Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
The Crimean War (57 page)
It was Mayran, in his eagerness, who made a fatal blunder, when he mistook a shell trailing light from its fuse as the rocket signal to attack, and ordered the 97th to begin the assault fifteen minutes too early, when the rest of the French troops were not ready. According to Herbé, who was with the 95th Regiment in the second column just behind Mayran, the general had been provoked by an incident shortly after two o’clock in the morning, when two Russian officers had crept up to the French trenches and called out in the dark,
‘Allons, Messieurs les Français, quand il vous plaira, nous vous attendons
’ [‘Come on, gentlemen of France, when you are ready, we shall be waiting’]. We were stupefied. It was obvious that the enemy knew all our plans, and that we would find a well-prepared defence. General Mayran was inflamed by this audacious provocation, and formed his men in columns, ready to attack the Malakhov as soon as the signal was given … All eyes were fixed on the Victoria Redoubt. Suddenly, at about a quarter to three, a trailing light followed by a streak of smoke was seen to cross the sky. ‘It’s the signal,’ cried several officers who were grouped around Mayran. A second trail of light appeared soon afterwards. ‘There is no doubt,’ the general said, ‘it is the signal: besides, it is better to be too early than too late: Forward the 97th!’
The 97th rushed forward – only to be met by a deadly barrage of artillery and musket fire by the Russians, who were well armed and ready on every parapet. ‘Suddenly the enemy was coming towards us in a huge wave,’ recalled Podpalov, who watched the scene from the Redan.
Soon, in the dim light, we could just make out that the enemy was carrying ladders, ropes, spades, boards, etc. – it looked like an army of ants on the move. They came closer and closer. Suddenly, right across the line, our bugles sounded, followed by the booming of our cannon and the firing of our guns; the earth shook, there was a thunderous echo, and it was so dark from the gunsmoke that nothing could be seen. When it cleared, we could see that the ground in front of us was covered with the bodies of the fallen French.
Mayran was among those who were hit in the first wave. Helped to his feet by Herbé, he was badly wounded in the arm, but refused to retreat. ‘Forward the 95th!’ he called back to the second line. The reinforcements moved forward, but they too were shot down in huge numbers by the Russians guns. This was not a battle but a massacre. Following their instincts, the attackers lay down on the ground, ignoring Mayran’s orders to advance, and engaged the Russians in a gun battle. After twenty minutes, by which time the battlefield was littered with their dead, the French troops saw a rocket in the sky: it was the real signal to attack.
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Pélissier had ordered the rocket to be fired in a desperate attempt to coordinate the French assault. But if Mayran had advanced too early, his other generals were not ready: expecting a later start, they had not managed to prepare in time. The troops from the reserve lines were rushed forward to join in the attack, but the sudden order to advance unsettled them, and many of the men ‘refused to leave the trenches, even when their officers threatened them with the harshest punishments’, according to Lieutenant Colonel Dessaint, the head of the army’s political department, who concluded that the soldiers ‘had an intuition of the disaster that awaited them’.
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Watching from the Vorontsov Ridge, Raglan could see that the disjointed French assault was a bloody fiasco. One French column, to the left of the Malakhov, had broken through, but its supports were being devastated by the Russian guns on the Malakhov and the Redan. Raglan might have helped the French by bombarding the Redan, as agreed in the original allied plan, before launching an assault; but he felt bound by a sense of duty and honour to support the French by storming the Redan immediately, without a preliminary bombardment, even though he must have known, if only from the events of the previous hour, that such a policy was bound to end in disaster and the needless sacrifice of many men. ‘I always guarded myself from being tied down to attack at the same moment as the French, and I felt that I ought to have some hope of their success before I committed our troops,’ Raglan wrote to Panmure on 19 June, ‘but when I saw how stoutly they were opposed, I considered it was my duty to assist them by attacking myself … Of this I am quite certain, that, if the troops had remained in our trenches, the French would have attributed their non-success to our refusal to participate in the operation.’
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The British assault began at 5.30 a.m. The attacking troops ran forward from the Quarries and the trenches on either side, followed by the supporting parties carrying ladders to scale the walls of the Redan. It soon became apparent that it was a hopeless task. ‘The troops no sooner began to show themselves beyond the parapet of the trenches, than they were assailed by the most murderous fire of grape that ever was witnessed,’ reported Sir George Brown, who had been given the command of the assault. The first Russian volley took out one-third of the attackers. From the trenches on the left, Codrington observed the devastating effect of the barrage on the troops attempting to run across 200 metres of open ground towards the Redan:
The moment they showed themselves, fire of grape was opened upon them – it ploughed the ground – it knocked over many, the dust blinded them, and I saw many swerve away to the trenches on their left. The officers told me afterwards they were blinded by the dust thrown up by the grape; and one told me he was quite blown – out of breath – before he got halfway.
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Overwhelmed by the torrent of grape-shot, the troops began to waver; some lost their nerve and ran away, despite the efforts of their officers to regroup the men by shouting threats. Eventually, the first line of attackers and the leading ladder-men reached the abbatis, about 30 metres from the ditch of the Redan. While they struggled to squeeze through the gaps of the abbatis, the Russians ‘mounted the parapets of the Redan and delivered volley after volley into us’, recalled Timothy Gowing:
They hoisted a large black flag and defied us to come on. The cry of ‘Murder’ could be heard on that field, for the cowardly enemy fired for hours upon our countrymen as they lay writhing in agony and blood. As some of our officers said, ‘This will never do – we’ll pay them for this yet!’ We would have forgiven them all had they not shot down poor, defenceless, wounded men.
The storming party dwindled to the last hundred men, who started to retreat, in defiance of their officers, whose threats to shoot them were ignored. According to one officer, who had urged a group of men to continue the attack, ‘they became impressed with the conviction that another step forward and they would be blown into the air; they would fight any number of men, they said, but they would not step forward to be blown up’.
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It had been widely rumoured that the Redan was mined.
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It had been widely rumoured that the Redan was mined.
Meanwhile, 2,000 men from the 3rd Division under the command of Major-General Eyre on the left flank broke through into the suburbs of Sevastopol itself. They had been instructed to occupy some Russian rifle pits and, if the attack on the Redan allowed it, to advance further down the Picquet House Ravine. But Eyre had exceeded his orders and had pushed on his brigade, defeating the Russians in the Cemetery, before coming under heavy fire in Sevastopol’s streets. They found themselves in a ‘cul-de-sac’, recalled Captain Scott of the 9th Regiment: ‘we could neither advance nor retire, and had to hold our ground from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m., 17 hours under a tremendous fire of shot, shell, grape, canister, and hundreds of their sharpshooters, our only cover being the houses which crumbled about us at every discharge.’ According to Lieutenant Colonel Alexander of the 14th Regiment, the storming of the city became something of an escapade, as some of the Irish soldiers ‘rushed on into part of Sevastopol, got among houses with women in them, pictures, mahogany, furniture and pianos; they got also among strong wine … Some of the Irish boys dressed themselves up as women and so fought; some of them brought back looking glasses, tables and a gooseberry bush with the berries on it!’ But for the rest of the troops, sheltering in bombed-out and crumbling buildings from the enemy’s fire, the day passed with no such amusements. It was only under cover of darkness that they were able to retreat, carrying hundreds of wounded men with them.
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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.
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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’.
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He died on 28 June.
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He died on 28 June.
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.’
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.
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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’:
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.
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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 much 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This was a new type of industrial warfare and Russia, with its backward serf economy, could not compete.
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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.
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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.
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