The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  The strange inactivity of the enemy was beginning to prey on overstretched nerves in the British camp. On that Monday evening troopers in the Light Brigade could see a glow in the southern sky which might be fields fired by Cossacks to deny the invaders forage, but could also he a reflection of camp fires where a Russian army lay silently in waiting. Suddenly a guard thought he heard, above the sound of frogs and crickets, the rattle of harnesses as horsemen loomed up in the darkness. He fired a warning shot, and at once the whole brigade turned out to meet the enemy — who were soon identified as one of the brigade’s own patrols. By now the neighbouring infantry divisions were responding to an apparent alert and they opened a brisk fire in the general direction of the horsemen. Order was restored through the powerful lungs and unmistakable manner of Lord Cardigan. A cavalry officer wounded his own batman in the leg; but, remarkably, no one was killed.[207]

  The incident showed it was high time that the army marched on Sebastopol. At 9 a.m., only two hours later than Saint-Arnaud’s proposed moment of departure, the allied armies — six thousand Turks on the right, then the French, with the British on the left — began to move southwards, regimental bands playing as they had when the men left their barracks months ago. Soon, with the temperature fast rising into the eighties Fahrenheit and throats parched as the marching columns climbed up from their encampments to a high, rolling plateau, the fifes, drums and bugles went silent. Weary regiments, still plagued by cholera, trudged slowly on, with no enemy in sight but the sun.[208] It was as if a cumbersome tortoise, three miles long and four miles wide, was ambling forward astride the one good coastal road that ran down from Eupatoria and across five river valleys before reaching Sebastopol itself. None of the rivers was much more than a stream at that time of the year, and although no doubt the primitive bridges would be destroyed, each river was easily fordable. ‘A nine days march’, the staff officers calculated at headquarters; but that, they conceded, depended on what obstacles the Russians might raise at each of those river crossings.

  Chapter Eight – To the Alma and Beyond

  Sebastopol – or, as it might be translated, ‘City of Imperial Power’ – became a naval base in 1804, two decades after Catherine the Great named her new foundation to celebrate the conquest of the Crimea; and from that year an edict of Tsar Alexander I sought, not always successfully, to keep the port closed to commercial traffic. When war began with Turkey in 1853 there were 45,000 people living in the city. 38,000 of whom were either in the army or navy themselves or were serving men’s dependents. Sebastopol Bay was a natural site for a harbour, with the main town — like the old centres of Plymouth and Brest — on raised tableland, sloping steeply down to an inlet four miles long and half a mile wide. Until Nicholas I’s reign the city’s defences had faced the sea, with six coastal batteries capable of engaging an enemy fleet one and a half miles off the outer anchorage. Since 1825 five more batteries had been completed, three of them in recent months; and Menshikov knew that he could now concentrate 610 guns on any seaborne invaders who ventured up Sebastopol Roads, quite apart from the fire-power of the Black Sea Fleet. It was from this mass of artillery that Menshikov had drawn his confidence all that summer.[209]

  But Tsar Nicholas, who inspected Sebastopol in 1837, had long been concerned with the ability of his naval base to withstand attack from the land; and theoretically Sebastopol was defended by an outer ring of eight earthwork bastions, connected by a trench system, and the protection offered by a crenellated wall. On the maps spread out across the tables at the General Staff Building in St Petersburg, these defences looked formidable. Yet, in reality, they were far from complete, the most important redoubts remaining isolated from each other. General Prince Michael Gorchakov, who had spent many months at Sebastopol before taking command in Bessarabia, was acutely aware of the city’s defensive weaknesses and, when it became clear that there would be no more fighting along the Danube that year, he ordered his most accomplished engineering officer, Colonel Eduard Totleben, to leave his headquarters at Kishinev, travel to Sebastopol, and offer Menshikov his services.

