*6 Samuel was so depressed that he wrote a letter to Prime Minister Pitt the Younger which offered to exchange his ‘battalion of 900 Russians’ in order to supervise a Panopticon ‘of British malefactors ‘.
*7 Ligne’s letters give only half the story; Potemkin’s archives hold the other half. Ligne’s claims that Potemkin was lying about his victories on other fronts were accepted by historians but are actually themselves false. Potemkin’s espionage network, revealed by his archives, kept him informed of events across his huge theatre of operations: he received regular reports from the Governor of the Polish fortress Kamenets-Podolsky, General de Witte, who explained how he had managed to get spies into Turkish Khotin in a consignment of butter – though the fact that the sister of Witte’s Greek wife was married to the Pasha of Khotin might also have helped.
*8 In the process, he invented an amphibious cart, perhaps the first amphibious landing craft; a floating timebomb; an early torpedo; and bottlebombs filled with inflammable liquid that had to be lit and then thrown – 160 years before Molotov cocktails. Perhaps they should be called ‘Bentham’ or ‘Potemkin cocktails’.
*9 Potemkin wrote to him: ‘Sir, Her Imperial Majesty distinguishing the bravery shown by you against the Turks on the Liman of Ochakov…has graciously been pleased to present you with a sword inscribed to commemorate your valour…’.
27
CRY HAVOC: THE STORMING OF OCHAKOV
It began in the morning
At the rise of a red sun
When Potemkin speaks…
Our bravest leader
Only wave your hand and Ochakov is taken
Say the word and Istanbul will fall
We’ll march with you through fire and rain…
Soldiers’ marching song, ‘The Fall of Ochakov’
The forbidding fortress of Ochakov was Russia’s most pressing prize in 1788 because it controlled the mouths of the Dnieper and the Bug. This was the key to Kherson, hence to the Crimea itself. The Turks had therefore reinforced its network of defences, advised by ‘a French engineer of note’, Lafite. ‘The town’, observed Fanshawe, ‘formed a long parallelogram from the crest of a hill down to the waterside, fortified with a wall of considerable thickness running round it, a double ditch…flanked by six bastions, a spit of sand running out from the west flank into the Liman which flanks the sea wall and terminates in a covered battery.’1 It was a considerable town of mosques, palaces, gardens and barracks with a garrison of between 8,000 and 12,000 Spahis and Janissaries, dressed in their green jackets and tunics over pantaloons with turbans, shields, curved daggers, axes and spears.*1 Even Joseph II, who inspected Ochakov on his visit, appreciated that it was not susceptible to a coup de main.2
As soon as he began to invest the fortress Serenissimus insisted on setting off with Ligne, Nassau and his entourage in a rowing boat to reconnoitre and test some mortars. Ochakov saluted the Prince with a bombardment and sent out a squadron of Turks in little boats. Potemkin haughtily ignored them. ‘One could see nothing more noble and cheerfully courageous than the Prince,’ said Ligne. ‘I loved him to madness that day.’3 Potemkin’s demonstrations of valour impressed everyone – especially a few weeks later when Sinelnikov, Governor of Ekaterinoslav, was hit in the groin by a cannonball while standing between an imperturbable Potemkin and an excited Ligne. Serenissimus ordered the reduction of a Turkish stronghold in the Pasha’s gardens. This ignited a skirmish which Potemkin and 200 courtiers observed from amid the barrage. ‘I’ve not seen a man’, said Nassau, ‘who was better under fire than he.’4 Potemkin rushed to help Sinelnikov, who, ever the courtier, even in agony, asked him ‘not to expose himself to such danger because there’s only one Potemkin in Russia’. The pain was so excruciating, he begged Potemkin to shoot him.5 Sinelnikov died two days later.6
The Prince extended both wings of his forces in an arc around the town and ordered a bombardment by his artillery. Everyone waited for the storming to begin – especially Suvorov, who was always longing to unleash the bloody bayonet, if not the ‘crazy bitch’ of the musket.
Next day, on 27 July, the Turks made a sortie with fifty Spahis. Suvorov, ‘drunk after dinner’, attacked them, throwing more and more men into a fierce fray, without orders from Potemkin. The Turks fled but returned with superior forces to pursue Suvorov and his Russians back to their lines, killing many of his best men, who were then beheaded. When Potemkin sent a note to inquire what was happening, Suvorov is supposed to have sent back this rhyming couplet:
I am sitting on a rock
And at Ochakov I look.7
Three thousand Turks fell on the fleeing Russians. Damas called it ‘useless butchery’.8 Suvorov was wounded and the rest of his division was saved only by Prince Repnin making a diversion. The heads of the Russians were displayed on stakes around Ochakov.
