7

Alma

Soon the allied fleets were strung out across the Black Sea, a moving forest of ships’ masts interspersed with huge black clouds of smoke and steam. It was a fantastic sight, ‘like a vast industrial city on the waters’, noted Jean Cabrol, doctor to the French commander, Marshal Saint-Arnaud, who was now mortally sick on the Ville de France. Each French soldier carried rations for eight days in his kitbag – rice, sugar, coffee, lard and biscuit – and on boarding the transports he was given a large blanket which he laid out on the deck to sleep. The British had much less. ‘The worst of it all’, wrote John Rose, a private in the 50th Regiment, to his parents from Varna, ‘is we cannot get a glass of groggy for money. We have living on 1 pound and a half of brown bread and 1 pound of meat per day but it is not for men.’ ¹

The soldiers on the ships had no clear idea where they were going. At Varna they had been kept in the dark about the war plans, and all sorts of rumours had circulated among the men. Some thought they were going to Circassia, others to Odessa or the Crimea, but no one knew for sure what to expect. Without maps or any direct knowledge of the Russian southern coast, which they viewed from the ships as they might have looked upon the shores of Africa, the enterprise assumed the character of an adventure from the voyages of discovery. Ignorance gave free rein to the imagination of the men, some of whom believed that they would have to deal with bears and lions when they landed in ‘the jungle’ of Russia. Few had any idea of what they were fighting for – other than to ‘beat the Russians’ and ‘do God’s will’, to quote just two French soldiers in their letters home. If the ideas of Private Rose are anything to go by, many of the soldiers did not even know who their allies were. ‘We are 48 hours sail from Seebastepol,’ he wrote to his parents, his West Country accent affecting his spelling:

and the place whear we have going to land is 6 myles from Seebastepol and the first ingagement will be with the Turkes and the russians. Thair is 30,000 Turkes and 40,000 Hasterems [Austrians] besides the Frinch and English and it will not be long before we comance and we hall think that the enemany will ground their harms when they se all the pours [powers] thairs is againest them and I hope it will please god to bring safe ought at the trouble and spare me to return to my materne home again and than I will be able to tell you abought the war.²

When the expedition left for the Crimea its leaders were uncertain where it was to land. On 8 September Raglan in the steamer Caradoc conferred with Saint-Arnaud in the Ville de France (with only one arm, Raglan could not board the French vessel, and Saint-Arnaud, who had stomach cancer, was too ill to leave his bed, so their conversations had to be conducted by intermediaries). Saint-Arnaud finally agreed to Raglan’s choice of a landing site, at Kalamita Bay, a long sandy beach 45 kilometres north of Sevastopol, and on 10 September the Caradoc set off with a group of senior officers, including Saint-Arnaud’s second-in-command, General François Canrobert, to undertake a reconnaissance of the Crimea’s western coast. The allied plan had been to capture Sevastopol in a surprise attack, but this was ruled out by deciding to land as far away as Kalamita Bay.

To protect the landing parties from a possible attack by the Russians on their flank, the allied commanders decided first to occupy the town of Evpatoria, the only secure anchorage on that part of the coastline and a useful source of fresh water and supplies. From the sea, the most striking thing about the town was its large number of windmills. Evpatoria was a prosperous trading and grain-processing centre for the farms of the Crimean steppe. Its population of 9,000 people was made up mainly of Crimean Tatars, Russians, Greeks, Armenians and Karaite Jews, who had built a handsome synagogue in the centre of the town.³

The occupation of Evpatoria – the first landing by the allied armies on Russian soil – was comically straightforward. At noon on 13 September the allied fleets drew near to the harbour. The people of the town assembled on the quayside or watched from windows and rooftops, as the small white-haired figure of Nikolai Ivanovich Kaznacheev, the commandant and governor and quarantine and customs officer of Evpatoria, stood at the end of the main pier in full dress uniform and regalia with a group of Russian officers to receive the French and British ‘parliamentarians’, intermediaries, who came ashore with their interpreter to negotiate the surrender of the town. There were no Russian forces in Evpatoria, except a few convalescent soldiers, so Kaznacheev had nothing to oppose the armed navies of the Western powers except the regulations of his offices; but on these he now relied, calmly, if pointlessly, insisting that the occupying forces land their troops at the Lazaretto so that they could go through quarantine. The next day the town was occupied by a small force of allied troops. They gave the population guarantees of their personal safety, undertook to pay for everything they took from them, and allowed them a day to leave, if they preferred. Many people from the region had already left, especially the Russians, the main administrators and landowners of the area, who in the days since the first sighting of the Western ships had packed their possessions onto carts and fled to Perekop, hoping to return to the mainland before the Crimea was cut off by the enemy. The Russians were as afraid of the Tatars – 80 per cent of the Crimean population – as they were of the invaders. When the allied fleets were seen from the Crimean coast, large groups of Tatar villagers had risen up against their Russian rulers and formed armed bands to help the invasion. On their way towards Perekop, many of the Russians were robbed and killed by these Tatar bands claiming to be confiscating property for the newly installed ‘Turkish government’ in Evpatoria.⁴

All along the coast, the Russian population fled in panic, followed by the Greeks. The roads were clogged with refugees, the carts and livestock heading north, against the flow of Russian soldiers moving south from Perekop. Simferopol was swamped by refugees from the coastal areas who brought fantastic stories about the size of the Western fleets. ‘Many residents lost their heads and did not know what to do,’ recalled Nikolai Mikhno, who lived in Simferopol, the administrative capital of the peninsula. ‘Others began to pack their things as fast as they could and to leave the Crimea … They began to talk in frightening terms about how the allies would continue their invasion by marching straight on Simferopol, which could not protect itself.’⁵

It was this feeling of defencelessness that fuelled the panic flight. Menshikov, the commander of the Russian forces in the Crimea, had been taken by surprise. He had not thought the allies would attack so close to the onset of winter, and had failed to mobilize sufficient forces to defend the Crimea. There were 38,000 soldiers and 18,000 sailors along the south-western coast, and 12,000 troops around Kerch and Theodosia – far less than the numbers of attackers imagined by the frightened population of the Crimea. Simferopol had only one battalion. ⁶

On 14 September, the same date as the French had entered Moscow in 1812, the allied fleets dropped anchor in Kalamita Bay, south of Evpatoria. From the Alma Heights, further to the south, where Menshikov had positioned his main forces to defend the road to Sevastopol, Robert Chodasiewicz, the captain of a Cossack regiment, described the impressive sight:

On reaching our position on the heights, one of the most beautiful sights it was ever my lot to behold lay before us. The whole of the allied fleet was lying off the salt lakes to the south of Evpatoria, and at night their forest of masts was illuminated with various-coloured lanterns. Both men and officers were lost in amazement at the sight of such a large number of ships together, especially as many of them had hardly ever seen the sea before. The soldiers said, ‘Behold, the infidel has built another holy Moscow on the waves!’, comparing the masts of the ships to the church spires of that city.⁷

The French were the first to disembark, their advance parties scrambling ashore and erecting coloured tents at measured distances along the beach to designate the separate landing points for the infantry divisions of Canrobert, General Pierre Bosquet and Prince Napoleon, the Emperor’s cousin. By nightfall they had all been disembarked with their artillery. The men put up the French flag and went off to hunt for firewood and food, some of them returning with ducks and chickens, their water cans refilled with wine they had discovered in the nearby farms. Paul de Molènes and his Spahi cavalry had neither meat nor bread for their first meal on Russian soil, ‘but we had some biscuit and a bottle of champagne which we had set aside to celebrate our victory’.⁸

The British landing was a shambles compared to the French – a contrast that would become all too familiar during the Crimean War. No plans had been made for a peaceful landing unopposed (it was assumed that they would have to fight their way onto the beach), so the infantry was landed first, when the sea was calm; by the time the British tried to get their cavalry ashore, the wind was up, and the horses struggled in the heavy surf. Saint-Arnaud, set up comfortably in a chair with his newspaper on the beach, watched the scene with mounting frustration, as his plans for a surprise attack on Sevastopol were undermined by the delay. ‘The English have the unpleasant habit of always being late,’ he wrote to the Emperor.⁹

It took five days for the British troops and cavalry to disembark. Many of the men were sick with cholera and had to be carried off the boats. There were no facilities for moving baggage and equipment overland, so parties had to be sent out to collect carts and wagons from the local Tatar farms. There was no food or water for the men, except the three days’ rations they had been given at Varna, and no tents or kitbags were offloaded from the ships, so the soldiers spent their first nights without shelter, unprotected from the heavy rain or the blistering heat of the next days. ‘We brought nothing on shore with us excepting our blankets and great coats,’ George Lawson, an army surgeon, wrote home to his family. ‘We suffer dreadfully from want of water. The first day was very hot; we had nothing to drink but water drained out of puddles from the previous night’s rain; and even now the water is so thick that, if put into a glass, you cannot see the bottom of it at all.’¹⁰

At last, on 19 September, the British were prepared and, at day-break, the advance on Sevastopol began. The French marched on the right, nearest the sea, their blue uniforms contrasting with the scarlet tunics of the British, while the fleet moved south alongside them as they advanced. Six and a half kilometres wide and just under 5 kilometres long, the advancing column was ‘all bustle and activity’, wrote Frederick Oliver, bandmaster of the 20th Regiment, in his diary. Apart from the compact lines of soldiers, there was an enormous train of ‘cavalry, guns, ammunition, horses, bullocks, pack-horses, mules, herds of dromedaries, a drove of oxen, and a tremendous drove of sheep, goats and bullocks, all of which had been taken from the surrounding countryside by the foraging parties’. By midday, with the sun beating down, the column began to break up, as thirsty soldiers fell behind or left to search for water in the nearby Tatar settlements. When they reached the River Bulganak, 12 kilometres from Kalamita Bay, in the middle of the afternoon, discipline broke down altogether, as the British soldiers threw themselves into the ‘muddy stream’.¹¹

Ahead of them, on the slopes rising south from the river, the British got their first sight of the Russians – 2,000 Cossack cavalry who opened fire on a scouting party from the 13th Light Dragoons. The rest of the Light Brigade, the pride of the British cavalry, prepared to charge the Cossacks, who outnumbered them by two to one, but Raglan saw that behind the Russian horsemen there was a sizeable infantry force that could not be seen by his cavalry commanders, Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan, who were further down the hill. Raglan ordered a retreat, and the Light Brigade withdrew, while the Cossacks jeered and shot at them, wounding several cavalrymen,^x before themselves retreating to the River Alma, further south, where the Russians had prepared their positions on the heights. The incident was a humiliation for the Light Brigade, which had been forced to back down from a fight with the ragged-looking Cossacks in full view of the British infantry, men from poor and labouring families, who took malicious pleasure from the embarrassment of the elegantly tailored and comfortably mounted cavalry. ‘Serve them bloody right, silly peacock bastards,’ wrote one private in a letter home.¹²

The British bivouacked on the southern slopes of the Bulganak, from which they could make out the Russian troops amassed on the Alma Heights, 5 kilometres away. The next morning they would march down the valley and engage the Russians, whose defences were on the other side of the Alma.

Menshikov had decided to commit the majority of his land forces to the defence of the Alma Heights, the last natural barrier on the enemy’s approach to Sevastopol, which his troops had occupied since 15 September, but his fears of a second allied landing at Kerch or Theodosia (fears which the Tsar shared) led him to keep back a large reserve. Thus there were 35,000 Russian soldiers on the Alma Heights – less than the 60,000 Western troops but with the crucial advantage of the hills – and more than 100 guns. The heaviest guns were deployed on a series of redoubts above the road to Sevastopol that crossed the river 4 kilometres inland, but there were none on the cliffs facing the sea, which Menshikov assumed were too steep for the enemy to climb. The Russians had made themselves at home, pillaging the nearby village of Burliuk after forcing the Tatars out, and carrying off bedding, doors, planks of wood and tree branches up onto the heights, where they constructed makeshift cabins for themselves and gorged on grapes from the abandoned farms. They stuffed the village houses with hay and straw in preparation for burning them when the enemy advanced. The Russian commanders were confident of holding their positions for at least a week – Menshikov had written to the Tsar promising that he could hold the heights for six times as long – winning precious time for the defences of Sevastopol to be strengthened and shifting the campaign on towards winter, the Russians’ greatest weapon against the invading army. Many officers were sure of victory. They joked about the British being only good for fighting ‘savages’ in their colonies, drank toasts to the memory of 1812 and talked of driving the French back into the sea. Menshikov was so confident that he invited parties of Sevastopol ladies to watch the battle with him from the Alma Heights.¹³

The Russian troops themselves were not so confident. Ferdinand Pflug, a German doctor in the tsarist army, thought that ‘each one seemed convinced that the next day’s battle would end in defeat’.¹⁴ Few if any of these men had ever engaged in a battle with the army of a major European power. The sight of the mighty allied fleet anchored just off shore and ready to support the enemy’s land forces with its heavy guns made it clear to them that they were going to fight an army stronger than their own. While most of their senior commanders could hark back to their memories of battle in the wars against Napoleon, the younger men, who would do the actual fighting, had no such experience on which to draw.

