The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  For more than an hour and a half General Soimonov was able to attack in strength, with twenty-two guns maintaining a steady cannonade on the 2nd Division camp, behind Home Ridge. At the same time a column penetrated the Mikriakov Gully while two battalions of the Ekaterinburgsky Regiment groped their way up the Wellway under cover of the fog. Suddenly, at the crest of the hill the Ekaterinburgsky found themselves faced by a composite force from Sir George Brown’s Light Division, hurriedly formed up at their camp from such battalions as were not then in the trenches.

  There followed a sharp engagement which was typical of the day’s confused fighting. General Buller, moving a group of no more than 260 infantrymen as quickly as possible through the brushwood, ‘guided only by the sound of the firing’, had to be convinced by his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Henry Clifford, that the shadowy figures looming up ahead of him in such vast numbers were the enemy. Bayonets clashed and, on the left, the British pulled away until Clifford himself led a charge which forced the Russians to retire and they then came under fire from a patrol of Grenadiers.[331] This marked the start of a series of British counter-attacks, which pushed the Tomsky and Ekaterinburgsky Regiments back on to Shell Hill. Unexpectedly the fog lifted briefly, making the whole spectacle clear to British sharpshooters. Within minutes General Soimonov, his two deputies and his artillery commander were picked off by riflemen and left dead on the field. But in the general confusion three battalions of Russians occupied a small, improvised and empty position known as ‘Sandbag Battery’ on a spur above St Clement’s ravine and some half a mile to the north of Home Ridge. Over the following two hours the militarily valueless Sandbag Battery — no more than a half-built protective shield ten feet high, with two gaping embrasures for field guns which were not there — became the scene of the most intense hand-to-hand fighting in the whole campaign. Pierre Bosquet, France’s toughest general in the field, was accustomed to the sickening carnage of North African campaigns. But when, later that day, he stood on the spur above St Clement’s Ravine and saw the ghastly layers of Russian, French and British corpses grotesquely intertwined around what remained of the Sandbag Battery, the sight pierced his mask of impassivity. ‘Quel abattoir!’ (What butchery!), he exclaimed with crisp revulsion.[332]

  Nothing had gone right for the Menshikov plan after the unfortunate Soimonov’s initial success. Over in the Chorgun sector there was no more than a desultory exchange of cannon fire and a token demonstration by Liprandi’s troops that deceived neither the French nor the British; and the fog made nonsense of the proposed sorties by the Sebastopol garrison. It was almost ten o’clock before Major-General Timofiev was able to send four battalions of the Minsky Regiment out from the protection cover of one of the southern bastions to break into the French siege works between Sebastopol and Kamiesh Bay. In this sector, more than four miles from the grim combats around Sandbag Battery, there was heavy fighting for more than two hours before Timofiev pulled back, with a third of his force dead or wounded.[333]

  But, apart from Timofiev’s attack, the day’s fighting was concentrated on Cossack Mountain, or the ‘Inkerman Heights’ as the British inaccurately called this massive spur of rocky scrubland, with its thorny bracken and stunted oaks. Here, too, General Dannenberg — who assumed effective command about half-past seven — had difficulty in preventing the Russian columns from acting in dangerous independence of each other. The weather, the terrain, the massive numbers of men concentrated in a small area, needed a great natural commander to improvise a victory once Menshikov’s plan had become an irrelevancy; and Dannenberg was new to the terrain, old and indecisive.

  From the start, Dannenberg was puzzled by the way in which the battle was unfolding. The 10th Division should have pressed forward towards Home Ridge almost side by side with Pavlov’s 11th Division, but there was still no sign of Pavlov’s gunners or infantry when Soimonov was killed. The 11th had been given the task of approaching the mountain up the Volovia and Quarry Ravines. So indeed they did; but at least an hour later than the timing on the original plan. Captain Chodasiewicz’s Tarutinsky battalion, who were protecting Pavlov’s engineers as his gunners made their way to the heights, found such confusion in the 10th Division after Soimonov’s death that Russians were firing on Russians; the battle-weary men of the loth were too demoralized to obey officers who sought to stop the senseless firing.[334] Yet, remarkably, Dannenberg restored some sort of order at the very moment when it looked as if the arrival of the Guards regiments from the Duke of Cambridge’s 1st Division would tilt the balance decisively in favour of the defenders of the ridge. But there was that day a dangerous sense of rivalry between the Scots Guards, the Scots Fusiliers, the Grenadiers and the Coldstreams. Successive charges proved so costly that the Duke was soon anxiously seeking reinforcements. And at that critical moment — still only about half-past eight in the drizzle of a November morning — Dannenberg was concentrating some 8,000 men and loo guns against the weakest point in the British position — ‘the gap’ an area of some 700 yards of unfortified scrubland south-west of the Sandbag Battery. If the Russians broke through there they might easily outflank Home Ridge and the whole British position. ‘Who can plug that gap?’ the British commanders asked each other urgently.[335]

