by Alan Palmer
It was not only the army that suffered. The disease spread alarmingly through the densely packed lower decks of the warships anchored at Balchik Bay, a few miles north of Varna. Many vessels put to sea, hoping to get away from an insalubrious anchorage. But Admiral Dundas’s flagship, HMS Britannia, had some four hundred cases of cholera while cruising for three days between Varna and the Straits; and over a hundred bodies were thrown over the side, with the most perfunctory burial rites.[192] In five weeks cholera and typhus cost the British and French forces on the Bulgarian coast 10,000 casualties, reducing their effective strength in the field by about one-sixth. And all this without the Russian enemy ever once giving a belligerent’s twist to the screw of horror.
On the evening of that same 10 August on which Lord Aberdeen’s son had wished his regiment had gone forward to the Danube, Varna was afflicted by the second chronic scourge of campaigning in Eastern Europe. There was a strong inshore wind that Thursday, blowing sand and dust through the improvised bars and cafes which were springing up in the lower part of the little town. At seven in the evening, as Saint-Arnaud was riding back from visits to the hospitals, he saw a column of smoke rising from one of the narrower streets; soon the whole quarter was on fire. As at Smolensk and Moscow in 1812 and Salonika in 1917, the French authorities claimed that enemy agents had started the blaze, which they believed flared up ‘in four places at once’, and a senior British officer told his wife, with approval, that the French had bayoneted to death five Greeks thought to have been arsonists. But, despite rumours which spread through the camps, the fire seems to have begun in a shop used by the French as a liquor store and may well have been started by a drunken soldier knocking over an oil lamp. After several rainless weeks the low, wooden buildings — many of them little more than shanties — were tinder dry; and for five hours Varna blazed like a copse caught in a bush fire. Such allied encampments and hospitals as remained in the vicinity of Varna were not themselves in danger, for they stood on higher ground, away from the town. But at one moment sparks threatened the three powder magazines — Turkish, French and British — which were placed thoughtlessly close to each other, near the waterfront. Seamen from the vessels off-shore fought the flames throughout the night. ‘Ten times I was near despair,’ Marshal Saint-Arnaud wrote to his wife, back at Yenikov; but at three in the morning the fire was under control, and by dawn only the embers were smouldering. Lord Raglan was at Balchik Bay with the fleet that night; he returned to find that a warehouse full of boots and a cookhouse full of biscuits had gone up in smoke, and a third of the town lay in ruins.[193]
Although the fire checked preparations for the great invasion, the delay allowed more and more shipments to arrive from Constantinople, with three or four vessels dropping anchor off the Bulgarian beaches each day. Sometimes the steamers brought not merely fresh supplies, but visitors from Britain. On 26 August the indefatigable General Burgoyne returned to the Balkans, having left London at six hours’ notice ten days before; and from him Raglan heard at first hand of the mounting anxiety and impatience at Westminster. With the cholera raging so fiercely in Bulgaria, recent reinforcements — including the Scots Greys — were detained at Scutari, ready for direct passage to the invasion beaches of the Crimea. Some distinguished travellers were not encouraged to come to Varna: the archaeologist, diplomat and Whig MP, Henry Layard, reached Constantinople in the first days of September and remained there until he could find a steamer which would enable him to follow the invasion convoy. So, too, did Delane, the Editor of The Times. His presence in Varna at that moment would have been embarrassing, for, as W. H. Russell himself wrote on 28 August, there were complaints at headquarters ‘that the London journals have done great mischief by publishing...correct intelligence respecting our intended movements...and preparing the Russians to resist us’.[194] As early as 3 August The Times announced that a combined French, British and Turkish army was about to invade the Crimea and lay siege to Sebastopol. Such reports were available for assessment at the General Staff Building in St Petersburg within a week of their appearance in the London press.
