Russians.8
Informed of these heroic efforts by the people of Sevastopol, the Tsar wrote to General Gorchakov at the end of September, reminding him of the ‘special Russian spirit’ that had saved the country from Napoleon, and urging him to summon it again against the British and the French. ‘We shall pray to God, that you may call on them to save Sevastopol, the fleet and the Russian land.
Tell our young sailors that all my hopes are invested in them. Tell them not to bow to anyone, to put their faith in God’s mercy, to remember that we are Russians, that we are defending our homeland and our faith, and to submit humbly to the will of God. May God preserve you! My prayers are all for you and for our holy cause.9
Meanwhile, the allies embarked on their lengthy preparations for the siege. Raglan had wanted an immediate assault. He had seen the weakness of the Russian defences, and was encouraged by the forthright and masterful Sir George Cathcart, in command of the 4th Division, whose troops had taken up positions on a hill from which he could see the whole town. It was from there that he wrote to Raglan:
If you and Sir John Burgoyne would pay me a visit you can see everything in the way of defences, which is not much. They are working at two or three redoubts, but the place is only enclosed by a thing like a loose park wall not in good repair. I am sure I could walk into it with scarcely the loss of a man at night or an hour before day-break if all the rest of the force was up between the sea and the hill I am upon. We would leave our packs and run into it even in open day only risking a few shots whilst we passed the redoubts.
Burgoyne, formerly an advocate of a quick assault, now disagreed. Concerned with loss of lives, the army’s chief engineer insisted on the need to subdue the enemy’s fire with siege guns before an assault by troops was launched. The French agreed with him. So the allies settled down to the slow process of landing siege artillery and hauling it up to the heights. There were endless problems with the British guns, many of which had to be dismantled before they could be unloaded from the ships. ‘The placing of our heavy ship guns in position has been most tedious,’ Captain William Cameron of the Grenadier Guards wrote to his father.
The ship guns have to be taken all to pieces, as the carriages, having only small rollers, as wheels, cannot be moved along by themselves, whereas the regular siege guns can be wheeled into their places as they stand. We have just completed a battery of five 68lb guns of 95 cwt each – all ships guns, which will tell more than any battery ever heard of at a siege before. The ground is dreadfully rocky, so that a great part of the earth for the parapet has to be carried.10
It was eighteen days before the guns were finally in place, days that gave the Russians crucial time to prepare their defences.
While the British were hauling up their guns, the French took the lead in digging trenches, moving slowly forward in a zigzag formation towards the defences of Sevastopol, as the Russians fired at them with artillery. The opening of the first trench was the most dangerous because there was little protection from the Russian guns. Armed with shovels and pickaxes, the first shift of 800 men crept forward under cover of the night, using rocks for shelter, until they reached a point within a kilometre of Sevastopol’s Flagstaff Bastion, and on lines marked out by their commanders began digging themselves into the ground, piling up the soil in gabions in front of them to protect themselves from the Russians. On that night, 9/10 October, the sky was clear and the moon was out, but a north- west wind took the sound of digging away from the town, and by dawn, when the sleepy Russians at last discovered them, the French had dug a protected trench 1,000 metres long. Under heavy bombardment, 3,000 French soldiers went on with the works, digging new entrenchments every night and repairing trenches damaged by the Russians the next day, while shells and mortar whistled past their heads. By 16 October the first five French batteries had been built with sacks of earth and wood for palisades, fortified breastworks and parapets, and more than fifty guns (cannon, mortars and howitzers) mounted on raised platforms on the ground.11
Following the French, the British dug entrenchments and sited their first batteries on Green Hill (the Left Attack) and Vorontsov Hill (the Right Attack), the two positions separated by a deep ravine. Shifts of 500 men on each attack worked day and night while more than twice that number guarded them from the Russians, who launched sorties at night. ‘I am off duty this morning at 4 am after 24 hours in the trenches,’ Captain Radcliffe of the 20th Regiment wrote to his family.
