Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  Having seen Sebastopol’s defences for himself, Raglan was now convinced of the need for a heavy artillery barrage prior to any infantry assault. Architect of the Russian entrenchments was Lieutenant-Colonel Franz Ivanovitch Todleben. In one month he had raised a formidable chain of earthworks strengthened with six great bastions. ‘We are in for a siege, my dear sir,’ Campbell warned Russell of The Times, ‘and I wonder if you gentlemen of the press who sent us here took in what the siege of such a place as Sebastopol means.’89 In fact, the enemy was very far from besieged. ‘The Russians have got free ingress and egress north and east, as our army is not large enough to surround the whole place’, pointed out Sterling.90

  On 2 October the 93rd were selected to remain near Balaklava to unload munitions and guard the harbour; a chore they saw as robbing them of the chance to storm Sebastopol. The 42nd and 79th, plus the Guards, marched up to the plateau and encamped about a mile behind the 2nd Division, near a windmill. Campbell’s brigade was finally issued with the tents they had been missing since leaving Calamita Bay. On the 5th, Raglan moved his headquarters to the Sapoune Heights, about halfway between Balaklava and Sebastopol. The crack shots from the 79th were sent forward to keep the Russians pinned down while the artillerymen built batteries. Seven days later, suspicious that closet Russophiles were about to set fire to the port, Raglan ordered all adult male inhabitants to be expelled from Balaklava. Two hundred soldiers of the 93rd, under Major Leith Hay, rounded them up. ‘When we went to their houses and ordered them away,’ wrote Private Cameron, ‘the shrieking of the women and crying of children was more trying, I thought, than a column of Russians.’91

  On the 14th, Raglan placed Campbell in charge of all British and Turkish troops ‘in front of and around Balaklava’. Aside from the 93rd, the principal allied force defending the port was Lucan’s cavalry camped in the valley to the north. Campbell assumed that he, a brigade commander, would serve under Lucan, a divisional commander, but Raglan explained that Campbell’s was to be an independent command. ‘Lord Raglan would not trust Lord Lucan to defend Balaklava,’ scoffed Captain Maude of the Royal Horse Artillery, ‘so sent down Sir Colin Campbell.’92 ‘This is calculated to inspire confidence, even more than the seasonable arrival of 3,000 Turks’, wrote visiting politician, Sir Edward Colebrooke.93 ‘As soon as the Chief made it known that the place was in charge of Sir Colin, people went to an extreme of confidence, and ceased to imagine that ground where he was commanding could now be the seat of danger’, confirmed Kinglake.94

  At last, on 17 October, Raglan felt he had enough artillery in place to unleash a decisive bombardment of Sebastopol, but when, after a day’s pounding, the guns ceased fire, General Canrobert* and his men had been alarmed by the explosion of a French magazine and were reluctant to pile in. The offensive was postponed. The barrage continued every day for a week, but each night Todleben’s men would venture out to repair the defences.

  While the campaign outside Sebastopol ran into the sand, rumours grew of a huge Russian army massing to the east, ready to storm Balaklava. On the 18th, and again on the night of 20/21 October, massive enemy columns approached the port, in what looked like a reconnaissance in force. On the first occasion Raglan sent the rest of the Highland Brigade down as a precaution. On the 20th, following a request for reinforcements from Campbell, Brigadier-General Goldie arrived late with 1,000 men, delayed because of fog. Campbell informed him gruffly that ‘it was no use sending troops to him unless they were sent in the evening, saying that when it was daylight he could do very well, and did not want any help’.95

  Then, four days later, allied fears were confirmed. Campbell and Lucan discovered from a Turkish spy ‘that 20,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry were marching against our position at Balaklava, from the east and south-east’. ‘We considered his news so important that Sir Colin Campbell at once wrote a report to Lord Raglan,’ recalled Lucan, ‘and I had it conveyed to his Lordship by my aide-de-camp, who happened on that day to be my son’.96 Lucan’s heir, Lord Bingham, rode from Kadikoi to Raglan’s headquarters, and handed the message to Airey. He made no comment and passed it to Raglan. Raglan disapproved of using spies. It was ungentlemanly. He pondered the matter for a while, composed a reply and handed it to Lord Bingham, who pocketed it and rode back with all speed to Balaklava.

