by Alan Palmer
The news of Admiral Nakhimov’s death induced Tsar Alexander to prod the defeatists even more vigorously. A single victory in the field would allow Alexander’s emissaries to seek a compromise peace, with honourable terms which would save the new reign from beginning with a humiliation. On 25 July and again exactly a week later the Tsar urged Prince Michael Gorchakov to go over to the offensive at once; he was to consult his generals and decide where best to strike at the enemy. A military council of senior Russian officers in the Crimea accordingly met under the Prince’s chairmanship at Fort Nicholas on 9-10 August: Osten-Sacken wished to evacuate the naval base and the southern shore — ‘downtown Sebastopol’, as it were; but a majority of those officers present favoured a diversionary offensive in the hills. Against his better judgement, Michael Gorchakov prepared plans for an attack on 16 August against the extreme east of the allied line, in the Fedioukine hills, close to the valleys along which the cavalry had charged on ‘Balaclava Day’.[459]
Russian security was, however, remarkably lax. Reports from Polish deserters in the Crimea were confirmed by intelligence assessments telegraphed from Berlin to the Foreign Office in London and forwarded — again by telegraph — to General Simpson. The allied commanders were left in no doubt that a Russian offensive was imminent; and troop movements noted early in the third week of August concentrated their attention on the river Chernaya. The Russians could even be seen constructing pontoon bridges. At least one French commander thought the preparations so obvious that he began to wonder if they were a decoy, intended to conceal a major sortie from the city itself.[460]
Earlier in the campaign such matters would have concerned, first and foremost, the intelligence department of the British army; and in October 1854 almost all the high ground looking out over the Chernaya towards Chorgun had been held by Raglan’s men and ‘Johnny Turk’. But now, ten months later, the nearest British force was Scarlett’s cavalry division encamped at Kadikoi, although in an emergency the Highland Brigade could have moved forward from Balaclava itself. The Sapoune Escarpment and the Fedioukine hills were occupied entirely by French and Piedmontese, but with Turkish infantry detachments held in reserve and some of Omar Pasha’s artillery on the more distant hills. Since this contest for mastery of the Chernaya banks was a predominantly Franco-Italian engagement, it has been neglected by most English-speaking commentators on the Crimean campaign; and the most renowned historian of the British Army, Sir John Fortescue, even dismisses the battle of the Chernaya as ‘a little affair’. Contemporaries were less arrogantly insular. Panmure and Simpson realized at the time that the battle was decisive for the fate of Sebastopol. A Russian victory would guarantee that the allies remained confined to their small foothold on the peninsula: a Russian defeat would make it certain that the invaders had the power to strike inland, cut the city’s last supply lines and finally make the siege of Sebastopol a grim reality.[461]
Although Gorchakov was pessimistic about the outcome of the battle, he took personal tactical command of the whole operation. He instructed General Read of Russia’s Third Corps and General Liprandi of the Sixth Corps to ‘await the order of the commander-in-chief at each stage of the battle before moving forward to their next objective. This direct involvement of the commander-in-chief — which was in striking contrast to Menshikov’s conduct at Inkerman — convinced his corps commanders that Gorchakov knew clearly where he intended his troops to make their main effort and how he was going to see the battle as a whole at any one moment. But Gorchakov, whose ideas had been clear during the fighting on the lower Danube, was by now so tormented by doubts that he became a muddled thinker. Not once did he explain to Read or Liprandi what he hoped to gain by an offensive in the Fedioukine hills. Did he intend to follow it up with an attack on the allied siege works, as Pélissier and Simpson anticipated? He was not sure. Was his principal thrust across the Chernaya to be against the French on his right flank or the Italians on his left? He could not make up his mind. Nor could Gorchakov find a single command post whence to observe the unfblding of a battle in which his 24,000 infantrymen were deployed along a two-and-a-half mile front broken by outcrops of high ground. Good clear summer weather might have made some form of semaphore visible from a particular high point. But at dawn on Thursday, 16 August, the hills were covered with a heavy mist; and Gorchakov spent much of the following two hours riding between Read’s and Liprandi’s headquarters, trying to assess the enemy’s strength before determining where to deploy the forty-eight squadrons of cavalry he was holding in reserve.