  Strictly speaking, the question should never have been posed, for Raglan was on the ridge himself. But one of the oddities of Inkerman as a battle is the absence of clear orders from the commanders-in-chief, allied and Russian alike. The fog, of course, was partly to blame, although it began to lift on the Heights about nine o’clock. But the real reason for the heavy responsibilities assumed by divisional commanders was the sense of having been surprised into an emergency unforeseen by councils of war. Surviving letters home from the officers attached to various regiments tell similar stories: fire of musketry heard from the outposts of the 2nd Division, a mustering of ‘all we had in camp’, and a march in the general direction of the firing. Pennefather, in the 2nd Division lines south of Home Ridge was therefore joined by two senior generals — Sir George Brown with the Light Division and Sir George Cathcart with the 4th Division — as well as by the Queen’s cousin, Lieutenant-General the Duke of Cambridge, with the 1st Division. Sir Richard England, with the 3rd Division, remained in reserve protecting the British siege works, although he sent individual units to the Heights. Pennefather, a competent hard-fighting and hard-swearing brigadier who had two horses killed under him that day, needed every reinforcement available, but, it could be argued, his position would have been easier had Raglan, with his senior rank, issued effective orders or if the divisional commanders could have held in check their dangerously contentious ardour.

  Sir George Cathcart, who had fought at Waterloo as a 21-year-old subaltern, came out to the Crimea with a reputation for courageous initiative won in campaigns against the Kaffirs in southern Africa. It had not, as yet, been enhanced in the Crimea. On that Sunday morning he committed a fatal blunder which, in its impetuosity, matched the decision to charge Obolensky’s battery beside the Worontsoff Road eleven days before. As soon as the 4th Division reached the Heights Cathcart assigned his Rifle Brigade to Pennefather. He refused, however, Cambridge’s request to support the Brigade of Guards by plugging that widening gap. Nor would Cathcart change his mind when General Airey rode up with a verbal order from Lord Raglan that his infantry should help Cambridge. His fellow commanders, Cathcart decided, were overcautious. Six hundred of his men — an ominously familiar number — were told to discard their greatcoats, so as to move more freely in the brushwood. They then followed their Brigadier in a downhill charge, intended to bite deeply into General Pavlov’s leading column, the Okhotsky Regiment, on the Russian flank. Cathcart, who was mounted, followed them and the charge threw the Okhotsky into disorder. The apparent success of Cathcart’s charge induced the Scots Fusiliers, contrary to the Duke of Cambridge’s orders, to rush pell-mell down the slopes into St Clement’s Ravine, shouting and firing, with bayonets at the ready. But the Jakutsky a
nd Selenginsky Regiments, who had advanced up the Quarry Ravine with the Okhotsky, were now able to cut round on to the high ground vacated by Cathcart’s men. With the mist suddenly giving way to wintry sunshine, the red coats of the British infantrymen stood out as conspicuous targets and, once they were down in the valley, they could be picked off easily by the Russians who had closed in above them. Cathcart himself was shot through the heart. In all, his 4th Division suffered 500 casualties, dead or wounded, that day.[336]

  The rash charge left the group of Grenadiers around the Sandbag Battery desperately outnumbered. The Duke of Cambridge’s horse was killed under him and he was fortunate to escape with his life. With some 9,000 men held in reserve, Dannenberg seemed close to a spectacular victory. Russian shells began to land close to Lord Raglan, killing his senior gunner, General Strangways. At this point the dashing young Bearnais general, Charles Bourbaki, induced two hesitant French regiments to go forward, take the Russians in the flank and force them to break off the engagement at the Sandbag Battery and fall back to regroup in greater numbers for another attempt, later in the morning, to clear the allies from Home Ridge.

