The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  On Monday morning at half-past eight the British columns began to march south-eastwards into heavily wooded country. Now it seemed as if they were heading away from the city whose lights they had seen reflected on the placid waters of the inner harbour the night before.

  Morale, so high on Saturday beside the vines and fruit trees of the Belbec valley, began to fall as they stumbled forward through brushwood, the narrow track beneath the oak trees left clear for field guns and horses. Still, it was encouraging to hear that at the end of their flank march the new veterans of the Alma would find a harbour, fresh supplies, and some of those battalions left waiting in the cholera camps of Varna. They were marching, it was said, to an inlet called Balaclava.

  *

  News of the Alma travelled slowly. Even Fanny Duberly, separated from her husband when the troops disembarked and now aboard ship off Eupatoria, did not hear of the battle until her maid — a trooper’s wife — woke her on Saturday morning with a rumour that the cavalry had been wiped out and that they were all widows.[238] Trustee for the news within Russia was Captain Serge Greig, the cavalry officer sent by Menshikov to give Tsar Nicholas an oral report of the battle; and Greig kept silent for six nights and days as he rode towards the capital. The Court, however, was not in St Petersburg but twenty-eight miles away at Gatchina where Nicholas’s father had spent so many months parading his Prussianized soldiery. Isolated in this grim, square-towered fortress, Nicholas did not know if the courier who arrived from the Crimea that Tuesday (27 September) was bringing news of victory or defeat.

  Among the officers in attendance on Tsar Nicholas was the future reforming minister of war, Count Dmitri Miliutin, then a colonel; and in his diary he described how Greig was so weary and overwhelmed at the prospect of telling his soldier sovereign that Russia’s armies had suffered defeat that he was incapable of giving the Court a coherent account of what had happened. Personal experiences intruded into his stumbling flow of words and he gave Nicholas the impression that his soldiers had lacked courage and fought badly. To Miliutin’s consternation, as Greig’s narrative rambled on, Tsar Nicholas sank back into a chair and burst into a flood of tears. Then, standing up to his full height, he seized the wretched Greig by the shoulders, shook him violently and bellowed, ‘Have you any idea what you are saying?’[239] The news of the Alma was not made public for several days: Russia’s newspaper readers were first told that, after an artillery duel between the two armies, Menshikov, finding his troops outnumbered, had ordered a strategic withdrawal to the defences of Sebastopol itself. Only when alarming rumours reached the capital from Berlin and Vienna was it admitted that Menshikov had suffered a defeat.[240]

  The earliest news of the Alma reached Paris and London by way of Constantinople, Belgrade and the Vienna telegraph on the evening of Friday, 30 September, but was not made public until the following day. Most ministers were out of town, Lord Aberdeen himself about to leave Balmoral, where he had been in attendance on the Queen, for a few weeks at Haddo, his Aberdeenshire estate. But Sir James Graham made sure that the news was telegraphed to Scotland; and he followed it up with a letter suggesting that the Prime Minister should ‘take the tide at its rise’ and hold a snap election, no doubt counting on the Alma factor to boost the popularity of the Peelites.[241]

  No one doubted that victory in the field would lead to the capture of Sebastopol and probably to peace. Indeed, hard on the news of the Alma came reports from several sources, including Britain’s Consul-General at Bucharest, which suggested that Sebastopol had already fallen. When, from the steps of the Royal Exchange, the Lord Mayor announced the victory of the Alma to a cheering crowd of Londoners on Saturday evening, the proclamation only mentioned the battle, despite rumours of the great prize in allied hands. But Napoleon III was less circumspect. On that Saturday he was reviewing troops beneath the great Emperor’s Column outside Boulogne, with the young Empress Eugenie beside him and a line of eagle-topped tricolour standards in front. The occasion was irresistible, and the Emperor won easy cheers with the words both sides of the Channel wished to hear. ‘At the moment I speak,’ Napoleon declared, ‘I have little doubt that the flags of the allied armies are waving on the walls of Sebastopol.’[242]

  The Times proudly announced ‘The Fall of Sebastopol’ in its Monday edition (2 October), ‘confirmed’ the report next day, quoted Napoleon III’s speech with warm approval, and by Wednesday was wondering when the Baltic Fleet would finish oil the war by taking Kronstadt and landing troops to enter St Petersburg. When, at midday on Monday, the saluting guns at the Tower and in Hyde Park fired salvoes celebrating the victory of the Alma, Londoners might legitimately be forgiven for assuming that the cannonade signalled the capture of Sebastopol.[243]

