The Crimean War (32 page)

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Authors: Orlando Figes

Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856

BOOK: The Crimean War
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‘The main and real object of the war’, Palmerston admitted in 1855, ‘was to curb the aggressive ambition of Russia. We went to war not so much to keep the Sultan and the Muslims in Turkey as to keep the Russians out of it.’ Palmerston envisaged the attack on the Crimea as the first stage of a long-term crusade against tsarist power in the Black Sea region and the Caucasus, Poland and the Baltic, in line with his memorandum to the cabinet on 19 March, in which he had outlined his ambitious plan for the dismemberment of the Russian Empire. By the end of August he had won considerable support within the cabinet for this enlarged war. He also had an unofficial agreement with Drouyn de Lhuys, the French Foreign Minister, that ‘small results’ would not be enough to compensate for the inevitable human losses of the war, and that only ‘great territorial changes’ in the Danube region, the Caucasus, Poland and the Baltic could justify a campaign in the Crimea.
44
But as long as Aberdeen was Prime Minister it was impossible for Palmerston to get such plans accepted as allied policy. The Four Points agreed by the Western powers with the Austrians after several months of negotiation on 8 August laid out more limited objectives. Peace could not be agreed between Russia and the allied powers unless:
1.
Russia renounced any special rights in Serbia and the Danubian principalities, whose protection would be guaranteed by the European powers with the Porte;
2.
the navigation of the Danube was free to all commerce;
3.
the Straits Convention of 1841 was revised ‘in the interests of the Balance of Power in Europe’ (ending Russian naval domination of the Black Sea);
4.
the Russians abandoned their claim to a protectorate over the Christian subjects of Turkey, whose security would be guaranteed by the five great powers (Austria, Britain, France, Prussia and Russia) in agreement with the Turkish government.
 
The Four Points were conservative in character (nothing else would satisfy the Austrians) but vague enough to allow the British (who wanted to reduce the power of Russia but had no real idea how to translate this into concrete policies) to add more conditions as the war went on. Indeed, unknown to the Austrians, there was a secret fifth point agreed between the British and the French allowing them to raise further demands depending on the outcome of the war. For Palmerston, the Four Points were a way of binding Austria and France to a grand European alliance for the pursuit of an open-ended war against Russia, a war that could be expanded even after the conquest of the Crimea had been achieved.
45
Palmerston even went so far as to articulate a broad long-term plan for the Crimea. He proposed turning the area over to the Turks, and linking it to new Turkish territories captured from the Russians around the Sea of Azov, Circassia, Georgia and the Danube delta. But few others were prepared to think in such ambitious terms. Napoleon largely wanted to capture Sevastopol as a symbol of the ‘glorious victory’ he desired and as a means of punishing the Russians for their aggression in the principalities. And most of the British cabinet felt the same way. It was generally assumed that the fall of Sevastopol would bring Russia to its knees, allowing the Western powers to claim victory and impose their conditions on the Russians. But this did not make much sense. Compared to Kronstadt and the other Baltic fortresses defending the Russian capital, Sevastopol was a relatively distant outpost in the Tsar’s Empire, and there was no logical reason to suppose that its capture by the allies would force him to submit. The consequence of this unquestioned assumption was that during 1855, when the fall of Sevastopol did not happen quickly, the allies went on battering the town in what was at that time the longest and most costly siege in military history to date rather than develop other strategies to weaken Russia’s land armies, which rather than her Black Sea Fleet were after all the real key to her power over Turkey.
46
The Crimean campaign was not only wrongly conceived but also badly planned and prepared. The decision to invade the Crimea was taken without any real intelligence. The allied commanders had no maps of the region. They took their information from outdated travelogues, such as Lord de Ros’s diary of his Crimean travels and Major-General Alexander Macintosh’s
Journal of the Crimea
, both dating back to 1835, which led them to believe that the Crimean winters were extremely mild, even though there were more recent books that pointed out the cold, such as
The Russian Shores of the Black Sea in the Autumn of 1852
by Laurence Oliphant, which was published in 1853. The result was that no winter clothing or accommodation was prepared, partly on the hopeful assumption that it would be a brief campaign and that victory would be achieved before any frost set in. They had no idea how many Russian troops were in the Crimea (estimates ranged between 45,000 and 80,000 men), and no idea where they were located on the peninsula. The allied fleets could transport only 60,000 of the 90,000 troops at Varna to the Crimea – on the most optimistic calculation less than half the three-to-one ratio recommended by military textbooks for a siege – and even that would have to be at the expense of ambulance wagons, draught animals and other essential supplies. The allies suspected that the Russian troops retreating from the Danubian front were going to be brought to the Crimea, and that the best outcome for them would be the seizure of Sevastopol by a lightning
coup de main
and the destruction of its military facilities and the Black Sea Fleet before they arrived. They reasoned that a less successful attack on Sevastopol would very probably require the occupation of Perekop, the isthmus separating the Crimea from the mainland, to block those Russian reinforcements and supplies. In his dispatch of 29 June, Newcastle had ordered Raglan to carry out this task ‘without delay’. But Raglan refused to carry out the order, claiming that his troops would suffer in the heat of the Crimean plain.
47
As the launching of the invasion approached, military leaders got cold feet. The French, in particular, had their doubts. Newcastle’s instructions to Raglan were copied by Marshal Vaillant, the Minister of War, to Saint-Arnaud, but the commander of the French forces was sceptical about the plan. His reservations were shared by the majority of his officers, who thought the attack would benefit Britain as a naval power more than France. But such doubts were brushed aside, as pressure was applied by the politicians in London and Paris, eager for an offensive to satisfy the public mood, and increasingly concerned to get the troops away from the cholera-infested Varna zone. By late August Saint-Arnaud had come to the conclusion that fewer men would be lost in an attack on Sevastopol than had died already from cholera.
48
The embarkation order came as a relief to most of the troops, who ‘preferred to fight like men rather than waste away from hunger and disease’, according to Herbé. ‘The men and officers are getting daily more disgusted with their fate,’ wrote Robert Portal, a British cavalry officer, in late August.
They do nothing but bury their comrades. They say loudly that they have not been brought out to fight, but to waste away and die in this country of cholera and fever … . We hear that there is a mutiny in the French encampment, the soldiers swearing that they will go anywhere and do anything, but remain here to die they will not.
 
