The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  The Kinburn expedition was an outstanding success. French and British troops and marines landed north of Kinburn on 16 October, so as to cut off the garrison from support; and the British and French warships then bombarded the Russian positions until the fort surrendered next day. Across the estuary the fort of Ochakov — whose acquisition by Catherine the Great had brought Britain and Russia close to war in 1791 — was blown up by its garrison in anticipation of an allied assault. Naval command over the estuary left the allies with an option of striking inland at Nikolayev or Kherson in the following spring. No attempt, however, was made to bombard Odessa, a city in which French concerns had invested heavily earlier in the century.[495]

  It is clear from their reports to Paris and London that Pélissier, Simpson, Lyons and Codrington suspected the Russians of preparing a counter-offensive before winter set in again. The Tsar’s proclamations to the Russian people after the fall of Sebastopol had rung with proud defiance. He at once left St Petersburg for Moscow. Once Alexander was in residence in Russia’s traditional capital, he invoked inspiration from what had happened in that other September, forty-three years before. On the anniversary of the day Moscow went up in flames around the Grande Armée, he sent a personal message of encouragement to General Gorchakov filled with a sense of the past: ‘Do not lose heart. Remember 1812 and put your faith in Providence. Sebastopol is not Moscow, the Crimea is not Russia. Two years after the firing of Moscow, our troops marched in the streets of Paris. We remain the same Russians, and God is still with us’. Alexander informed the General that he was sending to his headquarters in the Crimea the holy ikon of St Sergius, which was with Peter the Great when he gained his victory at Poltava and with the Moscow militia in the darkest days of the Napoleonic invasion.[496] The Tsar then summoned a military council to meet in the Kremlin at which it was agreed to defend the Crimea and prepare for a counter-offensive in the following spring. After a week in Moscow, Alexander II began a long and slow journey south to Nikolayev, where he remained for several weeks, and on to Simferopol early in November. A report which Codrington received from an intelligence agent on 13 November suggested that the Tsar was reviewing troops at Korales, halfway between Bakchisarai and the Mackenzie Heights, and that the Russians might launch an attack on the allied positions from the north-east. The allied commanders thought it too late in the year for any serious military operations, but they remained puzzled as to the Tsar’s intentions.[497]

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  So, indeed, was everyone else. Outwardly there was a show of patriotic pride in St Petersburg, matching those fine words proclaimed so defiantly from Moscow.[498] But at least one experienced public servant wanted the war to end before worse calamities hit Russia. Nesselrode was still serving as the Tsar’s Chancellor; no parallels struck in 1855 could incline him to equate what was happening in the Crimea or the Baltic with those epic days of 1812 when he had been at Alexander I’s side in Vilna, riding back with his sovereign to Moscow and St Petersburg as secretary in charge of diplomatic correspondence. In the week after Sebastopol was evacuated, the Chancellor told foreign envoys that Russia would listen with interest to any peace proposals made to her. For the moment, however, nothing happened. So long as Alexander II was with his troops in southern Russia, there was little overt diplomatic activity in St Petersburg. It was assumed that the Tsar was consulting his generals in the field, searching for one point where the allies were so vulnerable that Russia could snatch a victory before negotiating peace.[499]

  When Nesselrode was a young diplomat in Paris in 1809, he had won Talleyrand’s grudging admiration for his ability to forge unofficial links between Russia and France. The gift had not deserted him. Another great survivor of Congress diplomacy, Princess Dorothea Lieven, willingly served as an intermediary between Paris, where she had settled in 1835, and her Russian homeland.[500] But Nesselrode, who always distrusted the Princess, possessed even better contacts. Throughout the Eastern Crisis of 1853 and the subsequent war one of Nesselrode’s daughters was living in Brussels, as the wife of a diplomat; but more valuable still was a second daughter, Baroness Seebach, who was married to the King of Saxony’s envoy in Paris. On several occasions the Seebachs had been useful to Nesselrode, and he could be certain that peace feelers would win active support from the Baron’s nominal superior in Dresden, the Saxon Foreign Minister, Count von Beust. This Saxon connection became especially important in mid-October 1855 when two kinsmen of Napoleon III made secret approaches to the Russians. Count Walewski — who, besides being Foreign Minister, was known to be Napoleon I’s son — told Seebach that it was time the Russians put forward peace proposals which the Emperor could persuade Palmerston to accept;[501] and the Duc de Morny, Napoleon III’s half-brother, established contact with Alexander Gorchakov in Vienna through an Austrian banker, offering to meet him at Dresden. So closely involved were the Saxons in these diplomatic exchanges that Beust, with Nesselrode’s encouragement, personally travelled to Paris to see Seebach and Walewski in an attempt to get peace talks going in earnest; and, in the fourth week of November, it seemed from a letter sent by the Russian Chancellor to Beust that there was a good prospect of a direct exchange of views between Paris and St Petersburg.[502]

