by Alan Palmer
It is hard to see what the allied generals gained from the ten-day bombardment. Since any defences which were knocked out all lay in the southern sector, this massive expenditure of ammunition brought no nearer the investment of the city from the north, an essential prerequisite for any effective siege. Napoleon III repeatedly put forward a more ambitious plan: a holding force would man the siege-works and trenches; a British corps would advance northwards from Kadikoi on Bakchisarai; and the French would make a new landing at Alushta so as to march through the coastal mountains and capture Simferopol. These operations would secure for the allies control of the two supply centres for the southern Crimea. Having cut off both Sebastopol and Gorchakov’s relief army, the allied march would force the Russians to sue for peace. This essay in grand strategy was pastiche early Bonaparte, with the nephew showing that he had studied his uncle’s campaigns at least as far as November 1796. General Niel liked the plan; Canrobert was uneasy about its implementation without total unity of command; and Bosquet thought (rightly) that it took little account of the Crimean terrain. Back in London, Burgoyne considered the plan, at best, risky: it would weaken the army in front of Sebastopol; and it might require the transportation through the mountains of a siege-train, if Simferopol was turned into an armed camp. That same septuagenarian caution which, after the Alma, ruled out a direct march on Sebastopol now shelved the first imaginative concept of the campaign.[421]
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Throughout April 1855 there was, however, a strong possibility that no army would need to march on Simferopol or fight its way into Sebastopol. During the fortnight when the Vienna Conference stood suspended (2-17 April) it seemed likely to the allies that Russia’s new Tsar would send instructions to his ambassador to end the war. Lord John Russell remained in Vienna to represent Britain’s interests and he was joined by the French Foreign Minister, Drouyn de Lhuys. Nevertheless it was felt in London that there was a need to let the Austrians and the Russians know that Britain and France would continue to wage war if Alexander II rejected the revised Four Points as a basic for peace. Already the advance division of a new Baltic Fleet had sailed from Spithead, and the main squadron followed at the end of the first week in April. This spring there was no flamboyant Napier in command, for he had been succeeded by the former Second Sea Lord, Rear-Admiral the Hon. Richard Dundas; but the departure of the Baltic Fleet was once more trumpeted in the newspapers, with a clear warning to the Tsar that ‘the force is stronger and the duty more terrible than last year’.[422] News of the ten-day bombardment of Sebastopol was also interpreted in London as serving Russia notice of the massive fire-power which the allies could now concentrate on a single objective.
But when Prince Alexander Gorchakov returned to the conference table on 17 April, Drouyn, Russell and Buol found that the Russians would make no concessions. Buol, however, was ready to save the talks. He suggested that the Four Points be modified to enable Russia to keep as large a fleet in the Black Sea as before the war while Britain and France would be allowed to deploy warships in the Black Sea to act as a ‘counterpoise’. At the same time Buol gave an impression to both Russell and Drouvn that, if the Russians rejected ‘counterpoise’, Austria would enter the war. Russell and Drouyn accepted the plan, with modifications, and returned to London and Paris to win support from their respective governments. But Napoleon III, Marshal Vaillant, Palmerston and Clarendon were all opposed to the idea of ‘counterpoise’. ‘Were we to adopt Buol’s plan,’ Clarendon told the British ambassador in Vienna, ‘none of us would feel safe from attack in the streets, and serve us right.’[423]
