The Crimean War

by Figes, Orlando

  To protect these crucial bastions the Russians built new works outside the city walls: the Mamelon (the Kamchatka Lunette) to defend the Malakhov, and the Quarry Pits in front of the Redan. The Mamelon was constructed by the soldiers of the Kamchatka Regiment (from which it derived its Russian name) under almost constant fire from the French during most of February and early March. So many men were killed in building it that not all of them could be evacuated, even under cover of the night, and many dead were left in the earthworks. The Mamelon was itself a complex fortress system protected by the twin redoubts of the White Works on its left flank (so named because of the white clay soil exposed by the excavation of the defences). Henri Loizillon, a French engineer, described the surprise of his fellow-soldiers at what else they found inside the Mamelon when they captured it in early June:

  Everywhere there were shelters in the ground covered up with heavy timbers where the men had taken cover from the bombs. In addition, we discovered an enormous underground capable of holding several hundred men, so the losses which they suffered were much less than we supposed. These shelters were all the more curious for the surprising comfort we found there: there were beds with eiderdowns, porcelains, complete tea services, etc., so the soldiers had not been badly served. There was also a chapel whose only remarkable object was a rather beautiful gilded wooden sculpture of Christ.28

  Amid all this frenzied building there was little major fighting. But the Russians launched sporadic raids at night against the trenches of the British and the French. Some of the most daring were led by a seaman called Pyotr Koshka, whose exploits were so famous that he became a national hero in Russia. It was not entirely clear to the allied troops what the purpose of these sorties was. They seldom caused any lasting damage to their defensive works, and the losses they inflicted on the men were trifling, usually less than the Russians lost themselves. Herbé thought their aim was to add to the allies’ fatigue because the constant threat of an attack at night made it impossible for them to sleep in the trenches (that was in fact the Russians’ intention). According to Major Whitworth Porter of the Royal Engineers, the first intimation of an imminent attack would be ‘the discovery of several dusky forms creeping over the parapet’.

  The alarm is instantly given, and in another moment they are upon us. Our men, scattered as they are, are taken by surprise, give way step by step before the advancing foe, until at length they make a stand. And now a hand-to-hand struggle ensues. The cheers, the shouts, and the hallos of our men; the yells of the Russians raging like so many maniacs from the effects of the vile spirit with which they have been maddened before making the onslaught; the sharp cracks of the rifles, resounding momentarily on all sides; the hastily shouted words of command; the blast of the Russian bugle, ringing out clear in the midst of all of the din, sounding their advance – all conspire to render it a scene of confusion, enough to bewilder the steadiest nerves. When to this is added the probability that the scene of the struggle may be in a battery, where the numerous traverses, guns and other obstacles cumber up the space, and render it difficult for either party to act, some idea may be formed of this extraordinary spectacle. Sooner or later – generally in the course of a very few minutes – our men, having gathered together in sufficient numbers, make a bold dash forward, and drive the enemy headlong over the parapet. One smart volley is rattled after them to increase the speed of their flight, and the loud, ringing British cheer …29

  The allies also launched surprise attacks against the Russian outworks – their aim being not to capture these positions but to weaken the morale of the Russian troops. The Zouaves were the ideal soldiers to carry out these raids: in hand-to-hand fighting they were the most effective in the world. On the night of 23/4 February, their celebrated 2nd Regiment stormed and briefly occupied the newly constructed White Works, just to show the Russians that they could capture them at will, before retreating with 203 wounded men, and 62 officers and soldiers dead, whom they carried back, under heavy fire, rather than abandon them to the Russians.30