  These hopes were dashed by the return of Alexander II to his capital in the last days of November. He came in a belligerent mood: the satisfaction he gained from ordering defensive preparations at Nikolayev and inspecting regiments ready for action in the Crimea encouraged him to dispute the arguments of Nesselrode and Orlov in favour of peace. By now, moreover, Russian troops had gained the first military success of his reign: for seven months the Turkish garrison at Kars, strengthened by a handful of British officers, had resisted Muraviev’s army and in early November it had seemed that Omar Pasha would soon arrive with a relief force; but Omar moved too slowly and Kars surrendered to the Russians on 25 November. News of Muraviev’s victory, so far from persuading the Tsar that he might now obtain better terms, intensified his conviction that the allies were in more need of peace than Russia. Reports told him that the French harvest was bad and that there was discontent in Lyons and working-class districts in Paris. Alexander Gorchakov was told to have nothing more to do with Morny; but Nesselrode took the opportunity of inviting his son-in-law, Seebach, to St Petersburg for the Russian Christmas.[503]

  Both Alexander Gorchakov and Walewski had already made it clear to Nesselrode that the Austrians were once again contemplating entry into the war if Russia did not make peace soon. Similar information reached St Petersburg from Berlin, the King of Prussia warning Alexander II that he would have difficulty in preserving his neutrality, let alone maintaining friendly relations with the Tsar’s court, should there be an Austro-Russian conflict.[504] Quite apart from this German threat, Napoleon III was sharpening another diplomatic weapon. General Canrobert had arrived hack from the Crimea in August ready for ‘special service on behalf of the Emperor’. The first of these services was to charm Queen Victoria during her state visit, sitting net to her at dinner at St-Cloud, ‘talking with much gesticulation’ of trenches where I was a fortnight ago’.[505] But a harder task awaited the General. In November he was sent to Sweden to persuade King Oscar that the allies were prepared, in 1856, to shift the emphasis of their military effort against Russia from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Although Palmerston was by now suspicious of many aspects of French policy, he warmly approved the renewed approach to Sweden. A Swedish alliance, he explained to his Foreign Secretary a month before Canrobert left Paris, should be seen ‘as part of a long line of circumvallation to confine the further extension of Russia’.[506]

  The Canrobert Mission has not received the attention from historians which it merits.[507] The General saw King Oscar on 17 November. He gained Swedish agreement to a formal treaty, signed four days later, which although outwardly defensive in character secretly provided for joint military action on both sides of the Gulf of Finland. A Russo-Swedish dispute over grazing rights for reindeer in Lapland,
together with Russian naval incursions into Swedish waters, would give an excuse for the British and French to come to King Oscar’s assistance. Canrobert would be entrusted with overall command of a force of 165,000 men drawn from the armies of France, Britain, the kingdom of Sweden and Norway, and, it was hoped, Denmark. This army would force the Russians to evacuate Finland and raze the fortress of Kronstadt, while diversionary operations south of the Gulf would threaten Riga and Reval (Tallinn). The Swedes were assured that special gunboats and floating batteries were being built in British and French shipyards for operations in the Baltic.

