The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  By the time Admiral Kornilov stepped down from his carriage, the scene from Telegraph Hill — so sharply defined earlier on — was confused. For the battle refused to follow any predetermined pattern. Raglan’s divisions reached their first line before the French on their right had turned the Russian position around the village of Almatamac. The British infantry therefore lay waiting for some twenty minutes to half an hour almost a mile short of the river, under steady fire from the Russian artillery which, to the dismay of Raglan’s gunners, was sited too high in the hills to fall within range of the 9-pounders. When at last Lord Raglan gave the momentous order, ‘The infantry will advance’, ten thousand infantrymen prepared to go forward, a moving human wall two miles in extent.[221]

  it was as if the Cossacks too had heard Raglan’s order, for at that moment the village of Burliuk, ahead of the British centre, burst into flame. Every cottage had been evacuated on the previous day and filled with straw and some explosives. A brigade on the right of the 2nd Division — mainly infantry from Berkshire and Wales — was momentarily checked, not so much by the flames of the village street as by the choking smoke; Colonel Lysons later describing how the village dogs and pigeons had ‘dived...through the smoke in evident terror of their lives’. But the dramatic firing of Burliuk hampered the defenders. ‘We became blinded by the smoke which drifted back on us,’ a Russian officer recalled. ‘It would have been wiser, as those with battle experience said at the time, not to have created a smoke screen for the enemy’s benefit since this enabled him to fire on us without any loss on his side.’[222] Burning Burliuk blotted out the panorama from Telegraph Hill. It must have been at this point, if not earlier, that the Sebastopol gentlefolk hurriedly evacuated their grandstand, for the battle was creeping closer and closer to them. So precipitate was their departure that next day a British skirmisher found on the hillside an abandoned picnic basket, with six cold chickens ready to be eaten and a couple of bottles of champagne. Close by was ‘a lady’s bonnet very nicely trimmed’.[223]

  Meanwhile, out at sea, Lieutenant O’Reilly of HMS Retribution had a clearer picture of what was happening; and he duly sketched it for The Illustrated London News. From the frigate’s mizzen-mast the white cliffs on either side of the Alma’s mouth stood out sharply, reminding O’Reilly of the coastline between Brighton and Beachy Head. Like any other officer in the British or French fleets, he could see what Menshikov had ignored — a winding path up the steep face of the cliffs. It was up this route, beyond the village of Almatamac, that General Bosquet led his veteran colonial campaigners, the Third Regiment of Zouaves, to a plateau some 350 feet above sea-level. Once there, and supported by guns dragged up this precipitous path, the French 2nd Division was in a position to turn Menshikov’s left flank at a point where he had left only an understrength battalion of the Minsky Regiment and half a battery of artillery, sited well inland, to keep watch on the allied warships.[224]

  Four miles away, at his headquarters on Kourganie Hill, Menshikov at first refused to believe the horseman who brought him bad news from the clifftop. And when the group of staff officers around the Prince persuaded him that these alarming messages might be true, his first reaction was to wonder why General Kiriakov had not already plugged the gap. Captain Chodasiewicz described how Kiriakov was presiding over a champagne luncheon party when Lieutenant Stetsenkov, Menshikov’s most enterprising aide-de-camp, rode over to what should have been the western sector’s command post: he had, Kiriakov assured Stetsenkov, the French well in sight.[225] Menshikov, unwilling to wait for Kiriakov, rode off towards the sea, ordering the western sector’s reserve battalions and four hussar squadrons to follow him. But the Russian reinforcements came under heavy fire from the ships once they approached Bosquet’s plateau; and Menshikov pulled them back, so as to form a defensive line around the two dominant features of the whole landscape, Telegraph Hill and Kourganie Hill.

