The Crimean War

by Figes, Orlando

  Unwilling to send in their own forces to the Caucasus, and frightened of depending upon Muslim troops, the British and the French delayed making a decision on what sort of policy they should develop in this crucial area. With an effective force in the Caucasus, the allies might have dealt a much swifter and more devastating blow to Russia than they achieved by laying siege to Sevastopol for eleven months. But they were too wary to exploit this potential.

  The allies also had high hopes for the naval campaign in the Baltic, which was renewed in the spring. With a new fleet of steamships and floating batteries, and a new commander, Rear Admiral Sir Richard Dundas, in place of Napier, who had been widely blamed for the perceived failure of the campaign in 1854, there was optimistic talk of taking Kronstadt and Sveaborg, the Russian fortresses that Napier had failed to attack, and then of threatening St Petersburg itself. The naval surveyor and hydrographer who was placed in charge of planning the campaign was Captain Bartholomew Sulivan, who had accompanied Charles Darwin on the Beagle expedition. From his preliminary researches, Sulivan concluded that the fortresses could be captured by ships alone, without the need of land troops. When Clarendon went to Paris at the beginning of March to try to dissuade Napoleon from carrying out his threat to go to the Crimea, he took Sulivan’s report with him. It was warmly received by the Emperor, who thought that the decision not to attack Kronstadt in 1854 had been a disgrace. Like the British, Napoleon believed that Kronstadt’s capture would encourage Sweden to join the alliance against Russia.

  The first British warships left Spithead on 20 March, with more following a fortnight later; the French fleet under Admiral Pénaud arrived in the Baltic on 1 June. In a vain attempt to reinforce the allied blockade of Russian trade – a blockade that was circumvented by trade through Germany – the British fleet attacked and destroyed various Russian coastal stations. But their main targets remained Kronstadt and Sveaborg. From his ship, 8 kilometres from Kronstadt, Prince Ernest of Leiningen wrote to his cousin Queen Victoria on 3 June:

  There is the town before us with its numerous churches and spires and its endless batteries all showing their teeth ready to bite us if we give them a chance. The entrance of the harbour is guarded by two huge forts, Alexander and Menshikov, and to arrive at these ships must first pass the three tiers (78 guns) of Fort Risbank … From our masthead we can distinctly see the gilt cupolas and towers of St Petersburgh and right opposite the fleet is the magnificent palace of Oranienbaum, built of some white stone that looks very much like marble … It is still cold up here, but the weather is clear and we hardly have any night at all, only about two hours darkness from eleven to one.16

  While they waited for the French to arrive, Sulivan carried out a careful reconnaissance of the Baltic’s shallow waters, including the coastline of Estonia, where he was invited to a surreal dinner by an Anglophile noble family at their country house. ‘It really all seemed like a dream,’ he wrote:

  three miles inland in an enemy’s country, and going over all this quite English-like scenery with a nice young lady speaking as good English as I did, except with a slightly foreign accent … We had a splendid dinner, but more plain meats, game etc. than I expected. Coffee and tea were carried out under a tree, and we left about ten, just at dusk, the baron driving me at a rattling pace in a light phaeton with English horses and a thoroughly English-dressed groom, leather belts, boots and all.

  In early June Sulivan submitted his report. He was now pessimistic about the possibility of overcoming the powerful defences at Kronstadt, as Napier had been in 1854. During the past year the Russians had reinforced their fleet (Sulivan counted thirty-four gunboats) and strengthened the seaward defences with electrical and chemical underwater mines (described as ‘infernal machines’) and a barrier made up of timber frames secured to the seabed and filled with rocks. It would be difficult to remove it without suffering severe losses from the heavy guns of the fortress. The planned attack on Kronstadt was abandoned – and with it went the hopes of a decisive allied breakthrough in the Baltic.17

