Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  With winter drawing in, the Russians were eager to lift the siege. On 2 November, fire from Russian howitzers on the eastern end of Campbell’s line seemed to herald an attack, but the enemy stayed put. A rainy 4 November left the ground next morning shrouded in thick fog, allowing the Russians to take the British by surprise. Their goal was Mount Inkerman outside Sebastopol, high ground which offered a commanding line of fire on the allies. Campbell heard the crash of battle in the distance, but it was not until later that afternoon that he learned the British had won an arithmetic victory. Russian losses were estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000, compared with only 2,600 British casualties, but as Henry Layard observed, echoing Dalhousie after Chillianwala, ‘Another such victory would be almost fatal to us.’70 ‘It was a great pity we had not the 42nd, 79th and 93rd Highlanders with us,’ commented one soldier, ‘for we knew well they would have left their marks upon the enemy, under the guidance of their old commander, Sir Colin Campbell.’71 ‘It was a disgrace to all the staff concerned that we were caught napping by an enemy whom we allowed to assemble close to us during the previous night without our knowledge’, complained Wolseley. ‘Had any general who knew his business – Sir Colin Campbell for instance – been in command of the division upon our extreme right that Gunpowder Plot Day of 1854, we should not have been caught unawares.’72 Absent at Inkerman, Campbell’s reputation remained intact and, if anything, enhanced. Augustus Stafford, MP, visiting the Crimea that autumn, confirmed that the man ‘in whom the army seem to have the greatest confidence is Sir Colin Campbell’.73

  Though costing the Russians dear in men, Inkerman was a crushing blow to British morale. Sterling gloomily summed up their position: ‘We are besieging an enemy equal to our own in numbers, with another superior one outside and threatening us continually … The matter looks graver every day; a duel à mort with despotism requires numbers as well as bravery.’74 Two days after Inkerman, Raglan held a council of war. He decided to dig in and wait for reinforcements. Shocked at the thought of over-wintering, 225 of the 1,540 British officers simply left, many of them forced to sell their commissions at a loss.75

  By 12 November, Campbell had received an extra 500 Zouaves and a detachment from the 2nd Battalion, the Rifle Brigade, but conditions for the troops were deteriorating. They had been in the same kit for months and everyone was covered in lice, even the Duke of Cambridge. The government agreed to issue every soldier with an extra uniform, but not until 1 April 1855. In the interim, men paraded wearing trousers made of sacking. Others turned out in trousers and a kilt, with a blanket on top, then a greatcoat and a further blanket wrapped round the shoulders. ‘All pretensions to finery or even decency are gone’, explained Sterling. ‘We eat dirt, sleep in dirt, and live dirty.’76 ‘Even the ground within our tents was trodden into mud,’ recalled Surgeon Munro, ‘and there we sat and slept, and fortunate was he who could secure a bundle of damp straw of which to make a bed.’77

  Their Crimean hell had barely started. Two days later a cataclysmic storm broke. ‘We had just got our morning dose of cocoa, and the soldiers their rum, when, about seven o’clock, the squall came down on us’, recalled Sterling. ‘All the tents fell in about three minutes.’ ‘The Marines and Rifles on the cliffs over Balaklava lost tents, clothes – everything’, reported Russell. ‘The storm tore them away over the face of the rock and hurled them across the bay, and the men had to cling to the earth with all their might to avoid the same fate.’78 Twenty-one ships were wrecked, taking with them 10 million rounds of ammunition, twenty days’ forage for the horses, and 40,000 winter uniforms. On his yacht in the harbour, Cardigan was mildly sick. Raglan called in Commissary-General Filder and demanded that he send out officers to secure supplies ‘at any price’, while requesting the Duke of Newcastle send replacement shipments with the utmost urgency.79

  The losses wrought by the storm placed an intolerable strain on an army supply chain already saddled with incompetence. Only in late September did anyone realise the army had headed out without candles. It had oil lamps and wicks, but no oil. Iron beds were sent to Scutari while their legs ended up in Balaklava. Petty jealousies and an absence of common sense pervaded every arm of the services. Departmental demarcation was sacred: the commissaries insisted that rations for Campbell’s Marines were an Admiralty matter and refused them food. Vegetables, meanwhile, had to be paid for ‘as articles of extra diet’. These shortages fell hardest on the men. ‘The officers, of course, are not suffering actually quite so much,’ wrote Sterling, ‘though quite as much in proportion to their previous habits.’80

