by Alan Palmer
Saint-Arnaud embarked at last on 29 April with a fitting show of panache: ‘a fine looking-man of about 50’, noted a British traveller hurrying home from the fighting in the Balkans to train with the Surrey militia.[116] From Marseilles the Berthollet carried the Marshal, his wife and his staff through heavy seas to Malta. the island seized by General Bonaparte in the summer of Saint-Arnaud’s birth and occupied by the British two years later. At Malta the Marshal’s command of spoken English and his genial cordiality impressed his hosts. But, being a good Bonapartist, Saint-Arnaud could not resist writing home, ‘What a jewel lost to France!’[117] The Bertliollet entered the Dardanelles on the night of 6-7 May, allowing Saint-Arnaud to land briefly at Gallipoli before anchoring off the Golden Horn two days later. Raglan had arrived a week earlier.
By now a powerful allied army was concentrated around Constantinople: 14,000 British troops, with another 11,000 on the way eastwards; and more than 30,000 Frenchmen, including Zouave regiments of veteran colonial infantry from Algeria, with the promise of more to come. For the first time in history, steamships plied regularly across the eastern Mediterranean, building up the expeditionary forces of the two nations week by week. The Guards regiments who sailed from Southampton at the end of February spent a month in Malta before embarking for Turkey, but the first troopship had entered the Dardanelles on 5 April, just nine days after the declaration of war.
For the Golden Fleece — an ominous name for a vanguard sailing up the Hellespont — it was not the most propitious of landfalls. ‘The blast of English light infantry trumpets broke the silence of those antique shores’ for ‘the first time,’ wrote a passenger aboard the troopship; and ‘no one took the slightest notice of us’.[118] At Gallipoli, the base Burgoyne had pinpointed on the map for the French generals a few weeks before, nothing was ready for the British. The French advance guard was already ashore: tricolour flags fluttered over a neat line of tents, while the Turkish governor of the region had assigned the more salubrious houses in the gimcrack town to French officers. There was even an Auberge de l’Armée Expeditionnaire. The first thousand British troops landed on 8 April and at once set out for Bulair, eight miles to the north. ‘Our encampment is very wretched, and hardly anything except the men’s rations to be got to eat...The French have everything — horses, provisions, good tents and every kind of protection against contingencies,’ wrote an officer in the 50th regiment in the first of many letters to find their way into the English press.[119] It was galling to see French steamers disgorge their human and animal cargoes ‘with ease and celerity’. Years of experience in Algeria gave French administration a professionalism which the British might envy and admire, but which they could not emulate so long as the minutiae of transport and supply — once the daily study of the great Duke — were left to chance and a civilian Commissary-General.
George Evelyn, the Surrey militia colonel who travelled out to study the early stages of the war, first heard of Burgoyne’s ‘Torres Vedras’ plan while he was observing Russians and Turks firing at each other across the Danube: ‘An absurd arrangement, our troops might as well be at Malta as at Gallipoli,’ he at once wrote in his diary.[120] It was a point of view with which both Raglan and Saint-Arnaud came to agree as soon as they set foot in Turkey. Most of the British advance party, and all later contingents, were accordingly settled in or around the old Turkish barracks at Scutari, on the Asiatic shore, facing the Golden Horn. There, between a line of cypress trees and a beach ‘which somewhat resembled that at Folkestone at high water’, Lord Raglan established his headquarters in a modest wooden hut. Saint-Arnaud preferred a villa at Yenikoy, some twelve miles up the Straits and on the European side of the Bosphorus.[121] But Scutari and Yenikoy were still more than three hundred miles away from northern Bulgaria, where the Turkish commander, Omar Pasha, was faced with Russia’s long-awaited spring offensive. On 18 May Saint-Arnaud and Raglan sailed up through the Bosphorus for Varna and an urgent first meeting with Omar.
