Victoria’s Scottish Lion
Page 40
With the Russian threat diminishing, disease remained the most pressing menace throughout December. By 1 January 1855, boosted by reinforcements, the British army stood at 43,754 men, yet only 23,634 of these were fit for duty. Campbell’s old regiment, the 9th Foot, had ‘sickened so fast, that of men fit for duty after only a few days of campaigning, it had only a small remnant left’.106 War eroded the high command as much as the ranks. Cathcart had been shot dead at Inkerman. A wounded Bentinck had been invalided back home. Cardigan had left on 5 December, citing ill health, and in late January Lucan received an ultimatum, stating that it was ‘Her Majesty’s pleasure that he should resign the command of the Cavalry Division and return forthwith to England’. In addition, the Duke of Newcastle was eager for Raglan to weed out the old guard, in particular Airey, Estcourt, Filder and Burgoyne.
The Duke of Cambridge was also ready to leave. He had found a new reservoir of courage at Inkerman, holding his position until down to his last 100 men, but he was never the same again. The Guards’ continued enfeeblement from disease left him ‘very nearly crazy’, in the words of one colonel, and war was straining his marriage. While the duke was recuperating from dysentery and typhoid fever on HMS Retribution, a thunderbolt hit the ship during the storm of 14 November and nearly sank her. ‘This was without any exception the most fearful day of my life’, he confessed. ‘I cannot ask you to stay’, wrote Raglan, ‘after … your sufferings from illness, anxiety of mind, exposure to the weather and over fatigue.’107 On 25 November, Cambridge boarded the Trent, bound for Constantinople.
Raglan now offered Campbell the choice of the 4th Division or the 1st Division if, as suspected, the Duke of Cambridge was gone for good. Careful to underplay his ambitions, Campbell said he would be happy to command either but would leave the decision to Raglan. A medical board declared Cambridge unfit, and so Campbell took over the 1st Division. As a bonus he was appointed Colonel of the 67th Foot on Christmas Day. His delight was only blunted by Raglan’s appointment of a new commandant for Balaklava. ‘C. [Campbell] is not responsible for the state of Balaklava’, wrote Sterling that January. ‘He does not command here. He thought he did, and began knocking the Staff officers about, and the new Commandant, for various misdeeds, when an order came out to place the troops under the command of the Commandant. Private interest with someone.’108 A general order from Raglan on 3 March, confirming Campbell’s command of all troops in and around Balaklava (aside from the cavalry), but allowing the commandant of the port to make requisitions ‘for such Duties and fatigues as may be necessary’, did not settle the matter.
Raglan himself had been promoted field marshal after Inkerman, but at home his reputation had soured. On Saturday 23 December, in the last editorial before Christmas, The Times savaged him:
The noblest army England ever sent from these shores has been sacrificed to the grossest mismanagement. Incompetency, lethargy, aristocratic hauteur, official indifference, favour, routine, perverseness and stupidity reign, revel and riot in the camp before Sebastopol, in the harbour of Balaklava, in the hospitals of Scutari, and how much nearer to home we do not venture to say … Everybody can point out something which should be done, but there is no one there to order it to be done … The period for good nature is over in the Crimea, and sterner qualities must be invoked into action.
Raglan was ‘invisible’, his staff ‘devoid of experience, without much sympathy for the distresses of the rank and file and disposed to treat the gravest affairs with a dangerous nonchalance’.109 As Adjutant-General James Estcourt sat down on 25 December to a dinner of roast goose and plum pudding, you might be forgiven for thinking they had a point. The government in London shared the paper’s doubts. As the Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston, wrote on 4 January, ‘In many essential points Raglan is unequal to the task which has fallen to his lot but it is impossible to remove him, and we must make the best of it.’110 Although, according to Surgeon-Major Bostock of the Scots Fusilier Guards, ‘everyone blames Lord Raglan very much’,111 Campbell was his staunch ally. ‘Never was a public Man more unjustly censured by the public’, he wrote.112 ‘I am disgusted with the attacks that have been made upon dear Lord Raglan. God pity the army if anything were to occur to take him from us!’113
In London support for Raglan continued to decline. At the end of January 1855, a Commons motion from John Roebuck, demanding a select committee examine the state of Raglan’s army, acted as a lightning conductor for discontent over the direction of the war. And the more diatribes and speeches condemned the old school, aristocratic command, the brighter shone Campbell’s halo. ‘Did they put him in command of a division?’ asked Liberal Henry Layard in the ensuing debate, ‘No! But in the command of a brigade, under a general officer who had never seen a shot fired, and knew nothing about a campaign.’114 The government lost by an embarrassing 148 votes. Next day, Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen resigned, replaced by the old political pugilist, populist and Russophobe, Lord Palmerston. The queen had desperately tried to persuade Lords Derby, Lansdowne, Clarendon and John Russell to take the job, but to no avail. As Palmerston put it, ‘I am, for the moment, l’inévitable.’
