The Crimean War (43 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
The prospect of spending the winter in Russia filled many with a sense of dark foreboding: they thought about Napoleon in 1812. De Lacy Evans urged Raglan to abandon the siege of Sevastopol and evacuate the British troops. The Duke of Cambridge proposed withdrawing the troops to Balaklava, where they could be more easily supplied and sheltered from the cold than on the heights above Sevastopol. Raglan rejected their proposals, and resolved to keep the army on the heights throughout the winter months, a criminal decision prompting the resignation of Evans and Cambridge, who returned to England, sick and disillusioned, before winter came. Their departure began a steady homeward trail of British officers. In the two months after Inkerman, 225 of the 1,540 officers in the Crimea departed for warmer climes; only 60 of them would return.
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Among the rank and file, the realization that there would be no quick victory was even more demoralizing. ‘Why did we not make a bold attack after being flushed with victory at Alma?’ asked Lieutenant Colonel Mundy of the 33rd Regiment of Foot. He summed up the general mood in a letter to his mother on 7 November:
If the Russians are as strong as they say, we must quit the siege, for it is generally understood that even with our present strength we can do no good with Sevastopol. The fleet is useless and the work now so harrassing that when the cold weather comes on hundreds must fall victims to overexertion and sickness. Sometimes not one night rest do the men get in six and oftentimes are 24 hours on. It must be remembered that they have no clothing except a thin blanket, and the cold and damp are very severe at night, and the constant state of anxiety we are always in, for fear of an attack being made on our trenches, batteries or redoubts quite puts a stop to calm wholesome sleep.
Rates of desertion from the allied trenches increased sharply as the winter cold arrived in the weeks after Inkerman, with hundreds of British and French soldiers giving themselves up to the Russian side.
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For the Russians, the defeat at Inkerman was a devastating blow. Menshikov became convinced that the fall of Sevastopol was unavoidable. In a letter to the Minister of War, Prince Dolgorukov, on 9 November, he recommended its abandonment so that Russian forces could be concentrated on the defence of the rest of the Crimea. The Tsar was enraged by such defeatism from his commander-in-chief. ‘For what was the heroism of our troops, and such heavy losses, if we accept defeat?’ he wrote to Menshikov on 13 November. ‘Surely our enemies have also suffered heavily? I cannot agree with your opinion. Do not submit, I say, and do not enourage others to do so … . We have God on our side.’ Despite such words of defiance, the Tsar was thrown into a deep depression by the news of Inkerman, and his despondent mood was clear for all at court to see. In the past Nicholas had tried to hide his feelings from his courtiers, but after Inkerman there was no more concealing it. ‘The palace at Gatchina is gloomy and silent,’ Tiutcheva noted in her diary: ‘everywhere there is depression, people hardly daring to speak to each other. The sight of the sovereign is enough to break one’s heart. Recently he has become more and more morose; his face is careworn and his look is lifeless.’ Shocked by the defeat, Nicholas lost faith in the commanders who had led him to believe that the war in the Crimea could be won. He began to regret his decision to go to war against the Western powers in the first place, and turned for comfort to those advisers, such as Paskevich, who had always been against the war.
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‘It was a treacherous, revolting business,’ Tolstoy wrote of the defeat in his diary on 14 November.
The 10th and 11th divisions attacked the enemy’s left flank … The enemy put forward 6,000 riflemen – only 6,000 against 30,000 – and we retreated, having lost about 6,000 brave men.
am
And we had to retreat, because half our troops had no artillery owing to the roads being impassable, and – God knows why – there were no rifle battalions. Terrible slaughter! It will weigh heavy on the souls of many people! Lord, forgive them. The news of this action has produced a sensation. I’ve seen old men who wept aloud and young men who swore to kill Dannenberg. Great is the moral strength of the Russian people. Many political truths will emerge and evolve in the present difficult days for Russia. The feeling of ardent patriotism that has arisen and issued forth from Russia’s misfortunes will long leave its traces on her. These people who are now sacrificing [so much] will be citizens of Russia and we will not forget their sacrifice. They will take part in public affairs with dignity and pride, and the enthusiasm aroused in them by the war will stamp on them for ever the quality of self-sacrifice and nobility.