Rumours of a mutiny in the French camp were confirmed by Colonel Rose, attached to the French staff, who reported to London on 6 September that the French command did ‘not think well of the stability and power of resistance of the French soldiers’.
49
It was time to pack them off to war before they succumbed to disease or rose up against their officers. On 24 August the embarkation started. The infantry were ferried onto ships, followed by the cavalry and their horses, ammunition carts, wagons with supplies, draught livestock, and finally the heavy guns. Many of the men who marched down to the wharfs were too sick and weak to carry their own knapsacks or their guns, which were taken for them by the stronger men. The French did not have enough troopships for their 30,000 men and crammed them into their ships of war, rendering these useless if they were attacked by the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The defence of the convoy thus fell entirely to the Royal Navy, whose warships flanked the 29 steamers and 56 ships of the line carrying the British troops. On the quaysides there were disturbing scenes when it was announced that not all the soldiers’ wives who had travelled out from Britain could be taken to the Crimea.
w
The grief-stricken women who were to be separated from their men fought to get on board the ships. Some were smuggled on. At the final moment, the commanders took pity on the women, having been informed that no provision had been made for them at Varna, and let many of them board the ships.
By 2 September the embarkation was complete, but bad weather delayed the departure until 7 September. The flotilla of 400 ships – steamers, men-of-war, troop transports, sailing ships, army tugs and other smaller vessels – was led by Rear Admiral Sir Edmund Lyons in HMS
Agamemnon
, the Royal Navy’s first screw-propelled steamship, capable of sailing at 11 knots and armed with 91 guns. ‘Men remember the beauteous morning of the 7th of September,’ wrote Kinglake.
The moonlight was still floating on the waters, when men, looking from numberless decks towards the east, were able to hail the dawn. There was a summer breeze blowing fair from the land. At a quarter before five a gun from the
Britannia
gave the signal to weigh. The air was obscured by the busy smoke of the engines, and it was hard to see how and whence due order would come; but presently the
Agamemnon
moved through, and with signals at all her masts – for Lyons was on board her, and was governing and ordering the convoy. The French steamers of war went out with their transports in tow, and their great vessels formed the line. The French went out more quickly than the English, and in better order. Many of their transports were vessels of very small size; and of necessity they were a swarm. Our transports went out in five columns of only thirty each. Then – guard over all – the English war-fleet, in single column, moved slowly out of the bay.
50
 
