The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  Parliament reassembled, after the Christmas recess, on Tuesday, 23 January, in weather as bleak as the reports from the Crimea. There was freezing fog in London and ice on the railway track hampered communications with the court, which remained at Windsor until 2 February. On Monday evening (22 January) Arthur Gordon wrote in his diary that, for his father, ‘things look better’: Russell, ‘quite alone’ in the cabinet, had given up scheming for the moment; it ‘suited Palmerston’s game’ to wait upon events; Clarendon, although insincere and devious, was personally loyal to Aberdeen; and Gladstone, though impulsive, did not mind if there was ‘a rupture with Lord John’. The Duke of Newcastle, Arthur Gordon said, wished to resign in favour of Sidney Herbert but Palmerston was the only possible war minister who would ‘give real confidence’. Among his father’s cabinet colleagues it was Graham who worried Arthur Gordon, for he was ‘at once rash and timid...a warm friend and a dangerous adviser’ whom Aberdeen consulted too readily.[384] Yet, however astute this character analysis of the cabinet may have been, as a current political assessment it was singularly complacent, for tempers were already strained at Westminster, ‘deeply moved’ by reports from the Crimea and from Scutari. And on the first day of the session the plain-speaking patriot Radical MP for Sheffield, John Arthur Roebuck, gave notice that he intended to propose the appointment of a select committee of the House of Commons to inquire into the condition of the army before Sebastopol.[385]

  That Tuesday night Lord John Russell sent in his resignation: he said that he could not oppose Roebuck’s proposed motion; as it censured his colleagues in the War Departments, he would have to leave the cabinet. There followed an extraordinary political crisis, in which the Queen urged Aberdeen to stay on in office and rebuked Lord John for deserting his leader. Roebuck, a diminutive Yorkshire terrier, proposed his motion in the Commons on the following Friday but was unable to speak for more than ten minutes because he was racked with pain from a stomach ulcer. It made little difference. Others took up the challenge to the Government, notably Layard again and — when the debate was resumed on the following Monday — Augustus Stafford, the much-respected Conservative MP for Northamptonshire North, who had spent several weeks at Scutari helping Florence Nightingale. The best speech in defence of the Aberdeen Administration was made by Palmerston, who as nominal Home Secretary had little to lose and much to gain if the vote went against the Government. When the House divided on that Monday night, Roebuck’s motion was carried by the surprisingly large majority of 305 votes to 148.[386] ‘They...sent us down with such a whack that one heard one’s head thump as it struck the ground,’ Gladstone remarked to the defeated premier on Tuesday morning. That afternoon, as ‘large damp snow flakes fell slowly, thickly and sullenly’ around him, the Earl of Aberdeen walked up the hill from Windsor railway station to tender the Coalition Government’s resignation to a sovereign who was deeply distressed at parting with ‘so kind & valued and dear a friend’.[387]

  The Queen sent for Lord Derby to see if he could form a Conservative-dominated coalition; but Derby, to Disraeli’s disgust, thought the task beyond him. She tried the aged Lord Lansdowne and the able Lord Clarendon, but without success. Curbing her indignation at his disloyalty, she even sent for Lord John Russell who found that, apart from Palmerston, none of his old colleagues would serve under him. At last, on 4 February, she invited Palmerston himself; and he, with the fallen prime minister encouraging the Peelites to back him, had a government to present to the Queen by the following evening. Clarendon, Graham and Gladstone kept their old posts. The two War Departments were at last merged into a single Secretaryship of State for War held by Lord Panmure, a shambling giant of a Whig peer, hitherto nicknamed ‘Bison’ but now to enjoy greater dignity as ‘Mars’. Sir George Grey took Palmerston’s place as Home Secretary and Sidney Herbert became Colonial Secretary. Lord Palmerston kissed hands as the Queen’s chief minister at Buckingham Palace on 6 February.[388]

