The Crimean War

by Figes, Orlando

  As soon as the declaration became public, Church leaders seized upon the war as a righteous struggle and crusade. On Sunday, 2 April pro-war sermons were preached from pulpits up and down the land. Many of them were published in pamphlet form, some even selling tens of thousands of copies, for this was an age when preachers had the status of celebrities in both the Anglican and Nonconformist Church.51 In Trinity Chapel in Conduit Street, Mayfair, in London, the Reverend Henry Beamish told his congregation that it was a ‘Christian duty’ for England

  to interpose her power to maintain the independence of a weak ally against the unjustifiable aggression of an ambitious and perfidious despot, and to punish with the arm of her power an act of selfish and barbarous oppression – an oppression the more hateful and destructive, because it is attempted to be justified on the plea of promoting the cause of religious liberty and the highest interests of Christ’s kingdom.

  On Wednesday, 26 April, a fast-day set aside for ‘national humiliation and prayer on the declaration of war’, the Reverend T. D. Harford Battersby preached a sermon in St John’s Church, Keswick, in which he declared that

  the conduct of our ambassadors and statesmen has been so honourable and straightforward, so forbearing and moderate in the transactions which have led to this war that there is no cause for humiliation at this time, but rather of strengthening ourselves in our righteousness, and that we should rather present ourselves before God with words of self congratulation and say, ‘We thank thee, O God, that we are not as other nations are: unjust, covetous, oppressive, cruel; we are a religious people, we are a Bible-reading, church-going people, we send missionaries into all the earth.’

  In Brunswick Chapel, Leeds, on the same day, the Reverend John James said that Russia’s offensive against Turkey was an attack ‘on the most sacred rights of our common humanity; an outrage standing in the same category as the slave trade, and scarcely inferior to it in crime’. The Balkan Christians, James maintained, had more religious freedom under the Sultan than they would ever have under the Tsar:

  Leave Turkey to the Sultan and, aided by the good offices of France and England, these humble Christians will, by God’s blessing, enjoy perfect liberty of conscience … . Hand it over to Russia and their establishments will be broken up; the school-houses closed; and their places of prayer either demolished, or converted into temples of a faith as impure, demoralizing, and intolerant, as Popery itself. What British Christian can hesitate as to the course proper for such a country as ours, in such a case as this? … It is a Godly war to drive back at any hazard the hordes of the modern Attila, who threatens the liberty and Christianity, not of Turkey only, but of the civilized world.52

  To mark the embarkation of Britain’s ‘Christian soldiers’ for the East, the Reverend George Croly preached a sermon in St Stephen’s Church, Walbrook, in London, in which he maintained that England was engaging in a war for ‘the defence of mankind’ against the Russians, a ‘hopeless and degenerate people’ bent upon the conquest of the world. This was a ‘religious war’ for the defence of the true Western religion against the Greek faith; the ‘first Eastern war since the Crusades’. ‘If England in the last war [against Napoleon] was the refuge of the principles of freedom, in the next she may be appointed for the refuge of the principles of Religion. May it not be the Divine will that England, after having triumphed as the champion, shall be called to the still loftier distinction of the teacher of mankind?’ England’s destiny in the East, the Reverend Croly argued, might be advanced by the coming war: it was nothing less than to convert the Turks to Christianity: ‘The great work may be slow, difficult, and interrupted by the casualties of kingdoms, or the passions of men – but it will prosper. Why should not the Church of England aid this work? Why not offer up solemn and public prayer at once for the success of our righteous warfare, the return of peace, and the conversion of the infidel?’53

  To varying degrees, the major parties to the Crimean War – Russia, Turkey, France and Britain – all called religion to the battlefield. Yet by the time the war began, its origins in the Holy Lands had been forgotten and subsumed by the European war against Russia. The Easter celebrations in the Holy Sepulchre ‘passed off very quietly’ in 1854, according to James Finn, the British consul in Jerusalem. There were few Russian pilgrims because of the outbreak of the war and the Greek services were tightly managed by the Ottoman authorities to prevent a recurrence of the religious fighting that had become common in recent years. Within a few months, the world’s attention would be turned to the battlefields of the Crimea, and Jerusalem would disappear from Europe’s view, but from the Holy Lands these distant events appeared in a different light. As the British consul in Palestine put it:

  In Jerusalem it was otherwise. These important transactions seemed but superstructures upon the original foundation; for although in diplomacy the matter (the Eastern question) had nominally shifted into a question of religious protection … still it had become a settled creed among us that the kernel of it all lay with us in the Holy Places; that the pretensions of St Petersburg to an ecclesiastical protection by virtue of treaty aimed still, as at the very first, at an actual possession of the sanctuaries at the local well-spring of Christianity – that these sanctuaries were in very truth the meed contended for by gigantic athletes at a distance.54

  6

  First Blood to the Turks

  In March 1854 a young artillery officer by the name of Leo Tolstoy arrived at the headquarters of General Mikhail Gorchakov. He had joined the army in 1852, the year he had first come to the attention of the literary world with the publication of his memoir Childhood in the literary journal the Contemporary, the most important monthly periodical in Russia at that time. Dissatisfied with his frivolous way of life as an aristocrat in St Petersburg and Moscow, he had decided to make a fresh start by following his brother Nikolai to the Caucasus when he returned from leave to his army unit there. Tolstoy was attached to an artillery brigade in the Cossack village of Starogladskaya in the northern Caucasus. He took part in raids against Shamil’s Muslim army, narrowly escaping capture by the rebels on more than one occasion, but after the outbreak of the war against Turkey, he requested a transfer to the Danubian front. As he explained in a letter to his brother Sergei in November 1853, he wanted to take part in a real war: ‘For almost a year now I’ve been thinking only of how I might sheathe my sword, and I can’t do it. But since I’m compelled to fight somewhere or other, I would find it more agreeable to fight in Turkey than here.’1

  In January Tolstoy passed the officer’s examination for the rank of ensign, the lowest-ranking commissioned officer in the tsarist army, and departed for Wallachia, where he was attached to the 12th Artillery Brigade. He travelled sixteen days by sledge through the snows of southern Russia to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, arriving there on 2 February, and set off again on 3 March, travelling again by sledge, and then, when the snows turned to mud, by horse and cart through the Ukraine to Kishinev, reaching Bucharest on 12 March. Two days later, Tolstoy was received by Prince Gorchakov himself, who treated the young Count as one of the family. ‘He embraced me, made me promise to dine with him every day, and wants to put me on his staff,’ Tolstoy wrote to his aunt Toinette on 17 March.

  Leo Tolstoy in 1854

  Aristocratic connections went a long way in the Russian army staff. Tolstoy was quickly caught up in the social whirl of Bucharest, attending dinners at the Prince’s house, games of cards and musical soirées in drawing rooms, evenings at the Italian opera and French theatre – a world apart from the bloody battlefields of the Danubian front just a few miles away. ‘While you are imagining me exposed to all the dangers of war, I have not yet smelt Turkish powder, but am very quietly at Bucharest, strolling about, making music, and eating ice-creams,’ he wrote to his aunt at the start of May. 2

  Tolstoy arrived in Bucharest in time for the start of the spring offensive on the Danube. The Tsar was determined to push south to Varna and the Black Sea co
ast as soon as possible, before the Western powers had time to land their troops and stop the Russian advance towards Constantinople. The key to this offensive was the capture of the Turkish fortress at Silistria. It would give the Russians a dominant stronghold in the Danube area, allowing them to convert the river into a supply line from the Black Sea into the interior of the Balkans, and giving them a base from which to recruit the Bulgarians to fight against the Turks. This was the plan that Paskevich had persuaded the Tsar to adopt in order not to alienate the Austrians, who might intervene against a Russian offensive through the Serb-dominated areas of the Danube further to the west, where Serbian uprisings in favour of the Russians might spread into Habsburg lands. ‘The English and the French cannot land their troops for at least another fortnight,’ Nicholas wrote to Gorchakov on 26 March, ‘and I suppose that they will land at Varna to rush towards Silistria … . We must take the fortress before they arrive … With Silistria in our hands, there will be time for volunteers to raise more troops from the Bulgarians, but we must not touch the Serbs, in case we alarm the Austrians.’3

