Priests declared the capture of the British steamer a symbol of divine revenge for the attack on Holy Saturday, which they pronounced had begun a religious war. The washed-up liquor was soon consumed by the Russian sailors and workers at the docks. There were drunken brawls, and several men were killed. Parts of the ship were later sold as souvenirs. The Cossack ensign Shchegolov became a popular hero overnight. He was commemorated almost as a saint. Bracelets and medallions were made with his image and sold as far away as Moscow and St Petersburg. There was even a new brand of cigarettes manufactured in Shchegolov’s name with his picture on the box.10
The bombardment of Odessa announced the arrival of the Western powers near the Danubian front. Now the question was how soon the British and the French would come to the aid of the Turks against the Russians at Silistria. Fearful that a continuation of the offensive towards Constantinople would end badly for Russia, Paskevich wanted to retreat. On 23 April he wrote to Menshikov, the newly appointed commander-in-chief of Russian forces in the Crimea:
Unfortunately we now find marshalled against us not only the maritime powers but also Austria, supported, so it appears, by Prussia. England will spare no money to bring Austria in on her side, for without the Germans they can do nothing against us … . If we are going to find all Europe ranged against us then we will not fight on the Danube.
Throughout the spring, Paskevich dragged his heels over the Tsar’s orders to lay siege to Silistria. By mid-April, 50,000 troops had occupied the Danubian islands opposite the town, but Paskevich delayed the commencement of the siege. Nicholas was furious with the lack of vigour his commander showed. Although he himself admitted that Austria might join Russia’s foes, Nicholas sent an angry note to Paskevich, urging him to begin the assault. ‘If the Austrians treacherously atttack us,’ he wrote on 29 April, ‘you have to engage them with 4 Corps and the dragoons; that will be quite enough for them! Not one word more, I have nothing more to add!’
It was only on 16 May, after three weeks of skirmishing had given them control of the high ground to the south-west of Silistria, that the Russians at last began their bombardment of the town, and even then Paskevich focused his attack on its outer defences, a semicircle of stone forts and earthworks several kilometres from the fortress of Silistria itself. Paskevich hoped to wear down the opposition of the Turks and allow his troops to assault the town without major losses. But the officers in charge of the siege operations knew this was to hope in vain. The Turks had used the months since the Porte’s declaration of war against Russia to build up their defences. The Turkish forts had been greatly strengthened by the Prussian Colonel Grach, an expert on entrenchments and mining, and they were relatively little damaged by the Russian guns, although the key redoubt, the earthworks known as the Arab Tabia, was so battered by the Russian shells and mines that it had to be rebuilt by the Turks several times during the siege. There were 18,000 troops in the Turkish forts, most of them Egyptians and Albanians, and they fought with a spirit of defiance that took the Russians by surprise. In the Arab Tabia the Ottoman forces were led by two experienced British artillery officers, Captain James Butler of the Ceylon Rifles and Lieutenant Charles Nasmyth of the Bombay Artillery. ‘It was impossible not to admire the cool indifference of the Turks to danger,’ Butler thought.
Three men were shot in the space of five minutes while throwing up earth for the new parapet, at which only two men could work at a time so as to be at all protected; and they were succeeded by the nearest bystander, who took the spade from the dying man’s hands and set to work as calmly as if he were going to cut a ditch by the road-side.
