The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  While the Martin Committee was considering Dundonald’s secret weapon, Napier and Deschenes were at last able to give the allies their one success of the year in the Baltic. A combined sea and land assault was launched against Bomarsund, the ‘Gibraltar of the Aaland Islands’, on 9 August. A force of three thousand Frenchmen was landed four miles south of Bomarsund and another detachment of the French, supported by British marines, engineers and gunners, went ashore at a cove two miles to the north, so as to invest the fortress. By dawn on Sunday, 13 August, the French had several 16-pounder guns in position and were shelling the town, while four British vessels and the French flagship engaged the outer defences. Next day the French suffered the only serious casualties of the operation, when they occupied Fort Tree, the westernmost tower of the citadel, only to find that it had been heavily mined and blew up beneath them. A battery of British 32-pounders was ready to breach the walls of the inner defences (Fort Nottich) but by Tuesday evening it was clear that the citadel would not need to be stormed. on Wednesday morning — 16 August, a day on which The Times in London informed its readers of the formidable defences of this bastion of the Aaland Islands — Napier ordered seven of his ships to turn their 10-inch guns on the centre of the fortress, with the injunction, ‘Give them a shot and shell every five minutes’. The weight of fire-power from the ships and from the British and French shore batteries proved too much for the defenders. White flags of truce were flown from the casements and by the early afternoon more than two thousand of the garrison, almost all of whom were Finnish, had passed into allied captivity, together with many of their families.[175]

  Thanks to the use of the electric telegraph from Danzig, the fall of Bomarsund became known in London and Paris by Saturday. Its significance was inflated by the newspapers so that the public could celebrate the victory for which they had waited ever since ‘the finest fleet that has left these shores’ had sailed from Spithead in March. ‘The capture of Bomarsund and the eighty inhabited islands of the Aaland Archipelago...is not meant to be a mere lash ofthe whip, but a mortal thrust,’ The Illustrated London News declared on 26 August; and there followed more than a week of detailed reports of the engagement and speculation on where Napier would strike next. As late as 4 September a leading article in The Times assumed that news would soon come of other assaults around Russia’s Baltic shore.[176]

  On that same Monday, however, the Admiralty sent a peremptory note to Napier asking for information over ‘what further operations’ he proposed to undertake. For the Admiralty and the War Office were puzzled by Napier’s movements. Two senior soldiers serving in the Baltic, Brigadier-General H. D. Jones and General Adolphe Niel, were known by their respective governments to favour an immediate attack on Sveaborg. Napier, on the other hand, was behaving as though the campaigning season was over, while assuring Sir James Graham that ‘the French are all in a hurry to get home as fhst as they can’. Mistrust of Napier grew rapidly on both sides of the Channel. On the following Thursday the Prince Consort, in France to observe army manoeuvres around Boulogne with Napoleon III, compained that Napier ‘pours cold water’ on aggressive plans in the Gulf of Finland; and at the end of the week a second broadside from the Admiralty ordered Napier to convene a council of war to consider an attack on Sveaborg before the coming of winter. At the same time the Prime Minister wrote indignantly to Sir James Graham, stressing the importance of Sveaborg and the difficulty of justifying ‘to the world’ any decision not to attack the Finnish fortress.[177]

  But Napier, having gained a victory at Bomarsund, would not risk defeat in front of Helsinki. A council of war, meeting aboard his flagship on 12 September, decided that ‘nothing can be undertaken...with a chance of success’ at such an ‘advanced state of the year’. ‘I have received many propositions for attacking both Cronstadt and Sveaborg,’ Napier told the Admiralty, but I will never lend myself to any absurd project, or be driven to attempt what is not practicable, by newspaper writers who, I am sorry to say, I have reason to believe are in correspondence with officers of the fleet, who ought to know better.’[178] Three weeks after telling its readers of the ‘mortal thrust’ at Bomarsund, The Illustrated London News was admitting that ‘the prevailing impression seems to he that the Baltic campaign is at an end for the season’. And six weeks later still the same journal, whose rhyming couplets had in the spring warned the Tsar of Napier and his ‘gallant Jack Tars’, was writing scornfully of how ‘The Baltic fleet, with fifty thousand men,/ Sailed up the seas — and then sailed home again’.[179]

