The Crimean War

by Figes, Orlando

  The comfortable conditions which senior British officers were allowed to enjoy contrasted starkly with the circumstances of French officers, who lived much more closely to their men. In a letter to his family on 20 November, Captain Herbé explained the consequences of the hurricane for his living conditions:

  Soldiers and officers are all lodged together in a little tent; this installation, excellent in fine weather and on the march, is gravely inconvenient during prolonged rain and cold. The ground, trampled underfoot, becomes a mass of mud, which gets everywhere, forcing everyone to splash around in the trenches and the camp. Everybody is soaked through … In these tents, the soldiers sleep together, one against the other in a group of six; each man has just one blanket, so they stretch out three beneath them on the muddy ground, and cover themselves with the other three; their knapsacks, loaded up, serving as pillows.7

  Generally, the French were better housed. Their tents were not only more spacious but most of them were protected from the wind by wooden palisades or walls of snow erected by the men. The French constructed various types of improvised accommodation: large huts which the soldiers called ‘molehills’ (taupinères) dug out from the ground about a metre deep, the floor lined with stone, with plaited branches for the walls and roof; ‘tent-shelters’ (tentes-abris) made up from the cloth of the soldiers’ knapsacks sewn together and fastened to sticks in the ground; and cone-shaped tents (tentes-coniques), large enough to accommodate sixteen men, made from canvas sewn together and attached to a central pole. In all these structures there were ovens for cooking and keeping the men warm. ‘Our soldiers knew how to make ovens that won the admiration and the envy of our English allies,’ recalled Noir.

  The body of these ovens was sometimes made of clay, and sometimes from large bomb fragments cemented in a way to form a vault. The chimneys were constructed out of metal boxes or scrap metal pieced together on top of each other. Thanks to these ovens, our troops could warm themselves when they returned from the trenches or from sentry work half frozen to death; they could dry their clothes and sleep well without being woken by the terrible night fever that tormented the poor English. Our soldiers burnt so much wood that the great forest of Inkerman entirely disappeared in a few months; not a tree, not a bush was left. Seeing our ovens, the English complained about our cutting down the trees … . But they themselves made no use of these resources. None of the English soldiers wanted to build ovens for themselves; they were even less inclined to cut their own firewood. They expected everything to be given to them by their administration, without which they were destitute.8

  Noir’s disdain for the English was commonplace among the French, who thought their allies lacked the ability to adapt to field conditions. ‘Ah! These English, they are men of undoubted courage but they know only how to get themselves killed,’ Herbé wrote to his family on 24 November.

  They have had big tents since the beginning of the siege and still don’t know how to put them up. They haven’t even learned how to build a little ditch around the tents to stop the rain and wind from getting into them! They eat badly, although they receive twice or three times the rations of our troops and spend a lot more than we do. They have no resilience and cannot deal with misfortune or privations.

  Even the English were forced to recognize that the French were better organized than themselves. ‘Oh how far superior are the French to us in every way!’ noted Fanny Duberly on 27 November. ‘Where are our huts? Where are our stables? All lying at Constantinople. The French are hutting themselves in all directions while we lie in mud and horses and men alike die of an exposure which might oh so easily be prevented. It is all alike – the same utter neglect and mismanagement runs throughout.’9

  Unlike the French, the British could not seem to work out a system for collecting firewood. They allowed the men a ration of charcoal for burning in their fires but, because of the shortage of forage for the draught animals, it proved too difficult to haul the charcoal up from Balaklava to the heights, so the soldiers went without, though officers of course could send their servants down on their own horses to collect the fuel for them. The men suffered terribly from the freezing temperatures of December and January, with thousands of reported cases of frostbite, especially among the new recruits, who were not acclimatized to the Crimean winter. Cholera and other diseases also took their toll among the weakened men. ‘I found sad misery among the men; they have next to no fuel, almost all the roots even of the brushwood being exhausted,’ noted Lieutenant Colonel Sterling of the Highland Brigade:

