The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  As soon as the British saw the tricolour flying from the Mamelon, two columns of infantry advanced on the Quarries, avoiding the field of fougasses by a flank assault. Here, too, the initial attack was successful and some of the British infantry reached the parapets of the Redan in pursuit of the enemy. The Russians were not prepared to see either of their positions remain in enemy hands. Before dark they counterattacked and briefly recovered the Mamelon; and there was a grim tussle for possession of the Quarries through the night and into the next morning, both sides suffering casualties from the fougasses. But by noon on Thursday it was clear that the allies had secured their two objectives, although at heavy cost. Nearly half the British troops engaged in the struggle to gain and hold the Quarries were killed or wounded.[439]

  All was quiet again by Friday morning; and at midday a Russian emissary under a flag of truce proposed that there should be an immediate suspension of hostilities so that each side could bury its dead. Colonel Calthorpe rode down to the battlefield and watched British and Russian fatigue parties carrying away the mutilated corpses. Enemy officers were there, too. A young ‘civil and polite’ Russian told Calthorpe that the loss of the Mamelon was not of great importance to them. As the two men were in conversation, a ‘tall handsome man’ rode by. ‘His uniform was like that of the officer with whom I was talking, except that he had a broad gold strap upon his shoulders: his cap also had a certain quantity of lace upon it,’ Calthorpe wrote later that week. The young Russian saluted him and then told Calthorpe that the horseman was Totleben, by now promoted to acting general. There followed a curious incident. Calthorpe, a nephew of the Commander-in-Chief, walked up to ‘the man who has most distinguished himself in the Russian army during the war’ and chatted with him and with two French officers in a ravine where ‘bodies covered with ghastly wounds met the eye all around’. ‘He appeared to treat the capture of the Mamelon with perfect indifference...He also intimated that we were no nearer taking the place than before,’ Calthorpe noted. ‘I suppose he felt himself bound to appear cheerful on the occasion,’ the colonel reflected.[440]

  Totleben was confident that the main defences would hold and that, in seizing these outworks, the allies had exposed their advanced troops well beyond their support trenches. Inside Sebastopol there were by now 45,000 soldiers and 9,000 naval gunners, while there were another 21,000 men and over 100 field guns on the Belbec, to say nothing of the army east of Chorgun. If more troops promised from southern Russia reached the Belbec, reinforcements could be sent to augment the garrison and it would not be difficult to recover the Mamelon and the Quarries. But Totleben’s optimism was not shared by Prince Michael Gorchakov, who seems to have inherited Menshikov’s defeatism as soon as he reached the Belbec. Already, before the allied attack, he had written to the Minister of War to tell him that he did not see how he could retain the south bank of Sebastopol, the shore on which stood the city and the dockyard. Now, on the Friday that Totleben and Calthorpe had their macabre encounter, Gorchakov wrote to Tsar Alexander II, ‘I am at present thinking of only one problem: how Sebastopol is to be abandoned without losses which may mount to 20,000 men. We cannot even consider saving our ships or artillery.’ But when the Tsar replied, a week later, he was adamant: Gorchakov was to hold on to the fortress until further divisions could be sent south.[441]

  In St Petersburg, however, the Tsar was faced by a familiar dilemma: how many regiments from Russia’s northern armies might safely be despatched to the Crimea? A fleet of twenty-one British and four French warships appeared off Kronstadt in the last days of May. By now the island fortress and the approaches to St Petersburg were protected by the earliest naval minefield. The explosive devices themselves were not powerful, for in June three British warships — Firefly, Merlin and Vulture — detonated mines without suffering serious damage. Nevertheless the new invention convinced the Russians that there was even less danger of a direct assault on the capital than when Napier had brought his fleet into the Gulf of Finland twelve months before.[442] But the death of Nicholas I had not silenced Paskevich, and the old Marshal persistently warned Alexander II of the dangers of weakening military establishments in the Baltic provinces and Finland for the sake of the Crimea.

