The Crimean War
Page 44
The Zouaves did not stop in the Mamelon but continued to rush on towards the Malakhov – a spontaneous action by soldiers caught up in the fury of the fight – only to be mowed down in their hundreds by the Russian guns. Lieutenant Colonel St George of the Royal Artillery, who watched the dreadful scene, described it in a letter on 9 June:
Then such a fire opened from the Malakhov tower as never was seen before I am sure: sheets of flame, with their explosion, followed each other in the rapidest succession. The Russians worked the guns wonderfully well (and it is my trade, I am a judge) and fired like fiends upon the multitudes of poor little Zouaves, whose pluck had carried them to the edge of a ditch they had no means of crossing, & who stood in hesitation till they were knocked over. It was too much for them, and they wavered and retreated into the Mamelon; and even this became too hot for them, and they had to retire into their trenches again. Reinforcements came in strength. Again they dashed into the Mamelon, whose guns they had already spiked, and killed its defenders, and again, foolishly I think, went through to try the Malakhov. They failed a second time and had to retire, but this time no farther than the Mamelon, which they are holding still, having won it with admirable courage, and left between 2 and 3 thousand killed and wounded on the field.55
Meanwhile the British attacked the Quarries. The Russians had left only a small force in the Quarry Pits, relying on their ability to retake them with reinforcements from the Redan should they be stormed. The British took the Quarries easily but soon found that they had not enough men to hold them, as wave after wave of Russians attacked them from the Redan. For several hours, the two sides were engaged in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, as one side expelled the other from the rifle pits, only to be forced back yet again by reinforcements from the other side. By five o’clock in the morning, when the last Russian attack was finally repulsed, there were heaps of dead and wounded on the ground.
At midday on 9 June a white flag was raised from the Malakhov, and another appeared on the Mamelon, now in the hands of the French, signalling a truce to collect the bodies from the battlefield. The French had made enormous sacrifices to capture the crucial Mamelon and White Works, losing almost 7,500 dead and wounded men. Herbé went out into no man’s land with General Failly to agree the arrangements with the Russian General Polussky. After the exchange of a few formalities, ‘the conversation took a friendly turn – Paris, St Petersburg, the hardships of the previous winter’, Herbé noted in a letter to his family that evening, and while the dead were cleared away, ‘cigars were exchanged’ between the officers. ‘One might have thought we were friends meeting for a smoke in the middle of a hunt,’ Herbé wrote. After a while some officers appeared with a magnum of champagne, and General Failly, who had ordered them to fetch it, proposed a ‘toast to peace’ that was heartily accepted by the Russian officers. Six hours later, when several thousand bodies had been cleared away, it was time to end the truce. After each side had been given time to check that none of their own men had been left in no man’s land, the white flags were taken down and, as Polussky had suggested, a blank shot was fired from the Malakhov to signal the resumption of hostilities.56
With the capture of the Mamelon and the Quarry Pits, everything was ready for an assault on the Malakhov and the Redan. The date set for the attack was 18 June – the 40th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. It was hoped that an allied victory would heal the old divisions between the British and the French and give them something new to celebrate together on that day.
Victory was bound to cost a lot of lives. To storm the Russian forts, the attackers would have to carry ladders and run uphill across several hundred metres of open ground, traversing ditches and abbatisba under heavy fire from the Russian guns on the Malakhov and the Redan, as well as flanking fire from the Flagstaff Bastion. When they reached the forts, they would have to use their ladders to get into the ditch and climb the walls, under point-blank fire from the enemy above, before overcoming the defenders on the parapets and fighting off the Russians, amassed behind more barricades inside the forts, until reinforcements could arrive.
It was agreed by the allies that the French would attack the Malakhov first, and then, as soon as they had silenced the Russian guns, the British infantry would begin their storming of the Redan. On Pélissier’s insistence, the assault would be limited to the Malakhov and the Redan rather than a broad attack against the town. The assault on the Redan was probably superfluous because the Russians were almost certain to abandon it once the French were able to bring their artillery to bear against it from the Malakhov. But Raglan thought that it was essential for the British to storm something, even at the cost of unnecessary losses, if this battle was to achieve its symbolic aim as a joint operation on the anniversary of Waterloo. The French had been consistently critical of Britain’s failure to match their own troop commitments in the Crimea.
