Realizing that Sevastopol could not withstand the siege for much longer, the Tsar ordered Gorchakov to launch one last attempt to break the ring of allied troops. Gorchakov was doubtful that it could be done. An offensive ‘against an enemy superior in numbers and entrenched in such solid positions would be folly’, the commander-in-chief reasoned. But the Tsar insisted that something should be done: he was looking for a way to end the war on terms acceptable to Russia’s national honour and integrity, and needed a military success to begin peace talks with the British and the French from a stronger position. Sending three of his reserve divisions to the Crimea, Alexander bombarded Gorchakov with instructions to attack (though not suggesting where) before the allies sent more troops, as he believed they were about to do. ‘I am convinced that we must go on the offensive,’ he wrote to Gorchakov on 30 July; ‘otherwise all the reinforcements I have sent to you, as has happened in the past, will be sucked into Sevastopol, that bottomless pit.’14
The only line of action that Gorchakov believed had any chance of success was an attack on the French and Sardinian positions on the Chernaia river. By ‘capturing the enemy’s watering places, it might be possible to threaten his flank and limit his attacks on Sevastopol, maybe opening the way for further advantageous operations’, he wrote to the Tsar. ‘But we should not deceive ourselves, for there is little hope of success in such an initiative.’ Alexander would not listen to Gorchakov’s reservations. On 3 August he wrote to him again: ‘Your daily losses in Sevastopol underline what I have told you many times before in my letters – the necessity to do something decisive to end this frightful massacre [the Tsar’s italics].’ Alexander knew that Gorchakov was essentially a courtier, an acolyte of the cautious Paskevich, and suspected that he was reluctant to take the responsibility for an offensive. He concluded his letter with the words: ‘I want a battle, but if you as commander-in-chief fear the liability, then convene a military council to take it for you.’15
A council of war met on 9 August to discuss a possible attack. Many of the senior commanders were against an offensive. Osten-Sacken, who had been much affected by the death of Nakhimov and was now convinced that the loss of Sevastopol was unavoidable, argued that enough men had been sacrificed and that it was time to evacuate the naval base. Most of the other generals shared Osten-Sacken’s pessimistic view but no one else was brave enough to speak out in such terms. Instead they went along with the idea of an offensive to please the Tsar, though few had any confidence in any detailed plan. The most audacious proposal came from the gung-ho General Khrulev, who had led the failed attack on Evpatoria. Khrulev now favoured the complete destruction of Sevastopol (even bettering the example of Moscow 1812) followed by a mass assault on the enemy’s positions by every man available. When Osten-Sacken objected that the suicidal plan would end in tens of thousands of needless deaths, Khrulev answered: ‘Well, so what? Let everybody die! We will leave our mark upon the map!’ Cooler heads prevailed, and the meeting ended with a vote in favour of Gorchakov’s idea of an attack on the French and Sardinian positions on the Chernaia, though Gorchakov himself remained extremely doubtful that it could succeed. ‘I am marching on the enemy because if I don’t, Sevastopol will soon be lost,’ he wrote on the eve of the offensive to Prince Dolgoruky, the Minister of War. But if the attack did not succeed, ‘it would not be [his] fault’, and he would ‘try to evacuate Sevastopol with as little loss as possible’.16
The attack was scheduled for the early morning of 16 August. The evening before, the French troops had been celebrating the fête de l’empereur – also (not coincidentally) the Feast of the Assumption, a major holiday for the Italians, who, like the French, had been drinking late into the night. They had only just gone off to bed, when, at 4 a.m., they were woken by the sound of Russian cannon.
Using the cover of an early morning fog, the Russians advanced towards the Traktir Bridge with a combined force of 47,000 infantry, 10,000 cavalry and 270 field guns under the command of General Liprandi on the left (opposite the Sardinians) and General Read, the son of a Scottish engineer who had emigrated to Russia, on the Russian right (opposite the French). The two generals were under orders not to cross the river before receiving orders from Gorchakov, the commander-in-chief, who was not sure whether to deploy his reserve divisions against the French on the Fediukhin Heights or the Sardinians on Gasfort Hill. He was relying on the opening artillery bombardment to expose the enemy’s positions and help him make up his mind.