  The fuel ration was pitiful* and firewood so scarce that soldiers dug up roots or stole gabions** and pickaxe handles from the engineers. One night, Surgeon Munro was summoned to see Captain Mansfield, Campbell’s extra ADC, at his headquarters. Munro had not eaten because his servant could find no firewood. Spying a pile of logs, the surgeon asked if he might take one but Mansfield refused, so Munro waited until Campbell’s staff were in conversation, chose a large log and stole off with it. As he struggled back through the mud he heard footsteps behind him getting closer, until eventually a hand clapped him on the shoulder. Turning round, he saw Campbell’s batman with another log. He told Munro that if he was desperate enough to steal one from under the chief’s nose, his need was great indeed.81

  Aside from cold and hunger, the other major threat was disease. Despite a reinforcement of 1,400 Turks towards the end of November, Campbell’s garrison was being gradually consumed by sickness. It had reduced the effective strength of the 1,200 Marines outside Balaklava by 300 men. They had just two medical officers, who had to wade through 3 miles of mud to make their rounds, working from 9 a.m. until 7 p.m. and then staying on duty throughout the night for emergencies. he only drug available was alum, supplied as a powder which the doctors had to make up into pills themselves. The church at Kadikoi was turned into a makeshift hospital for the men but ‘was always filled to overcrowding … the poor fellows lay packed as close as possible upon the floor, in their soiled and tattered uniform, and covered with their worn field blankets’ (see Plate 16). The spacious twenty-room home of a Russian lawyer was commandeered for sick officers and an old priest’s dwelling for the very worst cases. According to Munro, often all that was needed was warmth and food, but there was none available: ‘All that could be done was to lay them gently down and watch life ebb away.’82 There was scant incentive for prophylactic measures. As Munro explained, his ‘duties were to cure disease, not to make suggestions to prevent disease’.83 Then there were the ever-present financial constraints. ‘A more devoted set of men than the regimental surgeons, I never saw,’ wrote Sterling, ‘but they have been brought up all their lives under the tyranny of the Inspector-General, whose object it is to please the Government by keeping down the estimates.’84 The doctors were further hamstrung by their own bloody-minded supply office, the Purveyor. ‘If I had a knife and a piece of wood, it would be shorter and easier for me to make a splint than draw one from the Purveyor’, complained one surgeon.85

  At least the agony of Balaklava forged a new bond between Campbell and the Highlanders, as Munro explained:

  He was of their own warlike race, of their kith and kin, understood their character and feelings, and could rouse or quiet them at will with a few words … He spoke at times not only kindly, but familiarly to them, and often addressed individuals by their names … He was a frequent visitor at hospital, and took an interest in their ailments, and in all that concerned their comfort when they were ill. Such confidence in, and affection for him, had the men of his old Highland brigade, that they would have stood by or followed him through any danger. Yet there never was a commanding officer or general more exacting on all points of discipline than he.86

  Within a few weeks the track from Balaklava had become a quagmire, and there wasn’t enough fodder for the pack animals. The solution was to corral Campbell’s men into fatigue parties, work despised by the Highlanders. Munro saw how:
/>
  So many loose shot or shell were placed in a field blanket, and two or four men, grasping the blanket by the corners, swung the load along between them. Many of the men preferred slinging the loads over their backs, and staggering along under the weight of two or more shot … The results of this duty were severe bowel complaints, fever, aggravated scorbutic symptoms and often cholera’,87

  ‘An army of this size in India would have with it 30,000 camels for transport’, protested Sterling. ‘I believe we have here in this place about 150 mules.’88 The situation reached such a crisis that when the 18th Foot landed it was decided the regiment would stay at Balaklava as porters.

