The Crimean War (34 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
But suddenly the British were confronted by four battalions (some 3,000 men) of the Vladimirsky Regiment pouring into the Redoubt from the open higher ground, while more Russian guns were pitching shell at them from higher up the Kurgan Hill. With one loud ‘Ooorah!’ the Russian infantry began charging with their bayonets, driving out the British, and firing at them as they retreated down the hill. The Light Division ‘made a front’ to fire back, but suddenly and unexpectedly there was a bugle call to cease firing, copied by the buglers of every regiment. For a few fatal moments there was a confused pause in the firing on the British side: an unnamed officer had thought that the Russians were the French and had ordered his men to stop firing. By the time the mistake was corrected, the Vladimirsky soldiers had gained the upper hand; they were steadily advancing down the hill and British troops were lying dead and wounded everywhere. Now buglers truly did give the order to retreat, and the whole rabble of the Light Division, or what was left of it, was soon running down the hill towards the shelter of the riverbank.
The charge had partly failed because there had been no second wave, the Duke of Cambridge having stopped the Guards from advancing in support of the Light Division for lack of further orders from Raglan (another blunder on his part). Evans, on his right, got the Guards marching once again by giving the Duke an order to advance which he pretended had come from Raglan, who in fact was nowhere to be seen.
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The three regiments of the Guards Brigade (Grenadiers, Scots Fusiliers and Coldstream) waded across the river. In their red tunics and bearskins they were an imposing sight. On the other side of the river they took an age to reassemble into lines. Irritated by their dithering, Sir Colin Campbell, the commander of the Highland Brigade, ordered an immediate advance. A firm believer in the charge with bayonets, Campbell told his men not to fire their rifles until they were ‘within a yard of the Russians’. The Scots Fusiliers, who had crossed the river before the other Guards, at once began charging up the hill, repeating the mistake of the Light Division, which at that moment was running down the hill pursued by the Russian infantry. The two crowds of men ran straight through each other – the Scots Fusiliers bearing the main brunt of the collision, with men knocked over and bearskins flying everywhere, so that when they emerged on the other side and continued running towards the Great Redoubt they were only half their number and in a chaotic state. In the centre of this mob was Hugh Annesley, a 23-year-old ensign, who recalled what happened next:
Suddenly the Russians seemed to line the redoubt again and their fire grew hotter and then the 23rd came down in one mass, right on top of our line … . I kept on shouting, ‘Forward, Guards’, and we had got within 30 or 40 yards of the intrenchment, when a musket ball hit me full in the mouth, and I thought it was all over with me; just then our Adjutant rode up with his revolver in his hand and gave us the order to retire; I turned round and ran as fast as I could down the hill to the river, the balls were coming through us now even hotter than ever, and I felt sure that I should never get away without being struck again; halfway down I stumbled and fell, then I was quite certain I was hit again, but I got up all right, and went on. I lost my sword and bearskin here; at last I reached the riverbank and got under shelter, there were crowds of soldiers here.
Annesley had been badly wounded: the bullet that had entered his left cheek had come out at the right corner of his mouth, taking away twenty-three of his teeth and part of his tongue. Around him was the rest of his shattered regiment, which remained in the shelter of the riverbank for the rest of the battle, ignoring repeated orders to advance.
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The other two regiments (the Grenadiers and Coldstream Guards) filled the gap left by the Scots Fusiliers, but refused orders to advance up the hill. Instead, on their own initiative, the 2,000 Guards formed into lines and fired fourteen volleys of Minié rifle shot into the Russian infantry. The volleys delivered an intensity of fire achieved by half a dozen machine guns. They stunned the Russian infantry, who fell in heaps upon the ground, and then withdrew up the hill. By disobeying their commanders, who had ordered them to charge with bayonets, the Guards had demonstrated a crucial innovation – the long-range firepower of the modern rifle – which would prove decisive in all the early battles of the Crimean War. The Minié was a new weapon. Most regiments had been issued with it only on their way to the Crimea, and had received a hurried training in how to use it. They had no idea of its tactical significance – its ability to fire with a lethal accuracy from well beyond the range of the Russian muskets and artillery – until the Guards discovered it for themselves on the Alma. Reflecting on the impact of the Minié rifle, the Russian military engineer Eduard Totleben wrote in his history of the Crimean War:
Left to themselves to perform the role of sharpshooters, the British troops did not hesitate under fire and did not require orders or supervision. Troops thus armed were full of confidence once they found out the accuracy and immense range of their weapon … Our infantry with their muskets could not reach the enemy at greater than 300 paces, while they fired on us at 1,200. The enemy, perfectly convinced of the superiority of his small arms, avoided close combat; every time our battalions charged, he retired for some distance, and began a murderous fusillade. Our columns, in pressing the attack, only succeeded in suffering terrible losses, and finding it impossible to pass through the hail of bullets which overwhelmed them, were obliged to fall back before reaching the enemy.
Without entrenchments to protect their infantry and artillery, the Russians were unable to defend their positions on the heights against the deadly Minié rifles. Soon the fire of the Guards was joined by that of the 2nd Division under Evans, on the British right, whose 30th Regiment could clearly see the gunners of three Russian batteries from the riverbank and take them out with their Minié rifles without the Russians even knowing where the firing was from. As the Russian infantry and artillery withdrew, the British slowly advanced up the hill, stepping over the dead and wounded bodies of the enemy. ‘Most of the wounded were crying out for water,’ Private Bloomfield wrote. ‘A man of my company gave a wounded Russian a drink of water, and as he left him, the Russian rose on his elbow, took his musket in his hand, and fired at the man that gave him the water. The bullet passed close by the man’s head. The man turned round immediately and ran his bayonet through the body of the Russian.’ By four o’clock in the afternoon, the British were converging on the Russian positions from all directions – the Guards on the left overcoming the last Russian reserves on the Kurgan Hill, Codrington’s men and the other Guards closing in on the Great Redoubt, and the 2nd Division pushing up the Sevastopol Road. With the French in command of the cliffs above the Alma, it was clear that the battle had been won.