  Totleben duly reported to Menshikov on 22 August, handing him a letter of introduction from Gorchakov which spoke highly of the 36-year-old sapper officer’s work at Silistria. But Menshikov, as arrogant and suspicious as ever, received Totleben coldly. The Prince, who prided himself on being a true Russian soldier schooled in a crack cavalry regiment, despised engineers (especially those over thirty years his junior) and disliked Baltic Germans — and the Totlebens came from Mitau (Jelgava) in Latvia. Moreover, Menshikov resented the intrusion of another field commander’s military protege. ‘In his absentmindedness, Prince Gorchakov appears to have forgotten that I have a sapper battalion myself,’ he told Totleben. ‘I suggest you take a rest, and then return wherever you came from.’[210] But it was not difficult in Tsar Nicholas’s army for a resourceful officer to extend a period of ‘rest’ until days stretched imperceptibly into weeks. Totleben examined Sebastopol’s defences at leisure; and he did not like what he saw, considering that some of the forts were only fit to beat off Tatars. To the north of the city was the biggest citadel of all, Fort Severnaya, soon to be known by the allies as ‘Star Fort’, from its octagonal shape. It looked impressive from a distance but Totleben was worried by the astonishingly broad northern arc of dead ground to its guns, by the effect of earlier years of neglect on its fabric, and by the absence of outer galleries or protective earthworks, giving contact with the main system of defence. For here, he was convinced, was the key fortress, looking out over the whole of the anchorage and the city beyond. Whoever held Fort Severnaya was master of Sebastopol.[211] Unfortunately for the allied invaders, Totleben was still ‘resting’ in the city when, on 15 September, Cossack riders brought the first detailed reports of the landings in Calamita Bay. It looked as if the allies intended to follow the direct coastal road towards the city.

  The news was, in one way, reassuring for Menshikov. Had the invaders split their forces, sending one column inland to Bakchisarai before turning south-west to approach Sebastopol’s defences from the Simferopol Road, their line of advance would have posed problems for the Russian commander. As it was, Menshikov could write confidently to St Petersburg that night informing the Tsar that he intended to take up advantageous positions along the road from Eupatoria and Sebastopol and await there the arrival of the enemy. Marshal Saint-Arnaud had told his wife in a letter written three days before he even saw the Crimean coastline that he would fight a glorious battle (‘une belle bataille’) beside the Alma; and Menshikov intended him to do so. Rarely has there been such resigned inevitability in the choice of a battlefield.[212]

  Menshikov had often ridden along the Eupatoria Road and knew its contours well. He did not bother to summon a council of war, nor take his senior commanders into his confidence. They sensed what he was planning; for already troops were beginning to concentrate on the plateau between the rivers Alma and Katcha, fifteen miles due north of Sebastopol. On either side of the river’s mouth was a sheer rockface of chalk which Menshikov assumed no enemy would attempt to scale: a battalion of infantry and a couple of guns could keep token guard from the top of the cliffs. What interested him were two hills, three miles inland: Telegraph Hill, where a skeletal unfinished semaphore looked more like a gibbet; and, overshadowing it, the bluff of Kourganie Hill, presenting a broad natural platform from which field guns could command the bridge across the Alma and over a mile of the main route towards Sebastopol. To a conventionally-minded general looking for textbook battlefields it was, as Menshikov remarked to Lieutenant-General Kiriakov, ‘a fine place’. And Kiriakov — an infantry commander to whom sobriety came as an unnatural condition — looked down on the vineyards upstream and agreed with him.[213]

  General Kiriakov’s men were first in action, the Tarutinsky Regiment stumbling largely by accident on the vanguard of the Light Division beside the Bulganek river on Tuesday afternoon (19 September). The Russians opened fire, kil
ling four cavalry horses in Cardigan’s brigade and wounding their riders. Neither Raglan nor Menshikov wished to risk the losses of a chance engagement on the eve of what each assumed would be a set-piece battle. Kiriakov, obeying the Prince’s general orders, accordingly pulled the Tarutinsky and their accompanying Cossacks back, while Raglan — with some difficulty — restrained Lord Cardigan from charging the enemy like Quixote tilting at windmills. ‘I don’t know how it is, but whatever I propose is always frustrated,’ one of his horsemen heard their Brigadier complaining. Officially Raglan praised Cardigan’s ‘spirit’ and skill in keeping ‘his Brigade under perfect command’; privately he resolved to use his light horsemen defensively as a protective screen, eschewing all flamboyance. At this distance from home good cavalry horses were in shorter supply than competent riders.[214]