Like all soldiers on the eve of a big battle, they tried to hide their fear from their comrades. As the heat of the day gave way to a cold night, the men of both the armies prepared themselves for the next morning: for many of the men these would be their last hours. They lit fires, cooked their dinners and waited. Most of the soldiers ate little. Some went through the ritual of cleaning their muskets. Others wrote letters to their families. Many of them prayed. The next day was a religious holiday in the Orthodox calendar, the date on which the Russians marked the birth of the Blessed Virgin, and services were held to pray for her protection. Groups of soldiers sat around the fires, talking late into the night, the older ones recounting tales of past battles to the younger men. They drank and smoked, and told jokes, trying to seem calm. Now and then the sound of men singing would drift across the plain. From the Sevastopol Road, where Menshikov had set up his tent, the band and choir of the Tarutinsky Regiment could be heard – their deep bass voices rendering the lines of a song composed by General Gorchakov:

He alone is worthy of life
Who is always ready to die;
The Russian Orthodox warrior
Strikes his foes without thinking twice.
The French, the English – what of them?
So what about the stupid Turkish lines?
Come out, you infidels,
We challenge you to fight!
We challenge you to fight!

Gradually, as the dark sky filled with stars, the fires died down and the hum of talking became quieter. The men lay down and tried to sleep, though few did, and an eerie silence settled over the valley, broken only by the barking of hungry dogs roaming the deserted village.¹⁵

At three o’clock in the morning, Chodasiewicz could not sleep. It was still dark. In the Russian camp the soldiers ‘were collected around the huge fires they had kindled with the plunder of the village of Burliuk’.

After a short time I went up the hill (for our battalion was stationed in a ravine) to take a peep at the bivouac of the allied armies. Little, however, was to be seen but the fires, and now and then a dark shadow as someone moved past them. All was still and had little appearance of the coming strife. These were both armies lying, as it were, side by side. How many, or who, would be sent to their last account, it would be impossible to say. The question involuntarily thrust itself upon me, should I be one of that number?¹⁶

By four o’clock the French camp was stirring. The men prepared their coffee and joked about the beating they were going to give to the Russians, and then the order came for them to put on their kitbags and fall into line to listen to the orders of their officers. ‘By thunder!’ the captain of the 22nd Regiment addressed his men. ‘Are we Frenchmen or not? The 22nd will earn distinction for itself today, or you are all scoundrels. If any one of you lags behind today, I will run my sabre through his guts. Line up to the Right!’ In the Russian camp the men were also up with the first light and listening to speeches from their commanders: ‘Now, lads, the good time has come at last, though we have waited some time for it; we will not disgrace our Russian land; we will drive back the enemy, and please our good father, Batiushka the Tsar; then we can return to our homes with the laurels we have earned.’ At seven o’clock in the Russian camp prayers were said to the Mother of God calling on her aid against the enemy. Priests carried icons through the ranks as soldiers bowed down to the ground and crossed themselves in prayer.¹⁷

By mid-morning the allied armies were assembling on the plain, the British on the left of the Sevastopol Road, the French and Turks on the right, stretching out towards the coastal cliffs. It was a clear and sunny day, and the air was still. From Telegraph Hill, where Menshikov’s well-dressed spectators had arrived in carriages to watch the scene, the details of the French and British uniforms could be clearly seen; the sound of their drums, their bugles and bagpipes, even the clinking of metal and the neighing of the horses could be heard.¹⁸

The Russians opened fire when the allies came within 1,800 metres – a spot marked with poles to let their gunners know the advancing troops were within range – but the British and the French continued marching forward towards the river. According to the plan that the allies had agreed the day before, the two armies were to advance simultaneously on a broad front and try to turn the enemy’s flank on the left – the inland side. But at the final moment Raglan decided to delay the British advance until the French had broken through on the right; he made his troops lie on the ground, within range of the Russian guns, in a position from which they could scramble to the river when the time was right. There they lay for an hour and a half, from 1.15 to 2.45 p.m., losing men as the Russian gunners found their range. It was an astonishing example of Raglan’s indecisiveness.¹⁹

While the British were lying on the ground, Bosquet’s division arrived at the river near the sea, where the cliffs rose so steeply to the heights, almost 50 metres above the river, that Menshikov had thought it was unneccessary to defend the position with artillery. At the head of Bosquet’s division was a regiment of Zouaves, most of them North Africans, who had experience of mountain fighting in Algeria. Leaving their kitbags on the riverbank, they swam across the river and quickly climbed the cliffs under heavy cover of the trees. The Russians were amazed by the agility of the Zouaves, comparing them to monkeys in the way they used the trees to scale the cliffs. Once they had reached the plateau, the Zouaves hid behind rocks and bushes to pick off the defending forces of the Moscow Regiment one by one until reinforcements could arrive. ‘The Zouaves were so well hidden’, recalled Noir, who was among the first to reach the top, ‘that a well-trained officer arriving on the scene would hardly have been able to pick them out with his own eyes.’ Inspired by the Zouaves, more French soldiers climbed the cliffs. They hauled twelve guns up a ravine – the men hit their horses with their swords if they refused to climb the rocky path – arriving just in time to engage the extra soldiers and artillery that Menshikov had transferred from the centre in a desperate attempt to stop his left flank being turned.²⁰

The Russian position was more or less hopeless. By the time their artillery arrived, the whole of Bosquet’s division and many of the Turks had reached the plateau. The Russians had more guns – 28 to the French 12 – but the French guns were of larger calibre and longer range, and Bosquet’s riflemen kept the Russian gunners at a distance where only the heavier French guns could take effect. Sensing their advantage, some of the Zouaves, exalted by the fighting, danced a polka on the battlefield to taunt the enemy, knowing that the Russian guns could not reach them. Meanwhile, the guns of the allied fleet were pounding the Russian positions on the cliffs, undermining the morale of many of their troops and officers. When the first Russian battery of artillery arrived, it found the remnants of the Moscow Regiment already in retreat under heavy fire from the Zouaves, whose Minié rifles had a longer range and greater accuracy than the outdated muskets of the Russian infantry. The commanding officer on the left flank, Lieutenant General V. I. Kiriakov, was one of the most incompetent in the tsarist army, and was rarely in a sober state. Holding a bottle of champagne in his hand, Kiriakov ordered the Minsk Regiment to shoot at the French but misdirected them towards the Kiev Hussars, who fell back under the fire. Lacking confidence in their drunken commander, and unnerved by the lethal accuracy of the French rifles, the Minsk Regiment also began to retreat.²¹

Meanwhile, in the centre of the battlefield, the two other French divisions, led by Canrobert and Prince Napoleon, were unable to cross the Alma in the face of heavy Russian fire from Telegraph Hill directly opposite. Prince Napoleon sent word to General de Lacy Evans, on his left, calling on the British to advance and take some pressure off the French. Raglan was still waiting for the French attack to succeed before committing British troops, and at first told Evans not to take orders from the French, but under pressure from Evans he finally gave way. At 2.45 p.m., he ordered the infantry of the Light, 1st and 2nd Divisions to advance – though what else they should do he did not say. The order was typical of Raglan’s thinking, which remained rooted in the bygone age of Napoleonic battles, when the infantry was used for primitive direct attacks on prepared positions.

