The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  The effective Superintendent of the nursing Order was Alexandra Stakhovich, who had influential contacts at court, but from its inception the Order was dominated by Pirogov, who arrived in Sebastopol early in November 1854. Ekaterina Bakunina, daughter of a governor of St Petersburg, wore the brown habit for six years and, having briefly walked the wards of a Moscow Infirmary, she was accepted as a nursing sister after only four further days of training. Most of her companions gained their experience of nursing from spending a fortnight in October working in clinics around Moscow or the capital, their period of ‘training’ almost coinciding with the journey of the Nightingale Mission from England to Turkey. But although there was such a close coincidence in timing for the formation of these British and Russian nursing societies, the Grand Duchess’s Order was hampered by a problem which had not troubled Florence Nightingale. Apart from a day spent on the Rhone covering the railway gap between Lyons and Valence, her nurses had completed their 2,000-mile journex by rail and steamer without great difficulty, although often buffeted by stormy seas. The thirty members of the Order of the Exaltation of the Cross who travelled speedily along the Nicholas Railway from the capital to Moscow at the beginning of November found that it took another month to complete the journey southwards to Simferopol in the Crimean hinterland. Five years later Alexandra Krupskaya — member of a liberal gentry family better-known after 1917 than before it — wrote their Odyssey, describing how horse-wagons, ox-carts and finally Crimean camels carried them down flooded roads and along dirt tracks until they reached Simferopol, where they were able to tend the wounded for the first time on 13 December. Another seven weeks went by before the first hatch of nurses were working under Dr Pirogov in beleaguered Sebastopol.[319]

  Pirogov himself succeeded in making the fifty-mile journey across the Yaila Mountains from Simferopol to Sebastopol about the same time that Florence Nightingale’s nurses were completing their voyage to the Bosphorus. Some of the problems he reports from the Sebastopol hospitals make familiar reading: the same shortages, the same appalling hygienic conditions; ‘more than 2,000 wounded, mixed up together, lying on filthy mattresses soaked in blood,’ he wrote in one of his earliest letters from Sebastopol. At one point he calculated that he was performing operations for ten hours a day ten days running.[320] Almost certainly Pirogov was the ablest surgeon of Nicholas I’s reign, with a military-surgical experience and a national standing unmatched by any British or French army doctor, and he could speak with an authority which Florence Nightingale only attained in later years. Yet, even so, he found himself battling constantly against the prejudice of the older generation of Russian officers. Prince Menshikov in particular was opposed to new-fangled ideas: he mistrusted the use of ether as an anaesthetic; and he was totally opposed to the employment of nursing sisters in the hospitals. He feared, so he told Pirogov, that it would increase the incidence of syphilis. Another high-ranking officer said bluntly that the men ‘will rape them right away’. Privately Pirogov suspected that the real reason why the military establishment were so hostile was a fear that intelligent and devoted nursing sisters would expose the knavery of hospital administration. He was fighting thievery and corruption as much as entrenched prejudice.[321]

  Pirogov had his way. The nurses came to the Sebastopol hospitals, some seventy of them in four escorted groups. They remained there, amid the sagging gutted houses of a ghost city, throughout the grimmest months of bombardment. Many travelled slowly back with ambulance convoys across the terrible roads of southern Russia. There were feuds within the nursing Order, with bitter conflicts between the matrons, just as there were also in Scutari. But the Russian soldiery respected the honour of their Sisters of Iercv just as the British sailors and soldiers respected the group of nurses who had come out with Florence Nightingale. If the wearing of a holland scarf, embroidered ‘Scutari Hospital’ in red, was said to be a guarantee of protection on the waterfront of Constantinople, so a brown habit with golden pectoral cross safeguarded Russia’s nurses in Sebastopol, Kherson and Simferopol. Not the least curiosity of the Crimean War is the almost encouraging circumstance that, unlike later campaigns, humanity’s brutalization by battle fhiled to corrupt the spirit.