The Russians’ opening cannon shots failed to reach their targets, however. They merely served to raise the alarm for the 18,000 French troops and 9,000 Sardinians to prepare themselves for battle and for those in the forward position to move up to the Traktir Bridge. Frustrated with the lack of progress, Gorchakov sent his aide-de-camp, a Lieutenant Krasovsky, to hurry out to Read and Liprandi and tell them it was ‘time to start’. By the time the message got to Read, its meaning was far from clear. ‘Time to start what?’ Read asked Krasovsky, who did not know. Read decided that the message could not mean to begin the artillery fire, which had started already, but the start of an infantry attack. He ordered his men to cross the river and storm the Fediukhin Heights – even though the cavalry and infantry reserves that were supposed to support an attack had not arrived. Gorchakov, meanwhile, had decided to concentrate his reserve forces on the left, having been encouraged by the ease with which Liprandi’s skirmishers had driven off the Sardinian outposts from Telegraph Hill (known by the Italians as the Roccia dei Piemontesi). Hearing the sound of muskets firing from Read’s men in front of the Fediukhin, Gorchakov redirected some of his reserves to support them, but, as he acknowledged afterwards, he knew already that the battle had been lost: his troops were divided and attacking on two fronts when the whole point of the offensive had been to deal a single mighty blow.17
Read’s men crossed the river near the Traktir Bridge. Without cavalry or artillery support, they marched towards their almost certain destruction by the French artillery and riflemen firing down on them from the slopes of the Fediukhin Heights. Within twenty minutes 2,000 Russian infantry had been gunned down. Reserves arrived, in the form of the 5th Infantry Division. Its commander suggested that the whole division should be committed to the attack. Perhaps by weight of numbers, they might have broken through. But Read chose instead to commit them piecemeal to the battle, regiment by regiment, and each one, in turn, was shot down by the French, who by this time were entirely confident of their ability to defeat the Russian columns and held off their fire until they were at close hand. ‘Our artillery played havoc with the Russians,’ recalled Octave Cullet, a French infantry captain who was on the Fediukhin.
Our soldiers, confident and strong, fired at them from two lines with a calm and deadly volley that can only be achieved by battle-hardened troops. Each man that morning had been given eighty cartridges but few had been shot; no one paid attention to the firing from our flanks but concentrated only on the approaching Russian troops … . Only when they were right onto us and threatening to envelop us, did we start our firing – not one shot was lost on this vast semicircle of attackers. Our men displayed admirable composure (sang-froid) and no one thought of retreating.18
At last, Gorchakov put an end to Read’s bungling and ordered the entire division to join in the attack. For a while, they pushed the French back up the hill, but the deadly salvoes of the enemy’s rifles eventually forced them to retreat and cross over to the other side of the river. Read was killed by a shell splinter during the retreat, and Gorchakov took over his command, ordering eight battalions from Liprandi’s forces on the left to support him at the eastern end of the Fediukhin Heights. But these troops came under heavy rifle fire from the Sardinians, who had moved across from Gasfort Hill to protect the open flank, and were forced back towards Telegraph Hill. The situation was hopeless. Shortly after 10 a.m. Gorchakov ordered a general withdrawal, and with one last round from all their cannon, as if to sound a note of defiance in defeat, th
e Russians retreated to lick their wounds.19
The allies lost 1,800 casualties on the Chernaia river. The Russians counted 2,273 dead, almost 4,000 men wounded and 1,742 missing, most of them deserters who had used the morning mist and confusion of the battle to run away.bb It was several days before the dead and wounded were cleared away (the Russians did not even come to collect theirs) and in that time there were many visitors who saw the frightful scene, not just nurses who came to help the wounded, but war tourists, who took trophies from the bodies of the dead. At least two British army chaplains took part in the plundering for souvenirs. Mary Seacole describes the ground ‘thickly numbered with the wounded, some of them calm and resigned, others impatient and restless, a few filling the air with their cries of pain – all wanting water, and all grateful to those who administered it’. Thomas Buzzard, a British doctor with the Turkish army, was struck by how most of the dead ‘lay on their faces, literally, to use the Homeric phrase, “biting the dust”’, in contrast to the way they were usually depicted on their backs in classical paintings of battles (most of the Russians had been shot from the front while advancing up the hill and so had fallen forwards naturally).20
