The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  Simpson need not have sent Biddulph forward to MacMahon, for the attack on the Redan was already in progress. The British assault troops had been waiting in their trenches for many hours and, on seeing the tricolour over the Malakoff, they rushed over the parapets without any formal order to go forward coming from Sir William Codrington, who was in the advance trenches as commander of the Light Division. Lieutenant Ranken of the Royal Engineers was in charge of one of the parties of eight men who were to carry 24-foot ladders across two hundred yards of open ground ready to scale the defences of the Redan. Ranken’s account, published less than two years later, describes what happened:

  We were ordered not to advance till a decided success had been achieved; but, as it were, in a second the dreaded Malakoff had fallen into the hands of the French. Our men could no longer be restrained; before there was time to get the ladders to the front...they rushed in a straggling line over the parapets, and dashed onwards to the salient. I hurried up my sappers as fast as I could, shouting to them till I was nearly hoarse, and ran forward with them and the ladder party, with a sword in my hand (my scabbard and belt I left behind).[474]

  Once again the advancing troops were raked by enfilading fire in a repetition of that storm of grapeshot which had horrified Raglan in June. Nevertheless, despite heavy casualties, the outer works of the Redan were taken.

  After half an hour of what Simpson called ‘a most determined and bloody contest’ the French and British commanders were confident of victory. Elsewhere along the front the French and Italian attacks had been checked; but no sector matched in importance the heavily fortified salient beyond the Karabelnaya suburb, and here MacMahon and Bosquet were establishing a commanding position on the Malakoff, while the Redan seemed close to capture by the British. General Codrington sent up reinforcements, but suddenly found that this second wave of infantry, many of them youngsters new to the Crimea, lacked the spirit of the assault troops. Henry Clifford reckoned that six hundred men were congested in the angle of parapet beforc the inner defences of the Redan, and ‘nothing the Officers could say or do would induce the men to make a dash over the Parapet’. Many were killed as they lay under inadequate cover, and when the Russians exhausted their ammunition they ‘began pelting them with stones’. Clifford and other officers drew their swords and ‘implored them...to stand and not to run’, but in vain. The British attack on the Redan, begun in overenthusiastic disorder, ended in an appalling rout. ‘What almost breaks my heart, and nearly drove me mad, I see our soldiers, our English soldiers that I was so proud of, run away,’ Henry Clifford wrote to his family next day.[475]

  The Redan was therefore never captured. Simpson could have brought up the Guards Brigades and the Highlanders, who were held in reserve that day; but he did not, perhaps because too much scaling equipment had been destroyed to warrant an improvised attack in the late afternoon. Sir Colin Campbell was, however, ordered to prepare for yet another assault on the Redan next morning. It was not needed. The Russians counter-attacked time after time against the Malakoff, but could not dislodge MacMahon’s troops. In the late afternoon General Prince Gorchakov came forward to the second line of his defences, overshadowed by the Malakoff itself. There, soon after 5 p.m., he gave orders for the evacuation of Sebastopol; he knew he could not hope to save the southern shore once the Malakoff was lost, and he hoped that the allied armies would he so exhausted by the day’s fighting that they would not interfere with the withdrawal. The first regiments pulled back over the pontoon bridge just seven hours after the Zouaves had launched their assault.[476]

  Not a man was lost during the evacuation; ‘A masterly retreat that does great credit to Russian military genius and discipline,’ wrote an American major sent to the Crimea to observe the war.[477] Throughout the night fires shot up from different parts of Sebastopol. From his flagship, off the approaches to the Bay, Admiral Lyons ‘at early dawn observed that the fortifications on the south side were in flames, and that the six remaining ships of the line had been sunk at their moorings, leaving afloat no more of the late Russian Black Sea fleet than two dismasted corvettes and nine steamers, most of which are very small’. At 9.22 on the Sunday morning Lyons was able to telegraph to the Admiralty, ‘Allied troops in the dockyard’. Already British troops were standing in what remained of the Redan.[478]