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Since the retreat of the Russian army from Silistria, Tolstoy had led a comfortable existence in Kishinev, where Gorchakov had set up his headquarters, but he soon grew bored of attending balls and playing cards, at which he lost heavily, and dreamed of seeing action once again. ‘Now that I have every comfort, good accommodation, a piano, good food, regular occupations and a fine circle of friends, I have begun to yearn for camp life again and envy the men out there,’ Tolstoy wrote to his aunt Toinette on 29 October.
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Inspired by the wish to do something for his fellow-men, Tolstoy and a group of fellow-officers thought of setting up a periodical. The ‘Military Gazette’, as they called their journal, was intended to educate the soldiers, bolster their morale, and reveal their patriotism and humanity to the rest of Russian society. ‘This venture of mine pleases me very much,’ Tolstoy wrote to his brother Sergei. ‘The journal will publish descriptions of battles – not such dull and untruthful ones as in other journals – deeds of bravery, biographies and obituaries of worthy people, especially the little known; war stories, soldiers’ songs, popular articles about the skills of the engineers, etc.’ To finance the ‘Gazette’, which was to be cheap enough for the troops themselves to buy, Tolstoy diverted money from the sale of the family house at Yasnaya Polyana, which he had been forced to sell that autumn to cover his losses at cards. Tolstoy wrote some of his first stories for the periodical: ‘How Russian Soldiers Die’ and ‘Uncle Zhdanov and the Horseman Chernov’, in the second of which he exposed the brutality of an army officer beating a soldier, not for something that he has done wrong, but ‘because he was a soldier and soldiers must be beaten’. Realizing that this would not pass the censor, Tolstoy omitted these two stories before submitting the idea for the periodical to Gorchakov, who sent it on to the War Ministry, but even so publication was rejected by the Tsar, who did not want an unofficial soldiers’ paper to challenge
Russian Invalid
, the government’s own army newspaper.
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Russian Invalid
, the government’s own army newspaper.
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The defeat of Inkerman made up Tolstoy’s mind to go to the Crimea. One of his closest comrades, Komstadius, with whom he had been planning to edit the ‘Gazette’, was killed at Inkerman. ‘More than anything, it was his death that drove me to ask for a transfer to Sevastopol,’ he wrote in his diary on 14 November. ‘He made me feel somehow ashamed.’ Tolstoy later explained to his brother that his request had been ‘mostly out of patriotism – a sentiment which, I confess, is gaining an increasingly strong hold on me’.
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But perhaps just as important to his decision to go to the Crimea was his sense of destiny as a writer. Tolstoy wanted to see and write about the war: to reveal to the public the whole truth – both the patriotic sacrifice of the ordinary people and the failures of the military leadership – and thereby start the process of political and social reform to which he believed the war must lead.
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But perhaps just as important to his decision to go to the Crimea was his sense of destiny as a writer. Tolstoy wanted to see and write about the war: to reveal to the public the whole truth – both the patriotic sacrifice of the ordinary people and the failures of the military leadership – and thereby start the process of political and social reform to which he believed the war must lead.
Tolstoy arrived in Sevastopol on 19 November, almost three weeks after setting out from Kishinev. Promoted to the rank of second lieutenant, he was attached to the 3rd Light Battery of the 14th Artillery Brigade and, to his annoyance, was quartered in the town itself, a long way from the city’s defences. Tolstoy stayed only nine days in Sevastopol that autumn, but he saw enough to inspire much of the patriotic pride and hope in the common Russian people that filled the pages of ‘Sevastopol in December’, the first of his
Sevastopol Sketches
, which was to make his literary name. ‘The spirit of the army is beyond all description,’ he wrote to Sergei on 20 November:
Sevastopol Sketches
, which was to make his literary name. ‘The spirit of the army is beyond all description,’ he wrote to Sergei on 20 November:
A wounded soldier, almost dying, told me how they took the 24th French battery, but weren’t reinforced. He was sobbing. A company of marines almost mutinied because they were to be relieved from a battery where they’d withstood bombardment for 30 days. Soldiers extract the fuses from bombs. Women carry water to the bastions and read prayers under fire. In one brigade [at Inkerman], there were 160 wounded men who wouldn’t leave the front. It’s a wonderful time! But now … we’ve quietened down – it’s beautiful in Sevastopol now. The enemy hardly fires at all and everyone is convinced that he won’t take the town, and it really is impossible. There are three assumptions: either he’s going to launch an assault, or he’s diverting our attention with false earthworks in order to disguise his retreat, or he’s fortifying his position for the winter. The first is least likely and the second most likely. I haven’t managed to be in action even once, but I thank God that I’ve seen these people and am living at this glorious time. The bombardment [of the 17th October] will remain as the most brilliant and glorious feat not only in Russian history but in the history of the world.