Marshal Saint-Arnaud issued a resounding Napoleonic proclamation to his troops on 26 August, promising them that within three weeks the imperial eagle would be flying over the bastions of Sebastopol; and two days later the first French detachments began to embark in the huge armada off the Bulgarian coast. Saint-Arnaud, who was by now dependent on narcotics to relieve the gnawing agony in his stomach, had also contracted a fever in Varna and his staff began to suspect that their commander-in-chief was a dying man. Nevertheless he concentrated his mind on the invasion, telling his wife that he hoped to sail on 2 September., the invasion force would make a feint towards Odessa, assemble at sea between the northern mouth of the Danube and Cape Tarkankhut, and then come down on the Crimea from the north-west. Saint-Arnaud duly boarded the Ville de Paris on Saturday, 2 September, only to find that the British were not yet ready.[195]
The French were inclined to scoff at their ally’s muddle and mismanagement. On this occasion, however, their scorn was not entirely merited. Although the French infantry contingents outnumbered the British, Raglan had more cavalry and more light artillery; it was difficult to load horses and equipment aboard transports from a small port whose limited facilities had so recently suffered from a major fire. Rafts would bring the horses out to the waiting vessels and the animals were by then so frightened that they lashed out with their hind legs at any seaman or groom seeking to get a sling around their bodies. If there was a ground swell — as on the Sunday morning — this activity became long, slow and painful. Special problems, too, attended the embarkation of officers’ wives. Lord Raglan sought to keep Mrs Duberly, Lady Errol and her French maid, and other ladies away from the Crimea, but without success. Cardigan, the commander of the Light Brigade, had conic to know Fanny Duberly well at Yenibazar: ‘We take wonderful rides with Lord Cardigan, but not often, as I detest him,’ she had written to her sister, Selina Marx. Now it was Cardigan who told her of Raglan’s ban. ‘Tired out by the marching and fasting, I burst into a passion of tears,’ she wrote to Selina before the ships sailed; and Cardigan chivalrously assured her that should she ‘think it proper to disregard the prohibition’ he would not stand in her way. The challenge to a woman of Fanny Duberly’s spirit was irresistible. She was smuggled aboard the Himalaya hidden in a baggage boat.[196] Other wives, too, successfully escaped the scrutiny of more dutiful officers and boarded the transports.
At last on 4 September steam tugs began to tow the sailing vessels to join a fleet of boo ships concentrated in Balchik Bay. Saint-Arnaud, in wretched health and confined to his hunk, ordered the Ville de Paris to get under way on Wednesday, but it was not until dawn on Thursday, 7 September, that the firing of three saluting guns aboard the flagship gave the signal for the main invasion fleet to put to sea.[197] A convalescent officer, awaiting later shipment from Varna, watched the convoy head slowly northwards under ‘an immense cloud of smoke which extended for many miles’. ‘So far as the visible horizon,’ a senior naval officer later recalled, ‘the sea was covered with vessels, half obscured by the smoke of a hundred steamers.’ When, on the following morning, the allied warships came together, they could concentrate 3,000 guns on the protection of their convoy. The Russian fleet made no attempt to put to sea and engage the allied armada. Despite Sinope, the overall commander in the Crimea, Prince Menshikov, was reluctant to authorize bold naval sorties. He was confident that his army could expel any invaders who landed near Sebastopol. Not that he believed they would come. Cholera and the Varna fire ruled out the assembling of any invasion force, the Prince wrote to Paskevich and the Tsar. However, ‘I remain ready to receive the enemy,’ he assured St Petersburg.[198]
*
The allied transports were at sea; but where was their destination? ‘Opinions are very much divided whether we are really going to Sebastopol at this season of the year and many think we are going to Odessa for winter quarters,’ A
lexander Gordon wrote to his father soon after embarkation. Colonel Gordon believed that Raglan, who ‘very wisely keeps his plans close’, intended ‘to land 15 miles N. of Sevastopol’; but he added that it would be ‘rather hard if it comes on to blow from the N. or NW when we want to land’.[199] This shrewd observation seemed justified on Friday when the wind changed and the sea became rough. With the convoy some thirty miles off Cape Tarkhankut Saint-Arnaud invited Raglan to a council of war. But Raglan, having lost his right arm at Waterloo, could not clamber up the side of a vessel rolling in a heavy swell; nor was Saint-Arnaud fit enough to leave his bunk. This important council, on 8 September, was therefore — apart from the two senior admirals — a gathering of deputies.