  A telegram from Simpson announcing that ‘Sebastopol is in the possession of the Allies’ was deciphered in London at a quarter to five on Monday afternoon, 10 September. There was jubiliation that evening in London and in Paris. The news reached Queen Victoria and her family at Balmoral ‘when we were sitting quietly round our table after dinner’; and at once they lit a bonfire on the top of a hill which had been prepared ‘last year when the premature news of the fall of Sebastopol deceived every one’.[479]

  Fanny Duberly recalled that false dawn of hope when, a few days later, she wrote to her sister, Selina, describing the reaction in the French camp. ‘Sebastopol est prise,’ she began her letter. ‘The cry was echoed in Paris months ago. Now it rings through every crevice and valley of the camp — Sebastopol est prise. And yet, strange to say, there is no elation — no cheers — no drunkenness, no bonfires except the vast bonfire of the smouldering blazing city which obscures the whole horizon and which fills the air with a smoke as heavy and black as the hearts of the Russians themselves.’[480] The flames were still burning in Sebastopol next morning; and explosions continued intermittently over several days, for the Russians had planted between thirty and forty booby traps which took a heavy toll among the first French troops, looking for plunder. The speculation in June on whether or not there would be restaurants open when the city was captured seemed ridiculous now, in retrospect. There were, in fact, only two sources of refreshment: looted wine cellars, and the indefatigable Mary Seacole who, having badgered Major-General Garrett into issuing a special pass for herself and her attendants, borrowed mules from the Land Transport Corps and became the first woman to go into Sebastopol on Sunday morning. ‘Every step had a score of dangers,’ she wrote eighteen months later, ‘and yet curiosity and excitement carried us on and on. I was often stopped to give refreshments to officers and men, who had been fasting for hours.’[481] Apart from some drunks who had looted wine cellars, the general mood was sombre. On that same Sunday morning Henry Duberly stood beside an Anglican chaplain outside the Redan as he read the funeral service over 700 shattered bodies lying in trenches which became their grave when the earth was shovelled in upon them. The stench of putrefying corpses and a piled-up heap of human bodies outside the Customs House greeted the Duberlys when they were allowed ‘actually in Sebastopol’ four days later.[482] Over the following few weeks, letters home conveyed the ghastliness of victory in all its tortured glory’.

  In London and Paris there was elation, a sense among the general public that the prime objective of the war was achieved. But, when the troops were at last allowed freely into the ravaged city, they became aware of the limits of their success. The southern shore of Sebastopol Bay, with its ruined barracks, sunken ships and derelict dockyard, was now in allied hands; but across the Bay, in Severnaya, Gorchakov retained a powerful army. To watchers on the Sebastopol waterfront, Forts Constantine, Michael and Catherine were low outlines, stone walls protecting tiers of black-muzzled artillery. Above them, almost concealed from view but known to be far more menacing, loomed Star Fort with its 120 guns mounted in positions as formidable as anything in the Malakoff or the Redan. It was hard to believe that the end of the war could be in sight so long as the Russian imperial flag flew defiantly over so commanding a fortress.

  Chapter Sixteen – The Second Winter

  The city of Paris was illuminated to celebrate the fall of Sebastopol on 10 September; and next day Napoleon III ordered his Minister of War to inform Pélissier that, in honour of the victory, he was ‘raised to the dignity of Marshal of France’. But Parisian delight at the news from the Crimea was not entirely a manifestation of patriotic pride. In th
e first months of the war there had been a good response to the Government’s appeal for subscriptions to a war loan, with most of Napoleon’s radical and socialist critics approving a campaign against Tsarist tyranny. By the summer of 1835, however, there was widespread disillusionment. The war never became a crusade against either Orthodoxy or Autocracy; it produced no striking feat of arms, no flashes of strategic vision; and there was an influential group at court who favoured an early end to the conflict in the hope of winning the new Tsar’s patronage for French commercial ventures. The capture of the Malakoff and the fall of Sebastopol were therefore welcomed as a sign that peace was close at hand. French national honour was satisfied, for, after forty years, military glory was once more uplifting the imperial eagles.[483]

