The Crimean War

(roughly one in eight of the entire army in the field) behaved so badly that they were court-martialled for various acts of drunkenness during the Crimean War. Most soldiers drank a good-sized tumbler of alcohol with their breakfast – vodka for the Russians, rum for the British and wine for the French – and another with dinner. Many also drank during the day – and some were never sober throughout the entire siege. Drinking was the primary recreation of soldiers in all the armies, including the Turks, who liked the sweet Crimean wine. Henry Clifford recalled the drinking culture in the allied camps:

Almost every regiment has a canteen, and at the door of each of these stood, no they did not stand, for very few could, but lay and rolled about, groups of French and English soldiers, in every state of intoxication. Merry, laughing, crying, dancing, fighting, sentimental, affectionate, singing, talking, quarrelsome, stupid, beastly, brutal, and dead-drunk. French just as bad as English, and English just as bad as French … What a mistake to over-pay a soldier! Give him one farthing more than he really wants, and he gives way to his brutal propensities and immediately gets drunk … . Let him be English, French, Turk, Sardinian, give him enough money and he will get drunk.³⁹

The sudden arrival of warm spring weather raised the morale of the allied troops. ‘Today it is spring,’ Herbe wrote on 6 April; ‘the sun has not left us for three weeks, and eveything has changed in appearance.’ The French soldiers planted gardens near their tents. Many, like Herbe, shaved their winter beards, washed their linen, and generally spruced up their appearance, so that ‘if the ladies of Sevastopol should give a ball and invite the French officers, our uniforms would still shine brightly among their elegant costumes’. After such a cruel winter, when all was hidden under mud and snow, the Crimea appeared to be suddenly transformed into a place of great beauty, with a profusion of colourful spring flowers on the heathlands, fields of rye grass a metre or so high, and birdsong everywhere. ‘We have had a few warm days only,’ wrote Russell of The Times on 17 March,

and yet the soil, wherever a flower has a chance of springing up, pours forth multitudes of snowdrops, crocuses, and hyacinths … The finches and larks here have a Valentine’s-day of their own, and still congregate in flocks. Very brilliant goldfinches, large buntings, golden-crested wrens, larks, linnets, titlarks, and three sorts of tomtits, the hedge sparrow, and a pretty species of wagtail, are very common all over the Chersonese; and it is strange to hear them piping and twittering about the bushes in the intervals of the booming of the cannon, just as it is to see the young spring flowers forcing their way through the crevices of piles of shot and peering out from under shells and heavy ordnance.⁴⁰

In the British camp, the spirit of the troops was lifted by improvements in the supply of foodstuffs and other basic goods, mainly as a result of the private enterprise that took advantage of the opportunities offered by the failure of the government to provide for the troops in the Crimea. By the spring of 1855 a vast array of private traders and sutlers had set up stalls and shops in Kadikoi. Although prices were extortionate, anything could be purchased there, from potted meats and pickles, bottled beer and Greek raki to roasted coffee, tins of Albert biscuits, chocolate, cigars, toiletries, paper, pens and ink, and the best champage from Oppenheim’s or Fortnum & Mason, which both had outlets in the main bazaar. There were saddlers, cobblers, tailors, bakers and hoteliers, including the famous Mary Seacole, a Jamaican woman who provided hearty meals and hospitality, herbal remedies and medicines at the ‘British Hotel’ she set up at a place she named Spring Hill near Kadikoi.

