Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  One lieutenant wrote:

  At about 4 am every morning we got up to parade and drill which lasted about two hours, but three or four times a week we had to march seven or eight miles over very rough country and indulge in sham fights, skirmishes and retreats for the gratification of HRH and Sir Colin Campbell. However, after 8 am we had the day to ourselves.21

  The 93rd had already been issued with 250 state-of-the-art Minié rifles, and soon the rest of Campbell’s brigade received them too. The new weapon used an elongated bullet narrow enough to be dropped, rather than rammed, down the barrel. When fired, the bullet expanded into the rifling. At 150 yards it was twice as accurate as the old smoothbore musket, at a stroke transforming every infantry soldier into a rifleman. Its range promised superiority for the infantry over the cavalry at last. Sir Charles Napier, however, had been unimpressed, warning that the Minié would ‘destroy that intrepid spirit which makes the British soldier always dash at his enemy’. The more ossified corps reacted with equal disdain. When asked for someone to familiarise himself with the new rifle at the Hythe school of musketry, the 90th Foot sent a one-armed officer.22

  Within days of the Black Watch’s arrival, Campbell’s brigade sailed for Varna** on the Bulgarian coast, from where Raglan planned to help the Turks at Silistria, currently besieged by the Russians. Having encamped a mile south of the town, the division moved further inland to Aladeen on 1 July. Here the detritus of the old Light Division camp, ‘dried leaves, broken bottles, battered cooking tins, huge half-burnt stakes, fowls’ heads, fragments of London papers, and impromptu musket racks cumber the ground in all directions’.23 Campbell instituted basic hygiene measures, such as designating certain springs for drinking water and others for watering horses and washing, but by late July cholera had broken out among the Guards. The division moved 3 miles away to the little village of Gevreklek, hoping to leave the disease behind, but by 1 August a soldier from the 42nd had died. The next day Campbell issued cholera belts*** but a week later nearly one-sixth of the division was incapacitated by cholera, dysentery, fever and diarrhoea. Having lost fifteen men of the 93rd, Campbell segregated the regiment in a new location, 2 miles away, but by 18 August 300 of his brigade were still afflicted.

  While his Highlanders were sickening, the motive to stay in Bulgaria had already disappeared. The Turks had raised the siege of Silistria by themselves and were busy chasing the Russians back to the Danube. With the tsar humbled and Turkish territory restored, the allies’ war aims had been achieved, but the war had never been about fighting for Turkey, rather against Russia, so the Duke of Newcastle (Secretary of State for War) told Raglan that the cabinet wanted Sebastopol, the Crimean home port of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, destroyed. ‘The broad policy of the war consists in striking at the very heart of the Russian power in the East, and that heart is at Sebastopol’, explained The Times on 24 July 1854. Generals Burgoyne and Tylden, and the Duke of Cambridge warned Raglan that it was too late in the year to start campaigning, especially given the disease crippling the troops, but, as the duke recorded in his diary, ‘public opinion in England is to be satisfied at any hazard, and so the attempt is to be made’.24

  Wracked with illness and short of supplies, Campbell’s Highlanders marched to Varna, ready to sail for the Crimea. ‘We are wild with delight at the prospect of being shot at, instead of dying of cholera!’ wrote one Guards officer, in an echo of the sentiments of Corunna.25 On 29 August Campbell’s brigade embarked. The allies’ ships mustered in Baltchik Bay and on 7 September set sail for Russia, with 61,400 men and 132 guns on board.26 Three days later the fleet anchored off the Crimean coast, a vast crescent of vessels 1½ miles deep, and 9 miles from point to point. ‘There has not been such an expedition from England since that unfortunate one under Lord Chatham’, observed Sterling, ominously.27 The British had set out with a comparable lack of intelligence. ‘Success or failure depends entirely on the force the enemy may have in the country,’ admitted General Burgoyne, ‘of which we have no information whatever’.28 Scarcely any of the officers even had maps. ‘They would have been great service’, confessed Lord Wantage of the Guards. ‘Sir Colin Campbell has got one and shows it as a great favour to his friends.’29