  That same evening, three miles away, the Lord Mayor was presiding over an annual banquet at which the Corporation of London entertained guests of particular distinction. This year a wave of patriotic sentiment had broken over the City: the banquet would honour the Queen’s fighting men. As the one admiral who had brought a fleet back to Britain, ‘Black Charley’ Napier responded to the toast of the Royal Navy; but to speak for the Army the hero of the hour had to be Lord Cardigan, who rode through the City astride Ronald, the horse which had carried him in the great charge at Balaclava fifteen weeks before. On that occasion Ronald had been lucky to keep his life; on this he was lucky to keep his tail, for as the Earl arrived at the Mansion House he was surrounded by an excited crowd eager to pluck a hair from the most famous chestnut charger in the world.[389] The Times thought the whole evening had a flavour of Madame Tussaud and The Illustrated London News ignored the occasion entirely. Cardigan spoke egotistically, although no doubt the tears he shed on mentioning the losses in his Brigade were genuine signs of grief; but the remarkable speech of the evening came, yet again, from Admiral Napier. He denounced the officers and men of his Baltic Squadron for giving him less personal loyalty than he might have expected; he denounced the Admiralty Board; and, most of all, he denounced Sir James Graham for having ordered him to strike his flag and return to civilian life while the laurels of victory were still eluding him.

  To attack a First Lord of the Admiralty at a time when he had just been confirmed in that office by a new prime minister was bound to cause a sensation, and Graham’s opponents in the Commons followed up Napier’s speech with a series of questions. Graham would say nothing that might be of value to the Russians, for ‘naval preparations’ were ‘about to be resumed in the Baltic’; and, as for Napier himself, ‘the gallant officer...has proclaimed himself a hero...but it is not my intention to allow him to dub himself a martyr as well as a hero’.[390] The nation, in these first days of Palmerston’s premiership, thus had an opportunity to discuss, not only shortcomings in the Crimea, but also the failure of Aberdeen’s ministers to give the people those victories in the Baltic which they had so confidently expected ten months before. So far from welcoming the advent of a new war leader, the Mansion House banquet made it harder for him to hold together the coalition which he had inherited.

  In Parliament the Government made a shaky start. Palmerston at once appealed to the Commons to give up the idea of a committee of inquiry into the conduct of the Crimean campaign; and the Commons refused. Roebuck explained that some of the guilty ministers were still there, in the cabinet; and he intended that the committee should assist ‘the Noble Lord in infusing new vigour into the constitution of the country’. Layard went further even than Roebuck, attacking aristocratic inefficiency at home and overseas and urging that investigatory MPs should be empowered to travel to the Crimea and dismiss on the spot incompetent administrators or commanders.[391] This proposal was too reminiscent of the French Revolutionary Convention to satisfy most members of the Commons, and Layard was left to wage his campaign for ‘the right man in the right place’ outside the House. But Palmerston was forced to give way to Roebuck, and the Sebastopol Committee came into being. Thereupon the three Peelite survivors in the cabinet decided that their prime minister was weak and inconsistent; and accordingly on 21 February Gladstone, Graham and Herbert resigned. Russell agreed to come back into the cabinet as Colonial Secretary, but was at once appointed First Commissioner to the proposed conference in Vienna. The rest of Palmerston’s team was not impressive, although Sir Charles Wood, who replaced Graham at the Admiralty, did at least possess nine continuous years of experience in office, mainly concerned with Indian affairs. ‘We have replaced a Cabinet of All the Talents by a Cabinet of All the Mediocrities,’ scoffed Disraeli.[392]

  To the nation as a whole, however, Palmerston gave an impression of vigorous war leadership. He no longer made memorable speeches in the Commons: that was the prerogative of John Bright, who on 23 February brought tears to members’ eyes by the simple grandeur of
his finest peroration — ‘The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings.’ Occasionally, too, Palmerston misjudged the public temper: thus the decision to institute a second National Day of Fasting and Humiliation at the end of March 1855 won little support and was satirized in Punch. But, for the most part, Palmerston offered the country action, not sackcloth and ashes. Over the next twelve months, like Churchill ninety years later, he concerned himself with the smaller details of campaigning and with operational sideshows as well as with the main theatres of war. Significantly the first returned officer he interviewed after becoming prime minister was General Channon, who had been in command of the Anglo-Turkish base at Eupatoria only six weeks before; and he never lost interest in what was happening elsewhere around the Black Sea. As early as 22 February he was warning Raglan, ‘If no proper precautions are taken before the sun’s rays begin to be felt, your camp will become one vast seat of the most virulent plague.’[393] Palmerston also examined proposals for improved weaponry, especially rifles, mortars, and ‘steam guns’; he was interested in plans for ‘a submarine vessel’; and when, later that year, James Cowan took out a patent for a steam-driven, four-wheeled, armoured ‘locomotive land battery fitted with scythes to mow down infantry’, this proto-tank aroused the Prime Minister’s interest. But Cowan’s ingenuity was never put to the test. An armoured chariot, like Dundonald’s sulphurous fumes project, was thought needlessly brutalizing to warfare.[394]