Drouyn was so angry at the refusal of his government to reach a compromise with Buol and Alexander Gorchakov that he resigned office, and was succeeded by Walewski. At first Lord John Russell sought to stay in Palmerston’s cabinet as Colonial Secretary, but newspaper attacks on his apparent willingness to appease the Russians forced him out of office early in July; he remained on the back-benches for the next four years. Technically the Vienna Conference stood adjourned until 4 June, when Alexander Gorchakov announced that the Tsar would not accept any peace which imposed limitations on the size of the Russian fleet. The British and French ambassadors at once broke off all talks. Austria, however, did not declare war on Russia; for Buol and Francis Joseph convinced themselves that their Western allies had deliberately sabotaged the conference in the hope that Austrian military intervention would induce the Russians to accept harsher terms of peace.[424]
Failure to reach agreement at Vienna made both Napoleon III and the British Government eager for a victory in the field. Napoleon used the telegraph several times each day at the end of April in an effort to force Canrobert to go ahead with his plan for a march on Simferopol. But since the British authorities knew that Raglan, too, wished for an early military success, they made no attempt to cajole him. It was the British commanders, Raglan and Sir Edmund Lyons, who on 29 April persuaded Canrobert to agree to a plan by which a combined Anglo-French force would make a lightning raid on the seven Russian batteries at Kerch, which kept the Sea of Azov closed to allied warships. The expedition, under Brown’s command, sailed from Balaclava at sunset on 3 May, heading out towards Odessa so as to confuse the enemy. But that night Canrobert received two telegrams from Napoleon he was to send vessels to Constantinople to convey 40,000 more French troops to the Crimea; then he would concentrate all his forces, ‘and not lose a single day’, preparatory to landing an expedition at Alushta, as the first step towards realizing the Emperor’s grand strategic plan. After reading the first telegram Raglan persuaded Canrobert not to interfere with the raiding force sailing for Kerch. But the arrival of Pélissier, Niel and the electric telegraph had destroyed Canrobert’s confidence. Ever since Easter his vacillations had led wits at British Headquarters to nickname the French Commander-in-Chief ‘Robert Cant’. Now, within an hour of leaving Raglan, the second telegram made Canrobert change his mind yet again. Without consulting Raglan he ordered a fast despatch boat to sail after the Kerch expedition, which turned back within sight of its objective, its commanders having ‘under very propitious circumstances, considered success certain’, as Lyons telegraphed to the First Lord.[425]
The recall of the expedition was ‘a vast disappointment’, Raglan told Panmure with his customary understatement on 8 May. Four days later a council of war, attended by Omar Pasha as well as by the principal French and British commanders, scrutinized the Emperor’s plan in minute detail. Canrobert, with Niel dutifully at his side to support Napoleon, found opinion rapidly hardening against the Alushta expedition. At one moment he even tempted Raglan with a proposal that the British Field Marshal should command the whole operation. But in the end the war council decided that 30,000 more good front-line troops were needed to maintain the pressure on Sebastopol and safeguard the allied bases before any troops marched into the interior of the Crimea. Wretchedly distraught, Canrobert decided to resign his command; a semi-official account, partly dictated by Canrobert himself, says that he even went down to the trenches and stood up, in full dress uniform, so that a Russian sniper could end his military career with glory. But not a shot was fired. Next day he handed over his responsibilities to Pélissier, gladly returning at his own request to his old division, now organized as the 1st Division of Bosquet’s 2nd Army Corps.[426]
Pélissier was a rough and tough officer, the antithesis of the gentlemanly Lord Raglan. He respected Niel as an engineer and as an organizer, but he would stand no nonsense from him as Napoleon III’s mouthpiece and observer: nobody was to communicate with the Emperor except through the Commander-in-Chief; and if Niel found this prohibition intolerable, he could return on the ship to Marseilles. Pélissier also made it clear that he would not be intimidated by those laconic, and often incomprehensible, messages that the cipher department brought to him from that ‘newest enemy’ of a good general, the electric telegraph. What he did not wish to know became crumpled paper in his pocket.[427] If Admiral Lyons and Lord Raglan sought t
o carry the war to the Sea of Azov, Pélissier would not stop them.
