The Crimean War (42 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
It was at this moment that Bosquet’s men appeared on the ridge. Never had the sight of Frenchmen been so welcome to the English. The Guards cheered them as they arrived and cried, ‘Vivent les Français!’ and the French replied, ‘Vivent les Anglais!’
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Stunned by the arrival of the French, the Russians withdrew to Shell Hill and attempted to consolidate. But the morale of their troops had dropped, they did not fancy their chances against the British and the French, and many of them now began to run away, using the cover of the fog to escape the attentions of their officers. For a while Dannenberg believed that he could win with his artillery: he had nearly a hundred guns, including 12-pound field guns and howitzers, more than the British at Home Ridge. But at half past nine the two heavy 18-pounders ordered up by Raglan finally arrived and opened fire on Shell Hill, their monstrous charges blasting through the Russian batteries, and forcing their artillery to withdraw from the field. The Russians were not finished. They had 6,000 men still to be used on the heights, and twice that number in reserve on the other side of the river. Some of them continued to attack, but their advancing columns were ripped apart by the heavy British guns.
Finally, Dannenberg decided to call off the action and retreat. He had to overcome the angry protests of Menshikov and the Grand Dukes, who had watched the slaughter from a safe position 500 metres behind Shell Hill and called on Dannenberg to reverse the withdrawal. Dannenberg told Menshikov, ‘Highness, to stop the troops here would be to let them be destroyed to the last man. If your Highness thinks otherwise, have the goodness to give the orders yourself, and take the command from me.’ The exchange was the beginning of a long and bitter argument between the two men, who could not stand each other, as each man tried to blame the other for the defeat at Inkerman – a battle where the Russians had vastly outnumbered the enemy. Menshikov blamed Dannenberg, and Dannenberg blamed Soimonov, who was dead, and everybody blamed the ordinary soldiers for their indiscipline and cowardice. But ultimately the disorder came from the absence of command, and there the blame must rest with Menshikov, the commander-in-chief, who lost his nerve completely and took no part in the action. The Grand Duke Nikolai, who saw through Menshikov, wrote to his older brother Alexander, soon to become Tsar:
We [the two Grand Dukes] had been waiting for Prince Menshikov near the Inkerman Bridge but he did not come out of his house until 6.30 a.m. when our troops had already taken the first position. We stayed with the prince all the time on the right flank, and not once did any of the generals send him a report on the course of the battle … . The men were disordered because they were badly directed … . The disorder originated from Menshikov. Staggering though it is to relate, Menshikov had no headquarters at all, just three people who work at those duties in such a fashion that, if you want to know something, you are at a loss to know whom to ask.
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Ordered to withdraw, the Russians fled in panic from the battle-field, their officers powerless to stop the human avalanche, while the British and French artillery fired at their backs. ‘They were petrified,’ recalled a French officer; ‘it was no longer a battle but a massacre.’ The Russians were mowed down in their hundreds, others trampled underfoot, as they ran down the hill towards the bridge and struggled to cross it, or swam across the river to the other side.
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Some of the French chased after them, and a dozen men or so from the Lourmel Brigade even entered Sevastopol. They were carried away by the chase and unaware that they were on their own, the rest of the French having turned back long before. The streets of Sevastopol were virtually empty, for the whole population was on the battlefield or standing guard at the bastions. The Frenchmen walked around the town, looting houses, and made their way down to the quay, where their sudden appearance caused civilians to flee in panic, thinking that the enemy had broken through. The French soldiers were equally afraid. Hoping to escape by sea, they rowed off in the first boat they could find, but just as they were rounding Fort Alexander into the open sea, their boat was sunk by a direct hit from the Quarantine Battery. The story of the Lourmel soldiers became an inspiration to the French army during the long siege, giving rise to the belief that Sevastopol could be taken with a single bold attack. Many thought their story showed that the allied armies could and should have used the moment when the Russians were in flight from the heights of Inkerman to pursue them and march into the town as those audacious men had done.
