The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  On the parade ground the Russian Arniy looked impressive. Sleekly groomed cavalry horses wheeled with the geometric exactitude demanded of equine choreography. The Guard Regiments were precise in their goose-step and alert in their arms drill; they took care to ensure that the foot was held at the correct angle as their colours were lowered before the saluting-base on those ceremonial occasions which filled Russia’s military calendar month by month. But field training was neglected, many of the infantrymen were too old for effective service, and they were weighed down by the half-remembered lessons of old campaigns. In the 1790s Suvorov had taught his men to despise the bullet in favour of the bayonet and his officers to rely on ‘Intuition, Rapidity and Impact’; and these maxims still held good. Paskevich’s army prepared for battle in tight formation, with bayonets at the ready; there were few battalions with rifled weapons. Nor was it only the soldiery who were ill-prepared for a new war. In 1810 a British general reckoned the artillery brigades of the Tsar’s army to he as well equipped as any in Europe and two years later Russian guns matched the firepower of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Borodino; but since 1814 nothing had been done to modernize the Tula Arms Works or the foundries at Bryansk, Ekaterinburg and other centres. Thus, although the artillery regiments were up to strength in the winter of 1853-4, doubts remained over the supply of munitions to the battle front in any protracted campaign.[64]

  One great problem was still unresolved from Napoleonic days: the rapid movement of men and supplies over the vast expanse of the Tsar’s Empire. Paskevich had his headquarters in Warsaw, astride the vital artery to the heart of old Muscovy. The General Staffwas in attendance on the Tsar in the capital which Peter the Great had created between Lake Ladoga and the headwaters of the Baltic Sea. A major war against the Ottoman Empire would require the transfer of troops and material at short notice from Poland and the shores of the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea and the Caucasus. Troops could by now be moved speedily between St Petersburg and Moscow along 404 miles of railway track as straight as any Roman road, and when this ‘Nicholas Railway’ was opened in 1851 it excited interest as the longest line in the world. But south of Moscow there were no railways at all, and by 1853 only 250 miles of track existed anywhere else in the Tsar’s Empire, almost all of it along the railway from St Petersburg to Warsaw, which reached no further from the capital than Pskov. By contrast the German Confederation had almost seven times as much railway track as Russia; and in France troops could be moved from the Channel coast to the Mediterranean ports with only two gaps in the railway system, both at points where it was possible to transfer to barges on the river Saône. Marshal Paskevich — who had been born in the Ukraine, close to Tsar Peter’s triumphant battlefield of Poltava — accepted, as part of the natural order, his army’s logistical problems south of Moscow: long and slow marches down terrible roads; supplies brought in convoys of wagons drawn, at times, not by horses but by oxen.

  But familiarity with the hard facts of geography left Paskevich uneasy at the thought of denuding the exposed Polish salient, a region which was without natural geographical boundaries and therefore open to attack from Prussia or Austria should they side with the Tsar’s enemies. He therefore proposed to retain his crack regiments in the north, concentrated along the traditional invasion route through Poland and on either shore of the Gulf of Finland. To advance southwards to Constantinople, he urged Nicholas to raise a volunteer army from ‘the Turkish Christians’ — Roumanians, Bulgars, Serbs and Greeks. By Paskevich’s reckoning, thirty or forty thousand bitter enemies of the Sultan were ready to viii their own independence, with Russian officers and Russian muskets.[65] The plan interested Nicholas; but he was not yet ready to use it. He had no wish to offend the Austrians by encouraging national sentiment among the Southern Slavs and the Roumanians, who formed minority groups within the Habsburg Empire as well as the Ottoman Empire. Nessefrode confirmed the Tsar’s intention of keeping his armies on the defensive if there remained a prospect of peace talks.