A second expedition accordingly sailed for Kerch on 22 May and gained command of both sides of the Strait leading into the Sea of Azov three days later. Over the following fortnight the smaller British and French warships swept the Sea of Azov clear of Russian vessels, destroyed a succession of supply bases and landed British, French and Turkish troops to hold strategically important posts in the eastern Crimea. Roger Fenton, the photographer, accompanied the expedition — although without his cameras and equipment — and his letters home chronicle a disgraceful tale of plunder and pillage along the eight miles which separate the historic town of Kerch from the old fortress of Yenikale; but, while appalled by what he saw, he recognized the ‘immense value’ of the operation to the allies. So long as they held the Strait, no men or material could reach the Russians in the Crimea from Taganrog and the other harbours in the Sea of Azov. Militarily the Kerch expedition was recognized as the first totally successful enterprise in the war against Russia.[428]
But Pélissier, Raglan and Lyons himself knew that Sebastopol remained the great prize. Back in London ingenious minds considered new ways of taking the city. Navvies who were no longer needed to build the railway might be employed, not merely to dig trenches, but to man them as a holding force while an allied attack was in progress, Panmure suggested. If untrained in the use of firearms, the navvies could always be issued with pikes, he explained. And, on this occasion looking to the future rather than the past, he put forward another proposal in mid-May: ‘I do not like to write about it officially,’ he diffidently told Raglan, ‘but it appears to me that, if you are to assault, a reconnaissance on a quiet day, by means of a balloon let up to a certain height and retained in position would be a means of ascertaining the inner defences and the obstacles which you may have to encounter. I shall have all ready, so that if you telegraph for one it shall immediately go to you’.[429]
No request was made for the balloon, for aerial reconnaissance was not needed. ‘Through field-glasses from the Heights it was possible to see by daylight the smallest details of the city and the antlike movements of Gorchakov’s troops. On May Day Roger Fenton, ‘basking in the sun’ on slopes covered with ‘a mass of wild flowers’, could pick out ‘a piquet of Cossacks along the Tchernaya and a regiment of infantry being drilled about two miles off’. The promontory above the Worontsoff Ravine where the British generals killed at Inkerman were hurried was now known as Cathcart’s Hill; the headquarters of Sir John Campbell’s 4th Division were on its crest, and looked out towards the centre of Sebastopol, about one and a half miles distant. From the Mortar Battery, some 500 yards north-west of Campbell’s headquarters, there was a good view down the ravine to the fortress of the Redan, little over a mile away. Here, at the start of the second week in May, Florence Nightingale was shown a hazy white vision of Sebastopol at her feet, as soldiers rushed from their tents and ‘cheered to the echo with three times three’, while her officer escorts presented her with a bouquet of wild lilies and orchids.[430]
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By now official visitors were beginning to arrive from the Bosphorus: the British ambassador to Turkey; the Anglican Bishop of Gibraltar, who wished to consecrate the war graves; and, later in the summer, the Duke of Newcastle, whose orders had first sent the expedition to the Crimea. Lord and Lady Stratford de Redcliffe were received with a guard of honour of Highlanders as they disembarked from HMS Caradoc in what Stratford called ‘the picturesque harbour of Balaklava’ on 26 April. For over a week the Great Elchi, his wife and a company of distinguished dignitaries and their ladies were escorted around the battlefields, often by the Commander-in-Chief in person. It was, however, more of a grand tour than an inspection: the route of the Light Brigade’s Charge as seen from the hills, not down in the valley where five weeks later both Fanny Duberly and Roger Fenton, on separate riding excursions, still found ‘many skeletons half buried’; the French Army in review order, not manning the trenches; while a distant night prospect of Russian musket flashes and a brief cannonade rounded off the visit with a touch of what later travellers might welcome as son et lumière.[431] It was left to Miss Nightingale a week later to see inside the hospitals, where she was received with suspicious hostility by the medical authorities. She thought the Balaclava General Hospital dirty and inefficiently run; and as her original instructions gave her no direct authority outside Turkey, some of the nurses treated her insolently. Unfortunately, soon after her arrival at Balaclava, Florence Nightingale collapsed with a bout of ‘Crimean Fever’ and was herself gravely ill for more than a fortnight. Not until a second visit to the Crimea, in November, could she leave any mark on its hospitals. Even then she accomplished far less than she had hoped in the spring.[432]
Some who made the voyage from Constantinople stayed on at Balaclava. Colonel Lord George Paget had already returned from England to serve in the Rifle Brigade, and the Stratfords invited the young and beautiful Lady George Paget to sail with them aboard Caradoc so that she could join her husband; and, as it happened, cheer Lord Raglan by her company.[433] Of greater importance for the army as a whole was Florence Nightingale’s travelling companion, Alexis Soyer. The chef of the Reform Club had come out to Turkey with government backing but at his own expense, in order to show how the cooking of food could be improved and the rations stretched further. Printed recipes distributed throughout the regiments not only gave instructions on such problems as how to cook a rice pudding when there are no eggs or milk, but enabled camp kitchens to offer such dishes as ‘Camp Pot au Feu’, ‘Stewed Salt Beef and Pork à la Omar Pacha’ and ‘Cossacks Plum Pudding’. Soyer’s Culinary Campaign, which was published in book form two years later, recorded his experiences, included special recipes, and pioneered ways of providing meals for huge numbers of men economically. The book also described Soyer’s inventions for use on active service: a field stove, ‘baking stewing pans’ (casseroles), and a tea percolator. ‘A material point I had in view was that no fire should be seen when used in the trenches,’ he explained.[434] No one had ever taken camp cookery seriously in the British Army, and there was still a tendency among the junior officers to look upon M. Soyer as one of the pleasanter jokes of the war— ‘a great swell’ who ‘sang some good songs and made himself very agreeable,’ Temple Godman wrote to his father after the chef of the Reform Club had been a guest in the cavalry mess at Kadikoi.[435] But, however much he might be treated as a ‘comic opera Frenchman’, there is no doubt that by his assault on the army’s traditional dietary chaos Soyer dramatically checked the incidence of sickness in the later months of the campaign.
