The Crimean War (39 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
The 661 men of the Light Brigade advanced at a walk down the gently sloping North Valley, the 13th Light Dragoons and 17th Lancers in the first line, led by Cardigan, the 11th Hussars immediately behind, followed by the 8th Hussars together with the 4th (Queen’s Own) Regiment of Light Dragoons. It was 2,000 metres to the enemy’s position at the end of the valley, and at regulation speeds it would take the Light Brigade about seven minutes to cover the distance – artillery and musket fire to the right of them, to the left of them and in front of them, along the way. As the first line broke into a trot, Nolan, who was riding with the 17th Lancers, galloped forward, waving his sword and, according to most versions, shouting to the men to hurry them along, although it has also been suggested that he realized the mistake and was attempting to redirect the Light Brigade towards the Causeway Heights and perhaps beyond to the South Valley, where they would be safe from the Russian guns. Either way, the first shell fired by the Russians exploded over Nolan and killed him. Whether it was Nolan’s example, their own eagerness, or because they wanted to get through the flanking fire as fast as possible, remains unclear, but the two regiments at the head of the charge broke into a gallop long before they were ordered to. ‘Come on,’ shouted one man from the 13th Light Dragoons, ‘don’t let those bastards [the 17th Lancers] get ahead of us.’
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As they galloped through the crossfire from the hills, cannonballs tearing the earth up and musket fire raining in like hail, men were shot and horses fell. ‘The reports from the guns and the bursting of shells were deafening,’ recalled Sergeant Bond of the 11th Hussars.
The smoke too was almost blinding. Horses and men were falling in every direction, and the horses that were not hurt were so upset that we could not keep them in a straight line for a time. A man named Allread who was riding on my left fell from his horse like a stone. I looked back and saw the poor fellow lying on his back, his right temple being cut away and his brain partly on the ground.
Trooper Wightman of the 17th Lancers saw his sergeant hit: ‘He had his head clean carried off by a round shot, yet for about thirty yards further the headless body kept in the saddle, the lance at the charge, firmly gripped under the right arm.’ So many men and horses from the first line were shot down that the second line, 100 metres behind, had to swerve and slow down to avoid the wounded bodies on the ground and the bewildered, frightened horses that galloped without riders in every direction.
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Within a few minutes, those that remained of the first line were in among the Russian gunners at the end of the valley. Cardigan, whose horse flinched from the guns’ last salvo at close range, was said to be the first man through. ‘The flame, the smoke, the roar were in our faces,’ recalled Corporal Thomas Morley of the 17th Lancers, who compared it to ‘riding into the mouth of a volcano’. Cutting down the gunners with their swords, the Light Brigade charged on with their sabres drawn to attack the Cossacks, who were ordered forward by Ryzhov to protect the guns, which some of the attackers were attempting to wheel away. Without time to form themselves before they were attacked, the Cossacks were ‘thrown into a panic by the disciplined order of the mass of cavalry bearing down on them’, recalled a Russian officer. They turned sharply to escape and, seeing that their way was blocked by the hussar regiments, began to fire their muskets point-blank at their own comrades, who fell back in panic, turned and charged into the other regiments behind. The whole of the Russian cavalry began a stampede towards Chorgun, some dragging the mounted guns behind them, while the advance riders of the Light Brigade, outnumbered five to one, pursued them all the way to the Chernaia river.
The panic flight of the Russian cavalry was watched from the heights above the river by Stepan Kozhukov, a junior artillery officer, who described the cavalry amassing in the area around the bridge, where the Ukrainsky Regiment and Kozhukov’s battery on the hill had been ordered to block off their retreat:
Here they were stampeding and all the time the confusion was getting worse. In a small space at the entrance of the Chorgun Ravine, where the dressing station was, were four hussar and Cossack regiments all crammed together, and inside this mass, in isolated spots, one could make out the red tunics of the English, probably no less surprised than ourselves how unexpectedly this had happened … . The enemy soon came to the conclusion that they had nothing to fear from the panicstricken hussars and Cossacks and, tired of slashing, decided to return the way they had come through another cannonade of artillery and rifle fire. It is difficult, if not impossible, to do justice to the feat of these mad cavalry. Having lost at least a quarter of their number during the attack, and being apparently impervious to new dangers and losses, they quickly re-formed their squadrons to return over the same ground littered with their dead and dying. With desperate courage these valiant lunatics set off again, and not one of the living, even the wounded, surrendered. It took a long time for the hussars and Cossacks to collect themselves. They were convinced that the entire enemy cavalry were pursing them, and angrily did not want to believe that they had been crushed by a relatively insignificant handful of daredevils.
