by A. N. Wilson
It was to ensure the arrival of these cakes at Balaclava that Soyer now made his way to the Commissariat and approached Lord Raglan. The one-armed veteran of Waterloo and commander-in-chief of the British forces was known to Soyer and had asked the cook to improve the distribution of meat. ‘Monsieur Soyer – anything you may propose or point out as an improvement will, so far as it is practicable, be carried out.’
As he galloped off towards headquarters, Soyer noted a group of officers gathered about a sort of gypsy tent by the side of the road. Many of these officers, as London clubmen, recognized the celebrated Frenchman and called out to him. From inside the tent, a stentorian female voice asked, ‘Who is my new son?’
‘Monsieur Soyer, to be sure,’ said one of the officers. ‘Don’t you know him?’
A plump Jamaican woman, past her first youth, emerged from the tent.
‘God bless me; my son, are you Monsieur Soyer of whom I heard so much in Jamaica? Well, to be sure! I have sold many and many a score of your Relish and sauces – God knows how many … I had a gross about ten days ago …’1
The great French cook alighted from his horse and the Jamaican lady invited him to drink a glass of champagne with her friend Sir John Campbell, the senior brigadier-general in the army, who after the battle of Inkerman was temporarily in charge of the 4th Division – destined to be killed in the assault upon the Great Redan, when he displayed ‘a courage amounting to rashness’.2
The ample Jamaican lady was Mary Seacole, and she too, like M. Soyer, was in the Crimea because she had read Russell’s newspaper reports. Sitting in Jamaica, she read of the battle of the Alma and the sufferings of the British soldiers, and realized that many of her army and navy friends, who had been stationed in the West Indies at some point in their careers, were now enduring the winter’s cold in the Crimean peninsula. Since she was both a self-trained nurse and a boarding-house keeper, she knew that she could be of use.
Mary Seacole was one of the many extraordinary characters thrown into relief by the Crimean War. Born in 1807, she was the child of a Scottish army officer and a free – not liberated, but born free – black woman who herself ran a boarding house in Kingston, Jamaica. By her late forties, Mary Seacole had travelled all over the Caribbean: Nassau, Haiti, Cuba and Panama. It was a momentous decision, however, to cross the world to Russia as a freelance nurse-hotelier. When Seacole reached London, Florence Nightingale had already left for the Turkish capital. She went to the organization in London which was recruiting nurses for Miss Nightingale’s hospital at Scutari (present-day Üsküdar) and was turned down flat, despite her obviously useful qualifications. She then applied to the managers of the Crimean Fund and was also turned down. It was a shattering moment. In Jamaica, where she had always been popular with British visitors and where her own father had been a white soldier, she had allowed herself to associate racial prejudice with the slave-owning citizens of the United States.
‘Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs? Tears flowed down my foolish cheeks as I stood in the fast-thinning streets.’
This overweight woman of forty-eight years and of boundless energy and spirit did not allow rejection to dash her spirits. She made her own way to Constantinople, and presented herself in person at the famous hospital at Scutari. Many of the wounded soldiers recognized her, and called out cheery greetings to ‘Mother Seacole’. Once again, however, she met with rejection. The nursing officer rebuked her with: ‘“Miss Nightingale has the entire management of our hospital staff, but I do not think that any vacancy…” “Excuse me, ma’am,” I interrupted her with, “but I am bound for the front in a few days,” and my questioner leaves me, more surprised than ever.’ Undeterred, she engaged a Greek guide to escort her to the front. She called him Johnny – ‘wishing however, to distinguish my Johnny from the legions of other Johnnies, I prefixed the term Jew to his other name and addressed him as Jew Johnnie’.3
Florence Nightingale’s admirable hospital was several hundred miles from the Crimean peninsula. Mary Seacole did not pretend to Nightingale’s formidable gifts of organization, but she was in the very front line. Her ‘British hotel’ in Balaclava was an important refuge. She served sponge cake and lemonade. ‘They all liked the cake, poor fellows, better than anything else: perhaps because it tasted of “home”.’4 The ‘ranks’ who had a fear of hospitals felt more at ease with ‘Mother Seacole’ than in the Turkish field hospitals. She treated patients suffering from cholera and dysentery. She was attentive to their practical needs. Officers and men had permanent colds throughout the Crimean winters. There were no pocket handkerchiefs until Mary Seacole established her ‘stores’.