  Like Lieutenant O’Reilly and Sergeant Mitchell, Russell of The Times looked for familiar parallels in the strange contours of the Crimea: ‘If the reader will place himself on the top of Richmond-hill,’ Russell wrote that night, ‘dwarf the Thames in imagination to the size of a Hampshire rivulet, and imagine the lovely hill itself to be deprived of all vegetation and protracted for about four miles along the stream, he may form some notion of the position occupied by the Russians.’[226] It was up these heights that General Codrington led the infantry of the Light Division in a frontal assault on the glacis defending the Russian gunners’ principal stronghold, the ‘Great Redoubt’, where 24-pounders and 32-pounders had been throwing iron balls more than six inches in diameter for as much as a mile, with reasonable accuracy. Astonishingly, Russian horse-teams succeeded in removing all but one of the guns before Codrington’s men rushed the final earthwork. They were not, however, allowed to remain there: the Duke of Cambridge, ponderously correct in his movements and receiving that day his baptism of fire as commanding general of the 1st Division, had not yet crossed the river, with his three battalions of Guards and three of Highlanders; and before he could begin the ascent to the Redoubt, the Vladimirsky Regiment counter-attacked and forced the Light Division to fall back from the Redoubt. To the British right, Prince Napoleon and General Canrobert had not advanced from their footholds south of the Alma, while Bosquet’s assault had lost its impetus. By now it was mid-afternoon; and suddenly the battle seemed to have swung in favour of the Russian defenders.

  The great battles of history have never ‘swung’; their fate has been settled, one way or the other, by the resolute hand of a natural commander, or the belated arrival of a second army. But on that Wednesday, beside the Alma, there was no outstanding general on either side and no prospect of reinforcements. Both Saint-Arnaud and Menshikov had planned their battle, leaving little to be improvised according to the circumstances of the day. Eye-witnesses describe the opposing commanders in the saddle for hours at a time, riding backwards and forwards along their lines: Saint-Arnaud, tired and gaunt; Menshikov, choleric and suspicious; a couple of aspiring grandmasters, hesitant above their chessboard. But one of Saint-Arnaud’s pieces refused to conform to the pattern of the game. Raglan puzzled his allies, deeply though they respected him. The French remained unsure how far he accepted the Marshal’s grand design for victory. At the crucial point in the battle — with Canrobert, Bosquet and Prince Napoleon checked and the Great Redoubt again in Russian hands — Raglan and his staff were lost from sight.

  Yet, in reality, Raglan was at that moment engaged in the enterprise which made an allied victory certain. As soon as the British infantry obeyed his order to move forward, he rode down to the river bank parallel to their line of advance, but well to the seaward side of burning Burliuk. The approach to the ford over the river had collapsed in the course of the fighting, but the deep water was held back by some rocks, over which Raglan’s horse carefully picked his way. His staff followed their commander, and it was remarkable that they were not caught in heavy crossfire from the Russian positions. ‘In a minute more,’ wrote Colonel Calthorpe, ‘we were among the French skirmishers, who looked not a little astonished to see the English commander-in-chief so far in advance’.[227] His staff officers then found, by chance, ‘a sort of lane with high hedges...which gradually rose higher and higher’ until it emerged on a promontory, looking out over Telegraph Hill and the Great Redoubt. Quickly two artillery officers on his staffrode down the lane again and returned with a couple of 9-pounders, but no gunners. Briefly staff officers ‘dismounted and served the guns themselves’, their somewhat random shots convincing the Russian commander in that sector, General Kvetsinsky, that the allied troops — at first he took it for granted that they were French — had, for the second time that day, mysteriously scaled heights up which, it had been assumed, no passable route existed. By the time Kvetsinsky wheeled his defenders to face the new threat, the British had hurriedly brought forward a full battery, whose gunners were in position and firing at the Russian infantry below. One shot hi
t an ammunition wagon; and in retrospect this stands out as the decisive single blow in the day. For, after such a tremendous explosion, Kvetsinsky determined to pull his troops back, so as to safeguard the next rise of ground protecting the Sebastopol road, known to the allies, rather grandly, as ‘the Pass’. At the same time General Canrobert’s artillery — and gunfire from the ships — repelled a counter-attack by a battalion of the Moskovsky Regiment, who were also forced back to guard the road to the Pass, taking up a position at right angles with the remaining Russian troops engaging the Duke of Cambridge’s division along the banks of the Alma.[228]

  By now the brief moment when Menshikov might have snatched victory had come and gone without the Prince recognizing it. The whole allied line moved forward, with the Guards Brigade and the Highland Brigade storming Kourganie Hill and recovering the Great Redoubt. To the Russians, Sir Colin Campbell’s kilted Black Watch and Cameron Highlanders seemed an irresistible force, ‘the savages without trousers’, as the mortally wounded General Karganov called them, with grudging admiration. The Lancers and Dragoons of the cavalry reserve forded the Alma and joined the pursuit, their commanding general, Lord Lucan, not waiting for orders from a distant Lord Raglan.[229]