 
Alma
 
Soon the allied fleets were strung out across the Black Sea, a moving forest of ships’ masts interspersed with huge black clouds of smoke and steam. It was a fantastic sight, ‘like a vast industrial city on the waters’, noted Jean Cabrol, doctor to the French commander, Marshal Saint-Arnaud, who was now mortally sick on the
Ville de France
. Each French soldier carried rations for eight days in his kitbag – rice, sugar, coffee, lard and biscuit – and on boarding the transports he was given a large blanket which he laid out on the deck to sleep. The British had much less. ‘The worst of it all’, wrote John Rose, a private in the 50th Regiment, to his parents from Varna, ‘is we cannot get a glass of groggy for money. We have living on 1 pound and a half of brown bread and 1 pound of meat per day but it is not for men.’
1
The soldiers on the ships had no clear idea where they were going. At Varna they had been kept in the dark about the war plans, and all sorts of rumours had circulated among the men. Some thought they were going to Circassia, others to Odessa or the Crimea, but no one knew for sure what to expect. Without maps or any direct knowledge of the Russian southern coast, which they viewed from the ships as they might have looked upon the shores of Africa, the enterprise assumed the character of an adventure from the voyages of discovery. Ignorance gave free rein to the imagination of the men, some of whom believed that they would have to deal with bears and lions when they landed in ‘the jungle’ of Russia. Few had any idea of what they were fighting for – other than to ‘beat the Russians’ and ‘do God’s will’, to quote just two French soldiers in their letters home. If the ideas of Private Rose are anything to go by, many of the soldiers did not even know who their allies were. ‘We are 48 hours sail from Seebastepol,’ he wrote to his parents, his West Country accent affecting his spelling:
and the place whear we have going to land is 6 myles from Seebastepol and the first ingagement will be with the Turkes and the russians. Thair is 30,000 Turkes and 40,000 Hasterems [Austrians] besides the Frinch and English and it will not be long before we comance and we hall think that the enemany will ground their harms when they se all the pours [powers] thairs is againest them and I hope it will please god to bring safe ought at the trouble and spare me to return to my materne home again and than I will be able to tell you abought the war.
2
 
