The Crimean War

by Figes, Orlando

  The allied commanders had no idea of this weakness and disorder on the Russian side. Raglan had wanted to press on as fast as possible to Sevastopol, as the allies had agreed in their war plans, but now the French were not ready, having left their kitbags on the other side of the Alma before they had scaled the heights, and needed time to collect them. Unlike the British, they did not have sufficient cavalry to give chase to the Russians, so were less inclined to rush ahead. Once the initiative was lost, the allied commanders began to hesitate about what they should do next. Tatar spies had misinformed them that the Star Fort was impregnable, that Menshikov intended to defend it with all his might, and that the city was almost undefended on its southern side. This encouraged the allied commanders to abandon their initial plan to attack the city quickly from the north, and instead march right round the city to the southern side, a plan of action strongly urged by Sir John Burgoyne, the chief engineering officer.ab

  The change of plan was also driven by the Russians’ bold decision to blow up their own fleet. Recognizing that they could not match the allied ships in speed or gunpower, the commanders of the Black Sea Fleet sank five sailing ships and two frigates in the mouth of the harbour to block the entrance and so prevent allied ships from supporting an attack from the north. The designated vessels were towed into place, their flags were taken down, and there were religious services to commit them to the sea. Then, at midnight on 22 September, the ships were destroyed. One frigate, The Three Saints, would not go down. The next morning it was shelled at close range by a gunboat for two hours until it sank. The noise was heard by the allied armies, which at that time were on the Kacha, prompting Saint-Arnaud to pronounce in amazement, once it was discovered what the noise was from, ‘What a parody of Moscow 1812.’35

  With the harbour blocked and no possibility of back-up from their ships, the allied commanders decided that it was too dangerous to attack Sevastopol from the north, so they now committed themselves to attack the city from the southern side, where their ships could use the harbours of Balaklava (for the British) and Kamiesh (for the French) to support their armies. The change of plan was a fatal error of judgement – and not just because the city’s defences were in fact stronger on the southern side. Moving south of Sevastopol made it harder for the allied armies to block the Russian supply route from the mainland, which had been a crucial element of the strategic plan. If the city had been taken quickly, this would not have been a major problem; but once the allied commanders had ruled out a coup de main, they fell into the trap of conventional military thinking about how to besiege a town, ideas going back to the seventeenth century that involved the slow and methodical process of digging trenches towards the town’s defences so that it could be bombarded by artillery before an assault by troops. The French favoured the idea of a longer siege, and they brought the British round to their traditional way of thinking. It seemed less risky than a quick storming. Burgoyne, the chief engineer, who had been in favour of a quick attack, changed his mind on the absurd grounds that it would cost 500 lives to seize Sevastopol in a lightning strike, losses that were ‘utterly unjustifiable’ in his opinion, even though the allies had already suffered 3,600 casualties at the Alma (and were to lose tens of thousands in the siege).36

  On 23 September the march south recommenced. For two days the allied troops proceeded across the fertile valley of the Kacha and Belbek rivers, helping themselves to the grapes, peaches, pears and soft fruits ripening in the deserted farms. Exhausted and battle-weary, many soldiers collapsed from dehydration, and all along the way the columns had to stop to bury victims of the cholera. Then the armies began their flanking march around Sevastopol, winding their way through the thick oak forests of the Inkerman Heights until they reached the clearing at Mackenzie’s Farm, named after an eighteenth-century Scottish settler. At this point the advance party of British cavalry crossed paths with Menshikov’s rearguard troops heading north-east towards Bakhchiserai. Captain Louis Nolan of the 15th King’s Hussars, who was in the vanguard with Lord Raglan’s staff, felt this was an opportunity for the cavalry to deal a heavy blow to the Russians. Since the landing in the Crimea, Nolan had become increasingly frustrated with the failure of the British commanders to unleash the cavalry – first at the Bulganak and then at the Alma – against the Russian forces in retreat. So when an attack on the Russian tail- and rearguard by the Hussars was halted by Lord Lucan, Nolan was beside himself with rage. In his campaign journal, he described looking down from the Mackenzie Heights as the Russians got away:

  The guns which had escaped were tearing along the road below with some of the few carriages of the convoy which had managed to escape. Disbanded infantry were running down the sides of the steep descent without arms, without helmets, whilst a few shots from our guns hastened them along towards a Russian Army formed in dense columns below. Two regiments of our cavalry moved along the road down the valley for some distance picking up carts and horses of which we captured 22 in all, amongst them General Gorchakov’s travelling carriage with two fine black horses.37

  The allied columns became increasingly stretched out, as the exhausted stragglers fell behind or lost their way in the dense forests. Discipline broke down and many of the troops, like the Cossacks before them, began to pillage from abandoned farms and estates in the vicinity of Sevastopol. The Bibikovs’ palace was vandalized and looted by French troops, who helped themselves to the champagne and burgundy from their extensive cellars and went on a rampage, throwing furniture out of the windows, smashing windows and defecating on the floors. Marshal Saint-Arnaud, who was on the scene, did nothing to prevent the pillaging, which he saw as a reward for his exhausted troops. He even accepted a small pedestal table as a gift from his troops, which he had sent to his wife in Constantinople. Some of the Zouaves (who had a tradition of theatricals) got dressed up in women’s clothes from the Princess’s boudoir and put on a pantomime. Others found a grand piano and began playing waltzes for the troops to dance. The owners of the palace had left it only a few hours before the arrival of the French troops, as one of their officers recalled:

  I went into a small boudoir … . Fresh cut flowers were still in vases on the mantelpiece; on a round table there were some copies of [the French magazine] Illustration, a writing box, some pens and paper, and an uncompleted letter. The letter was written by a young girl to her fiancé who had fought at the Alma; she spoke to him of victory, success, with that confidence that was in every heart, especially in the hearts of young girls. Cruel reality had stopped all that – letters, illusions, hopes.38

  As the allied armies marched south towards Sevastopol, panic spread among the Russian population of the Crimea. News of the defeat at the Alma was a devastating blow to morale, puncturing the myth of Russia’s military invincibility, especially against the French, dating back to 1812. In Simferopol, the administrative capital of the Crimea, there was so much panic that Vladimir Pestel’, its governor-general, ordered the evacuation of the town. The Russians packed their belongings onto carts and rode out of the town towards Perekop, hoping to reach the Russian mainland before it was cut off by the allied troops. Declaring himself to be ill, Pestel’ was the first to leave. Since the panic started he had not appeared in public or taken any measures to prevent disorder. He had even failed to stop the Tatars of the town shipping military supplies from Russian stores to the allies. Accompanied by his gendarmes and a long retinue of officials, Pestel’ rode out of the town through a large crowd of Tatars jeering and shouting at his carriage: ‘See how the giaouracruns! Our deliverers are at hand!’39

  Since the arrival of the allied armies, the Tatar population of the Crimea had grown in confidence. Before the landings, the Tatars had been careful to declare their allegiance to the Tsar. From the start of the fighting on the Danubian front, the Russian authorities in the Crimea had placed the Tatars under increased surveillance, and Cossacks had policed the countryside with ferocious vigilance. But once the allies had landed in the Crimea, t
he Tatars rallied to their side – in particular the younger Tatar men, who were less cowed by years of Russian rule. They saw the invasion as a liberation, and recognized the Turks as soldiers of their caliph, to whom they prayed in their mosques. Thousands of Tatars left their villages and came to Evpatoria to greet the allied armies and declare their allegiance to the new ‘Turkish government’ which they believed had been established there. The invading armies had quickly replaced the Russian governor of Evpatoria with Topal Umer Pasha, a Tatar merchant from the town. They had also brought with them Mussad Giray, a descendant of the ancient ruling dynasty of the Crimean khanate, who called on the Tatars of the Crimea to support the invasion.ad