As soon as the men rose from their lying positions on the ground, the Russian Cossack skirmishers, who had been hiding in the vineyards, set alight the village of Burliuk to obstruct their advance – though in fact all this did was raise a cloud of smoke, which made it more difficult for the Russian gunners to hit them. The British advanced in thin lines to maximize their rifle power, although in this formation it was hard to keep the men together over rough terrain without effective commanders of the line. The Russians were amazed by the sight of the thin red line emerging from the smoke. ‘This was the most extraordinary thing to us,’ recalled Chodasiewicz; ‘we had never before seen troops fight in lines of two deep, nor did we think it possible for men to be found with sufficient firmness of morale to be able to attack in this apparently weak formation our massive columns.’

The advancing lines broke up as they passed through the burning village and vineyards. A greyhound ran around them chasing hares. Moving forward in small groups, the British cleared the village of the Russian skirmishers and drove them out of the vineyards. ‘We rushed on driving the enemy’s skirmishers before us,’ recalled Private Bloomfield of the Derbyshire Regiment. ‘Some of these skirmishers even got up trees, so they could get a good shot at us, but we saw them and brought them off their perch. Some of these when falling from the trees … would catch their feet or clothes in some parts of the tree and hang there for hours.’ As they neared the river, the British came within firing range of the Russian guns. Men fell silently as they were hit but the rest of the line kept moving forward. ‘The most striking thing to me’, recalled Lieutenant General Brown of the Light Division, ‘was the silent way in which death did its work. No sight or sound betrayed the cause; a man dropped, rolled over, or fell out of ranks to the dust. One knew the little bullet had found its destination, but it seemed to happen in mysterious silence – they disappeared, were left, as we went past them.’²²

Under heavy fire, the men reached the river, collecting in groups at the water’s edge to unload their equipment, unsure of the water’s depth. Holding their rifles and ammunition pouches above their heads, some men managed to wade across, but others had to swim, and some drowned in the fast current. All the time, the Russians fired at them with grape-shot and shell. There were 14 Russian guns in the earthworks and 24 on either side of the road bridge. By the time Private Bloomfield reached the Alma near the bridge, ‘the river was red with blood’. Many men were too frightened to get into the water, which was full of dead bodies. They hugged the ground on the riverbank while mounted officers galloped up and down, shouting at the men to swim across, and sometimes even threatening to cut them with their swords. Once they had crossed the river, all order was lost. Companies and regiments became jumbled together, and where there had been lines two men deep there was now just a crowd. The Russians began to advance down the hill from either side of the Great Redoubt, firing on the British down below, where mounted officers galloped round their men, urging them to reform lines; but it was impossible, the men were exhausted from crossing the river, and happy to be in the shelter of the riverbank where they could not be seen from the heights. Some sat down and took out their water cans; others got out bread and meat and began to eat.

Aware of the danger of the situation, Major-General Codrington, in command of the 1st Brigade of the Light Division, made a desperate effort to regroup his men. Spurring his white Arab charger up the hill, he bellowed at the crowd of infantry: ‘Fix bayonets! Get up the bank and advance to the attack!’ Soon the whole of Codrington’s brigade – the regiments all jumbled up – began scrambling up the Kurgan Hill in a thick crowd. Junior commanders gave up forming lines – there was no time – but urged their men to ‘Come on anyhow!’ Once they had climbed onto the open slopes, most of the men began to charge with yells and screams towards the Russian guns in the Great Redoubt, 500 metres up the slope. The Russian gunners were astonished by the sight of this British mob – 2,000 men running up the hill – and found easy targets. Some of the Light Division’s advance guard reached the entrenchments of the Great Redoubt. Soldiers clambered over the parapets and through the embrasures, only to be shot or cut down by the Russians, who hurriedly withdrew their guns. Within a few minutes, the Great Redoubt was a swarm of men, pockets of them fighting on the parapets, others cheering and waving their colours, as two Russian guns were captured in the confusion.

But suddenly the British were confronted by four battalions (some 3,000 men) of the Vladimirsky Regiment pouring into the Redoubt from the open higher ground, while more Russian guns were pitching shell at them from higher up the Kurgan Hill. With one loud ‘Ooorah!’ the Russian infantry began charging with their bayonets, driving out the British, and firing at them as they retreated down the hill. The Light Division ‘made a front’ to fire back, but suddenly and unexpectedly there was a bugle call to cease firing, copied by the buglers of every regiment. For a few fatal moments there was a confused pause in the firing on the British side: an unnamed officer had thought that the Russians were the French and had ordered his men to stop firing. By the time the mistake was corrected, the Vladimirsky soldiers had gained the upper hand; they were steadily advancing down the hill and British troops were lying dead and wounded everywhere. Now buglers truly did give the order to retreat, and the whole rabble of the Light Division, or what was left of it, was soon running down the hill towards the shelter of the riverbank.

The charge had partly failed because there had been no second wave, the Duke of Cambridge having stopped the Guards from advancing in support of the Light Division for lack of further orders from Raglan (another blunder on his part). Evans, on his right, got the Guards marching once again by giving the Duke an order to advance which he pretended had come from Raglan, who in fact was nowhere to be seen.^y

The three regiments of the Guards Brigade (Grenadiers, Scots Fusiliers and Coldstream) waded across the river. In their red tunics and bearskins they were an imposing sight. On the other side of the river they took an age to reassemble into lines. Irritated by their dithering, Sir Colin Campbell, the commander of the Highland Brigade, ordered an immediate advance. A firm believer in the charge with bayonets, Campbell told his men not to fire their rifles until they were ‘within a yard of the Russians’. The Scots Fusiliers, who had crossed the river before the other Guards, at once began charging up the hill, repeating the mistake of the Light Division, which at that moment was running down the hill pursued by the Russian infantry. The two crowds of men ran straight through each other – the Scots Fusiliers bearing the main brunt of the collision, with men knocked over and bearskins flying everywhere, so that when they emerged on the other side and continued running towards the Great Redoubt they were only half their number and in a chaotic state. In the centre of this mob was Hugh Annesley, a 23-year-old ensign, who recalled what happened next:

Suddenly the Russians seemed to line the redoubt again and their fire grew hotter and then the 23rd came down in one mass, right on top of our line … . I kept on shouting, ‘Forward, Guards’, and we had got within 30 or 40 yards of the intrenchment, when a musket ball hit me full in the mouth, and I thought it was all over with me; just then our Adjutant rode up with his revolver in his hand and gave us the order to retire; I turned round and ran as fast as I could down the hill to the river, the balls were coming through us now even hotter than ever, and I felt sure that I should never get away without being struck again; halfway down I stumbled and fell, then I was quite certain I was hit again, but I got up all right, and went on. I lost my sword and bearskin here; at last I reached the riverbank and got under shelter, there were crowds of soldiers here.