That berry-brown face, with a kind heart’s trace
Impressed on each wrinkle sly
Was a sight to behold, though the snow-clouds roll’d
Across that iron sky.
(Punch)
Many Crimean veterans had cause to remember Mary Seacole gratefully. (She came back to live in London after the war, and prospered; during the 1870s she was a friend, and masseuse, of the Princess of Wales; she died in 1881.) Miss Nightingale’s hospital was where you were taken if you were wounded or fell sick. Mary Seacole was on hand for the troops in the long months when nothing much appeared to be happening and, unlike some of the officers, she showed courage under fire. She saw the fighting on the Redan and witnessed the horrors left behind when they finally lifted the siege of Sebastopol.
Florence Nightingale’s was a somewhat different story. Two-thirds of the total casualties in the Crimean War were from disease and hardship, not from battle – the French lost nearly 100,000 by the end, the British some 60,000, the Russians over 300,000.5 Russell’s dispatches had told a truly horrible story. Wellington’s first concern for an army on the march – the physical wellbeing of the common soldier – might have been shared by his former comrade-in-arms, now British commander-in-chief, Lord Raglan, but the poor organization of his expedition led from the beginning to unnecessary hardships. Britain declared war on Russia on 28 March 1854. By 8 April expeditionary forces were landing at Gallipoli, that strip of Turkish coast which in a later war was to see so much suffering and slaughter. The British troops watched the French troops being supplied by a flotilla of steamers – bakeries, hospital tents, stores. All their supplies were rushed on shore by a well-organized baggage train. The British, suffering badly from the cold, had no beds to lie on and waited several days for blankets or food to arrive. Disease had already broken out in Malta on the way down. By the time the officer class arrived in their comfortable transport ships and steamers the Sea of Marmara resembled a regatta and disease was rampant. The allied armies were transported through the Bosphorus, many of them decamping on the eastern shore to the makeshift field hospitals at Scutari.6 The healthy made for the coast at Bulgaria; it was at Varna, on this coast, that the allied command – Marshal St Arnaud, Lord Raglan and Admirals Hamelin (commander of French naval forces), Dundas, Lyons and Bruat considered the orders of the English Cabinet that they should make a descent in the Crimea and besiege Sebastopol. By now cholera had killed 7,000 French. In the villages surrounding Varna, Turks and Greeks perished ‘like flies’. The hospitals were full before a single shot had been fired in battle. On 10 August a further calamity was a fire in the stores at Varna, destroying weapons, provisions and 19,000 pairs of shoes.7
‘The conduct of many of the men, French and English, seemed characterized by a recklessness verging on insanity,’ Russell wrote.8 ‘They might be seen lying drunk in the kennels, or in the ditches by the road-sides, under the blazing rays of the sun, covered with swarms of flies.’ Those who survived cholera and the fire were severely weakened by ‘fever, ague, dysentery and pestilence’. Apart from minor skirmishes (in which a young Russian officer called Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy took part) in Silistria, there was not much to show for th
e first six months of the war.