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Generals January and February
Winter came in the second week of November. For three days and nights the freezing wind and rain swept across the heights above Sevastopol, blowing down the tents of the British and French troops, who huddled in the mud, soaked and shivering, with nothing but their blankets and coats to cover them. And then, in the early hours of 14 November, the shores of the Crimea were hit by a hurricane. Tents went flying like sheets of paper in the wind; boxes, barrels, trunks and wagons were thrown headlong; tent-poles, blankets, hats and coats, chairs and tables whirled around; frightened horses broke loose from their pickets and stampeded through the camps; trees were uprooted; windows smashed; and soldiers rushed around in all directions, chasing after their effects and clothes, or desperately looking for any sort of shelter in roofless barns and stables, behind the redoubts or in holes in the ground. ‘The scene was most ridiculous, the tents being all down and discovering everyone, some in bed, some like myself in … shirts … all being soaked through and bellowing loudly for their servants,’ Charles Cocks of the Coldstream Guards wrote to his brother on 17 November. ‘The wind was most awful and we could only keep our tents from going to Sevastopol by lying like spread eagles on top of them.’
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All morning the storm raged, and then at two o’clock the wind died down, allowing the men to come out from their hiding places and retrieve their scattered possessions: soaked and dirty clothes and blankets, bits of broken furniture, pots and pans and other debris from the muddy ground. Towards evening the temperature dropped, and the rain changed to a heavy snow. The men tried to pitch their tents again, their fingers numb with the freezing cold, or spent the night in barns and sheds, huddled altogether against the walls in a hopeless search for warmth.
The devastation on the heights was nothing compared to that down in the harbour and on the open sea. Fanny Duberly, on board the
Star of the South
, looked out at a harbour seething with foam, the ships swinging terribly. ‘The spray, dashing over the cliffs many hundred feet, fell like heavy rain into the harbour. Ships were crushing and crowding together, all adrift, all breaking and grinding each other to pieces.’ Among those ships was the
Retribution
, on which the Duke of Cambridge was recuperating from the battle of Inkerman, which had terrified him. ‘It was a fearful gale,’ he wrote to Raglan the next day, ‘and we had a more dreadful 24 hours of it than we ever spent.’
Star of the South
, looked out at a harbour seething with foam, the ships swinging terribly. ‘The spray, dashing over the cliffs many hundred feet, fell like heavy rain into the harbour. Ships were crushing and crowding together, all adrift, all breaking and grinding each other to pieces.’ Among those ships was the
Retribution
, on which the Duke of Cambridge was recuperating from the battle of Inkerman, which had terrified him. ‘It was a fearful gale,’ he wrote to Raglan the next day, ‘and we had a more dreadful 24 hours of it than we ever spent.’
It carried away two anchors & our rudder; [we] had to throw over all our upper deck guns and then we had to hold on by one anchor 200 yards from the rocks which by a merciful providence held us on … I find myself so completely knocked up and shattered in health by this … that I hope you will not object to my going for a short time to Constantinople, Gibson [his doctor] being of opinion that if I were at this moment to return to Camp in this dreadful weather I should only have to take to my bed.
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It was worse outside the harbour, where the bulk of the supply ships were moored in case of a new attack on Balaklava by the Russians. Smashed against the rocks, more than twenty British ships were destroyed, with the loss of several hundred lives and precious winter stores. The biggest setback was the sinking of the steamship
Prince
, which went down with all but six of its 150 crew and 40,000 winter uniforms, closely followed by the destruction of the
Resolute
and its cargo of 10 million Minié rounds. At Kamiesh, the French war fleet lost the
Henri Quatre
line-of-battle ship and the steamer
Pluton
, and the merchant navy lost two ships with all their crews and supplies. Boxes of French food were washed ashore behind the Russian lines at Quarantine Bay and as far north as Evpatoria. Ivan Kondratov, an infantryman from the Kuban, wrote to his family from a bivouac on the River Belbek on 23 November:
Prince
, which went down with all but six of its 150 crew and 40,000 winter uniforms, closely followed by the destruction of the
Resolute
and its cargo of 10 million Minié rounds. At Kamiesh, the French war fleet lost the
Henri Quatre
line-of-battle ship and the steamer
Pluton
, and the merchant navy lost two ships with all their crews and supplies. Boxes of French food were washed ashore behind the Russian lines at Quarantine Bay and as far north as Evpatoria. Ivan Kondratov, an infantryman from the Kuban, wrote to his family from a bivouac on the River Belbek on 23 November:
The storm was so strong that huge oak trees were broken. Many of the enemy’s ships were sunk. Three steamers went down near Saki. Zhirov’s Cossack regiment saved 50 drowning Turks from a sunken transport ship. They think that over thirty boats were sunk on the coast of the Crimea. That is why we have been eating English corned beef and drinking rum and foreign wines.
