them by night, covered only by the wet blanket which they have just brought up with them from the trenches.4
The allied commanders had also given little thought to the shelter the men would need. The tents which they had brought with them were not insulated on the ground, and provided little real protection from the elements. Many were irreparably damaged by the storm – at least half those used by the regiment of Captain Tomkinson of the Light Brigade, who complained that the tents were unfit to live in: ‘They let in water to such an extent that in heavy rains the ground beneath them is flooded and the men are obliged to stand up round the pole during a whole night.’ Inspecting the camp at Kadikoi, Lord Lucan found a large number of tents unfit for habitation. They were ‘rotten, torn and not capable of sheltering the men’, who were ‘nearly all frozen to death’ and suffering terribly from diarrhoea.5
British officers were much better sheltered than their men. Most of them employed their servants to install a wooden floor or dig and line with stones a hole inside their tents to insulate them from the ground. Some had them build a dugout in the ground which they walled with stones and covered with a brushwood roof. On 22 November Captain William Radcliffe of the 20th Regiment wrote to his parents:
My Hut is progressing steadily, I hope to be ‘underground’ by the end of the week. The first operation was to dig a pit, 3 feet 6 inches deep, 8 feet wide, and 13 long. An upright post is then placed in the centre of each end, & a cross-piece put on the top of these, & secured by rope, nails, or anything you can get; Poles or whatever Wood you can beg, borrow, or steal, are then placed from the earth to the cross-piece, & secured in the same way; the Gable ends are filled up with stones, mud and earth, & this forms the roof … . The Walls are the sides of the pit, & we make the roof a sufficient height for a man to stand up in. Now comes the covering of the Roof, this is generally made by twining brushwood between the Poles, & then throwing mud & earth over it, but I mean to improve on it, & am covering mine by degrees, with the skins of horses and bullocks (the former dying in great numbers) & so hope to make it water-proof beyond a doubt. This takes longer doing, for the hides have to be cured, ‘in a way.’ [Lieutenant] McNeil and I are hutting together, I have already named it ‘
At the top end of the social scale, British officers availed themselves of privileges which, in view of the suffering of the ordinary troops, were outrageous. Lord Cardigan (who had medical problems) slept on board his private yacht, enjoyed French cuisine, and entertained a stream of visitors from Britain. Some officers were allowed to spend the winter in Constantinople or to find accommodation at their own expense in settlements. ‘As far as comfort is concerned,’ Lieutenant Charles Gordon (the future ‘Chinese Gordon’) wrote, ‘I assure you my dear – I could not be more comfortable in England.’ Count Vitzthum von Eckstadt, Saxon Minister to London, later recorded that ‘Several English officers, who went through that rigorous winter, have since told me with a smile that they first learned of the [army’s] suffering from the newspapers’.6
The comfortable conditions which senior British officers were allowed to enjoy contrasted starkly with the circumstances of French officers, who lived much more closely to their men. In a letter to his family on 20 November, Captain Herbe explained the consequences of the hurricane for his living conditions:
Soldiers and officers are all lodged together in a little tent; this installation, excellent in fine weather and on the march, is gravely inconvenient during prolonged rain and cold. The ground, trampled underfoot, becomes a mass of mud, which gets everywhere, forcing everyone to splash around in the trenches and the camp. Everybody is soaked through … In these tents, the soldiers sleep together, one against the other in a group of six; each man has just one blanket, so they stretch out three beneath them on the muddy ground, and cover themselves with the other three; their knapsacks, loaded up, serving as pillows.7
Generally, the French were better housed. Their tents were not only more spacious but most of them were protected from the wind by wooden palisades or walls of snow erected by the men. The French constructed various types of improvised accommodation: large huts which the soldiers called ‘molehills’ (
The body of these ovens was sometimes made of clay, and sometimes from large bomb fragments cemented in a way to form a vault. The chimneys were constructed out of metal boxes or scrap metal pieced together on top of each other. Thanks to these ovens, our troops could warm themselves when they returned from the trenches or from sentry work half frozen to death; they could dry their clothes and sleep well without being woken by the terrible night fever that tormented the poor English. Our soldiers burnt so much wood that the great forest of Inkerman entirely disappeared in a few months; not a tree, not a bush was left. Seeing our ovens, the English complained about our cutting down the trees … . But they themselves made no use of these resources. None of the English soldiers wanted to build ovens for themselves; they were even less inclined to cut their own firewood. They expected everything to be given to them by their administration, without which they were destitute.8
Noir’s disdain for the English was commonplace among the French, who thought their allies lacked the ability to adapt to field conditions. ‘Ah! These English, they are men of undoubted courage but they know only how to get themselves killed,’ Herbe wrote to his family on 24 November.
They have had big tents since the beginning of the siege and still don’t know how to put them up. They haven’t even learned how to build a little ditch around the tents to stop the rain and wind from getting into them! They eat badly, although they receive twice or three times the rations of our troops and spend a lot more than we do. They have no resilience and cannot deal with misfortune or privations.
Even the English were forced to recognize that the French were better organized than themselves. ‘Oh how far superior are the French to us in every way!’ noted Fanny Duberly on 27 November. ‘Where are our huts? Where are our stables? All lying at
Unlike the French, the British could not seem to work out a system for collecting firewood. They allowed the men a ration of charcoal for burning in their fires but, because of the shortage of forage for the draught animals, it proved too difficult to haul the charcoal up from Balaklava to the heights, so the soldiers went without, though officers of course could send their servants down on their own horses to collect the fuel for them. The men suffered terribly from the freezing temperatures of December and January, with thousands of reported cases of frostbite, especially among the new recruits, who were not acclimatized to the Crimean winter. Cholera and other diseases also took their toll among the weakened men. ‘I found sad misery among the men; they have next to no fuel, almost all the roots even of the brushwood being exhausted,’ noted Lieutenant Colonel Sterling of the Highland Brigade:
They are entitled to rations of charcoal; but they have no means of drawing it, and their numbers are so reduced [by illness] that they cannot spare men enough to bring it six or seven miles from Balaklava. The consequence is they cannot dry their stockings or shoes; they come in from the trenches with frost- bitten toes, swelled feet, chillblains, etc.; their shoes freeze, and they cannot put them on. Those who still, in spite of their misery, continue to do their duty, often go into the trenches without shoes by preference, or they cut away the heels to get them on … . If this goes on, the trenches must be abandoned … I heard of men on their knees crying with pain.10
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