The Crimean War (44 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
Generally, the French were better housed. Their tents were not only more spacious but most of them were protected from the wind by wooden palisades or walls of snow erected by the men. The French constructed various types of improvised accommodation: large huts which the soldiers called ‘molehills’ (
taupinères
) dug out from the ground about a metre deep, the floor lined with stone, with plaited branches for the walls and roof; ‘tent-shelters’ (
tentes-abris
) made up from the cloth of the soldiers’ knapsacks sewn together and fastened to sticks in the ground; and cone-shaped tents (
tentes-coniques
), large enough to accommodate sixteen men, made from canvas sewn together and attached to a central pole. In all these structures there were ovens for cooking and keeping the men warm. ‘Our soldiers knew how to make ovens that won the admiration and the envy of our English allies,’ recalled Noir.
taupinères
) dug out from the ground about a metre deep, the floor lined with stone, with plaited branches for the walls and roof; ‘tent-shelters’ (
tentes-abris
) made up from the cloth of the soldiers’ knapsacks sewn together and fastened to sticks in the ground; and cone-shaped tents (
tentes-coniques
), large enough to accommodate sixteen men, made from canvas sewn together and attached to a central pole. In all these structures there were ovens for cooking and keeping the men warm. ‘Our soldiers knew how to make ovens that won the admiration and the envy of our English allies,’ recalled Noir.
The body of these ovens was sometimes made of clay, and sometimes from large bomb fragments cemented in a way to form a vault. The chimneys were constructed out of metal boxes or scrap metal pieced together on top of each other. Thanks to these ovens, our troops could warm themselves when they returned from the trenches or from sentry work half frozen to death; they could dry their clothes and sleep well without being woken by the terrible night fever that tormented the poor English. Our soldiers burnt so much wood that the great forest of Inkerman entirely disappeared in a few months; not a tree, not a bush was left. Seeing our ovens, the English complained about our cutting down the trees … . But they themselves made no use of these resources. None of the English soldiers wanted to build ovens for themselves; they were even less inclined to cut their own firewood. They expected everything to be given to them by their administration, without which they were destitute.
8
Noir’s disdain for the English was commonplace among the French, who thought their allies lacked the ability to adapt to field conditions. ‘Ah! These English, they are men of undoubted courage but they know only how to get themselves killed,’ Herbé wrote to his family on 24 November.
They have had big tents since the beginning of the siege and still don’t know how to put them up. They haven’t even learned how to build a little ditch around the tents to stop the rain and wind from getting into them! They eat badly, although they receive twice or three times the rations of our troops and spend a lot more than we do. They have no resilience and cannot deal with misfortune or privations.
Even the English were forced to recognize that the French were better organized than themselves. ‘Oh how far superior are the French to us in every way!’ noted Fanny Duberly on 27 November. ‘Where are our huts? Where are our stables? All lying at
Constantinople
. The French are hutting themselves in all directions while we lie in mud and horses and men alike die of an exposure which might oh so easily be prevented. It is all alike – the same utter neglect and mismanagement runs throughout.’
9
Constantinople
. The French are hutting themselves in all directions while we lie in mud and horses and men alike die of an exposure which might oh so easily be prevented. It is all alike – the same utter neglect and mismanagement runs throughout.’
9
Unlike the French, the British could not seem to work out a system for collecting firewood. They allowed the men a ration of charcoal for burning in their fires but, because of the shortage of forage for the draught animals, it proved too difficult to haul the charcoal up from Balaklava to the heights, so the soldiers went without, though officers of course could send their servants down on their own horses to collect the fuel for them. The men suffered terribly from the freezing temperatures of December and January, with thousands of reported cases of frostbite, especially among the new recruits, who were not acclimatized to the Crimean winter. Cholera and other diseases also took their toll among the weakened men. ‘I found sad misery among the men; they have next to no fuel, almost all the roots even of the brushwood being exhausted,’ noted Lieutenant Colonel Sterling of the Highland Brigade:
They are entitled to rations of charcoal; but they have no means of drawing it, and their numbers are so reduced [by illness] that they cannot spare men enough to bring it six or seven miles from Balaklava. The consequence is they cannot dry their stockings or shoes; they come in from the trenches with frost-bitten toes, swelled feet, chillblains, etc.; their shoes freeze, and they cannot put them on. Those who still, in spite of their misery, continue to do their duty, often go into the trenches without shoes by preference, or they cut away the heels to get them on … . If this goes on, the trenches must be abandoned … I heard of men on their knees crying with pain.
