frustration, as his plans for a surprise attack on Sevastopol were undermined by the delay. ‘The English have the unpleasant habit of always being late,’ he wrote to the Emperor.9
It took five days for the British troops and cavalry to disembark. Many of the men were sick with cholera and had to be carried off the boats. There were no facilities for moving baggage and equipment overland, so parties had to be sent out to collect carts and wagons from the local Tatar farms. There was no food or water for the men, except the three days’ rations they had been given at Varna, and no tents or kitbags were offloaded from the ships, so the soldiers spent their first nights without shelter, unprotected from the heavy rain or the blistering heat of the next days. ‘We brought nothing on shore with us excepting our blankets and great coats,’ George Lawson, an army surgeon, wrote home to his family. ‘We suffer dreadfully from want of water. The first day was very hot; we had nothing to drink but water drained out of puddles from the previous night’s rain; and even now the water is so thick that, if put into a glass, you cannot see the bottom of it at all.’10
At last, on 19 September, the British were prepared and, at day-break, the advance on Sevastopol began. The French marched on the right, nearest the sea, their blue uniforms contrasting with the scarlet tunics of the British, while the fleet moved south alongside them as they advanced. Six and a half kilometres wide and just under 5 kilometres long, the advancing column was ‘all bustle and activity’, wrote Frederick Oliver, bandmaster of the 20th Regiment, in his diary. Apart from the compact lines of soldiers, there was an enormous train of ‘cavalry, guns, ammunition, horses, bullocks, pack-horses, mules, herds of dromedaries, a drove of oxen, and a tremendous drove of sheep, goats and bullocks, all of which had been taken from the surrounding countryside by the foraging parties’. By midday, with the sun beating down, the column began to break up, as thirsty soldiers fell behind or left to search for water in the nearby Tatar settlements. When they reached the River Bulganak, 12 kilometres from Kalamita Bay, in the middle of the afternoon, discipline broke down altogether, as the British soldiers threw themselves into the ‘muddy stream’.11
Ahead of them, on the slopes rising south from the river, the British got their first sight of the Russians – 2,000 Cossack cavalry who opened fire on a scouting party from the 13th Light Dragoons. The rest of the Light Brigade, the pride of the British cavalry, prepared to charge the Cossacks, who outnumbered them by two to one, but Raglan saw that behind the Russian horsemen there was a sizeable infantry force that could not be seen by his cavalry commanders, Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan, who were further down the hill. Raglan ordered a retreat, and the Light Brigade withdrew, while the Cossacks jeered and shot at them, wounding several cavalrymen,x before themselves retreating to the River Alma, further south, where the Russians had prepared their positions on the heights. The incident was a humiliation for the Light Brigade, which had been forced to back down from a fight with the ragged-looking Cossacks in full view of the British infantry, men from poor and labouring families, who took malicious pleasure from the embarrassment of the elegantly tailored and comfortably mounted cavalry. ‘Serve them bloody right, silly peacock bastards,’ wrote one private in a letter home.12
The British bivouacked on the southern slopes of the Bulganak, from which they could make out the Russian troops amassed on the Alma Heights, 5 kilometres away. The next morning they would march down the valley and engage the Russians, whose defences were on the other side of the Alma.