The Cossacks were the first to come to their senses, but they would not return to the battlefield. Instead they ‘set themselves to new tasks in hand – taking prisoners, killing the wounded as they lay on the ground, and rounding up the English horses to offer them for sale’.
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As the Light Brigade rode back through the corridor of fire in the North Valley, Liprandi ordered the Polish Lancers on the Causeway Heights to cut off their retreat. But the Lancers had little stomach for a fight with the courageous Light Brigade, which they had just seen charge through the Russian guns and disperse the Cossacks in a panic flight, and the few attacks they made were against small groups of wounded men. Larger groups they left alone. When the retreating column of the 8th Hussars and 4th Regiment of Light Dragoons neared the Lancers, recalled Lord George Paget, the commander of the Light Dragoons, who had rallied them together before the retreat, ‘down [the Lancers] came upon us at a sort of trot’.
Then the Lancers stopped (‘halted’ is hardly the word) and evinced that same air of bewilderment (I know of no other word) that I had twice before remarked on this day. A few of the men on the right flank of their leading squadrons … came into momentary collision with the right flank of our fellows, but beyond this they did nothing, and actually allowed us to shuffle, to edge away, by them, at a distance of hardly a horse’s length. Well, we got by them without, I believe, the loss of a single man. How, I know not! It is a mystery to me! Had that force been composed of English
ladies
, I don’t think one of us could have escaped.
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In fact, the English ladies were on the Sapoune Heights with all the other spectators who watched the remnants of the Light Brigade stagger back in ones and twos, many of them wounded, from the charge. Among them was Fanny Duberly, who not only watched the scene in horror but later on that afternoon rode out with her husband to get a closer look at the carnage on the battlefield:
Past the scene of the morning we rode slowly; round us were dead and dying horses, numberless; and near me lay a Russian soldier, very still, upon his face. In a vineyard a little to my right a Turkish soldier was also stretched out dead. The horses, mostly dead, were all unsaddled, and the attitudes of some betokened extreme pain … . And then the wounded soldiers crawling to the hills!
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Of the 661 men who set off on the charge, 113 were killed, 134 wounded, and 45 were taken prisoner; 362 horses were lost or killed. The casualties were not much higher than those suffered on the Russian side (180 killed and wounded – nearly all of them in the first two defensive lines) and far lower than the numbers reported in the British press.
The Times
reported that 800 cavalry had been engaged of whom only 200 had returned; the
Illustrated London News
that only 163 had returned safely from the charge. From such reports the story quickly spread of a tragic ‘blunder’ redeemed by heroic sacrifice – the myth set in stone by Alfred Tennyson’s famous poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, published only two months after the event.
The Times
reported that 800 cavalry had been engaged of whom only 200 had returned; the
Illustrated London News
that only 163 had returned safely from the charge. From such reports the story quickly spread of a tragic ‘blunder’ redeemed by heroic sacrifice – the myth set in stone by Alfred Tennyson’s famous poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, published only two months after the event.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldiers knew
Someone had blundered:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the Six Hundred.
But contrary to the myth of a ‘glorious disaster’, the charge was in some ways a success, despite the heavy casualties. The objective of a cavalry charge was to scatter the enemy’s lines and frighten him off the battlefield, and in this respect, as the Russians acknowledged, the Light Brigade had achieved its aim. The real blunder of the British at Balaklava was not so much the Charge of the Light Brigade as their failure to pursue the Russian cavalry once the Heavy Brigade had routed them and the Light Brigade had got them on the run and then finish off the rest of Liprandi’s army.