Serenissimus wept at the waste of 200 soldiers, ‘due to the humanity and compassion of his heart’, according to his secretary Tsebrikov. ‘Oh my god!’, cried Potemkin. ‘You’re happy to let those barbarians tear everybody to pieces.’ He angrily reprimanded Suvorov, saying ‘soldiers are not so cheap that one can sacrifice them…’.9 Suvorov sulked and recuperated in Kinburn.*2
Potemkin did not storm Ochakov. The pressure on him increased all the time: on 18 August, the Turks made another sortie. General Mikhail Golenishev-Kutuzov, later the legendary hero of 1812 and vanquisher of Napoleon, was wounded in the head for the second time – like Potemkin, he was blinded in one eye.*3 Nassau repulsed the Turks by firing on their flanks from his flotilla in the Estuary. As winter descended on Ochakov, the foreigners – such as Ligne and Nassau – grumbled bitterly about Potemkin’s slow incompetence. Nassau considered Potemkin the ‘most unmilitary man in the world and too proud to consult anybody’.*4 Ligne said he was wasting ‘time and people’ and wrote to Cobenzl in code, undermining Potemkin – though he did not dare sneak to Catherine.10 ‘It is impossible’, wrote Damas, who thought the batteries badly laid out around the town, ‘that so many blunders should have been made unless Prince Potemkin had personal reasons…to delay matters.’ But these foreigners were prejudiced against Russia. Potemkin’s reasons were political and military.11 Serenissimus was happy to let the Austrians absorb the first Ottoman attacks, especially since Joseph had failed in virtually all his plans except the meagre prize of Sabatsch and had himself gone on to the defensive. Catherine heartily agreed: ‘Better be slower but healthy than quick but dangerous.’12 Given the Swedish war, the increasingly hostile Anglo-Prussian alliance and the surprisingly strong performance of the Ottoman armies against Austria, Potemkin knew Ochakov would not end the war: there was every reason to husband resources until the end of the year.
Serenissimus was not a genius of movement, more a Fabius Cunctator, a patient delayer and waiter on events. This was an age in which officers like Ligne and Suvorov believed warfare was a glorious game of charges and assaults, regardless of the cost in men. Potemkin threw away the book of conventional Western warfare and fought in a way that suited the nature of his enemies – and himself. He much preferred to win battles without fighting them, as in 1783 in the Crimea. In the case of sieges, he preferred to bribe, negotiate and starve a fortress into submission. His attitude was not swashbuckling, but modern generals would recognize his humanity and prudence.13 Potemkin specifically decided that he would not storm Ochakov until it was absolutely necessary, in order to save the blood of his men. ‘I’ll do my best’, he told Suvorov, ‘to get it cheap.’14 Potemkin’s emissaries rode back and forth negotiating with the Turks. Serenissimus ‘was convinced the Turks wish to surrender’.15 Storming was his last resort.*5 The foreigners also had little concept of his vast responsibilities, commanding and provisioning armies and navies from the Caucasus to the Gulf of Finland, from managing Polish policy to driving Faleev to create another rowing flotilla, already looking ahead to the next
year’s fight up the Danube.16
‘I won’t be the dupe of the Russians who want to leave me alone to bear the entire burden,’17 Joseph bitterly complained to Ligne. Joseph’s desperation to share the burden was the reason for Ligne’s frantic and venomous attempts to force Potemkin either to storm Ochakov or to bear the blame for Joseph’s failures. In September, the ablest Ottoman commander, Grand Vizier Yusuf-Pasha, surprised Joseph in his camp and the Kaiser barely escaped with his life, fleeing back to Vienna. Joseph learned the hard way that he was not Frederick the Great. ‘As for our ally,’ Potemkin joked, ‘whenever he’s around, everything goes wrong.’*6 The Turks had certainly improved their military skills since the last war – ‘the Turks are different’, Potemkin told Catherine, ‘and the devil has taught them’. The Austrians could not understand why Catherine did not order Potemkin to storm, but ‘she negotiates with him for everything’. Half the time, he did not even reply to her letters. ‘He has decided to do what he wants.’18
* * *
—
