The Crimean War (36 page)

Read The Crimean War Online

Authors: Orlando Figes

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

BOOK: The Crimean War
13.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
The guns which had escaped were tearing along the road below with some of the few carriages of the convoy which had managed to escape. Disbanded infantry were running down the sides of the steep descent without arms, without helmets, whilst a few shots from our guns hastened them along towards a Russian Army formed in dense columns below. Two regiments of our cavalry moved along the road down the valley for some distance picking up carts and horses of which we captured 22 in all, amongst them General Gorchakov’s travelling carriage with two fine black horses.
37
 
The allied columns became increasingly stretched out, as the exhausted stragglers fell behind or lost their way in the dense forests. Discipline broke down and many of the troops, like the Cossacks before them, began to pillage from abandoned farms and estates in the vicinity of Sevastopol. The Bibikovs’ palace was vandalized and looted by French troops, who helped themselves to the champagne and burgundy from their extensive cellars and went on a rampage, throwing furniture out of the windows, smashing windows and defecating on the floors. Marshal Saint-Arnaud, who was on the scene, did nothing to prevent the pillaging, which he saw as a reward for his exhausted troops. He even accepted a small pedestal table as a gift from his troops, which he had sent to his wife in Constantinople. Some of the Zouaves (who had a tradition of theatricals) got dressed up in women’s clothes from the Princess’s boudoir and put on a pantomime. Others found a grand piano and began playing waltzes for the troops to dance. The owners of the palace had left it only a few hours before the arrival of the French troops, as one of their officers recalled:
I went into a small boudoir … . Fresh cut flowers were still in vases on the mantelpiece; on a round table there were some copies of [the French magazine]
Illustration
, a writing box, some pens and paper, and an uncompleted letter. The letter was written by a young girl to her fiancé who had fought at the Alma; she spoke to him of victory, success, with that confidence that was in every heart, especially in the hearts of young girls. Cruel reality had stopped all that – letters, illusions, hopes.
38
 
As the allied armies marched south towards Sevastopol, panic spread among the Russian population of the Crimea. News of the defeat at the Alma was a devastating blow to morale, puncturing the myth of Russia’s military invincibility, especially against the French, dating back to 1812. In Simferopol, the administrative capital of the Crimea, there was so much panic that Vladimir Pestel’, its governor-general, ordered the evacuation of the town. The Russians packed their belongings onto carts and rode out of the town towards Perekop, hoping to reach the Russian mainland before it was cut off by the allied troops. Declaring himself to be ill, Pestel’ was the first to leave. Since the panic started he had not appeared in public or taken any measures to prevent disorder. He had even failed to stop the Tatars of the town shipping military supplies from Russian stores to the allies. Accompanied by his gendarmes and a long retinue of officials, Pestel’ rode out of the town through a large crowd of Tatars jeering and shouting at his carriage: ‘See how the giaour
ac
runs! Our deliverers are at hand!’
39
Since the arrival of the allied armies, the Tatar population of the Crimea had grown in confidence. Before the landings, the Tatars had been careful to declare their allegiance to the Tsar. From the start of the fighting on the Danubian front, the Russian authorities in the Crimea had placed the Tatars under increased surveillance, and Cossacks had policed the countryside with ferocious vigilance. But once the allies had landed in the Crimea, the Tatars rallied to their side – in particular the younger Tatar men, who were less cowed by years of Russian rule. They saw the invasion as a liberation, and recognized the Turks as soldiers of their caliph, to whom they prayed in their mosques. Thousands of Tatars left their villages and came to Evpatoria to greet the allied armies and declare their allegiance to the new ‘Turkish government’ which they believed had been established there. The invading armies had quickly replaced the Russian governor of Evpatoria with Topal Umer Pasha, a Tatar merchant from the town. They had also brought with them Mussad Giray, a descendant of the ancient ruling dynasty of the Crimean khanate, who called on the Tatars of the Crimea to support the invasion.
ad
Thinking they would be rewarded, the Tatars brought in cattle, horses and carts to put at the disposal of the allied troops. Some worked as spies or scouts for the allies. Others joined the Tatar bands that rode around the countryside threatening the Russian landowners with the burning of their houses and sometimes even death if they did not give up all their livestock, food and horses to them for the ‘Turkish government’. Armed with sabres, the Tatar rebels wore their sheepskin hats inside out to symbolize the overthrow of Russian power in the Crimea. ‘The entire Christian population of the peninsula lives in fear of the Tatar bands,’ reported Innokenty, the Orthodox Archbishop of the Kherson-Tauride diocese. One Russian landowner, who was robbed on his estate, thought the horsemen had been stirred up by their mullahs to wreak revenge against the Christians in the belief that Muslim rule would now return. It was certainly the case that in some areas the rebels carried out atrocities against not just Russians but Armenians and Greeks, destroying churches and even killing priests. The Russian authorities played on these religious fears to rally support behind the Tsar’s armies. Touring the Crimea during September, Innokenty declared the invasion a ‘religious war’ and said that Russia had a ‘great and holy calling to protect the Orthodox faith against the Muslim yoke’.
40
On 26 September the allied armies reached the village of Kadikoi, from which they could see the southern coast. That same day, Saint-Arnaud surrendered to his illness and gave up his command to Canrobert. A steamer took the marshal off to Constantinople but he died of a heart attack on the way, so the same boat took his body back to France. It also brought the false news that the siege of Sevastopol had begun, prompting Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris, to inform London that the allied armies ‘would probably be in possession of the place’ in a few days.
41
In fact, the allies were still three weeks away from the beginning of the siege. With the chill of the Russian winter already in the air, they were slowly setting up their camp on the plateau overlooking Sevastopol from the southern side. For a few days, both the armies were supplied through Balaklava, a narrow inlet hardly noticeable from the sea except for the ruins of the ancient Genoese fort on the cliff top.
ae
But it very soon became apparent that the harbour was too small for all the sailing ships to enter it. So the French moved their base to Kamiesh Bay, which was in fact superior to Balaklava as a supply base, since it was much bigger and closer to the French camp at Khersonesos – the place where the Grand Prince Vladimir had converted Kievan Rus’ to Christianity.
On 1 October Captain Herbé walked onto the heights with a small group of French officers to take a closer look at Sevastopol, just 2 kilometres away. With their field glasses, they could ‘see enough of this famous town to satisfy their curiosity’, as Herbé wrote to his parents the next day:
Down below one could make out the fortification works on which a large quantity of men appeared to be labouring with their picks and spades; you could even make out a few women in amongst the groups of labourers. In the port, I could perfectly distinguish, with the aid of my long-viewer, some men-of-war, of a sombre appearance, with white sails on their sides, black gangways, and guns sticking out from the embrasures. If it should please the Russians to mount all these guns on their fortifications, we can expect a jolly symphony!
42
 
