The Crimean War (55 page)

Read The Crimean War Online

Authors: Orlando Figes

Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856

BOOK: The Crimean War
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1.
Put in the boiler 30 quarts, 7½ gallons, or 5½ camp-kettles of water
2.
Add to it 50 lbs of meat, either beef or mutton
3.
The rations of preserved or fresh vegetables
4.
Ten small tablespoonfuls of salt
5.
Simmer for three hours, and serve.
42
 
The construction of a railway from Balaklava to the British camp above Sevastopol was the key to the improvement of supply. The idea for the Crimean railway – the first in the history of warfare – went back to the previous November, when news of the terrible conditions of the British army first broke in
The Times
, and it became apparent that one of the main problems was the need to transport all supplies along the muddy track from Balaklava to the heights. These reports were read by Samuel Peto, a railwayman who had made his mark as a successful London building contractor
ay
before moving into railways in the 1840s. With a grant of £100,000 from the Aberdeen government, Peto assembled the materials for the railway and recruited a huge team of mainly Irish and very unruly navvies. They started to arrive in the Crimea at the end of January. The navvies worked at a furious pace, laying up to as much as half a kilometre of track a day, and by the end of March the entire railway line of 10 kilometres connecting Balaklava with the loading bays near the British camp had been completed. It was just in time to help with the transport of the newly arrived heavy guns and mortar shells that Raglan had instructed to be taken up from Balaklava to the heights in preparation for a second bombardment of Sevastopol which the allies had agreed to begin on Easter Monday, 9 April.
43
 
 
The plan was to overwhelm Sevastopol with ten days of continual bombardment, followed by an assault on the town. With five hundred French and British guns firing round the clock, almost twice as many as in the first bombardment of October, this now became not only the heaviest bombardment of the siege, but the heaviest in history until that time. Among the allied troops, desperate for an ending of the war, there were high expectations for the attack, making them impatient for it to begin. ‘The works are continuing, as always, and we are hardly advancing!’ Herbé wrote to his family on 6 April. ‘The impatience of the officers and soldiers has created a certain discontent, everybody blames each other for the mistakes of the past, and one senses that an energetic breakthrough is now needed to reimpose order … Things cannot go on like this much longer.’
44
The Russians knew about the preparations for a bombardment. Deserters from the allied camp had warned them about it, and they could see with their own eyes the intense activity in the enemy’s redoubts, where new guns appeared every day.
45
On the night of Easter Sunday, a few hours before the shelling was due to begin, prayers had been held in churches throughout the town. There were also prayers in all the bastions. Priests processed along the Russian defences with icons, including the holy icon of St Sergius which had been sent by the Troitsky Monastery in Sergiev Posad on the orders of the Tsar. It had accompanied the early Romanovs on their campaigns and had been with the Moscow militia in 1812. Everybody felt the immense significance of these holy rituals. There was a general sense that the city’s destiny was about to be decided by divine providence, a feeling reinforced by the fact that both sides were celebrating Easter, which that year fell on the same day in the Orthodox and Latin calendars. ‘We prayed with fervency,’ wrote a Russian nurse. ‘We prayed with all our might for the city and ourselves.’
At the midnight Mass at the main church, so brightly lit with candles that it could be seen from the enemy’s trenches, a vast crowd spilled onto the streets and stood in silent prayer. Every person held a candle, bowing periodically to cross themselves, many people kneeling on the ground, while priests processed with icons and the choir sang. In the middle of the night there was a violent storm and the rain came pouring down. But no one moved: they thought the storm was an act of God. The worshippers remained out in the rain until first light, when the bombardment started and they dispersed, still dressed in their finest Easter clothes, to help in the defence of the bastions.
46
A storm picked up that morning, so intense that the booms of the first guns were ‘almost overpowered by the howling of the wind, and the dull monotonous plashing of the rain, which continued to descend with unabated violence’, according to Whitworth Porter, who watched the bombardment from the heights. Sevastopol was completely shrouded in black gunsmoke and the morning fog. Inside the town, people could not tell where the bombs and shells were coming from. ‘We knew that there was an enormous allied fleet at the harbour entrance just in front of us but we could not see it through the smoke and fog, the driving wind and pouring rain,’ recalled Ershov. Confused and frightened crowds of screaming people ran about the streets in search of cover, many of them heading towards Fort Nicholas, the one remaining place of relative safety, which now began to function like a sort of bustling ghetto within Sevastopol. In the centre of the town, there were bombed-out houses everywhere. The streets were filled with building debris, broken glass and cannonballs, which ‘rolled around like rubber balls’. Ershov noticed little human dramas everywhere:
A sick old man was being carried through the streets in the arms of his son and daughter while cannonballs and shells exploded around them – an old woman following behind … . Some young women, dressed up prettily, leaning up against railings of the gallery, exchanged looks with a group of hussars from the garrison. Beside them, three Russian merchants in conversation – crossing themselves every time a bomb exploded. ‘Lord! Lord! This is worse than Hell!’ I heard them say.
 
