Bayonets, Balloons & Ironclads: Britain and France Take Sides With the South
Page 21
ROMFORD RAILWAY STATION, ESSEX, 10:22 A.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 1864
The station master was more than usually attentive to his watch. Other station masters throughout Britain were similarly preoccupied. The main lines of the railway system were giving priority to troop trains as the second wave of reinforcement for British Forces in North America was in motion.
It was not just red coats on the trains but large numbers of men in Rifle Green, scores of the Rifle Volunteer Corps that had been called to active service. For the first time, such volunteers would see service in a war theater outside the home islands. Many of the RVCs would go to man the garrisons left empty by the regulars in Britain and Ireland gone to Canada. Even the Guards regiments would be sending more of their battalions across the Atlantic.
There was strong opposition in the Cabinet to so depleting the regular garrisons. The intelligence that the Russians and Americans had signed a secret treaty of alliance against Great Britain and France had unnerved more than a few of them, particularly, the Foreign Secretary Lord Derby. He argued that the battalions strung across the empire should be called upon more. Of course, no one included India in that suggestion. The embers of the Great Mutiny still glowed here and there, at least in the traumatized imagination of the British. Battalions in South Africa, the Caribbean, New Zealand, and China were ordered to war. But Disraeli stood firm against touching any of the thirteen battalions garrisoning Gibraltar and the islands, Malta, Corfu, and Cephelonia, much to the relief of the latter’s garrison considered with Canada to be the best peacetime posting in the Empire. That was the imperial reserve should Russia actually enter the war. He had insisted that they actually be reinforced by a dozen of the RVCs.
So it was that the Romford station master heard with relief the engine of the train coming south from Colchester. Right on time. He looked with apprehension to the platform where the 18th Essex RVC from nearby Chipping Onger stood in formation waiting to load the train. One of the two RVC from neighboring Brentwood had left three days ago. His own son was already gone with Romford’s own 1st Essex to embark for Canada at one of the great ports in Hampshire on the Channel. He had paid for the boy’s uniform, rifle, and kit with great pride, now tempered with a father’s very real dread that hung in the back of his mind.
As the train slowed to a halt, women of the Romford Aid Society rushed to the track to hand food packets and tobacco to the red-coated soldiers in the car, replacements from the three depot battalions at Colchester on their way to replace losses or bring battalions up to strength. They had already taken care of the local boys in green. Tomorrow he expected a train with RVCs from Suffolk and Norfolk to the north. He saw his own wife with the other women waving good-bye to the boys on the train as it departed fifteen minutes later. He took her by the hand as she looked up to him. “I think somewhere someone is helping our William. And our John.”
The station master caught himself. Like many British families, they had another son in America. They had waited each letter with desperate hope. John had been five years in America and the last two in Union blue. He had fought at a place called Gettysburg. “There, there, woman. Remember, our William’s a man and must do his part,” he said, despite the fear that welled up in him. “Let us ask God to hold both our sons in His hands.”
That night after dinner and prayers he sat down and wrote the member of Parliament for West Essex a letter asking why his country was engaged in a war of brother against brother.
NUMBER 10, DOWNING STREET, LONDON, 5:05 P.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 1864
Disreali cleared his calendar every time one of Senator Sumner’s letters was passed to him. It was clear that Lincoln was speaking through Sumner. He had no doubt of it. But before he could trust the words, he had to understand Lincoln. Today the French journalist, Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne, was being ushered into his library. The Frenchman bowed low. The unexpected offer of an interview from the British Prime Minister was a great honor.
After the usual courtesies, Disraeli said, “Monsieur de Hauranne, you have met Lincoln. I would appreciate your confidential impressions of the man.”
De Hauranne warmed to the subject immediately. He recounted his meeting with Lincoln when he had been introduced by Senator Sumner. “His voice is far from musical; his language is not flowery; he speaks more or less like an ordinary person from the West, and slang comes easily to his tongue.
“Beyond this, he is simple, serious, and full of good sense. He made some comments on Mr. Everett and on the unrealistic hopes the Democratic party entertained four years ago that it could impose its policies on the victorious Republicans. The remarks may have been lacking in sparkle, but the thought behind them was subtle and witty. I took away from my ten-minute interview an impression of a man who is doubtless not very brilliant, not very polished, but worthy, honest, capable, and hard-working. I think the Europeans who have spoken or written about him have been predisposed to consider it amusing to exaggerate this odds ways. What a stupid and egregious error.”25
After de Hauranne left, Disraeli leaned back in his chair to ponder his growing picture of his great adversary. His thoughts recalled the comments of the British journalist, Edward Dicey, who had also shared his thoughts with Disraeli. He had described Lincoln’s off-putting and ungainly appearance and then said, “And then add to all this an air of strength, physical as well as moral, and a strange look of dignity coupled with all this grotesqueness, and you will the impression left upon me by Abraham Lincoln. You would never say he was a gentleman; you would still less say he was not one. Still there is about him a complete absence of pretension, and an evident desire to be courteous to everybody, which is the essence, if not the outward form, of high breeding.”
