The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  To offset this humiliation, the Russians claimed a moral victory. In a manifesto published in St Petersburg on 31 March, Tsar Alexander II announced that an act of Providence had fulfilled ‘the original and principal aims of the war’: ‘From now on, the future destiny and the rights of all Christians in the Orient are assured. The Sultan solemnly recognized them...Russians! Your efforts and your sacrifices were not in vain. The great work is accomplished.’[538] To some extent this manifesto was an ingenious attempt to keep faith with the historic claims of the Russian Church to assert a protective right over Christian believers within the Sultan’s empire.

  There was, however, behind the Tsar’s pronouncement a more serious purpose than this somewhat specious attempt at saving face. On 18 February, a week before the opening of the Congress of Paris, Abdul Medjid had issued in Constantinople a Firman — a decree written for proclamation — which promised an improved status in the law and government of the Ottoman Empire for his non-Turkish and Christian subjects. This major reform, the Hatt-i-Humayun, was forced on Abdul Medjid by the insistence of Stratford de Redcliffe and the French and Austrian ambassadors. Tsar Alexander, however, instructed Orlov to urge the Congress to have the reforming edict written into the peace treaty, so as to guarantee the improved status of the Sultan’s Christians in perpetuity. Although Napoleon III showed some sympathy with the Russians over this question, all references to the Hatt-i-Humayun in the final settlement were toned down, largely at the insistence of the Austrians and the British: Article IX of the Peace Treaty did, indeed, recognize the ‘high value’ of the decree, but it denied the right of any foreign Power to interfere in the Sultan’s relations with his subjects or in the internal administration of his Empire. In St Petersburg — and even more in Holy Moscow — it was assumed that, with so vague a commitment to reform, the Turkish authorities would soon cease to observe the rights promised by the Hatt-i-Humayun. The Tsar’s manifesto therefore sought to give the Sultan’s ‘act of justice’ international recognition, in order to emphasize the enormity of any future backsliding by the Turkish authorities. The manifesto did not, however, in any way restore Russian influence within the Sultan’s Empire and it was as silent about ‘Holy Places’ as was the Hatt-i-Humayun and the Peace Treaty itself, so swiftly are the quarrels of yesterday forgotten. Yet even before the end of the decade there was rioting in Jerusalem and Christian communities were being put to the sword in Syria, Lebanon and the Arabian peninsula. Ironically, on this occasion it was Napoleon III who intervened, taking the opportunity to assert French primacy at Constantinople.[539]

  The Congress of Paris was, outwardly, a triumph for the Emperor of the French. But it did not, as he had hoped, give a neo-Bonapartist cut to a refashioned map of Europe. Nothing was done for Poland: Orlov asked that the Polish Question should not be raised at the conference table as discussion of so sensitive a problem might hamper his sovereign’s plans to bestow concessions on his Polish subjects after his coronation at Moscow later that summer; and this plea was accepted by the French and the British.[540] Little was done for the Roumanians: Wallachia and Moldavia, enlarged by the three districts from southern Bessarabia, were nominally confirmed under the suzerainty of the Sultan although they were promised ‘independent national administrations’ which, within six years, brought a Roumanian national state into being under French patronage. More surprisingly, despite Napoleon’s assurances to Cavour while La Marmora’s men were fighting in front of Sebastopol, no tangible reward for services rendered went to Sardinia-Piedmont, not least because the Emperor was anxious not to offend the French clerical party by supporting an Italian state in conflict with the Church.