  Thinking they would be rewarded, the Tatars brought in cattle, horses and carts to put at the disposal of the allied troops. Some worked as spies or scouts for the allies. Others joined the Tatar bands that rode around the countryside threatening the Russian landowners with the burning of their houses and sometimes even death if they did not give up all their livestock, food and horses to them for the ‘Turkish government’. Armed with sabres, the Tatar rebels wore their sheepskin hats inside out to symbolize the overthrow of Russian power in the Crimea. ‘The entire Christian population of the peninsula lives in fear of the Tatar bands,’ reported Innokenty, the Orthodox Archbishop of the Kherson-Tauride diocese. One Russian landowner, who was robbed on his estate, thought the horsemen had been stirred up by their mullahs to wreak revenge against the Christians in the belief that Muslim rule would now return. It was certainly the case that in some areas the rebels carried out atrocities against not just Russians but Armenians and Greeks, destroying churches and even killing priests. The Russian authorities played on these religious fears to rally support behind the Tsar’s armies. Touring the Crimea during September, Innokenty declared the invasion a ‘religious war’ and said that Russia had a ‘great and holy calling to protect the Orthodox faith against the Muslim yoke’.40

  On 26 September the allied armies reached the village of Kadikoi, from which they could see the southern coast. That same day, Saint-Arnaud surrendered to his illness and gave up his command to Canrobert. A steamer took the marshal off to Constantinople but he died of a heart attack on the way, so the same boat took his body back to France. It also brought the false news that the siege of Sevastopol had begun, prompting Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris, to inform London that the allied armies ‘would probably be in possession of the place’ in a few days.41

  In fact, the allies were still three weeks away from the beginning of the siege. With the chill of the Russian winter already in the air, they were slowly setting up their camp on the plateau overlooking Sevastopol from the southern side. For a few days, both the armies were supplied through Balaklava, a narrow inlet hardly noticeable from the sea except for the ruins of the ancient Genoese fort on the cliff top.ae But it very soon became apparent that the harbour was too small for all the sailing ships to enter it. So the French moved their base to Kamiesh Bay, which was in fact superior to Balaklava as a supply base, since it was much bigger and closer to the French camp at Khersonesos – the place where the Grand Prince Vladimir had converted Kievan Rus’ to Christianity.

  On 1 October Captain Herbé walked onto the heights with a small group of French officers to take a closer look at Sevastopol, just 2 kilometres away. With their field glasses, they could ‘see enough of this famous town to satisfy their curiosity’, as Herbé wrote to his parents the next day:

  Down below one could make out the fortification works on which a large quantity of men appeared to be labouring with their picks and spades; you could even make out a few women in amongst the groups of labourers. In the port, I could perfectly distinguish, with the aid of my long-viewer, some men-of-war, of a sombre appearance, with white sails on their sides, black gangways, and guns sticking out from the embrasures. If it should please the Russians to mount all these guns on their fortifications, we can expect a jolly symphony!42

  8

  Sevastopol in the Autumn

  If Herbé could have visited Sevastopol, as Tolstoy was to do in November 1854, he would have found the town in a state of high alert and feverish activity. In the sweeping opening passage of his Sevastopol Sketches Tolstoy takes us there in the early morning, when the city was bursting into life:

  On the North Side, daytime activity is gradually supplanting the tranquillity of night: here, with a clatter of muskets, a detachment of sentries is passing by on its way to relieve the guard; here a private, having clambered from his dugout and washed his bronzed face in icy water, is turning towards the reddening east, rapidly crossing himself and saying his prayers; here a tall, heavy madzhara drawn by camels is creaking its way towards the cemetery, where the bloody corpses with which it is piled almost to the brim will be buried. As you approach the quay you are struck by the distinctive smells of coal, beef, manure and damp; thousands of oddly assorted articles – firewood, sides of meat, gabions, sacks of flour, iron bars and the like – lie piled up near the quayside; soldiers of various regiments, some with kitbags and muskets, others without, are milling around here, smoking, shouting abuse at one another or dragging heavy loads on to the ship that is lying at anchor, smoke coming from its funnel, by the landing stage; civilian skiffs, filled with a most various assortment of people – soldiers, sailors, merchants, women – are constantly mooring and casting off along the waterfront … .