Heavy casualties were expected. The French were told that half the stormers would be killed before even reaching the Malakhov. Those in the first line of attack had to be offered money or promotion before they could be persuaded to take part. In the British camp, the stormers were known as the Forlorn Hope, derived from the Dutch, Verloren hoop, which actually meant ‘lost troops’, but the English mistranslation was appropriate.57
The night before the assault on the Malakhov, the French soldiers settled down in their bivouacs, each man trying to prepare himself for the events of the next day. Some tried to get some sleep, others cleaned their guns, or talked among themselves, and still others found a quiet place to say a prayer. There was a general sense of foreboding. Many soldiers wrote their name and home address on a ticket which they hung around their neck so that anyone who found them if they died would be able to inform their family. Others wrote a farewell letter to their loved ones, giving it to the army chaplain to send off in case they died. André Damas had a large postbag. The chaplain was impressed by the calmness of the men in these final moments before battle. Few, it seemed to him, were animated by a hatred of the enemy or by the desire for revenge stirred up by the rivalry between nations. One soldier wrote:
I am calm and confident – I am surprised at myself. In face of such a danger, it is only you, my brother, I dare tell this. It would be arrogant to confess it to anybody else. I have eaten to gain strength. I have drunk only water. I do not like the over-excitements of alcohol in battle: they do no good.
Another wrote:
As I write these lines to you, the call to battle can be heard. The great day has arrived. In two hours we begin our assault. I am wearing with devotion the medal of the Blessed Virgin and the scapular I was given by the nuns. I feel calm, and tell myself that God shall protect me.
A captain wrote:
I shake you by the hand, my brother, and want you to know that I love you. Now, my God, have pity on me. I commend myself to you with sincerity – let Your will be done! Long Live France! Today our eagle must soar above Sevastopol!58
Not all the allied preparations went to plan. During the evening there were desertions from the French and British camps – not only by soldiers but by officers who had no stomach for the imminent assault and crossed over to the enemy. The Russians were warned of the assault by a French corporal who had deserted from the General Staff and carried to the Russians a detailed plan of the French attack. ‘The Russians knew, in precise detail, the position and strength of all our battalions,’ wrote Herbé, who was later told this by a senior Russian officer. They had also received warnings from British deserters, including one from the 28th (North Gloucestershire) Regiment. But even without these warnings, the Russians were alerted by the noisy preparations of the British on the evening of the 17th. Lieutenant Colonel James Alexander of the 14th Regiment recalled that ‘the men, being excited, did not go to sleep but remained up till we were directed to fall in at midnight. Our camp looked like a fair, lighted up, with a buzz of voices everywhere. The Russians must have remarked on this.’59
They certainly did.
