Christian. If the Wallachians cannot understand that, because they are too much influenced by Europe, and given over to false beliefs, the Tsar nonetheless cannot renounce the mission that God has given him as the leader of the Orthodox, to remove for ever from the sovereignty of the Ottomans those who profess the true Christian faith, that is to say the Greek. That thought has preoccupied the Tsar since the beginning of his glorious reign, and the moment has arrived when His Majesty will carry out the project he has planned for many years, whatever may be the intentions of the powerless European states in the hold of false beliefs. The time will come when the rebellious Wallachians, who have incurred the wrath of His Majesty, will pay dearly for their disloyalty.
On 26 July the proclamation was read out to the assembled boyars in Bucharest by Gorchakov, who added his own parting words: ‘Gentlemen, we are leaving Bucharest for the moment, but I hope to return soon – remember 1812.’32
News of the withdrawal was a huge shock to the Slavophiles in Moscow and St Petersburg who had seen the Russian advance into the Balkans as a war of liberation for the Slavs. They now became despondent at what they saw as the abandonment of their ideals. Konstantin Aksakov had dreamed of a Slavic federation under Russian leadership. He thought the war would end with the planting of a cross on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. But the retreat from the Danube filled him ‘with feelings of disgust and shame’, as he wrote to his brother Ivan to explain:
It feels as if we are retreating from our Orthodox belief. If this is because we distrust, or because we are withdrawing from a holy war, then since the foundation of Russia there has never been such a shameful moment in our history – we have defeated enemies but not our own fear. And now what! … We are retreating from Bulgaria, but what will happen to the poor Bulgarians, to the crosses on the churches of Bulgaria? … Russia! If you leave God then God will leave you! You have renounced the holy mission with which He entrusted you to defend the holy faith and deliver your suffering brothers, and now God’s wrath will come to you, Russia!
Like many Slavophiles, the Aksakovs blamed the decision to retreat on Nesselrode, the ‘German’ Foreign Minister, who was now denounced in nationalist circles as a traitor to Russia and an ‘Austrian agent’. With the pan-Slav leader Pogodin, they mounted a campaign in the salons of St Petersburg and Moscow to persuade the Tsar to reverse the retreat and fight alone against the Austrians and the Western powers. They rejoiced in the fact that Russia would be fighting on its own against Europe, believing that a holy war for the Slavs’ liberation from Western influence would be the fulfilment of Russia’s messianic role.33
As the Russians withdrew from Wallachia, the Austrians moved in to restore order in the principality. An Austrian contingent of 12,000 troops under General Coronini pushed on as far as Bucharest, where they clashed with the Turks, who had already occupied the city following the retreat of the Russians. Omer Pasha, who had pronounced himself the ‘Governor of the Reoccupied Principalities’, refused to relinquish Bucharest to the Austrian commander. As a former Austrian subject who had joined the Turks, he could hardly be expected to hand over his hard-earned conquests to a courtier such as Coronini, who had been the personal tutor of the Emperor and stood for everything in the Habsburg world that Omer Pasha had rejected when he crossed over to the Ottomans. The Turkish commander was supported by the British and the French. Having spent so long attempting to involve the Austrians in the principalities, the allies now regarded the Austrian intervention as something of a mixed blessing. They were pleased that the Austrians had helped to liberate the principalities from Russian control, but they also suspected them of intending a long-term occupation of the principalities, either in the hope of substituting their own rule for the political vacuum left by the departure of the Russian troops, or in the belief that they might impose their own solution to the Russo-Turkish conflict at the expense of the West. Their suspicions were increased when the Austrians prevented Omer Pasha’s forces from pursuing the Russians into Bessarabia (the preferred tactics of Napoleon III); and even further when they reinstalled in power the Russian-nominated hospodars in a move evidently intended to smooth the ruffled feathers of the Tsar. To the British and the French, it seemed obvious that the Austrians had come to the rescue of the Danubian principalities, not as gendarmes of the European Concert, nor as champions of Turkish sovereignty, but with political motives of their own.34