‘My time passes pleasantly,’ Roger Fenton wrote to his wife during one of those early summer days when the war seemed wrapped in silence and the sun had not yet scorched the wild flowers on the slopes above the Chernaya. But, like every other visitor to the Crimea, he could sense the impatience of the troops with the long wait for action. During the Vienna Conference ‘officers and men in the batteries were,’ as Henry Clifford told his brother, ‘reluctant to make a sacrifice of life and limb at a moment when report said Peace was probable’. ‘I hope the war will be settled this summer because I am getting tired of it,’ Trooper Coombs wrote to his sister in his first letter home for six months. However, once it was known that the Conference had broken down, there was a return of the previous autumn’s eagerness to force an end to the war. By the beginning of June a succession of rumours — ‘shaves’, as they were called in the camps — built up such excitement that officers sought to cool their men’s enthusiasm. Everyone was convinced that a major assault on the two key forts, the Malakoff and the Redan, was imminent. The army, anticipating Dickens, had progressed from hard times to great expectations.[436]
Chapter Fifteen – Into Sebastopol
The third great bombardment of Sebastopol began, unlike its predecessors, in mid-afternoon. At three o’clock on Wednesday, 6 June, almost 600 French and British guns opened fire, concentr
ating on the narrow sector, hardly more than a mile from east to west, which separated the Little Redan from the point where the Worontsoff Road turned down towards the dockyards. The principal forts in this district were the Malakoff and the Redan, but ahead of them the Russians had fortified a mound known as the Mamelon and some diggings, ‘the Quarries’, which gave cover for sharpshooters. Around these two strong-points had been planted a field of fougasses, primitive land mines charged with powder and filled with stones. Pélissier and Raglan were agreed that, after persistent pounding by the allied gunners, the French would storm the Mamelon while the British would seize the Quarries. Then, once these gains had been consolidated, the armies would move against the Malakoff and the Redan. Everyone remained convinced that Sebastopol would be untenable if these two forts were in allied hands.
Spectators, civilian and military, journeyed up to Cathcart’s Hill, much as the Russians had flocked to the slopes above the Alma in September. Lord Raglan was accompanied by Lady Paget, while Roger Fenton and Fanny Duberly (who was cultivating favour with the French now that more British officers’ wives were at Balaclava) attached themselves to General Bosquet’s Corps. The firing ceased as darkness fell, but it was followed by a thunderstorm which kept the night sky alive with flashes until the deeper boom of the mortars gave notice that the bombardment had resumed.
Shortly after five o’clock on that Thursday morning Pélissier and Omar Pasha came to Raglan’s headquarters. Roger Fenton was there to take a photograph of the French, British and Turkish commanders as they sat studying a map in the clear, early morning sunlight: Omar glances suspiciously at Pellisier, as if seeking to lipread his exposition of the day’s plans; while Raglan wearily rests his arm on the table, a vast sun hat draped with a white scarf giving the Commander-in-Chief more than a passing resemblance to Miss Matty as Mrs Gaskell depicts her, hesitating over the merits of red and white silk in the shop at Cranford.[437] A strange timelessness hung over military operations that Thursday. Onlookers again took up positions in the hills; this time the band of the Rifle Brigade played popular tunes as troops and spectators waited while the temperature rose higher and higher under the June sunshine. At last, soon after six o’clock a signal rocket led to a quarter of an hour’s intensive bombardment. Then the French emerged from their trenches, dashed some 500 yards to the slopes of the Mamelon, and took the position without much difficulty. So elated were the Zouaves that they continued to pursue the Russians as though they were charging into the Malakoffitself. ‘God in heaven they have got the Mamelon and are going to take the Malakoff with all those guns! How the Malakoff fires! Flash and smoke leaping from it every moment,’ Fanny Duberly wrote to Selina. ‘Look once more through the glasses, Frenchmen certainly, but running under that tremendous fire, running for their lives away from the Malakoffand the Mamelon.’ But it was not so bad as she feared. The French held on to the first defences they had captured.[438]