  Paskevich also recommended the evacuation of all the outlying forts in the Caucasus, for he thought that they could not be supplied unless Russia was sure of naval mastery within the Black Sea. Nicholas rejected this proposal, which was resented by his Chief of Naval Staff, the ubiquitous Prince Menshikov. The admirals were divided among themselves. They knew that it would be difficult to keep the forts supplied from Sebastopol, but they were less inclined to wait upon events than the army along the Danube. The senior sea-going commander at Sebastopol in the autumn of 1853 was Vice-Admiral Paul Nakhimov, a somewhat outspoken officer and a good seaman, much respected by his men. In October 1827 the 25-year-old Nakhimov had been a junior officer in the Russian Adriatic squadron which, in collaboration with British and French warships and under the joint command of Admiral Codrington, had sunk the combined Turko-Egyptian fleet in Navarino Bay, at a crucial moment in the struggle for independence. Now, twenty-six years later, Nakhimov resolved to take a leaf out of Codrington’s book: he would carry the war to the enemy’s coast.

  In the third week of November Nakhimov’s flagship, the newly commissioned Imperairitsa Mariia, accompanied by two other sail of the line, reconnoitred the Anatolian coast, searching for a Turkish flotilla which had sailed eastwards from the Bosphorus earlier in the month and was believed to be escorting men and munitions to the southern Caucasus. Nakhimov found the flotilla on 24 November in the small harbour of Sinope, together with other ships which he assumed were troop transports. The vessels were protected by a line of forts along a spit of land which commanded the anchorage. There was near-panic in Sinope, but the Russians sailed away without a shot being fired, and the Turkish commander, Osman Pasha, sent an urgent message to Constantinople for reinforcements. Sinope was only a hundred miles south of the great Russian base at Sebastopol, but it was three hundred miles from the Bosphorus, where the French and British fleet kept watch on the Sultan’s palace. Not a single warship sailed east from Constantinople. There was, however, great activity at Sebastopol, and Vice-Admiral Novosilskii sailed across the Black Sea with four more large vessels and two frigates to reinforce Nakhimov’s squadron.

  Six days after his reconnaissance cruise, Nakhimov returned to Sinope, bringing his vessels close inshore soon after midday. The Turks opened fire first. But with 720 guns, 76 firing shells rather than the traditional cannon shot, the Russians were much stronger than the Turks, even with support from their shore batteries. After little more than an hour’s bombardment, with several Turkish vessels in flames and Osman Pasha’s flagship aground and sinking, Rear-Admiral Kornilov arrived with three steam-powered warships from Sebastopol to ram home Russia’s superior naval strength. By four in the afternoon on that last clay of November, the Turkish flotilla was no longer a fighting force. Seven frigates, two corvettes, two transports and two paddle steamers had been destroyed. A small British merchant vessel had also been sunk, and it was alleged that the Russians had fired on Turkish seamen in the water as they sought to escape from the inferno. Some three thousand Turks perished either in the fires or in the sea; and several hundred were taken prisoner, including the wretched Osman Pasha. Fire, fanned by a stiff inshore wind, spread from the ships to the waterfront and soon enveloped the whole of the straggling town. The Russians suffered no more than light casualties, for smoke from the burning wooden vessels effectively screened Nakhimov’s squadron from the Turkish coastal batteries. A single Turkish steamer, with an English commander, escaped destruction and put to sea, hotly pursued along the coast by Kornilov’s vessels. Some forty-eight hours later this one surviving warship brought news of the disaster to the Sultan and to the Anglo-French fleet riding at anchor off the Golden Horn.[66]

  Odessa, the southernmost port of the Ukraine, learnt of the battle earlier than Constantinople and, indeed, before Nakhimov’s fleet sailed triumphantly up the Bay of Sebastopol. From Odessa the news sped to St Petersburg (where a great victory was duly celebrated) and to Vienna, whence it was telegraphed to Paris an
d London. The Times carried the first reports in its later editions on Monday, 12 December, although reserving leader comment for Tuesday and Wednesday. An enterprising and legitimate act of war by the Black Sea Fleet was represented as a ‘massacre’ and no one accepted St Petersburg’s argument that Sinope was an attempt to forestall an invasion of the Caucasus. ‘The English people are resolved that Russia shall not dictate conditions to Europe, or convert the Black Sea, with all the various interests encompassing its shores, into a Russian lake,’ declared The Times. ‘To stop the unprofitable contest by striking down the aggressor with a blow is as plain a duty towards humanity as it was to send succour to Sinope’ reflected the Morning Chronicle a week later.[67] A Turkish defeat on land, with Russia’s armies heading south towards the Balkan Passes, would have stirred excitement at Westminster — and then passed rapidly into the margin of history as peace talks followed, in Vienna or Paris. But for the Russians to claim a naval victory against an empire whose capital was under the protection of British warships was another matter. To the general public it seemed a humiliation, the Nelson touch brushed aside or — even worse — appropriated. When, on that Wednesday after the news broke, Palmerston told the Foreign Secretary that ‘something must be done to wipe away the Stain’, he spoke — as so often — with the authentic, unreasoning voice of John Bull.[68]

