The Crimean War (41 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
Meanwhile, at 5 a.m., Pavlov’s men had arrived at the Inkerman Bridge, only to discover that the naval detachment had not prepared it for their crossing, as they had been ordered to by Dannenberg. They had to wait until seven o’clock before the bridge was ready and they could cross the Chernaia. From there, they fanned out and climbed the heights in three different directions: the Okhotsky, Yakutsky and Selenginsky regiments and most of the artillery branching to the right to reach the top by the Sapper Road and join Soimonov’s men, the Borodinsky ascending by the centre route along the Volovia Ravine, while the Tarutinsky Regiment climbed the steep and rocky slopes of the Quarry Ravine towards the Sandbag Battery under cover of Soimonov’s guns.
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There were fierce gun battles across the heights – small groups of fighters dashing everywhere, using the thick bushes to conceal themselves and fire at each other like skirmishers – but the most intense was on the British right flank around the Sandbag Battery. Twenty minutes after they had crossed the bridge, the advance battalions of the Tarutinsky Regiment overpowered the small picket in the battery, but then came under a series of attacks from a combined British force of 700 men under the command of Brigadier Adams. In frenzied hand-to-hand fighting, the Sandbag Battery changed sides several times. By eight o’clock Adams’s men were outnumbered by the Russians ten to one, but because of the narrow ridge on which the fighting for the battery took place, the Russians could not make their numbers tell in one assault. Once the British had regained the battery, the Russians came at them again in a series of attacks. Private Edward Hyde was in the battery with Adams’s men:
The Russian infantry got right up to it, and clambered up the front and sides of it, and we had a hard job to keep them out. Directly we saw their heads above the parapet, or looking into the embrasures, we fired at them or bayoneted them as fast as we could. They came on like ants; no sooner was one knocked backwards than another clambered over the dead bodies to take his place, all of them yelling and shouting. We in the battery were not quiet, you may be sure, and what with the cheering and shouting, the thud of blows, the clash of bayonets and swords, the ping of the bullets, the whistling of the shells, the foggy atmosphere, and the smell of powder and blood, the scene inside the battery where we were was beyond the power of man to imagine or describe.
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Eventually, the Russians could no longer be held back – they swarmed into the battery – and Adams and his men were forced to retreat towards Home Ridge. But reinforcements soon arrived, the Duke of Cambridge with the Grenadiers, and a new assault was launched against the Russians grouped around the Sandbag Battery, which by this stage had assumed a symbolic status far beyond its military significance to either side. The Grenadiers charged the Russians with their bayonets, Cambridge shouting at his men to keep to the high ground and not become dispersed by following the Russians down the hill, but few men could hear the Duke or see him in the fog. Among the Grenadiers was George Higginson, who witnessed the charge ‘down the rugged slope, full upon the advancing host’.
The exultant cheer … confirmed my dread that our gallant fellows would soon get out of hand; and in fact, except for one short period during the long day when we contrived to make some kind of regular formation, the contest was maintained by groups under company officers, who were unable, owing to the mist and smoke of musketry fire, to preserve any definite touch.
The fighting became increasingly frenzied and chaotic, as one side charged the other down the hill, only to be counter-attacked by another group of men from further up the hill. The soldiers on both sides lost all discipline and became disordered mobs, uncontrolled by any officers and driven on by rage and fear (reinforced by the fact that they could not see each other in the fog). They charged and counter-charged, yelling and screaming, firing their guns, slashing out in all directions with their swords, and when they had no ammunition left they began throwing rocks at one another, striking out with their rifle butts, even kicking and biting.
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In this sort of fighting the cohesion of the small combat unit was decisive. Everything came down to whether groups of men and their line commanders could keep their discipline and unity – whether they could organize themselves and stick together through the fight without losing nerve or running away out of fear. The soldiers of the Tarutinsky Regiment failed this crucial test.
