by Alan Palmer
The Friday after Menshikov’s departure — 27 September by Western calendars — was the anniversary of the coronation of Alexander I, the Tsar who redeemed the burning of Moscow by entering Paris in triumph eighteen months later; and Kornilov resolved to associate the coming battle for Sebastopol with the epic struggles of 1812-14 by an act of solemn religious observance, with Holy Russia consecrating the city’s defences. Priests, processing with sacred ikons and banners, sprinkled holy water over the troops, blessing them with the sign of the cross as they knelt beside the fortifications. It was thus that Russia’s soldiers had shown their devotion to the Blessed Virgin of Smolensk on the eve of Borodino, under the puzzled scrutiny of Napoleon’s staff. British and French officers were watching through their telescopes all the frenzied activity in front of Sebastopol day after day; but we do not know if, on this Friday, they perceived the significance of the strange procession which they must have seen winding along the earthworks and parapets in front of Malakoff tower and the Greater and Lesser Redans.
Although the allies had established themselves in Eupatoria as well as at Balaclava, they did not hold the lower stretches of the road down which they had marched from the Alma, and Sebastopol was not, in reality, cut off. It was thus possible for Menshikov’s naval aide, Stetsenkov, to ride up to Kornilov’s headquarters on the morning after the religious ceremony. What, he asked on behalf of the commander-in-chief, was ‘the state of Sebastopol’? And had the Chief of Staff made any assessment of enemy intentions? Kornilov replied crisply that he needed more trained battalions of soldiery since it was clear that the British and French intended to attack the city from the south. Two days later even Prince Menshikov ventured as far as Severnaya and met the Admiral in conference. The Prince told Kornilov that he had received reinforcements from the Caucasus and Odessa as well as from Gorchakov at Kishinev; more men, guns and supplies were on the way south from Moscow. An angry Kornilov even wrung from Menshikov a promise of infantrymen to support his improvised defence force; and during the first days of October the Tarutinsky, Moskovsky and Borodinsky regiments arrived back in the city, while Menshikov himself concentrated his army between the river Belbec and Severnaya so as to give Kornilov support in the rear.[256]
Lord Raglan and Sir John Burgoyne had chosen the day before Menshikov’s conference with Kornilov to reconnoitre the Russian position from the heights looking northwards towards the city; and Raglan’s nephew leaves us in no doubt that, after their ride, they no longer underrated the strength of Sebastopol’s defensive system. ‘The more he saw of it,’ Colonel Calthorpe writes of his uncle’s impressions, ‘the more convinced he was of the utter impracticability of attacking the town without first reducing the fire of the Russian batteries.’ ‘Large batteries were constructed on every available spot that could in any way assist the defence of the place,’ Calthorpe wrote, with some concern, a few days later. ‘When we first sat down before Sebastopol, we saw thousands of men employed making earthworks, and daily fresh batteries sprang up as if by enchantment.’[257]
Slowly and ponderously the British and French prepared for the great bombardment. Raglan worked as closely as possible with Dundas, Lyons and the French Admiral, Hamelin; the prospects for collaboration looked good. It was agreed that there would be a simultaneous cannonade of the Russian defences from sea and land, beginning at half-past six on the morning of Tuesday, 17 October. The most centrally placed of Canrobert’s batteries — forty-nine guns massed on a low hill known as Mount Rodolphe — would signal the start of the bombardment by, firing three shells; and then the whole tempest of explosive would shake Sebastopol to its foundations. The army would take care of the Malakoff and the Redan; the fleets would silence Forts Constantine and Alexander, as well as any other batteries above the harbour; ‘Star Fort’ at Severnaya was on the wrong shore, too distant for that day’s fighting. All in all, the admirals and generals agreed, it would be the heaviest bombardment the world had ever heard.[258]
