imagine, at the flash of the enemy’s guns on Shell Hill, and drew a heavy fire on themselves in return. Some [of the gunners] fell, and we also suffered, although we had been ordered to lie down to obtain what shelter we could from the ridge. One round shot, I remember, tore into my company, completely severing the left arm and both legs off a man in the front rank, and killed his rear rank man without any perceptible wound. Other casualties were also occurring in other companies … . The guns … were firing as fast as they could load, and each successive discharge and recoil brought them closer to our line … We assisted the gunners to run the guns into their first position, and some men also aided in carrying ammunition.45
The main thing at this stage was to keep the noise of the barrage up to make the Russians think that the British had more guns than they actually had, pass the ammunition and wait for reinforcements to arrive.
If Soimonov had known the weakness of the British defences, he would have ordered Home Ridge to be stormed, but he could see nothing in the fog, and the heavy firing of the enemy, whose Minie rifles were deadly accurate at the short range from which the British fired, persuaded him to wait for Pavlov’s men to join him on Shell Hill before launching an assault. Within minutes Soimonov himself was killed by a British rifleman. The command was taken up by Colonel Pristovoitov, who was shot a few minutes later; and then by Colonel Uvazhnov- Aleksandrov, who was also killed. After that, it was not clear who would take up the command, nobody was keen to step up to the mark, and Captain Andrianov was sent off on his horse to consult with various generals on the matter, which wasted valuable time.46
Meanwhile, at 5 a.m., Pavlov’s men had arrived at the Inkerman Bridge, only to discover that the naval detachment had not prepared it for their crossing, as they had been ordered to by Dannenberg. They had to wait until seven o’clock before the bridge was ready and they could cross the Chernaia. From there, they fanned out and climbed the heights in three different directions: the Okhotsky, Yakutsky and Selenginsky regiments and most of the artillery branching to the right to reach the top by the Sapper Road and join Soimonov’s men, the Borodinsky ascending by the centre route along the Volovia Ravine, while the Tarutinsky Regiment climbed the steep and rocky slopes of the Quarry Ravine towards the Sandbag Battery under cover of Soimonov’s guns.47
There were fierce gun battles across the heights – small groups of fighters dashing everywhere, using the thick bushes to conceal themselves and fire at each other like skirmishers – but the most intense was on the British right flank around the Sandbag Battery. Twenty minutes after they had crossed the bridge, the advance battalions of the Tarutinsky Regiment overpowered the small picket in the battery, but then came under a series of attacks from a combined British force of 700 men under the command of Brigadier Adams. In frenzied hand-to-hand fighting, the Sandbag Battery changed sides several times. By eight o’clock Adams’s men were outnumbered by the Russians ten to one, but because of the narrow ridge on which the fighting for the battery took place, the Russians could not make their numbers tell in one assault. Once the British had regained the battery, the Russians came at them again in a series of attacks. Private Edward Hyde was in the battery with Adams’s men:
The Russian infantry got right up to it, and clambered up the front and sides of it, and we had a hard job to keep them out. Directly we saw their heads above the parapet, or looking into the embrasures, we fired at them or bayoneted them as fast as we could. They came on like ants; no sooner was one knocked backwards than another clambered over the dead bodies to take his place, all of them yelling and shouting. We in the battery were not quiet, you may be sure, and what with the cheering and shouting, the thud of blows, the clash of bayonets and swords, the ping of the bullets, the whistling of the shells, the foggy atmosphere, and the smell of powder and blood, the scene inside the battery where we were was beyond the power of man to imagine or describe.48
Eventually, the Russians could no longer be held back – they swarmed into the battery – and Adams and his men were forced to retreat towards Home Ridge. But reinforcements soon arrived, the Duke of Cambridge with the Grenadiers, and a new assault was launched against the Russians grouped around the Sandbag Battery, which by this stage had assumed a symbolic status far beyond its military significance to either side. The Grenadiers charged the Russians with their bayonets, Cambridge shouting at his men to keep to the high ground and not become dispersed by following the Russians down the hill, but few men could hear the Duke or see him in the fog. Among the Grenadiers was George Higginson, who witnessed the charge ‘down the rugged slope, full upon the advancing host’.
