The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  News that Stratford had ordered the squadron to Sinope caused consternation at Westminster. Soon, Graham was to become highly critical of Dundas’s hesitancy; but in January he sided with the commander-in-chief in his dispute with an ambassador whom the Government lacked the courage to recall. For Graham there was one consoling thought: ‘If a misfortune happens the blame is Stratford’s and not ours; and by all means let it rest upon him,’ the First Lord told the Foreign Secretary.[76] But there was no cause for alarm. The British squadron remained at Sinope, undisturbed by the Russians, for some ten days, with Lyons’s flagship and three other vessels convoying Turkish troopships as far as Trebizond to keep the Sultan’s army along his Caucasian frontier up to strength. One of the smaller steamships, HMS Retribution, crossed the Black Sea on 6 January and approached Sebastopol. Her commander, Captain Drummond, fired a courtesy salute which was returned by a corvette; a ship’s boat was then lowered and an officer handed over a message for Prince Menshikov informing him that any vessel of the Black Sea Fleet outside Russian waters was liable to he challenged by British or French warships. Retribution was ordered out of the roadstead when she approached the inner harbour, but her officers were able to report that there were ‘upwards of three hundred guns commanding the harbour’ and ‘three lines of battleships with springs on their cables, and probably with guns shotted.’[77] It is remarkable that so daring an act of impudence did not provoke retaliation.

  There is no doubt that Captain Drummond was primarily engaged on a spy mission. Graham had already written to Admiral Dundas emphasizing the importance of Russia’s main naval base: ‘Should any such opportunity present itself,’ the First Lord declared, ‘I conclude that you will have your eye on Sebastopol. That is a place where a blow might be struck which will be memorable in Europe, and which would settle the affairs of the East for some time to come.’[78] By now members of the cabinet were beginning to focus their minds on these unfamiliar problems of grand strategy. The Times of 23 December reported that the British and French Governments were considering other possible theatres of war than the Black Sea, but the report mentioned only ‘an expedition to the Baltic in the early spring’. On Christmas Day Earl Granville, who as Lord President of the Council held a non-departmental post in Aberdeen’s cabinet, questioned the nation’s preparedness for war with Russia in a letter to the Foreign Secretary. Was the destruction of Sebastopol ‘the only or the best thing to be done?’ he asked.[79] In the summer months the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland seemed more accessible, and closer to the political heart of Russia.

  This debate on the rival merits of a ‘northern’ or ‘southern’ approach continued throughout much of the following year, but not in the narrowly partisan spirit of the contest between ‘easterners’ and ‘westerners’ in later wars. In 1834 there was deep uncertainty over how and where to fight Russia, and ministers frequently changed their opinions. What would the two central European autocracies, Prussia and Austria, do? If they entered the war against Russia, a thousand-mile front would be opened up in the East. If they entered the war alongside Russia, Napoleon III would need his armies for a campaign along the Rhine. And, even if the war did not spread, was France a reliable ally? The Queen — or her husband — had doubts: ‘Who can say it is impossible that our own shores may be threatened by Powers now in alliance with us?’ a worried note from Buckingham Palace asked Lord Aberdeen in the last week of February; the army should at once be augmented by 30,000 men. The Prime Minister told the Queen that he was seeking 25,000 recruits for the army, with double that number if the country went to war; and it was hoped to find another 10,000 seamen, and 3,000 marines for service with the fleet.[80] Effectively the British Army in January 1854 comprised some 60,000 men in the United Kingdom, with 40,000 troops in the colonial Empire and another 30,000 serving in India. This total of 130,000 men — considerably smaller than the army maintained by post-imperial Britain in the 1970s and 1980s — was almost as large as the real strength of the French and Turkish standing armies but less than a sixth the size of the active Russian army.