  The Tsar was hopeful of mobilizing troops from the Bulgarians and other Slavs. Although he was wary of inflaming Serb passions against the Austrians, he hoped that his offensive would trigger Christian uprisings, leading to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when a victorious Russia would impose a new religious settlement on the Balkans. ‘All the Christian parts of Turkey’, he wrote in the spring of 1854, ‘must necessarily become independent, they must become again what they previously were, principalities, Christian states, and as such rejoin the family of the Christian states of Europe.’ Such was his commitment to this religious cause that he was prepared to exploit revolutions against even Austria, should this be necessitated by the opposition of the Austrians to a Russian settlement of the Eastern Question. ‘It is highly likely that our victories will lead to Slav revolts in Hungary,’ he wrote to the Russian ambassador in Vienna. ‘We shall use them to threaten the heart of the Austrian Empire and force her government to accept our conditions.’ Indeed the Tsar was ready by now to abandon virtually all his legitimist principles in the interests of his holy war. Angered by the anti-Russian stance of the European powers, he talked of stirring up the revolutionary disturbances in Spain to divert French troops from the east, and even thought of forming an alliance with Mazzini’s liberation movement in Lombardy and Venice to undermine the Austrians. But in both cases the Tsar was dissuaded from supporting revolutionary democrats.4

  The start of the spring offensive was hailed by Slavophiles as the dawning of a new religious era in the history of the world, the first step towards the resurrection of the Eastern Christian empire with its capital in Tsargrad, the name they gave to Constantinople. In ‘To Russia’ (1854), the poet Khomiakov greeted the beginning of the offensive with ‘A call to holy war’:

  Arise my motherland!

  For our Brothers! God calls you

  To cross the waves of the fiery Danube …

  In an earlier poem by the same title, written in 1839, Khomiakov had referred to Russia’s mission to bring the true Orthodox religion to the peoples of the world, but had warned Russia against pride. Now, in his poem of 1854, he called on Russia to engage in ‘bloody battles’ and ‘Smite with the sword – the sword of God’.5

  The Russians advanced slowly, fighting against stubborn Turkish resistance at several points on the northern side of the Danube, before coming to a virtual halt. At Ibrail, 20,000 Russian grenadiers, supported by river gunboats and steamers, were unable to defeat the well-defended Turkish fortresses. At Maçin there were 60,000 Russian troops encamped in bivouacs outside the fortress town but unable to take it. Held up by the Turks, the Russians spent their time constructing rafts and pontoon bridges from pine masts in preparation for a surprise crossing of the Danube at Galai, which they completed unopposed at the end of March.6

  Advancing south towards Silistria, the Russians got bogged down in the marshlands of the Danube delta, the place where so many of them had been struck down by cholera and typhus in 1828–9. These were sparsely populated lands without food supplies for the invading troops, who soon succumbed to the effects of hunger and disease. Of 210,000 Russian troops in the principalities, 90,000 were too sick for action by April. Soldiers were fed on rations of dry bread that were so devoid of nutrition that not even rats and dogs would eat them, according to a French officer, who saw these husks abandoned in the fortress town of Giurgevo after the retreat of the Russian forces in the summer of 1854. A German doctor in the tsarist army thought that ‘the bad quality of food habitually served to the Russian troops’ was one of the main reasons why they ‘dropped like flies’ once they were wounded or exposed to illnesses. ‘The Russian soldier has such a small nervous system that he sinks under the loss of a few ounces of blood and frequently dies of wounds such as would be sure to heal if inflicted on persons better constituted.’7

  Soldiers wrote home to their families about the terrible conditions in the ranks, many begging them to send money. Some of these letters were intercepted and sent to Gorchakov by the police, who considered them politically dangerous, and they ended up in the archives. These simple letters give a unique insight into the world of the ordinary Russian troops. Grigory Zubianka, a foot soldier in the 8th Hussars Squadron, wrote to his wife Maria on 24 March:

  We are in Wallachia on the banks of the Danube and face our enemy on the other side … . Every day there is shooting across the river, and every hour and every minute we expect to die, but we pray to God that we may be saved, and every day that passes and we are still alive and healthy, we thank the Lord the Maker of all things for that blessing. But we are made to spend all day and night in hunger and the cold, because they give us nothing to eat and we have to live as best we can by fending for ourselves, so help us God.