The exultant cheer … confirmed my dread that our gallant fellows would soon get out of hand; and in fact, except for one short period during the long day when we contrived to make some kind of regular formation, the contest was maintained by groups under company officers, who were unable, owing to the mist and smoke of musketry fire, to preserve any definite touch.
The fighting became increasingly frenzied and chaotic, as one side charged the other down the hill, only to be counter-attacked by another group of men from further up the hill. The soldiers on both sides lost all discipline and became disordered mobs, uncontrolled by any officers and driven on by rage and fear (reinforced by the fact that they could not see each other in the fog). They charged and counter-charged, yelling and screaming, firing their guns, slashing out in all directions with their swords, and when they had no ammunition left they began throwing rocks at one another, striking out with their rifle butts, even kicking and biting.49
In this sort of fighting the cohesion of the small combat unit was decisive. Everything came down to whether groups of men and their line commanders could keep their discipline and unity – whether they could organize themselves and stick together through the fight without losing nerve or running away out of fear. The soldiers of the Tarutinsky Regiment failed this crucial test.
Chodasiewicz was one of the company officers in the 4th Battalion of the Tarutinsky Regiment. Their task was to take the eastern side of Mount Inkerman, providing cover for Pavlov’s other troops to bring up gabions and fascines for a trench work against the British positions. The unit lost its way in the thick fog, veered towards the left, and became mixed with disgruntled soldiers from the Ekaterinburg Regiment, among Soimonov’s troops already on the heights, who led them back down into the Quarry. By this stage, Chodasiewicz had lost control of his men, who were totally dispersed among the Ekaterinburg Regiment. Undirected by the officers, some of the Tarutinsky men began to climb the hill again. Ahead of them they could make out some of their comrades ‘standing before a small battery shouting “Hurrah!” and waving their caps for us to come on’, recalled Chodasiewicz; ‘the buglers continually played the advance, and several of my men broke from the ranks at a run!’ At the Sandbag Battery, Chodasiewicz found his men in total disorder. Various regiments were all mixed up so that their command structures entirely broke down. He ordered his men to charge with bayonets, and they overran the British in the battery, but then they failed to push them down the hill, remaining instead inside the battery, where ‘they forgot their duty and wandered about in search of booty’, recalled another officer, who thought ‘all this occurred because of a lack of officers and leadership’.
With all the fog and mixing-up of men, there were many instances of friendly fire on the Russian side. Soimonov’s troops, in particular the Ekaterinburg Regiment, began firing at the men inside the Sandbag Battery, some thinking they were firing on the enemy, others on the orders of an officer who feared the insubordination of his men and tried to discipline them by having others shoot at them. ‘The chaos was something extraordinary,’ recalled Chodasiewicz: ‘some of the men were grumbling at the Ekaterinburg Regiment, others were shouting for artillery to come up, the buglers constantly played the signal to advance, and drummers beat to the attack, but nobody thought of moving; there they stood like a flock of sheep.’ A bugle call to manoeuvre left caused a sudden panic among the Tarutinsky men, who thought that they could hear the distant noise of the French drums. ‘There were shouts on all sides of “Where is the reserve?”,’ recalled an officer. Fearing they had no support, the troops began to stampede down the hill. According to Chodasiewicz, ‘Officers shouted to the men to halt, but to no avail, for none of them thought of stopping, but each followed the direction prompted by his fancy or his fears.’ No officer, however senior, was able to reverse the panic retreat of the men, who ran down to the bottom of the Quarry Ravine and crowded around the Sevastopol aqueduct, which alone stopped their flight. When Lieutenant General Kiriakov, the commander of the 17th Infantry Division who had gone absent at the Alma, appeared at the aqueduct and rode among the men on his white charger, slashing at them with his whip and shouting at them to climb back up the hill, the soldiers paid him little attention, and then shouted back at him, ‘Go up there yourself!’ Chodasiewicz was ordered to collect his company, but he had only 45 men left out of a company of 120.50