  Although details of the military plan were kept secret, many aspects of Canrobert’s Mission were leaked to a Belgian newspaper. Subsequently the report appeared in The Times, whose columns, so everyone asserted at Westminister, were regularly scanned by the Tsar and his ministers. The press stories concentrated on an alleged conference between Canrobert, Rear-Admiral Richard Dundas, and the French Rear-Admiral, Charles Pénaud, which took place in the Danish port of Kiel on the last day of November. Apart from putting greater emphasis on landings in Russia’s Baltic provinces than on operations in southern Finland, assigning the conference to Pénaud’s flagship instead of Dundas’s, and saying that it lasted for four hours instead of eight, the report was substantially correct.[508] It was certainly accurate enough to alert St Petersburg, as Napoleon intended; and, since the Swedes duly informed Nesselrode that they had concluded a defensive alliance with Russia’s enemies, the threat was taken very seriously in the Tsar’s capital. On 16 December, eight days after the report of the Kiel conference appeared in The Times, Napoleon sent for Baron Seebach and asked him to emphasize to his father-in-law during his visit to St Petersburg that it would be extremely foolish of Alexander II not to make peace now, before the might of this new coalition was brought to bear on Russia in the coming year.[509]

  On that same Sunday, Count Valentin Esterhazy, Austria’s ambassador to the Tsar, left Vienna with new demands for a peace settlement which had been drawn up in consultation with the French and, belatedly, the British. If these terms were rejected by Russia, Austria would break off relations. But this latest threat did not immediately strengthen the hand of the peace party in St Petersburg. Throughout the last three months the pace of allied diplomacy had been set in Paris rather than in London, to the chagrin of both Palmerston and Clarendon, who had delayed Esterhazy’s departure by several weeks through their insistence on modifying the original Franco-Austrian draft.[510] This rift between Paris and London — characterized by a speech by Prince Napoleon in which he spoke about the Crimean campaign without mentioning the presence in the peninsula of the British — was well known in other European capitals and exaggerated in St Petersburg. The Tsar clung to the hope that, so long as there was no outward weakening in Russia’s resolve to continue the war, he might detach the French from their British partners and, by breaking up the allied coalition, secure a good peace for his Empire. ‘Never will I accept humiliating terms,’ he wrote to his Commander-in-Chief in the Crimea. ‘It only remains for us to make the sign of the Cross, march straight ahead, and defend our homeland and our national honour by our united efforts.’[511]

  Lord Panmure used less exalted language when he let General Codrington ‘know confidentially the political aspect of affairs’: ‘You will no doubt be inundated with many vague reports from all quarters, and dark hints from Pélissier as to the future,’ he wrote. ‘There can be no doubt that the Emperor of the French is tired of war at so remote a distance from France, and he is fast making up his mind to no more in the Crimea.’[512] Codrington had clear evidence around him of the declining French interest in the campaign. Generals Bosquet and Niel were back in Paris before Christmas, and many of the best regiments returned home. Apart from occasional skirmishes, there was little action. So surprised was Marshal Pélissier by a sudden eruption of fighting in the second week of December that he sent Brigadier-General Rose over to British headquarters to report that the Russians had made an unsuccessful raid on one of the most distant French outposts, nine miles east of Balaclava. It is characteristic of a winter in which the Commander-in-Chiefs despatches were concerned with leaky hut roofs, the state of the roads, and a temperamental locomotive on the Balaclava Railway, that when Rose rode over to headquarters, General Codrington was not there to see him.[513]

  Codrington was, however, commended at Windsor and Westminster for the clarity and frequency of his reports. He was prepared to do all that was required of him in the captured city. ‘The destruction of the South Side of Sebastopol, its docks and forts, is in our power,’ he wrote to Panmure on 8 December, ‘but the enemy holds as much control over the harbour as we do: we have not possession of it at all in a naval point of view; it is a large mutual wet ditch under fire from both sides.’ The delay in blowing up the docks was caused partly by heavy rain which flooded the holes in which explosives had been sunk, but over the New Year the work of destruction went rapidly ahead.[514] Codrington, too, withdrew veteran troops, so as to avoid having men and horses spend a second winter in the Crimea; but most units did at least remain in the theatre of war, ready for another campaign in the spring. Thus the Duberlys, wife and husband, left Balaclava with the 8th Hussars on 7 November for Turkey, so that the Light Cavalry could winter their horses in well-protected quarters at Izmit, fifty miles south-east of Scutari. They did not doubt that they would return northwards once the Crimean snowline receded. By contrast, in France on the last Saturday of the old year, there was a triumphant parade through the streets of the capital, as if the fighting were already over.[515]

