The Crimean War

by Figes, Orlando

  The defeat of the Russian forces at the Alma created panic among the civilian population of Sevastopol. People were expecting the allies to invade from the north at any time; they were confused when they saw their fleets on the southern side, supposing wrongly that they had been surrounded. ‘I don’t know anyone who at that moment did not say a prayer,’ recalled one inhabitant. ‘We all thought the enemy about to break through.’ Captain Nikolai Lipkin, a battery commander in the Fourth Bastion, wrote to his brother in St Petersburg at the end of September:

  Many inhabitants have already left, but we, the servicemen, are staying here to teach a lesson to our uninvited guests. For three days in a row (24, 25 and 26 September) there were religious processions through the town and all the batteries. It was humbling to see how our fighters, standing by their bivouacs, bowed before the cross and the icons carried by our women-folk … . The churches have been emptied of their treasures; I say it was not needed, but people do not listen to me now, they are all afraid. Any moment now we are expecting a general attack, both by land and sea. So, my brother, that’s how things are here, and what will happen next only the Lord knows.

  Despite Lipkin’s confidence, the Russian commanders were seriously considering abandoning Sevastopol after the battle at the Alma. There were then eight steamers on the northern side waiting for the order to evacuate the troops and ten warships on the southern side to cover their escape. Many of the city’s residents made their own getaway as the enemy approached, though their path was blocked by Russian troops. Water supplies in the city were running dangerously low, the fountains having stopped and the whole population being dependent on the wells, which were always short of water at this time of year. Told by deserters that the city was supplied by water springs and pipes that ran down a ravine from the heights where they were camped, the British and the French had cut off this supply, leaving Sevastopol with just the aqueduct that supplied the naval dockyard.5

  As the allies set up camp and prepared their bombardment of the town, the Russians worked around the clock to strengthen its defences on the southern side. With Menshikov nowhere to be seen, the main responsibility for the defence of Sevastopol passed into the hands of three commanders: Admiral Kornilov, chief of staff of the Black Sea Fleet; Totleben, the engineer; and Nakhimov, the hero of Sinope and commander of the port, who was popular among the sailors and seen as ‘one of them’. All three men were military professionals of a new type that contrasted strongly with the courtier Menshikov. Their energy was remarkable. Kornilov was everywhere, inspiring the people by his daily presence in every sector of the defensive works, and promising rewards to everyone, if they could only keep the town. Tolstoy, who was to join Lipkin as a battery commander in the Fourth Bastion, wrote a letter to his brother the day after he arrived in which he described Kornilov on his rounds. Instead of hailing the men with the customary greeting, ‘Health to you!’, the admiral called to them, ‘If you must die, lads, will you die?’ ‘And’, Tolstoy wrote, ‘the men shouted “We will die, Your Excellency, Hurrah!” And they do not say if for effect, for in every face I saw not jesting but earnestness.’6

  Kornilov himself was far from certain that the city could be saved. On 27 September he wrote to his wife:

  We have only 5,000 reserves and 10,000 sailors, armed with various weaponry, even pikes. Not much of a garrison to defend a fortress whose defences are stretched over many miles and broken up so much that there is no direct communication between them; but what will be, will be. We have resolved to make a stand. It will be a miracle if we hold out; and if not …

  His uncertainty was increased when the sailors discovered a large supply of vodka on the wharf and went on a drunken rampage for three days. It was left to Kornilov to destroy the supplies of liquor and sober up his sailors for battle.7

  The defensive preparations were frenzied and improvised. When the work began, it was discovered that there were no shovels in Sevastopol, so men were sent to procure as many as they could from Odessa. Three weeks later, they returned with 400 spades. Meanwhile, the people of the city worked in the main with wooden shovels they had made from torn-up planks of wood. The whole population of Sevastopol – sailors, soldiers, prisoners of war, working men and women (including prostitutes) – was involved in digging trenches, carting earth to the defences, building walls and barricades, and constructing batteries with earth, fascines and gabions,ag while teams of sailors hauled up the heavy guns they had taken from their ships. Every means of carrying the earth was commandeered, and when there were no baskets, bags or buckets, the diggers carried it in their folded clothes. The expectation of an imminent attack added greater urgency to their work. Inspecting these defences a year later, the allies were amazed by the skill and ingenuity of the Russians.8