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The French recovered from the storm in a few days, but the British took much longer, and many of the problems they encountered in the winter months – the shortages of food and shelter and medical supplies – were a direct outcome of the hurricane as well as the failures of the supply system. The arrival of the winter had turned the war into a test of administrative efficiency – a test barely passed by the French and miserably failed by the British.
Confident of a quick victory, the allied commanders had made no plans for the troops to spend a winter on the heights above Sevastopol. They did not fully realize how cold it would become. The British were particularly negligent. They failed to provide proper winter clothing for the troops, who were sent to the Crimea in their parade uniforms, without even greatcoats, which arrived later on, after the first cargo of winter uniforms had gone with the steamship
Prince
. The French were better prepared. They issued their troops with sheepskins and eventually with fur-lined hooded cloaks, which became known as the
criméennes
, originally worn by officers alone. They also let the soldiers wear as many layers as they preferred, without anything remotely like that peculiar British military fetish for ‘gentlemanly’ dress and appearance. By the depths of winter the French troops had become so motley in their uniforms that they hardly looked like a regular army any more. But they were considerably warmer than their British counterparts. ‘Rest assured,’ wrote Frédéric Japy of the 3rd Zouave Regiment to his anxious mother in Beaucourt:
Prince
. The French were better prepared. They issued their troops with sheepskins and eventually with fur-lined hooded cloaks, which became known as the
criméennes
, originally worn by officers alone. They also let the soldiers wear as many layers as they preferred, without anything remotely like that peculiar British military fetish for ‘gentlemanly’ dress and appearance. By the depths of winter the French troops had become so motley in their uniforms that they hardly looked like a regular army any more. But they were considerably warmer than their British counterparts. ‘Rest assured,’ wrote Frédéric Japy of the 3rd Zouave Regiment to his anxious mother in Beaucourt:
these are my clothes beginning with my skin: a flannel vest (
gilet
), a shirt, a wool vest, a tunic, a jacket (
caban
); on my feet some boots, and when I am not on service, leather shoes and leggings – so you see I have nothing to complain about. I have two jackets, a light one issued by the Zouaves and a monumental one which I bought in Constantinople for the cold; it weighs a little less than 50 kilograms, and I sleep in it when I am on trench duty; if it gets soaked, there is no way to carry it, nor to march with it; if I can, I shall bring it back to France as a curiosity.
Louis Noir described how the Zouaves dressed to survive the cold:
Our battalions, and notably those who came from Africa, survived the freezing temperatures admirably. We were well dressed. Usually, on top of our uniform, we wore either a large greatcoat with a hood, perhaps a
criméenne
or a sheepskin shaped as a jacket; the legs were protected by long fur-lined leggings; and every man had been issued with a warm sheepskin hat. But there was no regulation uniform; each man dressed in his own style. One man dressed like a bedouin, another like a coachman, and another like a priest; others preferred to dress in the Greek style; and some stoics added nothing to the uniform. There were all sorts of clogs and boots – leather, rubber, wooden-soled and so on. Headgear was left entirely to the imagination of every man …
Dressed in summer uniforms, the British envied the warm sheepskins and
criméennes
of the French. ‘They certainly are the proper clothing for out here,’ George Lawson, the army surgeon, wrote in a letter to his family:
criméennes
of the French. ‘They certainly are the proper clothing for out here,’ George Lawson, the army surgeon, wrote in a letter to his family:
I wish our men had something of the sort … Many of them are almost shoeless and shirtless, their great coats worn to a thread and torn in all directions, having had not only to live in them during the day but sleep in them by night, covered only by the wet blanket which they have just brought up with them from the trenches.