  They are entitled to rations of charcoal; but they have no means of drawing it, and their numbers are so reduced [by illness] that they cannot spare men enough to bring it six or seven miles from Balaklava. The consequence is they cannot dry their stockings or shoes; they come in from the trenches with frost-bitten toes, swelled feet, chillblains, etc.; their shoes freeze, and they cannot put them on. Those who still, in spite of their misery, continue to do their duty, often go into the trenches without shoes by preference, or they cut away the heels to get them on … . If this goes on, the trenches must be abandoned … I heard of men on their knees crying with pain.10

  A cantinière in Zouave regimental uniform, 1855

  It was the food supply where the British really fell down compared to the French. ‘It is painful for me to compare the French and English alongside of each other in this camp,’ wrote General Simpson to Lord Panmure. ‘The equipage of our Allies is marvellous. I see continual strings of well-appointed carts and wagons … conveying stores, provisions, etc … . Everything an army ought to possess is in full working order with the French – even the daily baking of their bread – all under military control and discipline.’ Every French regiment had a corps of people responsible for the basic needs of the troops – food supply and preparation, the treatment of the wounded and so on. There was a baker and a team of cooks in every regiment, which also had its own vivandières and cantinières, female sutlers, dressed in a modified version of the regimental uniform, who sold respectively food and drink from their mobile field canteens. Food was prepared collectively – every regiment having its own kitchen and appointed chefs – whereas in the British camp each man received his individual ration and was left to cook it on his own. This difference helps to explain how the French were able to maintain their health surprisingly well, compared to the British, even though they received half the rations and one-third as much meat as their allies. It was only in December that the British army moved towards the French system of mass food preparation in canteens, and as soon as they did so their circumstances began to improve.11

  ‘C’est la soupe qui fait le soldat,’ Napoleon once said. Soup was the mainstay of the French canteen in the Crimea. Even in the depths of winter, when fresh food supplies were at their lowest, the French could rely on an almost continuous supply of dried foodstuffs: preserved vegetables, which came in small hard cakes and needed only the adding of hot water, along with fresh or conserved meat, to make a wholesome soup; wheat biscuits, which kept for months and were more nutritious than ordinary bread because they contained less water and more fat; and plentiful supplies of coffee beans, without which the French soldier could not live. ‘Coffee, hot or cold, was all I drank,’ recalled Charles Mismer, a young dragoon. ‘Apart from its other virtues, coffee stimulates the nerves and sustains moral courage, it is the best defence against illness.’ There were many days when the French troops ‘lived on a kind of soup made from coffee and crushed biscuit’, Mismer wrote, though normally the rations ‘were composed of salted meat, lard and rice, and fresh meat from time to time, along with a supplement of wine, sugar and coffee; only bread was sometimes lacking, but instead we had biscuit, as hard as stone, which one had to crush or slice with an axe’.12

  All these goods were readily available because the French had set up an efficient system of supply with well-organized wagon trains and paved roads between Kamiesh and the siege lines. The harbour at Kamiesh was far more su
itable for landing supplies than Balaklava. Large warehouses, slaughterhouses, private shops and trading stalls soon sprang up around the broad horseshoe bay, where three hundred ships could unload their wares from around the world. There were bars and brothels, hotels and restaurants, including one where soldiers paid a fixed price for a three-day orgy of food, wine and women, all brought in from France. ‘I went to Kamiesh,’ Herbé wrote to his family; ‘it has become a proper town.’

