The Crimean War

incidents of British soldiers killing wounded Russians, and disturbing cases of the British shooting Russian prisoners because they were ‘troublesome’. It should also be remembered that the British walked among the Russian wounded, not only to give them water, but sometimes to steal from them. They took silver crosses from their necks, rooted through their kitbags for souvenirs, and helped themselves to what they fancied from the living and the dead. ‘I have got a beautiful trophy for you from the Alma, just one to suit you,’ wrote Hugh Drummond of the Scots Guards to his mother, ‘a large silver Greek cross with engravings on it – our Saviour and some Russian words; it came off a Russian Colonel’s neck we killed, and, poor fellow, it was next to his skin.’³²

If the allies had pushed on directly from the Alma, they would have taken Sevastopol by surprise. In all probability, they would have captured it in a few days, at relatively little cost in human lives compared to the many tens of thousands who were to die during the 349-day siege that followed from their errors and delays.

The Russian forces were in disarray, and Sevastopol virtually defenceless, on 21 September. To make matters worse, Menshikov decided that it was not worth committing any more of his demoralized troops to the defence of the city. Once he had gathered the remnants of his army at the Kacha, he set off on a march towards Bakhchiserai to prevent the allies from cutting off the Crimea at Perekop and to wait for reinforcements from the Russian mainland, leaving Sevastopol in the hands of just 5,000 troops and 10,000 sailors, who were completely untrained for this sort of war. The Russians had not thought that the allies would invade before the spring, and had not reinforced the defences of Sevastopol. The city’s northern fortifications had not been greatly improved since they were built in 1818.^aa The Star Fort’s walls were falling down from years of neglect and disrepair and not defended by sufficient guns to withstand a serious attack. On the southern side, Menshikov had ordered the construction of three new batteries in January 1854, but the defences there were in only slightly better shape. Facing the sea were extensive walls, armed with formidable batteries, and at the entrance to the harbour there were two well-armed fortresses, the Quarantine Battery and the Alexander Fort, which taken all together were enough to nullify the gunpower of the allied fleet. But on the land side the defences to the south of Sevastopol were relatively weak. A single stone wall about 4 metres high and 2 metres thick – with earthworks and stone batteries in the most commanding positions – protected only parts of the town. Not all these fortifications were able to withstand bombardment by mortar shells, and the stone wall was only good against musketry. Overall, the city was extremely vulnerable, and the expectation was that it could fall at any time. According to Totleben, who was placed in charge of the defensive works, ‘there was practically nothing to stop the enemy from walking into the city’.³³

Instead of moving swiftly to Sevastopol to take up its defence, the Russian troops retreating from the Alma battlefield allowed themselves to be diverted and delayed by looting the estates abandoned by landowners on hearing news of the defeat. Separated from their regimental units and their officers, the troops lost all discipline. ‘The Cossacks were the worst offenders,’ recalled one eyewitness; ‘there was nothing that they would not steal.’

Finding a house that had been locked up, they would smash the doors, break the windows, and rampage through the rooms, stealing anything they could carry. Assuming that the owners had hidden money, diamonds and other precious items in the house, the soldiers turned over everything – even pillows and cushions on the divans and armchairs. Books and libraries were destroyed. Large mirrors that could not be used by the soldiers were broken up so that they could put a piece of it into their pockets.³⁴

The allied commanders had no idea of this weakness and disorder on the Russian side. Raglan had wanted to press on as fast as possible to Sevastopol, as the allies had agreed in their war plans, but now the French were not ready, having left their kitbags on the other side of the Alma before they had scaled the heights, and needed time to collect them. Unlike the British, they did not have sufficient cavalry to give chase to the Russians, so were less inclined to rush ahead. Once the initiative was lost, the allied commanders began to hesitate about what they should do next. Tatar spies had misinformed them that the Star Fort was impregnable, that Menshikov intended to defend it with all his might, and that the city was almost undefended on its southern side. This encouraged the allied commanders to abandon their initial plan to attack the city quickly from the north, and instead march right round the city to the southern side, a plan of action strongly urged by Sir John Burgoyne, the chief engineering officer.^ab