 
Sevastopol in the Autumn
 
If Herbé could have visited Sevastopol, as Tolstoy was to do in November 1854, he would have found the town in a state of high alert and feverish activity. In the sweeping opening passage of his
Sevastopol Sketches
Tolstoy takes us there in the early morning, when the city was bursting into life:
On the North Side, daytime activity is gradually supplanting the tranquillity of night: here, with a clatter of muskets, a detachment of sentries is passing by on its way to relieve the guard; here a private, having clambered from his dugout and washed his bronzed face in icy water, is turning towards the reddening east, rapidly crossing himself and saying his prayers; here a tall, heavy
madzhara
drawn by camels is creaking its way towards the cemetery, where the bloody corpses with which it is piled almost to the brim will be buried. As you approach the quay you are struck by the distinctive smells of coal, beef, manure and damp; thousands of oddly assorted articles – firewood, sides of meat, gabions, sacks of flour, iron bars and the like – lie piled up near the quayside; soldiers of various regiments, some with kitbags and muskets, others without, are milling around here, smoking, shouting abuse at one another or dragging heavy loads on to the ship that is lying at anchor, smoke coming from its funnel, by the landing stage; civilian skiffs, filled with a most various assortment of people – soldiers, sailors, merchants, women – are constantly mooring and casting off along the waterfront … .
The quayside contains a noisy jostle of soldiers in grey, sailors in black, and women in all sorts of colours. Peasant women are selling rolls, Russian muzhiks with samovars are shouting, ‘Hot
sbitén
’,
af
and right here, lying about on the very first steps of the landing, are rusty cannonballs, shells, grapeshot, and cast-iron cannon of various calibres. A little further off there is a large, open area strewn with enormous squared beams, gun carriages and the forms of sleeping soldiers; there are horses, waggons, green field guns with ammunition boxes, infantry muskets stacked in criss-cross piles; a constant movement persists of soldiers, sailors, officers, merchants, women and children; carts laden with hay, sacks or barrels come and go; and here and there a Cossack or an officer is passing by on horseback, or a general in his droshky. To the right the street is blocked by a barricade, the embrasures of which are mounted with a small cannon; beside them sits a sailor, puffing at his pipe. To the left is a handsome building with Roman numerals carved on its pediment, beneath which soldiers are standing with bloodstained stretchers – everywhere you perceive the unpleasant signs of a military encampment.
1
 