  Some while later a breathless Lord Bingham reached Campbell’s headquarters, dashed in and handed him Raglan’s reply. It was just two words in acknowledgment: ‘Very Well’.

  Notes

  * William Russell of The Times is often credited as the first war correspondent, and the Crimea the first war to be so reported, but one of Campbell’s earliest battles, Corunna, was covered in 1809 by Henry Crabb Robinson of The Times. Russell has a claim, as one of his biographers put it, to be the first ‘professional’ war correspondent, but the Crimea was not even his first war (Furneaux, 16–17).

  * Generals with no experience of battle included Scarlett, Bentinck, Codrington, the Duke of Cambridge and Lord Cardigan. The experience of the rest since 1815 was extremely limited.

  ** See note on p. 15.

  * Raglan, Cardigan and Lucan were all peers. Cathcart was the son of an earl, Strangways the nephew of the second Earl of Ilchester and Sir Richard England’s mother was from a cadet branch of the family of the Marquess of Thomond. Scarlett was the son of Lord Abinger. Adams came from Warwickshire gentry and Tylden’s family had held estates in Kent since the reign of Edward III. Bentinck was the grandson of the Earl of Athlone. Sir John Campbell was the son of Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Campbell, baronet. Buller’s father had been a full general. Torrens was the son of Major-General Sir Henry Torrens. Codrington was the son of an admiral. Eyre was the son of a vice-admiral and his maternal grandfather had been a baronet. The only general with a chequered ancestry (apart from Campbell) was Sir John Burgoyne, the illegitimate son of the famous Lieutenant-General Burgoyne and singer Susan Caulfield, but then he was there only as an adviser.

  ** Despite a German doctor condemning it as pestilential (Quarterly Review, December 1854, 203).

  *** A flannel cummerbund supposed to prevent a chilled abdomen, regarded as a cause of the disease. See the War Office’s Instructions to Army Medical Officers for their Guidance on the Appearance of the Spasmodic Cholera in this Country (1848).

  * As one colonel wrote, it would have been easier to take the knapsacks to carry all this, and keep it dry (Ross-of-Bladensburg, 66–7).

  ** Their elaborate uniforms suggested the cavalry were poseurs rather than soldiers, especially the 11th Hussars. ‘The brevity of their jackets, the irrationality of their head gear, the incredible tightness of their cherry-coloured pants, altogether defy description’, wrote one reader of The Times, who had evidently examined their uniforms in detail. ‘But sir, for war service it is as utterly unfit as would be the garb of the female hussars in the ballet of Gustavus, which it very nearly resembles.’ He demanded that the commander-in-chief ‘be prevailed upon to allow the unhappy 11th to have the tightness of their nether integuments relaxed and their bottoms releathered’ (The Times, 22 April 1854).

  * French light infantry, originally recruited in French North Africa, who wore an exotic uniform of harem trousers, open fronted jacket and a turban or floppy fez. ‘Infinitely superior in physique and spirit to the ordinary French conscript’ (Wolseley, Story of a Soldier’s Life, I, 139–40).

  * Lysons (104), Evelyn (119) and Wantage (30) all suggest that the Scots Fusiliers retreated. Thirty-four years later, Wantage changed his mind. ‘Not one yard of the ground that a man had gained did we ever give up during that advance’, he wrote. In the same account, Wantage claims the Highland Brigade had ‘no Russian force in front of it’, so it seems his recollection had become warped (Wantage, 36).

  ** Kinglake claims that no one knew who the officer was. He may have been saving the Duke of Cambridge’s blushes. According to another officer, ‘The Duke of Cambridge ordered his division to retire but old Sir Colin C
ampbell said, “The Highlanders never retire with an enemy in front, your Royal Highness”’ (Essex Standard, 8 November 1854). Another version was ‘No Sir, British troops never do that, nor ever shall while I can prevent it’ (St Aubyn, 70).

  *** ‘The warmth of my speech was occasioned by the urgency of the moment’, Campbell later told the duke (RA/VIC/ADDE/1/3937).

  * The 42nd had been drilled to fire while advancing by Colonel Cameron, who had learnt it from his father.

  * This phrase was widely attributed to Campbell, but when Russell asked him four years later if it was true, ‘His lordship said it was a complete fiction’ (Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary, 225).

