? Why did they decide to invade Russia when the war against the Russians had been won? Why was there a Crimean War at all?

The allied commanders were frustrated by the retreat of the Russians. Having brought their armies all this way, they felt they had been ‘robbed of victory’, as Saint-Arnaud put it, and wanted to achieve a military goal to justify the efforts they had made. In the six months that had passed since their mobilization the allied troops had barely used their weapons against the enemy. They were mocked by the Turks and ridiculed at home. ‘There they are,’ wrote Karl Marx in an editorial in the New York Times on 17 August, ‘eighty or ninety thousand English and French soldiers at Varna, commanded by old Wellington’s late military secretary and by a Marshal of France (whose greatest exploits, it is true, were performed in London pawnshops) – there they are, the French doing nothing and the British helping them as fast as they can.’³⁹

Back in London, the British cabinet also felt that forcing Russia out of the Danube area was not enough to justify the sacrifices made so far. Palmerston and his ‘war party’ were not prepared to negotiate a peace when the Russian armed forces remained intact. They wanted to inflict serious damage on Russia, to destroy her military capacity in the Black Sea, not just to secure Turkey but to end the Russian threat to British interests in the Near East. As the Duke of Newcastle, the gung-ho Secretary of State for War, had put it back in April, expelling the Russians from the principalities ‘without crippling their future means of aggression upon Turkey is not now an object worthy of the great efforts of England and France’.⁴⁰

But what would inflict serious damage? The cabinet had considered various options. They saw little point in pursuing the Russians into Bessarabia, where the allied troops would be exposed to the cholera, while the French proposal of a Continental war for the liberation of Poland was bound to be obstructed by the Austrians, even if (and it was a big ‘if’) the conservative members of the British cabinet could be persuaded of the virtues of a revolutionary war. Nor were they convinced that the naval campaign in the Baltic would bring Russia to its knees. Soon after the beginning of the campaign in the spring, Sir Charles Napier, the admiral in charge of the allied Baltic fleet, had come to the conclusion that it would be practically impossible to overcome the almost impregnable Russian defences at Kronstadt, the fortress naval base guarding St Petersburg, or even the weaker fortress at Sveaborg, just outside the harbour of Helsingfors (Helsinki), without new gunboats and mortar vessels capable of navigating the shallow reefs around these fortresses.[22] For a while there was talk of mounting an attack against Russia in the Caucasus. A delegation of Circassian rebels visited the allies in Varna and promised to raise a Muslim war against Russia throughout the Caucasus if the allies sent their armies and their fleets. Omer Pasha supported this idea.⁴¹ But none of these plans were deemed as damaging to Russia as the loss of Sevastopol and its Black Sea Fleet would be. By the time the Russians had retreated from the principalities, the British cabinet had settled on the view that an invasion of the Crimea was the only obvious way to strike a decisive blow against Russia.

The Crimean plan had originally been advanced in December 1853, when, in reaction to Sinope, Graham had devised a naval strategy to knock out Sevastopol in one swift blow. ‘On this my heart is set,’ the First Lord of the Admiralty wrote; ‘the eye tooth of the Bear must be drawn: and ’til his fleet and naval arsenal in the Black Sea are destroyed there is no safety for Constantinople, no security for the peace of Europe.’⁴² Graham’s plan was never formally placed before the cabinet, but it was accepted as the basis of its strategy. And on 29 June the Duke of Newcastle transmitted to Raglan the cabinet instructions for an invasion of the Crimea. His dispatch was emphatic: the expedition was to start as soon as possible and ‘nothing but insuperable impediments’ should delay the siege of Sevastopol and the destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, although some secondary attacks against the Russians in the Caucasus might also be necessary. The language of the dispatch left Raglan with the impression that there was no disagreement in the cabinet, and no alternative to an invasion of the Crimea.⁴³ But in fact there were conflicting views on the practicality of the Crimean plan, and its acceptance was a compromise between those in the cabinet, like Aberdeen, who wanted a more limited campaign to restore Turkish sovereignty and those, like Palmerston, who saw the expedition to the Crimea as an opportunity to launch a broader war against Russia. By this time, the British press was piling pressure on the cabinet to strike a mortal blow against Russia, and the destruction of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol had become the symbolic victory that the warlike public sought. The idea of desisting from the invasion of the Crimea merely on the grounds that, with the retreat of the Russians from the Danube, it had become unnecessary was practically unthinkable.

‘The main and real object of the war’, Palmerston admitted in 1855, ‘was to curb the aggressive ambition of Russia. We went to war not so much to keep the Sultan and the Muslims in Turkey as to keep the Russians out of it.’ Palmerston envisaged the attack on the Crimea as the first stage of a long-term crusade against tsarist power in the Black Sea region and the Caucasus, Poland and the Baltic, in line with his memorandum to the cabinet on 19 March, in which he had outlined his ambitious plan for the dismemberment of the Russian Empire. By the end of August he had won considerable support within the cabinet for this enlarged war. He also had an unofficial agreement with Drouyn de Lhuys, the French Foreign Minister, that ‘small results’ would not be enough to compensate for the inevitable human losses of the war, and that only ‘great territorial changes’ in the Danube region, the Caucasus, Poland and the Baltic could justify a campaign in the Crimea.⁴⁴

But as long as Aberdeen was Prime Minister it was impossible for Palmerston to get such plans accepted as allied policy. The Four Points agreed by the Western powers with the Austrians after several months of negotiation on 8 August laid out more limited objectives. Peace could not be agreed between Russia and the allied powers unless:

The Four Points were conservative in character (nothing else would satisfy the Austrians) but vague enough to allow the British (who wanted to reduce the power of Russia but had no real idea how to translate this into concrete policies) to add more conditions as the war went on. Indeed, unknown to the Austrians, there was a secret fifth point agreed between the British and the French allowing them to raise further demands depending on the outcome of the war. For Palmerston, the Four Points were a way of binding Austria and France to a grand European alliance for the pursuit of an open-ended war against Russia, a war that could be expanded even after the conquest of the Crimea had been achieved.⁴⁵

Palmerston even went so far as to articulate a broad long-term plan for the Crimea. He proposed turning the area over to the Turks, and linking it to new Turkish territories captured from the Russians around the Sea of Azov, Circassia, Georgia and the Danube delta. But few others were prepared to think in such ambitious terms. Napoleon largely wanted to capture Sevastopol as a symbol of the ‘glorious victory’ he desired and as a means of punishing the Russians for their aggression in the principalities. And most of the British cabinet felt the same way. It was generally assumed that the fall of Sevastopol would bring Russia to its knees, allowing the Western powers to claim victory and impose their conditions on the Russians. But this did not make much sense. Compared to Kronstadt and the other Baltic fortresses defending the Russian capital, Sevastopol was a relatively distant outpost in the Tsar’s Empire, and there was no logical reason to suppose that its capture by the allies would force him to submit. The consequence of this unquestioned assumption was that during 1855, when the fall of Sevastopol did not happen quickly, the allies went on battering the town in what was at that time the longest and most costly siege in military history to date rather than develop other strategies to weaken Russia’s land armies, which rather than her Black Sea Fleet were after all the real key to her power over Turkey.⁴⁶

The Crimean campaign was not only wrongly conceived but also badly planned and prepared. The decision to invade the Crimea was taken without any real intelligence. The allied commanders had no maps of the region. They took their information from outdated travelogues, such as Lord de Ros’s diary of his Crimean travels and Major-General Alexander Macintosh’s Journal of the Crimea, both dating back to 1835, which led them to believe that the Crimean winters were extremely mild, even though there were more recent books that pointed out the cold, such as The Russian Shores of the Black Sea in the Autumn of 1852 by Laurence Oliphant, which was published in 1853. The result was that no winter clothing or accommodation was prepared, partly on the hopeful assumption that it would be a brief campaign and that victory would be achieved before any frost set in. They had no idea how many Russian troops were in the Crimea (estimates ranged between 45,000 and 80,000 men), and no idea where they were located on the peninsula. The allied fleets could transport only 60,000 of the 90,000 troops at Varna to the Crimea – on the most optimistic calculation less than half the three-to-one ratio recommended by military textbooks for a siege – and even that would have to be at the expense of ambulance wagons, draught animals and other essential supplies. The allies suspected that the Russian troops retreating from the Danubian front were going to be brought to the Crimea, and that the best outcome for them would be the seizure of Sevastopol by a lightning coup de main and the destruction of its military facilities and the Black Sea Fleet before they arrived. They reasoned that a less successful attack on Sevastopol would very probably require the occupation of Perekop, the isthmus separating the Crimea from the mainland, to block those Russian reinforcements and supplies. In his dispatch of 29 June, Newcastle had ordered Raglan to carry out this task ‘without delay’. But Raglan refused to carry out the order, claiming that his troops would suffer in the heat of the Crimean plain.⁴⁷

As the launching of the invasion approached, military leaders got cold feet. The French, in particular, had their doubts. Newcastle’s instructions to Raglan were copied by Marshal Vaillant, the Minister of War, to Saint-Arnaud, but the commander of the French forces was sceptical about the plan. His reservations were shared by the majority of his officers, who thought the attack would benefit Britain as a naval power more than France. But such doubts were brushed aside, as pressure was applied by the politicians in London and Paris, eager for an offensive to satisfy the public mood, and increasingly concerned to get the troops away from the cholera-infested Varna zone. By late August Saint-Arnaud had come to the conclusion that fewer men would be lost in an attack on Sevastopol than had died already from cholera.⁴⁸

The embarkation order came as a relief to most of the troops, who ‘preferred to fight like men rather than waste away from hunger and disease’, according to Herbé. ‘The men and officers are getting daily more disgusted with their fate,’ wrote Robert Portal, a British cavalry officer, in late August.

Rumours of a mutiny in the French camp were confirmed by Colonel Rose, attached to the French staff, who reported to London on 6 September that the French command did ‘not think well of the stability and power of resistance of the French soldiers’.⁴⁹

It was time to pack them off to war before they succumbed to disease or rose up against their officers. On 24 August the embarkation started. The infantry were ferried onto ships, followed by the cavalry and their horses, ammunition carts, wagons with supplies, draught livestock, and finally the heavy guns. Many of the men who marched down to the wharfs were too sick and weak to carry their own knapsacks or their guns, which were taken for them by the stronger men. The French did not have enough troopships for their 30,000 men and crammed them into their ships of war, rendering these useless if they were attacked by the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The defence of the convoy thus fell entirely to the Royal Navy, whose warships flanked the 29 steamers and 56 ships of the line carrying the British troops. On the quaysides there were disturbing scenes when it was announced that not all the soldiers’ wives who had travelled out from Britain could be taken to the Crimea.[23] The grief-stricken women who were to be separated from their men fought to get on board the ships. Some were smuggled on. At the final moment, the commanders took pity on the women, having been informed that no provision had been made for them at Varna, and let many of them board the ships.

By 2 September the embarkation was complete, but bad weather delayed the departure until 7 September. The flotilla of 400 ships – steamers, men-of-war, troop transports, sailing ships, army tugs and other smaller vessels – was led by Rear Admiral Sir Edmund Lyons in HMS Agamemnon, the Royal Navy’s first screw-propelled steamship, capable of sailing at 11 knots and armed with 91 guns. ‘Men remember the beauteous morning of the 7th of September,’ wrote Kinglake.