Realizing that the Russians needed to get closer to cause any damage to the forts, Paskevich ordered General Shil’der to begin elaborate engineering work, digging trenches to allow artillery to be brought up to the walls. The siege soon settled into a monotonous routine of dawn-to-dusk bombardment by the Russian batteries, supported by the guns of a river fleet. There had never been a time in the history of warfare when soldiers were subjected to so much constant danger for so long. But there was no sign of a breakthrough.11
Butler kept a diary of the siege. He thought the power of the heavy Russian guns had ‘been much exaggerated’ and that the lighter Turkish artillery were more than a match for them, although everything was conducted by the Turks ‘in a slovenly manner’. Religion played an important role on the Turkish side, according to Butler. Every day, at morning prayers by the Stamboul Gate, the garrison commander Musa Pasha would call upon his soldiers to defend Silistria ‘as becomes the descendants of the Prophet’, to which ‘the men would reply with cries of “Praise Allah!”’r There were no safe buildings in the town but the inhabitants had built caves where they took shelter during the day’s bombardment. The town ‘appeared deserted with only dogs and soldiers to be seen’. At sunset Butler watched the closing round of Russian shots come in from the fortress walls: ‘I saw several little urchins, about 9 or 10 years old, actually chasing the round shot as they ricocheted, as coolly as if they had been cricket balls; they were racing to see who would get them first, a reward of 20 peras being given by the Pasha for every cannon ball brought in.’ After dark, he could hear the Russians singing in their trenches, and ‘when they made a night of it, they even had a band playing polkas and waltzes’.
Under growing pressure from the Tsar to seize Silistria, Paskevich ordered more than twenty infantry assaults between 20 May and 5 June, but still the breakthrough did not come. ‘The Turks fight like devils,’ reported one artillery captain on 30 May. Small groups of men would scale the ramparts of the forts, only to be repulsed by the defenders in hand-to-hand fighting. On 9 June there was a major battle outside the main fortress walls, after a large-scale Russian assault had been beaten back and the Turkish forces followed up with a sortie against the Russian positions. By the end of the fighting there were 2,000 Russians lying dead on the battlefield. The next day, Butler noted,
numbers of the townspeople went out and cut off the heads of the slain and brought them in as trophies for which they hoped to get a reward, but the savages were not allowed to bring them within the gates. A heap of them however were left for a long time unburied just outside the gate. While we were sitting with Musa Pasha, a ruffian came out and threw at his feet a pair of ears, which he had cut from a Russian soldier; another boasted to us that a Russian officer had begged him for mercy in the name of the Prophet, but that he had drawn his knife and in cold blood had cut his throat.
The unburied Russians lay on the ground for several days, until the townspeople had stripped them of everything. Albanian irregulars also took part in the mutilation and looting of the dead. Butler saw them a few days later. It was ‘a disgusting sight’, he wrote. ‘The smell was already becoming very offensive. Those who were in the ditch had all been stripped and were lying in various attitudes, some headless trunks, others with throats half out, arms extended in the air or pointing upwards as they fell.’12
Tolstoy arrived at Silistria on the day of this battle. He had been transferred there as an ordnance officer with the staff of General Serzhputovsky, which set up its headquarters in the gardens of Musa Pasha’s hilltop residence. Tolstoy enjoyed the spectacle of battle from this safe vantage point. He described it in a letter to his aunt:
Not to mention the Danube, its islands and its banks, some occupied by us, others by the Turks, you could see the town, the fortress and the little forts of Silistria as though on the palm of your hand. You could hear the cannon-fire and rifle shots which continued day and night, and with a field-glass you could make out the Turkish soldiers. It’s true it’s a funny sort of pleasure to see people killing each other, and yet every morning and evening I would get up on to my cart and spend hours at a time watching, and I wasn’t the only one. The spectacle was truly beautiful, especially at night … At night our soldiers usually set about trench work and the Turks threw themselves upon them to stop them; then you should have seen and heard the rifle-fire. The f
irst night … . I amused myself, watch in hand, counting the cannon shots that I heard, and I counted 100 explosions in the space of a minute. And yet, from near by, all this wasn’t at all as frightening as might be supposed. At night, when you could see nothing, it was a question of who would burn the most powder, and at the very most 30 men were killed on both sides by these thousands of cannon shots.13
Paskevich claimed that he had been hit by a shell fragment during the fighting on 10 June (in fact he was unwounded) and gave up the command to General Gorchakov. Relieved no longer to be burdened with responsibility for an offensive he had come to oppose, he rode off in his carriage back across the Danube to Iai.
