firm, until at last British reinforcements arrived, enabling the Zouaves to push the Russians back towards the Mamelon. The sortie cost the Russians a great deal: 1,100 men were wounded, and more than 500 killed, nearly all of them in or near the trenches of the Zouaves. After the fighting was over, the two sides agreed to a six-hour armistice to collect the dead and wounded who were clogging up the battlefield. Men who had been at war only a few moments previously began to fraternize, speaking to each other with hand signals and the odd word in each other’s language, though nearly all the Russian officers could speak French well, the adopted language of the Russian aristocracy. Captain Nathaniel Steevens of the 88th Regiment of Foot witnessed the scene:
Here we saw a crowd of English officers & Men mingled with some Russian Officers & escort, who had brought out the Flag of Truce; this was the most curious sight of all; the Officers chatted together as freely and gaily as if the warmest friends, and as for the Soldiers, those who 5 minutes before had been firing away at each other, might now be seen smoking together, sharing tobacco and drinking Rum, exchanging the usual compliments of ‘bono Ingles’ &c; the Russian Officers were very gentlemanly looking men, spoke French and one English; at length on reference to watches it was found ‘time was nearly up’ so both Parties gradually receded from each others’ sight to their respective works, not however without our men shaking hands with the Russian soldiers & some one calling out, ‘Au revoir.’31
Apart from these sorties, the troops stayed on their respective sides in the early months of 1855. ‘The siege is now only nominal,’ Henry Clifford wrote to his family on 31 March. ‘We fire a few shots during the day, but all seems at a standstill.’ It was a strange situation, since there was plenty of artillery sitting idle, implying almost a loss of belief in the siege. In these months there was far more digging than shooting to be done – a fact that did not please many of the troops. According to Whitworth Porter of the Royal Engineers, the British soldier did not like ‘spade-work’, thinking it not soldier-like. He quotes an Irishman in the infantry:
‘Shure, now, I didn’t ’list for this here kind o’ work. When I tuk the shillen, it was to be a sodger, and take me senthry go, right and proper, and use me bayonet when I was tould to; but I never dhreamt o’ nothen o’ this kind. Shure, one o’ the very raisins why I listed was because I hated spade-work; and the Sargent as tuk me swore by St. Pathrick that I should niver see a spade agin; and yet, no sooner does I come out here, than I gits a pick and shovel put in me hand, just as bad as iver it was in Ould Ireland.’ And then he would go on with his work, grumbling all the time, and uttering fierce denunciations against the Russians, who he vowed he would make pay for all this, if ever he got inside that blessed town.32
As the siege settled into a monotonous routine of exchanging fire with the enemy, the soldiers in the trenches became accustomed to living under constant bombardment. To an outsider, they seemed almost nonchalant about the dangers that surrounded them. On his first visit to the trenches, Charles Mismer, a 22-year-old dragoon in the French cavalry, was amazed to see the soldiers playing cards or sleeping in the trenches while bombs and shells fell around them. The troops came to recognize the various bombs and shells from their different sounds, which told them what evasive action they should take: the round shot, ‘rushing through the air with a sharp, shrill shriek, very startling to the nerves of the young soldier’, as Porter recalled it; the volley of grape, ‘buzzing along with a sound not unlike that of a covey of birds very strong on the wing’; the ‘bouquet’, a shower of small shells enclosed in a bomb, ‘each one leaving a long curved trail of light in its track and, as they reach their destination, lighting up the atmosphere with short, fitful flashes, as they burst in succession’; and the larger mortar shell, ‘rising proudly and grandly in the air, easily to be discerned in the night by the fiery train of its burning fuse, tracing a majestic curve high in mid-air, until, having attained its extreme altitude, it commences to descend, falling faster and faster, till down it swoops … making a sound in its passage through the air like the chirping of a pee-wit’. It was impossible to tell where the mortar shell would land, or where its splinters would explode, so ‘all one could do when one heard the birdlike noise was to lie face down against the earth and hope’.33
Gradually, as the siege dragged on without any gains by either side, the exchange of fire assumed a symbolic character. In quiet periods, when the men grew bored, they turned it into sport. Francois Luguez, a captain in the Zouaves, recalled how his men would play shooting games with the Russians: one side would raise on the end of their bayonet a piece of cloth for the other side to shoot – each shot being greeted with a cheer and laughter if it hit, and jeering if it missed.34
With less and less to fear, the sentries in the picquets began to venture into no man’s land to entertain themselves or warm themselves at night. From time to time there was some fraternization with the Russians, whose own outposts were no further than a football-pitch length away. Calthorpe recorded one such incident, when a group of unarmed Russian soldiers approached the British picquets:
They made signs that they wanted a light for their pipes, which one of our men gave them, and then they stayed a few minutes talking to our sentries, or rather trying to do so, the conversation being something after this wise:
1st Russian soldier – ‘Englise bono!’
1st English soldier – ‘Russkie bono!’
2nd Russian soldier – ‘Francis bono!’
2nd English soldier – ‘Bono!’
3rd Russian soldier – ‘Oslem no bono!’
3rd English soldier – ‘Ah, ah! Turk no bono!’
1st Russian soldier – ‘Oslem!’ making a face, and spitting on the ground to show his contempt.
1st English soldier – ‘Turk!’ pretending to run away, as if frightened, upon which all the party go into roars of laughter, and then after shaking hands, they return to their respective beats.35
To while away the time the soldiers developed a wide variety of pursuits and games. In the bastions of Sevastopol, noted Ershov, ‘card games of all sorts were played around the clock’. Officers played chess and read voraciously. In the casemate of the Sixth Bastion there was even a grand piano, and concerts were arranged with musicians from the other bastions. ‘To begin with,’ writes Ershov, ‘the concerts were dignified and ceremonious with proper attention to the rules of listening to classical music, but gradually, as our mood changed, there was a corresponding tendency towards national melodies or folk songs and dances. Once a masked ball was arranged, and one cadet appeared in a woman’s dress to sing folk songs.’36
Theatrical amusements were very popular in the French camp, where the Zouaves had their own theatre troupe, a transvestite vaudeville, that entertained huge crowds of noisy soldiers in a wooden shed. ‘Imagine a Zouave dressed up as a shepherdess and flirting with the men (
Horse racing was also popular, especially among the British, whose cavalry was almost totally unoccupied. But it was not only the cavalry horses that took part in these races. Whitworth Porter attended a meeting organized by the 3rd Division on the downs. ‘The Day was bitterly cold,’ he noted in his diary on 18 March,
a keen west wind cutting into one’s very bones: still the course was crowded with stragglers from all parts of the army; every one who could contrive to raise a pony for the occasion had done so, and queer-looking they most of them were. I saw one huge specimen of a British officer, who could not have measured less than six foot three in his stockings, bestriding the smallest, skinniest, shaggiest pony I have ever seen.38
There was a lot of drinking in these relatively idle months. In all the armies it resulted in a growing general problem of indiscipline, swearing, insolence, drunken brawls and violence, as well as acts of insubordination by the men, all of which suggested that morale among the troops was becoming dangerously low. In the British army (and there is no reason to suppose that it was worse affected than the Russian or the French) a staggering 5,546 men