  In London and in Paris the coming land campaign was seen at first as a colonial expedition rather than a contribution to a major continental war. Napoleon III looked, in the first instance, to his armies in North Africa, and the British ambassador received the impression that he was not anticipating a French contribution of more than 10,000 men. By mid-Janury 1854 the War Office in London was making preparations to transport troops to Malta and eventually to Turkey, probably in defence of Constantinople. But neither of the ministers responsible for army affhirs, the Duke of Newcastle and Sidney Herbert, had any real understanding of the problems involved in raising an army for service overseas. As every regiment in the United Kingdom was below strength, Newcastle told his cabinet colleagues that he hoped 5,000 trained troops would be sufficient for the expeditionary force.[81] This totally inadequate estimate was challenged by the one minister who faced the coming of war with competent realism, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham, one of Aberdeen’s least warlike colleagues in the weeks before Sinope. It was Graham who pressed for 20,000 men to be sent at once to the Straits in order to guard this vital artery of the fleet from a Russian offensive once the snows melted in the Balkans. And it was Graham who induced the cabinet to send five engineer officers to Malta, where they were to pick up a detachment of sappers to help the Sultan re-fortify Sinope and strengthen the defences of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus.[82]

  Graham was in close touch with the two most senior and respected officers in the army, Raglan and Burgoyne. The 75-year-old Lord Raglan, Master-General of the Ordnance for the past fifteen months, had been Wellington’s right-hand man in the Peninsula, at Waterloo, and on his diplomatic missions to Paris, Verona and, in 1826, to St Petersburg. Sir John Fox Burgoyne, the Inspector-General of Fortifications, a gnarled 72-year-old, had entered the army as a boy soon after the death of his soldier father, ‘Gentleman Johnny’ Burgoyne, who, in his last years, won acclaim as a dramatist to compensate for the reputation lost in 1777 on surrendering to General Gates at Saratoga. Sir John too fought the Americans — in 1815 — but most of his knowledge came from serving Moore and Wellington in the Peninsula. No one remembered the 108 forts in the lines of Torres Vedras so vividly as General Burgoyne. On 19 January 1854 he left London for Calais and ultimately for Constantinople to give the Sultan the benefit of his military experience.

  Napoleon III found Sir John’s conversation ‘enchanting’ when he spent forty-eight hours in Paris. This is hardly surprising, for Burgoyne talked not simply of ways in which the Turks could defend Constantinople, but of the means by which an Anglo-French expedition could aid the Sultan should the Russians sweep down through the Balkan Mountains. Not surprisingly, Burgoyne favoured the establishment of a military base, easily supplied from the sea. Unfortunately the promontories around Turkey’s capital were, in this respect, less obliging for the fleets of western Europe than the familiar indentations of Portugal. Burgoyne therefore decided to recommend, not a line of forts covering Constantinople through Chatalja, but a base on the Gallipoli peninsula, easily defended by positions across the isthmus south of Bulair. An allied army encamped on this narrow neck of land would possess a springboard from which to strike at the flank of any Russian force investing the Sultan’s capital.[83] Not for the last time, the place-mine Gallipoli loomed large in Anglo-French strategic planning.

  Momentarily, after threatening to act alone in the fourth week of December, Napoleon III seemed to waver in his resolution to stand up to the Russians. The British ambassador in Paris reported that the Emperor and Empress had been especially gracious to his Russian colleague at a New Year’s Eve Ball; and on the very day that Burgoyne crossed the Channel, Napoleon sent to the Tsar a last appeal for peace.[84] Clarendon, who had read the letter in advance, thought the appeal weak: Napoleon asked for a Russo-Turkish armistice, a withdrawal of forces from the Danubian Principalities and direct Russo-Turkish peace talks.
But Clarendon failed to see the rapier covered by the velvet glove, for Napoleon listed all the old Anglo-French grievances against Russia, raising again Nesselrode’s violent interpretation of the Vienna Note and the treacherous ‘massacre’ of Sinope. This was a document more likely to goad Nicholas than appease him; and a fortnight later the Tsar sent a ringing reply: should France decide on war, he said, ‘Russia will be the same in 1854 as in 1812’.[85]

  While these exchanges were passing between Paris and St Petersburg, the cabinet in London seemed resigned to the inevitability of war. Only Lord Aberdeen still held out, hoping to check ‘rash or hasty determination’. Before he left for Turkey Burgoyne had sent Graham two memoranda which were circulated among ministers. Both emphasized that Sebastopol ‘was not open to attack by sea’: the first memorandum considered the possibility that the base might be destroyed ‘if the land defences be taken by an army equal to cope with the Russian garrison’; but the second document said roundly that ‘the thing is impossible’. To enter the port with shipping would be madness,’ Burgoyne declared; thirty or forty thousand of even the best British troops could do nothing against the thirty or forty thousand Russians who were reported to be holding Sebastopol, for ‘the finest feat of landing in any enemy’s country’ — by Abercromby’s army in Egypt — had shown the need for a military superiority of three to one. Burgoyne spoke with authority; in March 1801 he had been there.[86]