When the expedition left for the Crimea its leaders were uncertain where it was to land. On 8 September Raglan in the steamer
Caradoc
conferred with Saint-Arnaud in the
Ville de France
(with only one arm, Raglan could not board the French vessel, and Saint-Arnaud, who had stomach cancer, was too ill to leave his bed, so their conversations had to be conducted by intermediaries). Saint-Arnaud finally agreed to Raglan’s choice of a landing site, at Kalamita Bay, a long sandy beach 45 kilometres north of Sevastopol, and on 10 September the
Caradoc
set off with a group of senior officers, including Saint-Arnaud’s second-in-command, General François Canrobert, to undertake a reconnaissance of the Crimea’s western coast. The allied plan had been to capture Sevastopol in a surprise attack, but this was ruled out by deciding to land as far away as Kalamita Bay.
To protect the landing parties from a possible attack by the Russians on their flank, the allied commanders decided first to occupy the town of Evpatoria, the only secure anchorage on that part of the coastline and a useful source of fresh water and supplies. From the sea, the most striking thing about the town was its large number of windmills. Evpatoria was a prosperous trading and grain-processing centre for the farms of the Crimean steppe. Its population of 9,000 people was made up mainly of Crimean Tatars, Russians, Greeks, Armenians and Karaite Jews, who had built a handsome synagogue in the centre of the town.
3
The occupation of Evpatoria – the first landing by the allied armies on Russian soil – was comically straightforward. At noon on 13 September the allied fleets drew near to the harbour. The people of the town assembled on the quayside or watched from windows and rooftops, as the small white-haired figure of Nikolai Ivanovich Kaznacheev, the commandant and governor and quarantine and customs officer of Evpatoria, stood at the end of the main pier in full dress uniform and regalia with a group of Russian officers to receive the French and British ‘parliamentarians’, intermediaries, who came ashore with their interpreter to negotiate the surrender of the town. There were no Russian forces in Evpatoria, except a few convalescent soldiers, so Kaznacheev had nothing to oppose the armed navies of the Western powers except the regulations of his offices; but on these he now relied, calmly, if pointlessly, insisting that the occupying forces land their troops at the Lazaretto so that they could go through quarantine. The next day the town was occupied by a small force of allied troops. They gave the population guarantees of their personal safety, undertook to pay for everything they took from them, and allowed them a day to leave, if they preferred. Many people from the region had already left, especially the Russians, the main administrators and landowners of the area, who in the days since the first sighting of the Western ships had packed their possessions onto carts and fled to Perekop, hoping to return to the mainland before the Crimea was cut off by the enemy. The Russians were as afraid of the Tatars – 80 per cent of the Crimean population – as they were of the invaders. When the allied fleets were seen from the Crimean coast, large groups of Tatar villagers had risen up against their Russian rulers and formed armed bands to help the invasion. On their way towards Perekop, many of the Russians were robbed and killed by these Tatar bands claiming to be confiscating property for the newly installed ‘Turkish government’ in Evpatoria.
4
All along the coast, the Russian population fled in panic, followed by the Greeks. The roads were clogged with refugees, the carts and livestock heading north, against the flow of Russian soldiers moving south from Perekop. Simferopol was swamped by refugees from the coastal areas who brought fantastic stories about the size of the Western fleets. ‘Many residents lost their heads and did not know what to do,’ recalled Nikolai Mikhno, who lived in Simferopol, the administrative capital of the peninsula. ‘Others began to pack their things as fast as they could and to leave the Crimea … They began to talk in frightening terms about how the allies would continue their invasion by marching straight on Simferopol, which could not protect itself.’
5
It was this feeling of defencelessness that fuelled the panic flight. Menshikov, the commander of the Russian forces in the Crimea, had been taken by surprise. He had not thought the allies would attack so close to the onset of winter, and had failed to mobilize sufficient forces to defend the Crimea. There were 38,000 soldiers and 18,000 sailors along the south-western coast, and 12,000 troops around Kerch and Theodosia – far less than the numbers of attackers imagined by the frightened population of the Crimea. Simferopol had only one battalion.
6
On 14 September, the same date as the French had entered Moscow in 1812, the allied fleets dropped anchor in Kalamita Bay, south of Evpatoria. From the Alma Heights, further to the south, where Menshikov had positioned his main forces to defend the road to Sevastopol, Robert Chodasiewicz, the captain of a Cossack regiment, described the impressive sight:
On reaching our position on the heights, one of the most beautiful sights it was ever my lot to behold lay before us. The whole of the allied fleet was lying off the salt lakes to the south of Evpatoria, and at night their forest of masts was illuminated with various-coloured lanterns. Both men and officers were lost in amazement at the sight of such a large number of ships together, especially as many of them had hardly ever seen the sea before. The soldiers said, ‘Behold, the infidel has built another holy Moscow on the waves!’, comparing the masts of the ships to the church spires of that city.
7
 
