Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  The duke now feared for the very survival of the Guards, and once again his courage deserted him. In that moment the fate of the battle, of the very campaign itself, hung in the balance. If the British retreated, the massed Russian battalions waiting up the hill would descend on them. One of the staff cried, ‘The brigade of Guards will be destroyed! Ought it not to fall back?’** ‘It is better, sir, that every man of Her Majesty’s Guards should lie dead upon the field than they should now turn their backs upon the enemy!’ thundered Sir Colin, puce-faced.***55 ‘The moment was an awful one’, Cambridge told his wife:

  I had merely time to ask Sir Colin Campbell, a very fine old soldier, what was to be done. He said the only salvation is to go on ahead and he called to me ‘put yourself at the head of the Division and lead them right up to the Battery’.56

  Having put some backbone into his superior, Campbell turned to outflanking the Russians and gaining the higher ground. In case they beat the Guards to the Great Redoubt, he offered a guinea to the first Highlander inside. His last battle on European soil had been at the passage of the Bidassoa in 1813, where the enemy had occupied a similarly entrenched, elevated position on heights across an estuary and where Colonel Greville had used an advance in echelon to great effect. Campbell now ordered his Highlanders forward in the same echelon formation, the 42nd on the right and a little ahead, the 79th on the left and a little behind, with the 93rd in the middle. Sterling was despatched to form the furthest battalion, the 79th, into column so that they might be more easily manoeuvrable in case of a Russian attempt on their flank.57 Campbell rode up front with the 42nd. Leading the Black Watch was Lieutenant-Colonel Duncan Cameron, only son of Campbell’s old 9th Foot commander Sir John Cameron, who had died in 1844.

  ‘Don’t be in a hurry about firing. Your officers will tell you when it is time to open fire’, Campbell had told the men. ‘Be steady. Keep silence. Fire low. Now men, the army will watch us. Make me proud of the Highland Brigade.’58 The Russians, having faced the disorganised Light Division, were unnerved to see this solid kilted line. ‘This was the most extraordinary thing to us, as we had never before seen troops fight in lines of two deep, nor did we think it possible for men to be found with sufficient firmness of morale to be able to attack in this apparently weak formation’, recalled one Polish officer.59 ‘I never saw troops march to battle with greater sang froid and order than those three Highland regiments’, remarked Campbell.60

  The Russians’ diffidence persuaded Campbell to move the 79th from column back into line again. Reasoning that a gaggle of mounted officers would draw more fire than just one, he sent his staff officers back while he rode ahead in splendid isolation. At the crest of the first ridge he could make out two battalions of the Sousdal corps to his left. A further two lay out of sight to Campbell’s extreme right. Across the hollow in front of him and up the slope beyond were four Ouglitz battalions. None of these men had seen battle and all were fresh. On his left was Russian cavalry poised to ride him down. Dead ahead were two battalions of the Kazan regiment, and two of the Vladimir. The two Vladimir battalions had marched through the gap left by the retreating Scots Fusiliers, enduring fire on their left flank from the Grenadier Guards before turning to the right, past the rifles of the Coldstream Guards. Together with the Kazan troops to the right of the redoubt, they now pressed on towards the Highlanders. Altogether that meant twelve battalions facing Campbell’s three (see Plate 12).

  Campbell was the only senior British commander on the field to have seen battle in the last decade. Chillianwala had shown him the obsolescence of the old Peninsular War tactic of holding fire until close to the enemy. He knew that with their new rifles, his Highlanders could decimate the Russians at a distance. By now the 42nd had caught up with their general and followed Campbell as he rode down into the hollow. ‘The men were too much blown to think of charging,’ he recalled, ‘so they opened fire while advancing in line, at which they had been practised, and drove back with cheers and a terrible loss both masses and the fugitives from the redoubt in confusion before them.’* But as the Black Watch marched forward, the Sousdal regiment on Campbell’s left descended into the hollow, threatening the 42nd’s flank. Campbell was about to order five companies to change front to repel them when ‘just at this moment the 93rd showed itself coming over the table of the heights’.61