10
A
cantinière
in Zouave regimental uniform, 1855
cantinière
in Zouave regimental uniform, 1855
It was the food supply where the British really fell down compared to the French. ‘It is painful for me to compare the French and English alongside of each other in this camp,’ wrote General Simpson to Lord Panmure. ‘The equipage of our Allies is
marvellous
. I see continual strings of well-appointed carts and wagons … conveying stores, provisions, etc … . Everything an army ought to possess is in full working order with the French – even the daily baking of their bread – all under military control and discipline.’ Every French regiment had a corps of people responsible for the basic needs of the troops – food supply and preparation, the treatment of the wounded and so on. There was a baker and a team of cooks in every regiment, which also had its own
vivandières
and
cantinières
, female sutlers, dressed in a modified version of the regimental uniform, who sold respectively food and drink from their mobile field canteens. Food was prepared collectively – every regiment having its own kitchen and appointed chefs – whereas in the British camp each man received his individual ration and was left to cook it on his own. This difference helps to explain how the French were able to maintain their health surprisingly well, compared to the British, even though they received half the rations and one-third as much meat as their allies. It was only in December that the British army moved towards the French system of mass food preparation in canteens, and as soon as they did so their circumstances began to improve.
11
marvellous
. I see continual strings of well-appointed carts and wagons … conveying stores, provisions, etc … . Everything an army ought to possess is in full working order with the French – even the daily baking of their bread – all under military control and discipline.’ Every French regiment had a corps of people responsible for the basic needs of the troops – food supply and preparation, the treatment of the wounded and so on. There was a baker and a team of cooks in every regiment, which also had its own
vivandières
and
cantinières
, female sutlers, dressed in a modified version of the regimental uniform, who sold respectively food and drink from their mobile field canteens. Food was prepared collectively – every regiment having its own kitchen and appointed chefs – whereas in the British camp each man received his individual ration and was left to cook it on his own. This difference helps to explain how the French were able to maintain their health surprisingly well, compared to the British, even though they received half the rations and one-third as much meat as their allies. It was only in December that the British army moved towards the French system of mass food preparation in canteens, and as soon as they did so their circumstances began to improve.
11
‘C’est la soupe qui fait le soldat,’ Napoleon once said. Soup was the mainstay of the French canteen in the Crimea. Even in the depths of winter, when fresh food supplies were at their lowest, the French could rely on an almost continuous supply of dried foodstuffs: preserved vegetables, which came in small hard cakes and needed only the adding of hot water, along with fresh or conserved meat, to make a wholesome soup; wheat biscuits, which kept for months and were more nutritious than ordinary bread because they contained less water and more fat; and plentiful supplies of coffee beans, without which the French soldier could not live. ‘Coffee, hot or cold, was all I drank,’ recalled Charles Mismer, a young dragoon. ‘Apart from its other virtues, coffee stimulates the nerves and sustains moral courage, it is the best defence against illness.’ There were many days when the French troops ‘lived on a kind of soup made from coffee and crushed biscuit’, Mismer wrote, though normally the rations ‘were composed of salted meat, lard and rice, and fresh meat from time to time, along with a supplement of wine, sugar and coffee; only bread was sometimes lacking, but instead we had biscuit, as hard as stone, which one had to crush or slice with an axe’.
12
12
All these goods were readily available because the French had set up an efficient system of supply with well-organized wagon trains and paved roads between Kamiesh and the siege lines. The harbour at Kamiesh was far more suitable for landing supplies than Balaklava. Large warehouses, slaughterhouses, private shops and trading stalls soon sprang up around the broad horseshoe bay, where three hundred ships could unload their wares from around the world. There were bars and brothels, hotels and restaurants, including one where soldiers paid a fixed price for a three-day orgy of food, wine and women, all brought in from France. ‘I went to Kamiesh,’ Herbé wrote to his family; ‘it has become a proper town.’
You can find whatever you want here; I even saw two fashion shops selling perfumes and hats from Paris – for the
cantinières
! I have visited Balaklava – what a pitiful comparison! The shacks constructed in the little port are full of goods for sale but everything is piled up pell-mell, without any order or attraction for the buyer. I am astonished that the English chose it as their supply base in preference to Kamiesh.