At first all went well for Liprandi and the Sixth Corps; the Piedmontese fell back from their outposts in the hills. At the same time Read’s Third Corps forced the French to retreat quickly across the Traktir Bridge over the Chernaya, and Read was able to order up pontoons to speed the Russian advance beyond the river and over a canal which ran close beside it. But thereafter the attacks lost impetus. Liprandi’s troops, obeying Gorchakov’s original directive, consolidated their early gains in the face of Piedmontese artillery fire and awaited further orders. Read’s Third Corps was left to scale the green downland slopes of the Fedioukine hills which, when the mist lifted, gave them no protection from the French crossfire. On the left of his position, Pélissier assumed command himself, not allowing his troops to charge the Russians until they were two-thirds of the way up the hill. French field guns raked the enemy support troops, shell splinters killing General Read and the Tsar’s personal emissary, General Vrevsky. When, soon after eight in the morning, Gorchakov arrived at the Traktir Bridge to take over the Third Corps he was at once forced to order his staff officers to disperse and seek cover from the relentless French bombardment. An urgent appeal to Liprandi to shift his line of assault from the Piedmontese to engage the French right flank came too late to check the allies, for General La Marmora had himself seen the need to plug the dangerous gap which separated his troops from Pélissier’s main force. By ten in the morning the Russians were once more on the north bank of the Chernaya, leaving thousands of dead and wounded on the slopes above the river and the canal. Gorchakov, blaming the dead General Read for bungling the attack south of the Traktir Bridge, ordered his cavalry to pull back to the plateau known (after one of Catherine the Great’s Russo-Scottish admirals) as the ‘Mackenzie Heights’.
The total allied casualties in the battle of the Chernaya were less than 1,700; and only 14 Italians were killed that morning. But the defeat cost the Russians more lives than any other engagement except Inkerman. Gorchakov reported that he had lost 2,273 dead, with 1,742 missing and almost 4,000 wounded. In the hope of treating casualties more effectively than at the Alma or Inkerman, fourteen Sisters of Mercy had been sent from their field hospital on the Belbec to establish first-aid posts on the Mackenzie Heights. Alexandra Krupskaya, who was one of these nurses, later described their terrible burden of work, sixteen days of caring for the wounded without once having the opportunity to change their own clothes.[462] In St Petersburg Marshal Paskevich, who was gravely ill, prepared a bitter indictment of Gorchakov, alleging that the casualties were even higher than he admitted and that this needless battle ruled out the possibility of any subsequent offensive against the invaders. Tsar Alexander, however, knew of the mutual bitterness felt by Paskevich and Gorchakov since the siege of Silistria; he loyally supported his commander in the Crimea, not least because he knew that he had urged him to go over to the attack in the first place. Gorchakov, for his part, no longer disputed his sovereign’s wishes. Early in June he had told Alexander that his only concern was to avoid the heavy losses which would follow any withdrawal from Sebastopol. Now, ten days after the defeat, a letter from Gorchakov’s headquarters assured Alexander that he was determined not to evacuate the south bank of Sebastopol; if he could hold on for another ten weeks, the allies might seek a compromise peace rather than suffer a second winter in the Crimean hills. These words struck that note of stubborn defiance which the Romanov Tsars habitually expected from their generals in th
e field.[463]
*
Although Scarlett’s cavalry and some heavy field guns moved up from Kadikoi to support the Zouaves and Chasseurs who recaptured the Traktir Bridge, the British played no direct part in the battle of the Chernaya. Simpson’s army remained concentrated on the Heights overlooking the Redan and the Karabelnaya district of Sebastopol itself, in anticipation of a major sortie from the city. Morale, low after the failure at the Redan and the death of Raglan, picked up again with a change in the weather, thunderstorms at the end of July relieving the heat and giving way to what seemed to veterans from Varna like a good English summer. Newcomers continued to go down with cholera or dysentery but there was a more relaxed atmosphere in several British camps. Race meetings had been held on several occasions and on the day after the battle of the Chernaya there was a cricket match between the Guards Division and the ‘Leg of Mutton Club’, a scratch team of officers from other regiments. One of the Guard’s batsmen, Sir John Astley, remembered that leisurely Friday many years later, but his account is more informative about Mrs Seacole than the cricket, for he best recalled that ‘we had a capital lunch on the ground, provided by an old blackwoman who kept a sort of eating-house on the Heights’.[464]
There was good precedent for cricket on the eve of a great battle, for the Duke of Wellington had watched his Guards playing at Enghien six days before Waterloo. And while the Leg of Mutton’s bowlers were seeking to get the Guardsmen’s wickets, more sinister projectiles were being lobbed into the beleaguered fortress four miles away. Indeed the cricket match must have taken place against a background din of constant explosions, for on that Friday — 17 August — 800 guns and 300 mortars began a methodical bombardment of the city and the Karabelnaya suburb which was to continue intermittently for ten days. The Russians were left in no doubt that Pélissier and Simpson were determined to secure Sebastopol before mid-September, and the first anniversary of the allied landing in Calamita Bay.