  Almost as soon as Palmerston became prime minister conditions in front of Sebastopol began to improve. The reinforcements and supplies assigned to the Crimea by Lord Aberdeen’s ministers in the closing weeks of the previous year were at last reaching their destination; and on this occasion they were spared a hurricane. Moreover, the less severe weather helped earlier projects to come to fruition. ‘Our railway is growing fast,’ Fanny Duberly wrote to her sister on 17 February; and other letters home, too, commented on this track that British navvies, Croats, Montenegrins, Albanians and Turks between them were thrusting forward up the hill towards Kadikoi and the forward bases of the army. It did not reach the plateau until the end of March, and by then a Land Transport Corps had been improvised, to bring some order into the movement of supplies by horse cart, mule and dromedaries. The railway, however, meant more to officers and men than improved communications: it was a sign that Raglan and Canrobert were determined to organize a carefully planned assault on Sebastopol. When in mid-Febraury Lord Lucan was curtly recalled to England, there were some who hoped that ‘Raggles’ and his staff would follow him.[395] But by now the defeatism and self-pity of December and early January were out of fashion in the Crimea.

  Human endurance was still strained at Scutari, in the hospitals beside the Bosphorus. Despite Florence Nightingale’s devoted work, and the improved sanitary conditions, the mortality rate at the Selimiye Kislasi barracks was still two out of every five men admitted in February 1855, and higher still at neighbouring hospitals. An earthquake on the last day of February caused no casualties in the wards but ‘created great fear’; Sister Sarah Anne records that ‘many who had shown no emotion in battle were crying and trembling, and left the bed to which they had been confined though too feeble to return unassisted.’ Strained relations between Florence Nightingale, the army medical staff, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe and a second group of nurses brought out to Turkey by her friend, Mary Stanley, hampered the smooth running of the hospitals. Lord Raglan was reluctant to allow any female nurses to land in the Crimea itself. But he relented during the January crisis weeks and the first eight women nurses from England went ashore at Balaclava on 29 January. The Commander-in-Chief still forbade them to attend the field hospitals within range of enemy fire, but on 3 February he rode down to Balaclava and was gratified to find ‘the eight nurses in full employment’. ‘With the exception of the three ladies, they are none of them young,’ wrote Raglan’s nephew, ungallantly, ‘all rather fat and motherly-looking women, and quite up to one’s idea of orthodox nurses.’[396]

  That night of 3-4 February was the coldest of the winter, with the thermometer at Raglan’s sheltered headquarters dropping to 10° Fahrenheit (-12°C). But thereafter, climatically, the ‘hard times’ were over. Before the end of the month, three vessels chartered by The Times had berthed at Balaclava with comforts for the troops. No matter that flannel shirts, sheepskin coats, and knitted hats were being unpacked under sunshine which held promise of an early spring; what delighted the troops were the beer, sweets, biscuits and other forgotten luxuries. The gifts were distributed free or sold cheaply in shops which opened at Balaclava itself or up the hill at Kadikoi. It must have been late in that same month, although the precise date remains unknown, that Mrs Mary Seacole arrived in the harbour, having paid for her passage from her native Jamaica to England and thence out to the Black Sea. Soon this fifty-year-old Creole, with ‘good Scotch blood coursing in my veins’,[397] was serving the expeditionary force both as an unofficial nurse and as a sutler; and within two months she had opened the ‘British Hotel’, near Kadikoi, where there was an officers’ club and a good, clean canteen for the troops. Lord Raglan’s veto on women rendering assistance at the battle front did not inhibit Mrs Seacole from riding forward with her small, personal mule train of medicaments, food and refreshment. By the summer of 1855 Mary Seacole was regarded by the troops as part-heroine and part-mascot. If Scutari had its Lady with the Lamp, Balaclava could offer romantic legend a Creole with the Teamug.[398]