  ‘How any man who had served under the Duke of Wellington, or who had even read his despatches, could ever have allowed such a state of affairs to arrive, is, to me, incomprehensible’, fumed one colonel.89 Raglan’s apologists excused his problems as an inevitable product of the system. The United Service Journal claimed that ‘From all we can learn, there appears to be no incompetency to individuals, the whole fault arises exclusively from the organisation.’90 Karl Marx, in the New York Times, claimed ‘the terrible evils, amid which the soldiers in the Crimea are perishing, are not his [Raglan’s] fault, but that of the system on which the British war establishment is administered’.91 But, as Ellenborough told the House of Lords on 14 May 1855, ‘To attribute everything to the defect of system is the subterfuge of convicted mediocrity.’92

  There was nothing inevitable about the miseries of the Crimea. In China, Gough had encouraged his men to collect supplies as needed. His troops were always on the move, having to negotiate purchases in a language hardly anyone in the expedition understood, yet he succeeded. And while Gough was sourcing supplies locally, the Duke of Wellington was busy organising materiel from London, penning memos to the governor-general of India encouraging him to buy Chinese horses and hire carriage, or to employ junks as floating barracks and stables. In the Peninsula Wellington himself had slyly subverted the system by ordering far more corn than he needed and then selling the surplus, leaving him with cash to make up for deficiencies from Whitehall. Sadly, pre-empting the incompetence of his political masters was a measure alien to Raglan.

  Fortunately for the Highlanders, Campbell did not wait for Raglan or the government to remedy the shortages. Wooden cabins had been promised for the men, but had yet to arrive, so Campbell set the men to digging a massive trench, roofed with planks, and overlaid with a layer of beaten clay, big enough to accommodate an entire regiment, near the crest of the hill outside Kadikoi. After only a few days, the soldiers inside were flooded out, and ‘Sir Colin’s Folly’ was abandoned.93 Unabashed, he next did what he knew had worked in the Peninsula: he ordered the men to build their own shelters, and to that end encouraged them to scavenge. Finding some soldiers building a hut and running short of wood, he suggested they take a mule and cart down to Balaklava to get more planks. When they asked where they might find a cart, Campbell replied, ‘Where would you get it? Why, man, off you go and seize the first mule and cart you can get hold of!’ Some while later the men returned with a wagon piled high with timber, pulled by an exhausted mule. On closer inspection, Campbell realised it was his own personal mule and cart.94

  As Kinglake argued:

  The capacity, the force of will, the personal ascendancy of officers commanding these several bodies of men, the zeal, judgment, the ability of the assistant commissary allowed to each division, the comparative number of men left in camp who might not be so prostrated by fatigue or sickness as to be incapable of hard bodily exertion – all these and perhaps many more were the varying conditions under which it resulted that deficiencies occurring in some parts of camp were from other parts of it wholly averted.*95

  Campbell managed to alleviate many of those deficiencies and so his Highlanders had a better survival rate than most, but then as his brigade major wrote, he ‘has more experience in his little finger then the whole set up there [outside Sebastopol]’. Take food for example: officially, the British soldier was left to cook his unchanging rations himself. Campbell, however, realising the value in regimental kitchens, persuaded one of the Turkish commanders to send large copper cooking pots from Constantinople. It was a small advantage, but it was the sum of these little details which made the difference between a healthy regiment and a frail one. In any case, as a brigade commander he lacked the power to deal with anything beyond little details. As Sterling wrote on Campbell’s behalf in January 1855, ‘We, however, possess no power to remedy any radical error … we can only represent and lament.’96

  Unlike some officers, Campbell resisted shaming the army into action. As in the Peninsular War, tales of failures relayed home by letter found their way into the newspapers, but he had no truck with such indiscretions. Campbell told Colonel Eyre:

  The people of England have a right to expect a courage and endurance on the part of the officers of the army, which shall not yield to the discomfort unavoidable in a campaign carried on during the winter months, and that any little inconvenience they may be put to, shall be borne without the croaking and moaning they publish to the world. We have gone through some hardships, it is true, but nothing to justify the statements of officers that appear in the newspapers.97

  Indeed, as Lord Stanmore pointed out, ‘Suffering was not greater, and the hospital accommodation, bad as it may have been, was far better than it had been in the forces engaged in the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular campaigns.’98 The difference was that back in 1808 there hadn’t been much of a middle-class audience to gasp. The revelation of military incompetence in 1854 was nothing new, but this time the public were listening, and because so many more of them were enfranchised, the government took notice of their concerns. The status quo ante was not that no one knew about the problems in the army; it was that no one cared. In the past, the British soldier was an expendable drunkard. Now the middle class saw him as the last bulwark against foreign despotism. And as the common soldier was celebrated, so the blueblood generals were condemned. The didacticism of the aristocracy was discredited and there was a feeling abroad that things could be improved by individual effort. What better time for a self-made general to emerge? Campbell confirmed what the Victorian middle classes wanted to believe about their new society.