*
Once the first signs of a thaw came to St Petersburg, the Tsar turned his attention to ways of winning a dramatic success before the allies could come to Turkey’s assistance. To Nicholas’s dismay, however, his trusted Paskevich was unco-operative. Years of living in Warsaw had narrowed the Field Marshal’s strategic horizon. He had urged Nicholas not to denude Poland and the Baltic coasts as soon as the first shots were exchanged along the Danube and in the Caucasus. Now constantly his eyes focused on the long curving line of the Vistula as it ran northwards from Austrian-held Cracow, to wind through the vulnerable Polish plains and into East Prussia, that land of woods and lakes and marshes where Paskevich had fought against the great Napoleon nearly half a century before. Every rumour of troop movements in Austria or Prussia put Paskevich on the alert. To mount an offensive on the lower Danube, while leaving Russia’s Polish salient exposed to Austrian or Prussian invaders, seemed to the old Marshal the height of fhlly. Nicholas’s generals seemed unable or unwilling to implement the Paskevich Design of fomenting a grand anti-Turkish insurrection in the Balkans; and every subsequent plan proposed by the Tsar to carry the war into Turkey’s Bulgarian provinces was met by the Marshal’s gloomy warning to think of Poland. ‘Common sense demands that we should leave the Danube and the Principalities,’ Paskevich wrote in a memorandum two days before Saint-Arnaud embarked at Marseilles. To this bald proposal Nicholas’s response was a line of three exclamation marks in the margin.[122]
With Paskevich dragging his feet so obstinately, the ‘Eastern War’ , as the campaign against the Turks was called in St Petersburg, offered the Russian people neither victory nor defeat. The Tsar, ignoring Paskevich, at last ordered Prince Michael Gorchakov, his field commander on the Danube, to take the offensive, cross the river, mop up the outlying Turkish defences and attack the two key fortresses, first Silistria and then Ruschuk (Ruse).
So successful were Gorchakoy’s troops that they forced Paskevich to give his support to the ofThnsive. But it was only a qualified support. The Field Marshal moved cautiously. ‘File siege artillery was slow to reach Silistria, and Paskevich vetoed plans for an attack along the banks of the river (where the defences were at their weakest) because he thought it would expose the infantry to cannon fire from fortified outworks of the town. Five times in Nlity the Tsar sent urgent messages to Paskevich, stressing the importance of taking Silistria. A captured fortress would make the Austrians think twice befhre threatening intervention, Nicholas argued.[123]
It was while these exchanges were in progress between St Petersburg and the Danubian front that the allied generals reached Varna and met Omar Pasha for the first time. The Turkish commander-in-chief was horn in Croatia in 1809 and, as Michael Lotis, became an Austrian army cadet but, while still under twenty, deserted and crossed the mountains into Bosnia. There he apostasized, took the Moslem name of the second caliph, was commissioned in the Ottoman army and attracted the attention of Sultan Mahmud II who appointed him a military instructor. The British first encountered him in Syria and Lebanon and respected his ruthless qualities. The Austrians did not, and repeatedly made their objections known to the Sultan. He made a poor impression on Saint-Arnaud (‘un homme incomplet’) although he conceded that Omar was ‘remarkable enough for his adopted country’. On the other hand, Raglan and his staff were ‘much pleased’ with Omar and his men: twice they had sent the Russians reeling; and even now they were forcing the invaders back into the hinterland behind Varna.[124] Raglan had no hesitation in recommending to his French colleague that the allied force should be sent up to Varna as soon as possible, so as to relieve Silistria and throw the Russians back across the Danube.
