Let Our Fame Be Great
Page 7
The council attended by Longworth and Bell discussed and considered for five days, but resolved on little more than sending a letter to the Russian General Ivan Velyaminov asking him to withdraw from Circassia. The reply from the general was chilling, and instructive of the tactics that Russia was employing in its unequal battle.
Velyaminov had landed a force at the bay of Gelendzhik, which is a sheltered if shallow anchorage, that was joined by another marching overland. The Circassians, wary of the Russians’ grapeshot, were confining themselves to sniping from the trees, and neither side was in a position to win a significant victory. The general, however, was arrogant in his demand for submission.
‘Are you not aware that if the heavens should fall, Russia could prop them up with her bayonets? The English may be good mechanics and artisans, but power dwells only with Russia. No country ever waged successful war against her,’ he wrote. ‘If you refuse to listen to us, your country shall be taken from you, and yourselves treated with the utmost rigour. Be obedient, therefore, to my instructions. You must believe what has been told you, and you will be treated with lenity; otherwise, it will not be our fault if your valleys are destroyed with fire and sword, and your mountains trampled to dust! Yield, and you may retain your property; if not, all you possess, even your arms, shall be taken from you, and yourselves made slaves.’
The warning was prophetic, since the Circassians would indeed lose their country and experience their national tragedy, but a lot of skirmishing was to take place before that day.
Much of the Russian energy at this time was devoted to establishing a chain of forts along the coast that would seal off the Circassians from their allies over the sea. These forts were truly miserable affairs, often more deadly for the defenders than the attackers, but they served to warn off traders from the most important coastal sites.
Built of mud and brush, they were often cut off from all communications for the entire winter, when the sea was plagued by storms. During the winter months, the unfortunate defenders were exposed to disease and starvation as well as the ceaseless sniping of the Circassian rifles. Tornau, an engineer officer, despaired of the conditions of the forts he passed. The garrisons, he wrote, were too weak to intimidate the local inhabitants and served only as a source of slaves for the Circassians, who traded in Russian prisoners openly.
The garrison in Sukhumi, capital of present day Abkhazia, came in for particular censure when he passed through in 1835. ‘The people had the look of unfortunate victims, doomed to permanent fever, from which half of them died every year. They knew this and, not exactly with a calm spirit, but uncomplainingly bore their lot, not ceasing to fulfil their difficult duty with the submissiveness characteristic of the Russian soldier.’
The appalling conditions endured by the Russian soldiers must be borne in mind when reading descriptions of the military prowess of the Circassians, who so frequently failed to capture the forts manned by these pitiful creatures. The Russian army, though justly lauded for its defeat of Napoleon, had gone sharply downhill since 1815. The freedoms that its soldiers and officers had enjoyed during those heroic campaigns had been anathema to the government, and constant drill had replaced soldiering. The army had gone from a place where aristocrats and peasants were united in a common cause to a herd of cowed conscripts lorded over by vicious martinets. The tipping point had come in early winter 1825 when Alexander I died.
Officers who had seen conditions in western Europe, and who had lived in occupied Paris, wanted to push Russia towards the European mainstream. Alexander’s successor and brother Konstantin turned down the crown, and it passed to the younger brother Nikolai, who surpassed even his dead sibling in small-mindedness. In response to the proclamation of his accession, liberal officers called out their regiments to stand on Palace Square in St Petersburg, where they demanded a constitution until they were cut down by loyal troops. The significance of this ‘Decembrist’ uprising is often overstated, and the Decembrists were unlikely to have changed much even if they had won – Russia has a habit of reverting to autocratic type no matter who rules it – but their revolt terrified the new tsar.
Nikolai was convinced he had been spared by God, and forced the generals to come down even harder than before on any signs of subversion in the ranks. He came to believe that ‘unquestioning obedience and an absence of dangerous initiative on the part of subordinates were essential to the security of his realm’, according to one historian of the period.
He interfered and quibbled and altered plans drawn up for the Circassian war. At one point he was told about plans for a fort at a river crossing. Nikolai dug into his files for the results of a reconnaissance of the site three years earlier. ‘After studying the drawing, he marked on it the spot for the fort, and then ordered a special messenger to gallop two thousand versts [2,000 kilometres] to the Caucasus, so the entrenchment could be built according to his wishes,’ wrote the historian John Shelton Curtiss, in his book The Russian Army under Nicholas I.
The strict rules and mismanagement that resulted had the inevitable effect of creating flourishing circumstances for corruption. Alexandre Dumas, the French author of The Three Musketeers, recorded one case when he travelled in the Caucasus in the 1850s. A soldier he met told him how the men of his regiment were entitled to the meat of one bullock a day – a far from excessive amount for 400 or 500 men. On the long march from Kaluga near Moscow, their captain marched a bullock along with them. ‘Whenever an official came on a visit of inspection, there were the captain’s accounts, showing the purchase of one bullock a day as instructed, and there was the bullock, large as life, and ready for the men’s supper tonight.’ On they marched, the bullock bringing up the rear, for two and a half months. ‘Perhaps we might think that at last the men had a chance to eat their beef? Not a bit of it! The captain sold the bullock and since (unlike the men) it had been well fed every day, he made a handsome profit.’