  After nearly four hours of fighting the sheer weight of Russian numbers forced the British and the small French detachment back southwards until, about ten o’clock, the leading column of the 11th Division advanced up the old post road to Simferopol and captured three guns at the southern edge of the Home Ridge. Fortunately they seem to have been too elated by their trophies to have realized their key position on the field, and their hesitation was decisive. For at last two 8-pounders, ordered from the siege park by Raglan when the battle began and dragged up the steep escarpment by 150 men, were brought into action; soon afterwards twelve French heavy guns arrived to support them. Moreover, General Canrobert, who had joined Raglan at the height of the battle for Cossack Mountain, brought General Bosquet’s troops into action; and the arrival of 2,000 fresh French troops, many of them Zouaves from North Africa, checked the impetus of Dannenberg’s latest assault. Bosquet was greeted by the unemotional stone-faced Raglan almost as warmly as the great Duke had welcomed Blucher at Waterloo. The crisis was over. ‘Au nom d’Angleterre, je vous remercie,’ Raglan said formally to Canrobert at his side.

  The arrival of the French reinforcements alerted Dannenberg’s latent instincts of caution. The sight of those newly committed columns was a sign that no thrust or feint in any other sector had succeeded in pinning down Raglan’s chief ally. He believed, rightly, that even more French regiments were on their way to the Heights and he therefore held back sixteen battalions of Russian infantry. For some two hours Dannenberg tried to secure by entrenchment the positions won on Shell Hill earlier in the morning. Throughout that time the struggle swayed backwards and forwards along the westward end of Home Ridge and around what was left of the Sandbag Battery. Raglan, however, was determined not to allow the Russians to retain Shell Hill. Soon after midday Lieutenant Acton rallied a company of his 77th Regiment (later the Middlesex) and, under cover of an artillery barrage, stormed forwards towards Shell Hill. The Russians, believing that Acton’s charge would be followed by a wave of advancing bayonets, hurriedly sought to get their own guns away from Shell Hill. It was at this moment that Dannenberg decided to pull back his survivors, under cover of artillery fire from two Russian warships anchored high up the inlet of Sebastopol Harbour.[337]

  Raglan would have liked to pursue the Russians, but the British had lost more than 2,500 men dead or wounded in the eight-hour battle, more than half of their original strength on the Heights. The Brigade of Guards had suffered particularly badly. The Duke of Cambridge had brought 1,300 Guardsmen with him to the Heights that morning, and by the time Bosquet’s troops intervened there were only some 200 still fit to fight. ‘My company went into action 52 men, and came out only 21; and all other companies in about the same proportion,’ one of the unwounded survivors in the Scots Fusiliers, Strange Jocelyn, wrote home to his father next day. ‘Our Regiment now numbers only about 280 men, instead of the 1,100 that left England,’ he added.[338] If there was to be a pursuit on that Sunday afternoon, it would have to be undertaken by the French. Canrobert, however, declined — and rightly. The French, too, had suffered casualties: he did not know precisely what had happened either in the Chorgun sector or between the southern bastions and Kamiesh; but he could see the weariness of his troops here on the Heights. Moreover, he did not believe that anything would be gained from harassing the Russians back to their lines, thereby exposing his men to cannonades from Totleben’s guns in the forts as well as from the two warships. Far better to harness one’s strength for that long-planned attempt to break into the city, he argued. The battle was over; news of victory should be sent swiftly to Paris and London.

  The fifth of November, once but too notorious in the annals of civic dissension, has been made memorable for ever by the splendours of one of the greatest victories ever achieved by this nation over a foreign foe. The field of Inkerman and the 5th of November will henceforth be linked in glory on the page of European history.

  So began the leader article in The Illustrated London News three weeks later, when details of the battle became known in Western Europe. The editor, taking pride in the ‘dreadful glories of war’, rejoiced that the Queen had created ‘the illustrious soldier’, Lord Raglan, a field marshal in honour of his feat of arms. There was a conviction, in the British and French press, that Inkerman would stand out as the decisive victory of the campaign. And so, in a sense, it does — but not as the newspaper editors saw it in November 1854, for Inkerman was soon recognized as a negative, defensive success rather than a memorable triumph. The outcome of the battle settled two questions: the Russians, despite their reinforcements, could not eject the French and the British from their commanding positions above Sebastopol; and, although they were slow to admit it, the allies did not have the men or material to come down from the Heights and capture the city before Christmas. Inkerman imposed a stalemate on the opposing armies.