  In the absence of French support it was left to the British to champion the Italian cause. Palmerston, with engaging eccentricity in the first days of the Congress, suggested to Clarendon that Cavour might be invited to abandon claims to Austrian-held Lombardy and Venetia in return for the cession of the Crimea, to be developed as the first colony of an Italian state; and in March he was still proposing extraordinary changes of territory, although by now less distant from Piedmont.[541] Clarendon, more temperate than his Prime Minister but sincerely believing that ‘the state of Italy...was a scandal to Europe’, contented himself with a speech on 8 April in which he denounced the repressive measures of the King of Naples, Papal misrule and the presence in the Romagna of Austrian troops. Clarendon told Palmerston that he had spoken ‘in rather stifled terms and whether my speech was good or bad it completely satisfied Cavour and angered Buol’; and Cavour later told Parliament in Turin that Clarendon had ‘laid the cause of Italy before the bar ofpublic opinion’. Yet, at the time, Cavour did not hide his disappointment with the Congress. He recognized that after Clarendon’s speech Italian unification under the House of Savoy seemed to the British public, not simply a ‘respectable’ cause, but the natural consequence of a wartime partnership. He convinced himself, wrongly, that Clarendon would be prepared to perpetuate this comradeship, with British troops soon fighting alongside ‘the Sardines’ in a war against Austria ‘for the aggrandisement of Piedmont’. A campaign of this character would have been the oddest of all consequences from the Crimean alliance.[542]

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  Although the Treaty of Paris was signed on 30 March, news that the war was officially over did not reach the Crimea until 2 April, peace being welcomed by the shattering reverberation of a 101-gun salute. On the following day, as though to mock the general mood of relief, the spring weather turned sour: ‘As nasty a snowstorm, with heavy squalls, as I have seen this winter,’ commented General Codrington in a letter next day.[543] Soon the opposing armies were fraternizing, with official approval. At the end of January, General Gorchakov had given up the command of Russia’s southern armies to become commander-in-chief in Poland; he was succeeded by General Luders, who in July 1854 had been the first of the Tsar’s senior officers to see British troops in the field, when Cardigan’s ill-fated reconnaissance patrol reached the banks of the Danube. Now it was Luders who, on 13 April, invited Pélissier and Codrington to take the salute at a review of the Tsar’s troops on the Mackenzie Heights, subsequently entertaining the allied generals at a belated breakfast under the canvas of an ornately decorated double marquee. ‘Nothing could be more nicely done, with the ornamental show of arms, colours, drums, guns etc.,’ Codrington reported. ‘We sat down about 50 or 60 in it; every luxury — caviare, bottled porter, roast beef, any number of dishes in succession, and last of all two large sturgeon.’ Two days later the compliment was returned, Marshal Pélissier being host to the Russians, while the French army organized horse races and a carrousel of the Chasseurs d’Afrique. On 17 April allied and Russian top brass were together again. Luders stood beside Pélissier as 88 battalions of French infantry, 5 regiments of cavalry, siege artillerymen, sappers and 198 guns trailed past. After a luncheon provided by Codrington, 49 battalions of the British army, with 86 guns, went by at the salute. The victors, however, could not provide such luxuries as the Russians.[544]

  A generous issue of passes allowed the troops of the various nations to mix freely as well. The ex-enemy soldiers, it was observed a trifle primly, had no head for liquor. Soon hundreds of Russians were coming into Balaclava to purchase sugar, salt and tea, while the enterprising Mrs Seacole made various excursions into the interior, visiting both Bakchisarai and Simferopol. On the other hand, a horse fair held on the Mackenzie Heights was a dismal failure: the Russians would not pay the prices asked by the British officers; and the whole notion of selling trusted allied steeds to ‘our recent enemies’ was soon scotched by indignant protests from the Queen herself. But to the men in the Crimea the enemy now was, not the Russians, but sheer boredom. Horse races, athletic competitions and cricket were tried as diversions; and the British followed the example of the French in encouraging amateur dramatics on the improvised stage cfa camp theatre. At one of these entertainments, the Light Division raised £70 ‘for the humbler class of sufferers’ left destitute
when the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, went up in flames early in March.[545]

