The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  As the three lines of Hussars and Lancers, 400 yards apart and 200 yards across, moved forward up the North Valley, they had to pass immediately beneath a Russian battery on the Fedioukine hills and were soon within range of another battery to their left, along the Causeway Heights. Before the Russian cannon opened up, Captain Nolan moved out of position, cutting from left to right across the advancing line, sword drawn upraised, pointing towards the redoubts with their captured British guns. Some survivors said that they thought he shouted ‘Come on’: it seems as if, realizing that Cardigan was leading the brigade to the wrong objective, he sought both to correct the error and to fulfil his boast to ‘lead them myself’. But, no sooner had Nolan crossed to the right flank than a shell burst close to him and his body was pierced by a splinter of metal. ‘He uttered a fearful cry,’ Sergeant Mitchell recalled several years later;[285] and the officer who brought the cavalry’s scribbled orders down to the plain became the Charge’s first casualty.

  ‘Fearful’ was the adjective most readily conjured up that day. ‘A more fearful spectacle was never witnessed than by those who, without the power to aid, beheld their heroic countrymen rushing to the arms of death,’ Russell reported to his readers in a famous Times despatch which described how ‘30 iron mouths...belched forth...a flood of smoke and flame’ to thin ‘our ranks’. It was ‘fearful’, too, for Fanny Duberly, the only allied officer’s wife at that moment in the Crimea, as she stood powerless among the onlookers on the escarpment. ‘Ah, even now my heart turns sick,’ Fanny wrote to her sister two days later, with ‘I have a letter of disastrous news’ as her opening words. So many of the riders and their horses were known to her: only two and a half weeks before, Lord Cardigan had lent her ‘Ronald’, the chestnut charger with two white fetlocks on which he was now mounted; and the 8th Hussars, her husband’s regiment, were riding in the third line — although with one section short, for regimental orders, posted long before the battle, had assigned Captain Henry Duberly’s troop to serve on 25 October as personal guard and escort to the Commander-in-Chief.[286]

  For the first quarter of a mile it was possible for the onlookers to follow the Light Brigade quite clearly with the naked eye. Then men and horses were lost in the dust raised by their hooves and the smoke of explosives around them. But not before the group around Raglan sensed that something was wrong. ‘Cardigan must have lost his head’, was Hugh Rose’s horrified reaction to the sight of the Light Brigade advancing on the distant guns at the end of the valley between two ridges bristling with enemy artillery. General Bosquet was close to the British liaison commissioner when he declared that what they were seeing was ‘magnificent, but not war’, adding in a sentence which the tactful rarely quote, ‘It is madness’ (C’est de la folie).[287]

  So, too, at first thought the Russians at the other end of the valley, although Liprandi believed that the British must have made their riders drunk with spirits before they would follow a madcap leader on such an enterprise. General Ryzhov later described how, while his cavalry were reforming on the slopes above the Chernaya river, he went forward to talk to Prince Obolensky, when suddenly the Cossack gunners became excited by what looked like a cloud of dust bowling along the valley. Two minutes later, the Don Cossacks realized that these English horsemen were heading for them. They replied with shot, shell and case-shot, while Ryzhov tried to bring up his cavalry to protect the battery. But the enemy was on them, slashing with sabres and spiking the guns. Providence seemed to protect their leader, whom a Polish aristocratic officer recognized from his days in London society as the Earl of Cardigan, for his chestnut charger carried him through the battery and down towards Ryzhov’s Hussars, who had been slow to respond to their general’s call to arms. It was an extraordinarily confused mêlée around what was left of Obolensky’s battery.[288]

  By now casualties were thinning out the Light Brigade. The assault lost all impetus. Lucan, moving up more cautiously with the dragoons of the Heavy Brigade on Cardigan’s right, was checked by the fire from the redoubts; and the third line of the Light Brigade reached the battery only to find dazed survivors from the first line beginning to pull back. To Fanny Duberly, still trying through her husband’s field glasses to make out details from the plateau two miles away, there seemed to be some skirmishers among the Russian guns. With horror, she realized that she was looking at what was left of the Light Brigade.[289]