Sevastopol was a military town. Its entire population of 40,000 people was connected in some way to the life of the naval base, whose garrison numbered about 18,000 men, and from that unity Sevastopol gained its military strength. There were sailors who had lived there with their families since Sevastopol’s foundation in the 1780s. Socially the city had a singularity: frock coats were rarely to be seen among the naval uniforms on its central boulevards. There were no great museums, galleries, concert halls or intellectual treasures in Sevastopol. The imposing neoclassical buildings of the city centre were all military in character: the admiralty, the naval school, the arsenal, the garrisons, the ship-repair workshops, the army stores and warehouses, the military hospital, and the officers’ library, one of the richest in Europe. Even the Assembly of Nobles (the ‘handsome building with Roman numerals’) turned into a hospital during the siege.
The town was divided into two distinct parts, a North and a South side, separated from each other by the sea harbour, and the only direct means of communication between the two was by boat. The North Side of the town was a world apart from the elegant neoclassical façades around the military harbour on the southern side. It had few built-up streets, and fishermen and sailors lived there in a semi-rural style, growing vegetables and keeping livestock in the gardens of their dachas. On the South Side there was another, less obvious, distinction between the administrative centre on the western side of the military harbour and the naval dockyards on the eastern side, where the sailors lived in garrisons or with their families in small wooden houses no more than a few yards from the defensive works. Women hung their washing on lines thrown between their houses and the fortress walls and bastions.
2
Like Tolstoy, visitors to Sevastopol were always struck by the ‘strange intermingling of camp and town life, of handsome town and dirty bivouac’. Evgeny Ershov, a young artillery officer who arrived in Sevastopol that autumn, was impressed by the way the people of the city went about their ordinary everyday business amid all the chaos of the siege. ‘It was strange’, he wrote, ‘to see how people carried on with their normal lives – a young woman quietly out walking with her pram, traders buying and selling, children running round and playing in the streets, while all around them was a battlefield and they might be killed at any time.’
3
People lived as if there was no tomorrow in the weeks prior to the invasion. There was non-stop revelry, heavy drinking and gambling, while the city’s many prostitutes worked overtime. The allied landings had a sobering effect, but confidence ran high among the junior officers, who all assumed that the Russian army would defeat the British and the French. They drank toasts to the memory of 1812. ‘The mood among us was one of high excitement,’ recalled Mikhail Botanov, a young sea cadet, ‘and we were not frightened of the enemy. The only one among us who did not share our confidence was the commander of a steamship who, unlike us, had often been abroad and liked to say the proverb, “In anger is not strength.” Events were to show that he was longer-sighted and better informed about the true state of affairs than we were.’
4
The defeat of the Russian forces at the Alma created panic among the civilian population of Sevastopol. People were expecting the allies to invade from the north at any time; they were confused when they saw their fleets on the southern side, supposing wrongly that they had been surrounded. ‘I don’t know anyone who at that moment did not say a prayer,’ recalled one inhabitant. ‘We all thought the enemy about to break through.’ Captain Nikolai Lipkin, a battery commander in the Fourth Bastion, wrote to his brother in St Petersburg at the end of September:
Many inhabitants have already left, but we, the servicemen, are staying here to teach a lesson to our uninvited guests. For three days in a row (24, 25 and 26 September) there were religious processions through the town and all the batteries. It was humbling to see how our fighters, standing by their bivouacs, bowed before the cross and the icons carried by our women-folk … . The churches have been emptied of their treasures; I say it was not needed, but people do not listen to me now, they are all afraid. Any moment now we are expecting a general attack, both by land and sea. So, my brother, that’s how things are here, and what will happen next only the Lord knows.
 