  In contrast to the sorties of the allies, some of the attacks by the Russians were large enough to suggest that their intention was to drive the allies from their positions, though in reality they were never powerful enough for that. On the night of 22/3 March, the Russians launched a sortie of some 5,000 men against the French positions opposite the Mamelon. It was their largest sortie yet. The brunt of the assault was taken by the 3rd Zouaves, who held off their attackers in fierce hand-to-hand fighting in the dark, illuminated only by the flashes of the rifles and muskets. The Russians spread out in a flanking movement and quickly captured the weakly defended British trenches on their right, from which they aimed their fire into the French side, but the Zouaves continued to hold firm, until at last British reinforcements arrived, enabling the Zouaves to push the Russians back towards the Mamelon. The sortie cost the Russians a great deal: 1,100 men were wounded, and more than 500 killed, nearly all of them in or near the trenches of the Zouaves. After the fighting was over, the two sides agreed to a six-hour armistice to collect the dead and wounded who were clogging up the battlefield. Men who had been at war only a few moments previously began to fraternize, speaking to each other with hand signals and the odd word in each other’s language, though nearly all the Russian officers could speak French well, the adopted language of the Russian aristocracy. Captain Nathaniel Steevens of the 88th Regiment of Foot witnessed the scene:

  Here we saw a crowd of English officers & Men mingled with some Russian Officers & escort, who had brought out the Flag of Truce; this was the most curious sight of all; the Officers chatted together as freely and gaily as if the warmest friends, and as for the Soldiers, those who 5 minutes before had been firing away at each other, might now be seen smoking together, sharing tobacco and drinking Rum, exchanging the usual compliments of ‘bono Ingles’ &c; the Russian Officers were very gentlemanly looking men, spoke French and one English; at length on reference to watches it was found ‘time was nearly up’ so both Parties gradually receded from each others’ sight to their respective works, not however without our men shaking hands with the Russian soldiers & some one calling out, ‘Au revoir.’31

  Apart from these sorties, the troops stayed on their respective sides in the early months of 1855. ‘The siege is now only nominal,’ Henry Clifford wrote to his family on 31 March. ‘We fire a few shots during the day, but all seems at a standstill.’ It was a strange situation, since there was plenty of artillery sitting idle, implying almost a loss of belief in the siege. In these months there was far more digging than shooting to be done – a fact that did not please many of the troops. According to Whitworth Porter of the Royal Engineers, the British soldier did not like ‘spade-work’, thinking it not soldier-like. He quotes an Irishman in the infantry:

  ‘Shure, now, I didn’t ’list for this here kind o’ work. When I tuk the shillen, it was to be a sodger, and take me senthry go, right and proper, and use me bayonet when I was tould to; but I never dhreamt o’ nothen o’ this kind. Shure, one o’ the very raisins why I listed was because I hated spade-work; and the Sargent as tuk me swore by St. Pathrick that I should niver see a spade agin; and yet, no sooner does I come out here, than I gits a pick and shovel put in me hand, just as bad as iver it was in Ould Ireland.’ And then he would go on with his work, grumbling all the time, and uttering fierce denunciations against the Russians, who he vowed he would make pay for all this, if ever he got inside that blessed town.32

  As the siege settled into a monotonous routine of exchanging fire with the enemy, the soldiers in the trenches became accustomed to living under constant bombardment. To an outsider, they seemed almost nonchalant about the dangers that surrounded them. On his first visit to the trenches, Charles Mismer, a 22-year-old dragoon in the French cavalry, was amazed to see the soldiers playing cards or sleeping in the trenches while bombs and shells fell around them. The troops came to recognize the various bombs and shells from their different sounds, which told
them what evasive action they should take: the round shot, ‘rushing through the air with a sharp, shrill shriek, very startling to the nerves of the young soldier’, as Porter recalled it; the volley of grape, ‘buzzing along with a sound not unlike that of a covey of birds very strong on the wing’; the ‘bouquet’, a shower of small shells enclosed in a bomb, ‘each one leaving a long curved trail of light in its track and, as they reach their destination, lighting up the atmosphere with short, fitful flashes, as they burst in succession’; and the larger mortar shell, ‘rising proudly and grandly in the air, easily to be discerned in the night by the fiery train of its burning fuse, tracing a majestic curve high in mid-air, until, having attained its extreme altitude, it commences to descend, falling faster and faster, till down it swoops … making a sound in its passage through the air like the chirping of a pee-wit’. It was impossible to tell where the mortar shell would land, or where its splinters would explode, so ‘all one could do when one heard the birdlike noise was to lie face down against the earth and hope’.33

