The next morning a truce was called to clear the killed and wounded from the battlefield. The casualties were enormous. The British lost about 1,000 men, killed and wounded; the French perhaps six times that number, though the precise figure was suppressed. A Zouave captain who was part of the team sent out into no man’s land to collect the dead described what he saw in a letter home on 25 June:
I will not tell you all the horrible sensations I experienced on arriving on that ground, strewn with bodies rotting in the heat, among which I recognized some of my comrades. There were 150 Zouaves with me, carrying stretchers and flasks with wine. The doctor with us told us to care first for the wounded who could still be saved. We found a lot of these unfortunates – they all asked to drink and my Zouaves poured them wine … There was an intolerable smell of corruption everywhere; the Zouaves had to cover their noses with a handkerchief while carrying away the dead bodies, whose heads and feet were left dangling.68
Among the dead was General Mayran, who was blamed for the defeat in Pélissier’s account to Napoleon, although, if truth be told, Pélissier himself was at least as responsible for his last-minute changes to the plan. Raglan certainly believed that Pélissier was principally at fault, not just for the changes of plan but for his decision to limit the attack to the Malakhov and the Redan rather than commit to a broader assault on the town which might have had the effect of scattering the Russian defenders – a decision he believed Pélissier had made from worries that the French troops might ‘run riot’ in the town, as he explained in his letter to Panmure.
But Raglan’s criticisms were no doubt coloured by his own sense of guilt for the needless sacrifice of so many British troops. According to one of his physicians, Raglan fell into a deep depression following the failure of the assault, and when he was on his deathbed, on 26 June, it was not from cholera that he was suffering, as had been rumoured, but ‘a case of acute mental anguish, producing first great depression, and subsequently complete exhaustion of the heart’s action’.69 He died on 28 June.
11
The Fall of Sevastopol
‘My dear father,’ Pierre de Castellane, an aide-de-camp to General Bosquet, wrote on 14 July. ‘All my letters should begin, I think, with the same words, “nothing new”, which is to say: we dig, we organize our batteries, and every night we sit and drink around the campfire; every day two companies of men are taken off to hospital.’1
With the failure of the assaults on the Malakhov and the Redan, the siege returned to the monotonous routine of trench-digging and artillery fire, without any signs of a breakthrough. After nine months of this trench warfare, there was a general sense of exhaustion on both sides, a demoralizing sense that the stalemate might continue indefinitely. Such was the desire for the war to end that all sorts of suggestions were made to break the deadlock. Prince Urusov, a first-rate chess player and a friend of Tolstoy, attempted to persuade Count Osten-Sacken, commander of the Sevastopol garrison, that a challenge should be sent to the allies to play a game of chess for the foremost trench, which had changed hands many times, at the cost of several hundred lives. Tolstoy suggested that the war should be decided by a duel.2 Although this was the first modern war, a dress rehearsal for the trench fighting of the First World War, it was fought in an age when some ideas of chivalry were still alive.
Demoralization soon set in among the allied troops. No one thought a renewed attack had much prospect of success – the Russians were building even stronger defences – and everybody feared they would have to spend a second winter on the heights above Sevastopol. All the soldiers now began to write of wanting to go home. ‘I have fully made up my mind to come home somehow,’ Lieutenant Colonel Mundy wrote to his mother on 9 July. ‘I cannot and will not stand another winter. I know if I did, I should be a useless decrepit old man in a year and I would rather be a live jackass than a dead lion.’ Soldiers envied wounded comrades who were taken home. According to one British officer, ‘many a man would gladly lose an arm to get off these heights and leave this siege’.3
Despair that the war would never end led many troops to question why they were fighting. The longer the slaughter continued, the more they came to see the enemy as suffering soldiers like themselves, and the more senseless it all seemed. The French army chaplain André Damas cited the case of a Zouave who came to him with religious doubts about the war. The Zouave had been told (as all the soldiers were) that they were waging war against ‘barbarians’. But during the ceasefire to collect the dead and wounded following the fighting on 18 June he had helped a badly injured Russian officer, who as a mark of gratitude had taken from his neck and given him a leather pendant embossed with the image of the Madonna and Child. ‘This war has to stop,’ the Zouave told Damas; ‘it is cowardly. We are all Christians; we all believe in God and religion, and without that we would not be so brave.’ 4
Trench fatigue was the big enemy of the summer months. By the tenth month of the siege soldiers had become such nervous wrecks from living under constant bombardment, so exhausted from the lack of sleep, that many of them could no longer cope. In their memoirs, many soldiers wrote of ‘trench madness’ – a mixed bag of mental illnesses, as far as one can tell, from claustrophobia to what later would be known as ‘shell shock’ or ‘combat stress’. Louis Noir, for instance, recalled many cases when ‘entire companies’ of battle-hardened Zouaves would ‘suddenly get up in the middle of the night, seize their guns, and call to others hysterically for help to fight imaginary enemies. These incidents of nervous over-excitation became a contagion affecting many men; remarkably, it affected first of all those who were the strongest physically and morally.’ Jean Cler, a colonel in the Zouaves, also recalled seasoned fighters who ‘suddenly went mad’ and ran away to the Russians, or who were unable to bear it any more and shot themselves. Suicides were noted by many memoirists. One wrote of a Zouave, ‘a veteran of our African wars’, who appeared all right until, one day, sitting by his tent and drinking coffee with his comrades, he said that he had had enough; taking up his gun, he walked away and put a bullet through his head.5