So long as he was in the battle zone Saint-Arnaud fully agreed with Raglan. He arrived back at Yenikov on Thursday, 25 May, still determined to have 12,000 Frenchmen supporting Omar at Varna by the following Friday. But over the weekend doubt set in. Was the allied force ready to gain the victory which public opinion in Paris and London demanded? The Marsh
al travelled down to the French camp at Gallipoli: he was short of artillery, short of cavalry horses, short of ambulances and short of provisions. Moreover, as he told his brother, the ‘English Army is in no better state than ourselves’.[125] Over the following week there was no sign of French transports sailing for Varna, only of General Bosquet setting off from the Gallipoli peninsula with a long column of green-turbaned Zouaves on a hundred-mile march northwards to Adrianople and the southern outposts of the Balkan Mountains. Better to cover the valley routes to the key passes than send an expedition up to the Danube and risk some indecisive action, perhaps even defeat.
Saint-Arnaud was right in one respect. The British contingent at Scutari was not yet ready for a Balkan campaign. Two letters to the Prime Minister made that abundantly clear. Lord Aberdeen’s second son was serving with the Guards in the Duke of Cambridge’s division. On 10 May, little more than a week after reaching Scutari, Alexander Gordon let his father know of the confusion at headquarters. Why, he wondered, were they encamped on the wrong side of the Bosphorus for Varna? ‘Nothing is yet known of our ultimate destination or when we are to move, which I fear is not likely to he soon as we have the greatest difficulty in getting baggage animals. Not a single cavalry officer has yet arrived (except Lord Lucan).’ Three weeks later, after Raglan’s return from Omar’s headquarters, things were little better: ‘We are ready to go up to Varna, but the commissariat is not,’ Gordon wrote on 30 May. ‘They have no horses or mules for the transport of tents, provisions and baggage — and instead of setting to work to get them they are engaged in objecting to every thing proposed and thwarting Lord Raglan in everything. Until you send out an order that Lord R. is to command the army and not Commissary General Filder we shall not get into ready working order.’[126] There was a sound argument against sending the troops forward too soon.
At eleven at night on the following Saturday (3 June) Colonel Trochu, Saint-Arnaud’s chief aide-de-camp, arrived at Raglan’s headquarters at Scutari to tell the British commander that the Marshal had decided against sending any substantial contingents to help Omar relieve Silistria. Only a token French force under General Canrobert would go to Varna. He proposed that the main Anglo-French army should hold the Balkan Passes, and stand on the defensive. But Raglan, though always courteous, was firm: the Light Brigade had embarked for Varna on the previous Monday; he was winning the battle of Scutari, against Filder and the sluggards in the commissariat; and ten steamers and nine sailing vessels were standing by to move another 6,000 men and horses up the Bulgarian coast at the first opportunity. Nothing that Colonel Trochu or Marshal Saint-Arnaud might say could make Lord Raglan change his mind.[127]
On 9 June a British brigadier-general hurried across the Bosphorus with a message for Lord Raglan. Fifteen months before, Colonel Hugh Rose had sought to summon Admiral Dundas’s squadron to these waters. Now, released from Lord Stratford de Redcliffe’s service, Brigadier-General Rose enjoyed higher rank and less executive authority as principal liaison officer at Saint-Arnaud’s headquarters. And on that Friday morning he informed Raglan that the Marshal was reverting to his original plan. On Thursday evening the largest steamer in the world, the commandeered P. & O. vessel Himalaya, anchored off Constantinople. ‘She bore within her iron ribs a burden of more than 2, 100 souls,’ The Times reported. More prosaically she had brought the 5th Dragoon Guards from southern Ireland in eleven days and three hours. As soon as Raglan received Saint-Arnaud’s message the Himalaya was ordered up through the Bosphorus to take men and horses direct to Varna. Action seemed imminent. Raglan established his field headquarters on the outskirts of Varna on 21 June; and General Bosquet, whose division at Adrianople had risen to almost 12,000 men, began to march them another 150 miles through the mountains towards Varna and the coast. But the journey took them more than three weeks; and by the end of June the military situation was changing out of all recognition.[128]
