The Crimean War (40 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
More were taken prisoner, many of them giving themselves up or deserting to the British side. They brought dreadful tales of the conditions in Sevastopol, where there was a shortage of water and the hospitals were overrun with victims of the bombing as well as cholera. A German officer who was serving with the Russians told the British ‘that they were obliged to come out of Sevastopol on account of the disgraceful smell that was in the town, and his opinion was that the town would soon fall into the hands of the British as the killed and wounded was laying in the streets’. According to Godfrey Mosley, paymaster of the 20th Regiment,
The army that came out of Sevastopol to attack the other day … were all drunk. The hospitals smelt so bad with them that you could not remain more than a minute in the place and we were told by an officer who they took prisoner that they had been giving them wine till they had got them to the proper pitch and asked who would go out and drive the English Dogs into the sea, instead of which we drove them back into the town with the loss of about 700 in a very short time. The same officer told us that we might have got into the town when we first came here easily, but now we should have some difficulty.
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In truth, the attack by the Russians was really a reconnaissance in force for a major new assault against the British forces on the heights of Inkerman. The initiative for the assault came from the Tsar, who had learned of Napoleon’s intention to send more troops to the Crimea and believed that Menshikov should use his numerical superiority to break the siege as soon as possible, before the French reinforcements arrived, or at least to impose a delay on the allies until winter came to the rescue of the Russians (‘I have two generals who will not fail me: Generals January and February,’ Nicholas said, adopting the old cliché of 1812). By 4 November the Russians had been reinforced by the arrival of two infantry divisions of the 4th Corps from Bessarabia, the 10th Division under Lieutenant General Soimonov and the 11th under Lieutenant General Pavlov, bringing the total force at Menshikov’s disposal to 107,000 men, not including the sailors. At first Menshikov had been opposed to the idea of a new offensive (he was still inclined to abandon Sevastopol to the enemy), but the Tsar was adamant and even sent his sons, the Grand Dukes Mikhail and Nikolai, to encourage the troops and to enforce his will. Under pressure, Menshikov agreed to attack, believing that the British were a less formidable opponent than the French. If the Russians could establish themselves with artillery batteries on Mount Inkerman, the allied siege lines on the right would find themselves under fire from behind, and, unless they recaptured the heights, the allies would be forced to abandon the siege.
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For all the Russians’ losses, their sortie of 26 October had revealed the weakness of the British defences on Mount Inkerman. Raglan had been warned on a number of occasions by de Lacy Evans and Burgoyne that these crucial heights were vulnerable and needed to be occupied in strength and fortified; Bosquet, the commander of an infantry division on the Sapoune Heights to the south of Inkerman, had been adding his own warnings in almost daily letters to the British commander; while Canrobert had even offered immediate help. But Raglan had done nothing to strengthen the defences, even after the sortie by the Russians, when the French commander was amazed to learn that ‘so important and so exposed a position’ had been left ‘totally unprotected by fortifications’.
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It was not just negligence that lay behind Raglan’s failure but a calculated risk: the British were too few in number to protect all their positions, they were seriously overstretched, and would have been incapable of repulsing a general attack if one had been launched at several points along their line. By the first week of November, the British infantry were exhausted. They had scarcely had a rest since their landing in the Crimea, as Private Henry Smith recalled in a letter to his parents in February 1855:
After the battle of the Alma and the march to Balaklava, we were immediately put to work, starting from 24 September during which time we never got more than 4 hours sleep out of 24, and very often did not get as much time even as to make a tin of coffee, before we were sent on some other duty, till the siege opened on 14 October, and although shell and shot fell like hail, as from the dreadful fatigue we had to undergo, we were so regardless as to lie down and sleep even at the mouth of the cannon … We were often being 24 hours in the trenches, and I believe there was not an hour’s drying in the 24, so that when we came to camp we were wet to the skin and all over mud even to the shoulders, and in this very state we had to march to Inkerman battle without as much as a bit of bread or a sip of water to satisfy a craving hunger and thirst.