  Menshikov had lost the battle. Perhaps he had lost the war. A cavalry staff-captain was sent off at once to St Petersburg to tell the Tsar what he had seen that day, for the Prince could not bring himself to set pen to paper. Desperately the Russian commanders tried to restore discipline in a defeated army pulling back towards the outer ring of Sebastopors forts. ‘The battalions of the reserve began to retreat without orders and our battalion followed them,’ Captain Chodasiewicz wrote. ‘When we withdrew, nobody knew whether we ought to go to the right or to the left.’[230]

  There were still some hours of sunlight left. Raglan, having restrained Lucan’s Lancers and Dragoons, proposed to Saint-Arnaud that the allies should send their cavalry, horse artillery and reserve divisions down the Sebastopol road in pursuit of the enemy. The Marshal refused: his soldiers, he explained, must first retrieve their knapsacks, which they had left beside the river when the battle was at its height; he had to ensure that the wounded and the sick received medical attention; and, after four and a half hours of artillery exchanges, his gunners were short of ammunition. Not one of these reasons seemed convincing to the British; and they suspected that Saint-Arnaud was thinking in narrowly French terms rather than in collaborating closely with his ally. It is certainly strange to find him next day writing to his wife, ‘Had I possessed cavalry, I would have taken 10,000 prisoners’.[231] For, although Napoleon III would not risk the elite squadrons of the Empire on an overseas expedition, there were mounted troops on the battlefield that evening eager for a pursuit. A thousand British horsemen had spent much of the afternoon in a field of cantaloups, watching and waiting for the order to advance.

  For one officer, half Irish and half Italian in parentage, this enforced inactivity was particularly galling. At Raglan’s side during much of the day was an aide-de-camp who had served in the Austrian army and studied at first hand the cavalry systems of Russia, France and Prussia; and, on paper, no one in the British army was better informed on the handling of horsemen than Captain Lewis Edward Nolan. His textbook, Cavalry, its History and Tactics, supplemented by a manual, Nolan’s System for Training Cavalry Horses, kept his name before the public on both sides of the Atlantic; his system was introduced at West Point, where Colonel Robert E. Lee was Superintendent; and even Tsar Nicholas knew of Nolan’s works. But, like every other officer below the age of fifty-eight, until that Wednesday Captain Nolan had never watched a clash of arms between the great European Powers; and, to his chagrin, on this personally momentous occasion the opposing squadrons of cavalry remained inactive throughout the battle. That evening Nolan poured out his disillusionment to a sympathetic listener, W. H. Russell of The Times. Most officers around Raglan followed their commander’s example and shunned Russell, taking no more notice of him ‘than you would of a crossing sweeper’, as he once remarked. But Nolan respected the mounting influence of newspapers — and Russell was, after all, an Irishman by birth. ‘There were one thousand British cavalry, looking on at a beaten army retreating — guns, standards, colours and all — with a wretched horde of Cossacks and cowards who had never struck a blow, ready to turn tail at the first trumpet, within ten minutes of them,’ Nolan complained. ‘It is too disgraceful, too infamous! They ought all of them to be damned.’[232]

  Russell did not recount this conversation until he put together a book on the war, after the fighting was over, but the pronominal imprecision of the last sentence is so characteristic of Nolan that it rings true. At the time, Russell’s newspaper readers were merely told that ‘Lord Raglan had expressed his intention of keeping his cavalry “in a bandbox”, and he was apprehensive of getting into any serious difficulty with the enemy at the close of such a day’.[233] This was a half-truth, for Raglan was undoubtably disappointed by the Marshal’s lack of response: his instinct had been to exploit every sign of a Russian rout. But he was, indeed, short of cavalry, and the British contingent was not in itself powerful enough to risk an ambush in the failing light from the numerically superior Russian cavalry further along the road to Sebastopol. Tonight therefore the armies would bivouac on the Alma heights, or in what remained of the villages and vineyards along the river. Tomorrow Raglan hoped to convince Saint-Arnaud and Canrobert and the enigmatic Trochu of the need to march directly on Sebastopol.