Russell’s dispatches had revealed a miserable, unheroic, ramshackle campaign presided over by old men. Lord Raglan, fluent in French as he was, and genial, had a distressing habit – born of his youthful years of serving under Wellington – of referring to the French as ‘the enemy’. The inspector-general of fortifications, Sir John Burgoyne, was seventy-one years old. Four of Raglan’s aides-de-camp were relations – Major Lord Burghersh, Captain Lord Poullet Somerset, Captain Nigel Kingscole and Lieutenant Somerset Calthorpe. The cavalry was commanded by some truly grotesque specimens of aristocratic eccentricity. The commander of the cavalry division, Lord Lucan, had purchased the command of the 17th Lancers for £25,000, but had left the army in 1837 – since when he had been on half-pay. The closest he had come to seeing military action had been skirmishes with the Irish peasants on his estates in County Mayo. He was fifty-four when the war broke out. His brother-in-law, the 7th Earl of Cardigan, was pushing sixty. The noisy, lecherous life of this upper-class hooligan had been punctuated by scandals. He had been acquitted (by his peers) for fighting a duel in 1841; his command of the 11th Hussars (for which he had paid £40,000) had made him many enemies both among his officers, with whom he quarrelled regularly in the mess, and his men, who suffered merciless floggings.9
These were the men who joined the survivors (10,000 Englishmen died of cholera at Varna) for the invasion of the Crimea in September 1854, one of the most extraordinary armadas to set sail in the whole history of warfare. They were pursued by a flotilla of sightseers, well-wishers and busybodies, but none were more important than William Howard Russell, since he revealed to the world the vulnerability and the sheer crass inefficiency of the supposedly great powers. The newspaper reports which prompted the charitable impulses of Alexis Soyer and Mary Seacole to rush to the aid of the British were also capable of revealing, for example, to disgruntled sepoy officers of the native Indian regiments, reading flyblown, yellowed copies of The Times in Kanpur and Lucknow, that the British Lion was not necessarily invincible.
But journalism is a curious art. Russell wanted to tell the truth, but he also wanted to tell a story, and a story, if it contains fighting, must have heroes. The public demanded it. Since European literature began, setbacks and defeats were capable of acquiring heroic status just as much as victories. Britain had not been involved in a European war for forty years, and in the pages of The Times each morning they found the opportunity for a modern Iliad to be played out for them. Unlike the Napoleonic Wars, this one was happening a safe distance away. Everybody was gripped by it. If a plague-ridden army commanded by whiskery, bottle-nosed old roués made unlikely material for heroic literature, the public was perfectly prepared to hear and see what it chose. The invasion of Russian soil was followed avidly week by week. In the Birmingham Oratory, John Henry Newman established a room which, though geographically in the centre of an ugly industrial city, has the remote calm of Oxford in the 1830s. His Oratorian confrères have left the room as it was when he died in 1890. You can still see there the maps cut out from The Times with which he followed the Crimean campaign. He gave lectures on the Turks to his parishioners (Lectures on the History of the Turks, 1854). Such enthusiasm could be found in all classes in Britain, and all manner of households.
The Silistrian skirmishes of the summer did not have the stuff of which good stories are made. For one thing, it could not be disguised from anyone that, while the English and French troops languished from heatstroke, alcohol and disease, it was largely through the skill of the Turkish army that the Russians had been kept at bay in their Balkan incursions. Russell’s narrative pace quickens once the troops had disembarked in the autumn of ’54.
The Russian commander, Prince Menshikov, had about 80,000 men deployed in the peninsula. The allied troops numbered 26,000 British (with 66 guns), 30,000 French (with 70 guns) and 5,000 Turks. The first major engagement was when Menshikov established himself with some 40,000 men and 100 guns on the rising ground to the south of the river Alma. The Russians failed to stop the allied advance. After the battle of the Alma, Russell notes, ‘there was a sickening, sour foetid smell everywhere, and the grass was slippy with blood’. About 5,000 died, though Raglan listed only 326 casualties, the French 60 and the Russians 1,755. The Times had never sold so many copies, and prophesied an early victory and the fall of Sebastopol long before Christmas.
Within the three weeks that followed, the British ‘lost as many of cholera as perished on the Alma’.10 It was on 25 October that they fought the most celebrated battle of the campaign, that of Balaclava. While the Alma had been an allied victory, and Balaclava a Russian one, there was no doubt which made the greater appeal – just as, in a much later war, the British retreat at Dunkirk in 1940 went on being celebrated for decades.