In the Assembly of Nobles, the main hospital, nurses struggled to cope with the wounded, who arrived by the thousand. In the operating room, Pirogov and his fellow-surgeons went on amputating limbs while a wall collapsed from a direct hit. There was no attempt by the allies to avoid the bombing of the city’s hospitals. Their firing was indiscriminate, and among the wounded there were many women and children.
47
Inside the Fourth Bastion, the most dangerous place throughout the siege, the soldiers ‘hardly ever slept’, according to Captain Lipkin, one of the battery commanders in the bastion, who wrote to his brother on 21 April. ‘The most we could allow ourselves was a few minutes’ sleep dressed in our full uniforms and boots.’ The bombardment from the allied guns, only a couple of hundred metres away, was incessant and deafening. The bombs and shells came in so quickly that the defenders had no sense of their danger until they landed. One wrong move could get them killed. Living under constant fire bred a new mentality. Ershov, who visited the bastion during the bombardment, felt ‘like an inexperienced tourist entering a different world’, although he himself was a seasoned artilleryman. ‘Everybody rushed about, there seemed to be confusion everywhere; I could not understand or make out anything.’
48
Tolstoy returned to Sevastopol in the middle of the bombardment. He had heard the bombs from the River Belbek, 12 kilometres away, where he had spent the winter in the Russian camp attached to the 11th Artillery Brigade. Having decided that he could best serve the army with his pen, and wanting time to write, he had applied to join the staff of General Gorchakov as an aide-de-camp. But instead, much to his annoyance, he had been transferred with his battery to the Fourth Bastion, right in the thick of the battle. ‘I’m irritated,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘especially now when I am ill [he had caught a cold], by the fact that it doesn’t occur to anybody that I’m good for anything except
chair à canon
[cannon fodder], and the most useless kind at that.’
In fact, once he had got over his cold, Tolstoy’s spirits rose, and he started to enjoy himself. He was on quartermaster duty at the bastion four days out of eight. Off duty, he stayed in Sevastopol in a modest but clean dwelling on the boulevard, where he could hear the military band playing. But when he was on duty he slept in the casemate in a small cell furnished with a campbed, a table littered with papers, the manuscript of his memoir
Youth
, a clock and an icon with its vigil light. A fir post held up the ceiling, from which was suspended a tarpaulin sheet to catch falling rubble. Throughout his stay in Sevastopol, Tolstoy was accompanied by a serf called Alexei, who had been with him since he had gone to university (he figures in more than one of Tolstoy’s works as ‘Alyosha’). When Tolstoy was on duty at the bastion, his rations from the city were carried out to him by Alexei, a duty involving considerable danger.
49
The cannonade was incessant. Every day, 2,000 shells landed on the bastion. Tolstoy was afraid, but he quickly got the better of his fear, and discovered a new courage in himself. Two days after grumbling at being treated as cannon fodder, he confided to his diary: ‘The constant charm of danger and my observations of the soldiers I’m living with, the sailors and the very methods of war are so pleasant that I don’t want to leave here.’ He began to feel a close attachment to his fellow-soldiers in the bastion, one of whom would later remember him as a ‘fine comrade’ whose stories ‘had captured the spirit of us all in the heat of the battle’. As Tolstoy wrote to his brother, expressing an idea that would lie at the heart of
War and Peace
, he ‘liked the experience of living under fire’ with these ‘simple and kind men, whose goodness is apparent during a real war’.
50
For ten days the bombing never stopped. At the end of the bombardment the Russians counted 160,000 shells and mortars that hit Sevastopol, destroying hundreds of buildings, and wounding or killing 4,712 soldiers and civilians. The allies did not have it all their own way. The Russians counter-attacked with 409 guns and 57 mortars, firing 88,751 cannonballs and shells during the ten days. But it soon became apparent that the Russians lacked the ammunition to maintain their resistance. Orders had been given to the battery commanders to fire once for every two shots fired by the enemy. Captain Edward Gage of the Royal Artillery wrote home on the evening of 13 April:
The Defence, as regards long Balls, is as obstinate as the impetuosity of the attack, and every thing that genius & bravery can accomplish is conspicuous in the Russians. However, it cannot but be perceived that their fire is comparatively weak tho’ the effects is very distressing to our Gunners. We have had more casualties than during the last siege, but we have had more men & Batteries engaged … . I do not suppose the fire will last much more than a day longer, for the men are completely beat, having been in the trenches every 12 hours since the fire opened and human flesh & blood cannot stand this much longer.
51
 