  It is easy to understand the Government’s frustration in those first days of September. Parliament had gone into recess on 14 August in an angry mood, with attacks in both houses on the Prime Minister personally and on the failure of his Administration to wage the war effectively. In private Lord Palmerston was bitterly critical of Aberdeen’s apparent reluctance to weaken ‘Russia anywhere or at all’, while the Prime Minister complained that he was receiving little verbal support in the Commons or the cabinet from fellow Peelites like Graham and Gladstone. His letters show that he was close to a nervous breakdown. Granite willpower alone kept him in office; Queen and Country must be saved from the Whig warlords.[180]

  News from overseas remained uninspiring. Apart from the capture of Bomarsund there was little to lift patriotic hearts: a blockade of Russia’s northern White Sea ports, including Archangel, and a succession of setbacks for the Turks in the Caucasus. Newspaper reports suggested that the war had spread as far as the North Pacific but, as yet, no details were known. Some Russian vessels — including the frigate Aurora, whose presence in Portsmouth had caused so much disquiet nine months before — had put into Valparaiso, heading for Petropavlosk, the Tsar’s Far Eastern naval base on the peninsula of Kamchatka. It was said that they were being followed northwards from Honolulu by an Anglo-French flotilla commanded by Rear-Admiral David Price, but that several sailing days separated pursuer and pursued. In fact, however, at that very moment, the flotilla was facing defeat. Price’s six vessels reached Petropavlovsk on 29 August. Next morning, as an assault on the base was about to begin, the Rear-Admiral went below to his cabin and shot himself, apparently in remorse at not having caught the Russian vessels before they reached their heavily protected anchorage. Inevitably this personal tragedy hampered inter-allied collaboration. The subsequent attack on Petropavlovsk was a disaster, with the British accidentally shelling a French landing party, while a second party was ambushed by a powerful Russian force. The flotilla withdrew on 5 September. Fortunately it took months for news of this defeat in the North Pacific to reach London.[181]

  There was equally little cause for the Anglo-French allies to be satisfied with their diplomatic achievements. By the first week in September earlier hopes of bringing Sweden and Austria into the war were rapidly receding. The Swedes, knowing that any hostile move against Russia might soon expose them to an invading army across the frozen northern wastes, showed no interest in an allied offer of the Aaland Islands. But it was Buol in Vienna who most exasperated the British and French Governments. For, in July, Buol had played a prominent part in drafting the ‘Four Points’, a definition of allied diplomatic objectives whose presentation to the Russians would, it was assumed in London and Paris, serve as a preliminary to Austrian participation in the war: a European guarantee of the Danubian Principalities, rather than a Russian protectorate over them; free navigation of the Danube; revision of the 1841 Straits Convention, so that movement of warships through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus would be regulated ‘in the interests of the Balance of Power in Europe’; and Russian renunciation of any claim to exercise a protectorate over the Sultan’s Christian subjects.[182]

  These ‘Four Points’ were, however, soon to become not the basis of an Austrian ultimatum, but a mere programme of war aims. In August Buol found that non-belligerency brought Austria a fine reward, making the Habsburg Empire the first beneficiary from the war, for after the Russians withdrew north of the river Pruth an A
ustrian diplomatic initiative in Constantinople secured the Sultan’s consent to an agreement by which Francis Joseph’s army should move into the Danubian Principalities. Austrian forces immediately occupied Moldavia and Wallachia, thereby consolidating efkctive control over all the navigable Danube and creating a neutral buffer zone between the Balkans and the Ukraine. Despite pressure from a war party in Vienna and some discussion of military plans between top Austrian soldiers and the allied commanders at Varna, the Emperor Francis Joseph repeatedly assured the Tsar’s envoys that he would never attack Russia. In these assertions he was perfectly sincere: for the Habsburg Empire was wracked by a chronic financial crisis; even the cost of preventive mobilization and of moving troops into the Danubian Principalities left the Austrian Finance Minister convinced that bankruptcy lay only a few months away. The best hope for the allies in making common cause with Austria against Russia lay in Nicholas I’s furious temper, for when the Austrians began to garrison Danubian towns so recently vacated by his army, Nesselrode and Orlov had difficulty in persuading the Tsar not to send Francis Joseph an ultimatum which he had already drafted in his own hand. Relations between St Petersburg and Vienna had not been so strained for forty years.[183]