The battle of Balaclava fell into two distinct phases. At first, an unequal artillery duel between Russian and Turkish guns (18-pounders vs. 12-pounders) flew across the valleys above Balaclava. Overlooking the South valley were Lucan’s cavalry division and Campbell’s 93rd Highlanders. ‘Remember there is no escape from here. You must die where you stand.’ The Highlanders accordingly opened fire. ‘The ground flies beneath their [the Russians’] horses feet: gathering speed at every stride, they dash on towards that thin red streak topped with a line of steel,’ as Russell wrote. The Heavy Brigade moved westwards to help the Turkish guns. (Tennyson’s own recording of his poem on the charge of the Heavy Brigade is in its way as impressive as his more famous lines on the Light Brigade and
Dahn the hill, dahn the hill, thahsunds uv Rooshians
nicely demonstrates his Lincolnshire vowels.) It was an extraordinary piece of gallantry, 300 mounted men of the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons, the Royal Scots Greys and the 5th Dragoon Guards and the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards, charging with swords at heavy field guns. ‘Some of the Russians seemed to be rather astonished at the way our men used their swords. It was rather hot work,’ one officer recollected.11 The charge of the Heavy Brigade was a moderate success, leading to a withdrawal of the Russians into the North valley to regroup behind a battery of eight artillery pieces.
The first phase of the battle was over and had ended in stalemate. The Russians could still threaten Balaclava. Raglan wished the cavalry to advance and reclaim the heights. He sent orders to Lucan to this effect, promising infantry support. Raglan wanted Lucan to move forward at once. Lucan thought he should await the arrival of the infantry before beginning a two-pronged assault. The infantry were slow in coming. Through his telescope Raglan could see the Light Brigade dismounting and idling in the mid-morning sun. He told the nattily dressed Airey (who had caused a sensation in Varna by sporting a red flannel suit) to repeat the orders to advance. Airey scribbled on a piece of paper: ‘Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front – follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left. – Immediate.’
The note was given to the ADC, Captain Nolan, who was a hothead who had been ‘talking very loud against the cavalry … and especially Lucan’. Nolan rode to Lucan and told him to attack at once. No infantry support had arrived, and it was not clear in which precise direction Raglan wished the cavalry to ride. As Nolan arrived with his ambiguous order – to be greeted with Lucan’s ‘Attack, sir! Attack, what? What guns, sir?’ – Lord Cardigan sent his ADC, Lieutenant Henry Fitzhardinge Maxse, to point out that ‘the heights which flanked the valley leading to the Russian battery of heavy guns were covered with artillery men and riflemen’.
Nolan had not completely finished his unintentionally disastrous work. He asked permission to ride in the charge with the 17th Lancers. As the Light Brigade trotted forward, he suddenly galloped ahead, yelling and waving his sword. He was the first of 107 men and 397 horses who would be mown down by Russian guns in the next twenty-five minutes. The Light Brigade rode down into the valley, engaged the waiting Russian cavalry, and – there be
ing no way out of the valley on the other side – they were obliged to turn round and once more run the gauntlet of deadly gunfire. A Russian cavalry officer remarked, ‘It is difficult, if not impossible, to do justice to the feat of these mad cavalry, for, having lost a quarter of their number and being apparently impervious to new dangers and further losses, they quickly reformed their squadrons to return over the same ground littered with their dead and dying. With such desperate courage these valiant lunatics set off again, and not one of the living – even the wounded – surrendered.’
When Prince Albert was being ‘broken in’ by the landed classes, he surprised them all by his preparedness to make daring jumps when hunting with the Pytchley and the Quorn. Cardigan had been his host at Deene Park in Northamptonshire, magnificent hunting country. The celebrated reaction of the French Marshal Bosquet to the Charge – ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre’ – was totally accurate. Cardigan was showing himself more a master of foxhounds than a soldier in this magnificent display of bravado.12 Raglan was furious with him. Lucan has generally been held responsible for the blunder. ‘You have lost the Light Brigade,’ Raglan curtly told him that evening. He was sacked a few months later. Cardigan had invalided himself out of the war by then – he returned to England to the strains of ‘See, the conquering hero comes’. He was painted demonstrating the Charge of the Light Brigade on a plan of the battlefield to the royal family. (When she heard of the extent of Cardigan’s depravities – Deene Park little different in atmosphere from a bordello – the Queen had herself painted out of this canvas.) But both men remained in the army – Lucan to become a field marshal and Cardigan the inspector-general of cavalry.