The French were the first to disembark, their advance parties scrambling ashore and erecting coloured tents at measured distances along the beach to designate the separate landing points for the infantry divisions of Canrobert, General Pierre Bosquet and Prince Napoleon, the Emperor’s cousin. By nightfall they had all been disembarked with their artillery. The men put up the French flag and went off to hunt for firewood and food, some of them returning with ducks and chickens, their water cans refilled with wine they had discovered in the nearby farms. Paul de Molènes and his Spahi cavalry had neither meat nor bread for their first meal on Russian soil, ‘but we had some biscuit and a bottle of champagne which we had set aside to celebrate our victory’.
8
The British landing was a shambles compared to the French – a contrast that would become all too familiar during the Crimean War. No plans had been made for a peaceful landing unopposed (it was assumed that they would have to fight their way onto the beach), so the infantry was landed first, when the sea was calm; by the time the British tried to get their cavalry ashore, the wind was up, and the horses struggled in the heavy surf. Saint-Arnaud, set up comfortably in a chair with his newspaper on the beach, watched the scene with mounting frustration, as his plans for a surprise attack on Sevastopol were undermined by the delay. ‘The English have the unpleasant habit of always being late,’ he wrote to the Emperor.
9
It took five days for the British troops and cavalry to disembark. Many of the men were sick with cholera and had to be carried off the boats. There were no facilities for moving baggage and equipment overland, so parties had to be sent out to collect carts and wagons from the local Tatar farms. There was no food or water for the men, except the three days’ rations they had been given at Varna, and no tents or kitbags were offloaded from the ships, so the soldiers spent their first nights without shelter, unprotected from the heavy rain or the blistering heat of the next days. ‘We brought nothing on shore with us excepting our blankets and great coats,’ George Lawson, an army surgeon, wrote home to his family. ‘We suffer dreadfully from want of water. The first day was very hot; we had nothing to drink but water drained out of puddles from the previous night’s rain; and even now the water is so thick that, if put into a glass, you cannot see the bottom of it at all.’
10
At last, on 19 September, the British were prepared and, at day-break, the advance on Sevastopol began. The French marched on the right, nearest the sea, their blue uniforms contrasting with the scarlet tunics of the British, while the fleet moved south alongside them as they advanced. Six and a half kilometres wide and just under 5 kilometres long, the advancing column was ‘all bustle and activity’, wrote Frederick Oliver, bandmaster of the 20th Regiment, in his diary. Apart from the compact lines of soldiers, there was an enormous train of ‘cavalry, guns, ammunition, horses, bullocks, pack-horses, mules, herds of dromedaries, a drove of oxen, and a tremendous drove of sheep, goats and bullocks, all of which had been taken from the surrounding countryside by the foraging parties’. By midday, with the sun beating down, the column began to break up, as thirsty soldiers fell behind or left to search for water in the nearby Tatar settlements. When they reached the River Bulganak, 12 kilometres from Kalamita Bay, in the middle of the afternoon, discipline broke down altogether, as the British soldiers threw themselves into the ‘muddy stream’.
11
Ahead of them, on the slopes rising south from the river, the British got their first sight of the Russians – 2,000 Cossack cavalry who opened fire on a scouting party from the 13th Light Dragoons. The rest of the Light Brigade, the pride of the British cavalry, prepared to charge the Cossacks, who outnumbered them by two to one, but Raglan saw that behind the Russian horsemen there was a sizeable infantry force that could not be seen by his cavalry commanders, Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan, who were further down the hill. Raglan ordered a retreat, and the Light Brigade withdrew, while the Cossacks jeered and shot at them, wounding several cavalrymen,
x
before themselves retreating to the River Alma, further south, where the Russians had prepared their positions on the heights. The incident was a humiliation for the Light Brigade, which had been forced to back down from a fight with the ragged-looking Cossacks in full view of the British infantry, men from poor and labouring families, who took malicious pleasure from the embarrassment of the elegantly tailored and comfortably mounted cavalry. ‘Serve them bloody right, silly peacock bastards,’ wrote one private in a letter home.
12
The British bivouacked on the southern slopes of the Bulganak, from which they could make out the Russian troops amassed on the Alma Heights, 5 kilometres away. The next morning they would march down the valley and engage the Russians, whose defences were on the other side of the Alma.
Menshikov had decided to commit the majority of his land forces to the defence of the Alma Heights, the last natural barrier on the enemy’s approach to Sevastopol, which his troops had occupied since 15 September, but his fears of a second allied landing at Kerch or Theodosia (fears which the Tsar shared) led him to keep back a large reserve. Thus there were 35,000 Russian soldiers on the Alma Heights – less than the 60,000 Western troops but with the crucial advantage of the hills – and more than 100 guns. The heaviest guns were deployed on a series of redoubts above the road to Sevastopol that crossed the river 4 kilometres inland, but there were none on the cliffs facing the sea, which Menshikov assumed were too steep for the enemy to climb. The Russians had made themselves at home, pillaging the nearby village of Burliuk after forcing the Tatars out, and carrying off bedding, doors, planks of wood and tree branches up onto the heights, where they constructed makeshift cabins for themselves and gorged on grapes from the abandoned farms. They stuffed the village houses with hay and straw in preparation for burning them when the enemy advanced. The Russian commanders were confident of holding their positions for at least a week – Menshikov had written to the Tsar promising that he could hold the heights for six times as long – winning precious time for the defences of Sevastopol to be strengthened and shifting the campaign on towards winter, the Russians’ greatest weapon against the invading army. Many officers were sure of victory. They joked about the British being only good for fighting ‘savages’ in their colonies, drank toasts to the memory of 1812 and talked of driving the French back into the sea. Menshikov was so confident that he invited parties of Sevastopol ladies to watch the battle with him from the Alma Heights.
13

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