  On the other hand, better news reached St Petersburg from the south-western frontiers. Two days after the Sebastopol garrison had lost the Mamelon and the Quarries, the Emperor Francis Joseph ordered the demobilization of reservists sent earlier that year to augment his army along the Russian border — a line which, since Austria’s occupation of Moldavia and Wallachia, now extended for some 700 miles from the Carpathians to the Danube delta. From his accession Alexander II had made it clear to Francis Joseph that, like his father, he regarded Austria as Russia’s faithless friend, but at least this partial demobilization allowed the Tsar to reduce his concentration of troops around Kishinev.[443] Even so, he was not sure whether the regiments now freed from service in Bessarabia should undertake the relatively short journey to the Crimea or be moved to the Caucasus. There the Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief, General Nicholas Muraviev, was about to launch an offensive against the fortresses of Kars and Erzerum, which were garrisoned by the Turks, with a leavening of British officers. But Paskevich had no intention of letting troops go from Bessarabia or Poland to the Caucasus, for he had long regarded Muraviev as a personal enemy. Reluctantly, Paskevich agreed that three reserve infantry regiments should be sent from Kishinev to Sebastopol.[444]

  There was, however, little prospect that the reinforcements would reach the city until the first days of August; and it was clear that the allies would never wait so long before launching their principal assault on the city. Raglan wished the offensive to begin as soon as possible, but Pélissier needed more time to concentrate his troops. On 15 June an allied council of war decided that the French would put 25,000 men into the attack and the British 8,000; and, in the hope of bringing new significance to a historic date, Monday, 18 June, the fortieth anniversary of Waterloo, was chosen as the moment when the allied armies would make their hid for a decisive victory.[445]

  The weather was unbearably hot by now, the ground hard and burnt-up. As at Varna a year before, there were outbreaks of dysentery, and cholera became once more a scourge; one in twenty of the Italians in the advance party from Piedmont succumbed to cholera within a month of their arrival. On 17 June, while another great bombardment was giving notice of allied intentions, the waiting troops suffered from the glare of the sun, from smoke and dust, from a plague of flies, and from dehydration. Fenton, in his next letter to his wife, commented on his terrible thirst that Sunday:took seventeen tumblers of liquid, nine of which were tea, two champagne and the rest beer.’[446] To these natural torments were added extra dangers for the gunners, for it soon became clear that much of the allied artillery was overheated: one 68-pounder naval gun burst, not ‘from any symptom of weakness’ but because ‘like all the others’ it ‘had been fired much oftener than it is warranted to bear’.[447]

  The response from more than 700 Russian guns was, at first, determined and sustained. Three British warships received direct hits during the small hours of Sunday morning; and Admiral Lyons’s son, who was in command of HMS Miranda, was so gravely wounded that he died a few days later in hospital at Therapia, on the Bosphorus. By Sunday evening, however, the waiting troops noticed that enemy guns which had troubled them earlier in the day were silent. It was assumed that they had been knocked out by the allied bombardment. No one seems to have wondered if the guns were being moved to new positions or if the defenders were conserving ammunition. Morale among both the French and the British was high: officers speculated on the chances of there still being restaurants in Sebastopol where they might dine on Monday evening.[448]

  Pélissier was as confident as his junior officers. He had rejected Niel’s plan for an all-out offensive against the whole perimeter of the city’s defences, Bosquet’s suggestion that tunnels should be dug right up to the edge of the Russian forts, and
Raglan’s proposal of a diversionary attack in the south, on the Flagstaff Bastion. His plan was simple: ‘successive assaults and limited combats’; the French to concentrate on the Malakoff first, and then the British to storm the Redan. A furious row between Pélissier and Bosquet on the eve of the assault weakened French effectiveness; Pélissier accused Bosquet of retaining for his own use a captured plan of the Malakoff, and in a fit of rage he refused to allow the commander of the 2nd Corps to participate in the attack, putting him at the head of reserve troops along the Chernaya. Nor was this Pélissier’s only act of folly. Late on Sunday evening he changed the moment of attack, advancing the time by two hours to 3 a.m. Raglan did not learn of this modification in the agreed plan until he rode back to headquarters from an evening inspection of his forward troops. The timetable for attack was therefore wrong from the start. Confusion was made worse by French advance troops who mistook a trail of light from the fuse of a shell for the signal rocket which was to send them forward at zero hour. The French right therefore went ahead with their assault at about a quarter to three, before either of the other two columns was ready.[449]