The poor food coupled with a malarial climate and constant skirmishes had a devastating effect on the Russian soldiers sent to subdue the tribesmen. Xavier Hommaire de Hell, a French explorer who travelled extensively through southern Russia with his wife Adele, noted that, in spring 1840, 12,000 men of the 12th Division went to occupy the forts of Circassia. Four months later, only 1,500 of them returned.
‘The same year, the commander-in-chief found but nine men fit for service out of 300 that composed the garrison of [Sukhumi],’ he wrote, adding that 17,000 men died a year in 1841 and 1842.
‘Is it to be wondered that with such a military administration, Russia makes no progress in the Caucasus? What can be expected of armies in which want of all necessities and total disregard for the lives of men are the order of the day?’ he asked.
The tsar raged against the corruption and inefficiency. But, in truth, what was needed was delegation of powers to men on the ground and that the tsar was not prepared to do.
His micromanagement, with its inevitable inability to react to local conditions, would have catastrophic results in the eastern Caucasus, where the war was more intense. And it was bad for morale in the west. However, it did have one unintended consequence that we can welcome: a new witness of the warfare appeared on the scene.
Nikolai Ivanovich Lorer was one of the unfortunate Decembrists who appealed for a constitution in 1825. He was not a leader of the revolt – he would have been hanged had he been – but was sent into exile in Siberia for twelve years. At the end of this period, aged forty-eight, he was posted to the Caucasus to serve as a private soldier, and arrived on the Black Sea just when the army was building its chain of forts. He was in an anomalous position. He was an aristocrat, so the officers of this force were his friends and his schoolmates, but he was forced to fight in the ranks, giving him a unique perspective on how the army worked. He took part in a massive amphibious landing at a place he called Shapsugo (Bell calls it Sashe), not far from modern-day Tuapse, where the fort of Tenginskoye was to be built.
The Russians f
irst made a feint attack, causing the Circassians to gather, then under cover of an artillery barrage landed their troops to the north. The troops took a few small hills, much to the surprise of the Circassians gathered there, who bustled off to save their possessions and families.
The Russian victory was easy and they built their fort despite the best efforts of the Circassian snipers. But then the evil reputation of the Black Sea was confirmed. A massive storm sank a steamship and two frigates that were escorting it, leaving the army without reinforcements. The destruction was terrible. As it happens, Bell was only a few kilometres away at this time and the next few days are the only time during this whole campaign when we have two, independent witnesses to an event. According to Bell, the storm wrecked twenty-nine Russian ships on the coast as whole.
The Russians attempted to protect the wrecks near their new fort at Shapsugo/Sashe, but were driven back by the Circassians, who raided the ships for all they could find then burnt them.
Bell walked along the shore and saw the Circassians plundering the wrecks of ‘small arms, damaged powder, silver coin, ship stores, bales of merchandise . . . iron water-tanks, copper sheathing, bolts, bars of iron ... [which] will, no doubt, soon by transformed into swords, ploughshares, axes, knives and other necessaries’. The death toll appears to have been high. ‘A creek into which the sea seemed to have made its way during the gale – surmounting its barrier of shingle – was piled full of these planks; and among them was said to be an immense number of corpses, of which the intolerable stench gave proof superabundant.’
Lorer was a thoughtful man, and his humane memoirs make touching reading. He sat in this devastating scene and looked at the thickly wooded hills rising above the little army, at the plane trees, chestnuts and hazels, and wondered what it would take to conquer them. He could see little villages in the mountains, and wished to wander up to the huts and learn more about them, but the sniper fire was so intense that the soldiers were pinned down and he could not venture far.
When a Circassian delegation, under a flag of truce, came to ask for the return of the dead, Lorer received a chance to observe the enemy, and was deeply impressed with how they conversed with the general. The conversation was one of several recorded between generals and Circassian delegations, and may be identical to one recorded elsewhere by Tornau. A story similar to Tornau’s account is still quoted with pride by Circassians to this day, so it may be apocryphal but it is too poetic to leave out. The general started with a demand to know why the Circassians were rebelling against their lawful sovereign.
‘The sultan,’ said the general, ‘made a present of you to the Russian tsar.’
‘Aha, now I understand,’ replied one Circassian with commendable wit, and pointed out a bird sitting on a nearby tree. ‘General, I give thee that little bird, take it.’
The general’s response is not given. Lorer recorded a similar conversation, which shows a similar degree of dignity from the Circassians, who appear not to have been overawed by the lofty personage they were conversing with.
‘Why do you not submit to our great ruler,’ asked the general of the delegation. ‘And stop us having to spill blood in vain? I know that in the mountains with you is hiding the Englishman Bell, he incites you and he promises help from England, but believe me, he is lying to you, you will receive no help from anyone, and it would be better to give him up to me hand-and-foot, and you’ll receive for this a lot of silver from our ruler who is very rich.’