  *

  Tsarist Russia, although respecting Pirogov’s achievements and recognizing the philanthropy of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, never found a heroine of the war. There was too much in-fighting within the Order of the Exaltation of the Cross for Alexandra Stakhovich or Ekaterina Bakunina or Alexandra Krupskava to win acceptance as legendary figures. Moreover, though literate Russians avidly read newspapers and periodicals reporting the heroism of the Tsar’s troops, journalism in St Petersburg and Moscow did not become politically influential until the sudden ascendancy of Michael Katkov’s Panslav Moskorskiya Vydemosti a decade later. In Paris, too, the press remained inhibited by political censorship, enhancing the reputation only of those on whom the sun of imperial approval smiled benignly.

  By contrast, there is no doubt that in those last four crucial months of 1854 Britain’s newspapers and journals shaped public opinion as never before. With Parliament not sitting between 14 August and 12 December the press built up heroes and heroines of its own choosing while denouncing inefficiency wherever it was to be found. Three of the four memorable phrases of the war years owe their origin to reports in The Times, the odd one out coming from Bright’s apocalyptic Commons speech in the last week of February 1855. Indeed the issue of The Times which printed Russell’s famous account of the light cavalry charge not only included his description of the ‘thin red streak tipped with a line of steel’, but also a report sent several days earlier of how a road up to the British batteries facing Sebastopol was so exposed to ‘fire that it has been called “The Valley of Death”’ — an image which Tennyson borrowed and transferred five miles eastward to the Causeway above Balaclava.[322] It was The Times, too, which spread the most familiar picture of Florence Nightingale. Shortly before he left Constantinople, MacDonald, the almoner of the ‘Fund for the Sick and Wounded’, sent home a report from Scutari which finally placed the Superintendent of Female Nurses on her pedestal:

  Wherever there is disease in its most dangerous form, and the hand of the spoiler distressingly nigh, there is this incomparable woman sure to he seen; her benignant presence is an influence for good comfort, even amid the struggles of expiring nature. She is a ‘ministering angel’, without any exaggeration, in these hospitals; and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night, and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making the solitary rounds.[323]

  Thus did ‘The Lady with the Lamp’ make her entry into folklore. For months ahead, popular prints and verses would feed on MacDonald’s sentimental imagery. Nor was it only the British who were moved. Across the Atlantic, in the quiet serenity of Harvard, Longfellow had a vision of ‘heroic womanhood’ in Scutari. Lifting doggerel into poetry, he idolized the heroine of mid-Victorian London in the moving stanzas of Santa Filomena, an obscure early martyr whom in 1854-5 it was fashionable to venerate in France and Italy.

  The parallel was inappropriate. The Florence Nightingale of Sister Sarah Anne’s vivid journal is a woman of character, a compassionate fighter, suggesting a literate Joan rather than some nebulous waif from the catacombs. The ‘Lady with the Lamp’ cult was treated by Miss Nightingale with embarrassed impatience. To Sidney Herbert she confessed that she could see no good in this talk of ‘our self sacrifice, heroism and so forth’ when around her were ‘men who are neither gentlemen, nor men of education nor even men of business’ but men ‘whose only object is to keep themselves out of blame’.[324] At Scutari she had discovered what she had long suspected, that she was engaged in a battle against obdurate male prejudice which would continue long after the guns fell silent.

/>   Chapter Twelve – A Victory and a Disaster

  In later years Florence Nightingale used to head letters written on the anniversary of her arrival at Scutari, ‘November 4th (Eve of Inkerman)’. The parenthesis bore testimony to the importance she attached to the battle whose casualties so nearly overwhelmed her nurses in those terrible first weeks in Turkey. Yet in one sense the dateline was misleading. Most great battles in fluid campaigns —Agincourt, Lützen, Austerlitz, Borodino, to pick names at random — are preceded by days or nights of expectancy, with rival troops bracing themselves as their commanders find high ground from which to survey the terrain. Even in static trench warfare ominous signs suggest a coming attack: watchfires glow in the night sky; harnesses rattle, wagons creak; and it is enough to make forward troops stand-to for false alerts, as in the week before Balaclava.

