The Crimean War

Sketches, which was to make his literary name. ‘The spirit of the army is beyond all description,’ he wrote to Sergei on 20 November:

A wounded soldier, almost dying, told me how they took the 24th French battery, but weren’t reinforced. He was sobbing. A company of marines almost mutinied because they were to be relieved from a battery where they’d withstood bombardment for 30 days. Soldiers extract the fuses from bombs. Women carry water to the bastions and read prayers under fire. In one brigade [at Inkerman], there were 160 wounded men who wouldn’t leave the front. It’s a wonderful time! But now … we’ve quietened down – it’s beautiful in Sevastopol now. The enemy hardly fires at all and everyone is convinced that he won’t take the town, and it really is impossible. There are three assumptions: either he’s going to launch an assault, or he’s diverting our attention with false earthworks in order to disguise his retreat, or he’s fortifying his position for the winter. The first is least likely and the second most likely. I haven’t managed to be in action even once, but I thank God that I’ve seen these people and am living at this glorious time. The bombardment [of the 17th October] will remain as the most brilliant and glorious feat not only in Russian history but in the history of the world.⁷¹

9

Generals January and February

Winter came in the second week of November. For three days and nights the freezing wind and rain swept across the heights above Sevastopol, blowing down the tents of the British and French troops, who huddled in the mud, soaked and shivering, with nothing but their blankets and coats to cover them. And then, in the early hours of 14 November, the shores of the Crimea were hit by a hurricane. Tents went flying like sheets of paper in the wind; boxes, barrels, trunks and wagons were thrown headlong; tent-poles, blankets, hats and coats, chairs and tables whirled around; frightened horses broke loose from their pickets and stampeded through the camps; trees were uprooted; windows smashed; and soldiers rushed around in all directions, chasing after their effects and clothes, or desperately looking for any sort of shelter in roofless barns and stables, behind the redoubts or in holes in the ground. ‘The scene was most ridiculous, the tents being all down and discovering everyone, some in bed, some like myself in … shirts … all being soaked through and bellowing loudly for their servants,’ Charles Cocks of the Coldstream Guards wrote to his brother on 17 November. ‘The wind was most awful and we could only keep our tents from going to Sevastopol by lying like spread eagles on top of them.’¹

All morning the storm raged, and then at two o’clock the wind died down, allowing the men to come out from their hiding places and retrieve their scattered possessions: soaked and dirty clothes and blankets, bits of broken furniture, pots and pans and other debris from the muddy ground. Towards evening the temperature dropped, and the rain changed to a heavy snow. The men tried to pitch their tents again, their fingers numb with the freezing cold, or spent the night in barns and sheds, huddled altogether against the walls in a hopeless search for warmth.

The devastation on the heights was nothing compared to that down in the harbour and on the open sea. Fanny Duberly, on board the Star of the South, looked out at a harbour seething with foam, the ships swinging terribly. ‘The spray, dashing over the cliffs many hundred feet, fell like heavy rain into the harbour. Ships were crushing and crowding together, all adrift, all breaking and grinding each other to pieces.’ Among those ships was the Retribution, on which the Duke of Cambridge was recuperating from the battle of Inkerman, which had terrified him. ‘It was a fearful gale,’ he wrote to Raglan the next day, ‘and we had a more dreadful 24 hours of it than we ever spent.’

It carried away two anchors & our rudder; [we] had to throw over all our upper deck guns and then we had to hold on by one anchor 200 yards from the rocks which by a merciful providence held us on … I find myself so completely knocked up and shattered in health by this … that I hope you will not object to my going for a short time to Constantinople, Gibson [his doctor] being of opinion that if I were at this moment to return to Camp in this dreadful weather I should only have to take to my bed.²

It was worse outside the harbour, where the bulk of the supply ships were moored in case of a new attack on Balaklava by the Russians. Smashed against the rocks, more than twenty British ships were destroyed, with the loss of several hundred lives and precious winter stores. The biggest setback was the sinking of the steamship Prince, which went down with all but six of its 150 crew and 40,000 winter uniforms, closely followed by the destruction of the Resolute and its cargo of 10 million Minie rounds. At Kamiesh, the French war fleet lost the Henri Quatre line-of-battle ship and the steamer Pluton, and the merchant navy lost two ships with all their crews and supplies. Boxes of French food were washed ashore behind the Russian lines at Quarantine Bay and as far north as Evpatoria. Ivan Kondratov, an infantryman from the Kuban, wrote to his family from a bivouac on the River Belbek on 23 November:

The storm was so strong that huge oak trees were broken. Many of the enemy’s ships were sunk. Three steamers went down near Saki. Zhirov’s Cossack regiment saved 50 drowning Turks from a sunken transport ship. They think that over thirty boats were sunk on the coast of the Crimea. That is why we have been eating English corned beef and drinking rum and foreign wines.³

The French recovered from the storm in a few days, but the British took much longer, and many of the problems they encountered in the winter months – the shortages of food and shelter and medical supplies – were a direct outcome of the hurricane as well as the failures of the supply system. The arrival of the winter had turned the war into a test of administrative efficiency – a test barely passed by the French and miserably failed by the British.

Confident of a quick victory, the allied commanders had made no plans for the troops to spend a winter on the heights above Sevastopol. They did not fully realize how cold it would become. The British were particularly negligent. They failed to provide proper winter clothing for the troops, who were sent to the Crimea in their parade uniforms, without even greatcoats, which arrived later on, after the first cargo of winter uniforms had gone with the steamship Prince. The French were better prepared. They issued their troops with sheepskins and eventually with fur-lined hooded cloaks, which became known as the crimeennes, originally worn by officers alone. They also let the soldiers wear as many layers as they preferred, without anything remotely like that peculiar British military fetish for ‘gentlemanly’ dress and appearance. By the depths of winter the French troops had become so motley in their uniforms that they hardly looked like a regular army any more. But they were considerably warmer than their British counterparts. ‘Rest assured,’ wrote Frederic Japy of the 3rd Zouave Regiment to his anxious mother in Beaucourt:

these are my clothes beginning with my skin: a flannel vest (gilet), a shirt, a wool vest, a tunic, a jacket (caban); on my feet some boots, and when I am not on service, leather shoes and leggings – so you see I have nothing to complain about. I have two jackets, a light one issued by the Zouaves and a monumental one which I bought in Constantinople for the cold; it weighs a little less than 50 kilograms, and I sleep in it when I am on trench duty; if it gets soaked, there is no way to carry it, nor to march with it; if I can, I shall bring it back to France as a curiosity.

Louis Noir described how the Zouaves dressed to survive the cold:

Our battalions, and notably those who came from Africa, survived the freezing temperatures admirably. We were well dressed. Usually, on top of our uniform, we wore either a large greatcoat with a hood, perhaps a crimeenne or a sheepskin shaped as a jacket; the legs were protected by long fur-lined leggings; and every man had been issued with a warm sheepskin hat. But there was no regulation uniform; each man dressed in his own style. One man dressed like a bedouin, another like a coachman, and another like a priest; others preferred to dress in the Greek style; and some stoics added nothing to the uniform. There were all sorts of clogs and boots – leather, rubber, wooden-soled and so on. Headgear was left entirely to the imagination of every man …

Dressed in summer uniforms, the British envied the warm sheepskins and crimeennes of the French. ‘They certainly are the proper clothing for out here,’ George Lawson, the army surgeon, wrote in a letter to his family:

I wish our men had something of the sort … Many of them are almost shoeless and shirtless, their great coats worn to a thread and torn in all directions, having had not only to live in them during the day but sleep in