The loss of comrades was a major strain on soldiers’ nerves. It was not the sort of thing that men would often write about, even in the British army where there was no real censorship of their letters home; stoical acceptance of death in battle was expected of the soldier, and perhaps was needed to survive. Yet in the frequent outpouring of sorrow at the loss of friends we may perhaps catch a glimpse of deeper and more troubling emotions than such letter-writers felt able to express. Commenting on the published correspondence of his fellow-officer, Henri Loizillon, for example, Michel Gilbert was struck by the anguish and remorse in a letter to his family on 19 June. The letter contained a long list of names, a ‘funereal accounting’ of the soldiers who had fallen in the previous day’s assault on the Malakhov, and yet, Gilbert thought, one could feel from it ‘how much his soul was haunted by the breath of death (souffle de la mort). The list of names goes on and on, endlessly despairing, friends who disappeared, the names of officers who have been killed.’ Loizillon appeared lost in grief and guilt – guilt because he had survived – and it was only with the final humorous lines of his letter, in which he described the unsuccessful prayers of a fellow-soldier, that his ‘vigorous spirit of self-preservation reappeared’:
My poor friend Conegliano [Loizillon wrote], at the moment when we were leaving for the attack, told me (he is very religious): ‘I have brought my rosary, which the Pope blessed, and I have said a dozen prayers for the general [Mayran], a dozen for my brother, and for you as well.’ Poor boy! Of the three, it was only me his prayers helped to save.6
Apart from the effect of witnessing so many deaths, the soldiers in the trenches must have been worn down by the horrendous scale and nature of the injuries endured by all the armies in the siege. Not until the First World War would the human body suffer so much damage as it did in the fighting at Sevastopol. Technical improvements to artillery and rifle fire made for m
uch more serious wounds than those inflicted on the soldiers of the Napoleonic or Algerian wars. The modern elongated conical rifle shot was more powerful than the old round shot, and heavier as well, so it went straight through the body, breaking any bones along its way, whereas the lighter round shot tended to deflect on its passage through the body, usually without breaking bones. At the beginning of the siege the Russians used a conical bullet weighing 50 grams, but from the spring of 1855 they began to use a larger and heavier rifle bullet, 5 centimetres long and weighing twice as much as the British and French bullets. When these new bullets struck the soft part of the human body, they left a bigger hole, which could heal, but when they hit the bone, they would break it more extensively, and if an arm or leg was fractured, it would almost certainly require amputation. The Russian practice of holding their fire until the final moment, and then shooting at the enemy from point-blank range, guaranteed that their rifle power caused the maximum damage.7
In the allied hospitals there were soldiers with some gruesome wounds, but there were just as many in the Russian hospitals, victims of the even more advanced artillery and rifle fire of the British and the French. Khristian Giubbenet, a professor of surgery who worked in the military hospital in Sevastopol, wrote in 1870:
I do not think that I ever saw such awful injuries as I was forced to deal with during the final period of the siege. The worst without a doubt were the frequently occurring stomach wounds, when the bloody guts of men would be hanging out. When such unfortunates were brought to the dressing stations, they could still speak, were still conscious, and went on living for a few hours. In other cases the guts and the pelvis were ripped out at the back: the men could not move their lower bodies but they retained their consciousness until they died in a few hours’ time. Without a doubt, the most terrible impression was created by those whose faces had been blown up by a shell, denying them the image of a human being. Imagine a creature whose face and head have been replaced by a bloody mass of tangled flesh and bone – there are no eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, tongue, chin or ears to be seen, and yet this creature continues to stand up on its own feet, and moves and waves its arms about, forcing one to assume that it still has a consciousness. In other cases in the place where we would see a face, all that remained were some bloody bits of dangling skin.8
The Russians had far heavier casualties than the allies. By the end of July 65,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or wounded in Sevastopol – more than twice the number lost by the allies – not including losses from illness or disease. The bombardment of the town in June had added several thousand wounded, not just soldiers but civilians, to the already overcrowded hospitals (4,000 casualties were added on 17 and 18 June alone). In the Assembly of Nobles ‘the wounded were laid out on the parquet floor not only side by side but on top of each other’, recalled Dr Giubbenet. ‘The moans and screams of a thousand dying men filled the gloomy hall, which was only dimly lit by the candles of the orderlies.’ At the Pavlovsk Battery another 5,000 wounded Russian soldiers were just as tightly packed on the bare floors of wharves and stores. To relieve the overcrowding, the Russians built a large field hospital towards the River Belbek, 6 kilometres from Sevastopol, in July, where the less seriously wounded were evacuated, as dictated by Pirogov’s system of triage. There were other reserve hospitals at Inkerman, on the Mackenzie Heights and in the former khan’s palace in Bakhchiserai. Some of the wounded were taken as far as Simferopol, and even to Kharkov, 650 kilometres away, by horse and cart on country roads, where all the hospitals were filled to overflowing with casualties of the siege. But this was still not enough to cope with the ever-growing number of sick and wounded men. In June and July at least 250 Russians were added to the list of casualties every day. During the last weeks of the siege, the number rose to as many as 800 casualties a day, twice the losses officially reported by Gorchakov, according to Russian prisoners later captured by the allies.9
The Russians were coming under growing strain. With the allied occupation of Kerch and the blockade of their supply lines through the Sea of Azov from the start of June, they began to suffer from serious shortages of ammunition and artillery. Small mortar shells were the main problem. Battery commanders were ordered to limit their fire to one shot for every four received from the enemy. Meanwhile, the allies were now reaching levels of concentrated fire never before seen in a siege war – their industries and transport systems enabling their artillery to fire up to 75,000 rounds per day.10 This was a new type of industrial warfare and Russia, with its backward serf economy, could not compete.