  The quayside contains a noisy jostle of soldiers in grey, sailors in black, and women in all sorts of colours. Peasant women are selling rolls, Russian muzhiks with samovars are shouting, ‘Hot sbitén’,af and right here, lying about on the very first steps of the landing, are rusty cannonballs, shells, grapeshot, and cast-iron cannon of various calibres. A little further off there is a large, open area strewn with enormous squared beams, gun carriages and the forms of sleeping soldiers; there are horses, waggons, green field guns with ammunition boxes, infantry muskets stacked in criss-cross piles; a constant movement persists of soldiers, sailors, officers, merchants, women and children; carts laden with hay, sacks or barrels come and go; and here and there a Cossack or an officer is passing by on horseback, or a general in his droshky. To the right the street is blocked by a barricade, the embrasures of which are mounted with a small cannon; beside them sits a sailor, puffing at his pipe. To the left is a handsome building with Roman numerals carved on its pediment, beneath which soldiers are standing with bloodstained stretchers – everywhere you perceive the unpleasant signs of a military encampment.1

  Sevastopol was a military town. Its entire population of 40,000 people was connected in some way to the life of the naval base, whose garrison numbered about 18,000 men, and from that unity Sevastopol gained its military strength. There were sailors who had lived there with their families since Sevastopol’s foundation in the 1780s. Socially the city had a singularity: frock coats were rarely to be seen among the naval uniforms on its central boulevards. There were no great museums, galleries, concert halls or intellectual treasures in Sevastopol. The imposing neoclassical buildings of the city centre were all military in character: the admiralty, the naval school, the arsenal, the garrisons, the ship-repair workshops, the army stores and warehouses, the military hospital, and the officers’ library, one of the richest in Europe. Even the Assembly of Nobles (the ‘handsome building with Roman numerals’) turned into a hospital during the siege.

  The town was divided into two distinct parts, a North and a South side, separated from each other by the sea harbour, and the only direct means of communication between the two was by boat. The North Side of the town was a world apart from the elegant neoclassical façades around the military harbour on the southern side. It had few built-up streets, and fishermen and sailors lived there in a semi-rural style, growing vegetables and keeping livestock in the gardens of their dachas. On the South Side there was another, less obvious, distinction between the administrative centre on the western side of the military harbour and the naval dockyards on the east
ern side, where the sailors lived in garrisons or with their families in small wooden houses no more than a few yards from the defensive works. Women hung their washing on lines thrown between their houses and the fortress walls and bastions.2

  Like Tolstoy, visitors to Sevastopol were always struck by the ‘strange intermingling of camp and town life, of handsome town and dirty bivouac’. Evgeny Ershov, a young artillery officer who arrived in Sevastopol that autumn, was impressed by the way the people of the city went about their ordinary everyday business amid all the chaos of the siege. ‘It was strange’, he wrote, ‘to see how people carried on with their normal lives – a young woman quietly out walking with her pram, traders buying and selling, children running round and playing in the streets, while all around them was a battlefield and they might be killed at any time.’3

  People lived as if there was no tomorrow in the weeks prior to the invasion. There was non-stop revelry, heavy drinking and gambling, while the city’s many prostitutes worked overtime. The allied landings had a sobering effect, but confidence ran high among the junior officers, who all assumed that the Russian army would defeat the British and the French. They drank toasts to the memory of 1812. ‘The mood among us was one of high excitement,’ recalled Mikhail Botanov, a young sea cadet, ‘and we were not frightened of the enemy. The only one among us who did not share our confidence was the commander of a steamship who, unlike us, had often been abroad and liked to say the proverb, “In anger is not strength.” Events were to show that he was longer-sighted and better informed about the true state of affairs than we were.’4