Menshikov had decided to commit the majority of his land forces to the defence of the Alma Heights, the last natural barrier on the enemy’s approach to Sevastopol, which his troops had occupied since 15 September, but his fears of a second allied landing at Kerch or Theodosia (fears which the Tsar shared) led him to keep back a large reserve. Thus there were 35,000 Russian soldiers on the Alma Heights – less than the 60,000 Western troops but with the crucial advantage of the hills – and more than 100 guns. The heaviest guns were deployed on a series of redoubts above the road to Sevastopol that crossed the river 4 kilometres inland, but there were none on the cliffs facing the sea, which Menshikov assumed were too steep for the enemy to climb. The Russians had made themselves at home, pillaging the nearby village of Burliuk after forcing the Tatars out, and carrying off bedding, doors, planks of wood and tree branches up onto the heights, where they constructed makeshift cabins for themselves and gorged on grapes from the abandoned farms. They stuffed the village houses with hay and straw in preparation for burning them when the enemy advanced. The Russian commanders were confident of holding their positions for at least a week – Menshikov had written to the Tsar promising that he could hold the heights for six times as long – winning precious time for the defences of Sevastopol to be strengthened and shifting the campaign on towards winter, the Russians’ greatest weapon against the invading army. Many officers were sure of victory. They joked about the British being only good for fighting ‘savages’ in their colonies, drank toasts to the memory of 1812 and talked of driving the French back into the sea. Menshikov was so confident that he invited parties of Sevastopol ladies to watch the battle with him from the Alma Heights.13
The Russian troops themselves were not so confident. Ferdinand Pflug, a German doctor in the tsarist army, thought that ‘each one seemed convinced that the next day’s battle would end in defeat’.14 Few if any of these men had ever engaged in a battle with the army of a major European power. The sight of the mighty allied fleet anchored just off shore and ready to support the enemy’s land forces with its heavy guns made it clear to them that they were going to fight an army stronger than their own. While most of their senior commanders could hark back to their memories of battle in the wars against Napoleon, the younger men, who would do the actual fighting, had no such experience on which to draw.
Like all soldiers on the eve of a big battle, they tried to hide their fear from their comrades. As the heat of the day gave way to a cold night, the men of both the armies prepared themselves for the next morning: for many of the men these would be their last hours. They lit fires, cooked their dinners and waited. Most of the soldiers ate little. Some went through the ritual of cleaning their muskets. Others wrote letters to their families. Many of them prayed. The next day was a religious holiday in the Orthodox calendar, the date on which the Russians marked the birth of the Blessed Virgin, and services were held to pray for her protection. Groups of soldiers sat around the fires, talking late into the night, the older ones recounting tales of past battles to the younger men. They drank and smoked, and told jokes, trying to seem calm. Now and then the sound of men singing would drift across the plain. From the Sevastopol Road, where Menshikov had set up his tent, the band and choir of the Tarutinsky Regiment could be heard – their deep bass voices rendering the lines of a song composed by General Gorchakov:
He alone is worthy of life
Who is always ready to die;
The Russian Orthodox warrior
Strikes his foes without thinking twice.
The French, the English – what of them?
So what about the stupid Turkish lines?
Come out, you infidels,
We challenge you to fight!
We challenge you to fight!
Gradually, as the dark sky filled with stars, the fires died down and the hum of talking became quieter. The men lay down and tried to sleep, though few did, and an eerie silence settled over the valley, broken only by the barking of hungry dogs roaming the deserted village.15
At three o’clock in the morning, Chodasiewicz could not sleep. It was still dark. In the Russian camp the soldiers ‘were collected around the huge fires they had kindled with the plunder of the village of Burliuk’.
After a short time I went up the hill (for our battalion was stationed in a ravine) to take a peep at the bivouac of the allied armies. Little, however, was to be seen but the fires, and now and then a dark shadow as someone moved past them. All was still and had little appearance of the coming strife. These were both armies lying, as it were, side by side. How many, or who, would be sent to their last account, it would be impossible to say. The question involuntarily thrust itself upon me, should I be one of that number? 16
By four o’clock the French camp was stirring. The men prepared their coffee and joked about the beating they were going to give to the Russians, and then the order came for them to put on their kitbags and fall into line to listen to the orders of their officers. ‘By thunder!’ the captain of the 22nd Regiment addressed his men. ‘Are we Frenchmen or not? The 22nd will earn distinction for itself today, or you are all scoundrels. If any one of you lags behind today, I will run my sabre through his guts. Line up to the Right!’ In the Russian camp the men were also up with the first light and listening to speeches from their commanders: ‘Now,