  The Bulganek encounter also disturbed Raglan on another count. Cardigan’s isolation when he crossed the river drew attention to a widening gap between the British 2nd Division, on the extreme right of his line of advance, and the French 3rd Division under Prince Napoleon, the Emperor’s cousin. A French liaison officer, Lieutenant-Colonel de Lagondie, was duly sent by Raglan to Prince Napoleon with a polite request to close the gap. With his mission accomplished Lagondie started back for Raglan’s headquarters, but he was so shortsighted that he mistook the Kievsky Hussars for British cavalry, was captured by one of Kiriakov’s NCOs, and taken to Menshikov’s tent. The Russian staff officers felt so sorry for the poor bungler that they offered to send a horseman, under a flag of truce, to collect Lagondie’s personal belongings from the British; but the Frenchman, celebrated at Raglan’s headquarters for long yarns of his campaigning days in Algeria, had lost quite enough face for one day. The Russian offer was declined and Menshikov gave orders that Lagondie was to be escorted into Sebastopol and detained in Prince Bariatinsky’s house ‘since this was the only residence available with a staff of servants and cooks’ to attend to his needs.[215] Not all prisoners-of-war could count on such generous treatment. On that same day 180 captives from Bomarsund, some with wives and children, were nearing the end of a long journey from the Aaland Islands to East Sussex, where Lewes Prison had been specially set aside for them.

  *

  Captain Chodasiewicz of the Tarutinskv Regiment had reached the heights between the rivers Katcha and Alma late on Friday 15 September. His battalion — there were four battalions in the regiment, each of about 800 men — was therefore awaiting the enemy for four days before Tuesday’s skirmish along the Bulganek. Back in Sebastopol the officers had been confident of success, but the distant sight of the allied armada left them in doubt; a fleet of that size must have landed at least 80,000 men, they reckoned. The soldiers in the ranks were fascinated by the spectacle: they had been garrisoning Nizhni-Novgorod until the previous December, when they began a four months’ march to the war zone; and most of them had never seen the sea until that spring, let alone a fleet at anchor. Nor perhaps had Captain Chodasiewicz, for he later recalled how, ‘At night the forest of masts was illuminated with various coloured lanterns’. But to the Tarutinskys’ neighbours, a battalion of the Moscow Regiment, the hundreds of masts suggested church towers in a great city: ‘Behold the infidel has brought another Holy Moscow on the waves!’ Chodasiewicz heard one awed peasant remark.[216]

  Lord Raglan’s nephew, Colonel Caithorpe, bivouacked on Tuesday night outside a ruined post-house in the upland south of the Bulganek. Like the Polish captain in the Tarutinsky, he, too, was deeply moved by the scene at night; not the ships behind him, but ‘the hundreds of watch and bivouac fires’ among the hills. Earlier in the evening Marshal Saint-Arnaud, alert and irradiating a confidence pepped up by narcotics, had ridden across to the posthouse, with the ubiquitous Breton, Colonel Trochu, at his side, and informed Raglan of his general plan: a pincer attack on the Russian positions across the Alma, with the French engaging the enemy’s left flank, near the sea, and the British drawing Russian fire in the centre while sweeping round their right (inland) flank. Since Raglan was militarily a pragmatist, convinced that no general can decide on the envelopment of an enemy position until he has studied it on the field, he treated the Marshal and Trochu with his customary courtesy, assured them that France could rely on his army’s full collaboration, and made no comment on the plan. On Wednesday, a bright and clear morning, the armies resumed their march, somewhat later than the French had hoped, but without disturbance from the enemy.[217]

