The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  In Sebastopol itself morale was higher than at court. The soldiers and sailors despised Menshikov, looking on him as a useless outsider. They saw little of him. His headquarters were twelve miles away, on the Belbec river; occasionally he would come down to Fort Severnaya and he spent the night before the battle on Cossack Mountain even nearer to the city, but he remained a remote figure, little more than a name to them. Most of the dead at Inkerman had come from the relief regiments he had summoned up from Bessarabia. Inside Sebastopol the defenders were proud and confident. Lieutenant Count Leo Tolstoy arrived in the city a fortnight after Inkerman and found ‘the spirit of the army beyond all description’. It was, he assured his brother, ‘a wonderful time’ to be in Sebastopol; and he thanked God that he had enjoyed the privilege of seeing such heroic people.[345]

  By contrast, there was little elation over the Inkerman victory among the British troops in the peninsula, only a feeling that ‘the staff know nothing of the enemy until they see him’ and that, on the whole, they were ‘a moderate lot’. What rankled most was the slow reactions of Raglan himself to moments of crisis and the apparent lack of any strategic vision. ‘We are doing nothing with the siege, and there are great doubts if we shall take the place,’ wrote Temple Godman despondently three days after Inkerman.[346]

  More senior officers than Lieutenant Godman had doubts, too. After Inkerman the allied generals met in two councils of war at Raglan’s headquarters in the Nikolayevka House on Monday and Tuesday, 6-7 November. It was agreed that Bosquet should deploy 2,000 French troops on the Heights, alongside what remained of the British 2nd Division, and that once the Turkish labourers had disposed of the Russian bodies they should construct a system of redoubts to strengthen this whole sector. The second meeting was held on Tuesday morning at an hour when, three days before, it had been assumed that the combined might of the allies would be hammering the city’s defences. Now, after Inkerman, General Canrobert ruled out any such attack: the allies lacked the men and guns to be certain of a victory. Raglan was disappointed, but he had to admit that at that moment the British expeditionary force could muster only 16,000 fit infantrymen. Reinforcements were on their way from England and from France; reluctantly Raglan agreed with Canrobert to postpone the great assault on Sebastopol. Huts must be found for the troops, for it would now be necessary to winter in the hills around the city. Privately — and not at the council table — two generals who were about to leave for England proposed more drastic courses to Raglan: the Duke of Cambridge thought the British should raise the siege and establish defensive lines around Balaclava, on the model of Torres Vedras, emerging to defeat the weary Russians when spring returned; and the sick and incapacitated General De Lacy Evans argued that Sebastopol was too hard a nut to crack and that the army should be evacuated. Neither proposal appealed to Raglan; it was unthinkable that ‘our allies be left in the lurch’.[347]

  The Prime Minister’s son, Alexander Gordon, was by now Assistant Quartermaster-General and was therefore well placed to inform his father of the true state of affairs. Three days after Inkerman he wrote:

  You will have heard that we have had another terrible battle in which we were at length victorious but with a loss which we can ill afford. Owing to the mercy of God, I again escaped unhurt, although my horse was shot under me. The battle lasted 9 hours and hard fighting most of it. You need not expect to hear of the fall of Sebastopol this winter, the utmost we can do is to protect ourselves in our present positions and we shall be very fortunate if we succeed in that.

  The Russians, he explained, had received considerable reinforcements because the Austrians as yet showed no sign of taking the field against them.

  I hope you were not an advocate of this expedition although of course you must have sanctioned it. You must prepare another army to carry on the war next spring for I do not think you will get much out of this, or rather what will be left of it by that time. You should immediately order several hundred waggons for the conveyance of ammunition and commissariat supplies in the next campaign. Do not waste time but copy the French which is excellent.[348]

  These problems seemed so pressing to an officer at headquarters that Alexander Gordon reverted to them again in a letter to his father on the following Monday (13 November). Heavy rain had fallen throughout the weekend; roads and tracks were broken up, and it was difficult to move supplies or ammunition from the base to the front line. To the chronic shortage of horses was now added a desperate lack of fit and able troops. ‘Unless you send out 10 or 12,000 men, militia or anything immediately we shall not be able to keep our position here through the winter,’ he wrote. ‘You should also send out several shiploads of hay because the horses are fast dying of starvation and cold. Why was not winter clothing sent out sooner? Do not be surprised if the siege is raised and we fall back on Balaclava.’[349]