Annesley had been badly wounded: the bullet that had entered his left cheek had come out at the right corner of his mouth, taking away twenty-three of his teeth and part of his tongue. Around him was the rest of his shattered regiment, which remained in the shelter of the riverbank for the rest of the battle, ignoring repeated orders to advance.²³

The other two regiments (the Grenadiers and Coldstream Guards) filled the gap left by the Scots Fusiliers, but refused orders to advance up the hill. Instead, on their own initiative, the 2,000 Guards formed into lines and fired fourteen volleys of Minié rifle shot into the Russian infantry. The volleys delivered an intensity of fire achieved by half a dozen machine guns. They stunned the Russian infantry, who fell in heaps upon the ground, and then withdrew up the hill. By disobeying their commanders, who had ordered them to charge with bayonets, the Guards had demonstrated a crucial innovation – the long-range firepower of the modern rifle – which would prove decisive in all the early battles of the Crimean War. The Minié was a new weapon. Most regiments had been issued with it only on their way to the Crimea, and had received a hurried training in how to use it. They had no idea of its tactical significance – its ability to fire with a lethal accuracy from well beyond the range of the Russian muskets and artillery – until the Guards discovered it for themselves on the Alma. Reflecting on the impact of the Minié rifle, the Russian military engineer Eduard Totleben wrote in his history of the Crimean War:

Left to themselves to perform the role of sharpshooters, the British troops did not hesitate under fire and did not require orders or supervision. Troops thus armed were full of confidence once they found out the accuracy and immense range of their weapon … Our infantry with their muskets could not reach the enemy at greater than 300 paces, while they fired on us at 1,200. The enemy, perfectly convinced of the superiority of his small arms, avoided close combat; every time our battalions charged, he retired for some distance, and began a murderous fusillade. Our columns, in pressing the attack, only succeeded in suffering terrible losses, and finding it impossible to pass through the hail of bullets which overwhelmed them, were obliged to fall back before reaching the enemy.

Without entrenchments to protect their infantry and artillery, the Russians were unable to defend their positions on the heights against the deadly Minié rifles. Soon the fire of the Guards was joined by that of the 2nd Division under Evans, on the British right, whose 30th Regiment could clearly see the gunners of three Russian batteries from the riverbank and take them out with their Minié rifles without the Russians even knowing where the firing was from. As the Russian infantry and artillery withdrew, the British slowly advanced up the hill, stepping over the dead and wounded bodies of the enemy. ‘Most of the wounded were crying out for water,’ Private Bloomfield wrote. ‘A man of my company gave a wounded Russian a drink of water, and as he left him, the Russian rose on his elbow, took his musket in his hand, and fired at the man that gave him the water. The bullet passed close by the man’s head. The man turned round immediately and ran his bayonet through the body of the Russian.’ By four o’clock in the afternoon, the British were converging on the Russian positions from all directions – the Guards on the left overcoming the last Russian reserves on the Kurgan Hill, Codrington’s men and the other Guards closing in on the Great Redoubt, and the 2nd Division pushing up the Sevastopol Road. With the French in command of the cliffs above the Alma, it was clear that the battle had been won.²⁴

By this stage, on the Russian side, there were signs of panic, as the enemy closed in and the devastating effect of their long-range rifle fire became apparent. Priests went round the lines to bless the troops, and soldiers prayed with growing fervency, while mounted officers used the knout to whip them forward into line. But otherwise there was a general absence of authority among the Russian commanders. ‘Nobody gave any direction what to do,’ recalled Chodasiewicz. ‘During the five hours that the battle went on we neither saw nor heard of our general of division, or brigadier, or colonel: we did not receive any orders from them either to advance or to retire; and when we retired, nobody knew whether we ought to go to the right or left.’ The drunken Kiriakov gave a general order to retreat from the left flank of the heights, but then lost his nerve and went missing for several hours (he was discovered later hiding in a hollow in the ground). It was left to the junior commanders to organize the retreat from the heights, but ‘we had the greatest difficulty to keep our men in order’, recalled Chodasiewicz, who had to threaten ‘to cut down the first man who should break out of the ranks’ – a threat he had to carry out more than once.

With no clear idea of where they were to go, the Russians fled in all directions, running down the hill into the valley, away from the enemy. Mounted officers tried in vain to stop the panic flight, riding round the men and whipping them, like cowboys rounding up cattle; but the men had lost all patience with their commanders. Chodasiewicz overheard a conversation between two soldiers:

1st soldier: ‘Yes, during the fights we saw nothing of these great folks [the officers] but now they are as thick as imps with their shouting “Silence! Keep step!”’

2nd soldier: ‘You are always grumbling, just like a Pole; you are enough to anger Providence, whom we ought to thank for our lives.’

1st soldier: ‘It’s all the same to you, provided you are not flogged.’

Chodasiewicz spoke of chaos and confusion, of barely sober officers, ‘of the ten minutes of fear and trembling on the second line of heights, when we saw the enemy’s cavalry coming forward to cut down the retreating stragglers, for the most part wounded men’.²⁵

In the end the Russians were defeated, not just by the superior firepower of the Minié rifle, but by a loss of nerve among their men. For Ardant du Picq, who would develop his military theories from questionnaires he sent to the Frenchmen who had fought at the Alma, this moral factor was the decisive element in modern war. Large groups of men rarely engaged physically, he maintained, because at the final moment before the point of contact one side nearly always lost its nerve and ran away. The key thing on the battlefield was military discipline – the ability of officers to hold their men together and stop them fleeing out of fear – because it was when they turned their backs to the enemy that soldiers were most likely to be killed. The suppression of fear was thus the main task of the officer, something he could achieve only through his own authority and the unity he instilled in his men.

What makes the soldier capable of obedience and direction in action is the sense of discipline. This includes: respect for and confidence in his chiefs; confidence in his comrades and fear of their reproaches and retaliation if he abandons them in danger; his desire to go where others do without trembling more than they; in a word, the whole of esprit de corps. Organization only can produce these characteristics. Four men equal a lion.

