The Crimean War

Peasant women are selling rolls, Russian muzhiks with samovars are shouting, ‘Hot sbiten’,^af and right here, lying about on the very first steps of the landing, are rusty cannonballs, shells, grapeshot, and cast-iron cannon of various calibres. A little further off there is a large, open area strewn with enormous squared beams, gun carriages and the forms of sleeping soldiers; there are horses, waggons, green field guns with ammunition boxes, infantry muskets stacked in criss-cross piles; a constant movement persists of soldiers, sailors, officers, merchants, women and children; carts laden with hay, sacks or barrels come and go; and here and there a Cossack or an officer is passing by on horseback, or a general in his droshky. To the right the street is blocked by a barricade, the embrasures of which are mounted with a small cannon; beside them sits a sailor, puffing at his pipe. To the left is a handsome building with Roman numerals carved on its pediment, beneath which soldiers are standing with bloodstained stretchers – everywhere you perceive the unpleasant signs of a military encampment.¹

Sevastopol was a military town. Its entire population of 40,000 people was connected in some way to the life of the naval base, whose garrison numbered about 18,000 men, and from that unity Sevastopol gained its military strength. There were sailors who had lived there with their families since Sevastopol’s foundation in the 1780s. Socially the city had a singularity: frock coats were rarely to be seen among the naval uniforms on its central boulevards. There were no great museums, galleries, concert halls or intellectual treasures in Sevastopol. The imposing neoclassical buildings of the city centre were all military in character: the admiralty, the naval school, the arsenal, the garrisons, the ship-repair workshops, the army stores and warehouses, the military hospital, and the officers’ library, one of the richest in Europe. Even the Assembly of Nobles (the ‘handsome building with Roman numerals’) turned into a hospital during the siege.

The town was divided into two distinct parts, a North and a South side, separated from each other by the sea harbour, and the only direct means of communication between the two was by boat. The North Side of the town was a world apart from the elegant neoclassical facades around the military harbour on the southern side. It had few built-up streets, and fishermen and sailors lived there in a semi-rural style, growing vegetables and keeping livestock in the gardens of their dachas. On the South Side there was another, less obvious, distinction between the administrative centre on the western side of the military harbour and the naval dockyards on the eastern side, where the sailors lived in garrisons or with their families in small wooden houses no more than a few yards from the defensive works. Women hung their washing on lines thrown between their houses and the fortress walls and bastions.²

Like Tolstoy, visitors to Sevastopol were always struck by the ‘strange intermingling of camp and town life, of handsome town and dirty bivouac’. Evgeny Ershov, a young artillery officer who arrived in Sevastopol that autumn, was impressed by the way the people of the city went about their ordinary everyday business amid all the chaos of the siege. ‘It was strange’, he wrote, ‘to see how people carried on with their normal lives – a young woman quietly out walking with her pram, traders buying and selling, children running round and playing in the streets, while all around them was a battlefield and they might be killed at any time.’³

People lived as if there was no tomorrow in the weeks prior to the invasion. There was non-stop revelry, heavy drinking and gambling, while the city’s many prostitutes worked overtime. The allied landings had a sobering effect, but confidence ran high among the junior officers, who all assumed that the Russian army would defeat the British and the French. They drank toasts to the memory of 1812. ‘The mood among us was one of high excitement,’ recalled Mikhail Botanov, a young sea cadet, ‘and we were not frightened of the enemy. The only one among us who did not share our confidence was the commander of a steamship who, unlike us, had often been abroad and liked to say the proverb, “In anger is not strength.” Events were to show that he was longer-sighted and better informed about the true state of affairs than we were.’⁴

The defeat of the Russian forces at the Alma created panic among the civilian population of Sevastopol. People were expecting the allies to invade from the north at any time; they were confused when they saw their fleets on the southern side, supposing wrongly that they had been surrounded. ‘I don’t know anyone who at that moment did not say a prayer,’ recalled one inhabitant. ‘We all thought the enemy about to break through.’ Captain Nikolai Lipkin, a battery commander in the Fourth Bastion, wrote to his brother in St Petersburg at the end of September:

Many inhabitants have already left, but we, the servicemen, are staying here to teach a lesson to our uninvited guests. For three days in a row (24, 25 and 26 September) there were religious processions through the town and all the batteries. It was humbling to see how our fighters, standing by their bivouacs, bowed before the cross and the icons carried by our women-folk … . The churches have been emptied of their treasures; I say it was not needed, but people do not listen to me now, they are all afraid. Any moment now we are expecting a general attack, both by land and sea. So, my brother, that’s how things are here, and what will happen next only the Lord knows.

Despite Lipkin’s confidence, the Russian commanders were seriously considering abandoning Sevastopol after the battle at the Alma. There were then eight steamers on the northern side waiting for the order to evacuate the troops and ten warships on the southern side to cover their escape. Many of the city’s residents made their own getaway as the enemy approached, though their path was blocked by Russian troops. Water supplies in the city were running dangerously low, the fountains having stopped and the whole population being dependent on the wells, which were always short of water at this time of year. Told by deserters that the city was supplied by water springs and pipes that ran down a ravine from the heights where they were camped, the British and the French had cut off this supply, leaving Sevastopol with just the aqueduct that supplied the naval dockyard.⁵

As the allies set up camp and prepared their bombardment of the town, the Russians worked around the clock to strengthen its defences on the southern side. With Menshikov nowhere to be seen, the main responsibility for the defence of Sevastopol passed into the hands of three commanders: Admiral Kornilov, chief of staff of the Black Sea Fleet; Totleben, the engineer; and Nakhimov, the hero of Sinope and commander of the port, who was popular among the sailors and seen as ‘one of them’. All three men were military professionals of a new type that contrasted strongly with the courtier Menshikov. Their energy was remarkable. Kornilov was everywhere, inspiring the people by his daily presence in every sector of the defensive works, and promising rewards to everyone, if they could only keep the town. Tolstoy, who was to join Lipkin as a battery commander in the Fourth Bastion, wrote a letter to his brother the day after he arrived in which he described Kornilov on his rounds. Instead of hailing the men with the customary greeting, ‘Health to you!’, the admiral called to them, ‘If you must die, lads, will you die?’ ‘And’, Tolstoy wrote, ‘the men shouted “We will die, Your Excellency, Hurrah!” And they do not say if for effect, for in every face I saw not jesting but earnestness.’⁶

Kornilov himself was far from certain that the city could be saved. On 27 September he wrote to his wife:

We have only 5,000 reserves and 10,000 sailors, armed with various weaponry, even pikes. Not much of a garrison to defend a fortress whose defences are stretched over many miles and broken up so much that there is no direct communication between them; but what will be, will be. We have resolved to make a stand. It will be a miracle if we hold out; and if not …

His uncertainty was increased when the sailors discovered a large supply of vodka on the wharf and went on a drunken rampage for three days. It was left to Kornilov to destroy the supplies of liquor and sober up his sailors for battle.⁷

The defensive preparations were frenzied and improvised. When the work began, it was discovered that there were no shovels in Sevastopol, so men were sent to procure as many as they could from Odessa. Three weeks later, they returned with 400 spades. Meanwhile, the people of the city worked in the main with wooden shovels they had made from torn-up planks of wood. The whole population of Sevastopol – sailors, soldiers, prisoners of war, working men and women (including prostitutes) – was involved in digging trenches, carting earth to the defences, building walls and barricades, and constructing batteries with earth, fascines and gabions,^ag while teams of sailors hauled up the heavy guns they had taken from their ships. Every means of carrying the earth was commandeered, and when there were no baskets, bags or buckets, the diggers carried it in their folded clothes. The expectation of an imminent attack added greater urgency to their work. Inspecting these defences a year later, the allies were amazed by the skill and ingenuity of the