When we got under the breastwork that had been thrown up in the night we were pretty well under cover, but were obliged to lie down all the time for this of course was the target for the enemy’s artillery day and night and the trench was only half made. However a few men were placed on the look out, their heads a few inches above the work, to give notice when they fired, by watching the smoke from the guns by day and the flash by night and calling out ‘Shot’ – when all in the trenches lie down and get under cover of the breastwork till it has passed, and then resume their work. By attending to this we only lost one man during the day; he was killed by a round shot.12
On 16 October it was finally decided to begin the bombardment of Sevastopol the following morning, even though the British works were not quite completed. There was a mood of optimistic expectation in the allied camp. ‘All artillery officers – French, English and naval – say [that] after a fire of 48 hours, little will be seen of Sevastopol but a heap of ruins,’ wrote Henry Clifford, a staff officer in the Light Division, to his family. According to Evelyn Wood, a midshipman who had watched the battle of the Alma from the topmast of his ship before being transferred to the land attack with the Naval Brigade,
On 16 October the betting in our camp was long odds that the fortress would fall in a few hours. Some of the older and more prudent officers estimated that the Russians might hold out for 48 hours, but this was the extreme opinion. A soldier offered me a watch, Paris made, which he had taken off a Russian officer killed at the Alma, for which he asked 20 s[hillings]. My messmates would not allow me to buy it, saying that gold watches would be cheaper in 48 hours.13
At dawn on 17 October, as soon as the fog had cleared, the Russians saw that the embrasures of the enemy batteries had been opened. Without waiting for the enemy guns to open fire, the Russians began shelling them along the line, and soon afterwards the allied counter-bombardment began with 72 British and 53 French guns. Within a few minutes the gun battle was at its height. The booming of the guns, the roaring and the whistling of the shot, and the deafening explosions of the shell drowned out the calls of the bugles and the drums. Sevastopol was completely lost in a thick black pall of smoke, which hung over the whole darkened battlefield, making it impossible for the allied gunners to hit their target with any military precision. ‘We could only sit and guess and hope we were doing well,’ wrote Calthorpe, who watched the bombardment with Raglan from the Quarries on Vorontsov Hill.14
For thousands of civilians sheltering in the bombed-out ruins of their homes in Sevastopol, these were the most terrifying moments of their lives. ‘I never saw or heard of anything like it before,’ wrote one resident. ‘For twelve hours the wild howling of the bombs was unbroken, it was impossible to distinguish between them, and the ground shook beneath our feet … . A thick smoke filled the sky and blotted out the sun; it became as dark as night; even the rooms were filled with smoke.’15
As soon as the bombardment had begun, Kornilov had set off with his flag-lieutenant, Prince V. I. Bariatinsky, to make a tour of the defences. They went first to the Fourth Bastion, the most dangerous place in Sevastopol, which was being shelled by both the British and the French. ‘Inside the No. 4 Bastion,’ recalled Bariatinsky, ‘the scene was frightful and the destruction enormous, whole gun teams having been struck down by shellfire; the wounded and dead were being removed by stretcher-bearers, but they were still lying round in heaps.’ Kornilov went to every gun, encouraging the crews, and then moved on to the Fifth Bastion, under no less pressure from the enemy’s artillery, where he met Nakhimov, dressed as he always was in a frock coat with epaulettes. Nakhimov had been wounded in the face, though he did not seem to notice it, Bariatinsky thought, as blood ran down his neck, staining the white ribbon of his St George Cross, as he talked with Kornilov. While they were conversing there, Bariatinsky recognized an officer approaching, though ‘he had no eyes or face, for his features had completely disappeared underneath a mass of bloody flesh’, the remains of a sailor who had been blown up, which the officer proceeded to wipe from his face, while he asked Bariatinsky for a cigarette. Ignoring the advice of his staff, who said it was too dangerous to go on, Kornilov continued his tour at the Third Bastion, the Redan, which was then being pounded by the heavy British guns with a deadly concentration of power. When Kornilov arrived, the bastion was under the command of Captain Popandul, but he was soon killed, as were the five other commanders who succeeded him that day. Kornilov passed through the trench system, within close range of the British guns, crossed