  ‘We have no wish to loiter in the Crimea,’ Palmerston had remarked to Clarendon in a letter congratulating him on the completion of the Treaty of Paris.[546] The Russians did not object to the use of Sebastopol harbour for embarkation, and by the last week of April the transports were moving down through the Straits and out into the Mediterranean. ‘I think the Sardinians ought to go first, so as to relieve them from expense as they have been so true and so quiet in their assistance, and are so little gainers by the result,’ Codrington told Panmure.[547] La Marmora’s men duly sailed for Genoa and a triumphant reception in Turin. They were followed by French transports bound for Marseilles. But soon it became clear that many of the British troops would not be seeing home shores that year at all. The regular army was needed to relieve militia regiments who were garrisoning Malta, Corfu and Gibraltar. And unexpectedly, within a week of the signing of peace, Codrington was ordered to send five regiments as soon as possible to Canada. It is one of minor ironies of the Crimean War that while the fighting continued no precautions whatsoever were taken along the only frontier common to the British and Russian Empires, the remote border between the Yukon and the Russo-American Company’s Alaskan territories, but with the return of peace Palmerston became worried by complaints from President Pierce’s administration that the British had been enticing US citizens to enlist in their projected Foreign Legion. Palmerston had been Secretary-at-War in 1812, when the Americans mounted an invasion of Canada during the struggle with Napoleon, and he mistrusted Pierce. Not a day should be ‘lost...in properly reinforcing the garrison of our North American colonies,’ he declared.[548]

  The last regiment for North America sailed from Sebastopol at the end of the first week in May, but on 1 June Codrington still had more than 41,000 men under canvas awaiting ships. The General was irritated by the refusal of Royal Navy to use warships as transports and seriously alarmed that a new wave of typhus or cholera would spread as rapidly as the diseases at Varna two summers before. The blunt personal intervention of Queen Victoria after reading Codrington’s despatches swept aside the Admiralty’s reluctance to bring ‘her noble and gallant troops’ home ‘by ships of the Navy’; and embarkation went ahead speedily throughout June. Marshal Pélissier and the last French contingent left Sebastopol on 5 July. A week later, with HMS Algiers standing by to evacuate Codrington and his personal staff, a British bugler sounded reveille for the 666th, and last, time in the Crimea.[549]

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  In the first week of May the Secretary of State for War gave the earliest detailed casualty figures to the House of Lords. From the day of disembarkation in the Crimea until the occupation of the city of Sebastopol was completed at the end of September 1855, the British lost 158 officers and 1,775 men killed in action, with 51 officers and 1,548 men dying from their wounds, Panmure said. Deaths from cholera up to the end of 1835 were 35 officers and 4,244 men, while deaths from other diseases were 26 officers and 11,451 men. Another 322 men had died from wounds or disease in the first three months of 1856. Panmure therefore informed Parliament that, over eighteen months, there had been in all 19,584 deaths, of which fewer than one in ten had happened in action.[550] Since more than 111,000 British officers and men saw service in the Crimea, the casualty rate, as reported by Panmure, was not as high as in earlier or later wars on the Continent. His figures were, however, deceptively low; not only did they exclude deaths in other theatres of war (notably the Baltic) but they also omitted losses from disease at Varna, where the cholera claimed its first victims. Nevertheless, the proportion between those killed on the battlefield and those who perished from disease was probably accurate. French losses were certainly higher — 10,240 killed in action, with about another 70,000 dying from wounds or disease, says the most conservative estimate[551] — but the French sent out almost three times as many men as the British. No one attempted to count the number of Turks killed or wounded, let alone sick; nor did they then know the extent of Russian casualties, although the newspapers spoke of the Tsar’s army having suffered ‘enormous losses’. These reports seem to have been true, for the most careful modern analysis of Tsarist and Soviet sources suggests ‘that the number of members of the Russian armed services who lost their lives during the Crimean war was probably somewhat over 450,000’.[552] At all events it was clear, even in the spring of 1856, that despite the misery exposed by the war correspondents and by Roebuck’s Committee, Britain’s sailors and soldiers had not suffered so grievously as their sovereign and her statesmen had feared.

  A few diehards in London thought that peace had been made too soon and on disgraceful terms, for to them it seemed monstrous that the Tsar lost so little territory.[553] But, in general, people were thankful for the ending of a war which, contrary to Tennyson’s prediction, rarely shone ‘in the sudden making of spendid names’. There was no single victory parade, although the Brigade of Guards marched triumphantly through London in the second week of July. Queen Victoria, however, asked her ministers to keep her informed of troop movements so that she could welcome home every regiment returning to English shores. The royal calendar that summer accommodated a succession of reviews at Portsmouth, Aldershot and Woolwich, and the Queen and her consort were punctilious in visiting hospitals and entertaining the walking wounded at Windsor.

