The Crimean War (60 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
Feeling disgraced, tho’ I had done my best, unwillingly I turned to follow the men. I saw our trench at some distance but I never expected to reach it. The fire was fearful and I kept tumbling over the dead and wounded men who literally covered the ground. At last to my great joy I gained our Parallels and tumbled somehow into the trench … I should have said that on the way a bullet hit my water-bottle, which was slung at my side, spilt all the water and glanced off. A stone thrown up by a grapeshot hit me in the leg but didn’t hurt me much. Soon after we found … a few men and by degrees mustered most of the unhurt. It was very melancholy we found so many missing.
Henry Clifford was among the officers who tried in vain to restore discipline: ‘When the men ran in from the parapet of the Redan … . we drew our swords and beat the men and implored them to stand and not run, that all would be lost; but many fled. The trench where they ran in was so crowded that it was impossible to move without walking over the wounded who lay under our feet.’
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It was hopeless to attempt to renew the attack with these panicstricken troops, most of whom were young reservists. General Codrington, the commander of the Light Division in charge of the assault, suspended further action for the day – a day when the British had counted 2,610 fallen men, 550 of them dead. Codrington intended to renew the attack with the battle-hardened troops of the Highland Brigade the next day. But it never came to that. Later that evening the Russians decided that they could not defend the Redan against the French guns installed in the Malakhov, and evacuated the fortress. As one Russian general explained in perhaps the earliest account of these events, the Malakhov was ‘only one fortress, but it was the key to Sevastopol, from which the French would be able to bombard the town at will, killing thousands of our soldiers and civilians, and probably destroying the pontoon bridge to cut off our escape to the North Side’.
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Gorchakov ordered the evacuation of the entire South Side of Sevastopol. Military installations were blown up, stores were set alight, and crowds of soldiers and civilians prepared themselves to cross the floating bridge to the North Side. A good number of the Russian soldiers believed the decision to evacuate the city was a betrayal. They had seen the previous day’s fighting as a partial victory, in so far as they had beaten off the enemy’s attacks on all the bastions except the Malakhov, and they did not understand, or refused to acknowledge, that what they had just lost was indispensable to the continued defence of the town. Many of the sailors did not want to leave Sevastopol, where they had spent their lives, and some even protested. ‘We cannot leave, there is no authority to order us,’ proclaimed one group of sailors, referring to the absence of a naval chief following the death of Nakhimov.
The soldiers can leave but we have our naval commanders, and we have not been told by them to go. How could we leave Sevastopol? Surely, everywhere the assault has been repulsed, only the Malakhov has been taken by the French, but tomorrow we can take it back, and we will remain at our posts! … We must die here, we cannot leave, what would Russia say of us?
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The evacuation began at seven o’clock in the evening and went on all night. On the sea harbour quayside at Fort Nicholas a huge crowd of soldiers and civilians assembled to cross the floating bridge. The wounded and the sick, women with young children, the elderly with walking sticks, were all mixed up with soldiers, sailors, horses and artillery on carriages. The evening sky was illuminated by the flames of burning buildings, and the sound of the guns on the distant bastions was confused with explosions in Sevastopol, forts and ships, as the Russians blew up anything of use to the enemy that could not be removed. Expecting the British and the French to appear at any moment, people in the crowd began to panic, to push and shove each other to get closer to the bridge. ‘You could smell the fear,’ recalls Tatyana Tolycheva, who was waiting at the bridge with her husband and her son. ‘There was a terrific racket – people screaming, weeping, wailing, the wounded groaning, and shells flying in the sky.’ Bombs were dropping on the harbour all the time: one killed eight allied prisoners of war with a direct hit on the crowded quayside. The soldiers, horses and artillery were the first to cross, followed by the ox-drawn carts laden down with cannonballs, stacks of hay and wounded men. There was silence as they crossed the bridge – nobody was sure if they would make it to the other side. The sea was rough, the north-west wind still blowing strong, and the rain was coming down into their faces as they made their way across the sea harbour. The civilians formed a line to cross the bridge. They could take only what they carried in their arms. Among them was Tolycheva:
On the bridge there was a crush – nothing but confusion, panic, fear! The bridge almost gave way from the weight of all of us, and the water came up to our knees. Suddenly someone became scared and began to shout, ‘We’re drowning!’ People turned around and tried to make it back onto the shore. There was a struggle, with people stepping over each other. The horses became scared and began to rear … . I thought we were going to die and said a prayer.
By eight o’clock the next morning the crossing was complete. A signal was given to the last defenders to leave the bastions and set fire to the town. With the sole remaining pieces of artillery they sank the last ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in the sea harbour before crossing to the North Side.
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From the Star Fort, Tolstoy watched the downfall of Sevastopol. During the storming he had been placed in charge of a five-gun battery and had been one of the town’s last defenders to cross the pontoon bridge. It was his birthday, he was 27, but the sight before him now was enough to break his heart. ‘I wept when I saw the town in flames and the French flags on our bastions,’ he wrote to his aunt, ‘and generally, in many respects, it was a very sad day.’
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Looking back on the burning city that morning was Alexandra Stakhova, a nurse engaged in the removal of the wounded from Sevastopol. She described the scene in a letter to her family the following day:
The whole city was engulfed in flames – from everywhere the sound of explosions. It was a scene of terror and chaos! … Sevastopol was covered in black smoke, our own troops were setting fire to the town. The sight brought tears to my eyes (I seldom cry) and that eased the burden on my heart, for which I thank God … How hard it has been to experience and see all this, it would have been easier to die.