Chodasiewicz was one of the company officers in the 4th Battalion of the Tarutinsky Regiment. Their task was to take the eastern side of Mount Inkerman, providing cover for Pavlov’s other troops to bring up gabions and fascines for a trench work against the British positions. The unit lost its way in the thick fog, veered towards the left, and became mixed with disgruntled soldiers from the Ekaterinburg Regiment, among Soimonov’s troops already on the heights, who led them back down into the Quarry. By this stage, Chodasiewicz had lost control of his men, who were totally dispersed among the Ekaterinburg Regiment. Undirected by the officers, some of the Tarutinsky men began to climb the hill again. Ahead of them they could make out some of their comrades ‘standing before a small battery shouting “Hurrah!” and waving their caps for us to come on’, recalled Chodasiewicz; ‘the buglers continually played the advance, and several of my men broke from the ranks at a run!’ At the Sandbag Battery, Chodasiewicz found his men in total disorder. Various regiments were all mixed up so that their command structures entirely broke down. He ordered his men to charge with bayonets, and they overran the British in the battery, but then they failed to push them down the hill, remaining instead inside the battery, where ‘they forgot their duty and wandered about in search of booty’, recalled another officer, who thought ‘all this occurred because of a lack of officers and leadership’.
With all the fog and mixing-up of men, there were many instances of friendly fire on the Russian side. Soimonov’s troops, in particular the Ekaterinburg Regiment, began firing at the men inside the Sandbag Battery, some thinking they were firing on the enemy, others on the orders of an officer who feared the insubordination of his men and tried to discipline them by having others shoot at them. ‘The chaos was something extraordinary,’ recalled Chodasiewicz: ‘some of the men were grumbling at the Ekaterinburg Regiment, others were shouting for artillery to come up, the buglers constantly played the signal to advance, and drummers beat to the attack, but nobody thought of moving; there they stood like a flock of sheep.’ A bugle call to manoeuvre left caused a sudden panic among the Tarutinsky men, who thought that they could hear the distant noise of the French drums. ‘There were shouts on all sides of “Where is the reserve?”,’ recalled an officer. Fearing they had no support, the troops began to stampede down the hill. According to Chodasiewicz, ‘Officers shouted to the men to halt, but to no avail, for none of them thought of stopping, but each followed the direction prompted by his fancy or his fears.’ No officer, however senior, was able to reverse the panic retreat of the men, who ran down to the bottom of the Quarry Ravine and crowded around the Sevastopol aqueduct, which alone stopped their flight. When Lieutenant General Kiriakov, the commander of the 17th Infantry Division who had gone absent at the Alma, appeared at the aqueduct and rode among the men on his white charger, slashing at them with his whip and shouting at them to climb back up the hill, the soldiers paid him little attention, and then shouted back at him, ‘Go up there yourself!’ Chodasiewicz was ordered to collect his company, but he had only 45 men left out of a company of 120.
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The Tarutinsky men had not been wrong when they thought they could hear the sound of the French drums. Raglan had sent an urgent call for help to Bosquet on the Sapoune Heights at 7 a.m., after he had arrived to inspect the battle at Home Ridge (he had also sent an order for two heavy 18-pounder cannon to be brought up from the siege batteries to counter the Russian cannonade but the order had gone astray). Bosquet’s men had already sensed that the British were in danger when they heard the early firing. The Zouaves had even heard the Russians on the march the night before – their African experience having taught them how to listen to the ground – and they were ready for the order to attack before it came. Nothing suited their type of fighting better than the foggy conditions and bushy scrubland of the hills: they were used to mountain warfare from Algeria and were at their best when fighting in small groups and ambushing the enemy. The Zouaves and Chasseurs were eager to advance, but Bosquet held them back, fearful of Liprandi’s army, 22,000 soldiers and 88 field guns in the South Valley under the command of Gorchakov, which had begun a distant cannonade against the Sapoune Heights. ‘Forward! Let’s march! It’s time to finish them!’ the Zouaves cried impatiently when Bosquet appeared among their ranks. They were angry when the general walked before them. ‘A revolt was imminent,’ recalled Louis Noir, who was in the first column of Zouaves.
The deep respect and true affection which we felt for Bosquet were tested to the limit by the impetuosity of the old Algerian bands. Suddenly Bosquet turned and drew his sword, placed himself at the head of his Zouaves, his Turks and Chasseurs, undefeated troops he had known for years, and pointing his sword towards the 20,000 Russian troops amassed on the redoubts of the opposing heights, shouted in a thunderous voice: ‘En avant! A la baïonnette!’