  Cabinet ministers spent a few hours circulating notes to each other on what should be done with Sebastopol. Palmerston and Graham were agreed that the port should never be ‘returned’ to Russia. Graham wanted all fortifications facing the sea destroyed at once, but not the land defences, as the expeditionary force would need to winter in Sebastopol if the war continued. Most of his colleagues agreed with him, and, indeed, the suggestion had already been made by Napoleon III. Palmerston, who even before the expedition landed in the Crimea had told Clarendon that he thought the peninsula should come once again under the Sultan’s sovereignty, argued that Sebastopol should remain intact until the peace conference, as a bargaining counter.[244] Far away, at Haddo, Lord Aberdeen showed greater statesmanship. No territory liberated from Islamic rule by a Christian Power had ever been restored to the Sultan, and he personally could not share Palmerston’s Turcophilia: ‘The Turks really hate us all alike,’ he reminded Clarendon on 1 October, echoing the tone of Alexander Gordon’s letters from Constantinople. ‘With Sebastopol entirely razed, and the fleet captured, I would not give sixpence for the possession of the Crimea in any political view,’ he told Clarendon two days later, admitting that he was ‘much encouraged by the news’. But the Prime Minister was more cautious than his colleagues down south. It was, perhaps, a little premature to begin disposing of Sebastopol; there was still no official word from Lord Stratford or Lord Raglan that the city was, indeed, in allied hands. ‘The suspense is most tantalizing; and this is increased by distance,’ Aberdeen added.[245]

  All suspense was ended on Thursday, 5 October. An official announcement on the Paris Bourse deriving that Sebastopol had been occupied by the Franco-British armies was followed later in the day by reports in London that the allied force had set out on a flank march to ‘the port of Balaclava’. By the weekend the press was looking for ingenious explanations of the tale: all the work of stock exchange speculators, said The Illustrated London News: some diabolical scheme of Russian agents intended to demoralize the British and French public by raising false hopes, suggested a blandly unembarrassed Times.[246]

  The origins of the rumour may well have been less nefarious. After the Alma defeat Menshikov left the city with a sizeable force on 24 September, arguing that if the allies knew they had a Russian army on their flank and in their rear, they would not risk an assault on Sebastopol for fear of encirclement.[247] It is probable that garbled tales of Menshikov’s hasty departure towards Simferopol reached Bucharest from Gorchakov’s headquarters at Kishinev. What would nowadays be called the enforced Russian news blackout encouraged the spread of rumour, for it was obvious that the bells would have rung out had Nicholas’s army won a victory in the Crimea. But The Times was right to comment on the demoralizing effect of the report. Politicians were accustomed to such bu&tings of fortune: the general public was not. Over the following month there was to be a sharp reaction to the twin disappointments of an unmolested Kronstadt and an untaken Sebastopol.

  Chapter Nine – The Decisive Weeks

  The flank march of the allied army from the Belbec valley to the sea took some thirty hours. The weather was humid by day and foggy after dark; and there was a strange clash of arms on the Monday afternoon when Raglan and his staff, emergi
ng from woodland on the Simferopol Road encountered the rearguard of a Russian force moving away from Sebastopol six miles due east of Severnaya. The horse artillery, reacting quicker than the Hussars, soon scattered the surprised Russian infantrymen and captured some carts filled with food, clothing and delicacies. But Raglan himself was uneasy that night. His artillery was hampered by the narrowness of the pathway through the brushwood; the French were even worse placed, with all their guns parked overnight in what was probably the crater of an extinct volcano. Raglan was much relieved next morning when, four miles after crossing the river Chernaya by a bridge at Traktir, he reached the village of Kadikoi and saw beneath him what looked like a lagoon surrounded by red sandstone cliffs. It was the inner harbour of Balaclava.[248]