  Meanwhile the allies also thought of ways to broaden their campaign in the Crimea. The military stalemate of the winter months led many to conclude that continuing to bombard Sevastopol from the south would not produce results, as long as the Russians were able to bring in supplies and reinforcements from the mainland via Perekop and the Sea of Azov. For the siege to work, Sevastopol had to be encircled on its northern side. That had been the rationale of the original allied plan in the summer of 1854 – a plan which had been overturned by Raglan, who feared that his men would suffer in the heat if they occupied the Crimean plain to cut the Russians off from Perekop. By the end of the year the foolishness of Raglan’s strategy had become clear for all to see, and military leaders were calling for a broader strategy. In a memorandum of December, for example, Sir John Burgoyne, Raglan’s chief engineer, urged the creation of an allied force of 30,000 men on the River Belbek, ‘with a view to further operations against Bakhchiserai and Simferopol’ which would cut off Sevastopol from one of its two main routes of supply (the other being via Kerch in the eastern Crimea).18

  The Russian attack on Evpatoria in February prompted more plans for a stronger allied presence to interrupt the Russian supply lines from Perekop. Allied troops were sent to Evpatoria to reinforce the Turkish force during March. They found an appalling situation there – a real humanitarian crisis – with up to 40,000 Tatar peasants living in the streets, without food or shelter, having fled their villages out of fear of the Russians. The crisis encouraged the allied commanders to think about committing further troops to the north-west Crimean plain, if only to protect and mobilize the Tatar population against the Russians.19

  But it was in April that the allies really got down to the serious business of rethinking their military strategy in the Crimea. On 18 April, Palmerston, Napoleon, Prince Albert, Clarendon, Lord Panmure (the new Secretary of State for War), Vaillant, Burgoyne and Count Walewski (Drouyn’s successor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris) met in a council of war at Windsor Castle. Palmerston and Napoleon were decidedly in favour of a change in strategy, running down the bombardment of Sevastopol in order to concentrate on the conquest of the Crimea as a whole, which both men saw as the beginning of a larger war against Russia. The new plan would have the advantage of involving the Crimean Tatars on the allied side. Above all, it would represent a return to the sort of fighting in the open field in which the allied armies had proved themselves technically superior to the Russians at Alma and Inkerman. It was in the skill and rifle power of their infantry that the allies had their greatest superiority over the Russians – advantages that counted for very little in the siege warfare of Sevastopol. In engineering and artillery, the Russians were at least the equal of the British and the French.

  Napoleon was the most enthusiastic about a change of strategy. Though the occupation of Sevastopol was central to his aims, he was convinced that the town would not fall until it was fully encircled, but, when it was, it would fall without a fight. He proposed that instead of bombarding the city from the south, the allies should land an army at Alushta, 70 kilometres to the east, and march from there towards Simferopol, through which most of the Russian army’s supplies were transported. The British agreed with the broad outlines of Napoleon’s strategy, although as part of the bargain they managed to dissuade him from his daring idea of going to the Crimea to take command of the military operations himself. The ‘Emperor’s plan’ (as the Alushta expedition became known in French circles) was included as one of three options for a diversionary attack on the Crimean interior, the others being an offensive by allied troops based at Sevastopol against Bakhchiserai, and the landing of a force at Evpatoria which would march across the plain to Simferopol. The two war ministers signed a memorandum of the agreed plan, which Panmure sent to Raglan on the authority of the British cabinet. Panmure’s instructions left it up to Raglan to choose between the three alternatives, but made it clear that he was being
ordered to embark on one of them. The trenches at Sevastopol were to be left in the hands of 60,000 men (30,000 Turks and 30,000 French), whose new task would be to maintain a barrage to prevent the Russians from breaking out of the city rather than continue with any intention of taking the offensive.