On 14 June the Tsar received news that Austria was mobilizing its army and might join the war against Russia by July. He also had to contend with the possibility that at any moment the British and the French might arrive to relieve Silistria. He knew that time was running out but ordered one last assault on the fortress town, which Gorchakov prepared for the early hours of 22 June.14
By this time the British and the French were assembling their armies in the Varna area. They had begun to land their forces at Gallipoli at the beginning of April, their intention being to protect Constantinople from possible attack by the Russians. But it soon became apparent that the area was unable to support such a large army, so after a few weeks of foraging for scarce supplies, the allied troops moved on to set up other camps in the vicinity of the Turkish capital, before relocating well to the north at the port of Varna, where they could be supplied by the French and British fleets.
The two armies set up adjacent camps on the plains above the old fortified port – and eyed each other warily. They were uneasy allies. There was so much in their recent history to make them suspicious. Famously, Lord Raglan, the near-geriatric commander-in-chief of the British army, who had served as the Duke of Wellington’s military secretary during the Peninsular War of 1808–14 and had lost an arm at Waterloo,s would on occasion refer to the French rather than the Russians as the enemy.
Lord Raglan
From the start there had been disputes over strategy – the British favouring the landing at Gallipoli followed by a cautious advance into the interior, whereas the French had wanted a landing at Varna to forestall the Russian advance towards Constantinople. The French had also sensibly suggested that the British should control the sea campaign, where they were superior, while they should take command of the land campaign, where they could apply the lessons of their war of conquest in Algeria. But the British had shuddered at the thought of taking orders from the French. They mistrusted Marshal Saint-Arnaud, the Bonapartist commander of the French forces, whose notorious speculations on the Bourse had led many in Britain’s ruling circles to suppose that he would put his own selfish interests before the allied cause (Prince Albert thought that he was even capable of accepting bribes from the Russians). Such ideas filtered down to the officers and men. ‘I hate the French,’ wrote Captain Nigel Kingscote, who like most of Raglan’s aides-de-camp was also one of his nephews. ‘All Saint-Arnaud’s staff, with one or two exceptions, are just like monkeys, girthed up as tight as they can be and sticking out above and below like balloons.’15
The French took a dim view of their British allies. ‘Visiting the English camp makes me proud to be a Frenchman,’ wrote Captain Jean-Jules Herbé to his parents from Varna.
The British soldiers are enthusiastic, strong and well-built men. I admire their elegant uniforms, which are all new, their fine comportment, the precision and regularity of their manoeuvres, and the beauty of their horses, but their great weakness is that they are used to comfort far too much; it will be difficult to satisfy their numerous demands when we get on the march.16
Louis Noir, a soldier in the first battalion of Zouaves, the élite infantry established during the Algerian War,t recalled his miserable impression of the British troops at Varna. He was particularly shocked by the floggings that were often given by their officers for indiscipline and drunkenness – both common problems among the British troops – which reminded him of the old feudal system that had disappeared in France:
The English recruiters seemed to have brought out the dregs of their society, the lower classes being more susceptible to their offers of money. If the sons of the better-off had been conscripted, the beatings given to the English soldiers by their officers would have been outlawed by the military penal code. The sight of these corporal punishments disgusted us, reminding us that the Revolution of [17]89 abolished flogging in the army when it established universal conscription … . The French army is made up of a special class of citizens subject to the military laws, which are severe but applied equally to all the ranks. In England, the soldier is really just a serf – he is no more than the property of the government. It drives him on by two contradictory impulses. The first is the stick. The second is material well-being. The English have a developed instinct for comfort; to live well in a comfortable tent with a nice big side of roast-beef, a flagon of red wine and a plentiful supply of rum – that is the desideratum of the English trooper; that is the essential precondition of his bravery … . But if these supplies do not arrive on time, if he has to sleep out in the mud, find his firewood, and go without his beef and grog, the English become battle-shy, and demoralization spreads through the ranks.17