  In Turin opinion was divided. Victor Emmanuel II was pleased by the performance of his troops at the Chernaya and in the final assault on Sebastopol; and Cavour knew that, if Austria remained neutral, further military success would give Sardinia-Piedmont greater influence at the conference table. But what if Austria entered the war? Peace now would allow him to enjoy the status of a combatant in any discussion over the re-shaping of Europe’s political frontiers. There was much to be said for striking an early bargain with Napoleon III and Palmerston.[484]

  Sultan Abdul Medjid, on the other hand, was content that the war should continue: the Turks knew that they had little real chance of recovering the Crimea, and they had lost interest in what happened at Eupatoria or Sebastopol. The Caucasus was another matter; in that region the Sultan hoped that an allied victory would permit him to move his frontiers northwards. Throughout much of July and August Omar Pasha had been seeking permission from Simpson and Pélissier to withdraw Turkish units from the Crimea in order to relieve the allied forces locked up in Erzerum and Kars. As the French mistrusted Omar and as Simpson felt that the Sultan’s contingent could not be spared from the Crimea, Lord Stratford again came up to Balaclava from Constantinople to argue with the Turkish commander. However, once Sebastopol fell, there seemed no good reason for retaining his troops. If an offensive to relieve Erzerum and Kars was the only way to keep alive Turkey’s interest in the war, the British argued that Omar should he given a free hand. But Pélissier refused to let the Turks sail from the Crimea until the last days of September. Familiar complaints were voiced in Paris of British intrigues in Constantinople which were hostile to France’s best interests.[485]

  Foreign observers were constantly puzzled by the changing mood in London. Recruiting, which had been high when war was declared, had declined dramatically by the close of the year and never picked up again. Tennyson, writing his long epic Maud in the spring of 1854, made the romantic hero narrator of this curious monodrama find spiritual reawakening ‘to the better mind’ in answering a call to serve his country ‘by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep’. But when the poem was published fifteen months later the Poet Laureate found himself attacked as a militarist glorying in ‘a rampant and rabid bloodthirstiness of soul’.[486] At times the conflict into which the British people had entered with such intense patriotic fervour in the spring of 1854 seemed to recede altogether from their collective consciousness, the public showing an extraordinarily parochial concern with matters of little interest to Europe as a whole. Thus at four successive weekends at midsummer in 1853 there were violent clashes in Hyde Park against a private member’s bill to ‘prevent Sunday trading in the metropolis’; the Government had to persuade the bill’s sponsor, Lord Robert Grosvenor, to withdraw his measure in order to check rioting in the capital. The widespread indignation with the mismanagement of the Crimean campaign, which had enabled the belligerent Palmerston to become prime minister in February, found a safety-valve in Roebuck’s Select Committee. Day after day from early March to early June the Committee probed military muddle and aristocratic privileges ‘in front of Sebastopol’. Public attendance at its hearings declined sharply as the war entered its second year, and the Prime Minister remained untroubled by its activities or by the attacks of the short-lived Administrative Reform Association on sloth in the civil service. His constant concern remained the vigorous prosecution of the war.[487]

  In one respect, however, Palmerston took advantage of the call for administrative reform. When Parliament went into summer recess in 1855 he set up an informal four-man War Committee, which could meet more easily and frequently than the full cabinet and bring cohesion both to the overall strategy against Russia, naval and military, and to the making of peace. Naturally the Prime Minister was chairman of the committee. The other members were Wood (First Lord of the Admiralty), Panmure (the War Secretary) and Earl Granville (the Lord President of the Council), and senior naval and army officers in London could be co-opted by the four ministers. It is clear from a report of the first meeting, which Granville sent to Clarendon on 21 August, that the Lord President worked closely with the Foreign Secretary, a collaboration which assumed great importance in the weeks ahead because of sudden shifts of policy by both France and Austria. An article in The Times of 1 September welcomed the coming of this executive innovation, explaining to readers that the four men would come together each week ‘to superintend the operation of the war’. There had been criticism of Palmerston’s idiosyncratic style of leadership both inside and outside the cabinet; and it was hoped that the establishment of the committee would ensure a sense of ‘order’ and ‘regularity’ at the head of affairs. Yet to some extent the innovation was a sop to the newspaper’s Cerberus. After forty-eight years in Parliament Palmerston was at last, as Wood called him, ‘the new chief’; and he had no intention of delegating responsibility to ministers whom, in his more generous moments, he grudgingly acknowledged as well-intentioned advisers.[488]