The beginning of the month had brought an intensification of Russian preparations fir an assault on Silistria. Paskevich himself went forward into the battle zone to see how, during the short hours of darkness each night, the trenches were creeping nearer and nearer to the outlying bastion of Arab-tabia. On 10 June the Turks spotted a group of staff officers who had come across the river to study the effects of the Russian bombardment; and the artillery of the fortress opened up. A Turkish shell landed near Paskevich, but no one in the group of officers thought he was hit by any fragments. Suddenly, however, the old Marshal complained of a pain in his shoulder. He was taken back across the Danube; a carriage bore him out of the campaign and, as some believed, out of history too.[129]
When he heard of the incident, Tsar Nicholas was sympathetic: Paskevich was, after all, the military hero he had created. The Russian press announced that the Prince of Warsaw needed a long convalescence to recover from a wound sustained while directing the assault on the Turkish stronghold. To Nicholas’s considerable satisfaction, effective command in the field thus passed to Prince Michael Gorchakov. Within three days the Prince was able to send the Tsar detailed proposals for storming Silistria and meeting any challenge offered by an allied expedition to Varna. General Gorchakov argued that it would be better to give battle to the British and French in a region inhabited by Turks, Bulgars or Roumanians than to allow the enemy to land further along the Black Sea coast and carry the war to Russian towns and settlements. Nicholas was delighted with the General’s plans and accepted his reasoning: the Tsar’s only worry was the attitude of the Austrians, who in the second half of May began to concentrate newly raised armies in Galicia and along the borders of Transylvania.[130]
For several weeks General Gorchakov’s men had held high ground on the right bank of the Danube, above Silistria. From a vantage point in Governor Mustapha Pasha’s delightful gardens, a 25-year-old Russian artillery lieutenant looked out day after day over the islands and river banks to the town and citadel beyond, with the individual forts of Silistria clearly visible, ‘as if in the palm of your hand’. ‘It is an odd kind of pleasure, seeing people kill each other, and yet each morning and evening I would get up on my cart and spend hours at a time watching, and I was not the only one. The spectacle was really beautiful, especially at night,’ the lieutenant wrote in a letter home a month later. ‘At Silistria...I saw so many interesting, poetic and affecting things that the time I spent there will never be erased from my memory,’ he added; and twelve years later, in writing about Borodino, the ex-lieutenant placed Pierre Bezukhov on just such a knoll where he, too, was ‘spellbound at the terrible beauty’ of the unexpected panorama beneath him. But, unlike Pierre, Second Lieutenant Count Tolstoy was not simply a distant observer of events. On 19 June he was down in the trenches in attendance on a general whom he greatly admired, Prince Gorchakov — ‘a slightly ridiculous figure, very tall, standing with his hands behind him, cap on hack of head, bespectacled, and speaking like a turkeycock’. Late that afternoon, as Gorchakov and his staff waited in the trenches, there was a great explosion from the outer walls of the Arab-tabia fort. After nights of tunnelling the Russians succeeded in exploding what Tolstoy described as ‘a mine of 240 ponds’ (8,000 lb) of gunpowder under the most obstinate defensive bastion of the town. The roar of the explosion could be heard at Raglan’s headquarters outside Varna, sixty miles away; and it was assumed that the decisive assault on Silistria was about to begin. Five hundred Russian guns rained shells and shot against Silistria all night.[131]
Twenty-four hours later the assault troops were in position. Dawn approached, the period when (as Tolstoy explained in his letter) ‘fear at the thought of attack’ gave way to expectant exhilaration ‘the nearer the moment came...when we would see a cascade of rockets giving the signal to attack’. But on that morning of 22 June, the rockets were not fired. An hour before the assault was to begin, a senior member of Paskevich’s staff rode down to General Gorchakov with orders to raise the siege of Silistria. The Austrian ambassador had delivered what was, in effect, an ul
timatum at St Petersburg, demanding that Russia should withdraw from the Danubian Principalities. An army pinned between the sweep of the Danube and the Bulgarian coast was liable to be cut off by the powerful Austrian force poised in Transylvania.[132]