The Prince often played billiards with Ligne until 6 a.m. or just stayed up to chat. One night, Ligne gave him a dinner for fifty generals and all his exotic friends.19 Potemkin was often depressed and then he would ‘put his handkerchief dipped in lavender water around his forehead, sign of his hypochondria’. During the heat, he served icecreams and sorbets. At night, Ligne and the rest of them listened to his ‘numerous and unique orchestra conducted by the famous and admirable Sarti’. There is a story that during one of these recitals, as the horns were piping, Potemkin in his dressing gown asked a German artillery officer: ‘What do you think of Ochakov?’ ‘You think the walls of Ochakov are like those of Jericho that fell to the sound of trumpets?’, replied the officer.20
There were consolations of the feminine kind when they were rejoined by the three graces, whom Ligne called ‘the most beautiful girls in the Empire’.21 The Prince was falling in love with Pavel Potemkin’s wife. Praskovia Andreevna, née Zakrevskaya, had a bad figure but a ‘superb face, skin of dazzling whiteness and beautiful eyes, little intelligence but very self-sufficient’. Her arch notes to Potemkin survive in the archives: ‘You mock me, my dear cousin, in telling me as an excuse that you await my orders to come to see me…I am always charmed.’22 Damas was equally charmed by Potemkin’s libidinous niece-by-marriage, the twenty-five-year-old Ekaterina Samoilova. Her portrait by Lampi shows a bold, full-lipped sexuality with jewels in her hair and a turban tottering on the back of her head. When she later had children, the wags joked that her husband, Samoilov, never saw her – but she still provided ample ‘proof of her fecundity’.23 After a freezing day in the trenches, Damas, who dashingly sported French and Russian uniform on alternate days, visited the ladies’ tent: ‘I hoped that a more energetic siege would make them surrender more quickly than the town.’ He soon succeeded with Samoilova, but was then wounded again. Potemkin consoled his protégé by bringing Skavronskaya, another newly arrived sultana, to his sickbed.24 The Prince did not want to deprive Damas of ‘seeing one of the prettiest women in Europe’.*7
* * *
—
The Capitan-Pasha met the Sebastopol Fleet off Fidonise, near the Danube delta, on 3 July and Potemkin’s baby passed its first test – just. Ghazi Hassan withdrew and now returned to save Ochakov. The Crocodile delivered supplies and another 1,500 Janissaries for the garrison. Twice the supplies got through – much to the admirals’ shame and Potemkin’s fury. But the entire Turkish fleet was again cooped up under the walls of Ochakov and therefore neutralized: as ever, there was some method in Potemkin’s madness.
On 5 September, the Prince, Nassau, Damas and Ligne sailed into the Liman to examine the Hassan-Pasha Redoubt and discuss Nassau’s plan to land 2,000 men under the wall of the lower battery. The Turks opened up with grapeshot and shell. Potemkin sat alone in the stern, with his medals glittering on his chest and an expression of ‘cold dignity that was deliberately assumed and truly admirable’.25
Potemkin’s entourage, particularly his strange band of neophyte admirals and foreign spies, began to disband with mutual disillusionment. Life at Ochakov became harder. ‘We have no water,’ wrote Ligne, ‘we eat flies and we’re a 100 leagues from a market. We only drink wine…we sleep four hours after dinner.’ Bitter winter came early. Ligne burned his carriage for firewood. The camp became ‘snow and shit’. Even the Liman was green from the burned bodies of Turks.26
Samuel Bentham, appalled by the stench of decay and dysentery, called war ‘an abominable trade’. Potemkin indulgently sent him to the Far East*8 on the sort of mission that appealed to both of them.27 The King of Poland’s eyes, Littlepage, stormed off when Potemkin suspected him of trying to undermine Nassau. The little American protested he had never been ‘a troublemaker’. Serenissimus soothed him and he went back to Stanislas-Augustus.28 The real victim of this parting of the ways was America’s famous sailor John Paul Jones, whose obscure origins meant he was always under pressure to prove himself. His thin-skinned, pedantic behaviour did not endear him to Serenissimus. When Nassau was promoted rear-admiral, Jones got into a ludicrous row about his own precedence and salutes – his account gave six reasons why he need not salute Nassau!