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In fact, the size of Liprandi’s army was not as large as Bosquet had feared, since Gorchakov had foolishly decided to position half of them behind the Chernaia river in reserve, and had dispersed the rest between the lower slopes of the Sapoune Heights and the Sandbag Battery. But the Zouaves did not know this; they could not see their enemy in the thick fog, and attacked with fearsome energy to overcome what they believed to be their disadvantage in numbers. Charging forward in small groups, and using the brushwood for cover while they fired at the Russian columns, their tactic was to scare the Russians off by any means they could. They yelled and screamed and fired in the air as they ran forward. Their bugles sounded and their drummers beat as loud as they could. Jean Cler, a colonel of the 2nd Zouave Regiment, even told his men as they prepared to go into the battle: ‘Spread out your pants as wide as they will go, and make as big a show of yourselves as you can.’
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The Russians were overwhelmed by the attacking force of the Zouaves, whose Minié rifles took out hundreds of men within the first few seconds of their charge. Racing up the hill-bend round Home Ridge, the Zouaves drove the Russians from the Sandbag Battery and chased them down to the bottom of St Clement’s Ravine. Their momentum took them around the curving spur into Quarry Ravine, already heaving with the soldiers of the Tarutinsky Regiment, who began to panic in the crush and fired back at the new arrivals, killing mainly their own men, before the Zouaves backed out of the crossfire and climbed towards Home Ridge.
There they found the British in desperate battle with the forces on the right wing of Pavlov’s pincer movement: the Okhotsky, Yakutsky and Selenginsky regiments, who had joined the remnants of Soimonov’s troops and, under the command of Dannenberg, began to attack the Sandbag Battery again. The fighting was brutal, wave after wave of Russians charged with their bayonets only to be shot down by the British or tussle with them ‘hand-to-hand, foot to foot, muzzle to muzzle, butt-end to butt-end’, recalled Captain Wilson of the Coldstream Guards.
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The Guards were vastly outnumbered by the Russians, and in urgent need of reinforcements when they were at last joined by six companies of Cathcart’s 4th Division under the command of General Torrens. The new men were spoiling for a fight (they had missed out on the action at Balaklava and the Alma) and, ordered to attack the Russians on the ridge by the Sandbag Battery, they charged down the valley after them, losing all discipline and coming under heavy close-range fire by the Yakutsky and Selenginsky regiments from the heights above. Among those killed in the hail of bullets was Cathcart, the spot where he was buried becoming known as ‘Cathcart’s Hill’.
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The Guards were vastly outnumbered by the Russians, and in urgent need of reinforcements when they were at last joined by six companies of Cathcart’s 4th Division under the command of General Torrens. The new men were spoiling for a fight (they had missed out on the action at Balaklava and the Alma) and, ordered to attack the Russians on the ridge by the Sandbag Battery, they charged down the valley after them, losing all discipline and coming under heavy close-range fire by the Yakutsky and Selenginsky regiments from the heights above. Among those killed in the hail of bullets was Cathcart, the spot where he was buried becoming known as ‘Cathcart’s Hill’.
By this stage Cambridge and the Guards were down to their last 100 men in the Sandbag Battery. There were 2,000 Russians against them. They had no ammunition left. The Duke proposed to make a stand for the Sandbag Battery – an idiotic sacrifice for this relatively minor landmark on the battlefield – but his staff officers dissuaded him: it would be disastrous for the Queen’s cousin and the colours of her Guards to be brought before the Tsar. Among those officers was Higginson, who led the retreat to Home Ridge. ‘Clustered round the Colours,’ he recalled,
the men passed slowly backwards, keeping their front full towards the enemy, their bayonets ready at the ‘charge’. As a comrade fell, wounded or dead, his fellow took his place, and maintained the compactness of the gradually diminishing group, that held on with unflinching stubbornness in protecting the flags … . Happily the ground on our right was so precipitous as to deter the enemy from attempting to outflank us on that side. As from time to time some Russians soldiers, more adventurous than their fellows, sprang forwards towards our compact group, two or three of our Grenadiers would dash out with the bayonet and compel steady retreat. Nevertheless our position was critical.
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