The reduction of the Russian fire handed the initiative to the allies, whose barrage steadily increased. The Mamelon and the Fifth Bastion were almost entirely destroyed. Expecting an assault, the Russians frantically reinforced their garrisons, and put most of their defenders into the bunkers underground, ready to ambush the storming parties. But the assault never came. Perhaps the allied commanders were put off by the stubborn and courageous resistance of the Russians, who rebuilt their battered bastions under heavy bombardment. But the allies were also divided among themselves. It was during this period that Canrobert began openly to express his frustrations. He supported the new allied strategy, which entailed running down the bombardment of Sevastopol to concentrate on the conquest of the Crimea as a whole, and was reluctant to commit his troops to an assault which he understood would cost a lot of lives when they might be better used for this new plan. He was further discouraged from an attack by his chief engineer, General Adolphe Niel, who had received secret instructions from Paris to delay a move against Sevastopol until the Emperor Napoleon – then still considering a journey to the Crimea – arrived to take command of the assault himself.
Unwilling to act alone, the British confined themselves to a sortie on the night of 19 April against the Russians’ rifle pits on the eastern edge of the Vorontsov Ravine which prevented them from developing their works towards the Redan. The pits were captured by the 77th Regiment after heavy fighting with the Russians, but the victory came at a price, in the loss of its commander, Colonel Thomas Egerton, a giant of a man at over 2 metres, and his second-in-command, the 23-year-old Captain Audley Lemprière, who stood less than 1.5 metres tall, as Nathaniel Steevens, a witness to the fighting, described in a letter to his family on 23 April:
Our loss was
severe
, 60 men killed & wounded, and
seven Officers
, of whom Col. Egerton (a tall powerful man) & Capt. Lemprière of the 77th were
killed
; the latter was very young, had just got his company and was about the
smallest
officer in the Army, a great pet of the Colonel’s and called by him his
child
; he was killed, poor fellow at the first attack in the rifle pit; the Colonel, tho’ wounded, snatched him up in his arms & carried him off declaring ‘they shall never take my child’; the Colonel then returned and in the second attack was killed.
52

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