  As reports of conditions reached Britain, so private organisations and individuals decided to right matters themselves. On 13 October 1854, The Times created its own Crimea Fund. In November, Florence Nightingale descended on Scutari with a cohort of nurses. That winter, Mary Seacole arrived in Balaklava to set up her own provision store and ‘hotel’ (an institution Nightingale believed was no better than a brothel). Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed a prefabricated hospital. Joseph Paxton, gardener, architect and designer of the Crystal Palace, recruited navvies to take on much of the logistical work. Samuel Cunard offered ships sufficient to carry 14,000 men to the front. These efforts were not just helpful in themselves, but of enormous benefit in embarrassing the authorities into activity.

  The most famous chef of his day, Alexis Soyer, set about reforming the soldiers’ diet by introducing camp kitchens for mass meals, and new recipes to make the unimaginative rations palatable. ‘Exceedingly egotistical’, but with ‘all the marks of a great man in his own line’,99 Soyer invented a new stove (in use until the 1990s) to replace the charcoal ones that had caused carbon monoxide poisoning. He had intended to test his stoves on the Guards, but having landed at Balaklava and reported to the authorities, Soyer returned to find Campbell’s Highlanders had unloaded them and were already cooking on them.

  The general public did their bit by sending food and clothing. ‘Old England is at last roused to a sense of our misfortunes,’ proclaimed one officer, ‘and is determined to atone for her dilatoriness by her liberality.’100 The drought soon became a flood. Fellow Scots sent the Highlanders ‘oat cakes and currant buns and bottles of whisky’.101 ‘All this is very kind … if they would only send plenty of horses and carts, and f
at beeves for the soldiers’ dinners, it would be more use than a forest of hashed venison’, wrote Sterling after a consignment of potted deer arrived from the Marquess of Breadalbane, a man who had spent the past twenty years systematically ridding his estate of Highlanders.102 ‘The underclothing was in such superabundance that we could afford to make frequent changes,’ recalled Munro, ‘to put on new and throw away what we had worn only for a week or so, which, though new and good, and only soiled, it was considered too great a trouble to wash’. The 93rd even received a shipment of buffalo pelts. ‘These robes must have been expensive and I fear that the purchase of them was money thrown away’, wrote Munro, after finding they harboured lice.103

  Campbell had too many worries to take much joy in the public’s largesse. Wellington held, ‘My rule always was to do the business of the day, in the day.’ Campbell, in contrast, continued his work round the clock and was soon close to collapse. His brigade major was little better. ‘I have looked in a looking-glass today for the first time since landing in the Crimea; my beard is getting long and grizzled, my face brown and healthy, my body thin, and my expression reckless and cynical.’104 On 28 November, after much persuasion, Campbell moved to a small house 150 yards from battery No. 4, which he had previously rejected as too far from the line. Here he had the space to unpack his luggage, which had been lying in the harbour, but he still insisted on sleeping in a tent outside. ‘Such was his anxious temperament, that he could not rest tranquil for a moment in the house’, remembered Shadwell. ‘A man coughing, a dog barking, or a tent flapping in the wind, was sufficient to startle him.’

  Between 1 and 4 December, the sight of enemy officers just beyond the range of British guns, with a telescope so big it had to be supported on piled muskets, made Campbell more nervous still. Then on 5 December he noticed fires on the Causeway Heights near Redoubt No. 3. The Russian infantry had pulled back, taking their artillery with them and burning their huts as they went. ‘For the first time, that night Sir Colin lay down with his clothes off in the house’, recalled Shadwell, but even now Campbell could not relax completely, leaping out of bed in the small hours, mid-dream, and shouting ‘Stand to your arms!’ The Russians had retired to Tchorgoun, but that was still too close for Campbell. Helped by Turkish fatigue parties, the Highlanders strengthened their entrenchments still further, while Campbell roamed the lines urging vigilance at all times. Far from dreading these inspections, the men ‘vie[d] with each other in their endeavours to gain his approbation’. His ‘watchful energy was very different from that restless fussiness which is so often mistaken for it’, wrote Shadwell.105