  A letter from Palmerston to Dr Sumner, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sent a few days after news of Sebastopol’s fall reached London, throws light on his approach to the war that September. The surrender of the Russian naval base, the Prime Minister told the Archbishop, should be observed not by a weekday set aside for thanksgiving, as Waterloo had been, but by special services on a Sunday, the practice followed by the Church in 1812 and 1813 after Salamanca and Vitoria; for no one should assume that the capture of Sebastopol was so decisive a victory that peace was in sight.[489] Palmerston remained much concerned over the need for the allied forces to press forward against the enemy. Simpson, however, insisted that the Russians had withdrawn to an unassailable position on the north shore of the bay, where Star Fort seemed as impregnable as Gibraltar.

  Immediately after a cabinet meeting on 16 September Panmure sent a bluntly worded telegram to Simpson, following it up with a private letter, rich in mixed metaphor: the General was ‘not to rest on his oars’, nor ‘play second fiddle to Pélissier’; but Panmure conceded that ‘so much must depend on your own information that all we can really say is, “Don’t waste yourself in idleness”.’[490] When full details of the abortive attack on the Redan reached England, both the Queen and Palmerston were deeply worried by the Commander-in-Chief’s unimpressive leadership. ‘The assault in September appears to have been made almost identically in the same manner as that of June,’ Palmerston commented in a note to Panmure. Even stronger pressure was put on Simpson to take the initiative; and at the end of the month he decided to resign: ‘The turmoils of a command like this are too much for my age and health,’ he told Panmure. The cabinet accepted the General’s resignation on 3 October, but he was persuaded to stay at his post for another five weeks, because the débâcle at the Redan had also raised doubts over the abilities of the general designated his successor, Sir William Codrington. But whose reputation remained unsullied? On 11 November Codrington duly took over the command.[491]

  ‘Pélissier and myself are both of one opinion that the electric telegraph is our greatest enemy! worse even than the newspapers, which publish to the enemy everything we are doing,’ Simpson wrote to Panmure in a final fling three days before he left the Crimea.[492] The French Commander-in-Chief had suf
fered less from the press than his British colleague, but far more from telegraphic interrogatives. Should Sebastopol be razed and the Crimea evacuated? How many men would be needed to hold Sebastopol, if most units were brought home or sent elsewhere? Ought the allies to seize the Perekop Isthmus? Or would it be better to take Kherson, eighteen miles up the river Dnieper, or the base of Nikolayev, on the lower Bug? What were the views of the Commander-in-Chief on an offensive against Simferopol from the Mackenzie Heights? Or from Eupatoria? Or from Theodosia (Kaffa)? And would a seaborne invasion of Bessarabia with a force of a hundred thousand men be militarily practicable?[493] Pélissier referred all such questions to his staff-officers, telling them to emphasize the difficulties of any operation which might be suggested in Paris. But clearly something had to be done to stop those relentless wires buzzing. On 29 September an inter-allied conference attended by Pélissier, Simpson, Admiral Lyons and the French naval commander, Admiral Bruat, decided on an expedition to destroy the fortress of Kinburn, which controlled entry to the Dnieper estuary and the approaches to two of the possible objectives mentioned by Napoleon III, Nikolayev and Kherson. On 7 October 10,000 troops, 4,000 of whom were British, were embarked in seven ships of the Royal Navy, three French warships and two transports. Six French gunboats, with mortar batteries, sailed in support of the expedition. The overall command was entrusted to General Achille Bazaine, of the Foreign Legion, Marshal Pélissier courteously consoling Madame Bazaine by a personal visit on each afternoon of her husband’s absence.[494]