  Mrs Duberly missed seeing the fourth cavalry charge of the day, as indeed did most of the onlookers, for Bosquet had not contented himself with coining a famous epigram. Airey’s note had told Lucan, ‘French cavalry is on yr. left’; and it was Bosquet who made certain that the British did indeed have support from their ally in that quarter. A mile and a half behind the ‘Heavies’, and therefore rather more distant than Airey’s words suggested, the Fourth Regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique moved forward at a steady trot. Under the inspired leadership of General d’Allonville they swung sharply left up the northern slope of the valley and wiped out that Russian position on the Fedioukine escarpment which had rained down shot and shell on Cardigan’s men as they began their advance. Without d’Allonville’s action it is doubtful if any of the survivors from the Light Brigade’s Charge could have found the protective cover which enabled them to return to the British lines.[290]

  For survivors there were. ‘At 11.35 not a British soldier, except the dead and the dying was left in front of these bloody Muscovite guns,’ The Times told its readers on 14 November. Yet things were not quite so bad as Russell reported at the time. Wandering in front of the guns were some of the riders whose horses had been shot beneath them. Among them was Sergeant Mitchell, who tried in vain to calm and mount one riderless horse: ‘I was getting tired, for we had been out since 4 a.m.,’ he wrote in his memoirs. Some survivors took protective clothing from the bodies of dead colleagues: ‘From the day on which we landed, 15 September, until the 25 October, we had not had a change of linen, or hardly any opportunity of washing anything,’ Mitchell shamefacedly explained. Human endurance was reaching breaking point. ‘You had better make the best of your way back as fast as you can, or you will be taken prisoner,’ Lord Cardigan called gruffly down to the Sergeant as he rode past him. Many were too weak to avoid capture. But, with the aid of a generous swig of rum, Mitchell reached the British lines, and throughout the afternoon dazed survivors struggled back to safety. At last, at five o’clock, there was a roll call. Of the 673 who set out on the Charge, only 195 were fit six hours later. ‘You have lost the Light Brigade!’ Raglan said with icy reproach to Lucan when they met that afternoon.[291]

  The final casualty list gave 113 men killed and 134 wounded. But reality was grimmer than these figures suggest, for with few tents on the plain there was little immediate comfort for the survivors. ‘A bitter cold night,’ Mitchell recorded, ‘with a sharp white frost’ in the small hours. Fanny Duberly, although grieved to find that her maid’s husband was among the dead, was almost as affected by the sufferings of the horses. Four hundred and seventy-five perished, either in the battle or at the hands of farriers seeking to put those gravely injured out of misery. Yet there were as astonishing survivals among the animals as among the men. Sergeant Mitchell knew of one wounded horse which went through the rest of the campaign, returned to England and was still appearing regularly on parade when he left the army in 1862; and ‘Ronald’, as unscathed that morning as his rider, outlived the Earl of Cardigan by several years.[292]

  Militarily the Charge of the Light Brigade was a futile act of heroism which achieved nothing except the destruction of a Don Cossack battery. The immediate effect of this tragic disaster was to check Raglan’s plans for a counter-attack on the redoubts. He could not hope for cavalry support that afternoon, for the ‘Heavies’, too, had been severely mauled. Moreover if the infantry divisions of Cambridge and Cathcart recaptured the lost Turkish positions, good British regiments would have to keep them manned throughout the following weeks, reducing the effectiveness of the a
llied assault on Sebastopol itself. It was this argument which Canrobert hammered home in long talks with the British Commander on that Wednesday afternoon. Did it matter if Liprandi’s men held the three eastern redoubts along the Causeway Heights, provided that adequate defences were thrown up around Kadikoi? The allies, Canrobert insisted, must not be distracted from the primary objective of the campaign, the need to destroy Russia’s Black Sea naval base.[293]