  Inkerman, however, was one of those rare engagements for which there was little preparation on either side. The main body of the Russian assault troops knew nothing of the ground, having only arrived on the previous day from Bessarabia; and if there were warning signals of increased activity in the enemy camp, no British staff officer was perceptive enough to recognize them. Letters from England, based upon titbits of information picked up by British diplomats in the German states, had suggested that the Russians wished to launch a full-scale attack to relieve the pressure on Sebastopol. But the besiegers were both confident and complacent. They took little interest in what the Russians were doing: Menshikov had probed the flank ofthe British position in the hills on 26 October, only to pull back badly mauled by the Guards. He was, it seemed, as cautious as ever. ‘We can see that large reinforcements are daily arriving to the Russian army,’ Raglan’s nephew noted, but he was sure that the enemy did not have ‘determination and courage enough to overcome British firmness and French gallantry’.[325] The allies went ahead with their plans for an assault on Sebastopol, having reached the stage where scaling ladders were stacked ready on the Balaclava quayside, where any spy might note their presence. At Raglan’s farmhouse headquarters, midway between the harbour and Sebastopol itself, there were no ‘Eve of Inkerman’ premonitions.

  Throughout Saturday, 4 November, it was raining heavily in the hills behind Sebastopol, just as it was on the nurses disembarking off Constantinople. The clay soil in the valleys became a morass of mud and it was slow going for carts and wagons on the tracks up to the high ground. In the morning Lord Raglan rode the short distance to Canrobert’s headquarters for a council of war at which it was resolved that on the following Tuesday a final effort should be made to break into Sebastopol before the grip of winter tightened on the peninsula; the two commanders agreed that they would meet again on Sunday evening and settle details of the attack.[326]

  Late on the Saturday afternoon Brigadier-General Pennefather — temporarily in charge of De Lacy Evans’s 2nd Division, whose commander had recently fallen from his horse — rode to the southern end of the mile-long ridge which the Russians called Cossack Mountain. From an outpost on ‘Shell Hill’, the furthest hump in the ridge, Pennefather noticed some excitement along the road that formed ‘besieged’ Sebastopol’s remaining link with Simferopol and the interior. The drizzle made it difficult to focus his field-glasses but he could just make out a brightly coloured yellow carriage hurrying into the city; the Tsar’s third and fourth sons, the Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michael, had arrived to bolster the morale of the defenders. More interesting to Pennefather was what seemed to be a mass of troops across the marshland of the river Chernaya. He sent two officers down into the valley to take a closer look at the enemy; but they could see nothing remarkable.

  That night, as a raw mist clawed into the forward pickets on the edge of Cossack Mountain, their commanding officer took pity on them and pulled them hack into the shelter of Shell Hill’s crest. Next morning, well before dawn, the church bells of Sebastopol began to ring out. To the detachment on Shell Hill that seemed nothing unusual: it was after all a Sunday, merely Guy Fawkes Day to the British, but no doubt for Orthodox believers one of those occasions which call for a mighty din at an early hour. At six o’clock the young officer commanding the furthest picket post was pleased to see reliefs looming up through the heavy mist. All thirteen men turned out to greet them — and were at once taken prisoner, for the newcomers were a company of the Tomsky Regiment, who had scaled the ridge in the mist and darkness, with the carillons deadening the clatter of their approach. In all, three regiments — with twenty-two field guns — had made the difficult ascent and within minutes were ready to open fire on Pennefather’s advanced command post, 1,200 yards away on a slightly higher hillock known as ‘Home Ridge’.[327] This initial Russian success by the 10th Infantry Division was a remarkable achievement, not least because General Soimonov, their commander, had arrived in Sebastopol from Kishinev less than twenty-four hours before and had only received his somewhat confused operational directive from Prince Menshikov on the previous evening. Most of the ensuing battle was fought over this saddle of Cossack Mountain, separating Shell Hill from Home Ridge. Important actions also took place in the ravines which cut deeply into the 400-foot-high spur of the mountain. To the west, coming out from the bastions of Sebastopol itself, was the Careenage Ravine, with an offshoot known as the Mikriakov Gully at the foot of Shell Hill and another offshoot, the Wellway, which ran eastwards and northwards beneath Pennefather’s camp on Home Ridge. To the north of Cossack Mountain, cutting south-westwards into it from the marshy mouth of the river Chernava, were four other, smaller, ravines — Georgievsky, Volovia, Quarry and St Clement’s. Of these only Quarry Ravine had a significant distinguishing feature, the old post road from Bakchisarai to the port. Across the Chernaya marshes ran a causeway leading to Menshikov’s field headquarters near the overgrown village of Inkerman, where a cluster of towers and ramparts survived from a former Genoese settlement. Inkerman itself, five miles from the centre of Sebastopol, was on rising ground which faced, beyond the river, Quarry Ravine and the mountain saddle forming the battlefield that was to appropriate the village’s name.