Somehow the Russians had contrived to lose against an enemy less than half their size. In his explanation to the Tsar, Gorchakov put the entire blame on the unfortunate General Read, arguing that he had failed to understand his order when he moved his men against the French on the Fediukhin Heights. ‘It is grievous to think that if Read had carried out my orders to the letter, we might have ended with something like success and that at least a third of those brave troops who have been killed might have been alive today,’ he wrote to the Tsar on 17 August. Alexander was not impressed by Gorchakov’s attempt to shift the blame onto the dead general. He had wanted a success to approach the allies with proposals for a peace on favourable terms, and this setback had ruined all his plans. ‘Our brave troops’, he replied to Gorchakov, ‘have suffered enormous losses without any gain [the Tsar’s italics].’ The truth was that both men were to blame for the needless slaughter: Alexander for insisting on an offensive when none was really possible; and Gorchakov for failing to withstand his pressure for attack.21
The defeat on the Chernaia was a catastrophe for the Russians. It was now only a question of time before Sevastopol would fall to the allies. ‘I am sure that this is the second-to-last bloody act of our operations in the Crimea,’ wrote Herbé to his parents on 25 August, after being wounded on the Chernaia; ‘the last will be the capture of Sevastopol.’ According to Nikolai Miloshevich, one of the defenders of the naval base, after the defeat ‘the Russian troops lost all their trust in their officers and generals’. Another soldier wrote: ‘The morning of 16 August was our last hope. By the evening it had disappeared. We began to say farewell to Sevastopol.’22
Realizing that the situation was hopeless, the Russians now prepared to evacuate Sevastopol, as Gorchakov had warned they would have to do if they were defeated on the Chernaia in his letter to the Minister of War on the eve of the battle. The evacuation plan centred on the building of a floating bridge across the sea harbour to the North Side, where the Russians would have a commanding position against the allied forces if they occupied the town on the southern side. The idea of a bridge was first advanced by General Bukhmeier, a brilliant engineer, in the first week of July. It was rejected by scores of engineers on the grounds that it would be impossible to build, especially where Bukhmeier had suggested, between Fort Nicholas and the Mikhailov Battery, where the sea harbour was 960 metres wide (which would make it one of the longest pontoon bridges ever built) and strong winds often made the water very rough. But the urgency of the situation persuaded Gorchakov to give his backing to the dangerous plan, and with several hundred soldiers to cart the timbers from as far as Kherson, 300 kilometres away, and vast teams of sailors to link them to the pontoons, Bukhmeier organized the building of the bridge, which was finally completed on 27 August.23
Meanwhile the allies were preparing for another assault on the Malakhov and the Redan. By the end of August they had come to realize that the Russians could not hold out much longer. The flow of deserters from Sevastopol had become a flood after the defeat on the Chernaia – and they all told the same stories of the terrible conditions in the town. Once the allied commanders recognized that a new assault would probably succeed, they were all the more determined to launch it as soon as possible. September was approaching, the weather would soon turn, and there was nothing they feared more than a second winter in the Crimea.
Pélissier took the lead. His position had been greatly strengthened by the routing of the Russians on the Chernaia. Napoleon had had his doubts about Pélissier’s policy of persisting with the siege – he had been in favour of a field campaign – but with this new victory he set aside these reservations and gave his full support to his commander to push ahead for the victory he craved.
Where the French commander led, the British were obliged to follow: they lacked the troops or record of success to impose their military policies. After the catastrophe of 18 June, Panmure was determined to prevent a repeat of the unsuccessful British attack against the Redan, and for a while it seemed a new assault involving the British had been ruled out. But, with the victory at the Chernaia, things looked very different, and from the momentum of events a new logic developed that drew the British into a new assault.