  As if to emphasize Canrobert’s point, the Russians made a sortie from Sebastopol on the afternoon of 26 October, hoping to find the British sector weakened by the previous day’s withdrawal of troops to deal with the threat from the Heights seven miles away. At one point a Russian column, some 700 strong, was checked by a detachment from the Brigade of Guards, but further along the line only heavy artillery fire prevented a Russian breakthrough. ‘Little Inkerman’, as this action was called, helped Raglan make up his mind. The infantry divisions moved back to the plateau before Sebastopol, while British sappers gave every attention to the defences covering the approach to Balaclava. Within six days they were ready for inspection and for the verdict of a veteran specialist in such matters: ‘I have this day gone carefully over the entire position round Balaclava and consider it one of very great capabilities for defence throughout,’ General Burgoyne wrote confidently to Raglan on the last day of the month. He added, however, that it was ‘too extensive for the forces covering it’. Ten thousand more men were needed, Raglan reckoned, when he wrote that week to the War Secretary in London; and they were needed speedily. He was thinking now, not simply in terms of besieging Sebastopol, but of ways of enduring a siege of Balaclava by the combined forces of General Liprandi and his ally, the Russian winter.[294]

  Chapter Eleven – Sisters of Charity and Mercy

  Midway through a Friday afternoon in October 1854, a 32-year-old nurse was walking a group of orphans from Devonport up to the high ground at Stoke Damerel, where children always enjoy counting the warships moored in the Hamoaze. The nurse, Sarah Anne Terrot, belonged to an Anglican religious nursing Order, founded six years before by a naval commander’s daughter, Priscilla Seddon, and generally known as the ‘Devonport Sisters of Mercy,’ or more simply the ‘Seddonites’. Sister Sarah Anne, a woman of high intelligence fluent in French, was accustomed to discipline and obedience and she was not surprised when her walk was interrupted by an urgent message calling her back to the ‘Abbey’ in Plymouth. By five o’clock she was on the overnight mail train to Paddington with two other nursing Sisters; a fourth joined them at Totnes; a fifth at Bristol. When they reached London at 4 a.m. on Saturday, 21 October, the Seddonite nurses thought they had been summoned to help combat some cholera emergency in the capital. Within a few hours they were at the Secretary at War’s home in Belgrave Square, where they met Florence Nightingale and agreed to serve under her at hospitals in Turkey. Two days later, at ten past eight on the Monday morning, eight Seddonites were among a party of thirty-three nurses who left London Bridge station for Folkestone, Paris and the East; and on 4 November, just fifteen days after looking down on those familiar mastheads in the Hamoaze, Sister Sarah Anne was gazing at ‘great imperial Constantinople’, in the rain. ‘Giddy and confused, we could hardly realise that these painted houses, gay gardens and glittering minarets were not a vision or panorama’, she wrote in her journal.[295]

  It is small wonder if Sister Sarah Anne was ‘giddy and confused’ that day, for Florence Nightingale swept into Victorian legend with the awe-inspiring spontaneity of a whirlwind. At the start of October she was ‘Superintendent of the Establishment for Gentlewomen during Illness’ in Upper Harley Street, no more and no less. She was a solace to sick governesses and a person already feared and respected in Whig society for the persistence with which she fulfilled her vocation, but to the wider public who read the fivepenny dailies and sixpenny weeklies she remained unknown. Three weeks later, as she lay prostrate with sea sickness in a French mail steamer tossed by heavy seas off Sardinia, hers was a household name. By that last weekend in October even so radical a weekly as The Examiner could print a biographical portrait in which this ‘proudest and purest’ of ‘England’s daughters’ was delineated with all the inventive fervour of a mediaeval hagiographer; a 34-year-old saint was, it appeared, on her way to tend the sick and the dying in the hospitals along the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus.[296]