  Menshikov’s battle plan looked good on paper.[328] No less than 60,000 men and 234 guns, with a considerable force held in reserve and the promise of covering fire from two Russian warships, would go over to the offensive, mounting a series of attacks, first on the British positions on Cossack Mountain and then seven miles to the east, from the direction of Chorgun. The Sebastopol garrison would engage the British forward trenches, while on the extreme right of the Russian line a foray against French siege positions would threaten to cut Canrobert’s supply route from his base at Kamiesh. Detailed development of Menshikov’s orders were left to his second-in-command, General Dannenberg, to the generals who had recently arrived from Bessarabia (Soimonov of 10th Division and Pavlov of 11th Division), to General Moller in Sebastopol, and Generals Paul Gorchakov and Liprandi on the eastern sector. The plan, which needed precise and accurate timing if it were to succeed, thus assumed good co-ordination between the garrison of Sebastopol, the Black Sea Fleet and four Russian commanders who were separated from each other by high ground and by the enemy. Poor visibility, on top of heavy rain, made the plan almost unworkable from the start.

  Prince Menshikov, having sketched this grand design, took little part in its execution. Indeed he appears to have seen nothing of the battle. Next day the Grand Duke Nicholas, in a letter to his brother Constantine in St Petersburg, described how he and their brother Michael had been waiting for Menshikov on the causeway across the Chernaya when the first firing began. But the commander-in-chief did not leave his house until half-past six. He then rode with the Grand Dukes to the Georgievsky Ravine where he had decided to await reports from his generals. No message reached him; and the Grand Dukes, whose presence with the army in the field had been well publicized, heard the din of a great battle up on the heights and the boom of artillery echoing from more distant hills, but saw nothing of the morning’s action. At last, about one o’clock, Menshikov rode of
f in search of news. Apparently by chance he met the deputy whom St Petersburg had foisted on him, General Dannenberg, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who detested the Prince almost as much as the Prince detested him. It had been a hard morning’s struggle, Dannenberg explained; in fact he had just ordered a withdrawal, since otherwise the army would have been totally destroyed. ‘After this,’ Grand Duke Nicholas wrote, ‘the Prince became completely unnerved.’[329] Not until much later did it become clear to Menshikov that victory had come within reach of his troops on Cossack Mountain that Sunday morning.

  The British response to the sound of the first exchange of firing on Shell Hill was slow, for reports reached headquarters thick and fast of activity on one sector after another. Even as Raglan hurried off north-westwards from his headquarters, he was, as his nephew wrote, ‘doubtful for a moment as to which point he should go’ since news had reached him that Liprandi was also on the move in the east. Which was the genuine attack and which was the feint? Or did Menshikov think he was now strong enough to squeeze the invaders with a pincer embrace? Surely no commander-in-chief would attempt to launch a co-ordinated counter-offensive in such atrocious weather? ‘The fog and vapours of drifting rain became so thick...that one could scarcely see two yards before one,’ Russell told his Times readers.[330]