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By this stage, on the Russian side, there were signs of panic, as the enemy closed in and the devastating effect of their long-range rifle fire became apparent. Priests went round the lines to bless the troops, and soldiers prayed with growing fervency, while mounted officers used the knout to whip them forward into line. But otherwise there was a general absence of authority among the Russian commanders. ‘Nobody gave any direction what to do,’ recalled Chodasiewicz. ‘During the five hours that the battle went on we neither saw nor heard of our general of division, or brigadier, or colonel: we did not receive any orders from them either to advance or to retire; and when we retired, nobody knew whether we ought to go to the right or left.’ The drunken Kiriakov gave a general order to retreat from the left flank of the heights, but then lost his nerve and went missing for several hours (he was discovered later hiding in a hollow in the ground). It was left to the junior commanders to organize the retreat from the heights, but ‘we had the greatest difficulty to keep our men in order’, recalled Chodasiewicz, who had to threaten ‘to cut down the first man who should break out of the ranks’ – a threat he had to carry out more than once.
With no clear idea of where they were to go, the Russians fled in all directions, running down the hill into the valley, away from the enemy. Mounted officers tried in vain to stop the panic flight, riding round the men and whipping them, like cowboys rounding up cattle; but the men had lost all patience with their commanders. Chodasiewicz overheard a conversation between two soldiers:
1st soldier: ‘Yes, during the fights we saw nothing of these great folks [the officers] but now they are as thick as imps with their shouting “Silence! Keep step!”’2nd soldier: ‘You are always grumbling, just like a Pole; you are enough to anger Providence, whom we ought to thank for our lives.’1st soldier: ‘It’s all the same to you, provided you are not flogged.’
Chodasiewicz spoke of chaos and confusion, of barely sober officers, ‘of the ten minutes of fear and trembling on the second line of heights, when we saw the enemy’s cavalry coming forward to cut down the retreating stragglers, for the most part wounded men’.
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In the end the Russians were defeated, not just by the superior firepower of the Minié rifle, but by a loss of nerve among their men. For Ardant du Picq, who would develop his military theories from questionnaires he sent to the Frenchmen who had fought at the Alma, this moral factor was the decisive element in modern war. Large groups of men rarely engaged physically, he maintained, because at the final moment before the point of contact one side nearly always lost its nerve and ran away. The key thing on the battlefield was military discipline – the ability of officers to hold their men together and stop them fleeing out of fear – because it was when they turned their backs to the enemy that soldiers were most likely to be killed. The suppression of fear was thus the main task of the officer, something he could achieve only through his own authority and the unity he instilled in his men.
What makes the soldier capable of obedience and direction in action is the sense of discipline. This includes: respect for and confidence in his chiefs; confidence in his comrades and fear of their reproaches and retaliation if he abandons them in danger; his desire to go where others do without trembling more than they; in a word, the whole of
esprit de corps
. Organization only can produce these characteristics. Four men equal a lion.
These ideas, which were to become central to the military theories of the twentieth century, first became apparent to du Picq in a letter written to him in 1869 by a veteran of the Alma. The soldier had recalled the crucial intervention of his company commander, who had halted the panic of his men after a senior commander had mistakenly assumed that the Russian cavalry was about to charge and had ordered the bugler to signal a retreat:
Happily, a level-headed officer, Captain Daguerre, seeing the gross mistake, commanded ‘Forward’ in a stentorian tone. This halted the retreat and caused us again to take up the attack. The attack made us masters of the telegraph-line, and the battle was won. At this second charge the Russians gave, turned, and hardly any of them were wounded with the bayonet. So then a Major commanding a battalion, without orders, sounds a bugle call and endangers success. A simple Captain commands ‘Forward’, and decides the victory.
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By half past four the battle was over. Most of the Russians had retreated towards the River Kacha in small groups, without leaders or any clear idea of what to do or where to go. Many men would not be reunited with their regiments for several days. At the top of Telegraph Hill the French captured the abandoned carriage of Prince Menshikov, which was being driven off by some Cossacks. In the carriage they found a field kitchen, letters from the Tsar, 50,000 francs, pornographic French novels, the general’s boots, and some ladies’ underwear. On the hill were abandoned picnics, parasols and field glasses left behind by parties of spectators from Sevastopol.
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On the battlefield itself the ground was covered with the wounded and the dead – 2,000 British, 1,600 French and perhaps 5,000 Russians, though the exact numbers are impossible to calculate, since so many of them were abandoned there. It took the British two full days to clear the battlefield of the wounded. They had neglected to bring any medical supplies on the ships from Varna – the ambulance corps with its carts and wagons and stretchers was still in Bulgaria – so doctors had to plead with the commissariat for military carts to remove the wounded from the battlefield. Storekeeper John Rowe of the commissariat emptied his cart of its saddles to help with the wounded, and on his way back to collect his cargo came across a group of wounded officers, among them Hugh Annesley:
An officer of the 30th with a damaged arm was partly supporting an officer of the Scots Fusilier Guards. This officer was leaning forward and dripping blood from his mouth. He could not speak but wrote with a pencil in a small book that he was the Hon[oura]ble Annesley and that a ball was lodged in his throat after having knocked away some of his teeth and part of his tongue. He wanted to know what part of the field (if I may so call it) the Fusilier Doctor had his stand and whether I could convey him there. I could not tell him anything of the Doctor … I also told him I had no discretion as to the use of the mule cart but to fulfil the duty I was there upon.
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