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The British blamed the Turks for their defeat at Balaklava, accusing them of cowardice for abandoning the redoubts. They also later claimed that they had looted property, not only from the British cavalry, but also from nearby settlements, where they were said to have ‘committed some cold-blooded cruelties upon the unfortunate villagers around Balaklava, cutting the throats of the men and stripping their cabins of everything’. Lucan’s Turkish interpreter, John Blunt, thought the accusations were unfair and that if any looting did take place, it was by the ‘nondescript crowds of camp followers who prowled about … the battlefield’. The Turks were treated appallingly for the rest of the campaign. They were routinely beaten, cursed, spat upon and jeered at by the British troops, who sometimes even used them ‘to carry them with their bundles on their backs across the pools and quagmires on the Balaklava road’, according to Blunt. Seen by the British as little more than slaves, the Turkish troops were used for digging trenches or transporting heavy loads between Balaklava and the Sevastopol heights. Because their religion forbade them from eating most of the available British army rations, they never received enough food; in desperation some of them began to steal, for which they were flogged by their British masters well beyond the maximum of forty-five lashes allowed for the Queen’s own troops. Of the 4,000 Turkish soldiers who fought at Balaklava on 25 October, half would die from malnutrition by the end of 1854, and many of the rest would become too weak for active service. Yet the Turks behaved with dignity, and Blunt, for one, was ‘much struck by the forbearing manner in which they endured their bad treatment and long suffering’. Rustem Pasha, the Egyptian officer in charge of the Turkish troops at Balaklava, urged them to be ‘patient and resigned, and not to forget that the English troops were the guests of their Sultan and were fighting in defence of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire’.
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The Russians celebrated Balaklava as a victory. The capture of the redoubts on the Causeway Heights was certainly a tactical success. The next day in Sevastopol it was marked by an Orthodox service as the British guns were paraded through the town. The Russians now had a commanding position from which to attack the British supply lines between Balaklava and the Sevastopol heights; the British were confined to their inner defence line on the hills around Kadikoi. Russian soldiers paraded through Sevastopol with trophies from the battlefield – British overcoats, swords, tunics, shakos, boots and cavalry horses. The morale of the Sevastopol garrison was immediately lifted by the victory. For the first time since the defeat at the Alma, the Russians sensed they were a match for the allied armies on the open battlefield.
The Tsar learned about the claimed victory in his palace at Gatchina on 31 October, when the morning courier arrived from Sevastopol. Anna Tiutcheva, who was with the Empress in the Arsenal Halls listening to a Beethoven recital, wrote in her diary later on that day:
The news has lifted all our spirits. The Tsar, coming to the Empress to tell her the news, was so overcome with emotion that, in front of all of us, he threw himself onto his knees before the sacred icons and burst into tears. The Empress and her daughter Maria Nikolaevna, thinking that the frightful disturbance of the Tsar signified the fall of Sevastopol, also went down on their knees, but he calmed them, told them all the joyous news, and at once ordered a service of thanksgiving prayers, at which the whole court attended.
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Encouraged by their success at Balaklava, the next day the Russians launched an attack on the right flank of the British army on Cossack Mountain, a V-shaped ridge of undulating uplands, 2.5 kilometres in length, running north to south between the eastern sector of Sevastopol and the Chernaia estuary, known to the British as Mount Inkerman. On 26 October, 5,000 Russian troops under Colonel Fedorov marched east out of Sevastopol, turned right to climb Cossack Mountain, and descended on the unsuspecting soldiers of de Lacy Evans’s 2nd Division, encamped at the southern end of the high plateau, at a place called Home Ridge, where the heights sloped steeply down onto the Balaklava plain. Evans had only 2,600 troops at his disposal, the rest of his division being elsewhere on trench duty, but the outlying pickets at Shell Hill held off the Russians with their Minié rifles, while Evans brought up more artillery, installing eighteen guns in positions out of sight. Drawing the enemy onto their artillery, the British dispersed them with a devastating fire that left several hundred Russians dead and wounded on the scrubland before Home Ridge.
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