Morale was running dangerously low. In June the Russians lost their two inspirational leaders in Sevastopol: Totleben was seriously wounded during the bombardment of 22 June and was forced to retire; and six days later Nakhimov was hit by a bullet in the face while he was inspecting the batteries at the Redan. Taken to his quarters, he lay unconscious for two days before dying on 30 June. His funeral was a solemn ceremony attended by the entire population of the town, and watched by the allied troops, who ceased their bombardment to watch the funeral cortège pass below them by the city walls. ‘I cannot find words to describe to you the profound sadness of the funeral,’ wrote a Sevastopol nursing sister to her family.
The sea with the great fleet of our enemies, the hills with our bastions where Nakhimov spent his days and nights – these said more than words can express. From the hills where their batteries threaten Sevastopol, the enemy could see and fire directly on the procession; but even their guns were respectfully silent and not one round was fired during the service. Imagine the scene – and above it all the dark storm clouds, reflecting the mournful music, the sad tolling of the bells, and the doleful funeral chants. This was how the sailors buried their hero of Sinope, how Sevastopol laid to rest its own fearless and heroic defender.11
By the end of June the situation in Sevastopol had become so desperate, with not just ammunition but supplies of food and water running dangerously low, that Gorchakov began preparing to evacuate the town. Much of the population had already left, fearing they would starve to death, or fall victim to the cholera or typhus that spread as epidemics in the summer months. A special committee to fight the epidemics in Sevastopol reported thirty deaths a day from cholera alone in June. Most of those who stayed had long been forced to abandon their bombed-out homes and take refuge in Fort Nicholas, at the far end of the town by the entrance to the sea harbour, where the main barracks, offices and shops were all enclosed within its walls. Others found a safer home on the North Side. ‘Sevastopol began to resemble a graveyard,’ recalled Ershov, the artillery officer.
With every passing day even its central avenues became more empty and gloomy – it looked like a town that had been destroyed by an earthquake. Ekaterinskaia Street, which in May had still been a lively and handsome thoroughfare, was now, in July, deserted and destroyed. Neither on it nor on the boulevard would one see a female face, nor any person walking freely any more; only solemn groups of troops … . On every face there was the same sad expression of tiredness and foreboding. There was no point going into town: nowhere did one hear the sound of joy, nowhere did one find any amusement.
In Tolstoy’s ‘Sevastopol in August’, a story based on true events and characters, a soldier at the River Belbek asks another who has just arrived from the besieged town whether his room there is still in one piece. ‘My dear fellow,’ the other one replies, ‘the building was shelled to kingdom come ages ago. You won’t recognize Sevastopol now; there’s not a single woman left in the place, no taverns, no brass bands; the last pub closed down yesterday. It’s about as cheerful as a morgue.’12
It was not only civilians who were abandoning Sevastopol. Soldiers were deserting in growing numbers during the summer months. Those who ran away to the allies claimed that desertion was a mass phenomenon, and this is supported by the fragmentary figures and communications of the Russian military authorities. There was a report in August, for example, that the number of desertio
ns had ‘dramatically increased’ since June, especially among those reserve troops who were called up to the Crimea: a hundred men had run away from the 15th Reserve Infantry Division, as had three out of every four reinforcements sent from the Warsaw Military District. From Sevastopol itself, around twenty soldiers went missing every day, mostly during sorties or bombardments, when they were not so closely watched by their commanding officers. According to the French, who received a steady flow of deserters in the summer months, the main reason the men gave for their desertion was that they had been given virtually no food, or only rotten meat, to eat. There were various rumours of a mutiny by some of the reservists in the Sevastopol garrison during the first week of August, though the uprising was brutally put down and all evidence of it suppressed by the Russians. ‘There has been a report that one hundred Russian soldiers have been shot by a sentence of Court Martial in the Town for Mutiny,’ Henry Clifford wrote to his father shortly afterwards. Several regiments were broken up and put in the reserve because they had become unreliable.13
The Crimean War Page 45