The Crimean War (51 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
The French ministers were more inclined to take the Russian offer at its face value and explore the possibilities of a negotiated settlement. Their willingness to do so was greatly strengthened during February, when Napoleon announced his firm intention – against the many warnings of his ministers and allies, who feared for his life – to go to the Crimea and take personal charge of the military operations there. Palmerston agreed with Clarendon that every effort must be made to stop the Emperor’s ‘insane’ idea, even if it meant beginning peace negotiations in Vienna. For the sake of the alliance, and to give his government the appearance of being serious about peace talks following the resignation of three senior Peelites (Gladstone, Graham and Herbert) who had doubted his sincerity after just a fortnight in office, Palmerston named Lord John Russell as Britain’s representative at the Vienna Conference.
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The appointment of Russell, a long-time member of the war party, seemed at first to be a way for Palmerston to kill off the peace talks. But Russell soon became converted to the Austrian initiative and even came to question the principles and motives of British policy in the Eastern Question and the Crimean War. In a brilliant memorandum which he wrote in March, Russell listed various ways for Britain to protect the Ottoman Empire against Russian aggression – by empowering the Sultan to summon the allied fleets into the Black Sea, for example, or by fortifying and garrisoning the Bosporus against surprise attacks – without a war whose main aim, he concluded, was to bring the Russians to their knees. Russell was also very critical of Britain’s doctrinaire approach to the liberal reform of Muslim-Christian relations in the Ottoman Empire – its tendency to impose a single reformed system based on British administrative principles rather than to work in a more conservative and pragmatic way with existing local institutions, religious networks and social practices to promote improvements on the ground. Such thinking was very Austrian and set alarm bells ringing in Whitehall. Palmerston was suddenly confronted with the prospect of being forced to sign up to a peace he did not want, under pressure from the French and from the growing number of supporters of the Austrian initiative, including Prince Albert. The Prince Consort had by early May come round to the view that a diplomatic alliance of the four great powers plus Germany was a better guarantee of security for Turkey and Europe than the continuation of the war against Russia.
The longer the Vienna talks continued, the more determined Palmerston became to break them up and resume the fighting on a larger scale. But the ultimate decision over war or peace rested with the vacillating Emperor of the French. In the end, it came down to whether he would listen to the counsel of Drouyn, his Foreign Minister, who recommended a peace plan based on the Austrian proposals to limit Russian naval power in the Black Sea, or whether he would listen to Lord Cowley, the British ambassador, who tried to convince him that any such proposal was no substitute for the destruction of the Russian fleet and that it would be a national humiliation to sign any peace before that goal had been achieved. The crucial meeting took place in Paris on 4 May, when Marshal Vaillant, the Minister of War, joined with Cowley in emphasizing the disgrace of accepting peace without a military victory and the dangerous impact that such a peace might have on the army and the political stability of the Second Empire. The peace plans were rejected, and Drouyn soon resigned, as Napoleon grudgingly committed to the British alliance and the idea of an enlarged war against Russia.
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There was no shortage of new allies for such a war. On 26 January a military convention had been signed by France and Britain with the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, the one Italian state that had broken free of Austrian political control, by which 15,000 troops under the command of the Italian General Alfonso La Marmora were sent to join the British in the Crimea, where they arrived on 8 May. For Camillo Cavour, the Piedmontese Prime Minister, the sending of this expeditionary force was an opportunity to forge an alliance with the Western powers so as to promote the cause of Italian unification under Piedmont’s leadership. Cavour supported the idea of a general war against Russia and the Holy Alliance to redraw the map of Europe on liberal national lines. The commitment of Italian troops was a risky strategy, though, without any formal promises of help from the British or the French, who could not afford to alienate the Austrians (on 22 December the French had even signed a secret treaty with the Austrians agreeing to maintain the status quo in Italy as long as they were allies in the war against Russia). But the Piedmontese would have no real leverage on the international scene until they proved their usefulness to the Western powers, and, since it seemed unlikely that the Austrians would join the war as combatants, this was a chance for the Piedmontese to prove that they were more valuable than the Austrians. Certainly, the allied commanders thought that the Sardinians were ‘smart fine-looking fellows’ and first-rate troops. One French general, who watched them disembark at Balaklava, thought they all seemed ‘well looked after and turned out, organized and disciplined, and all fresh in their new and shiny dark blue uniforms’.
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They behaved well and bravely in the Crimea.