Mrs Fanny Duberly had been told on Sunday by General Airey’s ebullient aide-de-camp, Captain Nolan, that on no account should she miss being early at the forward positions on Tuesday, so as to be certain of seeing the start of the great bombardment. But she was still asleep in her cabin aboard a steamer in Balaclava Harbour when the first crash of guns echoed in the hills. The sound was, indeed, impressive; but it was not what Raglan or Canrobert or Captain Nolan or the ever-observant William Russell had wished to hear, for, before the French could give their signal, the Russians noticed a movement behind the allied gun positions and themselves began the firing. Perhaps others than Captain Nolan and Mrs Duberly had discussed, too freely, the timing of allied intentions; for the Russians were not taken by surprise and, by later standards, security at Balaclava was appallingly lax. Certainly no one had anticipated that the great bombardment would become a gunners’ duel. Moreover, to Raglan’s consternation, in all these exchanges there was no sign of any cannonade from the warships clearly visible off the coast. Not until the afternoon were the fleets in action. Admiral Hamelin had decided that he was too short of ammunition for a day-long bombardment; but he was slow to warn the British admirals of his change of plan, and even slower to send the information to Canrobert and Raglan.[259]
Long before the ships opened fire, the French artillery had gone silent. Brigadier-General Rose’s diary, written up that evening, contains the cryptic sentence, ‘French magazine blew up, 8.48’; Calthorpe, too, mentions ‘the great disaster of the day, viz. the explosion of the principal French magazine’ on Mount Rodolphe as having occurred ‘at 8-45 a.m.’; and in his next letter home Alexander Gordon wrote: ‘The batteries opened yesterday morning for both French and British attacks but about 9 a.m. the French fire entirely ceased owing to a terrible explosion in the centre’. Other accounts put the ‘thunderous explosion’ more than an hour and a quarter later, when a second magazine appears to have been hit. As often in the letters which Lord Aberdeen received from his son, there seems to have been a measure of exaggeration, especially in the phrase ‘entirely ceased’, for the outer French batteries kept up a steady cannonade until half-past ten when the senior artillery officer, General Thirry, reported to Canrobert that he could not maintain an effective barrage.[260]
Canrobert himself was so unnerved by the earlier explosion that he was convinced the Russians were employing a secret weapon, a shell filled with devastating high explosive. Rose and a French major were sent at once to Lord Raglan with what Calthorpe described as ‘this monstrous piece of information and appeared quite astonished when we all said we did not believe such humbug’. Later in the day Rose returned to British headquarters with a written message for Raglan: ‘General Canrobert and Colonel Trochu and I were this afternoon in the French Redoubt,’ it explained. ‘The whole magazine of the battery was blown up’ after three-quarters of an hour of heavy shelling; it was unlikely that the battery would be able to open up again tomorrow. Perhaps the redoubt would never be rebuilt, he added.[261] Meanwhile, Russian sorties threatened the general position along this sector of the French line. This depressing news was followed by further explosions, as the Russian bombardment again set off French ammunition outside the redoubts. Conversely, soon after three in the afternoon, a Russian magazine at the rear of the Great Redan went up, with ‘immense beams of wood and what looked like barrels thrown high in the air’. Here, when this key position was reduced to smouldering rubble, was the moment for which cavalry and infantry had been waiting since soon after dawn. ‘We have been saddled all day in expectation of a turn-out,’ wrote Lieutenant Temple Godman of the Dragoon Guards to his sister later that day. ‘Once the whole army was said to be advancing, and pistols were capped and got ready.’ All that the expectant officers looked for was a signal from Raglan or his mounted aides to go forward. It never came; the allied commanders had agreed that the British and French infantry should attack together. Since Canrobert was in no position to order an advance, Raglan dutifully held his men back.[262]
From prisoners, and from Polish deserters, the allies later discovered that, during the bombardment, the Russians had suffered one great loss. As soon as the artillery duel began, Admiral Kornilov set out from his headquarters beside the Volokhov Tower, to the north of the harbour, to visit each of Totleben’s forts in the threatened southern perimeter of the defences. Shortly after eleven o’clock he left the Malakoff to visit the Borodinsky Regiment, who with their horses were sheltering from the storm of fire in a ravine to the west of the fort. But he had only walked some six or seven yards when he was hit by a round shot and was carried off to the naval hospital, where he died a few hours later.[266] As Admiral Nakhimov was also slightly wounded that morning, there was a momentary crisis in command on the Russian side. But the sight of Kornilov unconscious on a stretcher beside the Malakoff did not demoralize the troops, as had the fatal wounding of Bagration at Borodino; rather it intensified their stoical capacity to endure until they themselves seemed fanatics, as willing as their dying commander to court a hero’s death. Ultimately it was this inspired courage of Russia’s soldiery that cemented the fissures in Totleben’s defensive wall.