The change of plan was also driven by the Russians’ bold decision to blow up their own fleet. Recognizing that they could not match the allied ships in speed or gunpower, the commanders of the Black Sea Fleet sank five sailing ships and two frigates in the mouth of the harbour to block the entrance and so prevent allied ships from supporting an attack from the north. The designated vessels were towed into place, their flags were taken down, and there were religious services to commit them to the sea. Then, at midnight on 22 September, the ships were destroyed. One frigate, The Three Saints, would not go down. The next morning it was shelled at close range by a gunboat for two hours until it sank. The noise was heard by the allied armies, which at that time were on the Kacha, prompting Saint-Arnaud to pronounce in amazement, once it was discovered what the noise was from, ‘What a parody of Moscow 1812.’³⁵

With the harbour blocked and no possibility of back-up from their ships, the allied commanders decided that it was too dangerous to attack Sevastopol from the north, so they now committed themselves to attack the city from the southern side, where their ships could use the harbours of Balaklava (for the British) and Kamiesh (for the French) to support their armies. The change of plan was a fatal error of judgement – and not just because the city’s defences were in fact stronger on the southern side. Moving south of Sevastopol made it harder for the allied armies to block the Russian supply route from the mainland, which had been a crucial element of the strategic plan. If the city had been taken quickly, this would not have been a major problem; but once the allied commanders had ruled out a coup de main, they fell into the trap of conventional military thinking about how to besiege a town, ideas going back to the seventeenth century that involved the slow and methodical process of digging trenches towards the town’s defences so that it could be bombarded by artillery before an assault by troops. The French favoured the idea of a longer siege, and they brought the British round to their traditional way of thinking. It seemed less risky than a quick storming. Burgoyne, the chief engineer, who had been in favour of a quick attack, changed his mind on the absurd grounds that it would cost 500 lives to seize Sevastopol in a lightning strike, losses that were ‘utterly unjustifiable’ in his opinion, even though the allies had already suffered 3,600 casualties at the Alma (and were to lose tens of thousands in the siege).³⁶

On 23 September the march south recommenced. For two days the allied troops proceeded across the fertile valley of the Kacha and Belbek rivers, helping themselves to the grapes, peaches, pears and soft fruits ripening in the deserted farms. Exhausted and battle-weary, many soldiers collapsed from dehydration, and all along the way the columns had to stop to bury victims of the cholera. Then the armies began their flanking march around Sevastopol, winding their way through the thick oak forests of the Inkerman Heights until they reached the clearing at Mackenzie’s Farm, named after an eighteenth-century Scottish settler. At this point the advance party of British cavalry crossed paths with Menshikov’s rearguard troops heading north-east towards Bakhchiserai. Captain Louis Nolan of the 15th King’s Hussars, who was in the vanguard with Lord Raglan’s staff, felt this was an opportunity for the cavalry to deal a heavy blow to the Russians. Since the landing in the Crimea, Nolan had become increasingly frustrated with the failure of the British commanders to unleash the cavalry – first at the Bulganak and then at the Alma – against the Russian forces in retreat. So when an attack on the Russian tail- and rearguard by the Hussars was halted by Lord Lucan, Nolan was beside himself with rage. In his campaign journal, he described looking down from the Mackenzie Heights as the Russians got away:

The guns which had escaped were tearing along the road below with some of the few carriages of the convoy which had managed to escape. Disbanded infantry were running down the sides of the steep descent without arms, without helmets, whilst a few shots from our guns hastened them along towards a Russian Army formed in dense columns below. Two regiments of our cavalry moved along the road down the valley for some distance picking up carts and horses of which we captured 22 in all, amongst them General Gorchakov’s travelling carriage with two fine black horses.³⁷

The allied columns became increasingly stretched out, as the exhausted stragglers fell behind or lost their way in the dense forests. Discipline broke down and many of the troops, like the Cossacks before them, began to pillage from abandoned farms and estates in the vicinity of