  A few months later the Poet Laureate could rejoice, no less patriotically, that ‘the peace, that I deem’d no peace, is over and done’, as he waited for ‘the sudden making of splendid names...by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep’. Without Nakhimov’s victory at a remote roadstead in Asia Minor there would have been no such mood among the British people. Sinope, the last occasion upon which wooden vessels were in combat, was no more a great naval engagement than Navarino had been. Yet it was, none the less, an historic event. The idea of a general crusade against Tsarist tyranny, popular that winter with radicals in Britain and in France, was conceived long before Nakhimov’s gunfire echoed along the Anatolian shore; but it was to avenge Sinope and prevent similar naval sorties that the principal expedition of the war set its sights on the destruction of Sebastopol.

  *

  Throughout most of the previous two months the Eastern Question had seemed less pressing in London than in the late summer. Rumours of war shook the stock market from time to time: ‘Rothschild called on me last night in great alarm,’ Graham wrote to Clarendon on 22 November. ‘He had heard that Brunnow was about to be recalled and would leave London in 3 days.’ There was still deep mistrust of Russia: the arrival at Portsmouth of the Tsar’s warship Aurora in such urgent need of repairs that the captain maintained he could not risk sailing his vessel as far as the Scheldt strained the limits of naval hospitality, and Brunnow’s protest to Lord Aberdeen when The Times suggested that the Aurora’s officers were spies lacked conviction.[69] But, for the most part, the Lords and Commons gave their attention once more to domestic problems. Chief among them was Russell’s insistence on committing the Coalition to parliamentary reform, a measure to which several leading Whigs remained hostile.

  Over this issue Palmerston and Russell could never agree. It continued to separate these two belligerent interventionists in the cabinet when, in December, the news became graver and graver. Even beforc the first reports from Sinopc, Palmerston was warning the Prime Minister that he felt bound to leave the Government and lead the anti-reformers in the Commons. Aberdeen doubted Palmerston’s sincerity and thought he was making a bid for popularity: ‘P. has stolen a march by combining the Eastern question with reform,’ he told Graham two days before London heard of Sinope.[70] The Queen and Prince Albert, who had long mistrusted Palmerston’s robust geniality, urged Aberdeen ‘to let him go at once: and suspicion of palace intrigue heightened Palmerston’s desire to quit the cabinet and speak his mind on the burning topics of the moment. A curt letter of resignation duly reached the Prime Minister on 14 December, Wednesday in the week in which Sinope held the headlines. Thursday’s Morning Post printed the letter, adding the gratuitous information that, even if reform was the ostensible reason for the Home Secretary’s resignation, Palmerston was really going because of his shame at the Government’s mishandling of the Eastern Question.[71]

  There followed, not so much a ‘day of dupes’, as a month of mugs. For no tale seemed too improbable to merit credence that December. The noisiest sections of the press not only backed Palmerston but turned against the court, with muddle-headed patriots blaming the Home Secretary’s decision to leave the Government on ‘Coburg intrigue’ and suggesting that Prince Albert was ‘a subservient tool of Russian ambition’. This extraordinary wave of public hysteria continued well into January 1854 and, as Lord Derby complained, on one occasion ‘led thousands to attend at the Tower to see His Royal Highness go in’ when it was rumoured that he had been arrested for high treason. Palmerston never in fact surrendered his seals of office. After basking for a week in popular idolization, he decided on 23 December that he had misunderstood the reform proposals. On Christmas Eve he was back at the Home Office, his political standing in the cabinet strengthened by what was, in this pre-Gallup era, clear evidence of a high rating in public opinion. Another month went by before an inspired announcement in the Morning Post emphasized that Lord Palmerston’s offer to resign ‘had not the remotest connection with anything on the part of the Court’.[72] The ‘escapade’ did nothing to enhance his reputation at Windsor.