  In London and Paris, too, government ministers complained of Habsburg trickery. Austria would deserve no consideration at the eventual peace conference, since Buol was freeing Gorchakov’s 50,000 men to fight elsewhere, Russell told Clarendon. But, on reflection, both Palmerston and Russell saw advantages in the Austrian move into the Principalities, for they had always feared that Lord Aberdeen would either use Buol as an intermediary ‘to agree to a suspension of hostilities’ before the allies had achieved any of their objectives or commit himself to having ‘our troops...die of fever in the marshes of Wallachia’.[184] Now the options facing the British Government were narrowed. There would be no campaigning along the lower Danube or the Pruth; nor could there be a winter war in the Baltic. Everything must depend on what was being settled at allied headquarters in Varna. ‘If our expedition to the Crimea sets out, it is sure to succeed,’ Palmerston told Clarendon on 5 September, ‘and if it succeeds, we are sure to have Austria with us.’[185] But, by then, more than nine weeks had already passed since the ‘sleeping cabinet’ at Richmond had approved the orders for an assault on the Crimea, and there was no word that the allied force had sailed from the Bulgarian coast. What if Sebastopol proved as elusive an objective as Sveaborg and Kronstadt? Still Mr Punch’s washerwomen could ask each other, ‘When’s the fighting going to begin?’; and still no one in the Government could give a confident answer.

  Chapter Seven – The Allied Armada

  Uncertainty over what was happening at Varna made Lord Aberdeen’s ministers carpingly critical of the commanders in the field. The French leaders fared worst, especially Saint-Arnaud: Palmerston wondered how ‘a man who has passed his Early Life as an actor could all of a sudden become a great General’; and Clarendon thought he ‘ought to he hung’ for ordering three of his best divisions northwards into the disease-ridden Dobrudja in response to faulty intelligence reports of a new Russian crossing of the Danube. The Duke of Newcastle, the Secretary of State for War, shared his colleagues’ contempt for Saint-Arnaud. But the frustration of having to remain in town after Parliament rose in August made him doubt the qualities of the British Commander-in-Chief as well. Newcastle could not forget that Raglan had spent most of the last quarter of a century in Whitehall, first as military secretary to Wellington and recently as Master-General of the Ordnance. ‘I fear Raglan is but seldom seen,’ he wrote to Clarendon at the end of August. ‘I wish he would devote less time to his desk and more to his saddle, but long use at the Horse Guards has made his fingers tough and his bottom tender.’ A week later, with some inconsistency, Newcastle was grumbling to the Prime Minister of the ‘singularly meagre’ character of the letters Raglan sent home from that over-burdened desk at headquarters.[186]

  Such cavilling was unjustified. It minimized the formidable task imposed on Raglan and Saint-Arnaud. They had to improvise the invasion of a peninsula 300 miles across the sea, geographically unfamiliar to them, and defended by an enemy whose strength might be as low as 45,000 or as high as 140,000 men. Anxiously they awaited assessment from their informal planning committee, who sailed for Crimean waters in the fourth week of July aboard HMS Fury. It was as dawn was breaking on 25 July that the frigate crept into the approaches to Sebastopol; and in the clear, early morning sunshine Generals Canrobert and Brown studied the fortifications in detail before the defenders opened fire, forcing Fury to raise steam and sail off northwards. There the two generals noted good landing-places around the mouths of the Katcha and the Alma rivers, about seven and fifteen miles respectively from Sebastopol itself. The planning committee was back in Varna for a conference at Saint-Arnaud’s headquarters on 28 July; and it was still hoped, on that Friday evening, to embark the expeditionary force of some 64,000 French, British and Turkish troops for the Crimea within a fortnight.[187]