  *

  Tradition maintains that ‘England rang with the story of Scutari because with the British Army was the first war correspondent, William Howard Russell’.[297] This tale distorts the facts, for Russell knew nothing at first hand of the tragic chaos in the hospitals beside the Bosphorus: he remained on the Balaclava front throughout the winter of 1854-5; and although his despatches after the Alma emphasized the hardships of the soldiery and criticized the lack of ambulance wagons, he spoke highly of the improvised medical services in the Crimea itself. In the second week of October The Times did indeed print a succession of reports publicizing the hospital inadequacies at Constantinople; this journalistic enterprise was, however, the work not of Russell but of the editor, John Delane, who arrived home in London from his brief visit to the Crimea and Turkey in the first days of the month. In crossing back to Constantinople from Eupatoria Bay, Delane experienced all ‘the horrors of a ship where hundreds died from its being overcrowded with invalids’; and he made sure that what had touched his eye with pity on the Black Sea was soon made known throughout Britain in a succession of editorials from his desk in Printing House Square. The despatches themselves were datelined ‘from Constantinople’ and were the work of the correspondent with whom the editor had talked in the Turkish capital, Thomas Chenery, a Barbadian-born Etonian barrister, then aged twenty-eight. It was Delane who, drawing on his personal experiences, wrote the leading article of 12 October, regretting that ‘there are no nurses at Scutari’ and suggesting that the British people might wish to set up a fund for ‘sending a few creature comforts’ to the sick and wounded. Next day the newspaper printed the famous despatch from Chenery which is almost invariably attributed to Russell:

  The worn out pensioners who were brought out as an ambulance corps are totally useless, and not only are surgeons not to be had, but there are no dressers or nurses to carry out the surgeon’s directions, and to attend on the sick during the intervals between his visits. Here the French are greatly our superiors. Their medical arrangements are extremely good, their surgeons more numerous and they have also the help of the Sisters of Charity, who have accompanied the expedition in incredible numbers. These devoted women are excellent nurses.[298]

  Delane’s editorial produced an instant response. The same issue of the newspaper which printed Chenery’s despatch carried a letter from Sir Robert Peel, son of the former prime minister, offering £200 towards Delane’s fund; and over the following fortnight the British public contributed so generously that the initial target of £10,000 was reached by 25 October. There was a response, too, to Chenery’s report praising the efficacy of French nursing services in contrast to British inadequacies. On Saturday, 14 October, a querulous letter demanded angrily, ‘Why have we no Sisters of Charity?’

  There were Sisters of Charity in Britain in 1854, following, like their French counterparts, the non-conventual nursing precepts laid down by Vincent de Paul and Louise de Merillac two centuries before: the Seddonites at Devonport, with their London home in Osnaburgh Street, St. Pancras; the Roman Catholic ‘Sisters of Mercy’ at Bermondsey and Norwood; the Anglo-Catholic sisterhood of St John’s House, Westminster; a Protestant nursing order founded by the great Quaker social reformer, Elizabeth Fry, in 1840, five years before her death; and others, too. What was lacking was not charitable sisterhoods, but a common standard of nursing and the presence of a woman of character who could impose her will on professional helpers from the hospitals and yet hold these sectarian groups together at a time when deviations in ritual habitually fired embers of bigotry within the faithful. That paragon, it was hoped, was Miss Nigh
tingale.

  Delane and Chenery impressed Florence Nightingale so deeply that on Saturday, 14 October, she wrote a letter to her friend, Mrs Sidney Herbert, wife of the Secretary at War, explaining that, although she did ‘not mean to say’ that she believed The Times accounts, she was convinced that she could do something for the ‘wounded wretches’. Why should she not take out ‘a small private expedition of nurses’ to Scutari? But the Secretary at War himself had other plans. While several of his cabinet colleagues discounted The Times reports as alarmist, Sidney Herbert was convinced that something was gravely wrong in the hospitals beside the Bosphorus, for private letters seemed to substantiate newspaper stories. On his own initiative he sent Florence Nightingale a 1,500-word letter in which he invited her to organize and superintend a female nursing service in Turkey. Cabinet approval followed on 18 October and next day Florence Nightingale received a directive defining the Superintendent’s responsibilities and authorizing her to draw funds for fitting out some forty nurses and meeting their travelling expenses to Constantinople.[299]