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Menshikov’s plan was a more ambitious version of the sortie on 26 October (‘Little Inkerman’ as that dress rehearsal later became known). On the afternoon of 4 November, only a few hours after the arrival of the 4th Corps from Bessarabia, he ordered the offensive to begin at six o’clock the next morning. Soimonov was to lead a force of 19,000 men and 38 guns along the same route taken on 26 October. Capturing Shell Hill, they were to be joined there by Pavlov’s force (16,000 men and 96 guns), which was to cross the Chernaia river and ascend the heights from the Inkerman Bridge. Under General Dannenberg, who was to take over the command at this point, the combined force was to drive the British off Mount Inkerman, while Liprandi’s army distracted Bosquet’s corps on the Sapoune Heights.
The plan called for a high degree of coordination between the attacking units, which was too much to expect from any army in an age before the radio, let alone from the Russians, who lacked detailed maps.
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It also called for a change of commander in the middle of the battle – a recipe for disaster, especially since Dannenberg, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, had a record of defeat and indecisiveness that was hardly likely to inspire men. But the biggest flaw of all was the whole idea that a force of 35,000 men and 134 guns could even be deployed on the narrow ridge that was Shell Hill, a rocky piece of scrubland barely 300 metres wide. Realizing its impracticality, Dannenberg began to change the battle plan at the last minute. Late at night on 4 November he ordered Soimonov’s men not to climb Mount Inkerman from the northern side, as had been planned, but to march east as far as the Inkerman Bridge to cover Pavlov’s crossing of the river. From the bridge, the attacking forces were to climb the heights in three different directions and round on the British from the flanks. The sudden change was confusing; but even more confusion was to come. At three o’clock in the morning, Soimonov’s column was moving east from Sevastopol towards Mount Inkerman when he received another message from Dannenberg, ordering him to march in the opposite direction and attack from the west. Thinking that another change of plan would endanger the whole operation, Soimonov ignored the order, but instead of meeting Pavlov at the bridge, he now went back to his own preferred plan of attacking from the north. The three commanders thus went into the battle of Inkerman with entirely different plans.
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aj
It also called for a change of commander in the middle of the battle – a recipe for disaster, especially since Dannenberg, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, had a record of defeat and indecisiveness that was hardly likely to inspire men. But the biggest flaw of all was the whole idea that a force of 35,000 men and 134 guns could even be deployed on the narrow ridge that was Shell Hill, a rocky piece of scrubland barely 300 metres wide. Realizing its impracticality, Dannenberg began to change the battle plan at the last minute. Late at night on 4 November he ordered Soimonov’s men not to climb Mount Inkerman from the northern side, as had been planned, but to march east as far as the Inkerman Bridge to cover Pavlov’s crossing of the river. From the bridge, the attacking forces were to climb the heights in three different directions and round on the British from the flanks. The sudden change was confusing; but even more confusion was to come. At three o’clock in the morning, Soimonov’s column was moving east from Sevastopol towards Mount Inkerman when he received another message from Dannenberg, ordering him to march in the opposite direction and attack from the west. Thinking that another change of plan would endanger the whole operation, Soimonov ignored the order, but instead of meeting Pavlov at the bridge, he now went back to his own preferred plan of attacking from the north. The three commanders thus went into the battle of Inkerman with entirely different plans.
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By five o’clock in the morning, Soimonov’s advance guard had climbed the heights in silence from the northern side with 22 field guns. There had been heavy rain for the past three days, the steep slopes were slippery with mud; men and horses struggled with the heavy guns. The rain had stopped that night and there was now a heavy fog that shrouded their ascent from the enemy outposts. ‘The fog covered us,’ recalled Captain Andrianov. ‘We could see no further than a few feet ahead of us. The dampness chilled our bones.’
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The dense fog was to play a crucial role in the fighting that lay ahead. Soldiers could not see their senior commanders, whose orders became virtually irrelevant. They relied instead on their own company officers, and when these disappeared they had to take the lead themselves, fighting on their own or alongside those comrades they could see through the fog, in a largely improvised fashion. This was to be a ‘soldiers’ battle’ – the ultimate test of a modern army. Everything depended on the cohesion of the small unit, and every man became his own general.