Despite Lipkin’s confidence, the Russian commanders were seriously considering abandoning Sevastopol after the battle at the Alma. There were then eight steamers on the northern side waiting for the order to evacuate the troops and ten warships on the southern side to cover their escape. Many of the city’s residents made their own getaway as the enemy approached, though their path was blocked by Russian troops. Water supplies in the city were running dangerously low, the fountains having stopped and the whole population being dependent on the wells, which were always short of water at this time of year. Told by deserters that the city was supplied by water springs and pipes that ran down a ravine from the heights where they were camped, the British and the French had cut off this supply, leaving Sevastopol with just the aqueduct that supplied the naval dockyard.
5
As the allies set up camp and prepared their bombardment of the town, the Russians worked around the clock to strengthen its defences on the southern side. With Menshikov nowhere to be seen, the main responsibility for the defence of Sevastopol passed into the hands of three commanders: Admiral Kornilov, chief of staff of the Black Sea Fleet; Totleben, the engineer; and Nakhimov, the hero of Sinope and commander of the port, who was popular among the sailors and seen as ‘one of them’. All three men were military professionals of a new type that contrasted strongly with the courtier Menshikov. Their energy was remarkable. Kornilov was everywhere, inspiring the people by his daily presence in every sector of the defensive works, and promising rewards to everyone, if they could only keep the town. Tolstoy, who was to join Lipkin as a battery commander in the Fourth Bastion, wrote a letter to his brother the day after he arrived in which he described Kornilov on his rounds. Instead of hailing the men with the customary greeting, ‘Health to you!’, the admiral called to them, ‘If you must die, lads, will you die?’ ‘And’, Tolstoy wrote, ‘the men shouted “We will die, Your Excellency, Hurrah!” And they do not say if for effect, for in every face I saw not jesting but earnestness.’
6
Kornilov himself was far from certain that the city could be saved. On 27 September he wrote to his wife:
We have only 5,000 reserves and 10,000 sailors, armed with various weaponry, even pikes. Not much of a garrison to defend a fortress whose defences are stretched over many miles and broken up so much that there is no direct communication between them; but what will be, will be. We have resolved to make a stand. It will be a miracle if we hold out; and if not …
 
His uncertainty was increased when the sailors discovered a large supply of vodka on the wharf and went on a drunken rampage for three days. It was left to Kornilov to destroy the supplies of liquor and sober up his sailors for battle.
7
The defensive preparations were frenzied and improvised. When the work began, it was discovered that there were no shovels in Sevastopol, so men were sent to procure as many as they could from Odessa. Three weeks later, they returned with 400 spades. Meanwhile, the people of the city worked in the main with wooden shovels they had made from torn-up planks of wood. The whole population of Sevastopol – sailors, soldiers, prisoners of war, working men and women (including prostitutes) – was involved in digging trenches, carting earth to the defences, building walls and barricades, and constructing batteries with earth, fascines and gabions,
ag
while teams of sailors hauled up the heavy guns they had taken from their ships. Every means of carrying the earth was commandeered, and when there were no baskets, bags or buckets, the diggers carried it in their folded clothes. The expectation of an imminent attack added greater urgency to their work. Inspecting these defences a year later, the allies were amazed by the skill and ingenuity of the Russians.
8
Informed of these heroic efforts by the people of Sevastopol, the Tsar wrote to General Gorchakov at the end of September, reminding him of the ‘special Russian spirit’ that had saved the country from Napoleon, and urging him to summon it again against the British and the French. ‘We shall pray to God, that you may call on them to save Sevastopol, the fleet and the Russian land.
Do not bow to anyone
,’ he underlined in his own hand. ‘
Show the world that we are the same Russians who stood firm in 1812
.’ The Tsar also wrote to Menshikov, at that time near the River Belbek, north-east of Sevastopol, with a message for the people of the town:
Tell our young sailors that all my hopes are invested in them. Tell them not to bow to anyone, to put their faith in God’s mercy, to remember that we are Russians, that we are defending our homeland and our faith, and to submit humbly to the will of God. May God preserve you! My prayers are all for you and for our holy cause.
9
 
Meanwhile, the allies embarked on their lengthy preparations for the siege. Raglan had wanted an immediate assault. He had seen the weakness of the Russian defences, and was encouraged by the forthright and masterful Sir George Cathcart, in command of the 4th Division, whose troops had taken up positions on a hill from which he could see the whole town. It was from there that he wrote to Raglan:
If you and Sir John Burgoyne would pay me a visit you can see everything in the way of defences, which is not much. They are working at two or three redoubts, but the place is only enclosed by a thing like a loose park wall not in good repair. I am sure I could walk into it with scarcely the loss of a man at night or an hour before day-break if all the rest of the force was up between the sea and the hill I am upon. We would leave our packs and run into it even in open day only risking a few shots whilst we passed the redoubts.
 
Burgoyne, formerly an advocate of a quick assault, now disagreed. Concerned with loss of lives, the army’s chief engineer insisted on the need to subdue the enemy’s fire with siege guns before an assault by troops was launched. The French agreed with him. So the allies settled down to the slow process of landing siege artillery and hauling it up to the heights. There were endless problems with the British guns, many of which had to be dismantled before they could be unloaded from the ships. ‘The placing of our heavy ship guns in position has been most tedious,’ Captain William Cameron of the Grenadier Guards wrote to his father.

Other books

Ohre (Heaven's Edge) by Silverwood, Jennifer
Invisible by L.A. Remenicky
Aimee and the Heartthrob by Ophelia London
Earthfall by Mark Walden
Rena's Promise by Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Heather Dune Macadam