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The allied commanders had also given little thought to the shelter the men would need. The tents which they had brought with them were not insulated on the ground, and provided little real protection from the elements. Many were irreparably damaged by the storm – at least half those used by the regiment of Captain Tomkinson of the Light Brigade, who complained that the tents were unfit to live in: ‘They let in water to such an extent that in heavy rains the ground beneath them is flooded and the men are obliged to stand up round the pole during a whole night.’ Inspecting the camp at Kadikoi, Lord Lucan found a large number of tents unfit for habitation. They were ‘rotten, torn and not capable of sheltering the men’, who were ‘nearly all frozen to death’ and suffering terribly from diarrhoea.
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Crimean Winter, Crimean Summer
by Henry Hope Crealock, a captain in the 90th Light Infantry Regiment. The caption reads: ‘The British Soldier – how he dressed in the depths of a Crimean winter – 0 degrees in the sun!!! The British soldier, how he dressed in the height of a Crimean summer – 100 degress in the shade!!’
by Henry Hope Crealock, a captain in the 90th Light Infantry Regiment. The caption reads: ‘The British Soldier – how he dressed in the depths of a Crimean winter – 0 degrees in the sun!!! The British soldier, how he dressed in the height of a Crimean summer – 100 degress in the shade!!’
British officers were much better sheltered than their men. Most of them employed their servants to install a wooden floor or dig and line with stones a hole inside their tents to insulate them from the ground. Some had them build a dugout in the ground which they walled with stones and covered with a brushwood roof. On 22 November Captain William Radcliffe of the 20th Regiment wrote to his parents:
My Hut is progressing steadily, I hope to be ‘underground’ by the end of the week. The first operation was to dig a pit, 3 feet 6 inches deep, 8 feet wide, and 13 long. An upright post is then placed in the centre of each end, & a cross-piece put on the top of these, & secured by rope, nails, or anything you can get; Poles or whatever Wood you can beg, borrow, or steal, are then placed from the earth to the cross-piece, & secured in the same way; the Gable ends are filled up with stones, mud and earth, & this forms the roof … . The Walls are the sides of the pit, & we make the roof a sufficient height for a man to stand up in. Now comes the covering of the Roof, this is generally made by twining brushwood between the Poles, & then throwing mud & earth over it, but I mean to improve on it, & am covering mine by degrees, with the skins of horses and bullocks (the former dying in great numbers) & so hope to make it water-proof beyond a doubt. This takes longer doing, for the hides have to be cured, ‘in a way.’ [Lieutenant] McNeil and I are hutting together, I have already named it ‘
Hide Abbey
’. He is now making the fireplace, a hole cut in one side of the Wall, & the chimney made of tin pots & clay. Oh! how I am looking forward to sitting by it.
At the top end of the social scale, British officers availed themselves of privileges which, in view of the suffering of the ordinary troops, were outrageous. Lord Cardigan (who had medical problems) slept on board his private yacht, enjoyed French cuisine, and entertained a stream of visitors from Britain. Some officers were allowed to spend the winter in Constantinople or to find accommodation at their own expense in settlements. ‘As far as comfort is concerned,’ Lieutenant Charles Gordon (the future ‘Chinese Gordon’) wrote, ‘I assure you my dear – I could not be more comfortable in England.’ Count Vitzthum von Eckstadt, Saxon Minister to London, later recorded that ‘Several English officers, who went through that rigorous winter, have since told me with a smile that they first learned of the [army’s] suffering from the newspapers’.
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The comfortable conditions which senior British officers were allowed to enjoy contrasted starkly with the circumstances of French officers, who lived much more closely to their men. In a letter to his family on 20 November, Captain Herbé explained the consequences of the hurricane for his living conditions:
Soldiers and officers are all lodged together in a little tent; this installation, excellent in fine weather and on the march, is gravely inconvenient during prolonged rain and cold. The ground, trampled underfoot, becomes a mass of mud, which gets everywhere, forcing everyone to splash around in the trenches and the camp. Everybody is soaked through … In these tents, the soldiers sleep together, one against the other in a group of six; each man has just one blanket, so they stretch out three beneath them on the muddy ground, and cover themselves with the other three; their knapsacks, loaded up, serving as pillows.
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