  Informed of these heroic efforts by the people of Sevastopol, the Tsar wrote to General Gorchakov at the end of September, reminding him of the ‘special Russian spirit’ that had saved the country from Napoleon, and urging him to summon it again against the British and the French. ‘We shall pray to God, that you may call on them to save Sevastopol, the fleet and the Russian land. Do not bow to anyone,’ he underlined in his own hand. ‘Show the world that we are the same Russians who stood firm in 1812.’ The Tsar also wrote to Menshikov, at that time near the River Belbek, north-east of Sevastopol, with a message for the people of the town:

  Tell our young sailors that all my hopes are invested in them. Tell them not to bow to anyone, to put their faith in God’s mercy, to remember that we are Russians, that we are defending our homeland and our faith, and to submit humbly to the will of God. May God preserve you! My prayers are all for you and for our holy cause.9

  Meanwhile, the allies embarked on their lengthy preparations for the siege. Raglan had wanted an immediate assault. He had seen the weakness of the Russian defences, and was encouraged by the forthright and masterful Sir George Cathcart, in command of the 4th Division, whose troops had taken up positions on a hill from which he could see the whole town. It was from there that he wrote to Raglan:

  If you and Sir John Burgoyne would pay me a visit you can see everything in the way of defences, which is not much. They are working at two or three redoubts, but the place is only enclosed by a thing like a loose park wall not in good repair. I am sure I could walk into it with scarcely the loss of a man at night or an hour before day-break if all the rest of the force was up between the sea and the hill I am upon. We would leave our packs and run into it even in open day only risking a few shots whilst we passed the redoubts.

  Burgoyne, formerly an advocate of a quick assault, now disagreed. Concerned with loss of lives, the army’s chief engineer insisted on the need to subdue the enemy’s fire with siege guns before an assault by troops was launched. The French agreed with him. So the allies settled down to the slow process of landing siege artillery and hauling it up to the heights. There were endless problems with the British guns, many of which had to be dismantled before they could be unloaded from the ships. ‘The placing of our heavy ship guns in position has been most tedious,’ Captain William Cameron of the Grenadier Guards wrote to his father.

  The ship guns have to be taken all to pieces, as the carriages, having only small rollers, as wheels, cannot be moved along by themselves, whereas the regular siege guns can be wheeled into their places as they stand. We have just completed a battery of five 68lb guns of 95 cwt each – all ships guns, which will tell more than any battery ever heard of at a siege before. The ground is dreadfully rocky, so that a great part of the earth for the parapet has to be carried.10

  It was eighteen days before the guns were finally in place, days that gave the Russians crucial time to prepare their defences.

  While the British were hauling up their guns, the French took the lead in digging trenches, moving slowly forward in a zigzag formation towards the defences of Sevastopol, as the Russians fired at them with artillery. The opening of the first trench was the most dangerous because there was little pr
otection from the Russian guns. Armed with shovels and pickaxes, the first shift of 800 men crept forward under cover of the night, using rocks for shelter, until they reached a point within a kilometre of Sevastopol’s Flagstaff Bastion, and on lines marked out by their commanders began digging themselves into the ground, piling up the soil in gabions in front of them to protect themselves from the Russians. On that night, 9/10 October, the sky was clear and the moon was out, but a north-west wind took the sound of digging away from the town, and by dawn, when the sleepy Russians at last discovered them, the French had dug a protected trench 1,000 metres long. Under heavy bombardment, 3,000 French soldiers went on with the works, digging new entrenchments every night and repairing trenches damaged by the Russians the next day, while shells and mortar whistled past their heads. By 16 October the first five French batteries had been built with sacks of earth and wood for palisades, fortified breastworks and parapets, and more than fifty guns (cannon, mortars and howitzers) mounted on raised platforms on the ground.11

  Following the French, the British dug entrenchments and sited their first batteries on Green Hill (the Left Attack) and Vorontsov Hill (the Right Attack), the two positions separated by a deep ravine. Shifts of 500 men on each attack worked day and night while more than twice that number guarded them from the Russians, who launched sorties at night. ‘I am off duty this morning at 4 am after 24 hours in the trenches,’ Captain Radcliffe of the 20th Regiment wrote to his family.