  Raglan was sceptical of the new plan. He wanted to continue with the bombardment, which he was convinced was on the point of a breakthrough, and believed that a field offensive would not leave enough troops to defend the allied positions before Sevastopol. In an act of open defiance, if not mutiny, against his political superiors, Raglan convened a council of war in the Crimea at which he told his allied commanders, Canrobert and Omer Pasha, that Panmure’s memorandum was only a ‘suggestion’ and that he (Raglan) could proceed with it or not as he thought fit. Raglan dragged his heels over the new plan, coming up with various excuses not to take men away from the siege, until Canrobert, who was in favour of the field campaign and had several times offered to place his troops under Raglan’s command if only he would start it, exploded in frustration. ‘The field plan worked out by Your Majesty’, Canrobert informed Napoleon, ‘has been rendered practically impossible by the non-cooperation of the Commander in Chief of the English Army.’20

  For many years the French would blame the British for the failure of the plan to march on Simferopol and conquer the rest of the Crimea. They had good reason to be enraged by Raglan, who could have been removed by Palmerston for insubordination, if not incompetence, after his refusal to implement the order for an attack on the Crimean interior. With their superior rifle power, and the support of the Tatar population on the plain, there was good reason to suppose that a field campaign would have captured Simferopol and cut off the Russians’ main route of supply through the peninsula. This was exactly the scenario the Russians had feared most, which was why the Tsar had ordered the attack on Evpatoria in February. The Russians knew how vulnerable they were to an attack on their supply lines, and had always seen the route from Evpatoria as the most likely one for an allied offensive towards Simferopol or Perekop. As they later admitted, they were amazed that the British and the French had never tried to launch such an attack.21

  The one serious effort the allies made to cut off Sevastopol from its bases of supply was their raid on the port of Kerch, which controlled the supply lines across the Sea of Azov, although it took two attempts to accomplish it. Plans for an attack had been advanced at the start of the campaign, but the first order for the action was not made until 26 March, when Panmure wrote to Raglan instructing him to organize a ‘combined operation by sea and land’ to ‘reduce the defences of Kerch’. It was an attractive proposal, not least because it would involve the Royal Navy, which had hardly been used so far, at a time when the British contribution to the allied effort was being seriously questioned by the French. Canrobert was initially doubtful about the operation, but on 29 April he gave his agreement for a squadron of French warships under the command of Admiral Bruat and 8,500 soldiers to join the expedition, which would be led by Lieutenant General Brown, the veteran commander of the Light Division. The allied fleet set off on 3 May, sailing north-west towards Odessa to disguise its intentions from the Russians before doubling back towards Kerch. But just before it reached its destination, a fast boat caught up with the fleet and delivered an order from Canrobert for the French ships to return. Shortly after the fleet had left, the new telegram line to Paris had brought an order from Napoleon for Canrobert, instructing him to bring up the reserves from Constantinople: since Bruat’s ships would be required, Canrobert reluctantly decided to withdraw from the Kerch attack. The Royal Navy was forced to turn back, and Canrobert was disgraced in British (and many French) eyes.22

  The recall of the expedition antagonized the already worsening relations between the British and the French. It played a major part in Canrobert’s decision to resign his command on 16 May. He felt that his position had been undermined, that he had let the British down, and hence had no authority to compel Raglan to carry out the plans for a field campaign. The new French commander-in-chief, General Pélissier, a short, stocky man with a rough-and-ready manner, was far more decisive, more a man of action, than Canrobert, who had long been nicknamed ‘Robert Can’t’ by the British. Pélissier’s appointment was greeted with enthusiasm in the British camp. Colonel Rose, the British commissioner at the headquarters of the French army, who had been close to Canrobert, wrote to Clarendon that the time had come for a more ‘can-do’ approach to the war and that Pélissier was the man to deliver it:

  General Pélissier will never allow a half and half execution of his orders; if it can be done, it must be done. He is of a violent temper and rough manner, but I believe him to be just and sincere; and I think that in all important matters these two qualities will triumph over his ebulliations of temper. He has a quick conception, plenty of common sense, and a resolute mind, which thinks of overcoming, not yielding to difficulties.23