  ‘Up the hill we went at the double’, wrote Private Cameron, ‘in a line two deep, in good order, but the hill getting steep, we stopped running and went on shoulder to shoulder keeping our places the best we could’.62 ‘The whistling of the balls was something wonderful,’ wrote Captain Ewart of the 93rd, ‘one broke the scabbard of my claymore; and MacGowan, who commanded the company of my right, got a ball through his kilt.’ As they reached the ridge Campbell noticed the 93rd’s disorder, and rode over. ‘“Halt, ninety-third! Halt!” he cried in his loudest tones, and we were all at once stopped in our career’, recalled Ewart. ‘It was perhaps as well that he did so, as the whole Russian cavalry were on the Russian right, and no great distance from us.’63 As musket balls whipped up the turf, Campbell insisted the men re-form properly. It was now that his best horse was killed under him. ‘He was first shot in the hip, the ball passing through the sabretache attached to my saddle, and the second ball went right through his body, passing through his heart’, recalled Campbell. ‘He sank at once, and Shadwell kindly lent me his horse, which I immediately mounted.’64

  Once dressed to his satisfaction, Campbell gave the order for the 93rd to advance somewhat behind and to the left of the 42nd, to shoot into the flank of the Sousdal column, just as they had been planning to do to the 42nd. ‘For the first time we got a close look at the Russians, who were in column’, recalled one officer of the 93rd:

  We at once opened fire, the men firing by files as they advanced. On getting nearer, the front company of the Russian regiment opposite to us, a very large one, brought down their bayonets, and I thought were about to charge us; but on our giving a cheer, they at once faced about and retired.65

  Still the Russians had battalions to spare, and now it was the turn of the 93rd to be attacked. ‘Two bodies of fresh infantry, with some cavalry, came boldly forward against the left flank of the 93rd when … the 79th made its appearance over the hill, and went at these troops with cheers, causing them great loss, and sending them down the hillside in great confusion’,66 reported Campbell. ‘We were pressing the enemy hard and they were yielding inch by inch, although you could not see six yards in front of you, so dense was the smoke,’ recalled a sergeant of the 79th.67 And so, once again, the Russians were taken in the flank as they were attempting to take the British in theirs. The echelon formation had worked superbly. The ‘savages without trousers’, as General Karganoff called them, had trounced the enemy.68 Every column that had engaged Campbell was in retreat.

  His position was still threatened by the Russian cavalry on his left and the four Ouglitz battalions to the south beyond the hollow. This block of infantry now began to bear down on the Highlanders but the Scotsmen’s solid fire sent them packing. ‘I never saw officers and men, one and all, exhibit greater steadiness and gallantry’, wrote Campbell in his despatch.69 ‘We reached the top, and the Russians not caring for cold steel, turned and fled’, wrote Private Cameron.70 The enemy only just managed to remove their guns from the Lesser Redoubt before it was overrun by two companies of the 79th under Major Clephane.

  ‘Our manoeuvre was perfectly decisive’, declared Sterling:

  As we got on the flank of the Russians in the centre battery, into which we looked from the top of the hill, I saw the Guards rush in as the Russians abandoned it … If we had waited ten minutes, or even five minutes more, the Russians would have been on the crest of the hill first, and God knows what would have been the loss of the Highland Brigade.71

  ‘I feel I owe all to the excellent advice of Sir Colin Campbell who behaved admirably’, the Duke of Cambridge told his wife.72 Campbell was jealous of the laure
ls: ‘The Guards during these operations were away to my right, and quite removed from the scene of this fight … It was a fight of the Highland brigade.’73

  The Ouglitz regiment tried to block the retreat of the other Russian battalions and force them to make a stand, but Lucan’s horse artillery discomfited them. ‘We got to the top just in time, and saw a column of infantry and artillery retiring up the ravine in front, about 1,100 yards off. We came into action at once, and plied them with shot and shell for a quarter of an hour and did great execution’, wrote one officer in the troop:

  Captain Maude begged of Lord Lucan and Sir Colin Campbell to be allowed to advance down the hill, but Sir Colin said Lord Raglan’s positive orders were that no one should go beyond the ridge on which we then were … Neither Wellington nor Napoleon would have stopped short at this point.74

  Meanwhile, in the middle of the allied line, de Lacy Evans’s 2nd Division had smashed through the enemy defences along the Sebastopol Road. To the west Canrobert’s guns, sent via Almatamack, crested the plain, let rip and forced the Russians back. Now, with artillery support at last, Canrobert’s infantry climbed the ravine and crossed the plateau towards Telegraph Hill. Aside from one sticky moment when the French mistook some discarded Russian knapsacks for soldiers and charged them, bringing a Russian barrage down on themselves,75 the advance was remorseless. The Zouaves soon had the tricolor planted on Telegraph Hill. Raglan was keen to press home the advantage with a general advance but Saint-Arnaud refused. After a long day in the saddle the French commander was feverish. His troops had left their packs at the river and, in his opinion, were unequipped to exploit the victory.

  Raglan sent for Campbell. ‘When I approached him I observed his eyes to fill and his lips and countenance to quiver, but he could not speak’,76 wrote Campbell. ‘The men cheered very much. I told them I was going to ask the commander-in-chief a great favour – that he would permit me to have the honour of wearing the Highland bonnet during the rest of the campaign.’ Raglan agreed.

  Back home, a public hungry for victory gorged on news of the Alma. It loosed a flood of rousing sheet music and bad poetry. Once again, William McGonagall singled Campbell out for praise:

  Twas on the heights of Alma the battle began,

  But the Russians turned and fled every man;

  Because Sir Colin Campbell’s Highland Brigade put them to flight,

  At the charge of the bayonet, which soon ended the fight.

  Sir Colin Campbell he did loudly cry,

  ‘Let the Highlanders go forward, they will win or die,

  We’ll hae none but Highland bonnets here,*

  So, Forward, my lads, and give one ringing cheer.’

  (continues for fifteen verses)

  Campbell was the hero of the hour. In his account of the battle, Kinglake included a five-page panegyric about him. ‘Scotland, as she boasts no higher name, never yet produced a greater soldier, or a chieftain more beloved’, enthused another writer.77 His new image as a latter-day Robert the Bruce, tartan-clad, amid the skirl of the pipes, was one which Campbell seemed reluctant to contradict. The more the press found fault with the aristocratic generals, the more they held Campbell up as the honest soldier who had worked his way up by the sweat of his brow, despite the evidence to the contrary. ‘The battle [was] decided by the admirable movement of the Highland Brigade, under Sir Colin Campbell,’ reported the Morning Chronicle, ‘to whom everyone assigns the decisive movement which secured complete victory.’78 According to Russell of The Times, Campbell had told his men, ‘Don’t pull a trigger until you are within a yard of the Russians!’ ‘By not firing the bonnie Scots were enabled to advance with such rapidity that the enemy’s cannon had hardly time to get their range before they were out of it again. Consequently their loss was but slight compared with that of the other brigades.’79 Utter nonsense, of course. Not only did the Russians know the range very well, having staked the hillside, but Highland volleys fired at a distance beat back the enemy infantry before they had time to engage them closely. What saved the brigade from greater losses was their general’s shrewd use of terrain, and an appreciation that casualties suffered while a battalion formed were as nothing to those meted out when storming a hill harum-scarum. But does one really need much explanation as to why the most experienced brigade commander came away with some of the lightest casualties despite being in the thickest of the fray?

  Six thousand Russians were killed or wounded. The French listed losses of 1,600 (later reduced to sixty killed and around 500 wounded). The bulk of allied casualties, around 2,000, were British, concentrated in the Scots Fusiliers and Grenadier Guards. ‘The first men who were brought in were struck by round shot, and had their legs torn off or shattered to pieces; they for the most part died’, recorded one doctor. ‘Then the terrible grape-shot wounds began to pour in, and in a short time we were surrounded with dozens of poor fellows, whose sufferings would shake the stoutest heart. One felt almost bewildered to know with whom to begin.’80 ‘We had a large number of regimental medical officers, but no regimental hospitals, and there were no field hospitals, with proper staff of attendants’, explained Surgeon Munro of the 93rd. ‘We had no ambulance with trained bearers to remove the wounded from the battlefield, and no supplies of nourishment for sick or wounded.’81