  * Saint-Arnaud had died of cholera on 26 September, relinquishing command to General Canrobert.

  1 Figes, 195.

  2 Fortescue, XIII, 33.

  3 Woodward, 268.

  4 Wolseley, Story of a Soldier’s Life, I, 98.

  5 Eckstaedt, I, 85.

  6 Woodham-Smith, 258.

  7 Barnett, 286.

  8 Shadwell, I, 316.

  9 RNRM/44.2.

  10 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, xviii, 226, 247.

  11 The Carlyle Letters Online, Letter from Thomas Carlyle, 6 March 1854 (carlyleletters.dukejournals.org).

  12 Shadwell, I, 68.

  13 Anon., The History of the Times, I, 420.

  14 RNRM/44.2.2.

  15 Cavendish, 87; Linklater, 95; Richards, II, 37.

  16 Prebble, 317, 321.

  17 Shadwell, I, 317.

  18 ‘Officers serving on the Staff in the capacity of Brigadiers-General are to take rank and Precedence from their Commissions as colonels in the Army, not from the date of their appointments as Brigadiers’ (Queen’s Regulations [1844], 3).

  19 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 135.

  20 Dallas, 83.

  21 Currie, 30–1.

  22 Wolseley, Story of a Soldier’s Life, I, 80.

  23 Woods, I, 149.

  24 St Aubyn, 68.

  25 Ross-of-Bladensburg, 45.

  26 Reilly, 1.

  27 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 61.

  28 Wrottesley, II, 83.

  29 Wantage, 25.

  30 Munro, 11.

  31 Cameron, 74.

  32 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 65.

  33 Woods, I, 319.

  34 USM, February 1855,194.

  35 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 136.

  36 Mitra, 320; USM, February 1855, 194.

  37 Chadwick, 22.

  38 Fortescue, XIII, 51, 73.

  39 Kinglake, III, 90.

  40 Heath, 60.

  41 Shadwell, I, 322; Colebrooke, 37.

  42 Gibbs, 73.

  43 Bairstow, 28.

  44 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 70.

  45 Marsh, 129.

  46 Kinglake, III, 135.

  47 Shadwell, I, 323.

  48 Murray, D., II, 49.

  49 Wantage, 34.

  50 Cameron, 74.

  51 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 70.

  52 Maurice, II, 81; Fortescue, XIII, 66; Ross-of-Bladensburg, 80–1.

  53 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 75.

  54 Kinglake, III, 218.

  55 Kinglake, III, 232–3.

  56 St Aubyn, 72; Vincent, 197.

  57 Kinglake, III, 233.

  58 Kinglake, III, 257.

  59 Hodasevich, 70.

  60 Shadwell, I, 325.

  61 Shadwell, I, 324.

  62 Cameron, 74.

  63 Ewart, I, 230–1.

  64 Shadwell, I, 321.

  65 Burgoyne, 106.

  66 Shadwell, I, 324.

  67 Murray, D., II, 50.

  68 Calthorpe, 42; Wright, H.P., 50.

  69 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 68.

  70 Cameron, 75.

  71 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 71, 75.

  72 St Aubyn, 72.

  73 Shadwell, I, 325.

  74 Marsh, 131.

  75 Hodasevich, 71–2.

  76 NAM/1967-06-7.

  77 Anon., The Battle of Alma, 50.

  78 Morning Chronicle, 14 October 1854.

  79 The Examiner, 21 October 1854.

  80 USM, February 1855, 196.

  81 Munro, 11.

  82 USM, November 1854, 433.

  83 Jesse, 153–4.

  84 Calthorpe, 41.

  85 Ross-of-Bladensburg, 100–1.

  86 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 75.

  87 Bostock, 203.

  88 Shadwell, I, 325.

  89 Russell, The Great War with Russia, 108–9.

  90 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 76.

