The Russians were overwhelmed by the sheer force of the French attack. They turned their backs and fled in panic from the Malakhov. Most of the soldiers in the bastion were teenagers from the 15th Reserve Infantry Division who had no experience of combat. They were no match for the Zouaves.
Once they had overrun the Malakhov, MacMahon’s men swarmed across the Russian defences, joining the Zouaves in fearsome hand-to-hand fighting against the Russians on the Zherve (Gervais) Battery, on the left flank of the Malakhov, while other units launched attacks against the other bastions along the line. The Zouaves captured the Zherve Battery but on the right they were unable to dislodge the Kazan Regiment, who bravely stood their ground until reinforcements were brought up from Sevastopol, enabling the Russians to launch a counter-attack. There followed some of the fiercest fighting of the war. ‘Time after time we charged them with our bayonets,’ recalled one of the Russian soldiers, Anatoly Viazmitinov. ‘We had no idea what our objective was, and never asked ourselves if it could succeed. We simply hurled ourselves forward, totally intoxicated by the excitement of the fight.’ Within minutes the ground between the Zherve Battery and the Malakhov was covered with the dead, the Russians and the French all entangled; and with each successive charge another layer of dead was added to the heap, on which the two sides went on fighting, treading on the wounded and the dead, until the battlefield became a ‘mound of bodies’, as Viazmitinov later wrote, ‘and the air was filled with a thick red dust from the bloody ground, making it impossible for us to see the enemy. All we could do was fire through the dust in their direction, making sure to keep our muskets parallel to the ground in front of us.’ Eventually, with more troops arriving all the time, MacMahon’s infantry overwhelmed the Russians with their superior rifle power and forced them to retreat. Then they consolidated their control of the Malakhov by building makeshift barricades – using the dead and even wounded Russians as human sandbags along with reclaimed gabions, fascines and embrasures from the half-destroyed defences – behind which they turned their heavy guns towards Sevastopol.28
Meanwhile, the British launched their own assault on the Redan. In some ways the Redan was much harder to capture than the Malakhov. The British could not dig their trenches in the rocky ground in front of it and would therefore have to run across this open space and then clamber over the abbatis under close-range fire from the enemy. The broad V-shape of the Redan also meant that the storming parties would be exposed to flanking fire as they crossed the ditch and climbed the parapet. It was also rumoured that the Redan had been mined by the Russians. But once the French had occupied the Malakhov, the Redan was more vulnerable to attack.
As in June, the British waited for the French to take the lead, but as soon as they saw the tricolour on the Malakhov they raced forward towards the Redan. Running through a storm of roundshot, grape and musketry, a good number of the storming party of a thousand men managed to cross the abbatis and climb down into the ditch, although at least half the ladders had been dropped along the way. There was chaos in the ditch as the stormers came under point-blank fire from the Russian gunners on the parapets above their heads. Some began to waver, unsure how to climb the parapet; others tried to find some shelter at the bottom of the ditch. But in the end a group of men succeeded in scrambling up the wall and climbing into the fortress. Most were killed, but they had set an example, and others followed them. Among them was Lieutenant Griffith of the 23rd (Royal Welch) Fusiliers:
We rushed madly along the trenches, grapeshot flying about our ears. Several officers we met coming back wounded said they had been in the Redan and that the supports were only wanted to complete the victory. On we rushed impeded more and more by the wounded officers and men carried back from the front … . ‘On the 23rd! This way!’ cried the staff officers. We scrambled out of the trench into open ground. That was a fearful moment. I rushed across the space about 200 yards, I think, grapeshot striking the ground all the way and men falling down on all sides. When I got to the edge of the ditch of the Redan I found our men all mixed up in confusion but keeping up a steady fire on the enemy … [In the ditch] there were lots of men of different regiments all huddled together – scaling ladders placed against the parapet crowded with our fellows. Radcliffe and I got hold of the ladder and went up it to the top of the parapet where we were stopped by the press – wounded and dead men kept tumbling down on us – it was indeed an exciting and fearful scene.29
The ditch and the slopes leading up to the parapet quickly filled with new arrivals, like Griffith, who could not climb the parapet because of the ‘press’ created by the fighting above them. The interior of the Redan was strongly defended with a series of traverses manned by the Russians feeding in their supports from behind; the few stormers who managed to fight their way into the fortress were hemmed in by them, vastly outnumbered and subjected to a devastating crossfire from both flanks at the northern end of the V-shape. The morale of the soldiers crowded in the ditch began to fall apart. Ignoring the commands of their officers to climb the parapet, ‘the men clung to the outside of the salient angle in hundreds’, recalled Lieutenant Colin Campbell, watching from the trenches, ‘although they were swept down by the flanking fire in scores’. Many lost their nerve entirely and ran back to the trenches, which themselves were full of men waiting for the order to attack. Discipline broke down. There was a general stampede to the rear. Griffith joined the panic flight:
Feeling disgraced, tho’ I had done my best, unwillingly I turned to follow the men. I saw our trench at some distance but I never expected to reach it. The fire was fearful and I kept tumbling over the dead and wounded men who literally covered the ground. At last to my great joy I gained our Parallels and tumbled somehow into the trench … I should have said that on the way a bullet hit my water-bottle, which was slung at my side, spilt all the water and glanced off. A stone thrown up by a grapeshot hit me in the leg but didn’t hurt me much. Soon after we found … a few men and by degrees mustered most of the unhurt. It was very melancholy we found so many missing.