One of his most urgent tasks was rationalising the army. Lord Panmure was appointed Secretary for War and given the additional responsibilities of the Secretary at War.* In March he took control of the militia and the yeomanry from the Home Office. Authority over the Army Medical Department followed and, in May, control of the Board of Ordnance, while the remit of the commander-in-chief (Lord Hardinge) was extended to the engineers and the artillery. At last, the administration of the army was on a sound footing. The most important change of all had in fact already happened, when in December 1854 control of the Commissariat had been wrested from the Treasury and handed to the obvious trustee, the War Office.
Palmerston also wanted personnel changes. Raglan’s adjutant-general and quartermaster-general both had to go. A new chief of staff, James Simpson, took over their duties. His promotion to the local rank of lieutenant-general was backdated to August 1854, making him senior to Sir Richard England and Campbell,* and therefore heir apparent in the event of Raglan’s death. This was the second time Horse Guards had pulled this trick. When Bentinck had been gazetted lieutenant-general, his promotion was also backdated, to one day before Campbell’s. ‘It is really too bad’, complained Sterling. ‘Court influence: Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat.’**
Despite this circumvention of his seniority, Campbell was on top form – optimistic, energetic, sure of British victory and with no semblance of the morbidity which had so often beset him in the past. ‘I have never enjoyed better health or more pleasant sleep’, he told his friend Colonel Eyre.115 There seems no obvious explanation for Campbell’s sudden buoyancy. The cabins promised for the men still languished unissued on the quay at Balaklava. Disease persisted. By the end of January, 12,000 British soldiers were still on the sick list.116 The enemy continued to bate him: on 6 January, four Russian infantry columns plus Cossacks approached the Marine Heights, but kept out of range of the guns, and between 7 and 10 February, the enemy threatened the Causeway Heights, but once again thought better of it.
Then finally, after the long winter stalemate, the allies declared themselves ready to push forward once more. The offensive would begin in the small hours of 19 February. Twelve thousand men under General Bosquet would advance and seize the Traktir Bridge. As a first step, Campbell, with 1,800 men and twelve guns, would take the high ground overlooking Tchorgoun before daylight, and then wait for the French. Bosquet’s task was to overwhelm the enemy’s right ‘while I went by myself to assail their left if possible’, as Campbell explained, ‘at any rate to hold it in check while the French were performing their part in the intended plan of operations’.*** ‘We were to move from our respective camps towards the enemy after midnight and I was to be at the place assigned to me at half past five in the morning, threatening the left of the enemy’s position’, but, wrote Campbell:
&nb
sp; One of the most desperate snow storms I ever witnessed or experienced came on before I started. My route was across country in which there were no roads. No counter orders having reached me I marched at the ordered hour. Before my people got to the place of assembly, before marching off, four guns and five wagons got upset. The snow drifted in our faces, and the ground being covered with snow and the night dark, it was scarcely possible to make out the features of the country. Nevertheless we moved forward. I was urged to return or to wait for daylight, but that I would not do. I succeeded in stumbling upon and surprising a picket of Cossacks, their flight gave me the true direction and I got to my ground at a quarter past five.