  Casualties at the Alma were not heavy by the standards of earlier or later wars. The French lost 60 men killed, of whom 3 were officers; British dead numbered 362, including 25 officers; Turkish losses are not known, but must have been few; and the Russians finally listed 46 officers and 1,755 other ranks killed, together with 7 officers and 728 men missing. It was the suffering of many of the 6,000 allied and Russian wounded that made the night after the battle hideous. ‘Groans’, ‘piteous cries for water’, ‘heartrending’, ‘a horrible scene — death in every shape and form’, in Colonel Calthorpe’s words; and a Russian guards officer wrote in almost identical terms of the terrible misery around him: ‘The sights I saw will remain vivid in my memory all my days,’ he added. Raglan, who surrendered one of his two tents as a casualty station that night, had seen the harrowing face of war before, in the Iberian peninsula and at Waterloo. The ghastly novelty in the aftermath of the Alma was the continuing incidence of cholera, which soon ‘swept off many who had taken part in the battle’; among them was Brigadier-General Tylden, commanding the sappers who had marched south from Calamita Bay. And there was, too, a terrible omission: for, unlike the French, the British landed in the Crimea ‘without any kind of hospital transport, litters or carts or anything,’ as the senior surgeon attached to the Light Division noted in shocked disbelief.[234]

  On Thursday morning (21 September) Raglan had two conferences with Saint-Arnaud and his staff. There is confusion over what was said. The French have maintained that the Marshal wished at once to press forward on Sebastopol and was held back by Raglan, since it took the British two days to tend their wounded and ensure safe conduct back to the ships off Eupatoria for the Russian prisoners, many of whom were themselves battle casualties. Saint-Arnaud, writing that day to his wife, told her that he intended to resume the advance at seven on Friday morning, expecting to cross the last of the rivers along the Eupatoria Road, the Belbec, on Sunday; he would then send her a letter from Sebastopol. But Raglan appears to have believed that the French were as reluctant to march on the city as on the previous afternoon. The crossings of the Katcha and the Belbec would be as hotly contested as the Alma, they maintained; the Russians must still have some 40,000 men to defend the naval base; no siege artillery had been landed to bombard the defences of Severnaya (‘Star Fort’). Better a more cautious approach, probing the outer defences, cutting the route from Simferopol and Bakchisarai so as to deny Menshikov reinforcements, while waiting for more French and British troops (includ
ing the cavalry Heavy Brigade) to arrive from Varna and Constantinople. To these arguments were added Raglan’s own doubts about the French Commander-in-Chief’s health, for Saint-Arnaud’s long hours in the saddle on Wednesday were followed by a serious relapse. Whatever the reason for the delay, it was Saturday morning before the advance was resumed along the road southwards from Eupatoria.[235]

  ‘There were not many traces of a beaten army,’ Raglan’s nephew noted with surprise, as they rode towards the Katcha. ‘A good many helmets and knapsacks...and occasionally a ghastly corpse, but altogether it did not give one the idea of a disorganized force.’[236] But it was a puzzling ride: no sign of the enemy at the Katcha, where the armies spent the night; and no speedily constructed earthworks around the Belbec. All the bridges had been left intact. The vineyards and villages were not fired, and marching soldiery long denied fresh fruit reached out for pears, apricots and melons growing beside the road. So much was unripe that Colonel Calthorpe was convinced the ‘men will make themselves ill’. There was something uncanny about the rustic peace of the valleys. In 1812, after Borodino, Napoleon had ridden towards Moscow unmolested by an enemy who seemed swallowed up by the vast emptiness of Russia; in triumph he surveyed this ‘Third Rome’ from Salutation Hill; and yet, only a few hours later, fire began to consume the heart of the city as the Imperial Guard marched in. Menshikov was a veteran of the 1812 campaign. Now, forty-two Septembers later, were the Russians in the Crimea setting a similar trap to spring on their invaders? The allies did not put the question to the test.

  There was no Salutation Hill on the road into Sebastopol, but on the afternoon of Sunday, 24 September, Raglan and his staff rode up to a ridge four miles north of the city and looked down, as Napoleon had done before Moscow, at the prize which had lured the allied expedition into Russia. ‘All the buildings were of white stone, and with the sun on them, quite dazzled’ the little party on their ridge. From the sea they had already picked out the onion-shaped cupola of the Admiralty, but the green roofs of the private houses were new to them. More ominous was the solid strength of the Star Fort, menacingly silent above the road into the town. Raglan turned away. Saint-Arnaud and General Burgoyne between them had persuaded him that the Russians were obviously waiting for an attack from the north. It would be better to move around the city, find quays for the steamers close at hand and then enter Sebastopol from the south, where there was no Star Fort guarding the approaches. Not one of the redoubts south of the city was yet ready for manning — or so, at least, primitive intelligence reports suggested.[237]