The Crimean War

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 Francois 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 Molenes 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