  The earlier pages of that same issue of The Illustrated London News gave a more sober account of Inkerman. In three long columns, written on the Wednesday after the battle, Crowe gave a detailed and accurate account of the fighting, finishing up on a personal note. He described how shells burst in his tent, in the 2nd Division lines ‘where I was standing just before’: ‘I never had such narrow escapes of life as on that day. The scenes on the battle-field were awful. I sickened over them, and have been ill ever since.’[339] Crowe was not the only one revolted by the carnage. The Duke of Cambridge, who had shed tears after the Alma, collapsed after Inkerman and went aboard ship for Malta and England a few days later. Fanny Duberly, having watched the ‘melancholy train of ambulances winding down to Balaclava’ on Sunday afternoon, irritated her insensitive husband by refusing to join him in a tour of the battlefield next day; the prospect of such an undertaking made her feel sick.[340] Shattered or twisted bodies lay strewn among the scrubble and brushwood. Turkish labourers continued burying the Russian dead for another three days. Around the Sandbag Battery and on the slopes leading down to the adjoining ravines more than eleven hundred corpses were counted, most of them Russian. Some 35,000 Russian troops were engaged in the battle, and nearly 11,000 of them were killed or seriously wounded.

  Menshikov was not prepared to recognize the magnitude of his defeat. His first message to the Tsar did not mention his original plan for a sustained offensive in successive sectors of the front, merely adding in the last paragraph that his troops had also carried out ‘a strong demonstration against Kadikoi’. The despatch simply described how nine regiments had made a sortie from Sebastopol, captured the English fortifications and spiked eleven guns. Menshikov admitted that ‘the enemy had won’ the battle, a success which, he explained, was due to the superiority of their rifles, the greater range of their siege artillery, and their ‘numerical superiority’.[341] This was, at best, a misleading account of a battle in which the Russians, for the only time in t
he Crimea, had far more men and far more guns than their opponents. Privately the Prince told his sovereign that Dannenberg was to blame for the failure to exploit the early success of the sortie. The Tsar was given a father’s satisfaction in reading of the fine example of ‘calm courage’ set by his two sons when they ‘were in the midst of this terrible fire’ and Menshikov urged that they should receive decorations. After the frustrations of the morning the Grand Dukes did indeed risk their lives when they sought to hearten the Russian infantrymen as they fell back towards Sebastopol with shells crashing down among them; and the Tsar subsequently created both of his sons Knights of the Order of St George (Fourth Class).[342] But if Menshikov believed that flattery would silence the Grand Dukes he was mistaken. Their letters to St Petersburg roundly blamed the Prince for the defeat, emphasizing his incompetence and his failure to organize an effective headquarters staff. Nor was it only the Grand Dukes who exposed Menshikov’s failings. Dr Pirogov, appalled by the disorder in the hospitals, never minced his words when writing to the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna; and she had been notoriously outspoken at court for more than twenty years. Over the following two months a powerful party in St Petersburg began to urge the dismissal of Menshikov.[343]

  Paskevich, Nesselrode and Orlov were all convinced that only a new commander could save Sebastopol. However, the Tsar, who spent longer and longer in the comparative isolation of Gatchina, was perplexed. If he dismissed Menshikov, who would replace him? Had Nicholas’s health been good, he would have acted with the old decisive authority which had safeguarded the throne from the Decembrists at his accession. But he was by now in a state of physical collapse: he could not sleep; he could not eat; he could not resolve the problems facing him. His eldest son, Alexander, had no doubt as to what should be done with the Commander-in-Chief; but obstinately Tsar Nicholas ignored all demands for Menshikov’s dismissal. Gatchina was gloomy and silent, a young maid-of-honour noted in her journal; and as for the Tsar, he seemed to her ‘like an oak, weakened by the gale, an oak which can no longer bend but only die in the midst of the tempest’.[344]