The Crimean War

advocated the march on Silistria, he was worried by the build-up of Austrian troops on the Serbian frontier. With the British and the French expected to land on the coast at any moment, with the Turks holding their line in the south, and the Austrians mobilizing in the west, the Russians were in serious danger of being surrounded by hostile armies in the principalities. Paskevich urged the Tsar to order a retreat. He delayed the offensive against Silistria, in defiance of the Tsar’s command to push ahead as fast as possible, for fear that an attack by the Austrians should find him without sufficient reserves.

Paskevich was right to be anxious about the Austrians, who were alarmed by the growing Russian threat to Serbia. They had mobilized their troops on the Serb frontier in readiness to put down any Serb uprisings in favour of the Russians and oppose Russian forces approaching Habsburg-controlled Serb lands from the east. Throughout the spring, the Austrians demanded a Russian withdrawal from the principalities, threatening to join the Western powers if the Tsar did not comply. The British were equally concerned by Russia’s influence on Serbia. According to their consul in Belgrade, the Serbs were being ‘taught to expect Russian troops in Serbia as soon as Silistria had fallen – and to join an expedition against the south-Slavonic provinces of Austria’. On Palmerston’s instructions, the consul warned the Serbs that Britain and France would oppose with military force any armament by Serbia in support of the Russians.⁹

Meanwhile, on 22 April, Easter Saturday in the Orthodox calendar, the Western fleets began their first direct attack on Russian soil by bombarding Odessa, the important Black Sea port. The British had received reports from captured merchant seamen that the Russians had collected 60,000 troops and large stockpiles of munitions at Odessa for transportation to the Danubian front (in fact the port had little military significance and only half a dozen batteries to defend itself against the allied fleets). They sent an ultimatum to the governor of the town, General Osten-Sacken, demanding the surrender of all his ships, and when there was no reply, began their bombardment with a fleet of nine steamers, six rocket boats and a frigate. The shelling continued for eleven hours, causing massive damage to the port, destroying several ships and killing dozens of civilians. It also hit Vorontsov’s neoclassical palace on the cliff top above the port, with one ball hitting the statue of the Duc de Richelieu, the first governor of Odessa, though ironically the building damaged most was the London Hotel on the Primorsky Boulevard.

During a second bombardment, on 12 May, one of the British ships, a steamer called the Tiger, ran hard aground in dense fog and was heavily shelled from the shore. Her crew was captured by a small platoon of Cossacks commanded by a young ensign called Shchegolov. The British attempted to burn their ship, while Odessa ladies with their parasols watched the action from the embankment, where bits of shipwreck, including boxes of English rum, were later washed ashore. The Cossacks marched off the British crew (24 officers and 201 men) and imprisoned them in the town, where they were subjected to humiliating taunts from Russian sailors and civilians, whose sense of outrage at the timing of the attack over the Easter period had been encouraged by their priests, though the captain of the ship, Henry Wells Giffard, who had been injured by shellfire and died of gangrene on 1 June, was given a full military burial in Odessa and, in an act of chivalry from a bygone age, a lock of his hair was sent to his widow in England. The cannon of the Tiger were displayed in Odessa as war trophies.^q

Priests declared the capture of the British steamer a symbol of divine revenge for the attack on Holy Saturday, which they pronounced had begun a religious war. The washed-up liquor was soon consumed by the Russian sailors and workers at the docks. There were drunken brawls, and several men were killed. Parts of the ship were later sold as souvenirs. The Cossack ensign Shchegolov became a popular hero overnight. He was commemorated almost as a saint. Bracelets and medallions were made with his image and sold as far away as Moscow and St Petersburg. There was even a new brand of cigarettes manufactured in Shchegolov’s name with his picture on the box.¹⁰

The bombardment of Odessa announced the arrival of the Western powers near the Danubian front. Now the question was how soon the British and the French would come to the aid of the Turks against the Russians at Silistria. Fearful that a continuation of the offensive towards Constantinople would end badly for Russia, Paskevich wanted to retreat. On 23 April he wrote to Menshikov, the newly appointed commander-in-chief of Russian forces in the Crimea:

Unfortunately we now find marshalled against us not only the maritime powers but also Austria, supported, so it appears, by Prussia. England will spare no money to bring Austria in on her side, for without the Germans they can do nothing against us … . If we are going to find all Europe ranged against us then we will not fight on the Danube.