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They behaved well and bravely in the Crimea.
The Poles too supported the idea of a general European war against Russia. With the encouragement of Adam Czartoryski and the Hôtel Lambert group, the French and British sponsored the creation of a Polish legion under the command of Zamoyski. Made up of 1,500 Polish exiles, prisoners of war and deserters from the tsarist army, the legion was equipped by the Western powers but disguised with the name of the ‘Sultan’s Cossacks’ to fight against the Russians in the Crimea and the Caucasus.
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According to a Russian officer, who had been imprisoned by the allies at Kinburn, most of the 500 Poles who had been recruited by the allies from his prison had been given money to join the Polish Legion, and those who had refused had been beaten.
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The legion did not come into active operation until the autumn of 1855, but the project had been endlessly discussed from the spring. It became entangled in the thorny issue of whether the Western powers would recognize the legion as a national force, which would therefore mean giving their support to the Polish cause as an objective of the war, an issue that was never really explored or clarified.
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According to a Russian officer, who had been imprisoned by the allies at Kinburn, most of the 500 Poles who had been recruited by the allies from his prison had been given money to join the Polish Legion, and those who had refused had been beaten.
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The legion did not come into active operation until the autumn of 1855, but the project had been endlessly discussed from the spring. It became entangled in the thorny issue of whether the Western powers would recognize the legion as a national force, which would therefore mean giving their support to the Polish cause as an objective of the war, an issue that was never really explored or clarified.
Eager to enlist more troops for a larger war against Russia, Palmerston called for the recruitment of mercenaries from around the world. He talked of raising 40,000 troops. ‘Let us get as many Germans and Swiss as we can,’ he declared in the spring; ‘let us get men from Halifax, let us enlist Italians, and let us increase our bounty without raising the standard. The thing must be done. We must have troops.’ Without a system of conscription to build up trained reserves, the British army was historically dependent on foreign mercenaries, but the heavy losses of the winter months made it more than usually reliant on the enlistment of a foreign legion. British troops were outnumbered by the French by at least two to one, which meant the French had the upper hand in deciding allied aims and strategy. During December a Foreign Enlistment Bill was rushed through Parliament. There was considerable public opposition, mainly based on mistrust of the foreigner, which forced the Bill to be amended so that no more than 10,000 troops were to be recruited from abroad. The largest group of mercenaries came from Germany, some 9,300 men, mostly artisans and agricultural labourers, about half of whom had military training or experience, followed by the Swiss, who numbered about 3,000 men. They arrived in Britain in April, each man receiving a bounty of £10. Trained at Aldershot, a combined force of 7,000 Swiss and German soldiers was sent off to Scutari in November 1855. As it turned out, they were too late to join the fighting in the Crimea.
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The question facing the British and the French was not just how to enlist new allies and recruits for a broader war against Russia, but where to focus that attack. By the spring of 1855 Russia’s forces had become extremely thinly spread and there were many weak points in the empire’s defences, so it made good sense to broaden the campaign with new assaults in these places. The only problem was deciding where. Of the 1.2 million Russian soldiers in the field, 260,000 were guarding the Baltic coast, 293,000 were in Poland and western Ukraine, 121,000 were in Bessarabia and along the Black Sea coast, while 183,000 were stationed in the Caucasus.
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So stretched were the Russians’ defences, and so frightened were they that the allies would break through, that plans were made for a partisan war on the lines of 1812. A secret memorandum (‘On National Resistance in the Event of the Enemy’s Invasion of Russia’) was drawn up by General Gorchakov in February. Gorchakov was worried by the build-up of the allied European armies for a new offensive in the spring, and feared that Russia would not have enough forces to defend all its borders against them. Like Paskevich and Tsar Nicholas, he was most afraid of an Austrian invasion through Poland and Ukraine, where the largest Russian forces were deployed, because of the ethnic and religious composition of these borderlands: if the Austrians broke through, they were likely to be joined, not only by the Poles, but by the Catholic Ruthenians in Volhynia and Podolia. Gorchakov proposed that Russia’s line of partisan defence should be drawn up on religious lines in areas behind these borderlands, in Kiev and Kherson provinces, where the population was Orthodox and might be persuaded by their priests to join partisan brigades. Under the command of the Southern Army, the brigades would destroy bridges, crops and cattle, following the scorched-earth policies of 1812, and then take to the forests, from which they would ambush the invading troops. Approved by Alexander, Gorchakov’s proposals were put into operation during March. Priests were sent to the Ukraine. Armed with copies of a manifesto written by the Tsar on his deathbed, they called on the Orthodox peasants to wage a ‘holy war’ against the invaders. This initiative was not a success. Bands of peasants did appear in the Kiev area, some of them with as many as 700 men, but most were under the impression that they would be fighting for their liberation from serfdom, not against a foreign enemy. They marched with their pitchforks and hunting guns against the local manors, where they had to be dispersed by soldiers from the garrisons.
