For all the Russians’ losses, their sortie of 26 October had revealed the weakness of the British defences on Mount Inkerman. Raglan had been warned on a number of occasions by de Lacy Evans and Burgoyne that these crucial heights were vulnerable and needed to be occupied in strength and fortified; Bosquet, the commander of an infantry division on the Sapoune Heights to the south of Inkerman, had been adding his own warnings in almost daily letters to the British commander; while Canrobert had even offered immediate help. But Raglan had done nothing to strengthen the defences, even after the sortie by the Russians, when the French commander was amazed to learn that ‘so important and so exposed a position’ had been left ‘totally unprotected by fortifications’.39
It was not just negligence that lay behind Raglan’s failure but a calculated risk: the British were too few in number to protect all their positions, they were seriously overstretched, and would have been incapable of repulsing a general attack if one had been launched at several points along their line. By the first week of November, the British infantry were exhausted. They had scarcely had a rest since their landing in the Crimea, as Private Henry Smith recalled in a letter to his parents in February 1855:
After the battle of the Alma and the march to Balaklava, we were immediately put to work, starting from 24 September during which time we never got more than 4 hours sleep out of 24, and very often did not get as much time even as to make a tin of coffee, before we were sent on some other duty, till the siege opened on 14 October, and although shell and shot fell like hail, as from the dreadful fatigue we had to undergo, we were so regardless as to lie down and sleep even at the mouth of the cannon … We were often being 24 hours in the trenches, and I believe there was not an hour’s drying in the 24, so that when we came to camp we were wet to the skin and all over mud even to the shoulders, and in this very state we had to march to Inkerman battle without as much as a bit of bread or a sip of water to satisfy a craving hunger and thirst.40
Menshikov’s plan was a more ambitious version of the sortie on 26 October (‘Little Inkerman’ as that dress rehearsal later became known). On the afternoon of 4 November, only a few hours after the arrival of the 4th Corps from Bessarabia, he ordered the offensive to begin at six o’clock the next morning. Soimonov was to lead a force of 19,000 men and 38 guns along the same route taken on 26 October. Capturing Shell Hill, they were to be joined there by Pavlov’s force (16,000 men and 96 guns), which was to cross the Chernaia river and ascend the heights from the Inkerman Bridge. Under General Dannenberg, who was to take over the command at this point, the combined force was to drive the British off Mount Inkerman, while Liprandi’s army distracted Bosquet’s corps on the Sapoune Heights.
The plan called for a high degree of coordination between the attacking units, which was too much to expect from any army in an age before the radio, let alone from the Russians, who lacked detailed maps.aj It also called for a change of commander in the middle of the battle – a recipe for disaster, especially since Dannenberg, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, had a record of defeat and indecisiveness that was hardly likely to inspire men. But the biggest flaw of all was the whole idea that a force of 35,000 men and 134 guns could even be deployed on the narrow ridge that was Shell Hill, a rocky piece of scrubland barely 300 metres wide. Realizing its impracticality, Dannenberg began to change the battle plan at the last minute. Late at night on 4 November he ordered Soimonov’s men not to climb Mount Inkerman from the northern side, as had been planned, but to march east as far as the Inkerman Bridge to cover Pavlov’s crossing of the river. From the bridge, the attacking forces were to climb the heights in three different directions and round on the British from the flanks. The sudden change was confusing; but even more confusion was to come. At three o’clock in the morning, Soimonov’s column was moving east from Sevastopol towards Mount Inkerman when he received another message from Dannenberg, ordering him to march in the opposite direction and attack from the west. Thinking that another change of plan would endanger the whole operation, Soimonov ignored the order, but instead of meeting Pavlov at the bridge, he now went back to his own preferred plan of attacking from the north. The three commanders thus went into the battle of Inkerman with entirely different plans.41
By five o’clock in the morning, Soimonov’s advance guard had climbed the heights in silence from the northern side with 22 field guns. There had been heavy rain for the past three days, the steep slopes were slippery with mud; men and horses struggled with the heavy guns. The rain had stopped that night and there was now a heavy fog that shrouded their ascent from the enemy outposts. ‘The fog covered us,’ recalled Captain Andrianov. ‘We could see no further than a few feet ahead of us. The dampness chilled our bones.’42
The dense fog was to play a crucial role in the fighting that lay ahead. Soldiers could not see their senior commanders, whose orders became virtually irrelevant. They relied instead on their own company officers, and when these disappeared they had to take the lead themselves, fighting on their own or alongside those comrades they could see through the fog, in a largely improvised fashion. This was to be a ‘soldiers’ battle’ – the ultimate test of a modern army. Everything depended on the cohesion of the small unit, and every man became his own general.
In the opening hours, the fog played into the hands of the Russians. It covered their approach and brought them to within close range of the British positions, eliminating the disadvantage of their muskets and artillery against the longer range of the Minie rifles. The British pickets on Shell Hill were unaware of the Russians approaching: they had taken shelter from the bad weather by moving to the bottom of the hill, from which they could see nothing. The warning sounds of an army on the march that had been heard earlier in the night failed to trigger the appropriate alarms. Private Bloomfield was on picket duty on Mount Inkerman that night, and could hear the sounds of Sevastopol stirring for something (the bells of the churches had been ringing intermittently throughout the night) but he could not see a thing. ‘There was a great fog, so much that we could not see a man 10 yards away from us, and nearly all the night there was a drizzly rain,’ Bloomfield recalled. ‘All went well until about midnight, when some of our sentries reported wheels and noise like the unloading of shot and shell, but the Field officer on duty took no further notice of it. All the night from about 9 o’clock in the evening the bells were ringing, and the bands were playing and a great noise was all over the town.’
Before they knew it, the pickets at Shell Hill were overrun by Soimonov’s skirmishers, and then fast upon them, emerging from the fog, were the advance columns of his infantry, 6,000 men from the Kolyvansky, Ekaterinburg and Tomsky regiments. The Russians established their guns on Shell Hill and began to push the British back. ‘When we retired the Russians came on with the most fiendish yells you can imagine,’ recalled Captain Hugh Rowlands, in charge of the picket, who withdrew his men to the next high ground and ordered them to open fire, only to discover that their rifles would not work because their charges had been soaked by rain.43
The sound of firing at last sounded the alarm in the camp of the 2nd Division, where soldiers rushed about in their underwear, getting dressed and folding up their tents before grabbing their rifles and falling into line. ‘There was a good deal of hurry and confusion,’ recalled George Carmichael of the Derbyshire Regiment. ‘A number of loose baggage animals frightened by the firing came galloping through the camp, and the men who had been away on different duties came running in to join the ranks.’44
The command was taken up by General Pennefather, second-in-command to de Lacy Evans, who had earlier been injured falling from his horse but was present in an advisory capacity. Pennefather chose a different tactic to the one employed by Evans on 26 October. Instead of falling back to draw the enemy onto the guns behind Home Ridge, he continued feeding the picket line with riflemen to keep the Russians as far back as possible, until reinforcements could arrive. Pennefather did not know that the division was outnumbered by the Russians by more than six to one, but his tactic rested on the hope that the thick fog would conceal his lack of numbers from the enemy.
Pennefather’s men bravely held off the Russians. Fighting forward in small groups, separated from each other by fog and smoke, they were too far ahead to be seen by Pennefather, let alone controlled by him, or to be supported with any precision by the two field batteries at Home Ridge, which fired blindly in the vague direction of the enemy. Sheltering with his regiment behind the British guns, Carmichael watched the gunners do their best to keep up with the vastly superior firepower of the Russian batteries:
They fired, I should