  It was more than forty years since Raglan had ridden into battle beside Wellington with crumbling dust from the Spanish sierra underfoot and the ochre cupolas of Salamanca on the skyline. Saint-Arnaud was then a schoolboy at the Lycée Napoléon and Trochu not yet born, although Menshikov was in the field that day, defending Russia from French invaders somewhere north-east of Minsk. But the terrain around the allied army’s line of march was more reminiscent of Leon and Castile than of the low-lying marshland and sandy birch thickets of Byelorussia. And if Raglan’s thoughts turned to this earlier campaign rather than to the three weeks before Waterloo, it is not surprising. So much around him was unchanged. The artillery was still smooth-bore; the cavalry still hankered after a mass charge rather than the long-range reconnaissance for which lightly armed horsemen were ideally suited; and infantry tactics remained the same, even if muskets now had percussion caps rather than flintlocks and crack marksmen were armed with the Minié rifles, already common to their French allies. But there were differences, too: no one had doubted in Spain that the military mastermind was Wellington and that the officers of Britain’s allies were there on sufferance; and in those days there had been none of these wretched ‘TGs’, ‘Travelling Gentlemen’, for although the editor of The Times hurried back to Constantinople after a day ashore in Eupatoria Bay, William Russell was keeping up with the columns on the march and so, despite the vexations of a temperamental pony, was the author of Eothen, Alexander Kinglake — who, in contrast to Russell, Raglan thought ‘a most charming man’.[218] There was, however, a more serious distinction between the old and the new campaigning. In Spain and Portugal Wellington’s army found animals, food, fuel for fires, carts and wagons while the local population looked upon them as liberators, except for those wild drunken days when discipline broke and the ‘scum of the earth’ pillaged and plundered. The Crimea offered few resources for an expeditionary force accustomed to live off the countryside — only fired villages, scorched earth, and, despite amiable gestures from surviving Tatar settlements, the implacable hostility of a colonizing master race. The British Commander-in-Chief was slow to recognize this difference between warfare in the two peninsulas. Outwardly his failure of perception made little difference to what happened on this day of the Alma, 20 September; but it was to hamper the exploitation of a narrow victory in the field.

  Whatever doubts junior officers in the Tarutinsky might hold, nothing could shake Prince Menshikov’s conviction that he was about to scatter his imperial master’s enemies. He had agreed that a group of eminent civilians from Sebastopol could come out early on that Wednesday and watch his 38,000 men put to rout the 30,000 Frenchmen, 26,000 Britishers and 9,000 Turks marching southwards down the Eupatoria Road. These privileged spectators brought picnics with them as if about to see a review or a tattoo, the ladies wearing elegant clothes and carrying parasols and shawls, for it was, after all, the third week in September and no one could be certain of the weather in the Chersonese uplands so late in the season. They were accommodated in an improvised grandstand close to the unfinished semaphore station where, through opera-glasses, there was no reason why they need miss a single rout.[219] And, soon after one o’clock, the spectacle began. The glint of sun on bayonets helped the eye to focus on the red or dark green coats of British infantrymen advancing towards the riverside cluster of villages and vineyards. Immediately below the onlookers and stretching down towards the sea was a proto-Gauguinesque galaxy of colour — scarlet pantaloons, blue tunics and red burnous — as France’s chasseurs,
Zouaves and Spahis brought to the Crimea all the military trimmings of North Africa. Close to the onlookers’ grandstand, a curling cloud of powder-smoke showed that Menshikov’s batteries were seeking to bite into the review precision of Raglan’s troops as they advanced on the Russian centre; and soon the first solitary puffs from low ridges beyond the narrow river anticipated the answering boom from the British 9-pounders. Eighteen miles away, back in Sebastopol, Admiral Kornilov, the energetic Chief of Naval Staff, heard the rumble of opposing guns and knew that a decisive battle to save the city had begun. As senior shore-based officer, he left Colonel Totleben to supervise labour battalions throwing up field-works in front of the Severnaya Fort and ordered a carriage to drive him out to Menshikov’s headquarters, for seamen and marines were in reserve to help the army protect the docks, barracks and anchorage of the Black Sea Fleet.[220]