Then Dicey suddenly became animated. “There is a softness, too, about his smile, and a sparkle of dry humor about his eye which redeem the expression of his face and reminded me more of the late Dr. Arnold, as a child’s recollection calls him to me, more than any other face I can call to memory.”
Disreali had also been struck by another of Dicey’s observations. “It struck me that the tone in which he spoke of England was, for an American, was unusually fair and candid.” 26
RUSSIAN EMBASSY, LONDON, 6:15 P.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 1864
The captain of the HIMS Variag bowed low before Baron Phillip de Brunnow, His Imperial Majesty’s ambassador to the Court of St. James and handed him a dispatch.
This was the trigger Brunnow had been dreading. His instructions from the tsar had been clear. Upon notice that Lisovsky’s squadron was at sea, he was to deliver Russia’s declaration of war. Upon him, however, was the delicate timing of the deed. He was to estimate when the squadron was within a day of the British coast before delivering the declaration. That estimate would depend upon the advice of this captain. He had not been fully informed of the circuitous route by which Sharpe had coordinated these plans now in motion with St. Petersburg, but he was aware that they existed and his role in them. The captain of the Variag assured the ambassador that the same information was on its way to St. Petersburg aboard the screw clipper, HIMS Almaz, which had taken a more direct route to the Baltic.
The ambassador looked up from reading the dispatch. “When does Lisovsky estimate he will strike, Captain?”
“Two days, Excellenz, the third of April.”
The dispatch now felt like lead in his hands. Two days. Then he must make that fate-laden ride to the Foreign Office to see Lord Derby and deliver what he knew would be a death sentence to countless men. He remembered all too well, the endless death lists from the Crimean War, his own oldest son among them. Now his youngest boy was an ensign in the Preobrazhensky Guard, the regiment that had pride of place among all the regiments of the Russian Army, founded by Peter then Great himself. Surely, the tsar would not wish that regiment, bearing the name of the Holy Transfiguration, to be absent from the redemption of Constantinople.
THE FOREIGN OFFICE, LONDON, 6:30 P.M., SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 1864
> Ambassador Brunnow moved slowly as befitted his old age, but his white hair was more a badge of his sagacity than his infirmities. Slowness was now a friend. He knew Lord Derby would not be at his office when he called without notice. It would take time to find him, if he were in London at all and not gone to his estate. The upper reaches of official London disappeared from London over weekends, even in wartime.
The only official at the ministry was little more than a clerk whose chore it was to accept correspondence. He was equally flustered and scandalized to find himself before the dean of the diplomatic community who demanded immediate audience with the Foreign Minister. When messengers did indeed confirm that Derby had left for his estate, Brunnow handed a sealed envelope to the clerk. “Please, ensure that this document is delivered to Lord Derby at once. It is a communication of the utmost importance from His Imperial Majesty.” He then left. The clerk decided to forward it by messenger to Derby the next morning and then went back to his desk to attack a stack of correspondence from various British embassies in South America requesting increases in their tropical post allowances.
8
Vae Victis
FORTRESS PORTLAND, 2:10 A.M., SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 1864
It was just such a night that Gen. Sir Hastings Doyle had been waiting for. It had been raining hard and steady for two days. He had chosen those hours when a man is most lulled into the arms of Orpheus, and he had judged correctly. Exhausted and increasingly hungry, too many of the guards along the edge of the bay-ringed city slept.
The boats crept on muffled oars toward the city’s splintered docks and the broken sea wall. Royal Marines crowded them, huddled in their dark-blue greatcoats gripping their rifles with bayonets fixed. The rain made it a night for the bayonet. Pouring a powder charge down a rifle barrel in a heavy rain would only spoil the charge. The naval ratings pulled on the muffled oars with a smooth glide that caused nary a splash.
It had been a long and costly siege, and Doyle had been issued an ultimatum by Hope Grant to clean this up before the roads dried enough for the Americans to make another lunge north to relieve the beleaguered city. There was no more time. The city had stood siege since September of last year and had proved a particularly tough nut. Portland was essentially a peninsula stuck into the bay; its landward defenses ran across a narrow neck of land which limited the area that could be directly attacked by Doyle’s troops. That had not stopped his artillery and the guns of the Royal Navy in the bay from reducing the Portland to a heap of broken brick and splintered wood.
The Confederates had relayed the intelligence that the U.S. VI Corps was to be reinforced with the IX Corps. Even the reinforcements Doyle had received would not be enough to both maintain the siege and turn and defeat the enemy coming north. Doyle’s force had been able to do just that last October when it had met and defeated VI Corps at Kennebunk in southern Maine. It still rankled that Hope Grant had arrived in time to take control of the battle from him and win its laurels. Not a few laurels awaited in Portland.
The first boat glided smoothly to the dock, and the Jollies quietly climbed out to disappear toward the first row of shattered buildings. Other boats found the rubble incline spilled from the gun-shattered sea wall and snaked up it also to be swallowed by the night. Drousy sentries fell one by one as the Jollies slipped deeper and deeper into the town. Behind them more boats arrived with the men of the Slashers of the 63rd Foot. Then the signal of three green rockets went up into the rain-washed sky, and three guns in rapid succession boomed across the bay.