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The Russians lost about 12,000 men on the battlefield of Inkerman. The British listed 2,610 casualties, the French 1,726. It was an appalling number killed in just four hours of fighting – a rate of loss almost on a par with the battle of the Somme. The dead and wounded were piled on top of each others bits of bodies, torn apart by shells, lying everywhere. The war correspondent Nicholas Woods observed:
Some had their heads taken off at the neck, as if with an axe; others their legs gone from the hips; others their arms, and others again who were hit in the chest or stomach, were literally as smashed as if they had been crushed in a machine. Across the path, side by side, lay five [Russian] Guardsmen,
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who were all killed by one round shot as they advanced to charge the enemy. They lay on their faces in the same attitude, with their muskets tightly grasped in both hands, and all had the same grim, painful frown on their faces.
Louis Noir thought the Russian dead, who were mostly killed by bayonets, had a ‘look of furious hatred’ captured at the moment of their death. Jean Cler also walked among the wounded and the dead.
Some were dying, but for the most part they were dead, lying pell-mell, upon one another. There were arms upraised above the mass of yellow flesh, as if begging for pity. The dead who were lying on their back had generally thrust out their hands, either as if to ward off the danger, or to beg for mercy. All of them had medals, or little copper cases, containing images of the saints, on chains around their necks.
Underneath the dead there were men alive, wounded and then buried under bodies struck down later on. ‘Sometimes, from the bottom of a heap,’ wrote André Damas, a French army chaplain, ‘one could hear men breathing still; but they lacked the strength to lift the weight of flesh and bones that pressed them down; if their faint moans were heard, long hours passed before they could be cleared.’
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Major-General Codrington of the Light Division was horrified by the scavengers who robbed the dead. ‘The most disgusting thing to feel is that the horrid plunderers, the prowlers of a battle-field, have been there, pockets turned inside out, things cut to look for money, everything valuable systematically searched for – officers particularly stripped for their better clothes, with just something thrown over them,’ he wrote on 9 November.
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It took the allies several days to bury all their dead and evacuate the wounded to field hospitals. The Russians took much longer. Menshikov had refused the allied offer of a truce to clear the battlefield for fear that his troops would become demoralized and might even mutiny at the sight of so many dead and wounded on their side compared to the losses of the enemy. So the Russian dead and wounded lay there for several days and even weeks. Cler found four Russian wounded men alive at the bottom of the Quarry Ravine twelve days after the battle.
The poor fellows were lying under a projecting rock; and, when asked on what they had contrived to subsist all this time, they replied by pointing, first, to Heaven, which had sent them water and inspired them with courage, and then to some fragments of mouldy, black bread, which they had found in the pouches of the numerous dead, who lay around them.
Some of the dead were not found until three months later. They were at the bottom of Spring Ravine, where they were frozen stiff, looking much like ‘dried-up mummies’, according to Cler. The Frenchman was struck by the contrast he had noted between the Russian dead at the Alma, who had ‘an appearance of health – their clothing, underclothing, and shoes were clean and in good condition’, and the dead at Inkerman, who ‘wore a look of suffering and fatigue’.
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As at the Alma, there were claims that the Russians had engaged in atrocities against the British and the French. It was said that they had robbed and killed the wounded on the ground,
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sometimes even mutilating their bodies. British and French soldiers put these actions down to the ‘savagery’ of the Russian troops, who they said had been well primed with vodka. ‘They give no quarter,’ wrote Hugh Drummond of the Scots Guards to his father on 8 November, ‘and this should be represented, as it is a scandal to the world that Russia, professing to be a civilized power, should disgrace herself by such acts of barbarity.’ Describing the ‘dastardly conduct’ of the Russian troops in his anonymous memoir, another British soldier wrote:
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sometimes even mutilating their bodies. British and French soldiers put these actions down to the ‘savagery’ of the Russian troops, who they said had been well primed with vodka. ‘They give no quarter,’ wrote Hugh Drummond of the Scots Guards to his father on 8 November, ‘and this should be represented, as it is a scandal to the world that Russia, professing to be a civilized power, should disgrace herself by such acts of barbarity.’ Describing the ‘dastardly conduct’ of the Russian troops in his anonymous memoir, another British soldier wrote:
Aided by night, they emerge from the fog unexpectedly, like demons … Panting with murderous intent (for fair fighting is not their aim), blessed by inhuman Priests, promised plunder to any amount, excited by ardent liquids, encouraged by two of their Grand Dukes … drunk, maddened, every evil passion aroused, they rush wildly upon our soldiers. At Inkerman we saw the Russian soldiery bayoneting, beating out the brains, jumping like fiends upon the lacerated bodies of the wounded Allies, wherever they could find them. The atrocities committed by the Russians have covered their nation with infamy and made them an example of horror and detestation to the whole world.