It was partly to counteract the Austrian threat, and partly to secure the Black Sea coastline for an attack on southern Russia and the Crimea, that the French sent an expeditionary force into the Dobrudja region of the Danube delta in late July. The force was made up of Bashi Bazouk irregulars (called the Spahis d’Orient by the French) under the command of General Yusuf as well as infantry from the 1st (General Canrobert’s), 2nd (General Bosquet’s) and 3rd (Prince Napoleon’s) Divisions. Captured as the 6-year-old Giuseppe Vantini in Elba in 1815 by the Barbary corsairs and brought up in the palace of the Bey of Tunis, Yusuf was the founder and commander of the Spahi cavalry employed by the French in their conquest of Algeria. His success there made him the ideal candidate to organize the Bashi Bazouks under French command. By 22 July he had assembled at Varna a cavalry brigade of 4,000 Bashi Bazouks given to the French by the Ottomans, along with various other detachments of irregulars, including a Kurdish band of horsemen commanded by Fatima Khanum. Known as the Virgin of Kurdistan, the 70- year-old Khanum led her tribal followers, armed with swords and knives and pistols, under the green banner of a Muslim war. Yusuf too appealed to the idea of a jihad to motivate his men against the Russians and give them something to fight for other than the prospect of plunder, their traditional incentive, which the French were determined to stamp out. ‘We have come to save the Sultan, our caliph,’ a group of Bashi Bazouks told Louis Noir, whose Zouave brigade joined Yusuf’s force on its march north from Varna; ‘if we die fighting for him without payment, we will go directly to heaven; if we were paid to fight, none of us would have a right to paradise, for we would have received our recompense on earth.’35
But not even the promise of paradise could ensure the discipline of Yusuf’s cavalry. As soon as they were ordered to set off from Varna, the Bashi Bazouks began to desert, claiming they would not fight for foreign officers (Yusuf spoke a Tunisian Arabic which the Syrians, Turks and Kurds under his command could not understand). An advance squadron of cavalry ran away en masse on their first sighting of the Cossacks near Tulcea, leaving the French officers to fight them on their own (they were all killed). On the 28th, Yusuf’s troops beat the Cossacks and forced them to retreat, but then they lost all discipline, plundering the villages, killing Christians and bringing their heads back to General Yusuf, in the hope of a reward (the Turkish army customarily paid a bounty for the heads of infidels, including civilians, defeated in a holy war). Some men even murdered Christian women and children, cutting their bodies into pieces also in exchange for a reward.36
The next day, the first of Yusuf’s troops succumbed to cholera. The marshes and lakes of the Danube delta were infested with disease. The death toll was alarming. Dehydrated by the disease and by days of marching in the scorching heat, men fell down and died beside the road. Yusuf’s force disintegrated rapidly, as soldiers fled to escape the cholera or lay down in the shelter of a tree to die. Yusuf ordered a retreat to Varna, and the remnants of his force, some 1,500 men, arrived there on 7 August.
They found cholera at Varna, too. They would have found it anywhere, for the whole of south-east Europe was struck by cholera in the summer of 1854. The French camp was infected first, followed shortly after by the British. A hot wind blew in from the land, covering the campsites with a white limestone powder and a blanket of dead flies. Men began to suffer from nausea and diarrhoea, and then lay down in their tents to die. Ignorant of the causes, soldiers went on drinking water in the summer heat, though some, like the Zouaves, who had come across the disease in Algeria, knew to stick to wine or to boil the water for coffee (of which the French drank enormous quantities). Cholera epidemics were a regular occurrence in London and other British cities in the 1830s and 1840s, but it was not until the 1880s that the link to sanitation was really understood. A London doctor by the name of John Snow had discovered that boiling drinking water could prevent cholera, but his findings were generally ignored. Instead, the disease was put down to miasmas from the lakes around Varna, excessive drinking, or the consumption of soft fruit. The elementary rules of sanitation were disregarded by the military authorities: latrines were allowed to overflow; carcasses were left to putrefy in the sun. The sick were carted off to a rat-infested barrack in Varna, where they were cared for by exhausted orderlies, who were joined in August by a small group of French nuns. The dead were wrapped in blankets and buried in mass graves (which were later dug up by the Turks to steal the blankets). By the second week of August, 500 British troops had died of the disease, and deaths among the French were spiralling to a rate of more than sixty every day.37