  At St Petersburg, two evenings later (1 January, 1856), Alexander II convened a special council of ministers at the Winter Palace to decide whether, in view of the threatening attitude of Austria, the war was to continue.[516] The Tsar, who had seen both Esterhazy and Seebach over the weekend, read out the Austrian demands: acceptance of the old and familiar Four Points as a basis of agreement, but with two important additions — a ‘Fifth Point’ in which the belligerents reserved a right to bring forward at a peace conkrence other ‘special conditions, in the interests of Europe’, and an amplification of the First Point (the future of the Danubian Principalities) requiring Russia to withdraw from southern Bessarabia and lose all sovereignty over the banks of the Danube. Alexander personally made no comment on these proposals, but he sought the opinions of Nesselrode, Orlov and three widely experienced ministers. None favoured the continuance of the war; yet none wished to accept these Austrian demands. Count Bludov, the President of the Imperial Council, wondered if the situation was as desperate as it seemed and made an emotional appeal to think of Russia’s honour. Others, however, emphasized Russia’s financial weakness and the danger of insurrections should the war drag on. All agreed that Alexander Gorchakov in Vienna must seek withdrawal of the Fifth Point, on the grounds that it was too vague to merit acceptance; and he should emphasize that Russia would not allow her frontier to he pushed back from the Danube. Gorchakov himself suggested to Nesselrode that Russia could ignore the Austrians and make a direct personal approach to Napoleon III; for the ambassador was convinced that the French were so tired of the war that they would prefer a speedy peace which left Russia on the lower Danube to a protracted diplomatic wrangle over the future of Bessarabia.[517]

  Although Nesselrode, who disliked all the Gorchakov family, was slow to respond to the ambassador’s proposal, it made good, shrewd sense. For Napoleon was embarking on a tortuous policy which could be eased by direct Russo-French contacts, rather than by counting on the Austrians. He had welcomed a British suggestion that the allies should hold a Grand Council of War in January to plan an overall strategy for the new year. But, whereas the British delegates and the French soldiers at the council table wished to consider specific military objectives, Napoleon hoped to persuade them that a wider war would impose greater burdens in manpower, money and resources than Britain or France could afford. Since there was a Piedmontese delegate to
the Grand Council, but nobody from neutral Vienna, it would be convenient for Napoleon if he could bring peace nearer by direct links with Russia, which ignored Austrian susceptibilities entirely. A deviously worded letter to Queen Victoria explained that public opinion in France would never understand a conflict which was allowed to drag on simply ‘in order to obtain some wasteland in Bessarabia’.[518]

  The Grand Council of War, which met intermittently in Paris under the Emperor’s presidency from 10 to 21 January 1856, was a typically Napoleonic showpiece. It fulfilled its function admirably, by attracting maximum attention and postponing every decision to a speculative future. The British ambassador (who had first proposed the convening of the Council) was joined by the Duke of Cambridge and two lesser military luminaries from the Crimea, Generals Airey and Jones, as well as by Admirals Lyons and Richard Dundas. General La Marmora had been fetched back from Balaclava to speak for Sardinia-Piedmont, but, as so often in these allied deliberations, there was no spokesman for the Turks. The French delegates were a collection of military heavyweights: Marshal Vaillant and Generals Bosquet, Niel, Canrobert and Martimprey (Pélissier’s chief of staff), together with three admirals and a transfusion of Bonapartist blueblood — Count Walewski; Prince Napoleon; and the septuagenarian Marshal Prince Jerome, the great Napoleon’s surviving brother, once King of Westphalia and, for three undistinguished weeks forty-four years in the past, commander of the Third Army in the invasion of Russia. Much of the discussion around the conference table seemed suddenly irrelevant. There was talk of using Eupatoria as the best base in the Crimea for striking inland, but more interest was shown in plans for a Baltic campaign, in which even Sardinia-Piedmont now wished to participate. Yet here, too, concentration wavered. On 12 January Canrobert began to read a paper that he had prepared on ways of capturing St Petersburg, but before he had finished his exposition he abandoned it, with profuse apologies for having wasted the Council’s time on so impracticable a project. Peace was in the air and everyone knew it; although the Duke of Cambridge took care ‘to urge upon the Emperor’ the need to press on vigorously with the war ‘should the pacific turn that affairs have momentarily taken not be continued in that direction’.[519] Napoleon, interested in summoning an even more prestigious gathering in the French capital, hurriedly agreed with His Royal Highness, who returned to London somewhat confused by what his cousin, Queen Victoria, felicitously called ‘the cancans at Paris’.[520]