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But in fact these actions had more to do with a sense of religious outrage. When Raglan and Canrobert wrote to Menshikov on 7 November to protest against the atrocities, the Russian commander-in-chief replied that the killings had been caused by the destruction of the Church of St Vladimir at Khersonesos – the church built to consecrate the spot where the Grand Prince Vladimir had been baptized, converting Kievan Rus’ to Christianity – which had been pillaged and then used by the French troops as part of their siege works. The ‘deep religious feeling of our troops’ had been wounded by the desecration of St Vladimir, argued Menshikov in a letter approved by the Tsar, adding for good measure that the Russians had themselves been ‘victims’ of a series of ‘bloody retributions’ by the English troops on the battlefield of Inkerman. Some of these facts were admitted by César de Bazancourt, the official French historian of the expedition to the Crimea, in his account of 1856:
Close upon the sea-shore, amid the irregular ground upon which stand the remnants of the Genoese Fort, and which descends towards the Quarantine Bay, rose the small chapel of St Vladimir. Some scattered soldiers, more bold than the others, would often creep through the undulations of the ground towards the Quarantine establishments which had been abandoned by the Russians, and carry off thence anything serviceable to them – either to shelter themselves or to feed the fires in front of their tents; fire-wood beginning to be scarce. To these soldiers, already culpable, succeeded those marauders who, in every army, will prowl about in contempt of all laws and all discipline, in search of pillage. They contrived to get beyond the line of outposts, and penetrated during the night into the small chapel placed under the guardianship of the protecting Saint of Russia.
But if the Russians had been driven to atrocities by deep religious feelings, it was certainly the case that they had been encouraged by their priests. The night before the battle, at services in churches in Sevastopol, the Russian troops were told that the British and the French were fighting for the Devil, and priests had called on them to kill them without mercy to avenge the destruction of St Vladimir.
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Inkerman was a pyrrhic victory for the British and the French. They had managed to resist the largest Russian effort yet to dislodge them from the heights around Sevastopol. But the casualties were very high, at a level that the public would find hard to tolerate, especially after they learned about the poor treatment of the dying and the wounded by the medical services. Serious questions would be asked about the wisdom of the whole campaign when the news reached home. With such heavy losses, it was no longer feasible for the allied armies to mount a fresh assault against Sevastopol’s defences until fresh troops arrived.
At a joint planning conference at Raglan’s headquarters on 7 November, the French took over from the British on Mount Inkerman, a tacit recognition that they had become the senior partner in the military alliance, leaving the British, now down to just 16,000 effectives, to occupy no more than a quarter of the trenches around Sevastopol. At the same meeting, Canrobert insisted on shelving any plans for an assault against Sevastopol until the following spring, when the allies would have enough reinforcements to overcome the Russian defences, which had not only withstood the first allied bombardment but had been greatly strengthened since. The French commander argued that the Russians had brought in a large number of fresh troops, increasing their numbers in Sevastopol to 100,000 men (in fact, they had barely half that number after Inkerman). He feared that they would be able to go on reinforcing their defences ‘as long as the attitude of Austria with respect to the Eastern Question allows Russia to send any number of troops she pleases from Bessarabia and Southern Russia to the Crimea’. Until the French and British had a military alliance with the Austrians and had brought in ‘very numerous reinforcements’ to the Crimea, there was no point losing more lives in the siege. Raglan and his staff agreed with Canrobert. The question now was how to make provision for the allied troops to spend the winter on the heights above Sevastopol, for all they had brought with them were lightweight tents suitable only for summer campaigning. Canrobert believed, and the British shared his view, that ‘by means of a simple stone substructure under tents, the troops might pass the winter here’. Rose agreed. ‘The climate is healthy,’ he explained to Clarendon, ‘and with the exception of cold northerly winds, the cold in winter is not vigorous.’
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