  Nikifor Burak, a soldier in the 2nd Battalion of the Tobol’sk Infantry Regiment, wrote to his parents, wife and children in the village of Sidorovka in Kiev Province:

  We are now a very long way from Russia, the land is not like Russia at all, we are almost in Turkey itself, and every hour we expect to die. To tell the truth, nearly all our regiment was destroyed by the Turks, but by the grace of the highest creator I am still alive and well … I hope to return home and see you all again, I will show myself to you and talk with you, but now we are in the gravest danger, and I am afraid to die.8

  As the Russian losses mounted, Paskevich became increasingly opposed to the offensive. Though he had previously advocated the march on Silistria, he was worried by the build-up of Austrian troops on the Serbian frontier. With the British and the French expected to land on the coast at any moment, with the Turks holding their line in the south, and the Austrians mobilizing in the west, the Russians were in serious danger of being surrounded by hostile armies in the principalities. Paskevich urged the Tsar to order a retreat. He delayed the offensive against Silistria, in defiance of the Tsar’s command to push ahead as fast as possible, for fear that an attack by the Austrians should find him without sufficient reserves.

  Paskevich was right to be anxious about the Austrians, who were alarmed by the growing Russian threat to Serbia. They had mobilized their troops on the Serb frontier in readiness to put down any Serb uprisings in favour of the Russians and oppose Russian forces approaching Habsburg-controlled Serb lands from the east. Throughout the spring, the Austrians demanded a Russian withdrawal from the principalities, threatening to join the Western powers if the Tsar did not comply. The British were equally concerned by Russia’s influence on Serbia. According to their consul in Belgrade, the Serbs were being ‘taught to expect Russian troops in Serbia as soon as Silistria had fallen – and to join an expedition against the south-Slavonic provinces of Austria’. On Palmerston’s instructions, the consul warned the Serbs that Britain and France would oppose with military force any armament by Serbia in support of the Russians.9

  Meanwhile, on 22 April, Easter Saturday in the Orthodox calendar, the
Western fleets began their first direct attack on Russian soil by bombarding Odessa, the important Black Sea port. The British had received reports from captured merchant seamen that the Russians had collected 60,000 troops and large stockpiles of munitions at Odessa for transportation to the Danubian front (in fact the port had little military significance and only half a dozen batteries to defend itself against the allied fleets). They sent an ultimatum to the governor of the town, General Osten-Sacken, demanding the surrender of all his ships, and when there was no reply, began their bombardment with a fleet of nine steamers, six rocket boats and a frigate. The shelling continued for eleven hours, causing massive damage to the port, destroying several ships and killing dozens of civilians. It also hit Vorontsov’s neoclassical palace on the cliff top above the port, with one ball hitting the statue of the Duc de Richelieu, the first governor of Odessa, though ironically the building damaged most was the London Hotel on the Primorsky Boulevard.

  During a second bombardment, on 12 May, one of the British ships, a steamer called the Tiger, ran hard aground in dense fog and was heavily shelled from the shore. Her crew was captured by a small platoon of Cossacks commanded by a young ensign called Shchegolov. The British attempted to burn their ship, while Odessa ladies with their parasols watched the action from the embankment, where bits of shipwreck, including boxes of English rum, were later washed ashore. The Cossacks marched off the British crew (24 officers and 201 men) and imprisoned them in the town, where they were subjected to humiliating taunts from Russian sailors and civilians, whose sense of outrage at the timing of the attack over the Easter period had been encouraged by their priests, though the captain of the ship, Henry Wells Giffard, who had been injured by shellfire and died of gangrene on 1 June, was given a full military burial in Odessa and, in an act of chivalry from a bygone age, a lock of his hair was sent to his widow in England. The cannon of the Tiger were displayed in Odessa as war trophies.q