Several French commanders were by now opposed to an outright attack on Sebastopol. They therefore proposed sailing southwards around the Crimea to take the enemy by surprise at Theodosia (Kaffa). General Rose, with several years of sifting intelligence reports from this region, had long advocated a landing here. He thought it essential to secure land mastery of the Crimean peninsula before attacking Sebastopol; and two eminent engineer officers, Burgoyne and Brigadier-General Tylden, also favoured a landing at some distance from the formidable fortress, preftrably in the cast of the peninsula. Theodosia was a hundred miles from Sebastopol, with a direct road to the key fortified inland town of Simferopol. Although it could only offer the seamen open sandy beaches and a small harbour, Theodosia was sheltered from the strong northerly winds. Moreover, since Theodosia enjoyed a milder climate than any town in the west of the peninsula, an army might winter in the vineyard-clustered bay of Kaffa. But other British spokesmen were more sensitive than Rose and Burgoyne to the high expectations held in London: if the name ‘Kronstadt’ was not to appear triumphantly in the press, then ‘Sebastopol’ it must be, for ‘Theodosia’ meant little, except perhaps to donnish clerics lovingly fingering patristic folios. The council of war settled nothing. Saint-Arnaud roused himself and said that he would agree with any decision taken by Raglan. The British Commander-in-Chief soon dismissed all talk of a landing a hundred miles from the expedition’s chief objective. He would, he said, cruise down the Sebastopol coast aboard Caradoc and choose a landing place in consultation with the allied admirals and generals.[200]
Caradoc’s reconnaissance of the coastline on Sunday, 10 September, is a familiar prologue to the Crimean drama: but some details have become confused with the passage of time. It was on Saturday morning — not, as so often said, Sunday — that Admiral Lyons in Agamemnon left the main fleet and, supported by a steam frigate and a French corvette, escorted Caradoc towards Sebastopol. The flotilla approached the Russian coast overnight until (as Rose noted in his journal) ‘a little after 4 a.m. we went on board Caradoc to reconnoitre Sebastopol’. Lyons thought that a single vessel so early on a Sunday morning would not arouse undue concern. The flagship therefore remained well out to sea and even the escorts came no closer inshore than three miles. But Caradoc, with Generals Raglan, Burgoyne, Brown, Rose, and Canrobert and Admiral Lyons himself aboard, slipped to within 3,000 yards of Fort Constantine, looking formidable on its spit of land to the north of the main harbour. So close inshore was the reconnaissance party that several British officers heard the curious chromatic tintinabulation from the cupolas of the city as Orthodox Russia prepared to observe St Alexander Nevsky’s Day. ‘We closely examined every part of the coast that the Generals desired to see, approaching sometimes within a few cables’ length of the beach,’ Lyons reported when he rejoined the fleet. ‘The fortifications looked of immense strength, and appeared to bristle with guns,’ wrote Colonel Calthorpe, Raglan’s nephew and aide-de-camp. But not a shot was fired. Through telescopes the generals studied the lie of several beaches near to Sebastopol, but they decided against any landing where the enemy might launch a counter-attack before the troops and their guns were safely ashore. They therefore looked for a low-lying section of coast, within a few days’ march of the great naval base. Raglan decided that ‘the most eligible spot for the disembarkation of the army’ was a beach near a ruined Genoese ‘Old Fort’, in Calamita Bay, twelve miles south of Eupatoria. Sir George Brown, Canrobert and several other officers would have preferred to land some thirty miles nearer Sebastopol, at the mouth of the river Alma; but, wrote Calthorpe, ‘the naval men, both English and French, objected to it, as the bay was far too small for our enormous flotilla’. The Old Fort might be forty-five miles from Sebastopol — and not ‘some thirty miles’ as several recent books have said — but the General welcomed its relative isolation, the protection afforded by a large inland lake, and the hopes of easily securing the small town of Eupatoria itself as a roadstead and advance base.[201]
By seven on Monday morning Lyons had brought his top-level reconnaissance party safely back to the main invasion fleet which was riding at anchor fifty miles west of Cape Tarkhankut, ‘a forest of masts, yet quite out of sight of land’. That evening the fleet moved off slowly eastwards. It was an oppressively humid night, threatening thunder and a possible end to the calm seas of the past two days. The French and Turkish ships could not keep up with the British fleet and Dundas dropped anchor eighteen miles north-west of Eupatoria late on Tuesday afternoon, sending tugs out to bring the slower allied vessels to join him. Provided the weather held and the Russians did not make a sortie from Sebastopol, the allied commanders were confident that they would get their first troops ashore on the beaches around the Old Fort on Thursday, 14 September. Saint-Arnaud noted that this was the anniversary of the entry into Moscow of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Rather curiously, the coincidence in timing seemed to afford the invalid Marshal comfort and confidence. General Bosquet, commander of the French 2nd Division, contented himself with wry comments on the unsuitability of choosing a place which the charts showed as ‘Calamity Bay’ for a landfall.[202]