  Gradually, as the siege dragged on without any gains by either side, the exchange of fire assumed a symbolic character. In quiet periods, when the men grew bored, they turned it into sport. François Luguez, a captain in the Zouaves, recalled how his men would play shooting games with the Russians: one side would raise on the end of their bayonet a piece of cloth for the other side to shoot – each shot being greeted with a cheer and laughter if it hit, and jeering if it missed.34

  With less and less to fear, the sentries in the picquets began to venture into no man’s land to entertain themselves or warm themselves at night. From time to time there was some fraternization with the Russians, whose own outposts were no further than a football-pitch length away. Calthorpe recorded one such incident, when a group of unarmed Russian soldiers approached the British picquets:

  They made signs that they wanted a light for their pipes, which one of our men gave them, and then they stayed a few minutes talking to our sentries, or rather trying to do so, the conversation being something after this wise:

  1st Russian soldier – ‘Englise bono!’

  1st English soldier – ‘Russkie bono!’

  2nd Russian soldier – ‘Francis bono!’

  2nd English soldier – ‘Bono!’

  3rd Russian soldier – ‘Oslem no bono!’

  3rd English soldier – ‘Ah, ah! Turk no bono!’

  1st Russian soldier – ‘Oslem!’ making a face, and spitting on the ground to show his contempt.

  1st English soldier – ‘Turk!’ pretending to run away, as if frightened, upon which all the party go into roars of laughter, and then after shaking hands, they return to their respective beats.35

  To while away the time the soldiers developed a wide variety of pursuits and games. In the bastions of Sevastopol, noted Ershov, ‘card games of all sorts were played around the clock’. Officers played chess and read voraciously. In the casemate of the Sixth Bastion there was even a grand piano, and concerts were arranged with musicians from the other bastions. ‘To begin with,’ writes Ershov, ‘the concerts were dignified and ceremonious with proper attention to the rules of listening to classical music, but gradually, as our mood changed, there was a corresponding tendency towards national melodies or folk songs and dances. Once a masked ball was arranged, and one cadet appeared in a woman’s dress to sing folk songs.’36

  Theatrical amusements were very popular in the French camp, where the Zouaves had their own theatre troupe, a transvestite vaudeville, that entertained huge crowds of noisy soldiers in a wooden shed. ‘Imagine a Zouave dressed up as a shepherdess and flirting with the men (faisant la coquette)!’ recalled André Damas, a chaplain in the French army. ‘And then another Zouave dressed up as a young lady of society, and playing hard to get (jouant la précieuse)! I have never seen anything as funny or as talented as these gentlemen. They were hilarious.’37

  Horse racing was also popular, especially among the British, whose cavalry was almost totally unoccupied. But it was not only the cavalry horses that took part in these races. Whitworth Porter attended a meeting organized by the 3rd Division on the downs. ‘The Day was bitterly cold,’ he noted in his diary on 18 March,

  a keen west wind cutting into one’s very bones: still the course was crowded with stragglers from all parts of the army; every one who could contrive to raise a pony for the occasion had done so, and queer-looking they most of them were. I saw one huge specimen of a British officer, who could not have measured less than six foot three in his stockings, bestriding the smallest, skinniest, shaggiest pony I have ever seen.38

  There was a lot of drinking in these relatively idle months. In all the armies it resulted in a growing general problem of indiscipline, swearing, insolence, drunken brawls and violence, as well as acts of insubordination by the men, all of which suggested that morale among the troops was becoming dangerously low. In the British army (and there is no reason to suppose that it was worse affected than the Russian or the French) a staggering 5,546 men (roughly one in eight of the entire army in the field) behaved so badly that they were court-martialled for various acts of drunkenness during the Crimean War. Most soldiers drank a good-sized tumbler of alcohol with their breakfast – vodka for the Russians, rum for the British and wine for the French – and another with dinner. Many also drank during the day – and some were never sober throughout the entire siege. Drinking was the primary recreation of soldiers in all the armies, including the Turks, who liked the sweet Crimean wine. Henry Clifford recalled the drinking culture in the allied camps:

  Almost every regiment has a canteen, and at the door of each of these stood, no they did not stand, for very few could, but lay and rolled about, groups of French and English soldiers, in every state of intoxication. Merry, laughing, crying, dancing, fighting, sentimental, affectionate, singing, talking, quarrelsome, stupid, beastly, brutal, and dead-drunk. French just as bad as English, and English just as bad as French … What a mistake to over-pay a soldier! Give him one farthing more than he really wants, and he gives way to his brutal propensities and immediately gets drunk … . Let him be English, French, Turk, Sardinian, give him enough money and he will get drunk.39

  The sudden arrival of warm spring weather raised the morale of the allied troops. ‘Today it is spring,’ Herbé wrote on 6 April; ‘the sun has not left us for three weeks, and eveything has changed in appearance.’ The French soldiers planted gardens near their tents. Many, like Herbé, shaved their winter beards, washed their linen, and generally spruced up their appearance, so that ‘if the ladies of Sevastopol should give a ball and invite the French officers, our uniforms would still shine brightly among their elegant costumes’. After such a cruel winter, when all was hidden under mud and snow, the Crimea appeared to be suddenly transformed into a place of great beauty, with a profusion of colourful spring flowers on the heathlands, fields of rye grass a metre or so high, and birdsong everywhere. ‘We have had a few warm days only,’ wrote Russell of The Times on 17 March,

  and yet the soil, wherever a flower has a chance of springing up, pours forth multitudes of snowdrops, crocuses, and hyacinths … The finches and larks here have a Valentine’s-day of their own, and still congregate in flocks. Very brilliant goldfinches, large buntings, golden-crested wrens, larks, linnets, titlarks, and three sorts of tomtits, the hedge sparrow, and a pretty species of wagtail, are very common all over the Chersonese; and it is strange to hear them piping and twittering about the bushes in the intervals of the booming of the cannon, just as it is to see the young spring flowers forcing their way through the crevices of piles of shot and peering out from under shells and heavy ordnance.40

  In the British camp, the spirit of the troops was lifted by improvements in the supply of foodstuffs and other basic goods, mainly as a result of the private enterprise that took advantage of the opportunities offered by the failure of the government to provide for the troops in the Crimea. By the spring of 1855 a vast array of private traders and sutle
rs had set up stalls and shops in Kadikoi. Although prices were extortionate, anything could be purchased there, from potted meats and pickles, bottled beer and Greek raki to roasted coffee, tins of Albert biscuits, chocolate, cigars, toiletries, paper, pens and ink, and the best champage from Oppenheim’s or Fortnum & Mason, which both had outlets in the main bazaar. There were saddlers, cobblers, tailors, bakers and hoteliers, including the famous Mary Seacole, a Jamaican woman who provided hearty meals and hospitality, herbal remedies and medicines at the ‘British Hotel’ she set up at a place she named Spring Hill near Kadikoi.

  Born in Kingston in 1805 to a Scottish father and Creole mother, this extraordinary woman had worked as a nurse in the British military stations in Jamaica and had married an Englishman called Seacole, who died within a year. She had later run a hotel and general store with her brother in Panama, where she had coped with outbreaks of disease. At the start of the Crimean War she travelled to England and attempted to get herself recruited as a nurse with Florence Nightingale, but she was rejected several times, no doubt partly because of the colour of her skin. Determined to make money and to help the war effort as a sutler and hotelier, she teamed up with Thomas Day, one of her husband’s distant relatives, to set up a company, ‘Seacole and Day’. Setting sail from Gravesend on 15 February, they collected stores in Constantinople, where they also recruited a young Greek Jew (whom she would call ‘Jew Johnny’). Although rather grandly named, the ‘British Hotel’ was really just a restaurant and general store in what Russell described as ‘an iron storehouse with wooden sheds’, but it was much loved by British officers, its main clientele, for whom it was a sort of club, where they could indulge themselves and enjoy comfort food that reminded them of home.41