husband to get a closer look at the carnage on the battlefield:
Past the scene of the morning we rode slowly; round us were dead and dying horses, numberless; and near me lay a Russian soldier, very still, upon his face. In a vineyard a little to my right a Turkish soldier was also stretched out dead. The horses, mostly dead, were all unsaddled, and the attitudes of some betokened extreme pain … . And then the wounded soldiers crawling to the hills!32
Of the 661 men who set off on the charge, 113 were killed, 134 wounded, and 45 were taken prisoner; 362 horses were lost or killed. The casualties were not much higher than those suffered on the Russian side (180 killed and wounded – nearly all of them in the first two defensive lines) and far lower than the numbers reported in the British press.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldiers knew
Someone had blundered:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the Six Hundred.
But contrary to the myth of a ‘glorious disaster’, the charge was in some ways a success, despite the heavy casualties. The objective of a cavalry charge was to scatter the enemy’s lines and frighten him off the battlefield, and in this respect, as the Russians acknowledged, the Light Brigade had achieved its aim. The real blunder of the British at Balaklava was not so much the Charge of the Light Brigade as their failure to pursue the Russian cavalry once the Heavy Brigade had routed them and the Light Brigade had got them on the run and then finish off the rest of Liprandi’s army.33
The British blamed the Turks for their defeat at Balaklava, accusing them of cowardice for abandoning the redoubts. They also later claimed that they had looted property, not only from the British cavalry, but also from nearby settlements, where they were said to have ‘committed some cold-blooded cruelties upon the unfortunate villagers around Balaklava, cutting the throats of the men and stripping their cabins of everything’. Lucan’s Turkish interpreter, John Blunt, thought the accusations were unfair and that if any looting did take place, it was by the ‘nondescript crowds of camp followers who prowled about … the battlefield’. The Turks were treated appallingly for the rest of the campaign. They were routinely beaten, cursed, spat upon and jeered at by the British troops, who sometimes even used them ‘to carry them with their bundles on their backs across the pools and quagmires on the Balaklava road’, according to Blunt. Seen by the British as little more than slaves, the Turkish troops were used for digging trenches or transporting heavy loads between Balaklava and the Sevastopol heights. Because their religion forbade them from eating most of the available British army rations, they never received enough food; in desperation some of them began to steal, for which they were flogged by their British masters well beyond the maximum of forty-five lashes allowed for the Queen’s own troops. Of the 4,000 Turkish soldiers who fought at Balaklava on 25 October, half would die from malnutrition by the end of 1854, and many of the rest would become too weak for active service. Yet the Turks behaved with dignity, and Blunt, for one, was ‘much struck by the forbearing manner in which they endured their bad treatment and long suffering’. Rustem Pasha, the Egyptian officer in charge of the Turkish troops at Balaklava, urged them to be ‘patient and resigned, and not to forget that the English troops were the guests of their Sultan and were fighting in defence of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire’.34
The Russians celebrated Balaklava as a victory. The capture of the redoubts on the Causeway Heights was certainly a tactical success. The next day in Sevastopol it was marked by an Orthodox service as the British guns were paraded through the town. The Russians now had a commanding position from which to attack the British supply lines between Balaklava and the Sevastopol heights; the British were confined to their inner defence line on the hills around Kadikoi. Russian soldiers paraded through Sevastopol with trophies from the battlefield – British overcoats, swords, tunics, shakos, boots and cavalry horses. The morale of the Sevastopol garrison was immediately lifted by the victory. For the first time since the defeat at the Alma, the Russians sensed they were a match for the allied armies on the open battlefield.
The Tsar learned about the claimed victory in his palace at Gatchina on 31 October, when the morning courier arrived from Sevastopol. Anna Tiutcheva, who was with the Empress in the Arsenal Halls listening to a Beethoven recital, wrote in her diary later on that day:
The news has lifted all our spirits. The Tsar, coming to the Empress to tell her the news, was so overcome with emotion that, in front of all of us, he threw himself onto his knees before the sacred icons and burst into tears. The Empress and her daughter Maria Nikolaevna, thinking that the frightful disturbance of the Tsar signified the fall of Sevastopol, also went down on their knees, but he calmed them, told them all the joyous news, and at once ordered a service of thanksgiving prayers, at which the whole court attended.35
Encouraged by their success at Balaklava, the next day the Russians launched an attack on the right flank of the British army on Cossack Mountain, a V-shaped ridge of undulating uplands, 2.5 kilometres in length, running north to south between the eastern sector of Sevastopol and the Chernaia estuary, known to the British as Mount Inkerman. On 26 October, 5,000 Russian troops under Colonel Fedorov marched east out of Sevastopol, turned right to climb Cossack Mountain, and descended on the unsuspecting soldiers of de Lacy Evans’s 2nd Division, encamped at the southern end of the high plateau, at a place called Home Ridge, where the heights sloped steeply down onto the Balaklava plain. Evans had only 2,600 troops at his disposal, the rest of his division being elsewhere on trench duty, but the outlying pickets at Shell Hill held off the Russians with their Minie rifles, while Evans brought up more artillery, installing eighteen guns in positions out of sight. Drawing the enemy onto their artillery, the British dispersed them with a devastating fire that left several hundred Russians dead and wounded on the scrubland before Home Ridge.36
More were taken prisoner, many of them giving themselves up or deserting to the British side. They brought dreadful tales of the conditions in Sevastopol, where there was a shortage of water and the hospitals were overrun with victims of the bombing as well as cholera. A German officer who was serving with the Russians told the British ‘that they were obliged to come out of Sevastopol on account of the disgraceful smell that was in the town, and his opinion was that the town would soon fall into the hands of the British as the killed and wounded was laying in the streets’. According to Godfrey Mosley, paymaster of the 20th Regiment,
The army that came out of Sevastopol to attack the other day … were all drunk. The hospitals smelt so bad with them that you could not remain more than a minute in the place and we were told by an officer who they took prisoner that they had been giving them wine till they had got them to the proper pitch and asked who would go out and drive the English Dogs into the sea, instead of which we drove them back into the town with the loss of about 700 in a very short time. The same officer told us that we might have got into the town when we first came here easily, but now we should have some difficulty.37
In truth, the attack by the Russians was really a reconnaissance in force for a major new assault against the British forces on the heights of Inkerman. The initiative for the assault came from the Tsar, who had learned of Napoleon’s intention to send more troops to the Crimea and believed that Menshikov should use his numerical superiority to break the siege as soon as possible, before the French reinforcements arrived, or at least to impose a delay on the allies until winter came to the rescue of the Russians (‘I have two generals who will not fail me: Generals January and February,’ Nicholas said, adopting the old cliche of 1812). By 4 November the Russians had been reinforced by the arrival of two infantry divisions of the 4th Corps from Bessarabia, the 10th Division under Lieutenant General Soimonov and the 11th under Lieutenant General Pavlov, bringing the total force at Menshikov’s disposal to 107,000 men, not including the sailors. At first Menshikov had been opposed to the idea of a new offensive (he was still inclined to abandon Sevastopol to the enemy), but the Tsar was adamant and even sent his sons, the Grand Dukes Mikhail and Nikolai, to encourage the troops and to enforce his will. Under pressure, Menshikov agreed to attack, believing that the British were a less formidable opponent than the French. If the Russians could establish themselves with artillery batteries on Mount Inkerman, the allied siege lines on the right would find themselves under fire from behind, and, unless they recaptured the heights, the allies would be forced to abandon the siege.38