These ideas, which were to become central to the military theories of the twentieth century, first became apparent to du Picq in a letter written to him in 1869 by a veteran of the Alma. The soldier had recalled the crucial intervention of his company commander, who had halted the panic of his men after a senior commander had mistakenly assumed that the Russian cavalry was about to charge and had ordered the bugler to signal a retreat:

Happily, a level-headed officer, Captain Daguerre, seeing the gross mistake, commanded ‘Forward’ in a stentorian tone. This halted the retreat and caused us again to take up the attack. The attack made us masters of the telegraph-line, and the battle was won. At this second charge the Russians gave, turned, and hardly any of them were wounded with the bayonet. So then a Major commanding a battalion, without orders, sounds a bugle call and endangers success. A simple Captain commands ‘Forward’, and decides the victory.²⁶

By half past four the battle was over. Most of the Russians had retreated towards the River Kacha in small groups, without leaders or any clear idea of what to do or where to go. Many men would not be reunited with their regiments for several days. At the top of Telegraph Hill the French captured the abandoned carriage of Prince Menshikov, which was being driven off by some Cossacks. In the carriage they found a field kitchen, letters from the Tsar, 50,000 francs, pornographic French novels, the general’s boots, and some ladies’ underwear. On the hill were abandoned picnics, parasols and field glasses left behind by parties of spectators from Sevastopol.²⁷

On the battlefield itself the ground was covered with the wounded and the dead – 2,000 British, 1,600 French and perhaps 5,000 Russians, though the exact numbers are impossible to calculate, since so many of them were abandoned there. It took the British two full days to clear the battlefield of the wounded. They had neglected to bring any medical supplies on the ships from Varna – the ambulance corps with its carts and wagons and stretchers was still in Bulgaria – so doctors had to plead with the commissariat for military carts to remove the wounded from the battlefield. Storekeeper John Rowe of the commissariat emptied his cart of its saddles to help with the wounded, and on his way back to collect his cargo came across a group of wounded officers, among them Hugh Annesley:

An officer of the 30th with a damaged arm was partly supporting an officer of the Scots Fusilier Guards. This officer was leaning forward and dripping blood from his mouth. He could not speak but wrote with a pencil in a small book that he was the Hon[oura]ble Annesley and that a ball was lodged in his throat after having knocked away some of his teeth and part of his tongue. He wanted to know what part of the field (if I may so call it) the Fusilier Doctor had his stand and whether I could convey him there. I could not tell him anything of the Doctor … I also told him I had no discretion as to the use of the mule cart but to fulfil the duty I was there upon.

Hugh Annesley after his return from the Crimea, the black patch covering his wound

Annesley was left to find a doctor on his own. What treatment he received remains unknown, but it would not have involved more than cutting out the ball, probably without the use of proper dressings or any chloroform to dull the shock and pain. Treatments on the battle-field were rudimentary. The staff surgeon of the Light Division, George Lawson, carried out his operations on the ground, until an old door was discovered which he made into an improvised operating table.²⁸

Early the next morning, Somerset Calthorpe, a nephew of Lord Raglan and one of his aides-de-camp, filled his flask with brandy and ‘sallied out to walk over the field of battle’.

The poor wounded were far more quiet than the previous evening; many doubtless had died during the night, and many were too weak and exhausted to do more than moan. I found all glad of something to drink … It was a horrible scene – death in every shape and form. I particularly observed that those shot through the heart or forehead appeared all to have died with a smile on their faces, generally speaking lying flat on their backs, with the arms spread out and the legs rather apart … Those who appeared to have died in the greatest pain were those shot through the stomach; these had always their legs and arms bent, and with all expression of agony on their faces.²⁹

The Russians were unable to collect their wounded from the battle-field. ^z Those who could walk were left to look for treatment on their own, many of them staggering to the dressing stations set up on the River Kacha, 15 kilometres south of the Alma, or limping back to Sevastopol over the next days. A Russian orderly recalled the scene on the first evening, as he set off with his vehicles for the Kacha:

Hundreds of wounded had been deserted by their regiments, and these, with heart-rending cries and moans and pleading gestures, begged to be lifted into the carts and carriages. But what could I do for them? We were already packed to overloading. I tried to console them by telling them that their regimental wagons were coming back for them, although of course they did not. One man could hardly drag himself along – he was without arms and his belly was shot through; another had his leg blown off and his jaw smashed, with his tongue torn out and his body covered with wounds – only the expression on his face pleaded for a mouthful of water. But where to get even that?

Those who could not walk, about 1,600 wounded Russian soldiers, were abandoned on the battlefield, where they lay for several days, until the British and the French, having cleared their own, took care of them, burying the dead and carting off the wounded to their hospitals in Scutari on the outskirts of Constantinople.³⁰

Three days after the battle, William Russell described the Russians ‘groaning and palpitating as they lay around’.

Some were placed together in heaps, that they might be more readily removed. Others glared upon you from the bushes with the ferocity of wild beasts, as they hugged their wounds. Some implored, in an unknown tongue, but in accents not to be mistaken, water, or succour; holding out their mutilated and shattered limbs, or pointing to the track of the lacerating ball. The sullen, angry scowl of some of these men was fearful. Fanaticism and immortal hate spoke through their angry eyeballs, and he who gazed on them with pity and compassion could at last (unwillingly) understand how these men could in their savage passion kill the wounded, and fire on the conqueror who, in his generous humanity, had aided them as he passed.³¹

There had been incidents of wounded Russians shooting at the British and French soldiers who had given them water. There were also some reported cases of the Russians killing wounded soldiers on the battle-field. Fear and hatred of the enemy were behind these incidents. French interrogations of the Russian soldiers captured at the Alma revealed that the Russians had been ‘told the most fantastic stories by their priests – that we were monsters capable of the most ferocious savagery and even cannibals’. Reports of these ‘dishonourable’ killings outraged British soldiers and public opinion, reinforcing their belief that the Russians were ‘no better than savages’. But such outrage was hypocritical. There were many incidents of British soldiers killing wounded Russians, and disturbing cases of the British shooting Russian prisoners because they were ‘troublesome’. It should also be remembered that the British walked among the Russian wounded, not only to give them water, but sometimes to steal from them. They took silver crosses from their necks, rooted through their kitbags for souvenirs, and helped themselves to what they fancied from the living and the dead. ‘I have got a beautiful trophy for you from the Alma, just one to suit you,’ wrote Hugh Drummond of the Scots Guards to his mother, ‘a large silver Greek cross with engravings on it – our Saviour and some Russian words; it came off a Russian Colonel’s neck we killed, and, poor fellow, it was next to his skin.’³²

If the allies had pushed on directly from the Alma, they would have taken Sevastopol by surprise. In all probability, they would have captured it in a few days, at relatively little cost in human lives compared to the many tens of thousands who were to die during the 349-day siege that followed from their errors and delays.