  This letter, which must have reached Lord Aberdeen by the end of the month, was intended not merely for the Prime Minister but also for Prince Albert, who had presented Alexander Gordon with one of the horses he took with him to the war. Already the Prince had received at least one private letter sent soon after Inkerman. His kinsman, Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, who was serving with the Guards Brigade, had repulsed a Russian patrol which reached a spur of land above the Wellway at the height of the battle. But Prince Edward, ‘still under the excitement of that fearful scene’, evidently wrote less of himself than of the British commanders; and so critical was his tone that he felt the need to write contritely three weeks later to the Queen. ‘Reflections on our Commanders...are at all times wrong,’ he confessed.[350] Yet, whatever niceties loyal obedience might demand, Prince Edward and Alexander Gordon rendered their brother officers a service by speaking out. So, too, did Major-General Bentinck, who was wounded in the arm during the terrible tussle for Sandbag Battery and subsequently invalided home. By 2 December he was fit enough to travel to Windsor and give the royal couple a personal account of the horror he had witnessed less than four weeks earlier. Thus did the truth about Sebastopol begin to puncture illusions of glory within the Castle’s precincts. Well before Christmas, Victoria and Albert could judge for themselves the wretchedness of seeking to improvise a victory in the Crimea. Soon the Queen’s cousin, George, Duke of Cambridge, would be at hand to add his weight of enlightened experience to their understanding of the war.[351] But not so soon as the Duke anticipated, for before he left Balaclava poor Cambridge was delayed by the worst natural disaster of the campaign.

  He had embarked in the steam frigate HMS Retribution which was about to sail for Constantinople when a strong gale sprang up from the south-west soon after dawn on 14 November. By nine o’clock the wind was so fierce that spray was breaking against cliffs several hundred feet high and falling as rain on the crowded inner harbour, which was seething with foam. It seemed as if ships at the quayside would he crushed against each other while those offshore in the harbour would he lifted by huge waves and dashed against the rocks. Retribution lost two rudders and would have capsized had not her commander jettisoned her upper guns, enabling the frigate — and her distinguished passenger — to ride out the storm. There was little hope for vessels in the outer harbour or waiting at sea anchorages: seven large and fourteen smaller vessels were totally wrecked on the rocks off Balaclava; five transports, protected by Dundas’s squadron at the mouth of the river Katcha were driven aground, Cossack snipers firing at their crews; and, further north, terrible damage was done to the vessels in the bay of Eupatoria (where the town was still occupied by an allied force, mainly Turkish). Some vessels were undamaged, Lord Cardigan’s yacht Dryad among them. But less compact ancillaries were battered to pieces. The Rip van Winkle, a familiar sight in Balaclava harbour, was lost with all hands. Aboard her was Richard Nicklin, a commercial photographer sent out by the army in May to make a visual record of Raglan’s campaign. Any prints Nicklin may have made went down with him and his equipment.[352]

  The worst single disaster of the gale was the
sinking of the new 2,700-ton steamship Prince off Balaclava. She had arrived four days earlier, having transported the 46th Foot from Southampton. The troops disembarked on the Saturday but congestion within the harbour prevented the unloading of a mass of munitions and supplies put aboard her in the first week of October when London first learnt of the desperate shortages in the Crimea and at Scutari. The Prince, having lost two sheet anchors, was pitched broadside on to the rocks; only six members of the crew of 150 were saved. It has sometimes been suggested that the value of the Prince’s cargo was later exaggerated so as to hide deficiencies in the administration. But Crowe’s report, which reached London three weeks after the gale, shows that the gravity of the disaster was appreciated immediately at Balaclava:

  With the exception of the troops everything remained in her when she was dashed on the rocks. The whole of the winter clothing for the men went down — 40,000 suits of clothes...; vast quantities of shot and shell; and, not least in consequence, the medical stores sent out in consequence of the deficiencies which formally existed. The latter were, with not uncommon negligence, stowed away under the shot and shell and could not be landed at Scutari.[353]