Prokofii Podpalov, an orderly to General Golev in the Redan, recalled noticing the steady build-up of activity in the Quarries in the evening – the ‘sound of voices, of footsteps in the trenches, and the rumbling of the wheels of the gun carriages being moved towards us’, which ‘made it obvious that the allies were preparing to give the signal for an assault’. At that moment the Russians had been withdrawing their forces from the Redan. Men were going back into town for the night. But noticing these signs of an imminent attack, Golev ordered all his troops to return to the Redan, where they mounted the cannon and took up their positions on the parapets. Podpalov recalled the ‘extraordinary silence’ of the men as they waited for the assault to begin. ‘That grave-like silence contained within it something sinister: everybody felt that something terrible was approaching, something powerful and threatening, with which we would fight for life and death.’60
The French attack had been scheduled to begin well before first light, at three o’clock, with three hours of bombardment, followed by the storming of the Malakhov at 6 a.m., an hour after sunrise. During the evening of the 17th, however, Pélissier made a sudden change of plan. He had decided that in those first minutes of daylight the Russians could not fail to see the French preparing to attack, and they would bring up infantry reserves to defend the Malakhov. Late that evening he issued a new order for the stormers to attack the Malakhov directly at 3 a.m., when the rocket signal to begin would be fired from the Victoria Redoubt, behind the French lines near the Mamelon. This was not the only sudden change that evening. In a fit of temper, and seeking to claim the expected success, Pélissier also removed General Bosquet, who had questioned his decision to begin the assault without a bombardment. Bosquet had a detailed knowledge of the Russian positions, and he had the confidence of the soldiers; he was replaced by a general who had neither. The French troops were unsettled by the sudden changes – none more so than General Mayran, the man chosen to lead the assault with the 97th Regiment, who was personally insulted by the fiery Pélissier in another argument, prompting Mayran to storm off to his post saying, ‘Il n’y a plus qu’à se faire tuer’ (‘There’s nothing left to do but get killed’).61
It was Mayran, in his eagerness, who made a fatal blunder, when he mistook a shell trailing light from its fuse as the rocket signal to attack, and ordered the 97th to begin the assault fifteen minutes too early, when the rest of the French troops were not ready. According to Herbé, who was with the 95th Regiment in the second column just behind Mayran, the general had been provoked by an incident shortly after two o’clock in the morning, when two Russian officers had crept up to the French trenches and called out in the dark,
‘Allons, Messieurs les Français, quand il vous plaira, nous vous attendons’ [‘Come on, gentlemen of France, when you are ready, we shall be waiting’]. We were stupefied. It was obvious that the enemy knew all our plans, and that we would find a well-prepared defence. General Mayran was inflamed by this audacious provocation, and formed his men in columns, ready to attack the Malakhov as soon as the signal was given … All eyes were fixed on the Victoria Redoubt. Suddenly, at about a quarter to three, a trailing light followed by a streak of smoke was seen to cross the sky. ‘It’s the signal,’ cried several officers who were grouped around Mayran. A second trail of light appeared soon afterwards. ‘There is no doubt,’ the general said, ‘it is the signal: besides, it is better to be too early than too late: Forward the 97th!’
The 97th rushed forward – only to be met by a deadly barrage of artillery and musket fire by the Russians, who were well armed and ready on every parapet. ‘Suddenly the enemy was coming towards us in a huge wave,’ recalled Podpalov, who watched the scene from the Redan.
Soon, in the dim light, we could just make out that the enemy was carrying ladders, ropes, spades, boards, etc. – it looked like an army of ants on the move. They came closer and closer. Suddenly, right across the line, our bugles sounded, followed by the booming of our cannon and the firing of our guns; the earth shook, there was a thunderous echo, and it was so dark from the gunsmoke that nothing could be seen. When it cleared, we could see that the ground in front of us was covered with the bodies of the fallen French.