Campbell’s determination was in vain. Perturbed by the weather, Bosquet had cancelled the offensive. Major Foley, ADC to Major-General Hugh Rose, had ridden out with orders for Campbell to retire, but had spent most of the night wandering around in the dark, before eventually stumbling into Raglan’s headquarters at 5 a.m. Raglan sent him out again with one of his own ADCs to make sure he didn’t get lost a second time. By now, Campbell’s brigade had been sitting on the Causeway Heights for several hours, believing they had 12,000 Frenchmen in support nearby, when all that time they had been quite alone. Luckily, as Campbell told Seward:
General Vinoy, a fine fellow, who is encamped near to my position here, seeing in the morning my people on the heights about six and a half miles off, at once concluded I might find myself with too many on my hands, for he knew the French had not gone out, and he started with three regiments to come and join me.
The whole pointless adventure had achieved nothing, except to leave many men with frostbitten fingers. Nevertheless, according to Campbell, ‘a good deal was thought of this march by Lord Raglan and the people at Headquarters at the time’, and it prompted a personal testimonial from the queen.117
By March, things were definitely looking up. Wood, charcoal and candle rations had all been increased and the death of the tsar on 2 March gave morale a fortuitous boost. ‘To the allies his death is a certain gain, as it is impossible to believe that his son will have his abilities’, wrote Sterling.118 As winter retreated, Campbell seemed full of the joys of spring. Running into him on 3 March, Paget described how he spoke ‘cheerfully of our prospects’,119 while another officer remarked how he ‘amused us much by his extreme vivacity and humour’.120 ‘The aspect of every thing here is much less sombre than it was during the Winter’, Campbell told the Duke of Cambridge. ‘The men are generally healthy and they are nothing near so much worked as they were … All the soldiers are in capital spirits.’121 What’s more, having suffered ‘the worst cook in the world, a very dirty Glaswegian soldier’, Campbell now received from General Vinoy a Monsieur Pascal Poupon as his personal chef. ‘Before his advent, our dinner was always a piece of mutton, when we could get it, stewed with French vegetable tablets’, wrote Sterling. ‘Now we have six dishes at least.’122
Everywhere were signs that the allies were gaining the upper hand, on their environment at least. A new railway stretched from Balaklava to Kadikoi and by 26 March had reached as far as Raglan’s headquarters, taking the strain off Campbell’s troops. Meanwhile, Colonel McMurdo, an old ADC of Charles Napier’s who had been with Campbell in the Kohat Pass, had arrived in the Crimea to institute a new Land Transport Corps and put a bit of stick about as regards the commissaries. Campbell still had his division digging and entrenching, but by now this was largely to keep the men occupied (see Plate 17). Confident in his defences, on 18 March he gave the men their first rest day since arriving at Balaklava. He was still twitchy enough to call all the troops out one night after hearing strange noises in the dip between Kadikoi and the Marine Heights, but it turned out to be an army of libidinous frogs, which amused General Canrobert enormously.123
Now that the basics of civilised life had been restored, boatloads of sightseers and officers’ wives began landing at Balaklava to hold picnics in between the skeletons – horse and human – in the North Valley or to watch the shelling of Sebastopol as the great second bombardment* began on 9 April. Though this barrage flattened the Russian Flagstaff bastion, once again it was not followed up by an assault. As the offensive faltered, so press interest waned. The mobile campaign of summer 1854 had given way to a long, tiresome war of attrition reliant on artillery and trenches, and with the scandals and shortages of the winter addressed, there was less for the newsmen to rail against. Punch, the previous autumn chock-full of the tsar, was now more interested in the new model dinosaurs in Sydenham. ‘Everyone was sick of the war,’ recalled Count von Eckstaedt, ‘but neither Russia nor the Western Powers could think of peace without incurring humiliation’.124
The temptation, when an army gets bogged down, is to try a new theatre. With stalemate at Sebastopol, Raglan suggested sailing east to take the port of Kertch, commanding the straits between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and thus cut off Russia from her Circassian provinces while gaining access for the allies to this inland sea. The French provided 8,500 men, the majority of the expedition.125 The 42nd, 71st and 93rd Highlanders were mustered to go, but, to Campbell’s surprise, Raglan chose Sir George Brown to lead them instead. Swallowing his pride, Campbell offered to serve under Brown but Raglan refused. One officer wrote:
You will hardly believe they send Sir G. Brown to command, and give him the Highland Brigade, taking it away from Sir C. Campbell, who has commanded it since he left England. The Highlanders worship him and would have fought twice as well under him as under anyone else … He will make a mess of it – he has not a general’s head on his shoulders as Sir C. C. has.126
‘I never saw C. so much vexed’, recorded Sterling:
There is no general here who has not been truer to Lord Raglan than C. He has uniformly defended him, not only because he thought him usually in the right, but also from a feeling that the proper soldier has of defending his general; and this is the way he treats him.