  Very little of the blood was Scottish. The corrugated ground to the east had protected the Coldstream Guards and the Highlanders from the Russian guns. The 42nd lost five men killed and thirty-six wounded. The 79th had only two men killed and seven injured. The 93rd came in for the worst casualties of the brigade: Lieutenant Abercrombie was shot through the heart as he climbed the hill, a further four men lay dead and forty NCOs and men wounded. The most seriously injured were shipped to Scutari for treatment. ‘The sick and wounded, officers and men alike, were obliged to be packed more closely than negroes in a slaver, in the putrid holes of two or three transports’, wrote one soldier. ‘Many died on the way; others lived only until they reached the landing place.’82

  There was, sadly, far worse in store. As at Walcheren, the Crimean campaign was premised on a coup de main and, as at Walcheren, unless executed speedily the army would wither without the enemy’s help. Murray’s Handbook to Russia warned that in the Crimea ‘the summer, in short, is one continued drought’, but that ‘the rains of autumn and the thaw in spring convert all the dust into such a depth of mud … that it is difficult to cross them without sinking up to the ankle’.83 A rapid advance was of the essence. Saint-Arnaud was keen to besiege Sebastopol but Raglan insisted on staying put to embark the wounded.84 For three days the allied army did not move.

  Raglan and Saint-Arnaud planned to invest Sebastopol from the south, and so the allies set off in a wide circuit across the Tchernaya River to the port of Balaklava, to secure its harbour as a supply base. Unaware of Raglan’s southward push, Menschikoff meanwhile led his troops eastwards from Sebastopol into the Crimean countryside to wait on events. Almost the entire Russian army got across the allied line of march before Raglan and his staff rode right into the tail end of the enemy column. Neither side wanted to escalate the skirmish, so each kept to its own course.

  As before, thirst, cholera and lack of carriage hampered their progress. Campbell’s men had to force their way through thick forest for four hours. ‘The heat was overpowering, not a breath of air percolated the dense vegetation’, recalled one soldier. ‘For a time, military order was an impossibility, brigades and regiments got intermixed. Guardsmen, Rifles and Highlanders straggled forward blindly, all in a ruck.’ That evening, Campbell’s brigade, ‘completely exhausted, parched with thirst, and their clothes much torn by struggling through the wood’,85 reached the Traktir Bridge and bivouacked near the village of Tchorgoun. The next morning, after a three-hour march across a broad plain carpeted in wild thyme, they found the little village of Kadikoi, just north of Balaklava, abandoned. In half an hour it was stripped and gutted. ‘The men seemed to do it out of fun’, wrote St
erling. ‘They broke boxes and drawers that were open, and threw the fragments into the street.’86

  To test Balaklava’s defences, Raglan sent the Rifles and horse artillery south through the gorge leading to the town. The Russian commandant, Colonel Monto, fired a few shells from the old Genoese castle near the harbour mouth, but the only damage caused was a tear to the coat of Raglan’s assistant military secretary. HMS Agamemnon sailed into the port to secure the wharfs. The residents seemed relieved to surrender.

  Raglan set up his headquarters in the commandant’s house. On 27 September, the 3rd and 4th Divisions tramped up to the Sapoune Heights, south of Sebastopol, while Campbell’s Highlanders, still waiting for their tents, bivouacked on the plain north of Balaklava with the rest of the army. It was harvest time and the countryside was fruitful. ‘At the present moment we are in clover,’ wrote a surgeon of the Scots Fusilier Guards, ‘surrounded by delicious grapes, peaches and apples, with plenty of Crimean sheep and cattle.’87 Campbell was unmoved. ‘I have neither stool to sit on, nor bed to lie on, I have not had off my clothes since we landed on the 14th’, he complained to a friend on 28 September. ‘Cholera is rife among us, and carrying off many fine fellows of all ranks.’88