Mayran was among those who were hit in the first wave. Helped to his feet by Herbé, he was badly wounded in the arm, but refused to retreat. ‘Forward the 95th!’ he called back to the second line. The reinforcements moved forward, but they too were shot down in huge numbers by the Russians guns. This was not a battle but a massacre. Following their instincts, the attackers lay down on the ground, ignoring Mayran’s orders to advance, and engaged the Russians in a gun battle. After twenty minutes, by which time the battlefield was littered with their dead, the French troops saw a rocket in the sky: it was the real signal to attack.62
Pélissier had ordered the rocket to be fired in a desperate attempt to coordinate the French assault. But if Mayran had advanced too early, his other generals were not ready: expecting a later start, they had not managed to prepare in time. The troops from the reserve lines were rushed forward to join in the attack, but the sudden order to advance unsettled them, and many of the men ‘refused to leave the trenches, even when their officers threatened them with the harshest punishments’, according to Lieutenant Colonel Dessaint, the head of the army’s political department, who concluded that the soldiers ‘had an intuition of the disaster that awaited them’.63
Watching from the Vorontsov Ridge, Raglan could see that the disjointed French assault was a bloody fiasco. One French column, to the left of the Malakhov, had broken through, but its supports were being devastated by the Russian guns on the Malakhov and the Redan. Raglan might have helped the French by bombarding the Redan, as agreed in the original allied plan, before launching an assault; but he felt bound by a sense of duty and honour to support the French by storming the Redan immediately, without a preliminary bombardment, even though he must have known, if only from the events of the previous hour, that such a policy was bound to end in disaster and the needless sacrifice of many men. ‘I always guarded myself from being tied down to attack at the same moment as the French, and I felt that I ought to have some hope of their success before I committed our troops,’ Raglan wrote to Panmure on 19 June, ‘but when I saw how stoutly they were opposed, I considered it was my duty to assist them by attacking myself … Of this I am quite certain, that, if the troops had remained in our trenches, the French would have attributed their non-success to our refusal to participate in the operation.’64
The British assault began at 5.30 a.m. The attacking troops ran forward from the Quarries and the trenches on either side, followed by the supporting parties carrying ladders to scale the walls of the Redan. It soon became apparent that it was a hopeless task. ‘The troops no sooner began to show themselves beyond the parapet of the trenches, than they were assailed by the most murderous fire of grape that ever was witnessed,’ reported Sir George Brown, who had been given the command of the assault. The first Russian volley took out one-third of the attackers. From the trenches on the left, Codrington observed the devastating effect of the barrage on the troops attempting to run across 200 metres of open ground towards the Redan:
The moment they showed themselves, fire of grape was opened upon them – it ploughed the ground – it knocked over many, the dust blinded them, and I saw many swerve away to the trenches on their left. The officers told me afterwards they were blinded by the dust thrown up by the grape; and one told me he was quite blown – out of breath – before he got halfway.65
Overwhelmed by the torrent of grape-shot, the troops began to waver; some lost their nerve and ran away, despite the efforts of their officers to regroup the men by shouting threats. Eventually, the first line of attackers and the leading ladder-men reached the abbatis, about 30 metres from the ditch of the Redan. While they struggled to squeeze through the gaps of the abbatis, the Russians ‘mounted the parapets of the Redan and delivered volley after volley into us’, recalled Timothy Gowing:
The storming party dwindled to the last hundred men, who started to retreat, in defiance of their officers, whose threats to shoot them were ignored. According to one officer, who had urged a group of men to continue the attack, ‘they became impressed with the conviction that another step forward and they would be blown into the air; they would fight any number of men, they said, but they would not step forward to be blown up’.66 It had been widely rumoured that the Redan was mined.
Meanwhile, 2,000 men from the 3rd Division under the command of Major-General Eyre on the left flank broke through into the suburbs of Sevastopol itself. They had been instructed to occupy some Russian rifle pits and, if the attack on the Redan allowed it, to advance further down the Picquet House Ravine. But Eyre had exceeded his orders and had pushed on his brigade, defeating the Russians in the Cemetery, before coming under heavy fire in Sevastopol’s streets. They found themselves in a ‘cul-de-sac’, recalled Captain Scott of the 9th Regiment: ‘we could neither advance nor retire, and had to hold our ground from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m., 17 hours under a tremendous fire of shot, shell, grape, canister, and hundreds of their sharpshooters, our only cover being the houses which crumbled about us at every discharge.’ According to Lieutenant Colonel Alexander of the 14th Regiment, the storming of the city became something of an escapade, as some of the Irish soldiers ‘rushed on into part of Sevastopol, got among houses with women in them, pictures, mahogany, furniture and pianos; they got also among strong wine … Some of the Irish boys dressed themselves up as women and so fought; some of them brought back looking glasses, tables and a gooseberry bush with the berries on it!’ But for the rest of the troops, sheltering in bombed-out and crumbling buildings from the enemy’s fire, the day passed with no such amusements. It was only under cover of darkness that they were able to retreat, carrying hundreds of wounded men with them.67