  On shore the gusts of the gale suddenly reached hurricane force. ‘We had just got our morning dose of cocoa and the soldiers their rum when, about seven o’clock, the squall came down on us,’ Colonel Sterling wrote in a letter three days later. ‘All the tents fell in about three minutes’; and the Colonel’s official papers were caught by the whirlwind and scattered 300 yards away. Temple Godman. with the 5th Dragoon Guards above Balaclava, was peeved that a three-week-old copy of the The Illustrated London News, which had arrived with a letter from his father on the previous day, was carried away by the wind before he had read little more than a page of it; but worse was to follow: ‘Every hut was levelled, and all our things drenched...One officer’s air-bed I saw flying high away, over the Turkish camp,’ he wrote three days later.[354] It was far worse on the Heights south of Cossack Mountain, for within a few hours a blizzard followed the hurricane and the heavy rain. ‘We had no shelter whatever,’ Strange Jocelyn wrote home from a Scots Fusiliers bivouac in the hills. ‘I never knew what misery was before. Nor our poor, starved men, only half clothed in rags.’ After twenty-four hours guarding an isolated battery, Captain Campbell, who had so recently come out with the 46th Foot aboard the ill-fated Prince, had to march fifty exhausted men five miles back to camp through the blizzard along a route ‘difficult to find’ in the pitch dark; and when the exhausted men reached ‘home’, their comrades were ‘endeavouring to shelter themselves under the wet canvas as it lay on the ground’. Captain Campbell records that ten men in the 46th Foot perished that night, presumably from hypothermia. Next morning, from the Rifle Brigade camp, a fatigue party was sent out to help bring in the ‘wretched parties in the trenches...they being quite unable to carry their rifles and water-bottles’.[355]

  The French sustained heavy shipping losses but, as letters home to England constantly emphasized, their men were better accommodated for a winter campaign than their ally’s troops. The Russians, too, suffered little. Lieutenant Tolstoy, who was in Sebastopol during the gale, does not mention it in a very detailed letter written soon afterwards; but on Wednesday, 15 November, the day on which the besiegers were rescuing frozen and frost-bitten patrols stranded on the Heights, he appears to have had no difficulty in leaving the city by the Inkerman Causeway and travelling to an outlying battery four miles away, at Eski-Orda.[356] Had the allied army entered Sebastopol in October — as its commanders had assumed it would when the army began that ‘nine day march’ south from Calamita Bay — gales and blizzards need have left little mark on the troops: the army would have sheltered in stone buildings while the ships rode out the storm at safe anchorages. As it was, this disastrous visitation of nature exposed the British expeditionary force’s greatest weaknesses. A tattered army, cold, frustrated and angry, saw no reason to keep silent. There was no censorship of letters from the battle fronts in 1854. Soon after the troops heard that they were to receive campaign medals John Leech was to capture the mood of the moment in Punch with the greatest of his satirical drawings. Two ragged soldiers crouch in a snowbound Crimean outpost: ‘Well, Jack! Here’s Good News from Home,’ one of them remarks. ‘We’re to have a medal.’ And Jack replies, ‘That’s Very Kind. Maybe one of these days we’ll have a coat to stick it on.’[357]

  Chapter Thirteen – Hard Times

  On 9 December a London weekly, The Examiner, published the stanzas by the Poet Laureate which immortalized the Light Brigade’s charge of seven weeks earlier. The poem became so popular that it was soon printed on thousands of sheets and given by wellwishers to the serving soldiery as a tribute to the army’s courage and unquestioning sense of discipline. But Tennyson’s poem, as originally published, was something more than a patriotic ode: the line ‘someone had blundered’ — omitted when, nine months later, the poem appeared in book form, alongside Maud — faithfully caught the mood of indignant uncertainty which spread across Britain in those closing weeks of the year 1854; to many it seemed time to call the Aberdeen Government to account.