At ten on Wednesday morning Russian observers, peering out across the sea from precarious platforms above Fort Constantine, spotted the smoke of a fleet on the horizon and alerted their commander-in-chief. But Menshikov was still reluctant to admit that an invasion was imminent. Only two days previously, after HMS Caradoc had been seen to approach the harbour and turn away again, he had written to St Petersburg stressing how recent events justified his assessments: the enemy would not dare make a landing; certainly not so late in the campaigning season. But throughout Wednesday afternoon the wooden arms of the coastal telegraph semaphore at the mouth of the river Alma signalled sightings of a great convoy moving into Eupatoria Bay. It seemed, to Menshikov’s amazement, as if more than a hundred vessels had slipped in undetected to the Russian coast. He ordered an enterprising junior naval officer, Lieutenant Vladimir Stetsenkov, to set out for Eupatoria with Cossack outriders, who would bring back intelligence reports for the naval and military high command. That evening the officers of the Sebastopol garrison and their families were enjoying a performance of Gogol’s satirical masterpiece The Government Impector when, at the end of the third act, news arrived from Stetsenkov that the enemy was, indeed, about to land near Eupatoria in great force; the theatre emptied rapidly.[203]
Stetsenkov also sent a message to Vice-Admiral Kornilov pointing out that as ‘the enemy fleet stood so crowded and in such disorder...it might be possible to use fire-ships [sic] against it’.[204] This was sound advice, but impracticable. A perceptive commander, intent on turning defence into attack, might well have prepared fireships at Eupatoria to be sent down at night on the prevailing wind if an allied fleet moored off the sandy beaches of Calamita Bay or the mouth of the Alma; but it was asking too much of the Black Sea Fleet to set out from Sebastopol with improvised fireships and sail them northwards for more than forty miles to a heavily protected enemy roadstead. Menshikov — who was both an admiral and a general — regarded the navy as an ancillary defence supporting the army. Until urgent fortifications on the north side of Sebastopol were completed, he wanted the fourteen ships oldie line and seven frigates to remain in port rather than r
isk destruction by the numerically superior allied fleet.
From aboard the Himalaya Sergeant Albert Mitchell of the 13th Light Dragoons watched the Russian coastline draw nearer and. being a true man of Kent, was at once reminded of Romney Marsh.[205] The comparison was apt: for, at the point where the Light Brigade disembarked, only a narrow stretch of shore separated the sea from a salt lake, while in the distance a crescent of turfy downland ended in shallow cliffs, not chalky white in appearance but a reddish sandstone. Apart from fleeting glimpses of Cossack outriders, there was no sign of the enemy, who were puzzled by a diversion made by seven British and French steamships off the mouths of the Katcha and Alma rivers. Throughout Thursday, 14 September, the disembarkation continued: the French landed first, then the 7th Fusiliers, and so on through the day, until rain began to soak officers and men alike and ‘a heavy swell setting in from the westward’ hampered the landing of tents, guns, stores and horses. That first stormy night the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, spent huddled under waterproof covers, tentless like the Guardsmen and Highlanders who comprised his 1st Division.
By Friday conditions had improved and the tents were coming ashore; but Raglan and his staff were acutely aware that their army was short of baggage animals, wagons and drivers, and attempts to make good these deficiencies locally by purchase, cajolery or requisition were not entirely successful. It was galling that the French possessed an efficient transport corps and, as at Gallipoli in the spring, they were quicker in learning to live off the land. Saint-Arnaud, whose health improved once his transports reached Calamita Bay, became impatient. From the Ville de Paris he had written to his wife telling her his proposed programme: on the 17th or 18th a battle on the Alma, perhaps another on the river Katcha, and so to Sebastopol by the 25th, with the Crimean campaign over by the middle of October. But on Monday, 18 September, Saint-Arnaud was still at the Old Fort waiting for Raglan to get his troops ready for the march. The Marshal was well-disposed towards Raglan, but the long wait tried his patience, and in the course of the day he resolved that he would move forward ‘tomorrow at 7 o’clock and nothing will hold us back any longer’.[206]