  So well sited were the Russian guns at the Malakoff and its adjoining batteries that not a single Frenchman was able to cross the defensive ditch and begin scaling its ramparts. Hundreds of infantrymen were caught in crossfire and perished from grapeshot. Individual units turned the Malakoff’s defences on the left and found themselves in the streets of one of Sebastopol’s suburbs, but no one supported them and they were soon mopped up by Russian infantry. Raglan, seeing that the French were heading for defeat, conferred with Sir George Brown; and the veterans agreed that the British would have to go forward against the Redan to draw off Russian fire at dawn, even though the assault was timed for later in the morning. General Sir John Campbell led the attack on the left, Colonel Yea on the right. Both officers required a covering party of riflemen to dash forward, followed by sailors from the Naval Brigade and sappers with ladders and other siege equipment, and then by the main storming party. But Campbell was killed as soon as he emerged from the trenches, and Colonel Yea as he reached the wooden stockade at the foot of the earthworks. The assault party was soon caught in a similar crossfire to the French; and casualties were just as heavy. So brief was the battle of 18 June that it was all over by half-past eight in the morning. The French sustained 3,533 casualties, nearly half of them fatal; and almost one in four of the British soldiers and sailors engaged in the battle was killed or seriously wounded.[450]

  On this fortieth anniversary of the day on which he lost his right arm, the Commander-in-Chief watched the battle from the Mortar Battery, where the troops had cheered Florence Nightingale five weeks before. ‘I never had a conception before of such showers of grape as they poured upon us,’ Raglan wrote wretchedly to Panmure after the tragic fiasco. ‘The greatest mistake is the partial attack of Sebastopol,’ he explained, for it allowed the Russians to concentrate reserves in the suburb of Karabelnaya, immediately behind the Malakoff and the Redan; ‘If the attack had been general, the enemy’s troops must have been scattered,’ Raglan added. He complained of the changed hour of attack, while Brigadier-General Rose in a despatch to the Foreign Secretary regretted the tension between the French generals and, in particular, Pélissier’s furious exchange of words with Bosquet.[451] The British tended to blame the French while the French blamed the British and the Italians and Turks blamed them both.

  When Raglan discussed with Pélissier the reasons for the allied failure, the two commanders agreed that they had dangerously underestimated the strength of Russian artillery and overestimated the damage caused by the allied bombardment.[452] Neither was prepared to admit the basic folly of an operational plan which required two thousand troops to dash across sloping ground exposed to enemy grapeshot for almost a quarter of a mile, scale a rampart of felled trees with outward facing branches, cross another ditch or sunken road, and then find themselves at the foot of a heavily defended escarpment. ‘A ditch and a wall require that a breach should be made, and that the guns should be silenced before an assault is given,’ the Prime Minister wrote in a note to Panmure a few days later; and, recalling events in Spain when he was himself Secretary-at-War, Palmerston added, ‘This seems to have been similar to the mistake made by the Duke of Wellington in his first attempt on Badajoz’.[453] But what made good military common sense when analysed in a room looking out over London’s Green Park eluded the Badajoz veteran plagued by ill health in the Crimean uplands.