Momentarily Pélissier appears to have hoped to gain the city not by a costly assault, but by saturation shelling, for the August bombardment differed from its predecessors. The largest mortars, firing 10-inch shells sighted on particular targets, could continue their work of destruction by night as well as by day, thus preventing the defenders from carrying out repairs as they had done on previous occasions. A thousand Russians a day were killed or seriously wounded by this August bombardment. Some of the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna’s ‘Sisters of Mercy’ remained in Sebastopol itself, with a makeshift casualty clearing station in a deep casemate at Fort Nicholas, where they could treat men wounded by shell splinters or rescued from the debris of fallen buildings. For eight weeks before the battle of the Chernaya allied observers had been puzzled by the movement of ox-drawn wagons from the Belbec to the northern waterfront of the bay, but soon they realized that Gorchakov was constructing a bridge of boats across a thousand yards of sea from Fort Michael on the north shore to Fort Nicholas. This major engineering feat, supervised by General Burkhmeier, necessitated the linking of eighty-six pontoons, each secured to the sea bed by a pair of anchors. The bridge was completed in the last week of August. ‘We are on the tip-toe of expectation to know what is the object of building it,’ Henry Clifford wrote to his father. Occasionally some round shot hit the bridge, Clifford reported, even though through his field-glasses he had ‘observed...some of the fair sex honouring it with little feet’. But it was noticed that the bridge traffic moved almost entirely out of Sebastopol. The Burkhmeier Bridge was intended for evacuation, not the arrival of a relief force.[465]
Apart from Pélissier, few people of eminence on the allied side seem to have believed that Sebastopol would fall like an apple pecked by the birds. The Russians continued to offer spirited resistance. A shell hit a French magazine in the Mamelon on the night of 27 August, causing an explosion which killed more than a hundred Frenchmen and scattered wreckage as far away as the north shore of the Bay and the British camps around Balaclava. In London both the Prime Minister and the War Secretary continued to look for ingenious ways of getting the troops into Sebastopol: Palmerston was even prepared to sanction the Dundonald project for smoking the enemy out of Sebastopol with sulphurous fumes — if the octogenarian admiral would himself go out to the Crimea ‘to superintend and direct the execution of his scheme’.[466] But Napoleon III and Marshal Vaillant believed that Sebastopol would fall only when the assault troops made one final effort. Napoleon explained his views to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert when they made their state visit to Paris in the third and fourth weeks of August: ‘The Emperor is full of anxiety and regret about the campaign,’ the Queen noted in her journal on 22 August. ‘Ten thousand shells have been thrown into the town within the last few days, and they are in want of more!’[467] Napoleon was convinced that the Second Empire needed the prestige of a battle honour, a French military victory achieved preferably at little cost. The British Government, too, was still looking for that ‘sudden making of splendid names’ which the Poet Laureate had anticipated in Maud. Rear-Admiral Richard Dundas, whose Baltic fleet was reinforced in July by a flotilla of block-ships, shallow-water steam gunboats and mortar vessels, could no more achieve a spectacular success than Napier in the previous summer: Kronstadt remained too formidable; Fort Svartholm, off the Finnish town of Lovisa, was captured by a raiding party from HMS Arrogant and its guns blown up; and the island fortress of Sveaborg, three miles southeast of Helsinki, was bombarded on 9 August, with further attacks by mortars and rockets over the two following days. Considerable damage was done to the dockyards and powder magazines, but the bombardment left the guns worn out and needing new mountings before any further attacks could be launched in the Baltic.[468] None of this made exciting reading in the British press. By now people in Britain were no longer talking of ‘our war with Russia’, but of ‘the Crimean War’; and they were waiting, with mounting impatience, for what they assumed would be the climax of the campaign, news of a triumphant feat of arms at Sebastopol.