13
Balaklava was a crowded and chaotic harbour in which the off-loading of government supplies had to compete with private traders from virtually every nationality in the Black Sea area – Greeks, Turks, Jews, Crimean Tatars, Romanians, Armenians, Bulgarians, even a handful of Russians, who were allowed to remain in the town. ‘If anybody should ever wish to erect a “Model Balaklava” in England,’ wrote Fanny Duberly in December, ‘I will tell him the ingredients necessary.’
Take a village of ruined houses and hovels in the extremest state of all imaginable dirt; allow the rain to pour into them, until the whole place is a swamp of filth ankle-deep; catch about, on an average, 1,000 Turks with the plague, and cram them into the houses indiscriminately; kill about 100 a day, and bury them so as to be scarcely covered with earth, leaving them to rot at leisure – taking care to keep up the supply. Onto one part of the beach drive all the exhausted
bat
ponies, dying bullocks, and worn-out camels, and leave them to die of starvation. They will generally do so in about three days, when they will soon begin to rot, and smell accordingly. Collect together from the water of the harbour all the offal of the animals slaughtered for the use of the occupants of above 100 ships, to say nothing of the town – which, together with an occasional floating human body, whole or in parts, and the driftwood of the wrecks, pretty well covers the water – and stew them all up together in a narrow harbour, and you will have a tolerable imitation of the real essence of Balaklava.
14
Balaklava was only the beginning of the British problem. Supplies could not be taken from the port until they were released by the clerks of the commissariat through a complicated system of forms and authorizations, all filled out in triplicate. Boxes of food and bales of hay would lie around for weeks and eventully rot on the quayside before they were identified and cleared for dispatch by inefficient bureaucrats.
an
From Balaklava to their camps on the heights above Sevastopol the British had failed to build a proper road, so every box of bullets, every blanket and biscuit, had to be carted 10 or 11 kilometres up a steep and muddy track by horse or mule. In December and January most of these supplies had to be carried up by hand, in loads of 40 pounds a time, because there was no forage for the animals, which were rapidly dying off.
an
From Balaklava to their camps on the heights above Sevastopol the British had failed to build a proper road, so every box of bullets, every blanket and biscuit, had to be carted 10 or 11 kilometres up a steep and muddy track by horse or mule. In December and January most of these supplies had to be carried up by hand, in loads of 40 pounds a time, because there was no forage for the animals, which were rapidly dying off.
It was not just a question of poor organization. The British troops were not accustomed to foraging for food or fending for themselves. Recruited mainly from the landless and the urban poor, they had none of the peasant know-how or resourcefulness of the French soldiers, who could hunt for animals, fish in the rivers and the sea, and turn almost anything into food. ‘It has become the habit of the British soldier’, concluded Louis Noir, ‘that every meal should be served up to him, wherever he may find himself at war. With the stubbornness which is the foundation of their character, the English would prefer to die of hunger than change any of their ways.’ Unable to look after themselves, the British troops depended heavily on their regimental wives to procure and cook their food and do their laundry and any number of other menial chores that the French did for themselves – a factor that accounts for the relatively large number of women in the British army compared to the French (where there were no army wives but only
cantinières
). Marianne Young of the 28th Infantry Regiment complained that the English soldier was ‘half starved upon his rations, because he could not, with three stones and a tin pot, convert them into palatable food’, whereas there was ‘virtually nothing the French would turn their noses up at if it could be converted into food’. They caught frogs and tortoises, which ‘they cooked up to their own tastes’, dug up tortoise eggs, and made a delicacy out of eating rats. The surgeon George Lawson saw a soldier cutting off the legs of a frog alive and remonstrated with him for his cruelty, but the Frenchman ‘quietly smiled – I suppose at my ignorance – and patting his stomach said they were for the cuisine’.
15
cantinières
). Marianne Young of the 28th Infantry Regiment complained that the English soldier was ‘half starved upon his rations, because he could not, with three stones and a tin pot, convert them into palatable food’, whereas there was ‘virtually nothing the French would turn their noses up at if it could be converted into food’. They caught frogs and tortoises, which ‘they cooked up to their own tastes’, dug up tortoise eggs, and made a delicacy out of eating rats. The surgeon George Lawson saw a soldier cutting off the legs of a frog alive and remonstrated with him for his cruelty, but the Frenchman ‘quietly smiled – I suppose at my ignorance – and patting his stomach said they were for the cuisine’.
15
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