  When we got under the breastwork that had been thrown up in the night we were pretty well under cover, but were obliged to lie down all the time for this of course was the target for the enemy’s artillery day and night and the trench was only half made. However a few men were placed on the look out, their heads a few inches above the work, to give notice when they fired, by watching the smoke from the guns by day and the flash by night and calling out ‘Shot’ – when all in the trenches lie down and get under cover of the breastwork till it has passed, and then resume their work. By attending to this we only lost one man during the day; he was killed by a round shot.12

  On 16 October it was finally decided to begin the bombardment of Sevastopol the following morning, even though the British works were not quite completed. There was a mood of optimistic expectation in the allied camp. ‘All artillery officers – French, English and naval – say [that] after a fire of 48 hours, little will be seen of Sevastopol but a heap of ruins,’ wrote Henry Clifford, a staff officer in the Light Division, to his family. According to Evelyn Wood, a midshipman who had watched the battle of the Alma from the topmast of his ship before being transferred to the land attack with the Naval Brigade,

  On 16 October the betting in our camp was long odds that the fortress would fall in a few hours. Some of the older and more prudent officers estimated that the Russians might hold out for 48 hours, but this was the extreme opinion. A soldier offered me a watch, Paris made, which he had taken off a Russian officer killed at the Alma, for which he asked 20 s[hillings]. My messmates would not allow me to buy it, saying that gold watches would be cheaper in 48 hours.13

  At dawn on 17 October, as soon as the fog had cleared, the Russians saw that the embrasures of the enemy batteries had been opened. Without waiting for the enemy guns to open fire, the Russians began shelling them along the line, and soon afterwards the allied counter-bombardment began with 72 British and 53 French guns. Within a few minutes the gun battle was at its height. The booming of the guns, the roaring and the whistling of the shot, and the deafening explosions of the shell drowned out the calls of the bugles and the drums. Sevastopol was completely lost in a thick black pall of smoke, which hung over the whole darkened battlefield, making it impossible for the allied gunners to hit their target with any military precision. ‘We could only sit and guess and hope we were doing well,’ wrote Calthorpe, who watched the bombardment with Raglan from the Quarries on Vorontsov Hill.14

  For thousands of civilians sheltering in the bombed-out ruins of their homes in Sevastopol, these were the most terrifying moments of their lives. ‘I never saw or heard of anything like it before,’ wrote one resident. ‘For twelve hours the wild howling of the bombs was unbroken, it was impossible to distinguish between them, and the ground shook beneath our feet … . A thick smoke filled the sky and blotted out the sun; it became as dark as night; even the rooms were filled with smoke.’15