*
‘The “weak Front” of Sebastopol turns out to be a very respectable one,’ Alexander Gordon commented drily to his father in the letter which he wrote on the following day. No one doubted, however, that the cavalry and infantry would go forward soon and scatter the Russians as on the Alma. When the army went into winter quarters in Sebastopol, Colonel Gordon told his father, he would, he thought, come back to Britain for a few months and then return to the Crimea, accompanied this time by his wife, before next spring’s campaigning season began.[267] But on the Wednesday on which Gordon wrote this letter came the first warning that the Russians were about to turn the besiegers inside out. That morning, as Raglan was watching his guns firing once again at the Redan, a report was brought to him from Turkish outposts to the north-east of the British positions which suggested that Menshikov was assembling a large force behind the river Chernaya and on the hills around the village of Chorgun.[268]
Raglan rode up a track on the edge of the Sapoune Heights from where he could look due eastwards across the Plain of Balaclava, along a ridge called by his troops the ‘Causeway Heights’ — for the ridge gave the impression of supporting like a causeway the best surfaced route in the Crimea, the Worontsoff Road, linking Sebastopol to Baidar and Yalta. To Raglan’s left, as he gazed through his field glass along the ridge, lay the ‘North Valley’, long and narrow, rising in grass-covered downland to the Fedioukine hills and almost barred more than three miles to the east by a humpy knoll running north-south from above the Chernaya to the Worontsoff Road. A hazy gap gave a faint outline of the upland beyond the Chernaya and around Chorgun. There was no sign as yet of any Russian concentration in those hills, and Raglan observed before him all that he had anticipated: a succession of six redoubts on small hillocks straddling the Worontsoff Road, two on the edge of the North Valley and four overlooking the South Valley, and the approaches to the gorge at the foot of which lay Balaclava village and harbour. Of these redoubts only the farthest east and south had been given a name by the allied soldiers — ‘Canrobert’s Hill’, in honour of the new French commander. Each redoubt was armed with 12-pounder British naval guns manned by the Turks. To Raglan all this seemed a strong enough protective crescent: everyone assured him that the Anatolian Turk was a good natural fighter. But, as an additional precaution, he placed the defence of his army’s eastern flank under the command of General Sir Colin Campbell, whose 93rd Highlanders were encamped around Kadikoi. The approaches to the Balaclava base were safeguarded by the Royal Marines, with three more batteries of naval guns. Raglan saw no reason to think that his foothold on the Crimean shore was in danger.
For the next week French and British guns continued, day after day, to lob high-explosive shells and red-hot shot against Totleben’s defences and into the heart of Sebastopol, bringing house walls crashing down and causing a succession of small fires. But, while Raglan and Canrobert gave their attention to these siege operations, beyond the protective screen of the Fedioukine hills twenty-four new battalions, hurried eastwards by forced marches from Bessarabia, were poised, ready to strike southwards towards the improvised British harbour and base; and two more divisions were on their way. Effectively these troops were under the command of General Pavel Liprandi, one of Russia’s ablest soldiers. Back in St Petersburg, Tsar Nicholas and his staff officers had every confidence in Liprandi’s force, if only they could instil some confidence into Menshikov and encourage him to take the initiative.[269]
The Prince, however, was unnerved by the events of the past month, and particularly by the confusion at the Alma; his judgement, faulty before the allied landing, was now the prey to every whim of the moment. At a war council which he convened on Monday, 23 October, his subordinate generals could see for themselves Menshikov’s difficulty in making up his mind: the weather was worsening, and he needed to be able to send St Petersburg news of a victory before winter set in; he was inclined to order Liprandi to attack the forward British positions facing Sebastopol. The generals urged him to strike instead at Balaclava — but, they said, not yet, for it was essential to wait until the full strength of the Russian army could descend on this weak allied flank. If they struck too soon, said Liprandi, their gains would not be decisive and the allies would have time to strengthen these positions against a renewed assault. Menshikov, however, was in a hurry. The attack must come on that Wednesday. Urgent orders were sent to General Ryzhov, who was three miles south of Bakchisarai, to march some fifteen miles down the road to Sebastopol and concentrate his cavalry, horse artillery, an infantry regiment and four battalions of rifle sharpshooters in the Fedioukine Heights, immediately above the ‘North Valley’.[270]
The British knew that there was some Russian activity in the hills. Two days after Raglan’s first alert, there was a ‘false alarm’ soon after dusk when a British outpost heard the sound of Russian reinforcements ‘marching in with their band playing’ and soon ‘the reflection of their watchfires could be seen in the sky over the hill’. All night the cavalry stood ready; a nervous sputter of musketry from one of the Turkish forts was followed ‘an hour or two later’ by the roar of a naval battery opening up against an imaginary enemy patrol. Another alarm, on Sunday, fetched out the whole of Sir George Cathcart’s 4th Division, unnecessarily. After such incidents it is not surprising that when, on the following Tuesday night, Campbell sent Raglan a report that a Turkish spy had seen 20,000 Russian infantry and 5,000 Russian cavalry converging on the Plain of Balaclava, the British Commander-in-Chief merely received the message with a crisp ‘Very well’, sent no formal acknowledgement to Campbell, and continued discussing with Canrobert the next stage of operations against Sebastopol.[271]