Throughout the spring, Paskevich dragged his heels over the Tsar’s orders to lay siege to Silistria. By mid-April, 50,000 troops had occupied the Danubian islands opposite the town, but Paskevich delayed the commencement of the siege. Nicholas was furious with the lack of vigour his commander showed. Although he himself admitted that Austria might join Russia’s foes, Nicholas sent an angry note to Paskevich, urging him to begin the assault. ‘If the Austrians treacherously atttack us,’ he wrote on 29 April, ‘you have to engage them with 4 Corps and the dragoons; that will be quite enough for them! Not one word more, I have nothing more to add!’

It was only on 16 May, after three weeks of skirmishing had given them control of the high ground to the south-west of Silistria, that the Russians at last began their bombardment of the town, and even then Paskevich focused his attack on its outer defences, a semicircle of stone forts and earthworks several kilometres from the fortress of Silistria itself. Paskevich hoped to wear down the opposition of the Turks and allow his troops to assault the town without major losses. But the officers in charge of the siege operations knew this was to hope in vain. The Turks had used the months since the Porte’s declaration of war against Russia to build up their defences. The Turkish forts had been greatly strengthened by the Prussian Colonel Grach, an expert on entrenchments and mining, and they were relatively little damaged by the Russian guns, although the key redoubt, the earthworks known as the Arab Tabia, was so battered by the Russian shells and mines that it had to be rebuilt by the Turks several times during the siege. There were 18,000 troops in the Turkish forts, most of them Egyptians and Albanians, and they fought with a spirit of defiance that took the Russians by surprise. In the Arab Tabia the Ottoman forces were led by two experienced British artillery officers, Captain James Butler of the Ceylon Rifles and Lieutenant Charles Nasmyth of the Bombay Artillery. ‘It was impossible not to admire the cool indifference of the Turks to danger,’ Butler thought.

Three men were shot in the space of five minutes while throwing up earth for the new parapet, at which only two men could work at a time so as to be at all protected; and they were succeeded by the nearest bystander, who took the spade from the dying man’s hands and set to work as calmly as if he were going to cut a ditch by the road-side.

Realizing that the Russians needed to get closer to cause any damage to the forts, Paskevich ordered General Shil’der to begin elaborate engineering work, digging trenches to allow artillery to be brought up to the walls. The siege soon settled into a monotonous routine of dawn-to-dusk bombardment by the Russian batteries, supported by the guns of a river fleet. There had never been a time in the history of warfare when soldiers were subjected to so much constant danger for so long. But there was no sign of a breakthrough.¹¹

Butler kept a diary of the siege. He thought the power of the heavy Russian guns had ‘been much exaggerated’ and that the lighter Turkish artillery were more than a match for them, although everything was conducted by the Turks ‘in a slovenly manner’. Religion played an important role on the Turkish side, according to Butler. Every day, at morning prayers by the Stamboul Gate, the garrison commander Musa Pasha would call upon his soldiers to defend Silistria ‘as becomes the descendants of the Prophet’, to which ‘the men would reply with cries of “Praise Allah!”’^r There were no safe buildings in the town but the inhabitants had built caves where they took shelter during the day’s bombardment. The town ‘appeared deserted with only dogs and soldiers to be seen’. At sunset Butler watched the closing round of Russian shots come in from the fortress walls: ‘I saw several little urchins, about 9 or 10 years old, actually chasing the round shot as they ricocheted, as coolly as if they had been cricket balls; they were racing to see who would get them first, a reward of 20 peras being given by the Pasha for every cannon ball brought in.’ After dark, he could hear the Russians singing in their trenches, and ‘when they made a night of it, they even had a band playing polkas and waltzes’.