  Only now, after surveying the coast, did Raglan decide on Calamita Bay, a little north of Sebastopol, as the landing ground. Despite minute instructions and the sailors’ best efforts, the landing on 14 September was shambolic. To reduce weight, each soldier was ordered to leave his knapsack behind but instructed to take boots, socks, shirt and forage cap, wrapped in a blanket and greatcoat, along with three days’ rations, sixty rounds of ammunition and a canteen.* Very little else was provided. ‘No army ever took the field, or landed in a hostile country … so unprepared and so imperfectly supplied with medical and surgical equipment’, complained Surgeon Munro of the 93rd.30 Cholera was still rife. Nine men, three sergeants and a corporal of the 93rd had died on the short voyage and the 79th lost four men that first night. Without tents, Campbell’s brigade had to bivouac a few miles inland near Lake Touzla. It was a foul night to be out in the open. ‘My comrade and I’, wrote Private Cameron of the 93rd, ‘got grass and anything we could gather for a bed and laid down, having a stone for a pillow, and then the rain came pouring on us. So we lay on our backs holding up our blankets with our hands so as the rain would run down both sides, and so keep our firelocks and ammunition dry.’31 ‘Our party were, I imagine, the only people who had a tent the first night’,32 confessed Sterling, who had brought his own.

  Next morning the men laid out their topcoats and blankets to dry while the tents were landed. For five days supplies were brought ashore, while the quartermasters negotiated for food and transport with the locals, with limited success. Worried that forage might be scarce, Commissary-General William Filder had ordered that virtually every horse and mule be left behind in Varna. Lacking the pack animals or wagons to carry them, almost all the tents and hospital marquees now had to be returned to the ships. Campbell was allowed one tent for himself, one for his staff, and three for his brigade’s sick and wounded.

  On 19 September the allies began their advance. ‘The ground we traversed was a succession of arid, barren-looking downs, covered knee deep with rank dried weeds and thistles, which made walking always laborious, and sometimes painful’, complained the Morning Herald’s correspondent. ‘The grass quite swarmed with snakes and centipedes, and hundreds of the former were killed.’33 At about 3.30 p.m. they reached the paltry trickle known as the Bulganak River. ‘You should have seen those poor thirsty fellows drinking up that dirty puddle as if it had been nectar,’ recalled one soldier.34 Campbell halted his brigade, and made sure they filled their canteens in rotation to avoid churning the stream to mud. Meanwhile, Raglan sent Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade across the Bulganak to scout the ground ahead. Raglan’s staff officers enjoyed taunting the cavalry,**35 so when Cardigan found 2,000 Russian troopers in his path he was keen to prove his corps. What Cardigan could not see was 6,000 more Russian infantry, artillery, cavalry and Cossacks beyond. Fortunately, Raglan spotted them in time and ordered Cardigan to retire, though not before the Russian artillery had cost him four casualties. One trooper returned with his foot ‘dangling by a piece of skin’.36

  South lay the River Alma, flowing westwards to the sea, transforming the dry plain into a lush valley. The approach from the north was uninteresting; a gentle slope down to the river, dotted with vineyards and orchards, reminiscent of the Iberian Peninsula of Campbell’s teens. In terrible contrast, the south bank was a natural fortress. At the estuary it rose up to cliffs 350ft high, and inland formed a stone eyrie criss-crossed with ridges. It was here that the Russians had lodged their army. As the British halted before the Alma at noon the next day, the magnitude of the task facing them was clear. ‘The greatest novice living could see that it was a fearful thing to undertake’, wrote one lancer.37

  Commanding the Russians was Prince Menschikoff, a man who had fought Na
poleon out of Russia and been castrated by a cannonball for his pains. On hearing of the approach of the allied fleet on 13 September, Menschikoff had positioned 40,000 soldiers on the rugged heights above the Alma, reasoning that he had a better chance of defeating enemy troops here than on the beaches where they enjoyed the protection of their own navies. His men had cleared the undergrowth near the river to deny the allied skirmishers cover, and staked the hillside with white range markers for their artillery. Altogether the Russians fielded ninety-six guns, nearly 4,000 cavalrymen and thirty-six infantry battalions against the allies’ twenty-seven.38

  The road to Sebastopol led south, past the village of Bourliok and over the Alma, wending its way between Kourgane Hill on the left and a second rise on the right, where the Russians were building a telegraph tower ringed by a low parapet armed with field guns. On the northern slope of Kourgane Hill were two Russian earthwork fortifications; to the west, the Great Redoubt, a 300-yard trench with a parapet heaped up on both sides and armed with twelve heavy guns, commanding the ground down to the river and the Sebastopol Road; and to the east, the Lesser Redoubt, sporting eight guns, protecting the Russian right flank and the flank of its greater brother.39 Menschikoff was confident of his position. If the allies advanced head-on or towards his eastward flank they would be attacking uphill against well-entrenched artillery and superior cavalry, and to the west he had the barrier of the cliffs to shield him.