The Russian forces were in disarray, and Sevastopol virtually defenceless, on 21 September. To make matters worse, Menshikov decided that it was not worth committing any more of his demoralized troops to the defence of the city. Once he had gathered the remnants of his army at the Kacha, he set off on a march towards Bakhchiserai to prevent the allies from cutting off the Crimea at Perekop and to wait for reinforcements from the Russian mainland, leaving Sevastopol in the hands of just 5,000 troops and 10,000 sailors, who were completely untrained for this sort of war. The Russians had not thought that the allies would invade before the spring, and had not reinforced the defences of Sevastopol. The city’s northern fortifications had not been greatly improved since they were built in 1818.^aa The Star Fort’s walls were falling down from years of neglect and disrepair and not defended by sufficient guns to withstand a serious attack. On the southern side, Menshikov had ordered the construction of three new batteries in January 1854, but the defences there were in only slightly better shape. Facing the sea were extensive walls, armed with formidable batteries, and at the entrance to the harbour there were two well-armed fortresses, the Quarantine Battery and the Alexander Fort, which taken all together were enough to nullify the gunpower of the allied fleet. But on the land side the defences to the south of Sevastopol were relatively weak. A single stone wall about 4 metres high and 2 metres thick – with earthworks and stone batteries in the most commanding positions – protected only parts of the town. Not all these fortifications were able to withstand bombardment by mortar shells, and the stone wall was only good against musketry. Overall, the city was extremely vulnerable, and the expectation was that it could fall at any time. According to Totleben, who was placed in charge of the defensive works, ‘there was practically nothing to stop the enemy from walking into the city’.³³

Instead of moving swiftly to Sevastopol to take up its defence, the Russian troops retreating from the Alma battlefield allowed themselves to be diverted and delayed by looting the estates abandoned by landowners on hearing news of the defeat. Separated from their regimental units and their officers, the troops lost all discipline. ‘The Cossacks were the worst offenders,’ recalled one eyewitness; ‘there was nothing that they would not steal.’

Finding a house that had been locked up, they would smash the doors, break the windows, and rampage through the rooms, stealing anything they could carry. Assuming that the owners had hidden money, diamonds and other precious items in the house, the soldiers turned over everything – even pillows and cushions on the divans and armchairs. Books and libraries were destroyed. Large mirrors that could not be used by the soldiers were broken up so that they could put a piece of it into their pockets.³⁴

The allied commanders had no idea of this weakness and disorder on the Russian side. Raglan had wanted to press on as fast as possible to Sevastopol, as the allies had agreed in their war plans, but now the French were not ready, having left their kitbags on the other side of the Alma before they had scaled the heights, and needed time to collect them. Unlike the British, they did not have sufficient cavalry to give chase to the Russians, so were less inclined to rush ahead. Once the initiative was lost, the allied commanders began to hesitate about what they should do next. Tatar spies had misinformed them that the Star Fort was impregnable, that Menshikov intended to defend it with all his might, and that the city was almost undefended on its southern side. This encouraged the allied commanders to abandon their initial plan to attack the city quickly from the north, and instead march right round the city to the southern side, a plan of action strongly urged by Sir John Burgoyne, the chief engineering officer.^ab

The change of plan was also driven by the Russians’ bold decision to blow up their own fleet. Recognizing that they could not match the allied ships in speed or gunpower, the commanders of the Black Sea Fleet sank five sailing ships and two frigates in the mouth of the harbour to block the entrance and so prevent allied ships from supporting an attack from the north. The designated vessels were towed into place, their flags were taken down, and there were religious services to commit them to the sea. Then, at midnight on 22 September, the ships were destroyed. One frigate, The Three Saints, would not go down. The next morning it was shelled at close range by a gunboat for two hours until it sank. The noise was heard by the allied armies, which at that time were on the Kacha, prompting Saint-Arnaud to pronounce in amazement, once it was discovered what the noise was from, ‘What a parody of Moscow 1812.’³⁵

With the harbour blocked and no possibility of back-up from their ships, the allied commanders decided that it was too dangerous to attack Sevastopol from the north, so they now committed themselves to attack the city from the southern side, where their ships could use the harbours of Balaklava (for the British) and Kamiesh (for the French) to support their armies. The change of plan was a fatal error of judgement – and not just because the city’s defences were in fact stronger on the southern side. Moving south of Sevastopol made it harder for the allied armies to block the Russian supply route from the mainland, which had been a crucial element of the strategic plan. If the city had been taken quickly, this would not have been a major problem; but once the allied commanders had ruled out a coup de main, they fell into the trap of conventional military thinking about how to besiege a town, ideas going back to the seventeenth century that involved the slow and methodical process of digging trenches towards the town’s defences so that it could be bombarded by artillery before an assault by troops. The French favoured the idea of a longer siege, and they brought the British round to their traditional way of thinking. It seemed less risky than a quick storming. Burgoyne, the chief engineer, who had been in favour of a quick attack, changed his mind on the absurd grounds that it would cost 500 lives to seize Sevastopol in a lightning strike, losses that were ‘utterly unjustifiable’ in his opinion, even though the allies had already suffered 3,600 casualties at the Alma (and were to lose tens of thousands in the siege).³⁶

On 23 September the march south recommenced. For two days the allied troops proceeded across the fertile valley of the Kacha and Belbek rivers, helping themselves to the grapes, peaches, pears and soft fruits ripening in the deserted farms. Exhausted and battle-weary, many soldiers collapsed from dehydration, and all along the way the columns had to stop to bury victims of the cholera. Then the armies began their flanking march around Sevastopol, winding their way through the thick oak forests of the Inkerman Heights until they reached the clearing at Mackenzie’s Farm, named after an eighteenth-century Scottish settler. At this point the advance party of British cavalry crossed paths with Menshikov’s rearguard troops heading north-east towards Bakhchiserai. Captain Louis Nolan of the 15th King’s Hussars, who was in the vanguard with Lord Raglan’s staff, felt this was an opportunity for the cavalry to deal a heavy blow to the Russians. Since the landing in the Crimea, Nolan had become increasingly frustrated with the failure of the British commanders to unleash the cavalry – first at the Bulganak and then at the Alma – against the Russian forces in retreat. So when an attack on the Russian tail- and rearguard by the Hussars was halted by Lord Lucan, Nolan was beside himself with rage. In his campaign journal, he described looking down from the Mackenzie Heights as the Russians got away:

The guns which had escaped were tearing along the road below with some of the few carriages of the convoy which had managed to escape. Disbanded infantry were running down the sides of the steep descent without arms, without helmets, whilst a few shots from our guns hastened them along towards a Russian Army formed in dense columns below. Two regiments of our cavalry moved along the road down the valley for some distance picking up carts and horses of which we captured 22 in all, amongst them General Gorchakov’s travelling carriage with two fine black horses.³⁷

The allied columns became increasingly stretched out, as the exhausted stragglers fell behind or lost their way in the dense forests. Discipline broke down and many of the troops, like the Cossacks before them, began to pillage from abandoned farms and estates in the vicinity of Sevastopol. The Bibikovs’ palace was vandalized and looted by French troops, who helped themselves to the champagne and burgundy from their extensive cellars and went on a rampage, throwing furniture out of the windows, smashing windows and defecating on the floors. Marshal Saint-Arnaud, who was on the scene, did nothing to prevent the pillaging, which he saw as a reward for his exhausted troops. He even accepted a small pedestal table as a gift from his troops, which he had sent to his wife in Constantinople. Some of the Zouaves (who had a tradition of theatricals) got dressed up in women’s clothes from the Princess’s boudoir and put on a pantomime. Others found a grand piano and began playing waltzes for the troops to dance. The owners of the palace had left it only a few hours before the arrival of the French troops, as one of their officers recalled:

I went into a small boudoir … . Fresh cut flowers were still in vases on the mantelpiece; on a round table there were some copies of [the French magazine] Illustration, a writing box, some pens and paper, and an uncompleted letter. The letter was written by a young girl to her fiancé who had fought at the Alma; she spoke to him of victory, success, with that confidence that was in every heart, especially in the hearts of young girls. Cruel reality had stopped all that – letters, illusions, hopes.³⁸

As the allied armies marched south towards Sevastopol, panic spread among the Russian population of the Crimea. News of the defeat at the Alma was a devastating blow to morale, puncturing the myth of Russia’s military invincibility, especially against the French, dating back to 1812. In Simferopol, the administrative capital of the Crimea, there was so much panic that Vladimir Pestel’, its governor-general, ordered the evacuation of the town. The Russians packed their belongings onto carts and rode out of the town towards Perekop, hoping to reach the Russian mainland before it was cut off by the allied troops. Declaring himself to be ill, Pestel’ was the first to leave. Since the panic started he had not appeared in public or taken any measures to prevent disorder. He had even failed to stop the Tatars of the town shipping military supplies from Russian stores to the allies. Accompanied by his gendarmes and a long retinue of officials, Pestel’ rode out of the town through a large crowd of Tatars jeering and shouting at his carriage: ‘See how the giaour^acruns! Our deliverers are at hand!’³⁹

Since the arrival of the allied armies, the Tatar population of the Crimea had grown in confidence. Before the landings, the Tatars had been careful to declare their allegiance to the Tsar. From the start of the fighting on the Danubian front, the Russian authorities in the Crimea had placed the Tatars under increased surveillance, and Cossacks had policed the countryside with ferocious vigilance. But once the allies had landed in the Crimea, the Tatars rallied to their side – in particular the younger Tatar men, who were less cowed by years of Russian rule. They saw the invasion as a liberation, and recognized the Turks as soldiers of their caliph, to whom they prayed in their mosques. Thousands of Tatars left their villages and came to Evpatoria to greet the allied armies and declare their allegiance to the new ‘Turkish government’ which they believed had been established there. The invading armies had quickly replaced the Russian governor of Evpatoria with Topal Umer Pasha, a Tatar merchant from the town. They had also brought with them Mussad Giray, a descendant of the ancient ruling dynasty of the Crimean khanate, who called on the Tatars of the Crimea to support the invasion.^ad

Thinking they would be rewarded, the Tatars brought in cattle, horses and carts to put at the disposal of the allied troops. Some worked as spies or scouts for the allies. Others joined the Tatar bands that rode around the countryside threatening the Russian landowners with the burning of their houses and sometimes even death if they did not give up all their livestock, food and horses to them for the ‘Turkish government’. Armed with sabres, the Tatar rebels wore their sheepskin hats inside out to symbolize the overthrow of Russian power in the Crimea. ‘The entire Christian population of the peninsula lives in fear of the Tatar bands,’ reported Innokenty, the Orthodox Archbishop of the Kherson-Tauride diocese. One Russian landowner, who was robbed on his estate, thought the horsemen had been stirred up by their mullahs to wreak revenge against the Christians in the belief that Muslim rule would now return. It was certainly the case that in some areas the rebels carried out atrocities against not just Russians but Armenians and Greeks, destroying churches and even killing priests. The Russian authorities played on these religious fears to rally support behind the Tsar’s armies. Touring the Crimea during September, Innokenty declared the invasion a ‘religious war’ and said that Russia had a ‘great and holy calling to protect the Orthodox faith against the Muslim yoke’.⁴⁰

On 26 September the allied armies reached the village of Kadikoi, from which they could see the southern coast. That same day, Saint-Arnaud surrendered to his illness and gave up his command to Canrobert. A steamer took the marshal off to Constantinople but he died of a heart attack on the way, so the same boat took his body back to France. It also brought the false news that the siege of Sevastopol had begun, prompting Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris, to inform London that the allied armies ‘would probably be in possession of the place’ in a few days.⁴¹

In fact, the allies were still three weeks away from the beginning of the siege. With the chill of the Russian winter already in the air, they were slowly setting up their camp on the plateau overlooking Sevastopol from the southern side. For a few days, both the armies were supplied through Balaklava, a narrow inlet hardly noticeable from the sea except for the ruins of the ancient Genoese fort on the cliff top.^ae But it very soon became apparent that the harbour was too small for all the sailing ships to enter it. So the French moved their base to Kamiesh Bay, which was in fact superior to Balaklava as a supply base, since it was much bigger and closer to the French camp at Khersonesos – the place where the Grand Prince Vladimir had converted Kievan Rus’ to Christianity.

On 1 October Captain Herbé walked onto the heights with a small group of French officers to take a closer look at Sevastopol, just 2 kilometres away. With their field glasses, they could ‘see enough of this famous town to satisfy their curiosity’, as Herbé wrote to his parents the next day:

Down below one could make out the fortification works on which a large quantity of men appeared to be labouring with their picks and spades; you could even make out a few women in amongst the groups of labourers. In the port, I could perfectly distinguish, with the aid of my long-viewer, some men-of-war, of a sombre appearance, with white sails on their sides, black gangways, and guns sticking out from the embrasures. If it should please the Russians to mount all these guns on their fortifications, we can expect a jolly symphony!⁴²