  Burgoyne’s memoranda stimulated comments from all the leading ministers, except Gladstone and Aberdeen himself. Palmerston, who was Secretary-at-War continuously from 1809 to 1828, agreed that ‘an attack on Sebastopol is an enterprise not to he undertaken without full deliberation. A naval attack ought certainly not to be attempted without the co-operation of a land force.’ He thought, however, that Burgoyne overlooked the value of Turkish troops: personally he was inclined to use the British and French squadrons to ferry Turkish troops to the Crimea, and leave them to crack the nut of Sebastopol. Palmerston looked to the Asian shores of the Black Sea: a British expedition might concentrate on ‘the sweeping away of all the Russian forts and establishments on the coast of Circassia’; and, as an afterthought, he added: ‘Something, too, might be done in the Sea of Azov.’[87] Russell, too, thought Sebastopol so strongly defended that it would be unwise to mount any assault on the city. He was content to see ten thousand men, half of them French, encamped on the Bosphorus, either to defend the Sultan or to undertake offensive operations ‘in the Black Sea’. The Duke of Newcastle did not look so far ahead, hut, like Burgoyne, he favoured an encampment on the Dardanelles.[88]

  Graham wanted a base at Gallipoli. He was ‘anxious to abate any extravagant expectation’ that the Royal Navy could ‘humble the pride of Russia or strike any decisive blow...to the heart of Russia’ either in the Black Sea or the Baltic. ‘Prussia and Austria must co-operate to compel the evacuation of the Principalities and prevent...the march on Constantinople,’ he added.[89] And while, in the following weeks, he concentrated on fitting out a powerful Baltic fleet, he was constantly pressing on the Foreign Secretary the need to build up a grand coalition, ‘my darling project of a northern maritime confederacy against Russia’, as he called it in one note to Clarendon.[90]

  After a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, 8 February, the Prime Minister told the Queen that ‘active preparations, both naval and military’ had been authorized, although he added that ‘Lord Aberdeen cannot abandon the hope that they may still turn out to he unnecessary’. This was a curious piece of optimism. At noon on the previous Friday Aberdeen had received Brunnow, his personal friend for the last fifteen years, and both men acknowledged that diplomatic relations were about to be severed.[91] The formal break came on the Monday before the cabinet meeting. No one else rated the prospects for peace highly. On 9 February Newcastle, as Secretary for War and Colonies, gave orders for the first 10,000 men to be transported by steamship to Malta, as a staging-post for the eastern Mediterranean.[92] In the following week The Times began a daily column of military intelligence headed ‘Preparations for War’, which was of course available for study in St Petersburg within a fortnight. There was speculation about the military commanders. It was anticipated that the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, would be entrusted with one division and that the other senior posts would be held for the most part by trusted — and elderly — officers who had served ‘the Duke’ in Portugal and Spain. On the Saturday following the severance of diplomatic relations, the editor of The Illustrated London News, a weekly paper with a circulation of some 100,000 copies, predicted a three months’ campaign against the Tsar’s armies, with the conquest of the Crimea, gains in the Caucasus and Bessarabia and victories in the Baltic. ‘Nothing that can warrant the name of disaster is to be apprehended for a moment.’[93]

  Small wonder if other issues of the day received scant attention. When, on 13 February, Lord John Russell introduced into the Commons the Reform Bill which he had first promised the House twelve months before, it aroused little interest in the country as a whole. His speech was remarkably short; and a Conservative backbencher at once sought to have debate on the measure postponed ‘in the present state of our foreign affairs’. So long as the nation was technically still at peace, Russell stuck to his principles and once more threatened to leave the Government if the Bill were dropped. But by April even Lord John had given way; and the Second Parliamentary Reform Bill became the first British casualty of the Crimean War.[94]