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Meanwhile the allies discussed where to direct new offensives in the spring. Many British leaders pinned their hopes on a campaign in the Caucasus, where the Muslim rebel tribes under the command of the Imam Shamil had already linked up with the Turkish army to attack the Russians in Georgia and Circassia. In July 1854, Shamil had launched a large-scale assault on the Russian positions in Georgia. With 15,000 cavalry and troops, he had advanced to within 60 kilometres of Tbilisi, at that time defended by only 2,000 Russian troops. But the Turks had failed to move their forces up from Kars to join in his attack on the tsarist military headquarters, so he had retreated into Daghestan. Some of Shamil’s forces under the command of his son Gazi Muhammed attacked the summer house of the Georgian Prince Chavchavadze in Tsinandali, taking off as prisoners the Prince’s wife and her sister (granddaughters of the last Georgian king) with their children and their French governess. Shamil had hoped to exchange them for his son Jemaleddin, a prisoner in St Petersburg, but news of their capture caused an international sensation, and French and British representatives demanded their unconditional release. But by the time their letters reached Shamil, in March 1855, the Imam had in fact successfully exchanged the women and their children for Jemaleddin and 40,000 silver roubles from the Russian court.
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The British had been running guns and ammunition to the rebel Muslim tribes since 1853, but so far they had been reluctant to commit wholeheartedly to Shamil’s army or indeed to the Turks in the Caucasus, both of whom they looked on with colonial contempt. The capture of the princesses did not win Shamil any friends in London. But in the spring of 1855, prompted by the hunt for new ways to bring Russia to its knees, the British and the French began to explore the possibility of developing relations with the Caucasian tribes. In April the British government sent a special agent, John Longworth, its former consul in Monastir and a close associate of David Urquhart, the Turcophile supporter of the Circassians, on a secret mission to make contact with Shamil and encourage him to unite the Muslim tribes in a ‘holy war’ against Russia by promising British military support. The French government sent its own agent, Charles Champoiseau, its viceconsul in Redutkale, on a separate mission to the Circassian tribes around Sukhumi in Georgia.
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The British pledged to arm Shamil’s army and expel the Russians from Circassia. On 11 June Stratford Canning reported to the Foreign Office that he had got the Porte ‘to issue a firman on Circassian independence in the event of the expulsion of Russia from their country’ (a dubious concept in this complex tribal area). By this time Longworth himself had arrived in Circassia, and had reported that the mountain tribes were well armed with Minié rifles and hunting guns. The British agent thought the Turks could lead the Circassian tribes on the Kuban plain in a war against Russia. Mustafa Pasha, the commander-in-chief of the Turkish forces in Batumi, had met with the Circassian tribal leaders and had ‘virtually become the governor-general of Circassia’, Longworth reported. There were rumours of Mustafa raising a large Circassian army, up to 60,000 strong, to raid southern Russia from the Caucasus. But Longworth was afraid that the Ottomans were using the situation to reassert their power in the Caucasus, and he warned the British to oppose them. The local pashas were taking advantage of their renewed links with the Porte to rule despotically, and this had alienated many tribes from the British and the French as the allies of the Turks. Longworth also rejected the idea of supporting Shamil’s movement on the grounds that it had been infiltrated by Islamic fundamentalists, most notably by Shamil’s emissary (Naib) in Circassia, Muhammed Emin, who had pledged to expel all the Christians from the Caucasus and had forbidden Shamil’s followers from having any contact with the non-Muslims. According to Longworth, the Naib planned to build ‘a feudal empire based upon the principles of Islamic fanaticism’. Longworth’s reservations about supporting Shamil were shared by many Eastern experts at the Foreign Office in London. They warned against the use of Muslim forces (especially the Turks) against the Russians in Georgia and Armenia on the grounds that only a European army could have any real authority among the Christian population there.
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