Henry Clifford was among the officers who tried in vain to restore discipline: ‘When the men ran in from the parapet of the Redan … . we drew our swords and beat the men and implored them to stand and not run, that all would be lost; but many fled. The trench where they ran in was so crowded that it was impossible to move without walking over the wounded who lay under our feet.’30
It was hopeless to attempt to renew the attack with these panicstricken troops, most of whom were young reservists. General Codrington, the commander of the Light Division in charge of the assault, suspended further action for the day – a day when the British had counted 2,610 fallen men, 550 of them dead. Codrington intended to renew the attack with the battle-hardened troops of the Highland Brigade the next day. But it never came to that. Later that evening the Russians decided that they could not defend the Redan against the French guns installed in the Malakhov, and evacuated the fortress. As one Russian general explained in perhaps the earliest account of these events, the Malakhov was ‘only one fortress, but it was the key to Sevastopol, from which the French would be able to bombard the town at will, killing thousands of our soldiers and civilians, and probably destroying the pontoon bridge to cut off our escape to the North Side’.31
Gorchakov ordered the evacuation of the entire South Side of Sevastopol. Military installations were blown up, stores were set alight, and crowds of soldiers and civilians prepared themselves to cross the floating bridge to the North Side. A good number of the Russian soldiers believed the decision to evacuate the city was a betrayal. They had seen the previous day’s fighting as a partial victory, in so far as they had beaten off the enemy’s attacks on all the bastions except the Malakhov, and they did not understand, or refused to acknowledge, that what they had just lost was indispensable to the continued defence of the town. Many of the sailors did not want to leave Sevastopol, where they had spent their lives, and some even protested. ‘We cannot leave, there i
s no authority to order us,’ proclaimed one group of sailors, referring to the absence of a naval chief following the death of Nakhimov.
The soldiers can leave but we have our naval commanders, and we have not been told by them to go. How could we leave Sevastopol? Surely, everywhere the assault has been repulsed, only the Malakhov has been taken by the French, but tomorrow we can take it back, and we will remain at our posts! … We must die here, we cannot leave, what would Russia say of us?32
The evacuation began at seven o’clock in the evening and went on all night. On the sea harbour quayside at Fort Nicholas a huge crowd of soldiers and civilians assembled to cross the floating bridge. The wounded and the sick, women with young children, the elderly with walking sticks, were all mixed up with soldiers, sailors, horses and artillery on carriages. The evening sky was illuminated by the flames of burning buildings, and the sound of the guns on the distant bastions was confused with explosions in Sevastopol, forts and ships, as the Russians blew up anything of use to the enemy that could not be removed. Expecting the British and the French to appear at any moment, people in the crowd began to panic, to push and shove each other to get closer to the bridge. ‘You could smell the fear,’ recalls Tatyana Tolycheva, who was waiting at the bridge with her husband and her son. ‘There was a terrific racket – people screaming, weeping, wailing, the wounded groaning, and shells flying in the sky.’ Bombs were dropping on the harbour all the time: one killed eight allied prisoners of war with a direct hit on the crowded quayside. The soldiers, horses and artillery were the first to cross, followed by the ox-drawn carts laden down with cannonballs, stacks of hay and wounded men. There was silence as they crossed the bridge – nobody was sure if they would make it to the other side. The sea was rough, the north-west wind still blowing strong, and the rain was coming down into their faces as they made their way across the sea harbour. The civilians formed a line to cross the bridge. They could take only what they carried in their arms. Among them was Tolycheva:
On the bridge there was a crush – nothing but confusion, panic, fear! The bridge almost gave way from the weight of all of us, and the water came up to our knees. Suddenly someone became scared and began to shout, ‘We’re drowning!’ People turned around and tried to make it back onto the shore. There was a struggle, with people stepping over each other. The horses became scared and began to rear … . I thought we were going to die and said a prayer.