  As soon as the bombardment had begun, Kornilov had set off with his flag-lieutenant, Prince V. I. Bariatinsky, to make a tour of the defences. They went first to the Fourth Bastion, the most dangerous place in Sevastopol, which was being shelled by both the British and the French. ‘Inside the No. 4 Bastion,’ recalled Bariatinsky, ‘the scene was frightful and the destruction enormous, whole gun teams having been struck down by shellfire; the wounded and dead were being removed by stretcher-bearers, but they were still lying round in heaps.’ Kornilov went to every gun, encouraging the crews, and then moved on to the Fifth Bastion, under no less pressure from the enemy’s artillery, where he met Nakhimov, dressed as he always was in a frock coat with epaulettes. Nakhimov had been wounded in the face, though he did not seem to notice it, Bariatinsky thought, as blood ran down his neck, staining the white ribbon of his St George Cross, as he talked with Kornilov. While they were conversing there, Bariatinsky recognized an officer approaching, though ‘he had no eyes or face, for his features had completely disappeared underneath a mass of bloody flesh’, the remains of a sailor who had been blown up, which the officer proceeded to wipe from his face, while he asked Bariatinsky for a cigarette. Ignoring the advice of his staff, who said it was too dangerous to go on, Kornilov continued his tour at the Third Bastion, the Redan, which was then being pounded by the heavy British guns with a deadly concentration of power. When Kornilov arrived, the bastion was under the command of Captain Popandul, but he was soon killed, as were the five other commanders who succeeded him that day. Kornilov passed through the trench system, within close range of the British guns, crossed the ravine, and climbed up to the Malakhov Bastion, where he talked to the wounded troops. He was just starting down the hill to complete his tour in the Ushakov Ravine when he was hit by a shell that blew away the lower part of his body. Taken to the military hospital, he died shortly afterwards.16

  Towards midday the allied fleet joined in the bombardment, directing their heavy guns towards Sevastopol from an arc around the entrance to the sea harbour some 800 to 1,500 metres from the coast (the blockade of the harbour by the sunken Russian ships stopped them getting any closer to their target). For six hours the city was shelled by an allied broadside of 1,240 guns; its coastal batteries had just 150 guns. ‘The sight was one of the most awful in the way of guns,’ Henry James, a merchant seamen, wrote in his diary after watching the bombardment from further out to sea. ‘Several of the liners kept up a heavy cannonade and it could be compared to the rolling of a huge drum … We could see showers of shot striking the water at the foot of the forts and flying up in heaps at the walls.’ The firing of the fleets created so much smoke that the Russian gunners could not even see the ships. Some of the gunners lost their nerve, but others showed extraordinary bravery, firing at the gun flashes of the invisible ships while shells crashed around their heads. One artillery officer on the Tenth Bastion, the main focus of the French attack, recalled seeing men who had been rewarded for their courage in previous engagements running off in panic when the firing began. ‘I was caught myself between two feelings,’ he recalled. ‘One half of me wanted to run home to save my family, but my sense of duty told me I should stay. My feelings as a man got the better of the soldier within me and I ran away to find my family.’17

  In fact, for all their guns, the French and British ships received better than they gave. The wooden sailing vessels of the allied fleet were unable to get close enough to the stone forts of the coastal bastions to cause them much damage (the blockade had done its job in this respect) but they could be set alight by the Russian guns, which were not so numerous but (bec
ause they were based on the land) much more accurate than the allies’ long-range cannonade. After firing an estimated 50,000 rounds to little real effect on the coastal batteries, the allied fleet weighed anchor and sailed away to count its losses: five ships badly damaged, thirty sailors killed and more than 500 men wounded. Without steam-powered iron ships, the allied fleet was destined to play only a subsidiary role to the army during the siege of Sevastopol.

  The first day’s outcome on the land was not much more encouraging for the allies. The French made little headway against Mount Rodolph before one of their main magazines was blown up and they ceased fire, and while the British caused considerable damage to the Third Bastion, accounting for most of the 1,100 Russian casualties, they had lacked the heavy mortars to make their superior firepower count. Their much-vaunted new weapon, the 68-pounder Lancaster gun, was unreliable firing shells and was ineffective at long range against Russian earthworks, which absorbed the light projectiles. ‘I fear the Lancaster is a failure,’ reported Captain Lushington to General Airey the next day. ‘Our guns do not go far enough out and we injure our own embrasures more than the enemy … . I have impressed on all the officers the necessity of slow and steady firing … but the distances are too great … and we might as well fire into a pudding as at these earthworks.’18

  The failure of the first day’s bombardment was a rude awakening for the allies. ‘The town appears built of incombustible materials,’ wrote Fanny Duberly, who had come to the Crimea as a war tourist with her husband, Henry Duberly, paymaster of the 8th Hussars. ‘Although it was twice slightly on fire yesterday, the flames were almost immediately extinguished.’19