Pélissier was not surprised by the mood in Paris and London. It coincided with views shared by several of his own generals and by Simpson and his staff officers. Moreover, professionally Pélissier remained a conventional Saint-Cyrist whose campaigning days in Algeria had taught him that enemy positions were there to be captured, not forced to capitulate. If officers whom he had known in Oran had wives with them at Kamiesh — the young and sultry Mme Soledad Bazaine, for example — they would be invited to dine with the Commander-in-Chief at his headquarters. There the guests might watch Pélissier’s dog obediently jump over a row of chairs at its master’s command, never once failing to do precisely what was expected of it. Pélissier was not a man of subtlety; and to some the inference seemed obvious. If only his divisional generals would perform their party pieces so dutifully and reliably, the war would soon be over and they could all enjoy a hero’s welcome home in France or Algeria.[469]
During the saturation shelling of August Pélissier had therefore continued to press forward with all the preparations for an eventual assault on the Malakoff. By the end of the month French sappers had advanced their trenches (‘parallels’) to within twenty-five yards of the great fort; and on 3 September Pélissier presided over a council of war which resolved that an attempt should be made to seize Sebastopol and the whole of the southern shore five days later, on Saturday, 8 September.[470] Unlike the abortive attacks on the Malakoff and the Redan twelve weeks before, Pélissier’s new plan provided for that general offensive which poor Raglan had vainly urged in June. The front covered more than six miles of the Sebatopol defences, but the principal assault was still to be made against the Malakoff, ‘the only objective’, General Niel noted at the time. No fewer than 25,000 French troops were assigned to this sector of the Front, as well as a brigade from the Sardinian-Piedmontese Expeditionary Force. General Bosquet, back in favour with Pélissier, was given the command denied him in June; under him, leading the 1st Division which was to break into the Malakoff its
elf, was a newcomer to the Crimea, General Patrice de MacMahon, who arrived on 18 August as a successor to Canrobert, recalled by Napoleon III for ‘special service’ on behalf of the Emperor.
While great attention was given to the details of the French operation, the British contribution was left as a matter for General Simpson to decide. No one at French headquarters had much respect for Simpson, as even General Rose’s journal shows. He did not possess Raglan’s natural authority and dignity, nor was he fluent in army French. He was physically and mentally exhausted and never sought the responsibilities of high command, constantly hoping that Panmure would recall him on grounds of ill-health. Through much of the council of war on 3 September Simpson is reported to have slept, his head nodding rhythmically as though in agreement with everything those Frenchies around him were saying. Subsequently his staff discovered that the British were committed to another assault on the Redan, seeking the success which had eluded them on 18 June. It was agreed that Simpson would put his men on the alert the moment the tricolour was seen flying from the Malakoff. They would move forward when their general ordered the firing of four signal rockets.[471]
On 8 September zero hour was fixed, not at dawn when the enemy might expect an attack, but at twelve noon. Originally it was intended that the fleet should support the attack with a bombardment of the shore batteries, but there was a north-west gale blowing on that Saturday morning and, as heavy seas made it impossible for the warships to concentrate their fire on any particular objective, only Admiral Lyons’s six mortar vessels went into action.[472] But the gale made no difference to the gunners ashore; and at noon, after forty minutes of intense artillery fire, the Zouaves in MacMahon’s Division sprang out of their trenches. Dashing over the twenty-five yards of open ground in a few seconds, they were inside the parapets of the Malakoff before the Russians realized that the infantry attack had begun. Within ten minutes of MacMahon’s forward troops leaving their trenches, the tricolour was fluttering from the top of the Malakoff. Repeated Russian counter-attacks failed to dislodge the French; but at times their situation looked desperate to Pélissier (who, Rose reported, ‘was very nearly killed, during one of the heaviest cannonades I ever heard’). Simpson, too, was worried, for he did not wish to commit his men prematurely to the assault on the Redan by firing off the signal rockets. A quarter of an hour after the tricolour streamed out in that north-west gale, Simpson decided to find out exactly what was happening at the fort. It was therefore an English officer — Captain Biddulph — who went forward through the trenches and into the captured fort to ask MacMahon the famous question, ‘My General wishes to know if you can hold your position.’ ‘Tell your General,’ MacMahon replied with laconic simplicity, ‘that I am here and that here I stay.’[473]