  This date was totally unrealistic. Already disaster was striking at the heart of the allied force. In a letter to his brother on 13 July Saint-Arnaud mentioned, almost casually, that he had a few cases of cholera in the army. By the end of that week a rush of cholera cases was overwhelming the French field hospitals; soon the disease was ravaging both armies. The French high command had known, as early as the first week in July, that there were over a hundred cases in the reception camp outside Gallipoli. But, for several weeks, the generals at Varna insisted that the awful scourge was spreading southwards; some even wondered if it was the reason why the Russians had broken off the siege of Silistria, for General Luders’s corps was known to have suffered from the disease. The fate of the French force which Saint-Arnaud despatched to the Dobrudja, the region lying between the Danube and the Black Sea, seemed to confirm this source. On a march which lasted for almost three weeks, only two Cossack raiding parties were sighted, too distant to be engaged; but, from the second day out, the Dobrudja force suffered heavy casualties, all of them from cholera or typhus. Within a week the French 1st Division (commanded, in Canrobert’s absence, by General Espinasse) had 5,000 cases, one-third of them fatal.[188]

  ‘It is almost beyond belief that of the 3 divisions the French sent towards the Dobrudja, 7000 have died of cholera and putrid fever,’ Lord Aberdeen’s son, Alexander, wrote to his father from a camp west of Varna on 10 August. ‘Seven thousand! A pleasant country to make war in! One regiment alone buried 760 in the lake near Kustendij.’ And the news of the British expeditionary force was little better: ‘Preparations are being made for our embarking on the 12th. The bay is full of shipping for transport, all victualled and watered, but I cannot think we shall go to Sebastopol to undertake the greatest siege ever attempted at the end of the summer, typhus fever and dysentery in our camp...You seem to think we are on the Danube. I wish we were...Even now it is not too late to get to Bucharest this winter if we set to work.’[189] But long before the Prime Minister received this grimly realistic letter, all London knew of the cholera’s mounting toll in the British camps. ‘It is useless to alarm friends and relations at home by talking of the number of sick or by giving their names, but it is evident that we are in a very unsatisfactory state as regards health,’ wrote the great war reporter, W.H. Russell, in a despatch sent from Varna six days before Alexander Gordon’s letter and published in The Times of 18 August. A few days later Russell gave ‘friends and relations at home’ what was presumably a message of mild comfort: ‘The cholera...is sometimes quite painless, there is little or no purging but the sufferer is seized with violent spasms in the stomach, which increase in intensity till collapse is established, and death then quickly follows, attended with but little exhibition of agony.’[190]

  Cholera epidemics were not uncommon in continental Europe during prolonged hot weather: hundreds died each day in Paris during the summer months of 1848 and, a little over a year later, Paskevich’s invading army suffered grav
ely from an outbreak in Hungary. Radical reformers in Parliament had sought to clean up insalubrious areas in Britain’s sprawling cities ever since the epidemics of the 1830s; and Lord Aberdeen’s Government could by now regard cholera as an occasional unwelcome visitor. In general, the health of the British soldiery was better than a decade earlier, and they had fewer cholera cases than their French allies. But some battalions in Raglan’s army suffered severely. On 10 August, the day that Alexander Gordon wrote to his father, the Coldstream Guards lost eighty men from cholera. Other letters home mentioned regiments ‘more than decimated’ in the course of the month. Most units struck camp in the valley of Devna, since it was assumed that all water there was contaminated. They trekked inland, away from Varna where nearly 30,000 men were concentrated in a vast mushroom field of canvas — but away, too, from the transports waiting to embark the great invasion force. Mrs Fanny Duberly, whose husband was a captain in the 8th Hussars, later vividly recalled how, in the last days of July, Lord Cardigan marched the Light Brigade twenty-six miles to the bare and treeless plateau of Yenibazar under a ‘blinding sun’ and ‘intolerable heat’ when, as another cavalryman wrote, in a letter home, the thermometer was ‘seldom below 90° in the shade, and often much higher’. Tragically the cholera kept pace with the Light Brigade; and within days of reaching Yenibazar sick and dying Hussars and Lancers were filling two huge hospital marquees. ‘There are no comforts but scanty medical stores, and the burning blistering sun glares upon heads already delirious with fever,’ Mrs Duberly noted in her journal. The principal medical officer in the 11th Hussars persuaded the imperceptive Cardigan to forbid further renderings of the ‘Dead March in Saul’, as falling morale was lowering the resistance of men capable of recovery. At night Lancers kept at bay wild dogs eager to snatch bodies from hastily dug shallow graves.[191]