The French army was superior to the British in many ways. Its schools for officers had produced a whole new class of military professionals, who were technically more advanced, tactically superior and socially far closer to their men than the aristocratic officers of the British army. Armed with the advanced Minié rifle, which could fire rapidly with lethal accuracy up to 1,600 metres, the French infantry was celebrated for its attacking élan. The Zouaves, in particular, were masters of the fast attack and tactical retreat, a type of fighting they had developed in Algeria, and their courage was an inspiration to the rest of the French infantry, who invariably followed them into battle. The Zouaves were seasoned campaigners, experienced in fighting in the most difficult and mountainous terrain, and united by strong bonds of comradeship, formed through years of fighting together in Algeria (and in many cases on the revolutionary barricades of Paris in 1848). Paul de Molènes, an officer in one of the Spahi cavalry regiments recruited by Saint-Arnaud in Algeria, thought the Zouaves exerted a ‘special power of seduction’ over the young men of Paris, who flocked to join their ranks in 1854. ‘The Zouaves’ poetic uniforms, their free and daring appearance, their legendary fame – all this gave them an image of popular chivalry unseen since the days of Napoleon.’ 18
The experience of fighting in Algeria was a decisive advantage for the French over the British army, which had not fought in a major battle since Waterloo, and in many ways remained half a century behind the times. At one point a third of the French army’s 350,000 men had been deployed in Algeria. From that experience, the French had learned the crucial importance of the small collective unit for maintaining discipline and order on the battlefield – a commonplace of twentieth-century military theorists that was first advanced by Ardant du Picq, a graduate of the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr, the élite army school at Fontainebleau near Paris, who served as a captain in the Varna expedition and developed his ideas from observations of the French soldiers during the Crimean War. The French had also learned how to supply an army on the march efficiently – an area of expertise where their superiority over the British became apparent from the moment the two armies landed at Gallipoli. For two and a half days, the British troops were not allowed to disembark, ‘because nothing was ready for them’, reported William Russell of The Times, the pioneering correspondent who had joined the expedition to the East, whereas the French were admirably prepared with a huge flotilla of supply ships: ‘Hospitals for the sick, bread and biscuit bakeries, wagon trains for carrying stores and baggage – every necessary and every comfort, indeed, at hand, the moment their ship came in. On our side not a British pendant was afloat in the harbour! Our
great naval state was represented by a single steamer belonging to a private company.’19
The outbreak of the Crimean War had caught the British army by surprise. The military budget had been in decline for many years, and it was only in the early weeks of 1852, following Napoleon’s coup d’état and the eruption of the French war scare in Britain, that the Russell government was able to obtain parliamentary approval for a modest increase in expenditure. Of the 153,000 enlisted men, two-thirds were serving overseas in various distant quarters of the Empire in the spring of 1854, so troops for the Black Sea expedition had to be recruited in a rush. Without the conscription system of the French, the British army relied entirely on the recruitment of volunteers with the inducement of a bounty. During the 1840s the pool of able-bodied men had been severely drained by great industrial building projects and by emigration to the United States and Canada, leaving the army to draw upon the unemployed and poorest sections of society, like the victims of the Irish famine, who took the bounty in a desperate attempt to clear their debts and save their families from the poorhouse. The main recruiting grounds for the British army were pubs and fairs and races, where the poor got drunk and fell into debt.20
If the British trooper came from the poorest classes of society, the officer corps was drawn mostly from the aristocracy – a condition almost guaranteed by the purchasing of commissions. The senior command was dominated by old gentlemen with good connections to the court but little military experience or expertise; it was a world apart from the professionalism of the French army. Lord Raglan was 65; Sir John Burgoyne, the army’s chief engineer, 72. Five of the senior commanders at Raglan’s headquarters were relatives. The youngest, the Duke of Cambridge, was a cousin to the Queen. This was an army, rather like the Russian, whose military thinking and culture remained rooted in the eighteenth century.
The Crimean War Page 22