  Genoese traders had discovered the inlet of Balaclava in the sixteenth century and constructed a small fort at the cliff-top to protect their anchorage. The fort was defended in September 1854 by some seventy militiamen with four brass mortars and they dutifully fired on Raglan and the vanguard of the expeditionary force as it prepared to descend from the Kadikoi plateau to the sea. It was, however, a token gesture of defiance, and Balaclava was taken without loss of life on either side. Already the Agamemnon, Rear-Admiral Lyons’s flagship, was off the inlet and Lyons sent the frigate Niger into the small harbour of Balaclava on Tuesday afternoon (26 September). By that evening a line of white bell tents ringed the edge of the plateau while seamen and marines were ashore along the cart track which served the cluster of sheds and shanties as a village street. With green-tiled cottages half-buried in honeysuckle and clematis, Balaclava was a picture of rustic artistry, the calm, translucent silver of the inlet forming a haven of domesticated peace. On the higher ground there were orchards and, below them, narrow sloping strips of pumpkins and tomato plants. Apart from hanging draperies of Muscatel grapes, it could have been an English West Country watercolour. ‘A most beautiful harbour, not more than two miles round — a basin in its shape, where the water is always like a mill-pond, though deep enough for any line-of-battle ship to come within stone throw of the shore,’ wrote Henry Clifford of the Rifle Brigade to his brother on the afternoon after the British arrived.[249] His letter was cheerfully optimistic: the fall of Sebastopol was imminent, now that siege guns were being landed; and, for the first time in six days, officers and men would be able to enjoy a wash — they might even shed their uniforms, a luxury they had been denied for a fortnight. On both counts, Lieutenant Clifford was wrong: the troops, called suddenly to arms, were sent unkempt and unwashed to bivouac on the heights inland; and another 346 days were to pass before allied flags flew over smouldering Sebastopol.

  Balaclava was recommended as an ‘admirable siege depot’ by Major-General Macintosh when, early in November, 1853, he prepared for the British ambassador in Constantinople the first intelligence assessment on Sebastopol’s defences in nearly twenty years; and it was favoured by Burgoyne, who had studied Macintosh’s report. But so narrow an inlet could hardly serve both the British and the French. Was it really the best forward base, Raglan wondered? Momentarily he hesitated, for from the Kadikoi Plateau another cart-track ran due west to the twin open bays of Kamiesh and Kazatch, nearer to Sebastopol. He consulted Rear-Admiral Lyons, who had no doubt that Balaclava was the right depot. Kamiesh and Kazatch were north-facing exposed anchorages, rather than harbours. Although steam tugs could manoeuvre sailing vessels more easily in the twin bays, their waters were shallow. A month later with the French building up a larger and better equipped expeditionary force, Raglan’s critics began to argue that he should have given them first choice of the quayside. But in September it seemed the right decision. No one believed that the siege would last long, and the British certainly had more vessels than the French plying between Constantinople and the Crimea.[250]

  On the evening he reached Balaclava Raglan drafted a precise memorandum for General Rose to pass to the French high command: ‘Lord Raglan does not consider it at all necessary that the French army should march upon Balaclava. The English army came here with a view only of securing its communications with the sea. The combined object of the allied armies is to establish themselves on the range of heights [which] may be said to command Sebastopol.’ Detailed references marked offsegments of the front to be held by the British and by the French, with the Turks in reserve. Siege guns, the French were assured, would be landed speedily. Soon everything would be ready for bombarding the city from the land and from the sea.[251]

  Raglan’s memorandum reads more like a directive from a generalissimo than a proposal from one allied commander to another; and with good reason. For on this flank march Saint-Arnaud’s health had finally given way. His son-in-law, who served as his military secretary, and the omnipresent Colonel Trochu persuaded the Marshal to hand over command of the French forces to the soldier whom Napoleon III had already nominated as his deputy, Francois Canrobert; and it was to the infantryman whom Raglan persisted in addressing as ‘General Kant Robert’ that the memorandum was despatched.

  Poor Saint-Arnaud resigned his command early on the morning of 26 September, at his overnight headquarters beside the river Chernaya. As soon as he was well enough to he moved, a column ofSpahis escorted the mortally sick Marshal down to Balaclava, where it was easier to board a vessel than at Kamiesh. ‘I had only one desire — to enter Sebastopol,’ he told his doctor, as he waited to sail for Constantinople and home in the steamer that had brought him out from Marseilles in the spring; ‘Had I been able to carry out my original plan, perhaps I could have done it, but I have been master neither of myself nor of events,’ he added. Saint-Arnaud had nothing but praise for the British when Raglan went to bid him farewell: a thirty-hour voyage across calm seas to the Bosphorus would speed his recovery, he told his visitor. But six hours before the Berthollet was due to pass Madame Saint-Arnaud’s waterside Villa at Yenikoy, the Marshal lost his long fight to go on living. An autopsy confirmed a chronic disease of the heart. But in a real sense he was a casualty of his own campaign, for, whatever the clinical cause of death, there is no doubt that he contracted cholera at Varna, later drugging himself heavily so as to rise from his sick-bed and spend those weary hours in the saddle at Calamita Bay and the Alma. The Berthollet continued her voyage to France, and on 16 October the Marshal was buried beside the greatest names of French military history in the chapel of the Invalides.[252]