  This strange affair meant that, although Palmerston attended every cabinet in the three months preceding Britain’s declaration of war, he took no part in the meetings of ministers which discussed how the Government should react to Sinope. Among the Peelite members of the Coalition there was still a strong movement in favour of negotiation. During the first week of December Buol had presided, with some success, over a conference of envoys from Austria, Britain, France and Prussia; and it was hoped that the Tsar would send a high-ranking diplomat to Vienna, with authority to accept Four-Power mediation in the Russo-Turkish conflict. Even at Constantinople, more than a week after news of Sinope reached the city, Stratford de Redcliffe was seeking Turkish backing for an immediate armistice, direct Russo-Turkish talks, and a Great-Power guarantee of a settlement based on renewal of existing treaties.[73] All this uncertainty helped make the cabinets of 17 and 20 December indecisive. It was agreed at the first meeting that Clarendon could inform Stratford that he might allow British warships to enter the Black Sea, something which the cabinet suspected (wrongly) that the ambassador would already have ordered. Three days later Clarendon went a little further and obtained cabinet approval for telling Stratford that the Anglo-French fleet must enjoy ‘complete command of the Black Sea’. But both Graham, as First Lord of the Admiralty, and Granville, the ex-Foreign Secretary who served as Lord President of the Council, had by now come to believe it was time for decisive action; and so, too, did Lord John Russell who was already threatening to out-Palmerston Palmerston by resigning specifically over this issue. To show that he was in earnest, Russell even stayed away from the third cabinet of the week, which met in the afternoon of Thursday, 22 December, and dragged on well into the evening.

  Thus the leading ‘hawks’ left the decisions at this vital meeting to their twelve colleagues. Traditionally the cabinet is said to have been most influenced by pressure from Paris, by Napoleon III’s threat ‘to act alone’ and order the French squadron ‘to sweep the [Black] Sea of the Russian flag’. But Palmerston and Russell were eloquent by their absence. The Coalition was as near foundering as Osman Pasha’s breached flagship at Sinope. Clarendon was prepared to send orders to the fleet which had, in effect, been drafted by Russell. This was too much for Aberdeen: he still hoped for peace; he believed it just possible that war could yet be avoided, but only through collaboration with the French. Accordingly the instructions sent to Stratford on Christmas Eve specifically adopted the ‘mode of action proposed by the Emperor’, Napoleon III: ‘All Russian vessels, other than merchant-men, me
t in the Black Sea, should be required to return to Sebastopol,’ the ambassador was told. Seymour in St Petersburg was instructed to inform Nesselrode of these orders; and he did so on 12 January.[74] The sands of peace were fast running out.

  Chapter Four – Unrolling the Banner

  The new orders for the navy reached Constantinople on Tuesday, 3 January 1854, and by Friday all the British and French vessels had passed through the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea. There were ten ships of the line from the Royal Navy and nine from France. To the fury of the commander-in-chief, Admiral Dundas, Lord Stratford believed that his instructions gave him authority over the British squadron. The ambassador at once ordered the main force to sail for Sinope, with Dundas’s deputy, Rear-Admiral Sir Edmund Lyons, flying his flag in the newly built Agamemnon, which, with her ninety-one guns, was the first steam-screw ship of the line in the Royal Navy. In these weeks of non-belligerent watchfulness there was no better qualified naval officer for so difficult an assignment. Lyons, who was five years younger than Dundas and expected soon to succeed him, had returned to the Royal Navy only ten weeks before, after eighteen years in diplomacy, first as Britain’s envoy to Athens, and later in Berne and Stockholm. Both the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Prime Minister wanted him back at sea: ‘Lyons is the best man to be employed for the service required, whatever it may be,’ Aberdeen told Clarendon with characteristic imprecision when, in the previous September, he sought Lyons’s release from the diplomatic service.[75] Lyons knew the waters of the eastern Mediterranean well and as a naval captain in 1829 had paid courtesy calls to Sebastopol, Odessa and Varna. Only the mysteries of steam-power were new to him.