By eight o’clock the next morning the crossing was complete. A signal was given to the last defenders to leave the bastions and set fire to the town. With the sole remaining pieces of artillery they sank the last ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in the sea harbour before crossing to the North Side.33
From the Star Fort, Tolstoy watched the downfall of Sevastopol. During the storming he had been placed in charge of a five-gun battery and had been one of the town’s last defenders to cross the pontoon bridge. It was his birthday, he was 27, but the sight before him now was enough to break his heart. ‘I wept when I saw the town in flames and the French flags on our bastions,’ he wrote to his aunt, ‘and generally, in many respects, it was a very sad day.’34
Looking back on the burning city that morning was Alexandra Stakhova, a nurse engaged in the removal of the wounded from Sevastopol. She described the scene in a letter to her family the following day:
The whole city was engulfed in flames – from everywhere the sound of explosions. It was a scene of terror and chaos! … Sevastopol was covered in black smoke, our own troops were setting fire to the town. The sight brought tears to my eyes (I seldom cry) and that eased the burden on my heart, for which I thank God … How hard it has been to experience and see all this, it would have been easier to die.35
The Great Fire of Sevastopol – a repeat of Moscow 1812 – continued for several days. Parts of the city were still burning when the allied armies entered it on 12 September. There they found some dreadful scenes. Not all the wounded had been taken from Sevastopol – there were too many of them to transport – and about 3,000 were abandoned without food or water in the town. Dr Giubbenet, who had been responsible for the evacuation of the hospitals, had left the wounded there on the assumption that they would soon be found by the allies. He had no idea it would be four days before the allies occupied the town. He was later mortified to read the Western press reports, like this one by Russell of The Times:
Of all the pictures of the horrors of war which have ever been presented to the world, the hospital of Sevastopol offered the most heartrending and revolting. Entering one of these doors, I beheld such a sight as few men, thank God, have ever witnessed: … the rotten and festering corpses of the soldiers, who were left to die in their extreme agony, untended, uncared for, packed as close as they could be stowed … saturated with blood which oozed and trickled through upon the floor, mingling with the droppings of corruption. Many lay, yet alive, with maggots crawling about in their wounds. Many, nearly mad by the scene around them, or seeking escape from it in their extremest agony, had rolled away under the beds and glared out on the heart stricken spectators. Many, with legs and arms broken and twisted, the jagged splinters sticking through the raw flesh, implored aid, water, food, or pity, or, deprived of speech by the approach of death or by dreadful injuries in the head or trunk, pointed to the lethal spot. Many seemed bent alone on making their peace with Heaven. The attitudes of some were so hideously fantastic as to root one to the ground by a sort of dreadful fascination. The bodies of numbers of men were swollen and bloated to an incredible degree; and the features, distended to a gigantic size, with eyes protruding from the sockets and the blackened tongue lolling out of the mouth, compressed tightly by the teeth which had set upon it in the death-rattle, made one shudder and reel round.36
The sight of the devastated city inspired awe in all who entered it. ‘Sevastopol presents the most curious spectacle that one can imagine,’ wrote Baron Bondurand, the French military intendant, to Marshal de Castellane on 21 September.
We ourselves had no idea of the effects of our artillery. The town is literally crushed to bits. There is not a single house that our projectiles missed. There are no roofs left at all, and almost all the walls have been destroyed. The garrison must have taken huge casualties in this siege where all our blows counted. It is a testimony to the indisputable spirit and endurance of the Russians, who held on for so long and only surrendered when their position became untenable with our capture of the Malakhov.
There were signs of destruction everywhere. Thomas Buzzard was startled by the beauty of the ruined town:
In one of the handsomest streets there was a fine classical building, said to be a church, built of stone, much in the style of the Parthenon of Athens. Some of its huge columns had been almost knocked to pieces. On entering we found that a shell had come through the roof and exploded on the floor, shattering it to pieces. It was strange to turn from this and look into a green and peaceful garden close to it with the trees in full leaf.37
For the troops, the occupation of Sevastopol was an opportunity for pillage. The French were organized in their looting and it was endorsed by their officers, who joined in plundering Russian property and sending home their stolen trophies, as if this were a completely normal part of war. In a letter to his family on 16 October, Lieutenant Vanson made a long list of the souvenirs he was sending them, including a silver and gold medallion, a porcelain service, and a sabre taken from a Russian officer. A few weeks later he wrote again: ‘We are continuing to pillage Sevastopol. There are no real curiosities remaining to be found, but there was one thing I really wanted, a nice chair, and I am pleased to inform you that I found one yesterday. It is missing a foot and the upholstered seat, but the back is beautifully carved.’ Compared to the French, the British troops were slightly more restrained. On 22 September Thomas Golaphy wrote to his family on the back of a Russian document. He talked of the soldiers
taking everything we could lay hands upon and selling it to anyone who would like to buy
it and there was some splendid articles sold very cheap but there was no one here but the Greeks to buy it, we was not allowed to plunder the town the same as the French, they could go into all parts of it but there was only one part that was facing our works that we was allowed to enter.38
If the British trailed the French in pillaging, they far outstripped them in their binge drinking. The occupying troops found a huge supply of alcohol in Sevastopol, and the British, in particular, set about the task of drinking it with the licence they assumed they had been given by their officers for their hard-earned victory. Drunken fights, insubordination and indiscipline became a major problem in the British camp. Alarmed by reports of ‘mass drunkenness’ among the troops, Panmure wrote to Codrington, warning him of ‘the extreme hazard to your army physically which must exist if this evil be not speedily arrested, as well as the disgrace which is daily accumulating on our national character’. He called for the soldiers’ field allowance to be cut, and for the full force of martial law to be applied. From October to the following March, 4,000 British troops were court-martialled for drunkenness; most of them were given fifty lashes for their misbehaviour, and many also lost up to a month’s pay, but the drunkenness continued until the stocks of alcohol ran out, and the troops left the Crimea.39
The Crimean War Page 47