  *

  On the day following Russell’s introduction of his short-lived brain-child to the Commons, the people of the capital saw, for the first time, these ‘preparations for war’. Shortly after twelve noon the First Battalion of the Coldstream Guards swung out of St George’s Barracks, Trafalgar Square. The regimental band, ‘cheerfully’ playing ‘the familiar air of The Girl I Left Behind Me’ (for was it not St Valentine’s Day?) turned eastwards down the Strand. Ahead of the column lay one and a quarter miles of roaring Londoners, for when it was said that the Guards were leaving for the Mediterranean a fever of excitement brought cheering crowds out into the streets. It was, The Times explained next day, ‘a spectacle to which for many years they had been strangers, and which it is impossible they could see without emotion’. For the moment, the nation remained at peace and the Coldstreams were travelling no further than Chichester, where they would be closer to the troopships of Portsmouth and Southampton than in barracks off Trafalgar Square. But few people doubted that war with Russia was imminent and, at the sight of the Guards, London exulted in anticipatory triumph.

  ‘Even the occupants of the omnibuses and cabs joined in these manifestations,’ The Times recorded, ‘and...for some time the thoroughfare was entirely suspended.’ The turnstile gates on Waterloo Bridge could not stem ‘the torrent of people eager to say farewell to the troops; the tollkeepers were swept aside, and a proud mob escorted the Guards to the railway terminus named after the greatest of recent victories. Two hours later, the Third Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, marching westwards from the Tower to replace the Coldstreams in St George’s Barracks, was also cheered along the Strand. On that Tuesday the people of London, who had treated the rank-and-file as social outcasts not so long ago, thrilled easily to the tread of soldiery in the streets.[95]

  The mood continued for the remainder of the month. On Thursday in that same week the Fusilier Guards, quartered in the Tower, held a farewell banquet in the London Tavern, at which their band played ‘inspiriting airs’ and the Duke of Cambridge was cheered. So, on the following Monday, was the much-wronged Prince Albert when he inspected ‘our beautiful Guards’, as the Queen called them in a letter to her uncle in Brussels. The Times of the following morning sounded a gloomier note: ‘It may perhaps serve as a salutary check upon that impulsive enthusiasm with which people are too apt to regard the commencement of war...if...note is taken of the movement of medical stores from Apothecaries Hall and from Savory and Son of New Bond Street to the Tower’; and it listed what it
regarded as ‘the needs for a campaign on the Danube’ — 1,000 yards of adhesive plaster, 1,000 lb of lint, 12 large medicine chests and 30 panniers for carriage on mules or donkeys, all of which were conveyed through the City in four wagons.[96] But the ‘impulsive enthusiasm’ was back next day as the cheers rang out at Southampton when the Grenadier Guards went aboard the P. & O. steamer Ripon, with the Coldstreains boarding the Orinoco and most of the Fusiliers the Manilla. Some twenty hours later — it was the morning of Thursday, 23 February, and only a fortnight since the War Office had given the first orders for troops to be ready for service in Malta — the three steamers sailed out into the Solent, leaving the Needles to port at a quarter past eight as they turned into a strong south-westerly; ahead lay a stormy five-day passage before they reached the Straits of Gibraltar. No ultimatum was yet on its way to St Petersburg.[97]

  *

  While the troopships headed down-Channel. On their first evening out from Southampton, an unusual trio of peace emissaries were travelling up from Dover to London at the end of a 3,000-mile journey to the Tsar’s capital and back. Shortly before Christmas, when the newspaper columns were breathing fire and thunder after Sinope, a sixty-year-old Birmingham corn merchant and philanthropist, Joseph Sturge, proposed to a group of his fellow Quakers that a deputation from the Society of Friends should travel to St Petersburg with an Address to the Tsar imploring him ‘to put a stop to the effusion of blood and human misery’ in the war with Turkey. Tsar Nicholas’s brother, Alexander I, had shown great interest in the Society of Friends during his visit to England in 1814 and gave his patronage to individual Quakers who visited Russia; and there was thus a better prospect of receiving a sympathetic hearing from the ruler of Russia than from other crowned heads in Europe. Sturge, who had actively supported conferences of the Friends of Peace at Frankfurt and Manchester, was backed by the principal executive committee of the English Quakers. It was decided that he should be accompanied by Robert Charleton, from Bristol, and Henry Pease, a successful railway promoter from Durham, whose elder brother had been, in 1832, the first Quaker Member of Parliament.[98]