Barely had the expedition weighed anchor on 3 May than it was summarily recalled by Napoleon III. ‘My reading of it’, wrote Sterling, ‘is that the Emperor of the French is coming here to command the whole, and that he will not let the army be frittered away in petty enterprises’. However, following the resignation of French commander-in-chief Canrobert on 19 May, his replacement, General Pelissier, reinstated the Kertch operation. Two days late, the allies raised steam and spread canvas once again. As before, Sir George Brown led the Highlanders. ‘I am giving you good troops,’ Campbell told Brown. ‘I would as soon have my own,’ was Brown’s reply.127
Despite these squabbles, the expedition was a resounding success. The Russians panicked and destroyed their shore batteries along with fourteen warships. Even so, the allies still captured 300 enemy guns and 500 supply vessels. By the 25th they were in possession of Kertch, having suffered minimal casualties. Only two men from the 42nd were wounded, shot by drunken French soldiers.**
Back at Balaklava a major new allied advance on 22 May pushed the lines well forward of Campbell’s old defences. At last, in Shadwell’s words, ‘all anxiety for its safety became a thing of the past’.128 A third barrage of Sebastopol followed on 6 June. The next day, the allies captured the fortified Mamelon and the Ouvrages Blancs, but hesitated after the French again demanded more shelling. A fourth great bombardment was scheduled for 18 June, the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, as a prelude to a crushing new offensive. Two days before, the Guards marched up to Sebastopol in readiness while Campbell’s Highlanders, who had returned triumphant from Kertch the previous day, formed a reserve. Plagued with delays, poor planning and even worse execution, it proved a costly failure. Allied losses, killed and wounded, were 4,604. For the Russians the figure was 5,776. Campbell’s division was not engaged.
Raglan took the defeat to heart. ‘I fear that it has affected his health’, wrote his nephew. ‘He looks far from well, and has grown very much aged latterly.’129 With cholera spreading once again, there was a risk Raglan would succumb. It had al
ready claimed Admiral Boxer and Adjutant-General Estcourt, and was gaining a grip in the Coldstream Guards. On 26 June Raglan collapsed. On the morning of the 28th he seemed to recover, but that afternoon relapsed. By 8.35 p.m. he was dead, the victim of disease, overwork, a broken will and a broken heart.*
‘Everyone here regrets his loss as a kind hearted man, but very few regret his loss as a general’, confessed one doctor.130 ‘I should think his death an equal gain to himself and us’, declared Florence Nightingale. ‘To himself, because a good man has been taken from the evil to come – to us, because few perhaps could have done worse for us than he has done.’131 With so many dead or departed, the stock of generals had shrunk significantly, and there was now a chance Campbell might inherit command. Tylden had died of cholera after the Alma. Inkerman had been the death of Strangways and Cathcart, and Goldie soon afterwards. Lucan, Cardigan, Burgoyne, Cambridge, de Lacy Evans, Scarlett and Buller had all left. Torrens was near to death. Brown was invalided home on the day Raglan died and Bentinck was still suffering from injuries. The Duke of Cambridge, having recovered his nerves in London, thought himself a promising candidate but Lord Panmure deemed him incapable. Airey was still in the Crimea, but his name was mud back home. Meanwhile, Campbell had widespread popular support. ‘He is very highly thought of and liked in the army,’ wrote Colonel Dallas. ‘Would to Heaven he were Commander-in-Chief.’132 Even Major Ewart of the 93rd, who had his run-ins with Campbell, admitted that he would make ‘an excellent selection’.133