By this time the French had sapped up to the abbatis of the Malakhov, only 20 metres from the fortress ditch, and were taking heavy casualties from the Russian guns. They had dug so close to the Malakhov that when they talked they could be clearly heard by the Russians. The British too had dug as far as they were able in the rocky ground towards the Redan – they were 200 metres from the fort – and were also losing many men. From the top of the naval library, the Russians could make out the facial features of the British soldiers in the exposed trenches. Their sharpshooters in the Redan could take them out without any difficulty as soon as they raised their heads. Every day, the allied armies were losing between 250 and 300 men. The situation was untenable. There was no point delaying an assault: if it could not succeed now, it would probably never do so, in which case the whole idea of continuing the siege should be abandoned before the onset of winter. That was the logic by which the British government now permitted Raglan’s replacement, General James Simpson, to join Pélissier in planning a last attempt to take Sevastopol by an infantry assault.24
The date for the operation was set for 8 September. This time, in contrast to the botched attempt of 18 June, the assault was preceded by a massive bombardment of the Russian defences, beginning on 5 September, though even before that, from the last days of August, the intensity of the allies’ artillery fire had been steadily growing. Firing 50,000 shells a day, and from a much closer range than ever before, the French and British guns caused immense damage. Hardly a building was left standing in the centre of the town, which looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake. The casualties were horrendous – something like a thousand Russians were killed or wounded every day from the last week of August and nearly 8,000 in the three days of the bombardment – but the last brave defenders of Sevastopol dared not think of abandoning the town. ‘On the contrary,’ recalled Ershov,
even though we were defending a half-destroyed Sevastopol, essentially a phantom of a town, without any more significance except for its name, we prepared ourselves to fight for it to the last man in the streets: we moved our stores to the North Side, put up barricades and got ready to transform every ruined building into an armed citadel.25
The Russians were expecting an assault – the bombardment left no room for doubt about the allies’ intentions – but they thought that it would come on 7 September, the anniversary of the battle of Borodino, their famous victory against the French in 1812 when one-third of Napoleon’s army had been destroyed. When the attack did not come, the Russian defenders let down their guard. They were even more confused on the morning of th
e 8th, when the bombardment started up again with a furious intensity at 5 a.m. – the French and British guns firing more than 400 shells a minute – until suddenly at ten o’clock it stopped. Again the assault did not come. The Russians had anticipated that the allies would attack either at dawn or at dusk, as they had always done before. So they interpreted this new bombardment as an indication of a possible assault that evening. That idea was reinforced at 11 a.m. when the Russian lookouts on the Inkerman Heights reported what they believed to be a preparatory build-up of allied ships. The lookouts were not mistaken: the allied plan had called for the navy to join the assault by attacking the coastal defences of the city, but that morning the fine hot weather broke and a strong north-west wind and a heavy sea forced this part of the operation to be cancelled at the last moment; so the ships that had gathered at the mouth of the sea harbour did not look as if they could be ready for an imminent attack. And yet that is precisely what the allies had in store. On Bosquet’s wise insistence, the assault had been set to start at noon – just when the Russians would be changing the guard and would expect it least.26
The allied plan was simple: to repeat the actions they had tried to carry out on 18 June but with a larger force and without the mistakes. This time, instead of the three divisions they had used on 18 June, the French would employ ten and a half divisions (five and a half against the Malakhov and five against the other bastions on the Town Front), a massive assault force of 35,000 men, supported by 2,000 brave Sardinians. The French commanders, who would give the signal for the assault to begin, had watches that were synchronized so as to avoid a repetition of the confusion caused by General Mayran’s mistaking of the rocket signal to attack. At midday they gave the order to begin. The drummers beat their drums, the bugles sounded, the band played the Marseillaise, and with a resounding cheer of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’, General MacMahon’s Division, some 9,000 men in all, surged out of the French trenches, followed by the rest of the French infantry. Led by the courageous Zouaves, they ran towards the Malakhov, and, using planks and ladders to cross the ditch, climbed the walls of the fortress. The Russians were caught by surprise. At the time of the attack the garrison was being changed and many of the soldiers had retired for their lunch, thinking that the halt in the bombardment meant that all was safe. ‘The French were in the Malakhov before our boys had a chance to grab their guns,’ recalled Prokofii Podpalov, who watched in horror from the Redan. ‘In a few seconds they had filled the fort with hundreds of their men, and hardly a shot was fired from our side. A few minutes later, the French flag was raised on the turret.’27
The Crimean War Page 46