  Eager to repair relations with the British, Pélissier agreed to revive the operation against Kerch, although he concurred with Raglan that the main target of the allied operations should remain the Sevastopol defences. On 24 May sixty ships of the allied fleet set off with a combined force of 7,000 French, 5,000 Turks and 3,000 British troops under Brown’s command. Seeing the approach of the armada, most of the Russian inhabitants of Kerch fled to the countryside. After a brief bombardment, the allied troops were able to come ashore without opposition. Brown was met by a deputation of the Russian civilians who were left. They told him they were frightened of attacks by the local Tatar population and begged him to protect them. Brown ignored their pleas. Ordering the destruction of the arsenal in Kerch, Brown left a small force of mainly French and Turkish toops in the town and marched with the remainder of his troops to the important fort at Yenikale, further along the coast, where the looting of Russian property continued under Brown’s supervision. Meanwhile, the allied warships entered the Sea of Azov, sailed towards the Russian coastline, destroyed Russian shipping, and laid waste to the ports of Mariupol and Taganrog.ax

  General Pélissier

  The attacks on Russian property in Kerch and Yenikale soon descended into a drunken rampage, and some terrible atrocities by the allied troops. The worst took place in Kerch, where the local Tatar population took advantage of the allied occupation to carry out a violent revenge against the Russians of the town. Aided by the Turkish troops, the Tatars looted shops and houses, raped Russian women, and killed and mutilated hundreds of Russians, including even children and babies. Among the excesses was the destruction of the town’s museum, with its rich and magnificent collection of Hellenic art, an outrage reported by Russell in The Times on 28 May:

  The floor of the museum is covered in depth with the debris of broken glass, of vases, urns, statuary, the precious dust of their contents, and charred bits of wood and bone, mingled with the fresh splinters of the shelves, desks, and cases in which they had been preserved. Not a single bit of anything that could be broken or burnt any smaller had been exempt from reduction by hammer or fire.

  For several days Brown did nothing to stop the atrocities, even though he had received reports that a contingent of French and British troops had taken part in the looting. Brown saw the Tatars as allies, taking the view that they were engaged in a ‘legitimate rebellion’ against Russian rule. Eventually, having been informed of the worst atrocities, Brown dispatched a tiny force (just twenty British cavalrymen) to restore order. They were far too few in number to have any real effect, though they did shoot some British troops whom they had caught committing rape.24

  According to Russian witnesses, it was not just the allied soldiers who had taken part in the looting, the violence and rape; it was also officers. ‘I saw several English officers carrying to their ship furniture and sculptures, and all sorts of other items they had plundered from our homes,’ recalled one resident of Kerch. Several women claimed they had been raped by British officers.25

  The d
evelopment of all these broader plans was held back because, with the coming of the spring, the British and French troops got bogged down once again in the siege of Sevastopol, which still held first place in the allied strategy. Despite the recognition that a change of plan was needed for the siege to work, the allies remained wedded to the idea that one last surge would bring the walls of Sevastopol tumbling down and force Russia to accept a humiliating peace.

  In terms of actual fighting, the siege had gone through a quiet period in the winter months, as both sides concentrated on the strengthening of their defensive works. The French did most of the trench digging on the allied side, mainly because the British-held ground was very rocky. According to Herbé, they dug 66 kilometres of trenches, and the British just 15, during the eleven months of the siege. It was slow, exhausting, dangerous work, cutting into the hard ground in freezing temperatures, dynamiting the rock that lay underneath, under constant fire from the enemy. ‘Every metre of our trenches was literally at the cost of one man’s life and often two,’ recalled Noir.26

  The Russians were particularly active in their defensive works. Under the direction of their engineering genius Totleben, they developed their earthworks and trenches on a more sophisticated level than ever before seen in the history of siege warfare. In the early stages of the siege the Russian fortifications were little more than hastily improvised earthworks reinforced with wickerwork, fascines and gabions; but new and more formidable defences were added in the winter months. The bastions were reinforced by the addition of casemates – fortified gun emplacements dug several metres underground and covered with thick ship-timbers and earthworks that made them proof to the heaviest bombardment. Inside the most heavily fortified bastions, the Malakhov and the Redan (the Third), there was a maze of bunkers and apartments, including one, in the Redan, with a billiard table and ottomans, and in each there was a small chapel and a hospital.27