The highlanders’ leader, whom Lorer calls a prince although he is unlikely to have enjoyed the wealth that such a Russian title implies, replied with a gentle reproach.
‘If it is true that your tsar is rich, then why does he envy our poverty and does not let us quietly sow our millet in our poor mountains? Your tsar must be a very greedy and jealous tsar. As for the Englishman Bell, we cannot give him up, because he is our friend and guest and he does us a lot of kindness. With us, like for you, there are scoundrels who you can buy, but we, princes and lords, will always remain honest, and you do not have enough gold and silver, to deflect us from the route of honesty.’
The Russians would not be seen off with gentle dignity alone, however, and the war continued in its brutal course. Bell and Longworth regularly saw burnt villages and hamlets on the paths of Russian attacks (although it was not clear who had set fire to the houses, fleeing defenders or vengeful attackers), and areas traversed by Russian roads had become deserted as the Circassian civilians fled into the hills.
Lorer’s exile continued to be spent on excursions along the coast. The next year he took part in a second amphibious attack to build another fort, but the efforts were not subduing the Circassians, even though they appear to have throttled the Circassians’ trade with the Turks. The frustration shown by the general’s comments was filtering through into all the senior officers of the army, and the war was particularly brutal under the leadership of General Grigory Zass, who commanded the right flank of the army.
Brutality as a military tactic had been pioneered by General Alexei Yermolov, who was proconsul in the Caucasus from 1816 to 1827. He once famously said: ‘I desire that the terror of my name should guard our frontiers more potently than chains of fortresses, that my word should be for the natives a law more inevitable than death.’ He became a byword for massacre and horror, especially in the eastern Caucasus.
Yermolov was a veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns, and adored by his soldiers, with whom he shared the hardships of garrison life. But his independent spirit was out of fashion when Nikolai came to the throne. Not realizing that Nikolai’s older brother had turned down the chance of ascending the throne, he ordered the army of the Caucasus to swear allegiance to Konstantin. This gaff undermined whatever trust the tsar had in him, and his position was chipped away at until mistakes in a war against Persia cost him his job. Even without his presence, however, the army maintained levels of brutality that shocked Lorer.
Lorer’s equivocal position in the army, as an educated soldier, gave him access to the likes of Zass and he visited the general in his home. ‘I told him I did not like his system of war, and he replied like this: Russia wants to conquer the Caucasus at whatever cost. How would we take these peoples, our enemies, except with fear and terror? They are not fit for philanthropy, and Yermolov only managed to achieve more than us by hanging people without mercy, by plundering and burning villages.’
Zass, who according to Bell and Longworth was himself feared and hated in the mountains, entered into his role with gusto. Lorer later went to tea with the general, as part of a group that included a doctor and the doctor’s wife. Zass had erected an artificial mound outside his house and impaled the heads of Circassians on spikes set into it. The doctor’s wife complained about the sight, and asked Zass to remove the heads before she came to tea. Zass here betrayed a mental state that surely bordered on the insane.
He agreed to take down the heads, but was loath to part with them. The visitors had not been in his house long before they noticed a revolting smell. Zass had, apparently, decided to store the heads in a box under his bed. He got out the box and showed off the heads to his appalled visitors. He would clean them up, he said, and send them to friends as souvenirs.
Zass was also, according to Longworth, in the habit of mutilating the bodies of Circassians killed in the fighting, since he knew how desperate his opponents were to regain the dead.
During their stay in Circassia, the Englishmen repeatedly complained that they were not allowed to take part in battles. They regularly heard skirmishes, but wanted to see large-scale military campaigns in which the Circassian cavalry routed their Cossack foes. They were asking the impossible here, since, as the Circassians already knew, the Russian artillery was too terrible to be braved in the field. But they finally secured permission to join an assault across the river Kuban towards the end of January 1838. The assault had been long discussed and the forces had to wait for some time before all the horsemen joined them.
Bell decided to stay on the Circassian side of the Kuban as a medic, but Longworth (together with another Englishman, called Knight, who had joined them unexpectedly) was in the thick of the action. By two in the morning, the force was reinforced and came to around 5,000 horsemen. They set off towards the river, across rough country choked with marshes, thickets, woodland and scrub.
The subsequent events were chaotic.
Longworth got lost in the dark, fell asleep in the saddle, was chased by an angry housewife whose thatched roof his horse stopped to eat, set out across country, fought his way through thorns, and finally found an acquaintance who had also lost his companions. Together, by daybreak, they found the rest of the army.
Eventually, the force was reunited and stood on the banks of the Kuban, ready to attack Russia across the frozen river. But its hopes were dashed: the ice had fractured and the attack was doomed. Instantly, the infantry which had been assigned to protect the army’s rear, and about a third of the cavalry, vanished.