  *

  Were it not for an obligatory tuft of imperial beard and vestigial reminiscence of flowing hair about the neck, portraits of Canrobert seem to anticipate Dame Agatha Christie’s descriptions of Hercule Poirot. Saint-Arnaud’s successor was commendably neat and precise in manner, a short, dapper man with a high, domed forehead and a heavily waxed moustache. It had soon become clear to his British allies that Canrobert possessed many excellent qualities, not least among them the combination of a brisk efficiency with a humane sense of compassion for his men. In three months as liaison officer Hugh Rose, who spoke and wrote French well, had come to understand and admire the astute Canrobert, although his journal shows that he was baffled by the General’s lingering attachment to the exiled Orleanists. Such subtleties of loyalty were not apparent to Raglan’s staff. ‘His bravery is without question,’ Colonel Calthorpe commented at the time of Canrobert’s appointment. Yet there was, none the less, one serious disadvantage for the French in the General’s assumption of these new responsibilities. For Canrobert was inexperienced in high command; at forty-five, he was eleven years younger than his predecessor and twenty-one years younger than the British Commander-in-Chief. It is not surprising if, at first, even so gentlemanly an officer as Raglan tended to treat him brusquely.[253]

  Not, however, for long. For at the first conference of the allied commanders, Canrobert insisted that he could not order a direct frontal assault by French troops on the Russian positions defending Sebastopol from the south until the forts had been reduced by steady bombardment. Over this question Canrobert had a strong supporter in Genera
l Burgoyne, to whom Raglan listened, with respect, more and more once it became clear that Sebastopol was a fortress needing investment. It was settled that no attack would be made until the siege guns were in position and the French ready to open up with a light cannonade on those Russian defences.[254]

  Twenty-one days elapsed between the conference of allied commanders and the first bombardment of the city. They were the three decisive weeks of the campaign. For, while the British concentrated first on hauling massive siege guns up from the shore to the heights and then on digging zig-zag approach trenches to extend sunken cover for the attacking infantry, Admirals Kornilov and Nakhimov took advantage of this precious time to ensure that Totleben’s genius made Sebastopol unassailable. These three weeks condemned the allied expeditionary force to all the rigours of a war of attrition.

  The sight of defeated and dejected troops filing back into their city from the Alma Heights caused dismay among the people of Sebastopol. Worse was soon to follow when, on 24 September, Menshikov led his main force of soldiers out along the Simferopol Road, leaving the city’s defence to the admirals. On the previous afternoon seven Russian warships, moored across the entrance to the harbour, were sunk to prevent the allied fleets from entering Sebastopol Roads, and the admirals could therefore make use of seven ships’ crews, together with naval reserves from the barracks, to help ward off an assault by land. Nevertheless, on the day after Menshikov’s departure, Admiral Kornilov, who assumed the title of Chief of Staff of the garrison, reckoned he had no more than 17,800 men, including sappers, to hold the city; along the north shore only twelve guns were manned and in position. But, like Suvorov and Kutuzov, Vladimir Kornilov was one of those remarkable folk heroes who, over the centuries, have lifted Russian morale from abject defeatism to a sublime defiance of the enemy. While Totleben drew up the plans for new batteries, Kornilov mobilized men, women and children to work throughout the day, bringing up guns from the ships, deepening trenches, building new protective works for existing redoubts, and making certain that powder magazines were secure. In front of the British position a round tower, the Malakoff, was converted into a formidable redoubt, protected by earthworks and linked to two other bastions, the Great Redan to the south and the Little Redan to the north. The French forces, to the west of the British, faced the improved fortifications of the Old Town — the Flagstaff, Central and Quarantine Bastions. Across the harbour, at Severnaya, the ‘Star Fort’ guarded the approach from the north. Fort Alexander to the south of the harbour entrance and Fort Constantine to the north remained as sentinels against bombardment by the fleet. To the south and east of the city, lamps and flares were improvised so that work could continue on improving all these defences by night and by day. In one thirty-six-hour period of intense physical labour no less than a hundred guns were placed in position.[255]