  An incident at the earliest disembarkation parade throws a sharp light on the Queen’s prejudices. The cavalry from Ismit — the 8th Hussars and the 17th Lancers — were needed for service in Ireland and landed at Portsmouth as early as 12 May. They disembarked in the morning and, despite a fortnight spent below decks, they were ready for inspection by the Queen, Prince Albert and their three eldest children in the late afternoon. Among the officers’ wives around the parade ground that Monday was Fanny Duberly, whose Journal during the Russian War had been published shortly before Christmas. Fanny’s brother-in-law, Francis Marx, had prepared the journal for the press and toned down some of the incidents, but, although this bowdlerized version lacks the sparkle of her letters home, some implied criticism of Raglan and Cardigan slipped through, as also did an account of how Fanny had defied the Commander-in-Chief so as to accompany Henry from Varna to the Crimea. Fanny had suffered one disappointment, the Queen having declined permission for the Journal to be dedicated to her, but the book was a success with the reading public; and Fanny, having spent longer in the Crimea than any other officer’s wife, might reasonably regard herself as a heroine. As such she had been petted by the officers of the Chasseurs d’Afrique, and it was in the light blue riding habit of a Chasseur that she waited, not too inconspicuously, for the royal visitors to cross from Osborne that afternoon. But it was not the sunniest of occasions for the Duberlys. Fanny’s brief note to her sister that evening is eloquent in its omissions: ‘My dear Selina,’ she began, ‘The Queen has just inspected us. She and Prince Albert made me low bows and the Princess Royal said, “Oh — there’s Mrs Duberly”.’ Majesty, however, passed on without a word.[554]

  There was one great ceremony which had to wait until the following summer. Since Christmas in 1855, the Queen had shown constant interest in some way of recognizing supreme acts of valour in the face of the enemy. It was Prince Albert who proposed and designed the first military and naval decoration open to men of all ranks, the Victoria Cross. An announcement was made on 5 February 1856 that, six days previously, the Queen had approved the creation of ‘The Victorian Order of Merit’ (as it was originally called), but the earliest awards were not gazetted for another twelve months, and it was midsummer in 1857 before the Queen personally distributed the first sixty-two VCs, at a great review in Hyde Park.

  More than 100,000 people crowded into the park on 26 June, hoping to see the ceremony from a distance. They burst into wild cheering when the Earl of Cardigan, mounted once more on Ronald, led the 11th Hussars past the Queen; and four survivors of the ‘gallant six hundred’ had the Cross pinned on their chests by their s
overeign that afternoon.[555] So, too, did heroes from the Alma and Inkerman, including Major Henry Clifford. But it was emphasized that, although the new decoration was said to be made of captured gun-metal from Sebastopol, the award was not specifically a Crimean campaign medal. Indeed, chronologically, the first VC went to a naval officer in Napier’s Baltic Fleet, Lieutenant Charles Lucas, who, as the mate of HMS Hecla, threw overboard that live shell during the bombardment of Bomarsund on 21 June 1854. It was fitting that, at this final parade of heroes, a place should he found for the deed that inspired the war’s earliest popular action prints.

  Chapter Eighteen – Into History

  To the British public the Hyde Park review brought down the curtain on the war with Russia. Already, in that last week of June 1857, there were alarming tales of mutiny spreading across the Ganges plain from Meerut; and soon the attention of newspapers and weeklies focused on Cawnpore rather than on the Crimea. To some Londoners the two emergencies in the East became closely associated with each other; and the red granite column which still catches the eye to the west of Westminster Abbey is a memorial to scholars of Westminster School who died both in the Crimean War and in the Indian Mutiny. Tributes in stone to the dead of the ‘Russian War’ are few. Only the 2,162 officers and men of the Brigade of Guards who perished in the Crimea or at Varna are commemorated by a special monument in London, its sides honouring by name Alma, Inkerman and Sebastopol; and, as if to spite the French ally, the site found for this memorial lies in the middle of Waterloo Place. Not a street-name in central London recalls the conflict with the Tsar’s Empire. By contrast, Napoleon III’s Paris could boast a Boulevard de Sébastopol, a Pont d’Alma, and a suburb named after Fort Malakoff. When Victor Emmanuel II became king of Italy even Rome acquired a Via Cernaia.