Soon anything that went wrong at sea was blamed on poor Jones. Potemkin ordered the American to destroy ships, moored off Ochakov, or at least spike their cannons. Jones tried twice but for some reason did not succeed. Potemkin cancelled the order and assigned it to Anton Golavaty and his beloved Zaporogian Cossacks, who accomplished it. Jones complained rudely to the Prince who replied: ‘I assure you Mr Rear-Admiral that in command, I never enter into individual considerations, I give justice when I should render it…As for my orders, I am not obliged to give account of them and I changed these same orders according to circumstance…I’ve commanded a long time and I know very well its rules.’29 Serenissimus decided Jones was ‘unable to command’ and had him recalled by Catherine.30 ‘I’ll eternally regret having had the misfortune to losing your good graces,’ Jones told Potemkin on 20 October. ‘I dare say it’s difficult but very possible to find sea officers of my skill…but you’ll never find a man with a heart as susceptible to loyalty with more zeal…’.31 At a last interview, Jones bitterly blamed Potemkin for dividing the command in the first place. ‘Agreed,’ snapped the Prince–Marshal, ‘but it’s too late now.’32 On 29 October, Jones departed for Petersburg,33 where he soon learned the danger of making powerful enemies.
After another attempt to bombard the town into submission by land and sea, Nassau, irritated by the delay and out of favour as Potemkin discovered his devious manipulations of truth, stormed off to Warsaw. ‘His luck didn’t hold,’ Potemkin told Catherine.34
Joseph’s spy Ligne left too. Potemkin wrote him the ‘sweetest, tenderest, most naive’ goodbye. Ligne apologized for hurting his friend in an unpublished semi-legible note to the Prince – ‘Pardon, 1000 Pardons, my Prince’ – that has the air of a rejected lover on the eve of parting.35 Potemkin, ‘sometimes the best of men’, seemed to awaken out of a dream to say goodbye to Ligne: ‘he took me in his arms for a long time, repeatedly ran after me, started again and finally let me go with pain’. But when he reached Vienna Ligne told everyone that Ochakov would never be taken and set about ruining Potemkin’s reputation.36 So young Roger de Damas lost his two patrons. The Prince offered himself to replace them as ‘friend and protector’. Thus Potemkin, who went from ‘most perfect graciousness’ to ‘the most morose rudeness’ in seconds, inspired ‘gratitude, devotion and hatred at the same moment’.37
Catherine worried about her Prince’s glory and consort’s comfort: she sent him the commemorative dish and sword for the former, and a jewel and a fur coat for the latter. Potemkin was delighted: ‘Thank you, Lady Matushka…’. The jewels showed ‘royal generosity’ and the fur displayed ‘maternal caring. And this’, he added with feeling, ‘is more dear to me than beads and gold.’38
* * *
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The weather at Ochakov and the politics in Europe deteriorated together at the end of the October. The cold was now severe. When Potemkin inspected the trenches, he told the soldiers they did not need to rise at his approach: ‘Only try not to lie down before the Turkish cannons.’ Soon the sufferings of the army were ‘inconceivable’ in the snow and ice with temperatures of minus 15 degrees Centigrade. The men rolled up their tents and lived in burrows in the ground that shocked Damas, though actually these zemliankas were the traditional Russian way for the troops to camp in the cold. There was hardly any food, meat or brandy. Potemkin and Damas received the latest news from France. ‘Do you think that when your King has assembled the States-General…he will dine at the hour that pleases him?’ Potemkin asked him. ‘Hell, he will only eat when they are kind enough to permit it!’
Soon it was so bad that even Samoilova had to go and camp with her husband, who commanded the left wing. This caused her lover Damas considerable inconvenience: ‘I was forced to take my chance of being frozen in the snow in order to pay her the attentions she deigned to accept.’39
The misery of the army was the ‘absolute fault of Prince Potemkin’, Cobenzl told Joseph. ‘It’s he who lost a whole year before unhappy Ochakov where the army has suffered more by illness and lack of substance than it would have lost in two battles.’40 Potemkin’s critics, especially the Austrians, claimed his delay caused the death of 20,000 men and 2,000 horses, according to the prejudiced Frenchman, the Comte de Langeron, who was not even there.41 Forty to fifty men were said to be dying daily in the hospital.42 ‘Scarcely any man recovers from dysentery.’43 It is hard to discover how many really died, but Potemkin certainly lost fewer men than earlier generals like Münnich and Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, both of whose armies were so decimated they could scarcely campaign. The Austrians, who damned him over Ochakov, were in no position to criticize: at exactly the same time, 172,000 of their soldiers were sick; and 33,000 died, more than Potemkin’s entire army.44
Catherine the Great & Potemkin Page 63