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The Great Fire of Sevastopol – a repeat of Moscow 1812 – continued for several days. Parts of the city were still burning when the allied armies entered it on 12 September. There they found some dreadful scenes. Not all the wounded had been taken from Sevastopol – there were too many of them to transport – and about 3,000 were abandoned without food or water in the town. Dr Giubbenet, who had been responsible for the evacuation of the hospitals, had left the wounded there on the assumption that they would soon be found by the allies. He had no idea it would be four days before the allies occupied the town. He was later mortified to read the Western press reports, like this one by Russell of
The Times
:
The Times
:
Of all the pictures of the horrors of war which have ever been presented to the world, the hospital of Sevastopol offered the most heartrending and revolting. Entering one of these doors, I beheld such a sight as few men, thank God, have ever witnessed: … the rotten and festering corpses of the soldiers, who were left to die in their extreme agony, untended, uncared for, packed as close as they could be stowed … saturated with blood which oozed and trickled through upon the floor, mingling with the droppings of corruption. Many lay, yet alive, with maggots crawling about in their wounds. Many, nearly mad by the scene around them, or seeking escape from it in their extremest agony, had rolled away under the beds and glared out on the heart stricken spectators. Many, with legs and arms broken and twisted, the jagged splinters sticking through the raw flesh, implored aid, water, food, or pity, or, deprived of speech by the approach of death or by dreadful injuries in the head or trunk, pointed to the lethal spot. Many seemed bent alone on making their peace with Heaven. The attitudes of some were so hideously fantastic as to root one to the ground by a sort of dreadful fascination. The bodies of numbers of men were swollen and bloated to an incredible degree; and the features, distended to a gigantic size, with eyes protruding from the sockets and the blackened tongue lolling out of the mouth, compressed tightly by the teeth which had set upon it in the death-rattle, made one shudder and reel round.
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The sight of the devastated city inspired awe in all who entered it. ‘Sevastopol presents the most curious spectacle that one can imagine,’ wrote Baron Bondurand, the French military intendant, to Marshal de Castellane on 21 September.
We ourselves had no idea of the effects of our artillery. The town is literally crushed to bits. There is not a single house that our projectiles missed. There are no roofs left at all, and almost all the walls have been destroyed. The garrison must have taken huge casualties in this siege where all our blows counted. It is a testimony to the indisputable spirit and endurance of the Russians, who held on for so long and only surrendered when their position became untenable with our capture of the Malakhov.
There were signs of destruction everywhere. Thomas Buzzard was startled by the beauty of the ruined town:
In one of the handsomest streets there was a fine classical building, said to be a church, built of stone, much in the style of the Parthenon of Athens. Some of its huge columns had been almost knocked to pieces. On entering we found that a shell had come through the roof and exploded on the floor, shattering it to pieces. It was strange to turn from this and look into a green and peaceful garden close to it with the trees in full leaf.
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For the troops, the occupation of Sevastopol was an opportunity for pillage. The French were organized in their looting and it was endorsed by their officers, who joined in plundering Russian property and sending home their stolen trophies, as if this were a completely normal part of war. In a letter to his family on 16 October, Lieutenant Vanson made a long list of the souvenirs he was sending them, including a silver and gold medallion, a porcelain service, and a sabre taken from a Russian officer. A few weeks later he wrote again: ‘We are continuing to pillage Sevastopol. There are no real curiosities remaining to be found, but there was one thing I really wanted, a nice chair, and I am pleased to inform you that I found one yesterday. It is missing a foot and the upholstered seat, but the back is beautifully carved.’ Compared to the French, the British troops were slightly more restrained. On 22 September Thomas Golaphy wrote to his family on the back of a Russian document. He talked of the soldiers
taking everything we could lay hands upon and selling it to anyone who would like to buy it and there was some splendid articles sold very cheap but there was no one here but the Greeks to buy it, we was not allowed to plunder the town the same as the French, they could go into all parts of it but there was only one part that was facing our works that we was allowed to enter.
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If the British trailed the French in pillaging, they far outstripped them in their binge drinking. The occupying troops found a huge supply of alcohol in Sevastopol, and the British, in particular, set about the task of drinking it with the licence they assumed they had been given by their officers for their hard-earned victory. Drunken fights, insubordination and indiscipline became a major problem in the British camp. Alarmed by reports of ‘mass drunkenness’ among the troops, Panmure wrote to Codrington, warning him of ‘the extreme hazard to your army physically which must exist if this evil be not speedily arrested, as well as the disgrace which is daily accumulating on our national character’. He called for the soldiers’ field allowance to be cut, and for the full force of martial law to be applied. From October to the following March, 4,000 British troops were court-martialled for drunkenness; most of them were given fifty lashes for their misbehaviour, and many also lost up to a month’s pay, but the drunkenness continued until the stocks of alcohol ran out, and the troops left the Crimea.
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The downfall of Sevastopol was cheered by crowds in London and Paris. There was dancing and drinking and much singing of patriotic anthems in the streets. Many people thought that this meant the end of the war. The capture of the naval base and the destruction of the Tsar’s Black Sea Fleet had been the focus of the allied war plans, at least in so far as these were communicated to the general public, and these had now been achieved. But in fact, in military terms, the loss of Sevastopol was a long way from the defeat of Russia: a large-scale land invasion to capture Moscow or a victory in the Baltic against St Petersburg would be needed to accomplish that.
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