The Crimean War

Then came the fire at Varna. It began in the evening of 10 August in the old trading quarters of the town and spread quickly to the neighbouring port, where the supplies of the allied armies were waiting to be loaded onto ships. The fire had almost certainly been started by Greek and Bulgarian arsonists sympathetic to the Russian cause (several men were apprehended with lucifer matches in the area where the fire had begun). Half the town was engulfed in flames by the time the French and British troops arrived with water pumps. Shops and wharfs loaded up with crates of rum and wine exploded in the flames, and alcoholic rivers ran through the streets, where firefighters gorged themselves from the gutters. By the time the fire was contained, the supply base of the allied armies was severely damaged. ‘Varna housed all the munitions, all the supplies and provisions needed by an army on campaign,’ Herbe wrote to his parents on 16 August. ‘The powder magazines of the French, the English and the Turks were at the centre of the conflagration. Much of the town disappeared, and with it the hopes of the soldiers encamped on the plain.’³⁸

After the fire, there were only enough supplies in the town to feed the allied armies for eight days. It was clear that the soldiers needed to get out of the Varna area before they were totally destroyed by cholera and starvation.

With the Russians forced to retreat from the Danube, the British and the French could have gone home, claiming victory against Russia. It would have been feasible to end the war at this stage. The Austrians and the Turks could have occupied the principalities as a peacekeeping force (by mid-August they had drawn up separate zones of occupation and agreed to share control of Bucharest), while the Western powers could have used the threat of intervention to make the Russians promise not to invade Turkish soil again. So why did the allies not pursue a peace once the Russians had left the principalities? Why did they decide to invade Russia when the war against the Russians had been won? Why was there a Crimean War at all?

The allied commanders were frustrated by the retreat of the Russians. Having brought their armies all this way, they felt they had been ‘robbed of victory’, as Saint-Arnaud put it, and wanted to achieve a military goal to justify the efforts they had made. In the six months that had passed since their mobilization the allied troops had barely used their weapons against the enemy. They were mocked by the Turks and ridiculed at home. ‘There they are,’ wrote Karl Marx in an editorial in the New York Times on 17 August, ‘eighty or ninety thousand English and French soldiers at Varna, commanded by old Wellington’s late military secretary and by a Marshal of France (whose greatest exploits, it is true, were performed in London pawnshops) – there they are, the French doing nothing and the British helping them as fast as they can.’³⁹

Back in London, the British cabinet also felt that forcing Russia out of the Danube area was not enough to justify the sacrifices made so far. Palmerston and his ‘war party’ were not prepared to negotiate a peace when the Russian armed forces remained intact. They wanted to inflict serious damage on Russia, to destroy her military capacity in the Black Sea, not just to secure Turkey but to end the Russian threat to British interests in the Near East. As the Duke of Newcastle, the gung-ho Secretary of State for War, had put it back in April, expelling the Russians from the principalities ‘without crippling their future means of aggression upon Turkey is not now an object worthy of the great efforts of England and France’.⁴⁰

But what would inflict serious damage? The cabinet had considered various options. They saw little point in pursuing the Russians into Bessarabia, where the allied troops would be exposed to the cholera, while the French proposal of a Continental war for the liberation of Poland was bound to be obstructed by the Austrians, even if (and it was a big ‘if’) the conservative members of the British cabinet could be persuaded of the virtues of a revolutionary war. Nor were they convinced that the naval campaign in the Baltic would bring Russia to its knees. Soon after the beginning of the campaign in the spring, Sir Charles Napier, the admiral in charge of the allied Baltic fleet, had come to the conclusion that it would be practically impossible to overcome the almost impregnable Russian defences at Kronstadt, the fortress naval base guarding St Petersburg, or even the weaker fortress at Sveaborg, just outside the harbour of Helsingfors (Helsinki), without new gunboats and mortar vessels capable of navigating the shallow reefs around these fortresses.^v For a while there was talk of mounting an attack against Russia in the Caucasus. A delegation of Circassian rebels visited the allies in Varna and promised to raise a Muslim war against Russia throughout the Caucasus if the allies sent their armies and their fleets. Omer Pasha supported this idea.⁴¹ But none of these plans were deemed as damaging to Russia as the loss of Sevastopol and its Black Sea Fleet would be. By the time the Russians had retreated from the principalities, the British cabinet had settled on the view that an invasion of the Crimea was the only obvious way to strike a decisive blow against Russia.

The Crimean plan had originally been advanced in December 1853, when, in reaction to Sinope, Graham had devised a naval strategy to knock out Sevastopol in one swift blow. ‘On this my heart is set,’ the First Lord of the Admiralty wrote; ‘the eye tooth of the Bear must be drawn: and ’til his fleet and naval arsenal in the Black Sea are destroyed there is no safety for Constantinople, no security for the peace of Europe.’⁴² Graham’s plan was never formally placed before the cabinet, but it was accepted as the basis of its strategy. And on 29 June the Duke of Newcastle transmitted to Raglan the cabinet instructions for an invasion of the Crimea. His dispatch was emphatic: the expedition was to start as soon as possible and ‘nothing but insuperable impediments’ should delay the siege of Sevastopol and the destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, although some secondary attacks against the Russians in the Caucasus might also be necessary. The language of the dispatch left Raglan with the impression that there was no disagreement in the cabinet, and no alternative to an invasion of the Crimea.⁴³ But in fact there were conflicting views on the practicality of the Crimean plan, and its acceptance was a compromise between those in the cabinet, like Aberdeen, who wanted a more limited campaign to restore Turkish sovereignty and those, like Palmerston, who saw the expedition to the Crimea as an opportunity to launch a broader war against Russia. By this time, the British press was piling pressure on the cabinet to strike a mortal blow against Russia, and the destruction of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol had become the symbolic victory that the warlike public sought. The idea of desisting from the invasion of the Crimea merely on the grounds that, with the retreat of the Russians from the Danube, it had become unnecessary was practically unthinkable.

‘The main and real object of the war’, Palmerston admitted in 1855, ‘was to curb the aggressive ambition of Russia. We went to war not so much to keep the Sultan and the Muslims in Turkey as to keep the Russians out of it.’ Palmerston envisaged the attack on the Crimea as the first stage of a long-term crusade against tsarist power in the Black Sea region and the Caucasus, Poland and the Baltic, in line with his memorandum to the cabinet on 19 March, in which he had outlined his ambitious plan for the dismemberment of the Russian Empire. By the end of August he had won considerable support within the cabinet for this enlarged war. He also had an unofficial agreement with Drouyn de Lhuys, the French Foreign Minister, that ‘small results’ would not be enough to compensate for the inevitable human losses of the war, and that only ‘great territorial changes’ in the Danube region, the Caucasus, Poland and the Baltic could justify a campaign in the Crimea.⁴⁴

But as long as Aberdeen was Prime Minister it was impossible for Palmerston to get such plans accepted as allied policy. The Four Points agreed by the Western powers with the Austrians after several months of negotiation on 8 August laid out more limited objectives. Peace could not be agreed between Russia and the allied powers unless:

1. Russia renounced any special rights in Serbia and the Danubian principalities, whose protection would be guaranteed by the European powers with the Porte;

2. the navigation of the Danube was free to all commerce;

3. the Straits Convention of 1841 was revised ‘in the interests of the Balance of Power in Europe’ (ending Russian naval domination of the Black Sea);

4. the Russians abandoned their claim to a protectorate over the Christian subjects of