With a crash the massed British artillery fired at the landward defenses of the city giving every impression that the infantry attack was to follow. Most of the garrison was already in those landward defenses. Chamberlain had leapt from his bed in the cellar when the rumble of the artillery had shaken the house. He was barely dressed when he heard firing and shouts above him. Pistol drawn he rushed up the stairs to see a man with bayonet leveled coming down. He shot first, and the body tumbled down. He barely hugged the wall as the man fell past him. Then up again to find his headquarters a shambles of bodies. He stepped over them in the hallway and crept toward the door, the sound of guns and screaming men filtering in through the rain. One dash and he would be outside.
Then behind him he heard the clear click of the hammer of a pistol being cocked. “Drop the pistol,” an English voice said.
SOUTHEND-ON-SEA, ESSEX, ENGLAND, 7:00 A.M., SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 1864
From the deck of Vanderbilt, Dahlgren watched in amazement as the ship approached the famous Southend Pier. The great wooden structure seemed to go on and on, as it jutted seven thousand feet into the sea. Southend Pier was the longest in the world and served the resort community of Southend-on-Sea on the east coast of Essex north of the Thames estuary mouth. Mudflats extended so far from the shore that large boats, much less ships of any size, could not put in near the beach and nothing could approach at low tide. Even at high tide the depth was never more than eighteen feet. Building the pier and running the London, Tilbury, and Southend Railway line to Southend had created one of the favorite of all British sea resorts.
Vanderbilt and Kearsarge had hidden in the dense flow of ships heading up the Thames for London. No one thought to question Kearsarge’s impersonation of a Royal Navy ship, and Vanderbilt hugging close fell under that protection.
As she nosed up to the pier, lines were thrown down. Her engines reversed to bring her to a halt, then stopped. Sailors swarmed onto the empty pier securing the ship. Dahlgren had not waited for the ship to stop pierside but had gone to the cargo hold for the black. He mounted with his good leg, and an aide strapped down the cork and wooden one. The gangways came down and first off the ship were the Marines with Dahlgren at their head riding his black, which pranced down the ramp and shook its head in delight to see the sun and breath the open air. He let the animal ride up and down the pier getting is land legs as the Marines formed up.
With the Marines had come Lt. Rimsky-Korsakov, looking splendid in his Russian naval dress uniform. Two Russian naval infantrymen, the hulking Feodor and Sergei, assigned as servants and bodyguards, stood behind him, rough men who had both fought in the defense of Sevastopol in the Crimean War when the ensign was still a little boy. Sergei held the flag of the Russian Emperor, on a yellow field the black double-headed eagle surmounted by the imperial crown with an icon of St. George slaying the dragon on a shield on the raptor’s chest. The words of Admiral Lisovsky came back to the lieutenant as he stood in the salt breeze looking at the flag. The admiral had his bad moments, but this was not one of them. He looked at Rimsky-Korsakov with all the authority of the Russian Imperial Navy as he gave his orders. “Nikolai Andreyevich,” he said, using his name and patronymic, a mark of closeness that surprised the young man,” and then, stopped and gave him the look that a father would give a son, and resumed now addressing him in the diminutive, “Kolya, my boy, I entrust the banner of His Imperial Majesty to you to carry into the heart of England. Carry it with honor, and no matter what else happens all Russia will rejoice at your deeds. And because the honor of Russia is in your hands, I promote you to the rank of lieutenant, my own flag lieutenant.”
Dahlgren smiled at him and then nodded to the Marine major, “Unfurl the colors.” The case came off the flag, and the Stars and Stripes caught the sea breeze and rippled above them with a snap. “Quick time, march!” and they were off.
The customs officer of Southend-on-Sea was halfway down the pier in his light, open buggy. The ships had been seen from shore, but it was so early in the season for anyone to dock, that he decided to personally see to them. He was surprised to see the column marching to him. Soldiers? At Southend? And in dark blue? A Rifle Volunteer Corps, not doubt, he thought, but didn’t they wear dark green? The sky was overcast, so he could not tell for sure. Then the closer he got, the flag declared itself as the breeze billowed it out. Americans? Can’t be. He was too dumbstruck to do anything but come to a halt as the column reached him.
“H-H-Her Majesty’s customs officer of Southend-on-Sea.”
Dahlgren touched the brim of his cap, “I thank you for the official welcome to England, sir. Unfortunately, I must poorly repay your courtesy. You, sir, are my prisoner. Now, please, be a good gentleman and go quietly with the sergeant.”
HIMS ALEKSANDR NEVSKY, LIFFEY RIVER MOUTH OFF DUBLIN, 7:26 A.M., SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 1864
Stefan Lisovsky crossed himself and said a prayer to the Virgin. His chaplain had been praying almost every waking hour since the squadron had slipped out of New York. Hundreds of wax candles had puddle before his icons of the Virgin and St. Andrew, who first brought Christianity to Russia. It was St. Andrew’s cross, a light-blue diagonal cross or saltire on a white field that was the Andreyevsky ensign or Russian naval ensign, and Lisovsky now ordered it raised and the British naval ensign lowered. He would not sail into the heart of Dublin under false colors.1