Born in Kingston in 1805 to a Scottish father and Creole mother, this extraordinary woman had worked as a nurse in the British military stations in Jamaica and had married an Englishman called Seacole, who died within a year. She had later run a hotel and general store with her brother in Panama, where she had coped with outbreaks of disease. At the start of the Crimean War she travelled to England and attempted to get herself recruited as a nurse with Florence Nightingale, but she was rejected several times, no doubt partly because of the colour of her skin. Determined to make money and to help the war effort as a sutler and hotelier, she teamed up with Thomas Day, one of her husband’s distant relatives, to set up a company, ‘Seacole and Day’. Setting sail from Gravesend on 15 February, they collected stores in Constantinople, where they also recruited a young Greek Jew (whom she would call ‘Jew Johnny’). Although rather grandly named, the ‘British Hotel’ was really just a restaurant and general store in what Russell described as ‘an iron storehouse with wooden sheds’, but it was much loved by British officers, its main clientele, for whom it was a sort of club, where they could indulge themselves and enjoy comfort food that reminded them of home.⁴¹

For the ordinary troops, Mary Seacole and the private stores of Kadikoi had less significance in improving food provisioning than the celebrated chef Alexis Soyer, who also arrived in the Crimea during the spring. Born in France in 1810, Soyer was the head chef at the Reform Club in London, where he came to the attention of the leaders of the Whig and Liberal governments. He was well known for his Shilling Cookery Book (1854), found in every home of the self-improving middle class. In February 1855 he wrote a letter to The Times in response to an article about the poor condition of the hospital kitchens in Scutari. Volunteering to advise the army on cooking, Soyer travelled to Scutari, but soon left with Nightingale for the Crimea, where she visited the hospitals at Balaklava and fell dangerously ill herself, forcing her to return to Scutari. Soyer took over the running of the kitchens at the Balaklava Hospital, cooking daily for more than a thousand men with his team of French and Italian chefs. Soyer’s main significance was his introduction of collective food provisioning to the British army through mobile field canteens – a system practised in the French army since the Napoleonic Wars. He designed his own field stove, the Soyer Stove, which remained in British military service until the second half of the twentieth century, and he had 400 stoves shipped in from Britain, enough to feed the whole army in the Crimea. He set up army bakeries and developed a type of flat bread that could keep for months. He trained in every regiment a soldier-cook, who would follow his simple but nutritious recipes. Soyer’s genius was his ability to convert army rations into palatable food. He specialized in soups, like this one for fifty men:

1. Put in the boiler 30 quarts, 7? gallons, or 5? camp-kettles of water

2. Add to it 50 lbs of meat, either beef or mutton

3. The rations of preserved or fresh vegetables

4. Ten small tablespoonfuls of salt

5. Simmer for three hours, and serve.⁴²

The construction of a railway from Balaklava to the British camp above Sevastopol was the key to the improvement of supply. The idea for the Crimean railway – the first in the history of warfare – went back to the previous November, when news of the terrible conditions of the British army first broke in The Times, and it became apparent that one of the main problems was the need to transport all supplies along the muddy track from Balaklava to the heights. These reports were read by Samuel Peto, a railwayman who had made his mark as a successful London building contractor^ay before moving into railways in the 1840s. With a grant of ?100,000 from the Aberdeen government, Peto assembled the materials for the railway and recruited a huge team of mainly Irish and very unruly navvies. They started to arrive in the Crimea at the end of January. The navvies worked at a furious pace, laying up to as much as half a kilometre of track a day, and by the end of March the entire railway line of 10 kilometres connecting Balaklava with the loading bays near the British camp had been completed. It was just in time to help with the transport of the newly arrived heavy guns and mortar shells that Raglan had instructed to be taken up from Balaklava to the heights in preparation for a second bombardment of Sevastopol which the allies had agreed to begin on Easter Monday, 9 April.⁴³

The plan was to overwhelm Sevastopol with ten days of continual bombardment, followed by an assault on the town. With five hundred French and British guns firing round the clock, almost twice as many as in the first bombardment of October, this now became not only the heaviest bombardment of the siege, but the heaviest in history until that time. Among the allied troops, desperate for an ending of the war, there were high expectations for the attack, making them impatient for it to begin. ‘The works are continuing, as always, and we are hardly advancing!’ Herbe wrote to his family on 6 April. ‘The impatience of the officers and soldiers has created a certain discontent, everybody blames each other for the mistakes of the past, and one senses that an energetic breakthrough is now needed to reimpose order … Things cannot go on like this much longer.’⁴⁴