  You can find whatever you want here; I even saw two fashion shops selling perfumes and hats from Paris – for the cantinières! I have visited Balaklava – what a pitiful comparison! The shacks constructed in the little port are full of goods for sale but everything is piled up pell-mell, without any order or attraction for the buyer. I am astonished that the English chose it as their supply base in preference to Kamiesh.13

  Balaklava was a crowded and chaotic harbour in which the off-loading of government supplies had to compete with private traders from virtually every nationality in the Black Sea area – Greeks, Turks, Jews, Crimean Tatars, Romanians, Armenians, Bulgarians, even a handful of Russians, who were allowed to remain in the town. ‘If anybody should ever wish to erect a “Model Balaklava” in England,’ wrote Fanny Duberly in December, ‘I will tell him the ingredients necessary.’

  Take a village of ruined houses and hovels in the extremest state of all imaginable dirt; allow the rain to pour into them, until the whole place is a swamp of filth ankle-deep; catch about, on an average, 1,000 Turks with the plague, and cram them into the houses indiscriminately; kill about 100 a day, and bury them so as to be scarcely covered with earth, leaving them to rot at leisure – taking care to keep up the supply. Onto one part of the beach drive all the exhausted bat ponies, dying bullocks, and worn-out camels, and leave them to die of starvation. They will generally do so in about three days, when they will soon begin to rot, and smell accordingly. Collect together from the water of the harbour all the offal of the animals slaughtered for the use of the occupants of above 100 ships, to say nothing of the town – which, together with an occasional floating human body, whole or in parts, and the driftwood of the wrecks, pretty well covers the water – and stew them all up together in a narrow harbour, and you will have a tolerable imitation of the real essence of Balaklava. 14

  Balaklava was only the beginning of the British problem. Supplies could not be taken from the port until they were released by the clerks of the commissariat through a complicated system of forms and authorizations, all filled out in triplicate. Boxes of food and bales of hay would lie around for weeks and eventully rot on the quayside before they were identified and cleared for dispatch by inefficient bureaucrats.an From Balaklava to their camps on the heights above Sevastopol the British had failed to build a proper road, so every box of bullets, every blanket and biscuit, had to be carted 10 or 11 kilometres up a steep and muddy track by horse or mule. In December and January most of these supplies had to be carried up by hand, in loads of 40 pounds a time, because there was no forage for the animals, which were rapidly dying off.

  It was not just a question of poor organization. The British troops were not accustomed to foraging for food or fending for themselves. Recruited mainly from the landless and the urban poor, they had none of the peasant know-how or resourcefulness of the French soldiers, who could hunt for animals, fish in the rivers and the sea, and turn almost anything into food. ‘It has become the habit of the British soldier’, concluded Louis Noir, ‘that every meal should be served up to him, wherever he may find himself at war. With the stubbornness which is the foundation of their character, the English would prefer to die of hunger than change any of their ways.’ Unable to look after themselves, the British troops depended heavily on their regimental wives to procure and cook their food and do their laundry and any number of other menial chores that the French did for themselves – a factor that accounts for the relatively large number of women in the British army compared to the French (where there were no army wives but only cantinières). Marianne Young of the 28th Infantry Regiment complained that the English soldier was ‘half starved upon his rations, because he could not, with three stones and a tin pot, convert them into palatable food’, whereas there was ‘virtually nothing the French would turn their noses up at if it could be converted into food’. They caught frogs and tortoises, which ‘they cooked up to their own tastes’, dug up tortoise eggs, and made a delicacy out of eating rats. The surgeon George Lawson saw a soldier cutting off the legs of a frog alive and remonstrated with him for his cruelty, but the Frenchman ‘quietly smiled – I suppose at my ignorance – and patting his stomach said they were for the cuisine’.15