  Raglan and French commander Marshal Saint-Arnaud agreed that General Bosquet would head towards the estuary to turn the Russian left flank, while more French divisions under General Canrobert and Prince Napoleon would assault Telegraph Hill. The British Light Division, supported by Bentinck’s Guards and Campbell’s Highlanders, would, as one captain put it, take ‘the bull by the horns, Lord Gough fashion, and march straight up to the batteries’ on Kourgane Hill.40 Behind them would be the 4th Division as a reserve. To the left and somewhat back, the Earl of Lucan’s cavalry would wait, protecting the British flank, ready to exploit any Russian weakness. To the right, the 2nd Division would head for Bourliok, supported by the 3rd Division.

  Immediately the Light Division had started forward around 1 p.m., Campbell noticed it was marching at a slight angle, every step drawing it closer to the 2nd Division on its right. The 2nd Division was in turn being crushed on its right by the French. The two British divisions began to overlap, bringing the end of the 2nd Division into the line of fire of the right-hand battery of the Light Division. Raglan sent an order to its commander, Sir George Brown, to move to his left. Nothing happened. Raglan rode down to give the order in person, but Brown could not be found and, anxious not to offend the notoriously touchy general by leaving the order with his subordinate, Raglan instead instructed the Duke of Cambridge to deploy his two brigades on a wider front. This left no room for the 3rd Division under Sir Richard England on the duke’s right, so Raglan ordered England to re-form behind the 1st Division.

  As the British neared the river, the Russian artillery opened a blistering onslaught. ‘Their guns were of large calibre’, explained Campbell, ‘and quite overpowered the fire of our 9 pounders.’41 Raglan ordered the men of the leading divisions to lie down. Carrying away the wounded was a tempting excuse to escape the Russian fire, but Campbell had warned his men that ‘Whoever is wounded must lie where he is until a bandsman comes to attend to him; I don’t care what rank he is. No soldiers must go carrying off wounded men. If any soldier does such a thing, his name shall be stuck up in his parish church.’42

  The British were waiting upon the French to their right. By 2 p.m. Bosquet had taken the village of Almatamack unopposed and crossed the river. Soon French artillery was rattling along the road leading up to the plateau beyond, while Zouaves* swarmed up the heights. As General Kiriakoff deployed two Russian battalions plus artillery on the eastern slopes of Telegraph Hill to repel the French, Menschikoff rode over with seven more infantry battalions, four squadrons of Hussars and four gun batteries. The Russian artillery was surprised to find its fire returned by French guns which had already reached the plateau. Shaken, Menschikoff pulled his men back while Bosquet halted awaiting reinforcements.

  Canrobert’s and Prince Napoleon’s divisions had been advancing in a line between the village of Bourliok to the east and Almatamack to the west. Once across the river, Canrobert pressed on south towards Telegraph Hill but, in the face of the Russian guns, Prince Napoleon’s division halted. Canrobert now stopped too, waiting for his artillery to catch up and give him covering fire. Saint-Arnaud sent two further brigades in support but both halted below Telegraph Hill with their colleagues. Now both allied armies were pinned down in the lee of each hill, with the Russian gunners above steadily knocking them down like nine pins. The only general who had gained any commanding ground was Bosquet, and his hold on it was tenuous. Desperate to maintain momentum, Raglan ordered his divisions to stand and march.

  Ahead of Campbell were the two brigades of Brown’s Light Division, under Generals Buller and Codrington. Having made it across the Alma, Buller had halted to protect the British flank. Codrington’s men had reached the far bank in a disorganised mob but their commander decided straightaway to press on up the hill towards the Great Redoubt. ‘All being so eager to get at the Russians, we never waited to form line properly, but up the embankment we went in great disorder’, recollected one sergeant.43 ‘By God! Those regiments are not moving like English soldiers’, declared Campbell.44 ‘Instantly grape and canister poured through and through them, sweeping down whole sections at a time’, recalled one artillery officer.45 Two blocks of Russian infantry stood either side of the Great Redoubt to funnel the Light Division in front of the guns. As Codrington’s men closed in, Russian general Prince Gorchakoff ordered these men to advance. Mild fire from the British sent the enemy column to the east into retreat, while the other column, encountering heavy resistance from the 7th Royal Fusiliers under Colonel Lacy Yea, stopped and threw out skirmishers.

