the ravine, and climbed up to the Malakhov Bastion, where he talked to the wounded troops. He was just starting down the hill to complete his tour in the Ushakov Ravine when he was hit by a shell that blew away the lower part of his body. Taken to the military hospital, he died shortly afterwards.16
Towards midday the allied fleet joined in the bombardment, directing their heavy guns towards Sevastopol from an arc around the entrance to the sea harbour some 800 to 1,500 metres from the coast (the blockade of the harbour by the sunken Russian ships stopped them getting any closer to their target). For six hours the city was shelled by an allied broadside of 1,240 guns; its coastal batteries had just 150 guns. ‘The sight was one of the most awful in the way of guns,’ Henry James, a merchant seamen, wrote in his diary after watching the bombardment from further out to sea. ‘Several of the liners kept up a heavy cannonade and it could be compared to the rolling of a huge drum … We could see showers of shot striking the water at the foot of the forts and flying up in heaps at the walls.’ The firing of the fleets created so much smoke that the Russian gunners could not even see the ships. Some of the gunners lost their nerve, but others showed extraordinary bravery, firing at the gun flashes of the invisible ships while shells crashed around their heads. One artillery officer on the Tenth Bastion, the main focus of the French attack, recalled seeing men who had been rewarded for their courage in previous engagements running off in panic when the firing began. ‘I was caught myself between two feelings,’ he recalled. ‘One half of me wanted to run home to save my family, but my sense of duty told me I should stay. My feelings as a man got the better of the soldier within me and I ran away to find my family.’17
In fact, for all their guns, the French and British ships received better than they gave. The wooden sailing vessels of the allied fleet were unable to get close enough to the stone forts of the coastal bastions to cause them much damage (the blockade had done its job in this respect) but they could be set alight by the Russian guns, which were not so numerous but (because they were based on the land) much more accurate than the allies’ long- range cannonade. After firing an estimated 50,000 rounds to little real effect on the coastal batteries, the allied fleet weighed anchor and sailed away to count its losses: five ships badly damaged, thirty sailors killed and more than 500 men wounded. Without steam-powered iron ships, the allied fleet was destined to play only a subsidiary role to the army during the siege of Sevastopol.
The first day’s outcome on the land was not much more encouraging for the allies. The French made little headway against Mount Rodolph before one of their main magazines was blown up and they ceased fire, and while the British caused considerable damage to the Third Bastion, accounting for most of the 1,100 Russian casualties, they had lacked the heavy mortars to make their superior firepower count. Their much-vaunted new weapon, the 68-pounder Lancaster gun, was unreliable firing shells and was ineffective at long range against Russian earthworks, which absorbed the light projectiles. ‘I fear the Lancaster is a failure,’ reported Captain Lushington to General Airey the next day. ‘Our guns do not go far enough out and we injure our own embrasures more than the enemy … . I have impressed on all the officers the necessity of slow and steady firing … but the distances are too great … and we might as well fire into a pudding as at these earthworks.’18
The failure of the first day’s bombardment was a rude awakening for the allies. ‘The town appears built of incombustible materials,’ wrote Fanny Duberly, who had come to the Crimea as a war tourist with her husband, Henry Duberly, paymaster of the 8th Hussars. ‘Although it was twice slightly on fire yesterday, the flames were almost immediately extinguished.’19
On the Russian side, the first day had destroyed the mystique of the allied armies established by their victory at the Alma. Suddenly, the enemy was no longer seen as invincible, and from that the Russians gained new hope and self-confidence. ‘We all thought it was impossible for our batteries to save us,’ a resident of Sevastopol wrote in a letter the next day. ‘So imagine our surprise when today we found all our batteries intact, and all the guns in place! … God has blessed Russia, and rewarded us for the insults we have suffered to our faith!’20
Having survived the first day’s bombardment, the Russians now resolved to break the siege by attacking Balaklava and cutting off the British from their main base of supplies. After Alma, Menshikov had set out towards Bakhchiserai. Now, with the change in strategy, he amassed his troops in the Chernaia valley on Sevastopol’s eastern side, where they were joined by the first reinforcements to arrive from the Danubian front, the 12th Infantry Division under the command of Lieutenant General Pavel Liprandi. On the evening of 24 October, a field army of 60,000 troops, 34 squadrons of cavalry and 78 artillery pieces camped around the village of Chorgun on Fediukhin Heights for an attack on the British defences of Balaklava the following morning.
The objective was well chosen. As the British were themselves aware, they were seriously overstretched and there was not much to protect their supply base from a swift attack by a large force of men. The British had constructed a total of six small redoubts along part of the Causeway Heights – the ridge-line of the Vorontsov Road separating the northern half of the Balaklava valley between the Fediukhin Heights and the road from the southern half between the road and the port itself – and placed in each of the four completed redoubts a Turkish guard (consisting mainly of raw recruits) with two or three 12-pounder guns of position. Behind the redoubts, in the southern half of the valley, the British had positioned the 93rd Highland Infantry Brigade, under the command of Sir Colin Campbell, to whom the defence of the port was entrusted, while encamped on their flank was the cavalry division of Lord Lucan, and on the heights above the gorge descending to the port 1,000 Royal Marines with some field artillery. In the event of an attack by the Russians, Campbell could also rely on the support of the British infantry as well as two divisions of French troops under General Bosquet encamped on the heights above Sevastopol, but until they arrived the defence of Balaklava would depend on 5,000 troops.21
At daybreak on 25 October the Russians commenced their attack. Establishing a field battery close to the village of Kamara, they began a heavy bombardment of the No. 1 Redoubt on Canrobert’s Hill (named by the British in honour of the French commander). During the night Raglan had been warned of the imminent attack by a deserter from the Russian camp, but, having sent 1,000 men to Balaklava in response to a false alarm only three days previously, he decided not to act (yet another blunder to put against his name), though he did reach the Sapoune Heights in time to get a grandstand view of the fighting in the valley below him after messages were sent to his headquarters at the start of the attack.
For more than an hour, the 500 Turkish troops defending the No. 1 Redoubt put up a stubborn resistance, as they had done against the Russians at Silistria, losing more than one-third of their men. But then 1,200 Russian troops stormed the redoubt at the point of the bayonet, forcing the exhausted defenders to abandon it to them, along with three of the seven British cannon which had been lent to the Turks. ‘To our disgust,’ recalled Calthorpe, who was watching from the Sapoune Heights with Raglan’s staff, ‘we saw a little stream of men issue from the rear of the redoubt and run down the hill-side towards our lines.’ Seeing their countrymen in full retreat, the Turkish garrisons in the neighbouring three redoubts (2, 3 and 4) followed their example and withdrew towards the port, many of them carrying their blankets, pots and pans and crying ‘Ship! Ship!’ as they passed the British lines. Calthorpe watched as 1,000 Turkish troops streamed down the hill pursued by large parties of Cossacks. ‘The yells of these wild horsemen could be heard from where we were as they galloped after these unhappy Muslims, numbers of whom were killed by their lances.’
As they ran through the settlement of Kadikoi, the Turkish soldiers were jeered at by a group of British army wives, including one, a massive washerwoman with brawny arms and ‘hands as hard as horn’, who seized hold of a Turk and gave him a good kicking for trampling on the washing she had laid out in the sun to dry. When she realized that the Turks had deserted her own husband’s regiment, the 93rd, she scolded them: ‘Ye cowardly misbelievers, to leave the brave Christian Highlanders to fecht when ye ran awa!’ The Turks tried to placate her, and some called her ‘