  *

  ‘Do you not see the change in Lord Raglan?’ a Guards officer asked a group of staff officers on 19 June: ‘Good God! He is a dying man’.[454] The remark struck those closest to the Commander-in-Chief with great force, for they had not recognized that ‘Raggles’, who always looked frail, was now gravely ill. Their lack of perception is hardly surprising; so many senior officers were collapsing around them that June. General Estcourt, Raglan’s Adjutant-General and personal friend, died from cholera on the Sunday after the attack; and Generals Pennefather and Sir George Brown were invalided home, although Brown did not sail until the end of the month. Raglan remained at his headquarters, trying to weld differing allied plans together, patiently defending the British from French complaints that they were unimaginative and slow to respond to emergencies. As late as 24 June he could still entertain Lady Paget and her husband to dinner, but his physical strength was ebbing away. Four days later, just three weeks after Fenton photographed him in conference with Omar and Pélissier, Lord Raglan succumbed to the disease which had killed so many hundreds of his men.

  The news was telegraphed to London that same Thursday. At once General Simpson was ordered to succeed Raglan. But Simpson had no illusions about himself: he was a very old sixty-three, sound and sensible as a Chief of Staff, but far too set in his ways to snatch a victory in the Crimea. He made a strong bid to prevent Panmure confirming his appointment. ‘I sincerely trust, my Lord, that a General of distinction will be sent immediately to command this Army,’ he wrote to Panmure two days after Raglan’s death. ‘My health is sure to give way, as I have constant threatenings of gout in spite of all the care I take, and it may come some day too hard for me to bear!’[455] Apart from his health, Simpson’s chief worry was the ‘irksome and embarrassing’ task of having to handle ‘these Allies’. Fortunately Rose was well able to manage the French by now and, if necessary, Stratford de Redcliffe in Constantinople would intervene with the Sultan to force Omar Pasha to toe the line. The Piedmontese commander, General La Marmora, was technically subordinate to Simpson, as the Italian contingent was attached to Raglan’s army as soon as it disembarked; La Marmora was eager for his troops to be given a chance to show their mettle but, unlike Pélissier or Bosquet, he was not personally ambitious. Queen Victoria thought Simpson too despondent to carry on with the command. His appointment was nevertheless confirmed on 18 July, while the cabinet looked around for a younger successor, if the task ahead proved beyond Simpson’s powers.[456]

  Both besiegers and besieged were by now weary of the campaign. The repeated allied shelling of the city’s defences in July accounted for about 250 men’s lives each day, ‘a frightful massacre’, as the Tsar himself commented. The senior Russian general inside Sebastopol, Count von der Osten-Sacken, was an extremely devout Baltic German who, although regularly interceding for the Almighty’s blessing on Russia’s just cause, was not in himself an inspiring leader; he made a practice of going up to the bastions from his headquarters at Fort Nicholas, down by the water’s edge, only in the quieter moments of the conflict. Totleben, a gifted engineer greatly respected by the officers of the garrison, remained something of an outsider; and, after the third major bombardment of the city, he had to leave Sebastopol to recuperate on the Belbec from a serious wound. But the Mikhailovs and Volodya Kozeltsevs of Tolstov’s perceptive Army Tales had, ever since the first days of the siege, been heartened by the example of the naval commanders: originally Kornilov; then, through the wint
er months, Rear-Admiral Istomin, who was killed by a shell in the middle of March; and thereafter Admiral Nakhimov, the hero of Sinope. Nevertheless Nakhimov became bitterly depressed by the defeatism around him: he knew that neither Gorchakov nor Osten-Sacken had any confidence in Sebastopol holding out until the enemy abandoned their assaults. To raise morale Nakhimov would let himself be seen in full uniform by the troops manning the defences. Gold epaulettes, however, could be spotted from a distance; and on 10 June he was shot by a French sniper while observing the allied positions from the Kornilov Bastion. Three days later he died. Just as allied observers noticed how Russian guns remained silent while poor Raglan’s coffin was borne down to HMS Caradoc, so Nakhimov’s compatriots commented on the ‘respectful silence’ of the enemy’s batteries when the Admiral was interred on St Vladimir Hill.[457] It was the same mood of mutual respect between opponents in adversity which prompted Tolstoy to tell his brother what ‘fine fellows’ the British and French prisoners were, ‘morally and physically a gallant lot’.[458]