  Yet, despite the war news, Queen Victoria opened Parliament on 12 December with customary splendour, a troop of Life Guards escorting the ten-carriage procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster. ‘The debates which ensued...will ring trumpet-toned throughout Europe,’ The Illustrated London News proudly reported four days later. What was said in the two houses, the journal predicted, would multiply ‘the meed of praise with which History will hereafter record the deeds of the present Administration in a crisis of unexampled peril and difficulty’.[358]

  Few members of the Government shared the optimism of the ‘Illustrated’, for the strains of war were weakening the coalition of Peelites and Liberals over which Aberdeen had by now presided for two uneasy years. Lord John Russell, in particular, frequently threatened resignation if his cabinet colleagues shelved his proposals for winning the war. The Prime Minister personally had been in no hurry to fetch MPs back to Westminster. But, in the week that brought news of Inkerman to London, he accepted the need for a pre-Christmas session, largely at the prompting of a youthful Lord Privy Seal and a buoyant Home Secretary. The Duke of Argyll and Lord Palmerston argued that it was essential to boost the nation’s confidence by presenting a list of measures being taken ‘to invigorate our troops’. They seem, too, to have been looking for a safety-valve; in ten days of debates, followed by another month’s adjournment, the disgruntled might let off steam without imperilling the life of the Coalition.[359]

  In one sense Argyll and Palmerston were right. The Government ministers emerged well from the debates, with safe majorities every time the division bells rang. A mass of statistics proved that reinforcements were steadily leaving the British Isles for the East and that clothing and stores were on their way to replace what had been lost when the Prince foundered. Parliament was told of new measures to prosecute the war energetically: militiamen, traditionally local defenders of the English shires, would be encouraged to transfer to the regular army; and a force of fifty-four navvies was at Birkenhead about to leave for Balaclava, where the men would build a railway from the quayside to the siege works. There were few objections to a Militia Bill to permit the sending of militia regiments to free garrison troops in Gibraltar, Malta and Corfu for service in the Crimea; but a Foreign Enlistment Bill that would allow the Government to recruit in Germany, Italy and Switzerland as well as from among refugees in England aroused considerable mistrust.[360]

  The origins of both the Militia Bill and the Foreign Enlistment Bill may be traced to a memorandum sent by Prince Albert to Lord Aberdeen in mid-November which emphasized the need for effective reinforcements and pointed out that many recent army recruits were ‘mere boys, unfit for foreign service’.[361] But nothing was said of the Prince’s initiative when these proposals came before Parliament; this was a wise precaution, considering the latent xenophobia of th
e English middle classes. As it was, the mere prospect of a British Foreign Legion excited narrowly patriotic prejudice, especially in the Commons. ‘A calamity and a degradation to this country,’ said the backbench member for Leominster; exiles and malcontents would ruin discipline in the army, other critics complained. Richard Cobden, on more general grounds, condemned the immorality of enlisting ‘mendicant Germans’ to fight for a cause for which they felt no call of sentiment; to employ them was ‘wholesale assassination’.[362] But, despite the misgivings of individual MPs, both the Militia Bill and the Foreign Enlistment Bill became law; and, by the following August, Victoria and Albert were able to review a British-German Legion and a British-Swiss Legion at Shorncliffe Camp on the eve of their departure for Scutari and Smyrna.[363]

  Yet, although the Aberdeen Coalition weathered this pre-Christmas buffeting, several speeches contained a threat of storms ahead. Nothing could reconcile Cobden and Bright to the war; and both orators spoke at the end of the briefsession, lifting the level ofdebate with pleas for the Government to ‘err on the side of humanity’ by concluding an early peace.[364] Of more immediate concern were the accusations that ministers were failing to wage war effectively.[365] ‘You have attacked Sebastopol,’ complained Disraeli on the opening day of the session. ‘It might have been a questionable proceeding at any period of the year; but you have chosen the very worst period — a winter campaign, in a country in which of all others a winter campaign ought to be avoided. You have commenced this, the greatest of blunders, without having provided for the next blunder. Your huts will arrive in the middle of January, and the furs in time for the suns of May.’[366] But it was Henry Layard who, having returned from the Crimea only nine days before, posed questions which no minister answered. If Sebastopol were captured, was that in itself anything more than a single step in toppling the power of Russia? Why had the great commercial port of Odessa been spared? Why had there been no effective demonstration of power in the Baltic? There was, Layard argued, only one way to overcome Russia, ‘and that was to meet her in Europe, and to erect Poland into a kingdom’.[367]