  Compared to the French, the British ate badly, although – to begin with – there were plentiful supplies of meat and rum. ‘Dear wife,’ wrote Charles Branton, a semi-literate gunner in the 12th Battalion Royal Artillery on 21 October, ‘we have lost many lives through the Corora they are dying like rotten sheep but we have plenty to eat and drink. We have two Gills of rum a day plenty of salt por and a pound and a ½ of biskit and I can ashore you that if we had 4 Gills of rum it would be a godsend.’ As autumn gave way to winter, the supply system struggled to keep going on the muddy track from Balaklava to the British camp, and the rations steadily declined. By mid-December there was no fruit or vegetable in any form – only sometimes lemon or lime juice, which the men added to their tea and rum to prevent scurvy – although officers with private means could purchase cheese and hams, chocolates and cigars, wines, champagnes, in fact almost anything, including hampers by Fortnum & Mason, from the shops of Balaklava and Kadikoi. Thousands of soldiers became sick and died from illnesses, including cholera, which resurfaced with a vengeance. By January the British army could muster only 11,000 able-bodied men, less than half the number it had under arms two months before. Private John Pine of the Rifle Brigade had been suffering for several weeks from scurvy, dysentery and diarrhoea when he wrote to his father on 8 January:

  We have been living on biscuit and salt rations the greater part of the time we have been in the field, now and then we get fresh beef and once or twice we have had mutton but it is wretched stuff not fit to throw to an English dog, but it is the best that is to be got out here so we must be thankful to God for that. Miriam [his sister] tells me there is a lot of German Sausages coming out for the troops. I wish they would make haste and send them for I really think I could manage a couple of pound at the present minute … . I have been literally starved this last 5 or six weeks … If my dear father you could manage to send me in the form of a letter a few anti-scorbutic powders I should be obliged to you for I am rather troubled with the scurvy and I will settle with you some other time please God spares me.

  Pine’s condition worsened and he was shipped to the military hospital at Kulali near Constantinople, where he died within a month. Such was the chaos of the administration that there was no record of his death, and it was a year before his family found out what had happened from one his comrades.16

  It was not long before the British troops became thoroughly demoralized and began to criticize the military authorities. ‘Those out here are much in hope that peace will soon be proclaimed,’ Lieutenant Colonel Mundy of the 33rd Regiment wrote to his mother on 4 February. ‘It is all very fine for people at home talking of martial order and the like but everyone of us out here has had quite enough of hardship, of seeing our men dying by thousand from sheer neglect.’ Private Thomas Hagger, who arrived in late November with the reinforcements of the 23rd, wrote to his family:

  I am sorry to say that the men that was out before I came have not had so much as a clean shirt on for 2 Mounths the people at home think that the troops out hear are well provided for I am sorry to say that they are treated worse then dogs are at home I can tell the inhabitants of old England that if the solders that are out hear could but get home again they would not get them out so easy it is not the fear of fighting it is the worse treatment that we receive.

  Others
wrote to the newspapers to expose the army’s poor treatment. Colonel George Bell of the 1st (Royal) Regiment drafted a letter to The Times on 28 November:

  All the elements of destruction are against us, sickness & death, & nakedness, & uncertain ration of salt meat. Not a drop of Rum for two days, the only stand by to keep the soldier on his legs at all. If this fails we are done. The Communication to Balaklava impossible, knee deep all the way for 6 miles. Wheels can’t move, & the poor wretched starved baggage animals have not strength to wade through the mud without a load. Horses – cavalry, artillery, officers’ chargers & Baggage Animals die by the score every night at their peg from cold & starvation. Worse than this, the men are dropping down fearfully. I saw nine men of 1st Batt[alion] Royal Regt lying Dead in one Tent to day, and 15 more dying! All cases of Cholera … . The poor men’s backs are never dry, their one suit of rags hang in tatters about them, they go down to the Trenches at night wet to the skin, ly there in water, mud, & slush till morning, come back with cramps to a crowded Hosp[ital] Marquee tattered by the storm, ly down in a fetid atmosphere, quite enough of itself to breed contagion, & dy there in agony. This is no romance, it is my duty as a C.O. to see & Endeavour to alleviate the sufferings & privations of my humble but gallant comrades. I can’t do it, I have no power. Everything almost is wanting in this Hospital department, so badly put together from the start. No people complain so much of it as the Medical officers of Regts & many of the Staff doctors too.