In the opening hours, the fog played into the hands of the Russians. It covered their approach and brought them to within close range of the British positions, eliminating the disadvantage of their muskets and artillery against the longer range of the Minié rifles. The British pickets on Shell Hill were unaware of the Russians approaching: they had taken shelter from the bad weather by moving to the bottom of the hill, from which they could see nothing. The warning sounds of an army on the march that had been heard earlier in the night failed to trigger the appropriate alarms. Private Bloomfield was on picket duty on Mount Inkerman that night, and could hear the sounds of Sevastopol stirring for something (the bells of the churches had been ringing intermittently throughout the night) but he could not see a thing. ‘There was a great fog, so much that we could not see a man 10 yards away from us, and nearly all the night there was a drizzly rain,’ Bloomfield recalled. ‘All went well until about midnight, when some of our sentries reported wheels and noise like the unloading of shot and shell, but the Field officer on duty took no further notice of it. All the night from about 9 o’clock in the evening the bells were ringing, and the bands were playing and a great noise was all over the town.’
Before they knew it, the pickets at Shell Hill were overrun by Soimonov’s skirmishers, and then fast upon them, emerging from the fog, were the advance columns of his infantry, 6,000 men from the Kolyvansky, Ekaterinburg and Tomsky regiments. The Russians established their guns on Shell Hill and began to push the British back. ‘When we retired the Russians came on with the most fiendish yells you can imagine,’ recalled Captain Hugh Rowlands, in charge of the picket, who withdrew his men to the next high ground and ordered them to open fire, only to discover that their rifles would not work because their charges had been soaked by rain.
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The sound of firing at last sounded the alarm in the camp of the 2nd Division, where soldiers rushed about in their underwear, getting dressed and folding up their tents before grabbing their rifles and falling into line. ‘There was a good deal of hurry and confusion,’ recalled George Carmichael of the Derbyshire Regiment. ‘A number of loose baggage animals frightened by the firing came galloping through the camp, and the men who had been away on different duties came running in to join the ranks.’
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The command was taken up by General Pennefather, second-in-command to de Lacy Evans, who had earlier been injured falling from his horse but was present in an advisory capacity. Pennefather chose a different tactic to the one employed by Evans on 26 October. Instead of falling back to draw the enemy onto the guns behind Home Ridge, he continued feeding the picket line with riflemen to keep the Russians as far back as possible, until reinforcements could arrive. Pennefather did not know that the division was outnumbered by the Russians by more than six to one, but his tactic rested on the hope that the thick fog would conceal his lack of numbers from the enemy.
Pennefather’s men bravely held off the Russians. Fighting forward in small groups, separated from each other by fog and smoke, they were too far ahead to be seen by Pennefather, let alone controlled by him, or to be supported with any precision by the two field batteries at Home Ridge, which fired blindly in the vague direction of the enemy. Sheltering with his regiment behind the British guns, Carmichael watched the gunners do their best to keep up with the vastly superior firepower of the Russian batteries:
They fired, I should imagine, at the flash of the enemy’s guns on Shell Hill, and drew a heavy fire on themselves in return. Some [of the gunners] fell, and we also suffered, although we had been ordered to lie down to obtain what shelter we could from the ridge. One round shot, I remember, tore into my company, completely severing the left arm and both legs off a man in the front rank, and killed his rear rank man without any perceptible wound. Other casualties were also occurring in other companies … . The guns … were firing as fast as they could load, and each successive discharge and recoil brought them closer to our line … We assisted the gunners to run the guns into their first position, and some men also aided in carrying ammunition.
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The main thing at this stage was to keep the noise of the barrage up to make the Russians think that the British had more guns than they actually had, pass the ammunition and wait for reinforcements to arrive.
If Soimonov had known the weakness of the British defences, he would have ordered Home Ridge to be stormed, but he could see nothing in the fog, and the heavy firing of the enemy, whose Minié rifles were deadly accurate at the short range from which the British fired, persuaded him to wait for Pavlov’s men to join him on Shell Hill before launching an assault. Within minutes Soimonov himself was killed by a British rifleman. The command was taken up by Colonel Pristovoitov, who was shot a few minutes later; and then by Colonel Uvazhnov-Aleksandrov, who was also killed. After that, it was not clear who would take up the command, nobody was keen to step up to the mark, and Captain Andrianov was sent off on his horse to consult with various generals on the matter, which wasted valuable time.
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