  91 Cameron, 78.

  92 Woodham-Smith, 207.

  93 Colebrooke, 44.

  94 Kinglake, IV, 234–5.

  95 Ewart, I, 262.

  96 Lucan, 6.

  8

  Modern Major-General

  * * *

  ‘I’ll tell you something else, which military historians never realise: they call the Crimea a disaster, which it was, and a hideous botch-up by our staff and supply, which is also true, but what they don’t know is that even with all these things in the balance against you, the difference between hellish catastrophe and a brilliant success is sometimes no greater than the width of a sabre blade, but when all is over no one thinks about that. Win gloriously – and the clever dicks forget all about the rickety ambulances that never came, and the rations that were rotten, and the boots that didn’t fit, and the generals who’d have been better employed hawking bedpans round the doors. Lose – and these are the only things they talk about’

  George Macdonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge

  * * *

  ‘We have an unfortunate mania for going right into the cannon’s mouth, instead of taking the side road’

  Henry Layard

  * * *

  The port of Balaklava nestled behind a cordon of hills. To the west these hills merged into the plateau south of Sebastopol, while eastwards they shouldered their way along the Crimean coast. A track from the harbour led north past Kadikoi until, about 2 miles north, it joined the Woronzoff Road, a metalled highway which led north-west to Sebastopol, and in the other direction curved round and headed due east along a natural viaduct of high ground called the Causeway Heights. Beyond the Causeway Heights was the North Valley, bounded to the north by the Fedioukine Hills, and to the east by Mount Hasfort and an embanked aqueduct. From here the ground sloped down to the Tchernaya River. Below the Causeway Heights lay the South Valley, hemmed in to the east by the Kamara Hills, and to the west ending in a narrow ravine, the ‘Col’, which led to the Sapoune Ridge.

  To guard the Woronzoff Road, Raglan had ordered the construction of six separate redoubts, each big enough to house 250–300 troops. They were widely spaced, some over a mile apart, and all of them more than a mile from Campbell’s headquarters at Kadikoi. The Turks had provided eight battalions (4,700 men) for their defence, commanded by Rustem Pasha and answerable to Campbell. Work on the redoubts had started on 7 October, but eighteen days later they were still half-finished. Redoubt No. 2 had benefited from just one day’s labour. ‘These works are not strong’, warned one officer. ‘I am sorry to say these Turks don’t seem worth very much; they are very idle, and there is the greatest difficulty in getting them to work, even though it is for their own security and comfort.’1 The most easterly, Redoubt No. 1, on what had been christened ‘Canrobert’s Hill’, was the strongest, but it remained vulnerable to artillery, overlooked as it was by the Kamara Hills to the south-east. Cavalry could jump both its ditch and walls. Nevertheless, Raglan was reluctant to denude the batteries bombarding Sebastopol, so Campbell received only nine light guns for all six redoubts.* Three were in Redoubt No. 1 and two each in the next three redoubts, leaving none at all in Redoubts 5 and 6.2

  Most of the rest of Campbell’s artillery was positioned on the far
side of the South Valley, guarding the approaches to Balaklava. On a rise slightly north of Kadikoi the 93rd had a battery of seven guns (Battery No. 4), and behind the village were a further five guns, manned by crewmen from HMS Niger and Vesuvius. In the hills to the east of the port lay more Royal Artillery and Royal Marine Artillery batteries, armed with some impressive 32-pounder howitzers.3 As for infantry, Campbell had the 93rd camped in front of Kadikoi and some mixed Turkish infantry plus Royal Marines to the north and east of the village. A further 1,200 Royal Marines under Colonel Hurdle guarded the heights east of Balaklava. Down in the harbour were HMS Wasp and Diamond, but the former had only one gunner and a skeleton crew, and the latter just a shipkeeper. On 26 September, Raglan had ordered ‘the least efficient soldiers of each regiment’4 to form an invalid battalion at Balaklava, but so far it numbered just a few dozen men. Meanwhile, the bulk of the army was camped 7 miles away, in front of Sebastopol. Back in Varna, the Guards had struggled to march 5 miles in a day. They had got no fitter, so if Campbell needed the rest of the 1st Division, it would not arrive for several hours.

  Nevertheless, Campbell was uncharacteristically blasé. ‘I think we can hold our own against anything that may come against us in daylight’, he reported. ‘I am however, a little apprehensive about the redoubts if seriously attacked during the night.’ ‘I cannot say whether Sir Colin Campbell’s sense of security was in any degrees found upon the cavalry, or whether, for once, he went along with the herd in his estimate of what could be insured by a little upturn of soil with a few Turks standing behind it’, wrote Kinglake,5 but whatever its basis, such confidence from a general known for his caution was doubly reassuring.