Under growing pressure from the Tsar to seize Silistria, Paskevich ordered more than twenty infantry assaults between 20 May and 5 June, but still the breakthrough did not come. ‘The Turks fight like devils,’ reported one artillery captain on 30 May. Small groups of men would scale the ramparts of the forts, only to be repulsed by the defenders in hand-to-hand fighting. On 9 June there was a major battle outside the main fortress walls, after a large-scale Russian assault had been beaten back and the Turkish forces followed up with a sortie against the Russian positions. By the end of the fighting there were 2,000 Russians lying dead on the battlefield. The next day, Butler noted,
numbers of the townspeople went out and cut off the heads of the slain and brought them in as trophies for which they hoped to get a reward, but the savages were not allowed to bring them within the gates. A heap of them however were left for a long time unburied just outside the gate. While we were sitting with Musa Pasha, a ruffian came out and threw at his feet a pair of ears, which he had cut from a Russian soldier; another boasted to us that a Russian officer had begged him for mercy in the name of the Prophet, but that he had drawn his knife and in cold blood had cut his throat.
The unburied Russians lay on the ground for several days, until the townspeople had stripped them of everything. Albanian irregulars also took part in the mutilation and looting of the dead. Butler saw them a few days later. It was ‘a disgusting sight’, he wrote. ‘The smell was already becoming very offensive. Those who were in the ditch had all been stripped and were lying in various attitudes, some headless trunks, others with throats half out, arms extended in the air or pointing upwards as they fell.’12
Tolstoy arrived at Silistria on the day of this battle. He had been transferred there as an ordnance officer with the staff of General Serzhputovsky, which set up its headquarters in the gardens of Musa Pasha’s hilltop residence. Tolstoy enjoyed the spectacle of battle from this safe vantage point. He described it in a letter to his aunt:
Not to mention the Danube, its islands and its banks, some occupied by us, others by the Turks, you could see the town, the fortress and the little forts of Silistria as though on the palm of your hand. You could hear the cannon-fire and rifle shots which continued day and night, and with a field-glass you could make out the Turkish soldiers. It’s true it’s a funny sort of pleasure to see people killing each other, and yet every morning and evening I would get up on to my cart and spend hours at a time watching, and I wasn’t the only one. The spectacle was truly beautiful, especially at night … At night our soldiers usually set about trench work and the Turks threw themselves upon them to stop them; then you should have seen and heard the rifle-fire. The first night … . I amused myself, watch in hand, counting the cannon shots that I heard, and I counted 100 explosions in the space of a minute. And yet, from near by, all this wasn’t at all as frightening as might be supposed. At night, when you could see nothing, it was a question of who would burn the most powder, and at the very most 30 men were killed on both sides by these thousands of cannon shots.13
Paskevich claimed that he had been hit by a shell fragment during the fighting on 10 June (in fact he was unwounded) and gave up the command to General Gorchakov. Relieved no longer to be burdened with responsibility for an offensive he had come to oppose, he rode off in his carriage back across the Danube to Iai.
On 14 June the Tsar received news that Austria was mobilizing its army and might join the war against Russia by July. He also had to contend with the possibility that at any moment the British and the French might arrive to relieve Silistria. He knew that time was running out but ordered one last assault on the fortress town, which Gorchakov prepared for the early hours of 22 June.14
By this time the British and the French were assembling their armies in the Varna area. They had begun to land their forces at Gallipoli at the beginning of April, their intention being to protect Constantinople from possible attack by the Russians. But it soon became apparent that the area was unable to support such a large army, so after a few weeks of foraging for scarce supplies, the allied troops moved on to set up other camps in the vicinity of the Turkish capital, before relocating well to the north at the port of Varna, where they could be supplied by the French and British fleets.
The two armies set up adjacent camps on the plains above the old fortified port – and eyed each other warily. They were uneasy allies. There was so much in their recent history to make them suspicious. Famously, Lord Raglan, the near-geriatric commander-in-chief of the British army, who had served as the Duke of Wellington’s military secretary during the Peninsular War of 1808–14 and had lost an arm at Waterloo,s would on occasion refer to the French rather than the Russians as the enemy.
Lord Raglan
From the start there had been disputes over strategy – the British favouring the landing at Gallipoli followed by a cautious advance into the interior, whereas the French had wanted a landing at Varna to forestall the Russian advance towards Constantinople. The French had also sensibly suggested that the British should control the sea campaign, where they were superior, while they should take command of the land campaign, where they could apply the lessons of their war of conquest in Algeria. But the British had shuddered at the thought of taking orders from the French. They mistrusted Marshal Saint-Arnaud, the Bonapartist commander of the French forces, whose notorious speculations on the Bourse had led many in Britain’s ruling circles to suppose that he would put his own selfish interests before the allied cause (Prince Albert thought that he was even capable of accepting bribes from the Russians). Such ideas filtered down to the officers and men. ‘I hate the French,’ wrote Captain Nigel Kingscote, who like most of Raglan’s aides-de-camp was also one of his nephews. ‘All Saint-Arnaud’s staff, with one or two exceptions, are just like monkeys, girthed up as tight as they can be and sticking out above and below like balloons.’15
The French took a dim view of their British allies. ‘Visiting the English camp makes me proud to be a Frenchman,’ wrote Captain Jean-Jules Herbe to his parents from Varna.
The British soldiers are enthusiastic, strong and well-built men. I admire their elegant uniforms, which are all new, their fine comportment, the precision and regularity of their manoeuvres, and the beauty of their horses, but their great weakness is that they are used to comfort far too much; it will be difficult to satisfy their numerous demands when we get on the march.16
Louis Noir, a soldier in the first battalion of Zouaves, the elite infantry established during the Algerian War,t recalled his miserable impression of the British troops at Varna. He was particularly shocked by the floggings that were often given by their officers for indiscipline and drunkenness – both common problems among the British troops – which reminded him of the old feudal system that had disappeared in France:
The English recruiters seemed to have brought out the dregs of their society, the lower classes being more susceptible to their offers of money. If the sons of the better-off had been conscripted, the beatings given to the English soldiers by their officers would have been outlawed by the military penal code. The sight of these corporal punishments disgusted us, reminding us that the Revolution of [17]89 abolished flogging in the army when it established universal conscription … . The French army is made up of a special class of citizens subject to the military laws, which are severe but applied equally to all the ranks. In England, the soldier is really just a serf – he is no more than the property of the government. It drives him on by two contradictory impulses. The first is the stick. The second is material well-being. The English have a developed instinct for comfort; to live well in a comfortable tent with a nice big side of roast-beef, a flagon of red wine and a plentiful supply of rum – that is the
The French army was superior to the British in many ways. Its schools for officers had produced a whole new class of military professionals, who were technically more advanced, tactically superior and socially far closer to their men than the aristocratic officers of the British army. Armed with the advanced Minie rifle, which could fire rapidly with lethal accuracy up to 1,600 metres, the French infantry was celebrated for its attacking elan. The Zouaves, in particular, were masters of the fast attack and tactical retreat, a type of fighting they had developed in Algeria, and their courage was an inspiration to the rest of the French infantry, who invariably followed them into battle. The Zouaves were seasoned campaigners, experienced in fighting in the most difficult and mountainous terrain, and united by strong bonds of comradeship,