  As Codrington neared the Great Redoubt the enemy guns fell silent. Through the smoke, the Russians could be glimpsed removing their artillery. The British swarmed up fast enough to capture two guns before the enemy could extricate them, but the rest escaped. Codrington desperately needed reinforcements to secure the entrenchment, but Cambridge’s 1st Division was still the wrong side of the river, halted in front of the vineyards which lined the riverbank. Unused to battle, the duke was scared of making a mistake. Raglan’s quartermaster-general, Airey, rode over and told Bentinck, brigade commander of the Guards, to advance. ‘Must we always keep within three hundred yards of the Light Division?’ he replied, dryly. At this point Airey caught sight of the duke and insisted he press ahead.46 His Royal Highness led his men forward a little way, but then halted again. This time General de Lacy Evans, whose 2nd Division was skirting round Bourliok, sent a rider begging Cambridge to advance, and he complied.

  As the Highlanders marched ahead, ‘the vineyards and garden enclosures in the narrow valley through which the river runs, completely broke the formation of our troops’, complained Campbell.47 ‘It was impossible to keep our formation,’ confirmed Colour-Sergeant Cameron of the 79th, ‘stooping down and picking a bunch of luscious grapes, cramming them in your mouth regardless of stems and earth, for we were both dry and hungry, our three days’ rations having been exhausted that morning.’48 ‘I, for my part will always remember the round cannonballs, which came towards us with long hops and skips’, wrote Lord Wantage, ‘raising the dust and stones in showers wherever they touched but for the most part whizzing over our heads with a most disagreeable sound … A good many of our men never reached the Alma, but lay writhing amidst the vines and the brambles.’49

  Fortunately, most of them did make it to the stream. ‘A thin hedge before us, we got through a slap two abreast and into the river which came up about my henches’, recalled Private Cameron. ‘Got some water to my mouth with my hand, the day being warm … After crossing we sheltered beside a little k
noll until the rest had got through.’50

  Momentarily cured of his indecision, the Duke of Cambridge urged Campbell to press on up towards the redoubts, but given the ragged efforts of the Light Division, Campbell was determined that his troops would join battle with parade ground perfection. Protected by the high south bank of the Alma, he ordered the ranks dress while the Black Watch’s pipers calmly played Blue Bonnets O’er the Border. Ahead, the ground rose up to a ridge before dipping slightly, approximately in line with the Great Redoubt, to climb again to the peak of Kourgane Hill. In the way lay two of Buller’s battalions: the 77th and the 88th. Campbell demanded that they join the advance. Buller had already ordered his brigade forward but the flat refusal of Colonel Egerton of the 77th sowed enough doubt in Buller’s mind to convince him to stay put. ‘You are madmen and will all be killed’, warned one soldier of the 77th, as Campbell’s brigade filed past.51

  Meanwhile, up at the Great Redoubt, 3,000 men of the Vladimirsky Regiment were bearing down on Codrington’s left flank. Mistaken for the French, they advanced in safety right up to the Light Division before recognition dawned. Codrington had to abandon his hard-won position, picking his way through the bodies littering the slopes, back towards the Alma. The only British troops left near the Great Redoubt were Yea’s Royal Fusiliers.

  The 1st Division was to advance as one, Bentinck’s Guards storming the Great Redoubt while Campbell’s Highlanders moved in on its flank, but Bentinck’s blood was up. ‘Forward, Fusiliers, what are you waiting for!’ he declared, and without waiting for the rest of the division, led the Scots Fusilier Guards up the hill.52 Only seven of the battalion’s eight companies were ready to move. Some hadn’t even had time to fix bayonets. ‘They got mixed with the beaten regiments of the Light Division, which retreated through them, and put them into confusion’, explained Sterling.53 By the time Sir Charles Hamilton, the Scots Fusiliers’ lieutenant-colonel, reached the redoubt, he had just five and a half companies left and found his battalion’s fire convincingly returned by the Russians. According to Kinglake, ‘with pistol in hand, for some of the Russian soldiery were coming close down, Drummond, the Adjutant of the battalion, rode up and gave the order to retire’.54 Sensing an opportunity, the Russians vaulted the walls of the redoubt and drove down upon the British in a bayonet charge.* The colour party made a gallant stand, resulting in VCs for three officers and one of the men, but the Russians had knocked the heart out of the Scots Fusiliers’ offensive, and gouged a glaring hole in the 1st Division’s line.