  Militarily there remained little activity in front of Sebastopol in the opening months of 1855: a Russian feint attack on 20 January; an allied probe across the river Chernaya on 20 February, which was frustrated by a late snowstorm; and, at the end of the month, a four-day tussle between the Russians and the French for control of a hillock known as the ‘Mamelon Vert’, which Totleben was able to secure as an advanced redoubt in his improved defensive system to the east of the city. The main Russian assault in the Crimea during February was further north, a determined effort by some nine thousand men, with support from over a hundred field guns, to eject the Turks, British and French from their base at Eupatoria; but the attack was beaten off by Omar Pasha’s troops, supported by gunfire from six French and three British warships.[399] In front of Sebastopol, the French gradually took over more trenches from the British. Shortly before the political crisis at Westminster led to his resignation, the Duke of Newcastle had written to Raglan insisting that, now French numbers had doubled, Canrobert should extend the French sector of trenches; and the recently promoted Major-General Rose recorded in his journal for 29 January an amicable council of war on closer Franco-British collaboration. Raglan seems at times to have taken French assistance for granted; French commanders, notably Bosquet, thought Canrobert too accommodating to ‘England’s needs’.[400]

  By early March it was clear that the allies would soon intensify the siege by bombarding Sebastopol once more. Raglan was presiding over a council of war on 7 March when a telegram reached him, forwarded by steamer from Constantinople and enclosing a telegram handed in at Berlin by Lord John Russell on 2 March saying that Tsar Nicholas I ‘died this day at 10 minutes past 12’.[401] At first the generals were sceptical, no doubt puzzled why such information should have come from such a person in such a place. A similar message reached Canrobert twenty-four hours later; but there was still much doubt at headquarters. There had already been many rumours flying around the camps, particularly about the Russian imperial family: only seven weeks before, a well-authenticated report had maintained that the Tsar was dying, although Polish deserters said he was expected soon in Sebastopol itself. ‘Some will not yet credit it,’ Henry Clifford wrote to his brother on 11 March. But when no denial came of Lord John’s message and when press reports indicated that he had, at that moment, been in Berlin on his way to Vienna for peace talks, hopes were high that the war would soon be over. It was resolved that the batteries would shortly open up on Sebastopol, provide
d the fine weather held; but it might not be necessary to storm those formidable defences. So often the conflict had been over-simplified as ‘the Tsar’s war’ that there seemed no reason why it should continue. ‘His eldest Son, they say, is most anxious for Peace,’ Henry Clifford wrote.[402] Moreover, it was surely a good sign that a British cabinet minister was travelling once again to confer round a table at Metternich’s old chancellery in Vienna. On 22 March even so cautious an observer of high politics as Hugh Rose went so far as to write in his journal, ‘I think there must be Peace’.[403]

  Chapter Fourteen – New Management

  Prince Menshikov had remained at his headquarters on the Belbec over Christmas and throughout January 1855. Ever since Inkerman his private contacts in the capital had kept him informed of the whispering campaign which was blackening his name at court; and he knew he was dependent for support on Tsar Nicholas’s obstinate reluctance to give way to any pressure group, either in his family or among his closest advisers. As he never came under enemy fire, it was difficult for Menshikov to follow the example of Paskevich and retire wounded from the war zone. Moreover, pride still drove him to hope that he might, somewhere soon, snatch a victory on the cheap. At last urgent prompting from St Petersburg induced him to order the attack on Eupatoria in mid-February; he might, he felt, recover lost credit by liberating a Crimean town which was held mainly by the despised Turks. But when news reached him that the naval guns of the defenders had repelled the attack and that the Russians had lost nearly eight hundred men, Menshikov sensed that his military career was over; and he was right. His despatch reporting the failure at Eupatoria reached St Petersburg on 24 February. Three days later — Tuesday, 15 February by the Russian calendar — Tsar Nicholas dismissed Menshikov from his command, appointing Prince Michael Gorchakov to succeed him as Commander of the Army of the Crimea while retaining responsibility for the Southern Army, stationed in Bessarabia.[404]